Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (19 page)

It zapped away my hunger, jacked up my metabolism, and in four months I had lost sixty pounds. Sure, I didn’t sleep much and was up at three in the morning doing calligraphy. But I got down to 240 pounds—which was still well above “normal,” but it felt more normal to me. For the first time in a long time, I bought clothes off the rack in a “normal” store, and I was feeling good, I was feeling energized, I was feeling . . . sexy.

John had been the only man I’d ever been with my entire life, and now that I was a free woman—free from the constraints of marriage, my parents, and the church that had turned me away—I unleashed all my inhibitions and went looking for love in all the wrong places, with all the wrong men. If my parents thought John was a bad boy, they hadn’t seen anything yet. I found out later that fen-phen affected your libido by either killing it or launching it out into orbit. Clearly, mine was going the orbit route and I went along for the ride, embarking on a year of living dangerously.

Pumped up and armed with a new, flirty wardrobe, I went online and scanned the dating websites. I don’t even know if you can call it dating—I created a fake name and persona and went directly to sites that catered to men who liked larger women. The men I met didn’t have old-fashioned “dating” in mind.

At one of those sites I hooked up with Tim, who lived in Manhattan and had placed an advertisement seeking “some company this afternoon to go skiing with me.” I knew he didn’t mean the kind of snow you find on the slopes. I’d tried cocaine once or twice with John and wasn’t into it, but I went over to see this guy anyway. Why? I’m not even sure I knew. I needed . . . something, I didn’t know what.

When Tim opened his apartment door, I was immediately
not
attracted to him. He was blondish, chunky, and short—the opposite of my type. But I was feeling high and pretty and bold, so I fooled around with him anyway and enjoyed the attention. I also enjoyed being this anonymous someone, acting out a secret, bad-girl fantasy life. But here’s the kicker—as I was getting my things together to leave Tim’s apartment, I glanced over at his coffee table and saw that day’s
New York Times
opened to the Arts section with a review of my current Met performance and a photo of me splashed across the page. Oh, hell! Tim didn’t even realize that the woman he just
shtupped
was the same woman he’d been reading about moments before I arrived. I hurried out before he had a chance to make the connection.

I’m not proud of it today, but I sought out a lot of nameless one-night stands like Tim as I watched myself go from one lover in twenty years to a woman diving into the deep end of promiscuity. Why was I doing this? I didn’t, couldn’t, stop to think about it because I was too pumped up and exhilarated. Later, I would understand that these one-night stands provided the same function for me as too much food and too much alcohol did—they anesthetized me, they took me out of myself, they were a drug.

I found Dane on the “Big Woman” site, too. His personal bio read: “Lonely, married Harvard law student seeks pen pal.” Pen pal. Right.

“Why are you lonely?” I wrote back. And we were off and running—two lonely people trying to beat back our respective inner demons. Dane was moody and dark, he read poetry and Latin, he was a former heroin addict who went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings religiously, and he introduced me to Joni Mitchell’s sad and soulful album
Blue
. But here’s the catch with Byronic Dane—when we had sex, he was so tender and adoring, he made me feel like he loved me, it wasn’t just boom-boom-boom. Therein lay the problem. Most women would have found this a plus in a man, but to me it was confusing—which, I realize now was a sign that I wasn’t looking for love, or maybe thought I didn’t deserve it. Dane was passionate, and he would make several appearances in my love life over the years to come. But he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d grab you, flip you over, and give you a spanking, and, for whatever reason, that’s what I was craving.

AND THEN MITCH
swaggered into my life.

It was the spring of ’96 and I was singing Sieglinde in
Die Walküre
opposite Plácido Domingo, at the Met. Despite the incredible high of that situation, I was having a bad night at home alone on one of my days off.

It was a Friday evening and I was feeling the way I get when I’m left alone with my thoughts; I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, I needed a diversion. Then a totally impulsive thought popped into my head:
I wonder if I could pick a man up? I wonder if I’m alluring enough to attract a man just by how I look, with my face and body?
All my friends had gone through that phase in their twenties, when they hung out at bars and danced all night and had guys telling them how pretty they were, something I skipped entirely. Now I wanted to see if I could do that, be like everyone else. I knew it wasn’t the way a
proper Christian girl thought, but then again, I hadn’t been acting like a proper Christian girl for a while. I was running on a hamster wheel of addiction—at this moment it was men and sex—and nothing was going to stop me.

