On the evening of October 18, 1968, Maria Callas walked into a party at Maxim’s in Paris wearing a bright printed gown and diamonds, smiling for every photographer in the room. She was forty-four years old, and she had been the most talked-about singer alive for nearly two decades. Two days later, on the Greek island of Skorpios, Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy, the most famous widow in the world. Callas had given Onassis nine years of her life.
When the press closed around her that night, she had a line ready. Mrs. Kennedy, she said, had done well to give a grandfather to her children. Onassis, she added, was as beautiful as a sunset.
The line traveled around the world in a day and has been quoted ever since as proof that she met the worst week of her life with her wit intact. But the evening ended, the photographers went home, and Maria Callas got into a car, returned to her apartment on the third floor of 36 Avenue Georges Mandel, and closed the door. She would spend most of the nine years she had left inside that apartment. She had met Onassis in 1957.
The affair had begun around 1959 aboard his yacht, and that August she had walked out of her marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, the man who was also her manager, her agent, and the person who collected her money. By the autumn of 1968, she had no marriage, no contract, no legal claim on Onassis, and no career that was producing anything. Her last performance in a staged opera had been Tosca at Covent Garden on July 5, 1965, three years and three months earlier. She was forty-one when she walked off that stage.
She would never sing a complete opera again. The world decided that week that the most important soprano of the century was now a woman someone else’s husband had thrown away. She never got out from under that sentence. The newspapers had been shortening her for years.
Before the affair, she had been sold to the public as a temperament: La Divina, the tigress, the difficult one. After 1959, the shorthand became the mistress of the richest Greek in the world. The wedding on Skorpios did not begin the reduction. It completed it.
She stopped being the mistress and became the discarded mistress, and the sentence closed over her like a lid. The woman inside the dress was not a celebrity who had lost a boyfriend. She was the artist who had reopened a dead repertoire of bel canto operas, who made Norma, Lucia, and Medea urgent again, who sang as though the woman on stage were a person in trouble rather than a vehicle for beautiful noise. Singers who heard her had to decide what singing was for.
Montserrat Caballé put it plainly: she opened a new door for all the singers in the world, a door that had been closed. The money tells you what the world thought a woman like this was worth. At her peak at La Scala in the mid-1950s, she was paid 650,000 lire a performance, a little over a thousand dollars a night. Her highest documented fee was five thousand dollars a performance for three nights of Norma at Epidaurus in August 1960.
She gave all of it away to a scholarship fund for young Greek singers. When Onassis died, his estate was estimated at around five hundred million dollars. The apartment on Avenue Georges Mandel, bought at the end of 1967 out of her own money, was decorated by Georges Geoffroy, one of the city’s society decorators. Her biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos described it as less a home than a tomb for a legend.
The filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis said he always felt Maria was living in someone else’s perfectly well-run house. Two people ran it and saw everything that happened in the years that followed. Bruna Lupi, her maid, had entered her service in 1953 and stayed twenty-four years. Ferruccio Mezzadri, the butler and driver, came in the late 1950s and stayed to the end.
They cooked for her, played cards with her, watched television with her in the evenings, and stood at the door turning reporters away. Her daily life came down to two activities. She listened to her own old recordings, and she walked her poodles along the same three streets every single day. The warmth in that flat came from the staff.
There were also the pills. Accounts agree she had chronic insomnia and relied on Mandrax, a sedative several biographers credit Onassis with introducing her to. French sources describe the pattern that developed: barbiturates by night, stimulants by day, and Coramine for sudden drops in blood pressure. According to her biographer, within weeks of the honeymoon, Onassis was in the street below her windows, whistling, then shouting her name.
When that did not work, he threatened to drive his car straight through the front door. At the door, a servant told him what he had been told to say: Madame is not at home. The strongest witness is Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, Onassis’s personal secretary. Her account is not hedged in the slightest.
