Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  Entirely blameless this time, she was caught in the middle of the censorship war. Herbert Graf stepped in to save Poliuto and to direct Maria in her return appearance at La Scala after thirty much-publicized months of absence. The opening night was not only the highlight of the Italian musical season, it was an Aristotle Onassis spectacular. Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, and the Begum Aga Khan were among his guests, as well as assorted members of his international coterie and Elsa Maxwell, who had been especially flown over from the States. Maxwell had nursed her wounded feelings long enough, and seemed at last prepared to accept the unpleasant fact that her beloved Maria now belonged to Onassis. It was almost like old times again. She dedicated her next column to Maria’s opening, describing it as something out of the Arabian nights. Sixteen thousand carnations given by Balmain decorated the auditorium, and among the audience of three thousand some had paid, according to The Associated Press, 800 pounds for a single ticket. Onassis arrived as the overture was beginning and slipped quietly into his box.

  “Maria,” said Nicola Benois who designed the production, “badly needed a strong hand to guide her, to give her courage—the hand of Luchino.” On that night courage was infinitely more important than artistic guidance. The presence of Ari and his fashionable friends, in addition to the usual Scala audience ready to pounce on her first vocal slip, terrified her. It was not just stage nerves; it was a deep, paralyzing anxiety as if something cold, horrible and humiliating was about to happen to her. It was as if all the whistling and booing, the throwing of radishes and walking out, all the rejections that she had experienced at one opera house or another, had merged into a single overwhelming specter and come to haunt her. And echoing through all these in her mind’s ear was a prolonged roar of laughter.

  She gave a performance almost designed to avoid risks, to avoid that nightmare roar of laughter. The woman whose audacity and determination to achieve the impossible had become legendary made her singing entrance as though she was carefully and hesitantly feeling her way into the part.

  The choice of an opera that posed few vocal problems was in itself a sign of Maria’s longing to be free of nervous tension—even at the expense of selecting for her return to La Scala an opera in which the heroine, Paolina, is less important than the hero, which demanded no great and potentially dangerous dramatic outbursts, and which gave her few chances to show that she could still command an astounding range of dramatic emotion. But the end of the opera was quite miraculous. “It was,” wrote Andrew Porter, “an almost physical enactment of the workings of grace, from the first stirrings when this pagan heroine listens to the Christians’ hymn, to the supernatural radiance which floods her in the final scene as she resolves to join the Christians in martyrdom.” The audience confirmed the triumph she feared would elude her. As always it was not as bad in realization as in anticipation. But the agony of the prospect extracted a higher and higher toll from her. Even after the opera was finished, her performance had to continue, for the evening was crowned with a supper given in her honor by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. After the celebrities and the gossip columnists had gone, Maria could give her four remaining performances without that ruthless spotlight on her. Ten days after opening night, at an ordinary matinee, with no sharp-tongued columnists and bejeweled socialites, her performance demonstrated unequivocally that it was not her voice that was the cause of her decline, but her fears. “No one will believe me,” wrote Andrew Porter in the Musical Times, “when I say I heard the only performance, of the five she gave, in which Maria Callas found her peak form (a matinee on 18 December, for the record). But so it was. She was spellbinding, secure, confident and inspiring confidence.”

  But the reviews after the first night read like obituary notices and by the end of the fifth performance, Maria was a physical and emotional wreck. The irony was that, as her fears and her life-style made her appearances rarer, their very rarity, together with that life-style, invariably turned each performance into a celebrity occasion which further increased the tension and her fears, until by the time of her Norma in Paris in 1964 she had to be tranquilized with pills and injections before she could go onstage. It is hardly surprising that as a result her appearances became even rarer. From the winter of 1960 to the end of her life she sang only three operas onstage—Norma, Medea and Tosca—but she discussed a very large number which never moved beyond the discussion stage. Each year consisted of what she sang and what she was in the process of negotiating to sing, and as the first list shrank, the second grew longer and longer.

  At the beginning of 1961 she and Sander Gorlinsky, who had since the end of her marriage become her exclusive agent, were in the process of negotiating with La Scala about the title role in Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda for the spring and with the Dallas Civic Opera about a production of Orfeo for the autumn. Onassis, too, was full of projects for her. It was some time since Maria had last announced to the press, “My relations with Mr. Onassis involve business matters,” but business matters continued to be discussed. There was, for a start, the question of the Monte Carlo Opera Company, but Onassis’ heart was in other projects closer to his own taste and understanding. Ever since Carl Foreman, his guest on the Christina, had offered Maria a part opposite Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone, Onassis had been trying to persuade her to do a film. He was particularly enthusiastic about turning Hans Habe’s German potboiler The Primadonna into a film—with Maria, of course, in the lead. There is no doubt that Onassis would have felt much more comfortable if Maria had been a film star instead of an opera star. Not being overwhelmed by the great Callas, as most men surrounding her were, meant that he could respond to her directly as a woman. It had made courting her easier, but his total absence of any feeling for her art made loving her more difficult. Maria, as an Italian friend of hers put it, had found bread for her teeth. But then so had Onassis. Here was a woman more famous than he was and whose fame, he felt, was rather more solidly based than his own. Mystified and perplexed by her art, he began to degrade and even openly ridicule it. He had never enjoyed opera except in Epidaurus and on gala nights, and it satisfied no emotional need in him. Singing to bouzouki music, smashing plates and other uninhibited expressions of emotion were much more to his liking.

