Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  Early in September, Maria arrived in Dallas with two cracked ribs: she had slipped in her bathroom in Cuernavaca and fallen on the tiled floor. Suddenly the physical pain became a welcome distraction from the emotional agony. John Ardoin, who was music critic of the Dallas Morning News and a great friend of Lawrence Kelly’s, started calling her Maria Click because of the sound made by her broken ribs. He remembers her giggling like a schoolgirl the first day he collected her from the doctor’s. “I had to get a doctor,” she said, still laughing, “who collects all my records. Poor man, he blushed when he asked me to take off my blouse, and he seemed afraid to touch me!”

  One afternoon, at John Ardoin’s house, after they had taped an interview for a local radio station, Maria turned very quiet; suddenly tears welled up in her eyes. As she began sobbing, and John Ardoin took her in his arms, she cried out: “How could anyone be so cruel?” After a few moments, she pulled away and went to the bathroom to compose herself. “Put another tape on,” she said when she came back. “These will be notes for you.” The pain she was carrying had somehow to be exorcised before she could face Paris and what remained of her world. It was as if the shock of the breakup with Onassis had opened the sluices of all the bitterness and resentment that had been accumulating for years. She longed to make sense of it all, to understand and to be understood. When she decided, that afternoon in Dallas, to talk to John Ardoin, the man who six years later would write the most comprehensive and most deeply understanding study of her singing, she knew that his respect and love for her were such that she could trust him completely. “I know you will never misquote me, John,” she said. “You understand me too well.” Nor did he betray her trust; the most intimate and painful details of their conversations he never published at all.*

  These tapes are the most extraordinary document we have of Maria talking about herself. In the last years of her life she would spend hours speaking into a tape recorder, but most of the time it was La Callas speaking in all her dignity and stature. In her conversations with John Ardoin, we can feel the legend creeping in every now and then, but most of the time it is Maria pouring her heart out in an English that had clearly suffered from nine years of speaking Greek with Ari. What we hear is a disjointed stream of consciousness welling up from a level deeper and more truthful than any from which she had yet spoken.

  Not once in this flood of memories does she refer to Onassis by name. He is “them” or “they” or “he” or an abstract presence hovering over everything she says: “If for nine years you have been living a hidden life, and a humiliating life, it gets you, and you’re not cured in two months. . . . When serious, strong people promise or guarantee relative happiness, then they have to live up to that. It’s too easy to say, ‘Well, you know . . . I mean . . . we did our best to be happy!’ ‘Well, thank you very much . . . for nine years.’ ‘Well, ain’t that sweet?’ as they say vulgarly. Where does it leave me? At least a friendship? Not even that. The way things have gone I can’t be friends. How can he be my friend? Humiliating me that way. It’s so easy to say, ‘No resentment.’ Sure, Christianity says, I’ve read it in books, ‘You must forgive, you must have no resentment.’ I don’t have resentment, but I have hurt.”

  Every word she spoke, every pause, is in fact steeped in both hurt and resentment. She felt that he had robbed her not only of her respectability, but, much more important, of her dream of a family that would bring meaning to her life: “ . . . After nine years, not a child, not a family, not a friend! That’s very little you know. And you say, ‘God, why? Why should these things happen?’ Also, because I figure in my own stupid logic that if people have been privileged to reach great positions they should realize that their obligation is to be happy, somehow or other. . . . It takes very little to make me happy, but then when you’re slapped down, it’s not very pleasant, don’t you think? Tomorrow you have a girl and you love her, and today she says she’ll love you forever, and then tomorrow she treats you all of a sudden very badly. That’s a big slap in the face. Now if that goes on every day up and down, you’ll be a nervous wreck. Am I right? Would you still hope? . . . I would rather hope for the worst and have the best. Frankly, for nine years I thought I would have, and I found out. . . . How can a man be so dishonest? So, I don’t know, so crazy. Poor man . . .”