I got glammed up in a black skirt and snug sweater, blew my hair out, and went over to—
what was I thinking?—
the restaurant across the street from the Met, where I took a seat at the crowded bar. I had barely sipped my first drink when I saw him—strutting across the room while rapping a pack of cigarettes against his palm. Mitch spelled Trouble.
Ding, ding, ding!
Within a few minutes I was making eyes at him after he sat down, alone, across from me at the bar. I was having a Long Island iced tea, the dead giveaway of the novice drinker. It was all I knew to order—but Mitch, in time, would educate me on how to drink like a pro.

“The guy over there would like to buy you a drink,” the bartender told me. “You can say no if you want.”

“Why in the world would I say no? Of course I’d like the drink!”

A seat opened up next to Mitch, so I sidled over.

“Hi, I’m Debbie.”

“Hi, I’m Mitch.” He was my type: tall, dark, thin, and a little rough-looking—like a cowboy outlaw who’d been riding out in the sun too long. Our drinks turned into dinner, and he told me he was a former car salesman who was now in the mortgage business. He asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a singer.”

“Really.” He took a drag off his cigarette and squinted. “What do you sing?”

“I’m an opera singer.”

“Well, that’s interesting. Because the friend that I’m waiting for is at the Met, across the street, seeing something called . . .
Gudda
. . .
Gadda
. . .”

“Götterdämmerung?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“That’s the fourth opera in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I’m not in that one. I sing Sieglinde in the second opera.” He had no idea what I was talking about.

“Well, you should stay and meet my friend. He’s coming to join me after the show. He’s a big opera fan.”

Well, this oughtta be priceless
, I thought.

A minute later, in walks the friend.

“Hey, Fred,” says Mitch. “I just met this lady, Debbie . . .”

Fred looks at me, stunned.

“That’s Deborah Voigt, the opera singer! She’s singing with Plácido Domingo, for God’s sake!”

Once you were paired with Plácido, I had learned recently, you entered the solar system of stardom yourself.

I could see stars in Mitch’s eyes; he was hooked. Mitch was a sucker for a woman who could offer money and fame. He told me later, though, that at first he’d thought I was a high-class hooker, which, strangely, flattered me.
He must have thought I was attractive
, I thought. How twisted is that? I was charmed by him in a sick, bad-boy way, and he supplied what I needed—someone who made me forget myself. So I took him home with me. He picked up liquor on the way and stayed until five a.m.

“Where’s your next engagement?” he asked, before taking off in the dark.

“Lisbon, Portugal.”

“I’ll meet you in Lisbon.”

A FEW WEEKS
later, he arrived at the Lisbon Portela Airport. He emerged out of immigration control drunk, and spectacularly so.

“I have a gift for you,” he slurred, through the cigarette dangling from his lips. “I feel our relationship could be something significant, and I want you to know I’m serious about pursuing you.”

He opened my right hand until my palm lay flat, and dropped a
diamond into it. This was something Aristotle Onassis was famous for doing with Maria Callas, handing her a loose diamond all by itself, so I swooned. (I would find out later that most of Mitch’s romantic gestures had a seedy underbelly—but not just yet.)

Mitch loved to do everything to excess—sex, food, drinking, and partying—and he encouraged me to do the same, so I tried to keep up. I’d never drunk so much in my life. Mitch wined and dined me and threw money around at the best restaurants in Lisbon and showed up at my door with bouquets of red roses and the best champagne. In the beginning, I never spent a dime—he took care of everything (his money, I’d later find out, came from his illegal pot farm in Tennessee). We’d still be awake when the sun came up, after being up all night taking tequila hits straight from the bottle. At dinner, he held my chair for me. He was fucked up, and he was a criminal, and I was his willing prisoner.

“I like you big,” he’d tell me, “I want a woman with meat on her. If the Jacuzzi doesn’t overflow when a woman gets in, she’s too small. But listen, baby”—he’d take a long drag on his Marlboro—“if you want to lose weight, I’ll help you lose weight. If you want to gain weight, I’ll butter your bread.” It was one of the best lines I’d ever heard.

