Daring Read online

  Gay Talese was already a famous New York Times journalist. A cocky Italian American man, he was staking claim to the sexual emancipation of the American male. In what might seem ironic, he also supported the idea that women of talent should be able to pursue independent careers, starting with his own wife. Nan Talese was beautiful, shy, and bookish. Gay encouraged her to talk to a friend of his at Random House about a job as an editor. Publishing was not a career friendly to women in those days, but Nan was hired. When I met the couple at a party in 1967, Nan and I immediately connected. Both of us looked like polite, winsome, white-gloved Anglo-Saxon young ladies who would never challenge the status quo. We were imposters. Underneath, we were both independent women-in-the-making.

  I mentioned that I was writing a novel, an outgrowth of my article “Lovesounds.” Nan invited me to come to her office to discuss turning the story into a book. At the entrance to a palatial building with the nameplate ARCHDIOCESE OF NEW YORK, I stared at the marble arches in awe. This was the address Nan had given me, 457 Madison Avenue. I knew Random House was at the pinnacle of the publishing world, but I must have missed the papal encyclical that placed it under the wing of the Vatican.

  Directed to the secular entrance, I climbed the broad marble stairs to the second floor. The nameplate BENNETT CERF, PUBLISHER told me I was in the rarefied executive area. I was redirected to the basement. There I found two of the only women editors in New York who edited serious fiction or nonfiction: Toni Morrison and Nan Talese.

  When Nan was hired, she confided, the managing editor had dropped a careless insult. “Of course, you’ll copyedit your own books and do cookbooks.”

  “I don’t know a thing about cooking,” Nan piped up in her high, airy voice. “Why don’t you ask Jason?”

  This was tantamount to asking Elizabeth Arden to do a client’s nails. Jason Epstein was editorial director of the paperback line at Random House. His friends and colleagues knew that Jason was also a serious, even scholarly, cook. But men didn’t write or edit cookbooks. That was the girls’ realm. It wasn’t until his eighty-first year that Jason published his version of a cookbook, a charming culinary memoir called Eating.

  When Nan was excited, her eyebrows jumped off her forehead. “I love ‘Lovesounds,’” she said. “It will be a book for the times.” With conspiratorial enthusiasm, we began the editing process.

  Nan had the same conflicted feelings I did about trying to balance a serious career with marriage and motherhood. The way she managed to commute between those worlds, she confided, was to live only twelve blocks from Random House, so she could walk home and give her two little daughters lunch. She and Gay rented five separate apartments on different floors in a building on East Sixty-First Street. Knowing that I needed a quiet retreat to rewrite, she kindly invited me to use a typewriter on her second floor. I could hear her prolific husband banging away on the floor below. He called his separate apartment his “bunker.”

  Gay’s incessant typing on the first floor kept me racing on the second. Nan would insist I come up to have lunch with her and the children in the zone to which they were relegated. She suggested for my book that I turn the story into a Rashomon, alternating chapters from the subjective point of view of both the wife and the husband. As women, I suppose, we felt we needed to represent the man’s point of view. I took pains to disguise the real names and places, moving the characters up in social class to render the husband as an up-and-coming attorney who lived on the Upper East Side. That only made me an easier target.

  I’LL NEVER FORGET CLAY CALLING me months later. “I just picked up the Sunday New York Times Book Review—you’re in it!”

  “What does it say?” Clay read the opening line: “‘Gail Sheehy’s Lovesounds is an angry book about a woman whose wifeliness approximates disease . . . She even has a child, apparently to convince her friends that she is not, to use that dreaded phrase, a ‘career woman.’”

  “Stop, Clay.” I put down the phone and looked for a place to be sick.

  When I was able to read the rest of the review, it felt like body blows directly to my gut. Only in the last paragraph did the reviewer mention the conflict at the heart of the story: the husband has been having an affair, so the wife, a successful career woman with a two-year-old child, tries for a year to be “the perfect wife.” When that effort suffocates them both, the wife has to decide whether to accept the pain and humiliation of a husband who she learns is still cheating on her, or to strike a blow for self-respect and independence by getting a divorce. She chooses the latter. That, to the reviewer, is her sin.

