by Irin Carmon
Male justices gussied up too. Rehnquist added gold stripes to his robes in a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. (RBG, a huge Gilbert and Sullivan fan herself, once jokingly presented him with a white English-style wig.) And John Paul Stevens had his trademark bow ties.
But RBG’s jabots are a language of their own. The justice who despises frippery in her writing uses her neck accessories as a rhetorical flourish. The glass-beaded velvet bib necklace she wears to dissent is made by Banana Republic, obtained from a gift bag when she was one of Glamour’s Women of the Year in 2012. “It looks fitting for dissent,” she said simply.
RBG’s majority-opinion jabot—not seen too often these days—dangles with gold trim and charms. It was a gift from her law clerks. One of her favorites, a uniform crocheted white ring, was first spotted in a museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Another was purchased in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera, a two-pronged copy of the collar worn by one of her favorite tenors, Placido Domingo, in Verdi’s Stiffelio. That reminded RBG of what she called one of the best days of her life, when Domingo surprised her by serenading her as they both received honorary degrees from Harvard. Her favorite tenor, and it was belated justice a half century after the dean of the law school had denied her a Harvard degree, all in a day. “It was glorious,” she said.
At her confirmation, 1992AP Photo/Joe Marquette
So far, however, her efforts to pass on the collar habit to the younger generation have stalled. At the Supreme Court, justices are sworn in twice, the second time publicly in a formal proceeding known as an investiture. At Sotomayor’s 2009 ceremony, the newest justice wore a jabot that encircled her neck with a row of lace, culminating in two lace blossoms and a flap of plain starched white down the center. It was a gift from Justice Ginsburg, reporters were told. But judging from court sketches and official portraits, it didn’t last. Sotomayor is generally spotted in her trademark dangly earrings paired with an unadorned robe.
Kagan was already a good friend of RBG’s when she joined the court, but she drew a firm sartorial line from the start. “I think you just have to do what makes you feel comfortable,” Kagan said not long into her tenure. “In my real life I’m not a frilly, lacy person. Some of the things people wear just struck me as not something I felt comfortable with.” RBG did not hold it against her.
If the jabot is RBG’s mark of individuality, every justice’s robe is meant to signal a kind of uniformity. “It’s, I think, a symbol of ‘we are all in the business of impartial judging,’” RBG said of the black cloaking. “And in the United States I think the pattern was set by the great Chief Justice John Marshall, who said that judges in the United States should not wear royal robes. They should not wear red robes or maroon robes. They should wear plain black.”
At the time, though, Marshall assumed an all-male bench. “I didn’t know anyone who made robes for women justices,” said O’Connor, who bore the burden of being the first female justice. “Most of what was available was something like a choir robe or an academic robe.” RBG’s usual robe is from England, a Lord Mayor’s robe she likes. Off the bench, when she judges mock trials, she occasionally allows herself a little more pomp. As a guest in China in the nineties, she admired the judges’ red and black robes and was eventually given one as a gift.
“The judiciary is not a profession that ranks very high among the glamorously attired,” RBG declared from the hallowed stage of Carnegie Hall at Glamour’s Women of the Year event. But RBG herself is an exception. She’s long been a dark-horse darling of the glossies. Her outfits at her confirmation hearing earned praise in The New York Times Magazine from none other than legendary fashion editor Carrie Donovan, formerly of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “When she turned up at the Senate last summer in a swingy pleated skirt and striped tunic-length top with a string of beads, she looked more pulled together than any woman in the Washington eye since Jackie Kennedy Onassis,” Donovan wrote.
Writing about a visit to RBG’s chambers in the same magazine in 1997, Jeffrey Rosen also compared her aplomb with Jackie O and her famous televised White House tour, and then offered this unusual rhapsody: “It was hard not to be struck by her improbable glamour. Scarcely more than five feet tall, in a turquoise Chinese-silk jacket with matching wide-legged pants, her black hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, she looked like an exquisite figurine.” A secretary at Marty’s law firm in New York who became a feminist after typing up RBG’s briefs for her remembered being flummoxed when the lady lawyer appeared in a green dashiki, looking nothing like the secretary had imagined.
