“We always do, Joe,” she said softly. It wasn’t quite true, but she knew he liked to think they were close, and it suited her to let him think that.
“You’ve moved around too much since you got married. You need a proper home in D.C., somewhere to raise your family. What if I help you get somewhere real nice?”
“Are you trying to bribe me?” She gazed at the darkening ocean. Fishing boats were heading out, their lights blinking as they rose and dipped on the waves.
“I wouldn’t call it that. I want you to be happy and I’m asking you to tell me what that would take.”
Her eyes blurred with tears, and she was glad of the dark and the wind blowing into her face, so that he wouldn’t realize it. Did any of them know what it felt like to have lost two babies when the other Kennedy wives and daughters were producing grandchildren like clockwork? To have to attend their baby showers and christenings was agony.
“He does love you,” Joe continued. “As much as he is capable of loving anyone. But he’s thoughtless. You have to be very self-sufficient to be with my son.”
“You can say that again.” She wiped her eyes quickly with the edge of her wrap.
“You should get pregnant again soon, Jackie,” he said. “I can’t help you with that, but you know I’m right.”
“You’re an interfering old goat, Joe.” She laughed to mask her embarrassment. Sexual relations with Jack had been almost nonexistent since Arabella had died. She was too angry with him. She should revive their sex life; she knew she should. It wasn’t good for a marriage to let these things slide.
They stopped when they reached the end of the beach, where a fence separated them from the rocks beyond.
“Start house hunting,” he said. “Let me know when you find one you like. Decorate it however you want. Build a nest.”
Jackie nodded. She would enjoy that. As it happened, she already had a picture of her ideal house in mind. And perhaps, if there was any cash left over, they could buy their own place in Hyannis Port and not have to stay at the family home anymore. She’d like that.
A FEW MONTHS later, a Washington paper printed a story claiming that Jackie had been thinking of leaving her senator husband but that Joe Kennedy had bribed her to stay by giving her a check for a million dollars. Where did they get these stories with their tiny kernels of truth? she wondered. It was alarming to think there could be a leak so close to home.
She called her father-in-law, assuming he would have seen the story too. “Only a million, Joe?” she teased. “Why not ten million?”
He laughed, but she could sense caution. “Worth it at any price,” he said at last.
“I’ve got some news for you.” She crossed her fingers before continuing, so she didn’t jinx it. “I don’t want everyone to know yet because it’s early days but I followed your advice. I’m pregnant.”
“That’s wonderful!” he cried, and she could hear that he was grinning. “Third time lucky, eh?”
“Third time lucky,” she agreed, but she kept her fingers crossed after they got off the phone. At long last she hoped to give Jack a child, but she couldn’t help feeling scared. She didn’t know how she would bear it if anything went wrong this time.
Chapter 7
Milan
April 1958
It was as if the Rome fiasco had unleashed whole new levels of abuse on Maria’s head. Her voice was as strong as ever and all her performances were sellouts, but the papers insisted she was a diva, a tigress, a monster, and wouldn’t have it any other way. They twisted the facts. One piece reported that she had insisted on rehearsing for six hours straight when she wasn’t happy with a production; it was true, but the director had agreed with her, and the press weren’t attacking him. She admitted to being a perfectionist about her work, but she always behaved with professionalism and never lost her temper, seldom even raising her voice. Yet when photographers snapped pictures of her in airports and emerging from stage doors, editors always chose the ones that made her look as if she were snarling or scowling.
“Does the public truly believe I am this vile creature?” she asked Battista, wincing at a particularly unflattering shot.
“Ignore it,” he said, without answering the question. “Who cares? Your friends know the real you.”
He didn’t understand her need to be liked. She couldn’t stand to have anyone think badly of her. She’d had a difficult childhood, with a mother who blatantly favored her elder, prettier, daintier daughter, Jacinthy. Maria grew up feeling ugly and unlovable, with her voice the only saving grace, so the news stories were rubbing salt in decades-old wounds.
What had she done to deserve this media treatment except be successful? Was she being punished for that, as she had been in the early days of her career when other singers resented her getting solo roles?
Some of the blame lay with La Scala’s press office, who fueled the flames by inventing a rivalry between Maria and another first soprano in the company, Renata Tebaldi: “Clash of the Prima Donnas!” It made good copy, but there was little truth in it. Renata was trained in the verismo school, which focused on a strongly produced tone and dropped the coloratura, while Maria trained in bel canto and had a full armory of trills and vocal flexibility. That meant they gravitated toward different repertoires. Maria didn’t know Renata well, but they were perfectly friendly whenever they met.
All the same, the rumor that they were rivals spread like the plague among Milanese opera lovers. They were a passionate bunch, never slow to express their opinions. If a singer missed a note, they would sing it back to him or her. If a performance was disappointing, the booing and hissing began. Their actions were in complete contrast to the hushed respect of other concert halls, especially London’s, where the audience was so polite that they would never dream of interrupting a performance. Maria admired the Milanese’s love of opera but not their bad manners.
It got to the point that one section of the La Scala auditorium was occupied by Renata Tebaldi’s supporters and another by Maria’s. Whenever she stepped onstage, Renata’s followers would shout abuse, and hers would try to drown them out with cheers. The moments before she opened her mouth to sing were like an ancient Roman gladiatorial contest: “Kill her!” “No, let her live another day.”
“Why can’t I just sing, without all the politics?” she pleaded with the press office, but they shrugged in that maddening Italian fashion, as if to say, “What can we do? It’s just the way things are.”
IN THE SPRING of 1958, Maria was rehearsing two productions back-to-back: Anna Bolena and Il Pirata. That was manageable, but for some reason Ghiringhelli, the artistic director of La Scala, was being childish and petulant. One morning, when he saw her entering through the stage door, he ducked behind a piece of scenery and disappeared, knocking over some wooden castle battlements that hit the floor with a resounding clatter.
“What’s eating him?” she asked the doorman, and he shook his head in bewilderment.
Ghiringhelli sat near the back of the auditorium during rehearsal that day and rushed out at the end before Maria could ask him for feedback.
“Have I done something to upset him?” she asked a nearby tenor.