The Private Lives of the Three Tenors
Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo: Part 6
Welcome to the concluding chapter of Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, where we’ve explored opera’s current #MeToo reckoning through four centuries of misogyny and misconduct in the genre’s history — onstage and off.
Plácido Domingo and Hilary Clinton, in an undated/uncredited photo published as part of The Private Lives of the Three Tenors (1996)
First, a moment to recap: Opera came together in part thanks to the court of a Florentine nobleman related to the Medici dynasty. The first surviving opera, Peri’s Eurydice, was written especially for the wedding celebration of Maria de’Medici to King Henry IV of France. The genre began to take off, reaching an international golden age during the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Works from that era are still heard today, including Mozart’s Don Giovanni (whose text was inspired by, if not directly edited by, librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s friend, Giacomo Casanova), and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (which epitomized the early 19th-century tradition of beautiful singing that underscored hysterical mad scenes).
Some authors, such as William Weaver, pinpoint the decline of opera’s golden age occurring with the death of Giacomo Puccini. And, because the meaning of an artist’s work changes after the death of the artist, Puccini’s own biography became largely subsumed by the plots of his operas. One key example of this is how we regard the story of his maid, Doria Manfredi, often read as a parable for Liù in Puccini’s Turandot (with Puccini’s wife, Elvira, as the eponymous ice princess).
Despite being arrested and convicted of sexual harassment, Puccini’s frequent leading man, tenor Enrico Caruso, enjoyed a similar revisionist legacy. This was enabled in part by his status as one of the world’s first multi-media celebrities. Caruso’s sanitized, Hays-Coded biopic from MGM went on to influence many of today’s tenors, including Plácido Domingo, whose career has included more cancellations than usual in the last year due to public allegations of sexual misconduct. (Earlier this year, an investigation launched by the Los Angeles Opera found allegations of harassment to be credible.)
That’s the upshot in just under 300 words. Tug on any thread, however, and you can see how intricately these elements connect.
Plácido Domingo was so influenced by Caruso that he recorded a tribute album to his hero. “Today’s great tenor sings famous arias of yesterday’s great tenor,” the LP cover announced. (He also recorded a tribute album to Puccini, the cover photo showing him dressed as the composer.)
Among the nearly 150 roles he’s sung in his career (more roles for Domingo than for women in France or Turkey for Don Giovanni), Domingo had an early breakthrough as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor. In his book My Operatic Roles, he writes that “the most difficult thing in bel canto is to control yourself.” Before that, he also sang Don Ottavio, a role he describes as “felt almost embarrassed to be singing” because the character was "neither exciting nor inspirational.”
That sentiment didn’t apply to Don Giovanni on the whole. In more recent years, Domingo has frequentlysung the Giovanni-Zerlinaduet, “Làcidaremlamano” in concert. (He also, in 2017, fulfilled “a dream” of his to conduct the opera where it premiered, at the Estates Theatre in Prague.) A role more recently added to Domingo’s catalogue: Giuliano de’Medici (the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent) in I Medici, a lesser-known work by Puccini contemporary Leoncavallo (who wrote the song “Mattinata” for Caruso).
Domingo grew up in a different era, one in which media became more diversified and markets more sequestered. Unlike Caruso, no New York Times editor would likely greenlight an article about Domingo showing up to the Met having shaved off his moustache. But if anyone in the latter half of the 20th (and beginning of the 21st) Century has reached a level of fame analogous to Caruso’s, it’s the tenor whose credits also include Sesame Street, The Simpsons, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
To say that Domingo, born to zarzuela stars Plácido Domingo, Sr. and Pepita Embil, grew up in a musical home is an understatement. When Pepita and Plácido, Sr. toured Latin America with composer Federico Moreno Torroba in 1946, they stayed on in Mexico to start their own zarzuela company. Young Plácido soon became drafted into his parents’ company, and at 14 he entered Mexico's National Conservatory.
After an initial marriage as a teenager to one of his classmates, Domingo moved to Tel Aviv in 1962 with his second wife, another classmate and soprano named Marta Ornelas. Three years later, he made his New York City Opera debut and resettled in the metropolitan area while his star ascended. He debuted in Europe in 1967. The following year, he sang his first performance at the Met. A feature interview with the New York Times in November 1968 (his first of many), began by invoking the 16th-century Saint Placidus. In 1972, one of the busiest years of his early career (9 debuts, 19 operas, and 4 concerts in the first six months alone), another Times feature quoted Birgit Nilsson: “God must have been in excellent spirits the day He created Plácido.” By 1974, new singers were vying for the title of “the next Domingo.” In 1977, Peter G. Davis wrote, “Plácido Domingo is the busiest, most in-demand tenor in opera today.” Five years later, Newsweek crowned him “The King of the Opera.”
