by Gail Sheehy
“Gail is here! C’mon down!” His voice filled the vast room. “Where’s Maura?”
“With her father for the weekend.”
“I’ll be up shortly. We’ve been invited to a cocktail party for Pamela Harriman.”
The situation was ludicrous. Here I was, hot off the subway in my jeans and boots with two bags full of groceries, imagining I’d cook us a cozy little supper. Instead, I was expected to be suited up in a chic little cocktail number for a party to celebrate the marriage of one of the most famous courtesans of the twentieth century. Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, once described as “a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings,” was the daughter-in-law of Sir Winston Churchill. The very day after her second husband died, she had gone back to her old lover, Averell Harriman. A month later, she had walked the venerated seventy-nine-year-old ambassador down the aisle.
“Tonight?” I gasped.
“Friends are giving them a little party,” Clay said casually. “Drinks at six.”
I set my humble bags down in the bedroom. The room smelled of roses; he had put a vase of yellow ones on the night table. A nice touch. But I couldn’t help feeling like a letter slipped under the door marked Addressee Unknown.
NOT A MOMENT TO CATCH my breath from the day we moved in. Mornings were a rush to get Maura off to school. During the day, I was always on deadline for Clay’s magazine. He’d dash past the desk while I was desperately trying to close a story by six o’clock—
“Why aren’t you home? Dinner’s at eight.”
He just assumed I’d also be home and dressed in time for a command performance as his companion at a plated dinner party where most of the other women would have had their nails lacquered like Chinese empresses, their pores glazed like English porcelain, and their lashes thickened like privet hedges, the better to make eyes at the richest men. I would usually be the youngest female at the party, but an ink-stained working waif by comparison, with waves of unmanageable red hair and wearing a then-twenty-nine-dollar Diane von Furstenberg wraparound dress.
WITH ALL THE FRENETIC ACTIVITY of sharing life with Clay, I was worried about the impact on Maura. She had started kindergarten at Grace Church School, a wonderfully nurturing primary school where the children began the day with organ music and the Lord’s Prayer in the chapel of the imposing Gothic-style Episcopal church. But for Maura, then five, Clay’s apartment was a castle beyond imagining. She slept like a princess in the four-poster. Carved on the headboard were fantastical wooden animals. Her tiny school uniforms hung in a closet that she could reach only by standing on a footstool. Her own recollections, which she gave me permission to include, are more vivid than any I can render, since she knew Clay’s world from the point of view of a young child:
I was five or six when I began to form the impression that Clay was magic. Whenever he thrust out a hand for a taxi, a checker cab appeared, even though there were hardly any left in New York at the time. I’d look up Second Avenue, or wherever we were, at the tide of charging yellow and there wouldn’t be one in sight. I’d think, “It’s not gonna happen this time,” and the next thing I knew I was climbing into a checker and opening up the jump seat, trying to remember when I looked away.
The door to Clay’s apartment on 57th Street was always wide open, propped by a solid brass lion. Clay didn’t need a door, he just needed a portal, a threshold. The world wasn’t supposed to stay out; it was supposed to come in. The buttons on the phone were always alight, people always calling, always coming over, always talking, meeting, asking, answering, eating, reading, listening, arguing, pitching, laughing. There was magic throughout the place.
Clay wasn’t like anyone else. He didn’t laugh like anyone else. Just a single, HA! And maybe a second, ha!, if he was really amused. He spoke in headlines and exclamation points; “The kid’s home from school!” From Clay’s life, I learned about passion for one’s work. Not driven duty but the deepest possible creative fulfilled engagement. I saw him inspire legions, especially my mother. If he thought you could do it—and he always seemed to—you could.
In the city when we went somewhere with him, he’d often just start off walking, impossibly fast, as if pushing against the atmosphere. Down some dark street the wrong way from home, I’d yank my mother to keep up, which couldn’t be done in her heels. If I asked how much longer, he’d just stab a pointed finger into the air and grunt “just . . . just . . . just . . .” and suddenly he’d stop and there would be a door where it never seemed there would be one and we would go in and there would be some great music, a splendid room, some unbelievable delight. People, sounds, something happening. It was magic.
