AN ARIA OF ANGUISH

On stage, Maria Callas was an imperious prima donna. But as a new book lays bare, in private the great soprano was drugged, sexually abused and ‘tortured’ by her billionaire lover, Aristotle Onassis – then dumped for Jackie Kennedy

- TOM LEONARD

HER fans called her La Divina – the divine – and Maria Callas seemed to heartily agree with this description of her. “I have been touched by the hand of God,” said the singer, who was hailed by her devotees as the greatest soprano.

A new biography, drawing on her previously unpublished letters, makes exactly the opposite claim, however: based on all the suffering and betrayal she endured in her glittering but turbulent life, it might seem to some that Maria was cursed.

ARI ONASSIS’ ‘DEPRAVED’ SEXUAL REQUESTS SHOCKED EVEN THE NOTORIOUS PARIS BROTHEL KEEPER, MADAME CLAUDE

She was regularly drugged by her violent lover, Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, so he could sexually abuse her; swindled by her husband and father, and blackmailed by a mother who tried to force her into prostitution.

Maria the singer may have had the upper hand in the music world but Maria the woman was a victim of circumstance, says biographer Lyndsy Spence, author of Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas.

Maria has been the subject of almost 30 biographies, but Spence has been able to shed revealing new light on the operatic superstar after obtaining access to boxes of her letters that have been sitting unexamined in an archive at Stanford University, California.

The correspondence with her husband and agent, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, shows “she was really so subservient and obedient to him, and I started to realise that is who she was as a woman”, Spence says.

“She was such a submissive person and that really contrasts with Callas the diva. And when you’re that way inclined, of course you attract abusers.”

And that includes Meneghini, Onassis and even her own parents, adds her biographer.