In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (27 page)

I have to confess that I was the person who recommended Jill Johnston to the Theatre for Ideas. I figured that she was the only woman in the city who could steal a scene from the top-billed performers.

Life
heralded Greer’s arrival with a cover story, “The
Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like.” Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt trumpeted
The Female Eunuch
in the
Times
by saying he wished “the timing of the publication of this book had been such that it could have caught the lightning that struck
Sexual Politics
, for it is everything that Kate Millett’s
book is not.” His review was titled “The Best Feminist Book So Far.” Betty Friedan was persuaded to host a publication party that is remembered by guests for Germaine’s opening salvo. “
Betty!” she boomed, “A talk show host told me it was so nice to have a spokesperson for Women’s Liberation who was good-looking for a change. But I stood up for you, Betty, I did.”

I must say my heart leaped at the book’s opening chapters: fresh, sharp disquisitions on bones, curves, hair, womb.
Eunuch
was strong on economic injustice, scathing in its analysis of male hatred. Further into the text I experienced doubt. It was apparent to me that as much as Greer thrilled to the vision of bedding down men in multiples while retaining her personal autonomy, she did not particularly like or respect women. Neither did she believe in organized movements. Hers was a personal, idiosyncratic declaration of independence, true to her anarchist-libertarian ideals. The woman went out of her way to scatter shots across the wide bow of the American movement, slamming Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” a sure way to curry favor with men, while producing such odd irrelevancies as “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if if makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby.” Oh?

Eunuch
zoomed to number one on all national best-seller lists. Never mind the absence of sisterhood, the disregard for a radical movement as the prime vehicle for social change—the book, and Germaine, struck a loud chord among huge numbers of women who were fearful of feminism unless it came wrapped in a glamorous package. I witnessed this phenomenon one afternoon in the book alcove of a chic department store. Two young women were daring each other to buy a copy. “Oooh,” said one, entranced by Germaine’s picture, “she looks like a
Vogue
model.” That night a friend at CBS called to report, “She came into the office wearing Jean Muir! I recognized the jacket!”

Only one American feminist, Claudia Dreifus writing in
The Nation
, dared to take on
The Female Eunuch
in print. Everyone else, so willing to bash and trash inside the movement, was unwilling to appear unsisterly in public. Germaine had a free license that season. She flummoxed
the men and hamstrung the women. It was an amazing tour de force. Yet for all its flaws,
Eunuch
made it easier for hundred of thousands of the uninitiated to overcome their nervousness and declare themselves in the feminists’ camp.

I met Germaine twice, both times on television programs where I was asked to be part of the window dressing. Our interesting exchanges took place off-camera during the breaks. At Channel 13, the public broadcast station, she looked me in the eye and leveled: “I’ve worked too hard all my life for this chance and I’m not going to blow it.” Our second encounter occurred on a
David Susskind Show
. Germaine had stripped to a sexy tank top, the male and female guests were trading insults as expected, and the invited audience of movement women was keeping up the heat by screaming at Susskind to take his hands off Germaine’s bare shoulder. At me they yelled, “You shouldn’t be up there, Susan.”

My movement sisters were saying: Germaine comes to us as a star so we accept her status and protect her, but you have no right to the spotlight unless we all do. It was a rather obscure movement point, but Germaine understood it perfectly and was enjoying my discomfort. At the close of each segment, she leaned over to whisper, “Hmmm, you held your own with me that time.”

Germaine Greer soon tired of explaining feminism to Americans. She grew increasingly testy on the lecture circuit, drank more than she should have, snapped at the repetitive questions, ducked the well-meaning professors and earnest students who had arranged her visits. Eventually she went back to London. Most of us weren’t sorry to see her go.

Gloria Steinem never shared a lecture platform or TV panel with Germaine Greer during the promotion of
The Female Eunuch
, although they were an obvious matchup. I believe Gloria was too media-wise to place herself in that windstorm, but her ascension was coming. In fact it arrived in August 1971, five months after Germaine’s triumph and one year after Kate’s. The deus ex machina was the
Newsweek
cover that Kay Graham had been hankering for. Pegged to the emergent “New
Woman,” the story declared Steinem the “unlikely guru” of Women’s Lib. No one was more surprised, I think, than Betty Friedan. It was the beginning of the bad blood between them.

A generational difference of fourteen years and the politics of the Cold War separated these two ambitious, talented women whose public careers would be so entwined, and whose animosities would run so deep. Each had escaped from a medium-sized industrial city in the heartland to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Smith (Betty in 1942, Gloria in 1956). Betty was Jewish, the precocious daughter of a shopkeeper in Peoria, Illinois, who sold jewelry and fine china. Radicalized at Smith during the Second World War, she had hurled herself into left-wing activism as a labor writer for the
UE News
, the boldly political paper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. UE was red-baited, expelled from the CIO, and nearly hounded out of existence during the fifties, but Betty stayed on until 1952, when she became pregnant with the second of her three children. From there she segued into issue-oriented freelancing for the women’s magazines.

Gloria grew up in Toledo, Ohio, the child of a mixed marriage between an erratic, entrepreneurial Jewish father and an aspiring journalist mother, of French Huguenot ancestry, whose mental illness had required hospitalization. Her precarious adolescence after her parents’ divorce had been offset by the advantage of breathtaking beauty. Gloria’s path after Smith was no less political than Betty’s, but her activism as an atypical rebel of the Silent Generation tilted to the establishment side of the Cold War divisions. Returning from a government fellowship in India, she took a recruiter’s job with the Independent Research Service of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a CIA front. Her mission was to lead student delegations into the jaws of Communist-sponsored international youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki to argue the case for American democracy. During the seventies this job would come back to haunt her.

