Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (30 page)

I’D ARRIVED IN
Belgium a week earlier to start rehearsals for
La fanciulla
—my third time singing Minnie, the Bible-thumping, gun-toting heroine—this time at the Opéra de Royal Wallonie. I
usually love to play her, she’s a great gal to act. She’s tough, smart, and ahead of her time. And she reads the Bible to the miners and the tough cowboys, not unlike my childhood self. The more I play her, the more I realize she’s a lot like me. On the surface, she’s a strong and independent career woman who bosses the guys around her saloon. But underneath the bold exterior, she’s got classic, insecure man trouble: she’s in love with a bad boy, the bandit Dick Johnson, whom she suspects frequents the town prostitute.

So often when I sing these great female heroines onstage—Brünnhilde, Amelia, Ariadne, Tosca, Isolde—I temporarily take on their strengths, like putting on a costume. But I know I must have some of their resolve, or I wouldn’t be able to sing them with any authenticity. I also know that women of all ages, eras, and cultures can relate to the universal, timeless joys and struggles of these women—to their stories of love, betrayal, insecurity, jealousy, faith, hope, and despair. Women often ask me about these heroines, as if portraying them also affords me the secret to happiness, or the recipe to avoid a tragic end. As if Puccini or Wagner embedded those secrets in the pages of the librettos I memorize. But when I take off the costume and the makeup at the end of the day with a slab of cold cream and look in the mirror, I only see Debbie. And I ask myself the same questions other women ask their own reflections:

Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I with this man? Why do I wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach? Why am I never happy? Why am I so scared? I don’t know my lines, I’m going to fuck up, I’m not ready, I don’t want to go to rehearsal today. . . .

I’d been reading Joyce Meyer’s
Battlefield of the Mind
, about how to reroute and retrain our thoughts to be more positive, like exchanging bad habits for healthy ones. In Liège, I tried to put her suggestions into practice.

Even though I’d sung Minnie before, I was struggling to remember the libretto and was nervous because the opera house was having difficulty finding a prompter. The role is known among sopranos as
“Minnie the Voice Wrecker,” and it’s the most technically difficult role I’ve ever done.

First of all, the orchestra is enormous and lush—very fortissimo—producing a lot more sound for the singer to project over than, say, a Mozart opera. Second, the range you need to sing it is wide and varied. In Act II, during a scene when Minnie describes what she loves about living in the mountains, Puccini suddenly includes passages that are “coloratura”—dainty little notes when you’d just been singing in a big, dramatic voice—and a high C that’s very difficult to reach. Minnie is like Brünnhilde, in the same way that you need many different voices to sing her—except with Minnie it’s all in one evening’s work. Lastly, the character is so emotional and raw at times that I have to be careful not to get too high in voice when she’s crying and pleading for Dick’s life or I will strain it.

Plus, she’s got so many props to handle, it’s difficult to keep track—guns, poker cards, Bibles, glasses, and even a horse that I have to hoist myself onto and trot around on. There’s always a horse wrangler on set, but that doesn’t mean the horse doesn’t stop to do his business right in the middle of an act if that’s when nature calls—I’ve seen it happen. A pile of fresh, steaming horse manure is not the easiest thing to ignore as you sing about finding love at last.

I had a growing list of other worries adding to my anxiety as well: my knees were aching from recent bilateral knee replacement surgery and were shooting pain each time I kneeled for one scene; and the tenor singing opposite me, with whom I’d have to share a kiss, had a worrisome cough. I’d also had an upsetting appointment with a Belgian vet whom I took Steinway to see. As soon as we arrived in Liège, Steiny seemed weary and not quite right. In his half-English, the vet told me Steiny had a heart murmur and something wrong with his lungs. I burst into tears and went back to my apartment and gave Steiny all the doggie treats he wanted, then played with him
until he fell asleep. The thought of losing Steinway was too much for me to even contemplate. Steinway was the only one who’d sent me a Valentine’s Day card that year, care of Jesslyn. It had a picture of a Yorkie on the front, and inside Jesslyn had written in broken, doggy-English: “Deer Momee, I luv you . . . yer boy, Stine-eeeee.”

