Finding her voice
In 1990, Graves married lutenist and guitar importer David Perry, who was 14 years older and helped manage her career. “I could not have survived without him,” Graves says. Although they are now divorced, she says they remain friends and business partners and still speak on the phone nearly every day. In 1995, Graves made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, singing the title role in Bizet’s Carmen. Fifty relatives and former neighbors from Washington, D.C., chartered a bus to attend the performance, including Grove, who greeted her former student afterward, Graves recalls, with, “My little Denyce!” Says Grove: “I’ve seen her at so many performances, and she’s still the same Denyce. If she’s asked to sing at Duke Ellington or at Zion Church, she’ll do it. She’s never too big.”
Graves’ Cinderella story made her the subject of a 1996 CBS 60 Minutes biography, and critics hailed her as the quintessential Carmen. “We do not merely listen to her Carmen, we experience it; she not only sings the role of the fiery Gypsy girl, she embodies her,” Tim Page wrote in The Washington Post. Chicago Tribune’s John von Rhein opined that if Graves’ Carmen “were any hotter, the company would have to station a fire marshal backstage.” Although Graves has expressed frustration with the limitations of the role—Carmen is never alone onstage, and her two most famous arias, “Seguidilla” and “Habanera,” are sung with other people—she has shown herself to be a good sport about being so closely identified with the mezzo-soprano Gypsy. A few years ago she sang “Habanera” to the Muppet Elmo on PBS’s Sesame Street, inserting child-friendly lyrics.
Through the 1990s, Graves performed more than 150 times a year in opera houses from Tokyo to London to Buenos Aires. She also began to gather awards, including the Grand Prix du Concours International de Chant de Paris, the Grand Prix Lyrique from the Association des amis de l’opéra de Monte-Carlo, and an honorary doctorate of music from Oberlin College. A particularly treasured prize, Graves says, was the Marian Anderson Award in 1991. It was presented to her by Marian Anderson, the African-American contralto who sang a 1939 Easter concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., because of her race.
“Miss Anderson was the grandmother of us all [African-American opera singers],” says Graves, who subsequently visited Anderson often at her home in Danbury, Conn. “She didn’t like to talk about that [Lincoln Memorial] concert,” Graves says. “She was of a generation that wasn’t in the habit of being vocal about racism. She wanted to be a singer, not a poster child.” But the last time Graves visited Anderson, shortly before her death in 1993, Anderson gave her the gold silk charmeuse gown she had worn at the Lincoln Memorial concert.
By 2000, Graves had reached the pinnacle of popular and critical success, but her personal life and her health were unraveling. While rehearsing for a production of Carmen staged especially for her by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, she began to suffer from cluster headaches, waves of brief but violent pain that have been characterized by headache specialist Dr. Peter Goadsby of the University of California at San Francisco as “the most severe form of pain known to man or woman.” The attacks were vicious, Graves says. “In one hour, I’d have 15 or 20. You can’t see. You can’t function. You would do almost anything to not have that pain.” The medication she took every four hours to enable her to perform caused bleeding from her vocal cords. She later had surgery to remove vocal cord polyps, but kept the operation a secret because such news can suggest that an opera singer’s voice is in decline. Meanwhile, her marriage to Perry was ending.
Graves became severely depressed, she says, and when President George W. Bush invited her to sing at the Washington National Cathedral in a televised memorial service after the 9/11 attacks, she says she wasn’t sure what sounds would come out of her mouth. But moving renditions of “America the Beautiful” and “The Lord’s Prayer” returned her to the spotlight, and she went on to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show in a live program about healing through gospel music. In 2003, the State Department named Graves a U.S. cultural ambassador, and she traveled the world on goodwill missions, giving musical performances and seminars. She bought a house outside Paris, having begun a relationship with French composer and conductor Vincent Thomas. In early 2004, to her joy and astonishment, she discovered that she was pregnant. She was 39, and doctors had told her 17 years earlier that fibroid tumors would make it impossible for her to have a baby. “I’d accepted that,” she says. “I love children, and I thought I’d just have to be a mother in other ways. So when I found out [about the pregnancy], my doctor said, ‘Please don’t get excited, because the likelihood of carrying this baby to term is very small.’ But that it had happened at all was a miracle.”
The pregnancy wasn’t easy. Early in the pregnancy, while performing in Germany, Graves hemorrhaged. Fearing a miscarriage, she refused an amniocentesis, but a sonogram indicated calcification in the baby’s heart, which suggested Down syndrome. “The doctors said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m going to have the baby I’m supposed to have—I’ll get what I get,” Graves says. Ella was born in Paris by emergency C-section in June 2004.
Now, in her Bethesda home, Graves tells a guest: “You’ll see her soon. She’s fine—full of life, perfect.”
The sense that Graves’ high-ceilinged house is a stage set is perhaps intensified by the presence of a videographer filming a documentary about a day in the life of the opera singer and her fiancé (now husband) the transplant surgeon. Not precisely on cue, but a few minutes later, 5-year-old Ella (“Named for [Ella] Fitzgerald, of course!” Graves says) bursts through the front door with her grandmother, Dorothy Graves-Kenner. Graves-Kenner agreed to go on the road with her daughter and Ella soon after the baby’s birth, and now the two are inseparable, Graves says. Dressed head to toe in pink, with a tiara in her cloud of curls, Ella announces excitedly that they have just been at a birthday party where the guests got to paint their own plates. Without prompting, she plants a kiss on a reporter’s cheek.
Ella, like her mother, is a charmer. And even though her childhood, with its world travel, French school, piano, ballet, violin and horseback-riding lessons, appears to be light-years away from Graves’ experience on Galveston Street, a certain common thread emerges. After Ella and her grandmother depart, Graves describes a recent tussle with her daughter over violin practice. “It turned into a real showdown, and I was praying the whole time what to do—will this be the moment of her childhood she’ll always remember,” Graves says. “But I want her to learn to discipline herself. I want her to wake up and know that we have the day in front of us, and we can create what it is we do.” Here, perhaps, are echoes of her own mother, who insisted, when the little girl did not want to sing a solo before a church packed with people: You have to.
Moments later, Graves’ then-fiance, Robert Montgomery, enters the room. Even without the video lights, Montgomery would cut a dramatic figure in cowboy boots and mutton-chop whiskers.
