Even Feminists Get the Blues

By MARGARET CARLSON

For all those women who wailed "How could she do it?" when Gloria Steinem, the world's most famous feminist, began keeping company with demibillionaire real estate developer and aspiring journalist Mort Zuckerman in the late '80s, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Little, Brown; 377 pages; $22.95) will serve as belated explanation. She did it for the car.

This wasn't just any car she fell for but a warm, chauffeur-driven cocoon of transit dispatched by Zuckerman to meet her as she returned to La Guardia Airport late one night from yet another fund-raising trip, so exhausted that the auto's "sheltering presence loomed out of all proportion." There she was, approaching 50, a burned-out crusader for women's causes who had not had time in 20 years to unpack the boxes in her bare apartment. She was nearly eligible for a senior citizen's discount before she bought her first sofa. Despite her confident demeanor, she felt so plain she wondered who that attractive, articulate woman impersonating her on television was. Thin as a pinstripe, she nonetheless felt one Sara Lee cheesecake away from Weight Watchers. Once a lively writer who impersonated a Playboy Bunny to expose Hugh Hefner's cheesy idea of sex appeal and quipped that if men could menstruate they would brag about how long and how much, she had produced very little since her collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, in 1983. Ms., the magazine she co-founded in 1972 and edited from crisis to crisis ever since, was spinning out of her control.

What was worse, the younger generation winced at the word feminism, while those who had never supported the idea were blaming it for everything from male impotence to global warming. By the time she sank into the soft leather interior of the car that night at La Guardia, she was insecure as a junk bond, without energy, without hope and without enough self-esteem to resist this inappropriate but eager suitor. "This relationship," she writes, "became a final clue that I was really lost."

By the time she is back to hailing cabs for herself several years later, she is well into her search for her lost self and a 12-point recovery program that includes imagery, hypnosis, meditation, unlearning, relearning and the Universal "I." She traces her loss of self to the day her 300-lb. father, an itinerant salesman, abandoned her when she was 10 in a rat-infested, dilapidated farmhouse fronting on a major highway in Toledo. Left to care for a loving but mentally ill mother who heard voices, she was forced to grow up too soon, to be mother to her mother. She escaped to Smith College but never escaped the trap of being the caretaker. Once she became involved in the movement, there was no campus, community group or benefit so small that she wouldn't hop on a plane and raise money for it. At times it seemed as if she had taken personal responsibility for every oppressed woman in America.

It is not surprising that this loss of childhood would catch up with her and that at fortysomething a parent substitute would come along in the guise of a knight in shining sedan, "someone," she writes, "I couldn't take care of." Overscheduled women everywhere will recognize themselves in her surrender to a decision-free zone of well-appointed houses and someone to clean them. "I found this very restful," she writes of the period. "I was just so . . . tired."

She mistook fatigue for love for only two years, but that was long enough to give rise to a rumor more virulent than the Asian flu that she was racing around Manhattan to fertility specialists trying to get pregnant. The sad truth is that she was consulting cancer doctors who saw her through breast surgery for a malignant tumor.

There were lots of reasons for the throw weight of the rumor. If true, it gave the lie to her belief that the single life was worth living, that a family consists of the people we are tied to by the work we share and < friendship as well as by blood. If false, it was still an excellent occasion for schadenfreude by those who suspected without proof that she was a cunning hypocrite and who, incidentally, resented the way she could blast men as a group for their piggishness but nevertheless attract a succession of highly appealing ones who adored her but didn't expect her to pick up their sweat socks.

When Steinem, now 57, pours a second cup of coffee and writes like she talks, there is no one more fascinating. The only comparable figure in public life is Ralph Nader, and he doesn't manage the trick of combining her monastic commitment with unapologetic glamour that gets her waved past the velvet ropes at clubs on both coasts. Strangers come up to her on the street and tell her, "You changed my life," and cleaning women at the airport find a place for her to take a nap.

But we get too few glimpses of this person in the book who, despite all the self-actualization, writes as if she believes that what Julie Andrews or Mahatma Gandhi or the Gnostic Gospels have to tell us is more worthwhile than what makes her tick. Fortunately, one of the world's most interesting women is incapable of writing an uninteresting book, even when she summarizes most of the extant literature on the inner child. A $700,000 advance can buy a lot of self-esteem. But if that's not enough, if only the women whose lives were touched by Steinem were to buy the book, it would be a best seller. Here, Gloria, is $22.95. Buck up, and thanks for everything.