by Gail Sheehy
My own fears were also stuffed inside that zippered suitcase. What Furies would fly out? From all my research and interviews, I expected to brace myself to accept the inevitable decline at this time of life. Would I cry a lot and come out the other side with the crisp, dispassionate composure of Older Woman?
Concentrated work on writing New Passages demanded discipline and solitude. I would have to walk away from my public platform and turn inward for at least a couple of years. A plan took shape when a friend offered to share her office in a resort town in Southern California. There I could drop out for a month, let fall the masks of public life, escape offers and deadlines, even ignore the rituals of grooming to get to work.
Clay promised to join me in California as soon as he closed the next issue of M magazine. Having found a modest condo to rent a block from the beach, I set up a Spartan routine. Rising at dawn, I stretched, inhaled coffee, spooned organic yogurt, and tried to work up the nerve to do what I had always enjoyed doing with no sense of danger: swim in the ocean.
Why not? I reminded myself that I had been comfortable in the water since I was a tadpole being tossed back and forth between my parents in the shallows of Long Island Sound. But this was the mighty Pacific. And I was no longer young.
Walking to the beach under the rattle of palm leaves, I melted from the warmth of the West Coast in winter. Abruptly, I came upon a little strip of beach. The backdrop was an outcropping of tall reddish rocks. With very little room between water and rock, I began running cautiously along the shoreline, considering the waves. These were not surfer waves, but they tumbled in with a careless energy that I began to sense as malevolent. Instead of thinking, as I had in the past, I can’t wait to dive under and come up on the other side, my imagination was invaded by thoughts of drowning. I returned quickly to the condo.
Over the next several days I waited a little longer each morning to walk to the beach, hoping the strip of sand would expand as the tide lowered. My fear only increased. Fear of losing my footing; fear of no longer being carelessly agile; fear of Clay’s body breaking down. When the thought of death is too terrifying to confront, it comes back in various disguises. Those waves represented everything that could overpower me and take away what I loved.
One night Clay called. For the first time in almost a year, his voice was booming with brio. “It hit me!” he said. “Today, while I was walking in the park—it’s like you were with me—I suddenly knew.”
“What?”
“What I love to do.”
“What, what?”
“I love to identify and shape young talent.”
“Of course, yes! You can do that as a teacher!”
He grunted. “But I don’t want to occupy a stuffy academic chair.”
“No, darling, Berkeley has something else in mind—actually making magazines with your students.”
Because he had pinpointed his core passion, he was suddenly open to a possible new container for it. Berkeley was about as remote from Manhattan as one could get, but its graduate school of journalism was among the most prestigious in the country. The very originality of the idea—to establish a brand-new center devoted to the hands-on creation of magazines—appealed to both of us. Clay was now eager to join me sooner in California and we would fly up to the East Bay together. He couldn’t wait to meet the graduate students.
The morning after that call, I waded into the ocean beyond my waist. An aberrant wave caught me off guard and broke over me. I was startled, but not frightened. That was the surprise: it was a gentle dunking, like that of a playmate. Foam gurgled around me. I suddenly felt girlish. I looked out at the big waves, playful as white-bellied dolphins, leaping and tumbling and inviting, C’mon in and dive through us. You’ll see, you’ll come out the other side.
No, this passage was not about decline! Our midlife can be a progress story, a series of little victories over little deaths. We have time for a Second Adulthood. This was one of those small epiphanies that Virginia Woolf called “moments of being.” It’s when a shock pulls the gauzy curtain off our everyday resistance and throws a sudden floodlight on what our lives are really about. Now I knew: faith over fear is what it would take.
I dove into the cold waves and came up on the other side, laughing. There it was. The challenge—the anchor for all of us in the sea of our Second Adulthood—is a rebellious purpose. Mine would be to redefine middle life and put out the word: this is a gift.
THE GREAT UPROOTING. The move from the East Coast to the West Coast in January 1994 fulfilled a long-held fantasy of Clay’s and mine to try living in Northern California. We would gain some release from the toxicity of New York’s unrelenting competitive struggle. And we’d be exposed to the wild creative energies of the new digital revolution.
