Daring

by Gail Sheehy

  THE EXCITEMENT OF PUBLIC SUCCESS was accompanied by a disequilibrium in the privacy of my soul. The more I looked into the blind eye of a TV camera, the more I began to understand why Native Americans distrusted photographers, believing them to be voyeurs who robbed them of their spiritual identity. Although I was thrilled that the book was received as breaking new and positive ground, I hadn’t figured on losing my privacy. That is to say, my normalcy. Most authors, even household names, couldn’t be picked out of a lineup. The more I looked into the face of TV cameras, the more I was complicit in my transmogrification into a different life-form—a quasi celebrity.

  Every one of my relationships was distorted by my new status as a bestselling author. Writer friends now saw me as competition; if I was on the bestseller list, I had stolen their rightful slot. My father now turned to me as an ATM machine. He wanted me to take out a second mortgage on his house. It would be for only a few years, he promised, until he built his own advertising business. I wanted so badly to believe him, to help him believe in himself. I could not say no. What’s more, to have money for the first time in my life made me nervous. Knowing nothing about how to manage money, I was sure I would let it slip through my fingers.

  These were luxury problems, of course. But I prayed for help in getting my feet back on the ground. I did not feel my uncertainties to be unique. I was a woman, like any other woman of my time, who had to discover how to make her way in a world constructed by and for men. My lot was not much different from all women and men. We have the same longings, the same fears and frustrations, the same fleeting successes and inconsolable losses, the same secret shame and muted self-doubts. I believe that if and when we face our flawed likeness, and find the courage to change what we can, we may be able to accept being merely human.

  The softcover edition of Passages was published in 1977 by Bantam Books, the king of quality paperbacks, when that house was run by the triumvirate of Mark Jaffe, editor in chief, Oscar Dystel, president, and Esther Margolis, a publicist so clever I believe she could have outsold the Bible with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She booked me for feature interviews in every major and minor newspaper. Word of mouth kept spreading like wildfire. People couldn’t wait to read about what stage or passage they were facing. Curiously, they rarely read ahead of their age; they didn’t want to know. TV interviewers almost inevitably began asking about their own stage. Except for Johnny Carson. I was warned, “Don’t get personal with Johnny. He’ll cut you dead.”

  Esther suggested we go with the fun of a guessing game with Carson. “Give him a few characteristics of three major passages and let him guess which one he’s in,” she advised. We knew he’d want to be as young as they come, so we front-loaded the choices with the Trying Twenties. He went for it and made jokes about trying out a new identity every night, on air. I was amazed at being able to forget myself and enjoy playing the game with a genius of comedy.

  “I’VE FOUND YOUR HOUSE!” It was my friend Margaret Ginna.

  “My house? I’m not looking for a house.”

  “Yes you are.” Her confidence resided in a Zen sensibility. “You hate leaving the Hamptons every fall. And now you don’t have to. You’ve worked hard for this.”

  It was Labor Day weekend. I was bemoaning summer’s end as I packed up the linens and pots to vacate our rented cottage. Passages had only been out in softcover for three months.

  Clay took a look at the hundred-year-old farmhouse with Margaret and urged me to take her advice. Within a matter of minutes of seeing the secluded house and grounds, I fell in love. It was a ramble of cozy bedrooms with fireplaces, a study, and a big barn of a living room with two window walls that looked out on a rolling lawn and lots of places to plant a garden.

  It was a relief to dig a hole in the sand and imagine stuffing the Passages money beneath a house and forgetting about it before I blew it. Who knew how long the book sales would remain strong? Besides, how could I qualify for a mortgage? I had no credit history. My friend Ted Kheel, the renowned labor lawyer, offered to vouchsafe to Chase Bank that I was not a deadbeat. The owner of the house, a Broadway producer, Fred Coe, agreed to sell me seven beds and a starter set of early-American antiques. The closing was accelerated in hopes that I could take occupancy before Thanksgiving.

  NOVEMBER 27, 1977. IT’S MINE! I had waited so long for a family life, I just had to turn the house into a home—in a day. My birthday.

