by Tim Moore
I’d wanted to walk to our meeting at Ortaköy (‘means Widow Village’, said a huskily tickled Seyyal), but unwilling to risk having a sack pulled over my velvet shoulders every time I stopped to look at the map I instead scrambled into a taxi. I was soon very glad I had. We bumped and hurtled up and down alleys, hit the road that ran along the Bosporus, and drove and drove and drove. Istanbul is vast, but because it’s in Turkey no one is quite sure how vast: estimates of its population range from eight million to over fourteen.
As the old riverside palaces slid by, shielding the great waterway from view, I leant my head against the juddering window and wondered what my female nul-point debut would bring. It had been gradually suggesting itself since arrival that assumptions of her enduring fame were no more than conjecture, a rather silly extrapolation on my part from her all-star phone manner. Perhaps this taxi driver would be more help than my first – he’d already demonstrated a handy grasp of English during our football-heavy introductions.
‘Do you know Seyyal Taner?’ I asked, leaning forward to give my raised voice a chance against his ancient Fiat’s orchestra of neglect and decay.
‘Sure, I know.’ That was something.
‘Is she … you know, any good?’
His stripy, poly-cotton shoulders rose and fell. ‘Maybe she … was.’
I shuffled through the cobbled streets of Ortaköy, a reassuringly twee realm of ethnic trinket marts and moderately bohemian tourist eateries, in the state of pensive trepidation that now coloured my pre-nul-points moments. If Seyyal’s husky-voiced celebrity mannerisms were a sad façade, perhaps her deluded bluster concealed the tragic, forgotten life she now led. The online Eurovision community was always keen to protect its idols: maybe the soap-opera role they’d trumpeted was a walk-on cameo. It probably wasn’t even a soap opera. Istanbul is my Witness sounded more like some kind of Crimewatch; maybe she’d played a corpse in a reconstruction. That glitzy seafront residence in Bodrum I’d pictured was a roach-scuttled flat above a kebab shop; her pampered existence there in fact a series of sparsely attended vocal engagements in its tawdrier bars. With my musical faculties abused and defaced by over-exposure to kitsch tat, it was far less surprising than it might have been a year before to find myself lost in the final verses of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. Now it’s a disco, but not for Lola. Still in the dress she used to wear, faded feathers in her hair.
I was early, and for twenty minutes wandered amongst the convivial early-evening loiterers outside our appointed riverfront restaurant. As the seventeen-mile link between the Black Sea and the Med-connected Marmara, the Bosporus isn’t really a river at all; but being almost a mile wide where I stood, it seemed a magnificent, muscular waterway. If the two seas it connects are the halves of an hourglass, the Bosporus is the stem between, subject to terrific currents that make for a stiff navigational challenge.
Neatly groomed young couples gazing at each other in moony silence, a benchful of chuckling, hunched old men, a scolding mother snatching her son’s laser pointer. Svelte tabbies braided themselves between my velvet legs; high above, banking and swooping swallows celebrated twilight. It wasn’t difficult to see what brought everyone here.
The grandly compelling prospect was dominated in the left-hand foreground by a marble mosque conceived on the scale of an opera house; this in turn was dwarfed by a suspension bridge that vaulted impressively across the darkening waters. In the gathering night and the challengingly nippy early spring breeze that accompanied it, a maritime procession struggled against or surfed atop the surface-billowing currents: shadowy bulk carriers, invitingly fairy-lit gin palaces. At the bridge’s distant, tapering conclusion, the lights of Istanbul’s other half dotted hillsides and clustered in beckoning profusion along the Bosporus. This, I grasped portentously, was Europe’s final frontier. Cross the bridge and I’d be in Asia. In Kalvik country.
‘Teeum?’
I look round, to be met with a happy-eyed woman in a black leather baker-boy hat, her olive face lightly freckled. She’s much younger than I’d imagined, and significantly less regal. These disparities are explained when a companion – half a head smaller, discreetly voluptuous and wrapped from neck to ankles in a complicated swathe of red and purple silks – steps serenely from behind her and breathes, ‘Seyyal Taner. Welcome to Istanbul.’
