What had driven her from performance to performance and from recording to recording without pause was now a faint echo, a memory with no power to revive the reality.
“You haven’t practiced once,” said Princess Grace to her in amazement at the end of a three-week cruise. “Margot Fonteyn wouldn’t go for three weeks without working out.”
“I don’t need to,” was Maria’s reply. “I can go for a month without.”
It would have been more accurate to say: “I don’t want to; I don’t want to go on vocalizing and acting and studying roles and doing all the things I’ve done all my life.” Zeffirelli remembers visiting her in Paris to talk about doing Tosca: “The first thing I noticed were the long nails of her beautiful hands and I realized that they were the nails of someone who had not touched the keyboard of a piano . . . for at least two years . . . and I told her that. I said, ‘I’m very sorry because, obviously, you haven’t been practicing your voice.’ She said, ‘How do you know?’ I said, ‘Look at your fingernails.’ And then she realized, looked at them and made a beautiful gesture with her hands, like a little girl, and she said, ‘Yes, all right, but I’ve been distracted. . . . I am trying to fulfill my life as a woman.’ ” Despite Aristo’s restlessness and his need for action and movement, she found herself on their cruises basking in a timelessness that made ambition and even achievement seem unimportant, almost irrelevant.
All this augured badly for Maria’s return visit to Epidaurus in August. But she was, after all, a toughened professional, and within hours of finding herself in the ancient theater, the old drive and perfectionism were back. The last four days before the opening night of Medea on August 6, 1961, were spent rehearsing without stop. With Minotis, who was delighted to be able to transfer his production to the center of ancient Greek drama, she worked late into the night, perfecting her movements, her poses, the play of her accusing hands, her fierce pacings to and fro before the palace, the violent caressings of the two children she is about to kill. On the night before the performance she even asked for a bed to be made up for her in a room in the Museum of Epidaurus so as not to be away from the theater. Cherubini’s music was written during the French Revolution, but as Peter Heyworth put it, “Maria Callas is much nearer to ancient Greece than to revolutionary France. While Cherubini trundles out his clichés she storms the heights with Euripides.”
It seemed as though the whole of Greece longed to hear her storm the heights. The dress rehearsal was given for the neighboring peasants who filled the theater and applauded with passion the Greek Medea who had sung all over the world and had now come back to sing for them. From very early in the morning on the day of the first performance, the main road from Athens to Corinth, on the way to Epidaurus, had been closed to eastbound traffic to make it possible for the hundreds of cars leaving the capital for the ancient theater to get there before nightfall. Among them were the cars of the prime minister and most of the cabinet. The prime minister took his seat for the performance three minutes before Elsa Maxwell took hers. Ghiringhelli was already there, and so were David Webster and Wally Toscanini and Prince Rainier’s uncle and numerous other citizens of the beau monde.
The orchestra came in, but all eyes still watched the entrance for the instantly recognizable figure of Aristotle Onassis—the man whose name had already entered the Greek language as a synonym for legendary riches. They watched in vain. Onassis, aboard the Christina, was heading toward Alexandria. When his friends later described Maria’s triumph to him, he claimed that business had kept him away. Perhaps it was business, and perhaps, too, he had simply had one too many of Maria’s first nights, receiving congratulations on her behalf and finding the warmth of her reflected glory uncomfortably hot. Jackie Kennedy may have been famous—perhaps even more so than Maria—but that was largely as the widow of the slain president of the United States, rather than through her own achievements. So although he had his problems dealing with Jackie, his male vanity had no difficulty coping with her celebrity.
He missed Maria’s greatest triumph in Epidaurus, seventeen curtain calls, twenty thousand spectators in ecstasy and, on the hills around the theater, standing, sitting on stones or perching in trees, thousands more who had not been able to get tickets for the performance but were going to hear her anyway. Once again in the front row, looking very dapper in his white tuxedo with his trim little mustache, was George Kalogeropoulos; this time, next to him, was his elder daughter. There was an emotional meeting between the two sisters and the family had dinner together after the performance, but the reconciliation went no deeper—nor did it include Evangelia.
