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

by Deborah Voigt

  THAT FALL OF 1992, John and I went to the City of Light for my debut at the Paris Opera Bastille, where I reprised my Chrysothemis in Elektra. I was feeling good about my year so far. A month before, Vanity Fair had published a reportage about the upcoming opera season, and I was one of the handful chosen to be photographed and interviewed. The photographer tried to do whimsical, offbeat, fairytale-like setups for each portrait—and for me, they dressed me up as an angel. I was at my all-time high in weight so far (325) and they gave me this big, drapelike blue shmatte to wrap around my body and a pair of really cool gold wings. The hair stylist piled my hair up high into a Grecian do, to look proportionate to my hips, and for the final touch—a dripping adornment of pearls. It was a pretty picture, but no matter how you draped me, you couldn’t hide the fact that I was a huge woman.

  So now I was in Paris, getting ready for my first rehearsal with Eva Marton, who was singing Elektra, and who wasn’t known for her politeness. I walked into the rehearsal room and the first thing she said to me was:

  “Oh my, I saw that picture of you in Vanity Fair.” Pause. “I couldn’t believe how fat you looked.”

  And then she laughed it off. I couldn’t tell if her remark was meant to be nice or catty. Was she paying me a compliment, saying I looked thinner in person and that the wide-angled lens made me look bigger than I actually was? Or was she just telling me I looked fat? Either way, I used the remark as fuel for my singing, and during rehearsal that day I sang like a goddess.

  In between the busy rehearsal schedule, John and I attempted to have a romantic time in Paris, but we weren’t doing a very good job of it. I vaguely remember having dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower. We’d been married only a few years but had been together since I was sixteen, so whatever romance we’d had was long gone. I felt more excited about the pâtisserie next to our Left Bank hotel than I did about John.

  The truth was, I was angry and losing patience.

  Throughout the years, as I was climbing in my career and he was doing odd jobs, driving buses or working behind the counter at stores, I tried to get him interested in a career of his own, but nothing clicked for him. Every time he started something new, he’d fizzle out after barely beginning. Once we got married, we decided he’d try being my manager for a while and take care of me, the family business, so that we could travel together. But he wasn’t doing that so well, either. He didn’t have a business head and he had trouble getting organized. One of his ideas was to take over my website and spiff it up, so we bought a computer and he did some research and then . . . that, too, fizzled out. Next, he decided he wanted to be a photographer, so he bought camera equipment, top-quality stuff and the most expensive kind. He liked nice things—designer suits and only the best cigars. After he purchased the cameras, lenses, flashes, motor drives, and filters, we made a darkroom at home so he could develop his own film and print his photos. But what photos did he take? All he wanted to shoot was inside the opera houses, where they already had their own staff photographers.

  “John, we go to all these incredible cities,” I said. “Why not get out there and take pictures and try and sell them to travel or airline magazines?” He nodded, but he never did it. Where was his drive? Where was his ability to do a job, any job, with commitment? I couldn’t even depend on him to pay our electric bill on time.

  It all came to a head for me over something so simple as that. A year or more after Paris, my mother was visiting us, and when she and I left to do some errands together, I asked John to pay a few bills while we were gone. They needed to be taken care of right away because they were overdue. When we got home a few hours later, the bills were still sitting on the kitchen table, unopened, and John was in the middle of one of his favorite hobbies—having a beer. It’s not like he didn’t take care of those bills because he was busy doing something; he didn’t do anything. (My brother’s words before our wedding came back to haunt me more than once.)

  Later that day as my mother was getting into her car to leave, she stood on the driveway and hesitated before getting in. She’d watched John and me for two decades and seen him coast along aimlessly, even when it came to me. He wasn’t a bad guy, he was just . . . inert.

  “Listen, Debbie. I’m going to say this to you and I’m only going to say it once.”

  I braced myself.

  “If you decide to divorce John, you have my complete support.”