  All this outpouring came before the shock of the public announcement of Ari’s wedding, which was still thirty-four days away. “I don’t like to lose. Who does? Frankly I’m terrified of going home. It’s like the beginning of a performance . . .” She had hoped that Onassis would have led her closer to reality. Now that he had gone, she felt she had no option but to return to the performance—in life no less than onstage, and however terrifying the prospect of both. From Dallas, she made an announcement: “Next season, I shall sing again at the Dallas Opera. Lawrence Kelly and Nicola Rescigno have been my friends for a very long time. It was with them that I made my debut in America. And it is with them that I would like to return to the stage.” She did not believe it; it was part of the performance. “Anything to survive, my dear,” she told John Ardoin. “At my stage of the game, anything to survive.” The announcement was part of the survival game: no date given, no opera, no cast, no director. More of an incantation than a statement of fact: next year, please God, make it possible that I may sing again, for there is nothing else left. “Don’t have any illusions, John. Happiness is not of my world.”

  From Dallas, with Mary Mead and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Lainie, she flew to New York. Maria found in Lainie a much-needed outlet for her love and her attention, giving her advice on how to diet, how to discipline herself in her life and, above all, how never to give herself over completely to anyone. But Maria’s despair, which even the fourteen-year-old had sensed, was a more powerful deterrent than any advice, especially as, while they were in New York, Onassis arrived and was everywhere reported escorting Mrs. Kennedy about town. “I can’t bear watching her pain,” Lainie said to her mother. “I hope I never, never care so much about anyone.”

  Renata Tebaldi was opening at the time in Adriana Lecouvreur at the Met. Maria decided to go to the first night and, backstage afterward, the two rivals fell into each other’s arms. Maria had tears in her eyes. It was as if something had driven her to seek some confirmation that there was still harmony and reconciliation underneath all the bitterness and the hurt. And she found it backstage at the Met.

  Back in Paris, she wrote to John Ardoin:

  Dear John

  Thank you so much for being such a warm affectionate friend—you really don’t know what strength you give me—may God pay you all back for such love & respect towards me.

  I came back quite exhausted—too many emotions, I suppose—I am so fragile under this so called control.

  I do so want to be worthy of you all, & of course, myself.

  It is still a long life to live and I must be worthy of so much bestowed upon me.

  And she signed it “Yours affectionately, Maria Click.”

  On October 17, 1968, at three thirty in the afternoon, Nancy Tuckerman, Jackie’s secretary, made an announcement to the press: “Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss has asked me to tell you that her daughter, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, is planning to marry Aristotle Onassis some time next week. No place or date has been set for the moment.”

  Maria was in Paris.

  Three days later on October 20, at five thirty in the afternoon in the tiny chapel of Panayitsa (the Little Virgin) on Skorpios, where Maria loved to sit alone in the hot afternoons, a bearded Greek Orthodox archimandrite, in gold brocade vestments, stepped forward to conduct a traditional Greek Orthodox wedding: “The servant of God Aristotle is betrothed to the servant of God Jacqueline, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . .” Artemis, the bridegroom’s sister, placed on the heads of the couple delicate wreaths with lemon blossom linked with a white ribbon, and changed them over three times while the priest was chanting. Gold wedding bands were placed on their fi
ngers and also passed between them three times. Alexander and Christina looked on grimly. Caroline and John-John watched dazzled. Patrol boats, reinforced by cruisers and helicopters from the Greek navy, circled the island to keep reporters from getting closer than a thousand yards.

  It was raining heavily as, a few hours later, around the wedding table on the Christina, Janet Auchincloss stood up and, dabbing her eyes, looked straight at her son-in-law: “I know that my daughter is going to find peace and happiness with you.”

  In Paris, Maria was arriving smiling at the film premiere of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear. She was still smiling when in the early hours of the morning she left Les Ambassadeurs where she had spent the night celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Maxim’s. It was one of the most convincing, one of the greatest performances of her career. Only someone who had looked closely into her huge dark eyes could have seen the anguish that had dimmed their light.

  * It was not until a year after her death that he made the full transcript available for this biography.

  13

  “IF I COULD HAVE A MEDICINE that could give me strength, mental and physical, especially physical . . . I’d be pleased with one year, one good year coming back to what I was. It’s the beginning . . . that’s what I’m terrified of, the beginning.”

  Since that last performance on the night of the wedding, Maria had existed in a mist, a dream, an intoxication, living and reliving the past in her mind—as though she could not only postpone but in some way avoid beginning again. The wheels of her mind would not slow down and only with sleeping pills and tranquilizers would they stop. At the deepest point of her despair, she found herself repeating, at first only half consciously and then with all her heart, “God, give me what you want, but, above all, give me the strength to bear what you send me and to survive it.”

