Truths Up His Sleeve: The Times of Michael Cacoyannis E-Book

John Howard

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 530

Beschreibung

This first critical biography of radio broadcaster, stage director, and auteur filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis examines his prolific body of work within the socio-political context of his times. Best known as a bold modernist for triple-Oscar-winner 'Zorba the Greek', Michael likewise was hailed as an astute classicist for his inventive interpretations of Euripides. Working across several continents and languages, he forwarded feminist, humanist, and pacifist agendas, as he further innovated crafty LGBT narratives of unprecedented artistry and complexity. Despite intense persecution during the Cold War red scare and lavender scare, his casts and crews of frugal cosmopolitans critiqued racism, militarism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Avoiding censorship, job loss, and jail, Michael thereby laid foundations for the 1990s new queer cinema and set the stage for empowering dramas of socio-economic justice in the third millennium. Over his long life and productive career, Michael exposed and espoused the vital truths up his sleeve.

Leseprobe

BIBLIOTECA JAVIER COY D’ESTUDIS NORD-AMERICANS

https://puv.uv.es/biblioteca-javier-coy-destudis-nord-americans.html

DIRECTORA

Carme Manuel

(Universitat de València)

Truths Up His Sleeve: The Times of Michael Cacoyannis

© John Howard

1ª edición de 2022

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-956-3 (papel)

ISBN: 978-84-9134-957-0 (ePub)

ISBN: 978-84-9134-958-7 (PDF)

Imagen de la cubierta: amb permís de Miranda Kenrick

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

https://puv.uv.es

[email protected]

Edición digital

For Shotaro Yamamoto

There is no true theatre without language and style, nor any dramatic work which does not, like our classical drama and the Greek tragedians, involve human fate in all its simplicity and grandeur. Without claiming to equal them, these are at least the models to set oneself.

Albert Camus

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

Emily Dickinson

Contents

PROLOGUEArtists Need No Permits

PART IWILLFUL COMING OF AGE

CHAPTER 1 Colonial Family Portraits

CHAPTER 2 Metropolitan Broadcast Performances

CHAPTER 3 Global Antigay Proceedings

PART IIFILMING THE GAYEST SORT

CHAPTER 4 The Modern Greece Quintet

CHAPTER 5 Devils, Gods, and Wastrels

CHAPTER 6 Zorba the Great, Michael the Greek

CHAPTER 7 Hollywood’s Biggest Bomb

PART IIIRESTAGING RESISTANCE

CHAPTER 8 On the Ancients, In Exile

CHAPTER 9 Coups and Clerics

CHAPTER 10 The Long Farewell

EPILOGUE Laying Queer Foundations

APPENDIX A Filmography

APPENDIX B Major Stage Productions

PRIMARY SOURCES

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUEArtists Need No Permits

On a warm evening in 1955, in Athens’ hip cafe district Plaka, two plain-clothes policemen approached three dubious characters straight out of central casting: all outsiders, all a bit shifty. One, a quiet German Jew whose rare words suggested impeccable English, stepped away from his large camera and listened. Another, an animated Lebanese man, paced back and forth, while the third, the obvious ringleader, waved his arms and professed their complete and utter innocence in fluent long-winded Greek with the hint of a Cypriot dialect. What had they done? Who was their accuser?

Crowds gathered. The noise made it difficult to be heard or understood. The police demanded a trip to the precinct, where charges would be spelled out. The trio bid farewell to their associates, a stylish assortment of women and men, insisting it was all a mistake, they would be right back. Then long hours passed with no word from them.

“Escorted to the local police station,” the suspects confirmed their names and occupations: director Michael, cameraman Walter, and manager Anis. They provided additional personal details and answered a few more questions. So, policemen surmised, the report they received was true. Each and every one of these men was a foreigner, as sworn in a complaint by an unemployed technician, the disgruntled civil war machine-gunner known as Bac-Bac. Furthermore, as the undercover officers witnessed firsthand, the three men and their associates were at work in the city, outdoors on the streets. Working without papers, the trio thus had contravened immigration restrictions. They were illegal aliens. Officers arrested them.1

As Walter later explained, “We were stripped of our belongings and taken to the cells, but before the doors were actually slammed on us, we were reprieved. Michael’s lawyer arrived.” Tense protracted negotiations yielded one slight concession. The three men would have to remain in custody until a hearing tomorrow, but as a “compromise,” they could “spend the night on makeshift beds … instead of in the cells.”2

The next day, the judge was rendered speechless as Michael’s attorney waxed eloquent about the grave injustice his clients suffered. For shame! Yes, it had to be admitted, they looked like a motley crew. But they understandably were disheveled after their night of degradation, tossing and turning on cots. More to the point, their arrest and detention represented a grievous misapplication of the law. True, in general, laborers from beyond Greek shores were expected to follow standard procedures, apply for the right to gainful employment, and accept work assignments only with permission of the authorities, all duly documented. But these were not ordinary workers. Nor were they mere moviemakers. These men were artists, he stated with a flourish. And artists need no permits! “The ploy seemed to work,” Walter concluded. “We were all able to get on with the film.”3

As this book shows, being artistic—as with being musical or theatrical—often connoted as it paradoxically covered over being queer. In realms of twentieth century cultural production, queerness in its broadest sense referenced people of outcast races, genders, and sexualities given to promiscuous practices of cosmopolitan mixing and making.4

*

Greece’s greatest filmmaker was neither reared in Greece nor trained in film. Born and schooled in Cyprus, Michael Cacoyannis moved to London in 1938 at the age of seventeen to study law, on the orders of his father, a knight of the British realm. Duty bound, Michael graduated and became a barrister in what was still the world’s leading global city and vaunted imperial metropole. He found work at the BBC Empire Service, running its new Cyprus Section, delivering innovative wartime content to radio audiences across the island colony. At last disregarding his father’s commands and indulging his own wildest fantasies, Michael abandoned these respectable professions to train as an actor at the Central School and as a stage director at the Old Vic School, under the long shadow of Laurence Olivier.

Only in 1953, at the age of thirty-two, did Michael migrate to Athens and start making motion pictures, first on tight fixed budgets, then with limited contingent support from Hollywood. Sixteen films later—along with numerous critically acclaimed stage productions from the dramatic and operatic repertoires, both classical and modern, from Spoleto to the Met, on and off Broadway—Cacoyannis would be recognized around the world as one of Europe’s most inventive auteur directors. Why then is he not the subject of multiple biographies, as say Hitchcock? Why don’t the libraries devote whole shelves if not sections to his work and his interpreters, as with Kubrick? Why doesn’t his name trip off the tongue of every eager young cineaste across the globe? To be sure, Hitchcock made three times as many films and much more television, though Kubrick made fewer films and next to no theatre. What other factors were at work in achieving canonical if not auteur status?

