Sunday, December 15, 2024






Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas on June 24, 1959. Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty

Not long before his death on March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis had a secret visit from Maria Callas in his private room at the American Hospital in Paris.

According to Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, then Onassis’ personal secretary, it was devastating for the famed opera diva. “She knew because she had spoken to the doctor that there was no hope — that he was almost dead, finished,” says Moutsatsos, “and Maria had no hope that they would ever be together again.”

It’s a moment dramatized in the new biopic, Maria, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie as the tempestuous opera singer.

At the time of his death, Onassis was still married to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to whom he’d grown more and more estranged, and still involved with his longtime lover Callas, the American-born Greek soprano whom he’d first met in 1957.

Moutsatsos, now 75, helped to arrange the visit, as she had done for many of their secret rendezvous over the years. “We tried to know exactly when his daughter, Christina or when Jackie would visit him in order to tell Maria that she could go and visit Aristo,” says Moutsatsos, using her favorite name for Onassis.

“I informed Maria because I knew if Christina would be in Athens and if Jackie was in the United States and I knew which day they were supposed to return, I said to Maria this is the correct day that you can visit him without any fear.”

Not long afterward, the Greek shipping tycoon died at age 69, from respiratory failure due to complications from myasthenia gravis.

“They were like twins,” Moutsatsos recalls. “They thought they were born for each other — that they would never be separated.”

In her memoir The Onassis Women: An Eyewitness Account (now the basis for a new series being developed by Heidi Lauren Duke) Moutsatsos details how Onassis and Callas continued their love affair throughout his marriage while still continuing to see other women. “He liked to have next to him beautiful women, and Maria was very jealous,” she recalls. “She was always fighting with him.”

Still, she adds, “He couldn't live without her. She was a piece of his body, a piece of his soul, a piece of his brain. They never stopped seeing each other.”

“After Aristo's death, Maria was desperate,” she says. “She didn’t want to live anymore. They kind of suffered the same fate, because Mr. Onassis, after his son died, he didn’t want to live anymore.”

Two years earlier, on Jan. 23, 1973, Onassis’ son Alexander died in a small plane accident at an airport in Athens, killing him at age 24. Onassis, she says, never recovered.

After Onassis' death in 1975, Moutsatsos recalls, “Maria was living in her own world. She didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to go out, she didn’t want to speak with friends. She lost her appetite to live.”

Two years later, on Sept. 16, 1977, she died of a heart attack at age 53.

Maria is now streaming on Netflix.


People

Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis. Getty Images

When Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, met Maria Callas, the great opera diva, in 1957 they were both married to others. But that didn’t stop them from falling in love and having an affair that would last until his death in 1975.

“They couldn’t live without the other one,” Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, Onassis’ longtime personal secretary, tells PEOPLE.

Once their affair began, she says, they "never stopped seeing each other — never.” Even after he divorced his first wife and later married Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968.

“Onassis was protecting his affair,” recalls Moutsatsos, 75. “He was protecting Jackie, but Jackie was very smart. Everyone in the house was speaking, secretly, of course, that Onassis every night was visiting Maria. She knew. She was discussing it with Onassis' sister, Artemis. She was complaining. Artemis told her not to fight. Just ignore it.”

“Not that it would have been changed,” she adds.

The story of their tempestuous affair is told in the new movie Maria, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie as the famous soprano.

Few were as close to what really happened as Moutsatsos, who began working for Onassis when she was 17 and later wrote the 1998 memoir The Onassis Women that she is looking to republish.

“They often saw each other in Paris,” Moutsatsos recalls. “Their houses were very close.” Onassis had an apartment on Avenue Foch and Callas lived at 36 Avenue George Mandel, both in the posh 16th arrondissement.

As she recounts, “When I was calling every morning, in Athens or in Paris, and I was speaking with the personnel, and they were making jokes, they were telling me Mr. Onassis was very, very tired. And when I was asking why, they were saying again that Maria was visiting.”

“We knew every moment what they were doing,” says Moutsatsos of all the women in Onassis’ life. “Because I was arranging from my office and could make all the details about the trips. Christina [Onassis’ daughter] and Jackie called me to tell me when they would be in Paris and when in the United States.”

But Callas wasn’t always happy with her lover. Says Moutsatsos, “When she was on the boat (Onassis’ yacht, the Christina) she was reading the newspapers and seeing all the rumors — and scandals — about Aristo; they were fighting.”

“He liked to have next to him beautiful women, and Maria was very jealous,” recalls Moutsatsos, who's memoir is the basis for a short film The Heiress, now screening on the festival circuit. "She was very nervous. When articles in the newspaper or magazines appeared, she couldn't stand it. She was always fighting with him.”

Jackie, on the other hand, rarely showed her emotions. Their marriage grew increasingly rocky in later years as they spent time apart. Still Onassis continued to see Callas.

The opera singer never truly recovered after his death on March 15, 1975. Afterward, Moutsatsos recalls, “Maria was desperate. She didn't want to live anymore.”