  It was a few years later, when the women’s movement had surfaced and was growing strong, that I began to grasp why my book had caused such a backlash. It had been published in 1970, just as the world of unsettling change was upon us. Consciousness-raising sessions had barely begun, so those of us who were “liberating” ourselves did not have any language or emotional concepts with which to understand what we were living. The review gave me an early feel for the reactionary rage at the earthquake of gender that would shake up the 1970s. Lovesounds was ahead of its time. It did not sell.

  Nan herself was always expecting that when she had another child, she would quit her career and stay home to be the perfect wife and mother. She never did. She outlasted most of the great male editors with whom she started at Random House and has been on the top of the heap for decades, today directing her own publishing imprint at Doubleday.

  Looking back through the retrospectoscope of forty years, I appreciate how vastly social conditions have changed and improved for women. But I also see, stronger than ever, evidence of an observation I made when I wrote Passages in my midthirties: “Women can have it all, but not all at once.” I had predicted that women who tried to wear all three hats in their twenties—marriage, motherhood, career—would likely see at least one blow off. Young women, like young men in their twenties, need time to extend their education, try out different partners and career paths, survive failure and build resilience, before they are ready to balance the competing demands and delights of marriage, family, and career.

  What I didn’t foresee was a truly dramatic unraveling of the American family: more and more women would rather do two things well than do all three poorly. Paycheck Mom is now the norm. In 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that in 40 percent of American households with children under age eighteen, the mother is either the sole or primary earner. That number has quadrupled since 1960. For great numbers of such women, marriage is now decoupled from motherhood. Forty percent of women with some college but no degree, and 57 percent of women with high school diplomas or less, elect to be single mothers. Why? Often, because they don’t want to take the chance of having to support the baby daddy, too. It’s only the elite—90 percent of women with bachelor’s degrees or higher—who still believe in acquiring a mate before producing a baby. These are the enviable couples who are able to invest in their children from the resources of two successful careers, thus widening the gap between the security of the elite and the struggles of the new middle class and impoverished Americans.

  MY FIRST FAILURE WAS SHORT-LIVED. Soon after the publication of Lovesounds in 1970, a call came from Otto Preminger himself. The world-famous Hollywood director spoke with a gurgly Viennese accent. He was interested in optioning the book for a film. How would he get in touch with my agent?

  I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t have an agent. I called Clay. He said he’d get in touch with his former wife’s agents, Irwin Winkler and Bob Chartoff. They invited me to lunch and offered to represent me. But weren’t they Hollywood agents? I asked. Yes, but it could add luster to their résumé to have an East Coast author. I tried not to smile. Only Hollywood agents would think of a failed first-time novelist as added “luster.” It’s reverse snobbism; they think we’re all intellectuals.

  The next thing I knew, I was spending afternoons writing my first screenplay under the tutelage of a temperamental tyrant. Preminger was a
big bearish man with a hairless ovoid head and a fleshy face. He had directed Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, and female stars such as Marilyn Monroe, whom he called “a void with nipples.” His actors nicknamed him “Otto the Ogre.”

  He invited me to work at his classical Italian manse on East Sixty-Fourth Street, where he sat behind a massive white marble desk. Once, when I couldn’t get a sitter, he invited me to bring my little daughter. Maura had inherited my Irish ginger hair and the outspokenness that comes with it. She took one look at this giant of a man and knew immediately how to tame him. She climbed into his lap. “Mr. Preminger, you’re a peanut!” He roared with laughter and picked up the child in one of his basketball-size hands and lifted her over his head. She squealed with delight. From her unique point of survey, she exclaimed, “It must be so fun not having any hair to comb.”

  Maura at age three.

  It took an Otto Preminger to option my little novel and get it green-lighted by a major studio, Paramount. Everything was on the upswing.

