But professional engagements were now squeezed into the gaps of an increasingly hectic and emotionally demanding private life, and when they could not be squeezed in, they were canceled or postponed. Her television concert was postponed because she had to be in Milan for a conference over the settlement of joint property. Also, Nicola Rescigno was ill, and Maria was increasingly loath to sing with any but her own conductors. In the end, the program was televised on October 3 with Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting. “The great Callas,” he said, with arms outstretched toward her as he introduced her to the orchestra.
A few days earlier Meneghini had filed suit for legal separation. The hearing, after a postponement, was finally scheduled to take place in Brescia on November 14. In between were Maria’s engagements in Kansas City and Dallas. For a short while it seemed as though nothing had changed, except that there were even more reporters than usual who seemed to have one question only: “Will you marry Mr. Onassis?” The penalties incurred by the new superpersonality that she had become included a bomb scare at the Midland Theater in Kansas City which turned out to be a hoax, but only after the entire bejeweled audience—an audience that included ex-President Truman—had vacated the theater.
To coincide with Maria’s arrival in the States, Elsa Maxwell broke, after a fashion, the silence about Maria that until then she had affected in her column. “That much-heralded diva arrives in America,” the column began. There followed a report of a conversation between Maxwell and Leonard Bernstein.
B:
How do you feel about her?
M:
I don’t feel anything.
B:
But you must take some stand.
M:
Do you mean morally or musically?
B:
Both.
M:
Musically, I can only say that she is the greatest artist in the world.
The rest was silence.
The news from Dallas was worse than silence. On November 6, Maria sang the penultimate Lucia of her career in Zeffirelli’s new production borrowed from Covent Garden. “I’ve only come because of you,” she told Lawrence Kelly. She was nervous and unprepared, but her dramatic sense was as unerring as ever. She had refused to wear the bloodstained dress designed for Joan Sutherland; she opposed, as always, any garishness that would seize the audience’s attention and distract them from the real drama. Vocally, though, she was in such bad form that she nearly broke down in the Mad Scene. “It was painful to hear her miss the high E-flat so cruelly,” said a lifelong fan who was in the first-night audience. It was infinitely more painful for Maria. “I had the note. I had the note. What happened? What happened?” she kept repeating to herself all the way to her dressing room, as though the Mad Scene was still going on. She suddenly stopped, took a deep breath and sang five consecutive E-flats. She could sense that she was losing her fight with the Voice. Two nights later, for her second performance of Lucia, she left the E-flats out. She would go on fighting but there were to be fewer and fewer trapeze acts. They were no longer worth the agony. “You cannot serve two masters,” she told Zeffirelli. “All she wanted,” he remembers, “was to be with Onassis, to be his wife, his woman, his mistress. If he had not pushed her to go on singing, as a kind of showcase for himself, she would have probably stopped altogether.” On November 9, Maria, having canceled her appearance in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, flew from Dallas to Milan. The court hearing in Brescia was only a few days away.
Very early on the morning of November 14, a large crowd began to assemble outside the courtroom of this small industrial city. Meneghini arrived first. For the previous couple of months, he had been receiving letters congratulating him on “finding his peace at last” and “being well rid of her.” “Get a nice Italian girl next time,” one correspondent had advised him. Now the Brescia crowd loudly applauded him. There was complete silence when Maria arrived. Whatever the crowd may have thought of doing or shouting before they saw her, there was something regal and contained in her presence that commanded respect.
Maria and Meneghini emerged six hours later. Judge Cesare Andreotti had made the ritual attempts at reconciliation before getting down to the serious business of dividing the spoils. There was remarkably little rancor as the settlement was being reached. Maria kept Via Buonarroti, most of her jewelry and both ends of the poodle. Meneghini kept Sirmione and all the real estate they owned; the paintings and all other valuables were equally divided. Meneghini’s original writ had spoken of Maria going to nightclubs and other places with a man “whom she described as her lover” and “behaving in a manner incompatible with elementary decency.” He had applied for the separation to be granted in a judgment against his wife, but by the end of the six-hour hearing he had agreed to separation by mutual consent.
