Clay Felker, RememberedLast night, hundreds of New Yorkers attended a memorial service hosted by ‘New York’ Magazine and Gail Sheehy for ‘New York’ founding editor Clay Felker.
ByJessica Pressler
intel
Gloria Steinem Remembers Norman MailerIt wasn’t lost on the activists at the National Women’s Conference at Hunter College that literary lion Norman Mailer, whose writing became a target of feminist wrath during the seventies, died in New York on the same day that their event began. The weekend-long program, which drew members of some 50 women’s and girls’ organizations, was planned by the late congresswoman Bella Abzug’s daughter Liz to mark the 30th anniversary of the first such gathering in Houston. And while the elder Abzug once told Mailer, “We think your views on women are full of s—,” she supported him in his losing 1969 campaign for mayor of New York, as did Gloria Steinem, who spoke Sunday morning to a cheering crowd of about 600 women from 21 states who had attended workshops with titles like “Smashing the Glass Ceiling.”
party lines
Rufus Wainwright Really Likes SausageParties for movies about human sex trafficking are a bummer. We guess we should have known that when we trekked over to the U.N. for the premiere of Trade, where we spent most of the night trying not to catch a case of self-righteousness from Mira Sorvino, Sigourney Weaver, Gloria Steinem, or the movie’s director, Kevin Kline. Happily, Rufus Wainwright was there. He had a song in the movie. “It’s by far my favorite placement of one of my songs in any films to date,” he said. “There’s nothing like having a song of yours play while somebody’s jumping off a cliff!” Rufus has a sense of humor! He also eats red meat. Jorn, his current German boyfriend, often cooks him Wiener schnitzel. “And every night for dessert,” he added, “we have sausage.” —Bennett Marcus
gossipmonger
Here’s … Billy?Billy Crystal is looking to take over a late-night talk show. Jimmy Fallon proposed to longtime girlfriend Nancy Juvonen. Brett Ratner won’t make as much money from Rush Hour 3 as he could have because it didn’t meet expectations at the box office. A White House staffer didn’t recognize David Beckham and asked if he was a friend or relative of the president. Val Kilmer dropped out of playing Adolph Hitler in Hebrew Hammer 2 because he was either scared or too bloated. Staffers at now-defunct Green Stone Media are complaining that the site won’t file for bankruptcy because founders Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem don’t want to be embarrassed.
intel
Alice Walker Talks About Feminism, But Not About Motherhood
There was an everydaughter-size elephant in the auditorium last night as old friends Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker, in conversation at the 92nd Street Y, talked about almost everything — meditation, California, Rwanda, George Bush (he’s bad!), peaches (mean freedom!), and mothers (complicated!). But they did not talk about Walker’s daughter, Rebecca, the feminist writer — and also Steinem’s goddaughter — who revealed in her recent book, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence that she is estranged from her Pulitzer-winning parent. (Okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely surprising: In Rebecca’s earlier book, Black, White and Jewish, she wrote about feeling emotionally neglected as a child.) “I am always happy to talk about my mother,” said Walker at the discussion. “My mother was a big woman, a strong woman, a beautiful woman, a woman who could not be beaten.” But there wasn’t a word on being a mother herself — not that there weren’t opportunities.
