Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva Read online

  Dedication

  For Mom, Dad, Rob, and Kevin.

  I love you all very much.

  Acknowledgments

  THANK YOU TO my wonderful, funny, loving family: Dad and Lynn, Mom and Don, Rob and Angie, Kevin and Tara, and Marianne.

  And to my nieces and nephews that warm this aunt’s heart: Maddie, Kailee, Abby, Nicholas, Graham, Olivia, and Morgan.

  And thanks to my cousins Martha, Amy, Peggy, Tony, Brian, and Todd—with whom I’ve shared a lifetime of memories.

  A big thank you to Jesslyn Cleary, my assistant through thick and thin and the mistress of “Camp Cleary for Yorkies and Cats.”

  Jaime Aita, this book wouldn’t have come together without you. Thank you!

  My gratitude to Jane Paul, my mentor and friend—and to Nancy Estes, Ruth Falcon, David Jones, Levering Rothfuss, and Brian Zeger.

  To Paul Côte, my first manager, for believing in me all those years ago.

  At Columbia Artists Management, many thanks to Ronald Wilford, Elizabeth Crittenden, Alec Treuhaft, Damon Bristo, Tim Fox . . . and to Andrea Anson, for your unconditional support and encouragement. I love you.

  To Albert Imperato at 21C Media Group (“Alberto!”), a heartfelt thanks for your vision and boundless enthusiasm! Same goes to Sean Michael Gross and Michael Lutz.

  Natasha Stoynoff, my co-writer; I’ve never bared my soul to anyone as much as I have with you. Thank you for that, and for all those sleepless, marathon, eating-writing sessions.

  To Jonathan Burnham at HarperCollins, I’m so grateful for your endless support and patience. Many thanks to Laura Brown and Bob Levine for their valuable contribution to the book.

  Thank you to Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell Management.

  And to Herbert Breslin, who always loved “a good scandal.”

  To my first opera family at the San Francisco Opera—Andrew Meltzer, Christine Bullin, and Sarah Billinghurst.

  Thank you to my dear friends: my buddy Jack Doulin, for our morning chats to solve the problems of the world; Victoria Gluth, for endless hours of laughter and amateur psychiatry; Julia Hanish, because I love you, Tyson, Tyce, and Lyles; and Sue Burhop Muszczynski—my secret-voiced, ice-cream caper pal forever.

  John Leitch—because you never quite get over your first love.

  And finally, thank you to Peter Gelb, Jimmy Levine, Joe Volpe, and the rest of my Metropolitan Opera Family.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Overture: Heavenly Voices

  ACT I: PICCOLA

  1. My Fair Little Lady

  2. Jesus Loves Me

  3. Sweet and Innocent

  4. High School Musical

  5. Wild Things

  ACT II: ACCELERANDO

  6. When the Student Is Ready

  7. Covering Butts

  8. Next Stop, the Wiener Staatsoper

  9. Diets and Divas

  10. Amelia and Ariadne: Luck Be This Lady

  11. Leona, Leonie, Luciano: Breakthroughs and Breaking Up

  ACT III: CRESCENDO

  12. Dangerous Liaisons and Plácido’s Kiss

  13. Blood, Death, and Grace

  14. Little Black Dress and Sexy Salome

  15. Princes, Rogues, Blackouts, and Bottoms

  16. Fathers, Love, and the Ride of the Valkyries

  17. Fear and Loathing in Liège

  18. A Tree of Life

  Photo Section

  Finale: Voigt Lessons

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Overture:

  Heavenly Voices

  WHEN I WAS fourteen years old, God spoke to me.

  I know it will sound unbelievable to most—and if it hadn’t happened to me and someone told me the same thing, I might accuse him or her of hallucinating. But it happened, and I remember it as vividly today, forty years later, as if He’d spoken to me yesterday.

  There was no burning bush, no blinding flash of light—but it was a miracle to me nevertheless, even if it was low-key and over in a matter of seconds. Those few mystical moments when I was a teenager forever changed the course of my life.