Why would Cacoyannis remain so underappreciated over time, even as he elicited stellar performances from the era’s best actors? Jane Alexander. Anne Bancroft. Alan Bates. Candice Bergen. Geneviève Bujold. Frances de la Tour. Colleen Dewhurst. Katharine Hepburn. Lila Kedrova. Melina Mercouri. Irene Papas. Anthony Quinn. Charlotte Rampling. Vanessa Redgrave. Sam Wanamaker. Perhaps because they were predominantly women, in powerful roles that challenged patriarchy and militarism? Crucially: Why was the pinnacle of success—three Oscars and global adoration for Zorba the Greek in the mid-1960s—followed straightaway by the depths of despair? Why was his fantastic follow-up feature, with a cast of thousands, met with unrelenting vitriolic contempt? Why can that “bomb” be reappraised only now, after his death, as—like Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury—its author’s “greatest failure”? Why did Michael’s devastating career low, exacerbated by seven years’ political exile, seem to foreclose a place among the immortals? (Or did it?)5

This book explains why. Tracking the cosmopolitan Cacoyannis, it probes his life and times—interrogating, as he did, the twentieth century’s thorniest political, cultural, and ethical dilemmas. Praised as a brilliant modernist, classicist, feminist, and humanist, Cacoyannis suffered debilitating personal setbacks and—as a gay man—massive professional obstacles. Nonetheless he persisted. He relied on his keen intellect and boundless resourcefulness to write, direct, produce, and even costume some of the most enduring, alluring, and incisive motion pictures of all time. Battling his own demons, defying his nastiest critics, Michael did it all with a principled resoluteness, combined with the continuous help of a small circle of tried-and-true colleagues and friends—plus a few fellow travellers whose contributions only now can be revealed.

Published just after the 100th anniversary of his birth, the 10th anniversary of his death, this first critical biography of filmmaker and stage director Michael Cacoyannis (1921-2011) assesses his large body of work with reference to the sociopolitical context of his times. It explores his complex thematic concerns across multiple genres, which also included radio plays, short stories, translations, memoirs, manifestos, and still photography. The study reinterprets significant secondary literatures to argue that an accurately characterized woman-centered modernist oeuvre furthermore incorporated path-breaking queer critique, class analysis, and critical race insights. Historicized understandings of race as tied to place, the book claims, were informed by Cacoyannis’ reading and translation of ancient texts, as well as his own upbringing on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, at the crosscurrents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Hailed as an astute classicist for his popular adaptations of Aristophanes, Sophocles and especially Euripides, Cacoyannis insisted on ancient Greek drama’s continuing relevance and contemporary application to anticolonial, antiwar, and antinuclear struggles. A secular humanist, he believed in a finite set of enduring truths, while helping to usher in the era of postmodern skepticism. A frugal cosmopolitan working across several continents and languages, he welcomed the progressive gains of globalization, this book demonstrates, even as he forcefully denounced its persistent inequities and injustices.

Organized into three parts of three to four chapters each, the book examines Michael Cacoyannis’ early years of schooling, training, and employment (1921-1953), his ascendance as both an auteur and popular filmmaker (1953-1967), followed by political exile and later life as a grand man of the stage (1967-2011), with considerable overlap across chapters. It argues that his life’s work—sixteen feature films, over thirty dramatic productions, seven opera presentations, and more—coheres around consistent themes, rich symbolism, provocative topics, and candid treatments, such that several movies and source texts were banned, censored, or attacked. As many of these already have sustained intense scholarly scrutiny, this book emphasizes undervalued works, overlooked innovations, and mistaken intentions.

In particular, Truths Up His Sleeve confronts and refutes scholar Vrasidas Karalis’ damning indictment from 2012. According to Karalis, Michael Cacoyannis’ “conservative politics and his hidden sexuality never allowed him to develop the full potential of the visual language that he constructed [with his first five films] in the 1950s.” Based on new evidence from previously untapped archives—along with personal interviews, close readings, site observations, and exhaustive surveys of contemporary criticism—this assertion is thoroughly disproven. As is shown, it misrepresents Cacoyannis’ politics, his sexuality, and the ways in which the two are articulated, interwoven, and made apparent across his entire output. Michael’s sex and gender politics were radical for his times; his worldview and political perspectives more generally would be best characterized as liberal. Moreover, the book shows that Cacoyannis comprehended gender and sexuality in perpetual dialectical relationship to race and class, yielding unique configurations at different times and places, all worthy of sustained artistic engagement across a multifaceted career of sixty plus years.6

*

In the late twentieth century, describing the late nineteenth century trials and tribulations of celebrity playwright Oscar Wilde, Neil Bartlett lamented that we gay men “all still grow up as liars.” Michael Cacoyannis lied over and over, with purpose, with abandon—even, or especially, when it came to those two fundamental questions of identity. When were you born? Where are you from? Until he was roughly twenty-eight years old, Michael overstated his age. Thereafter, he understated it, by as much as ten years. As for his place of birth, he repeatedly referred to himself as a native of Greece, despite being born and raised in Limassol, Cyprus. He also bent the truth in funny Hollywood yarns that over time became polished narratives with florid embellishment, similar to cinematographer Walter Lassally’s tale of their brush with jail in Athens. In their industry, as in all lives, half-truths, white lies, and harmless ploys made the world go round. They smoothed the way for daily social interaction.7

Outright falsehood proves a distinctive impediment for biographers. It is not an insurmountable one. Consistent patterns of deception reveal a great deal to historians of gender and sexuality, who must search for rare evidence of illicit activities that of necessity were covered up. We must glean scant traces of loves and liaisons that often were criminalized and—in Michael’s time—ruthlessly penalized. Of course Michael spun out lies to avoid prison, persecution, and censorship. He counseled others to do likewise. Their fabrications and circumlocutions can be deciphered. Queer forebears’ cagey habits of dissembling—their defiant practices of selective visibility and partial disclosure— can be construed. After all, these were shared inherited community practices of circumventing patently unjust laws, brutal stigma, and deadly violence around consensual adult relations. Indeed, Michael modeled the process of dissembling in his film scripts and on occasion in his interviews with journalists.

