Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  Because it was our first visit, Chip and I were put in the special suite in what was referred to as the Old Hunting Lodge, the main building where we had all our meals and where the walls were adorned with stag heads and other hunting trophies. Our wooden twin beds were said to have been owned by Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States, and the man who led the Union to victory over the Confederacy states. It was where ‘Mischa and Jessica’ always stayed, we were told. When the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from Russia in 1974, Howard Gilman had taken him in, taken care of him and set him up financially. More than a decade later, Howard was still managing Mischa’s financial affairs, hosting him and his partner Jessica Lange to regular weekends at White Oak and in 1990 would finance what became known as the White Oak Dance Project, a ballet studio where Baryshnikov and Mark Morris collaborated and created a program of touring works. This was the place where Annie Leibovitz shot her celebrated portrait of Baryshnikov, against a white roll in front of the pines of White Oak. Many eminent people were invited to White Oak. (There was no other way to get there, Charlie told us, as solicitations to visit were ignored; he recounted with sardonic pleasure how he and Howard had knocked back an overture from Madonna.) Nearly a decade later, it was the place where Bill and Hillary Clinton licked their wounds from the Lewinsky affair and plotted her Senate run. A few weeks later, we would be invited back. Isabella Rossellini, a good friend of Howard’s who served on the board of his foundation, was there with her twin sister Ingrid and on Saturday night we celebrated their birthdays, and Chip’s, whose was a week earlier.

  But this weekend in May 1990 was all about the nature conservancy. Howard himself took us on the tour of several hours through this truly remarkable place that he had set up to breed endangered species. There were more than 300 animals, including rhinoceroses, giraffes, cheetahs, antelopes, buffalo, zebras and many other exotic and unfamiliar animals. They all had large enclosures and, unlike zoos, the animals could roam free. We were shown a video of the birth of seven cheetah cubs just the night before we had arrived, a further example of the continuing success of the breeding program at White Oak which boasted more than 100 births a year. It was strange to look from the window of our bedroom directly into the enclosure that contained three black rhinoceroses. In Florida!

  Not all of the animals at White Oak were endangered. Howard bred horses, too, and had owned a quarter stake in the great racehorse Secretariat that had died just a few months before. Secretariat’s last foal, named Plantation, had been born at White Oak a week earlier. And the Bengal tigers were there because they had been confiscated by Florida police from various drug dealers and other loonies, who were keeping them as pets without a permit. Not knowing what to do with them, the police asked Howard if he would take them. Now White Oak had a special park, including a large lake, because they liked to swim and a very, very high fence that not even a Bengal tiger could leap over.

  There was also a bird sanctuary which included some black swans from Western Australia and, I was soon to discover, Howard worked closely with the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo in outback New South Wales, donating a white rhino for their breeding program. Maybe Howard had a thing about Australians because he and I became very good friends, staying in touch by letter after I returned to Australia. He used to send me photographs of newborns at White Oak, especially the giraffes which he loved even more than the rare rhinos, writing engagingly about each one as if it were a new grandchild.

  In July 1990, Ms. was relaunched as an ‘advertiser-free’ publication with Robin Morgan as editor-in-chief. The old logo was restored and the cover story, written by Gloria Steinem and titled ‘Sex, Lies and Advertising’, was an impassioned denunciation of advertising and the way it had constrained Ms. in the past. No longer a glossy magazine, its original mission of trying to create a mass-circulation commercial feminist publication abandoned, with fewer than 100,000 subscribers,14 and production values and design that made Ms. resemble a movement publication, it looked as if it had given up the fight.

  After my own experiences with advertisers, I could totally empathise with Steinem’s desire to escape their yoke. I would have applauded this radical change in direction as a welcome and timely reimagining of the original goals of Ms., except that the new Ms. included several attacks on ‘my’ Ms. The strained friendliness with Gloria and her gang of the past three years seemed to have evaporated faster than you could say sisterhood is powerful. Robin Morgan’s editor’s letter contained a list, apparently supplied by readers, of topics they did not want to see in Ms. The list included fashion, celebrities (‘unless clearly feminist’) and gardening. This was clearly a crack at ‘Earthly Delights’, the column I’d created, which Gloria had named and which Robin herself had written for. She had sent me a beautiful poem ‘Upstairs in the Garden’ which she described in her cover letter as ‘my own rather unusual version of a gardening piece’. I had placed it in the December 1989 issue, the one that Dale Lang had refused to print. Now ‘gardening’ apparently was code for what was wrong with what I’d done at Ms. The ‘new’ Ms. also included a couple of very specific repudiations. It reprinted the ‘We’re Not the Ms. We used To Be’ trade ad in their ‘No Comment’ section of sexist or demeaning advertisements. This was the ad showing a hippie-looking woman evolving into a 1980s glamour puss that had upset Gloria and her friends three years earlier. They claimed it was meant to represent—and repudiate—Gloria and no amount of disavowal on our part would convince them otherwise. The masthead of the new Ms. confirmed that I was not being overly sensitive. My agreement with Lang stipulated that in return for relinquishing the editorship-in-chief (to make way for Morgan), my new title was to be ‘Editor at Large for Ms.’, and that I was to be listed as such in the magazine. Instead, I was there as Editor at Large for Lang, in the corporate section of the masthead. Nothing to do with Ms., in other words. Suzanne Braun Levine was there, however, with the Editor Emirata title that I had declined to give her. I wrote to Robin Morgan, pointing out the contractual obligation and ‘to respectfully request’—my lawyer Robbie had guided the drafting of this letter—I be listed correctly in future issues. She replied saying the title no longer existed. And that was that.

