Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  The atmosphere was electric from the outset. At the sound of Tosca’s first “Mario,” still offstage, the audience gasped. Her entrance was greeted with a roar of applause which went on for an astounding four minutes. The conductor had no option but to stop the orchestra and wait for it, if not to die out, at least to quieten. Maria froze, and not for a second, while the applause was going on, did she step out of character. It was at the end of the performance during the sixteen curtain calls that she displayed that special Callas genius for acknowledging applause. The performance was scheduled to end at 10:40. It finished at 11:40, the extra hour having been taken up by the audience cheering, breaking into the middle of scenes and applauding, applauding, applauding.

  From The New York Times, the Washington Post, Opera News, the Saturday Review, The New Yorker, Time and a score of other publications, there sounded the same celebratory note.

  Miss Callas entered, and all things came to a halt. . . .

  A gasp went through the audience.

  Her conception of the role was electrical.

  Miss Callas is a unique creature—already, in fact, a legend . . .

  Her face mirrored even fleeting expressions implicit in the music . . .

  She was an electrifying figure on the stage, youthful, graceful, sensitive, beautiful to contemplate—and she lived the role as no other singer within my memory . . .

  If she did not care to sing a note, she would still rank among the genuine dramatic interpreters of our time.

  Hands. Just to watch Miss Callas’s hands at work almost recreated the opera. They caressed, stretched out in love and hatred, fluttered helplessly like a caged bird . . . At times she even sang through her hands.

  The stage presence shown by Callas in her performance would have raised the hackles on a deaf man.

  Her performance raised all kinds of hope that even the minor, trivial, technical problems of her recent years may be behind her. In any case, in fair days and foul, the Callas singing has been the voice of pure and palpable passion.

  Here we have a woman who, like her or not, is the most important person singing in opera today. Her greatness is in her fierce and all-pervasive power to realize every dramatic nuance of a character and to recreate that realization through the overwhelming use of her body and voice.

  Anyone, admirer or not, must admit that she has earned the right to stand at the top of a pyramid, with a total production—scenery, direction, conductor and cast—designed upwards in a consistent structure.

  But standing at the top of a pyramid felt much more like a burden than a privilege to Maria. It was as if with each celebratory adjective and with each adulatory word she read, the load she carried was becoming heavier. “After all,” she said on a BBC interview, “what is the legend? The public made me.” The legend of la Callas had long since begun to eat away at the woman, Maria. The more she identified with the legend, the greater the responsibility she felt toward it, the greater the fear that she might betray it. News of her New York triumph had very quickly reached Paris and everybody was expecting her to return exhilarated; instead she arrived exhausted. There were five performances of Norma at the Paris Opéra looming up and then Tosca at Covent Garden. But first there was a special edition of The Great Interpreters, a television program in which she sang arias from Manon, La Sonnambula and Gianni Schicchi, and after which she received hundreds of letters thanking her for “meeting the people” in this fashion and urging her to do more of it.

  The first night of Norma at L’Opéra was on May 14. In the last few days her fear had been mounting. On the night itself, full of injections and medicines, Maria felt that she could not even walk to the stage. In a talk with John Ardoin—her most moving outpouring on tape—she talked with pain of the gulf between the legend on the stage and Maria in her dressing room. “Can you go and tell them, John,” she said, or rather cried out, “that I am a human being and I have my fears . . . when they only see you sparkling under the lights, the limelights . . . how can people know you? How can newspapermen know you?”