  It happened just a little past dawn on a fall morning in 1974 that began like any other in our suburban home. The rest of my family—my parents, Bob and Joy, and two younger brothers, Rob and Kevin—were asleep, and the usually noisy household was quiet and still. I’d woken up early and was treasuring the silence as if it were a piece of rare and beautiful music. The light was peeking through my bedroom curtains and I snuggled under the blankets, sleepily watching the sun’s first rays slip across the room’s lemon walls.

  That’s when I heard Him, a voice that came from everywhere, and out of nowhere. The voice was as clear as day; it was both as loud as a lion and as soft as a whisper. He said five simple words, but they were powerful enough to put me onto the path I would follow from that moment onward:

  You are here to sing.

  I know, writing this now, what it must sound like. But I promise you: I sat up in bed and searched the room, wide-eyed. There was no one else there, and for a second I wondered, did I just dream that? No, I was definitely awake. And there was no doubt in my mind who that voice belonged to, I just knew. It was otherworldly but so very real. I have never been able to describe the timbre, cadence, accent, or inflection of that voice, but if I heard it again I’d know it like I know my own.

  I held my breath, waiting to hear if there would be more . . . some additional message, instruction, or revelation . . . anything. But there wasn’t. Five words was it, that’s what I got. I wasn’t given an earth-shaking command to lead my people out of bondage, or to plow up my Illinois cornfield, or to stand on a box in New York’s Times Square and warn the wicked to repent because the end was nigh.

  Nope, my message was simple and intensely personal, and, in a way, it was more of an affirmation than a directive.

  You are here to sing.

  God told me to do what I had always innately sensed I was born to do. And not just demurely, but proudly—with every ounce of passion in my soul and every fiber of my being. It was a dream of mine, even when I couldn’t articulate it.

  I never imagined myself becoming a world-famous dramatic soprano who’d share the stages of the biggest opera houses in the world with the most celebrated vocalists of our time. I didn’t yearn to meet presidents, princes, Pavarottis, and Plácidos.

  As a child, I only knew I loved to sing.

  Had I not heard the voice of God in my bedroom that day, my unarticulated dream may have gotten lost. Because even though I’d always felt that music was my destiny, the first several years of my life I struggled to hold on to it, to not let that calling be denied.

  But as I said, God’s voice that day would firmly plant my feet and my voice on the path that would lead me to fulfill it.

  And that dramatic journey begins, appropriately, as all great operas do . . . with music, and a story that stirs the soul.

  ACT I

  PICCOLA

  ( 1 )

  My Fair Little Lady

  MY FATHER SAYS I was singing before I was even talking.

  His mother, Grandma Voigt, owned a vinyl copy of the My Fair Lady movie soundtrack when I was a toddler. And, as family folklore has it, I’d tug at Grandma’s dress and beg her to play the record for me whenever we all visited her in Mount Prospect, a forty-minute drive from our home in Wheeling, Illinois.

  Mom and Dad were strict Southern Baptists and, with a few exceptions, any form of non-Christian “secular” music
was forbidden in our own ultraconservative home. But my three-year-old mind didn’t comprehend censorship, and to my young ears My Fair Lady was as sweet, fun, and innocent as candy, and it made me want to run to the center of the room and sing the songs out loud.

  Grandma Voigt was a heavy-set woman—I take after her physically—with a slightly dour disposition. She wasn’t particularly musical and was definitely not the whimsical, gamine, Audrey Hepburn type, so how she ended up with My Fair Lady in her record collection, I can’t say. But it was there, and it caught my eye. Every Sunday when we’d visit her, I’d run in the door and rush to Grandma in the kitchen.

  “Grandma . . . please, please. My Lady?” I’d manage to get out as I tugged at her apron.

  “Oh, Debbie. Again?”

  She’d wipe her hands and make her way to the long, teak stereo console in the living room, with me following close behind. After she put the record on, she’d give me her apron to use as my costume—which I accessorized with a netted pillbox hat from the front closet and one of Grandma’s shiny brooches, and took my position center stage on the living room floor.

