Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy
Born Gail Henion
(1937-11-27) November 27, 1937
Mamaroneck, New York, U.S.
Occupation Journalist, author
Language English
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Vermont, Columbia University
Literary movement New Journalism
Notable works Passages; The Silent Passage; Understanding Men's Passages; Hillary's Choice; New Passages; Passages in Caregiving
Website
www.gailsheehy.com

Gail Sheehy (born November 27, 1937) is an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She is the author of seventeen books, including Passages (1976), named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress.[1] Sheehy has written biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her latest book, Daring: My Passages, (Sept. 2014) is a memoir.[2]

Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character. Sheehy's article "The Secret of Grey Gardens", a cover story from the January 10, 1972 issue of New York, brought the bizarre bohemian life of Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and cousin Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale to public attention. The story was the basis for the film Grey Gardens and a Broadway musical of the same name.

Early life and education

Gail Sheehy was born in Mamaroneck, New York, to Lillian Rainey Henion and Harold Merritt Henion.[3] Her mother's family was Scotch-Irish. Her grandmother, Agnes Rooney ran away from Northern Ireland to the United States as a mail-order bride.[3] Another part of her mother's family was Scottish and worked the Ulster plantation for English landowners.[3] Growing up, Sheehy was close to her father's mother, Gladys Latham Ovens who lived with them. Gladys's husband had died of a stroke during the Great Depression—and after he died, Ovens went to work as a real estate agent, a career that lasted for over 40 years.[3] Her grandmother Gladys Ovens bought Sheehy her first typewriter at age 7.[3] When as an adolescent Sheehy began to sneak into New York City on Saturday mornings to explore, her grandmother kept her secret.[3]

In 1958, she graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Home Economics.[3] In 1970, Sheehy earned her Master of Arts in Journalism from Columbia University, where she studied on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship under renowned cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.[3]

Career

1960s

Sheehy's first job after college was working for the J. C. Penney department store chain. Sheehy traveled across the country putting on educational fashion shows for college home economics departments.[3] Sheehy also wrote for the company's magazines and worked with ad agencies to make informational filmstrips.[3]

The next few years a young married Sheehy supported her husband through medical school and began her work as a journalist. Sheehy married and moved to Rochester, New York where she found a job as a journalist for the Democrat and Chronicle in 1961.[3] She wrote for both women's page and for the Sunday feature section.[3] Sheehy and her husband then moved to the East Village in New York. Sheehy became a mother, but continued to work for various publications including the World Telegram for a brief time in 1963 and then the New York Herald Tribune[3] from 1963 to 1966.[3] Sheehy decided to leave her daily reporting job to become a freelance journalist.[3] Sheehy and her husband divorced in 1968.

Sheehy participated in a number of important and signifcant cultural events in the 1960s including covering Robert Kennedy's campaign and Woodstock. Sheehy was one of the original contributors to New York magazine[3] and contributed from 1968 through 1977. Clay Felker, founder of the magazine, encouraged Sheehy to write big stories--one of the first was following Robert Kennedy. on the campaign trail in 1968. She traveled with the campaign to the West Coast and had access to interview Kennedy directly. Sheehy was in route back to New York when Kennedy was assassinated in California.[3]Sheehy also ended up at Woodstock with her sister. Sheehy had covered the rise of amphetamine use in New York after her sister became addicted.[3] Sheehy helped her sister getoff drugs and they ended up at Woodstock in order to hide from her sister's drug pusher.

In 1969-70, Sheehy was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend graduate school at Columbia University. While there, she studied for the year under professor and anthropologist Margaret Mead who was then in her seventies.[3] Because of Mead, Sheehy investigated cultural trends with articles on "The Fractured Family" in New York magazine. During a commencement speech given at the University of Vermont, Sheehy credited Mead with encouraging her to become a cultural interpreter:[3] 'Whenever you hear about a great cultural phenomenon—a revolution, an assassination, a notorious trial, an attack on the country—drop everything. Get on a bus or train or plane and go there, stand at the edge of the abyss, and look down into it. You will see a culture turned inside out and revealed in a raw state."[4][5]

1970s

In the 1970s Sheehy's portfolio of high profile articles grew as she began to also author books. In 1971 after a call from Helen Gurley Brown, she signed on to publish a story a month for Cosmopolitian beginning with an article that had her traveling to India to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his disciples.

