Praise for
Maria Callas: The Woman behind the Legend
“Penetrating.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Huffington is a good reporter. . . . In writing Callas her great break was the cooperation of the singer’s godfather Leonidas Lantzounis. After he read a draft, he gave her the candid, affectionate letters that Callas had written him over many years. . . . Huffington is also good at interviewing sources and collecting anecdotes. . . . The foibles are fun; the gossip, especially about international high life, is entertaining.” —Time
“An official biography, bolstered by new information furnished by friends and associates, and supplemented by a fascinating collection of informal photographs.” —New York Review of Books
“Huffington is the ideal person to write about Callas. A fellow Greek, her fluent style [is] superlative. . . . With her lengthy descriptions of performances, applause, and ovations, Huffington captures something of the atmosphere of a Callas night. . . . Huffington has researched her subject thoroughly. She has tackled Maria’s formidable old mother . . . [and] has canvassed the opinions of many colleagues—directors and conductors, critics, and impresarios.” —Economist (London)
“Huffington has entered the complex and contradictory mind of Maria Callas in an extraordinary way, and the result is a powerful story told movingly, yet without exaggeration. It is unquestionably an important book, and surely the finest biography of Callas ever written.” —John Ardoin, author of Callas at Juilliard, and The Callas Legacy
“The most readable and by far the most illuminating biography to date of Callas the woman. . . . Compulsive and convincing reading.” —Times (London)
“Huffington writes with the intelligence and insight lacking in previous biographies. Detailed source notes are provided for every chapter. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
“The astounding achievement of Arianna Huffington’s exhaustive research and revelations is that, for all the magnificence of the characters, she tells the Callas story in compellingly human terms.” —Daily Mail (London)
“An intelligent and absorbingly built-up portrait of human nature on both sides of the footlights at its most magnetic.” —Sunday Times (London)
* * *
ALSO BY ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
THE FEMALE WOMAN
AFTER REASON
THE GODS OF GREECE
THE FOURTH INSTINCT: THE CALL OF THE SOUL
PICASSO: CREATOR AND DESTROYER
GREETINGS FROM THE LINCOLN BEDROOM
HOW TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT
Maria Callas
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND
Arianna Huffington
Time cover reprinted by permission from Time, the Weekly Newsmagazine; Copyright Time Inc., 1956.
First Cooper Square Press edition 2002
This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Maria Callas is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1981. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.
Copyright © 1981 by Arianna Stassinopoulos (Huffington)
Originally published in 1981 by Simon & Schuster
Designed by Even Metz
Photo Editor: Vinvent Virga
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
Published by Cooper Square Press
A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1109
New York, New York 10003-1503
www.coopersquarepress.com
Distributed by National Book Network
The Simon & Schuster edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:
Huffington, Arianna, Stassinopoulos, 1950–
Maria Callas, the woman behind the legend / Arianna Huffington.—1st Cooper Square Press ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, c1981.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-8154-1228-1
1. Callas, Maria, 1923–1977. 2. Sopranos (Singers)—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.C18 H84 2002
782.I’092—dc21
[B]
2002073819
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
FOR
BERNARD
Contents
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
1913–1936
CHAPTER 2
1923–1941
CHAPTER 3
1941–1945
CHAPTER 4
1945–1947
CHAPTER 5
1947–1949
CHAPTER 6
1949–1951
CHAPTER 7
1951–1954
CHAPTER 8
1954–1956
CHAPTER 9
1956–1958
CHAPTER 10
1958–1960
CHAPTER 11
1960–1963
CHAPTER 12
1963–1968
CHAPTER 13
1968–1975
CHAPTER 14
1975–1977
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCE NOTES
PICTURE CREDITS
INDEX
Photo section follows page 192
Preface
WE HAD ARRIVED AT EPIDAURUS BY boat in the pouring rain. Tightly clutching my mother’s hand, I walked, along with a big crowd, to the ancient Greek theater. It was August 17, 1960, just over a month after my tenth birthday, and I was about to hear my very first opera, Norma, with Maria Callas. All I knew about her, apart from the fact that she was a “great singer,” was what every other Greek between the ages of five and a hundred and five knew: that she was the woman in the life of the very, very rich Mr. Onassis, for whose familiar thickset figure hundreds of eyes were scanning the theater’s entrance.
