Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (11 page)

“Thank you, Debbie.”

The artistic manager met me in the wings as I came offstage to tell me I wasn’t ready to do the entire run, but that they wanted me to continue being the cover. I thanked them, and got my own well-sized butt back on the Greyhound bus with the other hopefuls until it was time to return and begin my covering-butt duties. Of course, in retrospect, they were absolutely right. Even if I hadn’t had the mishap with the rehearsing tenor, I was no more ready to do that part onstage than I was to fly to the moon.

They chose soprano Carol Neblett to take Ms. Price’s place, and I got back onto solid ground for rehearsals at the company, falling more and more in love with the role as I rehearsed it, and wanting so much to play it onstage.

Then, another chance for my “big break” came. One morning I got a phone call:

“Ms. Neblett isn’t feeling well, so you’re on call this evening if she needs to cancel. Be at the theater by five p.m. for hair and makeup.”

I called up my mom with the news, and she and my newest stepdad, Don, jumped into the car and sped the six hours from Placentia to San Francisco. (Don was Mom’s third husband. For their wedding, I sang a recycled, encore version of “The Lord’s Prayer.” I’m happy to say, the third time was the charm for her. Don was a kind teddy bear of a guy and proved to be Mom’s Prince Charming. The whole family fell in love with him.) A half an hour before the curtain was to go up, they were in their seats as I sat in front of the mirror in a tiny dressing room with wig and face done, ready to go on.
Waiting to hear. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I hear a knock on my dressing room door.

“Debbie, Ms. Neblett would like to speak with you.”

Fuck. What does that mean?

I go down the hall to her dressing room and tap on her door. It opens to reveal three cool, menthol vaporizers blowing at full speed, plus a row of medicines—antihistamines, decongestants, aspirin—lined up in front of her makeup mirror. She turns around and stares at me.

“Why are you in costume and makeup?”

“Well, Ms. Neblett, I’m on call. They told me that you were ill. I’m just here to cover for you and protect you in the eventuality that you feel you can’t go on.”

She smiled a very polite smile, but her eyes were not smiling. In a very calm voice, she said, “Oh, that’s very nice.”

I was excused from the room ten minutes before the curtain went up, and you’ve never seen such a miraculous healing take place. It was like all the vapors in the room suddenly evaporated and the medicines disappeared and she went out on that stage and sang like a goddess—you would’ve never known that she was ill. No, I never got onstage in that production. And since that day I’ve always maintained that if you want to get your diva out onstage, send in her cover. Or make sure the diva can hear her cover warming up somewhere backstage.

I had a lot of experiences like that, where I’m either understudying or singing opposite divas who say, “I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick,” and then they don’t cancel. I think that’s why I’m particularly sensitive to that situation. If I have my cover called in, it’s because I’m
really
sick.

When I was starting out, the cover wouldn’t be in the regular rehearsal room with the star. You didn’t see your cover until you were onstage and she was in the audience—because a cover always has to be within twenty minutes of the opera house during a performance,
in case they are needed. Today, the cover is sitting in the room while you are staging—and it drives me crazy. Sometimes these women have understudied roles several times that I’m just learning, and they are not subtle about showing that they know the words when I don’t yet, mouthing them during rehearsal as I sing.

When I was doing Puccini’s
La fanciulla del West
in San Francisco in 2011, I was learning the role of Minnie for the first time, and I was struggling with the text, as usual. So I kept looking over at my cover across the room because she was mouthing the words; little did she know it, but she was acting as my live prompter! When she realized that’s what I was doing, she shut her mouth pretty darn fast.

ANOTHER TIME, I
was called in to take the place of a Canadian soprano who was singing Leonora in
Il trovatore
, which I was understudying for the San Francisco Opera. The soprano, whose name I can’t recall, had a sudden throat problem and they needed me that same night in Victoria, British Columbia. I knew I could get there, but I also knew there was no way her costumes would fit me—I had seen a photo of their soprano and she was tall and lean. I called up friends in the costume shop in San Francisco and arranged to borrow a bunch of costumes that already fit me, packed them in several suitcases, and made it across the country to the customs counter at the airport in Victoria where Canadian officials stopped me. They opened up my suitcase and pulled out what were obviously not street clothes.

