Glykera Damonides
Glykera Damonides | |
|---|---|
 Glykera Damonides, photographed in 1960 | |
| Born | 23 February 1939 Ðajyr, Free Territories |
| Died | 5 December 2014 (aged 75) |
| Other names | Lykke |
| Occupation |
|
| Known for | Secretary and assistant to Chancellor Mette Elvensar |
Glykera Damonides (Hellene reformed: Γλυκέʀα Δάμοɴίδες; 23 March 1939 – 5 December 2014) was a Gylian–Delkoran model, showgirl, actress, writer, and political aide. She is best known for being Mette Elvensar's secretary and personal assistant during her tenure as Chancellor of Delkora.
Early life
She was born in Ðajyr on 23 March 1939. She came from a Hellene family with some Gylic descent. Her father died in the Liberation War, and she was raised mainly by her mother Helena.
The family moved repeatedly through the Free Territories in her childhood, and she was educated in volunteer classes. She found work as a photographic model aged 15, and later worked as a waitress in a restaurant.
She moved to Delkora in 1958, together with her boyfriend, an anarchist who joined the Labor Underground. The two lost contact soon after, and she was joined by her mother. She resumed her modeling work, and was discovered and hired as a topless showgirl in a Norenstal cabaret club. While working there, she befriended Marlene Dalgaard.
Career with Mette Elvensar
Damonides joined National Labor in 1959, and worked as a campaign volunteer during the 1959 federal election. She used several humorous campaign tactics that drew on her modeling experience, including posing as a living statue and encouraging people to vote by jokingly promising them auditions at her cabaret club.
During the campaign, she met Mette Elvensar as she campaigned in Norenstal. Elvensar remembered her among the party's volunteers, and they remained in contact by phone.
When National Labor won a single-party majority in the election, Elvensar hired Damonides as a secretary and personal assistant. Geirbjørn Feldengaard described it as "a very unusual appointment", given Damonides' youth and background. When invited to the Chancellery Building to be offered the job, Damonides replied, "I can still model in my free time, right?", causing those in the room to laugh.
As secretary, Damonides was mainly responsible for taking dictation from Elvensar and keeping her appraised of the news. She also had minor responsibilities related to filing documents and gathering information. Her working habits tended to be disorganised, but she gained a reputation for being eccentrically capable in her duties. She wrote down notes phonetically in Hellene, which Elvensar compared to a "cipher" only she could understand due to her use of eye dialect.
Elvensar and Damonides were close, and had a relationship more like a surrogate mother and daughter than employer and employee. Elvensar brought Damonides to cabinet meetings, where her presence served to improve the atmosphere and "restrain masculine posturing" from cabinet members. She was customarily seated next to the culture minister, or finance minister Harald Henriksen, which amused the cabinet due to the contrast between the tall Henriksen and the petite Damonides. Henriksen and Damonides became good friends, with Henriksen seeing himself as a kind of mentor.
Damonides also brought Nikoleta Kušić and Nike Koskina, acquaintances of hers from her modeling career, to Elvensar's attention while she was seeking replacements for Director-General of the Delkoran Broadcasting Service. Elvensar appointed them both to senior posts, and their tenure was marked by sweeping changes and modernisation, sometimes seen as DBS' "golden era".
While working as Elvensar's assistant, Damonides continued to model and perform as a showgirl. One of her famous portraits was taken in 1961, depicting her "technically nude" sitting astride an imitation Model 3107 chair. Her two careers, as well as her Gylian background, made her well-known. She was covered frequently in the Delkoran press, particularly tabloids, which alternately depicted her as a "clumsy oddball in the Chancellery Building" or "sex kitten".
She was amused by her fame, but avoided the appearance of impropriety, accepting modeling jobs only on the condition her job as the Chancellor's secretary would not be mentioned. Nonetheless, right-wing MPs sought to make a political issue out of Damonides' modeling career, suggesting that her nude portraits were symbolic of the government's "lack of morality." This strategy backfired however, as the public reacted negatively to what were seen as vicious and personal attacks on an innocent young woman.
Elvensar took notice of this and encouraged Damonides to take a more public role in advocating for the government's policies, giving her wide discretion in writing editorials and other commentary. In Elvensar's writings, she reflected that her intention was to provoke unmeasured responses from the opposition: "Whenever Lykke published an opinion piece promoting our program, we could count on the Conservatives to respond with the kind of patronizing, sexist indignation that made them look awful to the general public."