  When, for Maria’s sake, guests on the Christina turned the conversation to opera, he would very swiftly steer it into more familiar waters—and not always with his famed charm. Once the discussion turned to Maria’s Tosca and someone quoted Puccini’s description of himself as “a mighty hunter of wild fowl, beautiful women, and good libretti.” “That’s the best thing I’ve heard about him,” said Onassis looking straight at Maria, “except that he needn’t have bothered about the libretti.” Yet despite these philistine outbursts, he had a genuine feeling for music. During the Second World War, he had persuaded Ingse Dedichen, the Norwegian shipping heiress with whom he was living at the time, to teach him to play some Bach on the piano. He could not read music but he practiced the same piece for six months, until a few years later he could astonish Artur Rubinstein and everybody else present at a Hollywood party by playing it effortlessly and with much feeling. He always ventured into unexpected areas, amazing everybody with his knowledge, as he amazed Margot Fonteyn when one night he started discussing “entrechats-six” with her. It was a dancer in Anna Pavlova’s company visiting Buenos Aires who had taught him, but he had cared enough to learn. He never cared enough to learn much about opera, or, at any rate, more than had been necessary for courting Maria.

  Meanwhile, Maria wanted to know about everything that was part of his life. A friend who saw her for lunch in London could hardly believe the change: “She talks of nothing but politics, tourism and the future of air travel.” Her love broadened her life; its colors heightened. She adopted Ari’s interests, she adopted his friends, and two of them, Panaghis Vergottis and Maggie van Zuylen, were to become two of the people closest to her. She had never before reveled in friendship, nor drawn much strength fro
m it, but loving Onassis had made it easier for her to open herself to others. She, who had always had difficulty with intimacy of any kind, began to discover its joys. Vergottis was just seventy when Maria met him in London at the Dorchester party after Medea. His friendship with Ari dated back to the thirties when Vergottis, an established shipowner with a long family shipping tradition behind him, met the young Onassis on his way up. “One of my dearest friends, if not the best I have,” was the way Onassis described him to Maria.

  For Maria, Vergottis soon became a kind of cultural bridge between her new world and her new interests and the world of opera and music that had been her home for over twenty years and her kingdom for nearly ten. In her new world she was largely surrounded by people who would announce with shrill intensity that they loved music. Vergottis made a more than welcome change. He was not only interested and knowledgeable on the subject of opera, he was passionate about it. A tall, handsome man, almost invariably dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, he was one of the aristocrats of the shipping business, following developments in the world of art with at least as much enthusiasm as he showed for the shipping world, and carefully restricting his business life to the afternoons—after a good lunch, often at Claridge’s or the Ritz, and after he had lit his second or third cigar of the day. He had never married; instead his life was crowded with a succession of colorful mistresses. His home was the Ritz in London, but even after all these years of living there, his suite remained as impersonal as the first day he had moved in, without a single photograph or objet d’art that belonged to him; almost the only personal thing he had was a carpet that he loved, and even that was kept in the storeroom of the Ritz. Maria loved to tease him about his obsessive rituals, such as buying his cigars each morning from a cigar shop across from the Ritz, always six at a time, or ordering his dark suits and white shirts, all together, once every ten years, and always in the same style. At the height of their friendship, Maria was for him daughter, confidante and embodiment of his lifelong love of the arts. She was also a Greek, and although Vergottis felt more at home at the Ritz than on Kephalonia, the island of his ancestors in the Ionian Sea, he was intensely proud of his nationality.

  Maria felt both admired and loved when she was with him, and she opened her heart to him, especially about Aristo. Very soon Vergottis became the official envoy between Maria and Onassis, intervening whenever hostilities between the two superpowers reached breaking point.

  Maggie van Zuylen was the other go-between in this at times impossible relationship. It was at her Paris apartment on Avenue Foch that Maria and Ari met again for the first time after his marriage to Jackie, and it was she who often talked Maria into seeing Ari again after, like a hurt child, she had sworn never to do so. The range and intimacy of Maria’s friendship with Maggie throws much light on what Maria sought during this part of her life. Maggie’s life had been the opposite of Maria’s. Born in Alexandria of Syrian parents, she met the Baron van Zuylen during his travels, and so totally swept him off his feet that he went ahead and married her despite his father’s violent disapproval. The old baron, who had destined his son for at least a grand duchess, promptly disinherited him, and for three years they lived off loans on his name, the stock exchange and Maggie’s poker, occasionally leaving restaurants by the back door when all else had failed. Then the old baron met his daughter-in-law and was, in turn, swept off his feet.

