Читать книгу Truths Up His Sleeve: The Times of Michael Cacoyannis - John Howard - Страница 11

CHAPTER 1

Colonial 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

As liberating and enlightening as Zoe’s house were the summer cottages of Platres. “At Platres,” Stella recalled, children “were truly free. The whole mountain was ours. There was no traffic and no crime, and our parents did not worry about us.” That is, mothers did not worry. Fathers tended to stay in the city for work and pleasure, joining their families only at weekends. Meantime middle-class women and children enjoyed their autonomy. During the “memorable summer” of 1933, Angeliki’s cousin, soprano Calliope de Castan came to Platres from Vienna, her reputation as a “modern woman” preceding her. “This we interpreted as meaning that she had lovers.” One night, Stella and Michael “could not sleep for the noise in the sitting room.” They “crept out of bed and looked. Calliope was singing [Mascagni’s] Cavalleria Rusticana, dancing and shedding her clothes, until she finally stood utterly naked before her audience” of women, as it was midweek. Free spirit Calliope “sung all her songs” to Stella and Michael “on walks in the woods of Platres, vividly relating the stories of the operas, explaining the techniques of breathing and teaching us how to bring out the various sounds. Michael showed exceptional aptitude” for singing, as well as dancing.³¹

Indeed, Michael’s “first signs of artistic talent” emerged around dance. Back in town, twin aunts Cleo and Athena served as big sisters to Stella and Michael, taking them along to ballroom classes with dance master Little Cyrus, “who had taught two generations of Limmasolians to dance…. Michael excelled[,] showing a rare sense of rhythm and an ear for music. Not content with the conventional steps, he was prolific in inventing new ones.” At Platres, these bold moves came in handy, as did Michael’s flare for theatricals. “As soon as Michael was old enough he organized us into a theatre company,” Stella remembered. “He wrote the plays, the shows and the songs, he arranged the choreography, designed and made the costumes and sets, acted the leading roles and directed.” At first, “only the family took part [including] a distant cousin” Michael had “tested and pronounced worthy of us. The audience were the children of the neighbourhood to whom we issued numbered tickets. To immortalise our artistic achievements we published a weekly magazine containing Michael’s plays, shorts stories, and poems,” along with “cartoons and puzzles of our own invention.” At Platres, new opportunities arose, with larger, more diverse audiences.³²

After the turn of the century Cypriot bards—“who travelled from city to city singing their epic poems” of tragedy—live music and live theatre performances were all too infrequent for Michael. “With the exception of a rare theatre troupe from Greece, the only live performances at that time in Cyprus were the cabaret shows,” which in Limassol included weekend matinee performances for children. Spaniards and Hungarians were prominent among these cabaret vocalists, as well as Greek singers such as Kakia Mendri and Sofia Vembo. Michael so admired contralto Vembo that he later would cast her in a film. Just as foreign visitors to Platres inspired speculation and intrigue, so too in Limassol did cabaret “artistes” from abroad. “Even as children we knew that the main function of the artistes was the ‘consummation.’” Some artists were steadily “engagee’’ with town bachelors, others with married men. Indeed, during summer, as wives and children “enjoyed the coolness of Platres, the men relieved their loneliness with the artistes”— whether female or male, as we see in Chapter 9. “In a society [of] decorum, where young men and women were not allowed to mix unchaperoned,” the cabaret functioned as a “permissive” space, with alternative norms and limits. A cabaret artist “accompanied by her mother” was assumed “an inaccessible virgin. This provoked heavy competition among the young men for her conquest.” Trans artists likewise inspired admiration, but more discreet competition among suitors. Cabaret artist Argentino, for example, performed “Spanish dances [cross]dressed as a woman, ending the show by taking off his wig to reveal his short hair.” Hardly surprising for most cabaret audience members, especially those who traveled to continental Europe, trans performers in Cyprus called up the transgressive politicized cabaret of interwar France and Weimar Germany.³³