Onassis arrived just in time for the second Medea on August 13; and then, having once again donated her fee to the Scholarship Fund for Young Musicians, Maria was off on the Christina. But she, who could mesmerize an audience by her mere presence, seemed to be losing this power when it came to Ari. Her love and happiness with him were becoming more burdened with apprehension, with the fear of losing him. She always minded their separations much more than he did and, when she forgot all Maggie’s good advice and complained, she easily fell victim to his self-justifying and hectoring tactics. He had begun to take on a possessive tone of affectionate mockery, and he was becoming increasingly less affectionate and more mocking. What seemed at first only love bites began to leave scars and to hurt. Maria’s tolerant, understanding attitude was the result of a conscious decision and, therefore, extremely precarious. When it all became too much for her, she would explode and leave the room to sulk, alone with the pain that had caused the explosion. As soon as he sensed her retreating, he would advance and reconquer her, and it would all be beautiful for a while, until once again he would be off for days on end, sometimes without even telling her.
While Maria had been cruising on the Christina, Meneghini had lodged a new demand with the Civic Tribunal in Milan to annul their separation by mutual consent, and institute in its place a separation order that acknowledged Maria’s responsibility for the breakdown of their marriage. Meneghini was boiling in his statement to the press: “She’s not behaving like a woman of her position . . . has made nonsense of the court order that we should remain faithful to one another. . . . I want to whiten my name and I want to proclaim that it was because of her that our marriage was destroyed . . .” From his self-imposed exile in Sirmione, reading about Maria’s glittering new life must have been agonizing and infuriating. The woman whom he had very revealingly called “my chef d’oeuvre” had walked out of his life and was clearly wasting no time looking back. In the role of the wronged husband in an old-fashioned melodrama, he hoped to remind her of his existence and force her to look back. Nor would he stop there. Until the end of Maria’s life, Meneghini played the part of the chorus, commenting on what she did or what was done to her and predicting what she was going to do or what was going to be done to her. And he went on acting the part of the chorus even after her death; Maria, dead or alive, remained the center of his life.
In the summer of 1961, Maria must certainly have wished he had found another center. Using a technicality in the Italian divorce laws that made it possible to go on talking of infidelity after a separation, Meneghini was trying to prove something that nobody doubted in the first place. He later produced photographs of her with Onassis—especially one where they were kissing at a nightclub—to prove her infidelity. Maria, caught in the trap, tried to disprove it, using as her evidence the status of the other people present in the photographs. The unstated but all too clear implication was that sleeping with each other is not something that goes on in such exalted circles. It was one of the fictional public statements to which Maria was prone, as if she was driven to them against her will by the gap between her impulses and her actions on the one hand and her beliefs on the other. Her beliefs rather than reality almost invariably dominated her public statements, which is why they so often sounded stilted, rigid and unreal.
Commenting on Maria’s behavior and predicting her future was not the
prerogative of Meneghini alone. It was open season for friends and foes alike. And on the basis of their statements, it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart. In the middle of October, Visconti joined the fray. “I adore Callas,” he said, “but I don’t think she will sing again, except perhaps once a year. She knows that two years ago she was very great and that her great moment must pass. As a woman she is still young but as a singer she is not so young and the voice changes with age. Besides, now she’s involved with private stories, which is not good for her.”
