She had somehow to flee the anguish in her heart—if not any longer into work, at least into talking about work. John Tooley suggested Cavalleria Rusticana with Placido Domingo; then he suggested a new major production of Tosca. Together with Zeffirelli, they discussed first L’Incoronazione di Poppea, then The Merry Widow. Maria balked at the idea of an operetta. “Too undignified,” she would say. “Let’s do Traviata,” “Let’s do Traviata with Giulini.” And she went on saying it until a few months before she died: “Let’s do Traviata, Franco.”
“If she had accepted some compromises in the first act,” said Zeffirelli a year after her death, “she could have been singing it yesterday.” Perhaps she could, but the will to launch into a new adventure, a new trial, was not there. It would be rekindled every now and then, flicker uncertainly and then die, until the next time when someone would manage to ignite the fire for a while. In between, curling up in front of the television to watch someone else’s adventure in the Wild West was so much more inviting. She was drowning in a pool of lethargy and memory, but the instinct to expand and grow was so intense in her that when she stifled it, it began to choke her.
On February 21, 1977, she wrote to Leo. It was the shortest letter she had ever written to him, as if even this had now become an effort; it was also the last. She complained about her low blood pressure: “It makes me feel low and without desire for anything—but in a week I’ll be back to normal.” But she never was. The decline was now inexorable.
In the spring of 1977, she asked Vasso to prepare a will, leaving everything to Bruna and Ferruccio. She never signed it.
In July, Alan Sievewright went to see her again about doing a special discussion evening with her at Covent Garden on her roles, her life and her career. “Everything they want to know about me is there in the music,” she said. “ . . . Callas is dead.” She was stroking the little white poodle on her lap: “She is getting very old, you know. I always replace them when they die. I’ve always thought we should do the same with human beings, but I’ve discovered we can’t.”
Her last pilgrimage was to Skorpios; she spent hours kneeling in front of Aristo’s tomb, praying.
Back in Paris, in the hushed luxury of Georges Mandel, Maria was suffocating, too despairing and too resigned even to cry for help. Most of the time there was a faraway look in her eyes, as though there was nobody behind them, but a part of her continued with the old routine: walking Pixie and Djedda, watching television, practicing the Verdi Requiem with Vasso, reading Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, sometimes going to the hairdresser, sometimes having a friend in for supper, sometimes going to the movies, sometimes laughing or arguing or gossiping. But the old Maria had been dead for some time and, on September 16, 1977, the part of her that had gone on existing gave up. She awoke late, Bruna recalled. She had breakfast in bed, then got up and took a few faltering steps toward the bathroom. There was a piercing pain in her left side, then the sound of a fall. She was put back to bed and made to drink some strong coffee. They phoned her doctor; he was out. They rang the American Hospital; the number was engaged. Finally they rang Ferruccio’s doctor, who started out immediately for Georges Mandel. She was dead before he arrived.
Epilogue
EVANGELIA WAS GOING OUT FOR the evening. Waiting for her friends to collect her, in a red dress and a string of pearls, she was half watching television and half listening for the buzzer to ring when the news was flashed on the screen: Maria Callas is dead.
Driving from Yorkshire to London, Edith Gorlinsky stopped at a mailbox on a country lane to mail the card she had written to Maria. Back in her car, she switched the radio on just as the newscaster was announcing that earlier that day Maria Callas had died in Paris of a heart attack.
The immigration official at Paris airport looked closely at Peter Diamand’s passport: “So you are the artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival. Did you know Maria Callas?”
“Yes. Why?”
“She is dead,” he replied with that special eagerness of someone who is first with the news.
“It’s not possible,” snapped Peter Diamand. He rang Peter de Jong, the head of EMI in France; he was not there. He went on ringing one friend of Maria’s after another to reassure himself that it was not possible, that she was not dead. No one was in. He waited until three o’clock in the morning and then went to the Arc de Triomphe, where he knew he could get the first edition of the morning newspapers. He did not have to look far. There it was on the front page: La prima donna du siècle: La cantatrice Maria Callas est morte hier à 13 h 30 par suite d’un accident cardiaque.
