116 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2021
REAR VIEW
GAIL SHEEHY ILLUMINATOR OF LIFE
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
Cats crouched all around in the grass,
rattling in their throats, mean and
stricken.
“Are they wild?” I asked.
She called for Tedsy Kennedy, a Persian.
“Mother bred them all. We’ve had
300 cats altogether. Now we have twelve,
but they’re not wild. They’re fur people .…
It’s true about old maids, they don’t need
men if they have cats.”….
Then an operatic voice sang its lament
through the upstairs window.
EeeDIE? I’m about to die.
“Oh dear, Mother’s furious because
she’s not getting attention. I’ll be right
up, Mother.”
This is how journalist Gail Sheehy
described meeting the eccentric Edith
Bouvier Beale at Beale’s decaying,
animal-infested East Hampton home
in 1972. Sheehy’s New York magazine
piece, “The Secret of Grey Gardens,”
employed the revolutionary New
Journalism by freeing subjects from
newspaper style, what she called “the
old journalism, with its who-what-whenwhere
why rigidity.” Her techniques
recreated scenes, recorded dialogue
in full, and treated protagonists like
characters in a novel.
She wrote about Grey Gardens while
in East Hampton, her home away from
Manhattan starting in 1971 (she told
Newsday, “I wrote most of my books
in my house in Long Island”). Sheehy’s
bestselling fiction broke taboos and
struck baby boomer chords surrounding
menopause, divorce, remarriage,
and later-life fulfillment. Her 1976 blockbuster
Passages, Predictable Crises of
Adult Life, was a New York Times best
seller for three years and was named by
the Library of Congress as one of the top
10 most influential books.
She wrote 17 books and numerous articles.
What inspired her?
FINDING HER VOICE
Born Gail Merritt Henion in Mamaroneck,
N.Y., in 1936, her childhood storytelling
talent — she wrote a biography
of her grandmother — was cultivated by
that grandmother, who bought her her
first typewriter at age 7.
The budding writer later earned a
bachelor’s degree in English and home
economics from the University of Vermont
in 1958. During her first job as a
Gail Sheehy. (Credit: Bernard Gotfryd)
consumer representative for JCPenney,
she wrote for the store’s magazine, learning
the sacred journalism rule: Never
miss a deadline. She also learned about
speaking up, after moving to Rochester
with Albert Sheehy, whom she had married
in 1960. During a job interview at
the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle,
the editor said he didn’t want someone to
work for a year and then start a family.
“I said, ‘I didn’t expect a pregnancy
exam,’” she later told the Democrat and
Chronicle. In those days (the mid-1960s),
women were categorized as “either Holy
Mother or Frigid Career Girl,” she said.
She moved to Manhattan and found
work at the New York Herald Tribune
— a hotbed of New Journalism where
writers … “used the tools of novelists …
to create compelling narratives,” said
The New York Times. Relegated to the
women’s section (she called it “the estrogen
section”), she ventured into “the
testosterone zone” to pitch a story. Editor
Clay Felker liked her idea and told her to
write it as a scene. She was on her way.
In 1968, Felker founded New York
magazine. Sheehy nailed Vanity Fair
and Esquire assignments, profiling
world leaders Robert F. Kennedy, both
Presidents Bush, Hillary Clinton, and
many more. She became a mother then
divorced her husband in 1968. On fellowship
at Columbia University from
1969 to 1970, she earned her Master of
Arts in journalism and was mentored
by anthropologist Margaret Mead, who
taught her to be a cultural interpreter
exploring culture shock.
She followed Felker to New York as a
founding staffer, reporting on issues
such as the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings
of peaceful protesters in Northern
Ireland. Working alongside such New
Journalism talents as Jimmy Breslin and
Tom Wolfe, she often included anecdotes
of East End life in her articles.
PASSAGES
She was the golden girl of creative nonfiction
but the sheen tarnished. She committed
a major ethical breach in her 1971 New
York article on prostitution by fabricating
characters. Felker deleted her admission
of the fabrication — he did accept blame
— but the article was out there.
In 1976, Passages was published, delving
into cultural shifts and navigating life’s
signposts during the prime career and
relationship years. She was also sued
for plagiarism by a psychiatrist; the suit
was settled out of court. The next year,
she bought an East Hampton house with
earnings from Passages; she would live
there for 30 years with Felker, whom
she married in 1984.
In 2007, she sold her house; her husband
died in 2008. But she returned
to the Hamptons to visit friends and
Canio’s Books on Main Street, staying
at a rented Sag Harbor house. She was
a sought-after lecturer. talk show guest,
and in 2019 became an Audio Podcast
Fellow at Stony Brook University, creating
and producing Kid Rebels with Gail
Sheehy, a podcast series.
In August 2020 she was working on
Millennial World, a book about 20- and
30-somethings inventing new passages
while struggling with the rupture in
gender roles and a mental health crisis.
She died of pneumonia at age 83 in a Southampton
hospital before finishing the book.
“I wrote most of my books in my house in Long
Island,” Gail Sheehy once told Newsday.
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