Maria Callas is the latest star to be given the Hollywood treatment in a biopic, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, with Angelina Jolie in the title role. The film — whose screenplay was written by Steven Knight, best known for Peaky Blinders — looks at her final moments alone in her apartment in Paris, with her glory days far behind her. Callas herself has become a myth — a fabled figure whose heart was broken by Aristotle Onassis, the Greek billionaire and her partner of nine years, when he married Jacqueline Kennedy.
Legend has it that she lost her voice and died from a broken heart. The famous voice was strained, having sung the bel canto repertoire too early and too quickly. Callas’s fame was secured in 1949 when she alternated between Die Walküre and I Puritani in Venice, the vocal equivalent of an adventurer scaling the highest mountain and diving to the depths of the ocean and living to tell the tale. What followed was a decade of triumphs, and her musical genius remains unsurpassed. But in the Sixties critics and audiences turned on her, and her vocal problems were deemed unforgivable; she had abused her precious gift. The last operas she sang were Norma in Paris and Tosca in London, in 1965, and before both she was injected with Coramine, a drug given to mountaineers to increase their endurance. Prior to that she had appeared in operas and concerts all over the world and her canceled performances contributed to her reputation for being difficult. Everything with Callas was, and is, exaggerated.
“By nature I consider I’m not worth much,” she said, a belief instilled in her since she was born on December 2, 1923, to Greek parents in New York. She was a replacement child, conceived to alleviate their grief after losing their only son, Vasily, in 1922. Astrologers and the Phatoe (the Greek Ouija board) promised she would be Vasily reincarnated. George and Litsa Kalogeropoulos were so disappointed when she was born that they forgot the day of her birth and nobody looked at her for days. They could not agree on a name and she was eventually christened Sophie Cecilia Maria Anna, called Mary and Marianna throughout her childhood.
Maria was 13 when her parents separated and she moved to Athens with her mother and older sister, Jackie. They became homeless and took refuge in an apartment with no electricity or furniture. “I didn’t bring you into this world for nothing. I gave birth to you, so you should maintain me,” Litsa told her daughters. Maria was enrolled in the National Conservatory and would later study with the Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo at the Athens Conservatory. Jackie was pimped out to Milton Embirikos, a shipping magnate who paid for their new apartment and bought a piano for Maria. Those formative years coincided with the Second World War and the invasions of the Italian and German soldiers, to whom Litsa prostituted herself and tried to barter a price for Maria’s virginity. Instead, Maria sang for enemy soldiers in exchange for payment. She also dropped out of the Conservatory after a teacher attempted to rape her. “A pity he didn’t manage it, then we would have made him marry you and that would have been that,” Litsa said. Maria severed ties with her mother in 1950.
After the war, Callas returned to New York and lived at the Times Square Hotel, on the fringes of Hell’s Kitchen. She had three jobs, as a babysitter, waitress and assistant to a retired opera singer. An audition for the Metropolitan Opera failed and she began an affair with Eddy Bagarozy, a small-time gangster and husband of the opera singer Louise Caselotti, who gave her singing lessons. Bagarozy convinced her to sign a contract, citing him as her manager. He later sued her for lost commission and threatened to sell her love letters to the press.
As fate would have it, the artistic director of the Verona Festival, Giovanni Zenatello, was in New York to audition sopranos for La Gioconda. Callas sang for him and was offered a contract of $60 per performance. She sailed to Italy on a Soviet ship that served only potatoes and butter and arrived in Verona with a cardboard suitcase and no coat. Twenty-four hours later, Callas, then aged 23, went to dinner and met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a 52-year-old brick manufacturer and opera fanatic. She passed her plate to him and speaking in Italian (learnt from the fascists in Athens) said, “Sir, if you don’t mind I would like to offer you my cutlet.” Within days she had moved into his apartment and he became her manager.
