Maria Callas's Complicated Relationship with the Kennedys (2025)

Maria Callas was, despite her international fame, a quintessentially American success story. Born on the wrong side of the tracks in New York City, she scaled the heights of career success to become an icon not just in the rarefied world of opera but of the jet set—famous and mercurial enough to be lobbed with cabbages by fans after canceling performances. (Where was Chappell Roan when Callas needed her?) And like most celebrities of the era, she had more than a few encounters with the Kennedy family, culminating in the scandal that threatened to bury her artistic triumphs beneath schadenfreude and public humiliation.

Pablo Larraín’s new biographical drama Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as La Divina in the final week of her life, finds time to ruminate on the loss of lover Aristotle Onassis to the world’s most famous widow, Jackie Kennedy, and even include a scene in which Callas coolly puts Jack Kennedy in his place in an empty restaurant. She has become almost inseparable from the family—but how much of that is fact? T&C investigates here.

“Happy Birthday” Versus “Habanera”

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Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas and Caspar Phillipson as John F. Kennedy in Maria.

There’s something dispiriting about watching Callas—arguably the greatest singer of the 20th century—relegated to the audience at JFK’s 1962 birthday extravaganza as Marilyn Monroe sings “Happy Birthday” in Maria. Larraín frames the moment as a telling example of how Onassis’ possessiveness prevented Callas from pursuing her vocation, as well as of his offhanded cruelty when he tells Callas, “No one cares about [Monroe’s] voice, just as no one cares about your body.” In reality, Callas also performed at what was a truly bizarre variety show at Madison Square Garden.

Part birthday fête and part Democratic fundraiser, the May 19 event is now entirely known for the moment Monroe came out onstage, dropped her fur coat, and revealed a spangled Jean Louis gown so tight she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. (An arcane bit of trivia: Bob Mackie was the designer who sketched the dress for Jean Louis.)

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Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas and Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis in Maria.

But Monroe was hardly the only entertainer to take the stage. Everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Henry Fonda and Peter Lawford was on hand to celebrate the president. And, of course, Callas herself, singing “La Habanera” from Carmen in a demure floral gown with a bouffant somewhere between Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson in terms of proportions.

Monroe would be dead three months later. As for the sphinx-like Jackie, she wasn’t even there, not to see her first husband’s purported mistress perform and not to see her future second husband’s former mistress perform. Instead, she attended the Loudoun Hunt Horse Show, surprising the press by winning third place in the Maj. Larry Lawrence Memorial Trophy event for owner-riders.

Sail Away

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Maria Callas with Aristotle Onassis, with whom she was in a long relationship—until he married Jackie Kennedy.

A month later, Onassis and Callas were back on his mega yacht, The Christina, with the usual array of guests—including a new face, Princess Lee Radziwill. Onassis’ overt attention to Radziwill did not go unnoticed by Callas, but by that point, she had reached a detente about his infidelity. A year later, Radziwill brought Jackie aboard for a trip (one that Callas was not part of) to recuperate after the death of her newborn, Patrick. At the end of that voyage, the sisters’ positions in relationship to Onassis were clear. He gave Jackie a diamond necklace; Lee got a bracelet so insignificant that she couldn’t help sniping that “not even [six-year-old] Caroline would wear the thing.”

Peril on the High C

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Maria Callas on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

As far as historians can ascertain, the closest Jackie and Callas ever came to meeting might have been the former’s attendance at a performance of Tosca in which Callas starred.

According to John Mauceri’s first-hand account of the March 19, 1965, performance—Callas’ first at the Met since her very public feud with the venue began in 1958—Jackie was seated in the orchestra with Callas’s close friend Elsa Maxwell.

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Jackie Kennedy at a 1965 performance by Maria Callas at the Metropolitan Opera. The former First Lady is accompanied by the opera’s then general manager, Rudolph Bing.

It was Callas’ triumphant return to the Met; it was Jackie’s first public appearance since President Kennedy’s assassination.

The two women never confronted one another, as far as history records, and Maria shrewdly eschews inventing an encounter. But even without first-hand accounts, history has a way of marking people as winners and losers. Callas, for all her talent and passion, was no match for Jackie Kennedy’s cool self-possession. And so it is that, at the tail end of a bedazzled paean to her gifts, Mauceri refers to a bungled high C so bad that he looked to the Met’s chandelier to see if it had survived the blast. As fitfully as Maria follows real life, Larraín and Jolie do give Callas one last glorious performance—no Kennedys in attendance.

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Mark Peikert

Mark Peikert is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. His first novel, Jagged Sophistication, is out now.

Maria Callas's Complicated Relationship with the Kennedys (2025)
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