Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy (born Gail Henion; November 27, 1936 – August 24, 2020) was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She was the author of seventeen books and numerous high-profile articles for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fair. Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, sometimes known as creative nonfiction, in which journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character.

Many of her books focus on cultural shifts, including Passages (1976), which was named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress. Sheehy penned biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her final book, Daring: My Passages (2014), was a memoir.

Sheehy's article "The Secret of Grey Gardens", a cover story from the January 10, 1972, issue of New York, brought the bizarre bohemian life of Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and cousin Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale to public attention. Their story was the basis for the film Grey Gardens and a Broadway musical of the same name.

Early life and education Gail Sheehy was born in Mamaroneck, New York, to Lillian Rainey Henion and Harold Merritt Henion. Her mother's family was Scots-Irish. Her grandmother, Agnes Rooney ran away from Northern Ireland to the United States as a mail-order bride.

1970s In the 1970s, Sheehy's portfolio of high profile articles grew and she began to author books. In addition to writing for New York magazine, she also wrote a monthly article for Cosmopolitan--her first story had her travel to India to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his disciples.

The summer of 1971, Sheehy and Felker rented a house in East Hampton. Sheehy and her daughter found an abandoned box of bunnies and since they could not take them back to New York, Sheehy's daughter suggested they take the kittens to the "witch house" across the street. It was there that Sheehy first encountered Little Edie Beale and her mother Big Edie Beale, the reclusive cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis living in a dilapidated 28 room mansion called Grey Gardens. After the article was published, Onassis came forward with a check for $25,000 to help clean up the property. Little Edie and Big Edie were profiled in 1975 in the Grey Gardens documentary by the Maysles brothers. WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

Sheehy began work on her next book, Pathfinders, in 1978.

Sheehy helped organize the Sag Harbor Initiative with William Pickens, Pat Pickens, and Walter Isaacson among others in 1987. Isaacson went on to be president and CEO of Aspen Ideas Festival.

1990s During the 1990s, Gail Sheehy published five books including Gorbachev: The Making of the Man Who Changed the World (1990), The Silent Passage (1992), New Passages (1995), Understanding Men's Passages (1998), and Hillary's Choice (1999).

In 1989, Tina Brown asked Sheehy to expand her character profiles for Vanity Fair to include international figures. Her profile of Gorbachev made the February 1990 Vanity Fair cover as "Red Star: The Man Who Changed the World". Charmed by the relationship between Gorbachev and Thatcher, Sheehy also wrote a play based on a fantasy romance called Maggie and Misha. Sheehy received a million-dollar advance from Simon & Schuster for the paperback rights. After Felker's death in 2008, Sheehy was named AARP's Caregiving Ambassador in 2008 and began working with the AARP on a series of articles, interviews of caregivers through video, and blog posts. She eventually wrote a book on the subject of caregiving, Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence which was published in 2010. She also wrote a play, Chasing the Tiger, about her relationship with Felker.

Sheehy published her own memoir in 2014, Daring: My Passages. In 2019, she was an Audio Podcast Fellow at Stony Brook University, where she created and produced her podcast series Kid Rebels with Gail Sheehy.

Personal life In 1960, Sheehy married Albert Francis Sheehy, a medical student at the University of Rochester. They had one daughter, Maura, and divorced in 1968. In 1984, Sheehy married editor Clay Felker, with whom she adopted a Cambodian child, Mohm. Felker died in 2008.

Sheehy died in Southampton, New York, on August 24, 2020, from complications of pneumonia at age 83.

Selected articles

1969: "Speed City: The Explosion of Amphetamines", New York magazine

Sheehy wrote the cover story for New York magazine about the growing problem of amphetamine use among young people in East Village. The article arose out of Sheehy's own experience—her sister had become addicted to the drug. Part 2 is called "Redpants and Sugarman". To prepare for the interview, Sheehy tracked down Thatcher's "special Indian guru woman," to whose electric bath routine Thatcher attributed her youthful appearance. Sheehy described her difficulties with the interviewing process in the HuffPost, saying that she had "done a lot of things for getting a story, but maybe electrocution is going a little far."

