*
AFTER FIFTEEN MONTHS in Istanbul, I finally met Engin Cezzar on a raw winter’s day, when the clouds turned the Bosphorus a milky pewter and the air filled with the smell of burning coal. Around the same time a Polish scholar named Magdalena J. Zaborowska had released a book called James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, and an Istanbul bookstore had showcased a new collection of letters between Cezzar and Baldwin. The book’s Turkish publisher gave me Cezzar’s phone number. It turned out he lived near me, in a neighborhood called Gümü?suyu. The prospect of this New York–Istanbul connection was thrilling—and comforting. I showed up at Cezzar’s door expecting this Turkish theater actor to tell me the meaning of life, and dutifully carrying the newly published book of letters in my hand. When Cezzar opened the door, he looked at the book.
“Well, don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Welcome.”
Cezzar was about seventy-five, but spry and playful. A black-and-white photo of him I had found revealed a brooding dark face in which all its magnificent curves—his nostrils, his lips, his eyebrows, even the waves in his hair—seemed as if they had been composed in perfect union. Much of that unity had dissolved with age, but his voice, that piercingly clear stage voice, sounded like it hadn’t changed since his youth. He spoke in an old-school dramatic accent, as if prepared to launch into Shakespeare. Cezzar was a famous man, although I still didn’t understand enough about Turkey to know how “famous” a famous theater actor could possibly be in Turkey. His was also a mysterious generation—the Atatürk generation—born at the founding of the Republic but that experienced the intellectual freedom and social chaos of the 1960s. His huge windows looked out onto the Golden Horn, the mouth of the Bosphorus where it meets the Sea of Marmara; all these old Istanbullus, I thought, had procured the View long ago, apartments with windows as seemingly expansive as an aquarium. Gümü?suyu’s position on the hill was so steep it felt as if you could slide into the water. Close to us, enormous, voracious seagulls crashed and cawed around two mosque minarets, threatening with open beaks to break through Cezzar’s vulnerable window glass.
“The night before you called me I had a long, long dream and Jimmy was in the dream,” he said. “Jimmy was the lead! The place was huge and crowded, a big big big party. At least a thousand people, and I was there and I saw Jimmy, and Jimmy had a tray in his hands, like the ones the cigarette girls carry. I watched him for a little bit, and then he came near and then I showed myself. My God, what a meeting that was! Jimmy had risen from the dead. But he was in such good shape, so well dressed, so unbelievable, he was laughing—he laughed you know three mouthfuls when he laughed. So we had this beautiful reunion. And the next morning you called.”
He looked at me meaningfully for a long time.
“That’s really nice,” I said. I was nervous. “You met Baldwin first in New York, right? Not here.”
He began to tell the story of how he came to the fabled Actors Studio in New York in the 1950s, after a chance encounter with the Greek-Turkish-American director Elia Kazan, whose films included America America, based on Kazan’s own book about immigrating to New York. I felt plunged into a time when “America” meant something else entirely: an object of desperate yearning for Turkish actors and Greek directors, as if they, too, had merely been provincials from New Jersey who wanted to make it big in New York.
“I went to the Actors Studio. Kazan said, ‘You’re a long way from home.’ And I said, ‘You’re a long way from home, too, baby; much longer—you’re from Kayseri and I’m from Istanbul.’” He laughed and continued: “And by then Jimmy had become Kazan’s assistant. To learn about the theater.”
“Why do you think you and Baldwin hit it off?”
“Very simple,” he said. “To begin with we were both strangers. I was more of a stranger, but he was a ‘nigger,’ for crissakes. And it was not a very good time for ‘niggers.’ Actually the worst time, perhaps. There was no other black boy, and I was the only—what?—stranger. I mean, I don’t know if you can call Italians foreigners? You can call Marlon Polish, he was there. Eli Wallach, he’s Italian. And Fonda, she’s straight American. Anyway, so Jimmy and I held on to each other—a very strange unspoken sympathy.”
“And when did Baldwin come to Istanbul?”
“Baldwin arrived three years after he promised he was coming,” he said. “‘Baby, I’m broke, I’m sick, I need your help,’ he said. I’d become very famous—even in Shakespeare’s time no one actor played Hamlet that long, which was two hundred consecutive shows—and so I had money and a house and wanted him to come. He knew me, loved me, trusted me. Then he became accustomed to Istanbul. People loved him. I introduced him to the Robert College crowd”—the American school—“all the professors there who were very good and very gay. Robert College is famous for that. Very well-read, very intellectual. I took him to Taksim bars, Pera, Beyo?lu—several others, Asmal?mescit, taught him how to drink rak?. Then the shit hit the fan, Another Country came out and it was a big hit and everyone was after him. And he was being called back to New York to the marketplace. And he had to go.”
“Had he been one of the few black people around in Istanbul?” I asked. “I read that people didn’t refer to him as black, but as Arap.”
“No, not one of the only black people around,” Cezzar said. “Turkey’s very used to black people from the days of the empire, there were lots of black slaves brought into Turkey, they had become heads of the harem, the eunuchs, poor things. There are a lot of cotton pickers in the south of Turkey who came from Sudan. So people were used to it, it wasn’t a shock.”
“So he didn’t feel racism here?”
“Not at all.”
“Was it hard being gay?”
“Of course people knew he was gay,” he said. “He wasn’t hiding it. Jimmy never acted gay, but people came to know. He felt more comfortable as a gay man because men are affectionate here. Americans see it and say, ‘Look, it’s a Muslim country and they’re openly gay!’”