“One thing I know—
I know nothing…”
—Socrates, 399 B.C.
—Irene Papas, 1967 A.D.
The soil of Greece is in her eyes. Smoldering with fire and ice, like coals from an ancient volcano, on a tiny Greenwich Village stage no bigger than a discotheque dance floor, they are the eyes of Queen Clytemnestra—tortured and pained with the Greek furies swirling around them in a wind of black crepe—in Euripides’ Iphegenia in Aulis. But backstage, hiding from the applause of an audience in tears, they are the eyes of a lithe, compact, intense and restless lady named Irene Papas. And here the fire and ice turns to melted snow.
They’re trying to get at her, that audience. Sidney Lumet and Peter Shaffer and 20 girls from a Catholic convent are pouring backstage with hands to shake. But the face hides behind a black curtain, the charcoal embers in her eyes turning to frightened ashes. “I didn’t know they were coming. Nobody told me. I don’t know what to say.” Then she grabs a reassuring arm and darts into a taxi for some late supper, seeking answers: “I wasn’t very good, was I? Tell me the truth, I can take it.”
At Sardi’s, the eyes are not appreciated. Lost in the blurry browns and blacks of furs and raincoats, she stands timidly in a corner, thrilled to be in the same room where everybody else is too busy making a fuss over Pearl Bailey to notice a simple Greek lady in a simple black coat. “Did you see Pearl Bailey?” she asks, blushing. “She is very exciting, isn’t she?” Pearl Bailey is led to a center table. Miss Papas is hustled upstairs, where nobody recognizes her except two Greek waiters who treat her as though she were Constantine himself. They bow deeply and bring her a vermouth cassis. Here, in a quiet corner away from the glamour and noise, talking to other Greeks, she is at home. “When I came here last year to do That Summer—That Fall on Broadway, there were not so many Greeks here yet. Now they are everywhere—Paris, London, Rome. Like children without a country. And we all stick together. We have to. All we’ve got is each other. Melina Mercouri . . . Michael Cacoyannis, my director . . . we all know each other. I once played Melina’s sister onstage and when I made my first film she gave me a black dressing gown with ostrich feathers. Now we are all in the same tragic boat. I will never go back to Greece as long as the Fascists are in power. They didn’t export me—I exported myself! I was supposed to play Jocasta in a film of Oedipus Rex in Athens, but I knew if I went something would happen. I knew there would be no elections. I felt it all before it happened. I was in London the day the junta took over. I had gone there to see the producer, to tell him to get me out of this thing. He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ and what happened? He’s the one who ended up locked in the Athens Hilton. Then my film, For Each His Own, about the Mafia, was in Cannes, so I went there and spoke. Melina had already spoken out in New York, so I spoke against the junta, too. But I don’t know why they have not threatened my life as they have hers. I still have my citizenship and my property. Maybe they will kill me on the streets. Maybe they’re saving something really big for me.”
She laughs, but there’s no laughter in the sound. “My family still lives there, but I’m over 21, I have to be responsible for myself. I believe in democracy. So I came here. In America, you can be anything, you can even be a Fascist if you like. This seems to be the only free country left. If America goes, there’s nothing. In Greece you can no longer play the Greek tragedies. We couldn’t do this play there now. In it, we say, ‘We are Greeks, we are free!’ and the house comes down. But in Greece today the junta doesn’t want to hear anything against tyranny or dictatorship, so the great plays like Antigone are banned. It will be up to the people now to have a civil war, but they are not rich or self-sufficient. They need the aid of America. If Johnson had stepped in at the beginning, the Greeks would be free today. But today the world obeys and says nothing. That’s why I’m in trouble with my life as well as my acting. I don’t want to sit quietly by and obey.
“My problem is I’m too obedient. I try to serve the director, make him the hero. That’s why I may leave acting. I’m thinking about it. Because I can’t stand this dictatorship over me. I think I am too intelligent to be an actress. It’s very hard for an intelligent person to act, because you have to be selfish to stand up for what you believe and I’m not selfish. If I had been more selfish in That Summer—That Fall perhaps it would have been a different play, but I tried to obey the director when I disagreed with him. I wanted to burst out, to spew out all the tragedy that woman was feeling inside, and go AAAHGGHH!!” She hits the wall with her fist and nearly knocks over a caricature of Noel Coward. “Uta Hagen was like something I never saw in my life in Virginia Woolf because she refused to let anyone keep her down. With Cacoyannis I work well—he knows what I have to unleash and he lets me flourish—but not so well with other directors. I think, alas, the only director I will ever accept is me.”
As long as she talks about Greece, the eyes glow with some of the grandeur of Clytemnestra. But when the topic turns to Irene Papas, she winces and the eyes become sad, misshapen bullets, avoiding the issue. “Oh, how I hate to be charming for interviews. I never believed publicity had anything to do with acting. I don’t believe people want to really know about me. Maybe if I liked myself more as a person, I would not mind talking about myself. But I am very vulnerable and open and it’s up to you what you do with me. You can hang me in the paper if you want, but I will try to be a good interview for you and tell you what you ask.” She stabs a pork chop with a sullen fork and takes a deep breath. “My childhood?” A smile, and the corners of her dark mouth turn into a cave of secrets. “That was a happy time in Greece. I come from a village 100 kilometers from Athens called Chiliomodion.” She writes it on the tablecloth in Greek letters for me. “A tiny village, very ugly, but we have a telephone in our house and electricity. My family were teachers. My father is 96 now, on the pension. My mother, who is 66, lives in New York with me. I don’t want her to go back now while the junta is there.
