Long Live The Queen

Legendary feminist and human-rights advocate GLORIA STEINEM takes a rare step into the spotlight with an upcoming play and movie about her exceptional life

- Laura Brown

LAURA BROWN: Gloria! Am I correct in assuming you’re as busy as ever?

GLORIA STEINEM: I always thought the idea about age is that life gets less complicated, right? Or simpler. No, it’s cumulative, it turns out [laughs]. Who knew? Nobody told me.

LB: With the new play, Gloria: A Life, there will be another you. I was thinking about what it must be like to witness a play about your life and be portrayed by someone else.

GS: Kathy Najimy, who is a friend, director, and actor, said to me around three years ago, “You should do a one-woman play.” I said, “Oh, be serious now.” I couldn’t imagine! [laughs] But she went to see Daryl Roth, and Daryl—a very wise, experienced producer—said yes. We did a few days of workshop from which I learned that I could not possibly do it. I mean, it’s taken me to past 40 to feel OK about getting up and talking publicly because I’ve been two things in my life: a dancer and a writer. I went to a speech teacher when I was first trying to speak in public, and she said, “Of course you can’t talk; you’ve chosen both of those [professions] because you don’t want to talk.” She ended up giving up on me.

LB: You’re kidding! So you were 40 at this point?

GS: Yes. Clearly, it was very difficult then [in 1974] to get any accurate or serious articles published about the women’s movement, but since that was what my column in New York magazine was about, I received invitations to speak. So I asked my friend Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who ran one of the first nonsexist multiracial childcare centers and was a great organizing person, if she would come with me. So that was the beginning, and when she had a baby and wanted to stay home more, Florynce Kennedy and I [traveled] together for years, and then Margaret Sloan-Hunter.