OPERA'S BAD GIRL COMES CLEAN ABOUT HER DRUG-ADDICTED PAST

Andrea Gruber Says She Hopes Her Story Of Descent, Recovery Helps Other People

She has been off the stuff for more than eight years. But before that, she
once was so desperate for drugs that she reached into a toilet to retrieve
pills she had just vomited up. And there were times when she was so stoned
on Percocet, a narcotic analgesic, that she had no memory of singing with
the Metropolitan Opera.

"Try being a functioning junkie at the Metropolitan Opera," says Andrea
Gruber, 39. "I felt like such a fraud." Often, she would time a large dose
for right before a major aria or duet toward the end of a performance,
trying to achieve maximum numbness when the applause came.

"I felt unworthy," she explains.

At one point the Met banished her from its stage. But she's been back since
2001, appeared this month in the title role of "Turandot," and is set to
appear with the San Francisco Opera in November, as Leonora in Verdi's "La
Forza del Destino." Finally settling into the major career that was
predicted for her nearly two decades ago, she says the time has come for
her to talk about her descent into addiction to painkillers and
tranquilizers and her climb back out. The tales pour from her like the
rich, deep tones of her soprano voice.

Why talk now? Well, she figures, her past would come up anyway. And going
public fulfills the need of the recovering addict to proclaim sobriety and
make amends. Maybe it will help other people.

"I believe it's important for people to know that there are people in all
walks of life who come from hell and fight their way out," she says.

'I'm A Big Girl'

Gruber, who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, also says she knows
that some people will consider her speaking out to be a publicity ploy, a
gimmick to draw a wider audience to what some consider an elite art form.
"Fine," she says. "I'm a big girl."

And she says she recognizes the risk of being known as Opera's Recovering
Addict. "I don't want to be a cliche," she says.

"But I will show you my tattoo," she adds without missing a beat. She turns
around, raises her shirt, and there it is on her lower back -- the first
five notes and words of "In questa reggia," Turandot's aria from Act II.

The gesture is in keeping with her earthy, sometimes profane manner. Her
eyes crease when she smiles, and her laugh is a big, soprano laugh. Beyond
opera, her musical tastes run to a bad-girl mix of Janis Joplin, Eminem and
50 Cent.

At 5 feet 7 1/2, she weighs a relatively svelte 180 pounds, down about 140
from her peak before gastric bypass surgery -- another potentially touchy
subject in a world of heavyset performers, but another that Gruber seems to
relish discussing.

Opera executives say her past is fairly unusual in the opera world,
although there are singers there who have struggled with alcoholism, and
although drug addiction is nowhere near as rare among pop and jazz
musicians. The execs think it is rare in opera because the physical and
mental toll of the work would render singers unable to perform. Or maybe
classical singers are just "squarer," Gruber says.

Her life was troubled from early on. She was born and grew up on West End
Avenue in Manhattan, near 103rd Street on the Upper West Side, the daughter
of two history professors. She attended the private Bank Street School
until she was asked to leave after seventh grade. She says she began
smoking marijuana when she was about 11.

At the Putney School in Vermont, she tripped on acid her first week as a
freshman. But it was also at Putney, as a talented but unmotivated flutist,
that she began studying voice at 16.

"The only constants in my life," she says, "were trouble and drugs and music."

She managed to win a place at the Manhattan School of Music, where her drug
use continued. "I was the kid who was free-basing cocaine in the bathroom
during vocal lit class," she recalls. She says she also used heroin in her
teenage years.

Midway through her time in music school, she did her first of three stints
in rehab, at Phoenix House in Manhattan, and left non-prescription drugs
behind.

But after a root canal, she was given Percocet and began a decade of
abusing prescription medication, sometimes taking dozens of pills a day.

She says she used her skills as an actress to manipulate doctors into
prescribing the drugs. "I'm talking about junkie scams," she says -- such
as pretending that a flood had ruined her medication so she could get a
prescription refilled. But she also insisted on elective sinus surgery --
twice -- just to obtain more pills.

