The story of their improbable meeting more than two years ago is one they clearly enjoy telling. “We met in the only way possible—on an airplane,” Graves says.
Montgomery was in the departure lounge at Dulles International Airport, waiting to board a flight to Paris, when he noticed “a beautiful woman and her almost-2-year-old child,” he says. “It sounds crazy, I know, but there was light around Denyce’s head.”
“Heaven was saying, Here! Over here!” Graves says.
“She had on the most beautiful dress,” Montgomery recalls. “She takes it out about every six months just to relive the experience.”
So Denyce Graves doesn’t fly in sweat pants?
“I really don’t,” Graves says, laughing. “The day I’m in my sweats and wearing a ball cap is when a photographer will take my picture.”
“We live in fear of Opera News,” Montgomery teases.
Coincidentally, Graves was assigned to the seat on the plane next to Montgomery, and as she stepped over him, lugging Ella and all the baby gear, he says, she gave him an apologetic smile. “This is your lucky day,” she told him.
Montgomery was on his way to the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea to give a series of lectures on organ transplants, but instead of using his flying time to prepare his slides, as he usually did, he and Graves talked all night. Their sense of having lived parallel lives, of having been born with a gift that demanded tremendous work and sacrifice, was immediately powerful, both say. Then the plane landed in Paris. “I was completely taken with this woman, and here we are in baggage claim,” Montgomery says. “I’m thinking, now what do I do?”
Graves solved the problem by inviting Montgomery to Ella’s second birthday party in Paris, which was scheduled for the following week. To her surprise, he rearranged his schedule and came. Montgomery, who says that everything he knew about opera came from Bugs Bunny cartoons, made a pact with Graves: He would attend an opera if she would watch him perform a kidney transplant. “She said she wanted to bring some friends,” Montgomery says. “But I told her you can’t have four or five extra people in an operating room.”
Graves steeled herself and went, though she says viewing one operation was enough for her. Montgomery, on the other hand, attended many operas over the next year. His response to the music thrilled her. “His ears became sharpened,” she says, “and he could tell where the most exquisite moments were. I was like, oh yeah, he gets it.”
Montgomery and Graves exchanged long letters and arranged to meet in cities where she was singing. “It was a sort of Victorian courtship,” he says. “Whenever I’d meet her, she was always surrounded by people, a whole entourage. I was never alone with her.” He says he began to wonder whether he was making a fool of himself—a love-struck opera groupie who believes the magnetic diva is singing to him alone. “I thought, maybe she’s just someone who’s very kind and loving to everyone she meets,” he says.
One afternoon, after Montgomery had flown to Madison, Wis., to see Graves perform in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, they went out for tea, and she confessed that she had been thinking about him “all the time—nonstop, really.”
“I thought, OK, this is real,” Montgomery says. He proposed to her while they were on an airplane, surreptitiously placing the engagement ring box on her dinner tray.
“And voilà,” Graves says, holding out her hand to show a large round diamond set in a pavé diamond band. (The couple was married in a private ceremony at a chapel of Washington National Cathedral on June 29. On Sept. 12, the couple plans a large wedding at the cathedral following a rehearsal dinner at Dulles Airport, where they first met.)
In tribute
On Saturday morning, April 11, Graves stopped at the dry cleaner’s to pick up Marian Anderson’s gold silk gown, which she planned to wear at a tribute concert to Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial the next morning, Easter Sunday. But there was a problem. Graves’ instructions that the old and precious dress be steamed only lightly had been disregarded. The gown had been treated with dry-cleaning fluid and was in shreds.
“I screamed when I saw it—the shoulders and neck were gone,” Graves says. She called Beverly Johnson, the head of the costume department at Duke Ellington. “She knew what that dress was, what it meant,” Graves says. “Now I had to tell her it was destroyed.”
Graves and Johnson had met for the first time a few weeks earlier, during a fundraiser for the school, and they’d immediately hit it off. Graves invited Johnson to her house to go through her packing boxes from Paris and find old gowns that could be donated to the school’s costume shop. It was then that they came across Anderson’s gown. There was one tiny and easily repairable slit in the fabric, Johnson says. But now, in the call from the dry cleaner’s, Graves was in despair, Johnson says.
“She said, ‘Beverly, you have to come now.’” Johnson says the dress was in even worse condition than she feared. But she thought it might be salvaged if the fabric’s backing was replaced with silk organza and if the torn parts were overlaid with lace. She and Lindsey Parsons, the head of the costume department of the Washington National Opera, drove to G Street Fabrics in Rockville and bought the organza, along with a half yard of $279-per-yard Chantilly lace. They rushed back to the costume shop at Duke Ellington and started sewing.
Graves stayed with the two women as they refitted the dress to her, sewing every stitch by hand. At 2 a.m., Graves says, the women told her to go home to bed while they kept working. It was 5:30 a.m., Johnson says, when she and Parsons finally locked up the shop. Johnson slept for an hour at home before going to Graves’ house, where she continued stitching until the car arrived to take them to the Lincoln Memorial. Graves still hadn’t tried on the finished dress, but when she did, it fit perfectly. “Every time I see the photos of that day I just cry,” Johnson says.
Easter Sunday on the Mall was cloudless, but windy and cold. The audience gathered around the Lincoln Memorial was small. But Graves didn’t look cold or as if she had been through a harrowing night. “Opera isn’t about perfection,” she would say later. “It’s about the pursuit of perfection.” Her long curls blew softly over her bare shoulders as she sang “America,” “Ave Maria,” “O mio Fernando,” “Simple Gifts,” “This Little Light of Mine.” Passers-by stopped their bicycles and strollers to listen. Graves beamed as she looked out at the crowd. It had grown, song by song, to the edge of the Reflecting Pool.
Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda and writes frequently for Bethesda Magazine.
