Greek Fire : The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis - Softcover

Nicholas Gage

4.01

306 ratings by Goodreads

9780330484442: Greek Fire : The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330484443 ISBN 13: 9780330484442

Publisher: Pan Books, 2001

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The love affair of two twentieth-century icons - creators of their own grand opera. Onassis, one-time Anatolian refugee, built one of the world's greatest shipping fortunes; his life defined the jet set. Callas, defiantly Greek yet Manhattan-born, was acclaimed as the Voice of the Century. Almost as famously, she transformed not only opera but herself from dumpy, awkward ingenue to iconic sylph. Together, they shared a love that was passionate, volatile and ill-fated - yet indelible. A day-by-day recreation of the infamous 1959 cruise aboard Onassis's yacht during which the union was cemented ('It was as if a fire were consuming them both', remarked Maria's forsaken husband), and many intimates and family members speaking frankly for the first time, make this the definitive account. 'The legend has been spectacularly revived by Gage's riveting book.' Classic FM - The Magazine 'Gage ...tells this tale with a magisterial authority.' Hugh Massingberd, Mail on Sunday

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Review:

Nicholas Gage's meticulously documented and consistently absorbing account chronicles the stormy love affair between Maria Callas (1923-77) and Aristotle Onassis (1906-75). Gage sees the soprano who reinvented the art of opera and the tycoon who transformed the shipping industry as kindred spirits, drawn into romance by a deep connection to their Greek origins and a shared sense that, despite all they had achieved, something was missing. They found that absent element in a once-in-a-lifetime passion, which Onassis betrayed by marrying Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968. Gage appears to share the view of the tycoon's Greek coterie, who viewed this marriage as an act of hubris that inevitably led to financial and personal reversals which embittered Onassis in his final years. But he doesn't blame the tycoon for Callas's decline, pointing out that by the time they met, she was already experiencing severe vocal problems and was eager for respite from her taxing performance commitments. In any case, her career and his business dealings take a back seat here to Gage's evocative portrait of his subjects' outsized personalities and the jet-set society in the gaudy postwar years. Some of the new information is revelatory, particularly Gage's persuasive contention that Callas bore Onassis a son who died hours after his birth in 1960. At other times his investigative-journalist approach seems too weighty for this highly personal story of love, rage, and big, big egos. Fortunately, these lapses don't seriously mar a text distinguished by smooth prose, the seamless interweaving of several narrative strands, and a warm sympathy for its genuinely tragic protagonists. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Widely respected writer and journalist Nicholas Gage has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and is producer of several major motion pictures. Author of the international bestsellers Eleni and Eleni's children (Transworld), Greek by birth and now resident in the US, intimates and family members of both Callas and Onassis have talked to him as never before, many for the first time.

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