Many political babes and professional girlfriends avoid unseemly display by becoming über-groupies, courtesans in the corridors of power, like Pamela Harriman or Marietta Tree with their harems of husbands and lovers, their series of international affairs that allowed these women to end their lives while serving at high appointments in the world of diplomacy, with no further need for assignations with Averell or Adlai or Agnelli: their social skills in political salons ultimately displaced their slut status in private quarters. Judith Campbell Exner, while never quite becoming America’s idea of a classy dame, became a bit more than a simple Kennedy conquest when it was discovered that this babe-a-licious brunette—she had that real early sixties lush femaleness, a womanly heft that made her a voluptuous version of the thin, dainty Jackie—was a sometime moll to mobster Sam Giancana, was some kind of sweetheart to Frank Sinatra and was, by her own admission at the Church hearings, a liaison between the White House and the Mafia, delivering bribe money on behalf of the Kennedy boys in some last-ditch effort to get Fidel Castro assassinated. When Ms. Exner revealed to Liz Smith in an October 1996 article in Vanity Fair, as she lay dying of advanced metastatic breast cancer, that she had aborted JFK’s baby, she may have increased her mystique a bit more, but probably not: heaven knows, Exner is likely not the only woman who did such a thing, and no doubt there are even a fair number of John F. Kennedy’s unidentified offspring floating around the population, an inevitable result of the President’s purported rampant promiscuity in an age immediately preceding the Pill and much before legalized abortion. It is perhaps Exner’s extraordinary triad of lovers—Sinatra, Giancana, Kennedy—that will ensure her place in history. As Smith, who believes everything Judith Exner says, is still moved to note about her reaction when first hearing of Exner’s triple hit: “I remember wondering if she was just bragging. It was like baseball’s famous play: Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Mary Pinchot Meyer, another JFK mistress, is little known outside the world of D.C. gossip fetishists, but she might well have been the President’s most elegant and exquisite, pedigreed and patrician, altogether unusual paramour. Ms. Meyer was an artist, an abstract painter and partisan of the Washington Color School, a movement led by the better-known Kenneth Noland, who was four years Mary’s junior and one of many of her lovers. In her non-Bohemian life, Ms. Meyer was a Vassar graduate, a would-be medical student, a sister of Tony Pinchot Bradlee—first wife of retired Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee—as well as a former manuscript reader at The Atlantic Monthly, a feature writer for United Press, a great beauty, a mother of three boys and a woman who unorthodoxly divorced her diplomat husband Cord Meyer, a deputy director of the CIA, to pursue her painterly life. Mary was said to enjoy skinny-dipping ensemble at her family’s Poconos estate, and her irresistible beauty was described to reporter Ron Rosenbaum, in a 1976 article for New Times magazine occasioned by the revelation of the Meyer-Kennedy affair in the National Enquirer, as that of a woman “who always looked like she had just taken a bath. A man once told me that she reminded him of a cat walking on a roof in the moonlight. She had such tremendous poise.”
In every comment included in Rosenbaum’s piece, the mention of Mary Meyer’s gorgeousness cannot go without an allusion to her large array of lovers kept both pre- and post-divorce, which her forty-odd years did nothing to dwindle. Apparently President Kennedy was among Mary’s men, not even necessarily a particularly important person within her selection of suitors. Perhaps Mary Meyer’s story would not even merit telling by the few people—like Mr. Bradlee, in his memoir A Good Life—who bother to do so had she not been murdered one day in 1964, shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, on a towpath beside a canal near the Potomac River in Washington; the crime has never been solved, but James Jesus Angleton, the fanatical CIA counterintelligence man who made a mountain out of a mole hunt, was found stealing Ms. Meyer’s diary from her studio shortly after her death. Kennedy conspiracy theorists get good grist from this. Murder mystery aside, as a harbinger of a feminist future, this most independent of JFK’s lovers gives a peek at imminent revolution, at a moment in time when it became clear that the women’s movement was certain to happen, that female frustration was bound to burst open in a bad way. Reading accounts of Mary Meyer, one is invited into a world of strange bedfellows and crazy liaisons, artistic and sensitive wives married to gruff, bluff CIA husbands—the era of genteel gentleladies stymied and squashed in marriages to strong-jawed men with hardy names like Cord and Jack and Clem and Cap and Fritz and, yes, Oz (short for Osborn Elliot, a Washington Post executive). The discrepancy between what these women need and what these men can give is about to go haywire. Mary Meyer’s sexual adventures in reaction to that repression actually make her actions in general more interesting than anything that went on with John F. Kennedy in particular.