  She did go on. An announcement was made asking for the audience’s understanding. It turned out to be unnecessary for the first performance, but very necessary for the second. By the third, Fiorenza Cossotto had replaced Maria’s old friend Giulietta Simionato as Adalgisa. The understanding Maria had asked from the audience had so far been automatically extended to her by all her colleagues, who sensed the agony she was going through. Cossotto was the exception. Zeffirelli remembers with anger what happened: “In the duet, Norma and Adalgisa must sing in close harmony holding hands. When Maria would signal to end a phrase, Cossotto would ignore her sign and hold on to the final note for a few extra seconds. So ungenerous. Maria was hurt by this. I went backstage and swore to her I would never work with her again. And I never have.” But this did not help during the next three performances that Maria had to sing with her. Fiorenza Cossotto was determined to outsing the great Callas. It was hardly an achievement, as even Maria’s most ardent fans would acknowledge that Cossotto, with her thoroughbred voice, could securely grasp high notes that Maria only snatched at.

  The night of Maria’s last Norma, May 29, was another gala night, with the Shah of Iran in the audience. Maria’s doctor had tried to persuade her not to go on, so shattered were her nerves, but she found the prospect of facing the uproar of yet “another Callas cancellation” even harder than the prospect of the performance. She went ahead. By the third act, it was clear to those close to her that she could not finish. To top it all, Cossotto treated their big duet like a duel. It was painful to watch Maria desperately trying to keep up with her rival singing at full voice. She practically sleepwalked through the end of the third act, and as soon as the curtain came down, she collapsed and was carried unconscious to her dressing room.

  The curtain fell never to rise again. An hour later, supported by two men, Maria left L’Opéra forever. “Forgive me—I shall return to win your forgiveness,” she whispered to the waiting crowd. Her eyes were moist, her face white; she was crushed, and the crowd had sensed it. After her Rome “walkout,” there had been an uproar against her, but now, apart from the few Cossotto supporters bursting into cheers for their favorite and catcalls for Maria, it was as if the audience was reaching out to share with her their strength and love.

  At the zenith of her power, ten years earlier, she had been asked how she felt about the endless controversy surrounding her. “When my enemies stop hissing,” she had said with that mock aggressiveness behind which she hid her fears, “I shall know I’m slipping.” They had not entirely stopped hissing, but their hisses were only a faint, hesitant echo of the past. As Maria’s nightmare was beginning, the bulk of the audience was shouting “Bravo.” In the pain of her breakdown, everything seemed meaningless. She knew she could not go on singing without destroying herself, and she also knew, with that clarity that pain often brings, that the hectic gaiety of Onassis’ world was not where happiness, or any real meaning, could be found.

  “What are we in search of? Have you ever thought of that, John? What are we in search of today?” she asked John Ardoin. The life inside her was crying out for some clue. She was floundering, but she could at least find sustenance in her love for Aristo, and his for her. She would use this love to ward off despair until her love itself became desperate.

  Meanwhile four Toscas in London loomed threateningly ahead of her. Maria could not bear either to contemplate or to cancel them. Georges Prêtre talked to her on the phone before he left for London; she told him nothing of her fears. Her suite at the Savoy was waiting for her and her plane ticket had been bought. The Friday before the Monday she was due to arrive in London, she was seen and photographed at the Rothschild Ball in Paris. The Wednesday after she was due to arrive—forty-eight hours before she was due to sing—the London papers were full of “the mystery of missing Maria Callas.” In the evening, she rang David Webster at home. She was ill; her blood pressure was dangerously low and her doctors wou
ld not allow her to travel, let alone sing four performances. Panic broke out: people had been queueing around Covent Garden for five nights to get tickets; all performances were sold out; Georges Prêtre and Tito Gobbi were waiting for her to start rehearsing; and the last performance was a royal gala in the presence of the queen. David Webster talked to the doctors, then he talked to Maria in Paris, then he talked to Maria again and again, and finally he boarded a plane and arrived on her doorstep. He pleaded with her to sing at least once, at the royal gala; and Maria, who genuinely cared for Webster, gave in.

