Gail Sheehy (born Gail Henion; November 27, 1936 – August 24, 2020) was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She was the author of seventeen books and numerous high-profile articles for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fair. Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, sometimes known as creative nonfiction, in which journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character.
Many of her books focused on cultural shifts, including Passages (1976), which was named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress. Sheehy penned biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her most recent book, Daring: My Passages (Sept. 2014), is a memoir.
Sheehy's article "The Secret of Grey Gardens", a cover story from the January 10, 1972, issue of New York, brought the bizarre bohemian life of Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and cousin Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale to public attention. Their story was the basis for the film Grey Gardens and a Broadway musical of the same name.
Early life and education
Gail Sheehy was born in Mamaroneck, New York, to Lillian Rainey Henion and Harold Merritt Henion. Her mother's family was Scots-Irish. Her grandmother, Agnes Rooney ran away from Northern Ireland to the United States as a mail-order bride. Another part of her mother's family was Scottish and worked the Ulster plantation for English landowners.
Growing up, Sheehy was close to her paternal grandmother, Gladys Latham Ovens. Ovens' husband had died of a stroke during the Great Depression—and after he died, Ovens went to work as a real estate agent in a career that lasted for over 40 years. Ovens bought Sheehy her first typewriter at age 7. When as an adolescent, Sheehy began to sneak into New York City on Saturday mornings to explore, her grandmother kept her secret.
In 1958, Sheehy graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Arts in English and home economics. She later returned to school in 1970, earning her Master of Arts in journalism from Columbia University, where she studied on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship under the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Career
1960s
Sheehy's first job after college was working for the J. C. Penney department store chain. Sheehy traveled across the country putting on educational fashion shows for college home economics departments. It was here that Sheehy began writing professionally—she wrote for the company's magazines and worked with ad agencies to make informational filmstrips.
The next few years, a young married Sheehy supported her husband through medical school and began her work as a journalist. Sheehy moved to Rochester, New York, where she found a job as a journalist for the Democrat and Chronicle in 1961. She wrote for the women's page and for the Sunday feature section. Sheehy and her husband then moved to the East Village in New York City. Sheehy became a mother, but continued to work for various publications including the World Telegram for a brief time in 1963 and then the New York Herald Tribune from 1963 to 1966. Sheehy decided to leave her daily reporting job to become a freelance journalist. Sheehy and her husband divorced in 1968.
Sheehy participated in a number of important and significant cultural events in the 1960s including covering Robert F. Kennedy's campaign and Woodstock. Sheehy was one of the original contributors to New York magazine and contributed from 1968 through 1977. Clay Felker, founder of the magazine, and Sheehy's future husband, encouraged Sheehy to write "big" stories; one of the first was following Robert Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1968. She traveled with the campaign to the West Coast and had access to interview Kennedy directly. Sheehy was en route back to New York when Kennedy was assassinated in California. Sheehy covered the rise of amphetamine use in New York after her sister became addicted. Sheehy helped her sister get off drugs and they attended Woodstock in order to hide from her sister's drug pusher.