In Athens, Vasso Devetzi was preparing for her concert that night at Herodes Atticus, when Bruna called her from Paris: “Madame est morte.” A few hours later, with faltering voice, she broke the news to the Athenian public from the stage of the ancient theater.
Victoria de Los Angeles was rung by the French Press Agency at her home in Barcelona. It was a very bad connection and for the first couple of minutes she could not understand what they wanted. Finally she heard, “What is your reaction to the death of Maria Callas?” All the French journalist could hear at the other end was uncontrollable sobbing.
John Ardoin was in San Francisco to hear Renata Scotto in Adriana Lecouvreur. He was having lunch with the pianist Ivan Davis and some other friends, when one of them who had been idly looking at a newspaper suddenly stopped and pointed out to John a small, last-minute item on the front page: “Maria Callas is dead at 53.” “That was all I read. I pushed away from the table, and got up to leave the restaurant. I had no idea where I was going or why. All I knew was that I had to get out. I only realized what I was doing after Ivan, who had also known Maria, stopped me and brought me back to the table.”
Laid out on her bed in a gray gown with a cross and a rose resting on her bosom, her eyes serenely closed, her lips slightly parted and her long auburn hair framing her white face, she looked beautiful and seemed to be at peace. “Her hair was so rich, so full of life,” remembers Peter Andry, who together with a few other friends visited Georges Mandel on the day of the funeral. “I shuddered at the thought that in a few hours it would all be ashes. I felt a strong urge to touch her, to cut a lock to preserve it forever. . . . I wish I had.”
Long before the funeral service was due to begin at four thirty in the afternoon of September 20, there was a large crowd outside the Greek Orthodox church on Rue Georges Bizet. By four thirty there was expectant silence outside and chaos inside. Her sister, Peter Andry, Vasso Devetzi, John Coveney, Peter de Jong, Sander and Edith Gorlinsky, Franco Rossellini, Bruna, Ferruccio and Consuelo, made up the official party, but it was the photographers and the television crews who seemed to be in charge: pushing and shoving to get better pictures of the congregation, rearranging the flowers to get a better view of the ribbons on the wreaths (from the president of the French Republic, from the president of Greece, from Covent Garden, from La Scala. . . .), adding to the buzz, the charge, the anticipation. Suddenly the priests started chanting; for the first few minutes, it was not at all clear whether they were trying their voices or whether the service had already begun. The buzz, which had continued through the chanting, became even more excited when Princess Grace and her daughter arrived late, and the voices of the priests had to do battle with the clicking of the cameras and the noise of the television crews. It was as if everybody was expecting something to happen: for Onassis to be resurrected, her mother to descend on the altar and launch into a speech, Maria herself to rise from her coffin and demand another rehearsal before the service could proceed. The ceremony had started almost unnoticed amid the buzz and it ended in the same vague and haphazard manner. Even the coffin was pushed from the center of the church in the frantic attempt to get a better shot of Princess Grace leaving.
At the same time in Rome, in the little Greek Orthodox church off Via Veneto, a Mass was being said for Maria. The congregation of fourteen included Nadia Stancioff who had organized it, Giulietta
Simionato, Piero Tosi and a man in an old gray raincoat whom nobody knew but who had been crying throughout the service, his grief deeply etched in each line of his face.
Back at Rue Georges Bizet, the air was full of flowers and tension as the coffin was carried out. When it appeared at the door of the church, the hundreds of people outside, many of them with eyes moist or tears streaming down their faces, broke into sudden applause and cries of “Bravo Callas,” “Bravo Maria.” It was the last spontaneous, heartfelt good-bye, the first deeply moving moment of this absurdly impersonal afternoon.
“What happens now?” asked Princess Grace of Peter Diamand.
“I don’t know.”
