Maria Callas Page 2

  Through the interviews, the public statements and the private truths, her portrait gradually acquired focus and color, revealing new clues and new details. It was a bit like watching a Polaroid print develop. Forgetting who had set up and taken the photograph, I simply watched, fascinated, as it came to life.

  I began by holding her up to the light of close scrutiny. And just as she was in danger of disappearing into a shimmer of ordinariness—of insecurities, of snobbery, of fears, of common humanity—I rediscovered her without illusions in all her real rather than her public greatness. By then she had become part of my daily life and had even begun to invade my dreams.

  Only when I suspended theoretical interpretation did I begin to know her, and only when I suspended judgment did I begin to feel the full force of the passion that fueled her life. It is this passion for life, for her art and for something unknown beyond both that compelled her and drove her forever on. And it is this passion that I have tried to communicate in the pages that follow.

  To sing is an expression of your being,

  a being which is becoming.

  Maria Callas

  1

  PETROS DIMITRIADIS SAT ON THE porch of his home on his name day surrounded by his seven children and as many guests as the porch would hold. He was humming an old Greek ballad, mostly to himself, under his upturned mustache, through the buzz of talk and gossip. But it wasn’t long before his was the only voice to be heard. He had hardly stopped when his audience, which had been gradually swollen by the passersby, started chanting: “Give us a song, Petro” . . . “Colonel Petro, give us a song” . . . “Sing to us, Daddy.” He smiled and looked over the little square which was by now full of people. With the confidence of an old trouper, he let his eye rove around and take in all the newcomers, including the visiting Italian tenor who had sold out the bigger of the two village halls for his concert the following evening. Petros ceremoniously rested one arm on the ledge of the porch and burst into “Questa o quella,” one of his most beloved Verdi arias. He had never heard Rigoletto from beginning to end and had picked up this aria by ear, which is how he had picked up everything he sang.

  The audience was spellbound—so absorbed that they didn’t even notice the Italian tenor tiptoe away halfway through the aria. They only knew that all was not well with their famous operatic visitor when the following morning the concert was canceled, the money returned and the tenor found shut up in his room, consumed with envy and self-doubt. Petros Dimitriadis’ star had never shone brighter than it did that evening. In Stylis where he lived, across the Gulf of Lamia from Thermopylae, his was unanimously regarded as the finest voice. The Italian tenor’s withdrawal was another confirmation and the ultimate accolade. Petros needed no excuse to burst into song. He was always singing or humming—even, they said, when he was fighting. An army officer all his life, he was known during the Balkan War as the “Singing Commander.” Fifty years later his granddaughter Maria would be known as La Divina, the prima donna assoluta, the Golden Voice of the century.

  Her mother, Evangelia (known in the family as “Litza”), was Petros’ favorite daughter. She had his flair, his showmanship, his strength and quite a lot of his magnetism—but none of his talent. She longed to be an actress, but in a family of army officers in a remote part of Greece before the First World War the mere idea of a theatrical career seemed preposterous. So she followed instead the well-trodden path of marriage to a graduate in pharmacy from the University of Athens, George Kalogeropoulos. Everybody approved except Petros. “Don’t marry him, Litza,” he insisted. “You’ll never be happy with him.” But a few months after Litza and George met, Petros Dimitriadis died of a stroke brought on by the injuries he had received in the Balkan War. Sixteen days later, in a Greek Orthodox church in Athens, Litza and George were married. They made a strikingly good-looking couple. George, with his wide brow, thick auburn hair and full mustache, could have been called a beautiful man, looking particularly imposing and dignified next to his lustrous-eyed bride in her plain white dress.

  They moved to Meligala in the Peloponnese, where George opened a drugstore, the only one in thirteen counties. His customers came from miles away, and soon he had made enough money for the newlyweds to move to what was known as “the best house” in Meligala. But within six months, Evangelia knew—or rather, decided—that her father had been right. She should never have married George Kalogeropoulos and she was never going to be happy with him. She realized very quickly that his debonair looks were deceptive; he had no thirst for glory, and certainly no drive to match her longing for luxury, action and distinction. She determined, however, at least for the moment, to play the role of a good wife; but even before her first child was born, a year after their marriage, she had given up hope of making her marriage more than a convention.

  Whether George took to womanizing before or after his wife had reached her unstated conclusion that the marriage had been a mistake is not easy to determine. What is clear is that the more his pharmacy thrived and his status as an affluent and respected citizen increased, the more enthusiastically, in his quiet way, did he pursue his casual affairs. And Evangelia, following in the time-honored tradition of Greek womanhood, swallowed her resentment and took what satisfaction she could from playing the silent but occasionally explosive martyr. At the same time, what with her cook and her maids, she kept sufficiently busy with the routine of married life to forget that there was little substance and precious little joy in it.

  She was eighteen and a half when she left Meligala for Athens to give birth to Jackie, her first daughter, on June 4, 1917. Three years later came a son, Vasily, who, for more reasons than simply the special place traditionally assigned to sons in Greek households, stirred in both parents a deeper love than either of them had ever felt before. For a time it even seemed as though Vasily would resurrect the love Evangelia and George had briefly shared, but three years later typhoid fever broke out at Meligala and Vasily was one of the first victims of the epidemic. “My heart seemed to die with him,” wrote Evangelia years later, “and I thought I would never live again.”