These days, RBG favors regal, loosely fitting robes of brocades or embroidered silks, usually accented with statement jewelry: ropes of pearls, a single string of red she has been wearing for decades, or a large pendant.
She doesn’t have her ears pierced but often wears prominent colored stud or dangling earrings. RBG often picks things up when she’s traveling. David Schizer remembers her jokingly complaining that because Marty wasn’t much of a shopper, Nino—that would be Justice Antonin Scalia—would go with her instead.
With then-Senator Joe Biden in 1993 AP Photo/Marcy Nighswander
Rarely does she go casual. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, during a massive snowstorm, RBG and the other justices were picked up in jeeps for oral argument. “Ginsburg chose to wear a straight skirt and high heels,” Toobin reported. “Because of the snow on the ground and Ginsburg’s outfit, the driver, who usually worked in the clerk’s office, had to lift the tiny justice into the air and deposit her in the car. (Later, Ginsburg wrote the fellow a letter of recommendation for law school.)”
Dress is one issue on which RBG can be a conservative. Her oldest granddaughter, Clara, says RBG will not-so-subtly offer her a shawl if she thinks Clara’s shirt is too low cut. In her freshman year of college, Clara got her nose pierced, along with a total of thirteen piercings in her ears, much to RBG’s horror. “She kept calling it ‘that thing on your face,’” Clara says, amused. To me, RBG expressed relief that at least a nose ring, unlike a tattoo, could be easily removed.
At public functions, RBG wears gloves, often black or white lace. In the dead of winter in Michigan, she wore daring knee-high leather boots. She usually carries the Constitution in her handbag, and after she got an MZ Wallace tote in the Glamour gift bag, she liked it so much she bought another. (She bought one for Clara too.) She has a weakness for Ferragamo shoes. RBG’s hair is invariably combed back severely, often affixed with a scrunchie. Every once in a while, she would come to chambers wearing a turban, and her secretaries would warn the clerks, according to one of them, that it was a turban day, “so that we wouldn’t giggle when we saw her.”
RBG in 2015Sebastian Kim/Time magazine
Maira Kalman
RBG’s chambers are evidence of her finely attuned taste. There is a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, conventional enough, but then RBG had the standard desk the Supreme Court justices have topped with a black granite. Although she has said her favorite artist is Matisse, given her pick of art from Washington museum collections (as all justices are), her choices were more obscure. She favors the mid-twentieth-century American artist Ben Cunningham, whose abstract work his biographer describes as combining “logic with imagination to add new dimensions to our experience of social confrontation and protest.” Another favorite in the same geometrical, color-blocked vein is the German-born Josef Albers. (In 2011, she coyly said she wouldn’t retire at least until she got her Albers back from a traveling exhibition. She estimated that would happen sometime in 2012. The day came and went.) She has borrowed paintings by Mark Rothko and Max Weber too.
A SPARROW, EXCEPT IN HER DREAMS
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RBG weeps at the opera. “She could get quite sentimental in movies,” says Jane, but opera is in an emotional class of its own. RBG is often wistful about what could have been, had she only been born with the pipes. “If I had any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva,” she said. “But sadly I ha
ve a monotone. And my grade school teachers were very cruel. They rated me a sparrow, not a robin.” She sings anyway—but “only in the shower, and in my dreams.”
At the opera in 2000Getty Images/Karin Cooper
It all started when eleven-year-old Kiki sat in a Brooklyn high school and watched, electrified, as a conductor named Dean Dixon conducted La Gioconda. She would also always remember that Dixon, an African American whose career thrived in Europe, was held back for reasons that had nothing to do with his talent. “In all the time he conducted in the U.S.,” she told the Santa Fe New Mexican during one of her many visits to that city’s summer opera festival, Dixon “was never called maestro,” the customary respectful term for a conductor.