But the break was also agonizing. Clay’s apartment had been his home for thirty-five years. As we boxed hundreds of books and rolled up carpets, Clay groaned and turned gray. I tried to cheer him up with a brilliant insight from one of our best friends, Ciji Ware, whose book in progress redefined downsizing as rightsizing. But pain was literally hammering at Clay’s heart. Dr. Pat dispatched us to the cardiac unit at New York Hospital. He lay all day on a gurney, nearly bored to death. Once doctors snaked a balloon into one of his vessels and began stretching open an artery, he became animated. He couldn’t stop interviewing the doctors. “How close did I come?”
“Ninety percent blockage.”
In the recovery room, he was humbled. “It’s about time we opened up!”
Moving into a cramped faculty apartment turned out to be the best medicine of all. Even though we were back to living like graduate students, with brick-and-board bookcases and fighting over one bathroom, we also awoke to the music of goldfinches and woodpeckers. On walks through the woods, we might spot a quail or a preening blackbird. We found a running track that overlooked San Francisco Bay. Steep steps took us down to the original Peet’s Café. At first glance, I thought it must be a methadone clinic. A line of regulars would be standing outside, sleepy-eyed, clutching their own mugs and waiting for the 8 A.M. opening. For Clay and me to sit outdoors in T-shirts in January, reading the New York Times, while we lazily devoured oatmeal and lattes, was sheer bliss.
Clay swapped his tailored British shirts and big lunch ties for denim and rolled-up sleeves, driving to the campus wearing a jaunty cap and shades. He was crazy about his graduate students. They all seemed to know several languages, at least one of which was Chinese or Farsi. They were as in love with making magazines as he had been at their age.
I spoke to Clay’s class about what’s involved in writing for Vanity Fair, organizing a long-form story by themes. At the end of each semester, Clay and I entertained the class with a buffet at our home and talked about their aspirations. Carla De Luca, a star student and later documentary maker, remembers, “We got a twofer with you and Clay.”
On the exciting day when their magazine came out, Clay took his budding writers and editors to dinner at the Chez Panisse Café, where Alice Waters was pioneering the slow food movement. The Berkeley campus in those days was a veritable Garden of Eden where there were enough African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab Americans, and Native Americans along with preppie easterners and proper midwesterners to feel comfortably represented amid the swarms of supercool Californians. Clay often said he wished he had come to teaching sooner.
For me, it had to be a bicoastal life. My children, my hoped-for grandchildren, my sister, my editors, my publisher—so many of the important people in my life were on the East Coast (did I mention my hair colorist?). A week spent in New York, running to Vanity Fair to close a story, and on to Random House to talk about my next book, kept my adrenaline pumping. The returns to Berkeley always felt like being on vacation.
After two years, we bought a sun-filled house clinging to the hills, with a backyard garden full of exotic tropical plants. I would come back from a morning run up and down the hills and, while descending our
steps, pick a clementine or a sweet Meyer lemon to suck on while I gathered an armful of camellias or pink dogwood. It was a paradisiacal environment for a writer. Except for one thing. I couldn’t find an assistant with a New York work ethic. They always had to leave early for a pottery class or chanting circle or to feed a camel (honest, two people in our neighborhood kept camels as pets).
On weekends, Clay and I might drive up to the wine country or down the coastal road for an overnight in Big Sur, indulging in the sybaritic life for which we had never had time as young strivers. We were young again. We were in love again.
That lymphoma never came back.
JOIN THE FELKER FEST!
It was a happening. A pack of literary journalists at the gate! It took a ballroom to contain all the luminaries who came to support Clay’s new dream—the Felker Magazine Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Nearly a thousand people turned out to pledge contributions—writers, editors and publishers, business tycoons, artists and agents, even salespeople and switchboard operators who belonged to the original New York magazine family—all crowded into the ballroom of the Pierre on Fifth Avenue for the “Felker Fest” on an unforgettable evening in April 1995.