It was quite a blessing at the time that, ever since the breakup of her marriage, Tina had maintained a ladylike silence on the subject of the new woman in her ex-husband’s life. She was in any case too busy pursuing her desire for a real home, with winding staircases and family portraits on the wall. On October 23, at the Greek Orthodox church in Paris, she married the marquess of Blandford and became the chatelaine of Lee Place, her new husband’s estate in Oxfordshire. The duke of Marlborough, the bridegroom’s father, and George Livanos, Tina’s brother, were the witnesses, and for a change the spotlight was on Tina as the scores of photographers burst into the church to immortalize the marquess and his Greek marchioness, still wearing the coronets of flowers from the ceremony. When Ari and Maria flew into London a couple of weeks later, most of the questions were about Tina. “Our relationship has always been most friendly and as far as I know, we are still on the best of terms,” was Ari’s reply.
Maria was in London to record a selection of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini arias. It was another in the series of recordings made but never released. Only one aria from Pirata was judged by Maria to be good enough for general release. Back in Milan, she anxiously tried to get into shape for the opening night of Medea at La Scala. It was again the Minotis production, although the settings had had to be totally rebuilt and adjusted to the Scala stage, and it was once again Jon Vickers who was to sing Jason. The opening night on December 11 soon became part of the Callas folklore. She was not in good voice and during her first-act duet with Jason she sounded really weak, lacking the strength to give it the intensity it needed.
Thomas Schippers, who was conducting, recalled what followed. “From the top of the gallery came an awful hissing sound, like a typhoon, that covered the entire auditorium. Maria continued and finally reached the point in the text where Medea denounces Jason with a word ‘Crudel!’ (‘Cruel man!’). The orchestra must follow this word with two forte chords, then wait for her to sing a second ‘Crudel!’ before it can continue playing. But after the first ‘Crudel!’ Maria completely stopped singing. . . . I watched in disbelief as she glared up into the auditorium and took in every pair of eyes in the theater, as if to say, ‘Now look! This has been my stage and will be mine as long as I want it. If you hate me now, I hate you just as much!’ I saw this, I felt it. Then Maria sang her second ‘Crudel!’ directly at the public, squashing it into silence. Never in my life have I seen anyone dare such a thing in the theater. Never. And there was not a murmur of protest against her after that. I was paralyzed. . . . I had no idea when she was going to sing again. She controlled the whole thing.”
When she started again on the words, “Ho dato tutto a te” (“I gave everything to you”), she shook her fist at the gallery, precisely the kind of behavior that the other Maria, the Maria who talked so much about respectability, would have disdained. Here was another deep rift within her: the great artist who accepted everything—including hate and jealousy and ugliness and pain—as part of life and gave raw expression to them; and the other Maria, prim, proper, puritanical, worshiping “the done thing” and ardently believing in conventional morality and in what, time and again, she would refer to as normality. The imagination of this other Maria was peopled with mythical “normal” men and especially “normal” women, into whose ranks she longed to rise.
There would be two more performances of Medea. In between, in agonizing pain, she had to have a sinus operation to make it possible for her to sing the third Medea on December 20. While the newspapers, which had noticed the absence of Onassis from her bedside during her convalescence from the operation, forecast the end of their relationship, Maria joined Ari in Monte Carlo for Christmas. Such reports were to become a constant feature of the next six years. This time they were wrong in fact but right in spirit. The beginning of 1962 found Maria anxious and introspective. Surfeited with applause and praise, she hoped through Aristo and their love to find something more real; and she had convinced herself that it was to be found in something solid, in a family and children. But talk of marriage, of finding a house together, had dwindled. Maria was discovering, as Tina had discovered before her, that home for Onassis was wherever he was, provided there was a telephone on the spot and a nightclub not too far away. The Christina was the nearest thing to a conventional home that he ever had. He was to meet his match later when it became clear that Jackie wanted a home—at least a home with him—even less than he did.