After Steiny fell asleep, I turned on some mindless reality show to numb my feelings and had too many drinks until I fell asleep, too.

THAT NIGHT, THE
night before Valentine’s Day, I had the same recurring two nightmares I’ve had since I was a teenager. In the first one, my mother and I are arguing loudly—more aggressively than we ever have in real life—and she’s ordering me to move out of the house. The dream ends with me in limbo: homeless, and not knowing where I will be living the next day. In the second nightmare I’m sitting in a classroom and I haven’t done my homework. I’ve been skipping class, and all my teachers are angry and yelling at me. I sit there, not moving, as they yell, because I don’t know what to do or where to go. I can’t go home because then my parents will know how bad I’ve been. So I keep skipping classes, not doing homework, knowing it’s going to end really, really badly.

In the morning I woke up gripped in fear—like that time with Peter in London—so I said a prayer:

Later in the day, I pushed myself out the door and went across the street to the opera house for rehearsal. We were set to do Minnie’s signature aria at the end of Act I, in which she tells Dick she’s not good enough for him—“I’m only a poor girl,” she sings, “there is nothing important about me. I’m a nobody, good for nothing. . . .”

It being Valentine’s Day, I was feeling Minnie’s pain more than usual. As I sat on a barrel, singing her woes, I was fighting back tears. After I finished, director Lorenzo Mariani called a break and approached me. Lorenzo had directed me in
La fanciulla
in San Francisco two years earlier, in my happy Jason days, so he’d heard me sing the aria many times before. He’s one of those empathic directors who keys into his actors’ emotions like a tuning fork. He also has a kinetic energy that ricochets off the floors and walls of a set. But now he stood very still, watching me.

“Debbie. When you sang just now, it was very real and deep. You were gone somewhere. I’m not sure where you were or what you were thinking, but . . . it was very moving.”

After rehearsal, I walked down the street to a nearby cathedral to light a candle for Jesslyn and her father. After a long illness, he had passed away days before our scheduled trip and she’d stayed home to tend to his funeral arrangements. I had heard the church bells chiming six p.m. from my dressing room window, so I simply followed the sound. It was a Thursday evening and the church was empty. I sat in a front pew and looked around at the timeless beauty of the church and up at the crucifix. I wondered about the faith of those who built this church, stone by stone, with their bare hands. How many of those workers, I wondered, didn’t even live to see it finished? I thought about how much faith that took, to build something and not know its future, but to keep faith anyway that all would end well no matter what.

And what kind of faith did I have?

I had wished at one time to have the same blind faith that Peter had, one in which I was certain God would take care of everything and I wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. But Peter slept peacefully, like a baby, no matter what he did or how badly he treated the people who loved him. Then there was the kind of faith that I grew up surrounded by, the judgmental and finger-pointing kind that sent you to hell even if you were a good person. Maybe it was
that kind of thinking that planted the pit of fear I wake up with every morning and the voice in my head that tells me I’m not good enough. Neither of these faiths felt right to me, and I knew I was missing something.

What I needed didn’t involve someone else saving me or approving of me; it had to do with looking inside myself. It had to do with having faith in my own strengths and choices. It was the kind of faith that carried big blocks of stone and knew that I could build something strong and lasting. Jane had urged me to have faith in myself that day when I left for my apprenticeship in San Francisco. Now, two decades later, it was a kind of faith that still eluded me.

BACK IN NEW
York, in May, I was onstage performing my final show as Brünnhilde in the Ring Cycle at the Met. In the last scene in Act III of
Götterdämmerung
(“The Twilight of the Gods”), Brünnhilde emerges from banishment and rightfully claims the ring of her husband, Siegfried. Then she sings a tearful farewell as the blazing funeral pyre is lit—the fire is meant to cleanse the ring of its curse—and she boldly rides her horse into the flames. It’s an emotional, heartbreaking, brave and triumphant finale that leaves my nerves raw at the end of the night.

