Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva

by Deborah Voigt

  By Day Five and no Madame, Grandma and I were at each other’s throats. By now I’ve been dipping into John’s and my savings account so that we could have our own hotel rooms and give each other some breathing space. But as Days Six and Seven rolled around and still no Madame, I’d had it. I loved Europe but after tripping, crying, freezing, getting sick, and having my larynx ogled at, I was over it and was more than ready to go home. I called the airline, changed our return tickets, and when we touched down at San Francisco International I wanted to kiss the tarmac.

  The following year, the elusive Madame Crespin, whom I couldn’t get to see in Paris, came directly to me in San Francisco. She began teaching part-time at the Adler Fellowship, and I finally got my voice lessons. She was a great teacher and she loved my voice. So much so, that she tried to get me to go back to Paris with her.

  “You must come to the Conservatoire in Paris and study with me. You must!”

  “Madame Crespin, I’m not ready to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have a partner here. . . .”

  “Pffff!” she scoffed. “Well, you will never have a career, then. Are you married to this man? No! Why don’t you leave him?”

  “Because I love him.”

  Madame had no patience for such talk and sentimentality. After she went back to France, her words stuck in my mind, just as Jane’s had.

  Well, you’ll never have a career, then . . .

  I wasn’t so sure about that. A few months after I returned home from Europe, I got a letter from Cesare Mazzonis, the artistic director at La Scala in Milan, the site of my awful audition.

  He wrote:

  Thank you for coming to the audition. When I heard you sing, I heard the sun in your voice . . .

  Europe had been a rough trip, but also invaluable. It helped me define for myself what I didn’t want to do, and sometimes that’s just as helpful as figuring out what you do want. I was so “Miss America,” and still am, and I knew that this young American soprano was not going to take the European path, as so many do.

  I intended to build my career here at home, with my feet firmly planted on American soil and stage.

  ( 9 )

  Diets and Divas

  SOMETIME AROUND THE end of my apprenticeship in San Francisco, I began getting desperate about my weight. Maybe it was that father-daughter chat in the car that triggered it, I don’t know; but I embarked on a series of dangerous diets and procedures to get some flesh off me. I was now tipping the scale near 300 and miserable about it.

  First I tried Optifast. Oprah had recently made a big splash on TV by pulling a red Radio Flyer wagon laden with sixty-seven pounds of fat onto her talk-show stage while wearing her new size 10 jeans, so I signed up. For months I guzzled the sugar/corn syrup/red dye #3 concoction and lost fifty pounds. But that’s not the whole truth. Here’s how I really did it: I drank glassfuls of the sugary liquid for four days, until I had to go and do the weigh-in at the Optifast meeting. After my weight was recorded in the little notebook, I’d drive to the nearest Burger King, load up on burgers, shakes, and fries, and do my famous high school eating binge in the car as I drove home. I’d binge for three days, then starve for four, then weigh in, then drive to Burger King for another sabotaging meal—that was my system. I’m amazed I lost any weight that way, and God knows what damage I did to my body. By month number four I couldn’t stand the taste of the vile stuff anymore and every time I tried to drink it, I threw up—and not on purpose. By month five, I’d gained back that fifty pounds.

  Then I tried injections of pregnant women’s urine. Yes, that’s right, pregnant women’s urine. The theory is that it contains the hormone HCG, which is supposed to suppress your appetite and trigger your body’s use of fat for fuel, so that you can lose several pounds per day. Of course, they also make you follow a 500-calorie-per-day diet, and who’s not going to lose weight on 500 calories? Me, that’s who. Because it was going to take more than a few pregnant women to suppress my appetite and the complicated reasons that I was eating. Within a few weeks I was back at the Burger King counter. I didn’t even want to contemplate how they went about procuring the urine of pregnant women.