The following morning Maria flew to New York on her way to Dallas and the last engagement fixed by Meneghini. When she boarded the plane, she discovered that the seat next to hers had been reserved for the most enormous arrangement of red roses. There was nothing on them but TMWL. It was the kind of gesture which Meneghini would have thought “disgusting”; that is how he had described Onassis’ gesture of putting 50 pounds into the hands of the band leader at the Dorchester to play tangos for Maria all night. “And she was impressed,” Meneghini had added, puzzled. He had been just as puzzled by her anger on the fated cruise when he had so ludicrously under-tipped the water carriers from one of the islands that Onassis had to interfere and add a handsome sum himself. Meneghini had expected Maria to be angry with their host for the subtle and public humiliation of her husband. Instead she had exploded against him—against his cheapness, against his petty, calculating mentality. Maria, who had to fight this tendency in herself all her life, suddenly could not bear seeing it in such stark colors in someone else. “I am always careful,” she said once, “always afraid that I will die, or live the end of my life, in poverty.” Every now and then the old money terrors would hit her and, even though she knew that her alarm was baseless, she would castigate herself for her extravagance; at such times any expense, including one as modest as a television set, seemed reckless. Peter Andry, head of the classical division of EMI, remembers Maria calling him shortly after she had let him down at the last moment over a recording of Traviata, to ask if he could get her a discount on the new television set she wanted to buy.
Despite all her success and the fulfillment of so many of her dreams, Maria never really trusted her achievements and the income they generated. But being near Aristo, with his boundless trust in life’s abundance, made her fears seem absurd and the behavior they gave rise to odious. She wanted to escape those fears; Meneghini was not even aware that he had them. Maria could see the exaggeration and the extravagance in many of Onassis’ gestures, but she enjoyed, even loved, his expansiveness, especially after her husband’s penny-pinching.
With the two Medeas in Dallas over, the twelve years of Meneghini management were over too. As soon as the breakup of their marriage became public, the offers flooded in from agents wanting to represent her. Meneghini, for his part, was inundated by requests from hopeful sopranos, and even tenors and baritones, to take their careers in hand. “Just bring me,” he said, “one who sings like Callas, who has a mind like Callas, a heart and temperament like Callas, an ambition and fierce dedication like Callas, and leave the rest to me.” It was probably the last word on the Pygmalion-Meneghini myth, which, in his less honest moments, Meneghini himself did a lot to keep alive.
Maria had been legally separated for eleven days when Tina Onassis sued her husband for divorce in the New York State Supreme Court on the ground of adultery. The marriage that had been described as “the happiest between Cannes and Palm Beach” was coming to an end. On November 25, Tina called reporters to her Sutton Square home in New York and issued a statement:
It is almost thirteen years since Mr. Onassis and I were married in New York City. Since then he has become one of the world’s richest men, but his great w
ealth has not brought me happiness with him nor, as the world knows, has it brought him happiness with me. After we parted this summer in Venice, I had hoped that Mr. Onassis loved our children enough and respected our privacy sufficiently to meet with me—or, through lawyers, with my lawyers—to straighten out our problems. But that was not to be.
Mr. Onassis knows positively that I want none of his wealth and that I am solely concerned with the welfare of our children.
I deeply regret that Mr. Onassis leaves me no alternative other than a New York suit for divorce.
For my part I will always wish Mr. Onassis well, and I expect that after this action is concluded he will continue to enjoy the kind of life which he apparently desires to live, but in which I have played no real part. I shall have nothing more to say and I hope I shall be left with my children in peace.