Several of Sheehy's articles for New York were developed into books. This includes her novel Lovesounds (1970), a psychological novel that deals with the dissolution of a marriage, Panthermania: The Clash of Black against Black in One American City (1971), and Hustling: Prostitution in Our Wide Open Society (1973), which was turned into an NBC TV movie with Jill Clayburgh. Lovesounds was originally an article based on her own first marriage and she worked with Random House editor Nan Talese. Nan Talese loaned Sheehy the use of an apartment to write in and also suggested that Sheehy use a Rashomon-style which alternated the view of the wife and husband.[3]

The summer of 1971 Sheehy and Felker rented a a house in the East Hamptons. Sheehy and her daughter found an abandoned box of kittens and since they couldn't take them back to New York, Sheehy's daughter suggested they take the kittens to the "witch house" across the street. It was there that Sheehy first encountered Little Edie Beale and her mother Big Edie Beale, cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy.[3] Sheehy profiled the two in New York Magazine in the article, "the Secret of Grey Gardens." [6]

In 1971, Sheehy published a series on prostitution in New York magazine called the "Wide Open City." She used the New Journalism style of vivid description and narration and the article "Redpants and Sugarman" began with a composite. Sheehy later came under fire for fictionalizing the character. A paragraph describing the use of composites was left out of the print edition by Clay Felker.[3] Sheehy's story was chronicled in the book Hustling and later made into a 1975 television movie starring Jill Clayburgh as Redpants and Lee Remick as the journalist.[3]

She has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine since 1984.

Selected articles

1969:"Speed City: The Explosion of Amphetamines", New York magazine.

Sheehy wrote the cover story for New York magazine about the growing problem of amphetamine use among young people in East Village. The article arose out of Sheehy's own experience—her sister had become addicted to the drug.[3] The cover for the story was created by Milton Glaser of a snake writhing out of a drug capsule.[3]

1971: "Redpants and Sugarman", New York Magazine

Sheehy gained notoriety in 1971 after New York magazine published a series she wrote about prostitution called "Wide Open City".[7] Part 2 is called "Redpants and Sugarman".[7] Sheehy told the Washington Post that she had created a "composite character" for "Redpants" in order to trace the full life cycle of a streetwalker, but the explanation was edited out of the story.[3]

1989: "The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher", Vanity Fair


Published in June, 1989: President Mitterrand says Britain's prime minister "has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe." She also has the nerves of a five-star general and increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisors with the skill of Elizabeth I. And as she completes her unparalleled tenth year in office, the most powerful woman in the world has vanquished the opposition, gagged the media, and booted out the critics in her own party. So who is there left to tell her when she goes too far?

1992: "What Hillary Wants", Vanity Fair


Sheehy's 1992 article on Hillary Clinton[8] created a stir by quoting her mentioning rumors of an affair between President George H.W. Bush and a woman named "Jennifer". Sheehy reported that Clinton complained that the media had made much about Gennifer Flowers' affair with Bill Clinton but didn't look into the Bush transgression. Clinton considered that portion of the interview off the record, but Sheehy disagreed, and independently confirmed the "private conversation" Hillary had described by interviewing Hillary's confidante, Atlanta Journal & Constitution owner Anne Cox Chambers, who repeated the conversation word for word.

Fact checkers for Vanity Fair alerted editor Tina Brown to a potential problem, based on their review of the transcript of the interview, but Brown declined to remove the quote. The interview received wide coverage in the press.