For the moment he was offering Maria everything except what she deeply wanted. La passione dei sensi, as an Italian friend of theirs described their relationship, was still alive, but it could not sustain their life together, and Maria’s pleasure in the round of parties, balls and nightclubs had begun to suffer from the law of diminishing returns. Ari was a confectioner, and although he was a Confectioner Royal, Maria was finding out that confectionery will not satisfy for long those who seek the bread of life. With her fortieth birthday not far off, she could feel her life slipping by; and before it was too late she wanted to live out all the passion and the love that were inside her. “In operas,” she had said once, “I’ve played heroines who die for love—and that’s something I can understand.” Both the conventional woman in her who longed to be “normal,” and the passionate woman who could understand dying for love, wanted marriage. She had had, through her art, glimpses of another reality, another world: “ . . . a world I would like to live in all the time. It’s a—no, I won’t say superior—it’s a very nice, good world. No envy, no gossip, no nonsense, everything so pure and serene. But there is great passion, great love there, too.”
The tragic irony was that the man with whom she wanted to turn this world into a permanent reality could not imagine life except in the center of the world of envy, gossip and nonsense. There was essentially a deep seriousness in Maria. By nature and inclination she was an enemy to the world where all is sacrificed to the amusing. Surrounded by people from the world of the yacht and the private jet, with more than their share of joyless affairs and loveless marriages, she often felt lost and lonely. She was attracted to its glamour but frightened by its emptiness, and the novelty and the glamour were already beginning to fade. She never really smoked, though she did have an occasional cigarette when others were smoking around her; she was never a drinker, though with Onassis she began to have more than a token glass of wine; and she disliked dancing except, as she said once to Princess Grace, “with my husband or the man I love.” She hated nightclubs, and yet in 1962 and in 1963, she spent many more hours in nightclubs than in opera houses and concert halls. And during these years more column inches were published about her nightclub appearances than about her appearances in opera houses. Sometimes the headlines were fully interchangeable. “Callas walks out,” read one of them. The story was that she had walked out when a dancer was announced as “La Callas du Striptease.” “The truth,” said Maria later, “was that at the end of the number I had asked to be taken home simply because I found it rather boring.” News of Maria’s celebrated ferocity had reached even the farthest outposts of the beau monde. It was well known that she had claws and could bite. “Why are people nervous about meeting me?” she asked Derek Prouse when he went to see her in Monte Carlo for the London Sunday Times. There is, however, no record of any member of the beau monde having been mauled by her. “Ours,” said one of the more perceptive among them, “was the kind of immunity accorded to exotic tribes.”
Maria rarely felt part of Onassis’
world, and it certainly never became her own. When he left her, she left it. In a sense, Onassis never belonged to it either. He was too full of life, too close to the earth, the sea and the elements not to feel the emptiness and even the desperation that so often fueled the way that he and those around him lived. He idealized the lives of simple fishermen and often spent hours talking with them. Every now and then, he would go across to Nidri, two miles from Skorpios, to have an ouzo with Niko, whom everybody knew as the “Gelastos Psaras” (“the Laughing Fisherman”). He had even fixed on the stern of his fishing boat a wooden plaque of a happy face with an open smile. “Ah, Niko,” Onassis would tell him, “there are only two happy people in the world, you and that face.”
At times Ari displayed an almost monkish loathing of the international socialites flocking to Monte Carlo and was glad to exchange the lot of them for an invitation to spend a weekend with Churchill at Chartwell—which he finally received. There is no doubt that he was much happier as Churchill’s court jester than the beau monde’s king. Both Ari and Maria were romantic snobs, impressed by power, by names that had made history or that were old when history was young, but Maria’s snobbery was highly theoretical. “One” was “normally” impressed by such people; therefore she must be too. Yet she would not sing for Churchill if she did not feel like it, nor would she take even a few steps out of her way to befriend the powerful and the great. Onassis, on the other hand, would turn his life upside down, and often did, especially when there was a chance of impressing, upsetting or irritating Niarchos. The vanity and rivalry of these two men, both parachutists into the established Greek shipping community, overshadowed any recorded rivalry between warring prima donnas. At times it seemed that they bought their ships, chose their friends, closed their deals and married their wives for the sole purpose of impressing each other.
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