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Overview
From the New York Times bestselling biographer Anne Edwards comes the irresistible true story of the lives and loves of the great opera diva, Maria Callas.
Maria Callas continues to mesmerize us decades after her death, not only because she was indisputably the greatest opera diva of the 20th century, but also because both her life and death were shrouded in a Machiavellian web of scandal, mystery and deception. Now Anne Edwards, well known for her revealing and insightful biographies of some of the world's most noted women, tells the intimate story of Maria Callas—her loves, her life, and her music, revealing the true woman behind the headlines, gossip and speculation.
The second daughter of Greek immigrant parents, Maria found herself in the grasp of an overwhelmingly ambitious mother who took her away from her native New York and the father she loved, to a Greece on the eve of the Second World War. From there, we learn of the hardships, loves and triumphs Maria experienced in her professional and personal life. We are introduced to the men who marked Callas forever—Luchino Visconti, the brilliant homosexual director who she loved hopelessly, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, the husband thirty years her senior who used her for his own ambitions, as had her mother, and Aristotle Onassis, who put an end to their historic love affair by discarding her for the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Throughout her life, Callas waged a constant battle with her weight, a battle she eventually won, transforming herself from an ugly duckling into the slim and glamorous diva who transformed opera forever, whose recordings are legend, and whose life is the stuff of which tabloids are made.
Anne Edwards goes deeper than previous biographies of Maria Callas have dared. She draws upon intensive research to refute the story of Callas's "mystery child" by Onassis, and she reveals the true circumstances of the years preceding Callas's death, including the deception perpetrated by her close and trusted friend. As in her portraits of other brilliant, star-crossed women, Edwards brings Maria Callas—the intimate Callas—alive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250293916 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 347 |
| Sales rank: | 359,310 |
| File size: | 878 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
New York City: 1923–1937
UNLIKE THE OTHER Greek immigrants on the huge ship taking them from Athens to New York City, George and Evangelia Dimitriadis Kalogeropoulos and their six-year-old daughter, Yacinthy (Jackie) occupied a cabin in the first-class section. Mrs Kalogeropoulos's Persian lamb coat hung in the small wardrobe alongside two formal gowns she had brought with her. Packed in the steamer trunk in the hold of the ship were her silver candlesticks, tableware, icons and lace dinner cloths. Litza, as the five-months-pregnant Mrs Kalogeropoulos was familiarly known, was not going to arrive in a foreign land as a poor, dispossessed refugee. Coming to America had been her husband's idea and he had sold all their assets to finance their move before consulting her. Young and headstrong (only twenty-five at the time), she had fought bitterly in an attempt to get him to reverse his decision. George refused and, if she had not been carrying their child, she would have kept Jackie and remained with her family.
'My family have always been at the front of things,' she would proudly repeat to her young daughter. 'Your grandfather, my father, was a general, God rest him, as was your great-grandfather Dimitrios Dimitriadis. Your great-uncle Kostas Louros was the king's physician and I ...' She would sigh, her surprisingly blue, expressive eyes suddenly filled with resentment, 'I married a pharmacist.'
Litza was only seventeen when a cousin introduced her to the rather dashing-looking George Kalogeropoulos who, though nearly twice her age, had just graduated from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Athens. A handsome man with auburn hair, a roguish moustache and a gleam in his well-set dark eyes, George was intrigued by her youth, her energy and her prestigious background. He came from the small town of Meligala in the Peloponnese and his family was poor. For many years he had been employed as a pharmaceutical assistant in a chemist's shop in Meligala, the only pharmacy in thirteen counties and an exceptionally successful business. The owner, an elderly man, had offered to sell it to him if he could get his degree. This was what George had been working towards and saving penuriously for. Now his dream was about to be realized.
