Word: fats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hissing Snakes. Maria Callas clawed her way to her present eminence with a ruthless ferocity that awes her enemies and has left her few professional friends. Some have helped her on her way. But from the first the lonely, fat girl from Manhattan saw herself pitted single-handed against a world of enemies. In her triumph, she takes fierce pride in her defiant self-reliance. At La Scala supporters of a rival diva hiss her regularly. It only arouses Callas to cold fury...
...from job to job. The family moved from one cheap apartment to another, the parents always squabbling, often on the verge of breaking up. Maria remembers her childhood with bitterness: "My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted." Forced to wear heavy spectacles for her myopic eyes, little Maria avoided schoolmates, ate compulsively (sometimes a whole pound of cheese at breakfast). "I hated school, I hated everybody. I got fatter...
...leading singer in Athens' National Opera Company became ill. Maria was invited to take over the role of Tosca on 24 hours' notice. Backstage before the show, she overheard a male voice saying: "That fat bitch will never carry it off." With a shriek of rage, she leaped at the speaker, tore his shirt and bloodied his nose. Maria sang that night with a puffy eye. But she got raves from Athens critics...
...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...
Someone Possessed. Maria Callas was still fat and half sick. She was inclined to break out in rashes and blotches; she was often feverish; her legs became painfully swollen. She took her resentments out on the people around her. Her first victim was another soprano, Renata Tebaldi, long-standing favorite of Scala audiences, possessor of a voice of creamy softness, musicianship of delicate sensibility, and a temperament to match. She was no match for Callas. From the beginning the two women glowered. Tebaldi stayed away from Callas' performances; Callas, on the warpath, sat in a prominent box at Tebaldi...