By sheer coincidence the two women both entered the public consciousness in 1963, the year of bloody southern civil-rights battles and JFK’s assassination. Betty, of course, had come out with
The Book, tailoring her message somewhat to reach an audience of suburban
housewives. Gloria made a splash in
Show
, a glossy, short-lived journal of the arts, with a two-part exposé of her undercover life as a Playboy Bunny.

I’d admired and envied
the Bunny story. It was gutsy, and it observed something fresh about the chameleon qualities of feminine identity. Donning her Bunny ears and stuffing her bosom for her first night on the job, Gloria had looked in the mirror and seen, not herself, but a Playboy Bunny. The anecdote reminded me of an experience in my past when I’d tried on a Las Vegas showgirl’s plumes and feathers and seen an eponymous Showgirl in the mirror’s reflection.
Steinem is wise
, I concluded. That August, however, Gloria suffered one of her few accidents of bad timing. During a month when 350,000 Americans (including me and everyone I was close to—and Gloria, too) trekked to Washington for civil rights and were privileged to hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream,” she published
The Beach Book
, with unfolding reflector covers for sunning. I chalked her off as a frivolous jet-setter. When she began tackling political causes for
New York
magazine, I revised my judgment again. But there were aspects of Gloria Steinem—the fashion model glamour, the pop celebrity, the famous men she was linked with in the gossip columns—that didn’t jibe with my idea of a serious person.

My first encounter with Friedan and Steinem, in the flesh, took place during the fall of 1967 at Friedan’s apartment in the neo-Gothic Dakota on Central Park West. Betty was hosting a fundraiser for a writers’ group against the war, and Gloria was a cohost, although they had not met before. The big news in the room was Senator Eugene McCarthy’s decision to run in the Democratic primaries as an antiwar candidate against Lyndon Johnson. This was four years after the publication of
The Feminine Mystique
, two years after the formation of NOW, and a year before the Miss America Protest officially kicked off Women’s Liberation. In other words, as Friedan and Steinem and I formed our conversation node amid the buzz and flutter of peace activists and writers, only one of us, the oracle Friedan, possessed a vision of a mass feminist movement.

Betty was bedecked in a flowing caftan. Gloria was sinuous and
smashing in a mini. I walked over to say hello. Betty, my icon at a distance, who’d rebuffed my early attempt to join NOW, was full of herself and distracted, as she would continue to appear full of herself and distracted whenever I introduced myself, or reintroduced myself, over the next thirty years. That was Betty. Her lack of diplomacy went as a package with her Cassandra-like prescience, the way her rapid-fire delivery, with sentences left unfinished as thoughts sped ahead of thoughts, made her sound at times as if she were speaking in tongues. Gloria’s emblematic response to my interruption was generous and friendly. Putting my name through her mental calculator, she clicked her long fingers and paid me a compliment on something I’d written. I returned the compliment by saying that her statements against the war had been terrific on Carson or Cavett a few nights before.

She then treated me to a self-assessment that I would mull over many times during the next few years as she soared into prominence as the movement’s anointed leader. That evening I learned that Gloria was a keen student of her own natural powers, which she worked tirelessly and attentively to improve. She was aware that she had a rare gift to make things go down palatably in the “cool” medium of television, as Marshall McLuhan had defined it, but she did not yet comprehend how far it might take her.

“I call myself the Great Stone Face,” she confided. “But am I getting through or doing it wrong? I joke that I could call for a victory for the Viet Cong and Johnny would say ‘That’s nice, Gloria. We’ll be right back, folks, after this message.’ ”

“I was telling Gloria,” Friedan broke in, “that McCarthy has to put a plank on women’s rights in his platform.”

“Oh,
Betty!
” Gloria and I chorused, giving each other a sisterly wink. “Leave him alone. It’s enough that he’s running against the war.”

“You’re wrong, you’re both wrong. I’m in touch with women across the country. I know what’s happening.”

Betty did know, and we didn’t.

McCarthy did not put a women’s plank in his platform, and Friedan, riding a crest in NOW, had little time for his campaign.
Steinem’s peregrinations during the next few months were all over the lot. She endorsed McCarthy, switched to Bobby Kennedy when he announced, and jumped to McGovern after Bobby’s assassination. Gloria wasn’t alone in playing musical chairs during the swift, unexpected events leading up to the Chicago Democratic Convention, yet when McCarthy came to New York to read his poetry after his defeat, I was taken aback by his mockery of Steinem, and Steinem only, from the lectern. The man was known for his waspish spite, but I felt this was pure sexism, although the word had not yet been invented.

By then Gloria was soaring into the stratosphere as a friend of the California grape pickers, a booster of the antiwar movement, a fundraiser for a clutch of candidates and causes, and a journalist with impressive ties to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. She was a contributing editor at Clay Felker’s
New York
magazine, where her photograph graced an early cover, she had a contract at
Glamour
, and she represented
Seventeen
in speeches to campus groups. Welcomed into the fold by the celebrity male journalists, she was drafted in 1969 by Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin to run for comptroller in their waggish “Make New York the Fifty-first State” mayoral campaign. After the initial round of publicity, she eased out of her candidacy for a lesser role in the rampantly egotistical campaign. That April she took note of the new stirrings among the radical women in her City Politic column for
New York
, reporting on some WITCH zaps and the Redstockings abortion speak-out. Her piece was titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”