  As soon as he read about the wedding, Francesco Chiarini, an old friend of Meneghini’s who had remained Maria’s trusted friend, phoned her from Brussels where he was on business. Maria asked him to come and see her in Paris. They talked of the past, of common friends, of what he was doing now, but there was something withdrawn, almost absent about her. Finally, she said: “You know, Francesco, you are a funny man. You’ve read what has happened to me, and yet you come and see me and not once do you mention it. Look at these.” She got up and fetched him a thick pile of letters and telegrams of condolence from other friends, including Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, and Visconti. From that point on, they talked of nothing else. Or rather he listened while she poured out some of the anger and the pain.

  Ten days after the wedding, she wrote to John Ardoin in her own idiosyncratic English, again without once referring to Onassis by name.

  . . . So many things have happened and sincerely I am reacting externally very well, I presume. But I am under severe pressure and am desperately trying to keep controlled. Of course I consider all this a liberation. But how little faith one is left with. One moment I am full of confidence and the next very little. I fight the last because it is not christian and noble and my feelings are essentially pure and all that goes with it.

  But, John, what a lonesome life I see for myself. No work I can do will be what I was used to and no man is to my expectations or standards—and that does not mean financial situation. Is it so much to ask of people to be loyal, honest, faithful and passionate? (always in the happy medium of course?)

  I am quite discouraged of being only sure of myself and no one else past, present & future. Am I such a strange creature? And why?

  Forgive this strange letter but I am in a strange moment.

  When she looked ahead the only lifeboats she could see were work, new roles, new projects: a film of Puccini’s life that Visconti wanted to make; Menotti’s The Consul; Tennessee Williams’ Boom!, turned into a film by Joseph Losey. She thought a lot about this last one but, in the end, playing the part of a star living among her diamonds and her memories on her Mediterranean island and being visited there by the Angel of Death seemed too close to the whirlpool she was trying to escape. Elizabeth Taylor took the part, and Maria went on discussing other options. One of them, a new production of Traviata, directed by Visconti, got beyond the discussion stage. They went as far as signing a contract with the Paris Opera, but very soon the prospect of a major new operatic production became too daunting. Too proud to cancel the contract, she demanded twenty to thirty days of rehearsals for the orchestra and chorus—a demand which she well knew the administration of L’Opéra would never meet. Making impossible and varying demands had increasingly become Maria’s way of saying no.

  And then, to everyone’s surprise, she agreed to take part in Pasolini’s film of Medea—not Cherubini’s opera or Euripides’ tragedy but the myth of Medea. “When Franco Rossellini, Medea’s producer, and Pasolini proposed this one, I had no doubt. I immediately knew that this was the occasion I’d been waiting for, and I determined not to let it slip by.”

  It was an inspired choice. Had the film been a success, it could have led her not only to dry land but to a fresh start in her career and an opportunity to translate the forces raging inside her into art. Pasolini had sensed these forces and he hinted at them when he talked about why he wanted Maria for his Medea. “Here is a woman, in one sense the most modern of women, but there lives in her an ancient woman—strange, mysterious, magical, with terrible inner conflicts.” These forces and conflicts fascinated him. He had once described himself as drunk on reality, and he could see the drama in Maria’s life reflected in the drama of Medea. “I’m aware of her professional abilities,” he said during the filming, “but they are really of very little interest to me. It’s from personal qualities in Callas that I realized I could make Medea.” Before they started shooting, he made some notes and showed them to Maria: “Medea watches Jason, enchanted, lost in him. It is a true and complete love; in this moment it is Jason’s virility that prevails. Medea has lost her dazed manner, like a disoriented animal. Suddenly she finds in love which humanizes her a substitute for her lost religious sense. In the sensual experience she finds the lost rapport, the sacred identification with reality. So the world, the future, her well-being, the meaning of things, all take shape again suddenly for her. It is with gratitude, like one who feels reborn, that she lets Jason possess her, she in turn possessing in him the regeneration of life.”