In fact there are three of them. The baker-boy hat sits atop Melis Sokman, who had sung at Eurovision alongside Seyyal, or more accurately slightly behind her. Her presence at least is consistent with the deflective tactical approach initiated by Seyyal when she tried to palm me off on the song’s composer. A cock-up shared is a cock-up halved. More mysterious is the fourth member of our dining party, a rather younger woman who later dictates her name to me. Owing to the idiotic volume of spirits that our party had by then ingested, the best I can do now, looking at the relevant biro-smeared napkin, is N. Dogroll. By the same token, I can no longer be sure what Ms Dogroll was doing there, or indeed what she did elsewhere. At some point someone said something about selling clothes to gay club owners.
We cross the cobbles to the restaurant’s well-attended outside dining area, and are with deference ushered to a prime river-view table. Calm, self-confident and almost carelessly glamorous, Seyyal has already suggested through her own actions that here is no soiled and lonely Lola, and now the actions of others prove as much. Three or four heads turn as we take our seats, snapping back to share their find with table-mates who in turn crane around for confirmation. When a waiter brings our menus, he is accompanied by a three-man welcoming delegation from the restaurant’s management. Whatever the taxi driver had said, Seyyal Taner is not a was.
I sit next to her, and sneak an appraising glance as Melis and N. Dogroll inaugurate the nicotine festival that will be enthusiastically celebrated on their side of the table throughout our lengthy tenure (‘I quit last year,’ said Seyyal later – it was certainly no challenge to picture those thick red lips hosting a Marlboro). Slightly fuller of face than she had been in ‘87, on the wrong side of fifty she nonetheless still had it. There was the suggestion of a little ‘work’ around those round, brown eyes, which seemed slightly more startled than they had in Brussels eighteen years before, but the splendid mane of dark hair and boldly applied lipstick imparted the general impression of a sixties siren who had successfully spun out her prime.
A waiter arrives with a half-litre bottle of raki, the aniseed-derived native firewater. As yet unaware that the devil’s own licorice is not here as an aperitif, but will be liberally served throughout the meal, I down a good throatful. One small choking fit later, I extract my (new) voice recorder and place it between me and the best bad girl of her day. ‘So,’ I gasp, my raki-ravaged voice already muffled by Melis and N. Dogroll’s puffs and cackles and the dish-clinking arrival of the first wave of food, ‘where and when were you born?’
‘Is there anybody who does not know?’ is the retort I’m hoping to coax out, but as the query hangs in the cooling night air, I’m left to contemplate its ghastly crassness. A woman of her age (and of course I already know her age), and of her era, would rather be asked where and when she would die. Short of a profound and echoing belch, it’s difficult to imagine a more offensive introductory gambit.
My violent inward cringe necessitates a steadying draught of raki; the sudden awareness that almost all of the food before me contains aubergine in its horridest, soggiest forms means this and subsequent gulps of neat spirit shall slosh about my innards barely diluted.
Seyyal deals with my clumsy question by completely ignoring it. If she’s affecting a front of blasé celebrity, she’s doing a very good job: her demeanour throughout suggests that being interviewed by foreigners is a regularly enjoyed (and occasionally endured) professional obligation.
‘So I’m a teenage girl in Istanbul, and I’m interested in acting, I had a talent and I knew I had a talent, nyeh?’ This is the first outing for a favoured verbal tic, a ‘no’ that disconcertingly evolves in
to a ‘yes’, and can denote either. In this instance, however, it seems to mean: I’m in charge of this conversation, OK? It’s left to my subsequent research, aided by several Turkish Eurovision fanatics and in particular a middle-aged structural engineer from Ankara who translated a great many profiles of and interviews with Seyyal for 2.5 cents a word, to fill in the hefty preceding gap.
So: Seyyal Taner was born in Sanliurfa, near the Syrian border and far closer to Baghdad than Istanbul, on 28 September 1952. Her family travelled to Istanbul – to Europe – ‘during one harvest time’, and never returned; clearly more prosperous than most, they enrolled their daughter at the city’s American Girls’ College. While there she did a little ballet, a little singing, and developed what was at the time an unusual fondness for Western rock and pop (Melis tells me how as late as the mid eighties, sourcing even mainstream Euro chart hits in Turkey meant a visit to a knock-three-times backstreet cassette pirate). Few of the big sixties groups, in consequence, troubled themselves with Turkey, but some time in 1967 Spanish-German beat stars Los Bravos, who the previous summer had gone top five on both sides of the Atlantic with the rather splendid Black is Black, came to play Istanbul. (Following consultation with my wife, it has become depressingly apparent that many people will be more familiar with this song in the Euro-disco incarnation released by La Belle Epoque in 1977.)