In 1967, at a swish New York cocktail party, a roving reporter refused to accept Michael’s usual coy comments and obfuscations. Awed by the smash success of Zorba the Greek, eager to learn more about Michael’s much anticipated follow-up, she begged the director for a scoop. Where did they shoot? Who were the last additions to the cast? Was it true there were hundreds perhaps thousands on site? Most of all, what was the topic of this film? As it happens, the central theme was deceitfulness of various forms and magnitude. But Michael was not ready to reveal that. Nor did he ever publicly come out as gay. Nor did he need to, because he left behind coded texts that he knew we could decode. Insisting upon secrecy in advance of his new film release, ever cognizant that truth-telling is a tricky proposition, Michael deflected the journalist’s most intrusive queries, determined to keep “a couple of truths up my sleeve.”8

This book does not purport to blow the lid off a treasure chest of queer secrets. Community codes—double entendre, subcultural slang, on-screen workarounds to the U.S. Motion Picture Production Code—have long been known by insiders plus increasing numbers of outsiders. Wikipedia entries now explain the meanings of Camp (style), Beard (companion), Lavender marriage, and He never married. With all that taken as given, this book argues instead that Michael’s queer cohort mastered these inherited codes. Then Michael invented new ones of astounding artistry and complexity. Moreover, the book explains why passing or covering as straight, as Michael did, was a viable necessary strategy in a world of homophobic hatred, transphobic violence, and pervasive anti-LGBTQ persecution fueled by church and state, medicine and media. Individual strategies of passing were adopted, discarded, or modulated depending upon time and place. Never completely closeted, Michael safeguarded an open secret which, over his long life and prolific body of work, emerged as ever more open, less secret. Among the truths up his sleeve were selectively shared stories of the many men with whom he had intimate and sexual relations. All informed his cinematic and theatrical practices, which consistently foregrounded issues of gender and sexuality as they forwarded liberal reform or radical change.

Radical change threatens established institutions. The Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens resists such interpretations of his oeuvre. They have impeded this study but not stymied it. Aligned with distant relatives’ concerns as expressed in interviews, my requests to see my subject’s diaries—an essential component of most biographies—went unanswered once, twice, thrice. Next, an official stated that Michael’s personal writings were part of a private archive sealed to both general public and scholarly researchers. Finally, another claimed no such diaries exist. Michael anticipated these shenanigans and took steps to mitigate them. Among additional truths up his sleeve were his repeated injunctions to look closely at the films and plays, to discover the ways they both cloak and reveal. They protected project participants, as was appropriate for his era, but more so they divulge, as is necessary for ours. Thereby, Michael insisted, his life and times would be comprehensible—and, as it turns out, empowering. However frustrating, workarounds can enable. Michael’s taboo censored subject matter nonetheless found vast international audiences. This modest unauthorized biography has managed to find a readership too.9

For everyone who watches “classic” film or consults IMDb, for anyone who supplements contemporary theatre going with immersion in ancient and modern drama, Michael’s life and times are instructive. They help us answer any number of ethically charged questions. How could a not-so-ordinary boy born and raised in Cyprus become a national treasure in Greece? How could a pacifist in World War Two London complete his law degree and evade social stigma while never enlisting in the armed forces? How could a wartime then postwar BBC radio producer, moonlighting as a stage actor-director, break into the film industry? How did this budding screenwriter-director of feminist inclinations build on successes at Cannes and Edinburgh in the 1950s to reach the pinnacle of popularity off Broadway and in Hollywood in the 1960s? During the Cold War lavender and red scares, how could a gay liberal and fellow traveller avoid police persecution and employment discrimination to achieve all this and more? How did he become not only the era’s foremost interpreter of ancient Greek drama but also a modernist filmmaker of international renown? How could this admired “women’s director,” rumored to be gay, avoid jail and job discrimination to keep working? How could a flamboyant auteur with many communist colleagues forestall blacklisting as a leftist sympathizer? How could a wildly creative director of film, drama, and opera—time and again praised, then slayed by vicious homophobic reviews— continue to get out of bed in the morning and make films that found large global audiences? What inspired him? How did an underdog from the back of beyond navigate the corridors of cultural power in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris? In the final analysis, how did he stave off his most venomous critics— snooty elites, family members, and his own lacerating self-assessments?

Simply put, Michael persevered. By any reckoning, his long productive life of nine decades is a testament to strength of will, resilience under duress, courage despite hardship, loving friendship amidst animosity. When all hope was lost, he would not be defeated.

*

Part I argues that Michael grew up gay in a violently homophobic world, but he found a measure of freedom and greater outlets for creativity in midcentury London. Chapter 1 shows that on the small, poor, multiethnic island colony of Cyprus, Michael enjoyed many advantages as a child of the aspiring middle-class, even as he suffered brute bullying and corporal punishment. Cinema, movie magazines, broad reading, and cabaret culture gave him glimpses of lives less ordinary, worldviews more expansive, progressive, and transformative. Chapter 2 demonstrates that in London, Michael obeyed his father’s orders to study law, but he became willful then disobedient, turning to work in theatre and cinema, as well as radio and television broadcasting. With London’s voice coaches and stage instructors, he honed his abilities to sing, act, and direct, achieving remarkable success, while fending off racist, sexist, and homophobic critics. Chapter 3 makes clear why Michael never again lived in Cyprus. The U.S. lavender scare’s well-documented war on gays went global, following the contours of American and British empires, with distinctive viciousness in late colonial Cyprus. While modern medicine classified nonconforming genders and sexualities as diseased, church and state combined to condemn deviants and to punish them in the press and prisons.

Part II charts Cacoyannis’ rise as a cosmopolitan filmmaker, creating an increasingly sophisticated body of work noted for its minimalist auteur aesthetics and broad popular appeal. As Chapters 4 and 5 prove, over the twentieth century, successive generations of theatre, film, radio, and TV producers developed crafty codes of queer representation to avoid censorship, job loss, and jail. After sexy silent movies and pre-Code talkies, before the 1990s new queer cinema, midcentury makers faced intransigent structures of oppression. Defiant against these forces, Michael’s team inherited and mastered practices of euphemism, double entendre, partial disclosure, and selective visibility. Then Michael invented new codes, adopting thrifty methods from Africa and Asia, adapting them for Europe and America. As Chapters 6 and 7 elucidate, in the high stakes and low moments of multinational corporate cultural production, international renown could be followed by wholesale condemnation. After Michael’s acclaimed adaptation of modern literary masterpiece Zorba the Greek, he courageously wrote, costumed, and filmed a futuristic screenplay of his own, with complex intersecting themes, all widely derided. Hollywood’s biggest bomb coincided with the colonels’ coup in Greece, and Michael went into self-imposed exile in France.

Part III details Michael’s return from exile, his ever more assured position as a top international filmmaker, and his renewed commitments to translating and directing stage plays, plus opera, across Europe and America. As with his films, the plays and operas emphasized resistance to political tyranny, religious orthodoxy, sexual conformity, and the gender binary. Chapter 8 demonstrates how the creator of the acclaimed modern Greece quintet of films became equally renowned and celebrated for his Euripides trilogy of ancient antiwar plays, adapted for both stage and screen. Chapter 9 tracks Michael’s personalized engagements with high politics and international diplomacy, as first Chile then Cyprus suffered violent military overthrows aided and abetted by the United States. Chapter 10 assesses Michael’s late life stage commitments in Athens and Epidaurus, as it further probes his final two films, inspired respectively by the new queer cinema and a master Russian playwright.

