Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “No, Mommy isn’t buying The New York Times this week. She’s mad at The New York Times.”

  Alexander settles for a look at the wedding photos, in which he and his little brother are shown in full Kodak color eating their parents’ third wedding cake. “This is our wedding,” he says, pointing proudly at the Scotts in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes.

  Colleen roars. “I was expecting Alexander during the run of Caligula and Campbell came along during All the Way Home. I’ll never forget that. I was supposed to be pregnant in the play, but we had to keep changing the lines from ‘You don’t show Mary’ to ‘You show’ to finally ‘I see you’re pregnant, Mary!’ I played it until my eighth month. They’re not very typical kids, as you can see, but they’ll only be actors over my dead body. They came to Bucks County when G.C. and I did Lion in Winter there, and later we heard the cook asking them what it was about and they said, ‘Well, Daddy is a king and Mommy is a queen and they have two boys and Daddy likes the little boy and Mommy likes the big boy and they fight a lot.’ And G.C. said, ‘Yep, that’s absolutely right, that’s what it’s all about, all right.’”

  She’s in the living room now, making great stabs at being a country wife, pouring cream in the tea and chain-smoking Lucky Strikes from a crumpled pack. “The day after an opening I feel like I have a hangover. I want to go into the closet, change my name, and come out again a new person. I get so involved in everything and then when the critics don’t like it, I die. When Ballad of the Sad Cafe flopped, I went through agony. But this time I’m going to have fun and enjoy myself. I wanted to do this play and I’m not sorry. I love the O’Neill women. They move from the groin rather than the brain. To play O’Neill you have to be big. You can’t sit around and play little moments of sadness or sweetness. You cannot phony up O’Neill. And God knows if you fail, you can’t lay a quiet bomb up there onstage, you go with a resounding crash. I read it and was appalled at the length—you should have seen it when it ran five hours—but I have the utmost faith in José Quintero and knew he could cut it. He has survived the most colossal problems in this play—three actors who want to be evensy-Stevensy, six scripts before a final one was approved, producers who wanted it to be a commercial success and still remain reverent to O’Neill, the problem of bringing down the curtain at 11 because if you go over you have to pay the stagehands overtime. Endless problems. But in the beginning I could only see that role. Then Arthur Hill, who is as bad as I am about never taking the safety route to a commercial success, called me and said, ‘It’s fascinating, Colleen, but scary as hell.’ Then José told me Ingrid would like to do it and I just sat right here in my living room and stared at him. Then G.C. said, ‘Honey, you know I’m not an O’Neill fan and this play is a bloody bore, but two or three scenes of O’Neill are worth all the crap done in the theater every week, so do it.’ Then the first rehearsal came and Ingrid walked in and I thought, ‘My God!’ I knew she’d look good but this was ridiculous. She looks better than I did when I was 30. You know there are lots of well-preserved ladies in our theatre, but you get the feeling that if you touched them they’d shatter into a million pieces. Well, Ingrid is just the opposite. She’s not well-preserved in any unreal sense. She has her Scotches, she stays up late, she tells jokes, but she looks glorious. Nothing that she is is the result of any massage table or any face makeup. Well, she must have gone into shock when she saw Arthur and me. She had us running back and forth to the dye shop to look as good as she did. Even now, after living day and night with her for three months while the play was trying out in California, she can walk in after lunch and I just sit there and stare—‘My God, that’s Ingrid Bergman!’—and it takes me a few minutes before I can shake myself and realize it’s just Ingrid. She’s that incredible. And honest! Whoopsie, is she honest. Everything you get from her is right in the face, nothing phony. And thank God, she’s tall. When I’m onstage with her for once in my life I don’t feel like an Amazon charging with my warriors.

  “It’s been like a strange marriage for the past three months, an incestuous little circle made up of Arthur, Ingrid and me, that audiences can’t break into. They tried to build up a feud out in California because of a New York newspaper article saying I was better than she was, or something silly like that. It was like ‘Dewhurst is New York’s girl, Ingrid is Hollywood’s, we give Dewhurst 7 and Ingrid nothing.’ I didn’t read it, but G.C. told me about it and they tried to keep it from Ingrid. But she reads everything. So I came into the theatre that day scared to death and Ingrid said, ‘You know what we should do? We should start a rumor that there’s no feud, that we’re really having a thing between us. That’ll shake ’em up.’ That’s how close we all were. And that’s why I almost hated to see the opening night come, when the public could finally get at us. I can’t bear to see little flippy things like bad reviews come in and put us on the line like that after we’ve worked so hard. What if it is one of O’Neill’s inferior plays? The fact that it’s O’Neill at all should be reason enough for it to be seen. Isn’t that what the theatre is all about? Even today you say, ‘Goddammit, next time I’ll do Any Wednesday,’ but it never happens. I’ve always done plays I believed in and I have no regrets. Money isn’t important. I’ll do a TV show for thousands just so I can afford to work for Joe Papp in Central Park or do something off-Broadway for $50 a week, and that’s my integrity. But I never fool myself. I never say, ‘I’ll do that trashy TV play and make art out of it.’ I just do it for the money. Occasionally something will come along on TV like The Crucible and you get both the money and something that doesn’t stink, and then you’re really happy. But that doesn’t happen often.”