At approximately the same time that Domingo married Marta and launched his career in earnest, something else was happening in San Francisco that, while seemingly unconnected, would lead to a number of ramifications that gives us insight into opera’s current reckoning with power and the abuse thereof: Import-export broker Samuel M. Vilensky died. He left behind two daughters, Marcia and Debra. The experience bonded the girls, who eventually moved to Los Angeles to forge careers as journalists. They co-authored a few pieces for the Hollywood Reporter, using the last name “Lewis” in lieu of Vilensky. They even launched their own, short-lived, quarterly, Beverly Hills Magazine (it didn’t last a year).
Eventually, both also married wealthy doctors: Debra to cardiologist Bill Finerman, and Marcia to oncologist Bernard Lewinsky. Marcia and Bernard’s first child, Monica, was born in 1973 (the same year as two major debuts for Domingo: his singing debut in Paris, and his conducting debut in New York). The couple’s bitter divorce would stretch from 1987 into 1988. When her sister planned to move to Washington, DC in 1994 so that Bill could start a new job, Marcia uprooted her family’s Beverly Hills lifestyle and, with her two children, followed Debra and Bill. There, she sold a book proposal for what would eventually become The Private Lives of the Three Tenors.
By 1990, Domingo was one of the top opera stars in the world, and also spending more time in Los Angeles in a consulting role that would ultimately lead to him managing the Los Angeles Opera. A lifelong opera fan, Marcia had met Domingo a few times through Debra and Bill, who were supporters of the company.
That summer, along with colleagues Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras, Domingo gave a concert on the eve of the World Cup in Rome. The stadium performance (which was also a fundraiser) became the most popular video recording in the classical genre, and the biggest donation-generator for PBS. Rebranded as the Three Tenors by concert promoter Matthias Hoffmann, the trio reprised their concert programs of familiar hits and popular crossovers at the World Cup games in 1994, 1998, and 2002. They also gave a world tour between 1996 and 1997 that was estimated to earn them each $10 million (about $16.5 million in 2020 dollars).
Tapping into the popularity that the Three Tenors were enjoying throughout the 90s, Lewis sold The Private Lives of the Three Tenors to Carol Publishing Group, notable for its catalogue of unauthorized celebrity biographies. Published at the end of 1996 (and well-timed for holiday presents), the jacket copy read, in part:
“Domingo, Pavarotti, and Carreras have exploded from the rarefied world of opera to become bona fide pop culture icons.… In short, these three tenors have become superstars. Their personal histories surpass even those of their larger-than-life characters on the opera stage. The unvarnished story behind these three men is one of grand indulgences: lavish spending, overblown glamour, and plenty of sex.”
What follows is a 200-page biography that, per one New York Times critic, “displays both insight and a weakness for melodrama.” The Times review (a handful of sentences as part of a larger roundup of new releases) was the bulk of the coverage that The Private Lives of the Three Tenors received on its release. Reading The Private Lives, this is somewhat generous, but fair: Lewis bases her research mostly on the singers’ own authorized biographies and autobiographies, as well as feature interviews, broadcast archives, and press coverage, with a good deal of hearsay mixed in.
Given Carol Publishing’s track record (and the fact that it would be bankrupt and sold for parts by the end of the millennium) and the small number of reviews the book garnered, it’s likely that The Private Lives of the Three Tenors, which sold a respectable 20,000 copies and netted Lewis approximately $50,000 in 1996 (closer to $75,000 today), would have faded into the ether of supermarket tell-alls as the media landscape continued to shift. No one could have predicted that the contents of the book — or, more precisely, the contents of Lewis’s marketing campaign for the book — would come under a closer, and significantly more charged, focus just over a year after. But then again, no one would have predicted, in 1996, that Lewis’s daughter was about to become a latter-day Hester Prynne.
Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, circa 1995
Shortly after news broke of then-President Bill Clinton’s long-term affair with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern turned staffer, and the alleged cover-up thereof, the New York Times published a marketing pitch that Lewis had written for Carol Publishing as one proposed method of marketing the book:
“How did the author, a glamorous Beverly Hills reporter, formerly with Hollywood Reporter, get all the inside dope? She denies rumors she and Domingo were more than friends in the '80s but read the book and see what you think.”
