John Howard - Truths Up His Sleeve - The Times of Michael Cacoyannis

Again and again, silent movies, sound on disc film, and pre-Code talkies taught lessons markedly different from the sex-segregated education Stella and Michael received. Obsessed with bedroom protocols, Stella’s teachers ranged from mildly tolerant to outright vicious. As she recounted, at Terra Santa School, religious studies was a formal part of the curriculum for only “the few Roman Catholic girls [who attended]. Yet we were all influenced by Roman Catholic teaching” and forced to “say our rosary.” The girls also were exposed to the larger institution’s infamous cruelties. According to Stella, “the mother superior was a stupid, semiliterate elderly American with rimless glasses whose only distinctions” were her accent and body odor “of stale sweat in summer.” On one miserable occasion, she ritually shamed and humiliated a ten-year-old boarding student for bedwetting, “denounc[ing] her to the whole school.” Assisted by another nun, the mother superior took “the sheet from Rosu’s bed. After exhibiting the yellow stain, she draped Rosu with the sheet and made her turn around several times so that all would see.” Though “the injustice and brutality” appalled Stella, it had an even greater impact on Michael, to whom she retold the story. Whereas Stella would remain close to key Christian leaders throughout her career, Michael would lampoon, ridicule, and reproach them. 36

Michael’s love for his sister Stella interwove their mutual interests in reading and writing, song and dance, movie-going and putting on a show. Close in age, they also were close in spirit and outlook. They would remain so throughout their teens and twenties, by which time Michael would cultivate a deep sympathy for younger sister Yannoulla. In childhood and youth, “Yannoulla liked rough and dangerous games.” She played football with “notorious” bad boys: “typical” juvenile offenders and reform school “candidates.” Thus she was teased as a tomboy, no less than Michael was scolded as a sissy. Emotionally wounded by her upbringing, Yannoulla felt forever in Stella and Michael’s shadow. She fell short of their educational achievements and attained few of their professional distinctions. Even so, Michael and Yannoulla shared other affinities. But they would disagree bitterly throughout their lives about the best means of understanding, acknowledging, and engaging their affinities. 37

A Knight Reasserts Patriarchy

In early 1936, enjoying a short nap after lunch at home, Michael’s father was roused from sleep by incessant ringing. He tumbled out of bed and stumbled down the hallway. Nearly naked, he picked up the family’s new black rotary dial telephone. On the other end of the line, an official in London with brisk clipped accent announced that Mr. Cacoyannis’ presence was required at a Buckingham Palace ceremony later that year by his majesty King Edward VIII. Thus, as Michael told the story ever after as satire, his father was knighted in his underwear. 38

As a lawyer and politician elected by propertied men to the colonial Executive Council, as a King’s birthday honoree “for public services to Cyprus,” P. Cacoyannis now had reached a pinnacle of recognition—and privilege. That privilege, he soon ascertained, could command multigenerational advantages. For the moment, he made arrangements to travel to England, while colleagues covered his caseload. They would be called on yet again to shoulder his burden, as the very King who invested him as knight of the realm would abdicate amid international scandal. Sir Panayiotis would be summoned back to London to represent Cyprus at the coronation ceremony of Edward’s younger brother Bertie, aka King George VI. During his long absences from Limassol over summer 1936 and spring 1937, Angeliki and her children would relish an easing of tensions and a relaxing of restrictions, even as her husband found new ways to enjoy “white” male privilege by day and night in metropolitan London. By this time, Stella was enrolled at English Girls College in Alexandria, Egypt, an admired leader who was top of her class, with Yannoulla soon to follow her. As Yannoulla remembers, “we were [in] school. My mother wouldn’t leave us” in Zoe’s care. Most of all, “we couldn’t afford to all go to England, so my father went alone.” Thus, from age fifteen to sixteen, mid-1936 to mid-1937, Michael became the man of the family. It was an improbable role. 39

As Michael conceded, he “did a lot of gossiping” at school, but most teachers liked him. Though math often escaped him, he excelled in history, geography, and Greek, both ancient and modern. “The theater fascinated me. That was what I wanted to do.” He competed in dramatic readings of tragedies, starred in a high school production, and attended evening performances of Greek touring companies “secretly”—that is, with his mother’s permission, without his father’s. When it came to high culture, Michael confessed he could be “an unbearable snob.” But he loved pop culture too. At one annual Carnival celebration in Limassol, Michael took advantage of his short build to outfit himself as Napoleon. In subsequent years, he would design costumes for parade caricatures with outsized heads. Especially when his father was away in England, Michael came home from the boys school in the afternoons and sought solace in a women’s world of style and sociability. He often joined his mother’s bridge parties, and the ladies “loved me because I was a cool kid.” Other teenagers “were reluctant to speak to them intimately.” Michael, by contrast, offered fashion tips and makeup tutorials. As he once admonished a friend of his mother, "You changed the color of your lipstick. Error! The other made your lips more prominent." 40

In London, guided by his allocated valet, or “security person,” Michael’s father toured the Houses of Parliament and other lofty institutions of governance, jurisprudence, and legal education, notably the Inns of Court. According to Yannoulla, her father’s guide also led him to both reputable and disreputable establishments after dark. The guide “happened to be a very interesting man, you know, and introduced my father to a lot of things in London…. He enjoyed it, no question. Restaurants. Nightclubs.” Nodding her head, implying more still, she said her father “enjoyed the whole thing. Very much.” In time Yannoulla would take possession of the chief artifact from her father’s London journey, a replica of the diminutive furniture piece upon which he knelt before Edward: the hallowed knight’s stool. 41

In Britain’s arcane aristocratic hierarchies, Sir Panayiotis’ newfound status positioned him, in the words of one infamous snobbism, as “very nearly the best— of the second rate.” To explain: Other honorees from distant colonies such as British Honduras, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, and Trinidad received lesser titles of MBE, OBE, or CBE, designating them as, in ascending order, Member, Officer, or Commander of the British Empire. Above these were Knights. But among Knights, Knight Bachelor ranked lowest. And even among his cohort of ten Knights Bachelor, Sir Panayiotis stood out as the only one without a British surname. Others held additional titles such as Professor, Chief Justice, “Censor in Chief of Royal College of Surgeons,” and—tellingly—“Mining Consultant to the Government of Tanganyika.” In any case, “EDWARD THE EIGHTH, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King Defender of the Faith, and Emperor of India,” would decree “that We of Our especial grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion have given and granted … unto Our trusty and well-beloved Panayiotis Loizou Cacoyannis, Esquire, of Our Colony of Cyprus, the degree, title, honour, and dignity, of a KNIGHT BACHELOR,” plus “all rights, precedences, privileges, and advantages” thereof. After additional high-toned words that apparatchiks abbreviated as “&c., &c., &c.,” the decree ended with the day and month “in the first year of Our Reign.” As god apparently would have it, it also was the last year of said reign. 42