A Farewell To Kate Millett, Author Of Sexual Politics & Teacher

Kate Millett died in September in Paris on a birthday trip. She didn't quite make it to 83 - she had a heart attack one week prior. I knew her slightly years ago, just weeks before she became a celebrity, the author of Sexual Politics, one of the most influential books of the 20th Century. Through a series of improbable events and coincidences, I became her editor (albeit on a different literary endeavor) for three or four hours one day in April 1970. It happened like this:

I was a sophomore at Barnard College in New York City and co-editor of the college weekly, the Barnard Bulletin. Early that spring, Professor Mary Mothersill called me and said she had a tip about an important story, and the Bulletin should cover it. Kate Millett, she told me, had all the details: Here was her home number. I was to call her as soon as possible.

Millett taught freshmen English at Barnard. At the time she was married to Fumio Yoshimura. They were both sculptors and shared a loft in the Bowery. Every time I called, Fumio answered the phone. I would ask to speak to Professor Millett.

Giggles.

After a minute or two, he would call "Professor Millett" in a tone that indicated she should come to the phone.
More giggles, this time from both of them.

And then I would babble my way through my tale about Mary Mothersill and the important story. Yes, Millett said. She had all the details.

But the interview would not be easy to arrange. She did want to do the story, but she wasn't sure if she should do the story. She might need time to think about it. I should call her back.

I called regularly for a few weeks. Finally, she agreed to meet me at the newspaper office on a Monday morning at 9. She arrived on time, but had conditions for the interview I had not anticipated.

First, no interview. She would write the article herself. Second, she couldn't write in the newsroom. She needed quiet and privacy to work, a room all to herself.

Okay then; I ran upstairs to the college activities office, borrowed keys to the yearbook office, set her up with a typewriter, chair and desk. Then I went back to my office.

The Kate Millett that burst on the world a few weeks later, on the cover of Time Magazine, was a radical feminist who looked like Tarzan woman (and I do not mean Jane). But the Kate Millett we knew at Barnard was a dowdier character. Her clothes reminded me of a Catholic school girl's uniform. The jumper was Morning Blue or gray, over a short-sleeved cotton blouse. She wore her hair tightly wound in a bun. She accented the outfit with sensible shoes.

In the fog of time, I have to admit, I can't remember what her news story was all about. I had to look it up to write this account, and as best as I can piece together, the faculty had voted new disciplinary rules, filed them with the state capital in Albany and did it all without telling any students. So, her article was going to let everybody know about these new rules.

An hour later, I went to check on her.

No story yet. A student had somehow found her, and they were deep in conversation. Millett saw me at the door, smiled and assured me the article was coming along.

"Thank you so much," I said, and walked back to the newsroom. But I was getting nervous.

As soon as she finished writing, I had to grab the copy and trek it down to the printer on 18th Street. It took about a half an hour to make it to Boro Printing by subway, if nothing went wrong. At the latest, I had to leave Barnard by 1 p.m. Or, we wouldn't have a paper that week.

Ominously, I didn't hear any sound of typing.

I checked on her again an hour later.

No story. Still talking to a student. Might have been a different student.

How's it coming? I said.

This writing thing is so tough, she said. "You know."

I nodded. But nope, I had no idea what she meant. I was 19 years old. If I wanted to write, I turned on the IBM Selectric and the stories flowed onto the page. (All the self-doubt, the writer's block, the agonizing search for le mot juste, that would come later.) But I was flattered she included me in the circle of writers, even though she rather pointedly hadn't wanted me to write her story. So, I went back to the newsroom with Plan B. It was time to invent a couple of ways to move stories around to fill the hole on the front page, in the event she did not write the story.

Then it was noon. I offered her coffee and a sandwich.

No story yet. She wouldn't take a sandwich, but a cup of tea would be nice. I asked the student if she wanted anything. Nope.

And maybe what I did that morning did qualify as good editing. When a star offers to pen a story for your college newspaper, maybe the correct thing to do is find her a comfortable spot, offer encouragement and refreshments and lavish her with praise if she ultimately produces.

Which she did. At 10 minutes before 1 p.m. I grabbed her copy and ran.

The paper came out on time with her article the front page spread eight columns wide, above the fold. It bore the headline, Have You Heard About the Rules? Of course, she came up with the headline herself.

A few weeks later, Sexual Politics was published. Some of the students were invited to the book publisher's party. I wasn't part of the women's lib crowd, so I didn't get an invitation. I remember people saying, "oh, just go." But I didn't feel I knew her well enough to crash her party. Then the Time Magazine cover came out, and she was famous. Eventually, I ran into her again.

She wanted to thank me for the article. She was so pleased.

"I never thought I'd make the front page of the Barnard Bulletin," she said.

She wasn't being sarcastic or mean. It was almost as if Fumio and she were giggling about a call for "Professor Millett" and how funny it all was.

That quality about her, the wonderment, came through even in the final stories written about her before she died. Sexual Politics may have been a huge success in 1970, but doors didn't open for her. She told one interviewer she couldn't get a job and might end up a bag lady. She was not offered professorships.

Barnard didn't even continue her contract as an adjunct, although Mothersill did arrange for her to stay on as the experimental college leader for another year. (There was a famous story about her being fired after the 1968 student riots at Columbia. But they hired her back.)

She didn't have a "first-rate" mind, some said. A critic, Irving Howe, called her a "female impersonator" and a "middle class mind." Norman Mailer said worse.

Then the big disaster happened. Millett was speaking at the Columbia University School of Journalism. She was part of a panel discussion. I went over to the J-School to hear her. In the middle of the discussion, a woman started heckling her. Why didn't she admit she was a lesbian?

Millett pleaded with her to stop.

"Why are you doing this?' she said over and over.

The woman, who was from a radical lesbians group, kept screaming. Ultimately, Time reported Millett had admitted she was bisexual. Millett said later she admitted she was a lesbian. But details didn't matter. Millett's career was pretty much toast.

I read about her occasionally. She wrote more books, although she never had the success Sexual Politics brought her. She made at least one movie and exhibited at art shows. The New York Times seldom failed to put in a bad word for her. Old friends dropped her.

"Well, it just got to be too much," one said. Her family, the Guardian reported in 2001, had had her committed periodically for a manic-depressive condition.

In later years, she made money selling Christmas trees in Manhattan. But she weathered the adversity.
Her last interview a few days before she died was with writer Rachel Shteir. Shteir was surprised how generously Millett had spoken of The Feminine Mystique's Betty Freidan, despite their differences.

But typically, Millett had found the good in people, even the ones who had treated her cruelly. Columbia in 2016 published a new edition of Sexual Politics, arguably one of the most important books of the 20th Century. In the last few years of her life, she received some overdue recognition. Finally, the New York Times sent her off with full literary honors in its obituary.

I never saw her again after I left Barnard, but I can somehow hear her giggling.

In this May 21, 1979 file photo, feminist activist Kate Millett, right, laughs, during a surprise birthday party for her niece, Kristan Vigard, in New York. Millett, the activist, artist and educator whose best-selling "Sexual Politics" was a landmark of cultural criticism and a manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died at 82, it was reported on Thursday, Sept. 7, 2017. (AP Photo/Ron Frehm, File)