The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (17 page)

I managed to stay and sing two further performances, rather than the five I was scheduled for. There was virtually no booing after opening night, and the critics and journalists were sympathetic, criticizing the
loggionisti
for ruining the performance and, further, for frightening away top-flight singers. After the fiasco in which Pavarotti was booed in
Don Carlo
and swore never to return to La Scala, one is now likely to encounter an obscure Gluck opera being staged there alongside the riskier cornerstones of traditional fare. I never did find out the true reason for my own clash with the claque—whether they were paid by someone to contest me, whether they were honoring the memory of Maria Callas or Leyla Gencer, or whether it was simply a nationalistic slur. (Anti-Americanism was rampant that summer because, earlier in the year, a U.S. Marine jet had sliced through a ski-lift gondola cable in the Italian Alps.) A live radio broadcast of
Lucrezia
exists, so anyone curious enough can decide for himself if indeed this was a conspiracy or simply a spontaneous response to my performance.

I did find the courage to return to La Scala six months later for a recital. One of my Robert Mitchum-style uncles said, “You’re a Fleming. Of course you’ll go back.” Leyla Gencer herself sent me flowers and told me not to worry about it, that the whole affair meant nothing. “That happened to me all the time,” she said. “If you’re used to the culture, it isn’t so bad.” But I wasn’t used to the culture. If I wasn’t the thin-skinned girl I had been in my youth, this still was a decidedly unpleasant experience.

When I returned to the Met, Renata Scotto stopped me in the hall and congratulated me on joining that long and illustrious list of performers who had been booed at La Scala. It turns out that singers save up their own La Scala horror stories and swap them like baseball cards. “Fiorenza Cossotto got booed. She was singing Orfeo beautifully, and they booed her. Why on earth would they contest someone singing Orfeo?” Renata mentioned Luciano and then told me that after it happened to her, she never went back. “You can sing recitals, but forget about the opera,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek before she left.

Even Mirella Freni was kind enough to tell me how she had been badly booed (I love the fact that there are even
degrees
of being booed) when singing Violetta at La Scala. It was a debut in the role for her, a fairly early engagement, and she undoubtedly sang it beautifully. “I was scheduled to sing
Bohème
right after that, and I thought it was impossible. Still, the conductor told me I had to get right back up on that horse. I resisted. I said no, I couldn’t do it, but he said there was no other way.” She somehow got her courage up to sing another famous Italian opera a month later and she had an enormous success with it. If they gave medals for valor and bravery in opera, Mirella Freni would get one studded with diamonds and rubies for that.

Even with all the invaluable words of encouragement from other sopranos, the stress of that year had accumulated until I felt as if I was in some sort of vise and the whole world was squeezing in. It was affecting me physically to the extent that I never knew if I was going to be able to sing from day to day. Any exposed pitch in my middle voice had become terrifying and unreliable, making me feel as if I had just woken from a dream and found myself naked onstage. Still, my fears were all internal, an anxiety I was feeling rather than displaying, until a chamber music concert at the Ravinia Festival. I was performing before a small audience in a place where I felt very comfortable, and Christoph was the pianist, which is a rare luxury for me. There should have been no pressure in this engagement, but when I got to the middle of Schubert’s “The Shepherd on the Rock,” I suddenly suffered a paralyzing attack of stage fright. Nothing had happened to precipitate it, nothing had changed, but without warning, my throat closed up entirely. I was miserable, and for the next couple of days I sat in my hotel room thinking,
You know, you’re just going to have to give up singing
. I had some very high-profile engagements coming up, including the world premiere of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
followed by a new production of
Le Nozze di Figaro
at the Met, and I couldn’t decide whether it would be more humiliating to cancel or to go through with them in my uncertain state.

