‘Strong and Important Stories’

Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Friday, December 09 2011

Snapshot: Sheila Weller, author and journalist
Sheila Weller describes herself as an author and magazine journalist. She has published six books, including Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon – And The Journey of a Generation, published in 2009 by Atria/Simon & Schuster. As a writer for Vanity Fair, recent contributing editor of New York, senior contributing editor of Glamour, and writer for numerous other magazines, Weller has been highly awarded for her significant body of investigative, human interest, human rights, and social history articles.

She has written about conflict zones El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, and the deep South of recent history; and she has written an exposé of Scientology. She has profiled major cultural and political figures, broken news on high profile criminal cases (from O.J. Simpson to Alex Kelly to Natalee Holloway to the Diallo cops). And, in writing about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, she has had sustained, detailed, and extremely moving personal correspondence with several hundred victims’ families.

Weller has won a record number of six Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Awards: one in 2001(on the hidden phenomenon of extremely high-priced egg donation among Ivy League women); an unprecedented three in 2003 (for her news-breaking articles on the Pentagon’s secretly acknowledged abuses of the experimental anthrax vaccine on servicewomen; the hidden deaths of U.S. hospital patients during the 2001 nursing shortage; and a mid-spring-2001 Intifada profile of a Palestinian woman’s complicated lifelong friendship with a female member of the Israel Defense Forces or IDF); one in 2004 (on the separate trajectory of two women – one, the little-known daughter of a black civil rights martyr; the other, a daughter of the racist who killed him – in a slowly changing Mississippi); and one in 1994 (on the legal and attitudinal loopholes that allow confessed, convicted wife killers to gain custody of their children).

In 2006 she won an Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus for her exposé of a sweatshop in Los Angeles where undocumented workers labored in abusive conditions making clothes for one of the most high-profile women’s apparel chains in the country.

Weller grew up in Beverly Hills, graduated from the University of California Berkeley, and lives in Greenwich Village and Berkshire County, Mass., with her husband, history author John Kelly. Their son, Jonathan Kelly, is an editor at The New York Times Magazine.

Womenetics: Why did you decide to write about Carly Simon, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell?
Sheila Weller: Ever since I (envyingly) scarfed down every word of Sara Davidson’s Loose Change, I wanted to write a history of the women of the 1960s from a longer view. Other books published over the years, such as Donald Katz's Home Fires, David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street, and, of course, classics like Mary McCarthy's The Group, also had suggestions of a template for a telling of a story of a very distinctive generation through the interlocking stories of several people, each of whom personified, and resonated, a piece of that story. I also felt that, while the stories of the '60s were often told (and progressively less authentically with every passing year), it was always the male experience that was highlighted.

But the truth is: Women made the greater leap. The years just before Kennedy’s election, the Civil Rights movement, the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll, and the approval of the birth control pill were the most disconsolately boring and straitlaced time to be a little girl in America. It was magical to have come into puberty when all of that changed on a dime, and we were the lucky girls to be adventurers in that change, to experience and embody and create that change.

Not only did the music of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon form the soundtrack of what came next; they were women we compared ourselves to – celebrity versions of ourselves. They were middle class girls like we were, not wild iconoclasts like Janis Joplin or Grace Slick. They embodied all the changes (and wrote beautiful, resonant songs about those changes) in a very identifiable way. And they were resilient and heroic; they never stopped creating and producing, they never succumbed to drugs or self-pity. Conflating the biographies with the social history made sense.

Womenetics: What do you think those three singers meant to women in the '60s and '70s?
Weller: Carole was the sensible Brooklyn girl, teen mother, the hardworking premature professional who co-wrote some of the great treasures of the Brill Building songbook; then she moved to California, and, in Tapestry, she embodied the new mood of naturalness and communality, and she redefined what “beautiful” was. Joni was the classy, gossamer hippie princess. She was Alice, down the rabbit hole, describing what it was like for psychedelic-era bohemian girls to encounter life, and men, with a heart both “full and hollow.” She had an air of delicate, mysterious aplomb that thousands of girls put on long, thrift-store skirts and shawls to imitate; and, with Ladies of the Canyon, she made it into an archetype.

