One of the most pleasant parts of my career as a newspaperman and photojournalist has been the chance to meet and interview fascinating people. Many have been entertainers who appeared at music events like the Mississippi River Festival’s 10-year run on the campus of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and FloydFest we moved here in 2004.
Many interviews came during my 12 years at The Telegraph in Alton, IL, where I created. edited, wrote and shot photos for the paper’s weekly entertainment magazine. Celebrity interviews were often set at the Chase Park Plaza hotel in St. Louis and included conversations with Burt Reynolds, James Cann, Louise Fletcher, Benny Goodman, Fess Parker, Sally Field, Gloria Steinem and others.
The chance to meet and interview Steinem came when she called me at the newspaper and congratulated me for an article that I had written critical of conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly, the often loud and vocal appointment of the Equal Rights Amendment. It appeared in the May, 1974 issue of Viva magazine.
“You were spot on about Schlafly,” Steinem said on the phone. “Can we meet and talk?”
I met her at The Chase Park Plaza. She was in St. Louis for a women’s rights conference at St. Louis University and had a suite at the hotel. In the living room of the suite, she opened the conversation with a question about how I had come to write for Viva, which was published by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Viva was an erotic, glossy women’s magazine. It heavily championed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), second-wave feminist liberation, and sexual freedom.
Viva had contacted me. I had written several columns about Schlafly in The Telegraph. She and her lawyer husband, Fred, lived in an exclusive area in bluffs above Alton and he was a leader of the World Anti-Communism league. Phyllis also founded and ran the right-wing Eagle Forum.
Viva targeted a lifestyle Schlafly openly despised. The magazine was one of many major national publications in the mid-1970s—including Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Playgirl—that heavily covered the cultural war between the feminist movement and Schlafly’s hardcore right-wing rhetoric.
Steinem had founded Ms. Magazine in 1971 and was a strong supporter of the ERA but it fell just a few states short of ratification, thanks in large part by Schlafly’s time traveling around the country telling state legislatures that women belonged at home with husbands and families — a typical hypocrisy.
She said a researcher for Ms. found the article. She said she read my piece about Schlafly and an article about James Cann in the issue. “I can say I read the articles,” she said, applying the old excuse men used to say they read Playboy “for the articles, not the naked girls. “Yes, I did look at the centerfold photos of Andrew Prine. Well hung.”
Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire once called Steinem — “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.”
She was not wearing a miniskirt when we met in St. Louis. Her long, straight hair, parted in the middle framed a face dominated by aviator glasses. She was a delightful interview with a great sense of humor, a direct stare, a bright smile and a sharp, inquisitive mind.
In 1963, she had worked, covertly, as a Bunny in the New York Playboy Clug for a Show Magazine article about the harsh and often humiliating conditions they faced in the clubs.
“Most uncomfortable costume for any woman to wear,” she said. “Damn thing showed too much of my ass.”
Her smile disappeared when we talked about the Equal Rights Amendment and the problems facing women. Her bitterness towards Schlafly was obvious.
“Schlafly is a shameless hypocrite,” she said, “A hardcore phony.”
She told me that marriage was not for her. She enjoyed romantic relationships with men but saw marriage as a trap. “I tell women to live and avoid marriage,” she said. “A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job afterwards.”
Long after our conversation in St. Louis, she married David Bale, a South African businessman and father of actor Christian Bale, in 2000.
“I didn’t change,” she told a reporter who asked why she changed her mind about getting married. Marriage changed. We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”
Bale died of brain cancer in 2003. Steinem died this week at age 92, in her brownstone in New York City, with friends and loved ones.
In 1974, I spent an hour and a half interviewing her in St. Louis. She was a bright, energetic, intelligent, beautiful woman and I still cherish the time we spent together.