Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (4 page)

So while Maria was still talking and dreaming of becoming a dentist, her mother had already made up her mind that Maria would be not just a singer but a great singer, and not just a great singer but a famous, a world famous, great singer. In Evangelia’s mind love, happiness, fame and money were convertible currencies. For the time being this dangerous confusion gave her an unwavering vision that became the vital force behind Maria’s life.

Maria was winning singing prizes in school and Sunday school and was taking a leading part in school plays and concerts; but only her mother treated these childhood glories as a foreshadowing of what lay ahead. Everyone else compared the Callas daughters, and the conclusion was no less certain for the five and a half years that separated them. There was tall, slender, beautiful Jackie with chestnut hair and brown eyes, and there was plump, dark Maria with pimples and huge black eyes hidden behind thick glasses. Maria was regarded as the shadow of her older sister, less beautiful, less promising, less “accomplished.” It seemed clear to anyone, at least at first glance, that the older sister would have no problem marrying well, she would have a beautiful family and would always be supported, while the younger one would most likely have to fend for herself and would probably remain an old maid—and a young aunt. With every year that passed, Maria did all she could to reinforce the impression. Through her early childhood she had been matching herself against her all-too-admirable sister, but she soon gave up, a self-protective reaction against what seemed unattainable. It must have been fairly early on, even before she entered her teens, when Maria decided that the whole traditional feminine side of life—looks, figure, clothes, the art of being agreeable, of keeping guests entertained, of making charming small talk—was her sister’s domain.

By the time she was eleven, Maria’s life had begun to take the shape it would keep until the turning point of 1937. “La Paloma” had brought her her first audience, and in a national amateur talent contest on the Mutual Radio Network, it brought her her first
first
prize—a Bulova watch she proudly wore for years afterward. Her second public appearance was in a children’s show in Chicago. This time she won the second prize, but ample compensation was provided by the fact that Jack Benny presented it.

Thus began the long, demanding circus of children’s shows, radio programs and endless contests. The drive that Maria’s mother brought to her daughter’s career was equaled only by her blindness to Maria’s emotional needs. “There should be a law against that kind of thing,” Maria said bitterly years later. “A child treated like this grows old before its time. They shouldn’t deprive a child of its childhood!” It was not her childhood Maria had been deprived of; it was that special unconditional love that is the greatest gift anyone can give to a child—that bedrock of gold from which the adult can draw in later life again and again. All the love and approval Maria was given during this time was strictly conditional. “Only when I was singing did I feel loved,” she said on one of those very rare occasions when she talked about her early life instead of instantly dismissing the subject.

After she started wearing glasses at the age of five, she became so convinced of her ugliness that she would avert, or even tightly shut, her eyes, rather than have to face a mirror. She felt, as she herself put it years later, “detested and detestable.” She saw herself as justifiably rejected, convinced that she was “an ugly duckling, fat, clumsy and unpopular.”

Starved of love by those around her, she sought to fill the gnawing emptiness inside with food. It was as though Evangelia, unable to give her younger daughter the love Maria needed, sought to assuage her guilt in the only tangible way she could: by providing practically limitless quantities of food. Homemade bread, macaronada (Italian macaroni with mama’s own sauce of fried onions and chopped meat), fried potatoes and saganaki (two fried eggs with a soft, mild cheese on top) were Maria’s favorites. For a time no meal, however big, would be complete until she had had her saganaki. Even in the middle of the night she would often wake up and, half asleep, crawl to the kitchen and take whatever candy, cream cake or ice cream was there to bed to eat herself to sleep.

Years later the pattern persisted. We hear the echo of childhood habits in the words of Madame Biki, Maria’s dressmaker and friend for twenty-seven years: “Whenever Maria came to stay with us we would prepare her a tray for the night when she woke up and wanted something to eat.” Except that on the tray there would now be fruit and champagne rather than candy and cream cakes. The vulnerable, unhappy little girl was still very much alive, but by now well under the control of the world-famous Maria Callas.

The memories of her New York childhood are almost exclusively bleak and full of self-pity, but Maria’s childhood was by no means all misery. When Evangelia was not pushing and prodding, demanding and expecting, she could be an enchanting mother. She had a talent for turning a trip to hear a band concert in Central Park into an occcasion, and a visit to the library into a religious ritual. Twice a week they took the subway to the library on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, where Evangelia would, most unsuccessfully, try to encourage her daughters to read the “great books,” especially Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Dostoevski. She had never read any of them herself, but her faith in their greatness could hardly have been deeper. Yet no hymns in praise of Dostoevski would drag Maria away from the shelf of opera records. She spent hours listening to them, and for ten cents each she would borrow at least two at a time to take home with her, the Depression having cut short her mother’s attempts to build up the family’s own collection.

Apart from the library visits, there were two regular outings in the week for the Callas daughters. The first was the Sunday morning service when Evangelia took her daughters to the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Spyridon in Washington Heights. Maria loved the singing in church and was fascinated by the ritual, which was as far as her piety went. Her mother’s barely went that far; in Evangelia’s mind religion had to do with little more than being respectable and ladylike and not having “sweethearts” outside marriage. The other event took place every Tuesday night when Jackie and Maria had their special treat of the week—chop suey at a Chinese restaurant in Washington Heights. While church brought out in Evangelia everything prudish and narrow, the Chinese restaurant brought out her special talent for investing the commonplace with glamour. Even the fact that the restaurant had a receptionist took on a special magic for Jackie and Maria when seen through their mother’s eyes.

