Back in Milan, the rhythm of Maria’s life had completely changed. Her professional engagement book was empty for the whole of February; in fact there was nothing in it until March 16 and the recording of Lucia in London. It was as if somehow she knew she needed, and had therefore given herself, a fallow period, to prepare for the much more dramatic changes in store. Meanwhile she was desperately trying to convince herself and the rest of the world that it was business as usual. April 21, her tenth wedding anniversary, provided an excellent opportunity. On the arm of Titta she made her entrance at Maxim’s for a celebration dinner punctuated by the arrival of letters, telegrams, gifts, flowers and still more flowers. “I could not sing without him present,” she said. “If I am the voice, he is the soul.” They cut their almond anniversary cake and all Maxim’s joined in the clapping which ushered in the couple’s second decade together. From Maxim’s, together with a few friends, they went on to the Lido and there, until the early hours of the morning, continued celebrating what the world saw as a great partnership and a happy marriage.
Throughout the previous couple of years, as her doubts were growing more insistent, Maria’s public pronouncements seemed designed to keep them at bay and to feed the image of the perfect marriage: “I dress for my husband. He likes me to look well-dressed always. He takes a vivid interest in my clothes, his favorite color being red.” Or “Marriage is a full-time job. Put as much into it as you would into any career,” she said to a girl at a party. When the girl reminded her that she seemed, in that case, to have made a success of two careers, Maria smiled and, patting her husband’s arm, replied: “But this is the one that matters.” She was even heard saying that “If he asked me to, I would stop singing.”
Maria’s public statements, like those of most public figures, were a combination of truths, half-truths and lies. Concerning her marriage, they reflected very dramatically the conflict that was going on inside her, but which for the moment she was determined to silence with overblown expressions of gratitude and overpainted pictures of perfect harmony. There was in Maria a terrible yearning for the perfect marriage—a longing for loyalty, for security, for some backdrop of trust beneath the shifty, polite evasions of the world. She thought she could conjure all that up through words and willpower, but the waves of reality were soon to sweep over the sand castles.
Meanwhile, in her concert tour of Germany, which took up most of May and was a wild success, she used every opportunity to reiterate how much of her career and her glory she owed to her devoted, beloved husband. There was just under a month left before London and Medea. Covent Garden had come to a barter agreement with the management of the Dallas Civic Opera; they would send over their new, much-praised Zeffirelli production of Lucia in return for the Minotis production of Medea. The international musical world was applauding this transatlantic arrangement, and rumor had it that Rudolf Bing was watching anxiously. Maria was to sing in both Lucia and Medea even though the Covent Garden Lucia had originally been designed for Joan Sutherland. Maria had flown over from Milan for Sutherland’s dress rehearsal. Sitting in the Grand Tier, in a sable coat and sable hat, she listened entranced. “I would have been jealous of anyone singing so well, but not of you,” she told the woman who, almost seven years before, had sung the tiny part of Norma’s confidante, vowing as she did so that one day she, too, would be out there like Maria in the center of the stage. “Whatever the press may say, you have a great Lucia,” she told David Webster in his office at Covent Garden. “Don’t ever ask me to sing Lucia again. You have your own great British Lucia now and you should be proud of her.” Confronted with real talent, the artist in Maria always recognized and acknowledged it. Zeffirelli remembers bringing her a record of The Golden Age at the Metropolitan; she giggled outrageously when she heard Tetrazzini and Galli-Curci, but when Rosa Ponselle began to sing, she fell silent and listened absorbed.
Before London and Medea there was Venice and another ball—this time given by the Contessa Castelbarco. Ari and Tina Onassis were once again among the guests. Within a few minutes Ari had invited the Meneghini-Callases aboard the Christina.
“We can’t,” said Maria; “I am singing Medea at Covent Garden.”
“We’ll be there,” Ari replied promptly, to the amazement of Tina, who knew that he detested opera.
