by Gail Sheehy
Wolfe’s prose was the opposite. He invented unforgettable code phrases—“the right stuff,” “the statusphere,” and “social x-rays.” He exuded excesses of hyperbole never before seen on a black-and-white page. He spotted the first “Tycoon of Teen,” Phil Spector, and he was the first to explain the vision of Marshall McLuhan. The most mind-blowing of Wolfe’s early articles examined the LSD life of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.
Wolfe’s and Breslin’s windows into New York life assaulted city dwellers with stories that rubbed their noses in the true textures of the city—from the pretentiousness of Park Avenue dinner parties to the barstool exploits of colorful hustlers. My feeling about these writers was a stew made of equal parts admiration and competition. The city room was not an alternate universe. It was the universe.
As often as I encountered Breslin in the elevator, he never even gave me a nod. To Breslin, women were irrelevant. Tom Wolfe did exchange a few words with me, in passing, and I hung on them. “The Herald Tribune is like the main Tijuana bullring for competition among feature writers,” he told me. “You have to be brave.”
I was little, but I liked to think I was brave. I had a taste for adventure. Why couldn’t a woman write about the worlds that men wrote about? What about the world of prostitutes and pimps? The speed freaks creating a world of their own on the Lower East Side? The radical kids at Columbia beginning to make noise about Kennedy’s excursions into Vietnam? But men ran the newspapers and magazines that mattered in those days. Men read the news on TV. Men wrote the editorials that told people what to think. Why should men dictate what women could and couldn’t do?
Clay Felker was different. Not only was he open to women writers, he was actively recruiting and training them. Barbara Goldsmith, a socially prominent New Yorker who had a keen eye for cultural trends, was one of the first to spot Andy Warhol as the bellwether of the ’60s. Her New York Times review of Warhol’s book From A to Z caught Felker’s eye. He not only started her writing about the art world, he came to depend on Goldsmith and Wolfe to give him feedback on other new writers he was cultivating.
Patricia Bosworth was then a young actress playing on Broadway in Mary, Mary. Felker got her talking about her gabfests with other leading ingenues. He encouraged Bosworth to take notes, and he published their backstage bitching. “It made my name,” Patty told me when she and I became friends. Patty dropped acting and went on to become a famous journalist and biographer.
These women were among the first female feature writers who busted into the Trib’s Tijuana bullring, and I wanted to be like them. But women then needed a male sponsor. The blessing by Bellows initiated a period in my life that I came to recognize, retrospectively, as the Pygmalion Years. What began with Bellows led to the feet of Clay.
MY FIRST EXPOSURE TO CLAY FELKER was his voice, a legendary voice. It roared out of his bullpen and whipsawed through the walls of the city room with the force of a busted steam pipe. None of the working reporters looked up; they had learned to ignore it. Outside his doorless lair, I had a chance to observe the man. Half-high partitions were slapped together to enclose, barely, a desk littered with newspapers and magazines, two chairs, a typewriter and a phone, which was affixed to Felker’s ear while his feet rested on that desk. He was ruggedly handsome with a square John Wayne jaw and a forehead as broad as a search lamp. He further emphasized his presence by wearing an awning-striped shirt with gold cuff links. He was barking into the phone.
“What do you mean you don’t have my reservation! Clay Felker, three for dinner tonight, my usual table, in the Pool Room.”
The poor devil on the other end must have dissolved into broth when Felker demanded to speak to the Four Seasons maître d’hôtel. Who knew better than Felker, having invented the term “Siberia” for tables to which no-count potted plants were shown, that he and the maître d’hôtel of the state dining room for the media and entertainment elite had an understanding; he would be seated as prominently as a marble bust in the entrance of the Met.
“I’m taking Senator Javits and his wife out for pretheater supper—Pamela’s opening tonight in Dinner at Eight,” he told the maître d’. A long pause while the man must have been buttering him up.
“Terrific!” Felker’s bombast of approval was as thrilling as his displeasure was terrifying.