As the congregation forlornly began to disperse, the cortege, followed by the two official cars, started toward the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Only Bruna, unable to cope with more social mourning, had left the party for the emptiness of Georges Mandel, there to grieve alone.
In an enormous, high-ceilinged, freezing hall like a concrete Valhalla, they waited. Forty-five long minutes passed until at last someone appeared to lead them through long corridors to a cellar; there, two men in blue overalls were waiting with a trolley between them, and on the trolley a casket not much bigger than a cigar box, containing the earthly remains of Maria Callas. From the cellar the procession of the sister, the butler, the cook, the agent, the friend and the representatives of the music and film industries moved on along more seemingly endless corridors to where the boxes were stacked row upon row. The procession stopped. Maria Callas: 1923–1977: Number 16258.
The tributes had been pouring in for days: “The greatest musical performer of our time,” said Lord Harewood in London; “We will not see her like again,” Rudolf Bing announced from New York; “Goddesses do not die,” declared Rolf Liebermann, the director of L’Opéra, in Paris. Around the world, radio and television programs were honoring her, and concerts, galas and discussion evenings on her art were dedicated to her memory.
On September 16, 1978, the first anniversary of her death, a marble plaque with gold lettering went up outside 36 Avenue Georges Mandel:
Ici est décédée
Maria Callas
Le 16 Septembre 1977
Meanwhile the ex-husband and the mother had taken up their positions: the battle for Maria’s fortune, estimated at $12 million plus future record royalties, had begun. Meneghini unearthed a will made by Maria in 1954 leaving everything to him. As she had left no other will to supersede this one, he claimed that he was the sole beneficiary of her last testament, and a month after the funeral, on his application, the Georges Mandel apartment was sealed by legal order. At the same time in Paris, her sister was lodging a counterclaim on behalf of the family. It was the last link in the chain of Maria’s legal entanglements, although this time, it is true, she was responsible only by omission. Her failure to leave a will expressing her real wishes had led to an irony even greater than all the ironies and paradoxes of a life full of them: the two people for whom she had nothing but bitter words, and to whom she would have least liked to leave anything at all, were both now posing as the sole rightful heir.
Mercifully they both quickly realized that if they fought it out in court, the slenderness of their emotional claim to Maria’s fortune would have been made embarrassingly clear. An agreement was reached, the case was settled out of court, and the estate was divided between the two octogenarians. “I don’t want the money for myself but to make her known all over the world,” announced Meneghini, blatantly oblivious to the absurdity of wanting to make well known one of the most celebrated people on earth. The mother, more sensibly, refrained from announcing to the world how she proposed to dispose of the millions that suddenly belonged to her, although she assured me in Athens that she would give some of it away to provide dowries for a couple of poor Greek girls. Bruna and Ferruccio were taken care of before the estate was split, and once Georges Mandel was sold, Bruna left Paris for her village in Italy and Ferruccio to work for Christina Onassis.
On June 14, 1978, in a large, crowded room at the George V in Paris, the contents of the Georges Mandel apartment were put up for auction. While the room was being prepared for the sale, it seems a tall pair of doors opening onto a hallway suddenly flew open with such force that a commode was overturned, the porcelain on it broken, and a painting dashed to the floor; yet it was one of those still, Parisian summer days with no breeze at all. And even more unaccountably (according to John Ardoin who was present at the auction), as the bidding began, one of the first lots, a mirrored tray, was being held up for inspection when there was a crack like a rifle shot, and the glass split and fell to the ground. After an initial gasp of awe, the people in the room were frozen in silence, as if they half expected Maria herself to make a dramatic and furious entrance.
In the front row, a robust, white-haired man was bidding furiously. “I came here to save my memories,” Meneghini announced to the press. And he did buy back many of them, from a jade pendant he had given Maria to the eighteenth-century marital bed on which she had died. An admirer who could not afford Maria’s Steinway bought the piano stool, while those who could not afford any of the paintings, carpets, pieces of furniture or objets d’art, returned a few days later to bid for the washing machine, one of the three vacuum cleaners, or at least a saucepan that “belonged, you know, to Maria Callas.”