  It’s dark now. Outside, birdcalls in the meadow and leaves brushing the windows. She switches on a reading lamp and the warmth draws out the smell of the fireplace.

  Colors lead up dimly: purple, blue and brown, secretly shadowing the great face, half-lit half-obscured. Yes, she could be Cleopatra. Or Lizzie Borden, or any other damn thing you could think of. So why, you ask, has the face been ignored by the movies? She’s only done two: an insane creature who tried to murder Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story and a rather grotesque psychiatrist in A Fine Madness. “I’d love to do movies, but quite frankly, nobody’s asked me. People are always telling me to go to Europe, I’m another Jeanne Moreau. Hah! And then I get the line, ‘You’re a real woman!’ Sounds great, but then I think, ‘In contrast to what?’ It’d be nonsense to say I don’t want to be recognized in supermarkets. But here I am. I’ve been here all the time and I’m still not a supermarket star. I don’t think they ever knew where to put me. They’ll say, ‘She’s a cross between Ingrid Bergman and Ava Gardner,’ but the trouble is, they can’t find the pigeonhole. Then they say, ‘Your background is mostly classical, isn’t it?’ and that really throws them. Also, I never played roles that would attract a movie mind. I’ve tried not to fall into a niche, because in America we’re so cult-conscious that actors are always expected to be right where they’re supposed to be. You either play sex symbols and make good money or you play villains and make good money but you’re not supposed to be able to play everything and make good money. The only thing I require in a role is that I like the woman I play. I don’t care if she’s a Lesbian or a whore or a first-class pig. I have to like her and then know why she went in that direction. I can play all those ladies onstage, but not in the movies. I never saw the two I made because neither of them had anything to do with acting. Also, you’re at the mercy of cutters and mechanics in films, but once you’re out there onstage it’s all yours and a marvelous love-hate struggle begins with the audience. An audience can make you rise to great heights you never knew, the camera can’t. So I am content with just being a star in the theatre, and leaving the supermarkets to the other ladies. Then I drive home at night to my Concord grapes and my chickens and my vegetable garden and try to get with it, but I’m not very good at the country life. Every now and then, the kids decide I’m not like the other M
oms because I drive them to school in my nightgown with something around my head and come back home and go to bed while the other Moms are making their kids cookies and things. A few weeks ago, when I got back from California, I decided one Sunday to get up early and ship everybody off to Sunday school. It was time to get organized like the other Moms. Well, I left a pair of wet blue jeans on the radiator upstairs and they nearly burned the house down and then I left the shower on and G.C. said, ‘Honey I hear a great cracking noise,’ and it was the roof caving in under the flood. So I don’t pretend to be very good at any of it. When I decided to do this interview it got to be a joke backstage: which Colleen Dewhurst to show? Should we meet in my dressing room to show the dedicated actress or in a bar to show the carefree dame or out on the farm to show the all-American, folksy, genuine wife and mother? Well, it’s a good thing you saw me like this, with nothing planned to say and no time to think up anything. I’m not very good at any pose except just being myself. The theatre is the only thing in my life I’ve ever had any discipline about.”

  And later, when the kids are fed and tucked in, and G.C. has brought the car out and they’re both on their way into the city, he to be dropped off at The Little Foxes and she to drive on to More Stately Mansions, at about the point where the car angles in under the lights of the George Washington Bridge, she suddenly remembers: “Oh my God! Tonight we get the magazine critics!” A furrowed woodchuck glance into the back seat at the interviewer. “And then I’ve got next Sunday’s New York Times to look forward to with Walter Kerr and you side by side! Oh Christ!”

  “And then,” chuckles G.C. maniacally at the wheel, “you’ll read a headline: ‘Rather Obscure Actress Kills Self in Remote Westchester Retreat.’”

  Then the Dewhurst roar, turning the car, as she does the stage, into instant magic. Half I-don’t-care and half Come-up-and-see-me-sometime. And glorious to hear in the hush of the night.

  Irene Papas

  “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.”