Daring Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my grandchildren,

  Declan, Eva, and Mairead

  EPIGRAPH

  I THINK IT IS ALL A MATTER OF LOVE: THE MORE YOU LOVE A MEMORY, THE STRONGER AND STRANGER IT IS.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE:

  THE PYGMALION YEARS

  CHAPTER 1

  Do I Dare?

  CHAPTER 2

  Crossroads of a Million Private Lives

  CHAPTER 3

  False Starts

  CHAPTER 4

  Deceptions

  CHAPTER 5

  Seduction at the Algonquin

  CHAPTER 6

  Love and Death in the Year America Came Apart

  CHAPTER 7

  Failing Up

  CHAPTER 8

  The New York Family

  CHAPTER 9

  “I’ll Make You a Star”

  CHAPTER 10

  Hiding Out at Woodstock

  CHAPTER 11

  Playing House

  CHAPTER 12

  Fear of Feminism

  CHAPTER 13

  Women Helping Women

  CHAPTER 14

  Redpants and Regrets

  CHAPTER 15

  Secret of Grey Gardens

  CHAPTER 16

  Fighting Irish Women

  CHAPTER 17

  Kissinger and the Kitchen Wars

  CHAPTER 18

  Stepping off the Pedestal

  PART TWO:

  THE PASSAGES YEARS

  CHAPTER 19

  Lovebirds

  CHAPTER 20

  Birthing Passages

  CHAPTER 21

  Fear of Failure or Fear of Success?

  CHAPTER 22

  Fatal Attraction

  CHAPTER 23

  Power Fever

  CHAPTER 24

  Murdoch Makes His Move

  CHAPTER 25

  For the Love of Editors

  CHAPTER 26

  The Mission That Found Me

  CHAPTER 27

  Separations

  CHAPTER 28

  Discovering Mohm

  CHAPTER 29

  A Passage for Keeps

  CHAPTER 30

  Finding a New Voice at Vanity Fair

  CHAPTER 31

  Start-Ups

  CHAPTER 32

  Two Who Changed the World

  CHAPTER 33

  The Silent Passage

  CHAPTER 34

  Lions and Toads

  PART THREE:

  THE BONUS YEARS

  CHAPTER 35

  The Happiness Prescription

  CHAPTER 36

  The Hillary Decade

  CHAPTER 37

  Recurrence

  CHAPTER 38

  New Millennium, New Baby

  CHAPTER 39

  Losing Clay

  CHAPTER 40

  Losing Myself

  CHAPTER 41

  All That Jazz

  CHAPTER 42

  Coming Back

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Gail Sheehy

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  THE PYGMALION YEARS

  WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, OR DREAM YOU CAN, BEGIN IT. BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT.

  —GOETHE

  CHAPTER 1

  Do I Dare?

  IT FELT LIKE THE LONGEST walk of my life. Sneaking down the back stairs from the flamingo-pink precinct of the Women’s Department on the fourth floor of New York’s Herald Tribune to march across the DMZ into the all-male preserve of the city room, I was on a mission. I just had to pitch a story to the man who was remaking journalism. I could get fired for this.

  My boss, Eugenia Sheppard, was fiercely competitive. She would have thrown a fit if she knew I was giving my best idea to the editor of a lowly Sunday supplement. Girls in the 1960s wrote about beauty and baking and how to be the perfect engineer of that complex machinery called family life. Men wrote about serious issues. Nobody had ever thought of turning a Sunday supplement into a classy cultural magazine. But Clay Felker did. In 1965, he was incubating the future New York magazine.

  Just getting a job at the famous Trib had seemed an impossible dream. I’d read the paper religiously from my exile in Rochester, New York, where I was indentured in the early ’60s as a PHT—Putting Hubby Through. My husband, Albert Sheehy, was in medical school while I worked to support us as a reporter at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be? He got the degree; I was the helpmeet. That’s what I thought when I married him at twenty-three, milliseconds from what was then considered a woman’s sell-by date. While waiting for him to finish his fourth year, I’d studied the women’s page of the Trib. What made it so lively? Eugenia Sheppard was the answer. She was the queen of the country’s women’s-page editors, the national fashion cop and keeper of the flame of a dying social register. I wrote letters asking to work for her. Nothing. Inconveniently, the great New York newspaper strike of 1962–63 began in December of that year and lasted 114 days.