  “I’m going to sing now!” I’d announce loudly.

  Everyone would stop what they were doing and come in. With the hat falling over my eyes, and with a Cockney accent that would impress the likes of Michael Caine, I belted out at the top of my lungs one of the great refrains in English musical theater:

  “Jusst you ’ait, Enry Iggins, jusst you ’ait!”

  I think you get the picture.

  I was a pint-sized, self-assured, living room diva who performed for the sheer joy of it—not to mention the thrill of having a captive audience.

  It took only a few Sunday visits before I had the entire album—all the music and all the lyrics—memorized, an ability I wish stayed with me decades later when my opera career depended on memorizing thick librettos in a variety of languages. But I could do it then with ease, and once I’d conquered My Fair Lady, I moved on to a new repertoire, The Sound of Music, which came out the following year, and which my mother bought for me (it was one of those secular exceptions—after all, Maria had wanted to be a nun). By age four, it had become about more than singing for me—I loved the drama of it all. I’d sashay across the living room in my apron and truly feel Maria’s desire to banish all her doubts and fears and find courage and strength inside of her:

  “They’ll have to agree, I have confidence in MEEEEEEE!”

  My family played along as best they could and clapped, commenting to each other, “Oh, isn’t she cute!” and then, probably, “Don’t worry, she’ll grow out of it.” Because what was most likely at the forefront of my parents’ baffled minds at the time was: “Who does this kid think she is? Where did she come from?”

  No one in my family, not my parents or their siblings or cousins or even any of my four grandparents had ever shown an out-of-the-ordinary gift for music or a burning desire to perform. And suddenly here I was, this little kid parading around the house, belting out Broadway melodies at the top of her lungs and overemoting like a silent-film star. I’m sure it was shocking to them, even frightening.

  My mother liked to sing and play piano, but she mostly expressed her love of music in church, where she played hymns and sang in the choir.

  At their religious core my parents believed that any great talent, be it an athletic ability or a beautiful voice, was a gift from God, and that the proper use of that gift was to glorify God. So hymns sung in the house of our Lord were good; most other music sung elsewhere was sinful.

  Performers who boldly strutted their secular stuff across any other stage were condemned as prideful, which my father ranked as the number-one Deadly Sin—keeping one’s pride in check was a big, big deal, both at church and in our home. If we had a family crest, our motto would be: Pride Goeth Before a Fall. Or, as our pastor at Prospect Heights Baptist Church never tired of quoting from Proverbs during Sunday sermons, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall!” My parents were also influenced by their own parents’ old-fashioned, puritanical disdain for performers—especially female performers, who were considered “loose” women, tramps.

  So for them to see their little girl prancing about coquettishly with one eye on the footlights, it would have been nothing less than alarming.

  WHEN I WAS born, in Wheeling, Illinois, on August 4, 1960, my mother was seventeen and my father a year older. They were high school sweethearts who had, I romantically imagined later, succumbed to adolescent passion in the backseat of a mint-green Buick Skylark. Unromantically—nine months later—after a hastily arranged wedding, Debbie Joy Voigt made her debut into the world.

  My mother, Joy, was a pretty and voluptuous midwestern girl with a bright smile, kind heart, and a shy, trusting nature (aren’t they always the ones who “get in trouble”?). Even as a kid, I felt protective of her and didn’t want to leave her alone to go to school. She, in turn, showered me with affection. In my packed school lunches I’d find little “I love you” notes decorated with hearts atop my tuna sandwiches.

  My father, Bob, was her opposite—a salesman with a type-A personality: outgoing, driven, ambitious, and a natural-born charmer (aren’t they always the ones who get the nice girls in trouble?) with penetrating hazel eyes.

  In many ways my parents were amazingly mismatched, and I picked up on the tension from a very young age. Both were, no doubt, unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the demanding realities and messiness of being teenage parents. They liked clean lines and control—when we had company coming over and Mom vacuumed, we weren’t allowed to walk onto the carpet and mess up the vacuum lines.