Maria was with Onassis on the Christina in Monte Carlo when Tina’s statement appeared in the newspapers. They were expecting and fearing the worst: the citing of Maria as the adulteress. But Tina had other, older scores to settle, so the lady with whom her husband was supposed to have had an affair “by land and sea” was cited as Mrs. J.R. It did not take the gossip columnists long to discover that Mrs. J.R. was Jeanne Rhinelander, an old school friend of Tina. In 1954, when Tina was staying in the south of France, on an impulse she had driven over to her friend’s home in Grasse, only to discover her husband there in what are commonly known as “compromising circumstances.”
Tina waited five years to take her rather spectacular revenge, at the same time preventing the divorce from escalating into an even bigger scandal, as it would have if she had cited Maria. While in Monte Carlo Maria could hardly believe her narrow escape, in Grasse Jeanne Rhinelander was fighting off reporters. It was her turn to issue a statement: “I am astonished that after so many years of friendship of which everybody knew, here and in the United States, Mrs. Onassis should try to use it as an excuse to obtain her freedom.”
It was a difficult time for Maria. His pending divorce was emotionally much more wrenching for Onassis than he cared to admit. That in itself was a source of agitation to her, but it was not the worst of it. While Maria wholeheartedly wanted her divorce, Onassis never really wanted his, despite his protestations to Meneghini about his determination to marry Maria. He spent weeks and months away from Tina, but he would ritually call her from whatever part of the world he happened to be in, every day at 6:00 P.M. her time. He was not the first man, nor would he be the last, who wanted both his mistress and his wife.
In Monte Carlo, he had suddenly decided to behave discreetly. Maria was nominally booked into the Grand Hotel, and the night Tina’s statement appeared he dined alone with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. The next day his own statement appeared, much shorter and much less revealing than Tina’s: “I have just heard that my wife has begun divorce proceedings. I am not surprised; the situation has been moving rapidly. But I was not warned. Obviously I shall have to do what she wants and make suitable arrangements.” In fact he was hoping for a reconciliation and he began working toward it—phone calls to Tina, phone calls to the children, talks to friends who could intercede. Maria retreated to Milan and, in one of those ironies that filled her life, she spent her thirty-sixth birthday, the first since her separation, in the company of the man she had just left. Feeling rather abandoned by Onassis and uncertain of her new status, she turned momentarily to Meneghini, as if to an old friend.
Five days later, Renata Tebaldi returned to La Scala in Tosca after an absence of nearly five years. It was a triumph. The applause continued for over ten minutes and there was a rain of flowers while the audience chanted her name. “A state of delirium,” was how La Notte described it. The following morning, as Maria read the ecstatic reviews, she could not escape the uneasy awareness that, by her own choice, she had no fixed operatic engagements of her own in view. The career that had been everything was, for the moment, nothing. The feeling of relief at having escaped from what had become a prison was mixed with fear of the emptiness that loomed ahead of her, with Aristo embroiled in his own divorce; but her reaction to Tebaldi’s return was yet another indication of a new mellowness and a new maturity. When asked whether she would be present at the opening night, she replied: “Now that Renata Tebaldi returns to La Scala, public attention should be focused on this important event without direct or indirect interferences of any kind. I have closed many chapters this year; it is my sincere wish that this chapter too be closed.”
She had indeed come to terms with many things, including Rudolf Bing and the Met. She had initiated the reconciliation herself, even though she had no plans or even the wish in her present state of mind to sing there. She wanted the reconciliation for its own sake, for personal rather than professional reasons. “The return of a prodigal daughter,” ran Bing’s polished public response, “is no less welcome than the return of a prodigal son.” So there was Bing once again in the role of forgiving father.
Maria needed all the inner peace and outer harmony she could get if she was going to cope with the concentration of unpredictable energy that had entered her life in the form of Aristotle Onassis. The Italian papers were full of reports of his activities, and the innuendos were unmistakable. “Mrs. Jeanne Rhinelander, who was cited in Mrs. Onassis’ divorce suit, was seen dining in Monte Carlo last night with Mr. Onassis. He had invited her to the nightclub of the casino. They stayed there until the early hours of the morning. . . .” He would call to explain. Then he would not call for days. Then he would send flowers. She would call. He had gone. He would suddenly arrive or send for her. The pattern of the next eight years had been set. “A man can’t really change himself,” she had said a year before she met Onassis, “but a woman can change herself.” We may smile at the old-fashioned statement, but there are plenty of women in Greek villages today who still believe it; and when she fell in love with Onassis, Maria showed that she both believed it and acted on it. Their nine years together, instead of being a series of battles between two giant personalities, turned out to be the willing surrender of one to the other. Occasionally she would rebel, but with a rebellion deeply rooted in dependence.