Seyyal has described herself at the time she attended this gig as ‘wild, untidy and absolutely hyperactive’. What she doesn’t say is that she was fifteen – in fact, by mathematical probability fourteen – when the Los Bravos bassist, driving out Black is Black’s epic riff, swapped winks with her. In the chortlesome words of one profile, ‘The group realised Seyyal’s interest and curiosity in music, and invited her back to Spain.’ Within months she was shacked up in Madrid with German Harald. ‘I met these big, worldwide musicians,’ she tells me, ‘Los Bravos, very famous. I met them here when I was a student [cough], and finished with my school [cough], and went with them to Spain when I was seventeen [sorry – I think I need a glass of water].’
How on earth can her family have reacted? Even today Turkish women are expected to be seen and not heard, and in fact ideally not to be seen that much either, and if possible kept away from books. It’s difficult to imagine any girl of that age, then or now, being encouraged to accept such an invitation – particularly to Spain, where the age of consent was then twelve (responding to international outrage, the government recently raised it. To thirteen). And a girl from Turkey … ‘I got in trouble with my family, nyeh, of course,’ says Seyyal lightly, and for a moment I try to imagine the vortex of table-bashing, larynx-shredding, Harald-castrating rage unleashed by her actions. ‘I say I would go for three months but I don’t go home, and I don’t contact home, I was scared, and my mother has to try with the consul to look for me. After one year she found me.’
By then, displaying a determination that matched her almost petrifying sense of adventure, she had made herself a star. When that summer Los Bravos began filming Los Chicos Con Las Chicas, a Beatlemania-inspired comedy musical, she inveigled herself into the cast (not a challenge given its plot, summated thus by an online Iberian enthusiast: ‘In this film, the vacations of Los Bravos are in danger by the proximity of a feminine school.’). Though you’d be hard pressed to find a copy now, Los Chicos was a major hit in Spain when rushed out for release in early 1968. Amongst the 2.5 million who saw it were a group of Paramount executives, in the country to oversee filming of Villa Rides, a Sam Peckinpah-scripted bio-pic of Mexican rebel general Pancho Villa, who in 1916 staged what remains the most recent armed invasion of the continental United States.
‘I was a young girl,’ Seyyal tells me, for now but not for long excising adjectives relevant to her physical appeal, ‘and the producers saw me, and they say my God, you must be in our film! And so I start to make movies with the worldwide stars.’ A small, nonchalant smile. Yul Brynner (in a wig) was Pancho Villa, Charles Bronson his sadistic sidekick, Robert Mitchum an American pilot. At fifteen, Seyyal was already dining at celebrity’s top table.
‘A girl like me, that age, full energy, full dynamite, I couldn’t stay quiet or still for one minute. I was a Mexican guerrilla girl in the film. A beautiful experience for me, to make this film in Spain with these world-stars … nyeh, it was big luck.’ A waiter arrives: I hope he’s going to lay some un-aubergined foods on our table, but instead – eeeek! – it’s two bottles of red wine. Seyyal graciously nods for a glass, takes a sip, and after a slight grimace drops in a couple of cubes from our ice bucket. ‘You know Yul Bri-ner? He give me my birthday cake on the set. He came, he kissed me, he said you are eighteen today, congratulations.’ I ask whether he looked better with the wig. ‘I think without.’ I don’t ask why she said she was eighteen, when in fact she turned sixteen during the Pancho Villa shoot. Seyyal Taner is one of the few showbiz performers who’s been in the game long enough to have lied about her age in both directions.
Playing back this part of our conversation at home, I grasp the pertinence of a compelling phrase my structural engineer translator had supplied as the heading to one of the Turkish newspaper interviews with Seyyal: ‘this woman makes rap while talking’. Her relish for these enthralling years is infectious, and her account of them relentless.