  Up before dawn in New York, Maura and I finished packing dozens of boxes and hurled them into a rented station wagon. We took back roads, bleary with fog. “Mom! A deer! Watch out!” We barely missed brushing the white of his tail. Inside the chilly house, we emptied the boxes and flapped out seven sets of sheets to make up the beds. I lingered in each room, acquainting myself with its individual charm.

  My mother and I were both embarking on new and exhilarating passages. She and her new husband, Al, were driving up the coast from their home in Florida and out to near the end of Long Island to celebrate my taking possession of my very first house on the occasion of my fortieth birthday. I wanted to celebrate my mother’s emancipation into the woman she was always meant to be: a businesswoman. She now bought and redesigned houses for resale. Once released from incarceration in a cold, conformist suburb and a faithless marriage, she had recovered her self-respect in AA and become a sober woman and a contented wife. The divorced engineer she had met in the program adored her and brought his building skills to their collaboration in buying, renovating, and selling houses in Florida. All this as my mother approached sixty. She was a poster woman for a passage into the Age of Mastery.

  Clay was expected on the four o’clock commuter plane at East Hampton airport. Sister Trish and her husband were coming later by train, and stepsister Susie from a different direction.

  Maura had already made her signature lemon bundt cake and put it in the oven. I dashed outside to clip holly bushes bursting with red berries and found a huge copper container to display them and brighten the living room. Wood had to be chopped, the table had to be set. Oh wait! Farmer Ludlow was killing a twenty-pound fresh turkey for pickup at two. We drove to his farm. Maura helped me lug the bird in through the kitchen door, watch out! Ms., our emotionally needy Lhasa apso, got tangled up in our feet. A resident raccoon was flushed from the laundry room. Just then tires could be heard chewing the gravel as my mother and Big Al approached.

  I greeted them with hot cider and cinnamon sticks and shortbread cookies. My mother surveyed the living room and sweetly dissembled: “I can’t believe you have everything in place.” I took her by the hand to the piano. Clay arrived in time to set the fire as Mother was warbling her third chorus of “Indian Love Call.” I am calling you-who-who-who-ooh-ooh-ooh . . . I was seven again, accompanying her on the piano my father almost killed her for buying at auction so we could make music together. That means I offer my love to you-who-who-who-ooh-ooh-ooh . . . We took a simple supper by the fire. After tucking everyone in, I snuck outside to circle my new home and murmur prayers of thanksgiving. Looking back from the fringe of woods under a clouded moon, the hulk of white became the silhouette of a cruise ship. The ocean was close, licking and gnawing at the shore. We were safe. How long I had waited to reconstruct the lovely chaos of family life.

  Inside, in the dark of a hall, Maura surprised me. She hugged me tightly, her cheeks hot and damp; this would not be another solitary Thanksgiving. “Oh, Mommy, I love it! This house makes up for all the moving around—and it’s going to work!”

  PASSAGES REMAINED ON THE BESTSELLER LIST of the New York Times for three years straight. It was published in twenty-eight languages and went through countless reprintings. A survey by the Library of Congress named it “one of the ten most influential books of our time.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Fatal Attraction

  THE VISITOR HURTLED DOWN the spiral staircase in Clay’s apartment and assumed a gladiatorial crouch.

  “Dolly signed!” he bellowed triumphantly.


  It was the evening of November 20, 1976, and Rupert Murdoch had planted his flag on a new continent. It was Clay who had introduced him to the famously tough proprietor of the ultraliberal New York Post, Dorothy Schiff. The Australian newspaper magnate had been cultivating his relationship with Clay for a couple of years by then, to ease his entry into the clubby world of New York journalism. He had been in a pugnacious mood ever since we’d met him, waiting for the right moment to pounce on the only surviving afternoon newspaper in the Big Apple.

  “How did you close the deal?” Clay asked.

  Murdoch boasted about spotting her weakness: “We had lunch. She was tired, older all of a sudden, the Post was losing money.” With lightning speed he struck a deal for $32.5 million. “I may have paid too much for it, but it was the chance of my lifetime.” He had bought a powerful mouthpiece in the media capital of America.

