Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble by Nora Ephron

convention, had suggested Steinem at the meeting. The night Shirley Chisholm was to arrive in Miami, Lewis went up to the Deauville Hotel to welcome her and bumped into Betty Friedan in the lobby.
    “What are you doing here?” Friedan asked.
    “I’m here to meet Shirley,” said Lewis.
    “You really play both ends, don’t you?” said Friedan.
    “Explain that,” said Lewis.
    “What kind of black are you anyway?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You didn’t even want to support Shirley Chisholm,” Friedan said, her voice rising. “I heard you. I heard you put up somebody else’s name.”
    “That was after we decided to have a list ready,” said Lewis. “Stop screaming at me.”
    “I’m going to do an exposé,” shouted Friedan. “I’m going to expose everyone. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.” She turned, walked off to a group of women, and left Jane Lewis standing alone.
    “It’s like pushing marbles through a sieve,” Gloria is saying. Monday, opening day, and the N.W.P.C. is holding a caucus for women delegates to hear the Presidential candidates. Betty has publicly announced her drive to run Chisholm for Vice-President. The ballroom of theCarillon Hotel, packed full of boisterous, exuberant delegates, activists, and press, gives her suggestion a standing ovation; minutes later, it is hissing Chisholm with equal gusto for waffling on the California challenge. I am sitting next to Shirley MacLaine, McGovern’s chief adviser on women’s issues, and she is explaining to fellow delegate Marlo Thomas that McGovern will abandon the South Carolina challenge if there is any danger of its bringing up the procedural question of what constitutes a majority. McGovern, she is saying, plans to soft-pedal the challenge in his speech here—and here he is now, pushing through another standing ovation, beaming while he is graciously introduced by Liz Carpenter. “We know we wouldn’t have been here if it hadn’t been for you,” she says. “George McGovern didn’t talk about reform—he did something about it.” The audience is McGovern’s. “I am grateful for the introduction that all of you are here because of me,” says the candidate rumored to be most in touch with women’s issues. “But I really think the credit for that has to go to Adam instead.…” He pauses for the laugh and looks genuinely astonished when what he gets instead is a resounding hiss. “Can I recover if I say Adam and Eve?” he asks. Then he goes on to discuss the challenges, beginning with South Carolina. “On that challenge,” he says, “you have my full and unequivocal support.” Twelve hours later, the women find out that full and unequivocal support from George McGovern is considerably less than that.
    “We were screwed,” Debbie Leff is saying. Leff is press liaison for the N.W.P.C., and she is putting mildly what the McGovern forces did to the women. Monday night,the caucus, under floor leader Bella Abzug, delivered over 200 non-McGovern delegate votes on South Carolina—100 more than they had been told were necessary—and then watched, incredulous, as the McGovern staff panicked and pulled back its support. Tuesday night, the fight over the abortion plank—which was referred to as the “human-reproduction plank” because it never once mentioned the word “abortion”—produced the most emotional floor fight of the convention. The McGovern people had been opposed to the plank because they thought it would hurt his candidacy; at the last minute, they produced a right-to-lifer to give a seconding speech, a move they had promised the women they would not make. “Because of that pledge,” said Steinem, “we didn’t mention butchering women on kitchen tables in our speeches, and then they have a speaker who’s saying, ‘Next thing you know, they’ll be murdering old people.’ ” Female members of the press lobbied for the plank. Male delegates left