Shortly after Litza and George met, her beloved father, General Petros Dimitriadis, died suddenly of a stroke. George was filled with compassion. The lively, beautiful young girl he had known was in visible distress and unusually vulnerable. Her father had been the most important person in her life. Nothing had been too good, or too difficult to obtain if it was for 'his Litza', the youngest of his eleven children. Litza found George a comforting substitute and on 7 August 1916, two weeks after her father's death, they were married in a small private service in the Greek Orthodox Church, the bridegroom anxious to return to his new position as owner of the chemist's shop and the bride happy to find an escape from the deep mourning in the Dimitriadis household. Her family were horrified that Litza would not wait out a proper mourning period and her brothers warned her that George had a roving eye. Strong-willed as always, and with George's reassurance that she would have a house and a maid when they married, she could not be deterred. She wore a plain, white, unadorned gown out of respect for her father and there was no wedding reception. One brother, who had accused her of being pregnant, was haughtily excluded by her from the ceremony.
The wedding couple spent a week on the small island of Aegina, which was a short ferry ride from Piraeus, before going to Meligala. The home George had promised her was actually two floors over the pharmacy and was connected by a staircase that led from the first floor to the entrance of the shop. Litza was disappointed but there was compensation: not only would she have a maid but she could redecorate the upper two storeys. Doubts of her wisdom in marrying George set in almost immediately. In Athens she had seen only his charming side, how well he looked and carried himself. Now, she realized that they came from unrelated worlds; could she ever be happy living in his more prosaic one?
Although not wealthy, the Dimitriadis family were considered upper-middle-class and were of patrician heritage. They had produced some fine musicians along with army officers and political figures. One brother, who unfortunately had committed suicide over a lost lover, had been a rising poet. The Dimitriadises' claim to culture was of great pride to Litza. She was 'fanatical about anything to do with the stage', liked to display her musical knowledge and to discuss the well-known artists she had met. Meligala had little to offer of either an intellectual or an artistic nature. Litza managed to drag George away from the pharmacy to the coastal city of Kalamata, where there was a theatre visited by touring companies. Secretly, she harboured dreams of one day going on the stage herself. It was not an unusual ambition for a Greek woman. This was at a time when, almost every other profession being exclusively male, the theatre was one of the rare careers a young woman could dream of entering. But Meligala, and the restraints of her marriage, offered little hope that such a fancy could ever be realized.
The town was picturesque – white buildings that caught the strong morning sunlight and cast graceful cool shadows in the heat of summer afternoons, winding roads and several verdant oases. Well-tended olive groves flourished just beyond the town borders and their owners produced a few wealthy residents, none of whom extended any gracious invitations to the newlyweds. Litza's unhappiness was apparent.
On 4 June 1917, ten months after their marriage (proving her brother wrong), their first child, Yacinthy, was born in Athens because Litza did not trust the local physician. Three years later, on 27 June 1920, Litza gave birth, again in Athens, to a much wanted son, named Vasily. By now Litza was certain that her marriage to George had been a mistake. Still dapper-looking and of a sympathetic nature, with the proprietorship of the store and fatherhood he had lost the spirit of fun that had first attracted her and, as he flirted with all the pretty women whom he served in the shop, her brother's warnings left her uneasy. She turned her attention to little Vasily, a handsome child with large, blue, dreamy eyes and a gentle smile who, she believed, was fated to be either a poet or a musician. Jackie was left very much on her own, a situation that did not seem to disturb the little girl who found her mother cold and diffident at some times and volatile at others.
'Then the world was limited to the shady interior of our house, the darkened rooms and the chatter of the servants [the Kalogeropouloses now had a maid, a cook and a handyman who also delivered prescriptions for George],' Jackie would later remember. The staircase was her world for it led to the sweet-smelling room where her father passed his days. To her, it was a 'magic shop full of beautiful jars and bottles, of glass cabinets cluttered with packets and tubes', and she loved to watch her father 'graciously serving the ladies who came to the shop, carefully wrapping their parcels, passing them over with a bow and murmured comment, twirling the end of his black moustache with a little smile'.
The one thing that bound George and Litza was their children; especially Vasily, the son George so prized, who at three was reading well and could pick out a nursery tune on Litza's beloved piano. Then the unspeakable happened. The child contracted typhoid fever. The family was frenzied as the boy's condition quickly deteriorated. Neither the medications that the local doctor prescribed nor George's potions culled from other doctors he contacted helped. Within a week, Vasily was dead. The house was thrown into a darkened cavern of mourning. Litza declined into such a state of depression that she refused to leave her room and the grey days brought by a harsh early winter only intensified the gloom that spread throughout the house.
