Lady Business: The Post’s other women; What should men say?; Liam Neeson’s next thriller
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the thirteenth issue, published January 11, 2018.
All the Post's Women
Last weekend I did my journalistic duty and saw The Post, which was exactly the heartwarming hero-gram I was hoping it would be. (It also featured fabulous 70s fashions, especially Meryl Streep’s formal Golden Nightgown of Decisiveness.) Streep and Tom Hanks clearly enjoyed playing fun, famous people, and the movie was just as feminist and just as much a nerdy love letter to rah-rah-real-journalism as advertised; I would happily watch the 10-hour Netflix sequel about the same characters working their way through Watergate.
If The Post: The Series ever happens, I hope it gets to spend more time on the movie’s less-famous historical figures, the ones not known outside of journalism circles. Sure, Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee had impressive careers and dramatic lives, as did the movie’s strong supporting player, Ben Bagdikian. But there were tons of impressive, largely-unexplained cameos in The Post, including:
--The “Judy” banned from covering the Nixon daughter’s wedding, aka Judith Martin, who a few years later would start writing advice columns as Miss Manners.
--Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot, the artist and socialite who was Bradlee’s second wife. The movie doesn’t have time for her to do much more than womansplain its central thesis to Bradlee, and to have Bradlee talk at her about his relationship with JFK. Tony Pinchot undoubtedly had her own opinions about that relationship, since the dead president had been sleeping with her dead sister. (Kennedy also hit on Tony.) While he was president, Kennedy had an affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer ... who in 1964 was mysteriously murdered, in an unsolved crime suspected to be a CIA assassination.
--Meg Greenfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post editorial page editor and Newsweek columnist, who’s notable in the movie for being the only non-Graham woman allowed to weigh in on the Pentagon Papers. (Graham and Greenfield became close friends, and when Greenfield died of cancer in 1999, she left instructions asking Graham to write the foreword for her almost-completed book.) I spent a fair amount of time reading up on Greenfield after seeing the movie: she “read Latin [as] a form of relaxation”; was particularly interested in “nuclear strategy, military preparedness, politics and civil rights”; mentored a bunch of mostly-conservative male writers; inspired this essay about “my impossible and brilliant female boss”; and had a complicated relationship with feminism: “She detested the title 'Ms.' and kept a studied distance from the feminist movement. She once posted a sign on her office wall saying, 'If liberated, I will not serve.'"
Which brings us back to Kay Graham, who wasn’t always on the feminist side of history. (A year before the events of The Post, women working at Newsweek sued Graham’s company over sex discrimination; “Whose side am I supposed to be on?” she asked.) That sort of ambivalence towards feminism, felt by some of the professional women who would become heroic figures, is the sort of nuance that The Post didn’t have time or space for – but boy, would it make a terrific hour or two for that Netflix series sequel.
See Something, Say Something
In the wake of the Golden Globes and its Silence of the Men, I liked this Grub Street essay on how men in the restaurant industry are trying to avoid saying anything about rampant sexual misconduct there. Props to Danny Meyer for going on the record here, and his point about “listening more than speaking” makes some sense. I’m quite sure we got to Sunday, with lots of men wearing Time’s Up pins and saying absolutely nothing about them, for many of the same good intentions. But this is crucial:
The problem, though, is that someone like Meyer can’t strategically position himself as a spokesperson and leader for the entire industry — writing a book on his philosophies, regularly speaking at conferences and on podcasts, engaging in politics, and even acting as an investor — and then choose to avoid directly discussing the most important issue facing the industry. Crafting a response takes time and care, but three months after the Harvey Weinstein story hit, there is an obligation to at least start talking, holding yourself accountable for actions to follow.
Which applies pretty well to all those directors, producers, writers and movie stars entering awards season, too. You have the power to hire, to get movies made, and even to demand $1.5 million for reshoots that your female co-star is getting $1000 for. When next paraded in front of a microphone, well, time’s up; you’ve had plenty of time to think of something constructive to say.
Lady Bits
--I don’t have time to cook these days as much as I like to, but I do love Smitten Kitchen recipes, and I made Deb Perelman’s wonderfully green spinach quiche a couple of times over the holidays. I also really enjoy the weekly Grub Street Diet column, so: synchronicity!
--I am so delighted that Liam Neeson has progressed from beating people up on airplanes to doing so on Metro North trains. I love the on-the-nose title of The Commuter, and I am definitely making plans to see it (with lots of booze). But what I’m really excited for is the inevitable sequel, when octogenarian Liam Neeson stars in … The Pedestrian.
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