Jackie and Maria Read online

  Dedication

  For Barbara Douka, who gave me the idea for this novel

  Epigraph

  Of all creatures that can feel and think,

  we women are the worst treated things alive.

  —EURIPIDES, MEDEA, 431 B.C.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Act I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Act II

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Act III

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Act IV

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Act V

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Praise

  Also by Gill Paul

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Act I

  Chapter 1

  Hotel Danieli; Venice, Italy

  September 3, 1957

  Come with me.” Maria felt her elbow being tugged by the party’s hostess, so insistently that she almost toppled sideways. “I want to introduce you to your fellow Greeks: Aristotle and Tina Onassis. Here they are.” Arm outswept, the hostess announced, “This is Maria Callas.”

  Years later, Maria would look back on the seeming ordinariness of the moment. When you meet someone who is going to turn your world upside down and shake it up so violently that nothing will ever be the same again, there should be a warning sign, she thought. In Greek mythology there would be a thunderclap, an earthquake, an eclipse of the sun. Here there was no such thing. Just the murmur of polite conversation, a string quartet playing Schubert, and the clink of champagne glasses under crystal chandeliers.

  Of course Maria had heard of Onassis before. Depending upon which paper you read, he was either the world’s richest man and a charming host on his yacht, the Christina, or a crook and a pirate of the high seas. She was surprised to find that he was shorter than her, because in photographs he had the aura of a tall man, but straightaway she liked the amusement she detected in his eyes, the way he held her hand firmly and bent to touch it with his lips.

  “I’m honored to meet the world’s greatest soprano,” he said, his first-ever words to her.

  “One of the greatest perhaps . . .” Hyperbole always embarrassed her.

  “You must be the only person in this room who plays down her achievements,” he said, with a tip of his head toward the assembled company. There were actors and socialites, some royals, and a sprinkling of politicians, but few from the world of opera, Maria’s usual milieu. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were holding court, wearing crowns as if to mock the one he gave up when he abdicated the British throne; Princess Grace of Monaco wandered around with a sweet smile pinned to her face despite the conspicuous absence of Prince Rainier less than a year into their marriage; and Elizabeth Taylor was flirting at the bar with a swarthy man who was definitely not her husband.

  Maria laughed. “I was assured these were ‘Europe’s finest,’” she said, mimicking the Midwest accent of their hostess, a gossip columnist who relished bringing celebrities together.

  “Of course, one should always believe the word of journalists,” Aristotle retorted with a grin, and Maria warmed to him.

  “Are you Maria’s father?” she heard Tina Onassis asking her husband, Battista, who had been hovering behind her. People often thought that because of the thirty-year age difference between them.

  “Suo marito,” he replied with a hint of exasperation. He didn’t speak much English, only Italian, so Tina switched to that language to chat with him, while Aristotle continued addressing Maria in Greek.

  “I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard you sing. I’m not a fan of opera. It always sounds to me like a pair of Italian chefs screaming risotto recipes at each other.”

  Maria laughed. “I don’t think I’ve heard that one. Can you remember what it’s called?”

  “No idea,” he admitted with a grin. “But when Tina took me to an opera in Athens I dozed off in the box. At least they had comfortable seats.”

  “I think you’ll find that operas are as varied as . . .” She searched for an appropriate simile. “You are in shipping, are you not? As varied as shipping routes.”

  He pulled a face. “But more artistic, I hope. Despite my tin ear, I would love to hear the voice that all the critics rave about.”

  She gave a modest shrug. “They don’t all rave, I’m afraid. They ran out of superlatives long ago and now they come to my performances searching for things to criticize. I don’t want to make their job easy, so the pressure each time I perform is immense.”

  “That old story: they build you up only to knock you down again.”

  “Perhaps you have experienced something similar?” She knew that three years earlier he had been arrested in America on some technicality involving his shipping empire, and grainy photographs of him being fingerprinted had appeared in the press. It must have been humiliating.

  He leaned closer, and she could smell a sweet hay scent that was probably explained by the cigar protruding from his top pocket. “There’s a world of difference between us. To get where I am took nothing more than pigheadedness. But you—you clearly have a gift from the gods.”

  “I work quite hard too, Mr. Onassis.” That was an understatement. Maria memorized libretti, practiced all afternoon, and, if she didn’t have a performance in the evening, she read opera scores in bed till the early hours. Music was her life. Attending parties like these was a rarity.

  “Call me Aristotle. Please.” He touched her arm, just above the elbow, where her glove stopped and bare flesh was exposed. “So, when will I come to hear you sing? You be my guide.”