‘At the same time, the owner of Paramount Pictures, he was, uh, fall in love with me.’ The laugh she barks out here silences many tables; I can only assume Seyyal enjoys being encircled by eavesdroppers. ‘He gave me a lot of opportunities to go to Hollywood, to be rich, to be famous, to be a world-star! Because, you know, I had a beautiful figure, nyeh. I was a girl who Hollywood really wanted, but I was too much for that man. Too much!’ A marriage proposal was tearfully issued, and harshly rebuffed. ‘I was in love with Harald, I was about to marry him. I said come on, you’re my grandpa! So I fucked up with Paramount Pictures man. He was so sad. But he was more than fifty and I was eighteen [um … sixteen], it was just unbelievable.’
Very nearly. I really don’t want to doubt any part of Seyyal’s splendid saga, but trying to fill in the blanks later I find myself untangling a fist-sized granny knot of inconsistency. In 1967 Paramount was owned by an eccentric Austrian-born industrialist, Charles Bluhdorn, who had just turned forty, and was married (although one movie insider added a little grist to the Taner mill by claiming that ‘Wall Street’s mad Austrian’ – who greeted difficult actors with the word ‘fucking’ inserted between fore and surname – ‘bought Paramount as he figured it was an easy way to get laid’). I also find it impossible, after much detective work, to verify the details of her marriage to Harald, or its duration, or indeed Harald’s very existence. All the Los Bravos line-ups in their swinging heyday feature Basque-born Miguel Vicents on bass, and while the band wouldn’t have been the first to deceive their audience with a pretty-boy stand-in, it’s odd that even the Los Bravos fan club is unable to confirm that any Germans other than lead singer Mike Kogel ever took to the stage in their name. ‘You know, the only Spanish guy in the band was the piano guy, Hermanio,’ Seyyal says at one point. Everywhere I look, the keyboardist is down as Manolo Fernandez (whose suicide in 1968, coupled with a barren chart run and Mike Kogel’s departure, heralded the band’s effective demise).
Well, so what? It was a confusing time for everyone, and for Seyyal in particular a time of dizzying upheaval. Furthermore, as she now announces in an airy drawl, ‘You know, I always move with my feelings, I never like rules. I’m a … boheme. I do it all my own way.’
For the next five years she certainly did. Now married to Harald, or possibly not yet, or perhaps already divorced, in the late sixties and early seventies Seyyal travelled the world in textbook period fashion. ‘I was sometimes in Africa, sometimes in India … I was interested in Buddismus, I went to Tibet at that time, I live there for three or four months.’ Again I can’t help asking how her family felt about their teenage daughter’s eye-catching lifestyle. ‘At first they was really angry with
me, but after a year they understand that I am a girl who lives for art.’ Melis overhears this, and I see a smirk spread across her freckled face. ‘Flowers, films, mountains,’ continues Seyyal, casting a careless arm aloft. ‘Things catch me, I go for them.’ She suddenly fixes her big eyes on me. ‘Nyeh, I’m a real different person for Turkey for that time … I was anarchiste, a protestor girl in every way, always different, always against.’ A single, significant nod. ‘My mother understood it.’
At some point in this period she bore Harald a daughter, Melanie, leaving the child in Germany to live with her father. (‘She studies computers in Hamburg, a very beautiful girl, plays nice piano,’ says Seyyal later. ‘But her voice … nyeh, not so good.’) And throughout the early seventies she periodically returned to Turkey to make movies, playing the vamp in eight further films of gradually diminishing commercial import. Typical of her earlier output was 1972’s Vur, described by an online fan as ‘a cool violent western from Turkey, about two bounty hunters hired to clean up a gang of bandidos. One of them kills the boss, while the other one gets cozy with a sexy female gunslinger played by Seyyal Taner.’ Those that followed earnt her an appearance on the cover of a recently published retrospective entitled Turkish Erotic Movies.
The films dried up, and by 1974 she was earning her crust from photo-love stories. Not the humiliation it might have been in other countries: these ‘fotoromanlarda’ were big business in Turkey’s lingering pre-television age. Demis Roussos appeared in one as her love interest – insert wide-angle lens joke here – and Seyyal enterprisingly engineered an all-star cast for another by having herself photographed in poses of rapture or jealous fury alongside unwitting celebrities at the Cannes film festival.