The tale of Maria Callas, the world’s most glamorous diva, and Aristotle Onassis, the world’s richest man, and Jacqueline Kennedy, the world’s most famous widow, continues to fascinate. How did Maria lose her weight and her voice? Why did she ditch a husband and run off with Ari? And how and exactly why did Ari dump Maria and pay a fortune for the short-termed joys of marriage with Jackie Kennedy? And does anybody really want to know the answers anyway?
Well, of course we all do. And no wonder. The Callas story has everything: High Art, Hot Sex, Betrayal, Achievement, Disaster, Triumph. There’s even a sad ending straight out of La Traviata. You name it, it’s there.
For younger readers, perhaps a résumé is in order. Maria Callas appeared on the vocal scene about 1950. Born in New York, trained in Greece, she astounded the opera world with a big, strange, colorful voice that seemingly could sing anything. She sang Isolde and Gioconda, also Kundry and Lucia di Lammermoor. When she sang the Walküre Brunhilde and Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani in the same week, it created a sensation.
Callas was an astonishingly fortunate (her enemies, and there were plenty, said conniving) woman. When she went to Italy for her first important break (a La Gioconda at the Arena in Verona), one of the first persons she met was Giovanni Meneghini, a wealthy industrialist who had a thing for sopranos. Callas became his mistress, and, in due course, his wife. Meneghini had money and a flair for guiding careers. Almost immediately, the conductor Tullio Serafin appeared in Callas’ life, guiding her musically. Several years later, the great director Luchino Visconti took over the dramatic side of Callas’ education.
Callas had a phenomenal gift for musical expression. She phrased like a fabulous violinist, and her interpretative gifts were on the genius order. She could be heartbreakingly pathetic in some roles, violent and hate-filled in others. Moreover, the “real” Callas was an aggressive personality. Stories of her battles with family and colleagues and opera managers swirled through the world’s newspapers, making her ever more famous. Her blunt, no-holds-barred comments kept her on the front pages, as when she compared herself to champagne and Renata Tebaldi to Coca-Cola (“She’s got no backbone,” continued Callas, “She’s not like Callas.”) and pronounced the Met’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor “Lousy, REALLY lousy!” One of my favorite memories of Callas is a TV newsclip of her striding through a New York airport, pursued by a yipping pack of paparazzi and snarling in her harsh New York accent “Lay off, will ‘ya!”
She was a large woman, but she dieted herself into a reasonable facsimile of Audrey Hepburn and became a glamorous physical presence. Her name virtually launched the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the early 1950s, and the Dallas Opera was created mostly as a display case for her talents.
Along the way, and starting fairly early in her career, the Callas voice took on a distressing wobble. By the time she made her Met debut in 1956, the wobble was afflicting most of her high notes, and the size of the instrument had begun to shrink. Notes above B- natural became risky and sometimes catastrophic. After 1961, she disappeared from regular performing, but made sensational comebacks in the mid 1960s as Tosca, despite severe vocal limitations. A much-publicized affair with Aristotle Onassis, possibly the richest man on the planet, also fizzled.
And that was pretty much the end. Callas conducted some master classes at Juilliard, and she tried her hand at directing (a failure), and she even did a go-for-broke transworld concert tour with Giuseppe Di Stefano (it was a working romance). Callas spent her last years alone and mostly friendless, though far from penniless. She died unexpectedly in 1977, and ever since there have been whispers that her death was self-administered.
The author Nicholas Gage has tried hard to deal with all this in his new book Greek Fire. (Knopf, $26.95) Gage was an investigative reporter for The New York Times, and he knows how to track down a rumor. He mostly confines himself to the actual affair between Onassis and Callas, though inevitably he has to deal with such related matters as husband Meneghini, wife Tina Onassis, widow Jackie Kennedy and Sir Winston Churchill, not to mention assorted celebrities from the worlds of music, society and high finance.
Gage is diligent and seems to take nothing on faith. Rumors and allegations are checked and triple-checked, and some mysteries of the Callas life are convincingly solved. Why, for instance, did Callas hate her mother so fiercely? According to Gage, when Maria was a teenager in Athens during World War II, Mama Callas sent her out to work as a prostitute. Apparently Maria went, but put on such a pathetic act and sang so compellingly, that her soldier customers just gave her the money and sent her home.
Why did Callas lose her voice? Gage sought out Giulietta Simionato, who recalled Maria asking her why her voice should wobble beyond control. Said Simionato, “I told her, ‘You sang strong operas, like Cavalleria and Tosca, but you needed to sing, not yell’ She had injured the diaphragm to a certain point that she couldn’t sustain her breath. There was no more elasticity. When you lose the elasticity, there is nothing more you can do. Neither rest nor study. Nothing. ‘You have sung too many operas too strongly,’ I told her, ‘and you were too young!’”
In general, Gage avoids such cumbersome technicalities as voice production and its attendant dangers. Nor does he attempt much in the way of analysis as to why Callas was Callas, and not, say, Marilyn Monroe (whose life was also a tragedy, and whose path crossed Maria’s when they both sang at Madison Square Garden at a birthday celebration for President Kennedy). He summons up a vivid picture, though, of the human Callas; tough, humorless, curiously pathetic. Onassis comes off as cruel, charming, and lethal. Jackie Kennedy, who replaced Callas in the Onassis bed, though not in his affections, appears as a money-grubbing witch, running a money-laundering business with her own used clothing and unable to make do on the piddling $30,000 per month allowance Onassis gave her. On the other hand, it’s hard to dislike the nearly senile Winston Churchill, Onassis’ favorite guest aboard the yacht Christina.
The big sensation of the book is Gage’s revelation that Callas bore a son to Onassis, but that the baby lived only a few hours. In support of his claim, there is an unutterably sad picture of a dead infant, supposedly found in Callas’ belongings. If there were needed proof of the tragedy of Callas’ life, surely this is it.
Curiously enough, Gage omits any mention of the great soprano Claudia Muzio. To this day few people seem to know that in Onassis’ early days in Buenos Aires (the late 1920s) he seduced Muzio, who became his mistress and helped promote his line of cigarettes by smoking them in public. Onassis’ remarkable achievement of acquiring two of the world’s most famous prima donnas during one extraordinary lifetime might be worth another book all its own. Maybe someday somebody will write it.
