My Father, Maria Callas and Tom Hanks

The movie “Philadelphia” remains as powerful today as when it was released nearly 30 years ago. Credit: Visit Philadelphia

My father was a fan of movies, opera and baseball.

I was thinking of all this on January 14, the anniversary of movie star Marilyn Monroe and Yankee centerfielder Joe DiMaggio’s 1954 wedding. My father was a fan of both.

He also was a huge fan of the opera diva, soprano Maria Callas. I grew up listening to her recordings with him. Her version of La Mamma Morta (The Dead Mother), from an Italian opera about a mother who dies protecting her child, was one my father’s favorites because his own mother died when he was very young.

This reminded me of Tom Hanks in the movie “Philadelphia.” After the film was first released in late December 1993, staff from the Community Health Network and others in the local AIDS movement were invited to a screening at the Little Theatre.

Tom Hanks played a Philadelphia lawyer. A gay man who is dying of AIDS, he is fired by his law firm when they learn of his diagnosis. The film confronts homophobia, AIDS hysteria in what was still a fatal illness for many people.

We sat in the first two rows of an otherwise empty theatre and watched the story unfold. In the most moving scene, Hanks, like many of my own patients, was on home care with an intravenous infusion.

This scene has come to be called the opera scene. Hanks plays a recording of Maria Callas singing the aria La Mamma Morta.

Hanks stands holding his IV pole, eyes closed and walks around the room translating the Italian to English while his lawyer, played by Denzel Washington, listens.

As I watched, I thought about my own father who had died several years earlier, as Hanks continued his inevitable journey with AIDS. It was overpowering because, I had lived with that music all of my life and now it was being translated into my life experience taking care of AIDS patients.  

Beyond the music, the film itself is real and very raw. It totally reflected the era of people being fired from their jobs, losing their housing, insurance, families shunning them. As I watched, I couldn’t hold back any longer and sobbed. Sid Metzger, ever the social worker, comforted the experience by putting her hand on my knee.

Hanks won the Oscar for best actor that year. Nearly 30 years later, it’s still gut-wrenching to watch the film, especially the opera scene.  Today, people ask me, was it really like that? Yes. Some people didn't have their parents support either because their parents threw them out of the house, disowned them. The partner had died and he's left to fend for himself and his insurance will run out and he will die with his IV pole at his side instead of his mother.

After that screening, the late Democrat and Chronicle film critic Jack Garner interviewed us for his review.  He wrote that it took 14 years to bring AIDS to the screen. The only thing that was almost as slow was getting an HIV drug to market.

Garner revisited the screening in 2017 when he reviewed my memoir, “AIDS: A Matter of Urgency” and noted that I was happy Garner’s 1994 review chastised Hollywood for taking so long to bring a story about AIDS to the screen.