Why not quit now? After all, I had had a wonderful career. I had already accomplished more than most singers could ever dream of. I had certainly accomplished more than
I
had ever dreamed of. What profession was worth enduring this level of stress? I could find myself a nice teaching job somewhere in the Midwest, raise my girls, and call it a day. I would get all the details of my new future worked out in my head and then would suffer another crushing wave of anxiety that was both physiological and psychological, leaving my hands shaking and my teeth chattering. I had no idea what was happening to me; I knew only that I was in a state of abject misery. I remember sitting at the window of the dining room of my house a few weeks later, looking at the ancient trees and praying that this would stop.

I had always been such a positive, can-do sort of person that this pain felt incredibly debilitating, though of course it would have been debilitating to anyone. I couldn’t function. The simplest things, like getting dressed or making breakfast for the girls, felt nearly impossible and required all the fragile will I could muster.

In the middle of my dark night of the soul,
60 Minutes
was filming a piece on my glamorous life as an opera singer. The program’s staff followed me around for about six months, during which I somehow managed to keep my state of mind from them. I remember one particular morning when they had come to the house to tape, and I pulled my publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, aside and said, “Look, I cannot do this.” I was shaking. I was, as I used to say back then when things were especially bad, going into the tunnel. It was as if everything was happening at some great distance from me. Once I went into the tunnel, it became very difficult for me to focus on what people were saying. It was a symptom of panic, which didn’t happen often or last for long, but when it came over me it was terrifying. Mary Lou, who has been a constant rock for me, looked me dead in the eye with the calm firmness I would have received from Beverley had she been there, and said, “Of course you can do this.” She fixed me up, and sent me out to meet the cameras.

Through this entire period, I never stopped, I never backed out, and I never canceled. I give much of the credit for my ability to continue to the people who worked with me and to my friends and family, who looked out for me. I often think that if I had stopped at this point, it really would have been the end of my career, for I might never have found a way to get going again. The remarkable thing is that I can look at that
60 Minutes
tape now and see that no one would have suspected that I had been in the bathroom only five minutes earlier, looking in the mirror and saying, “I can’t do this . . . I can’t do this.”

Through all of this, my girls were the only ones who could lift me out of the fog. They would come home from school with the pictures they’d drawn and their books and all their stories and kisses, and I would simply melt into them. I knew who I was whenever my girls were with me. I was their mother and I loved them.

While I had experienced stage fright before, it had never followed me off the stage. By the time I began rehearsals for
Streetcar
every interview was excruciating. In the past I had always joked, “You want the soprano to talk about herself? Be sure to cut me off after two hours so I can get to my next interview.” But now all I was thinking was,
How do I form an intelligent sentence? How can I control this intense anxiety?
Every minute that I was talking about my work, I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

Oddly enough, the very thing I would have thought would send me careening over the edge turned out to be my saving grace, and that was playing Blanche DuBois. There were days when I really did question my sanity, when I wondered if I was ever going to be well again, and the character of Blanche, with her darkness and fears, gave me a place to pour all of my own. I also, blessedly, had André Previn, in whom I could really confide, to work with. He was consistently reassuring and had a deeply calming influence on me.

In fact, everyone involved in that production was stellar. The director, Colin Graham, through his quiet organization somehow managed to assemble this piece of enormous musical and theatrical complexity in only three weeks. Thankfully, the role of Blanche fit me like a glove, so there were no vocal obstacles to overcome. André had been open to several changes in tessitura, adding glamour to what were initially middle-voiced passages on my behalf, and generally being wonderfully collaborative throughout the process—which is one of the satisfactions of working with a living composer. All I had to do was focus on holding myself together for the run of performances.

By this point my stage fright was a full-blown reality. Fortunately, though, through this period and any other time I’ve had it since, most of my misery comes in advance of actually having to go onstage. I wake up in the night drenched in sweat and walk around consumed with terror at the thought of having to perform, but once I take the stage, something in my brain kicks in and says,
Okay, she’s suffered enough. We’ll back off and let her perform now.
It’s a strange phenomenon, but one that enabled me to continue. The alternative—that I would feel fine offstage and completely freeze up once I got on—was far worse. I thought so often about the story of Laurence Olivier’s having to stop in the middle of a play because he simply couldn’t continue. That was what I kept dreading would happen, and over and over again I pictured myself staring at the audience, frozen, until I finally had to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t,” and find a way to walk off with some semblance of dignity.