On the day after the first Christmas following Maria’s death, somebody had tried to forge a particularly morbid link with her by stealing her ashes from Père Lachaise. It was a short-lived link; hours later they were discovered in a remote part of the cemetery, but not before Evangelia had accused her ex-son-in-law of stealing her daughter’s ashes.
“Even now that she is dead, Meneghini wants to hold on to my child,” she told the Greek press, “but Maria’s ashes belong to her homeland.”
In the spring of 1979, the ashes were taken to Greece, with full honors, and ceremonially scattered in the Aegean.
“How shall we bury you when it’s over?” they asked Socrates just before he died.
“Any way you like, if you can catch me.”
Maria’s ashes were lost in the sea she loved. She lives on, like every great spirit, forever eluding our grasp.
Acknowledgments
I WAS IN LOS ANGELES WHEN GEORGE Weidenfeld called me from London a few days after Maria Callas’ death to ask if I would be interested in writing her biography. It is hard to believe, now that Maria has become part of my life, but I would never have thought of writing this book had George not suggested it. For the suggestion and for the encouragement that followed I am deeply grateful to him.
The first few months of research were the hardest, and the help of Jeannie Chandris over this period was invaluable. Just down from Oxford, she threw herself into the job of research assistant with enthusiasm and dedication. She conducted the first exploratory interviews; she spent hours in newspaper libraries cataloging everything that had appeared in the press about Maria in the last thirty years; and, like the most accomplished sleuth, she put together a directory with the addresses and telephone numbers of hundreds of people around the world whose lives had touched on Maria’s. For all the work she did and for her unending support and humor I am deeply grateful to Jeannie.
The book, of course, could not have been undertaken at all without the help and cooperation of the many people who had been close to Maria at various points in her life; their names appear in the Source Notes, and I would like here to express my profound thanks to them.
The first draft was read by John Ardoin to whom I owe a special debt of thanks, not only for his suggestions and corrections, but for all his generous help and guidance throughout the writing and rewriting. The book was greatly enriched by Maria’s godfather, Dr. Lantzounis. Through our talks, his incisive comments on the first draft, and especially through all Maria’s letters and the many documents and photographs he made available to me, he provided some of the most intimate material on Maria’s life.
The second draft of the book was read by Peter Diamand, Anastasia Gratsos, Lord Harewood, Harold Rosenthal, Michael Scott, Sir John Tooley and Gaby and Teddy van Zuylen. I am very grateful to them for their comments and suggestions. I am also indebted to John van Eyssen who read the manuscript and made available to me the tapes of his interviews with many of Maria’s friends and colleagues recorded during the months when he was collecting material for the film on Maria’s life that he planned to produce with Zeffirelli.
Different sections of the book were also read by Sander Gorlinsky, Robert Sutherland, Nadia Stancioff and Sylvia Sass, who amplified what I had already written about the periods or incidents in Maria’s life in which they were closely involved. My profound thanks to them as well as to Alan Sievewright who gave me access to his substantial collection of Callas material, to Peter Andry who allowed me to see Maria’s correspondence with EMI, and to Mary Mead for sharing memories and ideas throughout the writing of the book.
Michael Sissons, my agent, gave me invaluable advice both when I started working on the book and after he had read the first draft. For everything he, Victoria Pryor and Pat Kavanagh did for the book I will always be grateful. My deep thanks also go to Alex McCormick, my editor in London, as well as to Chris Warwick and Miranda Ferguson. Fred Hills, my editor in New York, is to a large extent responsible for the final shape of the book. He is the kind of editor writers dream about but rarely hope to find in the pressured world of modern publishing. No detail was too insignificant for his time and attention, and I am deeply grateful for his commitment to the book and his sustained editorial creativity. My warm thanks go also to his assistant, Martha Cochrane, for her considerable work on the manuscript, and to Vincent Virga for his imaginative editing of the picture section, as well as for his advice on many aspects of the book itself.
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