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

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