Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  And still the performance was not over. The Trianon Room at the Ambassador Hotel had been taken over by Angel Records for a large party in Maria’s honor. The guests, according to Dorle Soria, Dario Soria’s wife, who had organized it, were a cross section of the musical, social, diplomatic and press worlds—from the Greek and Italian ambassadors to Marlene Dietrich and Elsa Maxwell, the notorious socialite and gossip columnist. Dietrich, worried about Maria’s health during rehearsals, had spent hours boiling down eight pounds of beef to a quart of purest broth. “It’s wonderful,” Maria said gratefully. “Tell me, what brand of cubes do you use?”

  Exactly an hour after midnight, Maria finally arrived with her husband, Dario Soria and a man whose eyes never left her throughout the party. He behaved like the most ardent fan but was really a private detective employed by the famous jewelry firm of Harry Winston from whom Maria had borrowed, for the night, jewelry worth more than a million dollars. She looked like a queen, behaved like a queen, was treated like a queen.

  The party was given to celebrate Maria’s debut at the Met but, looking back, we can see that it marked a different kind of beginning. Still almost imperceptibly, Maria was being absorbed into the world of the Beautiful People; or rather, she was choosing to be absorbed. It was she, after all, who had asked Angel Records to give this party for her. The morning after the Great Night, hostilities were resumed—at first quietly in the rather lukewarm reviews. The emphasis was on Maria’s vocal limitations, with all the usual comments about the veiled middle register and the deficiencies of tone. But one of the reviewers, Howard Taubman in The New York Times, made a statement that revealed as much truth about Maria’s character as about her voice. “It is a puzzling voice,” he wrote. “Occasionally it gives the impression of having been formed out of sheer will power rather than natural endowments.”

  A few days later came Tosca. Dimitri Mitropoulos, the other great musical Greek, was conducting, and George London was Scarpia. When many trusted colleagues were lining up to dispense their venom on Maria, George London remained totally loyal. “When I learned that I would sing Scarpia to Callas’s Tosca,” he wrote in a magazine article, “I must admit I had a few forebodings. So much had been printed about this ‘stormy’ star that I was prepared for almost anything. The first rehearsal reassured me. Here was a trouper, a fanatical worker, a stickler for detail. Remembering my first season at the Met and the forlornness one can feel, I crossed the stage before curtain-time and, knocking at Maria Callas’s dressing-room, said a quick ‘in bocca di lupo’ [‘in the mouth of the wolf’—an Italian charm for good luck]. She took my hand in both of hers and seemed deeply moved. She later told me that this insignificant courtesy had meant a great deal to her.” And the general feeling of competitiveness and enmity around her made it all the more special.

  Those who went to Tosca to hear “Vissi d’arte” and other famous set pieces left feeling short-changed. Where was the full, generous outpouring of a Tebaldi or a Milanov? Elsa Maxwell, cheerleader in chief for Tebaldi—and a close friend—had decided to launch a personal vendetta against Maria. She attacked the “devious diva,” as she had termed her, on practically every ground she could think of; she even managed to detect jealousy of George London in the way she stuck the knife into him at the end of the second act. But there were others in the audience besides Elsa Maxwell and the vocal purists for whom Maria was a great—the greatest—Tosca. Some would even say that she was a much greater Tosca than Tosca deserved. Her understanding of the part illuminated even the smallest gesture and movement. And there were many in that first-night audience at the Met who realized that the brilliance of the Callas Tosca would linger in the public’s mind long after scores of other much more vocally accomplished performances had been forgotten.

  Ten days after that first night, Tebaldi officially joined the Callas opposition. In a letter that Time magazine published on November 26, that was to reverberate throughout the musical world, Renata angrily replied to the accusations Maria was reported to have leveled against her. “She’s got no backbone. She’s not like Callas,” Maria was supposed to have said. “The signora says that I have no backbone,” Renata snapped back. “I reply I have one great thing that she has not—a heart.”

