Maria Callas was born into a world that did not want her. On December 3, 1923, in a New York hospital, her mother Lita turned away in disappointment at the sight of the dark-haired daughter who had been meant to replace a dead son. Lita, who had been told by an astrologer that her next child would be her lost boy reborn, refused to look at the infant for four days. The rejection set the tone for everything that followed.
The family had moved from Greece to America in 1923, with George Callas shortening the family name and settling his wife and daughters into cramped tenements in Astoria, Queens. Nine moves in eight years marked their slide into poverty, and the household simmered with resentment. Lita, volatile and convinced of her own aristocratic superiority, punished her daughters unpredictably, while George retreated into silence and affairs. Maria later remembered her childhood simply: “I did not have it.
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Song became her refuge. She taught herself arias, mimicking the trills of her pet canaries in their crowded apartment. In 1937, her mother took her and her sister Jackie back to Greece, and Maria began formal training. Rejected by one conservatory for her youth, she found a teacher in Maria Trivella, then moved on to the great coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, who recognized her potential immediately and trained her for free.
By 1939, Maria was at the Athens Conservatory, building a voice on the demanding discipline of bel canto while Europe slid toward war. German occupation turned Athens into a hungry city. Air raid sirens sent Maria, her mother, and sister racing down 120 steps to shelter, and Maria would vomit from terror at the sound. Food vanished, and what bread they found was often salvaged from bins.
Yet her voice became the family’s lifeline. She sang in Thessaloniki and in a nightclub frequented by German and Italian officers, paid in precious rations of sugar and coffee. The accusations that followed cut deeply. When a male teacher attacked her at the conservatory, her mother’s response was chilling: a pity he did not succeed, because then he would have had to marry her.
Maria could forgive her mother for making her sing for the enemy, since her voice kept them alive, but she could not forgive Lita for trying to push her into prostitution. When Maria refused, her mother turned her out of the apartment. In 1944, Maria was named prima donna of the Greek National Opera and its highest-paid soloist, but her money went straight to her mother. Liberation brought no relief.
As the Germans withdrew in October 1944, civil conflict erupted between communists and the national unity government. Accused of collaboration for singing during the occupation, Maria was mobbed and branded a traitor. One performer struck her violently. She fled the opera, and her name was erased from its programs.
During the fighting, snipers overran her building, and she heard the chilling words: “We will kill Maria first. ” A boy disguised as a coal vendor escorted her to safety, and she survived the ordeal hiding at British headquarters. With Athens stifling her ambition, Maria decided to leave. Her father had sent her money and promises of love, so in October 1945 she sailed to New York.
The reunion with her father was a disappointment. George treated her like a housekeeper, and the Metropolitan Opera rejected her. Desperate and heavy, she worked at a restaurant in Greenwich Village and fell under the control of Louise Caselotti and Eddie Bagarozy, who seduced her and steered her into a disastrous production that ended in bankruptcy. Even after her mother arrived and imposed a brutal diet, salvation came from an unexpected quarter.
Giovanni Zenatello, the artistic director of the Verona Festival, heard her sing and offered a contract. In August 1947, Maria performed before 25,000 people at the Arena di Verona, her powerful voice drawing praise even as the acclaim went mostly to her co-stars. In Verona, she met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a wealthy brick manufacturer known as Titta, who supported her financially. She mistook his generosity for love and depended on him completely, even when he dismissed her as “fat, clumsy, dressed like a dog.
” Their relationship was transactional, though Maria dreamed of marriage and even of abandoning her career. Titta secured her an audition with the great conductor Tullio Serafin, who saw something in her that others had missed. He offered her roles, and her fortunes began to turn. Her performance of Norma in Florence was so moving that Serafin visited her dressing room in tears.
In 1949, under pressure from Maria, who threatened never to sing again if he did not marry her, Titta agreed. They wed in a hastily arranged ceremony, and hours later she boarded a ship for Buenos Aires believing she was leaving her career behind. She was wrong. Her voice made her a legend.