As for her own turn as the dramatic opera star, Oscar-winner Jolie has said, “I hope what audiences find is that there was so much research done into what we believe she really was like — the human being behind the voice and behind the image. Maybe not ‘behind the voice,’ because the voice is the woman,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

“But I think even if I’d read biographies on her, I [wouldn’t have understood her] until I stepped in and kind of felt her. I hope more people discover her and opera and go to the opera and listen to opera.”






How do you capture someone as mythic as Maria Callas in a two-hour movie?

That was the challenge facing screenwriter Steven Knight (“Spencer”), who reteams with director Pablo Larraín for the new drama “Maria,” featuring Angelina Jolie as the ill-fated opera star as she struggles to sing again.

“I wanted to compress the whole thing into a very significant period of days,” Knight says. “In fact, her last days were very reflective: She was very concerned about her voice coming back and the loves of her life. And in those days, she was very badly bruised by a critic.”

As portrayed in the film, Callas really was accosted by a journalist, who secretly recorded a rough vocal rehearsal and threatened to leak it to the media. Knight also based much of his script on firsthand accounts from Callas’ butler, Ferruccio (Pierfranceso Favino), and housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), who were her dearest companions at the end of her life.

Here’s what else is fact and fiction:

Was the real Maria Callas addicted to drugs?

“Maria” follows the singer as she wanders the halls of her sumptuous Paris apartment, popping pills and hallucinating a journalist named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a personified version of the sedative drug. Callas abused prescription pills throughout her life, Knight says.

“Remember, this is the ‘50s and ‘60s when there was less known about the consequences of that,” Knight says. “She always had an issue with her weight, so she was prepared to take chemicals to deal with that.” Later on, as her star waned, “she started to use drugs like Mandrax in order to control the pain. Imagine being at the pinnacle (of your career) and suddenly no one’s listening?"

How did Maria Callas die?



Callas died at home in her Paris apartment on Sept. 16, 1977, at age 53. Her official cause of death was a heart attack, although there has been widespread speculation in decades since that she either committed suicide or died as the result of a degenerative disease such as dermatomyostitis.

“A degenerative disease is quite a strong thing that people believe and would have been diagnosed now,” Knight says. “I’m absolutely convinced it wasn’t a suicide. Female icons like Maria Callas or Princess Diana or Marilyn Monroe are pursued by prey. (The public) wants to grab a bit and death is not enough to stop them. The conspiracy theories will always happen.”

Did Maria Callas have a relationship with Aristotle Onassis?



Onassis, a Greek shipping tycoon, met Callas at a party in 1957. Both were married at the time, but they carried on a decade-long affair before he abandoned her for Jackie Kennedy in 1968. Many historians have called Onassis “the great love” of Callas’ life, although the movie paints him as a controlling and dismissive man who made disparaging comments about her body.

In real life, “it was a despicable, flawed, broken relationship,” Knight says. “And it all took place on the world stage, because he suddenly announced he was marrying Jackie.” Despite their tempestuous courtship, “I do believe she loved him, and when he was dying, he declared that Maria was the one he loved.”

Did Maria Callas really have an abortion or miscarriages?



Historians widely agree that Callas wanted to have children but was unable to. The movie alludes to Callas suffering two miscarriages, and she tells Mandrax, “My body declined the invitation to make another self.” Additionally, author Arianna Huffington claimed in her 1981 book, “Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend,” that Onassis forced her to abort a third baby in 1966.

“I didn’t want to go there too deeply,” Knight says. “It’s so painful and personal, but the rumor is that he forced her to have an abortion. There’s no confirmation or proof, although I always thought she was stronger than to be told what to do.”

Was Maria Callas friends with John F. Kennedy?



The movie depicts Callas sitting in the audience at John F. Kennedy’s birthday party in 1962, when in fact, she performed two arias at the event. The film also imagines Callas and Kennedy sitting down at a restaurant together, where she rebuffs his flirtations and hints that Jackie and Aristotle are sleeping together. “You and I belong to a very small group of lucky angels who can go anywhere we want in this world,” Callas tells Kennedy. “But we can never, ever get away.”

“There is no evidence that Maria and Kennedy ever sat down to breakfast,” Knight says. “But I thought it was interesting to see these two people together. I wanted them to look a bit like prisoners, because they both were in the world they had created for themselves.”

Where was Maria Callas' last performance?

In real life, Callas’ final public performance was in Sapporo, Japan, in November 1974, roughly three years before her death. The movie concludes with her tearfully looking out her apartment window and singing “Vissi d'arte,” from the Giacomo Puccini opera “Tosca.” The impassioned moment might seem like a manipulative Hollywood ending, but it’s actually based in some truth.

“There is anecdotal evidence that in her final days, Callas was playing her own music and singing along in her apartment,” Knight says. “It was a breakthrough for her, because she never listened to her own music. So I’d like to think there were people standing outside, listening to her last performance.”




Posted by at
Labels: , ,