Even the pros were blown away by Fey. “I’ve never seen a better impression,” the S.N.L. master of the art, Darrell Hammond, says. “If they put those two on a sonar, they would match up electronically.” Jon Stewart—her “Dear Diary,” as she calls it, teenage crush (replacing Danny Kaye) from his days at Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central—told The New York Times’s Bill Carter that Fey “had the single best line of this campaign year,” one she wrote herself and delivered in the role of Palin during the debate: “I believe marriage is a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers.”
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In October, it seemed that Tina Fey was the campaign, with journalists writing that she had “swift-butted” Palin and derailed her future. Two weeks before the election, Fey’s Palin and Palin’s Palin met cute: the two women walked past each other wordlessly in S.N.L.’s opening sketch. As cast member Casey Wilson, standing next to a giggling Secret Service agent backstage, looked at Palin on a monitor raising the roof to Amy Poehler’s racy Wasilla rap, she blurted out, “Oh, my God!” Watching a parade consisting of Mark Wahlberg, a donkey, Palin, and her Secret Service agents, a visiting screenwriter observed, “This is like a Fellini movie.”
The McCain camp was on hand to ride herd, cutting out Poehler’s rap line about how, in the Palins’ bedroom, it’s “drill, baby, drilla.”
There were passionate arguments leading up to Palin’s appearance. Some connected with the show did not want to give the Alaska governor a platform. Neither did bloggers on the Huffington Post. “The people on the left were like, ‘No, you can’t do that!’” Fey recalls. “And it’s like, ‘We don’t work for you.’” The famously liberal Baldwin also found that line of liberal reasoning silly, saying he was outraged that commenters on the Huffington Post compared Palin to David Duke: “Palin came there to get thrown in the dunk tank. She knew it and she was gracious.”
Still, the debate raged about the politics of Sarah Palin’s appearance on S.N.L. Did it help her? Did it hurt her? Was it demeaning to politics? Were late-night shows determining the election? Should a comedian care? (Similar questions had arisen after Fey’s “Weekend Update” comment about Hillary Clinton: “Bitch is the new black.”) After weeks of appearing on S.N.L. as Palin, Fey opted to minimize the onstage interaction when the real Palin finally showed up, and despite reams of speculation the reason wasn’t fundamentally political. “Tina was agonizing about it, and I’m drawn to anybody who agonizes about things,” says her friend Conan O’Brien. “She told me, ‘When I fly, I don’t like to meet the pilot.’ On the one hand, she knew: It’s my job to sort of go after this person in a way, but at the same time I know when I meet her, she’s a human being and a mom. She’s not the Devil incarnate or Antichrist.”
After the mock and real Palins do their walk-by—in identical red jackets and black skirts the S.N.L. seamstresses whipped up for the two women, with flag pins provided by Palin—Fey seems relieved. She changes and comes back to the small room offstage where Lorne Michaels’s guests are hanging out. There are some drinks on ice by the monitor in Lorne’s cubbyhole, and Fey has a glass of white wine in a plastic cup. “At least I can have one of these now,” she says, smiling, to Jeff Zucker, the NBC president, who crows that she is “the hottest thing in American culture.” She’s wearing a purple-and-white checked Steven Alan shirt, and black Seven for All Mankind pants. She has taken off her Palin-streaked beehive wig, and her dark-brown hair is pulled back in a thick ponytail. She looks like a really pretty graduate student, and she has a soft voice and reserve that Matthew Broderick says cause people to “lean in to her.” (Like Daisy Buchanan, except her voice is full of funny rather than money.) She says the moments with Palin—which she has been dreading because it has been an ugly week on the Republican campaign, and because you don’t like to meet someone you’re “goofing” on—have gone fine. “She asked me where my daughter was,” Fey says. (Alice had been there earlier at the rehearsal, pointing at the monitor showing Palin and thinking it was somehow her mommy, even though Mommy was with her.) “She said Bristol could have babysat.”