  MY FATHER ALSO had a temper, and an odd sense of humor, and the combination of the two frightened and confused us kids. Often at dinner, in a quiet moment, he’d suddenly bang his elbows onto the table as hard as he could for no reason at all—sending the dishes clattering across the table and scaring me and my brothers. He had no trouble displaying anger or disapproval, but he did have difficulty expressing tenderness. Even though I see us together in old photos, me smiling in his arms, I don’t have any memory of him hugging me or telling me that he loved me. As affectionate as my mother was, he was that cool and distant—unreachable.

  My theatrical self-expression as a child may have been my way of reaching across that divide, or acting out the drama I saw around me. All the elements of a Puccini tragedy were played out in front of me during my formative years—lust, betrayal, jealousy, rage, heartbreak.

  My earliest memory is from age three, a few months before my Cockney-flower-girl turn. It’s a hazy memory: I was in my brother Rob’s room with my mother and it was night—this I remember, because I kept staring at the glow of Rob’s night-light, trying not to look at my mother’s face. The scene began with my little brother in his crib, and my mother, tearfully and furiously packing a suitcase that lay open atop a chest of drawers.

  “Debbie, we’re going to visit Grandma Helen and Grandpa Henry,” she said to me as she tossed our clothes into the suitcase. “Go get your teddy bear.” My brother was crying, and I shifted my gaze to my father, who had wandered into the scene stage left and was leaning against the door frame, shoulders slumped, head hanging low. All we needed to complete the tableau was the appearance of Puccini’s betrayed geisha, Butterfly, to sing the heartrending “Un bel dì vedremo.” That is, if opera music was permitted under house rules.

  Something was terribly wrong. I stood in the middle as my parents talked in strained voices—as if they were screaming at each other in whispers. They kept mentioning another woman at our church. Mom kept opening and shutting drawers loudly as Dad looked at her pleadingly, sorrowfully—a look you rarely saw on his face—and I wanted to cry, but I held it in. Days later, like all their arguments, the tragedy ended with a reunion and a lyrical love scene. From my bedroom, late at night, I could see their shadowy figures in the living room meet in a kiss, their silhouettes highlighted against the flickering light of
our black-and-white TV. I was relieved to see them happy again, but hopelessly confused about the interactions between grown-up men and women.

  AT AGE FIVE, after a successful two-year engagement belting out show tunes at Grandma’s, my passion for singing was rerouted by my parents and channeled toward the children’s choir at church. Somewhere along the way, they let me know, with nonverbal cues, that there was something not good about how and what I was singing. The connection dawned on me slowly, but once it did, I experienced a feeling I never had before and could not name at the time—shame.

  My brief, happy gig as a song-and-dance girl came to an abrupt end and I was relocated to the church altar beside the other kids, where my voice could be used for a higher, nobler purpose—to celebrate the glory of God.

  It was now 1965, going on ’66, and the rest of the world, especially young adults my parents’ age, were listening to the Rolling Stones, to the Mamas and the Papas, to the Beatles’ radically new, electric-guitar-pumped Revolver album. But my parents were having none of it. They may have come of age in the sixties, but their cultural feet were planted back in the conservative, clean-cut fifties, and they were more Pat Boone and Debbie Reynolds—pretty square. But they still appreciated music. Money was tight, but Dad bought us a piano, and we all took lessons. Mom would teach herself songs from The Fifty Top Romantic Songs of the Era—sweet, melancholy ballads like “Red Roses for a Blue Lady”—as I sat next to her on the piano bench with my eyes closed, listening to her pretty voice.

  At church, I had traded in my pillbox hat for a navy pinafore and a repertoire of gospel hymns. I happily discovered that the hymns were beautiful love songs about God, like “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and that I could sing them with all my heart, too.

  I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free.

  His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me.

  I adored their spiritual sweetness. But if my parents thought they could exorcise their little girl’s inner diva by choosing what and where I sang, they were mistaken.