After a Greek Tragedy : Her Life as a Political Wife Over, Margaret Papandreou Bounces Back to Lifelong Causes

In June the 38-year marriage of Andreas and Margaret Papandreou, he then prime minister of Greece, she his American-born wife, ended in divorce. The divorce was preceded by three years of rumor, scandal and tawdry evidence of what was at first an indiscreet affair and later a public romance between Papandreou, 70, and Dimitra Liani, 34, a former talk-show hostess and airline flight attendant.

It was high drama on a world stage, and it and a $200-million banking scandal reportedly involving him and his aides created a wake that contributed to Papandreou’s election defeat two days after the divorce. The former prime minister married Liani in July and is the subject of a criminal investigation undertaken by the Greek parliament.

World stage or not, what happened to Margaret Papandreou, 65, is a cliche that crosses all lines of class, culture, nationality and religion: Her husband left her for a younger woman.

An International Feminist Leader

Prestige and stature as a international feminist leader, peace movement activist and informal diplomat provide no fortress against that kind of pain and public humiliation. Nor was the ridicule and repudiation her husband received in some circles (and admiration from others), much of a buffer.

And yet here she is, six weeks after the divorce, in Los Angeles on behalf of a bold new venture, looking pleasantly calm and determined for the most part, looking forward, seeming assured.

After all this, how is she?

“I think I’m fine. I’ve come to terms with the situation. It was a bitch,” she said with finality. “Fortunately, I had some very wonderful persons who were supportive of me. I think I have a good future ahead of me, good friends, wonderful family and some career I believe in.”

She paused a moment and then said softly, but deliberately, “I’ll always treasure that portion of my life I had with Andreas. I do not want to spoil it with thoughts of revenge. That’s hard to do at times, but I do not want to spoil it. Out of it came four wonderful children and that I will always treasure.”

Papandreou was relaxing one morning last week, in a blue caftan, in the home of old friends of hers and her former husband’s from UC Berkeley days, Betty and Stanley Sheinbaum.

If she did not seem ebullient, it must be noted, that has seldom been her manner. She is a serious woman, a fact she joked about publicly later that evening. She was

resting up this morning, in fact, between speeches--a private fund-raiser the night before, and a public event to come that evening, both for the same new venture, part of the good future she sees ahead of her.

That night, she spoke before a packed church in Santa Monica where the spillover crowd sat on the floors and in choir pews on the altar. She had decided to lighten up, she began, having been stung recently by a comment that got back to her from a TV talk show that turned down an appearance by her. The word had been: “Oh, she’s so serious.”

“Is that the image I gave?” she said she asked herself, quickly concluding, “How could it be otherwise? What am I supposed to say? ‘The world is on a path of nuclear holocaust which may be the end of the human race. Ha, ha ha?’ ” After a similar comment about the ecology, she concluded, “It’s not that I’m so serious. The subject is serious.”

To her listeners’ delight, she then proceeded to tell a series of social gaffes she had made as wife of the prime minister, including one where she mistook a Norwegian diplomat, a stranger to her, for George Bush, patting him on the back at a reception with “Where’s your wife?” To the man’s flustered explanation that his wife was in Norway, she blurted out, equally flustered, “Oh, my husband’s out of town, too.”

Then on to the serious stuff: the specter of nuclear holocaust, a global economic and political collapse, and an ecological disaster.

“The three nightmares are not unrelated,” she told her audience of about 400. “They are all connected to the global war system we’re a part of.” The way out, she said, lies in the combined philosophies of the women’s movement, peace movement and ecology movement, all of which seek a turning away from violence and domination in favor of partnership and a sense of connection.

The event was sponsored by the the Center for Partnership Studies, a new L.A.-based institution founded by feminist writer Riane Eisler, whose book “The Chalice and the Blade” reinterprets and rethinks anthropology and history.

An Ambitious Project

Eisler, who also spoke at the events, and Papandreou are teaming up for an ambitious project, inspired by Eisler’s research on the ancient Minoan civilization on Crete, a Greek island in the Mediterranean.