And that did not just mean going to the performance and then congratulating Maria backstage. Onassis organized a grand party and invited thirty-seven of the guests to join them first for the opera. “Mr. and Mrs. Aristotle Onassis request the pleasure . . .” read the invitations. In Covent Garden’s Crush Bar before curtain up, visibly excited, Onassis poured champagne and proudly distributed tickets to his friends as though Medea had been his very own creation. A few minutes before the overture began, he escorted Lady Churchill to her seat and took his own next to Tina. It was the first time he would see Maria in an entire opera.
Nobody can really know what went on in his mind in the darkened opera house as, sitting next to his wife, he watched the woman who was to replace, and far surpass, her in his heart. What is certain is that later that night at the party he gave for her at the Dorchester, only one person existed for him: Maria. It was as if he was there not so much to grant as to divine her every wish. The fashionable crowd included Randolph Churchill, Margot Fonteyn and Cecil Beaton, and the Dorchester ballroom had been decorated entirely in pink and filled with pink roses. Neither Maria nor Meneghini was unaccustomed to luxury, but even they had never encountered such prodigious hospitality. It was a party on a scale far grander than all the other parties, dinners and balls that had been given for her. It was the abundance, the energy, the vigor, almost the grandeur that this short, thickset, froglike man radiated that was communicated to everyone around him, from the hotel manager to the most junior waiter. On the night of June 18, Maria was the focus of all this energy. What would she like to hear? A tango? The band leader is summoned, 50 pounds put in his hand and a command issued: play nothing but tangos. And all night, Onassis, aroused by the smell of impending conquest, exceeded even himself. It was after three o’clock when Maria left the Dorchester, and in the foyer she was prophetically photographed in a triple embrace with Onassis and her husband on either side. The invitation to cruise on the Christina had been repeated several times in the course of the night, and Maria had promised him an answer soon.
First, however, there were four more Medeas to be sung in London and a concert at the Holland Festival. There were thousands of people to welcome her at Amsterdam airport when she arrived there on the Sunday evening before the performance. Deeply moved by the reception, she drove with Peter Diamand, the festival’s director, to the Amstel Hotel where she was staying, and where, after her triumphant concert on July 11, a reception held in her honor lasted until morning. “We must talk, the two of us, without Titta,” she told Peter Diamand at the reception. The following day they drove to Keukenhof near Leiden where they had lunch among the tulips. Walking in the lush park afterward, she asked Peter not to send her fee to the Callas-Meneghini joint account:
“Keep the money until you hear from me. There will be many changes in my life in the next few months. All my instincts tell me so. You’ll hear many things. . . . Please stay my friend.”
“Maria, che melodramma!” protested Peter Diamand.
“No, not melodrama, Peter—drama,” she said, but she looked radiant as she was saying it.
She had made up her mind: they were going on the Christina. Tina Onassis had called twice: “We so much hope you will come.”
Meneghini had put up a good fight. “I have to be in touch with my mother who is ill,” he said at the end, almost in desperation.
“No problem,” replied Onassis; “there are forty-two radio telephones on the Christina.”
It was Meneghini’s last card, and he had lost. He could not swim, he hardly spoke English, barely spoke French and was constantly seasick, but the decision had been made. In record time, Biki prepared for Maria a magnifi
cent cruising wardrobe: twenty dresses, pants suits, negligees, bathing suits.
On July 22, they flew to Monte Carlo. They were met by Ari, Tina and Ari’s sister, Artemis. The next day the other guests arrived: Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, their daughter Diana, their canary Toby, Churchill’s secretary Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, and the head of Fiat, Umberto Agnelli, with his wife. Prince Rainier was there to see them all off on the Christina. The only other time Maria had seen Churchill was in Athens during the Civil War, when in a crowd of people she waited outside the British embassy to watch him arrive in his armored car.
