French Movie Sex Bombs Pursue US Marines

I remember my father as a master of salad making. Perhaps this was due to his Greek heritage but his salads were definitely not classically Greek, containing, for example, blue cheese.

My father’s pride at having been a United States Marine was softened by observing how he experienced as pleasurable and calming many of the routines of domestic life that he practiced on weekends.

My father, whose Greek parents were refugees due to ethnic cleansing in Turkey in 1924, makes an appearance in my film about refugees arriving in Greece from Turkey in 2017, No Human Is Illegal. 

These he had learned from his mother. They included grocery shopping, cooking and sewing. He was also prone to explosive, terrifying fits of anger that no one could predict. Despite this, by the pleasure he took in these recurring tasks, he helped out his wife, my mother, and augmented considerably the compassion I, the oldest of his four children, felt for him. 

His parents, who had immigrated to New York City, living first in Brooklyn and then in the Bronx, weren’t classically Greek either. They were diaspora Greeks. Before they immigrated they had been living in the Turkish city where my grandmother’s family had lived for generations and which is commonly known as Istanbul, although they persisted in referring to it as Constantinople. They left in 1924 when the rise of nationalism necessitated a treaty ordering the reciprocal ethnic cleansing of their largest respective minority religious communities. Instead of going to Greece, my grandparents came to the United States. They traveled on a Russian ship whose passengers my grandmother remembered as being Russian Jews. My grandfather had grown up in a Greek community in Georgia, where he learned to speak Russian, and more recently had been working on a British ship, where he learned English. My grandmother told me proudly that he had been able to act as a translator for the other passengers when together they arrived at Ellis Island.

For the salad dressing my father taught me to always put vinegar before oil. Despite his lesson--or perhaps because of it--for a long time I couldn’t remember which came first but only that he had admonished me that the order was very important. After living in Paris a number of years, my mnemonic trick was to associate this "v.o." (vinegar, oil) with the "v.o." one frequently sees after the titles of foreign films in France, « version originale , » meaning that at this cinema the dialogue of the foreign film will be heard in its original language, accompanied by subtitles rather than dubbed. I still have this chain of thought around v.o. when I dress a salad. Since childhood I have always been creating mnemonic tricks for myself. Most of them I forget almost immediately.  I think the mnemonic trick of v.o. sticks with me because it contains an added connection to my father whose salad-making is in some sense the palimpsestic blueprint of my own. 

Of the two great Greek historians of antiquity, I think of myself more drawn to the style of Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC),  who also lived and wrote in what is today modern Turkey, than to the style of Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BC), who lived and wrote in the same city where I am writing today, Athens. Despite my sense of affinity with the style of Herodotus, in my film about refugees landing on Lesvos in 2017, No Human Is Illegal, I make an extended reference to Thucydides. His style, in contrast to that of Herodotus,  provides to his work an overarching narrative that gives tragic form to the hubris of ancient Athens as it becomes weighed down with being an empire. Its democracy loses its ability to think politically as its thinking becomes distorted by its need to dehumanize those who stand in its way. The style of Herodotus, on the other hand, leaves intact stories that are hearsay and fanciful. He vacuums up a vast number of sources. Like Herodotus, I include what I hear and transmit it within the category of history as a new conceptual framework for rereading and analyzing these stories. However, at present, I am in Athens to create a video installation that derives from my long passion for Greek tragedy and my conviction of its current relevance to the fight against the resurgence of fascism. It is as if the tragic form returns to me and, at the same time, to the world, both in unexpected ways.

Over a few days one winter in the late 1980s, I sat down with my father’s mother in the cramped kitchen of the apartment in the Bronx where she had raised her four boys–of which my father was the second. I recorded my conversation with my grandmother using the kind of cassette recorder of the 1980s known as a boom box. Traveling to the United States in the 1920s, my grandfather’s transit papers had listed his occupation as “woodworker.” Once settled in the Bronx, he eventually became a self-employed wood manufacturer. As I have written about elsewhere, the period after WW2 was when Americans were obliged to figure out how to integrate new forms of technology, specificaly hifis and televisions, into their homes. One of their solutions was to make them look like furniture by encasing them in wooden cabinets. This was a great stimulus to my grandfather’s business. In the early 1960s, while my parents struggled to raise their children in a wealthy suburb of New York City, I remember playing in the garage in the pile of discarded pieces of lathed wood my father’s father would regularly drive up from the Bronx and deliver to us. Its intended purpose was for kindling in our fireplace. In our garage I remember loving to play in this pile of discarded wooden geometric shapes, imagining how they might connect to each other.  They still evoke for me the Timaeus, the dialogue of Plato which contains a discussion of geometry and the creation of the universe. In the late 1920s, my grandfather’s initial success as a small independent wood manufacturer had coincided with the pre-crash ever-upward rise of the stock market. He invested in the market and for a very short time this paid off handsomely. My grandmother after arriving had joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression swallowed the country, it was my grandmother’s work, she told me sitting in the kitchen, and the union to which she belonged that had kept food on the table and allowed them to pay the rent.