Carly Simon was the smart, urbane, sardonic, sexy Seven Sisters alumna; she was to pop music what Jane Fonda was to film, what Erica Jong was to pop literature, and what Gloria Steinem was to politics.

And, as women in rock, they had to deal, again, heroically, with much more adversity than their male peers. Most male rock idols always had a brow-mopping woman to go home to, and they never had to work around a partner’s ego. They were the ego you had to work around. Drugs and drink were their expressions of complexity. Women were much more out on a limb. Joni Mitchell – when she was still Joni Anderson – started her career as a single, pregnant, penniless girl, hiding from her family in a rooming house. You didn’t get more out on a limb than that.

Carole King was the breadwinning sensible mate in her songwriting-partnership marriage with Gerry Goffin, who was so mentally unstable he once tried to kill her and so feckless he had a baby with another woman, a singer they both worked with. Carly Simon lost record deals because she was derided as a "rich girl" (being rich didn't hurt guys), and an album she recorded with Dylan singing backup was never mixed or produced because she refused to sleep with the sound engineer, a bit of blackmailing that was not illegal in its day.

These women had to navigate men’s egos constantly – they lost boyfriends and husbands because of their superior success – and, instead of getting wasted, these women wrote painstakingly nuanced songs. That said, there are some achingly beautiful biographies of male rock stars, by men: Charles Cross’s of Jimi Hendrix; Bob Spitz’s of the Beatles; and of course Peter Guralnink’s of Elvis. Still, men in rock had it easier, every bit of the way.

Womenetics: Why did you decide to write your memoirs, in the book Dancing at Ciro’s?
Weller: I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't told the dramatic story of my family. When you're a writer and you had a dramatic childhood – in my case, we owned a famous nightclub, and my uncle tried to kill my father, and there was mayhem and tragedy among all the adults – the silver lining is that it becomes "material." I also wanted to honor my parents – my father, who didn't let a very bad heart condition get in the way of his becoming a neurosurgeon; my mother, a plucky and soulful and brave journalist – who were heroic to me. Despite vulnerabilities, bad choices, and a melodramatic narrative, both created by them and foisted upon them, it was very difficult for me to live through.

My wonderful sister and best friend, Liz Weller – an entertainment attorney in Los Angeles – is another reason I wanted to write of our challenging childhood. We survived it and triumphed over it. As the saying goes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Finally, I felt that the story of mid-century American Jews was so often told from an East Coast point of view. The experience of a certain kind of archetypal West Los Angeles Jewish family from the early '40s through the '50s and early '60s had not been told, and the East Coast-raised writers got things wrong. (Neal Gabler and others, for example, seemed to think there was some shame or perceived self-loathing in assimilating. In fact, West LA Jews were conceited about being Jews. Not only were we in a place whose main and most glamorous industry was invented by Jews, but glamorous non-Jews were always converting to Judaism.

No Jew in LA that I ever met tried to "pass." I knew many families like ours – Brooklyn-to-Broadway-to-Hollywood parents, West Coast Swimming Pool Jews, if you will. So I wanted to describe that world, that milieu, that subculture – as faithfully, insightfully, and lovingly as I could – to contribute a somewhat underrepresented narrative to the annals of popular social history.

Womenetics: Why do you think you became a writer? Was this something you always wanted to be?
Weller: My mother was a writer, so, yes, she was a role model. But I think writers just know that they're meant to be writers. I remember being 6 years old and walking around in circles by myself in the Hawthorne School playground, whispering to myself, unhappy, "Nobody thinks as much as me..." Meaning: Why is there a narrative always running around in my head? It's not normal! Finally, I think I became a writer because my best self was the one I typed, not the one I expressed in social interaction. I was more thoughtful, analytic, humane, interesting, witty, and sophisticated in writing. I was never that person face to face, and I knew it.

