In August, on the Gulf coast of Florida, the heat doesn't ease when the sun goes down. It becomes more punishing; there is no shade. People go to bed with their windows closed.
By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published September 30, 2003
[Times photo: Scott Keeler]
Elia Kazan, who died Sunday at age 94, wrote about the Greek sponge-diving community of Tarpon Springs in the novel Acts of Love.
- The opening paragraph of Elia Kazan's novel, Acts of Love.
TARPON SPRINGS - The late Oscar-winning film director Elia Kazan is usually remembered for two things: dazzling movies such as On the Waterfront and the accusing finger he pointed at former Communists in Hollywood.
What many people probably don't know is the Greek immigrant's love of Tarpon Springs.
Before his death Sunday at the age of 94, Kazan boasted an illustrious string of achievements. He won Oscars for Gentleman's Agreement and On the Waterfront. He staged five Pulitzer Prize-winning plays: The Skin of Our Teeth, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and J.B., for which Kazan won his first of three Tony Awards for directing.
But Acts of Love, Kazan's novel about a tough Greek Tarpon Springs sponge diver and his promiscuous new daughter-in-law, is probably not as widely known. Inspired in part by Kazan's longtime friendship with the late legendary Tarpon Springs sponge diver Johnny Gonatos, the novel paints a vividly accessible picture of the clash of old-world Greek traditions and a modern American setting.
Before he died in August 2000, Gonatos played bit parts in two Kazan films, A Streetcar Named Desire and Viva Zapata. The two became friends in 1947 during one of Kazan's frequent trips to Florida. For years afterward, Kazan often stayed at Gonatos' Tarpon Springs home when he visited Tampa Bay. In time, Gonatos provided the inspiration for Acts of Love's archetypical Greek patriarch, Costa Avaliotis, a former sponge diver who runs a bait shop in Tarpon Springs.
The Great American Novel it's not. But when it was published in 1978, Acts of Love joined a bookshelf full of Tarpon Springs literature. The city has inspired more than 25 books that touch on its fabled Greek sponge-diving industry.
For Kazan, the son of a Greek rug merchant who emigrated from what was then Constantinople, Turkey, in the early part of the 20th century, it was a perfect setting. The city provided an ideal backdrop for Kazan's late-in-life epiphanies about the role his Greek heritage played in his creative life.
"So many people found Tarpon Springs a fascinating place to write about fictionally," said Tarpon Springs cultural and civic services director Kathleen Monahan. "The whole notion of the sponge diver and sponge industry was very romantic because the diver was a hero."
Acts of Love was not the director's first novel. Kazan turned to writing in his 50s and produced six novels - including several bestsellers - and an autobiography. He made the first two novels, America, America and The Arrangement, into movies.
Kazan's novels were not as well received as his films.
Writing Monday in the English newspaper The Guardian, journalist David Thomson said that Kazan "began to write novels for the worst reason in the world - because he thought literature was more noble or worthy. He proved to be a page-turning hack in books like America, America (1962), The Arrangement (1967), The Assassins (1971), The Understudy (1974) and Acts of Love (1978). They are all readable, yet ordinary."
Ordinary, yes, but also romantic and deeply personal. Writing was almost therapeutic for Kazan, who struggled for years to reconcile his immigrant experience with his American success. The director described himself as the perennial outsider in his 1988 memoir.
He was shunned by Hollywood after implicating several friends as Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. He told the committee he had been a member of the Communist Party.
Estranged from a father who at first disapproved of his career choice, Kazan spent years in psychoanalysis tracing the roots of his discontents and triumphs back to his complex upbringing in a traditional Greek family. When he discovered Tarpon Springs, he found a home away from home and an ideal place to explore those issues.
Acts of Love turns the notion of alienation on its head. The novel profiles Ethel, an American woman and a permanent outsider to Tarpon Springs' rarefied Greek culture. Nonetheless, her marriage to a son of one the town's most respected sponge divers creates quite a buzz when her father-in-law takes her on a shopping trip. Kazan's warmth for Tarpon Springs is evident on almost every page.
Few will remember Kazan for his novels. But at least one Tarpon Springs old-timer remembers the director's notorious association with the Communist Party.
In the late 1940s, Nick L. Kavouklis ran a sponge boat and the Lazarus Coffee Shop on Athens Street and worked as a state road inspector. He was also active and well-connected in local political circles, having "played politics from the time I was a kid."
One evening in 1947 or 1948 - years after most people think Kazan left the Communist Party - Gonatos called and asked Kavouklis to meet him in a bar on Safford Avenue. There, Gonatos, who was trying to break into the movies, introduced Kavouklis to Kazan, and the two men went outside.
Kavouklis, now 84, says he would take a lie detector test about what happened next.
"He asked me to join the Communist party," Kavouklis said Monday. "This is the way he said it: he said, "One day this country is going to be a Communist country.' ... When he told me that, it was just like taking a knife and putting it in my back."
Kavouklis told him to go back in the bar: "Leave me alone. Go find some other people. Tell John I'll see him tomorrow."
He drove home.
"That was the first and the last time I ever talked to Elia Kazan," he said.
- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report. Times staff writer Richard Danielson and researchers Mary Mellstrom and Kitty Bennett contributed to this report. Candace Rondeaux can be reached at 727 771-4307 or rondeaux@sptimes.com
Elia Kazan, who died Sunday at age 94, wrote about the Greek sponge-diving community of Tarpon Springs in the novel Acts of Love.