  Three months later, on a day of drenching rain, Mr. Preminger called to cancel our afternoon meeting. “Vat gives with your agents? My studio tells me they did not get the reassignment of copyright.” My work was in the public domain. The studio had found a way to keep Preminger from making a movie based on an unsuccessful book written by a nobody novelist.

  It was one of those days when the roller coaster plunges down a hair-raising precipice and one’s stomach surges up into one’s throat. It was still pouring outside. Maura was having a meltdown. I was a divorced woman. My first movie sale was dead. My hope of making a living as a freelance writer looked dead in the water. I crawled into bed with Maura and we lost ourselves in the hilariously perverse world of Maurice Sendak, reading Where the Wild Things Are over and over.

  “PUSSYCAT, HOW SOON CAN YOU leave for India?”

  I’ll never forget that rescue call. It was few months later, the end of January 1971, and I couldn’t quite make the rent. The breathy voice was unmistakable. Helen Gurley Brown. She was reinventing the risqué women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, as a guide to “mouseburgers” like Helen herself—girls with neither looks nor money who, if they learned how to be sexy and worked hard enough to afford nice clothes and plastic surgeons, could get a rich man to marry them. Helen had proved it by snagging David Brown, a movie mogul famous for producing Jaws and The Sting with Richard Zanuck.

  I had only done a couple of stories for Helen’s Cosmo while working at the Trib, but this was a plum assignment. She wanted me to track down the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his most famous new disciples, the Beatles. What could be a better rebound from failure than to strap on a backpack and plunge into the Himalayas in search of bliss consciousness and the Beatles’ guru? I sensed a cultural shift in the making. Here was the first swooning embrace of Eastern mysticism by the darlings of Western pop culture. How could I pass up the chance to sneak inside the spiritual training camp of His Holiness, founder of the transcendental meditation movement? Hundreds of other journalists had staked out the compound with little chance of gaining entrance to the inner sanctum.

  But what about Maura—she was only six. Albert offered to take her; he knew I needed the money.

  The first and fundamental fact about gurus was revealed to me by one of the Maharishi’s public relations people: The shishya (disciple) does not seek. When the shishya is ready, the guru appears. In point of fact, the guru himself wasn’t quite ready for prime time. On the Maharishi’s first visit to New York, in 1959, he had greeted reporters at the airport in Hindi-lish: “I come to spread manure on you.”

  I was invited to an initiation ceremony on a Saturday night at the Barclay Hotel on East Forty-Eighth Street. The man behind the peephole of the Maharishi’s suite was not the ascetic Indian mystic. He was a Norwegian opera singer, Richard Fleur, a big strapping Siegfried who instructed a gathering of decorative young New York neurotics to remove our shoes and kneel to offer thanks and gifts to our teacher, Guru Dev. (Who he?) No answer.

  We were coached on how to meditate. Most of the shishyas drifted off to sleep. Then came the big moment. Each of us would receive our “customized mantra.” The mantra, Fleur said, is a sound, a vehicle; we travel with it to the innermost core of our being. “To receive the mantra possessed of the right vibration and mystical power for the individual,” he emphasized, “one needs a guide.” Then the fast finish: “Anything good costs a lot of money.” The price he quoted was roughly equal to an average week’s salary.

  “You understand this sound must never be told to anyone or written or even spoken aloud to yourself,” Fleur said solemnly. “It must be kept as part of your pure being. Do you agree?” I agreed. However, the picture of a robust Siegfried tossing water over the shoulder of his business suit and moving grains of rice between brass bowls while chanting Sanskrit in a Norwegian accent put a certain strain on reverence. Each of us was asked five questions, presumably to allow Fleur to penetrate our pure being and divine our unique sound.

  Forty-five years later, I think I am reasonably safe in revealing my personalized mantra, since it is merely a hitching of half my last name to the oldest of sacred sounds, OM. It is—forgive me, Guru Dev—Shee-Om. That’s it.

  “Now I will have to ask for the contribution,” Fleur said. “It is for the Guru Dev, not for me.”

  Fumbling with pen and checkbook in the darkened and densely incensed hotel room, I felt like we were kids playing dressup.

  “Where is the Guru Dev?” asked one intrepid shishya.

