The great diva — to her worshippers, the greatest one of all — was born December 2, 1923, in New York. She died in Paris in 1977.
I came late to opera, but when I discovered that musical genre in all its magnificent extravagance, its egotism, the silliness and the poignance, grand religiosity mixed with back street licentiousness, Maria Callas was the lure. The voice was beautiful and strange and imperfect, the acting better than any Oscar performance. She was La Divina.
Early in 1995 I interviewed Zoe Caldwell, who was about to play Callas in Terence McNally’s Master Class. Although Caldwell was petite and Callas tall, statuesque, the casting was right. At a preview in Philadelphia, Zoe Caldwell raised an arm to emphasize a point, and for a moment she seemed to rise to the height of Callas herself. Caldwell was not a singer, but when she acted a few notes of an aria to one of her students in the play, for a fleeting instant she recreated Callas in Tosca.
I interviewed Terence McNally at lunch in a Chelsea diner, then hurried to the office of Zoe Caldwell’s husband, the theatrical producer Robert Whitehead, on Broadway near Times Square. Caldwell’s reputation was that of a pro, meaning she didn’t arrive late for performances or for interviews. In fact, throughout her career she reached the theatre several hours before curtain up, a habit acquired as a teenaged actress in her native Australia.
Today she was late. Fifteen minutes, then twenty…finally a member of the office staff told me, “Miss Caldwell just phoned. She and her husband are caught in traffic but they expect to arrive shortly.” Car phones, incidentally, were not that common in 1995.
Another quarter hour, and: Herself in the doorway! She paused as though ready to go onstage as Medea, or Miss Jean Brodie, or another of her signature roles. She surveyed the room, spotted me, marched in grandly while declaiming, “Oh, I have made a mighty muck! Can you forgive me?”
Another Tony-award performance, and for me alone. I wanted to shout “Brava!”
After a bit of chat we settled down for the interview. Before I turned on the tape recorder, she asked suddenly, “How old are you? I’m sixty-three.” I told her my age, and later I wondered if she wished to sweep her sixty-three years aside like a cobweb from the wall.
In 2001 Zoe Caldwell published her entertaining memoir, I Will Be Cleopatra. I was surprised reading it, because it’s the undramatic, down-to-earth story of her humble beginnings in Australia and the first part of her career. She ends it in 1967 — too soon, I thought. But then clever Miss Caldwell no doubt recalled the adage: “It’s better for your audience to say, So soon? rather than At last!”
Zoe Caldwell died in 2020, as did Terence McNally.
Of all the actresses who might have played Maria Callas onscreen, the last one chosen should have been Angelina Jolie. Yet she has the lead in Maria, now in production with an inauspicious director and an equally inauspicious writer. I expect the picture will emphasize everything except the Callas artistry.
Skip this one and see Callas Forever (2002), with the French actress Fanny Ardant — who understands the Callas greatness — and directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a close friend of Callas and her director in several exceptional opera productions.