  Finally, I had an operation to insert a gastric bubble into my stomach. It was the newest cutting-edge weight-loss technique and was considered safer and more effective than stomach stapling or jaw-wiring—those I could not “stomach” the thought of, worried that they would affect my singing. I went into the hospital and they put me to sleep and stuffed a deflated balloon down my esophagus and into my stomach. Once it was in there, they inflated it, and it was supposed to fill up my stomach so that I wouldn’t feel hungry. Apparently I was in good celebrity company, because Zsa Zsa Gabor’s daughter (or so I was told) and I were the first two people in Southern California to have this procedure done.

  At first, I was very sick because my body recognized the balloon as a foreign object and tried to expel it. Once I stabilized a bit, I did notice my appetite had decreased. But I found ways around that. When I got hungry, I’d eat a Snickers bar instead of the recommended healthy small meal. Still, I lost about ten pounds . . . until my body finally did eject the balloon and it passed right out of me, the foul details of that I’ll keep to myself.

  I still didn’t quite understand why I was overeating, what feelings I was smothering or anesthetizing; but I was vaguely aware I was trekking on dangerous terrain, both emotional and physical. Just a few years earlier, my childhood idol Karen Carpenter had died from complications after years of starving herself as she suffered from anorexia nervosa—its roots also linked to emotions. I used to look at photos of her, so skinny and pretty, and wish I could be just like her. I overate and she under-ate—I felt a kinship with her, as if we were two sides to the same coin, the flip sides of the same record album.

  BUT IT’S NOT as if I was the only opera singer with a big appetite. Rotund singers have been the norm on the opera stage since the art began. And, as I was to learn later, after I lost a lot of weight, that extra flesh helps to engage the abdominal muscles and support the sound. It certainly did for one of the biggest opera stars in the world—big in both stature and breadth—Luciano Pavarotti, whom I first came within two feet of in 1988.

  Near the end of my apprenticeship, I began entering voice competitions around the world to make extra money and to help make a name for myself. For a few years, I was winning every one that I entered—I became known in the opera community as the Queen of the Competitions.

  One of my most memorable wins was the gold medal at the Luciano Pavarotti Competition in 1988. It was the third annual vocal competition held by the Opera Company of Philadelphia, under the aegis of the famous tenor. There were fifteen hundred competing applicants and just one category—opera singing, that’s it. The competition didn’t have separate vocal categories. It culminated in a two-day marathon at the Academy of Music with seventy singers, each performing arias with piano accompaniment. Pavarotti was one of the three judges for the finals; the winners would receive a role in a future production by the Opera Company of Philadelphia in which Pavarotti would star.

  On the last day of competition, I had sung my standard party pieces—the same list I had auditioned with at San Francisco—and was standing near the front of the stage with John during a break when in walked Luciano. He stood five feet from me in his baggy white T-shirt and trademark Hermès scarf, chatting with some of the other participants.

  “Go talk to him!” John whispered to me, giving me a nudge.

  “No, I’m not going to go talk to him! Why would he want to talk to me?” I was never good at networking and always felt uncomfortable—and in this case, completely intimidated—approaching celebrities.

  “Debbie, you’re in his competition. You’ve made it through to this round. Those people are talking to him.”

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get past the feeling of what would he want with me?

  Even though he stood right next to me,
happily talking to a handful of other contestants. I slunk to the back of the auditorium and watched him do his afternoon of judging from there, as one by one a host of Violettas, Mimis, Rodolfos, and Zerlinas emoted onstage.

  Luciano sat with his enormous Hermès scarf on the table in front of him, wiping his runny nose and sweaty brow with it. At the end of the day, when he got up onstage to announce who’d made it to the next round, he’d wrapped that scarf around his neck. I couldn’t help but think . . . Hey, can I wash that for you?

  LATER THAT SAME year, I made my European debut in Brussels in Richard Strauss’s one-act opera Elektra, in the small role of the fifth maid at the beautiful Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. Now, if you’re going to be a maid in Elektra, the fifth is the one you want to be—she’s got the most fire.