Above even cabaret, above all, “the cinema dominated our lives. It was by far our favorite entertainment.” According to Stella, “we saw films of all nationalities: French, American, English, German, Greek,” notably omitting Turkish, a lifelong bias. Much anticipated and long remembered by Stella and Michael, the first pre-talkie sound on disc film in Limassol was The Bohemian Girl from 1927. Its new technology was “announced by printed handouts distributed at the cinema and pushed under front doors” of homes. It also was “advertised by the town crier riding through the streets in a gharry,” or horse-drawn carriage. “The whole of Limassol was at the cinema” for its debut. From the youngest age, Stella recalled, Michael had “a passion for the cinema. He knew the name of every actor and every film; he could describe every detail and sing every song in any language. He collected photographs and postcards of film stars and arranged them in albums” or pinned them to his bedroom wall. “He also read everything he could find about the cinema and the theatre.” Of German silent movies, Michael likely missed the groundbreaking 1919 Magnus Hirschfeld gay feature Different from the Others, released before his birth. But Michael doubtless saw or at least read about the 1924 Carl Theodor Dreyer “homosexual love story” based on the relationship between sculptor Auguste Rodin and a male model. Released in English translation from late 1926 under various titles, it came to be known foremost as Michael, making a profound impression on young Mihalis. In Cyprus, the dangerous new influence of film threatened the authority not only of parents but also schools, which attempted to delimit movie-going. In Limassol, the Greek Gymnasium forbade its students from attending “except on fixed days [to] selected films”—an early lesson in age-appropriate content if not censorship. Ever resourceful, Michael developed yet another method of sneaky peaking, after his family moved out of the Otto and Amalia Street duplex and he lost his balcony view of the open-air cinema screen. He “discovered that by climbing on a table and chair … at a friend’s house opposite the Yiordamlis Cinema, he could see a small section of the screen,” through the window and through the projection room.³⁴

In addition to a love of reading and movie-going, Stella and Michael shared an intense interest in other people and other ways of living, from sex workers to intersex businesspeople. In Limassol, sisters “Marika and Panayota [were] known as hermaphrodites,” or intersex. Tall and “thickset with deep voices” but smooth skin, they always wore “a black skirt [but with] a black coat exactly like a man’s. Their stockings were black and they wore men’s shoes…. Capable and respected business women [in] wholesale trade[,] they also ran a khani, a kind of boarding house for farmers and others from surrounding villages.” As precocious Stella and Michael witnessed, “Marika and Panayota sat in the cafes in the Central Market Square and drank coffee with the men. Though they were different,” they were neither feared nor shunned. Whereas Stella claimed townsfolk were “not particularly preoccupied with their sexual status,” Michael doubtless was. At minimum, he noticed a fundamental paradox. Picked out as different, they were not picked on, as he sometimes was. Their economic rank and bold self-acceptance shielded them. If local physicians or nurses perhaps had broken their confidentiality, the sisters would refuse shame or self-pity—as would most local sex workers. Sex work in Limassol was connected to the movies both conceptually and spatially, on-and off-screen, at Heroes Square. Yes, films depicted or suggested sex work, as with Morocco’s audacious finale. But filmgoers furthermore mingled with sex workers. Not solely “the prostitutes’ domain,” Heroes Square also was home to “the best cinema in town.” So Michael and Stella “often passed the houses” of sex workers. “Front doors were always open, the beds clean and tidy.” Related, another house in Heroes Square bore a red cross with sign reading “Prophylactic Station.” It was “an annex to the V.D. clinic of the Government Hospital.” Thus, from as young as six, Michael and Stella “could recognize professional prostitutes,” who were characterized by “short tight dresses, flashy colours, high heels, long earrings[,] a painted face, dyed hair or gold teeth.” Also, when walking, they would “swing” their “behinds.” Or, prostitution took subtler forms. “A modest house in our neighbourhood excited our interest. Two young women lived in it and took in ironing. Somehow, we knew that their hobby”—or side hustle—“was prostitution.” In a similar manner, Stella and Michael learned about women’s reproductive health, about safe and unsafe methods of abortion, from the family cook. In these and countless other ways, close observation and empathetic attention—to and from women—supplemented “cinema [as] our main source of knowledge.” ³⁵

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

Whereas one Henry Tudor, aka King Henry VIII, married six times, with requisite annulments and occasional beheadings, furthermore declaring himself Supreme Head of a new Protestant denomination, one Edward Windsor, aka King Edward VIII, married just once. But scandal of all scandals, his wife had been divorced. Twice. To make matters worse, Wallis Simpson was an outspoken American, whose judgment Edward trusted. Though Britain lacked a constitution, constitutional crisis ensued. Edward abdicated, handing over the royal reins to Bertie.⁴³

Of course, many principled individuals have refused the royal honors bestowed upon them, often in protest against empire, monarchy, aristocracy, and unearned inherited privilege. Among the dissenting artists, writers, actors, and directors Michael admired were Francis Bacon, Alan Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Glenda Jackson, Ken Loach, L. S. Lowry, J. B. Priestly, Tony Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. There was never any question of Michael’s father declining the knighthood. He accepted with glee. Then, eager to return to London for the 1937 coronation, he would indulge in more debauched nightlife and still find time to chart the future of his children—and their children. The “precedences, privileges, and advantages” referenced in the royal decree were substantial. Most of all, he wanted his offspring to make the most of preferences given by the nation’s top institutions of higher learning. Sir Panayiotis had his eye on a particular law school in central London, far superior to La Salle Extension University. His effete eccentric elder son Michael would have to forget about that career in theatre.⁴⁴

*

As we’ve seen, over the 1920s and 1930s, Michael Cacoyannis was raised and schooled on the small but strategically important island of Cyprus with considerable resources at his disposal. Born into an aspiring middle-class family of Greek descent, he grew up with many advantages, including reliable food, clothing, and shelter. He benefited from decent healthcare, varied education, and extracurricular activities to sustain and excite both mind and body. Parental discipline extended to “severe” corporal punishment, so Michael and his older sister continually escaped to the comforting liberal-minded all-female household of their maternal grandmother and unmarried aunts, who valued wide reading, free thought, and open inquiry.

