ON MADNESS, MONEY, MEN, AND MOTHERHOOD (1980)
by Leah Napolin 
     When my friend Phyllis' first book, Women and Madness, came out, challenging commonly-held assumptions about the causes and treatment of mental illness in women, it was reviewed on the front page of the Sunday Times' book review and Phyllis became an instant celebrity.  Not bad for a ghetto child, the only daughter of a poor Brooklyn shopkeeper. Quite suddenly, Phyllis was in demand on college campuses, on talk shows, and in radical caucuses. It mattered little that the book contained sweeping generalities based on sloppy research, a hallmark of Phyllis' scholarship.  She said things that needed to be said, had focused attention on an important issue, touched a nerve. And in person she was utterly captivating. In person, she conveyed the sense of being someone of genuine conviction and integrity; of having a mission in life. Her audiences found themselves dazzled and bewildered by stream-of-consciousness rhetoric that sounded more like the outpourings of a revolutionary poet than a social scientist.  But it was, after all, the age of Timothy Leary and R.D. Laing.
S     Subsequently, Phyllis took on the role of resident analyst, gadfly, and spokesperson for the Women's Movement.  She once gave me her resumé to read: it came to eight closely-typed pages of degrees, honorary degrees, publications, memberships, and achievements.  She also told me that she had studied and could do brain surgery.
     My first glimpse of Phyllis happened in Columbus, Ohio circa 1971, shortly after Women and Madness came out. She was on a book tour and drawing big crowds wherever she appeared.  Those were heady times, and most of what filled the headlines was not happening in the Midwest. I was teaching at Ohio State University and my friends and I, starved for any contact with real feminists from the real world, flocked to the campus center to hear her speak.   It was standing-room only, and the atmosphere in the auditorium was positively charged.  I remember finding it hard to follow what she was saying, but that didn't matter to my graduate student friends, who made their way to the stage after the lecture and invited Phyllis to join them for a celebration at the only all-women place in town, which was a working-class gay bar not far from campus.  To our surprise, Phyllis agreed. I don't think she and I exchanged more than a hello that night. She was surrounded by crowds of adoring women. One of my young friends, who got to shake her hand, refused to wash it for a week.
     When I moved back to New York in 1973 I dropped Phyllis a note, introducing myself and inviting her to see my play, Yentl.  She sent back a note with a list of about fifteen names of Movement women she had rallied to attend opening night with her, and afterward, they all came along to the opening night party at Sardi's.  In the glittering, dizzying whirl of that night, and in the absence of offers to the contrary, I picked up the tab for all of their tickets and some of their food and drink, a gesture which Phyllis, as self-appointed leader of the group, grandly never bothered to acknowledge.  Said one of the feminists, rather belligerently, to my husband, "Who are you?"  Kate Millett was on the list but didn't show.  Gloria Steinem was on the list and did, the only one who offered to pay for anything.  So did a woman with wild uncombed hair who came attired in denim coveralls and never spoke a word to me.  Later, I learned it was Andrea Dworkin.
     After that, Phyllis called on average twice a week to enlist me in a series of protests.  Every time I answered the phone it seemed there was a new petition or manifesto to sign. I got the distinct impression that Phyllis thought I might be a conduit to all sorts of influential show-biz types.  Several times, at her urging, I asked my producer to lend her distinguished name to causes I myself might have thought twice about. But when the call went out to picket a sleazy 42nd Street movie house that was showing a "snuff" film, I begged off, said I had something else to do.
     One petition she drafted was supposed to be presented by none other than Elizabeth Taylor to the Secretary-General on the steps of the UN.  As I recall, that never happened either.
     You see, it's Phyllis' talent for friendship that got me to enlist in her army in the first place.  War is hell, as we know. And life is War, an unending struggle, so it's not surprising that what was expected of the troops was nothing less than unswerving loyalty.  For example: once, Phyllis accosted Esther, another dear friend, at intermission during a performance of Esther's play and bitterly accused her of betrayal, of speaking to someone who had written an unfavorable review of Women and Madness.  "How was I supposed to know that?" asked Esther, miserably. "It's your business to know!" said Phyllis.
     Another time, an editor at Phyllis' publishing house asked for a partial return of an advance on a two-book deal.  Phyllis had done the first book but failed to deliver on the second. Having spent the whole advance, Phyllis refused.  Suit and counter-suit followed. Outraged, Phyllis vowed, "I hold him personally responsible for putting me through this.  What's more, he's Jewish—I won't forget that."