  Maria was approaching her thirty-third birthday in an atmosphere of excitement, controversy, adulation and animosity. She had only to appear somewhere—even in a department store—for cameras and microphones to materialize in front of her. On December 3, 1956, the night after her birthday, Maria opened at the Met in Lucia. The praise of her dramatic art was qualified once again by the criticisms of her vocal performance and by the venom of Elsa Maxwell: “I confess the great Callas acting in the Mad Scene left me completely unmoved. . . . I was intrigued by the red wig she wore through the first two acts but in the Mad Scene she came on as a platinum blonde. Why this change of color? What did it mean to this egocentric extrovert?”

  During her second New York Lucia there was another explosion. At the end of the second-act duet, Enzo Sordello, who was singing Ashton, held onto an unwritten high note long after Maria had abandoned her high D, which made her appear embarrassingly short of breath. “Basta!” [“Enough!”] she cried, giving rise to the legend that the audience heard her and gasped, thinking that she had called her colleague a bastard. Sordello’s contract with the Met was instantly terminated—at Maria’s demand, according to the press and Sordello himself. “Him or me” was the ultimatum she was supposed to have sent to Bing. The front pages featured Sordello tearing up her picture while Bing’s denial of Maria’s interference was politely ignored. Sordello, said Bing’s press statement, was dismissed because of his continuous lack of cooperation and his persistent clashes with conductor Fausto Cleva. The ladies and gentlemen of the press were amused but not convinced, or at least they were not prepared to allow details and qualifications to water down a vintage Callas scandal.

  Maria’s nine-week stay in New York was coming to an end, but not before an extraordinary reconciliation. A few days before they left for Milan, Maria and Battista were guests of the Greek film tycoon Spyros Skouras at a dinner dance given for the American Hellenic Welfare Fund at the Waldorf-Astoria. Among the other guests was that ever-present barometer of the international social weather, Elsa Maxwell. Some time between Maxwell’s first attack on her and the night at the Waldorf-Astoria, Maria decided that Maxwell had to be conquered. Not an easy thing, Maxwell cognoscenti warned her. Elsa was notorious not only for ruthlessly pursuing vendettas in her column, but for proudly owning up to it. “I look like a bulldog,” she said, “and I have a dog’s persistence.”

  Undaunted, Maria asked Spyros Skouras to introduce them, and at that point she donned a mask that had never been and never became part of her personality. “I esteem you,” she said to Maxwell who printed it verbatim in her next column, “as a lady of honesty who is devoted to telling the truth.” Here was the great Callas suddenly transformed into an insincere flatterer for the sake of winning Madame Maxwell’s favor. She achieved this and much more besides: “When I looked into her amazing eyes, which are brilliant, beautiful and hypnotic, I realized she is an extraordinary person.” It was not so much love as attachment at first sight. Elsa Maxwell attached herself to Maria with an embarrassing persistence which she found increasingly uncomfortable. She always made sure that she was not left alone with Elsa, even for a few minutes, but at the same time, she was childishly delighted at having so unexpectedly replaced Renata as Mamma Maxwell’s favorite child.

  In her own way, Maria returned Elsa’s attachment. The rebel daughter in search of a surrogate mother seemed to have finally found one. The fact that, at seventy-three, Maxwell could more easily have been Maria’s grandmother made it all the more secure and attractive. What is more, she could open for Maria a new world of yachts, grand soirees, exiled princes and reigning millionaires, at a time when Maria, having conquered the world of opera, was fascinated by new, still unexplored vistas.

  Els
a Maxwell had captivated café society before Maria was born and seemed determined, with her flamboyant parties, to reclaim it at least three times a year. Whether in Paris, New York, Venice or Monte Carlo, she spent other people’s fortunes on parties designed to defy prediction and exceed expectation. “I have been called a parasite for accepting the largesse of the wealthy,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but I contributed as much, at least, as I received. I had imagination and they had money, a fair exchange of the commodity possessed by each side in greatest abundance.” By the time Maria was ten, back in the thirties, Maxwell was already identified as the world’s number one party-giver. She gave a Come as Your Opposite and a Come as You Are party in which ladies arrived without skirts and gentlemen without trousers; she gave a fête champêtre where Serge Lifar, one of Diaghilev’s last discoveries, appeared naked, painted gold, on a white horse; she gave a treasure hunt party at which guests stole Mistinguett’s shoes and a black swan from the Bois de Boulogne; she gave a party at the Ritz in Paris where the Diaghilev ballet danced on a specially constructed stage; and she gave a party for her seventieth birthday at Maxim’s at the end of which Albert, the headwaiter, informed “Mademoiselle” that the bill had been “lost.”

