Of course, Steinem’s looks alone were more than enough reason for jealousy, the underlying cause of much of the sniping over the years. And because she presented herself in a sexy way, other women often acted as if she must be insincere. The fact that her desirability conferred obvious privileges only exacerbated their suspicions of hypocrisy. “The thing I find most irritating about her is that I think she doesn’t tell the truth,” says one former editor. “When she says, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ it’s a great quote, but I don’t think you get to say it if you never in your life spent twenty minutes without a man.”
Not that Steinem ever conformed to conventional expectations about what you were supposed to do with a man once you got him. “She had all these guys, some of them really wonderful, and she didn’t marry any of them—unforgivable!” Smith says. “She didn’t have any children—unforgivable! She dared to be in love with Mort Zuckerman and not marry him! I think he was really in love with her and would have married her. But what she did was impale her conscience over it, because she was in love with him and didn’t want to be. She would say to me, ‘Have you ever been in love with somebody who was totally inappropriate?’ I said, ‘I’ve never been in love with any other kind! Relax and enjoy it!’ If I had been Gloria, I would have married him in a minute and used his money to accomplish my ends, but she didn’t really approve of him. People think any woman would do anything to marry a rich guy, but she didn’t want to marry him.”
Steinem didn’t make her detractors feel any better with remarks such as her much-quoted crack that she couldn’t “mate in captivity,” an image that made more conventional types feel rather like monkeys in depressing little cages. “People would like to believe she has some regret for making those choices, because otherwise maybe they should have made those choices,” says Letty Pogrebin. “She doesn’t seem to have suffered for them, and they would like to believe she has suffered for them, because otherwise they have to question their own lives.”
But the most important reason Steinem never wanted to be a parent has always been clear to her intimates. “I think she’s already had a child, and it was her mother, and therefore I don’t believe she has an interest in doing it again,” says Stan Pottinger, who was an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department when he and Steinem first got involved in the 1970s. “If she’s ever had more than a passing regret, I’ve never seen it. I don’t believe it’s there, and if it is, it’s so deeply suppressed that it’s not an issue for her.”
Steinem’s mother was “an invalid who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies, in a child’s version of what meals should be,” as Steinem would later write in her collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Her mother had been a journalist who loved her newspaper career, but she gave it up after she married and had children, and from then on she struggled with the nervous breakdowns, the terrible hallucinations, the dependence on the knockout drops her doctor supplied, the fear of leaving her own house. Eventually her husband, a charming but feckless man who prided himself on never wearing a hat and never working for somebody else, couldn’t take it anymore and moved to California, leaving ten-year-old Gloria to cope alone. Abandoned by her adored father and unassisted on a day-to-day basis by her sister, who was many years older and off on her own, the little girl retreated into a world of books, fantasizing that she had been adopted and that her real parents would someday find her. Eventually she escaped to Smith College, a triumph made possible when her mother managed to sell their deteriorating farmhouse, whose broken-down furnace had already been condemned by the health department; the house was bought for demolition by the church next door.
It scarcely seems surprising that such a child might grow up with a self-esteem problem, but the mere sight of Gloria always made it so hard to believe. She has often referred to her self-image as a “fat brunette from Toledo,” but that vision seemed so preposterous to other people that they assumed she was being disingenuous. To Steinem, however, whose father weighed three hundred pounds and whose sister was also obese, the vision was all too real. It dictated her hairstyle—“I was always hiding behind my hair because I thought I had a fat face,” she says apologetically—and her eating habits, which have always been bizarre. Steinem describes herself as a compulsive “fooda-holic”; her friends say she isn’t exaggerating. “There was never anything in her refrigerator, because she was afraid she would eat it,” explains Suzanne Levine. “I’ve seen her around a jar of chocolate cookies, and she just can’t stop. At Ms. she’d be in the office late at night and she’d go on a binge; she’d raid all the desks, and you’d come in the next morning to find these lovely little notes: ‘I took your Tootsie Roll,’ ‘I took your Cheez Whiz,’ ‘I’ll replace it,’ ‘I’m so sorry . . . ’”
“She would sit down and say she didn’t want any, and then she would eat it all,” says Letty Pogrebin. “As time went on, I began to see that she’s a person who’s always on the brink of eating it all. She’s got a finger in the dike—that’s why she’s thin—but let it out and she’s instantly overwhelmed. You can’t be not parented the way she was not parented and not do something with that pain. A lot of her placidity and peacefulness is papered-over pain, I’m sure—but that is not something she could have acknowledged or discussed until recently.”