Critics in Mexico City called her majestic and declared that God had lavished his gifts on her. At La Scala, her 1952 Norma was hailed as transformative, and after her 1953 Medea, Franco Corelli said that there was before Callas and after Callas. She remade her body as well, losing nearly seventy pounds in 1954 through drastic diet, iodine injections, and hormone treatments, then transforming her image with Parisian couture, hundreds of hats, and fur coats. Her rivals could not keep pace.
Renata Tebaldi, cast by the press as her angelic opposite, resigned from La Scala, unable to compete. But the private price was enormous. Titta had squandered her fortune, and when she wanted to retire and have a child, he told her she could not because she could not afford to stop. Her own mother, accumulating hidden savings while claiming destitution, demanded monthly allowances and gifts that were never enough.
Maria’s health suffered, her insomnia worsened, and her voice began to show strain. In January 1958, disaster struck at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. Maria was scheduled to sing Norma at a gala honoring the president of Italy, despite waking with bronchitis and tracheitis. Her voice faltered during Casta Diva, drawing jeers.
When management suggested she fake a fainting spell to appease the crowd, she refused, saying she would not deceive her audience. The cancellation of the second act sparked rioting outside her hotel, and Italian newspapers branded her an undisciplined diva. The theater banned her and sued for damages. In 1959, while she was retreating to her villa with a crumbling marriage, a new figure entered her life.
Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, had been sending roses to her suite at the Ritz, signed as “the other Greek. ” Invited aboard his yacht the Christina, Maria found herself drawn to his confidence and audacity. Their connection deepened during the cruise, and Titta’s suspicions erupted into bitter confrontation. By August, the affair was impossible to conceal.
Tina Onassis sought a divorce, and Maria told her husband she wanted to leave their marriage. Titta publicly accused her of betrayal, declaring that he had created Callas and she had stabbed him in the back. Onassis promised freedom, but he delivered torment. When Maria conceived his child in 1960, he demanded she terminate the pregnancy, offering money as though it could erase her pain.
The loss devastated her, and Onassis remained indifferent. He denied their relationship publicly and called her announcement of their engagement a joke. He flaunted his affair with Lee Radziwill aboard the Christina, relegating Maria to the sidelines, and when Jacqueline Kennedy joined the cruise, Maria watched Onassis show her the same city he had once shared with her. “That was me,” she said bitterly.
He mocked her eating habits, ridiculed her slenderness, and told her plainly that their relationship was “pay as you go. ” When she teased him about marriage, he dismissed her with devastating cruelty. The betrayals took their toll on her voice. After a concert in Copenhagen, critics noted that her soul was still there but her voice was a ghost.
“Unhappy birds cannot sing,” she said. In 1965, she collapsed on stage during a performance of Norma in Paris and had to be revived with coramine. Onassis mocked her, reportedly screaming that she had only a whistle in her throat that no longer worked. His contempt escalated into violence, and she later admitted that he knew exactly where to hit her so it would not show in the morning.
Still, she could not break free. “He was the first to make me feel like a woman,” she said. “I can’t lose him. ”
The end came on a Caribbean cruise, when his abuse became too much.
She left him, describing her decision as an act of survival. “He brainwashed me,” she said. “If I had stayed with him, he would have killed me, or I would have killed him. ” Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, and Maria watched from Paris, predicting the marriage would fail.
When he tried to force his way back into her life, she turned him away. “What is over is over,” she declared. In the years that followed, Maria found some fulfillment in teaching at Juilliard and in starring in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea, a story of love, betrayal, and vengeance that echoed her own life. But her isolation deepened.
Diagnosed with dermatomyositis, an autoimmune disease, she suffered constant pain but stopped taking her medication because it caused weight gain. She turned to sedatives and withdrew from the world. When Onassis died in March 1975, she slipped through a side door of the hospital to visit him. He whispered that he had loved her, though not always well.
After his death, she said only, “It’s over. ”
She died alone in Paris on September 16, 1977. Her funeral was understated, and she was cremated at Père Lachaise. In a final twist, her ashes were stolen, and when they were recovered, her ultimate wish was fulfilled: they were scattered over the Aegean Sea, the waters of her ancestors.
The woman who had belonged everywhere and nowhere found her rest at last in the sea that had given birth to gods and heroes.