Gail Sheehy
Gail Sheehy was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She was the author of seventeen books and numerous high-profile articles for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fair. Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, sometimes known as creative nonfiction, in which 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.
Many of her books focus on cultural shifts, including Passages, which was named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress. Sheehy penned 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 most recent book, Daring: My Passages, is a memoir.
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. Their 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. Her mother's family was Scots-Irish. Her grandmother, Agnes Rooney ran away from Northern Ireland to the United States as a mail-order bride. Another part of her mother's family was Scottish and worked the Ulster plantation for English landowners.Growing up, Sheehy was close to her paternal grandmother, Gladys Latham Ovens. Ovens' husband had died of a stroke during the Great Depression—and after he died, Ovens went to work as a real estate agent in a career that lasted for over 40 years. Ovens bought Sheehy her first typewriter at age 7. When, as an adolescent, Sheehy began to sneak into New York City on Saturday mornings to explore, her grandmother kept her secret.
In 1958, Sheehy graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Arts in English and home economics. She later returned to school in 1970, earning her Master of Arts in journalism from Columbia University, where she studied on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship under the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.
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. It was here that Sheehy began writing professionally—she wrote for the company's magazines and worked with ad agencies to make informational filmstrips.The next few years, a young married Sheehy supported her husband through medical school and began her work as a journalist. Sheehy moved to Rochester, New York, where she found a job as a journalist for the Democrat and Chronicle in 1961. She wrote for the women's page and for the Sunday feature section. Sheehy and her husband then moved to the East Village in New York City. 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 from 1963 to 1966. Sheehy decided to leave her daily reporting job to become a freelance journalist. Sheehy and her husband divorced in 1968.
Sheehy participated in a number of important and significant cultural events in the 1960s including covering Robert F. Kennedy's campaign and Woodstock. Sheehy was one of the original contributors to New York magazine and contributed from 1968 through 1977. Clay Felker, founder of the magazine, and Sheehy's future husband, 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 en route back to New York when Kennedy was assassinated in California. Sheehy covered the rise of amphetamine use in New York after her sister became addicted. Sheehy helped her sister get off drugs and they attended 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 under professor and anthropologist Margaret Mead who was then in her seventies. Inspired by 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: '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."
1970s
In the 1970s, Sheehy's portfolio of high profile articles grew and she began to author books. In addition to writing for New York magazine, she also wrote a monthly article for Cosmopolitan--her first story had her travel to India to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his disciples.Several of Sheehy's articles for New York magazine were developed into books. This includes her novel Lovesounds, Panthermania: The Clash of Black against Black in One American City, and Hustling: Prostitution in Our Wide Open Society. Lovesounds is a psychological novel that deals with the dissolution of a marriage based on her own first marriage. Her Random House editor, Nan Talese, suggested that Sheehy use a Rashomon-style for the novel, alternating the story between the wife and husband. Talese also loaned Sheehy the use of an apartment to write in.
In 1971, Sheehy wrote a series of articles on prostitution for New York magazine called the "Wide Open City." She used the New Journalism style which includes vivid description and narration for the article "Redpants and Sugarman." Sheehy later came under fire for fictionalizing a character which was a composite. Clay Felker accepted blame for taking out the paragraph describing the use of composites within the article. Sheehy's story was chronicled in the book Hustling and later made into an NBC 1975 television movie of the same name, starring Jill Clayburgh as Redpants and Lee Remick as the journalist. According to producer, George Pelecanos, Sheehy was the inspiration for a reporter character in the HBO series, The Deuce.
The summer of 1971, Sheehy and Felker rented a house in East Hampton. Sheehy and her daughter found an abandoned box of bunnies and since they could not 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, the reclusive cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis living in a dilapidated 28 room mansion called Grey Gardens. Sheehy spent the next few weekends of that summer on the beach with Little Edie learning about their story. Sheehy profiled the two women in New York magazine in "The Secret of Grey Gardens". After the article was published, Onassis came forward with a check for $25,000 to help clean up the property. Little Edie and Big Edie were profiled in 1975 in the Grey Gardens documentary by the Maysles brothers.
Sheehy traveled to Northern Ireland in 1972 to report on the Irish women involved in the Irish civil rights movement. The British government had created the Special Powers Act that allowed British soldiers to round up Catholic men. The women and family members left behind became fierce fighters. She was next to a young boy right after a march, and as British soldiers moved in, the boy was struck in the face by a bullet. That day, January 30, 1972, became known as Bloody Sunday or the Bogside Massacre. Sheehy was trapped inside a Catholic ghetto which was under the authority of the IRA. She made her escape in a car over pastureland to Dublin. There Sheehy traveled to several safe houses and interviewed Rita O'Hare. The whole experience affected Sheehy deeply and on her return to the States she had a difficult time writing the story and developed a fear of airplanes which she later described as PTSD or posttraumatic stress syndrome.
It was at this time in the mid-seventies that Sheehy began work on her book, Passages. After conducting about forty interviews for a book on couples—Sheehy noticed a theme within her interviewees who were in their late thirties and early forties. The subjects expressed being unsettled. At this time, Sheehy began studying work by Elliott Jacques on mid-life crisis between the ages of thirty-five and forty as well as works by Erik Ericson on adult life stages. Sheehy coined the term "Second Adulthood" to describe the equilibrium that follows the crisis. It was during this time that Sheehy's long-time editor Hal Scharlatt died and the book was taken over by Jack Macrae, the publisher of Dutton. Sheehy was awarded a fellowship by the Alicia Patterson Foundation to allow her to finish the book. Sheehy's editor was concerned that the title would make readers think that it meant "excerpts," but Sheehy was confident they would understand the title once they read the book. Passages was published in 1976. Sales spread through word-of-mouth when it landed on The New York Times Best Seller List where it would remain for three years.
During this time period, Sheehy, as both a writer for New York magazine and Felker's partner, was a front-row witness to Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover of Clay Felker's New York magazine. Felker was forced out of the magazine. Felker purchased Esquire magazine in 1978 and Sheehy wrote for the magazine including publishing a profile and interview with Anwar Sadat.
In 1977, Sheehy became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.
Sheehy began work on her next book, Pathfinders, in 1978. The book examined the lives of those who had led lives that many would consider to have led full lives, and attained a sense of well-being. In developing the book, Sheehy worked with social psychologists at New York University to develop a Life History questionnaire which was given to many people, including "corporate chiefs, congressmen, men & women lawyer, etc." The questionnaire was also published in Redbook and Esquire magazines. Sheehy then conducted hundreds of phone interviews for the book, where she identified that those who attained well-being have a willingness to take risks and have experienced one or more important transitions in their adult years which they handled in an unusual, personal, or creative way.