Just before beginning
Streetcar
rehearsals
,
I went to see my internist, Dr. Postley, in New York and said to him, only half joking, “Please just tell me I have a brain tumor.” I was shaking so much that I had begun to think there had to be something physically wrong with me. He said that it was probably just anxiety (just!) and that he knew the perfect person to help me, Dr. Ellen Hollander, a psychiatrist whose specialties included success conflict. I spoke to her every day on the phone during the time I was in San Francisco, feeling as if my connection to singing and performing, not to mention my equilibrium, was hanging by a single thread of spider’s silk. Dr. Hollander was very helpful in pulling me through the crisis, explaining that many factors can trigger a success conflict. She told me about an actress who had achieved overnight success and then walked away from it. Throughout her life she said it was the right choice for her and she never looked back. I think I would have said the same thing had I jumped the tracks, given it all up, and become a teacher, and I have no doubt that I would have been happy doing so. I would have looked back on the life I’d led and reflected, “Well, it was perfectly fine, but you couldn’t pay me to do that now.” Think of Barbra Streisand, who left the stage for more than twenty-five years, Olivier for seven, and Carly Simon; in our own world, Carlos Kleiber, Glenn Gould, and Rosa Ponselle left the stage at relatively young ages.

The psychiatrist explained my fears in general terms as a result of the subconscious mind more or less saying: “You’ve gone too far. You weren’t supposed to step away from the pack. You’ve strayed from your roots. You are by your nature an underdog, the second-place winner, and you shouldn’t be here on top.” This syndrome is by no means limited to successful individuals. It can affect a waitress who’s just gotten a job in the best hotel as easily as it can the president of the country. Think of the number of overnight successes in performing, for example, who soon sabotage their careers with drugs or alcohol, or even commit suicide. It’s an entirely relative operation and, in many ways, not rational. It was no accident that this came over me at the same time I was getting divorced, which proved to be more than my psyche could handle. Divorce is terribly painful on its own, but to then add the possibility of losing my identity as a singer, losing my career, was really too painful.

Every cell in my body was screaming,
No! I cannot do this!
Stage fright makes you feel as if you will die if you go out on the stage. In such a situation, the positive effect of an excellent therapist cannot be underestimated. There were too many issues in my life and my mind’s response to them that I just didn’t understand. Guidance in these areas can be critically helpful when you start pushing yourself out past the places where you’re naturally comfortable, especially when you have a tendency toward self-sabotage anyway. As a woman, in particular, I feel I wasn’t socialized for success. Number two, the first runner-up, gazing adoringly at the winner, had always been my favorite role.

When it came time to go back to New York and sing the Countess, I was actually more panicked than I had been in San Francisco. In
Streetcar,
I had been afraid of the stage, but because the music had been written for me I was completely comfortable in it. Even though there was no role I had sung more often than the Countess, it never stopped being a challenge, with “Dove sono” still inspiring nothing but nerves. I could feel myself moving back into the tunnel. On opening night, just before the curtain went up on act 2, I was backstage waiting to go on and started wondering if there was some graceful way I could slip out of the theater without anyone’s noticing. Then Beverley Johnson came back to my dressing room. Staring at me with those piercing blue eyes, she held my hand tightly and said, “You
will
do this. You
will
go out there and sing.” She knew exactly what I was feeling, but wouldn’t let me turn away from her. It was as if she were pouring herself into me, giving me every ounce of her strength and will. Even to this day I can see her piercing eyes at that moment, and the memory gives me strength. She had so much authority in my life, and genuinely understood the depth of my struggle. After she left me, in the remaining minute before my first entrance, I began to feel confident that I wouldn’t be alone anymore. It was then that I felt the vise begin to loosen around my chest and slip away. This is not to say that I never knew fear again; but the horrible, paralyzing darkness gradually broke around me over the course of the next eight months, until finally I could see. I could sing.