As I grew up, most of my childish impressions were corrected by the world. But not this one about Clay being magic. Instead I realized that everyone else thought so too.
It was going to take a long time to get to know this man in all his contradictory guises. He wanted me in his life yet he warned me more than once not to become emotionally dependent on him. “My emotions move with glacial slowness.” On the other side of our most tender moments, I felt those icy crevices open and swallow him. I brought the adulation of a young disciple, the sutured heart of a betrayed wife, and the insecurities of a child-woman who didn’t know how to play the part of hostess to the great man. But when it was good, it was very, very good.
CHAPTER 12
Fear of Feminism
CLAY STAGED AN EARLY FIRST SKIRMISH between the sexes at an unforgettable dinner party in February 1969. The setting was the Park Avenue apartment of Armand Erpf, Clay’s most faithful benefactor. His living room was a billion-dollar art gallery with Impressionist paintings casually interspersed with priceless Renaissance art. An elfin man over seventy, Armand’s most recent acquisition was a bewitching wife. Almost twice his girth and roughly forty years younger, Sue Erpf sat opposite him at the end of a stately dining table, black eyes blazing, black hair curling over her shoulders, breasts proudly displayed in an empire gown. Armand had found the perfect complement to his aging Giacometti ascetic, a flesh-and-blood incarnation of a nineteenth-century Courbet nude.
To provide the evening’s entertainment for Armand’s rich donor friends, Clay had invited two of his most formidable women writers, Gloria Steinem and Barbara Goldsmith, along with me. We were meant to be bait for the star guest, a biological anthropologist named Lionel Tiger. He had written his first book, Men in Groups, expounding a deterministic thesis meant to prove men’s biological superiority as hunters and women’s subservient purpose as breeders. His own biological superiority was not immediately obvious, although his unusually short stature and chimp-shaped ears did clearly link him to a primate past. Mr. Tiger’s book had not been published yet; Clay was eager to hear our reactions. And we wanted to perform for Clay.
“We are entering a period of intense personal acrimony between the sexes,” Tiger began pontificating. Stony silence. “The seriously competing woman between the ages of thirty and forty must forget about having children.”
Goldsmith and I squirmed. We both had children already, and we certainly had not dropped out of the competition. But we said nothing.
“The prerequisite is to forgo offspring,” Tiger repeated. “Or drop out and lose her place in the pecking order.”
Gloria was single and childless, by choice. I waited for her to pin his ears back, expecting her to say something like, To “forgo offspring” is a choice women can now make. The Pill gives us control over reproduction. You must know, Mr. Tiger, this is the bedrock of the feminist revolution. But Gloria, too, said nothing. She remembered later that Armand and his wife both sounded off when I spoke approvingly about seeing male graduate students with baby carriers strapped to their chests. “How pathetic,” Sue Erpf said. “So unmasculine.”
I had just published a cover story in New York titled “The Men of Women’s Liberation Have Learned Not to Laugh.” I was still a graduate student at Columbia University and in a prime position to observe a fierce and of
ten funny lashing out at men by the brightest of young, outspoken women. I had written about Polly, who went nowhere without her latest copy of Aphra, the first feminist literary pamphlet. Her boyfriend, Jerry, was used to treading on eggshells for fear of unconsciously dropping a male chauvinist remark just as they were cuddling into precoital mode on some sunken couch in the common area of his dorm.
“The way I look at it,” Jerry told Polly, “about the worst goddamn thing to be these days is a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon American male.” Polly gave him her byzantine stare. “What I mean is,” he tried to explain, “you haven’t got a damn thing to be oppressed about so everyone treats you like a crumb.” Polly fixed him with her blinkless stare.