Then-president of Carol Publishing, Steven Schragis, would later describe this level of media savvy as “quite rare” for a first-time author. He ultimately vetoed the angle, mainly as Lewis herself wouldn’t admit to having had an affair with Domingo, and made no mention of it in the book. He had also cut the one section of the book that veered from creative nonfiction into full-blown fantasy, wherein Lewis imagined what it would be like to have an intimate encounter with Domingo.
“As if the Monica Lewinsky story wasn't weird enough, it has now acquired a lurid Freudian psychosexual literary background,” wrote Gary Kamiya for Salon (in an editorial with the headline “Mommy Leerest”).
In a belated review of the book, Kamiya adds that The Private Lives of the Three Tenors could be used to serve either side of the “did-she-or-didn’t-she” debate surrounding Lewis’s daughter:
“You could guess that she shares her mom's tendency to hero-worship, with its concomitant, uh, breeziness about moral issues around adultery… if Mom was a secondhand starfucker, why shouldn't her daughter be a firsthand one? On the other hand, there's that dubious hey-I-started-a-rumor-that-I-did-Plácido letter. Maybe Monica's I-did-Bill tales are no more credible than that.”
In 2020, reading The Private Lives of the Three Tenors is notable, not for the parallels between Lewis’s account and Lewinsky’s testimony, but for the divergences between Lewis and the allegations of many women made against Domingo, representing decades of sexual harassment that was corroborated earlier this year by an independent investigation launched by the Los Angeles Opera.
Schragis told Salon that he had to “de-purple-ize” much of Lewis’s prose, which in 1998 had lost any of the insight that the New York Times accorded the book before the Clinton scandal. That still left a lot of purple-ness in-tact for the book’s Domingo section, which takes up nearly 80 pages, many of which commenting on the longstanding rumors of Domingo’s infidelities. One passage reads particularly uncomfortably in 2020:
“[It] may be that the stories are just that — stories and fables that have sprung up about a man so many women find irresistible. Or, the answer may lie in Plácido Domingo’s own, very special nature. Here is a man who noy only truly loves women, relishes them, revels in them but — most significantly — respects them. This stems from a basic truth about the man. He is universally acknowledged to be a person of extreme integrity, depth of character, and purity of heart.… He is, in short, very hidalgo, a true gentleman. And hidalgo is one of Domingo’s favorite Spanish words. There is a nobility implicit in the world — not necessarily of social status, but of conduct. A man who is hidalgo may love many women, and then he leaves them. Their hearts are broken, they weep softly, but there is no anger. No screaming fits, no ugly ‘scenes’ in public. And no ‘tell-all’ stories sold to the tabloids. He has loved them with a style and grace that lifts them to heights of ecstasy and fantasy, but when the storybook romance is over, the hidalgo lover leaves them with sweet, sweet memories and no rancor.
“Why would ‘an hidalgo’ be able to acquire so many willing conquests? Because he knows just how to treat a woman. An hidalgo would telephone her before a performance, whispering to protect his famous voice. They would meet late at night after a triumphant concert, his adrenaline still racing after the ‘high’ of hearing the thunderous applause of a thousand fans, a dozen encores. A true hidalgo would end every message left on an answering machine with the soft words… ‘For you, darling, a big kiss.’ If she traveled to New York to be near him, he would fill her suite at the Plaza Hotel with dozens of roses.
“An hidalgo’s lovemaking would be passionate and romantic, with murmurs of adoration and love, and an expert knowledge in how to pleasure a woman. Is Domingo an hidalgo? Millions of women the world over sincerely believe he is.”
Contrast this with what would be written nearly 25 years later, when the first nine women to go on the record accused Domingo of misconduct in a report for the Associated Press. With one Los Angeles-based singer who, at 27, was launching her career, he would frequently show up to her LA Opera dressing room uninvited, “leaning forward to kiss her cheeks and placing one hand on the side of her breast. Rather than aroused or respected, the singer described to the AP feeling panicked and trapped: “I was totally intimidated and felt like saying no to him would be saying no to God. How do you say no to God?”
That same singer described being harangued by phone calls, not with murmurs of adoration, but with persistent requests for a rendezvous. For her, Domingo wasn’t a hidalgo, he was a hunter.
While she then told the AP she eventually gave in to Domingo’s overtures, she soon broke it off and was never hired at Los Angeles Opera again. Nearly 25 years after the fact, she described being “haunted by fears that submitting to Domingo had mitigated any wrongdoing on his part.” (Suffice it to say, Domingo has denied both the AP report and Lewis’s book.)