There were no feelings of love on Meneghini’s behalf and he recalled, “When I first met her, she was fat, clumsy, dressed like a dog. A real gypsy. She didn’t have a cent and didn’t have the least prospect of making a career for herself.” Callas wanted to marry him and have a baby. He worried about maintaining her for the rest of his life. Before she left for a three-month engagement in Buenos Aires she gave him an ultimatum: “If you don’t marry me, I won’t sing again.” Later that afternoon, on April 21, 1949, they were married in a store cupboard in the Chiesa dei Padri Filippini, surrounded by broken pews and religious icons.
As Callas’s fame grew, so did her unhappiness in her marriage and by 1951 she and Meneghini were living platonically. Two years later she began a dangerous regime of iodine injections, lost almost seven stone, had plastic surgery to tighten her upper arms and capped her teeth. She reinvented herself as a fashion icon, becoming one of the most famous divas of all time. Although Meneghini had called her “a kind of clumsy, encumbered whale”, he hated skinny women and sought comfort from overweight prostitutes. For eight years Callas was the reigning queen of La Scala and was too busy to realise that Meneghini was squandering her money. By 1959, when she made the discovery, it was too late.
Scandals and ill health would distract from her art; she asked doctors for help but they dismissed her as crazy. There was a public rivalry with the soprano Renata Tebaldi, walkouts in Rome, canceled performances in Edinburgh and San Francisco, a public firing from the Metropolitan and a disastrous ending to her contract with La Scala. More than a prima donna, she became a controversial figure.
Everything with Callas was, and is, exaggerated.
Callas met Aristotle Onassis at her lowest ebb and, in August 1959, she accepted an invitation to a cruise on his yacht, Christina. Since encountering her in Venice two years earlier, Onassis had been following her career and sending flowers, signed by “The Other Greek”. After her performance in Medea in London he threw her a party at the Dorchester and gave her a chinchilla coat. “He was a man no longer young, but still predatory, still sexy, still stalking,” she said. Onassis was 53 and she was 35, and they were both married to other people. They spoke in Greek so others would not understand, and he told her of his upbringing in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey, and how he made his fortune in Buenos Aires by forming a shipping company used for trafficking heroin disguised inside crates of tobacco. Before the end of the cruise they were lovers and he gave her a gold bangle, the mark of all his mistresses.
Callas filed for separation from Meneghini — divorce was illegal in Italy — and he tried to have her arrested for committing adultery. Several months later, she was expecting a baby and Onassis told her to have an abortion, which she refused. As Meneghini was still her husband, he had rights to her child. Callas tried to get an American divorce and asked Meneghini to sign the paperwork but he demanded 50 percent of her recording royalties. Given his mishandling of her money, she could not afford his ransom. She miscarried in early 1960, as she would again in 1963.
Although Callas continued to sing, her art suffered from her nomadic life with Onassis, jetting between his yacht and apartments in Monte Carlo and Paris and his private Greek island, Skorpios. He loved famous women and paraded Callas like a trophy. In front of friends she joked that Onassis ought to marry her. “Maria, I can’t do that. This is a pay-as-you-go arrangement,” he told her. He was having an affair with Princess Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas also discovered that he was a client of Madame Claude, whose brothel near the Champs-Élysées employed 500 prostitutes. “The best girl is a girl you never have to see again,” he said.
Deeply unhappy, Callas tried to end her life. It would be the first of many suicide attempts. “In operas,” she said, “I’ve played heroines who die for love and that’s something I can understand.” She watched from the sidelines as Onassis took Lee and Jacqueline on a cruise, regaling them with tales of Smyrna, and looked at their photos in the newspapers. “Four years ago, that was me by his side, being seduced by the story of his life. I’m sure he makes most of it up. Memories demand too much effort.” He returned to Callas and they flew to Port-au-Prince, where he ordered her to sing for Papa Doc, the Haitian president who controlled his citizens through fear, murder and black magic.