1992: "What Hillary Wants", Vanity Fair

Sheehy's 1992 article on Hillary Clinton created a stir by quoting her mentioning rumors of an affair between President George H. W. Bush and a woman named "Jennifer". Sheehy reported that Clinton complained that the media had made much about Gennifer Flowers' affair with Bill Clinton but did not look into the Bush transgression. Clinton considered that portion of the interview off the record, but Sheehy disagreed, and independently confirmed the "private conversation" Hillary had described by interviewing Hillary's confidante, Atlanta Journal & Constitution owner Anne Cox Chambers, who repeated the conversation word for word.

Fact checkers for Vanity Fair alerted editor Tina Brown to a potential problem, based on their review of the transcript of the interview, but Brown declined to remove the quote. The interview received wide coverage in the press.

1995: "The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich", Vanity Fair

Sheehy learned the back story of Newt Gingrich's life from his mother, who revealed that she was a lifelong manic-depressive. Kit Gingrich's first husband abandoned young Newt to a stepfather in exchange for forgiveness of a few months of child-support payments. "Isn't it awful, a man willing to sell off his own son?" Kit Gingrich told Sheehy. Speaker of the House Gingrich told Sheehy that both his fathers were totalitarian and modeled "a very male kind of toughness". He did not blink when Sheehy asked him if he thought he had a genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder. He said he did not know, then applauded the special powers of leaders who are thought to have been bipolar. "Churchill had what he called his 'black dog'. Lincoln had long periods of depression." He speculated that leaders who are able to think on several levels at once may have a different biochemical makeup. "You have to have a genetic toughness just to take the beating" he told Sheehy. Her article also revealed that his wife at the time, Marianne Gingrich, did not want him to become president and threatened to make a revelation that would torpedo his 1995 presidential campaign.

2000: "The Accidental Candidate: George W. Bush", Vanity Fair

Sheehy found a possible source of the malapropisms for which Governor Bush was mocked: a history of dyslexia in the Bush family. Diagnostic experts told her that "The errors you've heard Governor Bush make are consistent with dyslexia," and that "a language-disordered person cannot take in a lot of information at once." Sheehy predicted that if Bush became president, "he would have to develop a work-style where others pre-organized and pre-digested information for him." Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, she suggested, organized much of the candidate's speeches and decisions.

2008: "Hillaryland at War", Vanity Fair Published June 30, 2008: Hillary Clinton's campaign had it all: near-death moments, hard-won triumphs, dysfunctional relationships—and a staff consumed with infighting over how to sell their candidate. It was a battle that revealed why she came so close to victory, as well as why she did not make it.

Professional affiliations In 2009 Sheehy was named AARP's Caregiver Ambassador. In 2011 she became a chairwoman for the National Osteoporosis Foundation's "Generations of Strength" campaign.

Television and other media appearances Sheehy was a frequent guest on NBC's The Today Show, MSNBC's Hardball and What Now? with Andrea Mitchell, ABC's World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America, Oprah, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, Larry King Live, Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, and documentaries such as PBS's "American Experience: Clinton".

In July 2015, Sheehy appeared for an interview on Huffpost Live to discuss her 2014 work, Daring.

Plagiarism lawsuit Sheehy's book Passages was a national bestseller. In 1975, Roger Gould, then a psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles, brought a suit, which was settled out of court, against Sheehy intended to enjoin publication of her book, which had not yet been completed. Sheehy ended up giving Dr. Gould ten percent of the royalties for the book. 1987 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Spirit of Survival 1994 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Dartmouth 1997 Hospital for Special Surgery Award For Groundbreaking Work in Women's Health 2002 American Psychological Association's Presidential Citation 2011 American Society on Aging Leadership Award

A Library of Congress survey named Passages one of the 10 most-influential books of our time.