Ever since Steinem’s cancer scare several years ago (she had a lumpectomy and has been fine ever since), she has been working on improving both the inner and the outer manifestations of her delinquent self-image. She eats differently, opting for grains instead of bologna sandwiches; she exercises; she stays home more. She still streaks her hair lightly, but the blatant stripes of an earlier era are gone. “I thought of them as rebellious,” she explains. “It was just a way of saying, ‘Fuck you.’ Brunette ladies did not streak their hair with obvious streaks in those days, and the whole point was not to be a lady. But I’m thinking of stopping altogether.” She grins. “As Alice Walker says, ‘Oppressed hair puts a ceiling on the brain.’”
And the last thing Steinem wants to do anymore is put a ceiling on her brain; she’s got too much to do for that. Now that Ms. is a reader-supported magazine owned by Lang Communications, Steinem no longer has to spend her time peddling advertising; she is a consulting editor who comes and goes as she pleases, secure in the knowledge that the magazine’s future doesn’t depend on her. [Today, Ms. is published by the Feminist Majority Foundation.] And having written her book at long last, perhaps the logjam is broken and others will stream forth. Certainly she has the energy, and the faith. “Women are lucky, in a way,” she says earnestly. “We have a hope, a dream of greater justice, of what society could look like. To have a vision—we all need that. I see little miracles women perform in their everyday lives, sometimes opposed by their own families, sometimes ridiculed by their own husbands, and somehow they do it anyway. It’s the cleaning woman in the airport who sees me sleeping on a bench where they’ve put all these armrests so you can’t lie down, and she says, ‘Honey, there’s a broom closet over there where I sleep when the foreman isn’t looking,’ and who then tells me about how her husband beat her up for so many years and how she finally wouldn’t put up with it anymore, and now she has this job—and that’s a miracle. I think to myself, If this was all I lived to see, this would be enough. How many people have in their lives, and in their work, a number of things that make them feel, ‘If I only did that!’? I realize people have that about their children, but a lot of us were motherless, because our mothers didn’t have the power to protect us, so the movement is partly about being mothers to each other.”
We are sitting in her living room, I on a cheerful yellow chintz armchair, she on the plush green velvet sofa; it is dusk, and the streetlights have begun to glow outside the soaring fron
t windows. For twenty years Steinem slept on a platform loft in one corner of this room, so she could use the back of her two-room apartment as an office, but when she got the $700,000 book advance for Revolution from Within she bought two rooms downstairs and connected them with a spiral staircase. (The first two rooms cost her $23,000 in 1977; ten years later, the second two cost her $323,000.) Steinem jokes that she used her first book advance to buy the additional rooms, and the $500,000 advance for the next book she’s agreed to write to pay the taxes on the first advance, but after a lifetime of financial precariousness there is enough of a margin that she has even established a belated pension fund for herself. And she finally has a big canopied bed irresistibly dressed in mountains of pristine white lace, a little girl’s dream of a bed, a magical haven where nothing bad could ever happen to you and all your dreams would be wonderful. “It’s so satisfying to feel as though I have a home!” she says. “And even when I’m by myself, I’m as real as I am when I’m being useful, or when there are other people around.” There is a sardonic grin on her face. “And I occasionally ask myself the revolutionary question ‘What do you want to do?’ as opposed to what needs doing, what other people want me to do, or what I’m expected to do!” She sighs ruefully. “That may not sound like much, but for me it’s a pretty big change.”