“What are these for?” asked a very stern customs official. I had made the mistake of saying on my declaration card that I was coming over the border for work, not thinking it would be a problem. I was delayed for hours. By the time I left the airport it was 7:15 p.m., and I was zooming toward the opera house for the eight-o’clock curtain. When I pulled up, at 7:45 p.m., the house manager was pacing up and down in front of the theater.

“We don’t have time to get you changed and put you onstage,” he said, rushing me backstage, running, “so you’re going to sing from the pit and (the other soprano) will lip-sync from the stage.”

I was wearing the worst thing possible for the pit—a billowy white dress with puffy sleeves and bright geometric shapes all over it, completely distracting for the audience. But the show had to go on. I sang through it and we got rousing applause; the next morning I was on a plane back to California.

WHEN I DID
get onstage, or when we rehearsed, I immersed myself in my role and loved the acting part of the profession. Some singers only love the singing, but I love the whole package—as was evident from when I was a little girl playing dress-up and playing pretend before I could barely talk. When I sit in a dressing room and see myself become a character in the mirror, as the hair is done up and the makeup applied and the costume put on, I love it. During my years in San Francisco, I could see my abilities as an actress stretch and strengthen.

I was gratified to know that even though I was big, what they valued in me in San Francisco was my talent and my presence onstage. They saw that I could walk onto a stage and make immediate emotional contact with an audience—as Jane Paul said, that came naturally to me, I was born with it.

The head of the Young Artist Program in San Francisco at the time, Christine Bullin, was a great supporter and encourager of young talent, and I was scared to death of her, but I held on to something she once said to me. She told me why she and conductor Andrew Meltzer took a chance on me for their program when the New York Met did not.

“You have the pipes,” she said. “You have a voice that has quality and tone. You have an
identifiable sound.
”

Because of the nature of the genre, opera singers tend to sound similar to each other. What lifts you a notch above the others is if
your voice is identifiable—unique—among the chorus of others. When they heard me singing at my audition, I had “a Deborah Voigt sound” that was my own, and that’s what they latched on to.

STILL, I WORRIED
that the more weight I gained, the less evident my acting would be to an audience or a director. When you look at someone whose face is buried in fat, which mine was because I tend to carry weight in my face, and it was getting bigger and bigger, expressions don’t read as clearly—especially on a big stage. That’s why in my heavier days the makeup artists used to try to “paint on” features for me by shading and contouring the sides and underneath my face.

Another obstacle for an audience when watching a very, very big (read: obese) person onstage is the stereotypes they must confront, whether they are conscious of it or not. I think when people see a big, fat person, they automatically assume the person can’t move well and, even worse, that nobody could possibly love them in a romantic way. In other words, how can a three-hundred-pound woman play the romantic role of Aida if the audience doesn’t believe the tenor onstage would find her attractive?

Near the end of my first year in San Francisco, my father came to visit, and, per family tradition, we had a snippet of intense conversation while driving in the car. I had just started some new diet and was explaining the measuring and caloric specifics to him as he drove. His eyes were on the road when out of the blue he said:

“Debbie, I feel so bad and guilty that I contributed to your gaining weight. And I’m sorry for anything that I did that might be the reason for it. I want you to lose this weight. Please, lose this weight.”

I was in shock. I’d never heard my father apologize before, at least not to me. And he sounded like he was near tears, a sound I’d never, ever heard from him. Was the Food Marshal taking some responsibility for my food issues? Or was he saying that my size was
a disappointment to him? Like that time at the piano, when I was thirteen, and he asked me,
“Who do you think you are?!”
I couldn’t decipher his intent or meaning. I appreciated what he was trying to say, but neither of us understood yet just how deep and far-reaching the damage my childhood would have on me. I wished it was so simple that an apology could fix everything.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We rode together in silence for the rest of the drive.