Throughout, the book examines Michael’s fraught familial relations in tension with his expanding queer network of intimates and colleagues, described by “good friend” Candice Bergen as “writers, composers, artists, lawyers of the left.” The book’s epilogue shows the surprising steps Michael took near the end of his life in an attempt to protect the legacy of his oeuvre’s queer, feminist, and humanist ideals. It further demonstrates how his family of origin yet again tried to thwart him, at his death and long after. In spite of it all, Michael could rest assured and rest in power. His vast body of work would continue to reach wider audiences who grew ever more skilled in decoding and interpreting his intricate narratives. An artist both attuned to his times and attentive to utopian possibilities, Michael Cacoyannis helped to lay foundations for bold new cultural developments in the third millennium.10

PART IWILLFUL COMING OF AGE

CHAPTER 1Colonial Family Portraits

In April 1928, ten people filed into a professional photographic studio, ready to be visually recorded for posterity. The only man among them took charge, as was customary. He described the special occasion to the photographer, agreed the price, then attempted to stage-manage the entire affair. However, the photographer had ideas all his own. As did the man’s mother-in-law. The result was a family portrait of extraordinary complexity. Now, almost a hundred years later—fully two centuries after photography’s invention—the image remains captivating, due in part to its unique composition, but foremost for its unabashed star.1

Among the three generations on hand, mother-in-law Zoe, by far the eldest, had the most experience of portrait sittings. And sit she did. Age 63, she at once spotted the large chair, and her daughters guided her into it. Then the photographer placed the four daughters improbably along the back row standing. At opposite ends of the row, he situated the youngest of them: identical twins in matching outfits, each with long pearl strand knotted at the neck. Between the twins were the two older sisters. One stood out.

By most accounts, Angeliki was a gracious woman of refined tastes and impeccable courtesy. Though she never finished high school—compelled to marry this imposing man instead—she could converse with the highest officials and the “lowliest” farm folk with equal ease. Apart from her tendency to overspend, she managed her household activities and social gatherings with great care. Indeed, this year she had noted the happy coincidence of two big events in mid-April. Consulting her husband, she decided to take advantage of it, and she booked this appointment with the Armenian photo-entrepreneur.2

Though the family was “not religious,” they nonetheless attended annual Easter services, often in new clothes purchased for the purpose. After all, they considered this spring ritual more of “a social thing.” So the ten relatives had arrived at the studio well dressed in fashionable garments and accessories, led by the aspiring patriarch in three-piece suit and necktie. The four sisters sported trendy roaring-twenties bob haircuts, even as their mother had pinned an heirloom broach at her neckline and now clutched a purse in her lap. Furthermore, Zoe was layered in black, as expected of all widows. Everyone else wore lighter colors appropriate to the season. Also, because this year Easter Sunday fell during the same week as Angeliki’s birthday, her husband and children had surprised her with a colorful gift corsage.3

Affixed high on her jacket, near her left shoulder, Angeliki’s birthday corsage featured at least three flowers, perhaps four. As Mother’s Day also was observed in spring, the four blooms might have been chosen to signify her four children, now waiting impatiently for their assigned positions. But first, of course, there was the matter of their father. As Zoe had commandeered the chair, the photographer gamely placed a piano bench at a slight angle to it. He coaxed Angeliki’s husband onto it and convinced him to hold their two younger children in his arms. Now the photographer only needed to arrange the two older children to complete the third generation and fix the tableau—the colonial family that is the subject of this book’s first chapter.

The photographer was meticulous, pride in his art evidenced by the studio props on display. Under the light-hued rectangular rug was yet another: a larger ornate Persian carpet. A tall decorative vase stood in the rear left corner. Paneled walls at right and left, with prominent dark baseboards, yielded diagonal lines creating the illusion of deep space. That illusion was continued on the photographer’s painted backdrop, which included candelabra seemingly fixed to the wall, plus curtains falling behind them and sweeping upward from left to top center. In right and left corners, actual fabrics were draped from ceiling to floor, framing and enhancing the trompe l’oeil.

However deep, the studio proper was more than wide enough to accommodate the two remaining children at either end of the front row. In her pleated dress, matching hair ribbon, and elegant lace-up boots, the older girl gravitated to her grandmother Zoe’s side, leaning against the chair, at right. But the older boy proved much more determined than his exasperated father, even more determined than the studio portraitist himself. Refusing to stand at left, Michael insisted on being front and center.

Aggravating the father’s anxieties about his fey son, Michael got down on the rug and reclined on it. Ever the showboat, he supported himself with his right arm, as his left arm rested along the left side of his body, left hand at his bare knees. In shorts and sweater, he stretched out his legs, which extended into long socks and patent leather shoes with ankle straps. Thus did Zoe’s grandson unfurl himself across the foreground of the family portrait.

Across nearly a century, from their time to ours, Michael gave us his best Greta Garbo pose.

British Colony, Cypriot Clan

For any school kid who ever gazed up at a world map and noticed South America and Africa fit together like pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, plate tectonics are easy to grasp. The earth’s landmasses seem to have split at the seams millions of years ago, continents ever-so-slowly drifting apart to their current stations—never mind what priests intone about god’s creation a few thousand years back. On a smaller scale, the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus formed a snug fit, an obvious earlier component, of Asia Minor, Anatolia, Middle East, or Western Asia. Nevertheless European powers again and again have claimed it, overtaken it, and controlled it, going back to crusading Richard the Lionheart and much earlier. For subsequent generations, aligning a family with a particular colonizing power constituted many a patriarch’s civic duty—or difficult decision of defiance.

The sunny coastlines of Cyprus and Turkey are separated by a mere 40 miles of water. By contrast the Cypriot capital of Nicosia is well over 500 miles from Athens, 2000 miles from London. Even so, Greek-and English-language accounts of the Cypriot past inevitably refer to Turks as invaders. Such is the course of empire, and such are the distortions of history written by the winners. Meanwhile, to this day, the United Kingdom owns two impressive chunks of prime beachfront real estate with lovely views to the south, overlaid with vast expanses of concrete—that is, runways, docks, and support structures. These military base areas are known as Akrotiri and Dhekelia, where the Union Jack still is raised and lowered to the strains of “God Save The Queen.” These royal realms are situated, no accident, adjacent to the thriving port cities of Limassol and Larnaca, now international tourist hotspots.4

In terms of landmass and population, Cyprus is small, belying the enormous strategic importance of its location, at the intersection of Mediterranean Sea lanes connecting East and West, global North and global South. It has strong prehistoric ties to the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. From early humans to the present day, Cyprus has experienced a staggering number of colonizations. Beginning around 9000 BCE, hunter-gatherers on the island were joined by farmer-herders from the Fertile Crescent—specifically, today’s Syria—who raised wheat, sheep, and goats. Over time, these early settlers were followed by colonizers from Greece, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Rome. Christians reached the island in the first century CE; Jews were expelled in the second; Muslims arrived in the seventh. After twelfth and thirteenth century religious wars staked various claims on “holy” land—killing around two million people—Venice, Turkey, then Great Britain colonized Cyprus. Since Venetians deforested the island to build their naval and commercial fleets, Turkey and Britain shored up agriculture and fisheries, as well as their own military garrisons. Not until 1960 did local leaders declare Cyprus an independent nation-state. However, many considered it an ethnarchy if not theocracy, since the first president was archbishop of the orthodox Church of Cyprus. He ruled—with brief albeit important exceptions—until 1977.5

