Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (10 page)

“We’re not sure we want to take you right now,” Ms. Stevens told me, “but . . . don’t accept any offers from any other programs until you talk to me first, okay?”

Then she added some off-the-record advice: “I think you have a glorious voice, but if you don’t do something about your weight, you won’t have a career.”

I was hurt by the comment, of course. I figured if they really wanted me, my weight wouldn’t matter. So I didn’t call them before accepting another offer.

My other audition that year was for the apprentice program at the San Francisco Opera company. Every year they held rigorous auditions for up to a thousand hopefuls and winnowed the number down to twenty-three singers who would then enter the company’s prestigious Merola Opera Program, a summer of intense voice, body, and acting training. From there, one could advance to their
Western Opera Theater tour that lasted five months, and finally to the program’s third tier, the two-year Adler Fellowship program in residence, where you take master classes, do small roles at the opera, and understudy leads.

Jane and I worked hard for months preparing five arias that would be my go-to audition arias in the future: “Leise leise, fromme Weise” (from Weber’s
Der Freischütz
); “Come scoglio” (from Mozart’s
Così fan tutte
); “Il est doux, il est bon” (from Massenet’s
Hérodiade
); “Ernani, Ernani, involami” (from Verdi’s
Ernani
); and “Nun eilt herbei, Witz, heit’re Laune” (from Nicolai’s
Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor
). When I got onstage for my audition, I had that coming-together feeling of preparation meeting opportunity: I won a place in the Merola Program for that summer.

I had done well at these two auditions, but in general, auditions would never be my strong suit. I never felt good about them because I was sensitive about being judged in general, and my weight added to my self-consciousness.

It’s not that I’m not competitive—in fact, when I was in a competition I usually sang the piss out of whatever I was singing—and won. That’s because in a competition it was all about “the voice”—and that voice could come in any package (or at least, in those days it could. Maybe not so much anymore).

But when I was auditioning, I walked into the room knowing that the person I was singing for had a preconceived idea of what they wanted the character to
look
like. Singers deal with that all the time, losing jobs sometimes even if they have the wrong eye color. After all, even Tosca is supposed to have brown eyes, telling the painter Cavaradossi to paint the Madonna’s eyes brown to match her own. I was a blue-eyed, 300-pound Tosca and managed to pull that off. Had I auditioned for that role, I would have known from the outset that I didn’t have the right look, and knowing that would have affected my performance.

I could never get to the same level of performance in an audition as I could in a competition, because how I looked was being scrutinized so closely. I can’t recall a time when I ever got a job from an audition. In the early days, I often got roles by winning contests that had a performance attached to them—like the Tchaikovsky competition in 1990. The prize was a performance at the Ravenna Festival in Italy. From that, Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly heard me and invited me to sing in Bologna. I won a lot of roles when I paired “Leise leise” and “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” from Puccini’s
Manon Lescaut
together in a competition, because the two arias are so dissimilar they showed my versatility. American conductor James Conlon, the current music director of the Los Angeles Opera, heard me sing those two arias at a competition very early in my career and it led to many future roles with him, starting with my debut and only official performance at La Scala in Weber’s
Oberon
(though I must admit I cringe when I remember it: I squeezed all 290 pounds of me into a lime-green harem-pants-and-turban costume—not a great look for me).

The only audition I ever remember feeling sure I aced was for the Grand Opera of Geneva. I sang a Mozart, a Weber, and a Verdi—and sang them so well I was certain I’d get the job. Nope! I found out later from my manager that I didn’t get it because I was so heavy—and that they’d made their decision about me the moment I walked out onstage. Still, they let me sing three very difficult arias. It’s no wonder I was so sensitive about the audition process.

THE DECISION TO
leave school early was one of the easiest decisions I ever made. I was twenty-four years old in the summer of ’85, and my bags were packed and in the car, and so was John. We decided he’d leave his classes at Cal State, too, and come to San Francisco with me and we’d live together in sin. My parents weren’t delighted about that, but they knew they couldn’t tell me what to do anymore.

I didn’t leave town without a little farewell performance, however. Two, to be exact.