  The strike ended shortly before my husband and I made our getaway from Rochester to plunge into grown-up life in New York City. We were imposters, of course, still just kids. Albert would disappear into St. Vincent’s Hospital for the next year. As a lowly intern, he was “on” all day and every other night, including weekends, and developed a pallor that matched his puce-green scrubs. I found a one-room garret secreted in a town house off Washington Square Park. Diane Arbus and her husband, then fashion photographers, occupied the ground floor. Never mind that we had only a pull-down Scandinavian bed, exposed toilet, and a kitchen the size of a phone booth. The garret had a big stone fireplace and lavender-and-topaz stained-glass doors that opened onto a miniature balcony. It was cheap and suited my fantasies of the artistic life.

  I desperately needed a job. I paid no attention when I began upchucking in the morning (it must be the summer heat), but when I felt a faint flutter in my belly, a tickle of life, I was ecstatic. “Guess what!” I jumped up and down on the pull-down bed when Albert came home. “We’re pregnant!” He danced with me on the bed. It broke. Since he was never home long enough to repair it, I slept in a V position inches off the tile floor.

  Sitting before the stained-glass-window doors in the sweltering heat of August, I bent over my Singer to sew a maternity dress. I didn’t know how long I could hold out before I’d have to take a waitressing job. But I knew there was only one place I wanted to work, the Trib. Still no reply from Eugenia.

  AN INTERVIEW WITH THE CITY EDITOR at the World Telegram and Sun started out poorly. He skimmed my clips. “What makes you think a little girl like you from the boonies of Rochester can write for a big city daily?”

  “I didn’t know geography was the measure of talent.”

  “I like the way you talk, sister!” He hired me on the spot.

  During my first week of working on the Telegram’s women’s page in August 1963, I kept hearing about an impending protest march on Washington. The country was on high alert. Images from the vicious response of Birmingham’s police to a peaceful protest led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders—seeing fire hoses and dogs turned on terrified high school students—burned in memory. Medgar Evers had been assassinated only weeks before. My reportorial juices were inflamed. The march was going to be a historic confrontation. Despite dire warnings of certain violence by the government, President Kennedy was supporting Dr. King. I knew the Washington Mall would be crammed with brave black women and men. I would persuade the
editor to send me. But when I told Albert my idea, he hit the roof.

  “You’re pregnant, are you crazy? They’re going to teargas people.” I had to admit he was right.

  We watched the march on TV. When I saw, I ached to be there. I was electrified by Dr. King’s speech envisioning a day when children, regardless of their race, would be judged by their character. Seeing the mall dense with the humanity of many colors, I heard not a sound of violence, only silence—rapt silence. I thought about the future of the child growing within me.

  It was a hundred years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and freedom still had not been given, it had to be won. I vowed I would not spend my life watching the news on TV. I would dare to be there as history happened and write what I saw.

  AT THE END OF AUGUST 1963, I was invited to interview with Eugenia Sheppard, a miniature woman perched on piano legs but a force majeure. I flattered her with my archival knowledge of her columns. She wanted me! As a feature writer! Thank God I would never again have to fake passion in print for the latest collection of Junior League tea dresses when all I wanted to do was plunge into the subcultures of New York.

  I offered three weeks’ notice to the editor who had hired me at the World Telegram. Not surprisingly, his face screwed into a bug-eyed facsimile of a jilted lover. “The World Telegram will not be used as a stepping-stone for that paper. Clear out your desk and leave.”

  Walking out of the paper’s downtown offices into the hammering heat of late summer, I was giddy with anticipation. But what would I wear to pass muster with Eugenia when I had a telltale bulge? I had been told there were two things she found abhorrent—pregnancy and old age. I spent the next couple of days sewing an orange-and-purple-striped knockoff of a Marimekko tent dress that a pregnant Jacqueline Kennedy had worn in the 1960 U.S. presidential campaign.

