Word: meneghini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real name was Maria Kalogeropoulos. Born in Manhattan in 1923 of Greek parents, she studied music in Greece-she and her mother were trapped there by the outbreak of World War II. In 1949 she married Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an Italian construction tycoon twice her age. Meneghini sold his business, put Maria on her famous diet and became her manager. He showered her with clusters of jewelry for each new role she sang. But at the Metropolitan Opera, he insisted on receiving her salary in cash before each night's performance. This so enraged Met General Manager Rudolf Bing...
...divorced Meneghini in 1959 to live with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate. The society columns buzzed regularly for years with accounts of their parties and travels aboard an assortment of yachts. If she was hurt when he abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968, she never showed it. As Callas liked to say, "I hate to be pitied, and I never pitied anyone...
...tiffs with Maria Callas (he fired her in 1959, re-engaged her in 1965 for two Toscas), Bing regards her Met debut in 1956 in Norma as "the most exciting of all such in my time at the Metropolitan." Bing also recalls Callas' husband and manager Battista Meneghini, who insisted on being paid in cash before the curtain rose every night. Callas' fee then was $1,000. "Toward the end," recalled Bing, "I had him paid in five-dollar bills, to make a wad uncomfortably large for him to carry...
Divorced. By Maria Callas, 47, tempestuous actress and opera diva: Giovanni Battista Meneghini, 75, Italian industrialist; after 22 years of marriage, the last twelve of which were spent in separation; in Brescia, Italy, following passage of a new Italian law allowing couples who have been legally separated for five years to divorce...
...became a French citizen and got a French divorce to marry his second wife, and Carlo Ponti, who went the same route to wed Sophia Loren. Under the new law, Gina Lollobrigida can Italianize her 1968 Austrian divorce from Milko Skofic, and Maria Callas can shed Giovanni Battista Meneghini, from whom she has been separated for eleven years...