Passionate Greeks - WHY AND WHY NOT by Nelson A. Navarro

NEW YORK – The ill-starred romance of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis has got to be one of the most enduring tearjerkers of all time. No matter how many times you’ve heard of their passionate and impossible love turning into its own cruel punishment, you cannot but wish they had somehow found a way to marry and live happily ever after.

Perhaps their tragic fate had something to do with the gods envying the lovers for having it all – beauty and brains, wealth and power, and to top it all, the promise of happiness.

In 1959, when their great romance began during a Mediterranean cruise, Callas was the prima donna assoluta of opera, the most exacting art of all. Onassis was this fabulous shipping magnate who turned everything he touched into gold.

Certain things were amiss: They were very much married and their respective spouses, along with Sir Winston Churchill and his Lady Clementine, were also aboard the ship of dreams, the Christina, on that memorable trip.

The paparazzi, of course, descended upon the erring lovers in the merciless manner they would later visit upon Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Callas promptly ditched Battista Meneghini, her husband and manager. Onassis was divorced by Tina Livanos, a pretty Greek heiress in her own right. The lovers would virtually live as man and wife, but marriage was not to be in the cards.

Eight years would pass until, one day, there came the shocker that Onassis had dumped Callas for Jackie Kennedy, JFK’s widow and the world’s most-coveted trophy wife.

Told and retold by countless books, articles and memoirs, this saga of love and betrayal may be up for some drastic refurbishing and fresh insight with the recent release of Nicholas Gage’s Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95).

What makes Gage’s account worth the bother is that, like the subjects of the dual biography, he happens to be of Greek descent and one who doesn’t hesitate to plumb into the wisdom and superstition of ancient Greece to explain the reckless thinking and behavior of Callas and Onassis.

Although both were not born in Greece (Callas in New York, Onassis in Turkey), they proudly and openly celebrated their Greek identity all their lives.

Callas, for instance, was haunted by what a Turkish fortune teller had foretold: That she would die young but not suffer much pain in dying. (She died at 53, suddenly.)

Onassis could endure all trials and tribulations but what he could not bear was the tragic loss of his and Tina’s only son, Alexander. The young man’s death in a plane crash was so much akin to Icarus falling from the sky.

In Greek Fire, Gage employs the sharp investigative reporting skills he honed at the New York Times to break new ground or straighten the record on the following important points of the Callas-Onassis story:

*Both the Meneghini and Onassis marriages were on the rocks long before the 1959 cruise. The miscalculation of Callas was that Menighini would shut up (he made trouble for years) and Onassis would marry her; that of Onassis was that he could keep both his wife and Maria..

*The shipboard romance resulted in the secret pregnancy of Callas. A baby boy was born but died within two hours of birth. A later story about Callas getting an abortion upon orders of Onassis appears to have been concocted by Callas to spite Ari for marrying Jackie.

*Contrary to popular belief, the liaison never ended; it was resumed within days of the wedding to Jackie, which Onassis came to bitterly regret. He was about to divorce Jackie when he died in 1975. Callas died two years later, many suspected, because there was no more Ari to live for.

*Callas was always in fear of losing her voice. She was told in the late 1950s that ruined it by singing "too strongly" and with such a wide and punishing repertoire from Brunnhilde to Tosca to Elvira in I Puritani. By the time she met Onassis, she was bent on retiring and being just a married woman and mother. Two comeback attempts fell flat.

*Fat and ugly and unloved in her youth, Callas lost 65 pounds in 1953 to become a slim and ravishing beauty. Her beauty secret? She voluntarily swallowed a tapeworm.

But why did Callas and Onassis love each other with such ferocity in spite and despite the forces against them?

Like many Greeks, according to Gage, they shared a deeply-held belief best expressed by Plato: "The idea that each person is half of what was once a whole and spends his or her whole life searching for the other individual who will make him complete."

The diva and the tycoon were fortunate to find each other, but they somehow let go. Presumably, in another life they’re still searching.

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Nelson A. Navarro’s e-mail address: <[email protected]>