  Clay was impressed. The connection between the two men resembled a friendship, but I was wary from the start. Editorial integrity was irrelevant to Murdoch. I had no doubt that he would renege on his promise to Schiff to maintain the Post’s liberal outlook, and, of course, he did. He had already built a newspaper empire of some ninety publications in Australia and England before the age of forty-five. Clay wanted to know how he did it.

  “The way to operate is with OPM,” Murdoch would tell Clay. “Other people’s money.”

  That touched a sensitive chord in Clay. “Since I had no track record and nothing in the bank when I launched New York,” he confided to Murdoch, “I had to take money where I could get it. You can pay too much for money by giving up too much control.”

  I brought out a tray of hors d’oeuvres and Clay broke open a bottle of champagne to celebrate Murdoch’s triumph. The combatant was still too full of fight talk to sit down. “If the Daily News tries putting out an afternoon edition, I’ll put out a morning paper and we’ll have a good old-fashioned newspaper war,” he barked. “Nobody will win, but they’ll know they’ve been in a hell of a fight!”

  Back then, I have to admit, I thought Murdoch looked like Humphrey Bogart: the dark eyes crouched under a thick shrubbery of black brows, the dissolute dents in his cheeks, the pouting lower lip. For all his legendary ruthlessness, Murdoch also had a sly charm. He turned it on full force around Clay, just as he had with Dolly Schiff, just as he would later do to woo Clay’s enemies and countless government officials all the way up to presidents and prime ministers—whomever he needed to build his media empire.

  What attracted Felker and Murdoch to each other puzzled me for a while. They couldn’t have been more different in temperament. Clay was an impresario. He had the volatile personality of a creative editor: he was fanatically loyal to his tribe, the writers and editors, artists and photographers, and they returned his loyalty. Murdoch was a juggernaut. He had to overpower. When he and Clay and I first met over a social weekend at Washington Post publisher Kay Graham’s Virginia farm, Murdoch played tennis not well but savagely, noticeably ignoring the proper nuance at a polite country weekend. Forget friendship, Rupert Murdoch played to win.

  I remember telling Clay at some point that Murdoch was not his friend. “He will court you, promise you, pick your brain pan clean, but he is a cannibal—the kind of guest you invite to dinner and he eats the host.”

  But Clay was seduced by being close to powerful men and women; he wanted to learn their secrets. He offered Murdoch a respectable entrée into the stratosphere of New York. He mistook Murdoch’s interest in him for friendship. It would prove to be a fatal naïveté. Clay’s other fatal flaw was his inability to fake friendship with his moneymen. As fascinated as he was by power, he did not know how to be manipulative. He didn’t know how to play people off against one another and he didn’t know how to protect himself. Worse, he didn’t think he had to; after all, his board of directors saw Clay as the golden goose of editors. But they also shared the assumption that he, like all artistic people, was clueless when it came to business.

  Business mesmerized Clay. He even took classes in corporate accounting, determined to teach himself to be a good businessman. He was convinced this was the only way he would be able to maintain control of the media empire he intended to build. But it was the moneymen who held the strings to his corporate purse. And some of them, jealous of Clay’s entrée, wanted to be wooed and introduced around town to elevate their social standing. Clay couldn’t bring himself to chum around with them.

  We often went to dinner with the Murdochs. I liked his then wife, Anna, a softly contoured blonde with a subversive agenda. She had been a reporter on Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Mirror when they married, and Murdoch commanded her to resign. Anna obeyed, but she never forgave. Whenever she raised the subject around the four of us, goading me to make some feminist comment, Rupert would laugh and move his chair away from the women.

  “I’ve made the breakthrough,” she proudly confided one evening. “I’m starting at Fordham to finish my undergrad degree and then I’m going on to grad school in psychology. I’m going to be my own woman!” To my ears, that statement of liberation was the death knell of the Murdoch marriage.

