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

by Deborah Voigt

  But there was one mezzo-soprano, let’s call her “Mezzo X.” She was a stunningly gorgeous woman who was having a lot of success based on the fact that she looked the way she did. She had a lovely voice, too, but it was limited to essentially one role, which she sang all over the world. She was very sexy, and I admit I may have been jealous of her to a certain degree.

  During our time in Israel, Mezzo X had all her meals brought up to her room and never ate with the rest of us. There was just one practice room in the house, and you had to walk past the kitchen table in order to get to it. We’d be sitting in the kitchen, eating, and Mezzo X would walk right by us without saying hello.

  Every day, they’d pick us all up as a group in a van and take us to the concert hall to rehearse. Strangely, there was only one room to warm up in at the hall, so with eight soloists that’s tricky. Most of us would warm up in our rooms back at the guesthouse and then do a little something before the concert. To be “proper,” they’d set up a screen running down the middle of the room so that the men would be on one side and the women on the other—sort of like an Orthodox Jewish wedding.

  The room at the concert hall had only one piano, and as soon as we’d arrive, Mezzo X would go over to that piano and warm up. And warm up. And warm up. Incidentally, she had the easiest part in the whole performance. Two lines, to be exact—which she could have burped out and she would have been fine. But she rehearsed these two lines over and over again, and did these funny tongue-twister exercises (Round and round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran . . .)—to the point where the other mezzo-soprano in our group was ready to bite her head off.

  After several days of this, a few of us went to administration and complained: “Look, isn’t there another room with a piano so that if someone feels they need to warm up extra long, they can go there. And the rest of us, who would like fifteen minutes of quiet before the performance, could have it?” The next day during rehearsal while Mezzo X is hogging the piano, someone comes in and announces that they’ve set up a second room for those who want longer rehearsal times.

  But Mezzo X stays at the piano, going on and on, running her ragged rascal round and round . . . until I finally had enough.

  “Mezzo X, did you not hear the announcement that was made a little bit earlier?”

  “Announcement? What do you mean?”

  “About there being another room to warm up in.”

  “Oh, do you need the piano?” Mezzo X was born and bred on the East Coast, but she talked with a trace of an affected British accent.

  “No, I don’t need the piano, but I would like to have a little bit of quiet before the concert, and there’s another room where you can—”

  BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  She slammed the piano shut, picked up her music, and stormed out of the room. Oh shit. Two days later I got a call from my manager.

  “How are things going in Israel?”

  “Fine, why?”

  “Well, I got a call from guess-who’s manager saying you were picking on her.”

  She never spoke to me again—until we worked together a year or two later and she was absolutely forced to. We were doing several concerts together with two other vocalists, and as luck would have it, she and I were set to share a dressing room. When I arrived on the first night, her stuff was everywhere—makeup all over the counter, hair all over the sink, clothes taking up all the hooks. And she had a camera crew following her around all week, even in our dressing room as she kept popping in and changing her outfits. We did a week of performances, and every night her dresses got more revealing until the last night when her breasts were barely covered by a skimpy halter top. The audience ate it up.

  Apparently, certain figures can be held against you on the opera stage. But if you have the right sort of figure, it can work to your advantage.

  THE OTHER DIVA I had a conflict with was a mezzo-soprano from Germany—Mezzo Y, I’ll call her.

  Skipping ahead several years, I was singing Isolde in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and she was singing the part of Brangäne, Isolde’s handmaiden. For the entire run in this midwestern city she was a troublemaker.

  In rehearsals, she started off by saying “there was something in the air” that was making her sick. She was faint, she was nauseous, and it was “something in the air” that was doing it to her.

  We managed to get through rehearsals, for a while, until she began challenging me on the staging.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that there,” she’d say, “the line says to do this.”

  After a few more days of her comments, I finally blew a gasket.

  “Listen, we have a director. When you sing Isolde you will make decisions you want to make, but for the moment I’m making mine and I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

  I went off to the side of the stage and broke down in tears and . . .

  “Break time!” the director called.

  A few minutes later I was in my dressing room and the general manager, who knows me well, knocks on my door.

  “Look, I know what you’re dealing with, I’ve heard it from other departments. I’m very sorry that this is happening, and we’ve had a talk with her and told her she can’t behave this way.”

  For a while, Mezzo Y’s behavior did improve. But she could not sustain it. A few days later we were performing the final scene in the opera that ends very dramatically. She was already onstage and I was to come running into the scene to perform the final aria, “Liebestod” (it means, literally, “love-death”), which I sing over the dead body of my love, Tristan. I ran in and begin to sing the sad, sad aria, and she looks at me and laughs! In the middle of the performance! I ignored her as best I could and carried on, but as soon as we took our bows and the curtain went down, I turned to her.

  “What were you laughing at?”

  “Oh, your lipstick. It was so red, it was silly.”

  The next performance, we went out onstage for Act I, which is primarily between me and her, in which I sing Isolde’s “Narrative and Curse”—a powerful, rage-filled aria—and I nailed it. It was one of those nights when I was really “on,” and I knew it, and so did the audience. At the end of the act, my character faints in her handmaiden’s arms and then the curtains close. Mezzo Y immediately pulled away from me roughly.