By the time the Churchills and the other guests appeared, Maria had already been shown the sea palace that was to be her home for the next three weeks; and the sophisticated femme du monde was transformed into a wondering girl. She laughed, she chattered, she asked questions, she enjoyed what she heard and what she saw: lapis lazuli balustrades, solid-gold fixtures in every bathroom, dolls designed by Dior for the children, an El Greco in Onassis’ study, a jeweled Buddha, the oldest known to exist in the West, a swimming pool decorated with an enlarged reproduction of a mosaic from the Palace of Knossos, marble bathrooms and ornate dressing rooms for the guest suites. . . . Tina had once said that for Ari the Christina “was not a fantastic plaything but a real passion. He is almost like a housewife fussing over it, constantly looking to see that everything is being done well, constantly looking for things to correct and improve.” It had a crew of sixty, and the staff included waiters, valets, seamstresses, masseurs and two chefs—one exclusively for French cuisine, the other for Greek. Both menus were available and the guests could choose.
Maria mostly ordered raw meat and green salads, and then, as was her lifelong habit, picked what she wanted from everybody else’s plates. The feeling that she had entered a fairy-tale world began to overwhelm her. She had brought with her a score of Bellini’s La Straniera. She did not touch it.
The first few days were difficult. Meneghini was grumpier and gloomier than she had ever known him. He was maddeningly lethargic and seemed unable to take an interest in anything except endlessly cataloguing what he saw as the other guests’ slights toward him. Maria found his worries, his complaints and his judgments of everyone and especially their host, exasperating. Onassis was only nine years his junior, but Meneghini seemed determined to behave like an ailing grandfather. Maria was divided between the marital proprieties and her instinctive longing to be close to Onassis.
By the time the Christina had reached Piraeus, the Greek gods seemed to have decided whose side they were on. The sea became rough, the weather stormy, Meneghini and most of the other guests took to their rooms, leaving Maria and Onassis alone in the deserted games room gazing at the roaring fire in the lapis lazuli fireplace and talking until the early hours of the morning. Something remarkable was happening to Maria: for the first time in her life she stopped being the sole object of her own absorbed attention. The self-absorption, it is true, had been for the glory of her art, but this did not change the fact that it had excluded all others; the attention she had given her husband was no more than an expression of her gratitude that he, too, had recognized that the world revolved around her and her art, and seemed well satisfied that this should be so. Now, suddenly, Maria had been displaced from the center of her world. She was deeply, passionately, in love. For a few days she went on fighting the feeling, resisting the realization, attributing the glow of happiness when she was near Ari to their common origins, his charm, his fascination for her; but it was only a matter of time—and a short time at that—before she surrendered.
As for Ari, he behaved as though he had thought of nothing in the past month except Maria. And in a sense that was true, except that Ari, as she was to discover, was capable of being monomaniacally obsessive about more than one thing at a time. He was in raptures over Medea, even though his dislike of opera was well-documented, and he was full of enthusiasm and ideas about Maria’s future, even though his ignorance of opera was at least as great as his dislike of it. He spent hours talking with her about the possibility of a Monte Carlo Opera Company built for her and around her. He did, after all, own a controlling interest in virtually all the major business activities in Monte Carlo.
In the long hours they spent together, they spoke mostly Greek to each other. They talked much of the future but they talked even more of the past. And mainly his past. Maria could not hear enough. He talked of Smyrna, on the coast of Turkey, where he was born seventeen years before her; he described the Greek quarters where he lived; he talked of his father Socrates and his uncle Homer, prosperous merchants of cotton, raisins, tobacco, figs and anything else the Anatolian interior produced. He talked of his mother Penelope, who had died of a kidney operation when he was six; of his father’s remarriage to her sister, of his grandmother Gethsemane whom he adored; of his time as a choirboy dressed in gold-braided cassock and surplice (“I still have a fine singing voice,” he teased her laughingly); of the time he pinched the attractive English teacher’s bottom and was suspended for several days as a result; of his first love and his first “mistress” when he was thirteen. He talked of the Turkish attack on Smyrna in which tens of thousands of Greeks perished, of his father’s arrest and the horror that followed, of his decision to emigrate to Argentina, and the crossing crammed with hundreds of immigrants packed together, of his arrival in Buenos Aires on September 21, 1923. He was sixteen and had sixty dollars in his pocket. When Maria was born, almost three months later, he was working for a Buenos Aires telephone company. The pay was not very good, he told her, but there were plenty of pretty telephone operators.
