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Midnight Polish. The war over, Maria returned to New York. The Met offered her the role of Madame Butterfly, but she did not dare try it at her weight. A chance to sing in Chicago blew up when the company went broke. For two years she remained in New York, studying, practicing and eating, but never singing in public. Discouraged and despondent, she sailed for Italy, where she got a job in Verona (at $63 a performance), an audition but no job at La Scala (the director told her that she had lots of faults).
"I knew I had failed," she says. "All that work and all those years were for nothing. I understood why people kill themselves. One thing I learned-don't ask anybody for favors. You won't get anything anyway."
But she had met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a millionaire building-materials tycoon and bon vivant more than twice her age. He wooed her in courtly fashion, and in the white-haired Meneghini, fat, unloved Maria found love for the first time. In 1949 they were married.
Meneghini sold out his business, invested the proceeds in real estate, and became Maria's private impresario and only agent. "Why should I give those damned agencies 10% or 20% of what I make?" she asked. Meneghini coaxed old Conductor Tullio Serafin, now 77, to coach her, and the two went to work. In Turin, before she was to appear as Aida, a curious critic wandered into the theater at 9 a.m. to find her onstage, going over every passage again and again. while Serafin interrupted, corrected, polished tirelessly. They worked until midnight, were at it again early next day. Callas' Aida became Turin's biggest postwar success.
First-Night Vespers. For the next four years, Serafin whipped her through one role after another, and Maria Callas began to find her niche. She blanketed Italy with her performances, made two tours to Latin America, getting wilder receptions at every appearance. In Genoa cheering fans carried her on their shoulders through the streets. In Trieste she was hailed as the "greatest Norma in history." But Maria decided that she was miserable. "I hated singing," she says. "I was terribly in love. It took me away from my husband." A shipboard companion remembers her on a trip to Latin America:
"All she did was eat, sleep, sprawl in her bunk, and talk about her husband: how tender he was, how he spread flowers around their bed."
But when Meneghini suggested that she give up singing, her demon drove her on. Success was in sight. La Scala asked her to do a guest performance of Aida. She accepted, but professed to scoff at the honor: "Sure, it's a magnificent theater. But me, I'm myopic. For me, theaters all look alike. La Scala is La Scala, but I'm Callas. and I'm myopic. Ecco!"
Her performance was a fair success, and La Scala offered her another guest appearance. But Callas had the scent of triumph in her nostrils. Haughtily, she refused. They would hire her as a full-fledged member of the company, or they would not get her at all. "They expected me to beg for a role. I would rather have died," she told friends. In 1951 La Scala capitulated. At the age of 28, she opened the Scala season in Sicilian Vespers.