Twenty thousand spectators had taken their seats when an announcement was made that, as the rain gave no sign of stopping, the performance would be canceled and would take place instead the following Sunday. When I did finally set eyes on Maria Callas a week later, something about her clearly caught the imagination of the ten-year-old. It was that performance, and not her London Tosca (her last appearance on the operatic stage) which I saw five years later that came flooding back into my mind, complete in every detail, when, in 1977, a couple of months after her death, I was asked if I would be interested in writing the biography of one of the most remarkable women of our time. Instantly, the memory of that night swept over me—my anticipation and excitement, my disappointment at the canceled performance and the impossible tedium of the year-long week that followed until I actually saw and heard her.
Many times since that night in Epidaurus, I have been transported by the power of her voice and the dramatic truth of her interpretation. And I have been touched by something deeper, by the intensity of the fire I could feel raging inside her, consuming her and at the same time illuminating everything around her. But it was the memory of Epidaurus that determined me to write her life. Clearly she fascinated me from that first moment, but it was not until some eighteen years later, when I was halfway through this book, that I really understood why. And only then did I also understand why she was the focus of such intense and unceasing excitement wherever she we
nt, why millions who neither knew nor cared anything about music followed her career and her life so avidly, why men and women camped for days outside opera houses to buy tickets for her performances. There was, of course, a private life as dramatic as that of many of the heroines she brought to life on the stage; there were the glitter of her career and the power of her operatic creations; there were Ari and Jackie and Franco Zeffirelli and Winston Churchill and an unending procession of the rich and the famous touching on her life. But these alone still do not explain the unparalleled fascination she generated, nor the hostility she provoked, as intense as the love she aroused.
The life of Maria Callas was both tragedy and fairy tale. As completely as anyone outside mythology, she transformed herself from a fat, awkward girl into a woman of magnetic beauty and personality. But even while the fairy-tale transformation was taking place, the tragedy had begun to unfold. It was to be played out on many levels: her unresolvable conflict with her mother, the long, gradual unraveling of her marriage, her deeply emotional relationship with her voice, her terrible dependence on Onassis and the bitterness, agony and humiliation of his leaving her. And underlying all these individual tragedies, there was the struggle that never ceased to rage within her, the struggle between Callas and Maria, between the legend and the woman, between the image and the reality. This struggle, which was at the center of her life, is also at the center of this book. I began by writing the biography of Callas and ending by writing the life of Maria. I began with deep respect and admiration for what she did and what she tried to become. I ended by loving her.
Naturally I began by reading all the existing literature on her—the books, the reviews, the profiles and the interviews. Then, for nearly two years, I traveled the world talking to friends, colleagues and sometime enemies who had been part of Maria’s life during her fifty-four years. The invaluable advantage of talking to people so soon after her death was the immediacy, the freshness, of their responses before the analyzing and assessing had begun. The danger, on the other hand, was that some of her friends, though mercifully very few, were determined to preserve the mask of La Callas—a Maria composed entirely of her public image and her public statements, a blameless waxwork free of all untidy contradictions. But the Maria who resisted this shrinking process in life will, I have no doubt, resist it in death.
As Maria’s relationship with her mother was at the scarred heart of her life, I knew I had to start with her. It was Christmas 1977, at the time when Battista Meneghini and her mother were fighting over the $12 million Maria had left without a will, and Mrs. Callas’ lawyers would not let her talk to anyone. I went to Athens, determined not to return to London until I had seen her. One afternoon, a bunch of flowers in my hand, I arrived at her apartment in a primly respectable part of Athens. She cautiously opened the door, took the flowers, thanked me, but would not let me in. Then something happened to remind me that miracles happen on suburban doorsteps quite as often as in sacred books, and perhaps more so. A frail old lady came out of the apartment next door, exchanged a few words with Mrs. Callas and suddenly collapsed in a faint. We carried her into her house, rubbed cologne on her forehead and stayed for a while after she had come around. “You need a drink after that,” said Mrs. Callas.
I emerged from her apartment six hours later, only to return the next day, and the next, and the next. The help she gave me and the knowledge I gained from the hours we spent together provided the foundation of understanding on which I began to build the book. What she told me is woven through these pages, together with what was said over the following eighteen months by many, many others who fleetingly, or for years, had been close to Maria. Some of them, like her mother, Franco Zeffirelli and Tito Gobbi, I had planned to see from the moment I embarked on the book. Others, often people who were by her side at important moments of her life, I was led to as the months unfolded.