“Pamela” could only be Pamela Tiffin, an ingenue with an angel face and cream puff of a body, who was Clay’s wife. This man seemed to know everybody; he had a senator to please and a beautiful wife opening in a Broadway show. Who was I? One short-lived boyfriend had labeled me “a skinny, brainy chick,” and he hadn’t meant it as a compliment. Back then, few men wanted to know what a chick thought. But I had the one thing Clay Felker prized above all. A good story. I’d have only seconds to spit it out.
“Mr. Felker?”
He looked up. “Come in. It’s Clay.” He asked where I had come from.
“The estrogen zone,” I said, pointing upstairs. He smiled.
“What have you got?”
The story in my mind was like Jell-O that hadn’t yet set. I began clumsily explaining that it was about single guys renting co-ed beach houses on Fire Island—they were holding auditions to attract beautiful girls—they’d only have to pay for a half-share, and then—
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
I had lost his attention.
“The guys are dorks. They want gorgeous girls to act like flypaper and attract people to their parties. These auditions are funny—like specimen viewings.”
“Did you go to a specimen viewing?”
“Of course.”
“Then write that scene—just as you described it! We’ll call it Flypaper People.”
Writing scenes was something I had done since I was seven or eight years old. But writing scenes as journalism? Clay had pushed me over the edge.
I liked it ♥ there.
CHAPTER 2
Crossroads of a Million Private Lives
THE GUN GOING OFF AT MY BACK is what I remember best. I was five, but old enough to enter the six-and-under swimming race. Bent over in a racing dive, hanging on to the edge of a cement dock by my toes, I would look at the mean gray slap of salty waves and shiver, but my father had a gun at my back. I’m not sure now if he actually was the starter but I always imagined it was him. The shot would explode—craaack!—but I’d already be in the air. I was little but I was fast. I had to beat the boys. I was the only child.
Half my early childhood was spent underwater. We lived in an old Indian town called Mamaroneck. As a child I couldn’t pronounce it so I’d say “mama-round-your-neck.” It was one of the earliest postwar suburbs, in Westchester County, a forty-minute commute to New York City by train, but you’d never know it when you awoke to the tickle of salt in your nose and the squeal of gulls.
Our house was across the street from the fat tub of a harbor. Hurricanes could swell it up like a bath with the faucets left on until it spilled over into our street and turned into a river. Daddy let me sit in a washtub and pretend I was paddling out to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. My father was my coach. He taught me a mean backhand and how to smack a baseball, but girls then couldn’t compete against boys in tennis or baseball so Daddy told me to stick to the water. He taught me to swim when I was three.
Gail at age five.
My father’s hands were long and soft and well manicured, the hands of a salesman. My launch came from those hands. My mother was the mooring. Her hands would cup under my armpits in the split second before my head dipped below water. Times when my head did dip and my nose and mouth took in the ocean and I thrashed like a fish, my father’s arms would curl me up but only for a few instants, then flip me around and set my feet to fluttering. “Kick like a frog, and you’ll never go down.” I would kick to my mother and her hands would reach for my stretched-out arms. Oh, Mama, yes, safe again, ready for another oceanic crossing.
Let me be clear about this. My father didn’t
really mind my being a girl, but I had to do double duty, as a boy-girl. He told me I could be a champion if I practiced hard enough and never gave up. The beach club he joined had a swim team. I would fly on my bike down to the end of Orienta Point to get to the club’s practice lanes before anyone so I could do laps before an important meet.
Notwithstanding, the gun went off at my back summer after summer and I captured a good number of medals for my father. He built a wooden case and displayed the trophies on velvet lining and hung the case in his bedroom. But I didn’t always win. “Go cut a branch off the forsythia bush,” he would say in a dark monotone when we got home from a losing meet. The first time he switched my legs, they bled. I didn’t cry. I tried to take it like a man. But it wasn’t the switchings that hurt so much. It was the anticipation of being switched, being shamed.
