Maria Callas and the Tale of the Tapeworm

Inspiration is a fickle mistress.  A few weeks ago, I sat down to write a ‘musing’ for the page; however, after considering several topics, and failing to gain traction with any of them, I scrapped the idea and moved on to something else. If I’ve learned one thing as a writer, it’s that if the muse abandons you, don’t sit around and wait for her return.  Like most women, she doesn’t cotton desperation and it’s usually only after you’ve moved on that she’ll reappear. 

If you’ve been following “Savanah’s Swan Song,” you know last week’s chapter featured an illustrated cameo by actress Angelina Jolie, and it was in researching this equally mercurial maven that my muse rematerialized.   I know what you’re thinking: how could an actress as sickly-thin as Angelina Jolie—a woman whose facial shape I once described to a friend as an anorexigon—inspire anything BBW or weight-gain related?  Trust me; I’m as surprised as you are.  Angelina is pretty and talented, but (surprise! surprise!) she isn’t my type.  Had Magmaman not created a series of illustrations of her I never would have incorporated her into the story. 

• Joke of the Day: What is Maleficent’s facial shape?  Hex-a-gone!

But he did so I did.  For narrative purposes, I wanted to know where she was living (for some reason I thought she was an expatriate), how old she was, and what her last movie was.  It was this last query, posed to Google late one night, that sent me down a rabbit hole I wouldn’t emerge from until the wee hours of the morning.

Jolie’s most recent project was a film called Maria, a biopic on opera singer Maria Callas released just a few months ago.  Now, I know virtually nothing about opera.  Whatever interest I had growing up came from this burgeoning BBW-lover’s observation that most opera singers tend to be rotund.  (I remember seeing pictures of a young Montserrat Caballé and thinking she was hot.)  Of course, the incongruity of someone like Angelina portraying a robust soprano prompted further slippage down the hole…and the more I discovered about the late opera singer’s life, the more I realized that Callas would be the topic of my next musing.

Maria Callas was born in New York in 1923 to Greek immigrant parents and, by all accounts, was a vocal phenomenon.  By 1952, before she was even thirty, Callas had sung at every major theatre and opera house across Italy, Greece, and the US, portraying iconic lead roles such as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre and Aida in Aida, and was widely regarded as the world's greatest coloratura soprano—and was well on her way to becoming the greatest opera singer of all time.

It was all downhill from there.

With an unassailable voice, critics of the period aimed at a bigger target—Callas herself.  Following her performance of Aida at the Royal Opera House, one critic wrote, “It’s impossible to tell the difference between the legs of the elephants on stage and those of Maria because she's monstrously fat."  Geesh.  And we thought the tabloids of the 80s and 90s were bad.  As you can tell by the photos I’ve posted, Ms. Callas was never close to “monstrously fat,” especially by opera standards.  At her heaviest she was about 200 pounds and, at 5’8,” wore it well. 

• Callas at her heaviest, circa 1952 

But did the opera community rush to her defense in light of such vicious and unwarranted criticism?  Nope.

In 1951, Callas met Sir Rudolf Bing, a British opera impresario serving as the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, who was “repelled by her fat and awkward appearance” and refused to offer her a contract.  This was followed by a meeting with Franco Zeffirelli, one of the most significant opera and theatre directors of the post–World War II era, who, after querying loudly during a performance, “Why is she so fat?” also refused to work with her. 

Beyond the strange irony of an opera singer being fat-shamed, keep in mind that this was in the 1950s, when voluptuousness was in and Marilyn Monroe was Hollywood’s Golden Girl.  Curves were desirable and companies even promoted supplements and other remedies to assist women with filling them out.  (As an aside, vintage ads for these weight-gain products were a topic I considered for a musing.)   I guess it just goes to show that man’s inhumanity to man won't be mitigated by merit or fashion. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ms. Callas developed a crippling self-image problem.  While her treatment was shameful, the drastic measures she took to deal with it were the beginning of the end of her career and what makes Callas’ tale as tragic as the operas she starred in.

In 1953, Callas traveled to Switzerland for medical treatment and promptly lost eighty pounds.  Although there is much conjecture as to how Callas’ rapid weight loss was achieved, good old-fashioned diet and exercise aren’t generally cited.  Some suggest it was early bariatric surgery; others—including a few of Callas’ closest friends—claim she willingly ingested a tapeworm, and there are still others who attribute it to a diet of "physiologic pasta." 

(NOTA BENE: “Physiologic pasta” is referenced in several articles and stories on Callas, but never explained and I still have no idea what it is.  It doesn’t sound tasty!)

Regardless of the extreme measures Callas took to achieve her weight loss, they proved an immediate, albeit short-term, boost to her career.  Rudolf Bing, who remembered Callas as being "monstrously fat" in 1951, stated that after the weight loss, Callas was an "astonishing, svelte, striking woman."  Famed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who had also been critical of Callas’ size, remarked upon her return, "What have you done with all that weight? How did you make yourself so beautiful?”  The global reaction was even stronger.  While she was already famous in the opera world, Callas’ drastic physical transformation, as well as the speculation surrounding its method of achievement, made her an International celebrity. 

• Callas with Marilyn Monroe in 1962, whose own voluptuous figure was beginning to frail.  

Unfortunately, Callas lost something else with all that weight: her voice. Music producer Walter Legge, who produced nearly all of Callas' recordings, states that Callas "ran into vocal difficulties as early as 1954" and that during the recording of La Forza del Destino, which commenced immediately after her weight loss, the wobble in Callas’ voice was so pronounced that he joked they "would need to give away seasickness pills with every record."

While Mr. Legge didn’t directly attribute Callas’ vocal issues to her weight loss, soprano Joan Sutherland, a contemporary of Callas, did.  “Hearing Callas in 1952 was a shock, a wonderful shock,” the singer said.  “You just got shivers up and down the spine. It was such a big sound.  When she lost the weight, she couldn't seem to sustain it, and the body seemed to be too frail to support it.”  Callas’ husband, Michal Scott, similarly proposed that Callas' loss of strength and breath support was directly caused by her rapid and progressive weight loss.

As the loss of body mass made it more difficult for Callas to support her voice, it triggered further vocal strain and, by the late 1950s, she was known less as a singer and more as a scandalous socialite, especially after engaging in a steamy extramarital affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.  By the age of forty, Callas’ career was effectively over.  She spent her last years living in isolation in Paris before dying of a heart attack at age 53, a time when, according to Walter Legge, "she ought still to have been singing magnificently."

• The last known photo of Callas at age 53.  

I probably won’t watch the Maria Callas biopic.  It would be too depressing.  I’m no size acceptance warrior, but I hate that a sublime talent like Callas was snuffed out, at least in part, because of fat-shaming.  And while her weight loss undoubtedly contributed to her International fame (and likely expedited society’s transition to the ‘thin is in’ 60s), it’s fair to wonder if she would have died so young and so alone had she remained a plump dynamo with a divine voice. 

While Ms. Callas isn’t around to answer the question of “was it all worth it,” it was posed to one of her close friends, music critic John Ardoin, following her death:

“That's such a difficult question.  There are people – certain people who are blessed, and cursed, with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. Maria Callas was one of those people.”

--Maverick