The Woman at the Washington Zoo

The item (written by Margaret Carlson, now a well-known political commentator) didn't explain that Marjorie Williams was all of twenty-six, and that the office in question was really an apartment shared with a boyfriend, from which Marjorie continued to perform the editing duties she'd previously executed in New York. The boyfriend lasted a few months, the publishing career (in which she'd invested seven years after dropping out of Harvard, rising to a level of some influence) about a year. What endured was Washington.

Washington became Marjorie's subject—as expressed through the lives of the people within it who sought and exercised power. She wangled an editing job at the Washington Post ("I've been a news junkie since I was twelve," she wrote the Post's personnel chief), then leveraged an offer to run the Book-of-the-Month Club into a writing job in the paper's marquee features section, Style. Within five years she'd established herself, among her professional peers, as the country's most perceptive writer of political profiles, writing first for the Style section, then for the Post's Sunday magazine, then for Vanity Fair, then for Talk, and finally once again for Vanity Fair. A Marjorie Williams profile was conspicuous for its almost frightening psychological acuity, its painstaking accumulation of reportorial detail, and its elegant prose. "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost," Henry James famously advised aspiring writers. Marjorie didn't just try; she embodied the ideal.

The Washington that Marjorie wrote about was mostly that of presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The decade of the 1990s was a period of relative moderation in politics, bookended by two eras of ideological fervor—the presidencies of Ronald Reagan at one end and George W. Bush at the other. Most of the people Marjorie profiled were political technicians who liked to think of themselves as visionaries or idealists; some of them perhaps were. But always there was tension between quotidian, usually partisan or commercial priorities and the vague, long-term goal to apply government muscle to beneficial ends.

Marjorie liked to point out that partisan and commercial self-interest almost always got the upper hand, and when that happened Washington's power players typically looked away. That's very much the theme of "The Pragmatist" and "The Rainmaker," Marjorie's profiles of Richard Darman and Vernon Jordan. "The Hack," her profile of Tony Coelho—whom she credits as inadvertent architect of the congressional Democrats' catastrophic electoral losses in 1994—illustrates what happens when the pretense of idealism is dispensed with altogether.

Once Marjorie had perfected the political profile, she started sharpening her skills at personal observation, and within a few years she had produced a corpus of essays whose brilliance, I believe, exceeds that of the profiles. (Two of these essays, "The Alchemist" and "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir," are published here for the first time.) By the end of the 1990s, Marjorie was writing exquisitely crafted columns blending the personal and the political for the Post's op-ed page. She never lost her passionate interest in the psychology of political leadership, but increasingly Marjorie's attention shifted to the subtler and more intimate dynamics of family life, including her own. Or rather, I should say, "our own," because in 1990 Marjorie had become my wife. She subjected my marriage proposal to textual analysis in a Post magazine cover story reprinted here as "Reader, I Married." Our two young children, Will and Alice, play leading roles in "Entomophobia" and "The Halloween of My Dreams," respectively, and make other, briefer appearances throughout this volume.

Marjorie's journalism career reached its peak in July 2001, when she began syndicating her Post column to other newspapers around the country through the Washington Post Writers Group. A long piece for Vanity Fair about the rocky relationship between former president Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, had just been published, and it was getting a lot of favorable attention. (Titled "Scenes from a Marriage," the joint profile concludes the first section of this book.) Marjorie was getting ready to tackle her next assignment for Slate's Book Club, which paired off for email exchanges members of a distinguished stable of critics that Marjorie had felt flattered to join. She had also taken up running with characteristic intensity, and looked forward to entering her first marathon. Meanwhile, she was furiously refurbishing the spacious Victorian on the "wrong" side of Rock Creek Park that we'd purchased the year before. Everything was falling into place. Then everything came crashing down.

There was a lump in Marjorie's lower abdomen. It was probably a fibroid tumor, her gynecologist said, a minor annoyance. But he sent her out for a sonogram immediately, and the lump turned out to be one of several metastases. Marjorie, who hadn't felt healthier or more excited by her work in years, had an advanced case of liver cancer, one of the deadliest of all cancers, and (in the United States) a somewhat rare one. Marjorie relates the shock of her diagnosis in "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir," the first and longest chapter in the third section. She was assured that she only had a few months to live, but in fact Marjorie went on to live three and a half years more before she died in January 2005. She was forty-seven.

What made Marjorie the extraordinary writer she was? I think it was her unrelenting refusal to accept fraudulent surface reality and her remarkable skill at finding the hidden truth that lay beneath. Washington journalists tend to exaggerate the difficulty of becoming an "insider" to the political subculture, and to deny the willed blindness that is often the price of admission. Marjorie showed that you could burrow into Washington's power culture without surrendering to its deceptions, on the one hand, or embitterment, on the other. "Of course," Marjorie writes in "Flying to L.A.," Washington is "a hive of conformity and caution, but that's part of what I like about it—about covering it, anyway."