In his piece for Salon (which, in all fairness, hasn’t aged terribly well either), Kamiya calls Lewis out for wallowing “cheerfully and without even a pretense of moral condemnation in the delectable sexual exploits of the full-throated celebrities… By virtue of their talent, power and fame, the Three Big Boys are deemed above the marital law.”
Most interesting here is Kamiya’s use of the word “power.” This is a word used liberally in The Private Lives of the Three Tenors. In describing how all three tenors are haunted by the ghost of Caruso, Lewis writes that their forebear “was the first tenor to understand the importance of the emotional power of opera.” (No one ever accused her of being a musicologist.)
There is also the “power” of the Don Juan; the “physicality and raw power” required for one of Domingo’s signature roles (Verdi’s Otello); and what Domingo himself describes as the power of emotionally transforming people’s lives with a live performance as both “my duty and one of my greatest satisfactions.”
Power also becomes an important element of the Clinton scandal. Writing for Vanity Fair in 2014, Monica Lewinsky acknowledged that “my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” While Clinton is still remembered for this affair and subsequent cover-up, he’s maintained a diverse portfolio of identifiers.
For Lewinsky (who, it should be re-stated, was 22 at the time of her affair a man who was 27 years her senior — and the president of the United States), this event continues to be the single identifier for her, no matter how much she has also tried to re-launch her career. That’s to say nothing of the trauma she describes during the Starr investigation, wherein she was threatened with 27 years in prison if she didn’t comply as a witness.
Reflecting on that 2014 article, Lewinsky revised her position for the same magazine in 2018. “I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent,” she writes. “Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege. (Full stop.)”
Without infantilizing Lewinsky (who was, as Hillary Clinton pointed out in response to the article, an adult), the argument that power compromises consent is a valid one.
“Power imbalances always have the potential to impact consent,” the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s Laura Palumbo told VICE in October 2018. “This is especially true when the level of power is very apparent because of a person’s formal position of authority. This can impact a sexual partner of any age’s ability to consent.”
Moreover, it can impact a victim’s ability to report abuse — or even, as Lewinsky proves, adequately identify what may be abuse — immediately in the aftermath. This, too, is a hallmark of the power held by those complicit. An unbylined Newsweek editorial from February 1998 suggests that it believes Lewinsky was telling the truth of her affair with Clinton, noting, “She does not sound unbalanced or delusional on the tapes [of Lewinsky’s phone calls with Linda Tripp] heard by NEWSWEEK.” But the following line calls to mind a gendered look at misconduct straight out of Charcot: “Still, a neurotic young woman trying to impress a worldly confidante might be tempted to embellish a flirtation at the highest levels.”
All things considered, it seems like our options are limited: We can be the media-savvy shyster who “hikes up her rhetorical skirt,” to borrow a phrase from Kamiya. Or we can be the “neurotic, slightly spoiled Valley Girl” (Newsweek) who is, as Maureen Dowd would later write as part of her Pulitzer-winning coverage of and commentary on the Clinton scandal, “in a panic to squeeze the last drop of profit from this sordid tale.” Or we can shut up and say nothing, which is to say, become complicit.
Even reader responses to the AP report on Domingo illustrate the lose-lose scenario: If you remain anonymous, your allegations are invalid. If you go on the record, you’re opening yourself up to public shaming for attempting to go after a so-called great man, if not outright threats. (“When a man is shamed, it’s usually, ‘I’m going to get you fired,’ Jon Ronson wrote in a profile on Monica Lewinsky. “When a woman is shamed it’s, ‘I’m going to rape you and get you fired.’”) The focus on the victim, as a gold-digger, an opportunist, or a revisionist historian who originally consented and was now changing their mind in order for a profit that most people who espouse this argument are then hard-pressed to name.
“It will continue to be jarring when we hear the names of some of our faves connected to sexual violence unless we shift from talking about individuals and begin to talk about power,” #MeToo movement founder Tarana Burke tweeted in 2018.
Ultimately, power is what connects the dots from Plácido Domingo and #MeToo to the birth of opera — and all of its moments of inequality and marginalization along the way. The power of the Medicis, Casanova, Puccini, and Caruso — by virtue of their fame, talent, and connections (not to mention their gender) has done a lot for art and culture. But it also censured and censored voices that were left on the margins. It excused those in power from the same burdens of accountability and responsibility placed on those who would speak truth to power. It shaped and reshaped the narrative of history in order to cover up the events that should be prodded, interrogated.
It’s time for those other voices to be heard. It’s time for those narratives to be interrogated. It’s time for those discussions about power to be had.
Thanks for subscribing to Undone. I’ll be off for the next 2 weeks, in part to research some upcoming stories. See you in August.