The Grandest Diva

By Martha Duffy

MARIA CALLAS: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND by Arianna Stassinopoulos; Simon & Schuster; 383 pages; $15.95

Franco Zeffirelli said that she did as much as Verdi for Italian opera. Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini said, "It is no fabricated legend. In my entire experience of the theater, I know of no artist like Maria Callas." Her private life, much of it conducted in public, was also the stuff of legend. She had the iron whim and comet-like will, the greed, love and hatred of someone strong enough to overturn the laws of life.

Her first and most enduring passion was hatred for her mother, a flighty but drivingly ambitious woman. Callas was born in 1923, shortly after the family arrived in New York from Greece. When Maria was a teenager, her mother took her back to Athens. During World War II, she sang major roles at the opera house, but in 1945 her teacher wisely decided that she should go to Italy and get the best training. Instead, Maria left without warning anyone, for Manhattan.

In New York she learned quickly that credentials from Greece meant nothing. She pushed endlessly for auditions. Finally, she got one with Edward Johnson, the Met's general manager, who offered her a contract for two starring roles. Inexplicably, she turned him down. Her refusal started the soprano off on a long, wearing odyssey. On the way she studied the subtleties of her art with great teachers like Conductor Tullio Serafin and learned stagecraft from Luchino Visconti, whom she deeply loved.

The term singing actress was virtually made for her. She opened up the territory of bel canto that was to be explored by Sills and Sutherland. An equal achievement was her interpretation of the war-horses--Lucia, Tosca--so that the weariest ear could hear them as new works of art. Her musical values were the strictest and most scrupulous. She sang with complete fidelity to the composer and his idiom; yet the human essence of each heroine shone through her interpretation. Audiences felt that they were seeing Norma or Violetta. Hers was not a conventionally "beautiful" voice, like that of her great rival Renata Tebaldi. It could be volatile and reedy. Her wanderings impaired her health and her voice. She enjoyed only about ten years of international fame before serious vocal trouble began.

But maybe Maria was ready to quit. She had married Giovanni Meneghini, a Veronese businessman 28 years her senior, who adored her but soon bored her. Walter Legge, then head of EMI records, liked to tell a story about a late night conversation with them: "Wooler undervests visible beneath their nightwear, [they were] reading Italian illustrateds." Callas decided to become Audrey Hepburn (Roman Holiday was a favorite film) and lost 62 Ibs. in two years. In 1956 Callas met Elsa Maxwell, who swept her into European cafe society and the next year introduced her to Aristotle Onassis.

Though he cared nothing for opera, Onassis immediately basked in Maria's artistic fame. She said goodbye to Meneghini and sailed away on Onassis' yacht Christina to a life of luxury and narcissism. She got her TMWL (To Maria With Love) bracelet-just as Onassis' first wife Tina had received a TTWL and his second, Jacqueline Kennedy, would get a TJWL.

She became pregnant and wanted the child, but Onassis insisted on an abortion. It was a turning point. Sometimes the Christina sailed without her. Once, in 1963, Jackie and her sister Lee Radziwill cruised instead. The future could be read in what those ladies made off with: Lee a string of pearls, Jackie a massive diamond and ruby necklace.

The Kennedy-Onassis marriage was not a success. He continued to see Maria and, reports Biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos, just before he died in 1975, he hired Roy Conn to start divorce proceedings against Jackie. But the diva's happiness was over. An affair with Tenor Giuseppe di Stefano was doomed; the poor man could not match her memory of Onassis. She declined rapidly after several illnesses, and it was not really surprising when she died in Paris, at 54, living in comfort but alone.

Callas, the artist, is a respected but pale figure in this book. Nor is there convincing evidence to explain the major psychological puzzles of her life: the cruel loathing of her silly mother, her odd artistic decisions. But if Stassinopoulos, 30, is deficient as a biographer, she is a good reporter. The child of a business consultant in Athens, she went to Cambridge University in England. 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. They are used as background, but one wishes that the author had quoted more.

Stassinopoulos is also good at interviewing sources and collecting anecdotes. When glaucoma was diagnosed and eyedrops required every two hours, Maria bought a tiny Louis XV timepiece that tinkled an alarm every two hours. Yet she loved nothing better than combing Woolworth's for such "bargains" as a lemon squeezer or potato peeler. A friend remembered a lunch at Claridges during which Maria proudly produced her latest finds. The Callas jealousy was legendary. The sight of her beloved Visconti, who was homosexual, merely talking with Leonard Bernstein sent her into a rage. Yet she did not always take herself seriously. At one of her classes, a student confessed to problems with "three or four notes." Replied the diva: "Likewise."

The foibles are fun; the gossip, especially about international high life, is en tertaining--and doubtless one reason why the book topped the British bestseller lists.

One longs, though, to hear more of Callas speaking on her art, for she said a great deal, especially in the 1971-72 master classes at Juilliard. Perhaps the cliche is correct: art is inscrutable. That may be the wisdom in a musing early in her career by Italian Conductor Nicola Rescigno: "It is a deep mystery why a girl born into a musically unsophisticated family, and raised in an atmosphere devoid of operatic tradition, should have been blessed with the ability to sing the perfect recitative."

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