In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  One morning in 1970, a gang of feminists, led by Kate Millett, barged into the offices of Cosmopolitan and staged a sit-in. Fresh from a successful 11-hour occupancy at Ladies’ Home Journal, where they pressed editor John Mack Carter to turn over an entire issue to the cause (they wound up settling for eight pages), they set their sights on Helen. They backed her up against the radiator, arguing that her magazine was sexist and woman hating and that she would do well to consider more feminist content.

  “We’re already a feminist book,” said Helen. But to appease them, she agreed to consider any and all articles they wished to publish in her magazine, with the requirement that she would have editorial control. They agreed. As these things usually go, only a few articles were written and submitted, and Helen went back to work.

  To further display her good faith in the movement, Helen agreed to go to a consciousness-raising session. Sometime before the end of 1970 she presented herself at a gathering but couldn’t help being wry: “Twelve of us—I almost said girls, but they say I must stop that and refer to us as women—sat about and related our hang-ups. Frankly, I was only into my eighth hang-up when I had to relinquish the floor to the next hang up-ee.” One could call her the Tenacious HGB.

  But as the years passed, Helen was increasingly on the wrong side of history, and her famous instincts began to fail her. She refused to have anything to do with motherhood, claiming that nothing could be more oppressive or less sexy. Plus, it ruined your figure.

  She also displayed her ignorance about HIV and AIDs. In the January 1988 issue of Cosmo, she ran a minimizing, inaccurate article called “Reassuring News about AIDS: A Doctor Tells You Why You May Not Be at Risk.” Even after U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote an alarmed letter, she refused to print a retraction or update, for fear of seeming antisex.

  IN 1997, AT THE AGE OF 75, Helen was asked to step down from the flagship magazine but stayed on as the editor of Cosmo’s 65 international editions. Her new office had pink silk wallpaper and leopard print furnishings. For the next 15 years, she would get up in the morning, pack a lunch of tuna salad in a recycled yogurt container, slip into her pink Pucci miniskirt, black fishnets, and Manolo Blahniks, and head to the office, as she had done for more than 50 years. She refused to be philosophical about old age. As long as she was upright, she would wear perfume, bangles, and high heels and bat her false eyelashes at the doorman. People disparaged her for refusing to granny-fy herself, but why shouldn’t she be the kind of woman she wanted to be for the whole of her life? This is how it should be. We should forget the calendar. We should stop tallying the number of high school reunions we’ve attended, and shrug it off that all the songs we once made out to are now golden oldies. We should all do whatever it is that makes us feel good about ourselves, and about who we are in the world, until we’re bored by it. Helen was never bored by feeling frisky, feminine, and a little outrageous, and good on her.

  Helen died in August 2012 at the age of 90,*4 but her spirit lives on in the pages of Cosmopolitan. Go to your local grocery store—not Whole Foods, or anywhere too concerned with the organic side of things—and there at the checkout stand behold the current issue. On the cover there will be a young woman with copious cleavage, framed by a series of come-ons that promise a better body, better sex, and a better way to make/save/spend your money. And on the cover of the issue I’m looking at this very minute, “The New Shows to Binge Watch.” That seems a little outside Cosmo’s usual purview, until you get to #stayinbed.

  Helen was at the swinging single girl party first, and stayed there until last call. She remained defiant until the end, impervious to criticism, relentless in her defense of her own belief in what girls really wanted. “If you’re not a sex object, you’re in trouble,” she once famously said. Helen Gurley Brown was perfectly incorrigible, and a lot smarter than anyone gave her credit for. In other words, a difficult woman at her best.

  *1That somehow every generation has to refight the battle to defend the notion that women deserve the same things as men is another essay for another time.

  *2Polio is spread via infected fecal matter entering the mouth, which is appallingly more common than you might realize. Remember to wash your hands before you eat, gentle readers.

  *3Which sorority girls now don with their yoga pants and Uggs to grab a post-hangover grande latte on Saturday mornings.

