Gail Sheehy, a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair and respected writer of sociology books about aging, died of complications of pneumonia Monday at a Southampton hospital. She was 83. In her years at Vanity Fair, she documented politics and presidential campaigns, profiling a wide range of subjects, from her iconic look at Hillary Clinton in 1992 to her search for Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Union dissolved.
Her profiles were often the final word on a given topic, establishing narratives that would last for decades. “For women who have been betrayed by unfaithful husbands, Hillary Clinton is a Rorschach test,” Sheehy wrote during the 1992 campaign, eight months before Clinton became first lady. “Some grimace at the prospect of having their hearts broken by a man whose story you never know whether to believe: ‘I don’t want another charmer.’ Others admire her stoicism and buy the strength-through-adversity story.”
Born on November 27, 1936, Sheehy spent her childhood in Westchester County, later graduating from the University of Vermont with a degree in English. As an employee of the New York Herald Tribune from 1963 to 1966, she had a front-row seat to the years when Clay Felker dreamed up what would eventually become New York magazine. When the publication became a stand-alone in 1968, she was one of its earliest contributors. In 1984, Felker and Sheehy were married; they remained together until his death in 2008. She later wrote for Esquire after Felker purchased it in 1977.
At New York, Sheehy wrote stories that tracked a changing New York City, on subjects like amphetamine abuse and sex work. “I was little, but I liked to think I was brave,” she wrote in her 2014 memoir, Daring. “I had a taste for adventure. Why couldn’t a woman write about the worlds that men wrote about?” She also wrote the feature about the Beales at Grey Gardens that led Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to fund repairs at the East Hampton home.
In 1976, after interviewing more than 100 people, she wrote Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, a work of pop sociology that stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for three years. She returned to the theme multiple times over the rest of her life, writing books about menopause, caregiving, and issues affecting men.
Sheehy became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in 1984. Her first story for the magazine was a profile of Gary Hart, and three years later she helped to break the story of his infidelity that would ultimately end his candidacy in the 1988 primaries. Over the next few decades, she specialized in profiles that were as psychologically probing as they were focused on the horse race of politics.
“Issues are today,” she said in a 2016 commencement speech at her alma mater. “Character is what was yesterday and will be again tomorrow.”
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