Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (26 page)

I had arrived in Barcelona a week before rehearsals began in order to work with a private coach, but once I got there I discovered we’d gotten our details crossed and she was on vacation. I could have easily found another coach, of course, but that’s not how the alcoholic mind works. The alcoholic mind will find any excuse possible to say,
Oh, fuck it! It’s not working out, so I’ll drink today!
Today turned into two days, then three, four, five days. I was alone and, as always, was looking to get away from myself—I didn’t want to be in my own skin. Apparently it didn’t matter if I was fat or slim, I still didn’t want to be there. So I partied the week away by myself in my hotel suite, and the next thing I knew I had to be in rehearsal bright and early the next morning and I didn’t know the part. I called in sick. Then I called in sick on day two, day three, day four . . .

The opera house called up Andrea in New York: “She’s not showing up for rehearsals, what should we do?”

There was nothing they could do. If they had come to my hotel room to see how “sick” I was, they’d have found me dousing myself with champagne, red wine, white wine, and vodka until I passed out.

To protect themselves, the management hired a cover. In Europe, one didn’t automatically have a cover like you did in the
United States. The countries are so close together that if a lead woke up one morning feeling sick, you could fly in a cover from an opera house in the country next door in an hour. Knowing that, I canceled opening night to protect myself. I didn’t feel ready to face the critics and convinced myself that all would be better with a few days of rehearsal. My ploy to skip opening-night reviews didn’t work. When the critics found out I wasn’t singing, they all returned for when I was.

Barcelona was the only time in my career that I’ve ever been penalized at work—they docked my pay ten percent because they had to hire the cover. It was also the closest I’d come to feeling as though my inner demons were taking over: my disease was raging.

What was happening, I realized later, was something I had vaguely heard about—cross addiction. Before gastric bypass surgery, patients are supposed to undergo counseling about the psychological aftermath of the procedure and the possible dangers that lie ahead. For many patients, once the ability to overeat is taken away, they substitute a new addiction, and it’s usually alcohol. I skipped much of the counseling part because as soon as I had those few weeks free from the Covent Garden schedule, I jumped at the first opportunity to have the surgery while there was a free block of time in my busy schedule. It didn’t occur to me that anything could go wrong after the surgery; I was certain, in fact, that it was going to solve all my problems.

Thanks to Mitch, I had grown to love drinking. But before the surgery I’d never had the feeling that I
had
to drink. I’d had that feeling about food and men, for sure, but not alcohol. Now those feelings had transferred to drinking. And with my added postsurgery anxieties—like relearning how to breathe and sing properly, and adapting to the rapid weight loss—I had more reasons to try to calm myself down with booze.

When our run was over in Barcelona, I went to the company manager’s office to apologize. I told him that I knew I’d been
unreliable and explained it was because of personal problems, promising it would never happen again. The manager sighed a breath of relief.

“We thought you just didn’t like your time here in Barcelona,” he said, “and that you were coming in today to cancel your upcoming contract for
Tristan and Isolde
!”

It was the last reaction I expected. (I did indeed go back a few years later to sing a very successful run of
Isolde
.) They had no idea what bad shape I’d been in. I was doing a good job of living a dual life, and even those closest to me—my friends and family—didn’t know how much trouble I was in. Jesslyn and Jaime worked closely with me and sometimes traveled with me and they were smart, observant women and still, they didn’t see it; I was a better actress than the music critics thought. If we were eating dinner in my hotel room and having wine, no one noticed that every time I went to the bathroom and casually took my glass with me, I’d refill it from the wine bottle hidden under the sink.

The blackouts began in early 2008; the first one happened when I was in L.A. for a concert. I spent a night alone in my hotel room—or so I thought—drinking, and when I woke up the next morning my body was covered in bruises. I was black and blue down one arm, on my forehead, on my back, and—here’s the scariest part—I had a purple handprint on one of my arms.

What the . . . ?

I stared and stared at it, trying to figure it out. I tried to fit my hand on it and saw there was no way it was mine. To this day, I have no idea what happened that night. Best case scenario? I ordered room service and took a fall and somebody grabbed me and helped me up. Worst case? I went downstairs to the bar and . . . I’m afraid to imagine the rest. After that night, I got in the habit of reaching for my BlackBerry as soon as I awoke in the morning, to check texts for clues as to what kind of mess I might have made the night before.

I TRIED TO
keep a sense of humor about the minor onstage mishaps in the following weeks even though at the time, they were not so funny. In February of that year, I was singing Sieglinde at the Met, when, in the middle of a long passage of music . . . I forgot the next line. I stood onstage, dumbfounded. I had sung that part so many times—at least every two years for a decade—the words were as familiar to me as “Happy Birthday.” But a quick, frantic search of my memory brought no words to my lips. Any opera singer will tell you that it happens to the best of us, but I never, ever expected it to happen with a role I could sing in my sleep.

I wasn’t too worried. After my initial shock, I looked downstage toward the prompter box. I had become an expert at using a prompter, I knew every trick in the book on how to read their lips, translate their eyewinks, and decipher their nose wriggles and ear pulling. Each prompter in every country, in every opera house, had their own personal “sign language” they used to give you your next line if you forgot it, and I had made it my mission to learn all their dialects. They, in turn, are trained to recognize the universal “deer in the headlights” look an opera singer gets onstage during a memory lapse and jump to attention. If they are really astute, they learn the subtle signs each performer gives as their personal SOS. When I need help, I turn my head slightly at a certain angle and make eye contact with the prompter. I’ve noticed Russian soprano Anna Netrebko does the exact same angle as me.

“If I have to lie on the floor for a scene,” Anna once told me, “I make sure my head is facing toward the prompt box.”

Being a prompter is an art unto itself. The best ones don’t wait until you’re in trouble, they feed you cues along the way, whether you need them or not.