“You just try being a woman in this society. It’s like being a cripple. For nineteen years I thought it was just me, but now we’re getting a sisterhood together. I’m sorry, Jerry”—she slipped off her engagement ring—“we’ve come to the period of separatism.”
Jerry was left speechless.
“I suggest,” Polly said, as she rolled his pants and shorts into a neat bundle and lobbed it into his arms, “you form a men’s consciousness-raising group as fast as you can.”
This may sound like dialogue you just heard in the next seats at the movies. One might have hoped that fifty years after the arc of male privilege began to end, only the angriest white men would still feel a sense of aggrieved entitlement. But there you are.
AS COFFEE WAS SERVED in the Erpfs’ living room, Clay raised the subject of women in politics. Gloria had begun raising money for women as political candidates.
Tiger ridiculed the idea that women could be effective in politics. “The problem women have is they can’t bond with one another.” That touched a raw nerve. Of course we didn’t know yet how to bond; we had been competing for crumbs from the table. Gloria made a provocative suggestion. A woman might run for president in the next election. (No one had yet dreamed that an African American woman, Shirley Chisholm, would do just that a year later.) Tiger’s face gave a shrug of disbelief. Gloria looked to me to back her up. Here, I must confess that my memory may have rearranged the climax of that evening. I would like to think that I came up with some smart riposte to Tiger’s hyperchauvinism. I must have voiced at least some lame defense of the right to self-determination that was surging in women like Gloria and Barbara and myself. When I later asked Gloria for her recollection of the evening, she gently administered the shock of counterfeit memory.
“It was at that dinner that you said women had ‘labial personalities,’” she wrote to me. “It came across to me that you were taking sides with the biological determinism of Lionel Tiger, who was a clear adversary. To be truthful, I had hoped you would be an ally.”
Did I really say “labial personalities”? What on earth did that mean? That women’s heads were dominated by their carnal desires? I don’t think I was aware yet of the manifold delights of the female erotic response system, much less their anatomical names. I’d certainly never uttered the “v” word; it would take thirty more years for Eve Ensler to make vagina a household word. I might have said women had “labile” personalities, which wasn’t much better. That would just have reinforced the stereotype that women’s emotions were in constant flux. What was I afraid of? Clay thinking that I was one of those ball-busting barracudas who seemed to be taking over the fledgling women’s movement at that time?
Whatever words I used, I am ashamed to admit that I let Gloria down.
Rather than allow Tiger the triumph of goading two women into disagreeing with each other, Gloria remained silent as we finished coffee. The dinner party was becoming unbearably uncomfortable. Clay tried to lighten things up. “When I was at Esquire, I gave Gloria the assignment to write the first article on the Pill. She came back with an exegesis on the science behind birth control.”
Gloria laughed. “Clay told me, ‘You have performed the incredible feat of making sex dull.’” Tiger wouldn’t let it go. “The Pill is the biggest put-on of the century,” he declared. From notes, I recall him stating that the Pill maintains women in a constant state of counterfeit pregnancy, thereby rendering men highly dispensable and no threat.
That was a clue to men’s fear that drugs and technology could make them irrelevant (not an unfounded fear, as it turned out). Armand Erpf weighed in. “Men have the power. We will always be dominant.” His wife, happy chatelaine of his vast apartment and his thirty-two-room country estate, nodded and raised her crystal goblet in a toast to the status quo.
The dinner party didn’t so much end as dissolve, with each of us fumbling among the hanging coats for something safe and familiar. Gloria and Barbara rode down in the elevator together. Standing on the street to hail a cab, Barbara looked at Gloria and vowed, “I will never, ever, ever again in my life keep my mouth shut.” Gloria looked at Barbara and repeated the same vow. I heard later that Gloria let loose with one of her zingers: “Tiger wouldn’t be so addicted to his idea of ‘masculinity’ if he were three inches taller.”