  In my first months at the Trib, I turned in the kinds of feature stories that Eugenia considered unsightly at best and radical at worst—about antiwar protesters, abortion rings, New York women doctors volunteering in Selma to sew up beaten civil rights workers, Harlem women on rent strike—while my boss was writing about Gloria Guinness and Wendy Vanderbilt and Betsy Bloomingdale and disease-of-the-month charity balls.

  “Bellows wants to see you.”

  Jim Bellows was editor of the Herald Tribune. This could only mean one thing. I had violated the Chinese wall between news and fluff. He would growl something like “Whaddya think you’re doing?” and tell me to stick to the soft stuff or get lost.

  Bellows was a tensely coiled man with blazing dark eyes. That was the only way one knew he was passionate about what he did, since he spoke as softly as a schoolboy trying to deflect attention from his zits. “Are these yours?” he asked, holding up several clippings of my stories. I stopped breathing and nodded.

  “I like this gritty stuff,” Bellows mumbled, “in the middle of all the fluff. Keep it up.”

  Being anointed by Jim Bellows was an epiphany for me. Finding, or being found, by the right editor was as important as finding the right husband. The rare editors could be mentors, even more than mentors, coaches who dared you to surprise them, who scared you by insisting you stretch, who wanted to see you perform the equivalent of a triple Axel jump and fall on your ass on the ice until you perfected the maneuver and then went beyond.

  I soon learned that Bellows was the Trib’s quiet radical. Named editor in chief of the poststrike paper, he saw himself as a young David with slingshot aimed at the Goliath of the New York Times. He was dead set on smashing the old conventional newspaper model and replacing it with bold graphics and offbeat writers. He had hired Clay Felker to tear up the old Sunday supplement and create something entirely fresh. Bellows never played it safe. He was always ready to stick his neck out to support writers or editors who challenged the status quo. I could go back to this editor and tell him the truth.

  “Mr. Bellows, I’m pregnant. But don’t worry! I’ll work until they’re ready to roll me into delivery! Meanwhile, I have an idea for using my, um, condition, for a story.”

  “Shoot.”

  I wanted to do an investigative series on the maternity clinics of New York. The city had one of the worst records on infant mortality. By now, I was at the five-month mark in my pregnancy, exactly the point where a good prenatal exam was the best defense against complications for mother or child. If, like so many women, I could not afford to buy private insurance for obstetrical care, my chances of premature birth would be doubled. I told Bellows I would pass myself off as an uninsured waitress whose only recourse for care was public clinics. He gave his blessing.

  It was a sobering experience. I sat in dingy waiting rooms and chatted with women who accepted routine abuse from the men in their lives. The bodies of most of the women were bloated with junk food, and their ankles were swollen from stand-up jobs they were sure to lose once the pregnancy showed. I could have been one of these women. We were poked and probed with indifference by trainees who didn’t offer their names. No one gave us information on birth control. A day’s pay was lost in the waiting. We passed the time making up nasty nicknames for the rude staff. No wonder so many uninsured women resisted this degrading and more or less medically useless experience. I swore I would reveal this disgrace.

  After dragging through thirteen public clinics from East Harlem to the Lower East Side, I found it took little effort to write a series exposing unprofessional staff and dangerously careless exams. Some clinics were shut down and supervisors fired. Plans were okayed to create satellite clinics closer to poor neighborhoods. Eugenia said nothing.

  ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 20, 1964, I was on night duty at the Trib making up the women’s page. That meant descending to the depths of the composing room and waddling between the rows of linotype operators to deliver last-minute copy changes. By 10:30 P.M. a proof was run off. I read backward and corrected it. Salem, the composition man, ran his razor between the leaded lines to tidy up the trays of type and off they went to be baked into the morning paper. “Looks good,” Salem said. Then, noticing my ninth month of baby bulge, he sweetly suggested I take a taxi home.