     Always at the center of attention, Phyllis seemed to thrive on controversy, even from within her own ranks.  "I gave an interview to Aviva the other day for her magazine," she once confided to me. "When they print it, boy oh boy, is everyone going to be mad!"
     One grandiose scheme followed another, but probably the most original was her plan to take a peace caravan of women, accompanied by female black-belt bodyguards, to the Middle East to capture Saudi Arabian oil fields and liberate Third World women.  She hinted that Jackie Kennedy could be persuaded to underwrite the junket. Several serious brainstorming sessions were held to discuss this, and the possibility of setting up a Women's Government in Exile.  At one of these meetings, even though no one had voted her president, Phyllis chose her cabinet.
     She once made a six o'clock dinner date with me.  We set out for the restaurant, but on the way, Phyllis insisted we first stop off at the hairdresser's.  "It won't take long," she promised. Larry Matthews' is a Madison Avenue salon where the women are Stepford Wives look-a-likes, where the owner of the establishment appears in his white Cardin suit to personally serve cake and small tumblers of wine to the clients, where everyone is on a first-name basis:  "darling-this" and "darling-that." Two hours went by while Phyllis had her hair done. I sat there counting the hairs as they fell to the floor. "Schmuck, what are you doing?" I asked myself. Phyllis loaned me a book to pass the time.  It was a study of women in concentration camps.  I got a headache and phoned to cancel an eight o'clock appointment I’d made earlier and missed.  On the way out, cut and coifed, Phyllis tried on wigs.
     Phyllis' second book was about Women and Money.  I was invited to her apartment to attend a seminar that was structured around discussions of the new book.  But since the women in the class discussed a wide range of topics from jobs to sex, the class was less a class in economics than it was a group for consciousness-raising. Besides, Phyllis and her class did a lot of after-hours partying. Phyllis, their guru, said, "I'm really here as a counselor and friend, helping them."  I was somewhat surprised, then, when she told me that she charged tuition.  Do women charge other women money for consciousness-raising?
     Later that year, Phyllis returned from UCLA where she'd been invited to speak to a student group.  The students said they didn't have enough money to pay her fee which, as speaking fees go, is high.  And they asked her to take less. "You wouldn't do that to Buckminster Fuller!" she charged, and stormed home.  The cause was Sisterhood, but the economic message was clear: get yours.
     Phyllis' personal life was nearly as colorful as her professional one.  Her first husband was an Afghanistani prince. But life as the wife of a Muslim prince did not suit Phyllis, who perhaps had entertained the notion that by marrying a prince she would thereby become a princess. It was more like being under house arrest, so she engineered a daring escape.  Her second husband, a handsome young Israeli with soulful eyes, was said to be a descendant of the Bal-Shem Tov. Except for those times when he could be found serving Phyllis her dinner on a tray, he seemed to be chronically unemployed. At a loss to explain either marriage, Phyllis only shrugged and murmured, "What can I say?  I lost my head. Thus do we sacrifice our lives, to beauty."
      Somewhere between the prince and the pauper, Phyllis lost her head once more and went out west to a feminist commune in pursuit of her true destiny, in pursuit of an old flame named Diana, a six-foot-two shiksa auto mechanic.  Diana—her muse, her love.
     "I feel like a giddy schoolgirl," said Phyllis.
     "Romantic intensity is counter-revolutionary," Diana told Phyllis.
     "Nuts to you," declared Phyllis.  "For me, romantic intensity is revolutionary!"
     "You're trying to make me into a sex object," complained Diana.
     "You've gotta be kidding," observed Phyllis.  "Just take a look at the two of us and say who's the sex object!"
     Diana refused to run away with her.  Broken-hearted, Phyllis returned home, nevertheless proclaiming that,                "Today, the only truly revolutionary women are lesbians!"
     "Why's that?" I asked.
     "Because they're in a revolutionary struggle against monogamy!"
          She did confirm, however, that the women she met in the commune spent much of their time consumed with jealousy because their lovers were sleeping with someone else's lover.  So much for the struggle against patriarchal patterns of behavior.
          As a professor at the university, Phyllis did not get along well with the school administration, nor with her male colleagues.  You have to know my friend Phyllis to understand that second only to Jewish editors and publishers, Jewish academics are the Enemy.  She claimed to be the maverick of the department, which was true since she spent a lot of time instituting sex discrimination class-action lawsuits against the school, which kept her so busy that she often didn't show up to teach class.  "I'm exhausted," she sighed. "Everyone wants a piece of me. I'm spread too thin."
          When she was refused a six-month leave of absence to recover from these exertions, Phyllis decided to stick it to the whole academic establishment.  She devised a clever plan whereby she would get not six months off, but a whole year!
          With the complicity of a female friend in the medical profession, Phyllis obtained a urine specimen from a pregnant woman and presented it to the Medical Board of the university as evidence that she was pregnant and entitled to a leave of absence.  She also furnished them with a letter from said doctor declaring that she had difficulty carrying to term and required six months' bed rest.
          The scheme worked wonderfully well.  Except for a quick trip to the Women's Year conference in Mexico City where she refrained from issuing any statements to the press, Phyllis managed to keep a low profile.  During that time she also kicked her ne-er-do-well husband out of the house and started working on a third book, the definitive WOMEN AND MEN. At the end of six months, the school was notified that Phyllis had miscarried.
          Now, Part Two of the scheme was about to unfold.  No purloined urine samples this time. Now Phyllis planned to really become pregnant, thus assuring herself of a second six-month leave, as well as fulfilling at age thirty-five another fond ambition--and, possibly, who knows,  another book? On MOTHERHOOD.
          But with Husband Number Two disposed of, who would father the child?  Since this was to be no ordinary child, this would be no ordinary conjunction of mortals. "We'll sign a contract," Phyllis said of the arrangement she had in mind.  "He'll agree to impregnate me, give me $10,000 a year to rear the tot, and thereafter relinquish all claims to my person and to the baby.”
          Exactly how many men Phyllis considered for the job is not known.  At one point, with time running out, she cried to me in despair, "Let's assassinate all the bastards!"  Then, as luck would have it, along came Richard, the new man in her life; Richard, the lucky sperm donor.
          Richard was head of a research institute at the state university in Stony Brook.  Richard was a psychiatrist—and, as it happens, Jewish. You have to know my friend Phyllis to understand that next to Jewish editors and publishers and Jewish male academics, this is the enemy, this is Hitler.  Phyllis and Richard met while testifying at a lesbian custody case in Colorado.  Richard had just gotten a million-dollar research grant. It was love at first sight.
          How Phyllis and Richard consummated their union at my writing studio is typical of the way my friend Phyllis moves through the world.  She called one morning to say that she was meeting Richard at the train station in Huntington, Long Island and suggested that maybe she and I could get together since Huntington is only 15 miles from Sea Cliff, where I live.  Regretfully, I told her I was planning to be at my agent's office in Manhattan that day to deliver the script of a new play. Whereupon Phyllis immediately changed plans so she could meet me in Manhattan and I could then drive her back out to Huntington.  "Pick me up at my health club and we'll talk," she said, summoning me.
          When I got there, Phyllis was swimming with great determination from one end of the pool to the other.  "I've just learned how to swim!" she cried, stroking her way down the pool like an Olympic gold medal winner. Phyllis, on becoming Superwoman:  "That's my next goal—to become a jock!  Janet is coming here from California to be my aide-de-camp and teach me athletics."  Note: Janet ended up like the rest of Phyllis' shifting entourage, becoming a kind of indentured servant doing household chores, running errands, and typing manuscripts.
          As usual, despite my own priorities, I hung around the club while Phyllis took a sauna, changed clothes, blow-dried her hair, and made a phone call to Richard, switching plans yet again, this time persuading him to drive 30 miles from Stony Brook to Sea Cliff.
          "Come on," I said, impatiently.
          "But I'm starved. Can't we eat first?"
          "No.  Well, okay.  We'll get some take-out," I said.  "Let's go!"
          "Blimpies?" she said, brightening up at the thought.  She agreed to let me buy hers since she didn't have enough cash.  "I'll owe you," she said, and we left.
          Richard was waiting for us at the studio when we arrived.  Impeccable credentials but a bit short. "Let's have coffee," Phyllis proposed.  It was a lovely day, and before the coffee had even perked the two of them decided to take a stroll.  Within minutes, the phone rang. It was Phyllis; she'd discovered a little outdoor cafe in the village and she and Richard were going to have lunch there, instead.  Richard hadn't eaten lunch yet. Phyllis was about to have her second one of the day.  Did I mind? Of course not.  The fact was, my working day was over.  I might as well pack up and leave to take my kids home from school.  I poured out the coffee I made into the sink.
          "Oh, by the way," said Phyllis, "could you stop off here with a key to the studio, in case
we—uh—you know—“
          "No problem," I said.
          Later that evening, pact concluded, romancing over, Phyllis called to say that Richard was on his way back to Stony Brook and she'd like to come by and see my new house.  "Now, can we spend some time together? Can we talk?" As if seeing me was the true agenda and this other tiresome business merely the pretext.
          "Gee, Phyl," I said.  "We're in the midst of renovating.  The place is a mess. My folks are coming over tonight.  We'll all be doing things, but you're welcome to come and pitch in."
          I should have known that the Phyllis who described to me her feelings of revolutionary rapture on viewing women in the commune, tanned and bare-breasted, hammering joists and fitting pipe, would not be especially eager to lay hands on mine.  But she came, anyway.
          On meeting my daughters for the first time Phyllis asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.  From the age of seven to the age of ten Margo had wanted to be President. Then she decided it was too dangerous, you could get killed, so she decided to become a writer, like Mommy.  This time, however, she looked Phyllis in the eye and with a straight face, said, "I think I'm going to be a wife." (Test Number One—flunk.)
          Like that earlier visit en famille, when it felt as though we were all auditioning for her, this one was whirlwind from start to finish.  First, she checked out my parents: my dad was up on a ladder, my mother had forgotten to put on her hearing aid and didn't hear a word anyone said, just kept smiling.  Then she made an impromptu inspection tour, exclaiming over the size of the closets and ending up at the refrigerator. "What have you got to eat?" she said. "I'm starved!" Whereupon she seized some leftovers in plastic containers and began sniffing them.  I started to throw together a meal for her, anything I could find. Canned soup, quickie salad.  While I was setting the table, Phyllis challenged Margo to accompany her on the piano while she sang, and four and a half minutes of loud operatic warbling followed, which caused the dog to have a fit.
          Once, Phyllis begged me, "Let me be in your next play. Please!  I can sing, I can dance.”
          "But Phyllis, it's not a musical."
          "So what, who cares?"
          As the soup boiled over on the stove, Phyllis checked out my upstairs.  In the midst of trying on hats and Jessica's dress-up gown, five sizes too small for her (she caught her heel in the hem, ripping it), in the midst of pirouetting in front of the mirror, she dumped the salad she was still forking into her mouth all over the bedroom floor.  
          "Oops, sorry," she said and made a hasty exit while I mopped up.
          Then it was back downstairs where she ate the rest of her supper ("Do you have a piece of bread, maybe?  Whole grain?"), complimented me on the soup ("Mm, delicious! You made it yourself?" "No," I answered contritely—flunk, flunk) and held court with Mama and the girls, lecturing them on the carcinogenic properties of mascara, hoping to impress Jessica with her story of being on a talk show with Miss USA.  Jessica was less than impressed.                   
     "Miss USA—for real? Yuck!" said Jessie. "She's so plastic!"
     "Not really," said Phyllis, wistfully.  "She's just a poor girl from a small town in Texas.  You have to understand, it was her ticket out of there—"
     Less than an hour after she arrived I reminded Phyllis that she had a train to catch, and she made hurried farewells to everyone, declaring in parting that we were all daughters of Lilith.
     "Who?" said my mother.
     "My pleasure," smiled my father vaguely, still up on his ladder where he'd been the whole time.
     My husband was kneeling on the kitchen floor surrounded by dishwasher parts.  Phyllis kissed him on the head. "My, your hair smells of glue!" And I drove her to the train.
     At the train station, Phyllis was scribbling furiously in her datebook when the pen she was using flew off into the bushes.  "Shit. Well, never mind," she said.
     "Here, take my pen," I offered, handing her my new Pentel Rolling Writer, knowing that I‘d never see it again.
     "Thanks," said Phyl. "Is it mine?"
     "Oh, keep it," I said.
     We hugged, kissed, she dashed for the train and waved goodbye as it pulled out of the station.
     At six o'clock the next morning, Margo came into the bedroom and whispered that the dog was lying in the upstairs hall with something in his paws that looked suspicious.  I opened one eye and said that if it wasn't moving to leave it there until the sun came up. I went back to sleep. A while later she came in again to say it looked more like a piece of green liver, or maybe a mouse.  My husband struggled out of bed and said, "What’s a piece of wilted bell pepper doing here?"
     Later that afternoon I went back to the studio.  Besides a half-empty bottle of Heineken in the fridge, I found—yes, dear reader—cum stains on my new bedspread, which I would dutifully launder.
     Knowing how my larger-than-life friend Phyllis feels about million-dollar grants I was happy for her sake, hoping she'd had a million-dollar fuck and would soon find herself that million-dollar baby in the five and ten-cent store.

Copyright 1980 - Leah Napolin