The other day, going through some files in my husband’s
office, I came across these three photos that were taken by a People Magazine photographer early in
1983. My first thought was “Were we ever
that young?” The second: “Was my hair
ever that curly?” (Clearly that was a perm!)
The photos were taken shortly after Nick’s book Eleni --about his mother’s life and
death in 1948 during the Greek civil war-- was published and then sold to
become a movie. The film Eleni was released in 1985, starring
Kate Nelligan as Eleni and John Malkovich as the adult Nick. (Secret: you can watch it on Youtube for
free.)
People published a
six-page article about the book and Nick’s attempts to find his mother’s
killer. These three photos were never used in the magazine, which is probably
why we have them. They were taken right
here in our house in Grafton, MA, which still looks much the same 34 years
later, but we sure don’t. In the photos
son Christos is 11, and daughters Eleni and Marina are 8 and 5. Nick is 43 and Joan is 42.
It was poignant but also exciting to rediscover those photos
from so long ago, when the children were still small. We had been living in a suburb of Athens,
Greece from September of 1977, when Marina was only a few months old, because
Nick was sent there by The New York Times to be a foreign correspondent. We returned to the U.S. and our house in
Grafton in 1982, a year before the book
Eleni was published.
After I discovered the photos, I dug out of the
files the People magazine with the
article. The opening spread is above. You can read the whole article on
line here: http://people.com/archive/a-sons-quest-for-revenge-vol-19-no-21/
but it doesn’t include any pictures.
At the same time I discovered the People photos, I came across two amazing shots of Nick on the job
in Iran in 1977 when he was covering the Iranian revolution and almost became a
hostage in the American embassy in Tehran.
But I’m saving those for a future post.