  It was probably the first and only time in my life that I actually listened to my mother about my love life. I thought about her words seriously, instead of automatically rebelling against them. But still, I lingered. I was unhappy, but I didn’t know what to do about it. When it came to John, I was inert, too.

  IN APRIL OF 1995 I had my second Pavarotti experience; and this time I was singing with him, sort of. We were in London, at the Royal Opera House, for a performance of Ballo, and in the middle of our love duet in Act II, he disappeared. There we were, singing and singing, and then came the part where I’m to sing alone . . . and suddenly I was feeling very, very alone. I look to my right and no Luciano. I look to my left, no Luciano! Panicked, I glanced over to the wings and there he was. He had left the stage to get a glass of water. I remember thinking: Is he gonna come back?

  Apparently he was known for this, but no one had warned me. I gamely kept singing, and a few minutes later back he came onstage . . . entering backwards, as though he’d been looking for conspirators in the wings and was returning from his search. It was quite hilarious. When we performed Ballo again at the Met, he did it again during the same love duet (there must be something especially dehydrating about his part in the duet), but at least this time I knew he always came back. And he’s Luciano Pavarotti, so he can do whatever he wants.

  When we were in London, I recall, he’d just come out with a new scent for women called “Pavarotti Donna.” David Letterman had a joke about it that he was repeating constantly—“Luciano Pavarotti has released a new perfume and it’s called ‘Sauce’, as in ‘spaghetti sauce.’ ” We had a dinner party after the show one night, and Luciano, as he often would, showed up still wearing his costume and his wig and in full makeup. He was quirky and everybody adored it because he’s Luciano!

  So we’re having this dinner party and we all start eating, and that’s the moment that he decides everyone should have a whiff of his perfume. So he gets up and he walks around the room and while we’re eating, he sprays everyone with the stuff! And, well, it wasn’t what I’d call a beautiful scent. John and I went back to our hotel reeking of it.

  IT’S FUNNY THE way art really does imitate life, or maybe it’s the other way around. All I know is that somewhere along the way, the operatic roles I delved into onstage began to eerily parallel the dramas playing out for me offstage, in my own real life. I had gotten Mom’s blessing to split from John—I imagined she and my father had been waiting twenty years for my relationship with him to end, thinking it was a flash-in-the-pan, teenaged rebellion from the beginning. It probably was. About a year after Mom’s big statement in the driveway, I finally pulled the plug on my marriage and two-decades-long relationship with John.

  In November ’95 we were in Dresden, where I was singing Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, which translates into English as “The Woman Without a Shadow” (though I’ve seen the title rendered elsewhere, ironically, as “Your Man Is Always on Your Side”). The role was new to me and it was a very, very serious role and I found it emotionally draining.

  My character, the Empress (Die Kaiserin), lives in an otherworldly realm with her husband, the Emperor, beyond earth. She is only half human, and because of that, she has no shadow—which also symbolizes her inability to have any children. She’s having trouble with her husband, who has gone off hunting, and she doesn’t understand what’s going on between the two of them. Her nurse, who has cared for her since infancy, suggests they go down to earth to observe the mortals and perhaps learn from them. They follow a couple who are also having problems because
the husband is a very simple man and his wife is unhappy and bored with him.

  On Thanksgiving Day we had a grueling eight-hour rehearsal where no one spoke any English, and so for me, with my scant German, it was a major effort communicating with anyone about anything. As I walked home from the theater to the little apartment where John and I were staying, my mind was spinning. I was playing a character going through all sorts of questions about her relationship with her husband just as I was questioning mine. My marriage had been falling apart for a long time—John and I weren’t even sleeping in the same room or bed together anymore. I was cold, tired, and upset; I just wanted to get inside and curl up in bed.

  John, on the other hand, was eager to talk, or to go out and have fun after being stuck all day in the apartment. He was suggesting we go out for a faux Thanksgiving dinner, but in those days, not so long after the Wall came down, Dresden was still very much East Germany. Hardly anyone spoke English, and there was very little in terms of service or restaurants. And besides, I was pooped.

