...And She's Only 19

An excerpt from a 1961 interview with Pamela Tiffin by Liza Wilson:


“It is shameless how many times I have seen One, Two Three. I keep finding new things to laugh at; I have only seen Summer and Smoke twice. The theme is too compelling emotionally. Earlier in life I used to want sturm and drang and excitement. Now I want some order and peace.”

And she’s only 19.

Marriage To Newsman Aids Pamela Tiffin's Press Relations

Another interesting interview with Ms. Tiffin, circa 1966:

Pamela Tiffin’s relations with the press have improved in the last three years. In 1962 the pretty young actress married, Clay Felker, a newspaperman.

            Pamela, currently starring with Paul Newman and Robert Wagner in “The Moving Target” at Warner Bros., admits that when she made her motion picture debut in “Summer and Smoke” she was ill at ease during interviews and bridled at the sound of the word “publicity”.

“At the time I pushed reticence,” she now confesses. “I felt that my personal thoughts and actions were my own and the concern of no one else. It wasn’t my idea to appear aloof, but I’m afraid that was the way I struck many people.”

            Her marriage to Felker, a working member of the Fourth Estate, changed all that.

            “But slowly,” admits Pamela, with a smile. “I found out from Clay that a certain part of an actress’ life belongs to the people who buy tickets to see her in the theatre. When I learned about ‘news’, what makes a ‘story’, I lost much of my self-consciousness. I still may not be the perfect interview but I really try to co-operate.

            Publicity, Pamela now feels, is an integral part of a player’s life.

            “Unless, of course, one is Garbo,” she adds with a smile. “But there are areas which I feel are closed as far as I am concerned. These include details of my home life. And, positively, no art for the play-play magazines for jaded males.

            When a screen role demands that Pamela wear brief attire, she goes along with it.

            “But the wardrobe – or lack of it – must be in context with the part I’m playing and the dramatic action,” she continued.

            In “The Moving Target” Pamela is seen as a wayward socialite, out to entrap the personable males she encounters.

            I go after Robert Wagner and Paul Newman while wearing a brief bikini. The girl is shameless,” Pamela admits. “To convey her character I could hardly play her in an outfit that would cover me from ankles to ears.”

Notes: "The Moving Target" was re-titled "Harper" for U.S. release. 

Pamela muses on Life, Love, Career, Dueling Personalities and the state of Teen-Agers.

An interview with Pamela Tiffin by syndicated columnist John Springer, circa 1966:


If someone in England asks you to tiffin, they are asking you to high tea. In America, however, Tiffin is a person – and a very personable person too. Born in Oklahoma, Pamela started modeling at 11 and has been in movies since she was 17 (“Summer and Smoke,” “One, Two, Three,” etc.). Married to magazine editor Clay Felker, living in New York, she starred on Broadway in “Dinner at Eight” – and, greeting anyone in her apartment, is inclined to flop down exhausted in a chair and say:

            “I want everything. I want to be a great actress. I want to be a good wife. I want to finish the book I’m reading. If you want a lot out of life, you have to put a lot in. So sometimes, you’re tired. That’s the price you pay. Take today. Usually I get up a 2:30 in the afternoon. Today I got  up at 12:30, but I could have slept until 8 tonight. The obligations of performing enervate you. You forget about yourself, which is very good for you. But you also get all charged up. I got charged up during the fight scene in ‘Dinner’ – like anybody would in a fight in real life. Yet we theater people always look like such bums of the working world. A photographer just called. “It’s only a picture’, he said. “It’ll only take a minute.” “Listen,” I told him, “my hair takes 45 minutes just to beat down.”

            “I was an only child, and I still am. I’m accustomed to being alone. I like a lot of solitude. It’s sort of incongruous wanting to be an actress. You have to put out so much. Not like in some of those stupid movies I did – those young girl parts. I mean in a part like in “Harper” or being Mastroianni’s wife in my new one, “Paranoia”.

            There are really two completely opposite me’s.  I grew up in Illinois – with all the Puritanical things that represents. My father’s parents were Slavs, but my mother is Anglo-Saxon, so that’s two people too. I was smart, I was in college at 16, and I wanted to be a teacher of Latin poetry, But the other half of me wanted to be a stripper at Minsky’s – so I collected calendar girls.

            “I’m different inside than out. That’s probably why my career is so crazy. In Harold Clurman’s class, I was doing Yelena in “Uncle Vanya”, and at the same time being the showgirl in “Dinner”. It’s hard to change from both and it’s hard to live with me. But I think reality is important too. It’s important to stop short from whatever snowball you’re on.

            “That fabled creature, the teen-ager, doesn’t really exist. People try to romanticize marriage, but they’re really just adults in miniature. The world needs grace and it needs beauty but it doesn’t need to romanticize untruths. Maybe romantic teen-agers existed before World War II and biology and paperbacks, but now they want to get in the water and mud, too. I was older and more sophisticated than I am now. Children are nice. Then that puberty comes and everything gets confused. When you get to be about 20, you have to unlearn everything. And you have to go back to being nice, too."