EDITOR'S NOTE: Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday, was a freelance journalist who had not yet founded Ms. Magazine when she invited The into her apartment for a feature on a life that found her equally comfortable at high-society dinners and in tenement halls. The April 5, 1970, feature written by then-AP writer Lynn Sherr, headlined “Making It Like, Wow,” ran with a photograph of Steinem — and her cat — at home, which doubled as her workplace.
It carried its own editor's note introducing Steinem: “She’s a writer who is almost as much written about as she writes. She’s as beautiful as the Beautiful People she records. She’s a name among name droppers.
And she’s Everygirl’s answer to whether Cinderella can ever find success and happiness in the big city.” As the AP looks back on Steinem's life and career, it is making that early profile available for readers. The story has been edited for typographical errors, but maintains the AP style — and mores — of the day. NEW YORK (AP) — It sounded like the bash of both decades.
A New Year’s Eve party at Gloria Steinem’s! Gloria Steinem: the writer-activist-antiwar-gorgeous bachelor girl who was pictured with Henry Kissinger in Time and Life and who helped keep the cool in Harlem with Mayor Lindsay and who almost has a permanent guest swivel chair in Carson and Cavett’s TV studios and who nearly ran on the New York mayoralty ticket with Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin and who once let Ali MacGraw share her apartment—I mean, wouldn’t her party be crawling with names? I mean, didn’t she practically run New York?
And so Marty and Jeff, two journalism students in search of the Jet Set, crashed. As it turned out, they’d have found more celebrities fox-trotting to Guy Lombardo. Steinem’s brownstone on that last day of 1969 yielded just six Black Panthers, four Long Island migrant workers, assorted interesting but unheard-of people and a doctor named Mortimer.
No Lindsay, no Mailer, no Breslin, not even one Kennedy. New Year’s Eve may have been all cold turkey on the table and ice cubes in the bathtub, but Gloria Steinem, 34, free-lance magazine writer and contributing editor to New York and Glamour magazines, hardly ekes out your basic subways-and-supermarkets existence as an Upper East Side Single. A humbly born Midwesterner-turned-Manhattanite whose showgirl legs have not yet been hidden beneath a maxicoat and whose perfect-for-a-Pucci-dress body stays slim with Slender and Fresca, Steinem is Everygirl’s dream of Making It.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