In a curious way, though, it was the library that was the Eden of Maria’s childhood. There, away from home and school, she could forget her miseries and her failures, both real and imagined and, in the fantasy of opera, create her own world. She would take her treasures home and try to make the world she was creating in her mind displace reality for as long as possible. At home she often listened to the records with her forehead pressed against a windowpane, gazing through her thick glasses and the halo of vapor formed by her breath. What did she dream of? Palaces, carriages, jewels and knights in armor? Or was it already red velvet curtains and adoring audiences?

By the time she was twelve, although she still talked about becoming a dentist, she had discovered that the road to her mother’s approval lay through her singing. She knew also that this was the only way she could gain attention, perhaps even popularity, at school. Miss Jennie Sugar, one of Maria’s teachers at Public School 189 in Washington Heights, dimly remembered her as “a pleasant, well-behaved girl”—hardly the pupil who would set the world on fire. It was her part in a performance of
The Mikado
at this time that crystallized in Maria’s mind the vague notion that singing was the only way out of her despised obscurity. She soaked up the applause and the compliments of her classmates; popularity, however short-lived, seemed such a satisfying substitute for the love she craved.

She also learned at school that to be weak and ignored is to be wretched. Like so many children whose experiences at school have made them wary of all human contact, Maria’s painful time there reinforced her already gloomy attitude to the world. But at last she had stumbled upon a way to exchange blow for metaphorical blow with anyone; she would use her voice to put an end to the humiliation of the seeming superiority of everyone else around her. “I hated school; I hated the world,” was the way she summed up this period thirty years later. The foundation had already been laid for her bleak view of the world and her bitter philosophy of life: “To live is to suffer, and whoever tells children this is not so is dishonest—cruel. . . . If you live, you struggle. It is the same for all of us. What is different are the weapons you have and the weapons that are used against you. That is the combination of personality and circumstance. That is fate.”

With every day that went by, Maria became increasingly certain that fate had not merely given her a voice as a weapon but had somehow appointed her custodian of all musical matters. The first indication that the family had of Maria as a self-appointed authority on the singing voice was one Saturday afternoon when the family, together with a friend, were sitting around the radio listening to a performance of
Lucia di Lammermoor
from New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Lily Pons was Lucia, and she was halfway through the Mad Scene when Maria, menacingly waving her hand in the direction of the radio, and with real anger in her voice, shouted to her across the radio waves that she had strayed off-pitch. The friend riposted that the lady was a great star of the Met, and a mere child like Maria should show more respect. “I don’t care if she is a star,” exploded Maria. “She sings off-key. Just wait and see, one day I’m going to be a star myself, a bigger star than her.”

This was still more bravado than conviction, but Maria’s fighting instinct was beginning to surface. She had by now made up her mind to
be
someone, although it would take another year, her last year in New York, to turn this vague feeling into the determination to become the best singer in the world, the most celebrated and the most envied, and to turn this determination into the absolute singleness of purpose that would guide her life for the next twenty years.

^*
The first controversy in Maria’s life involves the date of her birth. Maria always celebrated her birthday on December 2, which is when, according to Dr. Lantzounis who was present in the hospital, she was born. But her mother, who was no less indisputably present, insists that she was born on December 4. To complicate matters further, at her school she is registered as born on December 3, and there is no record of birth either at the New York Department of Health or at the Flower Hospital where she was born.

2

M
ARIA’S FIGHTING INSTINCT WAS
beginning to assert itself, but it was still her mother who was the force driving her on. Evangelia’s head may have been in the clouds about her daughter’s prospects, and her heart nowhere in evidence, but her feet were solidly on the ground. The conclusion she reached in the last days of 1936 was that, if Maria was to have the teachers and training she would need for the career Evangelia dreamed of, they would have to return to Greece. There, with her family’s musical connections and without her husband’s constant objections, she could dedicate herself even more thoroughly to the polishing of the treasure she was convinced she held in her hands. However logical the arguments in favor of leaving for Greece, the arguments against the move were equally compelling. In the end it was not logic, but instinct that resolved Evangelia’s dilemma. She had a dream in which her father—the figure who from her childhood had been most irrevocably associated with music—urged her to take her daughter and leave New York for Greece. Jackie was sent ahead, while Evangelia and Maria were packing up their belongings.

George Callas was ambivalent about the move. He had been living increasingly under the shadow of a wife who behaved as though she had produced their daughters without his help. Evangelia, in her unique way, and the three females of the family together, through the years had greatly encouraged his own innate tendency to sink into earnest insignificance. One can imagine George, as he was paying for the fares, heaving a deep sigh of relief at the prospect of temporary release, if not from supporting them, at least from being gradually suffocated by them.

On January 28, 1937, packing was interrupted. At Public School 189 on 188 Street and Amsterdam Avenue, it was graduation day for the eighth-grade class, Maria’s last contact with her school before she set off for what she looked forward to as her Greek adventure. For Maria the balance sheet of the trip showed nothing on the debit side; she was taking few happy memories with her and leaving no good friends behind. Neither in school nor outside it had she discovered anything of the magic of friendship, that peculiar intimacy of private languages and private jokes, of playing together in the morning and sharing dreams in that special twilight hour, when everything seems possible. There seems to have been nobody in Maria’s childhood, whether child or adult, with whom she could share her thoughts, her fears and her hopes.

Graduation Day, with its tearful good-byes and its joyful promises to keep in touch, would ordinarily have been agony for an outsider like Maria, but since the program included singing, it was an opportunity to shine. The musical selection for the ceremonies was Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S.
Pinafore
. Maria looked clumsy and uncomfortable, but she sang beautifully and was warmly applauded. Then came the signing of autograph books, the eighth-grade graduates vying with each other to see who could produce the most sparkling wish, the wittiest epigram, the most original phrase. Maria, unable to shine at this particular game, took refuge in a two-line commonplace couplet that was revealing of how she felt about herself at the time: