Nicholas Gage

Excerpts from an interview with award-winning investigative journalist and author Nicholas Gage, who spoke to Business File's Vanessa Alexakis in mid April.

Q. Before you became an author, you were an acclaimed investigative journalist. Can you tell us what inspired you to get into journalism?

A. It's an interesting story. I went to America not speaking a word of English. Three years later, I was in a class and I was being a little wise, and my junior high English teacher kept me after school. She said, "Why are you acting up?" and I started to talk and she said, "Wait a minute; you have an accent, where do you come from?" I went to tell her, and she said, "Don't tell me, write me something over the weekend of how you got here. Write me five pages." So, I went home and I wrote five pages, and she read it and was moved by it, submitted it to a state-wide essay contest, and it won a prize.

Q. How old were you?

A. I was thirteen years old. I had found a way to express myself, to express some of the pain and loss I was feeling after my mother was executed, and that's when I first made the decision that I would someday find out what happened to her, and write about it. So, I became an editor of the junior high school newspaper, then editor of the high school newspaper, then editor of the college newspaper at BU [Boston University]. That's where I won a prize from the Hearts Foundation for the best published writing from an undergraduate in the US, which was presented by President John F. Kennedy at the White House. Twelve years after leaving my village, where we had no electricity, no cars, I was at the White House, receiving an award from the US President. That's America.

Q. Only in America! I read your address to international graduates at Boston University (your alma mater and mine) in 2006 about how you went the extra mile as an undergraduate, and you urged the graduates to do the same. Can you tell us about your first journalistic scoop when you were still an undergraduate student?

A. I learned that the great American playwright Eugene O'Neill had died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston that had since become a Boston University dormitory - Shelton Hall. An important biography had come out about O'Neill, and I read it. The key scene in the biography was as O'Neill was dying, he asked his wife to tear his unfinished manuscripts - because he didn't want someone else working on them - and to burn them in the fireplace. She told the biographer, "It was like burning children." I decided to do a local story, and I went to the dormitory and went to the suite where O'Neill had died and I looked around. There was no fire place. I went to City Hall the next day and I checked all the plans on the building, and found that there had never been a fireplace in that suite. I wrote a story in the BU college paper, saying that the reported burning of O'Neill's unfinished plays couldn't have happened the way his widow described as there was no fireplace in his suite. The wire services then picked it up, and everyone thought that there might be O'Neill unfinished plays somewhere. He was the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize, so it became a big story.

The phone rang one day, and it was a fellow named Arthur Gelb and he said, "How can you say these things? My wife and I spent ten years working on this book [the biography]. I asked him, "Did you go to the hotel Mr. Gelb?" He said, "Of course, I've been a journalist for twenty nine years." I said "Did you go up to the room?" "Well, it was raining, and I had a train to catch," he said. I did more investigating and found the maid who had been working in the hotel, and she told me that Mr. O'Neill had asked her to come up and that together they took the torn manuscripts to the basement to burn them there. So I wrote a second story, and then Mr. Gelb revised his book. Six years later, when he became the metropolitan editor of the New York Times, one of the first reporters he hired was myself, because he remembered that I had an instinct to go beyond the usual and dig out a story.

Q. Was writing the book Eleni very cathartic and healing so to speak?

A. It was cathartic for the Greek nation, because from the end of the Civil War until 1974, you had the Right writing the modern history of Greece and telling it in a slanted way, and then once the Junta fell, then the Left started to control how the story was told, in their slanted way. What I did was to tell the story with facts and figures, name, dates and places, and to tell not the whole story of what happened to Greece, but my story about what happened in the Mourgana Mountains where my family lived. The book is now in 34 languages, and it has sold over 3.7 million copies, was made into a film, and is still in print in many languages. It's also now on Kindle. It is in every major library and university in the world, so the history of the Greek Civil War is going to be remembered from my book around the world.

Q. Charles Moskos, the academic, had said that Eleni made the Greek-American Community recognizable, put it on the map so to speak for Americans. Do you agree with that? Did the Greek-American community become more visible after that?

A. Yes, it broke the dyke. It was chosen as a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, which was a big deal in those days. Immediately, 300,000 people had a copy of this book. I asked the editor "Why did you choose this book?" He said "Why do you ask?" and I said the book is about a woman nobody has ever heard of, about a corner of the world no one has ever been to, about a war long forgotten. He said, "That's true, but emotions are the same everywhere. Fear and love, pain and loss are the same and you were able to capture those emotions with great power but no sentimentality." There have been thousands of books written in Greece about the Greek Civil War, but they're not written in a way that you can believe. They're slanted, exaggerated, or sentimental. "Eleni is one of the rare books in which the power of art recreates the full historical truth," The New York Review of Books wrote, and I think that explains the impact it has had.

Q. You then wrote about your experience as an immigrant growing up in the US, in the book A Place for Us. Do you find that through your art you reconcile your Greek and US sides, or are you already reconciled?

A. The wonderful thing about growing up in two cultures is that you can choose the best from both of them. That's what I hope I've done. People ask me if I'm Greek or an American. I say that in my heart I'm Greek but in my mind I'm American. I mean that I like close ties with family and friends, expression of emotions and joyous times, and am very Mediterranean in that way. But, the way I think, the way I evaluate, the way I rely on objective criteria, the way that once I commit to something I finish it…I'm very American. So I like coming to Greece, spending a lot of time in Greece with family and friends, but I like working in America.

Q. You've also imbued the writing bug in your children, Eleni and Christos, while your wife Joan is also a writer?

A. Yes, my son's a screenwriter. He writes screenplays, graphic novels, and comic books. He's a comic book guru. My daughter, Eleni is a novelist. She just finished her first novel, it's coming out next year. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University. She writes for all the top magazines. In fact, in the June issue of Travel & Leisure, she's written an article about Epirus, and every major magazine in America asks her to write about Greece. She's written for the New York Times, the Time group and many other top magazines. My wife Joan is also a writer who had a big article in the April issue of Vogue. We met at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. My other daughter Marina is an interior designer.

Q. Can you tell us about the Greek-American Diaspora community where you grew up in Massachusetts?

A. In America, the Greek Community is centered on the Church. There aren't many Greek schools, except some afternoon classes, nothing like the schools in Greek communities like Alexandria and Constantinople [as Istanbul was called at the time] or the type of Greek schools in European countries now, such as in Germany and Belgium. So, we've lost a lot of our young people.

Greek Americans have the highest level of education of any ethnic group in the United States, even higher than Jews. Greeks also have the second-highest per capita income in America. Greeks have really progressed tremendously, but we're losing our young people. They're not holding on to their Greek identity as we go into the second and third generations, largely because of our inadequate educational institutions. What I've always advocated is that there should have been a string of private Greek schools that are first rate, like the Anglican schools and the French lycees. There are only about a handful across the US, in major communities where Greeks are. There's one in Lowell, Mass, a couple in New York, and one in Chicago. There has been an attempt to create a university, Hellenic College, but it barely survives. You can't build an ocean unless you have rivers to feed it.

Greeks are very well liked in the US. My father told me that the big breakthrough came in 1940, when the Greeks stood up to the fascists in Epirus and stopped the Italian invasion. They're well liked in America, and are very influential. They're not as united, as Greeks are individualists, but they've done extremely well and they're very highly respected. Greeks are in medicine, in the arts, in journalism, in academia. They're also tremendously successful in business.

Q. Are you still involved in the Diaspora association World Council of Epirotes Abroad?

A. I'm very involved in Diaspora organizations, and I started the World Council of Epirotes Abroad. One of the problems with some of these groups is that the people who start them, stay there for thirty-forty years, and they atrophy. I've never done that. If I get involved in an organization, I stay for two to four years, and then I leave and bring in younger people. The last thing I did was to start the World Council of Epirotes Abroad. I stayed with it for four years, then I left, and brought in a very bright young man named Chris Dimou - a businessman in his thirties - who has brought in a new dynamism to the effort and it's worked very well.

Q. The BBC had a report that the Irish and the Greeks are planning a new exodus, and what a shame that in both Ireland and Greece where they were once proud that people were coming back and lessening the brain drain, now, a lot of people are leaving the country because of the crisis.

