Review: Vivien Horler
Diva, by Daisy Goodwin (Head Zeus)
I was a romantic-minded 16-year-old when I heard that the widowed Jackie Kennedy had married the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. I’d vaguely heard of the Greek opera singer Maria Callas, and she’d been ditched, but I loved the fact poor, beautiful Jackie had remarried. Just a pity the groom looked so much like a frog.
With no appreciation of opera, I had no idea of the story of Callas’s life and her magnificence as a diva. I know quite a lot more now, thanks to this novel. Author Daisy Goodwin makes it clear in a note that Diva is a novel, not a biography, and that while she has “stuck to the facts as far as possible”, she has taken some liberties with dates.
I can live with that.
The novel opens in 1968 with Maria going to the theatre in Paris with her great friend, the film director Franco Zeffirelli, and then on to dinner at Maxim’s.
All Maria wants to do is go home, but tonight she is putting on a performance every bit as important as one she has performed on stage at La Scala – she is appearing in public on the evening of Onassis’s marriage to Jackie, and giving every indication that she doesn’t give a damn.
In Greece, the relationship between Onassis and Callas is celebrated – they are probably the most famous Greeks in the world. She is elegant and hugely talented, he is outrageously rich, and they have had nine years together, despite the fact he has no interest in opera.
But on this night she is putting on a show, knowing that the world is watching Jackie marry Ari in the little chapel she and Ari built on the island of Skorpios, the chapel where she had thought she would marry Ari, and where their child would be baptised.
Mary Anne Kalogeropoulou was born in New York City, but in an act of spectacularly bad timing, shortly before World War 2 her mother insists she and her two daughters return to Greece where Mary can have proper voice training.
The training materialises, but the war and the German occupation of Greece meant life is hard, and her mother often makes Maria to busk in public for money for food.
This is contrary to the advice of her singing teacher, the Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo.
Elvira has told Maria her voice is a precious gift. “Don’t waste it singing in the snow.” She tells Maria to imagine her voice is an amphora filled with gold coins. “Every time you sing you are giving away one of those coins. So spend them wisely, my dear, because once they are gone, there won’t be any more.”
On top of Maria’s lifelong insecurity caused by her mother’s obvious preference for her older sister, another Jackie, and the fact she is a plump and stumpy girl with “peasant ankles”, Maria now has to worry about her stash of “gold coins” and the concern they could run out on stage when she is trying to reach upper C.
After the war the young Maria returns to New York, loses weight, meets the man who will be her husband and manager – and fame and fortune follow. But she is never entirely confident.
And then she meets Onassis. What follows is luxury, jewels, fabulous cruises aboard the yacht Christina, the purchase of the island Skorpios, further fame as a soprano, worry about Onassis’s roving eye – and eventual heartbreak.
She died of a heart attack aged just 53.
Obviously for a “historical” novel of this kind, Daisy Goodwin did a huge amount of research, including learning Italian, acquiring some Greek endearments, and taking singing lessons with her own diva “who discovered my high F sharp”.
This is a thoroughly engaging story about an icon, described by Wikipedia as “one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century”, and her troubled life. I enjoyed it enormously.