AS A MIDWESTERN
suburban girl transplanted to Southern California, the most exciting worlds I’d seen so far were Disneyland and the local super mall. Europe was a distant dream, a faraway, impossible place where the composers whose words and music I sang drew their breath and inspiration. Near the end of my time in San Francisco, I had my first chance to visit this world . . . and Grandma Voigt was my ticket overseas.

The head of the San Francisco Opera’s Artistic Administration at the time, New Zealander Sarah Billinghurst, had offered to shell out two thousand bucks for me to study with the world-famous Madame Régine Crespin in Paris for a few weeks. Madame Crespin had been an internationally famous dramatic soprano since the fifties, and a fixture at the Opéra National de Paris, where she was known for her Wagner and Strauss heroines, the roles I was being groomed to sing.

As her career wound down she was giving voice lessons at the Conservatoire de Paris, and Sarah arranged to give me a grant to pay for the lessons, and also offered to set up auditions for me at all the top opera houses in Europe, including the Vienna State Opera, the National Theater Munich, the Paris Opera, and, perhaps the most famous of them all, La Scala, in Milan.

I wouldn’t be auditioning to sing a principal role in these
companies; I was still considered a “baby” dramatic soprano and wasn’t at that stage. The auditions were more for the opera house managers to meet me, get to know me a bit, and maybe offer me a temporary position where I’d understudy several roles under their tutelage for a few months—much like what I’d been doing in San Francisco. It was an experience any young up-and-coming opera singer would jump at. Except me.

“I’ve got John, I can’t go away for months,” I told Sarah. (As I spoke, I could hear Jane’s voice haunting me—
You won’t push forward if you stay with him
. . . .)

“Debbie, it’s really important for you to have this experience,” she urged.

It just so happened that around the same time that Sarah wanted to set up my opera-house tour and Paris voice lessons, Jane was getting ready to go to Europe. Every year she took a handful of her Cal State students to Vienna—she had lived there for several years in her youth and spoke fluent
Deutsch
—for them to soak up the musical culture and the composers of some of the most famous Germanic operas. So the timing was perfect. All I needed now was the money. The San Francisco Opera arranged for a six-week whirlwind of auditions, and would pay for my two weeks with Madame Crespin in Paris, but I’d have to come up with the money for hotels, airfare, food, and other expenses. John and I didn’t have the cash to cover a trip like this, and I was telling my father this on the phone.

“I have a proposition for you, Debbie,” he said. “If you’ll take Grandma Voigt with you to Europe, I’ll pay for your flight and your hotel.”

Grandma, who was now in her early sixties—still young and with a lot of energy—had never seen Europe, either. She’d always been a very independent woman—she was the primary money-earner in their household when Dad was growing up—so even though she hadn’t traveled much, I figured she’d be a confident traveling companion. And ever since Grandpa Voigt died, on Christmas
Day a few years before, she and I had grown closer. I visited her every weekend during the year after he’d passed, and sat with her, holding her hand and listening to old family stories. And we’d had our first opera outing together, so the idea seemed inspired and a good fit.

And it was, it really was—for the first five hours. By the time we got to our layover in New York, Grandma was already overworrying about the customs officers we’d meet in Munich the following week.

“What if something happens to us? What if there are Nazis?”

“Grandma, nothing bad is going to happen. We have our passports; we’ll be fine. They don’t have Nazis anymore.” Uh-oh.

WE ARRIVED IN
Vienna in what was officially the coldest, cruelest winter they’d had in two decades. It was so cold, the homeless people on the street were urged to take shelter in the subways to sleep. The double-pane window in our one-star hotel filled up with so much snow between the two layers of glass that our room was pitch black and we couldn’t see out. We were freezing and in the dark, and, as inexperienced tourists, at a loss as to what to do first. Then in swept Jane with her students the following day, and suddenly our days were filled with museums, concerts, beer halls, and, of course, Belvedere Palace to see Jane’s beloved Klimt paintings.