  Marie Collier took over the first three performances and Maria herself arrived at the Savoy on July 3. The following night, on the eve of the performance, in a room next to hers, a Canadian businessman did not sleep. Maria spent the whole night singing Tosca—beautifully, according to her neighbor. But she knew that singing Tosca beautifully alone in her room was no guarantee that she would sing it beautifully on the night itself. She had said as much herself a few years earlier. “I say to my friends, if I had a performance tonight look how beautifully I’d sing. But probably if I did have the performance then I would say just the opposite. ‘Oh, how horrible I feel and I don’t feel like singing. Why do I have to sing?’ ”

  There was something cold about that gala night on July 5. It was as if Maria could feel the disappointment and disapproval of her absent friends, those who had queued uncomplainingly for days and heard Marie Collier instead of their idol. And the gala audience, with its inevitable complement of those who were there to be seen rather than to hear, did nothing to dispel the chill in Maria’s heart, despite the enthusiastic applause that greeted her curtain calls at the end. Part of her surely knew, as she left Covent Garden for the Savoy, that this was the last time; she would never sing another opera.

  That summer on Skorpios she ached for a new beginning, with no more struggle and no more torment. “Love is a single thing,” she was to say three years later. “You love, you worship and you honor, they go together. You can’t love in a different manner. They say, oh, well, I’m attracted and all that. No. You love, then you worship, then you honor.” It could have been a line from any one of her heroines who loved totally, heedlessly, obsessively. It nearly was Lucia’s: “My hopes, my life, I pledged to this one heart.”

  But that summer was their worst time together. Onassis, a master of the art of pleasing women, was no less a master of the art of crushing them. And there was something in Maria’s way of treating him like a sultan or a god that brought out the despot in him. Underneath the easy sophistication of the café society habitué (and not that far below the surface), Onassis had retained all the primitive male impulses of the old-fashioned Greek. Ingse Dedichen, the woman he nearly married during the Second World War, remembers the first time he beat her up, leaving her “like a boxer who has just lost a fight.” “Every Greek,” he told her afterward, “and there are no exceptions, beats his wife. It’s good for them. It keeps them in line.” There is no evidence that he ever beat Maria, but all the suppressed violence in him came out in the way he treated her, especially in front of his children. He would walk ahead with them, leaving her behind, and he belittled her constantly: “What are you? Nothing. You just have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.”

  At the beginning of their relationship it had been just the occasional jibe, but in the summer of 1965 it suddenly became unremitting, and, for many of Maria’s friends, unbearable to watch. Zeffirelli was one of them. One day on Skorpios he took Onassis aside: “Listen, Aristo,” he said to him, “I don’t know the details of your private relationship, but it is very distressing to people who love Maria to see her treated like this.” It had no effect, of course, and Zeffirelli found himself resisting their invitations more and more, simply because he felt powerless to protect her either from Onassis or from herself. Maggie van Zuylen, on the other hand, tried to make Maria see everything as part of life. “Of course he loves you. That’s why he yells and abuses you and puts you down. If he didn’t love you he would just ignore you and be totally indifferent to you.” And there were times in their relationship when Maria so desperately needed to clutch at something that even these straws of Maggie’s were better than nothing.

  Throughout this summer, they were hardly ever alone. Ari was constantly surrounded by a retinue of aides and managers—all of them men, all of them in a hurry, and most of them intent on raising a barrier impenetrable to mere women, even celebrated opera stars. There was much of the boy hero in Onassis. And as the feelings he shared with Maria, especially over the past year, had become deeper and more intimate, the boy hero had become frightened. Maria was so much more real than Tina or his various mistresses that he feared she might draw him into a true and complete relationship from which he could not run away. So he turned against her and clung to his wandering masculinity even more fiercely than before, almost challenging her to make him give it up. Maria could see that she loved a man suffering from almost pathological restlessness and, despite his joviality, from chronic dissatisfaction; she could see that while she wanted a family, he wanted the world. She could even see that under the tide of his will, her own was draining away. But perhaps the test of great passion is not that it is blind but that it survives even when those in its grip can see clearly. She had given her power over to him, and he, now feeling the stronger of the two, dictated the terms of their relationship.