On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Callas collapsed as the curtain fell on Norma in Paris and was carried to her dressing room. “I know I’ve let you down. I’m so sorry,” she told her fans. “I promise you all that one day I shall return to win your forgiveness and justify your love.” She was harassed by the press; they wrote that she had been murdered by an angry fan. For three weeks she and Onassis cruised the Mediterranean, but he, like the public, had grown tired of her despondency. “You on your high horse… What are you? Nothing!” he shouted at her. “You just have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.”
Callas felt worthless and her confidence was destroyed by Onassis’s insults. He was drinking heavily and taking Nembutal, a barbiturate that could cause respiratory failure if taken in large quantities. They were each self-destructing, he openly and she behind closed doors, and together they created a co-dependency that neither could break. She feared he would overdose or have a heart attack. The more she fretted, the more he enjoyed taunting her. He was also receiving injections of live sheep cells — sold to him as a powerful aphrodisiac — and injecting himself with amphetamines, steroids and testosterone, which made him unpredictable and physically violent. “All Greek men beat their women,” he said. “He who loves well beats well.”
In the summer of 1968 Callas came to learn of Onassis’s affair with the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Photos appeared in the press and Callas understood the significance of the publicity. “With a woman like Jackie and a man like you, starting something is easy, Aristo. But how do you stop it?” she asked. After a final degradation she walked out for good. Night after night Onassis sat on the stern of his yacht, drinking heavily and playing Callas’s records, her voice drifting across the dark waters of the Ionian. Listening to the cries of Norma, Medea and Tosca, he took the records and broke them in half, throwing them out to sea.
“What do you want for yourself?” he had asked before she left.
“I just want to be on good terms with myself.”
In the following years Callas attempted to rebuild her life in the shadow of Onassis. He changed his tactics and turned himself into a victim: he spoke of how unhappy his new wife, Jacqueline, made him and received Callas’s sympathy instead of her scorn. Their dynamic changed and she thought she had the upper hand and could succeed where his wife had failed. To others she called it “a passionate friendship” but maintained it was platonic. “Let him have his two whores,” Callas said of Lee and Jacqueline. She tried to revive her career by starring in Pier Palo Pasolini’s film Medea, a critical and financial failure, and teaching masterclasses at the performing arts college Juilliard in New York. In 1973-74, she embarked on a world tour with Giuseppe Di Stefano, her colleague from the Fifties with whom she began an affair. It ended badly: Di Stefano was married and his daughter was dying of cancer, and Callas wanted him to leave his wife.
After Onassis’s death in 1975, Callas slowly retreated from public life and befriended a Greek pianist, Vasso Devetzi, who, along with her estranged sister, Jackie, supplied her with Mandrax from an Athenian chemist (the drug was illegal in Paris). Highly addictive, it acted as a powerful sedative but long-term use made the body immune to its effects and insomnia was a common complaint. It could be fatal, particularly if mixed with alcohol. Perhaps Callas knew this, for she once told Di Stefano that each day was a step closer to the end. She felt she had nothing to live for. “I’ve lost everything. My voice is done, it seems. I don’t have a man; I don’t have a child. Isn’t it funny?”
Callas was also diagnosed with dermatomyositis, a disease that causes muscle weakness, but she stopped treatment because the medication made her gain weight. “You women are all crazy,” a doctor told her when she spoke of her symptoms two decades before.
The last year of Callas’s life was a torturous, lonely routine of introspection and regret. Her hours were spent watching television; through her myopic gaze — her vision had begun to fail her — she became absorbed in the static images of other people’s lives. Her blood pressure was declining: 80 at its highest, 50 at its lowest. At night she reached for Mandrax and when sleep came she dreamt of Onassis: “I want to help him but I can’t.” She died on September 16, 1977, aged 53.
Given the themes, the film Maria will be a harrowing tale of a woman searching for love and acceptance, only to find herself hindered by her own legend. A talented actress, Angelina Jolie is at heart a humanitarian and the portrayal of Callas needs a human touch. As the singer once said, “Put a human note into your story, please do. Because I am rather human at times.”
Lyndsy Spence is a Northern Ireland–based historian and screenwriter and the author of The Grit in the Pearl: The Scandalous Life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll
