7. Now I work with horses
1990 was the year The New Yorker held the first-ever sales conference that writers had to attend. It was held in Boca Raton, and only staffers who had been hired by Gottlieb were supposed to go.
At the tiny theater in the small-screen arthouse multiplex where my husband and I went to see She Said over Thanksgiving, last year, about a third of the seats were filled, which means there are at least 30 people within striking distance of Concord N.H. who are willing to venture out on a holiday weekend to see a movie made for grownups.
She Said is based on the book of the same title by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in The New York Times. It’s about their experience trying to get people, mostly women, to go on the record about Weinstein’s abuses of power and the payouts and nondisclosure agreements that his company used to cover them up. It’s written by the British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz and directed by Maria Schrader, who co-wrote and directed the cerebral comedy Ich Bin Dein Mensch (I’m Your Man), and it has wonderful performances from Zoë Kazan and Carey Mulligan as Kantor and Twohey, respectively, and an ensemble cast working hard not to make ordinary actual people seem too glamorous—Patricia Clarkson as Rebecca Corbett, the Times editor who initiated and drove the investigation; Andre Braugher doing a thankless turn as the paper’s former executive editor Dean Baquet; Samantha Morton and Angela Yeoh, as Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu, two former assistants of Weinstein who aided the investigation; and Jennifer Ehle as Laura Braddon, the first woman who agreed to go on the record.
All give moving performances. Perhaps most singular, though, are two portraits of moral ambiguity from Peter Friedman, as the legal fixer Lanny Davis, and Zach Grenier, as the Weinstein Company’s longtime accountant. In one scene between Mulligan and Friedman, Twohey is trying not to keep asking Davis how many payouts there were to women Weinstein victimized, because she knows he can’t tell her, and Davis is trying to tell her without actually saying. It’s a masterclass in how acting can paint with silences.
I found watching the movie an almost absurdly emotional experience and quickly tired of myself over-responding to things in it, to this line or that scene—the welling eye, the seizing throat, the sighs and gulps. I know this story so well—and I think a lot of women will feel that way. There’s so much that has resonance.
“I just thought: get through it.”
“I didn’t want to make him angry.”
“I thought I was the one who was sexualizing the situation.”
“Then he got angry.”
“I feel that it dictated a certain direction that my life took.”
“Now I work with horses.” 1
There’s one particularly chilling detail in the story Rowena Chiu tells, about how she took to wearing two pairs of tights to try to slow Weinstein down.
A week or so before the movie opened, I came across an article in which Chiu had been asked what it was like seeing her story “on the big screen.”
“There’s a whole mix of emotions,” she said. “You feel sad about it, you feel angry about it, you feel sort of amazed that there are so many people taking an interest in it and it's become such a big phenomenon.”
Reading this, I was reminded of how it felt waking up, in October of 2017, to find that the world had finally discovered sexual harassment.
Suddenly sexual harassment was everywhere and all anyone was talking and writing about. But back in 1990, no one talked about sexual harassment, and no one wrote about it. You talked about it with your girlfriends, not as “sexual harassment.” But you told each other stories.
1990 was the year that The New Yorker held the first-ever sales conference that writers were required to attend. It was held in Boca Raton, Florida, and it was a big deal because a strict divide had always existed at the magazine between the business and editorial side of things. There was to be a writers’ panel where each of us would talk for a few minutes about what we did. The idea was that we were supposed to be helping convey to the people whose job it was to sell ad space in the magazine what the “new” New Yorker was all about. So only writers who had been hired by Gottlieb were required to attend.
I very much didn’t want to go, and I asked Gottlieb if there was any possibility of getting out of it. But he said I had to go.
I complained to Veronica, who was sympathetic. I complained to Mr. New Yorker Writer, who reacted in a way I hadn’t expected. He was indignant. He wanted to know why he hadn’t been invited. I explained that only the writers hired by Gottlieb had to go. That nasty expression I’d glimpsed once or twice before flitted across his face, and he said something like, “We’ll see about that,” and went dashing out of my office, and when he came back it was to tell me that he would be going too.
No one in 1990 talked or wrote about sexual harassment. I talked about it, though. I talked to Meredith, my friend in media. Remember her from my second post here? Meredith and I were sexual harassment buddies. We didn’t think in those terms, but we used to swap stories about ourselves and the other women we knew.
I told Meredith about how Mr. New Yorker Writer had gotten himself invited to an out-of-state sales conference I had been required to attend, and how, once there, he’d come to my hotel room and blind-sided me with a pseudo-romantic declaration. (He was obsessed with me. He couldn’t think about anything else, blah, blah, blah.) I described all the different ways I’d tried to finesse the situation, to put him off without antagonizing him, explaining that he was barking up the wrong tree, that I had no interest in having a fling with a married colleague or anyone in an office context. I told Meredith about trying humor and reason and tact and candor and compassion and tough love—and how eventually I got scared because he got angry.
It was when he complained that his wife didn’t understand him. That’s such a cliché that there’s actually a joke about what a cliché it is in one of those early 60s sex comedies. In That Touch of Mink (1962), Audrey Meadows tells Doris Day, “Men take one look at you and all of a sudden their wives just don’t understand them.” So, I smiled involuntarily when he said that, and then I saw that flash of anger in his face, and I got scared.
He’d established in that first telephone conversation how much more important he was than I was—so important that he could do something highly unethical, and people would just shrug. And this was minor in comparison. If I complained, no one would take me seriously. And if I rejected him, he could say what he liked about me, such as that I’d come on to him—and no one would believe a word I said because he was married and I wasn’t. So, I’d—well, I don’t know what to call what I did—given up? given in? folded? said “uncle”? I’d suggested we have a one-night stand on the understanding that it would be a one-time thing.
I guess I thought my only chance of surviving the situation was to go along with what he wanted in the hope that by the time we got back to New York he’d have gotten to know me well enough to care about what I wanted or to understand why this wasn’t it.
I told Meredith about all this and everything that followed.
But we never called it “sexual harassment.” I never heard that term before 1991, when the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings were held. I know that because I can remember walking down the hallway in the new building The New Yorker had moved into that year and thinking: “‘Sexual harassment.’ I wonder if that’s what’s happening to me.”
Since posting this, I’ve watched She Said again and corrected certain small discrepancies between lines as I quoted them here and those that actually occur in the film. In one instance, where Zelda Perkins actually says, “…so I work with horses,” I decided to leave it as, “Now I work with horses,” and to add this footnote because I think it’s interesting that I heard it that way.