  “You’re wearing too much perfume!”

  “I’m wearing the same amount of perfume that I’ve been wearing every day for weeks and you never said a word about it before.”

  I knew what was really going on. I had sung well, very well, and she couldn’t stand it.

  “No”—she shakes her head—“something’s different. Maybe it’s your wig. Maybe they put something in your wig, but it’s really affecting me. I don’t know if I can sing. I might have to cancel. . . .”

  We’re all onstage—the cast, the crew—and everybody is hearing this entire exchange. I looked at her, amazed that she’d threaten to cancel in the middle of a performance.

  “Look, I’m not wearing any more perfume than I’ve been wearing before. You must be coming down with something, I’m really sorry to hear that.” I turned to leave the stage, then turned back—

  “—and if you ever walk onstage and laugh at me again, we’re going to have a serious problem.”

  I marched offstage and went to the general manager’s office. This was all happening during the break between Acts I and II, mind you.

  “I just had another incident with her. She threatened to cancel tonight and everybody heard her. Maybe she didn’t mean it, but maybe you want to call her cover, just in case.”

  And as I’ve said, the way to get a diva onstage is to call the cover.

  Moments later as we were getting ready to go on for Act II, she caught a glimpse of her cover backstage and, of course, she went on with the show.

  The end of this diva episode wrapped up with an odd and creative tour de force offstage. A few weeks later, on the last day of our run, the assistant stage director, who
m I’d known since my early San Francisco days, came to my dressing room, holding something behind her back.

  “I have a gift for you, but you can’t tell anybody what it is and you can’t show it to anybody.” I promised, and from behind her back she pulled out a voodoo doll of the diva in character, dressed in her green costume from the show, with the face painted and needles stuck up and down her body.

  “She was so unpleasant,” said the AD. Seems no one likes a nasty witch of a diva.

  ( 10 )

  Amelia and Ariadne: Luck Be This Lady

  JOHN AND I awoke to gunshots. It was 1990 and we were now living in a little apartment in New York—in Inwood, the northern most part of Manhattan, and the last stop on the number 1 train. I hated it. I was making no money at the time, and I’d gotten John a job working in the office of my new agent. The neighborhood was scuzzy and our stairwell was a hangout for drug dealers. In our first few weeks on Dyckman Street, there’d been one mugging and, as we were soon to discover, a murder in our building.

  We’d heard the BOOM! in the middle of the night, but had no idea what it was. At seven a.m. someone pounded on our door: “Police! There’s been a murder on the fifth floor. Didja hear anything, ma’am?” We answered a few questions and they were on their way, saying, “Thanks for your time, Mr. and Mrs. Leitch.”

  After fourteen years of “dating,” John and I took the plunge and got hitched a few months earlier, in California, and then relocated to New York. Why New York? Well, just as the TV world has “pilot season,” when actors audition for all the new TV shows in production, the opera world has a season in New York when managers and artistic directors from opera houses all over the world come to audition singers.

  And now our first abode as husband and wife was a dump that looked like a Law & Order murder scene. But it served me right, because I had gotten married for all the wrong reasons and I knew it. I was getting ready to go to Moscow to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition and I was in a panic—not about the competition, but about John. I sensed I was losing him, and that made me want to cling.

  That I was prepping to go to the Soviet Union, which was like a distant planet to me, only made me cling more. I suddenly decided, I have to marry him, there’s not going to be anyone else, I’m too fat. I might be talented but I’m not smart, I’m not pretty . . . who else would want me?

  There was no romantic proposal or anything like that. I basically told him it was time and I sold some of my jewelry and we combined our meager sums together to buy a diamond wedding ring. But there was one detail I wanted to do right, and traditionally, and that was to get married at our Evangelical Free Church. After all, my family had been members of the congregation since we’d moved to California, sixteen years earlier. It was the house of worship where I’d been the pianist and soloist, where my mother had been the Sunday school and vacation Bible school teacher, and where my dad had been a deacon. My entire family had a deep and longstanding relationship with this church.

  When the day came to speak to the pastor about my upcoming wedding, Mom and I walked into the church like it was our second home. The pastor, an old family friend, greeted us and made chitchat, asking about my brothers.

  “Oh, you know . . . Rob is doing this and Kevin’s doing that,” Mom said, “and Debbie and John are moving from San Francisco to New York. . . .”

  The pastor’s face paled. “Am I to assume”—he looked at my mother—“that Debbie and John are living together?”

  “Yes, we are,” I piped up. What was all this now? I was standing right there, why didn’t he just ask me?

  The pastor cleared his throat, and this time he did look at me.

  “You are living in sin. You cannot be married in this church.”

  “What are you talking about? Is that church policy? I mean, we’ve seen plenty of girls walk down the aisle very pregnant.”

  “It’s not a policy of the church,” he said. “It’s just the way I feel.”