Marjorie's dispassionate assessments of her subjects and her authoritative classifications according to social type inspired this book's title, which I borrow from Randall Jarrell's poem of the same name. Jarrell was a favorite of Marjorie's, and she quoted the poem in "A Woman Who Knew Her Due," her tribute to her late Post colleague Mary McGrory, which closes the second section. I plead guilty to subverting Jarrell's meaning by casting Marjorie as the Woman of the poem's title, and by implying that this book's organization by phylum of the Washington menagerie ("The Philanthropist," "The Pragmatist," and so on) somehow mimics Jarrell. It does not. Jarrell's poem, to the small extent that it addresses politics at all, does so by casting the Woman at Washington's National Zoo as a government bureaucrat clad in "dull null/ Navy," in stark contrast to the colorful saris worn by embassy wives from the Indian subcontinent ("cloth from the moon") and to the caged animals ("white wolves," a vulture's "red helmet"). Jarrell himself, in a commentary on the poem, called the Woman an "aging machine part." McGrory, however, had (Marjorie wrote) "the heart of a buccaneer." She was no machine part. Neither was Marjorie.

But there's another way to read the poem. William Pritchard, in a literary biography of Jarrell, noted that the Woman's rage against repression, as expressed by Jarrell, "belies the woman's powerlessness" and constitutes "a sound of strength and mastery rather than weakness and confusion"—so much so that the poem "has been adopted as a rallying point . . . for liberation or 'empowerment.'" In that sense, Marjorie seems very much like the Woman at the Washington Zoo. A strong feminist streak runs through the essays collected here, from Marjorie's exasperation when Ms. magazine decided to accept cosmetics advertorials ("Makeup and Ms."), through her sympathetic exploration of the idea of a "marriage sabbatical" ("Run for Your Life"), and on to her disgust when the feminist establishment gave Bill Clinton a free pass about Monica Lewinsky ("Bill Clinton, Feminist"). To observe Marjorie's "strength and mastery" as a writer and a human being, you need look no further than "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir." (I assembled this essay, after Marjorie's death, from fragments of a book she had started to write about her illness.) Marjorie was furious that she had to think endlessly about her coming death while you, dear reader, might be lucky enough never to "catch sight of the blade assigned to you." It made her furious when doctors treated her like a child, and (in her essay "The Doctor Factor") she exposed their arrogance and their petty vanities. Above all, Marjorie was furious that her body was failing her. In this context, Jarrell's concluding lines—"You know what I was,/ You see what I am: change me, change me!"—seem right on the money.

Marjorie overflowed with love for her family and her friends, but, even before her illness, she never accepted less than she thought she deserved, which was quite a lot. Self-denial was, to Marjorie's mind, a form of self-neglect, something not to admire but to mistrust. The greatest piece of writing Marjorie ever produced, I believe, is "The Alchemist," a portrait of the self-denying figure in Marjorie's life: her late mother, Beverly Williams. I had no idea, when Marjorie died, that she had written the essay; I found it when I was going through her files to compile this book. Why did she never publish it during her lifetime? My best guess is that it felt too close to the bone.

The house on Maple Street in Princeton, NJ, where Marjorie grew up, was part salon and part five-star restaurant. The salon's host was Marjorie's father, Alan Williams, a learned and gregarious editor at Viking Press. His authors included Nadine Gordimer, Shirley Hazzard, and Stephen King, and literary figures were forever passing through the Williams living room. Filling the stomachs of these luminaries fell to Beverly, a somewhat reserved woman whose self-effacing demeanor masked a razor-sharp wit. It was from her mother, and not her more conspicuously literary father, that Marjorie inherited the remarkable acuity about human character that makes her profiles so memorable. In "The Alchemist," Marjorie describes forever positioning herself, as a child, by the back stairs separating the living room, where Alan held court, and the kitchen, where Beverly lost herself in preparing exquisite meals for near-strangers. It was an ambivalence that haunted her the rest of her life. Eventually, though, "between my mother's moon and my father's sun, I made my choice." She planted herself in the sun; she chose to be hungry and alive. That choice radiates from every page of this book.

What follows is a small fraction of Marjorie's work. Although the selections tend to represent what I felt was her very best journalism, the scheme I chose imposed some limitations. As I noted earlier, the first and longest section, "Profiles," presents the reader with a sampling of distinct social types in Washington. That ruled out inclusion of some great profiles of non-Washingtonians; her Vanity Fair portraits of Anna Quindlen and Patricia Duff come to mind. The profile subjects whom I did include are not necessarily the most significant figures Marjorie profiled. Rather, they are the people Marjorie wrote about in a particularly insightful or entertaining way. An extreme example is "Protocol," a profile of Archie and Selwa Roosevelt, two utterly forgotten Reagan-era personages. The piece is included here because of the deft comedy Marjorie employed to describe one Washington power couple's particularly clumsy pas de deux. It felt like a good curtain-raiser. Gwendolyn Cafritz, the Washington-area philanthropist profiled in the book's second chapter, wasn't a political person at all, but I included her for variety, and because it's simply too much fun to rubberneck a big fight over a rich person's last will and testament.

The book's second section, "Essays," contains a mixture of magazine essays, newspaper columns, book reviews, and email exchanges published in Slate. In choosing items to include here, I tended to winnow out anything that didn't relate in some way to family or women's issues, which were Marjorie's principal concerns during her last active years. Consequently, very few of Marjorie's fine columns on the 2000 election made the cut.