  *4“…though parts of her are considerably younger,” according to the New York Times.

  CHAPTER 13

  EDIE SEDGWICK

  Decadent

  ONE DAY IN 1963, when Edie Sedgwick was 20, she invited her friends to lunch at the Ritz in Boston. Her father, she claimed, had an account there. The parents of the soon-to-be It Girl and muse of Andy Warhol lived on a ranch in the wilds of Santa Barbara, California; it seemed unlikely that Duke Sedgwick would have an account at this particular hotel.

  At the time, Edie was a student at Radcliffe studying sculpture. Her friends were mostly young gay men on Harvard’s arty fringe. At the extravagant meal, they guzzled as much expensive champagne as humanly possible; Edie ordered roast beef with Russian dressing. (This was her favorite dish, although she never touched it.)

  All the young men had brought money to cover the bill in case Edie had simply made the whole thing up, which was a distinct possibility. (She was cherished, in part, because of her complete indifference to reality.) The bill came, and she signed for it. The waiter went away and returned with the manager. As the story goes, Edie’s dining companions all sobered up fast, worried that their friend had been busted. They began reaching in their pockets for cash, and were prepared to make an apology on her behalf. But the manager just wanted to confirm that she meant to leave a 100 percent tip. The lunch was $250 give or take, and she had left an additional $250 for the waiters, who bowed their heads at her generosity. Edie celebrated by standing on the table and singing “Loads of Love,” from a recent Richard Rodgers musical.

  As for the tip, Ed Hennessy (who related the anecdote in Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s classic oral history of Edie’s life) discovered later that Edie had just been winging it. She didn’t have a clue about tipping, and had never left one in her entire life.

  Shortly after this episode, Edie ditched Radcliffe for New York, where in 1964 she met Andy Warhol, becoming his muse and “superstar” of his New York City studio, known as The Factory. She modeled for Vogue and was proclaimed the It Girl of 1965 before plunging deeper into drug addiction and dying in her sleep from an accidental overdose at 28. Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” was said to be inspired by her. Robert Rauschenberg declared her a living work of art. Lena Dunham, another member of the It Girl sorority, occasionally posts pictures of Edie in her various iterations on Instagram—attracted, as we all were and are, to her insouciance and fatal charm.

  I’ve read Stein and Plimpton’s Edie: American Girl half a dozen times over the years. The first was in 1982, the month it was published. I was only a bit older than Edie was when she split for New York, and I was both enthralled and envious. Like Edie, I was a girl from Southern California who had also moved to New York for a time—but there the comparison ended. She was so pretty, so skinny, so glamorously messed up. That platinum hair with the intentional roots. The chandelier earrings and “anthracite eyes,” a term coined by Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue (see Chapter 23). I believed John Anthony Walker’s poetic observation that Edie “had the capacity to create instantly the world around her.” Of her he wrote, “You entered Edie’s world and nothing tangential made any difference: everything else fell away and there Edie was in the middle of a pirouette.”

  Everything about Edie was mythic. She came from a great American family. The Sedgwicks were equal parts rich, influential, and eccentric since the founding of our nation. Along with the de Forests (Edie’s mother’s people), various Sedgwicks helped settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony, signed the Declaration of In
dependence, served as Speaker of the House under George Washington, founded colleges (Williams) and railroads (Southern Pacific), and created Central Park. Edie’s fifth great grandfather, Judge Theodore Sedgwick, was the first in the country to win a case arguing for the freedom of an African-American woman. (And in case you were wondering: Kyra Sedgwick is Edie’s first cousin, once removed.)

  Edie was born and grew up on a 3,000-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, where she was homeschooled with her seven siblings. They had those rich people names: Saucie, Suky, Minty. They called their dad Fuzzy. There’s a midwestern saying about people who migrate to the West Coast: If you tip America on its side and shake it up and down, all the nuts wind up at the bottom, in California. This was more or less the situation with Edie’s father, Francis Minturn “Duke” Sedgwick, who was deemed by the more staid Sedgwicks to be “arty” (code for a little crazy). At one point he was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder and “nervous breakdowns.”

