by Nancy Friday
I especially loved my grandfather’s ease, his big laugh, the energy he brought into a room. The way to his heart I had learned was not to hold back, but to brashly climb on his knee, give him a kiss, tell him a story. And show him my straight A’s, my prizes and ribbons from school. Ah, how he loved accomplishments. Loved them too much, no doubt, but he set me an objective. Having unconsciously decided long ago that, since my mother wouldn’t look at me, I would childishly tell her nothing of my successes, I sent my report cards to Daddy Colbert, as he liked to be called. His letters of praise and encouragement, dictated to his secretary, John, were my reward.
My high school graduation gift was an initialed set of Hartmann luggage, along with the promise of a trip to Europe when I finished college. “Buy the best,” he told me. “It is always worth the investment.” Those were the days when “good” things were well made and fine luggage was “meant to last.” The subsequent pieces of Hartmann luggage I would buy ten years later would be poorly constructed disasters. As for the original set of Hartmann, it is in its fourth decade, still used by one of my nieces.
Can a woman learn her look from a man? Absolutely. It was not my grandfather’s pale cream corduroy custom-made suit, which he so fancied in Palm Beach, that I aspired to own; it was my reflection in his eyes. The look I began to create for myself in my twenties was the invented image I saw as worthy of the woman on his arm. I can say this now, though at the moments of purchase, my careful choice of clothes was based on something unidentifiable. There was no woman in my family who dressed as I always have, with an eye for the beauty of the fabric and construction as well as the eye-catching effect. They are more conservative in their dress—not the least exhibitionistic the way I am, my grandfather’s direct descendant.
I cannot tell you how revelatory it is, writing this. Until now I have never understood the pattern. Today, as men enter the mirror in as thoughtful a way as they enter the workplace, I would imagine that there will be more young girls who, like me, grow up studying the men whom they love, perhaps learning much if not more from a relationship to his image than to a woman’s. Not all women like the mirror, either the reflecting glass or the eyes of others upon them. But my early world of invisibility is common today, there being so few reflecting eyes at home, and the place my grandfather filled in that void, not as fashion plate but as a substantial alternative to the sea around me, well, he saved my life.
When he visited Manhattan in the sixties, he never bothered to alert me in advance. He would call from The Pierre or The Plaza, tell me where and when to meet him for lunch or dinner. “I’ll be waiting for you at 21 at one o’clock,” he would say, and I would happily cancel any other plan, select my outfit carefully, and make my entrance, looking for his eye as he stood, open-armed, to embrace me and proudly introduce me to his men friends. He took such delight in the fact that I was “a working girl,” that my jobs took me to Europe and the Caribbean, and that my presence among these men made them sit up straight.
After lunch we would stroll east, he smoking one of his big cigars, to one of his favorite haberdashers, Sulka or Dunhill, where his entrance was greeted with a flourish. I would be given a comfortable chair, a glass of white wine, and then a performance. My grandfather’s love of excellence extended to the most esoteric details. A fresh cigar would be lit, and items would be brought forth from the inner sanctum, a fabric, for instance, that presumably no one but he, Charles Colbert, would appreciate. He and the shop’s manager would lose themselves in the turn of a lapel. He would ask my opinion on everything—ties, sports coat, dinner jacket, fabrics for shirts—pointing out to me subtle differences that accounted for superior craftsmanship.
Proudly, he would announce once again to the manager, as he did to everyone, “My granddaughter is a working girl,” thoroughly enjoying the man’s uncertainty as to our real relationship. It delighted me that they might think me this old man’s “poopsie.” I would recross my legs and smile, knowing I had made him happy and that the world had come to this. After all, hadn’t I learned it all from him, to work, to provide for myself, to finally be seen?
On the day he sold the company he had built, then lost and rebuilt, he telephoned me at 6 P.M. and in his usual peremptory manner instructed me to meet him at The Plaza Hotel for dinner, never questioning that I might have other plans. I bid farewell to the man on my sofa, taxied crosstown, and found my grandfather in his stocking feet in the middle of his suite, tired but ebullient. He was seventy years old.