  From now on, I had to accustom myself to hearing, or reading, almost non-stop criticisms of my tenure at Ms. Much of it was hurtful because it was so inaccurate. I got no credit for anything, even the widely praised political coverage. Instead I was criticised for how I had supposedly corrupted the magazine with fashion, celebrities and, of course, gardening. Steinem told her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun that I never consulted her about Ms. editorial, forgetting apparently our regular meetings, her generous annual consultancy fee—and the entire Hedda Nussbaum episode. At the same time, the story of how Sandra and I had managed to buy Ms., first via Fairfax and then through our MBO, was rewritten. In the retelling we were no longer ‘real feminists with real money’, we were ‘the Australians’ and, increasingly, this term came to refer not to us but to Fairfax. Steinem several times misrepresented how Sandra and I enabled Ms. to survive, by stating that the money we raised came from Australia rather than from Wall Street. As late as 2015, such inaccuracies appeared in interviews she did to promote her new book My Life on the Road. It was surprising, for instance, to read in the New Yorker, which used to pride itself on its fact-checking, about ‘the Australian media group that took over the magazine during a slump in 1987’ and that ‘two years later, a group of American feminists was able to buy it back, and eventually Steinem helped form a foundation to keep the magazine in print, ad-free, as a monthly.’15 Almost every single assertion in that sentence is inaccurate. The truth is that Dale Lang owned Ms. from 1989 to 1996 when he sold it to Jay MacDonald, an entrepreneur backed by a Florida-based media company. It was not until 1999—a full ten years after Matilda reluctantly relinquished control—that Steinem put together a consortium of wealthy women under the name Liberty Media for Women and, once again, got Ms. back.16
r />   ‘You have to understand,’ Pat Carbine had said to me over dinner one night in July 1989 when it was apparent that Dale Lang might end up as the new owner, ‘that Ms. is the child Gloria never had. She can never walk away from it.’ Perhaps this explained the attacks now being directed at me. It also now made sense of the time, over breakfast in the Pierre Hotel back in April 1989, just after the fiasco with advertisers over the Hedda Nussbaum cover, when Steinem had said to me with some bitterness, ‘You will never get advertising. You are wasting your time.’ I had been taken aback by the comment, and by the vehemence with which it had been delivered. I had thought—naively as it turned out—that if we worked harder, were more original, pitched better, etc., we would be able to crack advertiser resistance to Ms. Now here was Steinem not only saying it wasn’t possible, but almost sounding as if she did not want us to. For the first time, it dawned on me that she would never be able to let go, and so long as we did not succeed there was a chance for her. And then Dale Lang had come along, she had been able to set aside her revulsion and grab the opportunity he presented. Now that she had Ms. back, she seemed to be trying to expunge those years when her baby had slipped out of her hands. If they never existed, perhaps the pain they caused would go away. At times she talked as if she had never left. She told the Guardian in 2015 that she had once sent [Susan] Brownmiller to cover a domestic violence case in which ‘a man beat his wife and killed their baby and that Brownmiller had filed a piece for Ms. that blamed the mother’. ‘Not even the legal system came to this conclusion!’ said Steinem.17 This was a very unreliable recollection of what had happened at Ms. over the Hedda Nussbaum case, when I had commissioned the Brownmiller article and Steinem had tried to stop it being published.

  In August 1991 I received a warm handwritten letter from the journalist Susan Faludi thanking me for my letter in which I had congratulated her on winning a Pulitzer Prize and saying she’d call me in September when she was in New York so we could get together. This was part of an exchange of letters with Faludi that had begun when she had asked me to sign a release, agreeing she could quote from the interview she had done with me for her forthcoming book about the backlash against women’s equality in America. So I was astonished when I received my copy of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women to find more than three pages attacking ‘my’ Ms. Billed as the next great book of the women’s movement and documenting the ways in which the achievements of the 1970s women’s movement were being undermined or reversed, Backlash quickly became a must-read in feminist circles. Faludi worked for the Wall Street Journal so she knew how to get information, marshall facts and report accurately—she’d just won a Pulitzer for a series in the Wall Street Journal—but Backlash was not just factually wrong about so much of what I had done, there was a tone to the writing that made it sound almost malicious. Why? I was stunned because in my several interviews with Faludi she had given no clue she was going to attack me in this fashion.