At roughly 3500 square miles, home to about 500,000 people in 1950, Cyprus was comparable to the U.S. state of Delaware, though Cyprus was poor, not yet a tax haven. About half the size of Wales, Cyprus at mid-century had just one-fifth its population. A standard formulation tallied the people as 80% of Greek descent, 20% of Turkish descent, ignoring smaller minorities of Armenian and Lebanese ancestry. Unlike Michael and his family, most Cypriots found it difficult to move beyond their village or district, nigh impossible to leave the island, except as fishers or sailors. Thus, for many, it felt claustrophobic. The cultural norms were stifling, religious values overpowering—not unlike the Greek islands of Crete and Hydra, where Michael would set and shoot two films. Though foreigners frequently came and went, evidencing the cosmopolitanism of ports like Limassol and Kyrenia, they told tales of worlds inaccessible to ordinary Cypriots.6

Before World War II, a steamship from Larnaca to London required five days journey, including rail passages, at an obscene price quoted in pounds. If poor and working-class Cypriots—the vast majority—could not be transported to these far-flung places, they nonetheless could communicate with them nonstop. Letters and telephones, newspapers and books, movies and magazines, then radio and television all provided a sense of connection, especially to Turkey, Greece, and Britain. By the turn of the millennium, with roughly a million people, low-cost air travel enabled the tourism industry to overtake agriculture.7

The myth of distinct continents is easily put asunder when we consider that Cypriot’s northern neighbor Turkey straddles Asia and Europe and its southern neighbor Egypt overlaps Asia and Africa. More significant still are the individuals and groups who repeatedly cross over these territorial and metaphorical divides. The big construct known as the West, for example, takes in many elite and middle-class persons of the global South or East: The Orient. After all, who brokers these military deals? Who parcels out the properties? Who buys and sells provisions? Who draws up the contracts? Who translates from the local idioms into the colonizers’ language? The Queen’s English? Who sends their offspring to the metropole or, failing that, its finer imperial outposts for a “proper” education? In the prevailing tongue and accent, customs and manners?8

One such family in Limassol was called Cacoyannis. Among an island society given to fine distinctions, Angeliki Efthyvoulos came from a higher status family than her fiancé Panayiotis Cacoyannis, whose forebears were traders, selling horse feed and other supplies to imperial troops and locals. Still, Angeliki’s husband-to-be was ambitious. While she learned music at the piano, he took a correspondence course in the 1910s from Chicago’s La Salle Extension University, an early large-scale provider of distance education. Though U.S. regulators questioned La Salle’s designation as a university, no one doubted the determination of P. Cacoyannis, as his upstart law office styled him. With his La Salle Bachelor of Laws degree, he had begun his professional ascent.9

At the outbreak of World War I, the British Empire took Cyprus—already its protectorate—from the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Since Greece would join Britain and its allies in combat against German, Turkish, and other enemies, a wartime marriage between two Greek Cypriots violated no national or racial taboos. Nor was Cacoyannis too old for Angeliki, at just over five years her senior. So the wedding went ahead. A sixteen-year-old bride on 8 November 1915, Angeliki was well above the marrying age for girls in turn-of-the-century United States, for example. Before 1920, the vast majority of state age-of-consent laws permitted adult male sexual intercourse with female children, such that a daughter could be transferred by marriage from a father’s to a husband’s household at the tender age of ten—seven in Delaware. After her wedding in late 1915, Angeliki bore her first child, a son, just after New Year’s 1917. But Louis lived only three months. Overcoming their sorrow, the newlyweds tried again, and Angeliki gave birth to daughter Ellie in December 1918, as the Great War ended. Again, given the correlation between teen pregnancy and infant mortality, Ellie died just after her first birthday.10

In the 1920s, their odds improved, and the family flourished. Stella was born healthy in 1920, followed in rapid succession by Michael in 1921, Yannoulla in 1923, and finally George in 1924. So the family portrait commissioned in 1928 celebrated much more than a secular Eastertide, Angeliki’s birthday, or Mother’s Day for Angeliki and elder matriarch Zoe—whose four daughters on the back row represented scarcely a third of her offspring, with many others joining the diaspora in southern Africa. Most of all, the photographic portrait of ten subjects solidified as it commemorated this large extended family’s latest nuclear family in Limassol.11

With their plunging necklines and short hair, if not short skirts, Angeliki’s sisters seemed liberated flappers—uncoupled and unencumbered. By contrast, Angeliki was pinned with the sexist nuclear-family labels of housewife, homemaker, and hostess. Nonetheless she took considerable comfort in the notion that her husband and her children were destined for greatness. As the four siblings grew up, they grew close—and competitive. According to Michael, his “father was not very involved in the family,” leaving the bulk of parental duties to Angeliki. To be sure, he earned money for their food, clothing, shelter, and education, as well as nights out for himself, sometimes accompanied by their mother. In that last sense, earnings “were wasted, everything was spent” on parties and revelry. For many years, the Cacoyannis family did not own their own home, but rented “the upper floor of a duplex house.”12

Across a longstanding cosmopolitan mix of religions, languages, races, and ethnicties in Cyprus, gender and sexuality were ordered along binaries consistent with globalizing trends. Oppressive gender norms sent middle-class men into the public sphere of employment, leisure, and political participation, with P. Cacoyannis serving on the British colonial Executive Council, relegating women to dutiful daughters then wives, working mostly inside the home. They took on the responsibilities of childbearing, childrearing, cooking, cleaning, purchasing and mending clothes, managing education and extracurriculars. Men enjoyed great sexual license in both premarital and extramarital contexts, while women suffered under dominant representations as virgin or whore: chaste bride then honorable mother, or fallen woman. This heteronormative sexual double standard for women—permitting men to forever sow wild oats while chaining women to one lifelong monogamous marriage—was of course unsustainable. Exogamous marriage, outside one’s own cultural group however defined, also generated anxiety, ostracism, and hardship. Further queering these norms, LGBTI people faced enormous obstacles and persecution, from birth to—often early—death. The Cacoyannis family crystalized these values, even as Michael tested them again and again.13