So it was in the rock world, where uninhibited free love was often equated with liberation. Hence, grande dame groupie Pamela Des Barres has turned her affaires d’amour into two books—the first one, I’m with the Band, a major best-seller—and has recast her hippie chick days as a consort of choice into a kind of performance art, an act all her own; in fact, Miss Pamela—as she was known around the Whiskey-A-Go-Go and the Fillmore West—and a few fellow super-groupies became a sideshow for Frank Zappa under the guise of GTO (Girls Together Outrageously). The main thing one gets from reading Des Barres’ memoir is that being the old lady for a boy rocker—which is now reduced to the pathetically prefeminist terms of servitude and suffering, waiting at home while this modern-day highwayman hits the road—was at one time a rebellious statement of sexual liberation. Like pornography in the days of Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door—when the sexual exploitation was purposeful to some plot, when it was not all the money shot on an overlit videotape with a boom mike visibly hanging in the center of the set—to be a groupie involved a sensual, stylish mode of self-expression available in no other way to women. Rolling Stone devoted an entire issue in 1969 to groupies, illustrating—in a certain backward way that would occasion most of the radical left’s attitude toward its other half, its essential misogyny, its inability to extend its notions of liberation of the human spirit to ones about freeing the female spirit from typing pool tedium—the way in which these lady libertines were pioneering a form of women’s liberation predicated on a self-determined promiscuity, a choice to enjoy men for what they were.
Later on, Bébé Buell emerged on the scene: a blonde, blue-eyed willowy model with a slouchy seventies way about her at a time when the look had not yet been codified and categorized into what’s now known as waifish. Beull was a Playboy Playmate back when high-fashion models did not cross that particular line and back when the centerfold girls could be nearly flat-chested and barely made up and still exude adequate sexual aroma. Hopelessly uncareerist and lazily unambitious, Bébé gained renown as den mother to rock stars of all kinds, real mother to Liv Tyler, lover of Todd Rundgren, Steve Tyler, Elvis Costello, Stiv Bators and others in the New York punk scene. But somehow she radiated an air of rarity and honor—she was nobody’s one-night stand unless she chose to be—befitting a groupie who knows that while other girls line up to sleep with boys in bands, those same guys are breaking down doors and windows to get next to her. In fact, certain groupies became particularly desirable for band members because they became a rite of passage of sorts: a band going through Arkansas had to get it on with Little Rock Connie, and in Texas there was Dallas Alice (alluded to on Little Feat’s live version of “Willin’,” on the two-record set Goodbye Columbus); to be worthy of the honor of having one’s penis molded into a statue for posterity by the Plaster Caster girls was a sign of a rocker’s arrival; in Please Kill Me, an oral history of the punk scene, Hollywood groupies like Laurie Maddox, Sable Starr and Cyrinda Foxe (who mothered another of Steve Tyler’s love daughters) speak excitedly of having David Bowie desperate to bed them down, to join the elite club. “They weren’t competitive. They didn’t have to be,” Bébé Buell
says in tribute to her fellow super-groupies. “Every rock star that came to L.A. wanted to meet them, it wasn’t the other way around.”
In the athletic setting of the movie Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon is a fanatical devotee of the North Carolina minor league baseball team attached to her town, and each season she takes on a different player with promise as a lover but also as a student: she tutors over toenail polish, she teaches the rules of the game, the rules of life, the secrets of confidence, the ways of winning; she is a groupie who can affect a player more persuasively and meaningfully than any coach. She ends up with far more power over her chosen charges than they will ever have over her. In the world of show business, it would seem that no groupie worth the goods would give it away for free—and it seems that there are certain prize prostitutes who men have decided are worth a price of thousands of dollars a night. In You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, the highly compensated—if not exactly high-class—hookers who wrote of their “dates” with famous men like Jack Nicholson, Don Henley, Don Simpson and Timothy Hutton, among others, seem rather more proud than sad that a dollar figure—a large one, but none as infinite as the size of love—can be attached to their beautiful, buyable bodies.
