Read Online Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend by Arianna Huffington - Free Book Online Page B

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    Maria’s explosions would later be magnified and even caricatured by a press that recognized very early that Callas the Tigress sold many more copies than Callas the Opera Singer; still, there is very little doubt that the potential for violence lurked just beneath the surface in Maria, and the world watched hypnotized as she displayed it in public. The aggrieved soprano’s husband, however, did not merely watch, and there was nothing hypnotized about him as, his face speckled with blood, he jumped back and landed his fist on Maria’s face. So when Tosca made her entrance on the stage, one of her eyes, under her wide-brimmed hat, was slightly blacker than the other.
    But the critics were ecstatic and the audience, as one of them put it, “electrified.” They were swept along by the passion of this seventeen-year-old Tosca, a woman consumed in turn by jealousy, hate and pain. Maria was famous. And during a war, fame of that kind is not just an ethereal commodity; it has a very practical value, often readily convertible into food. Since the occupation, Maria’s diet, the black market notwithstanding, had consisted mainly of bread and other starches, and as she was allergic to them, she had broken out in boils. By the end of 1941, with the help of better food and an admiring dermatologist, she was completely cured.
    For Maria’s mother fame was an ethereal—almost a spiritual—commodity. “It was fame I wanted for my daughter,” she said in an interview in New York twenty years later. “Money came second.” That in her mind justified it all; she did not feel she had to pay even lip service to any other values. Seeking money alone might be seen as base, vulgar and mean-spirited, but it had not occurred to her that there was something sad, too, in her relentless pursuit of fame. In her imagination Evangelia saw her daughter rising ever more gloriously in the world with herself at the center of all Maria’s social triumphs. For her mother, Maria’s singing was the key that would unlock the door to those triumphs. She had always dreamed of seeing her children distinguished, at first she hardly knew in what area. By now there could be no doubt. Maria was to be—already was—a famous singer, and Jackie, the singing and piano-playing wife of a rich Greek shipowner.
    When Maria returned to her dressing room at the first intermission of Tosca , her mother was waiting for her. She was waiting for her at the second intermission too, and had there been a third, she would still have been there waiting for Maria. Wherever and whenever Maria sang throughout the next year, the faithful sentinel was invariably on duty. She was known in the company as Maria’s “Shadow”; she described herself as “a prizefighter’s second,” fanning Maria with a towel before she went back onstage, helping her dress and undress and warding off any overexcitable tenors. And Maria, with her “Shadow,” her size and her absorption in her work, was living the self-denying life of a vestal virgin, without the compensating conviction that she would be rewarded in a future life.
    The next summer she repeated Tosca , this time not as a replacement, but headlined in her own name. The reports about her became more lyrical and enthusiastic, wilder with every performance, until by the end of the series of performances in August 1942, men and women were walking nearly ten miles from Piraeus to hear her. Others, confronted at a time of rationing and little or no money with the choice of Maria or a meal, chose Maria. After the Toscas were over, the commander of the Italian army of occupation asked Maria, together with five other members of the Athens Opera and a pianist, to go to Salonika, in the north of Greece, to sing for the Italian soldiers. Maria’s Shadow asked for permission to accompany her daughter. Maria was only eighteen, she explained, and Salonika was one of the most licentious of Mediterranean ports. The Italians refused and