Embracing the Past, High Heels and All
Anyone meeting Marie Brenner last year would think she had the perfect turn-of-the-century sophisticate’s life. As writer-at-large for Vanity Fair magazine, she had a flourishing, sexy career crafting serious and important articles like the one about dirty deeds in the tobacco industry that inspired the Oscar-nominated movie “The Insider.” She thought of her second marriage, to venture capitalist Ernie Pomerantz, as uncommonly lucky and stable. Her daughter, Casey, a senior in high school, had applied for early admission to Brown University, and the Ivy League school welcomed the 17-year-old cross-country runner and voracious reader into their freshman class.
Brenner enjoyed a close, supportive group of female friends, high-achieving media queens like herself, who lunched monthly to bitch, moan and solve one another’s latest crises, which ranged from the existential to the cosmetic. At 50, she was pretty, healthy, poised and productive.
She had also choreographed for herself a sanity-salvaging work routine. She would spend six to eight months researching and writing complex “testosterone stories,” then take a break by interviewing some of the grand divas who helped shape the 20th century. Her profiles of such icons as Jacqueline Onassis, Marietta Tree and Pamela Harriman appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair, insightful portraits of women who were a dying breed.
The only black fly in her chardonnay, so to speak, was the gnawing sense that she was in hiding. “One of the things that drew me to reporting,” she said, “was that, as a witness to events, you are in disguise. Nothing is required of you in terms of self-revelation. As the chronicler, it’s like you’re wearing a flak jacket, hiding behind a notebook.” She increasingly felt that, by avoiding writing about things that were deeply personal, she was a coward.
Carrying Out Her Parents’ Legacy
What Brenner failed to see was that while she thought she was escaping into tales of whistle-blowers like Jeffrey Wigand and such underdogs as Atlanta bombing suspect Richard Jewell, then breathing the rarefied atmosphere in the worlds of Clare Boothe Luce and Kay Thompson, creator of the “Eloise” books, she was actually carrying out a legacy bequeathed her as the only daughter of unsung heroes Thelma and Milton Brenner.
Her father had been a crusader in merchants’ clothing, dispensing political fliers along with bargains at his south Texas discount stores. Thelma was harder to bring into focus, until Brenner began to understand that all the flamboyant, stylish, larger-than-life women she was drawn to were versions of her own mother.
She compiled nine of their stories in a book, “Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women” (Crown Books, 2000), and added a chapter about the great dame who had raised her. “The hardest story to write was the one I wrote last, which was the chapter about my mother and my life with her.”
Writing that intimate coda, she felt very much in the middle, influenced by one generation of women, trying to make her mark on the next. She had lived that scary baby-boomer moment--no, not looking in the mirror and seeing her mother’s thighs but hearing her mother’s voice come from her mouth when she spoke to her own teenager. As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “You put your arm into your sleeve, and your mother’s hand comes out.”
Brenner said, “My mother was a kind of walking [John] Bartlett’s ‘[Familiar] Quotations.’ She would quote philosophers and French poets to me. Of course I would just roll my eyeballs and reject all her odes and bromides. Then she died, and my own daughter turned 17 and was saying everything to me that I used to say to my mother. And I actually heard myself repeating my mother’s lines: Pascal says, ‘When all else is gone, knowledge remains.’ And I began doing exactly what my mother used to do with me--posting big words like ‘tautology’ in Casey’s room, for her to learn. And I suddenly realized, this is all such a personal story of generations. Just as I was so different from my mother and her friends, Casey and her friends are so different from my friends and from me. And I thought, there’s some lesson here.
“I looked back at all these interviews I’d done over the years with these fantastic, actressy women, and I wanted to know, what can these lives teach me? How can they show me to be braver and to have tenacity at my age, in a way that will make the next years really powerful?”
One clear message was that, in criticizing and dismissing the ways of the generation that preceded theirs, Brenner and her contemporaries had thrown some smashing babe qualities out with the bathwater. These boomers had surfed into womanhood on a wave of feminism. “We came of age thinking that having an air of grace and civility was phony,” she said.
In her 20s, Brenner affected greasy Joan Baez hair and black turtlenecks, deaf to her mother extolling the virtues of “put together” outfits. In 1977, she moved to London to work as a freelance foreign correspondent. Compared with landing an interview with the Israeli prime minister or a European diplomat, her mother’s frequent reminders to snare an appropriate husband seemed silly.
She returned to America in 1979 and became a baseball columnist for the Boston Herald, a job that proved she wouldn’t let her gender limit her career opportunities. For the next 20 years, she contributed to New York magazine, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and her bestselling book about a famous newspaper family, “House of Dreams: The Binghams of Louisville” (Random House, 1989), featured a central character whom the author describes as “the original great dame.”
Conspicuous Femininity Seemed Frivolous
By the time Brenner, at 40, began interviewing older women who seemed to be enjoying dynamic third acts in extraordinary lives, her point of view hadn’t changed much--conspicuous femininity still equaled frivolity. “As a feminist, I’d been trained to see a woman out in high heels as not authentic,” she said. “I was very, very judgmental. I had to give all that up and see what the lives of these women really represented, which was bravery. For me, it was time to reexamine these strong, intelligent women who kept smiling, made others feel good and had a lavish regard for others.”
As she came to appreciate the dignity of the great dames, Brenner viewed their style, and the discipline it took to maintain it, as admirable. “There is a kind of grandness in it. They did dress up the world. And behind their facade was the intense ambition it disguised.”
For many years, an earnest brand of feminism restricted the vocabulary that could be used to describe women, and dame (along with doll, babe, tootsy) was banished from politically correct lexicons. The book’s title was suggested by Brenner’s friend, novelist Jane Stanton Hitchcock.
“The minute I heard it, I knew that was it,” Brenner said. “Because these women were dames. Dames were out there. They were brassy, they were fun. They had flair. We’ve gone so far away from the notion of dames that I just loved the pizazz of the word. I loved the implication of it, that it was totally thrilling to be a dame, to be a performer in your own life.”
Great dame Kitty Carlisle Hart, widow of theatrical legend Moss Hart and still an indefatigable arts advocate in her late 80s, continues to keep her date book filled and told Brenner she never wants to miss anything. Brenner admits that working at home in her pajamas five days in a row is one of the great pleasures of her life. “The idea of having 11 activities on a day fills me with despair. But these women felt this was a way of staying alive. The great dame lesson here is you never know where being active and curious will lead you.
“I’m aspiring to be a great dame, in terms of their optimism, and the spirit they had. I do identify with them, to the extent that Auntie Mame and Eloise are my spiritual guides. I’m trying to mask my vulnerability more. I think these women have taught me to be braver and better.”
Looking at the Chanel ballet slippers she chooses over killer heels, Brenner sighed, smiled and said, “If only I could learn to dress as well.”