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  PENGUIN PRESS

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  Copyright © 2019 by Condé Nast

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  All essays in this collection were previously published in Vanity Fair or on vanityfair.com. The following essay is used by permission:

  “Love Match” from Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith,

  copyright © 2012 by Sally Bedell Smith. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Jones, Radhika, editor.

  Title: Vanity fair’s women on women / edited by Radhika Jones ; with David Friend.

  Other titles: Vanity fair (New York, N.Y. : 1983)

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019009993 (print) | LCCN 2019981398 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525562146 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525562153 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women--Biography. | Women--Attitudes--Case studies.

  Classification: LCC CT3235 .V36 2019 (print) | LCC CT3235 (ebook) | DDC 920.72--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009993

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981398

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also from Vanity Fair

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by RADHIKA JONES

  THE COMEDIANS

  WHOOPI GOLDBERG by JANET COLEMAN “Making Whoopi”

  TINA FEY by MAUREEN DOWD “What Tina Wants”

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  BARBARA BUSH by MARJORIE WILLIAMS “Barbara’s Backlash”

  HILLARY CLINTON by GAIL SHEEHY “What Hillary Wants”

  MICHELLE OBAMA by LESLIE BENNETTS “First Lady in Waiting”

  SOCIETY AND STYLE

  EMILY POST by LAURA JACOBS “Emily Post’s Social Revolution”

  KATHLEEN HARRIMAN MORTIMER by MARIE BRENNER “To War in Silk Stockings”

  AUDREY HEPBURN by AMY FINE COLLINS “When Hubert Met Audrey”

  THE RENEGADES

  FRIDA KAHLO by AMY FINE COLLINS “Diary of a Mad Artist”

  JULIA CHILD by LAURA JACOBS “Our Lady of the Kitchen”

  GLORIA STEINEM by LESLIE BENNETTS “Deconstructing Gloria”

  THE MUSICIANS

  MICHELLE PHILLIPS by SHEILA WELLER “California Dreamgirl”

  TINA TURNER by MAUREEN ORTH “The Lady Has Legs!”

  LADY GAGA by LISA ROBINSON “In Lady Gaga’s Wake”

  THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

  QUEEN ELIZABETH II by SALLY BEDELL SMITH “Love and Majesty”

  PRINCESS DIANA by TINA BROWN “The Mouse That Roared”

  THE STARS

  GRACE KELLY by LAURA JACOBS “Grace Kelly’s Forever Look”

  NICOLE KIDMAN by INGRID SISCHY “Nicole’s New Light”

  MERYL STREEP by LESLIE BENNETTS “Something About Meryl”

  CHER by KRISTA SMITH “Forever Cher”

  LENA WAITHE by JACQUELINE WOODSON “Ready for Lena”

  MICHELLE WILLIAMS by AMANDA FORTINI “The Change Agent”

  IN THEIR OWN WORDS

  CARI BEAUCHAMP “A Boom of Their Own”

  BETHANY McLEAN “What Happens When the Reckoning Meets Wall Street”

  SUSAN WOJCICKI “How to Break Up the Silicon Valley Boys’ Club”

  MAYA KOSOFF “How Millennial Women Are Combatting the Gender-Pay Gap”

  LUCY McBATH “Why I Decided to Run”

  MONICA LEWINSKY “#MeToo and Me”

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  About the Editors

  INTRODUCTION

  By Radhika Jones

  Vanity Fair profiles set themselves apart through the bracing, unflinching nature of the writer’s gaze. This is especially powerful and poignant when the gaze is female. Who could prepare for the scene in Maureen Orth’s 1993 portrait of Tina Turner when Turner pulls the hem of her dress from her legs all the way up to her shoulders—no bra—and turns to show off her curves in profile. A showstopper, you’d think—but Orth doesn’t stop there. Instead, she looks past the silhouette to note that the thing she can’t see is just as important, if not more. “What’s really remarkable about Tina Turner’s face,” she writes, “is how few scars it bears from the years of beatings she took.” A difficult, at times contentious discussion of brutal domestic violence ensues. This is no glossed-over celebrity profile; this is a deep, dark dive. (See page 224.)

  But since this is also the resilient Tina Turner, she comes up singing. And at one point, Turner circles back to an almost confrontational question that Orth posed during their sessions together: Have you ever stood up for anything? Turner, with strength and vulnerability on display, revisits the question and responds, “I am happy that I’m not like anybody else. Because I really do believe that if I was different I might not be where I am today. You asked me if I ever stood up for anything. Yeah, I stood up for my life.”

  This book is full of women who are not like anybody else—women who, in their singular ways, stood up for their lives, as they envisioned them, and in so doing, shaped the lives of multitudes. Vanity Fair’s Women on Women is a collection of classic profiles and essays about women by women. All these pieces appeared in the modern incarnation of the magazine, during the past thirty-six years, though some travel further back, into the lives of icons such as Frida Kahlo and Grace Kelly, whose work and legacy endure.