Friends are waiting at an old-fashioned French restaurant to have dinner with her, but later on tonight Steinem will come home alone; there is no beau these days. “For the first time in my life,” she says, bemused at the thought. “If I say it feels wonderful, I don’t mean that I wasn’t happy being involved. It feels wonderful in a different way. I suppose I’m doing something now that I should have done at sixteen.” And what will her future hold? She smiles. “I feel as if now I know what I want to say, I should begin it,” she says.
ADDENDUM, IN A 1991 LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
In the context of questions about the sale of Ms. magazine in 1987, I answered what I heard as a query about whether or not Mortimer Zuckerman had offered to save Ms. from sale. Since he had been among those urging a sale, I answered no. As the query was paraphrased in print, however, it was about “help.” In fact, he had earlier been one of those who made contributions to the educational foundation that owned Ms. and also co-signed bank loans (the last of which was repaid with interest by the foundation with proceeds from Ms.’s sale). He also assigned his staff to give us advice.
Gloria Steinem
New York, New York
LESLIE BENNETTS’S REPLY, AT THE TIME:
Gloria Steinem was quoted as indicating that Mortimer Zuckerman had failed to help Ms. magazine when it was struggling for survival. Mr. Zuckerman has informed Vanity Fair that Ms. Steinem’s statement was incorrect and that he donated a total of $406,151 to the Ms. Foundation for Women and the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication (which operated Ms. magazine) in seven different contributions of varying amounts between 1984 and 1990. Mr. Zuckerman also guaranteed three separate bank loans worth a total of $995,000—all were eventually repaid with interest by Ms.—and guaranteed a printing contract and paper supplies. In addition he assigned his most senior executives to consult with Ms. and advise the magazine on its financial problems. In her December 11 [1991] letter to Vanity Fair, Ms. Steinem places our discussion about Ms. magazine “in the context of questions about the sale” of the magazine, but this was not the case. I asked her whether or not Mr. Zuckerman’s financial assets were part of his appeal for her. She replied that they were a factor, not so much because she was personally interested in his money but because she hoped he might use it to help Ms. magazine, among other causes. I then asked whether Mr. Zuckerman had done so. “No,” she replied. Contrary to what Ms. Steinem says in her letter, and as my notes show, the query was indeed about helping the magazine, not about saving it. I regret that Ms. Steinem’s assertion was incorrect.
THE MUSICIANS
MICHELLE PHILLIPS
CALIFORNIA DREAMGIRL
By Sheila Weller | December 2007
When Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty spoke on January 18, they did as they’d done for 40 years: “We made it a point to keep things very professional and not . . . slip back,” Michelle says in that arch, bemused way of hers. “Slip back” into talking like lovers, she means. Denny was about to undergo surgery for an abdominal aneurysm, and she’d called with moral support, her reliable compassion delivered with its usual frankness. “I was gung-ho and positive. ‘If it has to be done, just get it over with!’”
The Mamas and the Papas had always remained a family—a shadow of the old, clamorous family, to be sure (“It was two and a half years of total melodrama,” Michelle fondly recalls), but touchingly close, even through the decades of Sturm und Drang that postdated their breakup. Early on, their ranks had been thinned from four to three (in 1974, Cass Elliot died, at a tragically young 32, of a heart attack); then, much later, from three to two: in 2001, John Phillips, 65, finally succumbed, after decades of drinking and drugs, to heart failure. And so, by last January, only Denny, 66, and Michelle, then 62—like the little Indians in the children’s rhyme—remained standing, their old, red-hot affair, which had nearly torn the group apart, self-protectively excised from their frequent reminiscences.
That two people in the seventh decade of their lives would need to try to bury several months of ancient lust is a testament to the mystique that has long outlived the group’s thin songbook and brief domination of the pop charts. The Mamas and the Papas were cannon-shot onto the airwaves when the country was still shaking off its post-Camelot conventionality; girls were wearing go-go boots, and boys were growing out their early-Beatles haircuts. No group had ever looked like them—a magnetic fat girl, a pouty blond beauty, two sexy Ichabod Cranes in funny hats—or sounded like them: Cass’s wry-beyond-her-years alto and Denny’s aching choirboy tenor lacing through that creamy, 1950s-prom-worthy close harmony, kissed with all those ba da da das.