Damonides was known in the Chancellor's office for her heavily-accented Delkoran and propensity to speak mainly in Hellene. Her co-worker Maiken Fischer recalled, "She was well-liked by everyone, even those grumbling about her working habits. She was innocent and lovely and I think that tended to bring out people's parental sides around her." She was nicknamed "Lykke", and sometimes "limousine Lykke" for her habit of accepting lifts.
She was a frequent guest at Norenstal nightclubs and befriended several prominent figures of its artistic scene through her friendship with Marlene Dalgaard. Elvensar came to regard Damonides as a valuable connection to Delkora's bohemian and arts subcultures, using her to contact and consult with artists. Damonides' background and reputation gave her more credibility in meeting with countercultural figures that otherwise were wary of officially meeting with cabinet members. She had regular contacts with Kjeld Rasmussen, Astrid Borup, Karl Høj, and Natasja Troelsen.
Early in her tenure, Elvensar discovered that Damonides "simply could not keep a secret". While this caused some initial embarrassment due to news leaks, Damonides soon became important for the Chancellery to conduct trial balloons. Elvensar would have Damonides mention ideas or policy proposals either among her circle of friends or to journalists, so they could gauge reaction. If an idea went over poorly, Elvensar simply declared that Damonides was speaking in a personal capacity.
One well-known instance occured in 1961, when Elvensar's cabinet was privately debating the merits of drug liberalization. At Elvensar's prompting, Damonides made casual remarks to the press in support of the Law on Substance Controls of 1961 that had recently been passed in Gylias. After public backlash, Elvensar dropped plans for liberalization and denied her government was drafting similar legislation.
She participated in Elvensar's first official visit to Gylias after establishing formal relations, and recalled that she and Sofia Westergaard were among the most popular figures involved. During the visit, she was a contestant for one episode of What Do I Do?.
She was involved in a notable political incident in 1962. When the Conservative leader Archibald Bødker criticised Elvensar's employment of a "Gylian national" in the Federal Parliament and accused Damonides of dual loyalty, Damonides replied by pointing out she had been born in the Free Territories, making her technically stateless at birth, and that Gylias had only recently passed a citizenship law, thus she could not have held Gylian citizenship. The issue briefly caused the government embarrassment when the media discovered Damonides was still stateless, prompting an investigation and her hasty application for Delkoran citizenship.
Later life
Damonides remained at the Chancellery after Elvensar retired in 1967. The new Chancellor, Geirbjørn Feldengaard, gradually reduced Damonides' responsibilities in favour of the more conventional Maiken Fischer, who recalled, "Geirbjørn couldn't bring himself to do something as nasty as give Lykke the boot." For her part, Damonides understood Feldengaard's decision, joking, "I suppose not everyone wants a secretary who scrawls in ancient letters and then goes off to model clothes."
Elvensar remained in Feldengaard's cabinet as foreign minister, and thus Damonides continued to attend as Elvensar's aide rather than the Chancellor's secretary. She unofficially retired in 1975, when Elvensar was replaced as foreign minister by Osvald Bjerg.
Damonides was approached about running for Parliament by Harald Henriksen when he took over as leader of National Labor in 1983, but she declined the opportunity.
She published two accounts of her life: Working for the New Kingdom (1985), a book about the inner workings of the Elvensar and Feldengaard cabinets, and Dear Girl (1989), an autobiography named after the frequent term of endearment used by her co-workers and superiors. Both books were well-received critically and commercially; the former is considered one of the best "insider's memoir" about the National Labor government of 1959–1983.
Marlene Dalgaard quipped that in contrast to her "slow descent into respectability", Damonides' later life was a "slow descent into bohemianism". She remained involved with Norenstal's artistic scene, continued to work as a model and actress, and wrote columns for local newspapers. She accepted her reputation with good humour, and sat for new versions of her nude chair portrait in 1991 and 2001, as a rebuke to ageism in beauty standards.
She was briefly back in the headlines during the Geirbjørn Feldengaard kidnapping incident of 1989, when his kidnappers freed him by dropping him at night in front of the entrance to Damonides' apartment building. Both Damonides and investigators were unsure whether the kidnappers wanted to insult Feldengaard or mistook her address for Fischer's.
She was interviewed for the DBS documentary series A New Kingdom (1983), appeared as a guest on The Havomar Report, and made cameo appearances in several films, including Pirate Radio (1992) and Rhythm and Blue Lights (1993). The latter held personal significance for her, as she had been present at the scene of the Siege of Gothendral.
In 1996, Damonides was inducted into the Order of the Violet Lilac by Chancellor Emma Jørgensen for her artistic work.
During the 2001 referendum on the legalization of polyamorous marriage, she campaigned in favor of legalization.
Death
Damonides died on 5 December 2014 in Norenstal, having been ill with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for some months.