We sat together on the deep sofa looking out at the pale spring treetops in Central Park and toasted his success. He didn’t yet know what it would be like not to work, to be devoid of responsibility and power; how could he? He had worked since he was a boy, had supported his own parents, for my great-grandfather, much to his son’s confusion, was a man who cared more for people than for money, couldn’t press a man to pay a bill if he didn’t have the cash, and so went bankrupt half a dozen times. Almost from the day he sold his company, my grandfather’s health would deteriorate, like so many men who, with retirement, lose their identities.
But for that night’s celebration, our last alone together, he was on top of the world, proud of the trust he had created for his children and grandchildren. “Better than that foolish trust Mellon set up,” he boasted, and pressed me to ask questions as to the workings of the trust. But I was chilled at the thought of anything that took its life from his and begged him to talk instead of early days in Pittsburgh, when he and Mellon and Carnegie dined at The William Penn Hotel, competed at Steeplechase, and drank bootleg gin.
He told me about his first job interview, how he was late and running across the fields, ripped the new pair of high-top black patent leather shoes on a wire fence; he told me about his dates with Delores, who sang with a band and who would become Bob Hope’s wife, and how there used to be a white linen runner on the stairs leading to the ladies’ section of the exclusive Duquesne Club.
There was a moment over drinks when the bellboy knocked at the door and my grandfather anxiously shooed me into the next room where I stood in my bare feet, amused that he had feared the bellboy would see me as “a bad woman,” a projection, no doubt, of my grandfather’s own fantasy.
That would be the last night I would dance with him. When we entered The Persian Room he pressed a bill into the maître d’s hand saying, “John, this is my granddaughter, and I want you to always take good care of her.” As far back as I could remember, John had stood at this door at Thanksgiving reunions, had ushered our family to a table at the edge of the dance floor where we would watch Ethel Merman or maybe Bobby Darin while the adults drank martinis and ate food, such as frogs’ legs, repugnant to me. John no more remembered me as the plain child with the braces than he believed I was this elegant old man’s granddaughter.
My grandfather and I drank champagne, ate oysters and lobster, and danced every dance, for my mother’s father was a superb dancer. That he held me too close and put his hand on my leg under the table, though I repeatedly removed it, all but brought me to tears; my grandfather was celebrating the end of his life.
“You are the only woman in the family who sees your grandfather as a man,” my step-grandmother would tell me years later, just before his death. She also confided that he was a wonderful lover. He was a great womanizer, my daddy Colbert. Married three times, he managed to remain in the Catholic Church and, in the words of his last wife, was “the greatest catch in Palm Beach.”
If, near the end of his life, he saw me as a sensual woman, I am sure I became that way, in part, for him. I was his child, he was my hero, my model of how to live life on a big scale. My fondness for the company of men, my inclination to think of them as no more evil than women, comes from him and from the mystery of my own father, in whose enigmatic absence was created an idealized image of man, the missing parent who would have loved me and seen me as his girl. Those women who would choose to leave men out of their children’s lives should remember this.
The Good Provider
Until recently, most men and women in our culture and throughout the world defined masculinity as a Good Provider. It cannot be exaggerated how succinctly this definition summed up a man’s masculinity, his unquestionable success at being A Real Man. Being a Good Provider was so much the stamp of a man that the more he provided, the more money he made, the less anyone questioned anything else about him. His personality, his coldness, his kindness—if he succeeded at providing, he succeeded at being a man.
This definition, on which generations of men were raised, was so vital to the stability of the world—Atlas holding up the globe outside Rockefeller Center—that all other roles were arranged beneath it, beginning with the definition of womanliness as The Caretaker. Under this Patriarchal Deal, children might grow up with dreams of alternative lives, but they were almost always abandoned as the reality of The Deal took precedence.
