Senator John McCain joked in 1998 that Chelsea Clinton was so ugly “because Janet Reno is her father.” He allegedly apologized to Bill Clinton for the smear a decade later, but not to any of the women.
Reno’s gayness was so often assumed that she addressed it publicly, calling herself an “awkward old maid who has a very great attraction for men,” not women. Still, this didn’t stop people from calling her a cross-dressing gay, and “Aunt Janny.” “The culture is confused,” wrote Mundy, in a meditation on the obsession with Reno’s gender and sexuality. “Is she Ma Kettle, hillbilly dominatrix? Is she Nurse Ratched, humorless and repressed? She’s hit from all sides. She’s a man, she’s a woman, she’s a man-woman, she’s straight, she’s gay—but amazingly often, she’s depicted sexually.”
“Janet Reno’s Dance Party” tackled Reno’s sex life head-on, but, to Mundy’s point, vacillated between portraying her as gay and straight, depending on which seemed funnier. In a January 1997 sketch, Reno pulls Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala (Kevin Spacey, also in a dress) close to her for a slow dance. Reno is the butch, as it were, to Shalala’s “beautiful china doll on a shelf.”
By October that same year, the mood has changed and Reno is straight, if sexually repressed, and secretly in love with her boss. She wears a frilly pink robe and slippers while lounging in a girlish bedroom. She cuddles and kisses a large stuffed lion doll, imagining it is the president, and fashions a veil for their nuptials out of her drapes. How did Reno feel about the SNL depiction of her, and the criticism of the way she looked? “She was thick-skinned,” Gorelick recalled. “But you couldn’t ignore it.”
At the time, Ferrell said he did Reno a favor by playing her as straight, since she was more often perceived as “almost asexual, in a way.” Writing a scene in which Reno longs for a man—rather than women, or nobody—gives her “the benefit of the doubt . . . in that we’ve chosen to portray her as being repressed and dreaming about—men,” he said at the time. Conversely, Ferrell told Mundy that he and his writers would only focus on a male politician’s sex life in a sketch if that politician had done something scandalous or wrong, like Bill Clinton. Janet Reno’s sex life became a tool for comedy because she didn’t seem to have one. A powerful, public woman without a husband, children, or rumored romantic prospects was startling. America didn’t understand her, so the culture mocked her. Ferrell said he wouldn’t have crafted such a sketch if Reno was a “normal woman.” “Madeleine Albright, a short little, quote ‘normal’ woman . . . I don’t know if we . . . It’s weird. I hate to break it down into something as simple as the fact that she’s tall, but it’s almost as simple as that,” he explained.
It wasn’t that simple. “Will Ferrell playing Janet Reno is incendiary given the challenges for women at that time not coming off as masculine when they were successful,” comedy expert Kohen said. “Because that dynamic existed in real life, it certainly complicated matters for women.” Ferrell said it best himself: Men on SNL are mocked if they do something wrong. For a woman, being tall is enough.
Reno took it like a man—a pretty famous one. “Her model was Lincoln,” Gorelick said. “If you looked at the things that were said about him. That he looked like a monkey, for starters. He just let it roll off of him and that’s what she did.” She wasn’t just a good sport about the teasing. She participated in her own skewering when she appeared on Saturday Night Live as she departed the attorney general’s office in 2001. Reno ran for Florida governor in 2002, but was unsuccessful, and soon after faded from public life. She died the day before the 2016 presidential election from complications related to late-stage Parkinson’s disease.
THE AUDITION
In July of 1996, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright visited Prague with Hillary Clinton. Some reports from their trip: The women slip out of their hotel, as if on an illicit errand, and stroll through Old Town Square in smart pantsuits. They pause in Wenceslas Square—the site of protests that ignited the Velvet Revolution and the dissolution of communism in the Czech Republic—and window-shop nearby. The women giggle when the wind blows up their umbrellas. They walk in the rain rather than ride in the car, perhaps so they can be photographed being carefree by foreign press. “They talk about their children, the professors they had at Wellesley College, walking, eating and vitamins,” according to one account. The pair nibble dumplings and cabbage and “are clearly having a good time.” The travels of a UN ambassador and the First Lady of the United States were couched as a girls’ weekend for two vapid coeds. But on this getaway, Clinton had political tricks up her smart pantsuit sleeve. She was on official White House business, vetting Albright for a cabinet position. And while Hillary Clinton was unlikable for trying so hard, Madeleine Albright was considered too hard for failing to be diplomatic.