  Maggie van Zuylen had instinctively what Maria would never acquire; she had that intangible quality which makes a woman a courtesan, the sexual worldliness of a seductress who knows how to please a man. For about ten years she remained an endless source of worldly advice for Maria. A regular guest on the Christina, she would always be prodding her to organize things for Ari—card games, boat parties, new people, anything to keep him amused. “You are always shown to best advantage,” she would tell her, “against the background of all those guests and activities so that he can get away from all that, into your arms.” Maria tried—tried, tried and went on trying—right down to organizing parties for card-playing which she detested. Unable to master the rudiments of female artifice, she grossly overvalued its importance and admired anyone who had mastered it as thoroughly as Maggie. She felt as though Maggie ruled over a mysterious territory in which she longed to be at home. Maria never stopped to wonder why, if all these techniques for “winning men and keeping them” were so successful, Maggie’s husband had kept a mistress for thirteen years, an actress who had become a permanent fixture in his life. “Never create jealous scenes,” Maggie would tell Maria, especially when there was good cause for creating them. “Be unfaithful. The greatest, the most effective jealousy scene you can create is a nicely publicized affair on the side. A man can’t go on being interested, especially sexually interested, in his wife, if he feels too secure in her.”

  Maria once followed Maggie’s advice and was photographed kissing Pier Paolo Pasolini on the lips, just before Onassis was to set off for a Caribbean cruise with Jackie and the Radziwills. Unfortunately Pasolini’s inclinations were so well known that the most she could have hoped for from such a photograph was a weary smile on Ari’s face. Whatever the effectiveness of her advice, Maggie van Zuylen was an arresting, sparkling personality; she had once been a great beauty, and although twenty-three years older than Maria would always remain much more secure as a woman. Unlike Maria, she was totally at ease wherever she was and whoever she was with—whether with André Malraux, who described her as “the least cultured and most brilliant woman I ever met,” or with Georges Pompidou, of whom she once said that one of his eyes was that of a Jesuit and the other that of a thief.

  This ease fascinated Maria, for whom everything—her art, her charm, even her social life—had been hard work. Maggie, who had never worked, had never created anything except evanescent evenings and had never read a book from cover to cover except, once, a biography of Marie Antoinette, found Maria’s application and success overwhelmingly attractive. It is interesting that Maggie’s other great friend was Coco Chanel, another highly successful woman who had worked hard for everything.

  Maggie was Maria’s first intimate friend, someone with whom she could discuss everything, from her sex life with Ari to the placement for a dinner she was giving. But Maggie was strictly mondaine, and there were stirrings and longings in Maria that in Maggie’s case were buried far too deep to feel. For the time being, the contrasts between them tied them to each other more tightly than any matching qualities could have done. The frustrated artist, with her two children and her six grandchildren, met the celebrated singer longing to fulfill herself as a woman, and what followed was a fusion based on opposite needs. “The only things that interest me now,” said Maggie toward the end of her life, “are having dinner with Maria and Ari and playing gin rummy.”

  In the first flush of her mutual love affair with France and the French, Maria had announced that she longed to live in Paris, and ever since that moving reception at Orly in early 1958, more and more people and feelings seemed to draw her there. Ari and Maggie were, of course, the main attractions. It was not by accident that the apartment she rented was at 44 Avenue Foch, Maggie’s at 84 and Ari’s at 88. Her work also increasingly attracted her to Paris. Michel Glotz, head of Pathé-Marconi, the French counterpart of EMI, had become a good friend, and Georges Prêtre was to become her favorite conductor. At the end of March 1961, he conducted the recording of Great Arias from French Opera that Maria did at the Salle Wagram. It was an entirely new repertoire for Maria. Delilah’s Spring Song, Orpheus’s Lament, the Habanera from Carmen—they all demonstrate that if only Maria had not stuck to the soprano repertory long after she could no longer sing it, she could have had a new and thriving career as a mezzo: “I’m seriously afraid,” wrote Roger Dettmer in the Chicago American, “that if she pursues this course her mezzo colleagues one and all will flee to the wings where Maria Callas stands ready, waiting to go on with possibly the supreme Carmen since Calvé, the definitive Delilah our
age has lacked, the humanizer of Gluck in this era of classical frigidity, and who knows what other wonders. The queen is reborn, long live the queen.” But all these remained the dreams of reviewers, opera managers, thousands of Maria’s fans and, every now and then, of Maria herself.

  Meanwhile Georges Prêtre was helping her rebuild her shaky confidence. Young, exuberant, a judo black belt and devoted to Maria, he became a friend and a source of support during and between performances. “When she is working she is always nervous,” he said just before Maria’s last appearance. “She thinks of nothing but the performance. She can’t sleep. She is always screwing herself up to do even better. But on holiday, when we were cruising with Mr. Onassis, I don’t believe she even thought of it.” Her engagements were increasingly scheduled around her cruises. Immediately after her recording in Paris, she left for Monte Carlo and a cruise; and after her next engagement—a concert at St. James’s Palace with Sir Malcolm Sargent accompanying her at the piano—she left London, no less promptly, for yet another cruise.