Fey chats about the election for a moment, wondering if Obama could be “another Jimmy Carter.” She tells Zucker, who is leaning against the wall, taking it all in, that she hasn’t yet called her “Republican parents” to see how they feel about tonight’s skit. Later, she tells me, “I grew up in a family of Republicans. And when I was 18 and registering to vote, my mom’s only instruction was ‘You just go in and pull the big Republican lever.’ That’s my welcome to adulthood. She’s like, ‘No, don’t even read it. Just pull the Republican lever.’” (Fey made a call to arrange for Richmond’s excited Republican parents and sister to meet Palin at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.)
Although some considered it a missed comedic opportunity, Fey says she didn’t want to do what Jim Downey, the burly writer who has done many of S.N.L.’s renowned political skits, calls “a classic sneaker-upper” with Palin. “I just didn’t want to have to do the impression at the same time with her,” she said. “One, it would shine a light on the inaccuracies of the impression, and, two, it’s just always . . . the only word I can think of is ‘sweaty.’ It just always feels sweaty.”
Two weeks after the appearance with Palin, Fey does another scorchingly funny Palin skit, this time with John McCain, a bit where Fey’s Palin goes “rogue” and starts selling “Palin in 2012” T-shirts on QVC. “A man running for president of the United States onstage with a woman playing his running mate—isn’t that a great moment in our country’s history?,” Lorne Michaels says in wonder as he leaves 30 Rock, wading through a throng of reporters, at 1:30 a.m. Adam McKay, Will Ferrell’s writing partner in Hollywood, wrote the S.N.L. sketch where Ferrell’s fumbling W. gives Fey’s flirtatious Palin an endorsement. “It is the most ridiculous, borderline-dangerous thing that the Republican vice-presidential nominee happened to look like the funniest woman working in America,” McKay says. “What if the next Republican presidential nominee looks exactly like Seth Rogen?”
Around the same time, Fey saw an entertainment reporter on TV say that Palin had been gracious toward Fey, but Fey hadn’t been gracious toward Palin. “What made me super-mad about it,” Fey says later, “was that it seemed very sexist toward me and her. The implication was that she’s so fragile, which she is not. She’s a strong woman. And then, also, it was sexist because, like, who would ever go on the news and say, ‘Well, I thought it was sort of mean to Richard Nixon when Dan Aykroyd played him,’ and ‘That seemed awful mean to George Bush when Will Ferrell did it.’ And it’s like, No, that’s not the thing. This is a comedy sketch on a comedy show.” “Mean,” we agreed, was a word that tends to get used on women who do satirical humor and, as she says, “gay guys.”
“I feel clean about it,” she says. “All these jokes were fair hits.”
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When Fey and her clever band of writers conjure up Liz Lemon, her 21st-century Mary Tyler Moore New York career girl, they put in a lot of Rhoda-like neuroses and insecurity about looks and food jokes and epically bad dates—though this season she’s upgraded to Mad Men’s sexy Jon Hamm, who plays a pediatrician who impresses Lemon with his love of pie-making documentaries and ice-cream makers. Liz is more like Seinfeld’s Elaine—bossy/awkward on the outside and meek/insecure at her core—than The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s poised Mary Richards. Fey borrows much of the material from her own life and her writers’ and actors’ lives, and then heightens it. Baldwin’s character has an obsessive relationship with an ex, and hers dates a little person she had initially mistaken for a child. Richmond wonders serenely if he inspired it.
Lemon noshes on “off-brand” Mexican cheese curls called “Sabor de Soledad”—“taste of solitude.” When forced to choose between a great man and a great sandwich, she puts the sandwich first. “No one has it harder in this country today than women,” Liz co
mplains to her friend Jenna. “It turns out we can’t be president. We can’t be network news anchors. Madonna’s arms look crazy.”