He would always talk to Maria about the women in his life in a way that made her feel flattered to be the culmination of such a long and varied list of conquests. In his search for the steady partner, which had already begun at the age of sixteen, he used to grade his dates meticulously in ten different categories ranging from receptivity and dress to love of the sea and love of parents. Before he was twenty-four, he was Greek vice-consul general in Argentina. He had not yet found the perfect mate, but not very long after that he found the perfect ships with which to begin his unique shipping career—two Canadian vessels, belonging to a company that had suffered huge losses during the Depression.
He loved talking to her of his struggles more than his victories, and he loved hearing of her own struggles. As he was to say later, “I have always had a great admiration for Madame Callas. More than her artistic talent, even more than her success as a great singer, what always impressed me was the story of her early struggles as a poor girl in her teens when she sailed through unusually rough and merciless waters.” The long, hard roads they had traveled, separate but parallel, until they became what the popular papers never tired of describing as “the world’s two most celebrated Greeks,” had finally come together in a love for each other that at times seemed almost predestined. Each liked the fact that the other was also a fighter, and a winner, with whatever cards life had dealt them. Aristo—as his family called him in Smyrna and as Maria loved to call him herself—always played down the prosperity and standing of his family before the Smyrna disaster, so that nothing would be allowed to detract from the romantic picture of the man who had started with nothing.
He ordered the captain to stop the Christina at Smyrna, ostensibly to show his guests the place where he was born, but in fact to bring to life for Maria the past he had been telling her about. At the beginning of August, the Christina anchored at Istanbul, still referred to by the Orthodox Greeks as Constantinople, their Church’s most sacred place. The following morning the patriarch received Onassis and his guests. When they knelt to receive his blessing, Ari and Maria were side by side. He called them “the world’s greatest singer and the greatest seaman of the modern world, the new Ulysses”; he thanked them for the honors they had brought to Greece; he blessed them. For Maria, this was the moment of complete surrender. She was deeply moved, as if the Byzantine ri
tual, the solemnity of the old patriarch, the special blessing for the two of them—as if all these corresponded to the drama being played inside her. More; it was as if the patriarch’s blessing was a blessing of their union, a formal permission to Maria to acknowledge the emotions that had been awakened in her and give them their proper name. “But she is already married,” Meneghini was heard whispering bitterly. He could sense Maria’s emotion, and although nothing had yet been said, some part of him knew that Maria already thought of herself as another man’s wife. “It was an outburst of nationalism,” he would insist later, the bitterness still very much alive. “It left Maria with the physical mark of exultation. She was no longer the same. How could I defend myself against the new Ulysses?”
Aristo was her first experience of loving and being loved—the world and everything in it glowed under a different light. Meneghini was right. Maria was no longer the same. Aristo had brought love, frivolity, passion and tenderness to the life of a dedicated nun who had begun to lose the taste for her vocation. He had broken that single-minded and in many ways glorious obsession with her work that had excluded so much, and he had opened the way for a host of feelings never before experienced and impressions never before sensed. For the first time she was not dominated by the constant tug of engagements, commitments and looming first nights. She could wake up in the morning without a sense of apprehension, soak up the sun during the day and Ari’s stories during the night as though there were no conflicts and no troubles. Ari came alive at night, especially after midnight. He loved to tell the stories of Greek myths, as others tell fairy tales to children, or to conjure up all the sea monsters he had heard sailors talk about. He could summon up the spirit of the places he had been, the force of the elements, the strangeness that lurked in the sea around them.
Maria Callas Page 25
