Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend

Praise for
Maria Callas: The Woman behind the Legend

“Penetrating.” —
Times Literary Supplement
(London)

“Huffington is a good reporter. . . . In writing
Callas
her great break was the cooperation of the singer’s godfather Leonidas Lantzounis. After he read a draft, he gave her the candid, affectionate letters that Callas had written him over many years. . . . Huffington is also good at interviewing sources and collecting anecdotes. . . . The foibles are fun; the gossip, especially about international high life, is entertaining.” —
Time

“An official biography, bolstered by new information furnished by friends and associates, and supplemented by a fascinating collection of informal photographs.” —
New York Review of Books

“Huffington is the ideal person to write about Callas. A fellow Greek, her fluent style [is] superlative. . . . With her lengthy descriptions of performances, applause, and ovations, Huffington captures something of the atmosphere of a Callas night. . . . Huffington has researched her subject thoroughly. She has tackled Maria’s formidable old mother . . . [and] has canvassed the opinions of many colleagues—directors and conductors, critics, and impresarios.” —
Economist
(London)

“Huffington has entered the complex and contradictory mind of Maria Callas in an extraordinary way, and the result is a powerful story told movingly, yet without exaggeration. It is unquestionably an important book, and surely the finest biography of Callas ever written.” —John Ardoin, author of
Callas at Juilliard
, and
The Callas Legacy

“The most readable and by far the most illuminating biography to date of Callas the woman. . . . Compulsive and convincing reading.” —
Times
(London)

“Huffington writes with the intelligence and insight lacking in previous biographies. Detailed source notes are provided for every chapter. Highly recommended.” —
Library Journal

“The astounding achievement of Arianna Huffington’s exhaustive research and revelations is that, for all the magnificence of the characters, she tells the Callas story in compellingly human terms.” —
Daily Mail
(London)

“An intelligent and absorbingly built-up portrait of human nature on both sides of the footlights at its most magnetic.” —
Sunday Times
(London)

A
LSO BY
A
RIANNA
H
UFFINGTON

T
HE
F
EMALE
W
OMAN

A
FTER
R
EASON

T
HE
G
ODS OF
G
REECE

T
HE
F
OURTH
I
NSTINCT
: T
HE
C
ALL OF THE
S
OUL

P
ICASSO
: C
REATOR AND
D
ESTROYER

G
REETINGS FROM THE
L
INCOLN
B
EDROOM

H
OW TO
O
VERTHROW THE
G
OVERNMENT

Maria Callas

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND

Arianna Huffington

Time
cover reprinted by permission from
Time,
the Weekly Newsmagazine; Copyright Time Inc., 1956
.

First Cooper Square Press edition 2002

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Maria Callas is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1981. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

Copyright © 1981 by Arianna Stassinopoulos (Huffington)
Originally published in 1981 by Simon & Schuster

Designed by Even Metz
Photo Editor: Vinvent Virga

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press
A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1109
New York, New York 10003-1503
www.coopersquarepress.com

Distributed by National Book Network

The Simon & Schuster edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

Huffington, Arianna, Stassinopoulos, 1950–

Maria Callas, the woman behind the legend / Arianna Huffington.—1st Cooper Square Press ed.

    p. cm.

Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, c1981.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-0-8154-1228-1

1. Callas, Maria, 1923–1977. 2. Sopranos (Singers)—Biography. I. Title.

ML420.C18 H84 2002
782.I’092—dc21
[B]

2002073819

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

F
OR
BERNARD

Contents

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SOURCE NOTES

PICTURE CREDITS

INDEX

Photo section follows
page 192

Preface

W
E HAD ARRIVED AT
E
PIDAURUS BY
boat in the pouring rain. Tightly clutching my mother’s hand, I walked, along with a big crowd, to the ancient Greek theater. It was August 17, 1960, just over a month after my tenth birthday, and I was about to hear my very first opera,
Norma
, with Maria Callas. All I knew about her, apart from the fact that she was a “great singer,” was what every other Greek between the ages of five and a hundred and five knew: that she was the woman in the life of the very, very rich Mr. Onassis, for whose familiar thickset figure hundreds of eyes were scanning the theater’s entrance.

Twenty thousand spectators had taken their seats when an announcement was made that, as the rain gave no sign of stopping, the performance would be canceled and would take place instead the following Sunday. When I did finally set eyes on Maria Callas a week later, something about her clearly caught the imagination of the ten-year-old. It was that performance, and not her London Tosca (her last appearance on the operatic stage) which I saw five years later that came flooding back into my mind, complete in every detail, when, in 1977, a couple of months after her death, I was asked if I would be interested in writing the biography of one of the most remarkable women of our time. Instantly, the memory of that night swept over me—my anticipation and excitement, my disappointment at the canceled performance and the impossible tedium of the year-long week that followed until I actually saw and heard her.

Many times since that night in Epidaurus, I have been transported by the power of her voice and the dramatic truth of her interpretation. And I have been touched by something deeper, by the intensity of the fire I could feel raging inside her, consuming her and at the same time illuminating everything around her. But it was the memory of Epidaurus that determined me to write her life. Clearly she fascinated me from that first moment, but it was not until some eighteen years later, when I was halfway through this book, that I really understood why. And only then did I also understand why she was the focus of such intense and unceasing excitement wherever she went, why millions who neither knew nor cared anything about music followed her career and her life so avidly, why men and women camped for days outside opera houses to buy tickets for her performances. There was, of course, a private life as dramatic as that of many of the heroines she brought to life on the stage; there were the glitter of her career and the power of her operatic creations; there were Ari and Jackie and Franco Zeffirelli and Winston Churchill and an unending procession of the rich and the famous touching on her life. But these alone still do not explain the unparalleled fascination she generated, nor the hostility she provoked, as intense as the love she aroused.

The life of Maria Callas was both tragedy and fairy tale. As completely as anyone outside mythology, she transformed herself from a fat, awkward girl into a woman of magnetic beauty and personality. But even while the fairy-tale transformation was taking place, the tragedy had begun to unfold. It was to be played out on many levels: her unresolvable conflict with her mother, the long, gradual unraveling of her marriage, her deeply emotional relationship with her voice, her terrible dependence on Onassis and the bitterness, agony and humiliation of his leaving her. And underlying all these individual tragedies, there was the struggle that never ceased to rage within her, the struggle between Callas and Maria, between the legend and the woman, between the image and the reality. This struggle, which was at the center of her life, is also at the center of this book. I began by writing the biography of Callas and ending by writing the life of Maria. I began with deep respect and admiration for what she did and what she tried to become. I ended by loving her.