The Cacoyannis family rented their flat, as money flowing into the household flowed out faster. Crucially for Michael and sister Stella, the flat balcony looked across Otto and Amalia Street into an outdoor cinema and onto its screen. Its music then dialogue filled the night air every year from mid-spring to mid-autumn. Aside from the capital Nicosia, Limassol was home to more indoor cinemas than any other town on the island. As the Cacoyannis kids matured into teenagers, silent film then talkies depicted worlds and imparted wisdom often at odds with their father and their schools.

Their “terribly conservative” father enrolled Michael and George, Stella and Yannoulla, in the Greek Gymnasium and the English Girls College respectively, keeping the boys close to home in Limassol, sending the girls farther afield of Terra Santa for schooling and “finishing” in Alexandria. The very names of these three schools signaled their father’s national, religious, and racial prejudices. On this diverse island split off from the Anatolian/Middle Eastern/Western Asian mainland—with its multifaith, multiracial, multilingual populations—Sir Panayiotis insisted his children look to Greece and England as fonts of white Christian European civilization.

Ironically, as Michael and Stella soon would discover, historic Cypriot ties to Britain were not a reliable predictor of cross-cultural amity. Moreover, claims of Greek ancestry could not forestall white racism or imperial scorn in the London metropole, with its long history of dominion over vast expanses of earth. In advance of his bloodthirsty military campaigns, British imperialist Herbert Kitchener had mapped various parts of the empire, detailing their exploitable natural resources and—less reliably—commenting on their peoples. In Cyprus, Kitchener described a crude racial division between Turks and Greeks, the former “peaceful, moderately honest, and industrious,” the latter “stupid[,] bad workers, shirking as much as they can.” These ostensibly innate differences he applied to males alone. Ever incongruous, as racist reasoning is, he lumped the attributes of Cypriot females, by contrast, into one misogynist basket. “The women of both races are not at all prepossessing; it is rare to see a face even tolerably good-looking, and their figures and voices are very objectionable. The Turkish women veil their faces, which is an advantage.” Published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1879, such racist stereotypes circulated far and wide in the late nineteenth century. They were re-circulated as Britain strengthened its grip on the island in the twentieth century. Indeed, these ideas were fundamental to imperial discourses designed to demean and belittle locals, thus justifying the entire enterprise of violent exploitation, including gendered and sexualized subordination. When Stella and Michael arrived in the metropole, they would face numerous obstacles. For Stella, the hurdles would be even higher, born of institutionalized sexism. As Michael resisted the path his father mapped out, straying into suspect professions and into criminalized leisure activities, he too would face additional impediments.⁴⁵

A fey boy more interested in cosmetics than football, theatre than fishing, Michael in his early years took courage from Broadway and Hollywood director George Cukor. One generation older than Michael, Cukor had pursued the sorts of stage and screen careers Michael longed for. Like Cukor, Michael had grown up in “relatively modest circumstances.” He was “raptly devoted” to his mother, and “his keen observation of her mannerisms and reactions” helped him make many female friends and later supervise women in various capacities. With his first forays in the performing arts—in backyard skits, school plays, dramatic readings, touring production audiences, and soon London’s West End—Michael “found that he was intoxicated by life in the theatre. He loved the community and camaraderie.” Through diva worship of screen idols Garbo and Dietrich, no ordinary pin-ups, Michael learned how to read, as he furthermore discovered that wearing a tuxedo as a young man or woman produced remarkably different outcomes and possibilities. When the movie magazines circulated incredible stories that Garbo and Cukor were a couple, Michael paid heed and took note. Though he understood what “marriage of convenience” meant, the phrase “lavender marriage” was not known to him. Yet.⁴⁶

For now, Michael still had his father to deal with. This formidable man, further empowered as a knight of the realm, dictated Michael’s future, as he deplored his son’s effeminacy and theatrics. Like Cukor, Michael “was expected to follow family tradition and become a lawyer, a safe bourgeois occupation. The profession of stage director was from the family point of view … equivalent to a drug pusher or bookie.” Inexpert gamblers at poker and bridge, Panayiotis and Angeliki would take no such risks with their youngsters' lives and livelihoods. Father knew best. The children would obey.⁴⁷