  That was three years before the night at the Waldorf-Astoria when the “Mademoiselle” fell in love with Maria. “I discovered when I was sixteen,” Elsa wrote, “that I could not permit myself even to be kissed by a man. Maybe egotism or false idealism prevented me from letting any man know me well enough for such intimacy.” Whatever Maxwell’s predilections, for the next three years, Maria became for her the object of an almost adolescent passion. For Maria, Maxwell was clearly her champion and her expert guide to a new world.

  Before she threw herself fully into the world of international café society, however, Maria found herself exploring the world of lawyers, courtrooms, judgments and settlements. The morning of the day she was leaving for Milan she spent at the New York Supreme Court giving evidence in the Bagarozy lawsuit. Two weeks later she had to return to Chicago, this time for the actual hearing of the case. As if there had not been enough of a circus in the previous few days, Maria arrived at the airport to find that Enzo Sordello, the fighting baritone, had booked seats on the same plane. He approached her all smiles. Maria ignored the offer of a handshake and refused to address a single word to him, but she did speak to the waiting reporters.

  “I don’t like that man taking advantage of my publicity.”

  “What then did you think of your New York publicity, Madame Callas?”

  “I think it’s been wonderful. But this is lousy.”

  Enormous mink hat, short, pithy answers for the eager reporters, Toy, the perfect poodle, in her arms—the trappings of the public personality were complete. And yet the journalists sensed, and the public sensed, that here was an original—vivid, utterly unique—a woman who resembled no public personality they knew.

  As the new year began, Maria was testing her power and enjoying her social victories as much as her musical ones. After a two-week Christmas holiday at her home, she was back in New York. On January 11, 1957, there was a glittering ball, again at the Waldorf-Astoria, with a glittering theme: a regal pageant. Maria put as much energy into her fancy dress as she would have put into her costumes for La Scala or the Met. She arrived dressed as the exotic Egyptian queen Hatshepshut, covered in emeralds worth $3 million dollars. “Everybody” was there—and so, of course, was Elsa Maxwell, not quite impenetrably disguised as Catherine the Great.

  Then came Chicago, the city that Maria had forsworn forever. She had forgotten her oath and her anger at the city as easily as she had in the case of all those tenors and baritones she had once sworn never to sing with again. Still adamant, however, that she would not sing under the Lyric Opera’s management, she gave only a concert in Chicago; in a vivid red velvet gown she looked as regal as she had a few days earlier as the Egyptian queen. Two days later, back in Milan, she appeared at La Scala in a chinchilla coat and diamond-encrusted glasses. She was not singing, but the occasions when she was the center of attention without singing were fast multiplying. This time the occasion was the first night of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, and the evening was to honor Poulenc himself.

  Her arrival in London was her next social coup. Although the purpose of her visit was to sing two performances of Norma, on February 2 and 6, the interest and fascination had spread far beyond those wishing to hear her sing. The Daily Mail devoted three columns to the preparations for her arrival and the excitement of those involved in the preparations at Covent Garden and at the Savoy. Both performances were sold out before the first day of booking had ended, and among those lucky enough to find tickets, many came to London specially to hear Maria’s Norma. The French music critic Jacques Bourgeois arrived from Paris and, having declared to the passport official the purpose of his visit, was greeted with a rapturous, “Isn’t she fantastic!”

