Though the critics belittled Broken Lives in vicious terms, it met with such enthusiasm among audiences in both Istanbul and the provinces that it was pronounced a box office hit. During the last scenes, when Papatya sings two bitter, anguished songs about her misfortune, it was women in the provinces who cried hardest, but people of all sorts, young and old, left the humid, airless cinemas with puffy eyes. In the penultimate scene, when Papatya kills the evil rich man who had tricked her, staining her honor when she was still a child, but who now stands before her, pleading for his life, there was universal exultation. This scene made such an impression, becoming so familiar that the actor playing the part of the evil rich man (Ekrem Bey, our friend from the Pelür, who typically played Byzantine priests and Armenian militants) stopped going out for a time, tired of being punched and spat upon in the streets. The film was also praised for bringing back the crowds that had stayed away from cinemas during the “terror years”-as people now alluded to the period preceding the military coup. And with the revival of the cinemas, the Pelür Bar had filled up again, too: Sensing the resuscitation of the film business, its former regulars were again coming every day to strike deals or just to be seen. On a windy, rainy night at the end of October, two hours before the curfew, when-at Feridun’s insistence-I dropped by the Pelür, I saw that my reputation there was much enhanced; to use the expression of the day, I was in my element. The commercial success of Broken Lives had transformed me into a prominent producer to whom many were also prepared to attribute a quick wit and slyness, and everyone from cameramen to famous actors sought to sit for a while at my table and befriend me.
By the end of that evening, though my head was swimming from the compliments, the attention, and the drink, I remember sitting down with Hayal Hayati, Feridun, Papatya, and Tahir Tan. Ekrem Bey, at least as drunk as I was, kept needling Papatya with mischievous jokes about the photographs of the rape scene that the papers had been reprinting incessantly; but Papatya responded with a good-natured smile, saying that she would never sleep with a penniless, decrepit rooster. At the next table was a dandified critic who had ridiculed her for appearing in such a “vulgar melodrama;” Papatya tried for a time to provoke Feridun into giving him a good thrashing, but the effort was fruitless.
After the film, Ekrem Bey received numerous invitations to appear in bank commercials, though he confessed that he could not understand why: Evil men weren’t supposed to be in demand for commercials. But in those days, with everyone talking about the bankers offering 200 percent interest, and these bankers fanning the flames with big advertisements in newspapers and on television using Yeşilçam’s most famous faces, the film community was well disposed toward them. Still, as I was in the drunken eyes of the Pelür’s clientele a modern businessman (by Hayal Hayati’s definition, “A businessman who loves culture is modern”), whenever such subjects came up there was a respectful silence, which, it was hoped, I would fill with my opinion. In the wake of the box office success, I had been credentialed a farsighted “ruthless capitalist;” and everyone forgot that I had first come to the Pelür years ago to make Füsun a star, just as they had forgotten Füsun herself. Just reflecting on how fast Füsun had been forgotten caused my love for her to flare up inside me, and I would want to see her at once, and then thinking about how she had been able to resist being drawn into this tawdry world to the point of staining her reputation, I loved her all the more-and once again I would congratulate myself on keeping her away from these malevolent people.
It was an aging unknown, a friend of Papatya’s mother’s, who had dubbed the songs for Papatya in the film. Now, thanks to the success of Broken Lives, Papatya was going to make a record in which she sang the songs herself. That October evening we agreed that Lemon Films should back this venture, too, and also get started on a sequel to Broken Lives. Actually, the decision to do the sequel was not ours; it was what the cinemas and distributors of Anatolia called for unanimously, and so insistently that any refusal by Feridun would have been seen as “spitting in the face of success,” to use another expression of the day. Whatever her intentions, by the end of the film Papatya’s character had, like all girls, good or evil, who had lost their virginity, died without realizing her dream of a happy family life. We decided that the best solution was to reveal that Papatya had not really died at all, that having been wounded, she had feigned her death to keep herself safe from other evil men. The sequel’s first scene would be in the hospital.
It was three days later that Milliyet ran an interview with Papatya in which she announced that shooting was soon to begin. By now there was an interview with her in the papers every day. When Broken Lives had first opened, the papers had dropped hints that Papatya and Tahir Tan were having a secret affair in reality, but the life had gone out of this rumor, and now Papatya was denying it. When we spoke on the phone at around this time, Feridun informed me that all the most famous actors now wanted to play opposite Papatya, and that, anyway, Tahir Tan wasn’t suited for the part. For in her latest interviews Papatya had begun revealing that, though she had kissed men, she’d of course never been truly intimate with one. Her fondest and truly most indelible memory remained her first kiss, this with her teenaged sweetheart on a summer’s day, in a vineyard buzzing with bees. Sadly, the youth had been martyred while fighting against the Greeks in Cyprus. And after that Papatya had considered intimacy with any man inconceivable, concluding that only another lieutenant might be able to mend her heart. Feridun allowed that he didn’t approve of such lies, but Papatya insisted that she’d only told them to help get the sequel past the censors. Feridun made little effort to conceal his relationship with Papatya from me; it was in keeping with his nature as one who picked no fights and had no quarrels, only carrying on, forever the naïf, never bitter or less than sincere-and for this I genuinely envied him.
“Broken Lives,” Papatya’s first single, came out the first week of January 1982, and though it was not as big a hit as the film, it was much beloved. Posters appeared on the city’s walls, so many of which had been whitewashed after the coup, and advertisements, however small, in the papers. But because the censorship board of Turkey ’s only television channel (actually, it had a more elegant name: the Inspectorate of Music) found the song lacking in moral fiber, Papatya’s voice was on neither television nor radio. The record, nevertheless, afforded her another round of interviews, and spurious stories about beatings and other controversies that she fabricated for these occasions made her more famous still. Papatya began to take part in cultural discussions along the lines of “Should a modern Turkish Kemalist girl think first about her job or her husband?;” posing in front of her bedroom mirror (having bought a traditionally Turkish furniture set, adorned with a few pop features), she would frolic with her teddy bear while musing on what a shame it was that she had yet to meet the man of her dreams; making spinach pastry with her mother in the kitchen, in which there was an enameled pot identical to one at Füsun’s, she played the honest housewife to prove that she was far more respectable than Lerzan, the angry, wounded heroine of Broken Lives. Her honor had not been stained, and she was perfectly happy, though, she allowed, “Certainly there is something of Lerzan in all of us,” hoping to have it both ways. Feridun expressed pride that Papatya was such a professional, never taking the interviews and articles about her to heart. So many of the harebrained stars and starlets at the Pelür had reacted amateurishly, worrying that the lies propagated about them might damage their public image, but Papatya took control of the matter, telling her own lies from the start.