Certain administration officials thought the trip was “so blatantly political that it is dismissed in just two words: the audition.” Albright was auditioning for the post of secretary of state, and Hillary Clinton, who would later hold the post herself, was the casting agent. Clinton was sent to determine whether to anoint Albright as the first woman for the job. Some were unnerved that the First Lady would command such influence, while others felt their jaunt was outright silly. Former secretaries of state like Warren Christopher and Henry Kissinger hadn’t needed to audition. They won the role based on diplomatic prowess and political acumen. To frame Albright’s bid for the job in theatrical terms, and to describe the trip as a dining and shopping getaway, diminished both the office and the diplomat.
Albright’s political career began in the early 1970s when she was forty-five years old, after she had supported her newspaperman husband’s career and given birth to three girls. She had earned both a master’s and a PhD from Columbia, and taught international affairs at Georgetown, winning Teacher of the Year four times. Albright hobnobbed with Washington elite, often hosting salons at her home. She worked for Democratic senator Edmund Muskie, was recruited to the National Security Council, and advised Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.
From the moment she appeared on the national and international stage, she was subject to a chorus of criticism. As with Clinton and Reno, the slights against her had broad reach, from her competence and intellect to her looks and likability. Albright was fifty-five when she earned her first diplomatic post. In January 1993, Bill Clinton named her US ambassador to the United Nations, a position she would hold for three years. It was where she would develop her reputation for being hard and even nasty.
Her detractors were quick to attribute her UN appointment to her connections rather than her credentials. They pointed to her wealth and the access she had to Democratic heavyweights like Geraldine Ferraro and Dukakis. Critics called her “an intellectual lightweight,” and argued that she had used her prolific networking skills to wheedle her way into the job—as if bringing powerful people together was not a credential for a job as a diplomat. These so-called extracurricular activities were said to deplete her time at the United Nations, “prompting criticism there that she does not take her job seriously enough,” reported the New York Times.
KUKO AND COJONES
Albright was the only woman on the fifteen-member Security Council and didn’t regularly kowtow to her male colleagues, so she was characterized as abrasive, cold, and out of her depth. She “sneered,” “sputtered,” and “snarled” to make her point, critics said. Albright was a popular television talking head—especially on CNN, which she jokingly called the sixteenth member of the Security Council—because she spoke in sharp sound bites, often lashing political enemies in ways her male colleagues wouldn’t dare. When Albright moved to block UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from serving a second term in 1996, fellow diplomats found her “too confrontational,” and deemed the ouster she led “monstrously handled,” despite all the support she received for the ballsy endeavor. Lawrence Eagleburger, the secretary of state under George H. W. Bush, lambasted Albright over the Boutros-G
hali incident in the press. “She is like a bulldog who gets its teeth into the bone and won’t let go,” he said, evoking the “bitch” slur without being explicit.
Not all of her critics held their tongues. In March of 1996, Ambassador Albright toured the wrecked Croatian city of Vukovar. A Serbian mob recognized Albright immediately. The angry horde grew violent, throwing stones and chanting “Kuko! Kuko!” as she walked with her aides through the streets. Albright didn’t cower; rather, she demanded that her staff walk through the debris, heads held high. They were American emissaries, after all. By that time, Albright had become a widely identifiable diplomat. The Washington Post explained: “There are very few other members of Clinton’s Cabinet who would immediately be recognized by a crowd of angry Serbs in an obscure Balkan town and attacked with stones.” In addition to her fluency in English, French, Russian, and Czech, Albright knew enough Serbian to know what they were calling her: bitch.