  “I’m fine.” I had just enough energy left to take a bus to the Lower East Side where we had recently moved to dirt-cheap digs. I climbed the four flights of stairs and settled down on the sofa with the cat and a chicken pot pie. I knew I couldn’t ask for time off before I had the baby; that would have classified me as a woman who was not as professional as a man. When the grinding began in my belly, I ignored it and went on watching the eleven o’clock news. The contractions began coming with some regularity every four minutes. I called my husband. He was on duty, of course, and told me to come to the hospital. I didn’t ask why he couldn’t get off to accompany me, but it made me sad that he didn’t offer.

  It was the dead of winter. February. Snow sifted under the streetlights as I took the slippery stoop step by step. One A.M. by now. It was not normal for a heavily pregnant woman to be wandering around in the wee hours without a husband, except for one reason: imminent delivery. That scares off taxi drivers. I had to ask a waiter inside Ratner’s, an old-time kosher restaurant, to hide my telltale suitcase. I walked to the curb of Second Avenue and turned my back to hide my girth and hail a cab. It took some time. I heaved myself in, the waiter slid my suitcase on my lap, but the address gave it all away.

  “St. Vincent’s Hospital, please.”

  “Hold on, little lady; you’ll make it or we’re both in trouble.”

  I was set on natural childbirth, considered a way-out choice at the time. My husband had protested: “It’s not evidence based.” Ten hours later, after a long doze when the contractions stopped, I found the lever to release the baby’s gateway to the world. Every cell in my body felt alive and in sync. A few painful thrusts and a minute later, the unmistakable cry of a healthy infant made my heart soar. Only then did my husband poke his head in. “Nice work,” he said. “You did it your way.” We had a daughter.

  We ch
ose the Irish name for Mary, one that meant “great” in Gaelic but was softened with vowels—Maura—it came to our lips at almost the same time.

  Gail brings newborn Maura to an editorial meeting in the Herald Tribune’s “estrogen zone.”

  Not long afterward, to my astonishment, I received a call from the New York Newswomen’s Club informing me that I had won an award for the best feature series of the year. Unbeknownst to me, Eugenia had entered my series on maternity clinics. A formal awards dinner was to be held at the Plaza Hotel. Formal! I had a budget of $30 for a dress. I found a long flowered silk nightgown on sale at Henri Bendel. With a fake chignon from a hookers’ salon, I could pass Eugenia’s taste test.

  NOW, A YEAR LATER, CROSSING into the clackety-clack chaos of the Trib’s city room plunged me into an alternate universe. Every desk was occupied by a man, and every man wore the same shirt and tie. Except two. I spotted Tom Wolfe. He looked different. His longish silky hair curled over the well-turned collar of an English-tailored tweed suit. He looked like a Tidewater Virginian gentleman, which he was. His lips were locked in a concupiscent smile. Of course, I thought, he must be flicking open his satirical switchblade to dice up the status strivings of some sacred cow who had no idea he was about to be skewered. (Tom had not yet effected the wardrobe of a contemporary Beau Brummel in white suits and spats, not on a salary of $130 a week.)

  Picking my way through the scruffy desks and crumpled copy paper scudding along the floor, I saw a cloud of smoke. A blunt head covered with black Irish curls was vaguely visible. That must be Jimmy Breslin, I thought. Just the way his stubby fingers stabbed at the typewriter keys let you know: back off. I knew from his writing that he was an angry man. In one of the early issues of New York, he wrote about posting a sign on his lawn in Queens that read WHY I HATE THESE NEIGHBORS, and he published their names. His people were hustlers, bookies, bail bondsmen, kneecappers, and his sidekick, a professional arsonist called Marvin the Torch. Breslin started every day prowling the precincts and courts to check who was getting out of prison, then returned to the city room at six to bang out his story and make the seven o’clock deadline. To loosen up afterward, he’d cross the street to hold court at the legendary Bleeck’s tavern and get drunk enough to insult nearly everyone.