Still, she won a coveted place in the Young Artists program at the Met in
1989, and that year, precociously, was asked to perform as the Third Norn
from "Gotterdammerung" for a Met recording. "That was how good and
promising she was at the very beginning," says Jonathan Friend, then and
now the Met's artistic administrator. "The voice was big, rich."

Her stage debut at the Met came in that same role the following year.
Critics and opera aficionados began calling her a bright new light on the
vocal scene. Her first starring role at the Met was in "Ballo in Maschera"
in late 1990, with Luciano Pavarotti. Her performance won critical praise.
"I was stoned out of my gourd on Percocet," Gruber says.

Her deficiencies were obvious enough to James Levine, the Met's music
director, that he asked to ask her not to sing the next performance.

"I was a mess," she acknowledges. "I had no business singing 'Ballo in
Maschera' onstage at the Met."

Her career sputtered along, with a few successes mixed with cancellations.
She had trouble memorizing dialogue and missed rehearsals. Her vocal cords
would swell when, numbed by the drugs, she would push her vocal mechanism.
Cortisone shots would bring down the swelling, and the cycle would continue.

"Somehow I managed to function well enough not to get fired," she says. But
then came a disastrous performance of "Aida" at the Met in 1995. She
remembers one point when she was unable to hit a note. The Met orchestra's
concertmaster at the time, Raymond Gniewek, looked up at her and just shook
his head. The Met -- her hometown opera house, where her career began and
was nurtured -- cut its ties and bought out her contract.

Friend says the nature of her problems actually was unclear to officials
but that the Met did not have the responsibility to intervene. "The fact
is, the Met is not her voice teacher, her parents, her boyfriend, her
whatever," he says. "We have a relationship with her, but our obligation is
to the institution." He adds, though, that he was heartbroken by her
decline and what seemed at the time as her failure to fulfill her early
promise.

In the mid-'90s, Gruber receded into relative obscurity on the opera scene.
Only Speight Jenkins, the general director of the Seattle Opera, maintained
faith, casting her in three operas during the decade. "I believed that
Andrea had the capacity to come through it because she was so
strong-willed," he says.

In 1996, she was hospitalized in Vienna with a blood clot in her leg.
That's when the incident with the toilet took place, while doctors were
trying to control her withdrawal symptoms. Her next stop was the Hazelden
clinic in Minnesota, where she began a year and a half of withdrawal, and
recovery.

But as she recuperated, her weight ballooned. And because of her girth,
Gruber says, she was told she would not be asked back to the Vienna State
Opera and was dismissed from the Salzburg Festival. She bears grudges to
this day. "I was sober, I got my life together, and all of a sudden I was
too fat."

Her career rehabilitation took a major step forward in 1999 when Friend
heard her sing well in San Francisco and took a chance, engaging her for
several performances in "Nabucco" at the Met in 2001. She was hired to sing
"Turandot" there in the fall of 2002 -- a triumphant return that brought
cheers from the chorus. A well-reviewed "Nabucco" came the following year.

Time For A Change

Gruber lives next door to a firehouse in New York, Ladder 25, and on Sept.
11, 2001, she felt the loss of the firefighters there. Like many others,
she experienced a life-is-short moment, and she decided to have her gastric
bypass surgery. "I said, 'I don't want to spend a second thinking what it's
like to live in this body.' It changed my life. I can feel my mechanism. I
can run around the stage like a monster. I can sing things in one long
breath rather than three or four."

Now, with a boyfriend in West Virginia (a relationship that blossomed
during a six-week e-mail courtship), her beloved golden retriever Max, and
engagements through 2008 at the Met, she says she is happy.

Striding through the opera house's basement after a laughter-filled
"Turandot" rehearsal one day recently, she heard repeated variations of
"It's great to have you back!" Security guards greeted her by first name.

She walked out to 65th Street and yelled out to the traffic: "Mamma need a
taxi! Take me home!"