  John traveled with me as much as possible, but for this extended stay he couldn’t, and I got very homesick. I was starting to hate traveling—and travel is a definite requirement for someone who wants to be an opera singer, as Jane warned me. I had always had a difficult time being on my own and isolating myself too much. Alone in a hotel room late at night in a foreign city, with no one I knew nearby, loneliness and self-doubt visited me like unwanted, unshakable guests. The only thing that eased their hold on me was . . . food. So I kept eating.

  The Elektra director was, I recall, very, very thin, and she’d had some problems trying to stage me because I wasn’t able to move the way she wanted me to. I was feeling bad about that. She never said anything to me, but on opening night she gave each cast member a gift with a card, and on the cover of mine was a picture of an angel trying to fly into the air but being held down by a rope wrapped around her waist and tied to a giant rock on the ground.

  I was feeling pretty down one evening when I had dinner with the soprano Catherine Malfitano, who was also in Brussels performing, and her husband, Stephen Holowid. Stephen was a former actor, singer, and musician working as artistic coordinator for the New York City Opera when they met and he later became Catherine’s personal adviser. They’d invited me to their apartment for dinner, and after hearing me complain all night about traveling and feeling lonely, Stephen shook his head and said to me, “Well are you a singer or aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean do you want this or not?”

  It was a humbling moment, reminding me of Jane’s question: “How dedicated are you?” Why was I always so hesitant, so reluctant? I’d been given a rare opportunity—to have a career in the high arts and a life that took me around the world, singing the operas of the greatest composers. To touch people’s hearts and stir their emotions was a special gift, and something I should not, and did not, take lightly.

  This was a lesson I learned from Jane years earlier, when I was still in college.

  I had sung in a small concert and didn’t think it had gone very well, and neither did Jane. But afterward, people came up to me and said how much they’d loved it.

  “Oh, but this was wrong and that was wrong. . . .” I was very busy telling them why they shouldn’t have liked my singing that night. Jane pulled me aside.

  “Don’t ruin it for people. They’ve had an experience. Whether you or I think it was good or not, we can discuss later.”

  I never forgot that. To this day, when I know a show was not so great, but people come up and say, “Oh, you were wonderful!” I put a clamp on it and say, “Thank you.”

  It was difficult for me to take praise—pride goeth before a fall, and all that.

  IN MY LATE twenties I was “double cast”—that’s when two parallel casts alternate performing the roles each night—while working with an opera company based in Orange County, California, called Opera Pacific. I was in the “B cast,” or “silver cast”; and in the “A cast,” or “gold cast,” singing the lead role, was the American lyric soprano Carol Vaness.

  Carol was older than I was and much, much more experienced, of course, but I was moving up and had won all these awards and had gained enough confidence to feel that I might have a better instrument than she did.

  Or, if not better, more suited to the particular repertoire we were doing at the time. And then I watched Carol in rehearsal. She knew how to carry herself onstage, she knew how to hold the moment, she knew that a singer’s stillness sometimes relayed a greater, deeper moment to an audience than a physical gesture. Her deportment onstage was something you don’t learn in a practice room—unless you have a teacher like Jane Paul, who really knows. I learned so much watching Carol that I never again doubted that there might be something to learn from someone when you don’t expect it.

  THE OTHER SIDE of the “pride goeth” coin was the diva behavior opera stars were known for. It was a stereotype sopranos of the past like Maria Callas fed to the hilt with their big personalities and flamboyant lifestyles.

  I’m more the anti-diva. I was ultra-aware not to draw attention to myself. Whenever I acted the diva at home, growing up, it was not tolerated, so it would never occur to me to do it as an adult, in public, at work.

  But for some divas, like soprano Jessye Norman, whom I would understudy several times, it was still tolerated when I was entering the profession. Some of it had to do with the era—people were still in awe of that kind of figure and enjoyed the diva character.

