Word: joans
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...exercise. Handel's original Alcina, Anna Strada, was unkindly described by a contemporary as having "so little of Venus in her appearance, that she was usually called the Pig." But more than anyone else, it was a 33-year-old Australian, 225 years later, who put Alcina center stage. Joan Sutherland's stupendous stamina and strength in Franco Zeffirelli's 1960 production at La Fenice not only earned her the title of La Stupenda but single-handedly brought this neglected opera back into the repertoire. Since being snapped up by New York's Metropolitan Opera for its young artists' development...
Simon had attained fame and wealth, and, to observers, his marriage seemed idyllic. But when he was 40 and in a brief mid-life crisis of his own, he thought of divorce. "I felt my mortality and told Joan over lunch that I wanted to leave and start all over again. We'd married young, I explained, and I needed to experience life. She smiled benignly and said, 'That's O.K.' After five seconds I told her, 'Never mind.' I had asked for her permission to get out, and she had given it. I no longer felt she was controlling...
...When Joan was struck by cancer at 38, Simon says, "the doctor told me how long she had to live, and I decided we wouldn't tell her. But she knew. And only once did she ever show that she was scared." Simon's way of handling the strain was to throw himself into writing about the randomness and futility of life in The Good Doctor (1973), an attempt at dramatizing Chekhov-like stories, and God's Favorite (1974), a deliberately vulgar retelling of the Book of Job. Both were among the few misfires in his career, artistically and commercially...
While Simon was recovering from his bereavement, he met Actress Marsha Mason at an audition for The Good Doctor. The mutual attraction was immediate. He married her 2½ weeks after they met, "And that was with one postponement," he adds. Simon encountered little resistance to the abrupt romance from Joan's mother Helen Bairn or daughters Ellen, then 16, and Nancy, then 10. Nancy explains: "We responded to Marsha right away. She was warm and funny, and we needed to become a family again...
Simon bared his rage and guilt at Joan's death and recounted his quick marriage to Mason in Chapter Two (1977). That put him back on stride, and every stage work since?from the musical They 're Playing Our Song (1979) to the trilogy?has clicked. Meanwhile, the new marriage thrived for about eight years, then ended in divorce in 1982. Although Simon wrote five films for her to star in (notably 1977's The Goodbye Girl), part of the problem was career conflict. There were other tensions, about which they are enigmatic. "Marsha was starting to find new ways...