  “John, I really need to rest, and I need some time alone.”

  “You’ve been alone all day.”

  “No. Actually, you have been alone all day. I’ve been working and dealing with dozens of people and problems and—”

  “Well, maybe I’ll go out for a walk, then.”

  As I stood at the window, watching him as he roamed aimlessly along the Elbe river, smoking one of those expensive cigars he liked, a question popped into my head:

  Do you want this man to be your life forever? Is this all you want?

  I had married John for all the wrong reasons—out of insecurity, because I didn’t think I was good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, or deserving enough to have a real, true love of my own. Because I was scared to be left alone.

  When John returned from his walk, I told him it was time for us to be apart for a while.

  At that moment, far away from home and stuck in a barren marriage, I decided that I wanted more.

  ACT III

  CRESCENDO

  ( 12 )

  Dangerous Liaisons and Plácido’s Kiss

  THE SNOW FELL softly on Johann Strauss’s statue. A few months after I told John it was over, I was walking alone through the Stadtpark in Vienna in the wee hours and came upon a beautiful gilded likeness of the famous Waltz King. I had come to the city in early 1996 to record Elektra, composed by that other Strauss, Richard, and after a long day at work I needed some air. In the early-morning quiet, surrounded by old-fashioned gas lamps casting light onto the park’s white canvas, I felt like I was in a painting. I brushed away the snow from the stone and looked at Strauss’s name, in awe of his brilliance and grateful that I was part of the classical world of artists and music.

  It was a magical moment—and a rare one of stillness and contemplation amid my new, frenzied life since leaving John.

  I was recording Elektra with fellow soprano Alessandra Marc, who was considered one of the biggest opera singers, weight-wise, until I hit the scene. The joke going around opera circles was that she and I and another larger-than-life soprano, Sharon Sweet, were going to go on tour together as “The Three Ton-ers.” Very clever, but a little hurtful, too.

  Alessandra was a colorful, boisterous character famous for throwing wild pool parties where opera singers—especially Alessandra herself—got tipsy and flung off their bathing suits. She was also one of my first cautionary tales when it came to weight and work. At that time she was still Queen Bee of the stage, but a few years later she would become so big in size, people simply stopped hiring her. That made her furious. She was an in-your-face kind of woman and if you ticked her off, you knew about it. I remember hearing she had a concert in Berlin that didn’t go so well and the audience booed, after which Alessandra defiantly gave them the finger.

  But, oh, we did have fun together. On our last night in Vienna, we sat in a smoky little bar at the fancy Hotel Johann Strauss all night and drank dirty martinis (an homage to my olive-juice bender at age five) and smoked Cuban cigars (Montecristos). But although I was her drinking and cigar buddy, I wasn’t her eating buddy. In Vienna, I ate like a bird—a cliché I never thought I’d use to describe myself. It was around the time when I told John it was over that I discovered the dynamite weight-loss cocktail fenfluramine-phentermine (street name: fen-phen). It was all the craze in the diet world and I was in love with it.

  It zapped away my hunger, jacked up my metabolism, and in four months I had lost sixty pounds. Sure, I didn’t sleep much and was up at three in the morning doing calligraphy. But I got down to 240 pounds—which was still well above “normal,” but it felt more normal to me. For the first time in a long time, I bought clothes off the rack in a “normal” store, and I was feeling good, I was feeling energized, I was feeling . . . sexy.

  John had been the only man I’d ever been with my entire life, and now that I was a free woman—free from the constraints of marriage, my parents, and the church that had turned me away—I unleashed all my inhibitions and went looking for love in all the wrong places, with all the wrong men. If my parents thought John was a bad boy, they hadn’t seen anything yet. I found out later that fen-phen affected your libido by either killing it or launching it out into orbit. Clearly, mine was going the orbit route and I went along for the ride, embarking on a year of living dangerously.

  Pumped up and armed with a new, flirty wardrobe, I went online and scanned the dating websites. I don’t even know if you can call it dating—I created a fake name and persona and went directly to sites that catered to men who liked larger women. The men I met didn’t have old-fashioned “dating” in mind.

