Mr. Savalas…May I call you Telly?...If you come over to our house we will have moussaka and my mother makes the best pastitsio…And you can stay the night if you want…I love the stories you tell and the way you tell them…We will have wine…We will have music…We will invite all our friends—all Greeks—and many other of Chicago’s cultural elites, if you like (I was proud of remembering and inserting the word elite, though I didn’t know who those “elites” might be and how you distinguished them and how I would ever get up the nerve to invite any of them, once I knew them, to our apartment, even for such a big star like Telly Savalas).
Mercifully, Telly Savalas never took me up on my offer, and my letter must have been one of the thousands he received every week, many from Greeks throughout the world who thought they knew him just as personally as I did back in my burb in Chicago. But I did make contact, in my mind, with one of my heroes.
Just as I made contact many years later after I put him on a pedestal with one of my literary idols, Harry Mark Petrakis. I first heard his booming, orotund voice forever declaiming Petrakis maxims when I did a telephone interview with him for the National Herald, and later got to know him for the fiercely-proud and committed artist he is when I staged a play I wrote called The Petrakis Universe based on his life and work. He didn’t like it much (he liked his stories uncut), but he loyally attended our reading in New York with his wife Diana, though he didn’t feel well, and he still allows me a place as an acolyte while I still consider him a literary mentor.
It’s heartening to hear that Ariana Savalas is very much her father’s daughter (in acting and music and love of life) and that she’s an incurable romantic whose protean talent spills over into many styles and media. Her father inspired many of us, and perhaps she will be an inspiration, as well, to some Greek kid in Chicago, or elsewhere in this wired world, who might send her an e-mail, or tweet, or “friend” her on Facebook, and might even get the thrill of a response.
Hronia Polla from all of us at NEO!
Dimitri C. Michalakis
I told Ariana Savalas, our cover profile this month, that when I was a teenager living in Chicago and her father’s television show, Kojak, was then one of the biggest hits on television and Greeks were swellingly-proud of having a star like Telly Savalas as their own, I heard that he planned to visit Chicago one of these days and I decided to pre-empt every other Greek in Chicago who would offer him their hospitality by inviting him to our house first, and I sat down and wrote him a very long and fulsome letter, with sentiments that I thought, in my callow teenage sensibility, would be calculated to sway him.