Reading with Garbo, Gender-bending with Dietrich

In the late 1920s in Cyprus, sacred and secular realms grew in tandem and often in opposition, depending upon a constellation of factors such as language and ethnicity. Sunni Muslims tended to speak Turkish, Orthodox Christians Greek, Protestants English. Lebanese and Armenian also were spoken. Enterprising Armenians such as the portrait photographer attended their own Eastern Orthodox Church, whereas most Lebanese were Maronite Catholics. What was a non-believing family to do? Many chose to tolerate the pious, play it by ear, and go through the motions. For this particular family, that meant speaking both Greek and English, identifying as Κακογιάννης and Cacoyannis, as well as attending Easter and Christmas services at the Church of Cyprus. First grade classes for Stella, as she reached the age of six, commenced at Terra Santa School, which—as its name suggested—considered Cyprus a part of the contested Middle East “holy” land. This Maronite Catholic girls school was situated on St. Andrew Street, named for the apostle, brother of Peter. As in Catholic dogma Peter’s successor is the pope in Rome, so too in Orthodoxy Andrew’s successor is the patriarch in Constantinople, aka Istanbul. Perhaps more important to Stella, her school was conveniently located just one block from their rented home on Otto and Amalia Street, named for the mid-nineteenth century king and queen of Greece. This was the multifaith, multiethnic, multilingual mix into which motion pictures intervened in early twentieth century Cyprus.14

For Michael, the Cacoyannis’ upper floor apartment on Otto and Amalia Street was ideally situated, because it stood across the street from an open-air cinema. As good luck would have it, the apartment’s balcony, with narrow-gauge child-safe wrought-iron railing, provided a view of the screen. Luckier still, stern Cacoyannis père returned home late from the office or club, and in any case, he largely ignored the children, while Angeliki sometimes indulged them. So as Stella learned to read by day, Michael—just over one year her junior—came to consciousness with movies at night. Indeed, the two activities overlapped. After school, Stella let Michael “help” with her homework, not that she needed it. Then the two went to the balcony to watch and listen to so-called silent films. For Stella and Michael, early childhood education extended from formal schooling to sneaky movie-going.15

As soon as they were out of the crib and comfortable in a bed, Yannoulla moved into Stella’s bedroom and George moved into Michael’s—three years separating the sisters, three years separating the brothers. So from age six or seven, watching a film for Michael and Stella represented an escape from the younger roommate, time apart, to sit together in the dark under the stars, to be guided through a story, and to become absorbed if not enthralled with the actors and their characters. Then of course, there was the music and dancing. Sister and brother listened to the latest international trends and mimicked them, as Michael belted out new show tunes at the family piano. Weekend afternoons, with or without their mother’s permission, Stella and Michael attended matinees at indoor venues too, including Benjamin Gunzberg’s Cine Rialto, constructed in the early 1930s as the latest of Limassol’s six cinemas.16

Before talkies, studios expected exhibitors to screen silent films with musical accompaniment, either live or recorded. Live performances were more common, and the most palatial picture houses were fitted with a pipe organ and orchestra pit. Some studios circulated song recommendations from standard repertoires and even suggested particular sheet music. Tiny exhibitors, such as the makeshift open-air cinema in almost every Cypriot village, brought in a guitarist, violinist, or pianist— or a gramophone. So from 1926, when Greta Garbo’s character Leonora in Torrent sang an aria from the opera Carmen on the Paris stage or played her own recording on a turntable, the cinema operator too could spin a shellac 78rpm record with the selfsame aria. Operators spun jazz records for Paris cabaret scenes of scantily clad women dancing the Charleston.17

Garbo’s first film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after moving from Stockholm to Hollywood, Torrent captivated Stella and Michael, as they read about it in the press, saw it from their balcony, or watched at an indoor cinema. Based on a novel by Spaniard Vicente Blasco Ibañez, it likely reached Cyprus in late 1927, a few months before MGM’s follow-up star vehicle for Garbo, The Temptress, also adapted from a Blasco Ibañez novel. In both cases, Stella and Michael probably took turns reading the title cards to each other, star student Stella coaching Michael. Afterward, they discussed the implications of what they had seen. For example, romantic drama Torrent is concerned momentarily with “conspicuous” interracial interaction between a black male and white female, but foremost with mixed marriage across class lines, extramarital sex, and the nature of human happiness. Raised poor in rural Valencia, Garbo’s Leonora achieves stardom as a singer in the European capitals of Madrid and Paris, while her lifelong love interest spurns her to pursue the conventional bourgeois path akin to the Cacoyannis family. As one card reads, mostly legible to a smart eight-year-old, “Life went on – year after year. For Rafael the treadmill of monotony – for Leonora the golden heights of song.” When late in life Rafael hopes to rekindle their love affair, Leonora refuses, enumerating the potential fallout, a catalog of middle-class propriety again with remarkable parallels to the Cacoyannis household: “Home – a good wife – money – a career – you have everything to make you happy,” including three children shown sleeping. Thus as Leonora finally rejects Rafael in Torrent, true love is denied to both Leonora and Rafael. The film ends unhappily, in a bleak mournful tone. “Obviously a fine actress,” according to historian Robert Sklar, Garbo as the “sultry Spanish siren” in Torrent and The Temptress “shone with an inner intensity few other performers” could match. Michael was captivated.18

Born in 1921, the same year Western Union innovated the halftone wire photo, Michael grew up cutting out and collecting photo portraits of Garbo, creating a shrine to her. In the Cacoyannis home, both the girls’ bedroom and the boys’ bedroom were furnished with twin beds. On the wall above each headboard and on the adjoining wall, each child could express his or her creativity and individuality with trinkets, icons, and foremost photo images, tacked or taped. Michael shows us a version of his sisters’ bedroom in his own first film from 1954. Big sister displays and imitates ballerinas, while tomboy little sister creates a wall collage of various young women and men, including one in cowboy hat. Michael told a select few reporters about his own corner of the boys’ bedroom dedicated to Garbo and contemporaries. Moreover, as he conceded in interviews, by the time he was a teenager, he purchased a poster of another favorite idol, the Berlin transplant to Hollywood, Marlene Dietrich. He then took a pen and with cursive handwriting authored a counterfeit message with false signature, “To my beloved Michael, Marlene.” As he said, “I loved Marlene Dietrich,” and he thereby imagined she loved him too. He began to hope his life could approximate hers—as a singer, an actor, and a bold transgressor of old-fashioned sex and gender norms epitomized by his parents.19

For the adolescent Michael, diva worship of Garbo and Dietrich interlaced the nascent desires to have and to be the beloved. On the one hand, he wanted to possess, love, and be loved by a glamorous leading lady—his own handwriting dubious evidence thereof. On the other, he wanted to be that star, exult in her public’s adulation, and thus be sexually attractive to men. In an autobiographical short story, Michael memorialized his first sexual encounter, age twelve, in which an older male cousin taught him how to masturbate. The cousin demonstrated the act for Michael, Michael followed his example, and both carried on to completion. In addition to mutual masturbation, solo masturbation for Michael often happened at night in bed before sleep. Unsurprisingly, screen images came to mind, as with gay actor Ramon Novarro in a favorite film Ben-Hur. As an alternative sleep aid, Michael would run compelling film scenes across his visual field, falling into slumber as he recalled, for example, Christians thrown to the lions in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1932 The Sign of the Cross. In that case, he once woke “with a start, after what seemed an eternity, having found myself stark naked in the arena of the Coliseum, while a gigantic gladiator … advanced on me.” As he learned, religious epics in particular could be among the most erotic of feature films, raising the hackles of censors such as the Catholic Legion of Decency, leading Hollywood to establish then enforce its own Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, from 1934.20