  TO FURTHER CELEBRATE MURDOCH’S COUP with the Post, we repaired to Elaine’s, the legendary uptown bistro that attracted Manhattan avatars like Woody Allen and Mayor Ed Koch. The proprietor, Elaine Kaufman, indulged her pet writers. Wriggling between tables with her half-bushel hips, she doled out witty vulgarities and a free drink here and there to the likes of George Plimpton, Kurt Vonnegut, Mario Puzo, even Pavarotti. The food was overpriced and just palatable, but Elaine’s regulars accommodated with an excess of drink. Elaine always welcomed Clay; he brought to her establishment the faces that would be all over the news in the future. Everyone enjoyed Clay’s access to the newest media curiosity in the Big Apple.

  The biggest contrast between Clay and Murdoch was the scale on which they did business. Murdoch’s empire was then worth hundreds of millions and was controlled by a family holding company. Clay’s company had a market value somewhere between $10 million and $20 million and was controlled by investors. Nonetheless, that evening at Elaine’s, they talked like publishing peers, offering each other advice: “The one you should hire to find gossip for the Post . . .” and “What you should do with the Voice . . .” When Clay mentioned the Village Voice, there was no mistaking the delight in his purchase of the premier alternative weekly with its Peck’s bad-boy irreverence. But Clay spoke like a proud father of his firstborn, New York.

  Murdoch was envious. All was not galloping down the glory road for him. Over the exultation of his first major conquest in the New World there hung a cloud of probable rejection in the Old World. As contemptuous as he pretended to be of the “establishment,” Murdoch’s strategy was to court the very aristocrats and prime ministers he was presumed to hate, then invade their hierarchies and usurp their power. Without question, the route to respectability for Murdoch was to buy a prestige publication in Britain. He had begun expanding from his native Australia into the United Kingdom in 1968 when he took over the populist News of the World and immediately established his reputation as a purveyor of tits-and-ass photos and lurid crime and scandal tales. A year later he bought the Sun and turned it into a tabloid with the same hugely successful down-market format.

  In 1973, he made one fatal turn. His Sunday News of the World caught the conservative Lord Lambton with a prostitute and exposed him in photographs as a symbol of decadent British aristocracy. The establishment ostracized Murdoch. That had driven him to sell his home in England and move lock, stock, and silver chests to America. Just that winter another chance had arisen in England. A venerable British institution, the Observer, was for sale. Murdoch was so certain about buying his first establishment newspaper that he and his wife had taken a new flat in Mayfair.

  “Anna and I went over there earlier last week to put finishing touches on the flat,” he told Clay at Elaine’s. “When I found out all of a sudden that Dolly was willing to sell the Post, I flew back.”


  “Did you sew up the Observer deal?” Clay wanted to know.

  A great shrug lifted Murdoch’s cheeks and then dropped them even lower. “Crybaby liberals are throwing fits.” His fighting words masked the nasty reality. Murdoch leaned over and confided to Clay that in the past forty-eight hours he’d had word that the board was blocking his bid. Journalists at the Observer refused to work if Murdoch took over. As we left Elaine’s in Murdoch’s limo, it was Clay’s turn to confide that he was having problems with his board.

  “You’ve had a lot of experience with these things, Rupert. Maybe you can give me some advice.”

  “Let’s get together and talk about it.”

  Six weeks later Rupert Murdoch would smell the weakness in Clay’s hold on the board of his publishing company. Gladiators have to win; they can’t afford friends.

  CHAPTER 23

  Power Fever

  WATCHING CLAY DRESS FASCINATED ME. He had gained in girth. He puffed out proudly in his custom-made Turnbull & Asser shirts, his chest an awning of bold stripes in tangerine silk or cornflower blue. His suits had the unmistakable high-cut sleeves and narrow cuffs of custom tailoring from London’s Savile Row. If his shoulders weren’t already broad enough, piling on a Huntsman camel’s hair overcoat gave him a positively equine silhouette. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it was the contrast of the top heft to his feet that made it almost seem so.

  Clay’s feet were positively balletic, I mean tiny, with the high arch of a Baryshnikov. I would watch him shoehorn those delicately articulated tootsies into the polished oxfords bench-made for him at John Lobb. Could he really support himself on them? Yes! He’d leap up and I’d almost expect him to pirouette out the door and prance off across East Fifty-Seventh Street like a Lipizzaner stallion.