Ideally, a man didn’t have a “look” at all. You might say his success went before him in the images of his wife and children, handsomely turned out, or the fine spectacle of his house and car; but when we looked at him, whether he was fat or thin, bald or bearded, what we saw was power, and power in itself was, and still is, very attractive.
When a man wore a beautiful woman on his arm, we would look at her fur coat, her alligator handbag, the elegance of her face and form, and having totaled her assets, we would read the bottom line of his prominence. While we complimented her on her fine accessories, our deepest respect went to him.
As the feminist army entered the workplace, the way we saw women changed, and I can’t imagine that we will ever go back to the traditional definition of womanliness. The Caretaker may, in part, define women, but our partial appropriation of what used to be called masculinity has left men exposed. Meanwhile, we continue to judge men’s status by the attractiveness of the woman on his arm.
“Men seek attractive women as mates not simply for their reproductive value,” writes psychologist David M. Buss, “but also as signals of status to same-sex competitors and to other potential mates.” Buss’s research, using photographs of men with women of differing physical attractiveness, led him to conclude that “people suspect that a homely man must have high status if he can interest a stunning woman.” Psychologist Susan Harter found a corollary: “Men’s attractiveness is often associated with power, status, wealth, position. The man who has these commodities is often judged to be attractive even if physically you may not think that his features meet some classic definition.” One survey that drove that home for Harter came right after the Gulf War in a woman’s magazine article that asked, “Who Is the Sexiest Man in America?” It was General Norman Schwarzkopf.
Under Patriarchy some wealthy men, like my grandfather, had a touch of the peacock and dressed more elegantly, choosing fine suits and linens, shoes that were recognizably well made, but they required a panache to carry it off; a man had to watch himself where showy looks were concerned. In the nineteenth-century industrialized world, it just didn’t do for a man to put appearance above performance. Better to err on the side of invisibility. High-ranking military men, like Generals Göring and Patton were famous for flourish, but mere mortals knew better. A “fancy man” advertised that he had been with his tailor instead of behind his desk.
Men’s withdrawal from the mirror was a momentous historical reversal. Until the advent of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, men’s clothes had been more splendid than women’s. In the eighteenth century, men had dressed to draw attention to their person; the finer the cloth, the more admired the man. But near the turn of that century men renounced fashion, elegance, and beauty and donned a new uniform, the dark suit, in which they entered the capitalist factory. In exchange for this public power, the role of being gorgeous was given to women, a private power, yes, but very much controlled by men.
Superficially it sounds like a good deal for men, but wearing beauty in the form of a woman on your arm, and owning none yourself, is like eating food with all the flavor chewed out of it. As my old friend psychiatrist Richard Robertiello once remarked, “Men get a lot of nourishment from people’s eyes admiring the beautiful women they wear. We identify with her exhibitionism, unconsciously, of course, but we get our vanity fed when people savor her beauty.”
“Secondhand admiration doesn’t sound very filling,” I replied.
He shrugged. “Which is why many men resented the power of women’s beauty and put them down. Men loved it, and they envied it too.”
In terms of healthy narcissism, the Patriarchal Deal was healthy neither for men nor for women, who were encouraged to be lovely objects, but worn like pretty flowers, with a brief life span. When we look back on those years, it is tempting in today’s chaos to think of them as a better time, more ordered. But order was precisely what drove The Deal; sexual roles were regimented so rigidly that what didn’t fit was smothered in denial.
Men couldn’t afford to admit to themselves how powerless, amused, and intimidated they felt opposite women’s beauty; it would have defeated the commercial demands of Patriarchy before it got started. Therefore, women had to be domesticated, their potent sexual beauty neutered so that the man might comfortably leave the little woman at home while he went off to stoke the furnaces of the industrial world.
Knowing full well what had attracted him to his woman in the first place—her breasts, full lips, beautiful legs—how could he leave this tempting sexual being at home, unmonitored, miles away from his place of business? What if another man saw her, smelled her, got his foot in the door? Why, the husband would be cuckolded, the worst thing that could happen to a man.