1995: "The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich", Vanity Fair


Sheehy learned the back story of Gingrich's life from his mother, who revealed that she was a lifelong manic-depressive. Kit Gingrich's first husband abandoned young Newt to a stepfather in exchange for forgiveness of a few months of child-support payments. "Isn't it awful, a man willing to sell off his own son?" Kit Gingrich told Sheehy. Speaker of the House Gingrich told Sheehy that both his fathers were totalitarian and modeled "a very male kind of toughness." He didn't blink when Sheehy asked him if he thought he had a genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder. He said he didn't know, then applauded the special powers of leaders who are thought to have been bipolar. "Churchill had what he called his 'black dog'. Lincoln had long periods of depression." He speculated that leaders who are able to think on several levels at once may have a different biochemical makeup. "You have to have a genetic toughness just to take the beating." he told Sheehy. Her article also revealed that his wife at the time, Marianne Gingrich, did not want him to become president and threatened to make a revelation that would torpedo his 1995 presidential campaign.

2000: "The Accidental Candidate: George W Bush", Vanity Fair


Sheehy found a possible source of the malapropisms for which Governor Bush was mocked: a history of dyslexia in the Bush family. Diagnostic experts told her that "The errors you've heard Governor Bush make are consistent with dyslexia," and that "a language-disordered person" cannot take in a lot of information at once." Sheehy predicted that if Bush became President, "he would have to develop a work-style where others pre-organized and pre-digested information for him." Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, she suggested, organized much of the candidate's speeches and decisions.

2008: "Hillaryland at War", Vanity Fair


Publish June 30, 2008: Hillary Clinton's campaign had it all: near-death moments, hard-won triumphs, dysfunctional relationships—and a staff consumed with infighting over how to sell their candidate. It was a battle that revealed why she came so close to victory, as well as why she didn’t make it.

Professional affiliations

In 2009 Sheehy was named AARP's Caregiver Ambassador. In 2011 she became a Chairwoman for the National Osteoporosis Foundation's Generations of Strength campaign.

Television and other media appearances

Sheehy has been a frequent guest on NBC's The Today Show, MSNBC's Hardball and What Now? with Andrea Mitchell, ABC's World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America, Oprah, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, Larry King Live, Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, and documentaries such as PBS's "American Experience: Clinton".

In July 2015, Sheehy appeared for an interview on Huffpost Live to discuss her 2014 work, Daring.[9]

Plagiarism lawsuit

Her book Passages was a national bestseller. In 1975 Roger Gould, then a psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles, brought a suit, which was settled out of court, against Sheehy intended to enjoin publication of her book, which had not yet been completed.

Awards and recognition

A Library of Congress survey named Passages one of the 10 most-influential books of our time.[10]

Personal life

In 1960 Sheehy married Albert Francis Sheehy, a medical student at the University of Rochester.[3] They had one daughter, Maura,[3] and divorced in 1968. In 1984 Sheehy married editor Clay Felker, with whom she adopted a Cambodian child, Mohm. Felker died in 2008.[11] Sheehy currently lives in New York City.

Bibliography

Non-fiction

Novels

References

  1. ↑ "Overview". Gail Sheehy.
  2. ↑ World Archipelago. "Daring: My Passages". HarperCollins US.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Sheehy, Gail (2014). Daring: My Passages: A Memoir. William Morrow. ISBN 9780062291691.
  4. ↑ "Gail Sheehy Urges Class of 2016: 'Dare to Care' | Public Relations | The University of Vermont". www.uvm.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  5. ↑ University of Vermont (2016-05-26), Gail Sheehy Urges Class of 2016: ‘Dare to Care’, retrieved 2016-10-12
  6. ↑ "Inside Grey Gardens With Gail Sheehy -- New York Magazine". nymag.com. Retrieved 2016-10-19.
  7. 1 2 Sheehy, Gail (1971-07-26). "Redpants and Sugarman". New York. Retrieved 2015-07-18.
  8. ↑ Sheehy, Gail (1992-05-01). "What Hillary Wants". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2015-07-18.
  9. ↑ Huffpost Live editors (2015-07-16). 'Daring' Author Gail Sheehy LIVE. The Huffington Post. Archived from the original on 2015-07-19. Retrieved 2015-07-18.
  10. ↑ "Gail Sheehy discusses Passages in Caregiving". Retrieved 28 June 2012.
  11. ↑ "Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82".

External links

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