I said goodbye to my parents and my childhood the best way I knew how—in song. Just before John and I took off, I sang at two weddings in the space of one week—strangely enough, for both of my parents. Mom had met Tim, a warehouse worker, at our church, and Dad had proposed to his secretary, Lynn. Dad got married on a Friday night in Newport Beach and had a reception at one of those eighteenth-century-themed restaurants with waitresses dressed as wenches; Mom got married at her new home in East Anaheim the following Saturday. I couldn’t help but feel it was a race between them—
I’ll show you, I’ll get married, too!

For Dad and his new wife, I sang Karen Carpenter’s “We’ve Only Just Begun”; for Mom and her new husband, I sang “The Lord’s Prayer.” It was strange for me to be singing at my parents’ weddings to other people. At the time, I didn’t feel so ready to embrace these newcomers into the family. (Later, Lynn and I would become very close.) But I knew it was a time for changes and moving on, for me and for my parents, and that we all needed fresh starts with new people and new surroundings.

This time, leaving home was easy. I was stronger and had a definite path, and I wasn’t doing it alone. After the weddings, I didn’t stay around long for any encores—I was eager to get on my new road.

Leaving Jane, on the other hand, was emotional for both of us. Even though I planned to come back every few months to see her and continue our sessions when we could, we hugged goodbye in the driveway outside her house as John waited for me in the car, and we had one of our little cries. And just for old time’s sake, I gave Jane a farewell dose of my classic low self-esteem rant, lest she miss it while I was gone.

“Jane, I don’t know if I can do this . . . if I’ll ever amount to anything.”

“Be patient, Debbie. Have faith. Even if you don’t know it, I’ve known it all along—you have it in you to do it.”

Jane believed in me. The big question was, did I believe in me? John and I took off and drove north on Interstate 5, toward my future, whatever it might be.

ONCE I ARRIVED
in San Francisco, there was no turning back—my road was clear and I was moving forward with a single purpose: I was going to be an opera singer.

The next few years would consist of intense coaching in movement, acting, breath work, musical style, and role preparation . . . followed by four months touring the country on a Greyhound bus with my fellow apprentices . . . then two years studying small roles and understudying seven major operatic roles, including Donna Anna in Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, Fiordiligi in
Così fan tutte
, Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s
Pique Dame
, Amelia in Verdi’s
Un ballo in maschera
, and Leonora in Verdi’s
Il trovatore
.

For the first time in my life, I was supporting myself fully with music. The company gave me a yearly salary of $35,000 and John found a job at a local Good Guys, selling electronics. We rented a little one-bedroom apartment on Franklin Street, two blocks from the opera house and in the heart of downtown San Francisco, sandwiched between City Hall and the Courthouse. It didn’t occur to us to go to that Courthouse next door and get married—we planned to live in sin for a while and see where it took us.

SOME OF THE
most invaluable roles for a young opera-singer-in-training are the ones that you understudy. In opera, we call under
studies “covers”—I’m not sure why. I liked to call them the “cover your butts,” and I covered many a well-sized butt in my early days (and later on, had my own butt covered).

I understudied for top sopranos like Leontyne Price, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Jessye Norman—the great divas of the era, because I sang in the same “fach” as they did.
Fach
is a German word meaning “compartment,” and in the opera world we use it as a way to categorize voices. A singer’s fach is his or her comfort zone, the place where one naturally belongs on the spectrum from bass baritone to coloratura soprano, the vocal range where one’s voice is most natural, expressive, and powerful without strain.

Starting out in San Francisco, I was a “spinto” soprano, which meant I could push my voice (“spinto” means “pushed” in Italian) to reach large, dramatic climaxes. Jane Paul and I did a lot of work on strengthening my upper register when I was her student.

From there, the natural progression of my voice over time would grow and mature to being a “jugendlich-dramatischer” (a young dramatic soprano), and then, finally, a dramatic soprano, which is my category today, where I sing over big orchestras and perform roles of soaring gravitas.

