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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 119 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 57

Even Feminists Get the Blues


At 57, Gloria Steinem finally comes to terms with her childhood
and realizes what she has been missing

By MARGARET CARLSON


    For all those women who wailed "How could she do it?"
when Gloria Steinem, the world's most famous feminist, began
keeping company with demibillionaire real estate developer and
aspiring journalist Mort Zuckerman in the late '80s, Revolution
from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Little, Brown; 377 pages;
$22.95) will serve as belated explanation. She did it for the
car.

    This wasn't just any car she fell for but a warm,
chauffeur-driven cocoon of transit dispatched by Zuckerman to
meet her as she returned to La Guardia Airport late one night
from yet another fund-raising trip, so exhausted that the auto's
"sheltering presence loomed out of all proportion." There she
was, approaching 50, a burned-out crusader for women's causes
who had not had time in 20 years to unpack the boxes in her bare
apartment. She was nearly eligible for a senior citizen's
discount before she bought her first sofa. Despite her confident
demeanor, she felt so plain she wondered who that attractive,
articulate woman impersonating her on television was. Thin as
a pinstripe, she nonetheless felt one Sara Lee cheesecake away
from Weight Watchers. Once a lively writer who impersonated a
Playboy Bunny to expose Hugh Hefner's cheesy idea of sex appeal
and quipped that if men could menstruate they would brag about
how long and how much, she had produced very little since her
collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,
in 1983. Ms., the magazine she co-founded in 1972 and edited
from crisis to crisis ever since, was spinning out of her
control.

    What was worse, the younger generation winced at the word
feminism, while those who had never supported the idea were
blaming it for everything from male impotence to global warming.
By the time she sank into the soft leather interior of the car
that night at La Guardia, she was insecure as a junk bond,
without energy, without hope and without enough self-esteem to
resist this inappropriate but easuitor. "This relationship," she
writes, "became a final clue that I was really lost."

    By the time she is back to hailing cabs for herself
several years later, she is well into her search for her lost
self and a 12-point recovery program that includes imagery,
hypnosis, meditation, unlearning, relearning and the Universal
"I." She traces her loss of self to the day her 300-lb. father,
an itinerant salesman, abandoned her when she was 10 in a
rat-infested, dilapidated farmhouse fronting on a major highway
in Toledo. Left to care for a loving but mentally ill mother who
heard voices, she was forced to grow up too soon, to be mother
to her mother. She escaped to Smith College but never escaped
the trap of being the caretaker. Once she became involved in the
movement, there was no campus, community group or benefit so
small that she wouldn't hop on a plane and raise money for it.
At times it seemed as if she had taken personal responsibility
for every oppressed woman in America.

    It is not surprising that this loss of childhood would
catch up with her and that at fortysomething a parent substitute
would come along in the guise of a knight in shining sedan,
"someone," she writes, "I couldn't take care of." Overscheduled
women everywhere will recognize themselves in her surrender to
a decision-free zone of well-appointed houses and someone to
clean them. "I found this very restful," she writes of the
period. "I was just so . . . tired."

    She mistook fatigue for love for only two years, but that
was long enough to give rise to a rumor more virulent than the
Asian flu that she was racing around Manhattan to fertility
specialists trying to get pregnant. The sad truth is that she
was consulting cancer doctors who saw her through breast surgery
for a malignant tumor.

    There were lots of reasons for the throw weight of the
rumor. If true, it gave the lie to her belief that the single
life was worth living, that a family consists of the people we
are tied to by the work we share and friendship as well as by
blood. If false, it was still an excellent occasion for
schadenfreude by those who suspected without proof that she was
a cunning hypocrite and who, incidentally, resented the way she
could blast men as a group for their piggishness but
nevertheless attract a succession of highly appealing ones who
adored her but didn't expect her to pick up their sweat socks.

    When Steinem, now 57, pours a second cup of coffee and
writes like she talks, there is no one more fascinating. The
only comparable figure in public life is Ralph Nader, and he
doesn't manage the trick of combining her monastic commitment
with unapologetic glamour that gets her waved past the velvet
ropes at clubs on both coasts. Strangers come up to her on the
street and tell her, "You changed my life," and cleaning women
at the airport find a place for her to take a nap.

    But we get too few glimpses of this person in the book
who, despite all the self-actualization, writes as if she
believes that what Julie Andrews or Mahatma Gandhi or the
Gnostic Gospels have to tell us is more worthwhile than what
makes her tick. Fortunately, one of the world's most interesting
women is incapable of writing an uninteresting book, even when
she summarizes most of the extant literature on the inner child.
A $700,000 advance can buy a lot of self-esteem. But if that's
not enough, if only the women whose lives were touched by
Steinem were to buy the book, it would be a best seller. Here,
Gloria, is $22.95. Buck up, and thanks for everything.