I walked onstage for my last bow and the audience jumped to their feet, applauding and cheering, sending a much-needed tsunami of love washing over me. I felt . . . everything. I was relieved that after two years I’d reached the end of Brünnhilde’s ride, and proud that I’d completed two Ring Cycles despite the part of me that could have sabotaged it. I was afraid because I wasn’t sure what my future held at that moment. I looked at the cheering audience sitting beneath the glittering Lobmeyr crystal chandeliers and wondered if this would be my final curtain call—as Brünnhilde, at the Met, or ever.

And, finally, I was sad because I also wondered if it would be the last time I’d be onstage with Jason, who was in the
Götterdämmerung
chorus. That night during Act II, there was a scene where the captured Brünnhilde is brought to the castle and the Chief Minister tells the men how to treat her. Unbelievably, Jason was singled out from the chorus to receive special instruction from the Minister.

“Brünnhilde comes near,” he said to Jason. “Love your lady, faithfully help her; if she be wronged, swift be your vengeance!”

In the final act, Brünnhilde’s end and her lover’s death, felt like a funeral pyre for Jason and me as well. Onstage, all those emotions bubbled up in me and I burst into tears. Then, I went home and drank—not knowing how to deal with the feelings, or what to do with this overpowering sense of ending.

The next month, June, I was in Beijing to perform a Broadway musical concert, and I arrived a few days early to acclimate, rehearse, and see the sights. As every alcoholic will tell you, I woke up every morning with the best of intentions. My hotel was around the corner from Tiananmen Square, and every morning I’d say to myself:
Okay, I’m going to have lunch out today and see the historical square, I’ll go to the gym, I’ll do a little sightseeing and shopping . . .

But by ten a.m. I’d have already ordered champagne with breakfast, and the day would continue with more drinking and end with me passing out, never leaving my room.

After a few days, my memories of China became a blurry, dramatic repeat of Chicago, but worse: empty bottles strewn across the floor . . . a frantic phone call to my father and Lynn . . . strangers knocking loudly at my hotel room door . . . doctors saying my name to me in an emergency room . . . I’m in hysterics, sobbing . . . nurses sedating me . . . “put her on suicide watch,” says a disembodied, stern voice. . . .

A little Chinese lady sat in a chair and watched me all night and into the morning, until I left the hospital early the next day. I went to my hotel, took a shower, and was onstage rehearsing by ten a.m. After a small break and a nap, I was onstage, performing “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun” from
Annie Get Your Gun
. How did I do it?
It’s what I do. And an IV drip in my arm all night plus a pot of coffee didn’t hurt.

Somehow, in my most insane moments I find an enormous amount of resilience. I wouldn’t call it sheer will, because my will would have wanted to curl back into bed and stay drunk. But my resilience knows that no matter what, the show must go on.

A FEW WEEKS
later, I was in Florida, sprawled in the backseat of Dad and Lynn’s car, guzzling a four-pack of white Zinfandel screw-tops as they drove me to rehab. The day before was Father’s Day and I’d arrived to spend it with Dad and have my last blowout before checking into a place Dad and Lynn had found for me. At our Father’s Day dinner, I put back three martinis and two bottles of wine by myself. If my drinking had to stop, then I was going to drink every drop I could find until the last possible moment and arrive at the sterile promontory stinking drunk.

After China, I’d had a turning-point conversation with my assistant Jaime.

Both she and Jesslyn had done what they could to help keep me away from booze, and Jesslyn—my one-time Salzburg drinking buddy who’d caught ice balls falling from the sky for us—made it a point never to drink alcohol in front of me again. When I got back from China, Jaime hit me with this little gem of truth:

“Debbie,” she said, “you can’t continue living a double life like this. Deborah Voigt ‘the opera star’ onstage, and off-stage . . . an out-of-control drunk.”

I knew she was right. That second Debbie had to make her exit.

The next day I cleared my schedule and signed up for four weeks and $33,000 worth of intense rehab in Florida, in the hope that the thing that needed to kick the bucket was my old pattern of thinking and feeling instead of me myself. There was some serious saving to do, all right, and I had to do it and not expect someone or something outside myself to do it for me.

Before I left New York for Florida, Jason had come over to my apartment to watch a movie, fool around, and say goodbye.