No children my age lived around our house. The kids who did were mostly boys and a lot bigger than I was. Toey was the meanest one. He liked to get into fights, which is why they called him Toey, because one kid stomped on his toe and broke it. So he picked on girls.
Toey liked to push over my doll carriage. He would wait until I was distracted by pretending to buy groceries with one of my mother’s pocketbooks, and then he’d rock the carriage until I screamed to see my doll falling out. Toey just laughed. One day I filled up a plastic bag with water and ice cubes and twisted the top to hold it all inside. I put the bag in the carriage. Pretending not to see him as I sauntered past, I waited for him to start rocking my carriage. Then I pulled out the water bag and twirled around with it in my hands and hit him on his backside. The bag burst open and water splattered all over. Toey didn’t cry, but it looked like he wet his pants so he ran home sniveling for his mother.
“Good, you bopped him one,” my father said.
It made him proud of me. So when bigger kids in nursery school tried to take away toys that I was playing with, I knew what to do. One day I was putting together tracks for a toy train. I remember the boy with yellow hair. He wasn’t bigger than me, but he kept pulling my tracks apart. I told him to stop. “My tracks!”
“No, mine.”
So I picked up a piece of track and bopped him one. He cried bloody murder.
I didn’t really mind being kicked out of nursery school. My mother diverted me into dancing school. I liked being a girl. I loved being able to dress up as a shrimp with two other little girls and dance in a recital at Honey Adams Dance School. My mother sewed us pink tutus and made satin headpieces with two long antennae sticking out of the tops. My father told me that shrimps have five swimming legs. After that, I tried even harder to win races for him. He loved me when I won.
GRANDMA GLADYS, MY FATHER’S MOTHER, was my polestar, a dependable navigator. She lived with us. In her room, one could dream. It smelled of lilies of the valley; a fresh bouquet was always on her dressing table. But one had to be invited into her room. She had “valuables.” She didn’t believe in banks. Grandma Gladys never went out of the house without lacing herself up in her corsets. She kept a suede pouch snapped on to her garter belt so she could always be sure her valuables were safe. Inside the pouch were two diamond rings. I was allowed to take them out, one at a time, but only if her door was locked. My grandmother wasn’t taking any chances.
She would let me sit on her lap and punch the keys of her typewriter. I loved the thwock of the keys as they made the words. My fingers weren’t strong enough at five to make all the letters in, say, butterfly. But after a couple more years of practice, I could type prestidigitation. Grandma Gladys said I was ready for my own typewriter, and she gave me one for my seventh birthday.
Gail’s mother, Lillian Rainey Henion, modeling, circa 1932.
Grandmother Gladys Latham Ovens (center in hat) and Gail’s father, Harold Merritt Henion (far right), circa 1928.
I was nine when my sister, Trish, was born. After that, things pretty much fell apart. My mother began sleeping on the couch all day. I got to be the mother. I had a real baby to walk in a carriage and feed with a bottle. My mother and father moved into separate bedrooms. I lost my own room, my own dreaming place, the writing nook that my father had outfitted for me with a desk and vanity table. Now he slept there. I was moved to the other twin bed in my mother’s room. My baby sister’s crib was in the corner. While my mother read paperback books with names like Sweet Savage Love, I would read Nancy Drew mysteries.
My father began bringing home his golf friend. Her name was Bernice and she was bigger than he was with a laugh like a man’s. They liked to have wrestling contests on our living room floor. I could hear them downstairs. They didn’t see me peeking between the staircase balusters. Bernice wore Bermuda shorts. Her legs stuck out, big as bolsters. She could sit on my slender father and wrap a huge leg around him and hold him down until he laughed so hard, it scared me. I remember once calling to my mother, “Mommy, Daddy’s girlfriend is hurting him!”
She didn’t come.
My mother would be in her bedroom with all the shades pulled down, snoring like a dog. I was scared of the smell in her room. She told me it was nail polish remover. But it came from her mouth.