Except on this night, when I was in trouble. I wandered across the stage with my eye on the prompter box, telepathically screaming at the top of my lungs: LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! TELL ME
MY NEXT LINE!!! I could see the light reflecting off the top of my prompter’s balding head as he looked down at the music. I still had a few bars of music before my next line, so he was unaware of my crisis. He had been my prompter for this role many times before and knew how well I knew it.

A few bars later—it felt like hours—the window of opportunity closed and I had to move on, my line was up. What did I do? I made up some nonsensical German-sounding gibberish and hoped no one in the audience that night knew German. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Maestro Levine look up at me from the pit, thinking:
What did you just say?

THE NEXT MONTH
I was in a production plagued by illness, and it got so ridiculous, it was more like a British farce than a German opera. Tenor Ben Heppner and I were paired up to sing
Tristan und Isolde
at the Met for five performances. But when opening night arrived, Ben fell sick with the flu and called in his cover—to simplify the story, I’ll call him Tristan #2.

Opening night went fine with Tristan #2, but a few days later, for our second performance, #2 got sick too, and we had to call in Tristan #3. But I barely got to sing with #3 that night, because then it was my turn. That morning, I felt the unmistakable rumblings in my stomach of whatever flu was going around, and by the time I reached the theater that night, I had a fever and called for my cover.

Because we were singing Wagner, which was “through composed,” I knew I had to bow out immediately rather than try to go on and wing it. “Through composed” means that each act of the opera is filled with an uninterrupted stream of music, without any pauses for clapping—or running off the stage to puke one’s guts out, if need be. Verdi, by contrast, always has plenty of natural moments during his acts where a girl can tiptoe daintily into the wings—in character, of course—and barf into a prop bucket. But Wagner was not so generous. If I started Act I and felt even worse—and I was
feeling worse by the minute—there would be no break to make a graceful exit.

“Ah, c’mon, Deb. You can walk offstage if you feel sick,” the on-duty administrator told me. “You’ll be fine.”

It was their job to get me onstage, and they did. I don’t know how I got through the first act without gagging, it was pure luck. By Act II, though, I knew my luck had run out and asked for the cover again.

“But Debbie, you already did Act I, and you were great! You’ll be fine for Act II!”

Convinced again, I went out onstage. As soon as I started the beautiful love duet, one of the longest and most opulent love duets in the history of opera, I got dizzy and felt the bile bubbling up inside of me. Poor Tristan #3. As he sang his heart out, I pulled a Luciano on him and ran offstage, wild-eyed, in the middle of our duet. In the wings, a stage manager had a trash can ready. I grabbed it and tossed my cookies so violently I bet they heard me in the last row of the balcony. (To this day, my brother Kevin, who was in the audience with Peter, does a hilarious impression of T-3 standing forlornly onstage, as I did when Luciano abandoned me in
Ballo
, still singing and wondering:
Is she coming back, or what?
)

But it gets worse—or rather, funnier, depending on your sense of humor. The curtain closed mid-duet and mid-cookie-toss, and I was crying and hysterical. Juliet Velri, my wig lady and confidante of many years (you know how it is in the hair biz, they put their hands in your hair and you spill all your secrets), rushed over and put her arm around me to console me.

“Deb, Deb . . . it’s going to be okay, Deb,” she said soothingly, steering me purposefully toward my dressing room. For one tough broad, Juliet was being incredibly sweet to me. In fact, she was being unusually,
scarily
sweet for Juliet. As soon as we got inside my dressing room she closed the door, swiveled around, and held her hands and arms up in front of her like a Greco-Roman wrestler, ready to pounce.

“All right, honey.
Gimme that wig!”

In a mad rush, she started pulling the long, blond, Pre-Raphaelite curls off my head as one of the dressers popped his head into the room.

“Debbie, you know we love you, you
know
we love you . . . but we need your costume—
now! Give me that dress!
” My cover, Janice Baird, was in the next room, about to be pushed onto the stage to finish Act II, and she was waiting for hair and costume. Juliet and the dresser fled the room just as my brother and Peter arrived. After I’d run off the stage, Maestro Levine had put his baton down and someone came out and announced I was sick. They came back to see if I was okay, and found me hairless, dress-less, and sobbing onto my piano keys.

The next day, it was all over the opera chat rooms online: “Debbie Voigt barfed in the wings at the Metropolitan Opera last night!”

Ah, the glamorous life of an opera diva. If you check the Met archives online, it lists my performance that night as “Acts I, II . . .
partial.
”

For our third performance, I was healthy and Tristan #3 was healthy and we both performed; it was a stage catastrophe that nearly did our Tristan in this time.

I was in my dressing room, waiting to go on in the middle of Act III to sing the love-death “Liebestod” when I heard, over the intercom speaker backstage, the audience gasping, then applauding vigorously when they shouldn’t have been.
Huh?
What happened, I found out soon enough, was that during the scene in which Tristan has been stabbed and is lying on a makeshift mattress, dying (but singing a perilously difficult and anguished aria, nevertheless), the mattress came loose from its moorings and Tristan and his bed slid downstage like a runaway train toward the prompter box. The prompter on duty let out a piercing scream—the bed was moving toward her so fast, she feared it was about to decapitate her, like a Brian De Palma production of
The Phantom of the Opera.
The
performance stopped, and once Tristan, the prompter, and the bed were all inspected and deemed intact, the show went on and the audience applauded.

But with the next performance came another new Tristan. Number 3 took sick and Tristan #4 took over. At this point, we were all scared to even breathe on each other. Someone in the press dubbed the run “the revolving door of Tristans.”

Finally—finally—for the fifth and final performance, Ben and I were onstage together. According to the
New York Times
, it was “well worth the wait.”