Clay hailed a taxi and opened the door for me. I glared at him. “I can take care of myself, thank you.” Inside, I couldn’t wait to light up. Fumbling for the box of Newports in my bag, I remembered that Clay disapproved of smoking, especially in women. I took my sweet time opening the new box, tapping to tease out one long tube of pleasure with its fine white filter, probably replaying in my mind the commercial of a young couple playing tag in the waves and then flopping down on the beach so he could light up a Newport for each of them. This was my pathetic little passive-aggressive retaliation for the evening’s scenario. All the way back to his apartment, we snapped in personal acrimony. Clay never lit my cigarette. This was the paradox of our early radicalization. I still wanted to be the girl.
“YOU’RE NOT GIVING YOURSELF the huge credit you deserve for changing, as most of us were doing profoundly, in different ways,” Gloria wrote to me after reading the first draft of this chapter. Gloria’s recollection of that early period in the movement was that “Women began to actually tell the truth and not to ‘Uncle Tom’ and be ‘feminine.’ We were less likely to seek a derived identity through men—and thus manipulate them or expect the impossible.”
What made me fear changing was the prospect of choosing between an either-or. I was not then, not ever, willing to give up being feminine. And neither, by all evidence, was Gloria, which is what made her so effective. With her low, creamy voice and natural beauty, Ms. Steinem as she came to be called, having invented that simple honorific, rarely if ever antagonized men. On the contrary, she charmed them, played games of wit with them, politely listened to them, and never argued without insulating her words with a warm laugh. Men often found themselves nodding to curry her favor, until they got home and analyzed her actual words and had a virulent attack of indigestion.
Here was the dilemma for me in those early times: how to preserve the best of our inborn feminine nature—our nurturing, compassionate, and ferociously protective instincts, our insights, our powers of love and, yes, female attraction, which are vital in ameliorating the more aggressive nature of men—while we discovered our power to say No! to inequality.
Up to that moment in 1969, I didn’t consider myself a feminist; I thought of myself as a humanist. Gloria was a few years older and far more sophisticated politically, but she wasn’t a card-carrying feminist yet, either. Yet she was breaking new ground. Clay had given her “The City Politic” to write. She was one of the first women to pen provocative essays on politics. Gloria had no interest in marriage or children. In her spare time she raised money for female political candidates and flew to California to organize protests for migrant workers. I wondered when she had time for men. In fact, she was one of the more sexually prolific women of our generation.
When my early dream of working to put hubby through graduate school was smashed, I’d had to start all over again. Who was I if not my father’s little winner? Who was I if not my husband’s helpmate? I didn’t even ha
ve a name to call my own. “Sheehy” belonged to Albert. Who would I be when I didn’t belong to anyone? These were the kinds of shattering questions that millions of women were being forced to confront. Gloria had been invited to join Betty Friedan’s new organization for women, NOW. She had politely refused. When asked by NOW to join a sit-in at the Plaza Oak Room in February of 1969, she begged off. You will find this hard to believe: for women to be served lunch there, we had to be accompanied by a man. Nine years earlier, in 1960, four brave black American male college students had seated themselves at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s and remained seated when they were refused service. Their passive resistance helped to ignite a sit-in movement all over the South to challenge racial inequality. Yet here we were, fortunate northern white women in one of the most liberal cities in America, becoming aware that we were being discriminated against in the same way.
Friedan had picked the Plaza to attract mainstream publicity. She urged her group of demonstrators to wear fur coats, intending to differentiate the proper upper-middle-class membership of NOW from the radical feminists who had recently been ridiculed for burning their bras at the 1968 Miss America Pageant.
Arriving at the Plaza in black mink and dark sunglasses, Friedan hardly looked like a revolutionary leader. Her group brushed past the maître d’ to seat themselves at a round table in the center of the room. They were ignored. Finally, waiters hoisted the table over their heads and left the women sitting in a circle like kindergartners waiting for the teacher. Friedan turned to reporters and announced triumphantly that they were being refused service. That simple action thrust NOW to the forefront of leadership of the nascent women’s movement.