This kind of stardom is what she wanted and it's what she got, ever since the pride of Galveston Street became one of the world's most famous opera singers more than a decade ago. But real life gets in the way, the sort of real life you don't think about when you're in seventh grade and you're an unpopular black girl in a grimy neighborhood of Southwest Washington and you decide you are going to transcend your surroundings and do the one thing that you love for the rest of your life and become very rich and very famous.
"I guess things don't always go the way storybooks tell you," Graves says with a rueful laugh, driving her SUV down North Capitol Street one afternoon after rehearsal last week. "You don't necessarily live happily ever after."
Ella was born to Denyce Graves in June, after an emergency C-section in Paris. "It was a gift, a miracle," Graves says.
(Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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Raised by a church-going single mother in a neighborhood near the Blue Plains sewage plant, Graves blew through the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, scrubbed pots and pans to put herself through Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and the New England Conservatory, and blossomed, in her late twenties, as a star alongside Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras. She was the definitive Carmen of the 1990s, and parlayed that high-profile role into opera superstardom.
She performed more than 150 times a year, all over the world. When Oxford University Press in London published a history of the opera, they put her picture -- and hers alone -- on the cover. She crossed over to a popular audience, and her Christmas special on PBS became an annual event. She and her manager husband, classical guitarist David Perry, were guests at the Clinton White House and fixtures on the arts circuit.
You burn that bright, though, and the candle burns down, whether in public or private, whether you want it to or not. Nobody runs forever.
By 2000, hidden from public view, Graves's life was unraveling.
She had always had severe headaches, but now they came in clusters, severe things that would cause her to black out. She was hit with paralyzing self-doubt. She wanted children, but doctors said she was physically unable. She had the first of four operations to try to change that.
In the fall of that year, while performing in Chicago, she had an emotional breakdown. "My dark night of the soul," she describes it now.
Stuck in a hotel room and terrified, she called her mother, Dorothy Graves-Kenner, and her friend Eve Soldinger, who was trained in meditation, to come on the run. The collapse was so personal, and so severe, that she kept it hidden, even from her husband.
"She called and said, 'I need you now,' " Soldinger, now living in California, recalls in a telephone interview. "I'd known Denyce for years and had never heard her like that. She sent a car to pick me up and take me to the airport the next day. I got there, and it was just the two of us in a hotel room. We did meditations, on how to focus, and how to determine God's will. She was very distraught. . . . We were up till long after midnight."
Graves had little choice but to return to the stage -- she was booked years in advance -- but the headaches returned with brutal efficiency. She performed her signature role of Carmen in Florida, with doctors "shooting me up with cortisone every night."
The nadir of her physical problems came a few months later when she was performing at OperaDelaware. Feeling awful, she forced herself onstage for the first half of her performance. Just before the second set, "I sneezed, and I had no voice," she says. She drops her voice to a stage whisper. "I don't mean I sounded like this. I mean I opened my mouth and no sound came out at all. I was bleeding from my vocal cords."
The bleeding happened twice more in the coming months -- she took to walking around her mansion in Leesburg with a notepad looped around her neck so she could communicate -- and she was forced to cancel months of concerts. She was terrified she would never sing again, says biographer Rob Howe.
"There's a vulnerability to Denyce that you could never imagine, having seen her onstage," Howe says from his home in California. "When people meet her, they see this person who is so much larger than life, and it takes a long, long time to see the demons she struggles with."