The Mamas and the Papas were the first rich hippies, stripping folk rock of its last vestiges of Pete Seeger earnestness and making it ironic and sensual. They made the rock elite part and parcel of Hollywood. (Michelle’s eventual serial conquest of its three top young lions—Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty—nailed for her its femme fatale sweepstakes.) And then, just as fast as they’d streaked across the psychedelic sky, they burned out in some unseen solar system.
* * *
—
The day after her pep talk to Denny, Michelle got a phone call from Cass’s daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell. Denny was dead. He didn’t survive the operation.
“I’ll bury you all!,” Michelle had screamed at the other three one night in 1966, when they’d (temporarily) evicted her from the group for her romantic transgressions. Now that wounded taunt revealed itself as prophecy. Michelle flew to Toronto for Denny’s funeral and then to Halifax for his burial. No one loved the group more than she. For 25 years she had tried to bring a Mamas and the Papas movie to fruition. (The right script is in the process of being written.) She was the group’s impeccably preserved face on a PBS tribute. Now she was the last one standing.
Yet people who have seen Michelle mature into a consummate rescuer know she’s repaid her luck. According to Cass’s sister, Leah Kunkel (who started out “unsure Michelle had my sister’s best interests at heart”), “Michelle has rescued a lot of people over the years. I’ve come to really respect her.” Plastic surgeon Steven Zax, Michelle’s beau of eight years, says, “She is the most generous person I know. She drives hours to visit friends who are shut-ins. Every Saturday and Sunday she packs bags of fruit and sandwiches and money and takes them to the homeless, who know her by name.” And those who watched her mint the shrewd-chick archetype in the midst of the reckless, sexist counterculture don’t doubt her resilience. “I’m not saying Michelle was Helen of Troy, leading men to war while she remained unscathed, but that’s close,” says her onetime musical partner
Marshall Brickman. “She was a very clever, centered girl, to have kept afloat in that environment. There’s steel under that angelic smile.” According to Lou Adler, the Mamas and the Papas’ producer and Michelle’s lifelong friend and at one time romantic interest, “Michelle is the ultimate survivor—so loyal and ‘street’ that John and I called her Trixie. And, unlike John—who was swept away . . . who was a devil, on drugs—Michelle was more logical, more constant. She had an anchor, her dad.”
“My father was six foot three, dashingly handsome, and so unflappable nothing could rattle him,” Michelle is saying, sitting in her picture-windowed living room in L.A.’s leafy, off-the-status-track Cheviot Hills. In pride of place on the coffee table is a photo album of her three grandchildren from daughter Chynna, 39, and actor Billy Baldwin, yet she’s sipping wine in the early afternoon like any self-respecting sybarite.
Gardner “Gil” Gilliam, a movie-production assistant and self-taught intellectual, was all Michelle and her older sister, known as Rusty, had after their mother, Joyce, a Baptist minister’s daughter turned bohemian bookkeeper, dropped dead of a brain aneurysm when Michelle was five. Gil took the girls to Mexico for several years, then back to L.A. There, as a county probation officer who smoked pot and never made a secret of his love affairs (he would eventually marry five more times), he seemed to model the axiom “Hedonism requires discipline.” “My father had very few rules, but with those he was steadfast. ‘Clean up your messes.’ ‘Be a good citizen.’” (The code stuck. “I have never been late for work a day in my life, I refused to ask John for alimony, I have never been in rehab,” she enumerates proudly.) But young Michelle needed more than a male guide. “In retrospect, I see that I was looking for a girlfriend/mother figure.” In 1958 she found, through her sister’s boyfriend, a 23-year-old who had an unsurpassable store of harrowingly acquired female survival skills to impart.
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