  She smiled. “I’ll let you
know when I am singing in a concert hall with particularly comfortable seats. Maybe you should bring your own pillow.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said, his hand still resting on her arm.

  He was flirting, with her husband just inches away. Maria usually had no time for the directors and fellow performers who made advances, but this was innocent fun and she was enjoying herself. “How can I believe you?” she teased. “Don’t they say you should never trust a sailor?”

  “My friends can trust me with their lives, my enemies can trust that I have a Greek appetite for revenge—so I suppose that makes me trustworthy.” His eyes were flecked with gold, she noticed. Shrewd eyes.

  “And I? Do you think I should trust you?” she asked.

  “If I make you a promise, I will always keep it,” he told her, serious now. “You can trust in that.”

  Those words stuck in her head long afterward.

  Chapter 2

  Venice

  September 4, 1957

  The morning after Elsa’s party, Maria awoke to find a note slipped under the door of their suite asking if she and Battista would join Aristotle and Tina Onassis for lunch in Harry’s Bar at one o’clock. She stretched and looked at the ormolu clock on the mantel: it was almost twelve. She generally preferred to ease herself into the day with a scented bath followed by a leisurely breakfast, but something about Aristotle had piqued her curiosity. She’d expected the world’s richest man to be serious and money obsessed, but instead he seemed fun.

  “Battista!” she called. Her husband was reading a newspaper on a sunny balcony that overlooked the Grand Canal. “We’re going for lunch in an hour.”

  Harry’s Bar was a short walk away along the waterfront and they arrived only slightly late. A maître d’ in white jacket and black bow tie led them through the restaurant, past the long, polished-wood bar to a table at the back, where the Onassises were poring over menus. Aristotle leapt to his feet.

  “I’m delighted you could come,” he declared in Italian, kissing Maria’s hand, shaking Battista’s, then clapping him on the back. “Please, sit. Bellinis all round? It seems fitting, when they are named after the great opera composer.”

  Tall glasses of the bar’s trademark cocktail appeared: white peach juice mixed with Prosecco, so light and aromatic, it seemed impossible it was alcoholic.

  Maria sat on a banquette next to Tina Onassis, a pretty woman with bleached blond hair and dark eyebrows who on closer scrutiny seemed scarcely out of her teens; there was clearly a substantial age gap in their marriage, as in hers.

  “I’m honored you could join us,” she said to Maria. “I’m one of your biggest fans. Did Aristo tell you? I first heard you singing Aida at La Scala back in 1950, and since then I’ve flown to Milan for all your premières.”

  “Really?” Maria was touched. “That’s very flattering. Do you live in Athens?”

  “We have homes all over the place: Athens, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Montevideo . . .” She gave a quick eye roll, mocking the length of the list. “But Aristo is usually to be found on the Christina. He gets crotchety if he has to spend too long on dry land.”

  Battista was telling Aristotle about the funds he was trying to raise to make a film of Maria singing Medea. She hoped their host didn’t feel he was being pressured to contribute.

  “How long have you two been married?” she asked Tina, looking from one to the other.

  “Forever!” Tina cried. “Eleven years. I was just seventeen at our wedding and Ari was forty, so I’m sure I seemed terribly childish. But then we had children and they make you grow up fast.”

  She pulled one of those faces that Maria had often noticed mothers make: it was meant to be long-suffering but was really a look of pride. She would rather have joined Aristotle and Battista’s conversation about the film business but knew Tina was waiting for her to ask about the children, so she did.

  “What ages are they now?”

  Tina began to describe them, and Maria’s attention wandered. Everyone assumed that she hadn’t wanted children because of her devotion to her career, but it wasn’t true. She yearned for a baby, ached for one, and it simply hadn’t happened. A specialist had told her she had a malformation of the womb that would make it difficult, but not impossible, for her to get pregnant. She was thirty-three years old and all too aware that time was running out.

  She blinked, realizing Tina had asked her a question.

  “How did you and Battista meet?” she repeated.

  Maria smiled. “He saved me from a life typing businessmen’s letters and got me where I am today.” As she told her story, Aristotle and Battista paused to listen.

  IT HAD BEEN hard for Maria to get her break in opera, because her voice was too strong, too mature, for the chorus, and it had an unusual timbre. She needed directors who were prepared to risk giving her lead roles, but most were risk averse—unsurprisingly, given the astronomic cost of staging opera. She had trained in Athens, where she spent the war years living with her mother and sister, then moved to New York, where her father’s pharmacy business was based. After more than a year of disheartening auditions, she at last won a lead role, singing La Gioconda in Verona, and sailed to Italy alone at the age of twenty-three.