  Duke had a preferred psychiatric hospital, Silver Hill in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he also sent his children when they started showing signs of not being the people he wanted them to be. In 1962, when Edie was 19, she was sent there at her father’s insistence to deal with her anorexia. It didn’t work. Her older brother, Minty, was sent there when he came out of the closet and Duke disapproved. Later, Minty hanged himself with a necktie.

  I’m not dismissing the severity of the Sedgwicks’ mental illness. It was real and debilitating and caused a lot of genuine anguish. Still, right or wrong, for those of us who hail from the murderously dull middle-class suburbs, there is something enchanting about upper-class mental instability. (Maybe it’s that their breakdowns always allow for plenty of time off, at a place with heavy plaid lap robes and a restful view.) We middle-classers also suffer nervous breakdowns, but they generally consist of taking a fake sick day from work, sitting on the couch in our sad coffee-stained bathrobes with a pint of ice cream, and binge-watching something mediocre on TV. The next morning we’re back in fine fettle, because we have to be.

  After she moved to New York in 1964, Edie drove a gray Mercedes-Benz, often on acid. When a friend of hers crashed it, she switched to a limo service. As her onetime flame, Bob Dylan crony Bob Neuwirth, said: “Edie went through limousine companies the way people go through cigarettes. She never paid her bills, so the limousine people would shut off her credit, and she’d switch to another company. The drivers loved her madly, because she’d dole out these 25- and 35-dollar tips.”

  I have always felt conflicted about adoring Edie. She was a fragile girl, wounded bird division. The kind of girl men rush in to protect, to rescue, to make excuses for, to celebrate. The exact kind of woman I normally struggle to wrap my feminist arms around.

  And still, her March 1966 spread in Vogue is captivating. The camera loved her. Just try to take your eyes off of her.

  Maybe we can’t help but adore Edie. Maybe it’s just not our fault. A wise philosopher friend of mine (literally, he had a Ph.D. in philosophy) once explained that girls have never been swept away by Star Wars because it doesn’t tell the archetypal female hero’s journey. The archetypal female hero’s journey, according to my friend, is exemplified in Dirty Dancing. Specifically, the way nobody puts Baby in the corner. Women, according to my friend, want to be seen and appreciated for everything they are, just as they are. Edie lives on in our imaginations because she made a life out of doing nothing but being Edie.

  NEW YORK IN 1965 was all about Edie. Vogue called her a youthquaker: the perfect, awkward-in-retrospect descriptor for the times. Her love-fest with Andy Warhol, in which she starred in multiple underground films he directed, was surprisingly short-lived: Their association lasted only from 1965 to early 1966. People said that Andy believed Edie would be his ticket to Hollywood. Together they made 18 films, which are (in my humble opinion) total unwatchable crap. His first film with Edie, Poor Little Rich Girl, starred Edie being Edie (a great subject, as we know). Half of it was out of focus. I survived a semester of experimental film theory, and I can tell you there are genuinely bizarre and successful underground films (Scorpio Rising, Pink Flamingos). But the Warhol oeuvre looks as if it came from a student auteur on the verge of flunking out of film school. Andy financed the movies from the sale of his paintings. He didn’t pay Edie a penny, which (understandably) she began to resent.

  Booze, coke, uppers, downers, and speedballs. These were the drugs that Edie took from morning till night. Sometime in 1967, Vogue stopped calling. There was some high schoolish infighting between the Factory hipster crowd and Bob Dylan’s hipster crowd—and when Edie took up with Bob Neuwirth, her time with Warhol was over. She moved in to the Chelsea Hotel, then accidentally set her room on fire when she nodded off holding a cigarette.

  Here is something I don’t understand: For all the great love people had for Edie, where were they when she began her slide into deep addiction? Where were the young men from Harvard’s arty fringe? Where was Andy Warhol, who, upon hearing of her death in 1971, reputedly said, “Edie who?” The coroner’s report listed the cause of Edie’s death as undetermined/accident/suicide. It’s tremendously sad. Still, the mystery suits her.