She and Marty were in the audience in 1961 when the legendary soprano Leontyne Price, an African American who battled racism on the stage and beyond, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Il Trovatore. RBG remembered how a spotlight shone on the proud faces of Price’s parents, a Mississippi mill worker and midwife. Decades later, RBG greeted Price at the court by taking her hand and exclaiming, “My, this magnificent woman.” (When Price spontaneously sang at lunch, a reporter in the room was pretty sure Justice Kennedy, another opera fan, shed a tear.)
Opera ran in Marty’s family too. Jane remembers that her paternal grandmother—RBG’s beloved surrogate mother, Evelyn—listened every Saturday to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, and Evelyn’s own father had been a mechanic in an opera house in Odessa. When RBG and Marty were stationed in Oklahoma, they drove four hours to Dallas to hear the Metropolitan Opera’s traveling performance and borrowed opera records from the library on base. Later, in New York, they shared a box at the Met and went every Friday, a secular Sabbath.
In Washington, they chose an apartment at the Watergate, right across the street from the John F. Kennedy Center, home to the Washington National Opera. Opera stars often speak of RBG’s visits backstage, and her reverential but knowledgeable comments after the curtain falls. “We do consider her, informally, part of the family,” the opera’s president said. The justice also is a regular at the theater. “She has terrific taste and she’s very knowledgeable,” says Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, at whose wedding RBG officiated.
Being an opera fan on the highest court has its perks, including at least three onstage turns as an extra. One of these was with Scalia, in Ariadne auf Naxos, where RBG batted a fan and wore a white wig. One singer hopped on Scalia’s lap. In a 2003 production of Die Fledermaus, she, Kennedy, and Breyer surprised everyone onstage when they were introduced as “three guests supreme from the Court Supreme.” The best part? “Domingo was about two feet from me—it was like an electrical shock ran through me,” RBG said.
With Scalia onstage at the opera Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
RBG now oversees twice-annual opera and instrumental recitals at the court. As she put it in a speech, they “provide a most pleasant pause from the court’s heavy occupations.”
IRIN: And when the time comes, what would you like to be remembered for?
RBG: Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.
—MSNBC interview, 2015
RBG DOES NOT LIKE to be told to slow down. In early 2009, just as people began counting her out, RBG was suddenly everywhere. Yes, she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but the tumor was small and detected early. Yes, a Democratic president had been elected with a Democratic Senate, laying the groundwork for a successor she could approve of. But RBG had a job to do, and she wasn’t done yet.
There she was on February 23, smiling broadly from the bench less than three weeks after surgery, asking pointed questions at oral argument. There she was on February 24, taking her seat with the other justices at the first black president’s inaugural speech to a joint session of Congress. “Some of us were angry with her, but we were wrong,” David Schizer said. “We kept telling her to slow down, we kept telling her to take it easy.” He sent her novels to read. “She wouldn’t have any of it.”
RBG, as ever, had a purpose. “First, I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn’t all male,” she said. Then, referring to Kentucky senator Jim Bunning, who had predicted she was at death’s door, she added coolly, “I also wanted them to see I was alive and well, contrary to that senator who said I’d be dead within nine months.” That night she paused to embrace the new president. “I’ve got a soft spot for Justice Ginsburg,” Obama later said, and the feeling was mutual. “There was a rapport from the start between us,” RBG said.
At Barack Obama’s first speech to Congress in 2009 Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
A decade earlier, her bout with a more advanced stage of colorectal cancer had given her a new outlook. “It is as though a special, zestful spice seasons my work and days,” RBG said after her first recovery. “Each thing I do comes with a heightened appreciation that I am able to do it.” That was doubly true the second time around. That spring, in a tribute to mark her fifteen terms on the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts offered his “warm congratulations on the occasion of your reaching the midpoint of your tenure,” adding that she had “earned acclaim for your work ethic, intellectual rigor, precision with words and total disregard for the normal day-night work schedule adhered to by everyone else since the beginning of recorded history.” If it really was the midpoint of her tenure, she’d be retiring only a year older than John Paul Stevens did, at age ninety-one.