At the end of my visit to my Greek grandmother, she gave me what she said was a wooden swan that my grandfather had been trying to repair at the end of his life. It was broken at the neck. He had glued the head back onto the body and then glued it into a wooden dowel so that he could–I suppose–manipulate it more easily and possibly place it in a lathe again. It was the most elaborate and artistic piece of wood carving I ever saw done by my grandfather.

The newspaper columnist James Brady, in his book The Scariest Place in The World: A Marine Returns to North Korea devotes a good part of a chapter to my father but the content is not what the title of his book might lead one to expect. The title of the chapter in which my father figures prominently reads, Marines At the “21” Club With French Movie Sex Bombs In Pursuit. It’s mainly about the role my father’s Manhattan apartment played in the good times Marines who were friends and acquaintances of my father enjoyed when they were away from the Korean Conflict. Near the start of the chapter Brady states that “Marines are snobs, if you haven’t fought, you don’t really belong.” It then introduces my father as someone who didn’t see combat because of no fault of his own but because he was in a plane accident the night before he was to be sent to Korea. My father’s wish to be one of Brady’s snobs never left him.

Brady writes of asking my father, more than forty years later, at lunch at the Yale Club, about the circumstances of the accident the night before he was to leave for the place that in the title Brady has described as “the scariest place in the world.” The circumstances of the plane crash are fairly accurately recounted by Brady, as far as I can tell, although he writes that my father described it to him as a one-time event, which differs from what my father told me. Brady writes that the Marines on board the plane, one with his new wife, had commandeered the plane with orders carrying forged signatures. Their goal was to go gambling with money they were able to draw before heading to Korea.  By taking an advance on their pay–which was generously calculated on the assumption they wouldn’t be very quickly killed–the Marines had all–in their colorful expression that Brady quotes—”taken down a dead horse.” This particular trip, on their way back, in the version of the story my father told me, he noticed the pilot was disoriented and changed seats so that he would be in the co-pilot seat. Over the radio they received instructions to turn a certain number of degrees but didn’t correctly hear the command. The next radio communication warned that they were headed for a mountain. The pilot turned sharply and their plane stalled. It crashed down the side of a mountain in Nevada and into the Truckee River.  Those who had survived found themselves swimming in the cold fast-moving water. My memory of my father recounting to me this story–when he was driving me home during a bad thunderstorm from the private boarding school I was attending–included the detail  that forging orders to obtain a plane was a stunt they had pulled multiple times before. 

I can understand Brady’s interest in this story but what really stands out for me in this chapter of Brady’s book, in which my father is the main protagonist and for which he is the only acknowledged source, are two details on the first page. The first of these, which I have already mentioned, is Brady’s declaration that Marines who had served in combat differentiated themselves from who who hadn't to such a degree that Brady could describe them as snobs.. The second is a major factual inaccuracy in Brady’s account regarding my father’s extended family.

When my father was buried, his funeral highlighted his military service. My father--at the very least--had often let pass the presumption that he had been in combat. I have been to the funerals of a number of people who happened to have been US combat veterans but none of their funerals have come anywhere close to my father’s in terms of underlining their connection to the military. Four marines as honor guards lifted his coffin onto a horse-drawn wooden carriage, behind which walked an Episcopalian minister holding in front of him an ornate cross, followed by the honor guard who in turn were followed by the mourners. This whole procession was preceded by a bagpipe player. At the site of the grave, next to my mother’s, the honor guard performed a 21 gun salute. 

Of the mourners following behind the wooden wagon. I was the first, filming the procession with my cellphone. That day to me my father’s whole life seemed to have been about either giving the impression he belonged to groups to which he didn’t belong or giving the impression he had an uncomplicated relation to groups to which his relation was very complicated. I find this underlined by the most glaring factual error in Brady’s description of my father. Brady writes, “Ledes himself was related to the Skouras family, wealthy Greeks who owned 20th Century Fox.” 

