From the Scandalous to the Outrageous to the Inspiring True Stories About Interesting Women

Grace Slick, singer

I present to you today nine stories about nine interesting women, including a singer,  three actresses, a queen, a First Lady, an activist, an athlete and a writer. I've edited some of the experts for brevity but have not added to or altered  any.

From a 1978 story in the Washington Post, Grace Slick:

The Grace Slick stories abound, and most of them are true. She appeared on a Toronto radio program and began an earnest discussion about masturbation. She walked into a hotel restaurant barefoot, was asked to put her shoes on, and responded by kicking the restaurant man in the leg. (She was discovered in the hallway later that night, still barefoot, shouting and holding three white uniformed security guards at bay with karate poses.)

She swore at interviews, roared around San Francisco in her black Aston Martin, showed up at a White House tea for Tricia Nixon (both women attended the same private Manhattan college) in a see-through crochted blouse and purple middy skirt, with Abbie Hoffman as her escort. "My bodyguard," she exclaimed. The White House declined to admit them.

From her Wikipedia page, Marliu Henner:

Henner has hyperthymesia or total recall memory; she can remember specific details of virtually every day of her life since she was a child. On December 19, 2010, the CBS News program 60 Minutes aired a segment that featured six individuals thought to have this condition. As a longtime friend of 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, Henner was included on the show. Henner also discussed her superior memorization abilities on other programs….

From the Palace of Versailles website, Marie Antoinette:

Marie Antoinette enjoyed entertainment and was influential in choosing shows to be put on at Court. She encouraged artists and she loved court balls. As was required by her position, she also entertained her circle in her apartments, where she was a keen player of billiards and cards, often playing to excess, both losing and winning large sums, to such an extent that the King became worried and banned some of the more risky games that were swallowing up entire fortunes. Marie Antoinette was a musician, playing the harp and the harpsichord. She could also sing. She supported the composers she appreciated, like Grétry, Gluck and Sacchini. She had a very refined taste and as a result was patron for many artists….

From the website Dametown, Jean Harlow:

Jean Harlow

Jean Harlow lived across the street from canine superstar Rin Tin Tin and his owner Lee Duncan. The old boy was 16 (Rin-Tin-tin, not Mr. Duncan) and as he was dying Jean went over to cradle the dog’s head. The dog died in the Blonde Bombshell’s lap.

Jean’s autograph is considered to be very rare as her mother signed all her fan mail. (I have one of those. (I bought it with my saved-up allowance through the Nostalgia Book Club when I was about 12. I distinctly remember squealing and doing a little dance!)

Its said that, like fellow screen star Carole Lombard, Jean dyed her “cuff to match her collar.” or should I say “muff.’  Hard to believe, only because Jean was a natural blonde and very fair already. It is true about Lombard; George Raft walked in on her while she was dyeing her hair ‘down there’. 

From page six.com, Faye Dunaway:

When The Post reported that actress Faye Dunaway was fired from the Broadway-bound play “Tea at Five” — after allegedly slapping crew members and throwing things at them, and creating a “dangerous” environment in which no one was allowed to wear white lest it distract her — some people were not surprised.

“My first day on the set, she slapped me,” said Rutanya Alda, who appeared with Dunaway in the 1981 movie “Mommie Dearest.”

Alda, who played the assistant character to Dunaway’s Joan Crawford, told The Post that they were filming a scene when “instead of doing a stage slap, she slapped me on the cheek, hard and for real.”

Broadway wig designer Paul Hunt­ley, who worked with Dunaway on a 1996 tour of the show “Master Class,” claims to have witnessed her wrath. “Faye didn’t like how the hairpins were being presented and she slapped my assistant’s hand,” recalled Huntley. “[The assistant] was horrified and did not know what to do.”

According to the book “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls,” during the filming of 1974’s “Chinatown,” Dunaway had a habit of urinating into trash cans and a disdain for flushing toilets in her dressing room. Rather, the book claims, she called in Teamsters to do the job, leading to multiple resignations. (Dunaway told author Peter Biskind she had “no recollection” of such doings.)

Once during filming, the book alleges, Dunaway said that she needed a bathroom break but director Roman Polanski asked her to wait. Later, when he bent down to speak with the actress through a car window, she allegedly responded by tossing a cup of liquid into Polanski’s face. It was full of urine.

From history.Com, Mary Todd Lincoln:

Mary Todd Lincoln had always had a hard time meeting the severe expectations for women of her era. Women, even famous wives, were expected to focus on the home and not seek attention or appear in public, but Mary loved the spotlight and had a knack for publicity. This created friction during her husband’s life, and after his death it would prove disastrous.

The first whiff of trouble came in the form of Mary’s own reaction to her husband’s death. Though the era was known for its lavish displays of mourning, social custom also dictated that upper class women suppress their emotions in public. But Mary, who had also lost two of her sons in childhood and who is thought to have been bipolar, showed no restraint in her grief. Soon after Lincoln’s death, Washington was filled with rumors of the scenes Mrs. Lincoln was making within the White House. She terrified onlookers with her expressions of pain.

Later, in a tell-all book about the days after the assassination, Mary’s servant, dressmaker, and confidante Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley recalled “the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions” of the bereft widow. Though those reactions might seem appropriate for a woman who witnessed her husband’s traumatic assassination at close range, they were seen as indicative of an unladylike craving for attention at the time.

From the Wikipedia page of Fannie Lou Hamer:

Fannie Lou Hamer

Hamer traveled around the country speaking at various colleges, universities, and institutions. She was not rich, as confirmed by her clothing and vernacular. Moreover, Hamer was a short and stocky poor black woman with a deep southern accent, which gave rise to ridicule in the minds of many in her audiences. Although she often gave speeches, she was often patronized by both black and white people because she was not formally educated. For instance, activists like Roy Wilkins said Hamer was "ignorant", and President Lyndon B. Johnson looked down on her. When Hamer was being considered to speak as a delegate at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hubert Humphrey said, "The President will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention."In 1964, Hamer received an honorary degree from Tougaloo College, much to the dismay of a group of black intellectuals who thought she was undeserving of such an honor because she was "unlettered" On the other hand, Hamer had supporters like Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Charles McLaurin, and Malcolm X who believed in her story and in her ability to speak. These supporters and others like them believed that despite Hamer's illiteracy, "People who have struggled to support themselves and large families, people who have survived in Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, have learned some things we need to know." Hamer was known to evoke strong emotions in listeners to her speeches indicative of her "telling it like it is" oratorical style.

From britannica.com, Martina Navratilova:

From 1975 Martina Navratilova was consistently one of the top five women tennis players. She made her first claim to the number-one position in 1978, after winning the Virginia Slims championship and the Wimbledon women’s singles final. In 1979 she again won the Wimbledon women’s singles as well as the women’s doubles and was ranked the undisputed top player.

In 1982 Navratilova won 90 of 93 matches, including 41 consecutive matches, and 15 tournaments, notably the Wimbledon women’s singles and the French Open women’s singles. The following year she won 86 of 87 matches, the U.S. Open women’s singles, the Wimbledon women’s singles, and the Australian Open women’s singles. Beginning with the 1983 Wimbledon title, she won six consecutive Grand Slam women’s singles titles. The 1980s also marked the height of her friendly rivalry with Chris Evert. Navratilova pitted her serve-and-volley game against Evert’s baseline style in 80 matches, winning 43 of them. In 1986 at Filderstadt, West Germany, she became the second player in modern tennis to win 1,000 matches.

By 1990 Navratilova had won the women’s singles championships of the French Open twice (1982, 1984), the Australian Open three times (1981, 1983, 1985), the U.S. Open four times (1983, 1984, 1986, 1987), and Wimbledon a record nine times (1978, 1979, 1982–87, 1990). In 1987, along with her singles championship, she won both the women’s doubles and the mixed doubles to become the first triple-crown champion at the U.S. Open since 1970. On winning her 158th title in 1992 in Chicago, Navratilova had accumulated more championships than any other player, male or female, in the history of tennis. She retired from singles play after the 1994 season, having won 167 titles in all.

From a New Yorker article, Shirley Jackson:

Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as “a practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life as a housewife and mother.

Shirley Jackson did all of these things, and, during her lifetime, was largely dismissed as a talented purveyor of high-toned horror stories—“Virginia Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. For most of the fifty-one years since her death, that reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lottery,” her story of ritual human sacrifice in a New England village, has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, and her novel “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959) is often mentioned as one of the best ghost stories of all time. But most of her substantial body of work—including her masterpiece, the beautifully weird novel “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (1962)—is not widely read. 

In a new, meticulously researched biography, “A Rather Haunted Life,” Ruth Franklin sets out to rescue Jackson from the sexists and the genre snobs who have consigned her to a dungeon of kooky, spooky middlebrow-ness. Franklin’s aim is to establish Jackson as both a major figure in the American Gothic tradition and a significant, proto-feminist chronicler of mid-twentieth-century women’s lives. In contrast to Jackson’s first biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, whose 1988 book, “Private Demons,” somewhat played up Jackson’s alleged occult powers, Franklin argues that Jackson’s sorceress persona was mostly shtick: a fun way to tease interviewers and to sell books. Jackson was interested in witchcraft, she writes, less as a “practical method for influencing the world” than as “a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives.” Similarly, Jackson used supernatural elements in her work not to deliver cheap thrills but, in the manner of Poe or James, “to plumb the depths of the human condition,” or, more particularly, to explore the “psychic damage to which women are especially prone.”