They never stopped seeing each other. She says she personally arranged many of the secret meetings. She says he could not live without Maria. But from January 1, 1972, to the day Onassis died in March 1975, there is not one dated, independently corroborated meeting between them anywhere in the accessible record.
The return, whatever its true size, was conducted entirely in private, while the marriage was conducted entirely in public. He had a wife the world wanted him to have, and a woman he apparently could not do without, available in the dark in an apartment nobody was allowed into, with no claim on him whatsoever. In the summer of 1969, she made Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea. It was a great mythological role, the sorceress who gave everything to the man she followed and was set aside for a better marriage.
In the film, Maria Callas does not sing a single note. She was forty-five, working outdoors in heavy costume in some of the hottest, harshest country in Turkey. She fainted and went down in full costume. When she came round, her first concern was the production time she had wasted.
Onassis telephoned her nightly, according to her co-star, and it distressed her. Pasolini adored her. He drew her fourteen times and wrote poems about her. The film itself failed on a scale worth quantifying.
Across its first five years in Italy, it took just under thirty million lire, about thirty times less than his previous film. In October 1971, she began teaching at the Juilliard School in New York. Nearly a thousand strangers paid five dollars each to watch her teach young singers how to do the thing she could no longer reliably do herself. Roughly three hundred singers auditioned, about twenty-five were selected.
She taught there from October 11, 1971, to March 16, 1972. Twenty-three classes were held out of twenty-four scheduled, one cancelled because she was ill. She told students that singing was the most difficult job in the world, that she did not care if they cracked on the top note so long as they went at it hard, because Caruso cracked many times. She described her own method in four words: I counsel and observe.
In April 1973, she directed Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani for the reopening of the Teatro Regio in Turin. The reviews were disastrous, not mixed, and they are still cited that way. Then she went out anyway. The farewell tour with the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano opened in Hamburg on October 25, 1973, and ran across Europe, then America, then Asia into November of the following year.
Two singers, both past their instruments, a piano, and a program of arias people had come to hear. Sir John Tooley put it with precision: the crowds cheered, the atmosphere was electric, and the singing was at best a disappointment and at worst a travesty of former greatness. At Carnegie Hall on March 5, 1974, the New York Times reported the hall had been swept by an emotional torrent. Not a word about the singing.
She completed the tour and stopped on her own terms. The last public performance of her life was in Sapporo, Japan, on November 11, 1974. She was fifty years old. There was a single question hanging over the second half of her life: what had happened to the voice?
For decades the answers were about character. She had lost weight. She had lost her nerve. She was difficult.
In 1975, a Roman professor named Mario Giacovazzo was flown to Paris on a state aircraft at the request of Italian officials to examine her. He found a brownish complexion, a purplish tint on the left side of her neck, and hands full of nodules. The disease was dermatomyositis, an autoimmune condition that attacks the muscles, including the muscles that power breathing and support the voice. He prescribed prednisone.
He did it without laboratory tests because she begged him not to put her through any more examinations. He said nothing about it to anybody for twenty-seven years. When he finally told the story in a newspaper interview in October 2002, his reason was discretion and respect for a great artist. The treatment worked.
By the beginning of 1976, she telephoned the professor to tell him the high notes and the middle voice had come back and that she felt ready to resume concerts with Di Stefano. Then she stopped taking the steroids because they made her gain weight. She went back to the Mandrax instead. The end of Aristotle Onassis began with his son.
On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis, twenty-four years old, lost control of a small aircraft within seconds of takeoff from Athens airport and died the following day. The man never recovered. He had myasthenia gravis, a disease that attacks the signals between nerve and muscle. In his last public appearances, his eyelids had to be taped open so he could see.
In February 1975, he went into the American Hospital of Paris at Neuilly for gallbladder surgery, collapsed afterwards, and died there on March 15, 1975. His daughter Christina was with him. His wife was in New York. Maria Callas was living in the same city.