In just over three months, Maria had left her Italian husband and manager, and was on the way to abandoning her Italian identity, in search of a new self in her Greek origin, a Greek lover and a fashionably rootless cosmopolitanism. But a shift, even more significant, had begun. For years she had lived on willpower, determination, courage, audacity—even aggressiveness. From now on, having chosen to make someone else the center of her life, she would need qualities she had never before developed: empathy, patience, understanding—qualities that could all too easily be turned, self-destructively, into resignation, passivity, even submissiveness.
11
IT WAS AS IF MARIA HAD SAID TO herself: “First you must become the great Maria Callas. Then you can become a woman.” She set about the second task with as much determination and single-mindedness as she had brought to the first. When, at the beginning of 1960, rumors began to spread, and were soon confirmed, that Maria had no singing plans at all for the months ahead, the general feeling was that she had thrown herself into Onassis’ arms so violently that she had lost her balance. The truth was far more complex. On a BBC interview in 1958, she had expressed bitter resentment at the terrible weight of her career and had declared her intention of retiring within a year. In a subsequent interview she spoke about the growing fear of going onstage: “The more I grew in reputation the more frightened I got.” Underneath Maria’s prodigious capacity for work, her forceful personality, her unique ability to take risks and her superhuman will, lay a profound insecurity. Her strength was, and had always been, rooted in weakness. And now, hard work, tensions, fears, condemnations and relentless self-criticism had all become too much. She longed to break free. And some part of her knew that singing was not the whole purpose and meaning of her life. Onassis made her aware of her sensuality, and he was her first real lover. Maria dis
covered sex at thirty-six and she discovered it through Onassis. That alone would have been a strong bond. “It was a definite sexual passion,” said Zeffirelli, who had frequently stayed with them on the island of Skorpios. “She found real, sexual fulfillment with him.”
There was more. In Maria’s battle for a greater experience of life and of herself, Onassis opened the door to a wonderland of new adventures, new sensations and new insights—the promise of a whole new beginning for which she had longed. But Maria had no way of knowing what an emotional upheaval it would create. All she really understood was work, and suddenly she was not working. She had been deprived, even though of her own free will, of the one thing that had so far given meaning and direction to her life.
At first Onassis was the center of her new dream, replacing the dreams of glory that had soured into frustration and nightmare; he had done everything to earn this position. But then the affair that had begun with such an impetuous rush lost its momentum. After Tina’s divorce petition he had suddenly withdrawn—not for the first time in his personal life, when faced with the inescapable necessity of making a decision. He kept appearing and disappearing, no longer to be relied on for the support she needed, now more than ever.
The year 1960 began with the first major crisis of her voice. Maria had repeatedly, both in public and in private, stressed the effect of her emotional state on her voice. Although true of any singer, it was especially so in her case after her legend had been established and her fears had begun to grow with it. It was as if each fear, each anxiety and upheaval, had an instant, audible effect on her voice. “Only a happy bird can sing,” she said once. And another time: “It is not my voice which is sick, it is my nerves.” Her nerves were certainly ragged at the beginning of 1960, her blood pressure was distressingly low, and she suffered from sinus trouble that made singing extremely painful. She did not want to sing but she wanted to know that she could sing. So she would go into her music room, sit at the grand piano, still piled high with music, and try to sing something, anything. Then the pain—a pain that started in her throat and traveled all the way up to her forehead—would force her to stop.
Maria Callas Page 27