Helen of Athens

How can Greeks be persuaded to work harder? "Ban chairs in coffeehouses." How can tourism be encouraged in Greece? "This summer thousands of foreigners will cross our frontiers. Some will be concerned only with antiquity, others with the contemporary. Personal tastes will keep one traveler from going to Delphi, another from seeing Olympia; but everyone will be going to the lavatory. The nation's lavatories must be improved so that all those freshly scrubbed people will not turn up their noses at us."

Such are the tips offered in the thrice-weekly column of Helen Vlachos. In a country where it is a tradition that nobody listens to the opinions of a woman, everybody listens to Helen. One of Greece's most important publishers, the 54-year-old iconoclast puts out the nation's second-largest and best newspaper, Messimvrini (circ. 90,000), and the fifth-largest Kathimerini (56,000). She also publishes Greece's biggest picture magazine, Eikones, as well as a vast number of paperback books.

Ruined Mothers. Helen Vlachos was born to the business. Her father, George, founded Kathimerini, which she joined at the age of 16. "People say it is not easier if your father is the boss," she says bluntly. "That's not true. It is easier." She attended the Berlin Olympics of 1936, interviewed Mussolini in Libya, covered "all the earthquakes in Greece." She worked as a nurse during World War II when the Nazis took over the paper; after the war, she started her column, which soon became one of the most popular in Greece. A conservative who likes to needle the left, she once made fun of a prominent pro-Communist Deputy in Parliament who loves the good life enough to own a house, a yacht in Athens and an apartment in Paris. When she suggested in a subsequent column that the Deputy did not even believe in Communism, he angrily threatened to sue, and other left-wingers cheered him on. Said the columnist: "The left has no sense of humor."

When her father died in 1951, Helen Vlachos took over Kathimerini. Her employees, who regarded her as still a child, resisted innovations. So in 1961 she started Messimvrini, a paper in which she could "have her own way. She had the temerity to take the news off the last page, where it is customarily placed in Greek journalism, and spread it throughout the paper. She also brightened makeup and introduced Western-style leads. "All my staff were sure they'd be ruined," she recalls, "that my poor mother would be ruined, that their mothers would be ruined." But "Greeks like everything that everybody else likes," says the ambitious publisher, who is on a crusade to haul her countrymen into the 20th century.

Pink Pages. Working a man-killing schedule, Helen Vlachos has enlisted her second husband, Constantin Loundras, as business director of her enterprises. She lends her services to many worthy causes, such as the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. But she scrupulously avoids cocktail parties and chooses her own guest lists carefully; in 1961, Jackie Kennedy was a visitor at her home on the island of Mykonos. "I don't like the abandoned female intellectual type," she says.

Currently she is doing battle with authority. She wants to increase the size of Messimvrini, but the government restricts the supply of available newsprint in order to protect the smaller papers among Athens' 15 dailies. She defied the ban by adding a couple of extra pages to her allowable two-week maximum of 112, as well as a weekly pink insert of financial news. "Just try to put me on trial," she warned the government. "Just try." Nobody is betting that the government will.

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