It was Easter 1923 when Litza found that she was once again pregnant. She harped on incessantly about returning to Athens where this son (she was positive that God was sending her a replacement for Vasily) could have the advantages of which the brother he would never know had been deprived. There were fierce rows with George, floods of tears would fall, bitter words were exchanged. The household was a war zone. Litza was in her fifth month when George sat her and Jackie down at the dining-room table and informed them that he had sold the pharmacy and their apartment, for which he had received a very good price, and – believing this would sweeten the shock – had purchased first-class tickets on an ocean liner leaving from Athens for America in three weeks' time. He wanted the three of them and the coming child to have a new life and so he had contacted an old friend from his university days in Athens, Dr Leonidas Lantzounis, an orthopaedic surgeon, who had emigrated to New York the previous year and was at present working to secure his American licence. Dr Lantzounis had arranged a job for George with a pharmacy as a clerk until he was allowed to practise as a pharmacist.
Litza's rage and resentment did not deter George, who was now resolute that his family should emigrate to America. Litza had been outspoken about her discontent at living over a store in a provincial town like Meligala but the idea of leaving her homeland for so distant a country where she did not speak the language seemed too much and too callous of George to expect of her. The suddenness of his decision also made her suspicious of his motives. From what or from whom was he running away? Litza considered the many times she had seen various married women in the town smiling seductively at him when they came into the store. Had he got himself into a situation from which he could not extricate himself if he remained in Meligala, or even Greece? Had she not been pregnant, Litza often declared later, she would have taken Jackie, returned to Athens, and let George go on to America alone. But there was now their son, soon to be born, to consider. A boy needed a father and a Greek man would never give up a son.
'We will not suffer,' George assured her. 'America is the land of opportunity. We have money enough to live well until I get my licence and then we will be rich. You will see.' He also stressed the wonderful things that New York had to offer – the theatre, concert halls, opera house, museums and a large colony of Greeks who were from some of the best families in Athens. Litza was not convinced. To her, there was no city more beautiful or rich in history, heritage and culture than her native Athens.
She cried when she saw so many of her treasured possessions being packed in crates to be sent to her family home where they would be kept, George promised, just until they had a permanent place in New York. Her mood darkened further as their departure date drew closer. And when they boarded the ship that would carry them halfway across the world to their new home on a steaming day in late July 1923, Litza was so distraught that she would not come up on deck to wave goodbye to the members of her family gathered at the dock at Piraeus to see them off.
Too progressed into her pregnancy to wear either of her gowns to dinner, for the first two nights she refused to join George for their evening meal. On the third night, upon learning that there would be a recital by a singer whose name she recognized, she changed her mind, placed a large embroidered shawl over her daytime clothes and, wearing her best earrings and a tortoise and diamond comb (a family heirloom) in her hair, entered the dining salon on George's arm. They made a handsome couple with their dark, good looks and patrician bearing. From then on, when speaking to other passengers, she referred to him as 'the Doctor', spoke rather disparagingly about the poor people travelling in steerage and warned Jackie, a joysome, pretty six-year-old, still unaware that her stumbling was caused by myopic vision, not to go into that section of the ship for fear that she might become infested with lice.
On 2 August 1923, the day of their arrival in America, George awoke his wife and daughter at 4 a.m. so that they could go up on deck and see the Statue of Liberty when the ship sailed into New York harbour. As they were first-class passengers, with papers (perhaps by Litza's inspiration) claiming they were on a three-month visit to New York where George was to attend a medical convention, and carried with them enough currency to cover all their expenses, they avoided being herded with the rest of the émigrés into the crowded halls at Ellis Island.
Dr Lantzounis, a large, kindly, intelligent man, his Greek heritage immediately recognizable in his strong features, met the three of them on the quay. The men threw their arms round each other and Lantzounis picked up Jackie in his arms. Having been in New York a year, he spoke English and had an air of assurance that helped in getting their luggage quickly cleared. George and Litza were dazed, unable to understand a word that was spoken to them and overwhelmed by the throngs of excited people anxiously searching for a familiar face, and by the height and density of the buildings that rose spectrally through the haze of heat that encompassed the city on this broiling August day.
