St.Joe to Fifth Avenue

By Martha Smilgis

The salon is modeled after a room in a 15th century Italian palace. Carved cherubs adorn the ceiling. The walls are decorated with brocade and wood panels. A black Steinway grand piano sits next to tall windows overlooking Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Within this setting, Author Shere Hite is a slight, willowy figure, resembling nothing so much as a fey, reclusive maiden on leave from a Renaissance fair. It is an exquisitely crafted image, graceful, faintly otherworldly, eccentric. The $1.5 million, four-room duplex apartment is a monument to the success of her two earlier Hite Reports.

At the center of Hite's life these days is a West German concert pianist more than 20 years her junior, Friedrich Horicke, 24, whom she married 2 1/2 years ago. Unlike her disgruntled respondents in Women and Love, Hite is euphoric about her husband. "With some people you feel like the whole world is open and everything is possible," she says. "That's how I feel with Fred."

Hite says in her marriage there is none of the emotional violence she describes in Women and Love. Because Horicke was raised with sisters who did the household chores, Hite did set down firm domestic rules. "He has learned to live with them," she says, laughing. "He even changes light bulbs without being asked." Her husband is supportive of her work. On the rare occasions , when he insults her or sulks, Hite says, she reminds him, "Fred, you're doing that thing!"

The soft-spoken sexologist is more reluctant to discuss the details of her splintered childhood. Hite was born Shirley Diana Gregory in 1942 in St. Joseph, Mo. Her father Paul Gregory, a serviceman and flight controller, and her mother divorced shortly after the end of World War II. Her mother later married Raymond Hite, a truck driver, who legally adopted her. After 2 1/2 years that marriage dissolved. Throughout the turmoil, Shere (short for Shirley) lived on and off with her grandparents, who, after a 30-year marriage, also divorced. Her grandfather, Alexander Hurt, acted as a surrogate father, although Shere remembers that she was too shy to call him Daddy.

When Shere was 14, she became frustrated with her grandparents and joined an aunt and uncle in Daytona Beach, Fla. An intelligent and resilient child with a flair for music, she was a piano soloist at her baccalaureate ceremony at Daytona Beach's Seabreeze High School in 1960. With money supplied by her grandfather, she attended the University of Florida, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history with honors.

Hite moved to New York City in 1968 to pursue a doctoral degree in history at Columbia University. Dissatisfied with the program (she says a professor falsely accused her of plagiarism) and hard pressed for money, she turned to a modeling career with the Wilhelmina agency. Life on the modeling circuit was fast and daring ("It was a time when women believed they should have sex freely like men did"). She accepted offers to pose nude for Oui and Playboy magazines because the money was good. Hite blames "society" and skin magazines for exploiting women. She says now that the experience was "extremely painful and embarrassing."

Her transformation into a feminist came after she posed as a secretary for a typewriter ad with the tag line, as Hite recalls, "The typewriter is so smart she doesn't have to be." On impulse, Hite joined ranks with members of the National Organization for Women who were protesting the ad. In 1971 Hite read a pamphlet in the NOW office, The Myth of Female Orgasm, and decided to create a questionnaire on the issue for a NOW-sponsored "speak-up." As she read the women's responses about their sexuality, "a whole picture of the universe began to fall into place," says Hite. "Without feminism I don't know what I would be doing today. It gave me the belief in myself."

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York, with other bureaus