I remember my mother telling me over and over about her dream to become an opera singer. Years later, I learned from my maternal grandmother how hard she had tried to make my mother’s dream come true. Agnes Rooney was the only one of her seven sisters to step out of the trough of water in the Lisburn linen factory of Northern Ireland and flee to the docks, at age fifteen, where she caught a boat to America to barter herself as a mail-order bride. She was married to an engineer so miserly he bought a wife off the boat. Somehow, Agnes squirreled away the money to buy my mother opera lessons. When the miser found out, he beat her and terminated my mother’s lessons. To win her freedom from that marriage, Agnes had to barter her daughter. Forced to drop out of high school as the price to free Agnes, my mother had to work as her father’s housekeeper for two years. Modeling and hairdressing on the side, she earned enough to be released at eighteen.
She must have thought marrying my father was a great step up. He was handsome and came from an affluent family. He was also a college man, with graduation from Cornell in sight until the Depression made him quit. She loved him, too; I’m certain of that now, because he was able to break her heart.
Marriage meant the end of her own aspirations. “No wife of mine needs to work” was my father’s decree. It was the patriarchal edict of my mother’s father all over again. Men who rode the commuter trains to New York, and competed for the prettiest split-level and the latest Chrysler model, and played golf all day Saturday had wives who did not work. They were part of the furnishings of a successful man’s house. An adequate breadwinner wouldn’t have a wife who worked.
My mother’s attention would come and go, like clouds. She was there for me, mostly, in the daytime. But after dark my mother’s bright star would float away during dinner and rotate into some realm known only to her. She would leave the table.
“Where did Mommy go?” I’d ask.
“Sinus attack,” my father would say.
He didn’t entirely crush my mother’s dream of becoming a performer. She turned to me as the surrogate artist in the family, giving me dance and music lessons. She bought a piano at auction so she could teach me to play for her while she sang “Indian Love Call” and imagined herself as Jeanette MacDonald. My father almost killed her. She was so happy when she sang, my mother, and I loved her spirit. On Friday nights, if my father took her out to a party, she would come home singing and happy, all red and shiny. I’d play the piano for her and she would dance. Sometimes, she even kissed the boys at my birthday parties. My friends said how lucky I was to have such a fun mother.
ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about my earliest childhood were the blackouts. The war was far away, in Europe and Japan, but we practiced blackouts in case the enemy tried to attack our country. Around dinnertime the lights in our neighbors’ windows would blink off, the few streetlights would dim, and I
was allowed to strike matches to make little halos of light from candles. I couldn’t wait to climb out on the roof under my bedroom window and watch the stars flung across the black sky like careless diamonds. To a child, war had a lot to offer.
When I was six, my cousin Ranny came home funny from that war. His skin was yellow from malaria, and his hands shook when he smoked cigarettes, which was all the time. He stayed with us for a while and sometimes screamed out at night. “Shell-shocked,” my father told me, whatever that was. I asked my father if he would have to go to war. No, definitely not, but he wouldn’t tell me why. I found out from Ranny. When they were kids playing with slingshots, Ranny had accidentally put out my father’s left eye. Grandma Gladys had called upon a Christian Science practitioner to pray for the “error” to be taken away and my father’s eye to be restored. It didn’t work.
Nobody would answer my question: Why did my father still have two eyes? I only found out when I spied on him one night through the partly open bathroom door. He took a little box out of the medicine cabinet, opened it carefully, and took out something that glowed like a magic orb, white and shiny with a brown center—a glass eye! I formed the impression that my father had special sight. With that magic eye he could see things that nobody else could.
It wasn’t war that scared me. It was Bert the Turtle. He was a cartoon character they showed us in sixth grade. When a firecracker went off behind his head, Bert ducked into his shell and sang, Dum dum, deedle dum dum, Duck, and Cover, Duck, and Cover. The singsong voice of a civil defense worker told us just what to do: We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous. We must get ready for it. The atomic bomb flash can burn you worse than the worst sunburn. Now, you and I don’t have shells to crawl into like Bert the Turtle. So don’t wait! Duck and cover.