  The first time I met Jessye, I was understudying her in Chicago for Gluck’s Alceste in the late eighties. The director was Robert Wilson, who was known for his brilliant, but very difficult, stagings. His reputation was such that the theater indulged him and paid for all his “covers” to come to the theater six weeks before the principals arrived so that he could work out and practice his staging using us. It was highly unusual even then to do this, and today it would be unheard of because it would be too costly.

  But I was there to do what he asked of me, and it was six weeks of intense physical work. At one point he had me spread-eagled on the ground, my arms out, face down.

  “Debbie, do you think that Jessye would do this?”

  “Well . . .” I mumbled, my lips against the dusty floor, “I don’t know her, but I’d be surprised if she did.”

  When Jessye showed up, the theater told me I was not required to do any rehearsals from that point onward unless she was sick. Jessye showed up for the first day of rehearsals dramatically dressed in a flowing, colorful cloak, big jewelry, and her hair wrapped in a turban. She was very grand, very big, and (with that turban) very tall, but with a beautiful, thin face—and when she was introduced to me she barely acknowledged me, which was fine. I tried not to take it personally.

  Finally it came time for Robert to stage that spread-eagle scene, and I was watching from the corner. And wouldn’t you know it, Jessye turns around to me and says, “Well, do you think the cover can show me what you’ve been doing?”

  In other words, she wanted me to do it for her. I don’t know where I got the guts, but I looked at her and asked, “Well, are you ill?”

  “No, why?

  “I was told I should only do this if you are ill.”

  Some balls I had! But I just can’t stand a diva! She got up and did it. But every single night after that, she complained there was a draft onstage and made noise about canceling.

  I never went on, though. I found out later she was known to be a very delicate diva—she could feel every breeze. Apparently the Met had set up a private dressing room for her on the second floor, not with the rest of us mortals on the main floor, because she had a mysterious allergy to the carpeting. Or something. Her lungs were very, very sensitive, I discovered, when I was covering her in the role of Ariadne some time later. There was one performance (finally!) when she was too ill to go on, and at the last minute I got my chance.

  When I heard the call “Miss Voigt to the stage”—my cue—and quickly made my way from my dressing room to the stage, bursting through a pair of double doors, I was accosted by two hulking guys on the other side with spray tubes who started misting me with vapor.
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br />   Aaaargh! What the . . . ?

  “Oh,” they said, putting their tubes down. “You’re not Jessye Norman.”

  “No, I’m not!” I sputtered, wiping my face—while trying not to smudge my makeup—and racing to the stage so I wouldn’t miss my entrance.

  “Who the heck were those guys?” I asked my dresser, who was running next to me.

  “Oh, them. They’re Jessye’s ‘misters.’ They mist in front of her as she walks to the stage to get the dust out of her air.”

  SOME DIVA STORIES have become legend around the opera houses.

  When I first got to the Met, soprano Aprile Millo was the reigning diva, and I understudied her all the time. She’s American, she came up through the Met’s Young Artists’ Program, and the rumor in the house was that she was born April Mills but changed it to be more exotic. I couldn’t fault her for that, I’d done the same thing. My birth certificate has me as “Debbie,” and when I went professional I was worried my name sounded too “And now, live from the Grand Ole Opry!” and decided “Deborah” sounded more operatic, more sophisticated, more like I wasn’t just plain ol’ Debbie from suburban Illinois who hadn’t been anywhere or done anything.

  I WAS A team player, so I usually got along with everyone. In my career, I was only to have big conflicts with two major divas.

  I butted heads with one of them when I went to Israel for the first time to sing with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. We were doing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, also known as the Symphony of a Thousand because of its enormous orchestral and choral requirements, in addition to its eight soloists. All the soloists were living together in a kosher “guesthouse,” and while we each had our own room and bathroom, we were expected to take all our meals together. When you accepted a gig there, you knew it was going to be a little bit like camp—a very communal, dormlike atmosphere.