Tom Wolfe embodied the pop idiom in his winter white suit, lime tie, and—of course!—his white spats. There’s Gloria! Long legs in black leather and streaked hair curtaining her beautiful, ageless face. And Clay himself, rather shy and nervous at first. I overheard snatches of conversation with the same phrases: “He gave me my first job”; “He changed my life”; “He loved me and left me, but I forgave him”; “Can you believe how many of us came out of that one place?”
Everyone wanted to say hello to Clay, so we formed a reception line in the Cotillion Room. Abe Rosenthal, the formidable former executive editor of the New York Times, had mellowed enough since leaving that post to be able to say to me, “I didn’t so much know Clay as steal from him. He gave me the idea of giving readers information to enjoy—service reporting. That’s when we added enjoyment to the New York Times.” Mort Zuckerman, for whom Clay had been a consultant, dropped a punchy compliment: “He dumped all over everything I did. He’s a genius.”
It was better than a wedding. No infighting relatives among this bunch; every face that came past me was someone I cared about—Milton, Lesley Stahl, Helen Gurley Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, still playing the old fart smoking his fags; Chris Buckley, who would later write the spoof Thank You for Smoking; Pete Hamill, who would later write his moving memoir, A Drinking Life. Ken Auletta recalled Clay descending for the first time on the offices of the Village Voice, “like an astronaut landing on a strange planet. I remember wanting to strangle the bastard. I thought he was a showman, but I found out he is much more. The showman is a servant of his blinding talent as an editor.”
Terry McDonell remembered Clay telling him, when he was trying to raise money to start Smart magazine, “‘It’s impossible.’ Then he’d give me another idea for how to make it happen. He helped all sorts of people launch new magazines.”
Cyndi Stivers called herself a Claymate, from her brief but indelible stint as a member of the female cast at East Side Express. She had created a fifty-page booklet of reminiscences from Clay’s protégés, titled Uncommon Clay, and recalled the first important lesson she got as a Claymate. “He would look into the middle distance, rake his fingers through the few remaining hairs, and tell you that your latest opus, felt, uh, thin and bloodless. ‘Go back and write it like you told it to me,’ he’d dictate. ‘You’ve got to add your point of view.’”
Walter Bernard had one of the best stories. When the magazine moved uptown in 1974, it was suddenly transformed from a cozily choked garret to a large but sterile space. Clay designed himself a separate office with Georgian paneling and a private bathroom. “How could we overhear his private phone calls?” Bernard griped. “How could he hear our complaints and sniping? Would we have to knock on his door? Could we use his bathroom?” The move took place over a weekend. “On Monday, Clay was barricaded by paneling. By Tuesday, the staff felt out of touch and isolated. On Wednesday, managing editor Jack Nessel marched into Clay’s office and used his bathroom. On Thursday, Clay moved his desk out of the office and into the newsroom. He never went back. We all used the bathroom.”
The witty literary jester Mary Ann Madden, of the famous New York magazine competitions, assembled a toast by combining the title of a percussion band, Adversity Breeds Malice, and a line from Macbeth: “Clay fostered unknown talent by instinct and smarts. From the New York of the Herald Trib to the New York ripp’d untimely by Rupert Murdoch, Clay remained wantonly original, gutsy, graceful. Success becomes him. And in adversity, malice is not his gift.”
Seeing Clay as the object of such deep affection and respect from the whole upstairs to downstairs of our profession, I was in awe. I couldn’t believe how many people felt a personal attachment to this midwestern nobody who showed up in New York with no money, no connections, yet was able to transform journalism. He had changed so many lives.
By the end of the night, a little more than a million dollars was pledged, enough to create a foundation and endow the center, assuring its longevity. Clay had the last word. “This is kind of a tribal gathering of the magazine world,” he said. “Magazine people like each other. Even if I wasn’t the honoree, I’d still really want to be here!”