Perhaps because of the proliferation of this kind of pricey prostitution—along with a sort of mass-production of groupie girls who lacked the distinctions of their pioneering foresisters—as the seventies and eighties arrived, even in the rock world of anything goes, being a full-fledged wife became uniquely important, in ways disproportionate to the outlaw status this community is supposed to occupy. Women bartering babies for vows became a phenomenon among rock girlfriends as if it were 1958 all over again. Sting had out-of-wedlock kids with inamorata Trudie Styler, but he did ultimately marry her—in a Shakespearean ceremony on his lordly manor with all the pompous pomp you’d expect from a bass player who claims that he once taught both Nabokov and differential calculus—after showing footage of her giving birth in a Paris hospital in his concert film Bring on the Night. Patti Scialfa had a son with Bruce Springsteen before a backyard wedding bash and the arrival of two more little bosses. Jerry Hall, the Mesquite model who went from boredom with the overly elegant Bryan Ferry to a roller-coaster relationship with Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, finally got him to marry her on the island of Mustique after giving birth to two of his children (a third was delivered down the road); though Ms. Hall has suffered through a marriage made of infidelities and indignities that her husband seems at least as committed to continuing as he is to being with her, she seems gratified to know that while there may be many chicks, only she is Mrs. Jagger. Seventies Staten Island-born model Patti Hansen has stuck it out with Keith Richards through several blood changes, and she even managed to get married before she got pregnant.
There are, of course, certain women who seem always to get the guy. Imagine being Jessica Lange, going from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Sam Shepard—two distinct and differently desirable men—and managing to bear children with both. Or Patti Smith, the one woman that gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is known to have been in love with, the woman who shacked up with Sam Shepard and settled down with the MC5’s Fred Smith. Victoria’s Secret model Stephanie Seymour, whose public persona is so strictly photographic that she may well be preverbal, could be Warren Beatty’s transitional babe between Madonna and Annette Bening, she could be Axl Rose’s heavy metal honey with a tattooed ankle and a Playboy nude spread, and she could finally settle in with the horsy set, commuting between estates in Bridgehampton and Greenwich she shares with businessman and Interview publisher Peter Brant (whom she married after bearing his baby—and getting her tattoo taken off). Mia Farrow has gone from Frank Sinatra to André Previn to Woody Allen, an impressive array. Claire Bloom has been with Richard Burton, Rod Steiger and Philip Roth, another assortment of types. These women, these always well-manned maidens and matrons, the ones who still seem lucky or at least luxuriously endowed in the matrimonial department even when it all goes wrong—both Farrow and Bloom have recently written memoirs that catalogue much devastation on the home front—always make the rest of us, whether the bare-bottom feeders of dating or just the ordinary women who can’t attract men with such seeming ease and can’t keep them around with any sort of regularity, wonder what on earth the secrets of these seductive creatures are.
And if we ever do figure it out, the fashion, cosmetic, women’s magazine and self-help wing of the publishing industry will find a complete erosion of their customer base, and the whole economy will probably cave in as a result.
In 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which has come to be known as a feminist classic, and which, like Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), still seems fresh and lucid today. Many of the absurdist cant manifestos written under the auspices of consciousness-raising in the early seventies are by now ridiculously dated, male-bashing and silly and as embarrassing as classes in masturbation and other cultural arcana that occasioned these writings and render them mere artifacts, while the clean, well-reasoned works of literature by Wollstonecraft and these others remain frighteningly alive.
Wollstonecraft was a friend of Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was said to have galvanized the American Revolution (this was back in this country’s infancy, back before the days when the only political action a book could inspire was a book-burning), she was moved by the French Revolution and its ethos of enlightenment, she was as epileptically giddy as the rest of the Western world at the sudden discovery that there was no need for monarchs, that the simple dignity of the individual person invested at birth with the ability to think meant that no person by reason of royal birth (a position that often seemed accompanied by reason of insanity) should be allowed to tell anyone else what to do.