  Since its inception during the Jazz Age, more than a century ago, Vanity Fair has covered historically significant women, focusing on their pursuits and passions, their trials and triumphs, and their evolving roles in society. When the magazine’s inaugural editor, Frank Crowninshield, took the helm in 1914, one of the cornerstones of his mission statement for the publication declared: “We hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.” The magazine would go on to be a vital cultural bellwether until the Great Depression, when it suspended publication and was folded into Vogue, only to be resurrected in 1983.

  Crowninshield—a social dynamo, art connoisseur, and uncanny arbiter of magazine talent—employed dozens of women writers and editors. Among his earliest hires was a budding essayist, humorist, and contrarian named Dorothy Rothschild (later Dorothy Parker). Among the most influential editors in Crowninshield’s crew was Clare Boothe (Brokaw) Luce, who, after helping conceive what would become Life magazine in the 1930s, became
a renowned playwright, member of Congress, U.S. ambassador to Italy, and an advisor to presidents.

  Vanity Fair’s literary roster during the Jazz Age included many of the luminaries of the era: Djuna Barnes, Helen Brown Norden, Margaret Case Harriman, Willa Cather, Colette, Janet Flanner, Anita Loos, Vita Sackville-West, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Helen Wells, and Elinor Wylie among them. Illustrators such as Thelma Cudlipp, (Regina) Aline Farrelly, Ethel M. Plummer, Ethel Rundquist, and Rita Senger—along with the prolific Anne Harriet Fish—created scores of memorable covers. Women also filled Vanity Fair’s photographer ranks, including some of the emerging portraitists of the time, such as Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Helen Macgregor, Florence Vandamm, and Toni von Horn.

  Women contributed essays and columns about the suffrage movement and social norms, sexual mores and modern manners, crime and scandal, nightlife and high society, the workplace and the home, art criticism and theater reviews. In 1915, Crowninshield decided to assign one of the magazine’s most popular early pieces after he was ridiculed for asserting that he knew a dozen women in New York who earned more than $50,000 a year—and fifty more who made over $10,000 (more than $250,000 in current dollars). The writer, Anne O’Hagan, conducted her own investigation, surveying a range of female entrepreneurs and arts figures, and discovered that Crowninshield’s estimate was far too low.

  Some seventy years later, Tina Brown, who turned the magazine into a cultural mainstay in the 1980s and early 1990s, continued in this tradition, realizing that the voice of the intrepid woman writer—along with the vision of women photographers and illustrators—were part of Vanity Fair’s DNA. One need only consider how integral the work of Annie Leibovitz, the magazine’s principal photographer for its entire modern era, has been to its identity to understand the role women have played in Vanity Fair’s staying power, whether through the inaugural Hollywood Issue cover in 1995 (featuring a young Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Julianne Moore, among others), Leibovitz’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in 2016, or her picture of a wry, knowing Lena Waithe, the actor-screenwriter-producer, in 2018.

  Graydon Carter, who edited the magazine for twenty-five years, and who assigned the lion’s share of the stories in this anthology, once described Vanity Fair as “the biography of our age, one month at a time.” Like the best biographies, the stories in Vanity Fair gain power from their contemporary resonance. Magazines are cultural arbiters, and their editors unabashedly seek to predict the future—or even help determine it. The only problem is that by the time that future comes to pass, the magazine has often been relegated to the recycling heap. It is striking, therefore, in this collection, to come across past moments of prescience one, two, even three decades old. A remark from Gail Sheehy’s profile of Hillary Clinton in the spring of 1992: “Hillary could—and should—be our first woman president.” (Were we governed by the popular vote, she would have been.) An observation from Ingrid Sischy’s profile of Nicole Kidman ten years later: “She’s proved herself to be a star with a capital S, the one-in-a-generation kind who, like Elizabeth Taylor, is bigger than the Hollywood system.” (Kidman’s almost-complete takeover of big and small screens can attest to this.) A passage from Janet Coleman’s profile of Whoopi Goldberg in 1984: “Among her fans was the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Alice Walker. (‘I loved her work,’ Walker says. ‘I thought she was just great.’) They discussed the film version of Walker’s novel The Color Purple. ‘Honey, in The Color Purple,’ Whoopi says, ‘I’d play the dirt.’” In fact, she played the lead, Celie, in the 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg, a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama.

  But signaling the future isn’t Vanity Fair’s only function. Also in its house codes is a fascination with nostalgia, those forays into the past that help us interpret the present and remind us how we got from there to here. There was Julia Child, an ad-industry copywriter turned employee of the O.S.S. (precursor to the C.I.A.), who, after acquiring a knack for fine cuisine while living in Paris and Provence, would eventually elevate the palate, taste, and cooking regimens of millions of Americans. There was Emily Post, the former debutante who dabbled unremarkably in Edith Wharton–style fiction before turning her attention at the age of forty-eight to a bible of manners—a book that still sells hundreds of thousands of copies. (Laura Jacobs writes, “The very qualities that made Post’s fiction a bit simplistic—her endless optimism, her ingrained sense of fair play, her authorial presence too much in the room—were exactly the qualities that made Etiquette embraceable, accessible, intimate.”) There was Cher—no, no, Cher is still here; she is very much still here. Cher is forever.