  Mom, meanwhile, burst into tears while I stood there in shock. The pastor hadn’t asked me about my or John’s relationship with Christ or if we wanted to do premarital counseling, none of the more important questions that really counted. If he had been just a bit compassionate, I would have told him that John and I intended to spend the next few months before the wedding living apart. (It was due to my busy schedule, but still . . .) But he was cold and immovable. I remember how disapproving he was ten years earlier when Mom and Dad got divorced and there was a bit of scandal in the church about that. It was payback time, I guess.

  The pastor’s shunning of my mother and me at that moment affected me so deeply, it took many, many years before I could embrace the idea of going back to church again.

  His refusal to let us marry in our church wasn’t the only omen before the wedding. A few weeks earlier when I broke the news to Rob that John and I were getting married, his reaction was less than congratulatory.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Everybody is wondering why.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Well, John doesn’t work or do anything. And you’re so . . . heavy.”

  I froze. I looked at my brother, astounded by the words I’d just heard come out of his mouth. Did he feel I was somehow unlovable or not worthy of getting married because of my size? I knew he just wanted me to be happy and hadn’t meant to hurt me. What he was really trying to say was: “You have a problem, and this man is maybe not the right man for you.”

  Still, hearing his words hurt.

  JOHN AND I got married at another church in Orange County, where the pastor didn’t ask if we were cohabitating and/or fornicating. My dear voice teacher Jane was my matron of honor (and her band played at the reception!), and at age thirty I walked down the aisle wrapped in so much virginal-white embroidered fabric, I looked like a walking tablecloth. I can’t remember how much I weighed, but I remember the size of the dress: 24. Still, against all odds, we managed to pull off a romantic do, and I remember feeling happy and excited. Although it’s a wedding taboo and bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the ceremony, we took all our wedding party photos before the ceremony instead of after. So the wedding planner devised a plan so that we could still experience our own version of “the big reveal”—that first moment the groom sees the bride in her dress. Before the photo sessions and ceremony, she put John up by the altar and flung open the front church doors for me to fake-walk down to him swaddled in my hundred yards of taffeta, twenty yards of tulle on my head, and a garden of lilies in my hands. He looked devastatingly handsome in his tails and even though he’d seen me in dozens of glamorous gowns before, when I reached the altar he was beaming and said, “You look very beautiful.”

  The wedding was a fairytale moment, and for a brief time I did feel beautiful. Until a woman I didn’t know approached me during the reception to applaud me on my political statement.

  “Debbie, I want to tell you how proud I am of you! You look so beautiful.”

  “Oh, thank you. It’s such an important day, ” I said with a smile, trying to remember who she was.

  “I think it’s just wonderful the example you’re setting for heavy women,” my unknown wedding guest continued, “by having this wedding, and even wearing a wedding dress.”

  Her words rang in my ears with the echo of my brother’s words weeks before. How brave of you to display yourself like this, she was saying, between the lines. And, furthermore, How brave of him to love you, even though you are a big, fat person. Lucky, lucky Debbie to have found a man to love her.

  I did my best to brush her comments aside and joined my bridesmaids—which included Lynn’s daughters, Melinda and Marianne—who were motioning for me to pose with them by the three-tiered cake. They surrounded me in their poufy pink-and-white Jessica McClintock creations like a cloud of cotton candy. The barrier was not so thick, though, that we all couldn’t hear Grandma Gruthusen, my mother’s mom, whisp
ering (or so she thought) off camera a few feet away in her wheelchair.

  “Debbie always insisted she’d never get married!” she said, loudly, to my grandpa, sitting next to her in his own wheelchair.

  “We can hear you, Grandma!” I called out to her, as we all burst into laughter—especially me. But her comment, and that of my anonymous guest, lingered in my mind well beyond the wedding night.

  THE INTERNATIONAL TCHAIKOVSKY Competition is one of the most prestigious classical music competitions in the world and taken very, very seriously by the Moscovites. It gained fame in the United States at the height of the Cold War when American pianist Van Cliburn won the very first quadrennial competition and came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. It’s most famous for its piano division, but it also awards prizes to violinists, cellists, and singers.

  A colleague of mine who’d entered the competition in the past and placed second with a silver medal gave me advice on the most important items to pack: cans of tuna and toilet paper. Food was scarce, and their toilet paper consisted of little waxed squares. “It’s a smearfest,” she warned me. I also went to the nearby dollar store and bought loads of nylons, Tic-Tacs, bubblegum, cigarettes, lipsticks, and condoms—everyday items that were impossible to get over there—and made up little packages as gifts to give to housekeepers or people working at the competition.

  Unfortunately, my luggage took a wrong turn and didn’t get to me for days. For once in my life, I’d decided to travel comfortably and had only sweatpants to wear. So that’s what I arrived in for the first day of competition—stretched out, navy-blue Gap sweats and a T-shirt that had been slept in and spilled on during the long flight. I couldn’t buy anything to wear because . . . there was nothing to buy. To make matters worse, what scant clothes or food that might have been available for purchase had been scooped up by the La Scala Ballet troupe, who’d been there weeks before and cleared out any bottled water, potato chips, chocolate bars, and T-shirts. I did my best to tart myself up with the curling iron in the bathroom—a tiny room with a shower in the center, out in the open without a screen or curtain, and two towels that had holes in them and were rough as sandpaper.