This was essentially the same criticism of her a month prior, in February of 1996, after Cuban military pilots shot down civilian planes leaving Miami. The pilots gloated that they had “taken out the cojones” of their victims. “This is not cojones, this is cowardice,” Albright shot back, inveighing against the act by repeating the Spanish word for testicles. But that word, uttered by a woman ambassador, was unacceptable to her cohort at the United Nations, many of whom were “outraged.” A former representative from Venezuela accused her of appropriating “a man’s word” that he wouldn’t say, “even on my farm.” The incident “may have been her worst moment at the United Nations,” listed among her many “barbed verbal jabs” that won her enemies, according to CNN talking heads. It proved that she could be “too strident,” not a coalition builder or a smooth talker who could achieve consensus.
In the press, as in diplomatic circles, Albright was hectored for not being as well liked as some of her peers. While other beloved diplomats had nicknames like “the magician,” Albright was called “the queen of mean.” Whether it was negotiating with Balkan states or the Middle East, Albright wasn’t smooth or decisive. She “nudged” parties for months toward compromise or “lectured” them about history they already knew. She looked askance at partner nations and was called “crisp,” “impatient,” and “cold.” Former president of the Council on Foreign Relations Leslie Gelb called the treatment of Albright what it was: “sexism.” “It is hard for a woman, and it’s particularly hard to be the first,” he said.
Sexism it was, and barely concealed at that. When Albright flew to Moscow to discuss a NATO bomb threat with the Russian foreign minister, he picked a silk flower off of their table and handed it to her. During another diplomatic mission near Paris, foreign colleagues working late at night confused Albright with a cleaning woman and tried to send her away. Albright reportedly hated press coverage of her appearance, and was then called “thin-skinned” and “frustrated” for saying so.
THE GRANDMOTHER
In an echo of the O. J. trial, where Marcia Clark was the only lawyer called by her first name, Albright was routinely called Madeleine by members of the foreign policy community, even those who didn’t know her personally. This contrasted with her all-male predecessors, who were called “Secretary” or their surnames. Richard Holbrooke, a fellow diplomat who served as UN ambassador when Albright was secretary of state, repeatedly called her Madeleine throughout a 1999 interview with the Washington Post, some believe to undermine her credibility. “Vietnam was known as McNamara’s war,” wrote the New Republic, referencing former secretary of state Robert McNamara. “Kosovo is known as ‘Madeleine’s.’” (The article was referring to the ethnic cleansing and subsequent war in the Serbian province of Kosovo.) Women had spent decades trying to rise from the secretary title. It was ironic that perhaps the world’s most powerful secretary—who actually wanted to be called by that word—was denied it.
“Madeleine’s War” was also the headline of the Time magazine story about the Kosovo conflict, and whether Albright was equipped to manage the United States’ role in it. Her critics were said to “see Madeleine’s War as the latest example of an incoherent foreign policy driven by moral impulses and mushy sentiments, one that hectors and scolds other nations to obey our sanctimonious dictates and ineffectively bombs or sanctions them if they don’t.” This furthered the notion in Washington that Albright was overeager and underqualified, and, in case you forgot, a woman.
Albright used her grandmotherly persona to her advantage in negotiations with tough parties. She made a game of diplomacy by wearing witty pins to difficult meetings. After an Iraqi newspaper called her a serpent for criticizing Saddam Hussein, she donned a snake pin. She sported a bug pin at the Kremlin after a Russian wiretap was uncovered at the United Nations. She also deployed animal brooches to signal how negotiations were progressing—a turtle if things were slow, a bee or crab if they were heated. To confer with the Russian foreign minister on an antiballistics treaty, she had just the thing: an inceptor missile pin. She made headlines for exercising “jewelry” or “brooch” diplomacy, by calling attention to world matters with her impressive pin collection. And the mostly male officers and dignitaries she dealt with appreciated the good humor her pins indicated. They became conversation starters, and world leaders tried to guess what she might wear next, and what it might mean. They also softened her edges.
SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL
At a 2016 presidential campaign event for Hillary Clinton, Albright was flogged again for a one-liner. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” she said. It’s an epigram she has used for the better part of forty years, so famous and devoid of conflict, in fact, that it’s printed on a Starbucks coffee cup. But young women called the remark, which was intended to rally their support, “startling and offensive.” Albright was swiftly criticized for “rebuking” and “reprimanding and ridiculing” young women.