  In a sense, they all are forever, as long as their stories remain. To spend time with these women—subjects and writers alike—is to be reminded of how indelibly they continue to shape our culture, our politics, the way we live now. It is something of a magazine maxim that the most compelling stories expand out from their subjects to capture something fleeting about the world around them—the ways they make their moment, and the ways their moment makes them. This is a moment for women’s voices, and we are proud and delighted to bring them forward.

  THE COMEDIANS

  WHOOPI GOLDBERG

  MAKING WHOOPI

  By Janet Coleman | July 1984

  The bombilation started in New York on February 3, 1984, when the headline WHOOPI GOLDBERG DOES “THE SPOOK SHOW” exploded in the “Weekend” section of the Times above a picture of a grinning black woman and Mel Gussow’s rave review. Whoopi Goldberg was described as a cross between Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor, “not simply a stand-up comedian but a satirist with a cutting edge and an actress with a wry attitude toward life and public performance.”

  At the Dance Theater Workshop, in Chelsea, early the following Saturday night, the lines on the staircase included college kids, agents, middle-aged black men in tweed sport coats, old women in minks, and sisters in cornrows. To a dignified experimental theater like D.T.W., The Spook Show was obviously more than just a mild sensation. Twenty minutes before curtain, the only seats were on the floor.

  For her New York debut, Whoopi Goldberg selected four haunting characters—“spooks”—to appear as a quartet: a dope fiend, a knocked-up surfer chick, a cripple, and a little girl. The dope fiend, Fontaine, opened the show, singing, “Around the world in ay-tee muh’fuckin’ days.” Scratching his crotch, Fontaine moved into the audience and at once put the crowd at ease and on edge: “How you doin’, mama. That’s a bad ring you’re wearin’. Want me to hold it for you?”

  Back in the spotlight, Fontaine blithely discussed every conceivable controversial subject, from legalized marijuana and Abraham Lincoln to Mr. T (“A guy with a Mohawk I’m supposed to relate to. This motherfucker is a throwback, man”) and AIDS (“A government conspiracy—they put germs in the discos”). He panned The Big Chill as “a lot of motherfuckers sitting around crying about the sixties. I could have saved them a whole lot of money, Jack. ’Cause I know what happened in the sixties, CETA”—the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act—“You could get a CETA job and learn to part your hair. I see you had one of those jobs.”

  Next, this funky Don Quixote ran down a European trip. His spiel was accompanied by a series of eye-popping physical transformations: into a stewardess steering a quivering beverage cart; a microwaved airplane string bean; a German burgher ogling “the Schwarze” making his way down narrow Amsterdam streets and thanking God for legal hashish.

  The anxiety in the theater was tangible when Fontaine’s itinerary stopped at the house of Anne Frank. There seemed nothing here to be funny about. But Whoopi Goldberg didn’t plan to amuse. From empty space she created the room where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis—the table, the wallpaper, the stillness, the fifteen-year-old girl’s note to posterity: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at he
art.” Fontaine relived a moment of enlightenment, and we were moved. “It kicked my ass,” he said. “I discovered what I didn’t think I had: a heart. Now if someone breaks into my house to steal my stereo, I will break his legs, but I will remember that in spite of everything, there is goodness in people. And that will save his life.”

  When Fontaine turned upstage, the back view of Whoopi Goldberg transformed into that of a teenage girl who was “like a surfer chick, like not a Valley Girl. Moon Zappa has wrecked our lives.” With jerky teenage mannerisms and studied nonchalance, she told of an unwanted pregnancy and her first attempt to abort the child with “a mixture of Comet and Johnnie Walker Red, and, you know, like jump up and down fifty-six times.” She had resorted to the hanger only after being rejected by her mother and the church. The surfer chick described the grisly procedure and unsentimentally shrugged off the way it would have affected her life: “Like you can’t go surfing with a baby on your back.”

  Next, Whoopi Goldberg distorted her voice and contorted her body into a character so handicapped one wondered whether she could make it work without veering into bathos, or bad taste. Like Lily Tomlin, who has walked a similar tightrope, she brought it off.

  The last character, the little girl, looked so young that one observer swore Whoopi Goldberg was thirteen. She wore an old white skirt draped over her head and called it “long blond hair.” She said her ambition was to sail on the Love Boat, but with a headful of pigtails that “don’t do nuffin’, don’t blow in the wind,” she wouldn’t be welcomed aboard. She had tried other ways not to be black, but bathing in Clorox didn’t work. This night the little girl approached a black woman in the audience. “Do you go out with a skirt on your head?” The answer was no, but the little girl pressed on, asking, “Can I touch your hair?” She was so clever and charming, her victim couldn’t refuse.