  If Vasily alive had nearly brought his parents together again, Vasily dead made communication between them almost impossible. Locked in their separate fortresses of grief, they could find no way of building a bridge between them, until George Kalogeropoulos could bear it no longer. Secretly, he conceived a plan of release which showed more daring and imagination than his wife ever gave him credit for. Within a few days, he had sold both the pharmacy, his proudest achievement, and their home, and had bought three passages to America.

  Not until the day before they were due to sail did he inform his wife that they were leaving their home. She never forgave him: it was 1923, she had no money or qualifications, she had a five-and-a-half year old child and was expecting another. So she felt that she had no option but to swallow more poisonous resentment, stifle her pain at leaving her country and her family and follow across the Atlantic a husband she would willingly have drowned in it. Evangelia could not easily have been in a more bitter and heartbroken state than she was during that pregnancy. And on top of everything, she was continuously seasick. “All the way across the Atlantic,” she wrote, “I was wretched.”

  They sailed into New York Harbor on August 2, 1923. The country was in mourning for President Warren Harding and the flags all flew at half-mast when Evangelia, five months’ pregnant, arrived in the United States with her husband and daughter. The first American newspaper that was thrust into the hands of the perplexed Greek couple bore great black headlines which neither of them could read, for they spoke no English. Waiting for them on the quay was Leonidas Lantzounis, who had left Meligala for New York a year earlier. The sight of New York City, as well as the presence of a friend from home, evoked in Evangelia feelings of excitement and adventure that for months had been stifled under layers of grief and despair. George, who had been at school with Leonidas’ older brother, was relieved to see someone who could help hi
m through the faltering first steps in a new land.

  With Leonidas’ help, George found a job in a pharmacy, and while her husband was adjusting to working for someone else, Evangelia threw herself into decorating the apartment they had rented in Astoria on Long Island. Greek carpets, Greek cushions and Greek icons under which a little candle burned all day in the bedrooms made the impersonal New York apartment feel much more like home.

  At the same time, both parents were getting ready for the arrival of their new son. Neither of them seemed prepared to consider even for one moment the possibility that their newborn child might be a girl. Their yearnings and primitive logic had convinced them that the new baby would be a son who would take the place of Vasily and, so far away from where he had lived and died, make their life complete. All the little clothes Evangelia knitted were blue, and everything they bought for the baby’s bedroom was for a boy. “Ever since Vasily’s death,” Evangelia said, “I had prayed for another son to fill the empty place in my heart.”

  On December 2,* 1923, the expected son failed to arrive. Instead Dr. Lantzounis brought to the mother a baby girl weighing twelve and a half pounds. The baby clothes would not have been right even if they had been pink: “You made clothes for a baby like a doll,” Dr. Lantzounis told Evangelia, sitting by her bed, laughing and patting her hand, “but they are too small for this baby. The nurses can’t get them on her. She is like a young lamb, she is so large!”

  The first words Maria heard from her mother were “Take her away.” And her mother’s first gesture was to turn her eyes from her daughter and fix them on the snowstorm raging outside the hospital window. As for her mother’s thoughts, she later admitted, they were all loving, tearful thoughts of Vasily. When the nurse asked the mother what name to put on the bead hospital bracelet, there was silence. Neither she nor her husband had thought of a girl’s name. Plucking a name out of the air, she said, “Sophia.” Her husband interrupted, “No, Cecilia.” In the end, they managed to agree on Maria. When, three years later, Maria was christened in the Greek Orthodox cathedral on East Seventy-fourth Street, she was, like a young princess, given all three names and one more: Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria. Leonidas Lantzounis, the first man to greet her parents on American soil, was her godfather. The man who first put her into her mother’s arms became not only her godfather but, right to the end, her loyal supporter and her beloved confidant. About the same time as her christening, Maria was also given a different surname. Her parents changed their name by court order from Kalogeropoulos to Callas—a symbol of their intention at that time to make America their permanent home. Their Greek friends, though, continued to call them by their original name, so Maria grew up accustomed to both.

  It took Evangelia four days before she could look at her daughter again, but it is not easy to resist a four-day-old baby. She finally succumbed to her daughter’s big, black eyes, and set herself to giving her baby the love she had at first denied her.

  Perhaps it is in the nature of babies to inspire legends—from knocking the cat out the window to finishing off all the garden strawberries and being sick for days. When the baby itself grows into a legend, there is no end to the childhood stories that are recollected, repeated, embroidered or invented. There was the doctor who delivered her, taking one look at her and predicting that “she will break many hearts”; there was Maria herself, three months old and not yet weaned, standing up in her crib and munching zwieback; Maria’s baby war-blings; and then, at the age of four, Maria crouched under the Pianola, pressing the pedals with her hands and, her little mouth half open, listening ecstatically to the first music she ever made.

