Thinking Man's Shrimpton

One of the best dates to take to a New York party these days -- or, failing such luck, one of the most arresting names to drop -- is Gloria Steinem. Writers, politicians, editors, publishers and tuned-in businessmen are all intensely curious about her. Gloria is not only a successful freelance writer and contributing editor of New York magazine; she is also a trim, undeniably female, blonde-streaked brunette who has been described as "the thinking man's Jean Shrimpton." She does something for her soft suits and clinging dresses, has legs worthy of her miniskirts, and a brain that keeps conversation lively with out getting tricky.

In the past six years, more than 40 articles in many magazines, including Glamour, Esquire, Look, LIFE and New York, have established her as a prolific and competent journalist. Escorted by the likes of Mike Nichols and John Kenneth Galbraith, she has become a quiet celebrity in her own right. Unmarried at 32 (her steady boy friend is TV Writer Herb Sargent), she is one of the few fascinating singles left in the literary set since George Plimpton took the vows.

Bitter Division. No dilettante for all that, Steinem is a political activist whose subjective accounts in New York of the anguish of the antiwar left are among her best reporting. An early supporter of Eugene McCarthy, she switched to Robert Kennedy and tried to unite her friends in the two factions. "Because of preference for one or another of two men whose platforms were not very different," she wrote, "friends no longer spoke to friends. Gossip about who had switched to whom politically was suddenly as juicy as who was having an affair with whom. But less tolerant."

A ten-day tour with the Nixon campaign in September produced a totally negative picture of the candidate ("When Nixon is alone in a room, is anyone there?"), but her interview with Pat Nixon provided a striking glimpse into Mrs. Nixon's personality. Made uncomfortable by Gloria's questioning about "what she identified with, other than daughters and husband," Mrs. Nixon finally spoke, "low-voiced and resentful; like a long accusation, the words flowed out. 'I never had time to think about things like that -- who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I don't have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I've never had it easy. I'm not like all you ... all those people who had it so easy.' " Gloria is now persona non grata among the Nixon entourage, but else where she is in much demand. Her mail and phone calls one recent week included offers to: work as a woman's newscaster on a national network, collaborate on setting her interview with Pat Nixon to music, write the introduction to a German movie on sex education, appear on ABC's The Dating Game, work with a studio on a movie based on her life, and cohost, with Senator George McGovern, a fund-raising benefit for Cesar Chavez, the leader of the migrant workers in California. She turned down all but the last and spent most of the week in her Upper East Side brownstone writing an article.

Nice work for a girl who had no formal schooling until age 12. She spent her childhood wandering around the country with a jack-of-all-trades father who "had two points of pride. He never wore a hat, and he never had a job. He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink." Her parents separated when she was twelve, and four years later Gloria went to live with a sister in Washington. Before that, she says, "I'd never lived any place to invite anybody home to. I thought that people always ate out of refrigerators."

After graduating from Smith College in 1956 (scholarship student, government major), she went off to India for two years on a fellowship, then came home to work in Cambridge, Mass., for a group encouraging American students to attend Communist youth festivals abroad. It was revealed as a CIA-supported operation in 1967, but Gloria says, "I was happy to use the Establishment's money against the Establishment."

Bunny Tale. In the early '60s, some unsigned articles for Esquire and a job with Huntington Hartford's Show magazine launched her freelance career. A Show assignment to use a false name and get herself hired as a Playboy bunny really started her as journalist-celebrity. After a month as a bunny, she wrote an engaging and unflattering journal of the furry-tailed life. "For two years after it, all the jobs I was offered were the same kind of thing," she now complains. "Everybody at a party would say, 'This is Gloria Steinem. She used to be a bunny.' It was awful."

This spring, when Clay Felker revived New York, which had died with the World-Journal-Tribune, Gloria found her medium. Finally, she could write freely on sociology and politics. Says Felker breathlessly and in terms appropriate to a sort of junior Mary McCarthy or a Colette reborn: "She is a modern woman, independent and activist, a beautiful, intelligent, with-it, extraordinarily well-informed, first-class brain." When she practices instant sociology, the first-class brain slips occasionally. Her recent "Notes on the New Marriage" between dominating women and homosexual men contained a fascinating idea, but was flawed by superficiality and sweeping overstatements ("In the land of camp and Conspicuously-Elaborate Consumption, the New Marrieds reign").

She does better when she is not trying to be a female Tom Wolfe. Her new biweekly New York column, "The City Politic," usually provides something extra, as when she discussed the city's unions and concluded, "Nothing's simple anymore. We'll just have to distinguish between good unions and bad, between people living in the past out of stubbornness or out of dire necessity. If the city were sprayed with plastic right now, we would preserve samples of life from the past two centuries, with the transportation system representing the oldest thing alive."

Though she has tried to get away from the "woman writer" tag, Gloria does not hide her feminine point of view. For the current issue of New York, she complains, in an essay about "Women and Power," that in a society which sees ambition as somehow unfeminine, "most women will have to exercise their much denied but very much alive instincts for power through men for a while yet." Happily, she forecasts a change in the future because "young girls are refusing to be emotionally blackmailed into domesticity."

Meanwhile, New York writers and editors play the guessing game of "why doesn't Gloria Steinem settle down?" Her response: "I always think I'm going to get married. The trouble is, I just don't want to now. You can't expect a man to give you your identity on a silver platter, which is what society would have us believe. That's dishonest, and it has produced a lot of bitter women. Because I have work to care about, it's possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form."

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