A. One of the best times for Greece in modern times was the eight years of old man Karamanlis, Constantine Karamanlis. Growth was 8 per cent a year. They were building hotels, setting up companies, and there was such fervor everywhere. There was such a feeling of a tremendous future heading this way. Then there was one upheaval after another, ideological conflicts, the Junta, irresponsible governments and we're at this point now where Greece is struggling to survive economically and is humiliated throughout the world.

Q. You've met and received an award from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. What was that like?

A. I am an archon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. My title is Didaskalos tou Genous. Patriarch Bartholomew is very impressive. He speaks a lot of languages and he's very well educated, very well read. I met him long before he became a Patriarch, when I went to Istanbul as a journalist, and later he came to the US and asked to see me after reading my book Eleni. I'm impressed by him; with his struggle against vicious persecution in Turkey. I've covered Turkey as a journalist and I know what he's had to go through. I'm impressed with his determination to keep the seat of the Ecumenical Orthodox Church in Istanbul.

Q. I've read that you attended Catholic mass at times growing up with your friends, aside from attending Orthodox Church sermons…

A.I went to a public school that was predominantly Jewish. At one time, for two to three years, I lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood and I would go to local church on Ash Wednesday, and I read a lot about all religions. I think there are many rivers to the sea. But, it's the same sea. We have one God. I don't know why we have so many religions.

Q. Tell us about your close ties with the Greek Church in the US…

A. Oh yeah. I'm a traditionalist. I go to church every Sunday, and my children went to Sunday school and participated in church organizations. And I believe the church played a great role in maintaining Hellenism during the Ottoman occupation and in the liberation of Greece. I believe that in the US, the Church is the center that holds Greeks together. People [of Greek decent] who are not connected to the Church rarely hold on to their Greek identity in America more than one or two generations. I've seen that happen. The Church has played an important role in maintaining the Greek identity of the immigrants that went to the US in the last century in droves. Between 1910 and 1925, there were 400,000 men from Greece that immigrated to the US. That's an amazing number of men. Then later, they went back and got married and brought their wives to the US. That's the basis of the Church. They built most of the churches themselves from their meager earnings. In the US, churches are self supporting and they're financed by their members, who keep and maintain them. Where I live, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Greek Church has 5,000 Greeks, but the church is bigger than most churches in Greece.

Q. Do you have any favorite writers from Greece or the Greek Diaspora?

A. My favorite Greek writer is Stratis Mirivilis, because he writes very well, and he writes about characters that seem real. Sometimes Nikos Kazantzakis' characters are bigger than life, and it's hard to accept that these people existed. Not all the time though. I'm more of a realistic writer and I identify more with Mirivilis. Of the modern writers, I like Sotiris Dimitriou.

I'll tell you something interesting. Last year I bought Mike Dukakis to Epirus. He's from a remote Epirot village very high in the mountains. From this little village came Dukakis' mom, - and her father (Mike Dukakis's grandfather) and John Cassavetes' grandfather were brothers. So, Mike Dukakis and John Cassavetes are second cousins, who trace their roots to a remote mountain village in Epirus. The only other place where I know that's happened is a small area in Wales that produced both Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins.

Q. Do you have any new projects in the works?

A. My last book Greek Fire about Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas is being made into a movie. The script is being written by Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for Gosford Park, and also wrote the script for Young Victoria, a movie out now. Eva Mendes is playing Maria Callas, the only one we know about as of now until the script comes in and there's a director.

I did an article about the capture of November 17 by this group of investigators led by Minister Michalis Chryssochoidis, for Vanity Fair in January 2007, called "Race against Terror," because they had to get the terrorists before the Olympic Games or who would've come to the Games if they hit even one venue? There's interest to turn that into a film, and I've been working on the script for that.

Additionally, I've done an outline for a possible book on my reporting days, another memoir, and there's interest in doing part of that as a film. That is the part of me investigating the Mafia in New York in the early 1970s.

Q. Can you tell us about the scholarship fund you've set up in your mother's name at Boston University?

A. It's called the Eleni Gatzoyiannis Scholarship Fund. It's for Boston University students of Greek birth or ancestry. Between what we've given away and the endowment for it, it has produced some $1,000,000 in funding. As many as 20 students a year receive scholarships, or as few as five depending on the income the fund yields each year.

To see more of the interview (including Mr. Gage's views on the Greek economy), please see the June issue of Business File Quarterly Review, #76, pp. 50-54