Wasn’t the wife his property? A crass thing to think, but he did pay for everything, and a casual fuck with the plumber, the postman, anyone, would diminish her value, much as a splintered leg ruins a fine Chippendale table. A man would lose face appearing in public with a woman another man had sexually “used.” Better to desexualize her after the marriage, encourage her to lengthen her skirts, let her hair go back to its natural color. Best to dim his own view of her as sexual.
Men complain that women turn off sexually once the honeymoon is over, but these highly significant adjustments are usually in tandem. A family man didn’t want to think of the kind of “dirty” sex he craved with the mother of his children, the woman he also called “Mother”; for this kind of sex, he went to Bad Women, who had their own look, one you can be sure was very, very different from that of a Caretaker.
In cutting her sexual beauty short, he limited his own enjoyment too, but it made The Good Provider’s life easier. He who couldn’t “control” his wife was seen by other men, and women, as limp. In time, moving a wife to the suburbs, where there were only other women during the long days, was as consoling to modern man as the chastity belt had once been to the crusader departing for the war, which was how men saw the marketplace.
Prior to feminism, society was structured in such a way as to eliminate anything that impeded economic progress. Those who interfered therefore had a look signaling trouble. The unsettling effect of a Bad Woman—the character Lana Turner portrayed in movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice—was that her exaggerated sexuality—high heels, short shorts, and a turban—threatened the status quo. From the second this “type” entered the film, the music took an erotic turn, telling women viewers in their full-skirted dresses what they already knew: that they were in jeopardy of losing their men to women such as these. The entire town would go to hell when a Gloria Grahame or Marilyn Monroe walked down Main Street, turning every man’s head, as the music went va-va-va-voom. Looks told us everything.
Growing up under this formula, I saw myself as neither home breaker nor nest builder, nor did I recognize my kind of man in a gray flannel suit that promised security. Once I arrived in New York, I found the look of men who were not Good Providers to be exciting. There was a siren sexuality in the unruly hair, the slouch, the absence of the dark blue suit, the way “forb
idden men” held their cigarettes or a glass of scotch. A girl knew they had no money and were driven by other, far more fascinating goals—oh, boy! Their faces were animated with the thoughts about to spill out, and when they looked at a woman, they saw her. In their regimented way, most men’s lives were as narrow as women’s; we’d all been set on tracks early on and nothing advertised where we were heading like the way we looked.
Men get little sympathy from women who still see them as having all the power, when in fact most men are in the business of making themselves dull, dependable, closing down all horizons except those that lead to economic success, which still describes a man. To women interested in settling down, the blue-suited look of surrender to the capitalist harness is the mating call.
That I went the opposite way was a mystery to my mother, though she never worried about me. When I took my various men home for the holidays, she didn’t mention the absence of the blue suit and sensible shoes. Musicians, writers, artists, drifters, none of the lovers who accompanied me to Mother’s house dismayed her or provoked comment, except the occasional, “He’s Jewish, isn’t he?” They were, almost without exception, smart, funny, and obviously sexual, which I think my mother also sensed.
There was a gift I gave to every man I loved, which was what my grandfather had given me: I introduced them to the mirror. Not to the dark blue suit, which they so clearly had disavowed, but to the finest version of whatever it was they chose to put on their backs. It is a powerful gift to open a man to his vanity, very heady, as in fairy-tale awakenings. A woman who applauds a man’s narcissism, giving him permission to pursue it further, well, a man does not quickly forget such tutelage. A certain dependency is born, wherein the man feels a more pressing need for that woman in his life. She is now the sun, without whom there would be no one to take him in, see him. Giving a man this gift puts meat on the bones of love, a word begging for definition. “Ah, my love, I love the way you see me!” Now, that has meaning. We women are the permission givers, beginning with that first woman in his life, who loved his adorable shape or didn’t; either way, this is what the grown woman ignites in him, the sight of himself as adored in her eyes.