  And she was fantastic—fantastic on the first night and even more fantastic on the second. This greatest of Normas gave the greatest performance she would ever sing in the role on February 6 at Covent Garden. After the torrential applause that followed “Mira o Norma,” her second-act duet with Ebe Stignani, John Pritchard, the conductor, had no option but to break Covent Garden’s ironclad rule against encores. “Brava Divina” was the cry that could be heard above the applause. Rudolf Bing sent a telegram congratulating her. “I am still trying to discover,” Maria wrote back, “what happened in New York. I am only sorry I couldn’t give you personally what other theaters have. I hope next year.” Meanwhile, as Opera put it, London’s hysterical reaction to her was “no more than the performance deserved.”

  Maria’s return to La Scala with La Sonnambula on March 2 was just as triumphant. Once again she seemed unable to do wrong, once again the world was hers, and still another triumph was around the corner.

  On April 14 Maria opened in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena with Gianandrea Gavazzeni conducting. It was her nineteenth role at La Scala. Visconti and Nicola Benois had created designs of such beauty and drama—all in black, white and gray—that the audience burst into loud applause as each new set appeared. But as Visconti put it: “For Anna Bolena, you need more than sets and costumes. You need Callas. Each day I went with her to the tailor to watch over every detail of her gowns, which were in all shades and nuances of blue. Her jewels were huge. They had to be to go with everything about her—her eyes, her head, her features, her stature.” Maria’s costumes, all inspired by Holbein’s portraits of Anne Boleyn, were practically sculptured on her figure. Whether slowly and regally descending the long, broad staircase of Windsor Castle or hurling herself on the floor in pain and humiliation, Maria was magnificent.

  Here was, as the critic John Ardoin wrote, “the culmination of all the wronged, wounded characters she had previously portrayed.” Here also is the answer to those who have all too glibly summed up Maria as a great actress but not a great singer. Her greatness may have been that of an actress, but the dramatic use to which she put the natural gift of her voice was her genius. That is why thousands fell in love with her through her recordings long before they had a chance to experience the Callas presence, the Callas gestures and the Callas movements on the stage, and why thousands who never saw her in the flesh go on falling under the Callas spell only from what they hear.

  Of course Maria’s voice, at the end of her career, was not what it had been at the beginning, but at the March premiere at La Scala in 1957, the combination of her still powerful voice and the inspired way she used it to enhance the drama made Anna Bolena the perfect demonstration of the unrivaled way in which at her best she fused the two arts. In the final moments of the opera her voice rises securely to its top Cs and is transformed for Anna’s final lines to the rawest of chest notes so that “Vendetta” is hurled out, transfixing the audience. They were cheering and applauding before the final notes of the orchestra had died away, and that night Maria broke the recor
d of solo curtain calls at La Scala: twenty-four minutes of continuous applause.

  A new peak in the mountain range of voice and drama had been scaled, but it was a culmination rather than a taste of things to come. The future could be predicted from a photograph in the Italian press a few days later: Elsa Maxwell in the arms of the waiting Maria at Milan airport. She had arrived at Maria’s invitation to see her in Anna Bolena, and in between performances and rehearsals for Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Maria had found the time to meet her at the airport. Maxwell was preparing a ball in Venice in Maria’s honor and castigating in her column “the evil web of invective” around Maria, forgetting that not so long before she had been one of the web’s chief spiders.

  She was back for the dress rehearsal of Iphigénie. The result was another column devoted to Maria in which, like a knight protecting his beloved, she threatened to track down those spreading poison about her. The reference to denigrators was intended for Karajan and the Vienna State Opera: they had announced the cancellation of Maria’s scheduled return to Vienna to sing Traviata. In the course of the negotiations, Meneghini had suddenly announced that his wife’s fee had doubled. Vienna refused to go beyond $1600 per performance, and Maria’s visit was off. “I’m not interested in money,” Maria had said, “but it must be more than anyone else gets.” It was a childish demand for a tangible and much needed confirmation that she was the best. For manager-Meneghini, getting a higher and still higher fee for his wife was almost a raison d’être, but in Vienna his greed had met retribution. Maria found herself under attack for putting extravagant demands ahead of her art and her commitments, and at the same time she was in the vulnerable position of being defended by that semiofficial mouthpiece of the moneyed beau monde, Elsa Maxwell.