The most extraordinary of these meetings was with her godfather, Leonidas Lantzounis, a Greek doctor who emigrated to America a year before Maria’s parents and there established himself as a successful orthopedic surgeon. I knew that he had been close to her, but nothing I had discovered so far had given me any indication of the strength of the bond between them. We talked for hours in his New York apartment on the Hudson River, and then he suddenly produced a thick pile of letters spanning twenty-seven years from 1950 to the year she died. Maria, who, as her closest friends had assured me, hated writing letters, had consistently and in all her vulnerability opened her heart to this man; it was immediately clear from her letters that he provided the family love and warmth she always longed for. “I love you and admire you,” she writes in one of the letters, “and you are like a blood relative for me. Strange how blood relations are really not strong. My people have given me nothing but unhappiness. You have always been a source of pleasure and happiness.” She often addressed him as dear “noné,” the Greek for godfather, and signed her letters, “your godchild.” Her language is a curious mixture all her own: the grammar and syntax borrowed heavily from Greek, French and Italian, and the words, though always in English, are often overliteral translations. The letters I have included in the book are printed as she wrote them—misspellings and all. I owe Dr. Lantzounis an immense debt for entrusting me with these precious documents that he himself treasures so much.
There were others who were not part of her professional or public life, but who provided much of the personal knowledge and intimate detail that I needed to bring Maria, and not just Callas, to life: Mary Mead traveled with her from hotel to hotel in the desperate, fugitive months that followed Onassis’ decision to marry Jackie Kennedy; Peter Diamand was backstage with her after some of her greatest triumphs and a few of her greatest disasters; Nadia Stancioff was by her side all through the filming of Medea, and with her during that intimate summer on the private island of Tragonisi in the Aegean; François Valéry became her semiofficial escort and close friend in the last lonely years. There were colleagues such as Jon Vickers, Nicola Rescigno and Sylvia Sass, friends like Vasso Devetzi, Gaby van Zuylen and Christian Bischini, and those linked to her through their work—her agent, her hairdresser, her decorator—who inevitably became part of her everyday life and sometimes her friends. I saw all of them during these two years, often going back to talk to them again and again as my own understanding of her grew.
In instances where our talks were not tape-recorded and where my notes on our conversations might contain inaccuracies, I rechecked with each of them before the book went to press. Whenever I write about thoughts or feelings, they are not speculation but based on firsthand interviews; when the person referred to is dead, his thoughts and feelings are as described by close friends or relatives.
The most important source of information and understanding was Maria herself, though rarely through her public statements, which often give little or no indication of her real state of mind. In fact she regularly declared in public the exact opposite of what she felt. She would talk about how happy and content she was when she was in private torment; she would insist on the stability of her marriage and her devotion to her husband a few months before she left him. But we have the letters to her godfather in which she writes as though she is talking to herself, and the occasional intimate letter to a friend. And we also have her talks with John Ardoin, which provide the most direct, the most honest and the most tragic record of her feelings that we have on tape. Only part of these conversations has ever been published, and I am deeply grateful to John for making the complete transcripts available to me.
Every now and then, chance, fate or whoever arranges these things singles out an individual to be not just the greatest in his or her field but unique, setting new standards by which everyone who follows will be judged. Such was Callas. Her genius was that, although she was interpreting, she made her audience feel that she was creating. However many great artists had imposed their personalities on the roles Maria was singing, her uniqueness lay in making the audience forget them.
She continues to haunt all the productions of the roles she made her own; there is no higher praise for a Norma, a Violetta or a Tosca today than that “she is the best since Callas.” By bringing to life operas many had forgotten existed, by going to the heart of the drama in the music and conveying it through her body no less than through her voice, and by inspiring directors such as Visconti and Zeffirelli to create the productions in which her dramatic truth could flourish, Maria revolutionized opera in our time. And by making audiences more discerning and thus more demanding, she went further and revolutionized the art of opera going too. But over the last two years, as I listened to every commercial recording she made and every pirate recording and rehearsal tape I could lay my hands on, I came to the conclusion that even more important than her revolutionary influence is the fact that she lived and sang, and by breathing drama and power and life into the music, she held a mirror to our most secret passions.
Maria was, without doubt, the most controversial, the most disturbing, singer of our century. Even in her prime, her voice was ridiculed as unmusical, ugly, a blasphemy against all ideals of vocal beauty. Those who know nothing about the musical controversies know about her temperament and tantrums, her abrupt cancellations of long-awaited performances and her limelit walkouts from performances already in progress. What emerged time and again while I was working on the book were valid, often tragic reasons for behavior that at the time and in later accounts was explained purely in terms of bad temper, impossible demands and vanity. Still more important, these discoveries revealed the conflict within Maria, a split which she unceasingly yearned to heal.
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