Snippets of Callas' Cute and Funny Quips💡

Salut !

Like promised last week, I'll share a couple of fun snippets of my findings from Maria Callas' letters and memoirs this week. It has definitely been interesting to discover Callas' thoughts in different eras of her life, and I think she has a very fun and beautiful way of expressing herself. It truly feels like time travel to read someone's correspondance like this and it offers such an intimate view on her life and the realities of having a high-level career and status like she did. I'm looking forward to having a more of a general idea of her thoughts on clothing, style and beauty after I've written my essay, but in the meantime, here are some rather funny and cute things that I've gathered so far from the book:

• The book includes a letter from Callas' father George Callas from 1957, and it's just so cute that he mentions at the end of the letter that he'll send the lipstick that Maria asked for, but that he doesn't know if it is the shade that she wanted, because she hadn't written that detail to him. It does feel strange that Callas would've asked for a lipstick from her father and not indicate the color, but maybe she really just forgot to mention it (p.242).😀
• Callas was performing in Buenos Aires in 1949 and in one of the multiple letters she sent to her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini, she said that for one, the coffee is disgusting there, and that the people in Italy are more elegant and well-mannered, and that she prefers her life in Italy rather than there in Buenos Aires at the moment (p. 127). Callas wasn't very impressed with the clothing styles of the Mexicans of that era either because she wrote to her husband in 1950 from Mexico that the weather is very hot there, but that she won't buy any summer clothes there, because they are just 'horrible' (p. 170).😆
• In Trieste in 1948 Callas had a problem with her opera costumes for Verdi's La Forza del destino -opera, because they smelled so much like sweat that it almost made her faint. Apparently she had to use someone else's old costumes that smelled so bad, and even her colleagues were complaining about it, because they made the whole dressing room smell terrible (p. 96). I bet many opera singers and theatre actors can relate to this problem!
• Callas broke a bone in her ribcage on her travels in the US with her friends in 1968, and in consequence her friends had an inside joke to call her 'Maria Click' after the incident because of the sound that her ribcage made when walking.😂 Callas found it funny too, because she signed her letter to her friend John Ardoin as 'Maria Click' after getting home from her travels.
• Callas asked twice her dear maestra and singing teacher Elvira de Hidalgo in her letters that she'd write with a clearer handwriting, because sometimes she gets tired of reading her 'calligraphy' (p. 403, 408). I can very well imagine that De Hidalgo, who was born in 1892, had such a handwriting. That said, Callas' own handwriting isn't that clear either. The little I've seen of Callas' handwriting, it has required for me to stare at it for a while to learn to decipher her writing.✍️
• I love how Callas began her letter to her housemaid Bruna Lupoli in 1959 on board Aristotle Onassis' yacht Christina: "A little word from this little boat..." [sic] The irony is clear considering that Christina is 99,13 metres long and was the 59th largest luxury yacht in the world even in 2022, according to Google.😜

That's it for this time! I hope you find Callas' tales as amusing as I do, and have a stylish week!

Bisous,

Elle

Recent delights❣️

• I watched the film Giant from 1956 and I'm quite impressed by it! I'm not sure I'm such a fan of the plot, but I feel it's a very interesting film at least in terms of its cinematography. It was fun for me to see James Dean and Rock Hudson in a film for the first time (Callas actually wrote a letter to Hudson in 1971 to ask him to appear in a gala), and Elizabeth Taylor is just ravishing in many scenes (she met Callas at least once, in fact on the night when Onassis married Jackie Kennedy). It also didn't hurt that the costume design of the film was most of the time like straight from a Ralph Lauren western-inspired catalog.🤓
• Here's a nice video of Anna Wintour interviewing Victoria Beckham on her thoughts after her first show at the Paris Fashion Week.
• Here's my favorite song of the moment: Mel Tormé singing Too Close for Comfort with The Marty Paich Orchestra