CHAPTER 36
The Hillary Decade
THE 1990S WERE FULL OF NEW PASSAGES for my entire family. When Mohm graduated from Wellesley College and devoted herself to becoming an artist and an activist working with refugees of war, Clay and I were deeply moved. Eventually, she would have to go back to Cambodia to discover who she was.
Maura started out as a journalist—a successful staff and freelance writer for several major national publications. She earned an M.A. in cultural studies and a second degree as a master of social work. She found a new career as a psychotherapist in private practice. Early on, she and Tim Moss committed to an egalitarian marriage and were part of the great social shift of their generation, seeking an urban village where they could support a family-centered life. Settling in Brooklyn, they tag team as parents and self-employed professionals.
My own new passage began with the excitement of setting up a new bicoastal life for Clay and me in 1994. Six golden years would follow. Despite anxieties over Clay’s health, the 1990s were also the most fertile years in my career. Looking back over my Day-Timer diaries from that decade makes me wonder what I was smoking. But now I think I know how I was able to do so much: in 1990 I was riding high on the booster rocket of energy that Mead defined as “post-menopausal zest.” It was exhilarating to feel healthier and stronger than ever. Who would have thought? This was nothing like the dreaded middle age that women had been conditioned to expect. I felt fortunate to be able in those ten years to write five books about which I was passionate: Gorbachev: The Making of the Man Who Changed the World (1990); The Silent Passage (1992); New Passages (1995); Understanding Men’s Passages (1998); and Hillary’s Choice (1999).
Through all the creative ferment of my writing life, there was one figure, and one story, that captured my attention more than any other. Hillary Rodham Clinton. I followed her from her entrance to the national stage in 1991 and wrote about her turbulent evolution over the next ten years, culminating in her own dramatic midlife passage—at the age of fifty-three—when she ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate. I found it fascinating that Hillary was the same age as Margaret Thatcher when she reached her goal of becoming elected to high office in her own right.
From my first exposure to Hillary in January 1992, I had a strong hunch that she would become the most important woman in American politics. I had never met a woman like her.
We met at Little Rock airport on the morning after she appeared on 60 Minutes, a maternal arm around Bill Clinton as she leaned in to coach and cover for her husband while he weakly ducked one question after another about an alleged affair. He blew
their strategy of total denial. Hillary jumped in and shook her fist and declared, “Ah’m not sittin’ here, some little woman, standin’ by my man like Tammy Wynette. Ah’m sittin’ here because I love him . . .”
When all hell broke loose the next day, I was standing by Hillary’s side. We had just entered the lounge of a nondescript motel in Pierre, South Dakota. Hillary flipped on the TV. The screen filled with the come-hither countenance of a black-rooted blond lounge singer, Gennifer Flowers, who was playing tapes for the media of the love-talk she used to “deflower” Governor Clinton. Not a whit of surprise showed on Hillary’s face. Her eyes took it all in with the glittering blink of a lizard. She ordered her tearful campaign manager, “Get Bill on the phone.”
Returning from that call, she scowled and said Bill had brushed it off. “He said, ‘Everybody knows you can be paid to do anything.’” Hillary was furious, not at her husband’s unfaithfulness, but at his carelessness. “Everybody doesn’t know that,” she had told him. “Bill, why were you even talking to this person?”
An hour later, fortified with a mask of equanimity, she swept into a Pork Producers’ Rib Feed and charmed the whiskers off the farmers—until her press secretary whispered in her ear, “All three nets led with the Flowers press conference.” Hillary made a beeline to another pay phone. Another woman had been offered a million dollars to say she had a one-night stand with Bill Clinton.
Squeezed into her six-seater plane, I sat knee to knee with this publicly scorned woman and listened, openmouthed, as she vented her frustration above the grinding hum. “If we’d been in front of a jury, I’d say, ‘Miss Flowers, isn’t it true that you were asked this by AP in June of 1990 and you said no? Weren’t you asked by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and you said no?’ I mean, I would crucify her.”