  Maria recognized the parallels, and through Medea she could relive her own story: the love that made her tap into the woman in her and in some sense humanized her, the sensual experience of oneness, the new meaning, the new vitality like a rebirth. And in reliving her story through Medea’s, she could exorcise some of her bitterness; she could see that it was not, after all, as it had seemed in the dark months that had passed, “nine years of meaningless sacrifice.”

  In the spring, Maria arrived in Rome to settle the details of her contract and discuss her costumes. Franco Rossellini met her at the airport. With him was Nadia Stancioff who in the past had done public relations for the Spoleto and the Venice festivals and whom he had now asked to handle Maria’s public relations. In her contract, though, Maria had stipulated a secretary, not a public relations agent, and indeed this is what Rossellini had told her she was getting. It did not take long for the misunderstanding to surface. Once in her suite at the Grand Hotel, Maria took the cards from all the flowers that had been sent to welcome her and handed them to Nadia, asking her to type some thank-you notes. “And there are also all these bills to be paid,” she said, handing them to her together with the cards. “I’m not your secretary, Madame Callas,” Nadia said, and she went on to explain what she thought she had been hired for.

  “Do you realize that you are talking yourself out of a job with Maria Callas?”

  “I do, but I am a free spirit and I like to choose. Besides, I’ve heard some terrible things about you, and in any case, I don’t like working with women.”

  “You don’t! Neither do I,” said Maria, completely won over by Nadia’s directness
. “Well, you can stay for a few days and help me choose a secretary.” The next day, the parade of secretaries began: most of them froze at the typewriter at the prospect of working for the great Maria Callas. “I’ll do without a secretary,” Maria finally said. “Nadia, you stay, you can help me with my lines, get rid of people and generally relieve me of things I don’t want to do.”

  That was the beginning of a real friendship between the two women: one dark and striking, the other tall and fair; Nadia, half-American and half-Bulgarian, complementing Maria’s own Greek-American upbringing. Ironically, after ten days, Nadia, as well as being Maria’s friend and barrier against intruders, was also doing everything a secretary would have done. One of the things that made Nadia reconsider the “terrible things” she had heard about Maria was her attitude toward Bruna and Ferruccio. Maria had brought them with her to Rome, and when she discovered that they had been put in two rooms in the attic, she became furious. She asked the manager to move them instantly to two of the hotel’s best rooms. “And if the production,” she added, “does not pay the difference, then I will.”

  As her friendship with Nadia grew, another fascinating and much more unlikely friendship was beginning for Maria: with Pasolini. Maria, who, at her most petty, had exploded against both Marxists and homosexuals, had found in Pasolini, a passionate Marxist and a notorious homosexual, not just a friend but, as she was to say after his death, a brother. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man. Unlike the typically expressive Italian he generally locked his hands together when he talked, and his hollow-cheeked, deeply lined face showed little animation. Yet this unobtrusive-looking man had been, whether through his films, his views or his friendships with the criminal classes, the center of colorful scandals which had, by turns, offended orthodox Marxists, orthodox Christians and the middle-of-the-road bourgeoisie.

  At the beginning of June 1969 this Marxist mystic and Maria found themselves working together on Medea in a forgotten wild corner of Asia Minor. Goreme, in Turkey, with its rocks carved into weird shapes, was exactly the place that Pasolini wanted—a place where it was at times hard to distinguish between myth and reality. From Goreme, they went to Aleppo in Syria, and then to Italy, to Pisa, to the lagoons and islands of Grado, to Tor Caldara and Tor Calbona near Rome. And wherever they were, out of rocks and deserts, blanched dunes and beaches, Pasolini re-created a strange, lost world of mystery and magic, a world where ritual, violence and the supernatural were part of everyday life. Even in the loneliest parts of Turkey, reporters, photographers and television cameras followed Maria to document her first, ambitious step into the world of film. Once, to get closer to her, a journalist dressed up as a local peasant woman, and broke through the cordon surrounding Maria. Another time, protecting her face from the scorching Turkish sun with white muslin, Maria talked to the press about her Medea: “She was a semigoddess who put all her beliefs in a man. At the same time she is a woman with all the experiences of a woman, only bigger—bigger sacrifices, bigger hurts. She went through all these trying to survive. You can’t put these things into words. . . . I began to look into the depths of the soul of Medea.”