The media seized on the malodorous scent of an intergenerational catfight, and the ground Albright helped gain for women seemed crushed beneath her ten-second sound bite. The scorching lines Albright had been known for in the 90s, which resulted in her being called harsh and undiplomatic, dogged her once again. But this time, Albright dealt with the flak differently. Rather than steamroll forward, she apologized. “One might assume I know better than to tell a large number of women to go to hell,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed titled “My Undiplomatic Moment.” It was her version of pastelizing, or handing out cookies. This event, and the public response, indicates that less has changed in the decades since Albright became the first female secretary of state than we’d like to believe.
7
Female Anger
Female anger in the 90s was demonized and feared, particularly when it was revealed in the public personas and cutting-edge work of artists and entertainers. For musicians like Paula Cole, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and actress Shannen Doherty, their volatility created “bad girl” personas, which colored their reviews, alienated would-be fans, and led to their bitchification. They possessed fiery tempers and misbehaved in public. Society and the reviewers who covered them reacted by shaming their behavior, belittling them, and reducing them to their sexual function.
PRIMAL SCREAM THERAPY
“I didn’t write this song for Dawson’s Creek,” says Paula Cole, seated at a piano. Behind her a glass wall reveals a rock-carved inlet of the Atlantic Ocean peppered with sailboats. The audience laughs, knowing they will soon hear the familiar, earnest “do-do-do-do” that punctuated the opening credits of the popular teen drama that premiered in 1998.
Cole wrote “I Don’t Want to Wait” for her grandfather, as he was nearing death. She grew up in the small, puritan New England village of Rockport, Massachusetts, where she is performing tonight. She returned to the area a mother, a Grammy winner, and an artist who wrote a song so popular she was able to live off of its royalties for nearly a decade as a single parent.
“I never in a million years expected
Dawson’s Creek to be so popular,” she told me. “It really usurped my career. I’m also grateful, because it gave me years with my daughter. I can’t speak badly of it when it helped our lives so much.” She returned home in 2008 and took an eight-year hiatus from touring. Cole extricated herself from major record labels and now funds her new releases, like the 2017 collection of jazz and folks songs, Ballads, through Kickstarter. She recently let her hair return to gray, having grown tired of dyeing it for years.
In the 90s, Cole’s rebelliousness fueled her award-winning music and led to her national bitchification. She was once so infamous that Jay Leno created a Paula Cole doll with tufts of underarm hair to mock her. The presence of pit hair defied industry standards for female musicians. “I didn’t expect such negativity and frothing hatefulness around such a thing,” Cole said. After Cole was called out, she hid her armpit hair under sleeves for a while. Eventually, like Marcia Clark succumbing to pastels, and Hillary Clinton to cookies, she just shaved it. Cole, like Clark and Clinton, wasn’t angling to appease critics as much as she wanted to eliminate the distraction so she could get back to work. “I was just sick of it being something that I did pay attention to,” Cole says.
Fame and a music career in the 90s were not what Cole had imagined. “I was very unhappy at the height of popularity with This Fire,” her breakout album, she told me. “I was cut off from my family and I was working all the time.” Cole suffered from anxiety and depression, and said the rigors of the star machine and her “quick ascent” left her with PTSD. “I got my ass kicked,” she said. Cole’s mother feared she was suicidal.
Some of Cole’s unhappiness stemmed from the textbook manipulations she was subjected to as a young woman artist. Because she came up during “a newly progressive time” when “women play electric guitars and openly spew their feelings,” as Entertainment Weekly put it, Cole was dismissed as just another feelings spewer. Coming on the heels of female performers like Alanis Morissette (whom critics called “the princess of post-adolescent feminist angst”) and Courtney Love, Cole was mashed together with them, her songs called either “little-girl type” or “riot grrrl variety.” Like her contemporaries, Cole’s performances, lyrics, and image faced gender-based scrutiny. She was all too often critiqued not as an artist, but as a girl. “Flaunting her bare midriff and pierced nose, she roams the stage wildly, a tough, strident little girl,” the New York Times observed in 1997.
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