Attending Limassol’s Greek Gymnasium boys school, Michael turned up his nose at most children’s books and soon was reading a variety of English romantic writers, along with Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy, with special admiration for Anna Karenina. He appreciated the sprawling Tolstoy classic thanks in large measure to Garbo’s lead roles in the 1927 and 1935 film adaptations Love and Anna Karenina, reprised in 1948 by Vivien Leigh. If sister Stella and screen sweetheart Garbo thus helped teach Michael to read, then defiant Dietrich offered him a visual literacy connected to gender-bending bisexuality. Talkies like 1930’s pre-Code feature Morocco opened up for Michael a surprising exoticized world, in which a cabaret’s gay master of ceremonies introduces Dietrich’s character, a beloved chanteuse. Amy emerges onstage cross-dressed in white tie and tails. Singing and mingling, she avoids the eyes and arms of adoring male fans, finds a lovely female audience member, and gives her a long full kiss on the lips.21

The widely reproduced image of Dietrich smoking a cigarette, cross-dressed in top hat and tuxedo with pearl studs, jeweled cufflinks, and cummerbund, is perhaps the same photo blown-up on the poster Michael autographed and pinned to his wall. When his “terribly conservative” father bothered to look in on the boys, he reacted with alarm and reiterated the need for masculine pursuits. Yet in all-male team sports or contact sports, Michael was unsuccessful. In individual athletic competition such as tennis, he was more at ease. He enjoyed swimming but prefered dancing. By the time Michael reached his teens, family members went on holiday most summers to Platres, a mountain resort a couple of hours north by car, a cool retreat from Limassol’s July and August heat. Platres hotels held a “pervasive charm and exoticism [with] many foreign” guests. When he was fourteen years old, Michael’s mother instructed a tailor to make “my first tuxedo,” much like Dietrich’s, “and I wore it while attending afternoon tea dances. We usually danced tango. I was good, but a friend of mine, Nikos, a good-looking beauty, was best.”22

If Michael learned to read in part with silent film intertitles, he acquired distinctive visual and sartorial acumen by virtue of motion pictures and their still photographs—the headshots, half-shots, and group portraits that filled film fan magazines. These images formed an alternative iconography to the traditional family portraits kept in frames and photo albums by Michael’s mother and grandmother. As Michael made clear, Garbo and Dietrich enlivened his daydreams, as they featured on the covers and pages of Motion Picture (US), Vu (France), and BIZ (Germany), available at newsstands or peripteros on Limassol street corners and promenades. From these magazines and others, he lovingly cut out Garbo and Dietrich’s images and affixed them alongside his bed, even as the magazines compared the actors’ attributes. Features such as Leonard Hall’s “Garbo vs. Dietrich” in Photoplay declared “battle” between “the charms and talents of Paramount’s rising star and the goddess of MGM’s studio.” Thanks to the bilingual Cacoyannis household and thanks to the Greek Gymnasium, where first-graders were taught Greek and English in equal measure, Michael had no difficulty reading the salacious stories of Hollywood gossip. From second-grade, French also was taught, just as Parisian (and local) cabarets began to figure prominently in Michael’s imagination. For Michael and Stella, multilingualism was tied to movie-going, as silent films in French, Greek, and English and talkies in Greek, English, and other languages were screened across the street and around Limassol.23

Moreover, pre-Code pictures in particular offered sustained views of lives lived against the grain of middle-class respectability and sexual normativity. At Morocco’s end, Dietrich’s unmarried but experienced Amy chooses to pursue her French Foreign Legion lover, played by Gary Cooper. Suspending her stage career for the moment, Amy sets off into the desert, in the company of other industrious women, the band of nonwhite north African sex workers who follow the fighters into combat zones. Oddly enough, Hollywood depictions of northern European stars in Mediterranean climes also taught Michael an important lesson in social and physical mobility, applicable to Garbo and Dietrich’s on-and off-screen personas. To free yourself of traditional family values, you had to remove yourself from the family home and relocate. To move away was to move up—or, at least, to move toward a more flexible kinship network of race-mixers, gender-benders, and sexual libertines.

Four Siblings and an Outsider

In the unpublished autobiographical short story “Exterminating Leslie,” drafted and reworked over the 1980s and 1990s, Michael depicts Christmas season 1933 in Limassol, when a young visitor to the Cacoyannis household tests family allegiances and exposes regional taboos of race and sexuality. As the four siblings ostracize the newcomer with formulaic insults of ethnicity and paternity, as they even come to blows, Michael reconsiders his loyalty to family and locality, as he at last empathizes with a gangly boy of uncertain origins. The story shows Michael on the cusp of higher knowledge about the world’s structures of inequality. It signals one of many moments in which he becomes, in Sara Ahmed’s theorization, a willful child primed for the collective possibilities of adult dissent.24

The only child of family friends, Leslie arrives as an exotic threat, mysteriously cut off from his parents who are abroad over the holidays. Left in the care of Michael’s mother, twelve-year-old Leslie is just a few months younger than Michael, but he is taller than “all the Greek boys in school” and a better dancer than Michael. A skinny, freckled redhead with a thin piping voice, Leslie is “terribly English-looking.” Resembling his father, Leslie nonetheless poses the predicament of mixed parentage—that is, biracial white/non-white coupling— which “precocious” ten-year-old Yannoulla criticizes with a racist verbal assault. “You are only half-English. Everybody knows your mother is an Egyptian”—an opera singer with a “thick accent.” Moreover, the story suggests, Leslie might be an “illegitimate” child or “bastard.” Thus does the elder author Michael examine his family’s complicity in Leslie’s childhood degradation.25

The four Cacoyannis siblings are characterized as close but competitive to the point of antipathy. Eldest child Stella is bright, poised, and principled. She considers Michael’s scheming “terrible,” his “plots” and “machinations” always getting the children into trouble. Cunning, forever spying on their houseguest, Michael is “particularly touchy about his artistic talents,” regularly repairing to the piano to sound out proof of his abilities, from Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz” to Schubert’s “Serenade.” He also is self-conscious about his short stature, declaring that “most great men were short. Napoleon, for instance.” Highly observant of women’s makeup, Michael judges whether ladies are under-or “over-painted.” He has “a knack for making people laugh,” but given his fragile adolescent masculinity—and incipient internalized homophobia—he tries to make his voice lower and deeper. At ten, tomboy Yannoulla is a shameless money-grubber who weighs the relative value of gifts with precision. She can discern grades of gold from 14 to 18 to 24 karat, and she can determine whether items of jewelry are pure gold or gold plate on tin. Of the siblings’ godfathers, Yannoulla’s is “richest,” so she is “furious” over his “tacky” inexpensive Christmas present to her. Like eldest child Stella, baby brother George has a “sweet disposition.”