None of these public displays of vigor stilled the retirement drumbeat. As Obama ran for reelection, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote what insiders had been whispering. Thurgood Marshall, for whom Kennedy had clerked, had retired in ill health, allowing George H. W. Bush to replace him with the ultraconservative Clarence Thomas. “Now, if Justice Ginsburg departs the Supreme Court with a Republican in the White House”—one that could be elected in 2012—“it is probable that the female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence Thomas,” Kennedy wrote. Technically, Kennedy aimed his advice at the five-years-younger Breyer too. “Those, like me, who admire their service might find it hard to hope that they will soon leave the Court—but service comes in many forms, including making way for others,” he wrote. It was RBG, however, and not Breyer, who was essentially followed around with a microphone pointed at her, journalists asking her when she would just get out already.
After Barack Obama was reelected, the clamor didn’t stop—after all, the Democrats faced an all but certain drubbing in the Senate in 2014, so there was a tiny window for Obama to appoint another liberal justice. (Democrats were indeed drubbed.) Women who had seen older women pushed out before or been pushed out themselves were furious at the pressure on RBG. Longtime Supreme Court chronicler Linda Greenhouse flat out called it sexist. “I am just pissed as hell at my friends, liberal law professors who urge her to retire,” says Sylvia Law, a law professor who worked with RBG in the seventies, “because she is a complete unique and wonderful gem on the court. There are so many cases, especially technical cases, where you read the majority and it doesn’t seem all that bad. And then you read Ruth’s dissent, and you realize they have just done something terrible.”
Justices try not to acknowledge what everyone else knows, which is that they tend to share many of the values of the president who appointed them. Each time she was asked about retirement, RBG walked a careful line. “There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president,” she said. In another interview, with Nina Totenberg, she went even further, offering, “Well, I’m very hopeful about 2016.” One reporter said she nodded when it was said aloud that the next presidential election could bring the first female president. “Yes,” RBG replied, “and wouldn’t that be fantastic.” A Hillary Clinton presidency might be the perfect moment for RBG
to step down, but for now, she stays because she loves the job.
RBG has her own metric for when it’s time to go. “When I forget the names of cases that I once could recite at the drop of a hat,” she said, “I will know.” She’s not there yet.
SEEKING OUT THE JOYS OF BEING ALIVE
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“Do you want to see Marty’s kitchen?” RBG recently asked her friend Anita Fial when she visited RBG’s Watergate apartment. It is still Marty’s kitchen, except these days, Jane comes down from New York and spends weekends at her mother’s house cooking. In the freezer, Jane leaves behind little packages of meals, each marked “chicken” or “fish.”
“Sometimes she’ll be going to sleep just as I’m waking up,” says Jane. “If I see that the paper has been brought inside, I know it’s not because she got up early.” Her mother still spends the weekends catching up on sleep she misses during the week.
Life after Marty has fallen into a kind of rhythm. In the old days, as she worked until the job was done, Marty would tell her that if she went to bed, in the morning everything would be clearer. “He was right,” RBG said after Marty’s death. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a maze, then go to sleep thinking about the way out, and when I wake up in the morning, I see the path. But now there’s no one telling me it’s time to quit.”
On mornings that the court is in session, the U.S. marshals make sure she’s awake. “She lives off coffee,” says her granddaughter Clara, who lived with her grandmother for a summer. Without it, “she will not engage.”
Asked what had been the most surprising thing about growing older, RBG was characteristically crisp. “Nothing surprised me. But I’ve learned two things. One is to seek ever more the joys of being alive, because who knows how much longer I will be living? At my age, one must take things day by day.” She added, “I had some trying times when my husband died. We’d been married for fifty-six years and knew each other for sixty. Now, four years later, I’m doing what I think he would have wanted me to do.”