Perhaps, particularly in the United States, which I still believe to be the only nation founded on principles of democracy, it is hard to say what the big deal is in casting off kings, but mankind had simply never done it. Even the Israelites in the Bible, despite a relationship with God so close that they received manna from heaven daily, demanded a royal ruler, could not be satisfied with a “common” prophet or judge as a source of counsel. So the end of the eighteenth century was heady as hell. It took a world defined by the dictum of René Descartes, a place that believed I think and therefore I am, that finally said that the guiding principle of man should be the one quality that separates him from the ranks of animals: that he is not bundles of instincts and impulses, that clear thought allows him access to kindness and fairness and freedom from artificial and often unkind and unfair rule.
It was natural, in this atmosphere, that some woman should insist that gander and goose go together. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote William Wordsworth of that era. “But to be young was very heaven!” (This couplet, in its simple depiction of human events that pervade society like a weather system, is recalled when Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” can conjure a whole decade with the lines “There was music in the cafes at night / And revolution in the air.”) Mary Wollstonecraft felt that there was no reason that only the men should be allowed to have all the fun. She wanted to live in sin and fuck around with the other Utopian philosophers of her day, she wanted to be a mother (in fact, her daughter was Mary Shelley) and still be all these other things, which is why she wrote her book. “A husband is a convenient part of the furniture of the house,” she wrote in a letter to her betrothed, the equally open-minded William Godwin. Wollstonecraft is generally credited with spearheading the free-love feminist spirit such as we know it, and her simple point—that a woman is more than just a wife or a would-be wife or a widow; that a woman is not defined by her relationship to a man—has been made quite a lot, and quite often, and it is on these simple truths that contemporary feminism is predicated.
The point of feminism—of any civil rights movement—is every pe
rson’s right to be who they are.
And that is the American project: it is a human potential movement that is over two hundred years old, it is all about the largeness of the human spirit compared with the petty smallness of everything that would quash it. It is about judging people by the best they can be and not the worst they can do. Feminism, and art that has a feminist agenda, serves to remind us of all the things we could be, all the shackles we can shed from our lives if we wish. It reminds us that we can be anything we want to be this time around. A play as old as A Doll’s House is still performed regularly—in 1997 it had a controversial and acclaimed run on Broadway—because the image of Torvald calling Nora his “little skylark,” his “little squirrel” and his “little featherbrain” still rings true for some people or is a grim reminder of what is no longer true for others. (In fact, Liz Phair’s song “Canary,” about the oppression of being a good, obedient girl, seems to refer right back to Ibsen.) Every single person still loves the moment when Nora tells Torvald, after a whole play of being treated like a helpless child, that she is leaving him, that this “gives me great pain, for you have always been so kind to me, but I cannot help it. I do not love you any more.” People love it the same way they love the moment toward the end of sex, lies, & videotape when the Andie MacDowell character tells her husband, whom she discovers has been fucking her sister in her own bed, that she is leaving him, enough is enough. People love it the same way they love the moment in Mary-Chapin Carpenter’s hit “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” when the little woman who married at twenty-one and has been good ever since finally decides to be bad: “When she was 36 she met him at the door / She said I’m sorry I don’t love you any more.” People love it the way they love the video for the country song “Independence Day” that shows all these women whose husbands beat them but who have somehow managed to pack up and leave to the chorus of “Let freedom ring.” People love it the way they love ntozake shange’s play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, when the four female characters, after describing bleak lives of poverty, abuse, rape, racism and really bad hair days, finally say, “i found god in myself / and i loved her fiercely.” They love it the way they love the quasi-inane, quasi-spiritual writing of Maya Angelou, a woman whose mediocre pop poetry comes this close to making me want to say that just because she’s black doesn’t mean her clichés are art, and yet, somehow, when she writes, “I am phenomenal woman,” even I feel something that sounds like yes! They love it the way they love a beaten Tina Turner leaving Ike while on tour in Dallas, convincing a hotel to let her stay even though she has no money, no credit cards, no nothing on her.
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