But in her own life, Fey is the stable one, just as Mary Richards was on TV, anchored among oddballs in her Minneapolis newsroom. Outside her comedy, Fey does not want drama. When I ask her if she ever gets the urge to straighten out Lindsay Lohan, who starred in Fey’s movie Mean Girls, or to counsel Tracy Morgan or Alec Baldwin when they hit tempestuous passages in their personal lives, she says, “I have no enabler bone in my body—not one. I’m sort of like, ‘Oh, are you going crazy? I’ll be back in an hour.’” She is the Obedient Daughter, the German taskmistress, the kind but firm maker and keeper of rules. And what Tina wants, Tina gets, sooner or later, because she works and works and works for it.
So what does she do with what she calls her “15 minutes,” now that she’s got America’s attention and a $5 million deal for a humor book?
Her manager, David Miner, whom she met when he was in the coatroom at Second City, has no doubt she’ll continue to call on the way up to his office and get a latte for his assistant. “She never looks at the world and says, ‘Give me this,’” he says. “She adapts and rolls up her sleeves.”
She’d like to “mono-task” for a change and pull 30 Rock into syndication. She’d like a slightly bigger apartment, so they can entertain more. (Jeff cooks and sews.) “I feel like the window is closing—I’m 38,” she says about having more kids. “Obviously you want the best chance of the baby being healthy, and I think with our life and jobs right as they are at this moment, it doesn’t seem possible. It’s the year after the baby comes that is like someone hitting you every day in the face with a hammer.”
Fey’s idea of an ideal day off is still the same: she and Jeff take Alice to the playground and go to the Neptune Room, a fish place around the corner, or the Shake Shack on the Upper West Side for shakes and burgers and fries.
Everybody wants to be Tina Fey, I tell her. Who do you want to be?
“I don’t want to be somebody else,” she says.
And why would she?
THE WHITE HOUSE
BARBARA BUSH
BARBARA’S BACKLASH
By Marjorie Williams | August 1992
Even Barbara Bush’s stepmother is afraid of her. Over the course of a half-hour interview, Willa Pierce, the South Carolina painter the First Lady’s widowed father married in 1952, hasn’t commented on anything much more controversial than her famous stepdaughter’s shoe size. But now, in a quavering voice, she is re-evaluating her decision to say anything at all.
“I could get in so much trouble if I said something she didn’t agree with,” the elderly widow says pleadingly. “Because you know how she is: she knows how she wants to appear to the world.”
Indeed: Barbara Bush is America’s grandmother, casual, capable, down-to-earth; she is fake pearls and real family. “I’m not a competitive person,” she once said, “and I think women like me because they don’t think I’m competitive, just nice.” She bakes cookies, knits, needlepoints. She is funny, but mostly at her own expense. She is a woman so modest that she writes in the voice of a dog.
At a time when George Herbert Walker Bush has slid almost fifty points in most polls in a little more than a year, Barbara Bush stands as close to universal popularity as any figure in American life. Her approval rating is forty, even fifty points higher than her husband’s, and she gets as many as eight thousand letters a month. Aides call her “the National Treasure”—“the treasure” for short—in sly tribute to the qualities that make her an awesome asset to her husband.
The First Lady’s hard work on causes ranging from AIDS to illiteracy has been justly praised, but it has also helped to obscure the void of the Bush domestic policy with a theater of activism. She is, first and foremost, her husband’s alter ego, charged with showing his compassion in the areas that an aide merrily summarizes as “poverty, pain, and degradation, basically.”
“In the thirty-some years I’ve been around American politics, she’s far and away the greatest political spouse I’ve seen,” says political strategist Edward J. Rollins, one of the managers of [independent presidential candidate] Ross Perot’s campaign. And her help has never been more important than at the current moment, when political advisers to Bush have taken to joking that every one of the president’s speeches should include the phrase “Barbara and I . . .”
It is an extra stroke of luck for the president that the Democrats’ answer to Barbara Bush is Hillary Clinton. “I’ll take a matchup between George and Barbara Bush and Bill and Hillary Clinton any day,” says a senior Bush adviser. “People like Barbara Bush. And people don’t like Hillary Clinton.” Even if Ross Perot, not Bill Clinton, proves to be the greater threat to Bush’s re-election, Margot Perot seems unlikely to divert much attention from the symbolic face-off between her more famous counterparts. Republican strategists will be working overtime to remind us that the Arkansas governor’s controversial wife is the perfect foil for the First Lady’s image as the embodiment of all cardinal virtues.