  At one of those sites I hooked up with Tim, who lived in Manhattan and had placed an advertisement seeking “some company this afternoon to go skiing with me.” I knew he didn’t mean the kind of snow you find on the slopes. I’d tried cocaine once or twice with John and wasn’t into it, but I went over to see this guy anyway. Why? I’m not even sure I knew. I needed . . . something, I didn’t know what.

  When Tim opened his apartment door, I was immediately not attracted to him. He was blondish, chunky, and short—the opposite of my type. But I was feeling high and pretty and bold, so I fooled around with him anyway and enjoyed the attention. I also enjoyed being this anonymous someone, acting out a secret, bad-girl fantasy life. But here’s the kicker—as I was getting my things together to leave Tim’s apartment, I glanced over at his coffee table and saw that day’s New York Times opened to the Arts section with a review of my current Met performance and a photo of me splashed across the page. Oh, hell! Tim didn’t even realize that the woman he just shtupped was the same woman he’d been reading about moments before I arrived. I hurried out before he had a chance to make the connection.

  I’m not proud of it today, but I sought out a lot of nameless one-night stands like Tim as I watched myself go from one lover in twenty years to a woman diving into the deep end of promiscuity. Why was I doing this? I didn’t, couldn’t, stop to think about it because I was too pumped up and exhilarated. Later, I would understand that these one-night stands provided the same function for me as too much food and too much alcohol did—they anesthetized me, they took me out of myself, they were a drug.

  I found Dane on the “Big Woman” site, too. His personal bio read: “Lonely, married Harvard law student seeks pen pal.” Pen pal. Right.

  “Why are you lonely?” I wrote back. And we were off and running—two lonely people trying to beat back our respective inner demons. Dane was moody and dark, he read poetry and Latin, he was a former heroin addict who went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings religiously, and he introduced me to Joni Mitchell’s sad and soulful album Blue. But here’s the catch with Byronic Dane—when we had sex, he was so tender and adoring, he made me feel like he loved me, it wasn’t just boom-boom-boom. Therein lay the problem. Most women would have found this a plus in a man, but to me it was confusing—which, I realize now was a sign that I wasn’t looking for love, o
r maybe thought I didn’t deserve it. Dane was passionate, and he would make several appearances in my love life over the years to come. But he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d grab you, flip you over, and give you a spanking, and, for whatever reason, that’s what I was craving.

  AND THEN MITCH swaggered into my life.

  It was the spring of ’96 and I was singing Sieglinde in Die Walküre opposite Plácido Domingo, at the Met. Despite the incredible high of that situation, I was having a bad night at home alone on one of my days off.

  It was a Friday evening and I was feeling the way I get when I’m left alone with my thoughts; I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, I needed a diversion. Then a totally impulsive thought popped into my head: I wonder if I could pick a man up? I wonder if I’m alluring enough to attract a man just by how I look, with my face and body? All my friends had gone through that phase in their twenties, when they hung out at bars and danced all night and had guys telling them how pretty they were, something I skipped entirely. Now I wanted to see if I could do that, be like everyone else. I knew it wasn’t the way a proper Christian girl thought, but then again, I hadn’t been acting like a proper Christian girl for a while. I was running on a hamster wheel of addiction—at this moment it was men and sex—and nothing was going to stop me.

  I got glammed up in a black skirt and snug sweater, blew my hair out, and went over to—what was I thinking?— the restaurant across the street from the Met, where I took a seat at the crowded bar. I had barely sipped my first drink when I saw him—strutting across the room while rapping a pack of cigarettes against his palm. Mitch spelled Trouble. Ding, ding, ding! Within a few minutes I was making eyes at him after he sat down, alone, across from me at the bar. I was having a Long Island iced tea, the dead giveaway of the novice drinker. It was all I knew to order—but Mitch, in time, would educate me on how to drink like a pro.