With “eyes soft and infinitely gentle,” Mama exercises skills of even-tempered persuasion over her clever children. Papa “always got back late from the office and didn’t want to be bothered with domestic problems,” apart from bad behavior warranting corporal punishment. “Only when their mother was driven to appeal to him for discipline did his authority make itself felt, sometimes quite painfully. Otherwise, he displayed little interest in their activities, except when they brought home their school reports, earning from him chuckles of pleasure and, in his more generous moods, money.” Thus the father promotes competitiveness in education and extracurricular activities, even as he insists that they be pursued along traditionally gendered lines, the girls at the pious Terra Santa school, the boys at the rough-and-tumble Greek Gymnasium. Though Mama and Papa sometimes go out to parties together, playing cards and gambling “till the early hours,” more often Papa claims to work late at the office alone. When Mama rings, however, he’s not there, indicating dishonesty, perhaps infidelity.

The siblings’ tight bonds, in extreme, take on the qualities of xenophobia. “Whenever their private world was threatened by some unfamiliar intrusion, the clan feeling swept away their antagonism, plunging them into a wordless conspiracy.” Leslie is the victim of just such a conspiracy, what he calls their “ferocious solidarity,” as verbal disputes escalate to scuffles, with brawler Yannoulla “punching [Leslie] wildly on the chest,” unafraid of the older taller boy. The story suggests foremost that in 1930s cosmopolitan Cyprus, race, gender, and sexual politics were learned from the youngest ages. Children understood and participated in discourses of “inferior” African ancestry, as well as bastardy— though in the end, Leslie is proven “legitimate.” The touring Egyptian opera singer is discovered not to be Leslie’s biological mother but rather his stepmother. As author Michael ultimately generates sympathy for the boy left behind over the holidays, we learn that his birth mother too was an outcast, a victim of prejudice. Two years after Leslie’s birth, “his mother ran away with someone she shouldn’t have fallen in love with,” but the gender of her lover is left unspecified. Stella speculates it was a “close friend,” suggesting the early twentieth century “crushes” and “smashes” of young lesbian women, whereas adolescent Michael says it might have been “her husband’s brother”—reminiscent of legendary Salome’s mother. Moreover the birth mother’s racial identity is left undisclosed, mutable, and so even queerer. At the story’s conclusion, Leslie goes off to live with this birth mother who has finally located her lost son, inspiring jealousy in Michael. The mother charts a new life path as an unattached professional. She “never got married again and … built up a successful model-agency in London,” a place where Michael dreamed of settling.26

Circulated among family members much later in life, the “Exterminating Leslie” manuscript reminded the Cacoyannis siblings of their childhood selves, their young familial alliances, and their participation in combative discourses that exoticized and stigmatized racial others. With decades of hindsight, Michael may have crafted his story’s siblings with the attributes of their adulthood, or perhaps his autobiographical short story accentuated well-remembered traits—such as evaluating gifts of gold jewelry—that proved consistent over his brother and sisters’ lifetimes. The story’s limited circulation suggests Michael may have never submitted it to publishers, but was willing to test the truth of its claims with its subjects, his siblings. As they perhaps concurred, at that early stage in life, Stella was their ethical compass; Michael a smart, sensitive, cunning boy; Yannoulla an avaricious fighter; George a charming beloved baby brother.

In time, as the father’s restrictions on his teenage children tightened, Michael would become willful, disobedient, and defiant. As Sara Ahmed suggests, “Feminist, queer, and antiracist histories can be thought of as histories of those who are willing to be willful.” Though not yet prepared to turn willfulness into radical statements of “self-description,” Michael Cacoyannis was reaching the threshold of “willfulness as standing against, willfulness as creativity,” especially when cultivated and encouraged by women flouting patriarchal norms.27

Stella’s Sisterhood

The Cacoyannis family courted middle-class respectability, with limited financial resources often lost to gambling. Mother’s bridge parties cost a pretty penny, but father’s work-hard-play-hard regimen of lawyering, politicking, gaming, and carousing cost much more. Frustrations sometimes were vented at home, where corporal punishment was the norm. When curious inquisitive Stella and Michael “drove her beyond endurance, [Angeliki] would not only raise her voice but also … her bare hand which she used quite regularly on our buttocks,” sometimes faces. Father was worse. Though he sometimes spared his favorite Stella, the “die-hard conservative … could be very severe with his children.” As she remembered, “his authoritarianism was not confined to his chambers.” In her most candid moments, Stella acknowledged her father was “blunt,” “unyielding and obstinate,” “harsh and disagreeable.” A brute homophobe, he bristled at Michael’s fey ways and punished him for them. Stella further hinted their father physically abused their mother, almost “acquir[ing] the reputation of wife-beater.” Or, as Stella demurred: Was it just a “vivid dream”—or nightmare—of childhood?28

By contrast, grandmother “Zoe did not rule her household with a rod of iron.” Later joined by Yannoulla and George, Stella and Michael often “walked out of the [parental] house in mass protest” against slapping, spanking, and belting, instead finding a “peaceful atmosphere” at Zoe’s home. Zoe was “courteous, dignified, and never lost her temper.” Moreover, she was “proud and independent, refusing to … live with us” lest she “be a burden.” Most of all, unlike their frightfully religious paternal grandmother, who warned “of the fires of hell,” maternal grandmother Zoe “was broadminded and liberal,” disinclined to “locked doors and lectures on morality.” Three unmarried daughters didn’t inspire panic in widow Zoe. “Old maid” Dryas and twins Cleo and Athena “were free to come and go as they pleased,” with Zoe “only accompanying them to formal functions and dances when a chaperone was essential.” All told, the four women managed their household just fine on their own, without men. Their home became a refuge for the Cacoyannis children.29

Along with silent film intertitles, Stella and Michael “inherited [their] love of reading” from Zoe. “There were no forbidden books.” In fact, Zoe encouraged discussions of “daring literature.” So reading too was both refuge and resource, a way out, a means of looking and learning beyond locality, questioning received wisdom. Stella noticed the profound impact on Michael. As an infant, her brother had been “by all accounts very ugly.” Thus Angelika’s friends “teased [her] mercilessly.” Though Angeliki must have regretted her choice of friends, she nonetheless “secretly wept over” young Michael’s unsightliness. Ridiculed as an ugly ducking, Michael initially “was a very quiet boy. His favorite pastime was to hide behind a book, reading and sucking his left thumb while passing and re-passing his forelock between the index and middle finger of his right hand.” Fortunately for Michael, “his looks” improved, and he became an “outgoing and sociable” child, thanks in large measure to his maternal grandmother, mother, aunts, and sister Stella.30