People who knew me as a corny high school cheerleader who was mortally jealous of her beautiful best friend and who failed at the "coolness" games of Beverly Hills High School would never have expected me to be an interesting writer, or a writer at all. That was my hidden better self, and I relished going from my interactional self (the one who always knew, Hey! Wait! I'm better than this! – but I don't know how to act it out.) to my wiser, deeper writer alter ego. It was like Clark Kent ducking into the phone booth and putting on the cape: my typewriter, then my computer: that was my cape.

Womenetics: What kind of child were you?
Weller: High-strung, hyperactive (if there had been the medication then that there is now, I'd probably have been on it), very talkative, a little "difficult," theatrical, insecure, bossy, creative in a circumscribed way, cheerful with a dark edge, secretly transgressive and sardonic (what we would now call "snarky") despite a conventional exterior, borderline obnoxious but well-meaning and very much wanting to be liked and praised. Much smarter and introspective than I presented.

Womenetics: Who has had the biggest influence on your life?
Weller: Wow, that's a very hard question to answer, for anyone. My mother was a huge influence because we were so temperamentally alike, and we both saw it. Musical figures had a huge influence. I often say (a bit for effect, but it really felt true at the time) that Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles saved my life. Seeing West Side Story and listening to the Drifters sing There Goes My Baby and Up On the Roof ignited my romantic fascination with New York, the place I moved to right after graduating UC Berkeley. Having a wonderful son, Jonathan Kelly, age 29 and an editor, has been the most rewarding experience of my life. My son's wonderfulness makes me feel I'm a better, saner, more giving person than I ever thought I was: free props, not sure I deserve ‘em but I'll take ‘em.

Womenetics: In your journalistic work, you’ve written about rape, egg donation among Ivy League women, women judges, domestic violence. Do you consider yourself a feminist writer or “just” a writer?
Weller: A writer and a feminist writer. Someone who values finding and telling strong and important stories, and, over the last 30 years, many have had women as protagonists.

Womenetics: Are you writing a book right now?
Weller: Yes, I have just finished intensively researching and will soon start writing an intertwined career biography of Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour – and the triumph of women in TV news, as well as the change in the idea of what constitutes news and news reporting.

Womenetics: Is there any subject that you haven’t written about, that you’d like to?
Weller: Sure there are a few article-subject wish-list items, but I have to keep them secret. Sorry.

Womenetics: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing women today?
Weller: That, too, is a very good question. I think, by and large, women have made extraordinary, and permanent, gains. I don't see feminism – basic, common sense feminism – unraveling unless we have a hellish scenario that, like World War II, necessitates only men going into extreme and broad-based, life-risking combat for an extended period of time, thus thrusting women in the bizarre role that 1950s women were in (a role unequaled in previous, more sensible and wittier generations).

I think today's young women are mind-bogglingly terrific. They're sensible, careerist, practical, assertive; they PLAN their lives (my generation only did at zero hour), and (because of strides made by the previous generation and a half) they are free to value and relish what we jumped away from as entrapping and retrograde: classically feminine pursuits, like cooking and earnestly worked-at parenting.

I can't think right now of a challenge facing women today that doesn't also face men. Our economy is a nightmare, and that's equal-opportunity. The political right wing has perfected the politics of total intransigence and fury and vilification, and that, alas, is not gender-based (Palin, Bachman, etc.). Of course, young women still feel vulnerable in terms of finding love and commitment; it's still a "man's world" in the romance and mating department, alas. But those young women are also so much better at living robust, fulfilled, enviable, independent, enriched, proud lives while they're single than we ever were at it. I think women are in good shape today. And that's great news.

Jan Jaben-Eilon was a founding staff writer of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Since then, she has been the international editor of Advertising Age magazine and has written for such publications as The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Journalism Review, and Consumer Reports. She is the author of soon-to-be-published (There is) Life After Cancer. Jan and her husband have homes in Atlanta and Jerusalem.