“As a child, I was always acting. I made dolls out of sticks and rugs”—she makes a doll out of her knife and fork to show me—“and once a tour came to the village and set up a tent and I saw women tearing their hair in the Greek tragedies and I liked that. After that I would tie black kerchiefs around my head and charge the other children to watch me. When I was 7, we moved to Athens and lived in a marvelous house with a palm tree in the garden. At 12, I went to the drama school and they kicked me out, and said go home and get old and come back. I went back at 15, going to high school in the morning and drama school in the afternoon. In Greece actors are respected, because they have the most education. You can’t be a dumb actor there. Then you must get a license or you can’t work. It’s like becoming a doctor in America. Without a license, the police arrest you. I played Elektra, Mrs. Alving in Ghosts and Lady Macbeth, all at the age of 18 and got my license.”
She made her stage debut in 1948 in a musical. A musical? “Oh yes. I was very funny. I played a high society girl who goes from one cocktail party to the next refusing to speak Greek. Everyone thinks of Melina as a musical and comedy star and of me as a tragic actress, but I’m very good at comedy, and Melina is the best tragic actress Greece has produced. You know what I would like to propose? That we switch roles. Melina playing Clytemnestra and me playing in Illya Darling. She would be better than I am and I would be the best Illya you ever saw.”
Spyros Skouras brought her to America for the first time in 1954. She did a scene from The Country Girl for Elia Kazan, but nobody hired her. In 1955 she came back with a seven-year contract at MGM, where she made only one film, Tribute to a Bad Man, which was originally to star Spencer Tracy and the young actor Bob Francis. “We went to Colorado and waited for one month while Mr. Tracy fought with the director. Then he walked out, we went back to Hollywood, and Bob Francis was killed in an airplane crash. Then they had to get a new old man and a new young man. They got James Cagney and a young actor named Don Dubbins. What ever happened to him? I guess he vanished. It’s easy to vanish in America. I vanished too.”
She came to New York where she was interviewed by Eva Marie Saint’s husband for another film, but “he didn’t like me either, so I spent the winter going to the Actors Studio. I had some money saved from Greece, but I didn’t need much. I don’t spend a lot. If I have one pair of shoes, it’s enough. I had only one dress when I came here, but I just washed it and put it on again. Who needs a second dress?”
Finally she went back to Greece in despair and toured with the National Popular Theatre for two years in plays like Inherit the Wind and Merchant of Venice and starred in films like Zorba the Greek and Elektra, gradually building her protean talents into an international reputation which now requires her to give as much of herself as a 24-hour day will allow. She has no children, although she has been married (“one and a half times,” she tosses off, without explaining). Currently she has two unreleased films (“One is a comedy—I don’t think they can sell it”) and she’s making a third during the day in New York. “It’s called The Brotherhood and it’s about the Mafia. I play Kirk Douglas’ wife. It’s not such a great part, but I need the money. Like most Greeks, I am supporting several people back home.”
Has her best work been in movies or onstage? “I haven’t done my best work yet” is the simple, direct answer. Then the big black eyes turn moist and she seems on the verge of tears. “Many things I do just for money because I don’t know how to make a living any other way. I miss that, not having done something more important with my life. I’m very sad that I may have to spend the rest of my life as an actress. Acting depends on love, and I never know—I’m never certain—if people love me. My sister Elektra is an archaeologist. My other sister, Leda, is a radiotherapist in Athens working on a cure for cancer. Those are wonderful, important jobs. They have done so much more with their lives than I have with mine. If I was in science, making a rocket fly, then nobody could say I didn’t do that. But with acting, people are never sure. I feel I am not good enough. I’m always looking into people’s eyes to see if they like me. That’s my proof of being alive. And that’s why actors are so unsteady, so unhappy. It’s a profession of doubt. You have no God, no love. Life gives you nothing to hold onto. So every night I feel nervous, nauseated. I’m not a happy person. I’m moody. There is a beautiful word in Greek—apolotriosis. It means you are confiscated. You don’t belong, but nobody can kill you. That’s what I feel every night when I walk onstage. They may hate me and I may fail them, but they can’t kill me. I have no ego and no ambition. I’m like a cow you milk milk milk and then it finally gives you a kick. I feel like kicking back, but I never do.”
“But now you are more successful than ever—”
“What is success? After Elektra won all the international film prizes, I didn’t work for two years. After Zorba I didn’t work for a year and a half. I’m loved and admired, then dismissed with laurels. It’s never been an easy life, acting. Blood and sweat, as we say in Greece. I’ve never made much money. For Zorba, my most popular film, I made only $10,000. I am not a star people pay money to see. They take my blood instead and I’m always there to give it. Every time I begin a new project I nearly die. When we started rehearsals for Iphegenia Cacoyannis said to me—he knows me so well—‘OK, Irene, let’s go through that birth-giving again,’ and he was right. And even now, when they applaud, I wonder if another actress couldn’t do it better. I feel a tremendous responsibility to those young faces in the audience. I wonder every night if I have studied enough history, or read enough books, or lived through enough pain to give them what they deserve. If you are cobbler you know if your shoes are worth the public’s dollars, but I live my whole life wondering—am I worth it?”
Gathering up her pride, with no more difficulty than if she were closing a door, she is gone before the answer comes. Home to her 66-year-old mother, waiting in some tiny West Side hotel. And leaving me behind with a lump in my throat, wondering why it is sometimes so hard to say “Yes.”