Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (28 page)

At some point after my Valentine’s Day heart massacre, I made a few drunken phone calls. One was to Jesslyn.

“I have a bottle of Xanax and a bottle of Ambien,” I told her, sobbing. “I’m going to swallow them and jump off the balcony. Please, please,” I begged her, “come and get Steinway after I’m gone and give him a good home.”

UNLIKE TOSCA, BUT
very much like Debbie, I didn’t take the leap.

After calling Jesslyn, I passed out before taking even one pill. But my suicidal phone call set off a chain of events that had my family jumping in cars and boarding planes to get to me. Jesslyn called my brothers, who called a family relative who lived nearby. I don’t know how many minutes later it was that Cousin Tony showed up at my apartment. In that time I had woken from my stupor, gone downstairs to buy more booze, and returned to find him banging on the door.

“Tony? What are you doing here?”

“Hi, Deb,” he said, eyeing the paper bag still in my arms. “I came by to see how you were doing.” He slowly reached toward my bag, careful not to make any quick movements.

“Here, let me take that for you. How are you feeling?” He talked soothingly as he got me inside.

“To tell you the truth, Tony, I’m not feeling so good.”

Once inside, I passed out again. I have a vague, discombobulated memory of hearing voices. First there was Tony, saying to someone on the phone, maybe it was 911,“Yeah, I’ve got the pills. There’s all different kinds here. . . . She says she didn’t take any. . . . Yeah, I’ll get rid of the booze. . . .” I remember waking up some time later and seeing my sister-in-law, Angie, Rob’s wife—they lived in
Atlanta—sitting next to my bed, watching me anxiously. I remember hearing Kevin’s voice talking on the phone, saying, “It would be best if you didn’t call Debbie anymore, Peter. Leave her alone.”

My mother and Don arrived the next day, and Mom was devastated. She hugged me and cried and kept saying, “I can’t believe my little girl would want to kill herself.” I tried to explain to her that I didn’t—not really, and that I was so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought to ask her about when I was sixteen and she herself had phoned my father late at night crying, with a bottle of sleeping pills next to her. Had she wanted to harm herself? Mom didn’t take the leap then, either. Like mother like daughter, as Dad would say. But I didn’t have the energy to go there, and I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up.

Amazingly, I managed to pull myself together and sing the next night, and sing well. Actually, it wasn’t that difficult. I had a good, reliable technique, and I focused on that instead of how I was feeling physically or emotionally—which I always tried to keep separate from my performances. That’s how I usually worked, and it pulled me through just about anything. Maybe this time I let a little bit of heartache seep through during the final act. Because there’s nothing like using a little real life-and-death drama of one’s own to add extra oomph to that “Liebestod” when Isolde surrenders to death.

Despite my drinking and heartache (or maybe because of it?) the critics gave me good reviews. From the
Chicago Tribune
:

Mom and Don stayed with me for two weeks, during which Mom cooked comfort food from my childhood. On my days off, we went to movies and out to dinner. I couldn’t stop crying. I felt like I’d hurt everyone so much, let alone what I’d done to myself. I was ashamed that I was not what they all thought I was—that I was not the strong, sunny, happy Debbie they expected and wanted. People, even my family, often look at my life and think, “Oh wow, how fabulous, how fantastic,” and don’t think there can be a sad side to it. My old publicist, Herbert Breslin, who had urged me to present a darker, more complicated image to the public instead of being so “sunny,” would have eaten this stuff up. He would have been sending out press releases.

“What you need, kid,” he used to say, “is a good scandal.”

I found a therapist to speak to in Chicago, and she laid out the situation clearly:

“You can go to rehab or you can go to AA or,” she said, “you can slowly kill yourself. Or, you can quickly kill yourself. What are you going to do?”

I didn’t have time to go to rehab, and I wasn’t even sure I believed in it. So I took the AA route, determined to take my commitment seriously. The meetings had helped in the past—I had several sober months under my belt when I met Peter. But with all my traveling I had begun to skip them, and then stopped all together, which was not good.

“You forget you have a disease,” said the chairperson of a meeting I went to in Chicago. “You start to think you don’t need the meetings. It’s a disease that doesn’t want you to believe you have
a disease. It’s a disease that wants you dead. Don’t forget, ‘meeting makers make it.’”

I admitted (again) to myself that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable. I began counting days (again), this time counting hours, since whole days without drinking seemed unimaginable.
I’ve got twenty-four hours sober. Now I’ve got forty-eight hours sober. Now I have a week.
During my first few meetings, all I could do was weep. The only words I could whisper were, “Hi, I’m Debbie, I’m—”

Once I stopped crying long enough to speak, I was afraid to share with the others, as they call it. When I finally forced myself to talk, that’s what I spoke about: fear. I told strangers that I’d always been afraid ever since I was a little girl. I was afraid of my father’s elbows pounding the dinner table in a pocket of silence. I was afraid the laundry wouldn’t be there when we got back, and of my mother crying. I was afraid of that steel-toe boot smashing against my face.

I said the Serenity Prayer over and over and over again:

ONE SOBER YEAR
and a half later, I floated up, up, up into the clouds in a hot-air balloon in Aspen, feeling weightless. I was performing at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2010 and as a birthday present to myself, I took a balloon ride to see the world from my new perspective. As the balloon rose in the sky I felt free—free of 150 pounds of weight off my body (I had lost another 15 pounds from not drinking); free from the Mitches and Peters in my life; and finally, free from the disease and poison that was killing me, alcohol—I hadn’t had a drink in eighteen months (roughly 540 days, or 12,960 hours, and counting . . .) and I felt healthy and transformed, like I was soaring. I remembered that card a stage director gave me once,
of an angel tethered to the ground. Now, twenty-two years later, I had cut the rope and freed myself.