It is an image that has been perfectly honed through almost four years at the White House. “Short of ax murder,” says former Bush spokeswoman Sheila Tate, “I think she could get away with anything. She’s so benign.”
Then why are people so scared of her?
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Current and former associates inevitably set anonymity as the price of any statement at variance with the myth.
“People always said Nancy Reagan would kill you if you said bad stuff about her,” says one staff aide who worked closely with the Bushes during his vice presidency. “But I always thought Mrs. Bush was the one who would kill you. . . . No one sat around and gossiped about Mrs. Bush. I don’t think it was that people loved her; I think everyone was scared of her. It was just like when your mother said, ‘I have eyes in the back of my head.’”
People who have worked with the Bushes use words and phrases like “difficult” . . . “tough as nails” . . . “demanding” . . . “autocratic.” A 1988-campaign staffer recalls that “when she frowned it had the capacity to send shudders through a lot of people.”
And one longtime associate explained his refusal to talk—even to describe his most positive feelings about Mrs. Bush—by saying, straight-faced, “I don’t want to be dead. . . . I really like her, but I don’t go anywhere near her.”
Some of the fear she inspires is a function of her position: no one wants to piss off a president by crossing his wife. But the widespread apprehension that Barbara Bush creates is also a fear of the woman herself.
The same reporters who spin misty reports of Barbara Bush toiling in soup kitchens discuss a different reality among themselves: the flinty stare she fixes on the source of a question she doesn’t like; the humorous dig; the chilly put-down. For behind her rampart of pearls, the nation’s most self-effacing celebrity is in fact a combative politician. Always there, not far below the surface, is the Barbara Bush who briefly emerged in 1984 to denounce Geraldine Ferraro as “that $4 million—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with ‘rich.’”
This Barbara Bush has a brilliant grasp of image, and has always understood a chief source of her appeal: that she is—as folks in Washington never tire of pointing out—Not Nancy [Reagan].
During inaugural week in 1989 she made unmistakable digs at her predecessor, especially by spoofing her own new clothes: “Please notice—hairdo, makeup, designer dress,” she said at one event. “Look at me good this week, because it’s the only week.”
Washington lapped it up—despite the fact that Barbara Bush had been wearing makeup, designer dresses, and “hairdos” for years. True, her earlier instincts had run to shirtwaists and circle pins. But by the time George Bush became president, his wife was a faithful customer of Arnold Scaasi and Bill Blass. Similarly, she has commissioned interior designer Mark H
ampton to work on every house in which the Bushes have lived since 1981, both private and official.
Yet, today, she has successfully established her image as one too down-to-earth for fashion. “Personally, I think she’s tougher than Nancy, but in a much more sophisticated way. . . . She’s a pretty slick lady,” says one sharp-eyed former Reagan aide, who counts such details as the $1,245 Judith Leiber bag that was a gift from the designer.
While she has excelled by poking fun at herself—her hair, her age, her waistline—aides have learned that they cannot count on this self-abasement: the First Lady is not amused when someone else tries to inject this note into a speech written for her.
Barbara Bush controls her press more tightly than Nancy Reagan ever dreamed of doing. She uses publicity to good effect when she sees an opportunity to deliver a useful message. In one of her first public events as First Lady, for example, she arranged to be photographed holding an AIDS baby, to convey the message that the disease can’t be contracted through casual contact.
But she almost never sits down alone with news reporters who cover the White House regularly. Instead, she speaks to them a few times a year over ladylike luncheons in the family quarters, where they feel constrained by her hospitality. Reporters are social creatures, too, and are far less likely to lob a hostile question over the zucchini soup. (Mrs. Bush declined to be interviewed for this article, and most of her family, including her children, followed suit.)
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