With all their trunks, two taxis had to be hired, George and the doctor going in one, Litza and Jackie in the other. This meant that Litza was being driven to an unknown destination by a man who could not understand her. All during the ride she grasped Jackie tightly to her, terrified. It did not help that lamp-posts were draped in black bunting. The entire city and the country were in mourning for the death of President Warren Harding who only a few days earlier, had died suddenly of a heart attack in San Francisco on returning from a trip to Alaska.
The Kalogeropoulos family's first home was a three-room apartment in Astoria, Queens, with a view across Hell Gate to the awesome skyscrapers of Manhattan. There was a small park a few streets away with a playground for Jackie. At this time the foreign born and their children accounted for three-fourths of the city's residents. Groups generally tended to live in close proximity instead of taking the individual plunge into American life. But these emigrant sections gradually disintegrated, spreading to other sections as the more ambitious members bettered their circumstances, albeit among another enclave of their own extraction. In 1923 there were about 25,000 Greeks in New York City. Less than one-tenth of them lived in this area of Queens (originally home to Italian immigrants),1 which was a blue-collar workers' community, a level up from the section where Greeks without English skills or steady wages usually made their home upon arrival in America, but not the area where the well-to-do Greeks were by now ensconced. Litza, both arrogant and humiliated, was scornful of her working-class neighbours and Jackie was not allowed to use the playground the area boasted as her mother did not want her to associate with children of 'a lower class'.
Litza had brought her overweening pride across the ocean with her. No matter what her circumstances, she would not allow herself, or Jackie, to forget that she was a Dimitriadis, a family of high reputation in Athens; nor would she ever accept her situation as an immigrant. George settled in quite easily. He started his job within days of his arrival and learned English at amazing speed. His hours were long and he had a forty-five-minute subway commute at the beginning and end of each day. When he finally arrived home each evening he was faced with his wife's bitter complaints.
On 2 December, four months to the day after their arrival in New York, early snow lacing a grey sky, Litza went into labour and was taken by Dr Lantzounis to Flower Hospital on Fifth Avenue in lower New York where he was completing his American residency. Litza kept talking about the son she would soon have. For months she had been knitting blue baby sweaters and caps. The child was to be called Petros after her father, 'Ever since Vasily's death, I had prayed for another son to fill the empty place in my heart,' she later wrote. She allowed no talk of the possibility of having a second daughter. Jackie was told she would soon have a little brother. When, undoubtedly after a difficult birth, a rosy-faced ten-pound-four-ounce baby girl was handed to her by a nurse, she is claimed to have said, 'Take her away.'
'She was big for a newborn child,' Jackie recalled, 'and had a wispy corona of jet-black hair so unlike the rest of us ... My father was saying something to Mother about ... why didn't she try to look at the child but she just went on staring at the snow and taking no notice. Clearly angry, my father gripped my wrist and hurried out [of her hospital room].'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Maria Callas"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Anne Edwards.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Acknowledgements,
1 New York City: 1923–1937,
2 Athens: Student Years,
3 The War Years: 1939–1945,
4 The Nazis Goose-step Out of Athens,
5 New York: 1945–1947,
6 An Italian Debut: Verona 1947,
7 A Diva Is Born: Europe 1948–1949,
8 Maria Callas Meneghini,
9 Maria Meneghini Callas,
10 Metamorphosis,
11 America the Beautiful,
12 'Please Save La Scala',
13 Onassis Enters,
14 Crossing Troubled Waters,
15 The Other Greek,
16 Aboard the Christina,
17 A Cruise To Be Remembered,
18 An Historic Affair,
19 A Family Affair,
20 A Loss of Innocence,
21 Enter: the Temptress and the President's Lady,
22 The Turning Point,
23 An Historic Hiatus,
24 By Herself,
25 Touring Days,
26 Machiavellian Influences,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Anne Edwards,
About the Author,
Copyright,