  After her last Tosca, there was nothing that really mattered in her life except Aristo, although there was, right to the end, much talk about the many projects that she was considering with her mind but rarely with her heart. For the time being, the film of Tosca was the project most likely to materialize. Zeffirelli was going to direct it, and he had great dreams for Maria: “She will immediately impose herself as what the French call a monstre sacré, she will be the new Greta Garbo.” Maria’s friends, headed by Vergottis, were totally in favor of the project. In fact Vergottis was in touch with Beta Films, the German producers, and together with Sander Gorlinsky, who was negotiating on Maria’s behalf, he had been discussing terms and conditions with them. “I went a couple of times to the island that summer,” Zeffirelli remembers, “and could not believe the way Onassis manipulated her mind and unleashed her greed. At one moment she asked for twenty-five percent of the gross plus about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for appearing in it.”

  In August, Maria interrupted her holiday to go to London to be at Vergottis’ side following the death of his brother. Once again they talked of the project. Finally a compromise was reached and Maria, Gorlinsky, Vergottis and the German producers all met in Monte Carlo to complete the arrangements. Zeffirelli had agreed, Gobbi had agreed, the studio had been booked and at the Monte Carlo meeting the final details were ironed out. All that was needed was Maria’s signature on the contract. She asked to take it with her to show it to Ari.

  Two weeks later, Gorlinsky received a call at his office from Maria on the Christina. Could he, together with Onassis’ lawyer, leave London immediately and come to Skorpios, where the Christina was anchored, to discuss the contract? A car rushed them to London airport where the Olympic Airways flight to Crete was held up until they arrived. In Crete, a private plane was waiting to fly them to Skorpios. Right from the start, their talks turned into legalistic wrangling. Quibble after quibble followed, until Onassis had torn the contract to pieces. When the producers arrived a couple of days later, the discussions became even more fraught with tension. It was instantly obvious to all, who dominated the meetings; so much so that when, at one point, Maria asked a question, Onassis cut her off: “Shut up! Don’t interfere, you know nothing about these things. You are nothing but a nightclub singer.” “I was hoping,” remembers Gorlinsky, “that she would pick up the nearest bottle and throw it at him, but no, she just got up and walked out. She was totally under his thumb.”

  “We are going to make the film on our own,” Onassis finally said to Gorlinsky. “You find out how much they want to sell the r
ights for, and you become the producer.” When Beta Films eventually realized that in no circumstances would Onassis let Maria make the film with them, they agreed to sell their rights. Gorlinsky was dispatched to Rome, with a suite booked at the Grand Hotel and the full resources of the Onassis offices at his disposal, to negotiate the hand-over and start on the film. Gorlinsky is now convinced that Onassis never intended to buy the film rights or let Maria make the film. Apart from sabotaging the negotiations with Beta Films, he reinforced all Maria’s own doubts and fears about launching into something new. He wanted a slave—and a new career is not conducive to slavery.

  Two weeks after Gorlinsky had called his wife in London to ask her to make preparations to go to Rome for the film production, the whole thing had collapsed, and in October, Maria announced publicly that she was withdrawing from Tosca. Vergottis telephoned her and implored her to reconsider. She was, he told her, making a big mistake, depriving both herself and the world of art of something very important. Maria, sounding like Onassis’ mouthpiece, began talking about crooked producers who could not be trusted or relied on, and it was clear that nothing Vergottis could say was going to move her. He felt that she had not even been listening. He lost his temper and began accusing her of having given up everything, including her judgment, for “that man” who had now torpedoed her chance to make the film. It was Maria’s turn to flare up. It is impossible to discover exactly what she said but it was abusive and hurtful, and one thing is certain—Vergottis never forgave her. It did not take her long to realize that she had gone too far. She sat down and wrote him a letter, explaining, asking him to understand. He did not reply, nor did he understand.