After he died, according to his secretary, Maria was desperate. She did not want to live anymore. Not one public statement by Maria Callas about his death exists anywhere. His estate came to an estimated five hundred million dollars.
His will left roughly fifty-five percent to his daughter Christina and about forty-five percent to endow a foundation in the name of his dead son. His widow’s dispute with Christina was settled in 1977 for a figure most commonly reported at twenty-six million dollars. Maria Callas received nothing. She had no marriage to him, no contract, no settlement, no standing of any kind.
She had given him nine years, and when he died, she had exactly the same legal claim on his fortune as the man who parked his car. She died without a will. She had renounced her United States citizenship in April 1966 and died a Greek citizen, so Greek intestacy law applied and her mother and sister were called as heirs. Then Giovanni Battista Meneghini appeared with a single sentence written in 1954, a mutual will in which each spouse left everything to the other.
An Italian court had granted an actual divorce on July 22, 1971, six years before she died, which he appealed. The claim was settled out of court on a fifty-fifty split. Half of everything Maria Callas earned in her life went to a man a court had divorced her from, on the authority of one sentence from 1954. The last thing Maria Callas is known to have sung was an aria asking not to be abandoned, four weeks before she died.
They rehearsed excerpts from Verdi’s La forza del destino in her apartment in August 1977, with Vaso Devetzi at the piano. The last documented occasion of her singing was a private rehearsal. Friday, September 16, 1977, she had breakfast, said she was very thirsty, and asked for an orangeade to be brought to her in the bathroom. She drank it quickly.
Bruna, walking back toward the kitchen, heard a thud behind her, ran back, and found her on the floor. By the time they had her on the bed, she was already lifeless. She was fifty-three years old. There were Mandrax tablets on the bedside table.
No autopsy was performed. The medical report recorded cardiac arrest as the sole cause, and the death certificate was signed by the family doctor of her butler. The funeral was on September 20 at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Rue Georges Bizet. Princess Grace of Monaco came with her daughter Caroline.
Tito Gobbi came. She was cremated the same day, which contravened French law requiring a relative’s signature and at least a day between service and cremation. Cremation was contrary to Greek Orthodox practice. But she had told Bruna what she wanted: scatter my ashes on the Aegean.
The ashes were finally scattered in the Aegean in 1979. Her niche at Père Lachaise is still there. It is empty. Warner Classics released her complete studio recordings as a sixty-nine-disc set in September 2014.
In 2007, a poll of twenty-one British critics and broadcasters put her first among the twenty greatest sopranos of all time. In the same year, she was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. At auction in Paris in 2000, more than four hundred lots of her possessions sold for about 1. 3 million dollars.
Among them was her underwear. Most of the lingerie went to a foundation whose president told the press they had come to buy it in order to burn it and cast the ashes into the Mediterranean. Go back to that photograph. Paris, October 18, 1968.
The printed gown, the diamonds, the smile she put on two days before the man she had given nine years to married somebody else, the line about grandfathers, and the car waiting to take her home to a locked apartment. For fifty years, we have looked at that photograph and seen a broken heart in beautiful clothes. The evidence supports something else. She was ill for years with an autoimmune disease nobody named until she was fifty-one and nobody made public until 2002.
The best medical reading of the evidence is that she died of a heart under attack from her own immune system, in a city where nobody performed an autopsy to find out. She told a reporter in plain words, and it was published two weeks after she died: I never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. My vocal cords were and still are in excellent condition, but my sound boxes have not been working well. A woman describing in the language available to her an autoimmune disease that attacks muscle, twenty-five years before the public was told what it was.
She told us out loud what she actually wanted years before any of it ended. She wanted to live just like a normal woman, with children, a home, a dog. She got the home. She got the dogs.
She got two employees who loved her and the same three streets every day in the greatest city in Europe, alone. That is not somebody who died of a broken heart. That is somebody who died with her working shoes on, in the middle of trying again.