  “He is everywhere.”

  So I bought my mantra and headed off to India with more than a dollop of skepticism.

  I CHOSE TO MAKE THE JOURNEY from Delhi to Rishikesh by bus. Three dollars. Racing around the bus yard looking for the No. 1871 bus among forty skeletal conveyances, all piled high with bedrolls and numbered in Hindi, was the first test of the staying power of bliss consciousness. I failed. It was miserable.

  The road through 140 miles of flat Gangetic plain was a river of bullock carts, rickshaws, and columns of men who looked headless under bundles of wash, wood, or sugar cane. At the foothills of the Himalayas, the driver motioned for me to get off. “You wait. You sit. It coming.” In a while a horse-drawn tonga appeared and carted me to a notch in the hills at the headwaters of the Ganges. I scrambled down to the clear green water. Stranded on the wrong side of Mother Ganga, I didn’t have to fret for long about how to cross to Rishikesh.

  “Hey, American girl, over here!” A power boat was swerving in my direction. What a welcome sight, a bunch of tangle-haired American hippies! They welcomed me to spend the night in their Hash Ashram. That was a trip in itself. A traditional ashram is a spiritual hermitage hidden in a forest or mountains where Hindus seek tranquillity and perform some sacrifice. The Hash Ashram was a joyful happening where the only sacrifice was privacy. A motley collection of young men and women—stoned-out visa violators and guitar-toting trust-fund babies—crowded around an open fire in their stone abode. Joints were shared. We sang folk songs and Beatles favorites, I get by with a little help from my friends, I get high with a little help from my friends, until near dawn when everyone spilled out onto the bamboo deck, as if on cue. We slept until the sun rose too high to ignore.

  Walking up the burning sand in the noonday sun, with two heavy bags and no idea where to find the pathway to bliss consciousness, I practiced meditating. Amazingly, it sort of worked. My walking meditation was indeed quite pleasant. As if by divine mercy, a boy appeared and piled my bags on his head. He led the way to the side of an unmarked cliff and pointed up. I climbed about a mile up a trail from the beach. WELCOME! Pastel flags flew from the outpost of the Maharishi’s sixteen-acre compound, which was encircled by barbed wire.

  I was detained at the guesthouse outside the compound. Dutifully, I submitted a copy of my written request to interview the Maharishi. Five o’clock. A light Himalayan wind sprang up. Monkeys descended to snatch the banana I foolishly peeled. The Beatles were n
ot yet in residence, I learned. Mia Farrow was en route. Where would I sleep?

  “You wait. You sit. It coming. Just now.”

  Then I heard it. The unmistakable California sound of a high-pitched male voice mingled with guitar. Emerging from the trail was Mike Love, blessed Beach Boy, draped in a purple satin hooded rajah coat and singing “Good Vibrations.”

  Mike was full of smiles. He had renounced drugs. But even he had to sit and wait. He asked for tea and we were served. He talked excitedly about how meditation had changed his life. I told him I had been practicing. Don’t worry, he said, he would make sure the Maharishi gave me a proper initiation. Did he always find the time and quiet to practice meditation in the hectic show-business life?

  “Oh, well, you blow a meditation now and then.”

  We were joined by an English journalist. Like most Brits, Peter Drake avoided sincerity at all costs. “I don’t buy the Maharishi’s Kool-Aid,” he said, “but I can offer you other forms of libation.” He revealed a fifth of Gilbey’s gin and several bottles of tonic in his backpack. We asked our minder if we could have some ice—for our tea. After an hour of happily drinking and chatting, Peter and I were admitted to adjoining rooms in the guesthouse. We smoked some hash I had brought along from the night before. I relaxed into the delicious abandonment of responsibility with this handsome fellow vagabond. Before I knew it, Peter and I were in the same bed. The night turned into a rediscovery of the joys of eros. What had I been missing! Peter was a sexual athlete. Tussling for what seemed an eternity ended with us asleep on the floor when our minder knocked. Morning already?

  “You come. You hurry. Maharishi ready. Just now.”