I was also in love again, and this time it was going to be different.

Jason was in the chorus at the Met, and he was singing in Wagner’s
Der fliegende Holländer
(“The Flying Dutchman”) earlier that spring as I sang the role of Senta. We’d noticed each other before but had never spoken until I ran into him on the street during
Dutchman
. We recognized each other from work and chatted as we stood on a busy Manhattan sidewalk. I was immediately attracted to him—he was my type in looks: tall, slim, dark, and with a sexy beard.

“Maybe we should have a coffee,” I ventured. “After all, we’ve been making eyes at each other for years now.”

He suggested dinner, and a week later we had a surprisingly relaxed and chatty meal in a cozy eatery on the Upper West Side, not far from the Met. During our date I confirmed some essential facts: one, he didn’t drink; two, he was divorced and was a doting father to his teenaged daughter; three, he wasn’t a religious freak; four, he wasn’t looking for a woman to pay his bills; and, five, he was dating a woman who also sang in the Met’s chorus.

“Well, you’re not married,” I pointed out, “and you don’t live with her.” We both laughed.

He told me all about his daughter, and I admired how he was so attentive to her, taking her out for dinners and movies and hanging out together, talking and having fun—the sort of moments my father and I never had together. I don’t remember doing anything alone with my father growing up, not even a stroll around the block.

Jason and I talked for hours; I felt completely at ease with him. Spending time with him was so unlike what it was with Mitch or Peter—I felt more comfortable with him than I had with any other man I’d ever known.

In fact, being with him was the only time I ever felt completely comfortable with myself, in my own skin. After dinner, Jason hailed
a cab for me and before I got in he pulled me in to him and planted one hell of a kiss on my lips, loaded with chemistry and heat.

The next night, as I got ready for the show, I pumped a costumer friend of mine who knew Jason for tidbits about him.

“Oh, no, don’t go there, Debbie,” he warned me, mysteriously, “he’s not for you. Don’t do it.”

He obviously didn’t know that was the wrong thing to say to keep me away from a man. Besides, he didn’t understand how perfectly we clicked together and that we both felt it. Soon Jason and I were texting constantly (“Hi sexy!”) and making out for hours like teenagers on my living room couch and in my dressing room.

In
Dutchman
I was singing the role of a young woman in a sailing village who becomes obsessed with a portrait of the legendary Flying Dutchman, cursed to sail the seas until he finds a wife who will be true to him. Senta wants to save him from his horrible fate and can only think about being with him and wanting him to be in love with her. Every time I gazed at the handsome portrait onstage, while singing my love-drenched arias, Jason would be standing ten feet away offstage, behind the portrait, looking at me, irresistible in his fisherman’s hat and wool sweater. We’d lock eyes and share a secret smile. His outfit in
Dutchman
was rivaled only by his turn as a cowboy packing a big rifle when we did
La fanciulla del West
together at the Met at the end of that year.

At first, Jason was hesitant to have a romance with me because, as he put it, “you’re an international star that I’ve watched from afar for years.” But we got rid of that nonsense. And in due course, he got rid of the girlfriend. And somewhere between my first
La fanciulla
Minnie—a feisty, Bible-reading saloon owner and feminist before her time—in San Francisco in the fall of 2010, and my second Minnie, at the Met that winter, our romance was official and out in the open.

A FEW MONTHS
later, I embarked on the role of my career.

I had sung Sieglinde a dozen times all over the world, but to take
on the more mature Brünnhilde in Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle of four operas—
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung
—is a monumental challenge and turning point for any dramatic soprano and a demanding role that must be earned. One has to wait until her voice matures, you can’t sound like a young little bell. You don’t come out of a conservatory singing Brünnhilde, it’s a gradual journey that leads to her. You have to sing a few Toscas, Minnies, Ariadnes, and Chrysothemises first and, if you’re lucky, those roles take you to that great and fearless Valkyrie shieldmaiden.

My voice was ripe for it, and my leaner body was the right size. (Though, ironically, the famous expression “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” is supposedly a reference to Brünnhilde’s famous sacrificial fire scene at the end of
Götterdämmerung
.)

The new production was to be helmed by Canadian film and stage director Robert Lepage, and his vision and concept for the set was controversial. It had over two dozen removable planks that were set up like a line of seesaws in a concrete jungle. I and the rest of the cast called it, unaffectionately, “the Machine.” I always referred to the set as female in gender, and always capitalized her pronoun, because She was the biggest diva in the entire production.
She
was the one who was the most temperamental, the most prone to mishaps, very particular about her lighting, and She was the heaviest—the stage floor had to be reinforced to bear Her weight. And She was definitely overpaid—She was more expensive than the combined fees of the entire Ring Cycle cast.

I started studying the libretto six months ahead of time, which would still be considered last-minute cramming for most sopranos, who’d begin studying Brünnhilde years before their first performance. I pored over the thick binder of text for hours on end and worked especially hard on my technique. The role has a lot of “middle voice,” and as a soprano my voice likes to live a little higher, so I had to spend a lot of time “anchoring” my middle register—the very opposite of what I had to work on when I first walked into Jane
Paul’s studio decades earlier. But each opera in the cycle has its own specific challenges. For
Die Walküre
, it was very important for me to be hooked into the middle voice, whereas for
Siegfried
, I had to send high C’s into the balcony.
Götterdämmerung
is more an exercise in pacing and is very dramatic vocally. It’s as if each one was written for an entirely different type of soprano. I worked especially hard with my voice teacher, David Jones, whom I’d been with for a few years at that point. I also flew to Cardiff, Wales, to spend a week working with conductor and opera coach Anthony Negus, who is known as a “Wagner specialist.”