  Faludi’s description of Ms. under my stewardship suggested I covered nothing but celebrities and that every issue was a celebration of fashion and makeup: ‘The magazine that had once investigated sexual harassment, domestic violence, the prescription-drug industry and the treatment of women in third-world countries now dashed off gushing tributes to Hollywood stars, launched a fashion column, and delivered the real big news—pearls are back.’18 She ‘reported’ that I had ‘pulled’ a photo of Hedda Nussbaum from a cover ‘to pacify advertisers’, and noted that now Ms. was not-for-profit again and could endorse candidates: ‘Instead’, Faludi wrote, ‘the magazine wound up endorsing beauty products.’19 She compared me with the editor of Good Housekeeping, more interested in upscaling the magazine than in covering issues. No mention of our Washington Bureau, our regular political coverage, our tough reporting on women’s health, violence against women, abortion and countless other topics.

  As a journalist with a financial newspaper you’d think Faludi might have had some appreciation of the business pain our little media group was suffering because of the Sassy boycott and its impact on Ms. but no. Her take on what happened? ‘Finally, with the advertiser exodus threatening to push Ms. into financial collapse, Summers gave up,’ she wrote. ‘She turned the female-run publication over to male publisher Dale Lang …’20 I could not let this stand. It was inaccurate, it was cruel and it was going to be read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Once again, I called on Robbie. His initial tough letter of complaint to Random House landed a few days before the Time magazine cover promoting the book appeared. ‘Fighting the backlash against feminism,’ was the main cover line. ‘Susan Faludi and Gloria Steinem sound the call to arms.’ It made them sound like co-authors and the accompanying photograph suggested it really was the two of them against the world. In the weeks that followed, there was extensive correspondence between Random House and Robbie. Initially they merely offered an apology but then agreed to make substantial changes. Susan Faludi had not meant to attack me, her publisher said. She ‘feels badly’ about it. She would write a letter of apology. Ultimately, a very large number of changes were made to the section about Ms. and me in all subsequent US hardcover and paperback and all foreign editions. I was not satisfied because the new version still badly misrepresented what I had tried to do with Ms., and the tone was still sneering, but Robbie’s letters had already cost me several thousand dollars and I could not afford to take it to court. There was nothing more I could do but I was very unhappy. I still am. Faludi’s letter of apology must have been lost in the mail, because I never received it.

  On 5 April 1992 several hundred thousand people marched through the streets of Washington DC, the route taking them past the US Supreme Court which was about to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania state law that would restrict rights to abortion. It was one of the largest marches ever seen in the national capital and it culminated in a rally at a park where a huge crowd gathered to hear speaker after speaker denounce the proposed threats to women’s right to choose. Gloria Steinem was one of the speakers, but during her address she departed from the abortion script to talk about the magazine: ‘We got Ms. back!’ she yelled at the crowd—who roared back their appreciation.

  It was almost two years now since the relaunch of Ms., so Steinem had had her magazine ‘back’ now for almost as long as we had ‘had’ it. Except, I wondered, did she really have the magazine ‘back’ when Dale Lang was the owner and could ultimately call the shots? It was no longer my problem but still I could not rest in the face of yet another public denigration of me and what I had done. On 22 April I wrote her an angry letter, pointing out that if Fairfax had not come along in 1987 Ms., with its more than $8 million in debt, was most unlikely to have survived. I also got a few other things off my chest. Why, I asked, were she and Robin Morgan continuing their attacks on me, in the magazine and around the traps in New York, accusing me of having removed all ‘substance’ from Ms. by introducing ‘gardening’, celebrity covers and beauty and fashion editorial? I reminded her that Ms. had run celebrity covers and articles on fashion and beauty long before I came along. She might want to pretend those two and a half years never existed, I wrote, but then so would I: ‘Some parts of me, too, would like to be able to expunge the memory of what was in many ways a nightmare and which continues to have unpleasant consequences,’ I wrote. ‘It was bad enough having to deal with bankers who were inflexible, advertisers who were unyielding and fundamentalists who were determined to put us out of business. I did not expect, after that was all over, to be subjected to a campaign of denigration by mean-spirited feminists.’ She never replied.

  In mid-2012, the City of New York hosted a morning tea function at City Hall to mark the 40th birthday of Ms. magazine. Presumably the City did this because Ms. had been founded in NYC, but it was now based in Los Angeles and had been for eleven years since its acquisition in 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation. This women’s activist group was run by the admirable Ellie Smeal, who I
knew from when I was at Ms. She had served three terms as president of the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and she and her successor, Molly Yard, visited me early on. I was impressed by their pragmatism, their clear focus on the need for tangible wins and to protect rights, such as abortion, that were under threat. We quickly concluded a membership deal with NOW that would have given us an additional 150,000 subscribers by January 1990. Smeal had established the Feminist Majority as a lobbying vehicle in 1987 with the aid of a $15 million gift from feminist philanthropist Peg Yorkin and, more than a decade later, had been savvy enough to see that Ms. could be an effective mouthpiece to serve the organisation’s lobbying and activism.