For about 4,000 years, starting in 6000 BC, Crete is believed by many to have been a technologically advanced, artistic and socially harmonious society, where nature--in the form of the Goddess of Nature--was worshiped, war and tyranny abhorred and law prevailed. Men and women were fairly equal, and there is evidence, Papandreou said, of a more equitable distribution of resources than there is in the world today. Much of Eisler’s research concentrates on Minoan Crete as a prime example of previous social organization that worked better, Papandreou noted, than the current model based on a struggle for domination among nations, between the sexes and between man and nature.

Calling Eisler a visionary idealist in contact with history, archeology and philosophy, and herself a pragmatic idealist involved in redefining global security and dealing with military and defense establishments in the East and West, she said they made a good team.

The team of Eisler and Papandreou is organizing an international conference and arts celebration in Crete, she said, in 1991 on “women, partnership and peace.” Sponsored by Eisler’s Center and Women for a Meaningful Summit--a loosely organized global peace network for which Papandreou serves as international liaison--the conference will “work on a rational plan for a new world social organization which recognizes that the road to the future is based on human values and social arrangement, of equality between the sexes, of nonviolence in personal and public behavior.”

That may sound visionary to the point of uselessness, but not as Papandreou sees it.

In describing her dealings with a U.S. State Department careerist, she said the official regarded groups like hers as being somewhat “off with the butterflies and pansies.” Not a bad place to be, Papandreou said. “I think we are the only ones talking Realpolitik, “ she said, considering the seriousness of the situation and the drastic measures needed to turn things around. “Our kind (of solution) is the only kind that will work.”

Variously called Margarita or Margaret, she is known to her friends as Maggie, this lanky Midwesterner with blond hair and blue eyes who was born Margaret Chant in 1923 and grew up in Elmhurst, Ill. The oldest of five children, she has often said her family was fairly well off before the Depression; after it, wiped out and poor.

Her grandfather was a socialist and when she was 12 she campaigned for his unsuccessful Senate run on the American Socialist ticket. She has been involved in politics and committed to the principles of socialism ever since. As for feminism, she has often described not being able to understand why she, too, couldn’t try out for the basketball team.

She worked her way through the University of Minnesota, graduated and opened a public relations office in Minneapolis.

She met Andreas in Minneapolis in 1948. From the start, she has said, they found they had the same political philosophy. She was 24; he 29, married and teaching economics at the university. They had a brief affair and went their separate ways. She married briefly. Then, in 1951, after they had both divorced, they were married in 1951, and soon moved to UC Berkeley where he eventually chaired the economics department.

Papandreou had been in self-imposed exile in this country since 1940, had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and become a citizen. He returned to Greece on a Fulbright scholarship in 1959 with his wife and four children--three sons and a daughter--and finally moved back to stay in 1961. When his father George became prime minister in 1964, he was elected to Parliament, but with the overthrow of the king, the Constitution and the government by a military junta in 1967, he was imprisoned as a leftist. Later, after he was freed, he and his family went into exile in Sweden and Canada.

The family returned to Greece in 1974 after the junta was driven out. Papandreou, with Margaret and their son as founding members, formed the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), was elected to Parliament in 1977 and in 1981 became prime minister, bringing in Greece’s first socialist government.

Organized Feminists

Meanwhile, his wife had not been idle. Once back in Greece, Margaret Papandreou and several friends formed the Union of Greek Women, a socialist feminist group that organized women in urban and rural areas and successfully worked for changes in the civil code--especially the family law section, legalizing civil marriage, eliminating the dowry, enabling women to be heads of household. Recently Greek women gained the right to free and legal abortions. Papandreou served as Union president from 1980 until she resigned recently.

Having seen the Union grow from a group of 20 to an organization of 30,000, she said that despite her resignation, she would still work with the women’s movement in Greece. Progress has been made in changing laws and attitudes, she said, but there are still barriers for women entering politics. Papandreou led Greece’s delegation to the United Nations conference on women in Nairobi in 1985.

It was about that time that Women for a Meaningful Summit started as a loose coalition of American women seeking to have an influence on the Reagan/Gorbachev meeting on nuclear disarmament in Geneva. It stayed together, and soon expanded internationally.

Papandreou has played a highly visible role in the organization, leading delegations to summit meetings, meeting with American and Soviet government officials, with NATO and Warsaw Pact officials, bringing “peace platforms,” the concerns and commentary of feminists to the attention of the decision-makers.

Her New Status

It is work she plans to continue, although she acknowledged her new status as an independent individual may affect her access.