“Mitch, do you drink like this all the time?”

“Only on days that end in a ‘Y,’ baby.”

God, he was fun. Mitch was a perfect man-drug for me—his wildness got me out of myself immediately, completely, and I needed him intensely. And he knew how to make my codependence grow. He kept me in an ever-tipsy state when I wasn’t working, and pushed me beyond my comfort levels—often in unhealthy ways, but sometimes in good ways, too. One night in Lisbon we decided to go nightclubbing (for the first time in my life!). It was one a.m. when we arrived at a very chic-chic disco filled with dozens of fantastic-looking transsexuals standing around in their high heels, showing off their sculpted legs.

“Why isn’t anyone dancing?” I wondered aloud, as we got drinks at the bar.

“They’re waiting for somebody to start. You want to see?” He jumped off his stool. “C’mon, come with me!”

The idea of getting on a dance floor in general was nerve-wracking to me, let alone being the first one out there, where everyone would be watching me. But Mitch never took no for an answer. He pulled me off my stool and dragged me to the middle of the room.

Within five minutes we were surrounded and the floor was packed and moving. Mitch’s daring personality constantly energized me. We’d go up onto hotel rooftops and dance at ungodly hours and he’d call me his little vampire because I refused to go to sleep, I was so “on.”

MITCH CONVINCED ME
to do things I would have never done, like get naked in a coed sauna. At our next rendezvous, in Germany, I was performing concerts with the Staatskapelle Dresden, one of the greatest orchestras in the world. We were staying at a beautiful five-star hotel and after my concert we went back to the hotel, had a few cocktails, and Mitch lured all 250 pounds of me into the coed sauna. As I lay on my back, topless, with a tiny towel across my lower lady bits and my flesh flopping about everywhere, two guys came in.

“
Guten Abend, guten Abend,”
we all murmured to each other. The two men continued to talk in German as I shut my eyes and relaxed . . . until I started to recognize some of the words.
Konzert . . . Staatskapelle
. . . Fuck! They were asking me, “Are you Deborah Voigt who just sang with the Staatskapelle Dresden?” I must have blushed from head to toe, and surely they could see it; meanwhile, Mitch was ripping his guts out laughing.

Other times, he could be moody, rude, and selfish. Mitch never watched me perform; he wasn’t interested in that side of me, and couldn’t give a shit about opera. He’d sit through a few minutes and
then take off at intermission to wander through the silent, empty opera house lobby. He’d stop at every bar on every level, downing drink after drink, smoking like a chimney when it was still allowed. If it was Wagner, the added hour or two meant at least four extra drinks. When the opera was over, I’d be back in my dressing room, relieved and happy, with friends popping in to offer their congratulations. Mitch would arrive with two pints of chocolate-chocolate-chip Häagen-Dazs and two plastic spoons, impatiently circling the crowd of well-wishers, wanting my attention on him. It didn’t occur to me that his behavior was disrespectful. I’d just been married to someone who had spent his entire life, all his energy, on me and my career, so I was ready for someone who wanted nothing to do with it.

He was, however, very interested in how people fussed over me, and the fact that my photo was all over the place, and that he was dating the on-the-verge-of-big-big-fame opera star Deborah Voigt and all the celebrity that surrounded that. So when an opera I was singing had a celebrity onstage, and paparazzi at the stage door, Mitch made sure he was there.

BUT BACK TO
that spring of ’96, when I first laid eyes on him. At that time I had also just met the famous tenor Plácido Domingo, a man as different from Mitch as you can get. I was singing Sieglinde in
Die Walküre
opposite Plácido for the first time, and do I even need to mention that I was oh so nervous?

“You’re going to
love
him, you’re going to
looooove
him,” my director, Phebe Berkowitz, kept saying.

“But I’m scared because he’s Plácido Domingo!”

“Debbie, he is the nicest and most workmanlike guy ever. He shows up, he doesn’t know his part most of the time but he works hard and he gets through it. He’s kind to everyone and he’s Plácido Domingo, so the theater goes crazy to have him there.”

That turned out to be exactly my experience with him. At first,
when he walked into the rehearsal room at the Met, my heart pounded out of my chest.