  In 1969, after sustaining serious burns in the Chelsea Hotel fire, Edie went home to California to try to get herself together. She struggled to stay sober, and after an arrest in August of that year, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she met her future husband, the dashing hippie Michael Post. They married in 1971, and their wedding picture shows Edie looking like the typical California girl she once was; her brown hair is shoulder length, glossy, center parted. She wears a white lace dress with bell sleeves and holds a white magnolia, still on its stem. Michael Post wears a fancy tux. They both grin into the sun.

  Edie’s death on November 16, 1971, came not on the heels of some major youth culture happening, but after a fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum (how staid), where she drank too much. Afterward, she responsibly called her husband to pick her up. At home, Michael Post gave Edie some medication prescribed by her doctor. In the morning, she didn’t wake up. She was 28 years old.

  LISTEN, LADIES, we all do too much. I don’t even have to know what you do to know that it is too much. We are exhausted—or at least I am—by the demands of American womanhood. Our contemporary It Girls and superstars work too much. Rather than exuding the languorous appeal befitting the hip, famous, and gorgeous, they always seem to be slaving away. They endure Navy Seal–level workouts, to which they submit daily before dawn, and special enjoyment-free diets. They live in a state of eternal, sexy selfie, red-carpet readiness, smooth, waxed, and starving, and tend their Instagram accounts with the obsessive attention usually reserved for rare orchids. Madonna once said, “I live a highly scheduled life. There’s absolutely no time wasted. I’m very focused.”

  Edie’s life, on the other hand, was unscheduled, wasteful, unfocused. She possessed the sexy louche aura of someone perpetually smoking a cigarette. Her idea of exercise was a few ballet stretches upon awaking, sometime around noon. She liked to lie around listening to opera. She showed up for fashion shoots in a T-shirt and a pair of black tights (which then became all the rage).

  Can’t we all be a little more like this? Sleeping in, eating something whenever, moving around when our bodies demand it, showing up for our appointments in whatever we feel like wearing? We might be viewed as being a little decadent, a little difficult. But let’s agree not to care, shall we?

  CHAPTER 14

  ANGELA MERKEL

  Inscrutable

  THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN on November 9, 1989. It was a Thursday, and on Thursdays Dr. Angela Merkel left the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences, where she worked as a research scientist, to take a nice, long sauna. Here was a woman so disciplined and unflappable that even at a turning point in her country’s history, she still wasn’t about to miss out on one of the few joys o
f her week. While other East Germans rushed across the border into West Germany, Angela didn’t see the need. “I figured if the wall had opened, it was hardly going to close again, so I decided to wait,” she said later. Afterward, pink-cheeked and relaxed from the heat, she allowed herself to be swept over the Bornholmer bridge and into West Berlin, where she had a beer and then walked back home. After all, she had to work in the morning.

  This anecdote is often trotted out in the press to demonstrate the stolid, methodical, and passionless nature of Germany’s first female chancellor, a position Angela Merkel has held since 2005. According to this theory, Angela’s celebrated steady-as-she-goes management style belies the fact that on a fundamental level, she is a little odd.*1 On this day, of all days, when the Eastern bloc was no more and Germany was reunited, how could the woman who would in six short years become the leader of the nation, as well as the de facto president of the European Union, be so blasé? Why wasn’t she weeping with joy and dancing in the streets and making out with strangers like other Ossis (as the “Easties” are called), drunk on liberty and newfound possibilities? People didn’t understand her behavior, and so they didn’t understand her.

  Brilliant, introspective, and inscrutable, Angela Merkel enjoys a global reputation as an enigma—in part, because her personality belies the female stereotype. Angela isn’t shrill, chatty, erratic, emotional, or frivolous, so no one knows what to make of her. And once you refuse to be pigeonholed—especially if you’re a woman in power—you become known as difficult.