  “It was a difficult time,” she told the Onassises. “There was resentment toward this young interloper who didn’t even speak fluent Italian yet had somehow landed the lead. The cast pushed past me backstage without saying buon giorno, and I went home alone most nights.”

  She didn’t add that she was a whale of a girl in those days, over two hundred pounds of blotchy, dimpled flesh, with a nose that was too big for her face, and thick, black-rimmed glasses, without which she was near blind. Her appearance made her shy and awkward, another reason it was hard to make friends.

  “I had a guardian angel, though.” She turned to Battista with a smile. “I met this man at a dinner party on my first evening in Verona and he took me under his wing. He was an opera aficionado and we bonded over our shared love of music.”

  Battista took up the story: “When Maria’s contract at Verona ended, her father wanted her to return to New York and work as a secretary. To me, that would have been a criminal waste of talent. I offered to subsidize her for another six months while I introduced her to the directors I knew and tried to get her career off the ground.”

  “What a clever investment!” Aristotle exclaimed. “You gained a beautiful wife and the world gained a magnificent talent.”

  Battista grinned. “We had luck on our side. One evening, when we were strolling after dinner, we bumped into my friend Nino Catozzo, the director at La Fenice. A soprano had let him down at the eleventh hour. His production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had been advertised, tickets sold, and suddenly he had no Isolde—so I suggested Maria for the role.”

  She interrupted. “You have no idea how terrifying it was. Battista pretended I already knew the part, which is one of the most difficult in opera. I had to audition a week later, sight-reading for Tullio Serafin, the great guru who had conducted me in La Gioconda. Fortunately he thought I was capable of the role and arranged two months of intensive coaching to get me ready.”

  She would never forget the blind panic of that time: the technical difficulties of the part of Isolde, the wild, passionate Irish princess; the immense pressure of stepping out onto the glittering stage where Rossini’s and Bellini’s works had premièred; the grandeur of La Fenice, with its rows of golden boxes, the ceiling mural of flying Graces, the ornate putti, the plush red-velvet seats. All of it combined to make her feel unworthy.

  On opening night Tullio had given her a gift of a Madonna icon—a pretty one in jewel tones with a gilt frame. She remembered trembling as she prayed to the compassionate face of the Holy Mother that she would not let everyone down.

  The prayer must have worked, because the production was an astounding success. She couldn’t see beyond the proscenium arch without her glasses but could hear that many were getting t
o their feet, cheering and whistling as well as clapping, and she was called back to the stage a dozen times before she could finally retreat to her dressing room. It felt like a dream.

  “You should have seen the reviews.” Battista beamed. “I’ve never read anything like it. The critics were unanimous that a new star had appeared in the firmament. After that, every director in Italy wanted to work with her, and Tullio became her cheerleader.”

  They had told this story before, and she smiled at him as she delivered the punch line. “Battista waited till the third night after the opening, when he was sure his investment had paid off, before asking me to marry him.”

  They all laughed. In fact, Maria had been stunned by his proposal. She had so little confidence in those years that she couldn’t believe anyone would want her for anything other than her voice. How could he think of making love to a woman so large that no chairs were big enough for her? A woman with thighs the circumference of the average woman’s waist? She had been reluctant to remove her tent of a nightgown on their wedding night, but Battista seduced her slowly, awakening sensations she adored. Right from the start, she loved sex, couldn’t get enough of it. She loved him too; he was the first person ever to make her feel cherished.

  Waiters interrupted them with plates of pink carpaccio, the house specialty that Aristotle insisted they try. Maria was glad he had ordered for them. She couldn’t have read the menu without her glasses, and she was too vain to wear them in public. The thinly sliced raw beef was succulent, tender, sublime. When that was gone, he ordered prawns, freshly caught in the Lagoon that morning and grilled with garlic butter. All afternoon, they drank frothy Bellinis and nibbled delicacies, while getting acquainted. Maria felt uncharacteristically light-headed, and more relaxed than she had in many a month.

  The windows at the far end of the bar were frosted glass, and cozy lamps glowed on the walls, so it was hard to judge the time. She was astonished when she read Aristotle’s watch upside down and saw that it was almost seven. Diners were beginning to arrive for the evening meal, and she spotted their host slipping some folded lire to the maître d’ with a sleight of hand as smooth as any magician’s. She guessed he was bribing him to let them keep their table.