During those two days during which I visited with my grandmother and recorded her with my boombox, one of the topics we discussed was how my father had become a frequent guest in the home of George Skouras who had started and at that time was running United Artist Theaters. The brother of George Skouras was Spiros Skouras, who had founded and was then running 20th Century Fox . 

After Greece’s entry into WW2 was triggered by the invasion of its territory by Italy in 1940, the two Skouras brothers became prominent in fundraising in the U.S. on behalf of Greece, drawing on the star power of Hollywood to raise money. The US had not yet officially entered the war against fascism. 

One of the fund-raising events to help Greece at which George Skouras appeared in 1940 was at a play performed at a Greek Orthodox Church in the Bronx, Zoodohos Peghe. My father’s family were members of the church. My grandmother told me her husband had crafted most of the woodwork in the church and served as a deacon. At the church my father acted in the performance of the play that was attended by George Skouras.  I don’t know what the play was or what role he played, but, according to my grandmother,  afterwards my father was introduced by his father to George Skouras. My grandmother explained to me that George Skouras had two daughters and was happy to have my father as a young man around the house, as a kind of surrogate son. Did my father misrepresent himself to James Brady and others as being related to the wealthy Skouras family rather than to his own family?  I asked him this on numerous occasions near the end of his life and he always vehemently denied it.

Brady goes on to describe how during the Korean Conflict my father’s ground floor apartment on the Upper East Side was headquarters for wounded Marines looking for a good time in Manhattan. Brady writes, “...it was his bachelor apartment on the East End Avenue that we recall, with its cocktail parties, gorgeous young women, decorated Marine officers, and White Russian aristocrats.” A little later in the same paragraph Brady continues, “Wounded Marine officers from the untutored corners of rustic America, recently returned combat officers of no especial background, arrivistes like myself, there we were hanging with a Prince of all the Russias, cracking Easter Eggs and hurling champagne glasses into fireplaces.” I have no doubt that most of this is true. One of the Russian princes became by godfather and the chapter ends on a tragic note describing the slow but steady decline of one of their brothers-in-arms who struggled for years to write a screenplay about Ullyses S. Grant and who finally died from complications related to his alcoholism. I remember this friend of my father. During a period when I was working writing for my father’s trade magazine in cosmetics, his friend would clandestinely sleep on one of the fire escapes of the company offices. The only thing that obviously isn’t true about Brady’s account is the claim that my family is related to the Skouras family. 

After Pearl Harbor my father had transferred from Columbia University to Yale, which had an officers program. While George Skouras had daughters, his brother Spiros had two sons.  They were at Yale at the same time as my father. He told me they didn’t get along with him because other students assumed they were related. I wonder now if my father wasn’t responsible for creating this rumor. 

Just before mentioning that my father was related to the Skouras family, Brady describes him as “our one man Almanach de Gotha.” By this Brady means that my father could be counted on for his knowledge of the blood lines of European royalty that had immigrated to the United States and also for his knowledge of which American families were considered “the best” and who belonged to them. My mother’s family were, as I often heard it pointed out by him, “the Chapmans of Baltimore.” Their names were included in the Baltimore Social Register. After my parents’ marriage, my father’s name was added to the register and, starting with myself, the names of their children were added. At the time of my father’s death, the only books in a bookshelf beside where he would sit everyday was a complete set of the annual indexes of the Baltimore Social Register. 

My Greek grandmother never showed or expressed anything but love and admiration for her four sons. The only exception was the day I interviewed her.  She told me in a matter-of-fact tone of voice she wanted to be buried in the dress she had planned to wear for my parents’ wedding. The wedding had taken place in Baltimore. My mother's parents believed--as my maternal grandmother once told me with bitterness--people like my father should never have been allowed into the country. My father did not invite his parents to his wedding. 

While growing up, I remember being alone in my parents' bedroom, approaching their adjacent beds and examining closely and clandestinely the bayonet my father kept under his mattress. Had the scariest place in the world migrated from North Korea to here where my father slept?

When I first started making films with a Super 8 camera owned by the private school I was attending in my early teens I imagined telling people that I had been in direct contact with George Skouras, the founder of 20th Century Fox, and that he had given me a motion picture camera.