“It could make a difference,” she said. “Because of my status as wife of a prime minister, it was a little easier to get the ear of someone in public office. I think most of the things, I can still do now and will. If it’s more difficult, I’ll just have to push harder.”

She does not avoid reference to the past, including the breakup of her marriage. She easily incorporates references to Andreas, to experiences she had as wife of the prime minister, to memories of her father-in-law, George, and the personally excruciating time she has recently been through.

But it is mainly a matter of passing reference or slightly abstracted observation. She does not wear her heart on her sleeve for strangers or seem compelled to bare her soul. Even her personal revelations soon get put through the prism with which she looks at most of life: the lens of a politician, activist and lifelong feminist and socialist.

She has a lot to look at and evaluate now and she intends to turn to writing for that work.

‘A Way of Sorting’

Author of two children’s books, on feminism and anti-imperialism, written in Greek, and an account of life under the junta, called, “Nightmare in Athens,” she said she likes to write and called it a learning experience, “a way of sorting things out. You get different insights regarding behavior and events that do not occur to you at the time. It’s an exciting part of putting the puzzle together.”

She has a book in mind now that she wants to get started on.

Oh?

“Not a ‘kiss and tell’ book,” she smiled wryly.

She could command a pretty penny if she chose to go that route.

“You bet I could,” she said with a flash of fire. But “if I do a book, mainly it will have something to do with political life in Greece and being the wife of the prime minister. I would look at my personal experience and functioning in political chambers from a feminist point of view.”

She has some notes, she said, and would like to set aside some time this year to get started. Beyond that, she plans another book on political wives, focusing to some extent to the restrictions placed on their personal and professional activities for the sake of their husbands’ image.

What happened to her has happened to women from all walks of life, she knows. Some come up to her, she said, anxious to talk to her, fearful her experience is a forerunner of what’s in store for them. Or having already gone through it, they want to know how she has survived.

“It’s a formula maybe--men getting old and looking for younger wives,” she remarked.

Her outlook is as much sobering as it is reassuring.

Hardest Hit

“So many women have (confronted), or are going to confront, it. They should be prepared for it. When this happens, people often say they feel like a part of their body has been cut off. It’s a way of saying that person is being a part of you rather than close to you but separate.”

Hardest hit, she said, are those women who have made marriage their whole life. “Beyond their economic dependence, they’ve had their whole profession taken away from them.”

By contrast, “I was fortunate when this present problem hit me. I was very active, independent of being the wife of Andreas Papandreou.”

Men, she said, tend to put careers first, families second. Women put their families first and don’t always have a “second.” What such women go through, she said, bears some similarity to a man’s losing his job--depression, panic, loss of self-esteem.

“When your main activity in life is withdrawn from you, it really hits you. So if family is going to be your main concern, it’s good to have a second (involvement) and it should be something connected with other people.”

She is a little surprised that so many assume she will return to the States to live, as she phrases it, “because my marriage broke up.” She has dual citizenship in both countries, but plans to live in Greece.

Family and Friends

“I’ve spent almost half of my life in Greece since 1959,” she said. Of America, she said, “My development stage, my values system were developed here.” She has family and friends here, and said, “This is home for me, but Greece is home as well.”

It is where her daughter Sophia, 34, and sons, George 37, and Nicholas, 33, and her two grandchildren, are. Her youngest son, Andreas, 30, now studying at Harvard, plans to return at some point.

“I have other reasons, my work, my career. And I really love Greece. I think it’s kind of nice to have at least two countries that are home.”

She wears two plain bands on her left ring finger, one silver, one gold. Could they possibly be her wedding rings?

“They’re my replacements,” she said with a laugh. “I wore my wedding rings until the day the divorce was final. But when I took them off, after 38 years, my hand felt so bare I looked through my jewelry box to find something else.”

For a moment, in the Sheinbaums’ airy living room, as she was ready to escort her visitor to the door, Papandreou stood with her hand extended, gazing down at the substitute rings. Smiling fondly, and without looking up, she recalled how she and her husband had been married in Nevada and had designed matching silver bands that were reminiscent of American Indian jewelry.

Looking far from revenge, and very far from defeat, she said laughingly, “I suppose I’ll have to come up with a name for these. Independence rings. Maybe that’s what they are.”