  By the time Maria was four the Callas family had moved from Astoria to Manhattan and were living in Washington Heights on 192 Street. George Callas had his own drugstore again and was well on his way to fulfilling the dream he had nurtured ever since they had left Greece: to reestablish the business status he had enjoyed in his small community back home. The Pianola was one of the first symbols of their new affluence, but it was much more than that. Evangelia, prompted by memories of her father’s glorious singing, the dim stirrings of her own ambitions and her daughters’ chirpings around the house, was, still only half-consciously, taking steps that would stimulate her children’s musical inclinations. Although Maria’s earliest childhood ambition was to be a dentist, Evangelia was not easily discouraged. A Gramophone followed the Pianola; the first record that she bought was “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca, and the next, soon after, excerpts from Martha and Aida. Meanwhile George Callas bought record after record of Greek popular songs. At regular intervals ritualistic fights broke out between the parents over whatever record was on the Gramophone, and Evangelia, her big eyes flashing like a jaguar’s, would shout to George to take off his lousy Greek records this instant, for fear of corrupting her daughters’ tastes.

  George and Evangelia understood each other now no more than they did the first day they met. Evangelia’s quaint description of her husband was: “Like a bee to whom every woman was a flower over which he must hover to seek the sweetness.” But he was certainly not permitted to hover in peace. The Gramophone became the lightning conductor of the Callas’ marriage; the fights over whether it would be “Ritorna vincitor” or the Greek version of “Hold me tight, O my love, while I’m dying!” masked some of the much deeper and more dangerous tensions in their marriage.

  Despite their relative affluence, these first few years in America were not easy. Life was a continuous process of adjustment. Their friends, most of them earlier Greek immigrants, were solid, worthy citizens marked by financial comfort, a certain decent Orthodox godliness and an ardent concern for the God of Opinion. Considered collectively, Mr. and Mrs. Callas and their friends belonged to what one might call the lower middle classes. Evangelia was an expert on the minutiae of social position. She never allowed her husband to forget for long that she came from a better family than he, a state of affairs symbolized for her by her family’s private cemetery in Stylis.

  For a woman of her pretensions, the thought of so quiet a life stretching indefinitely before her was quite unbearable. She had been forced to give up her dreams of a career on the stage and she had had to accept that she would never transform her husband into the exciting, important figure she had once imagined. She had, in effect, to come to terms with the fact that she would never be distinguished in her own right, nor would she ever be the wife of a distinguished man. But resignation was not natural to Evangelia, and she obsessively transferred her ambitions and drives to her daughters.

  Five and a half years separated the two Callas girls, and this gap greatly contributed to the younger sister’s idealization of the elder. It was not easy for Maria. She was the younger, the plainer, the fatter, the less charming; and she must have sensed very early on that she was also the less loved. In the competition for mother, Jackie had won outright, and throughout her childhood Maria remained bitterly envious of Jackie. Yet, at the same time, she adored Jackie, longed to be with Jackie, wanted Jackie’s entire devotion.

  One July evening when she was just five and a half, waiting with her parents to cross the street to their house, she saw Jackie standing across the road. She pulled away from her mother and ran with open arms toward her sister. A car speeding down the street struck her and dragged her for twenty-five feet before it stopped. George, with Maria unconscious in his arms, and his wife holding the screaming Jackie tightly by the arm, arrived at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital on Fort Washington Avenue to be told that the chances were slim. George was numb with fright and Evangelia nearly hysterical when Dr. Korilos, a Greek brain specialist, arrived to reassure them that Maria, although suffering from shock and severe concussion, was not in danger.

  She remained in the hospital for twenty-two days, looked after by the nuns. For some time after she went home, she was more irritable and unpredictable than before and more prone to accidents and misadventures. There was always a good deal of skirmishing between Jackie and Maria; the
y yelled, hurled abuse and occasionally, very occasionally, came to blows, Maria’s size compensating to some extent for her age. The one thing that Evangelia would not forgive was “tale telling,” and her punishment was based on age-old Greek tradition: she would sprinkle pepper in their mouths and on their lips.

  Maria’s car accident was in July 1929. A few months later the world was shaken by the Wall Street Crash; and for the second time in his life George Callas found himself having to sell his pharmacy, this time not by choice. Each year from 1929 to 1933, the family moved to a less and less expensive apartment and money became a real problem for the first time. There remained for Maria only one source of relative affluence and security: her godfather, Dr. Lantzounis, with his presents every Christmas, the traditional candle and silver trinket every Easter and their Sunday lunch outings at Longchamps on Tenth Street. Leonidas, or Leo as more and more people called him by now, had joined the New York Orthopaedic Hospital shortly after Maria was born and, by the time the Crash came, was a successful orthopedic surgeon.

  In the Callas home, money was becoming the occasion of incessant complaints, accusations and recriminations between the couple. The main bone of contention was the girls’ piano lessons. George Callas, who had to become a traveling salesman of pharmaceutical products to meet his family’s basic needs, already had had to make considerable psychological adjustments. No longer his own boss with his own business, with little prospect of ever having his own business again, he had to adjust to a large drop in his income; and he had to endure his wife’s constant reminders of their comfortable life in Greece. On top of all this he was forced to pay a substantial chunk of his much-diminished income for his daughters’ piano lessons four times a week.