Covering a lead role is both exhilarating and frustrating. To an opera singer trying to break into the scene, performing a coveted role in a major opera house could ignite one’s career; all it takes is a sniffle coming from the leading lady’s dressing room. But more often than not it’s frustrating. You can sit in “the house” for hours and hours every day for the entire run of an opera, watching the person you are understudying rehearse and perform, and never get onstage to sing those arias yourself. It’s tedious and exasperating because, as a singer, you have to have a certain amount of ego to start with (to my parents’ dismay) and believe you can do the role. Sometimes, you even believe you can do it better than the person who’s up there (and in some cases that may be true).

Sometimes you get so close to going on—you’re wearing the
big gown, the big wig, the big makeup—that you can taste it. But then . . .

One of my first big “cover” assignments was to understudy Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price, who was then very famous and poised to star as Amelia in
Un ballo in maschera
at the San Francisco Opera House.

It was several weeks before my cover assignment was to begin. I was on a bus at the time, traveling somewhere from Biloxi, Mississippi, to Wichita, Kansas: two dozen of us were on tour going from town to town with our production of
Don Giovanni
.

Twice a week, four singers in the group also performed “An Hour for the Opera” and did early-morning opera “variety” shows for schoolchildren before their classes began. Those were tough, because we had to get up at six a.m., often after being up late the night before with a show, and sleepwalk our way through costume and makeup while trying to find something to eat that the guys in the bus hadn’t already gotten to. We all bitched and groaned because we were tired and not getting paid extra for it, but once we got onstage we loved it! The children, ranging in age from five to ten, would rush up and lean on the edge of the stage with their elbows, looking up at us with their little faces and eyes as big as saucers.

They were the best audiences ever, laughing out loud and clapping and shrieking when my character, Carmen, had a spat with Madame Butterfly. We really hammed it up for them, and sometimes it was hard for us to maintain our composure, especially when a little kid would be up front picking his nose when we’d barely digested our morning cereal. We were in small, small towns, in run-down little schools—I remember one was a paper-mill town with a population of 2,000—and these kids had never, ever seen anything remotely like these opera characters clowning around like crazy for them.

Life on the road was a kind of opera bootcamp. Some nights I sang the lead of Donna Anna, and on other nights I sang in the
chorus. It was rigorous work, and we were a young, talented, driven-for-success, rowdy bunch. We learned how to get along with our colleagues on a day-to-day basis, we learned how to stay healthy on a bus where if one person got sick we all did (especially when there were late-night romances going on). Hours on the bus every day gave us “bus butt” and “bus hair” and “bus cramps,” and we complained about it and laughed about it and endured it. But back to Ms. Price.

We had already been on the bus for several weeks when I got a panicked message from the opera house. Rehearsals hadn’t even begun yet, but she was ill and had canceled. They were looking to replace her for the entire run. As her official cover, I was in the running.

“Get off the bus right away,” the message said, “and get to the nearest airport and fly back to San Francisco. We want you to audition for the head of the theater and the conductor. We need to see if you are ready to take over this role on the main stage.”

Ready? I was twenty-five, which was pretty young to be put onstage in such a big part. And not for one or two nights, for the entire run!

I flew back and went straight to the opera house from the airport for the audition, a chance-of-a-lifetime role for a green ingénue. I had already begun learning the role of Amelia, but because rehearsals hadn’t started yet I wasn’t scheduled to be back in San Francisco for quite a while so I wasn’t “off book” yet—I didn’t have it memorized. I did the audition with the music stand in front of me—which is the first clue that someone probably isn’t so ready to take on a major opera lead!

I sang the aria from Act II, “Ecco l’orrido campo,” and then approached the moment in the aria called an “unaccompanied cadenza,” which is basically a florid without any instruments, it’s just you singing notes a capella. I had to pluck the notes out of the air and sing them. Just as I was about to do that, the tenor in the show
that evening began warming up in his dressing room, which was just offstage. As soon as I heard him, I lost all sense of pitch and could not figure out what note I was on. The theater manager and the conductor had no idea what was happening, since they couldn’t hear the tenor from where they were sitting. All they knew was, I was not good. I blew it. I heard a quiet, disembodied voice from the dark: