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GREAT DAMES II interviews with solange, , , jessica williams, , rose mcgowan, , , , alana glazer and Table of Contents

1 Turning the Tables (April/May 2017) A Grammy-winning singer//producer/activist and fashion icon with a LOT to say, Solange is exactly the kind of star we’ve been waiting for. By Jamia Wilson

10 all dolled up (June /July 2014) Our cups runneth over with love for Dolly Parton—’s BUST-iest badass. By Lisa Butterworth

18 Fey’s Time (Aug/Sept 2016) Who better to usher in our 100th issue than comedy legend Tina Fey—our most popular interviewee of all time? By Debbie Stoller

28 Seriously Funny (Feb/Mar 2016) Catching up with The Daily Show’s reigning queen of satire, Jes- sica Williams. By Bridgette Miller

36 Carrie On (Aug/Sept 2014) The multitalented Carrie Brownstein opens up about Portandia, Sleater-Kinney, and the legacy she’s proud to leave behind. By Lisa Butterworth

44 Peace, Courtney Love, and Understanding (June/July 2013) Ever wondered what it would be like to spend the day with rock icon and perpetual rebel Courtney Love? Well, here’s your chance to find out. By Debbie Stoller

52 She’s All That (June/July 2015) , star of , opens up about boy- friends, black culture, and . By Sara Benincasa

60 Rebel Girl (June/July 2016) Kathleen Hanna, the undisputed queen of , opens up about her return to public life with her hit squad the . By Lisa Butterworth

68 Rose the Riveting (Dec/Jan 2017) Rose McGowan’s evolution from movie star to social media femi- nist warrior is super inspiring. And she’s just getting started. By Amber Tamblyn

76 Greta the Great (Dec/Jan 2018) Indie actor Greta Gerwig stepped behind the camera to write and direct Lady Bird, and created the best female coming-of-age film in years. By Jenni Miller

84 All Abroad! (Feb/Mar 2015) Abbi Jacobson and of ’s hilarious hit bro down and act up. By Bridgette Miller Song Seoyoon jacket; Wendy Faye jewelry earrings.

38 . apr/may 2017 . BUST Turning The Tables

With her latest , A Seat at the Table, Solange created not only an R&B masterpiece, but also a call to action. Here, the soul-singing superstar opens up about her upbringing in her mom’s salon, talks about her “womanist” awakening, and shares a tearful moment with our interviewer

By jamia wilson photos by NADYA WASYLKO // styling by Peju Famojure // makeup by Tracy Alfajora Hair by amy farid // nails by miss pop

olange Piaget Knowles is a time trav- number of bold futuristic styles, including stunning designs eler. At just 30 years old, she already represents by Issey Miyake, whom she’s credited on for a bold new synthesis of R&B, funk, soul, and inspiring the avant-garde aesthetic she and her mom, Tina hip-hop, expertly carrying the mantle of her Knowles Lawson, developed for A Seat at the Table’s visual creative forbearers while imagining whole new elements. Lithe and graceful, Solange glides around the set Sartistic worlds into existence. with an air of purposeful lightheartedness, despite being Despite pressure to confine herself to fit narrow industry tired from recent travel. standards for female R&B vocalists, her latest album, A Seat During a break, I stroll over to check out the pulsing at the Table, is her most overtly political, critically acclaimed, playlist we’ve been enjoying, featuring Sun Ra, Sade, Outkast, and commercially successful release to date. In it, Solange Prince, Cassie, , Animal Collective, and takes unapologetic ownership of her cultural pride, voice, and Marvin Gaye. When I notice the music is playing on Tidal— style. “All my niggas let the whole world know,” she declares her brother-in-law Jay-Z’s streaming service—Solange’s on her song “F.U.B.U.” “Play this song and sing it on your team confirms that she made the mix. As I continue to listen, terms/For us, this shit is for us/Don’t try to come for us.” I recognize how whispers of this eclectic blend of intergen- Clearly, Solange was unambiguous about her goals and erational influences made it in to her emergent sound. intentions while making her third studio album. Beyond Solange’s recent tribute to the 20th anniversary of serving as a love letter to blackness past and present, A Seat Erykah Badu’s iconic debut album, at Essence Magazine’s at the Table is a call to action. A breathing piece of oral his- Black event, is just one example of her tory, the album empowers listeners to share and celebrate reverence for the artistic lineage that inspired her own evolu- their stories of triumph and tribulation, practice self-care, tion. Of Badu, Solange remarked, “she is mother, she is sister, and reach back for ancestral wisdom while marching for- she is friend, she is auntie, she is chief, she is warrior of many ward in the face of injustice. tribes. She is a beautiful reminder that you cannot put us in a I first meet Solange during herBUST cover shoot in box.” Her words, while directed toward Badu, could easily be Long Island City, Queens. Taking shelter from frigid winds, used to describe Solange’s own persona—one that centers the I confirm that I’m in the right place when I notice the shad- beautifully messy complexities of black women’s lives. ow of her long silhouette and curly fro swaying on the bright The next day, a few hours before Solange is due to “get studio wall. For the next few hours, Solange dazzles in a back to [her] babies”—she lives in New Orleans with her

39 Kenzo jacket; Stella McCartney pants; LRS boots.

40 . apr/may 2017 . BUST Saint Laurent dress.

41 husband, director Alan Ferguson, and her 12-year- Chatting more about how she “felt the sisterhood of black old son Julez from a previous marrriage—we meet for breakfast women everywhere” as a result of her upbringing, I share with at Hotel Americano in Chelsea’s gallery district. Illuminated by Solange that her conscious lyrics have created for many, includ- the sun streaming in from the patio, Solange sips decaf as if she ing myself, a sense of spaciousness and possibility in the midst hadn’t just spent the past 48 hours keynoting at Yale, modeling of a tense and traumatic social climate. “Thank you for recogniz- for BUST, and attending Open Ceremony’s protest-inspired bal- ing that,” she says. “I think that as women, and as black women let performance and fashion show. in general, we’re always having to fight two times harder.” Admiring her air of tranquility despite her demanding Solange straightens in her seat. “And you know, even with my schedule, I note that she truly “woke up like this,” as her older videos, I was so invested in the visual storytelling, of wanting to sister Beyoncé—whom she affectionately refers to as “B”—fa- see black men and women in the way that I see them every day, mously sang on her self-titled album. After commiserating which is powerful but graceful but also vulnerable and also regal about the power of the protests at JFK airport that occurred and stately. And how we use style as a language, and our pag- following Trump’s Muslim ban, and our shared aversion to the eantry, and how we communicate.” cold weather’s effect on our Southern-bred sinuses, we dive Storytelling is just one way Solange leverages her platform to into deeper conversation. lift up her community as she climbs. Like Prince—the late artist Solange starts out by describing how growing up in her whose activism inspired Solange’s January lecture at Yale—she mother’s Houston, TX, hair salon inspired her. “I saw women of walks her talk by investing in women and people of color, in all kinds, from doctors to teachers to to drug dealers’ public and behind the scenes. For example, her collaboration girlfriends to judges. I saw the entire spectrum of black women,” with hairstylist Nikki Nelms inspired a tidal wave of YouTube she muses, vividly describing the clientele who she refers to as and selfie memes celebrating and emulating her natural black her “2,000 aunties.” Passionate about the power of the salon as tresses that became known as the “Solange Effect.” The phrase a convening space for women to care for themselves and tell was coined by writer Doreen St. Felix in Vogue to describe a stories about their lives, Solange noted the common threads phenomenon that both elevated public conversation about black between their experiences. After nibbling on her plate of smoked women’s beauty, and helped Nelms cultivate global recognition. salmon and eggs, she says, “I would see them come into the sa- Solange has also been compiling a directory of black-owned lon, and carry these woes of whatever they were dealing with businesses, curating a crowdsourced A Seat at the Table syl- labus, and speaking out about moving her money to a black-owned bank. “I was so invested in wanting to see black This past February, while accept- ing her very first Grammy for Best R&B Performance for her song “Cranes in the men and women in the way that I see them Sky,” Solange recognized the far-reaching impact of performers with social justice every day, which is powerful but graceful but legacies like Marvin Gaye and Nina Sim- one, who “push political messages through their music and artistry.” In a media and also vulnerable and also regal and stately.” political landscape that is becoming in- creasingly fraught with fake news and in the world, whether it be career issues, relationship issues, “alternative facts,” she used the Grammy stage to call for truth self-esteem issues, or whatever they were working through. telling and community building. “I think that all we can do as And as you know, a black hair salon is really kind of a mediation artists, and especially as , is write about what’s and therapy session between you and your stylist and the other true to us,” she said. “I felt like I won far before this, because of women in the salon,” she says with a laugh. “I would hear these the connectivity that the record has had, especially with black conversations,” she continues, “and I think what I was hearing, women and the stories that I hear on the street.” outside of the triumph and the resilience and the grace, was also Although Solange’s political voice is more amplified on this just how hard it is out in the world for us.” latest album, I learn during our talk that she’s been building That female bonding didn’t end once the salon closed for the support systems for black women and girls since she started a night. From the way Solange describes it, the Knowles family group called “The BF club” in middle school. She reaches for home was also a place where sisterhood ran deep. “I grew up in a her phone and shows me an image of her 13-year-old self, pos- house with five women,” she says. “My mother, my sister B, Kelly ing with other young brown girls with cornrows and delightful [Rowland, of Destiny’s Child] actually moved in with us when I smiles. “I realize, looking back, that it was really about creating was five. And my other—I also consider [her] my sister, but she’s fellowship in a space that felt like it didn’t belong to us, because actually my first cousin, Angie—she moved in when I was 13. So it was a predominately white school,” she says. “We were giv- this household was all women’s work. Literally. And there was ab- ing each other sisterhood and camaraderie and just creating solutely nothing that couldn’t be done between us. My father was safe spaces for ourselves.” super smart and brilliant and instilled many wonderful qualities Since Knowles speaks so much about how powerful women in us, but my mother was really the heart and soul of the family.” inspire her, I ask if she identifies as a feminist. “Yes. I am a proud

42 . apr/may 2017 . BUST Issey Miyake jacket. 43 Marni top; LRS pants; Wendy Faye jewelry earrings. Stylist asst: Anna Estelle Flaglor. shot at attic studios nyc. 44 . apr/may 2017 . BUST black feminist and womanist and I’m extremely proud of the in R&B music, has always been kind of accessorized. Because work that’s being done,” she says, referring to the school of I guess it’s supposed to be just so easy and effortless for us, as thought put forth by writer Alice Walker in her 1983 essay col- vocalists.” She sighs. “[Singing] is something that a lot of people lection In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, think that we are all just blessed with. And so, maybe that’s it. in which African-American women are placed more centrally But I do know that there are so many black women who paved in the struggle for women’s liberation. “I’m a feminist who the way for me as a songwriter. I think about Missy Elliott, and wants not only to hear the term intersectionality, but actually what she achieved not only as a songwriter, but as a producer in feel it, and see the evolution of what intersectional feminism such a male-dominated industry at the time. I mean, you can’t can actually achieve. I want women’s rights to be equally hon- get any more feminist than what she was writing.” ored, and uplifted, and heard...but I want to see us fighting the Despite Solange’s magical ability to make it feel like she’s fight for all women—women of color, our LGBTQ sisters, our bending time and space in her performances, we aren’t able Muslim sisters. I want to see millions of us marching out there to shape shift our way out of the reality of her impending for our rights, and I want to see us out there marching for the flight departure time. I thank her for taking a risk by speak- rights of women like Dajerria Becton, who was body slammed ing truth to power, and for providing affirmation and solace by a cop while she was in her swimsuit for simply existing as a at a time when so many are in the throes of alienation due to young, vocal, black girl. I think we are inching closer and closer the prevalence of sexism, racism, and state violence targeting there, and for that, I am very proud.” people of color. “I’ve literally just been immersed in gratitude Reflecting on how she developed her black feminist iden- that the work that I feel like I was the most afraid to do, in the tity, Solange ruminates on how both the women at her mom’s beginning, has been received in this way,” she says, wiping hair salon and writers and activists online helped inform away a few tears. “What this project has done for me is more her perspective. “I feel really grateful that I’m also a student than I could ever—I’ll start crying—but more than I could of black feminists and womanists,” she says, “and of women ever do for anyone else.” who have created this terminology for us to use as we carve out our space. That is one of the beautiful things about the Internet. I’m a high-school educated woman. And I rely on incredible women like you mentioned [we had spo- “I want to see us fighting the fight ken previously about the groups Crunk Feminist Collective and Black Women’s Blueprint], and women like yourself, to for all women—women of color, our really guide me through the process of carving out my feel- ings, and how I articulate them.” LGBTQ sisters, our Muslim sisters. I Solange’s remark about carving out her feelings leads me to thinking about the ways she’s literally rewriting the rule- want to see millions of us marching book for women vocalists, and transforming the cultural nar- rative as a composer. Above all of her other talents as a singer, out there for our rights.” actor, model, and producer, Solange prizes her identity as a songwriter most of all. Her eyes light up when I ask about the role of writing in her life and work. “It means everything to Heartened by Solange’s vulnerability, I realize that the me,” she says. “I consider myself a songwriter first, and in the resonance and connection her album provided for countless trajectory of what I’m trying to create, singer comes last. I’m women means just as much to her as it does for us. Humbled, I really invested in storytelling.” placed my hand on my heart and share that A Seat at the Table Her longtime writing prowess has flourished since she moved me in a way that felt similar to when I read Ntozake won second-place in the United Way’s jingle-writing competi- Shange’s award-winning choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who tion in elementary school, and expanded into an impressive Have Considered Suicide /When the Rainbow is Enuf. Tears songwriting and production resume that includes, among well up in my eyes as I say, “Thank you for your assertion of many other achievements, writing, arranging, and co-produc- self and for the knowledge that I’m not alone in my experience. ing every song on her new album, and serving as music consul- We’re persevering.” tant for ’s HBO show, Insecure. Although I’ve observed Our eyes meet, and she declares, “Well, that is what an increased focus on this aspect of Solange’s talents in recent women are doing for me. When I read [poet, essayist, and play- profiles, many features about her are more eager to focus on wright] Claudia Rankine, that is what she’s doing for me. I feel her personal relationships, vocal abilities, and fashion sense like black women go through so much on a daily basis, we need than on her formidable composition skills. It’s with this in to tell each other, ‘Hey girl, you’re not crazy.’” mind that I share with her my frustration with a longtime And with that, we end a conversation that has traveled trend I’ve observed in mainstream music coverage. “Solange, across our shared experiences, raised our consciousness, and I’m exhausted by it,” I say, “but why is it that mostly white brimmed with therapeutic reflection. As she walks out the women vocalists get praised for writing their own music?” door in her silky, pearl-colored Tigra Tigra shirt, I notice the Solange responds thoughtfully. “I don’t know the answer to writing on her back for the first time. Embroidered in scarlet that,” she says. “I think that the black female voice, especially are the words, “GOOD LUCK.”

45 All Dolled Up Country music legend Dolly Parton opens up about her new album, her old-time religion, and what makes “” the greatest ballad of all time By Lisa Butterworth Photos courtesy of “What better person to do BUST magazine community, even while championing a deeply re- than me?” It’s the first thing Dolly Parton says when ligious worldview. In a culture of manufactured pop she calls from her part-time home of Nashville, TN, singers, she’s a self-made superstar who rose to the top before letting loose with a melodic laugh, as familiar exactly the way she wanted to. And her status as such as her Southern, honey-pie accent. It’s not surprising is a feat in and of itself. that the 68-year-old leads with a boob joke. Her larger- Parton was born in 1946 in Sevier County, TN, just than-life chest on her petite five-foot frame garners as north of the Great Smoky Mountains, the fourth of 12 much attention from fans and the media as her plati- kids. Legend has it she was delivered by a local pastor num-selling singing voice and hit-making songwriting. who was paid for his services with a bag of cornmeal. And making boob jokes is kind of her thing. “I’ll just say Her parents were sharecroppers and the family lived something, you know, ‘Well, I’m glad to get that off my in a one-room farm cabin—money was scarce but cre- chest,’ right up front so then they can’t comment,” she says. “But of course, you don’t want people to just think that that’s “People hopefully now at least all you are.” know there is a heart beneath the Anyone with an inkling of Parton’s history knows she’s much more than her boobs and that’s one of the reasons bra size (and no, her chest isn’t insured for half a million dollars as celebrity lore my boobs are so big, it’s just all would have you believe). She’s a singer, heart pushin’ out my chest.” a songwriter, a tireless performer, a mu- sician, a movie star, an author, a philanthropist, and ativity was free, and plentiful. Her aunt wrote songs, even an amusement park mogul (in 1986 she bought a her grandmother was known in town for her singing, Smoky Mountain–themed tourist attraction in Pigeon and her uncles played a variety of instruments. Her Forge, TN, and reopened it as ). She’s won grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher and some of eight Grammys and has been nominated for 46 of them Parton’s earliest “performances” were in church. She (a female artist record tied only by Beyoncé). She’s re- wrote her first song about her homemade corncob corded 42 studio and has had 26 number-one doll when she was just a kid, and learned to play guitar hits on the country music charts. She was even nomi- shortly afterward. In 1960, she made her first record- nated for two Oscars for Best Original Song: one for “9 ing at the studio of one of her musician uncles; the 45 to 5,” the track she wrote for the eponymous, now-clas- featured two songs she co-wrote, “Puppy Love” and sic feminist flick she also starred in, and one for “Trav- “Girl Left Alone.” elin’ Thru,” the theme from 2005’s Transamerica, That was over half a century ago. Blue Smoke, re- which featured as a . leased in May, marks her 42nd album. But she’s no less But somehow it always comes back to her looks. enthusiastic about this one than she was about the 41 And her breasts. “I don’t mind. I’ve kind of exposed others that came before. “I get excited about whatever them. I had big boobs all my life, but I had ’em made my latest project is. Every time, I think, Well, this is the even bigger, so why not just go along with the fun,” best I’ve ever done,” she says. “This album really has she says. “People hopefully now at least know there all the colors of my life and my personality in it, from is a heart beneath the boobs and that’s one of the rea- gospel to mountain music to bluegrass to the country sons my boobs are so big, it’s just all heart pushin’ out flavor and the pop stuff. It has duets too, so it kind of my chest,” she says, letting out another laugh. It’s this marks all the things I’ve done through the years.” combination of “I do what I want” attitude, disarming Obviously, the things she’s done through the years graciousness, and an endlessly sunny disposition that are plentiful. Not only did Parton build a world-re- make Parton one of the most loveable icons of country nowned career despite an incredibly impoverished music. But after nearly six decades in the public eye, childhood, but she also did it during a time when she’s become much more than that. Her body of work women were second-class citizens, relegated to is so pro-woman, if BUST had a hall of fame, she’d be kitchens and secretary desks. After finishing high a shoe-in. And she doesn’t have a legion of gay fans for school (the first in her family to do so), Parton hopped nothing—Parton has always been supportive of the on a bus and headed to Nashville. It wasn’t long be-

45 fore she was getting paid to write songs—she often Fonda helped land her the part, Parton starred in this talks about being the only girl hanging out in the base- screwball comedy drenched in the ethos of second- ment of Monument Records, writing with the likes of wave feminism—as secretary Doralee Rhodes. Along- Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson—and at 19 she side Fonda and Lily Tomlin, Parton played a woman fed landed her first record deal. But it was her addition up with her sexist jerk of a boss. The three decide to get as a regular on famed country star ’s even, and the film plays out like an absurd feminist re- television variety show that truly acquainted Amer- venge fantasy involving kidnapping, blackmailing, and ica with Parton’s charisma, mile-high hair, dimpled the eventual liberation of the three women. The movie smile, and heart-splitting vibrato. introduced the singer as a bona fide movie star—she’d go It was right around this time, in 1968, that Parton re- on to star in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with leased the title track to her second album, Just Because Burt Reynolds and Steel Magnolias with Julia Roberts I’m a Woman. Its prescient lyrics about sexual double and Shirley MacLaine, among others—and helped Par- standards are just as relevant in today’s slut-shaming ton the musician cross over from country to the main- culture as they were in the ’60s: “I’m sorry that I’m stream with the movie’s title hit, a tune that Parton sup- not/The woman you thought I’d be/Yes, I’ve made my posedly jotted down on the back of her script between mistakes/But listen and understand/My mistakes are takes, tapping out the rhythm with her acrylic nails. The no worse than yours/Just because I’m a woman.” The song went to number one on the country charts (noth- song debuted at the beginning of Parton’s rise to fame, ing new for Parton), but also reached the top of the Bill- and is one of the main reasons she’s hailed by many as board Hot 100, making her one of the few female artists a feminist icon. But this appointment isn’t without its to ever have a simultaneous hit on both the country and complications. How many feminist icons have self- pop charts. It also solidified her place as a role model for rendered their bodies to resemble a Barbie doll (or a independent women, in a part that wasn’t too far from , the title of her 40th album)? The the truth. Parton has said that playing Doralee, who subject is open to debate, and debated it is, with lengthy threatened to change her boss “from a rooster to a hen diatribes—mostly defending her feminist-icon worthi- with one shot” using the gun in her purse, reminded her ness—appearing everywhere from Jezebel.com, to The of the attitude she had to take with Porter Wagoner, a Times of London, to the Huffington Post. (For her part, man she described to the L.A. Times in 2008 as “a male Gloria Steinem praised Dolly Parton in a 1987 issue of chauvinist pig.” That’s presumably one of the reasons Ms. magazine, calling her a woman who “has turned Parton left their partnership in 1974, even though he’d all the devalued symbols of womanliness to her own brought her so much success. ends.”) Even Parton’s style, which she often says was Despite ’s undeniable inclusion in the feminist inspired by prostitutes, can be looked at from both sides film canon and the blatantly feminist themes running of the lens. Is she parading herself as an object of the through her work, Parton, surprisingly, tells me she male gaze, or is her appearance a self-conscious, almost doesn’t identify with the label. “I consider myself a fe- ironic, over-the-top gender performance? “It costs a lot male,” she responds, when I ask her if she’s a feminist. “I of money to look this cheap!” is one of her favorite Dolly- think of myself as somebody who’s just as smart as any isms (the capitalizing marketer even offers the phrase man I know. I don’t think anybody should ever be judged on an official Dolly Parton shirt), and her attire seems by whether they’re male or female, black, white, blue, or to be a sartorial middle finger to those who think they green. I think people should be allowed to be themselves know what a “lady”—especially one of Parton’s age— and to show the gifts they have, and be able to be acknowl- should look like. edged for that and to be paid accordingly. You know, I love But many doubts about Parton’s feminist cred can men, but I love women too and I’m proud to be a woman. I be laid to rest with a simple viewing of her feature film just really try to encourage women to be all that they can debut in 9 to 5. In 1980, after a chance run-in with Jane be and I try to encourage men to let us be that.”

From Childhood to Dollywood: A Dolly Parton Timeline

1946 1957 1966 1973 Dolly is born in Dolly records Dolly gets her Dolly writes two of Sevier County, her first single, big break when her biggest hits, “I TN, the fourth “Puppy Love,” she’s cast on Will Always Love The Porter You,” and “Jolene” of 12 children. at age 11. Wagoner Show. on the same day. Parton will be the first to tell you that she’s pretty was a guest on her show. Between her legion of gay good at getting men to let her be all she can be. And you fans, her country bombshell persona, and the songs get the feeling that beneath all of the sparkle, shine, and in which she defends women and their sexuality, how Southern hospitality, there is a truly calculating busi- does she reconcile this social progressiveness with nesswoman. But if she’s manipulating you, you can be her deeply religious roots? “I don’t care what people sure she’s doing it with a wink and a smile. “I’ve always do. I’m not God and I’m not a judge and I just accept been proud of the fact that I was a woman,” she says. “I people,” she says. “I try to find the God-like in every- grew up in a family of 12 children and 6 of those kids body and respond to that. I just love people and we’re were boys. I was very close to my dad, and my uncles all God’s children so I don’t pass judgment on any- and my grandpas, and my brothers, so I relate to men. thing or anybody; I just look for the fun and the joy I understand the nature of men. I always say that I look and the light in everybody.” like a woman, but I think like We may be 2,000 miles a man, or I can think like a apart while we’re talking, man. So at least I know who but Parton’s charm comes they are and how they’re li- through the phone line in full able to be. But through the force; she sounds so casual years, I’ve always used my and warm, we could just as femininity to my benefit. I’ve easily be sippin’ sweet tea never slept with anybody and shootin’ the shit on a to get to the top, though. If ramshackle porch overlook- I slept with somebody, it’s ing the banks of Tennessee’s ’cause I wanted to, not to get Little Pigeon River. It’s clear from point A to point B.” she’s made a business of her Parton’s refusal to call likeability, and though she’s herself a feminist, while likely given this same spiel acting like one all over to thousands of other jour- the place, may seem like a nalists, she somehow still contradiction. But her life makes it seem authentic. It’s is full of apparent dichoto- just another facet of her in- mies. She’s as likely to be featured in Christianity triguing duplicity—Parton is a genuine person in exte- Today—she’s said that songwriting is her “private rior trappings that are anything but. She’s one of the few time with God”—as she is in The Advocate. In 2006, celebrities who is completely honest about the amount she received that Oscar nod for penning the theme of plastic surgery she’s had. Much like her manufac- song for Transamerica, and the deeply spiritual tured bosom, she cracks wise about nipping and tucking singer often jokes about her gender. “I always say the rest of her body as well: “If I have one more facelift, if I hadn’t been born a woman I’d have definitely been I’ll have a beard,” she often jokes. She has a staffer em- a , so there you go,” she says, with a giggle. ployed solely to create her custom outfits (no label on “I’m gaudy and flashy and I’m probably gonna always the planet makes clothes to her measurements, espe- be that.” And while those may be some of the main cially as skin-tight as she likes to wear them), which are reasons she’s become a gay icon, she supports the heavy on the fringe and kept in a humidity-controlled community off stage as well, even vocally support- clothing warehouse spanning 24,000 square feet. She ing marriage equality. “I always say, ‘Sure, why can’t even has a full-time wig wrangler. they get married? They should suffer like the rest of She also has a full-time husband, though you’d hard- us do,’” Parton once jokingly told Joy Behar when she ly know it. Parton met Carl Dean just hours after first

1980 1986 1999 2014 Dolly makes her Dolly’s theme Dolly is inducted Dolly releases her film debut as park Dollywood into the Country 42nd studio album, Blue Smoke, and Doralee Rhodes opens in Pigeon Music Hall finally appears on in 9 to 5. Forge, TN. of Fame. the cover of BUST. arriving in Nashville, at a Wishy-Wash Laundromat, and film The Bodyguard. Parton released the original—in- the two were married in 1966. Dean apparently hates spired by her professional split from Porter Wagoner— publicity and the two are rarely seen together. But Par- in 1974, and it’s since become one of the most famous ton often talks of their marriage as a happy one, explain- love songs of all time. Houston is only one of many who ing repeatedly that the way they live is working out just have covered it. Even wanted to record a fine for them, regardless of what anyone else thinks. (She version when he first heard it, though Parton told him also has an Oprah-Gayle-like relationship with her pal no when he also asked for publishing rights—a wise Judy Ogle, who’s been her best friend since the two were decision, since that tune alone has made her millions kids, sparking gay rumors that she’s often squelched). of dollars since. When I ask her why she believes that The couple never had kids, which seems to suit Parton song has resonated for so long with so many people, her reply is thoughtful. “Well, I think it has for two reasons. One is, it’s a very simple melody, really easy to sing, like “My songs are like my holding the notes. Even if you can’t sing, you can sing, children and I expect them Iiiiiiiiii-Iiiiii will alwaaaaays love yooou,” she says, sing- ing the chorus to demonstrate the song’s ease, as if we to support me when I’m old.” could all break into a wrenching soprano on command. (It should be noted, that having Dolly Parton herself just fine. They helped raise several of her siblings once croon those words straight from her mouth into your her career was on the up-and-up, and her nieces and ear is an entirely surreal, amazing experience.) “Plus nephews seem more like grandchildren (they even call there’s the message,” she continues. “I think everybody her Aunt Granny). And of course, she has her music, can connect with it, whether it’s their lost love affair, which she refers to in a very maternal way when I ask or a partnership, or when children go off to , or about the mix of covers and originals on Blue Smoke. when people die. I’ve had so many people say, ‘Oh, we “The covers are more exciting to me as a singer, but the played “I Will Always Love You” at my dad’s funeral content, you know, is more personal to me if they’re or at my mom’s funeral,’ so I think it’s something every- mine,” she says. The most surprising cover on the new body can relate to for one reason or another.” record is Bon Jovi’s “Lay Your Hands on Me.” But Par- Being relatable is another characteristic on which Par- ton has a way of making tracks her own, despite how ton has built her career. She may own homes in Nashville, disparate the original might seem, and this one is no Malibu, and Manhattan, have an estimated net worth of exception. “I love Bon Jovi, first of all. So when I got $450 million, and a theme park named after her, but that’s ready to record this album, I thought, Well, which song not what people think of when it comes to Parton’s care- am I going to choose to Dolly-ize? And that one popped fully crafted legend. They remember her origin story, the into my mind,” she says at a press event the week af- one-room cabin and the 14-member family she helped ter our phone chat. “I thought, Wow, now that sounds support; they think of her tune, “,” like it would make a great gospel song. ’Cause I grew up about the jacket her mom made from rags that parallels where we believed in laying hands on people, prayin’ the story of . She’s someone who came from for em.” But even after “Dolly-izing” songs she loves, nothing, who will never forget her roots. It helps that re- the ones that come straight from her—nearly non-stop invigorating her hometown is a top priority for Parton if accounts of her prolificacy are to be believed—are (hence Dollywood), and that giving people jobs is some- their own kind of special. “It’s like your own children— thing she takes great pride in (the business of being Dolly you love other people’s kids, but you love your own the employs nearly 3,000 people). The superstar also created best,” she says. “My songs are like my children and I ex- a nonprofit called Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, pect them to support me when I’m old.” which sends books to underprivileged children, one a One of the songs that’s certainly supporting her now month from the day they’re born until their fifth birthday. is a little ditty called “I Will Always Love You.” Despite “The Imagination Library really came from a serious place Parton’s acclaim in the country music scene, for some in my heart,” Parton says. “My dad and a lot of my relatives of us who came of age in the ’90s, our first introduction were not able to go to school, ’cause they were all from big to Dolly actually came via Whitney Houston, who sang poor mountain families, and when kids were born, they this Parton-penned tune as the theme song of the 1992 had to get out and work the fields and do whatever they

48 . june/july 2014 . BUST could to keep the rest of the family going. My dad was so smart, but he couldn’t read and write. I just knew how crip- pling that was to him.” The organization now serves over half a million kids in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. “My dad was so proud of that,” she continues. “He got to live long enough The Incredible, to see the Imagination Library do well, and hear the kids call me .” Parton refers to “Try,” the plucky closing track on Blue Smoke, as the theme song for the Imagination Quotable, Dolly Library. But it also acts as a type of soundtrack for Parton’s life, a manual for success the Dolly way. “Yes, I have always Delicious sound bites been a dreamer, and yes, I have always tried,” Parton says from the queen of country when asked about the song. “And dreams are special things. But dreams are of no value if they’re not equipped with wings and feet and hands and all that. If you’re gonna make “There’s no such thing as a dream come true, you gotta work it. You can’t just sit natural beauty.” around. That’s a wish. That’s not a dream.” Mini pep talks like this one are simply part of Parton’s “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes being. If she ever decided to retire from music (God forbid), because I know I’m not dumb…and I also she could undoubtedly travel the world as a motivational know that I’m not blonde.” speaker. Following her on is like having a super- smiley life coach, cheering you on with her sweet Southern “If you talk bad about country music, it’s like charm. “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the saying bad things about my momma. sails! ” and “When someone shows you their true colors, Them’s fightin’ words.” believe them! ” are just a couple of representative Tweets. But it’s her tongue-in-dimpled-cheek humor that knocks the “I was the first woman to burn my bra— saccharine down a bit, just before it gets cloying. “Well, Dan- it took the fire department four days ny’s holding up one finger,” she says toward the end of our to put it out.” conversation, referring to one of the many team members keeping her on a well-greased press schedule. “He gave me “I look just like the girls next door…if you the other one before and I didn’t acknowledge it, so I think happen to live next door to an this is the middle one,” she says, laughing at her own joke. I amusement park.” squeeze in one more question: As someone who’s made such a name for herself by being no one but herself, what advice “I like to buy clothes that are two sizes too would Parton—who happens to be Miley Cyrus’ godmoth- small and then take them in a little.” er—give to young women coming up in the music industry now? “Well I tell you, it is hard to be yourself, especially this “I have little feet because nothing grows day and time. There’s so many managers, so many people in the shade.” telling you what to do and how to do it and when to do it, how to say it, how to sing it. I just kind of feel sorry for a lot of the “After Momma gave birth to 12 of us kids, we artists today. It was different in my day,” she says, her voice put her up on a pedestal. It was mostly to keep lilting musically. “If you can be yourself, stay as true to that Daddy away from her.” as you can. Like I say, I don’t usually give advice, I just pass along some information ’cause I know everybody has to do “I always pattern my look after the town it their own way and everybody has their own road to walk tramp. I swear to God that’s true, but and all that. But if you can, just like that old saying, ‘To thine I can’t give her name.” own self be true.’ It’s just about knowing who you are and standing up for that as best you can.” We may never know who Dolly Parton truly is, but lucky for us, we don’t have to. She knows, and that’s all that really matters.

49 fey's time

Tina Fey is a woman who needs no introduction, and in this interview with BUST’s editor-in-chief, the legendary comedy icon reveals why being a teen in the ’80s was so much better, what still makes her nervous, and how she knows her daughter is powerful

By debbie stoller // Photos by ramona rosales Stylist: Cristina Erlich // Makeup: Gita Bass // Hair: Ted Gibson // nails: miss pop

42 . aug/sept 2016 . BUST 43 erry ye ll ow dress; iiJin sneakers; I S ti Love Y ou NY C Lisa P erry purp l e u c ite b ra et pink p l asti c sung asses; Al exis Bittar

44 . aug/sept 2016 . BUST ry to imagine a world without Tina years since her original shoot with us—writing and acting in Fey. It isn’t easy. We would never have one film Mean( Girls) and starring in six others (Baby Mama, heard the words “third-wave feminist” Date Night, Admission, This Is Where I Leave You, Sisters, uttered on a network , like we did on and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot); writing, producing, and acting the episode of . We wouldn’t in two television (30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy have seen a raft of exceptional female co- Schmidt); penning a New York Times-bestselling memoir medians quickly take center stage on SNL (Bossypants); hosting the Golden Globes, together with Amy in the 2000s—women including Rachel Poehler, for three years; and winning eight Emmys, two Dratch, , Maya Rudolph, and Golden Globes, five SAG awards, six Writers Guild of Amer- Kristen Wiig, all of whom continue to entertain us today. ica awards, and being the youngest person ever awarded the We wouldn’t have had a pair of smart, funny, BFFs—Fey and Mark Twain Prize for . Given her outra- Poehler—give us news with a feminist edge on that same pro- geously impressive list of projects and awards, the 46-year- tgram, and then watch those BFFs go on to take both TV and old Fey has earned the right to flash some serious ’tude, yet by storm. We wouldn’t have had a film likeMean there was not an ounce of diva on the set. Instead, she was Girls to tell the sad tale of the kind of teenage girl-on-girl wonderfully goofy, going along with everything that was crime we all experience in high school, but in a way that we asked of her, and managing to make everyone there laugh. could laugh at. We wouldn’t have had the groundwork laid for future funny feminists like Jessica Williams, Samantha Bee, hen I meet Fey a few weeks later at a restaurant Broad City, and Amy Schumer. And we might have spent the near Central Park, she arrives wearing a casual last eight years living under President John McCain and Vice shirt and pants ensemble with her hair in a po- President Sarah Palin. nytail.w It’s no coincidence that Fey has been appearing in Gar- Since her rise to prominence 16 years ago as SNL’s head nier Nutrisse hair color ads for the past four years: her crown- writer, and, later, one of its correspondents, ing glory is truly glorious—thick, glossy, and full. “It’s like that Fey’s influence on the pop culture landscape can’t be over- on the rest of me, too,” she deadpans, after I compliment her stated. And we’ve been lucky enough to count her as a BUST luxurious locks. It’s exactly the type of self-effacing comment fan for all that time. We first featured Fey on our cover in 2004, one would expect from her 30 Rock character, , and and were honored when she showed up to that issue’s release it’s charmingly endearing. party. We were ecstatic when she later appeared on The To- She orders a kale salad, I switch on my recorder, and we night Show with Jay Leno and held up a copy of BUST with her begin talking about—what else?—feminism. In Bossypants, image on the cover. We were amazed to discover that she had a Fey claims that she’s never watched the first episode of30 framed copy of BUST, featuring Amy Poehler on the cover, as Rock since it ran, so I remind her about a scene in which Fey’s set dressing in her 30 Rock office, where it remained through- character, Liz Lemon, is meeting with her new boss, Jack out the show’s seven seasons. And we were floored when she Donaghy. “I got you,” he says, sizing her up. “New York, third- twood; E arrings: Y eprem included a large reproduction of her early BUST cover in her wave feminist, college educated. Single and pretending to be 2011 book, Bossypants. After describing what a very high-end happy about it. Overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any maga- photo shoot is like, she went on to discuss the low-key sce- zine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover, and every two nario she experienced at BUST, and how much she enjoyed it. years you take up knitting…for a week.” For many viewers, it “Feminists do the best Photoshop,” she wrote. felt like Fey was killing us softly with her song, singing our life This time, however, Fey’s cover shoot was almost exactly with her words. I ask if any of Donaghy's description could fit like the fancy ones she mocked in her book. It took place in an not just Lemon, but also Fey herself. “Definitely the intermit- enormous, brightly lit Chelsea photo studio, complete with its tent attempts at knitting and quilting,” she says, laughing. “But own private coffee bar, and makeup artists, manicurists, and the ‘being single and trying to be happy about it’ was a straight stylists were all there to prep Fey for her close-up. Only the up burn from Jack to Liz. I was already married at the time. photographer, Ramona Rosales, was the same as last time. Of I’ve been with my husband since I was 24, so I didn’t have a

D ress: Christian S iriano; hoes: Brian A course, Fey’s achieved an insane amount of success in the 12 long, active single life.”

45 I know the “third-wave feminist” applies to the real-life of Kimmy Schmidt that Fey’s working on right now; she’s Fey, but what about the many flashbacks to a young Lemon as also executive producing a new TV show that will debut in a teenage feminist? Was Fey also a feminist teen? “I certainly mid-season on NBC. Great News is about a woman and her was, whether I had any language for it or not. But I’m still a mother who end up working at the same local news station poorly educated feminist — I never took a women’s studies together. Unlike both 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, Fey will class,” she says. “I should rectify that now and stop acting like not be writing or directing this time around; the show was it’s something that I can’t go back and read more about.” created and written by Tracey Wigfield, and is loosely based “Yeah, ’cause you have so much time,” I say, sarcastically. on Wigfield’s life. “Yeah, I have so much time,” she sighs. “If I had that kind of Luckily for Fey, the project will allow her some breathing time I would floss my teeth!” room, as it will be shot in L.A. while Fey supervises from N.Y.C. That’s not to say, however, that Fey’s life is anything less than ur conversation turns to the teens of today, and I incredibly hectic. For instance, take the day of our interview. mention that so many more young women are will- What else is on her calendar? “We’re literally moving offices ing to call themselves feminists than women of today,” she tells me, “and I should be working on the musi- oour generation, Generation X. “You know,” she says, “I just cal—we have an internal deadline. But right after this I’m going started reading the Peggy Orenstein book, Girls & Sex. She over to NBC to rehearse for the Maya & Marty show. And then talks about how among some younger girls, there are a lot I have a meeting at the end of the day with my husband and of mixed messages around feminism. Like, [they’ll say] ‘It’s Lorne [Michaels] about another project.” feminist that I wear booty shorts and twerk,’ and Orenstein The Maya & Marty thing has her a bit stressed, even says maybe it is. But the question really is whether [they're though she’ll be working alongside her old friend Maya Ru- doing it] because it feels good, or if they're just doing it to dolph and SNL alum . “We’re going to tape it have the currency of being hot.” tomorrow,” she says. “It’s giving me an old SNL-style bellyache I tell her that it’s surprising how little some of those because it’s still a little up in the air. They’re like, ‘We’ll figure it things have changed since we were teens. But Fey disagrees. out,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh God, I don’t do “figure it out” anymore!’” “Orenstein talks about how girls don’t even consider if [sex] And also, I haven’t been in front of the camera in months. You is or should be pleasurable to them. Like [they’ll say], ‘You lose your nerve. I gotta try and get some kind of game face.” just have to give boys blowjobs so they’re not mad at you.’ Once again, I find myself reminded that stars, they’re just And that was definitely not the case when I was younger. like us: human. Yet, I wonder how many “normal” things Fey is We definitely felt like, ‘I gotta get mines!’ It’s sad to me that still able to do in her life, now that she’s so famous. “All of them!” [young girls today] have so little expectation of reciprocity.” she assures me. “I go to the grocery store. I ride the subway—I We discuss the increased popularity of blowjobbing among took the subway to jury duty every day last week and I loved it. It the young, and Fey tells me that, according to Orenstein, was so peaceful.” Jury duty? How does that work when you’re a President Clinton gets credit for some of that by defining the celebrity, I ask. “I tried to ask that question, too, because I don’t act as “not sex.” “Also, there’s a lot more anal now,” she adds. want someone to be unhappy with how [their trial] goes and “So, great news everybody! A lot of teen anal!” then Google where I live and murder me,” she says. “And they “Amy Poehler and I have talked a lot about what things were like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’” were like when we were teens, and it was so different,” she continues.“First of all, ’80s fashion was so covered up. It was, nother “normal” thing Fey faces is the challenge of like, a pirate shirt and jeans and maybe even a big military being a working mom, and she’ll be the first to admit jacket. And you’d go to a party feeling like you looked pretty that the only way she can manage it is with lots of good and you could just ride out that feeling because there ahelp. Yet, there still seems to be a tinge of guilt that she can’t weren’t Instagram-ed pictures of everything. You’d maybe manage to “have it all.” “I like to be home in the morning, and take a camera and, two weeks later, you’d get the pictures after school as much as possible, because there are really long and you’d throw out five of them and keep the two where you stretches of time where I am not home at 5. I’m home at 7:30,” thought you looked good.” she says, a bit hesitantly. “I still feel reluctant to tell you the Fey must be spending a lot of time thinking about teens time, because I feel like people will judge you that you weren’t these days, not just because she has two young daughters who there, or that a babysitter put your kid to bed.” And those will eventually become teens, but also because she’s work- evenings when she does manage to be at home on time? They ing on a musical adaptation of Mean Girls. She’s writing the sound pretty normal, too. “My husband’s a really good cook. I musical together with her husband, composer and musician like to cook, too. It’s not really something I have to do—because Jeff Richmond, and another collaborator, Mel Benjamin. Rich- it’s not 1955—but I find it fun and relaxing. I’m a good baker. mond wrote the scores for both 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, For me, an ideal day is when I get home in time to cook a meal, and you can thank him for the latter’s fictional album,Now eat it with my children, and get them to bed.” That Sounds Like Music!, which featured hilarious pop-music Fey has two kids. Her first, Alice, 10, became an instant sound-alikes such as “Brother Baptist” for “Sister Christian,” meme at 8 when a paparazzo captured her looking like she and “I’m Convinced I Can Swim” for “I Believe I Can Fly.” just didn’t GAF while out walking with her parents. Alice is

But the Mean Girls musical isn’t the only project outside also responsible for Liz Lemon’s saying, “I want to go to there.” E arrings: Y eprem; R ings: FF D ress: El iza b eth K ennedy;

46 . aug/sept 2016 . BUST “For me, an ideal day is when I get home in time to cook a meal, eat it with my children, and get them to bed.”

47 . june/july 2016 . BUST 47 48 . aug/sept 2016 . BUST Fey’s second daughter, Penelope, 4, sounds like she’s following The Second City comedy club, and who preceded Poehler in in her fierce sister’s footsteps. “The other night she was doing joining SNL. When 30 Rock flashes back to a young Jenna and anything to stall going to sleep, and one of her last-ditch efforts Liz performing a two-woman show together, we’re getting a was, ‘Mommy, let’s lick tongues.’” Fey tells me, “And I said, ‘No, glimpse into the real life history of Dratch and Fey. that’s inappropriate,’ to which she answered, ‘But nobody’s The original 30 Rock pilot was shot with Dratch in the around!’ Which is terrifying for a parent to hear—that their Jenna role, but before it aired, the execs at NBC, “in the most kid’s moral compass is like, it’s OK if no one sees it. I asked her, passive, non-direct, taking forever kind of way, forced me to recast Rachel,” Fey says. “They just kept saying, ‘We’re not sure…,’ And I kept say- Her relationship with Amy ing, ‘Oh, I think it’s going to be fine.’ And then they finally said it was a hard order. Rachel is so sweet and lovable and silly Poehler is a celebrity friendship and I was trying to have her play a diva, and they just wanted a diva,” she ex- that’s so high profile, it’s a plains. Eventually the role went to . “A list of actresses was made wonder no one’s given them a and one was Jane. I thought, let’s go meet this lady and see if she seems cool. combo name yet, like Brangelina So I had lunch with her and was just like, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’ She’s been a muse or Bennifer. (Tinamy?) in a lot of ways. She’s a delight to write for.” Happily, after what must have been who do you lick tongues with when no one’s around? To which a tense situation, Fey says she and Dratch are still friends. she sheepishly replied, ‘Teddy,’ who is our dog. I got the best “Much to her credit as a mature human being,” she adds. possible answer, right? It’s not the doorman, it’s not some kid Fey has also maintained close ties with many of her other at school. It’s the dog.” female SNL colleagues. “I have this text chain going with Amy, The next Penelope story Fey shares makes it clear that the Maya, Emily Spivey, Paula Pell, Rachel, and Ana Gasteyer, and girl is destined to be a superstar. “You know, kids at that age, we talk every day on this thing, sharing pictures and bits and, they have no shame about their body. And a year ago she took oh my God, we just keep saying we could publish this thing. It’s to naming her privates ‘Coca,’ which is great, because in that really funny. Paula Pell named it the SNL Tang, which I believe Orenstein book she also points out that with boy babies it’s all is short for poontang.” named—like, these are your eyes, this is your nose, this is your pee pee—but with girls you don’t name it, you just…skip it. So, earing about Fey’s ongoing friendship with her fe- good for Penelope.” male comedy pals is heartening, and gives me the “Then she was wrestling with her sister one day. We had opportunity to ask about a 30 Rock episode in which just come back from Disney World, so she was really wound a female comedian, who gets attention by acting up. And then she started mooning everybody and it was really hoverly sexual, is taken down by Jenna and Liz. (In one scene, funny, and it escalated to, like, pants-off wrestling. And her Liz convinces the comedian that she doesn’t have to talk like a sister was laughing but also yelling, ‘Get her off me! Get her sexy baby to get laughs. “But I’m a very sexy baby!” she replies.) off me!’ And then at one point she tackled her older sister and The character drew comparisons to Sarah Silverman and straddled her back with no pants on and yelled, ‘Coca! Eat , but who was the “sexy baby” really modeled on? her!’ And instructed her vagina to eat her sister. She was feel- Fey laughs. “It was an amalgam of people, but the idea came at ing really powerful.” this time when Jezebel was very anti-Olivia Munn, very pro- I tell Fey this story proves that she’s doing an excellent Beth Ditto. I had done a movie with Olivia and she was perfect- job raising her daughter. “She just came out that way,” she ly lovely. And I started thinking, ‘Are we mad at Olivia because says. “She is powerful.” she’s conventionally attractive?’ Also, there are certain female performers who act very sexy, and, you know, that might inher- t was a great stroke of genetic luck that landed Fey two ently be repugnant to a heterosexual female. Because you’re daughters, as she is the consummate lady’s lady—the literally putting out a vibe that what you are saying is not for kind of woman who loves to spend time with other me. The actress who played the role, Cristin Milioti, physically women. Her relationship with Amy Poehler is a ce- looks like Sarah Silverman, so a lot of people thought it was us lebrityi friendship that’s so high profile, it’s a wonder no one’s trying to get after Sarah,” Fey explains. given them a combo name yet, like Brangelina or Bennifer. These days, there are a large number of successful female (Tinamy?) But Poehler is not Fey’s only longtime comedy comedians making headlines, and I ask if Fey ever experiences friend. In fact, the character of 30 Rock’s Jenna was written for competition among them. “No,” she says. “The key here is that

erry; T ights: Capezio; S hoes: M arie l a ontie Bur b erry; Ja c ket: Rachel Dratch, another of Fey’s pals from her Chicago days at we’re all generating our own material. If you’re going in to an

49 iiJin pink and white sequin top, shorts, and b oots shorts, iiJin pink and white sequin top,

50 . aug/sept 2016 . BUST audition, you’re all reading for the same shitty part, but every- explains. “So I had to go back in and say, let’s remember season one is making their own stuff and it changes everything. Amy one, where Liz is talking about the Defenestration of Prague, Schumer doesn’t have to be worried that she’s not going to be and bragging about reading the papers. And then you just right for . It’s kind of great.” course correct, that’s a thing you do with a series.” “I think we’re in a golden age for female comics right now,” I venture, but Fey clearly does not agree. “Coming ut even if she’s not “the mayor of television,” Fey from BUST, I will allow the question,” she begins, patiently. must realize that what she does can have an impact “But when Amy and I were doing the Sisters junket, ev- beyond simply eliciting laughter. Her power to affect eryone was like, ‘Isn’t this an amazing time for women in popular opinion was made abundantly clear when, comedy?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, is it?’ Do I make what bmidway through her 30 Rock run, a meteor named Sarah Palin Will Ferrell makes? No.” came careening through her life. John McCain’s seemingly She’s right, of course. “I think the next phase will be clueless pick for running mate during his 2008 election bid whether me and Amy [Poehler] will be allowed to age in this had an uncanny resemblance to Fey, and it created an opportu- business,” she says. “What will happen? I’ve met a lot of older nity for satire that Fey just couldn’t refuse. male comedy writers who still work, but almost no female Fey’s impersonation made actual waves in that election comedy writers who aren’t marginalized in some way.” cycle. The perfectly honed barbs that were aimed at Palin (and Hopefully, that will change. After all, most of today’s best- which never made fun of her simply for being female) hit too known female comedians and comedy writers are creating close to home to be easily shaken off by the VP hopeful. The work that is clearly feminist. Whereas once only folks like combination of SNL head writer Seth Meyers’ scripts and Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo, and later, Tina and Amy, Fey’s spot-on performance perfectly captured the disgust so dared to take on the subject, an entire new generation of funny many felt about this very uninformed and unqualified woman, feminist women has sprung up. That’s good, isn’t it? and likely contributed to Palin’s downfall. “I agree that it’s a positive development,” Fey concurs. “But But now the country is facing a candidate who is much the new trap is, ‘Oh, so you’re saying you’re a feminist? Well, more unpredictable, and powerful, than Palin ever was. “I feel I’m gonna tell you you’re doing it wrong.’” very paralyzed,” Fey says about the current political situation.

t’s obvious that Fey is speaking from experience. Over the past decade, she has found her work to be the target of a wide variety of Internet criticism. Some writers “I’m a comedian. I do that have called her a “feminist hypocrite” for, among other things,i creating in Liz Lemon a conventionally beautiful job first. I’m not an elected woman who we are supposed to think is smart but ugly, and in Jenna, a woman who is pretty but dumb. And more recently, official. I didn’t run for she has come under fire for what have been deemed racist por- trayals in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. mayor of television. I raise the issue of the feminism critique. “Does it ever ” make you want to quit feminism?” I ask. “No,” she says. “But it makes you feel old. At a certain point you have to be, like, “This Trump thing is no bueno. It’s really bad. I wish I had one I know my own intentions. And if I know my best efforts were perfect joke that would dismantle it. But I don’t have it yet.” ist’s assistant: K evin eri c son ; S ty l ist’s assistant: made, I have to move on.” Then she adds, “But, like, you gotta be able to do it without me. Fey seems to also feel unfairly held up as feminism’s Surely, I’m not the tipping point here.” standard bearer. “I’m a comedian. I do that job first. I’m not Suddenly, I realize that we’ve been talking for an hour and an elected official. I didn’t run for mayor of television,” she a half, and I need to let Fey go. But first, I let her know she has jokes. But that doesn’t mean she’s not listening to what people some kale stuck in her teeth. “Oh, of course I do," she says. "My say about her work. “We definitely take it in,” she says of the gums are very loose; they’re billowy like a beach umbrella. It’s response to such critiques in the writer’s room. “We discuss a sign of stress.” it, take from it what we think is right, and improve ourselves While she’s trying to get the kale out, I manage to squeeze going forward. But I’ve recently decided to opt out of the step in one final question. I remind her that in our 2004 interview where we apologize or explain,” Fey says. she said she was going to try to be “less obedient” in the future. And sometimes, the reasoning behind a storyline isn't as Does she feel like she’s accomplished that? intentional as it seems. “I remember in season four or five, “Yeah, I think so,” she answers. “A little bit.” some article came out that was, like, ‘Liz Lemon is being so And with that, she gets up from the table and jumps on stupid now, and Jack is the boss of her,’ and we sat down and top of a nearby banquette to check her teeth in a mirror that’s took it in. What was happening was, the show was moving placed high on the restaurant’s wall. I watch as Fey stands atop very quickly, the writers were very tired, and I, as an actor, was the banquet’s leather seats like a naughty child.

ennedy; E arrings: Y eprem; R ings: FF D ress: El iza b eth K ennedy; more willing to play the fool in a scene than, say, Alec,” she Not so obedient at all, I think.

51 Seriously Funny

Jessica Williams, The Daily Show’s reigning queen of satire, opens up about her mom, her therapist, and how she deals with haters

by Bridgette Miller // photos: jill greenberg TOP: SAMANTHA PLEET; NECKLACE: HOLST+LEE; RING: KATE HEWKO NECKLACE: HOLST+LEE; RING: KATE TOP: SAMANTHA PLEET;

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42 . feb/mar 2016 . BUST 43 essica Williams is not a morning person. world is not made for them, then they would be upset, too,” This is one of the first things she tells me when we Williams says. “There’s this idea of the ‘Angry Black Woman,’ meet on a Wednesday morning, which happens to and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, because I often feel be Free Egg Sandwich Day at The Daily Show of- like I’m put in that category. A lot of women of color are put fice in New York. Williams arrives with one egg in that category, when I think our anger is justified. I actually sandwichJ in her hand and another in her jacket pocket, wear- think that female anger isn’t that different from male anger. ing a T-shirt emblazoned with an illustration of the female Boxing and football are, like, national fucking pastimes. And reproductive system. She looks a bit like a low-key feminist yet, when a woman expresses that she is unhappy with the superhero gearing up for a long day of ass kicking. way in which our society exists, that’s a big fucking problem. Which is, of course, kind of the truth. As a correspon- That’s crazy to me.” dent on Comedy Central’s long-running news satire series One high-profile celeb who seems to have evaded the The Daily Show, Williams takes on nefarious forces (racism “Angry Black Woman” classification while still embracing and sexism are frequent targets feminism is the aforementioned of hers) with the not-so-secret Beyoncé, a public figure Williams power of wit. Since coming on as debates about often with friends. the show’s youngest-ever corre- “I feel like Beyoncé is one of those spondent in 2012, Williams, now “Feminism is people where it really splits down 26, has honed her comedic chops the middle whether [you think] in hugely popular segments that something that she’s feminist or not,” says Wil- have earned her praise from her liams. “Is it wrong for her to have fellow feminists and ire from, as is so important a song like ‘Flawless’ and still do Williams tells me with liberal the VMAs with the word ‘Femi- air quotes and eye rolls, “Men’s right now and nist’ flashing behind her? I don’t Rights LOL Activists LOL.” And know if that’s necessarily wrong indeed, just past 10 a.m., in our dear to our or negative; however, I do have very casual initial conversation girlfriends who say that she’s not about the beauty of N.Y.C. bo- hearts. It’s also a feminist and she is marketing dega egg sandwiches, feminism it. Feminism is something that is somehow mentioned, and Jes- something very is so important right now and sica “Not a Morning Person” Wil- dear to our hearts. It’s also some- liams’ eyes light up. “Woo!” she thing very marketable, for like, exclaims at the mere mention of marketable, for ‘the modern young lady.’ So it’s the word, swallowing the last bite controversial. But even if I don’t of her breakfast and diving right like, ‘the modern agree with a young girl who sees into a discourse on the impor- Beyoncé as a feminist, who wants tance of feminism in her life that young lady.’” to step on a young girl processing spans Christianity, intersection- feminism—as opposed to allowing ality, Beyoncé, and bell hooks. her to go through her journey? You She begins with hooks: “I’m know what I mean?” reading Feminism is for Everybody,” she says, “and her Beyoncé’s style of feminism aside, Williams’ pointed TV definition of feminism is what it means to me: ‘Feminism commentaries, and the anger she brings to them, are part of is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and op- why she’s so beloved. She says she admires women who ac- pression.’ I found working on The Daily Show that as soon knowledge their anger, but don’t carry it around all the time. as you say something about feminism, some people—not all “But at 26 years old,” she admits, “I’m not there yet. I’m so men, but certainly a lot of conservative men—clench at the not.” She pauses. “I have this idea of myself when I’m older, idea of there being an equal existence between people. It’s having had a career and having done acting and activism and infuriating to me.” affecting the world in some sort of way, and I’m a bit more of And that fury, it seems, only causes further clenching in a settled feminist—I’m less angry, less angsty. And I’m able to the pants of the patriarchy. “If those men were women, and be sort of Zen and just smoke weed on a beach in Southern especially women of color, who lived in a society that every California with no bra on.” single day, whether subtly or overtly, reminded them that the The idea of a chilled-out elder Williams, no-doubt radiant RACELETS: ANNDRA NEEN; RING: JOVANA DJURIC; B RACELETS: ANNDRA NEEN; RING: JOVANA SONIA B Y RYKIEL; TOP: ZERO + MARIA CORNEJO; SKIRT: PIN WORN AS HAIR CLIP: I STILL LOVE YOU NYC NECKLACE: LULU F ROST;

44 . feb/mar 2016 . BUST top: Etro; denim shorts: Citizens of Humanity RACELETS: ANNDRA NEEN; RING: JOVANA DJURIC; B RACELETS: ANNDRA NEEN; RING: JOVANA SONIA B Y RYKIEL; TOP: ZERO + MARIA CORNEJO; SKIRT: PIN WORN AS HAIR CLIP: I STILL LOVE YOU NYC NECKLACE: LULU F ROST;

45 RACELET: TOPSHOP; NECKLACE: HOLST+LEE; B RACELET: SKIRT: TOP: SAMANTHA PLEET; OWN HEWKO AND JESSICA’S DJURIC; RINGS: KATE JOVANA

46 . feb/mar 2016 . BUST as she reclines in the sand after a long life spent alternately and I was like, ‘Well, Mom, uh, when you really think about it, (or simultaneously) making people laugh and fighting for Cs aren’t really that bad. Cs are average.’ And I’ve never seen their rights, is certainly delightful. But what’s most striking my mom so upset, to this day. I just saw this flash of fire in her about Williams now is how passionate she is. It’s a trait that, eyes, and she yelled, ‘AVERAGE? You are never allowed to be from what I can tell based on what Williams tells me next, average, because you look like me. And because you look like she gets from her mother, whom Williams calls an “awesome, me, you always have to work 10 times harder than everybody beautiful force” and whose catchphrase (“when she’s a little else. There are people out there who are men, who are white, bit too excited”) is “‘You came from my coochie!’” “She really who don’t look like you, who will get more than you have for kicked ass,” Williams says. “When she was a single mom, she doing perfectly average work. So you will never, ever be aver- worked, went to school, got a degree—so naturally she had a lot age.’ And I was like, Oh shit, but I said, ‘So am I, like, grounded of feminist qualities. And then she and my stepdad got mar- or what?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, you know you grounded!’ That ried and they found religion together. was a really hard lesson to learn. I So that really affected my upbringing, didn’t really know what she meant, because I grew up very Christian, go- but as I got older, and as I examined ing to church every Sunday.” feminism more and took things in Williams, who was born and “I’m still a from a black woman’s perspective, raised in , says she even which is the only way I could take participated in her church’s purity Christian; I’m things in, then I sort of knew what ceremony when she was 14, where she meant. She didn’t grow up with she promised not to have sex before just a Christian the advantages I had, and she sac- marriage. “At that age, what I took rificed for me, and she knew that I away from it was that my body is not who believes had all these opportunities in my my own, that sexuality is bad; that if I future, and that the world is a tough leaned into my sexuality or took own- in equality. I won’t place, especially for a woman, and ership of my body, that was wrong,” especially for a woman of color, so I she says. “Then, when I was in high compromise wasn’t allowed to slack. I think that school, Sleater-Kinney was doing a lot of women of color have that what we thought was their last tour, on that.” sort of experience.” and so I really got into them, and Bi- I wonder out loud if people tend kini Kill, and , and all those to project a lot onto Williams, be- riot grrrl bands. That’s how I got some cause she seems to represent so of my angst out. But when I went to college, I still carried a much to so many people. Williams nods. “Sometimes, yeah,” lot of that with me. I’m still a Christian; I’m just a Christian she says. “And it’s flattering, but it also gives me anxiety.” I ad- who believes in equality. I won’t compromise on that. But mit that I struggle with anxiety, too, and that I’ve noticed that I started to realize that my body is my body, and I wanted the subject of anxiety has come up in several of the interviews to know more about sex, and I wanted to be free to explore I’ve read with her. these things as a woman. I do believe that a woman has the “Oh yeah,” she replies. “I have anxiety and OCD [Obses- right to choose. I realized, Oh, there is a word for this. Oh, it’s sive Compulsive Disorder]. I go to therapy twice a week.” feminism. Oh, OK.” Therapy, she says, “is the coolest, most fun thing ever…to “But aside from the sort of non-feminist sentiment I grew have somebody who is fucking awesome and older and wiser up with, being Christian,” Williams continues, “I also have a objectively listen to you and give you advice is the best.” Wil- black woman sentiment. I got this from my mom. I wasn’t do- liams credits her therapist, Heather (“She’s the best!”), with ing my homework in middle school, and my mom went to my helping her through the difficult transition of moving from parent-teacher conference and was really upset. She wasn’t L.A. to New York in the middle of winter to start on The Daily the kind of upset where she’s like, yelling at you in the car. She Show. Williams was still enrolled at California State Univer- was the kind of upset where she was just, like, driving quiet- sity, Long Beach, studying film and English, when she audi- ly. And I knew, Oh shit, I’ma get it. When we walked into the tioned for Jon Stewart in 2011. At that point, she had some house, it was just me and her, and she was like, ‘You wanna experience performing: as a teen, she’d co-starred in the talk to me about these grades?’ And I was like, ‘Uhh…no,’ be- short-lived 2006 Nickelodeon series Just For Kicks; did mu- cause I knew what was coming. She said, ‘OK, well, you wan- sicals in high school; and later took improv classes at the L.A. na explain these Cs to me? Why wasn’t you doing your home- Theatre. Williams impressed Stew- work?’ I had no real reason. I was probably just playing The art and landed the gig, and soon found herself experiencing Sims and watching Lizzie McGuire. I looked up at my mom the pressure of suddenly becoming a public figure. “I got a lot

47 of anxiety, and it came quickly,” Williams says. “After my boxing, and it’s so much fun. You put on gloves, and you get first two nights on the show, my Twitter just blew up, and to kick and punch. It feels really good to do that action. Not all my @ mentions said things like, ‘Nigger.’ ‘Coon.’ ‘Token.’ at a human, but at a bag. My boyfriend and I took a kickbox- ‘Uncle Tom.’ I just really got blasted with that, and it was ing class together a couple days ago, and he was saying that devastating to me for my first couple months on the show.” I got really into it. Like, I always look like I’m gonna die, Williams says that a lot of her anxiety comes from the ‘cause I just don’t have the stamina for kickboxing. So I’m idea of “having to represent other people, because ultimate- just sweaty and sort of flopping my arms everywhere but ly, there’s nobody that can represent a particular individu- still punching and yelling, ‘WOO! YEAH!’” She claps. “He al’s experience, except for that person.” She also says that was telling me about it this morning. And I was like, I’m so after that initial spewing of hateful comments, “I never get proud of myself.” that sort of thing anymore. And if I do, I’m like, LOL. You’re But despite her self-proclaimed lack of stamina at stupid and I don’t care. And I’m kind of happy that you’re an- the gym, Williams shows no signs of slowing down when gry.” Now, when it comes to haters, “it’s less of a racial sen- it comes to her career. In addition to The Daily Show, she timent and more of an anti-feminist sentiment, and, well, co-hosts a live-show-turned-podcast called 2 Dope Queens good,” she says. “If a man’s upset because I said something with her “work wife” and fellow comedian Phoebe Rob- about catcalling last night, inson. (“We like to talk about and that’s something that sex and politics and How To Get he wants to defend, then I’m Away With Murder,” she says.) glad that he’s upset. I’m so “ If a man’s upset And she’s also producing and happy he’s upset. Good. I’ve co-starring in a film with Broad done my job today. I just don’t because I said City’s Ilana Glazer that was writ- care anymore.” ten and directed by James C. “Separating myself from something about Strouse (who also directed Wil- my thoughts helps,” Williams liams opposite Jemaine Clem- adds. “And this is gonna sound catcalling last night, ent in the 2015 indie flick People very, like, college G.E. require- Places Things). ment right now, but my thera- We chat more about mov- pist says sometimes I can think and that’s something ies for a bit before we part ways of my ideas and my thoughts as so Williams can head to a ses- trains, and if something hap- that he wants to sion with Heather. But before pens, I don’t have to catch ev- she leaves, she drops one more ery train, because that would defend, then I’m glad pearl of wisdom from therapy be really exhausting. That’s that would probably be helpful to what triggers my anxiety—if that he’s upset. a lot of feminists out there who I’m worried about what bit occasionally get exhausted from I’m going to do on the show Good. I’ve done my fighting the good fight. “Some- tonight while being worried times my therapist is like, ‘You about what my parents are job today.” don’t have to fight that right doing and if they’re safe while now,’” Williams says. “And I’m being worried about the state like, ‘What do you mean?!’ Be- of terrorism in the world—if cause I’m always ready to fight— those thoughts are all trains going by, I don’t have to jump I have all this anxiety in my body, and so many things make on each one. I can see it, and I can acknowledge it, and I can me so mad. I’m like, ‘If I could just tell that UPS guy that just let it pass, which is a really nice way to think about it, he’s not allowed to condescend to me like that just because because it puts me a little bit more in control. Especially I’m a—’ and she’s like, ‘You can relax, breathe. You don’t with the OCD, because that’s a control thing.” have to fight that today. You can do that next week. You can With her schedule being as downright bonkers as it these do that another time. Sometimes it’s OK to just get in bed days, Williams does what she can to take care of herself. She and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’” Williams grins, as loves to “ and chill,” doing her makeup (“I love a good if the idea of watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer in bed re- highlight”), and working out. “I try to exercise, but it’s really ally appeals to her. “Yasss, therapy!” she exclaims. And then hard when I’m traveling a lot,” she says. “I just started kick- she’s gone.

48 . feb/mar 2016 . BUST

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38 . aug/sept 2014 . BUST Carrie On

From riot grrrl trailblazer in the band Sleater-Kinney to sketch comedy aux leather cut- aux leather genius on , Carrie Brownstein has been cranking out pop culture gems since 1994. Here, the Jill-of-all-trades opens up about fame, Fred, and driving traffic to her fave feminist bookstore

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39 40 . aug/sept 2014 . BUST he last time I was in the same organic-food-loving, fleece-wearing, NPR-listening room with Carrie Brownstein it was residents, alongside her best friend, SNL alum . 2006, and she was on stage in San Portlandia premiered in January 2011—“Put a bird on it,” Francisco completely shredding on from a sketch about avian trends in handcrafted DIY décor, guitar, maniacally shaking her shag quickly became one of the year’s most oft-repeated catch- hairdo, and singing intensely over her phrases—and its popularity has increased exponentially. Last band Sleater-Kinney’s raucous, urgent season, 3.7 million viewers tuned in to watch characters like rock. The trio, which also included gui- the impossibly earnest married couple Peter and Nance; or tarist and singer and drummer , Toni and Candace—the gals who run the feminist bookstore hadT just released what turned out to be their final album,The Women & Women First; or Carrie and Fred, who seem to be a Woods, and they were tearing through their new songs for an lot like the real-life Brownstein and Armisen, with the added extremely pumped-up crowd. Brownstein hopped and yelped bonus of being super tight with Portland’s mayor (played by and high-kicked like a true punk goddess, and everyone there Kyle MacLachlan). to see the impressive group, born from the Pacific North- These days, however, Brownstein is in L.A., Airbnb-ing west’s riot grrrl scene, bounced right along with her. She was a house in Laurel Canyon with one of her two dogs (the less louder and larger than life. adaptable one stayed home in Portland with her house sitter) Today, Brownstein’s in a Los Angeles photo studio and while writing season five, which will premiere early next year. she’s not holding a guitar, but rather a gigantic prop tooth- (Portlandia’s production takes place in its titular town, but all brush. It’s almost as tall as she is, and as Ramona, our pho- of the writers live in Los Angeles, a testament to the show’s “[People] just see me as this person they know from television, and then they listen to Sleater-Kinney and they think, ‘What is this scary music? You seem so happy on the show. What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?’”

tographer, snaps away, the 39-year-old brandishes it like an humor having roots in a mindset rather than a specific loca- enormous spear, pretends to brush her teeth, uses it to scrub tion.) “I can’t believe it’s season five, that just seems so sur- her armpits, and twirls it around like she’s an oral care ma- real. It’s like, now I’ve been doing Portlandia for almost half jorette. She seems tiny. And not just because she’s channel- the amount of time I did Sleater-Kinney, and Sleater-Kinney, ing Lily Tomlin in the 1981 cult flickThe Incredible Shrinking that just seemed like I did that forever,” Brownstein says. The Woman, though that certainly helps. Brownstein’s not unusu- photo shoot over, she’s back in her street clothes—black jeans ally short, but she is legit petite and low-key. When she goofs and boots, a distressed T-shirt, and a floral panel hat, the brim off, she does so quietly. of which she tugs up and down as we talk. “I think significant As we chat, seated on a mustard-colored vintage couch changes take longer to settle in as part of your identity. And I at the photo studio, there’s a thoughtfulness to all of her an- guess because Portlandia feels like a newer aspect to my iden- swers. She is quick to smile but more reserved with her laugh- tity and what I do, it still feels fresh.” ter, even when she’s exercising her signature wit, which she Despite having four seasons under her belt, Portlandia, does when we talk about her BUST cover (“I’m so psyched, it’s and the accompanying career as a sketch comedian, is new to like a bucket list thing. Sleater-Kinney was never on the cover. Brownstein’s identity. But many of her recent fans have no idea I’m not mad about it. [But maybe you can] superimpose Janet what she did before. “It’s weird now, because a lot of people and Corin next to me?”), her happiness over finally giving up only know me from Portlandia, and can’t believe I was ever in a on reading the entire literary canon (“I’m like, ‘Wait, I can read band,” she says. And not just any band, of course, but one of the A Visit from the Goon Squad? I don’t have to read Flaubert? most iconic feminist groups of the late ’90s and early aughts. OK!”), or her forthcoming memoir (“I don’t think it’s a tear- “I’m like, ‘But wait a second, that’s what I did first!’” she says. jerker, but you never know. That’s gonna be the tagline, like, “They just see me as this person they know from television, ‘You’ll cry your way through this…with laughter?’”). and then they listen to Sleater-Kinney and they think, ‘What For many, this is the Carrie Brownstein they’re familiar is this scary music? You seem so happy on the show. What’s with—the one who created and stars in the IFC sketch com- wrong? Why are you so upset?’”

eopard-print dress b y Wren, w renstudio.co m ; Booties A sk lice G eorge M ang, askaliceshoes.co L eopard-print edy show Portlandia, in which she lovingly skewers her fellow At the time Sleater-Kinney was making music, there was

41 plenty to be upset about. Brownstein met Tucker while they crisis” before she found a niche as an NPR music columnist were both attending in Olympia, WA, and “All Songs Considered” contributor. (It was also during the epicenter of the riot grrrl movement. They formed Sleater- this time that she was named “Volunteer of the Year” for her Kinney, named for an Interstate exit near Olympia, in 1994 work with animals at the Oregon Humane Society.) (Weiss joined two years later), and quickly gained a devoted But it was the web series ThunderAnt that she started following, even among mainstream press (in 1997, they were working on with Armisen in 2005—the two met at an SNL af- named one of Spin magazine’s “Top 40 Most Vital Artists” and ter party in 2003—that catapulted her into the comedy world in 2001, renowned music critic named them she’s so comfortable in now. Brownstein says ThunderAnt was “the best rock band of the year” in Time). When The Woods, “very clumsy and only partially formed,” but it laid the ground- Sleater-Kinney’s seventh full-length, came out, they were work for Portlandia, and gave the pair a reason to get together. more popular than ever. But they called it quits shortly after its “Our friendship started in stages because we were on oppo- site coasts so we didn’t get to spend that “The friendships you want to maintain, you really much time together. But there was always a shorthand that we had,” she says. “He have to protect—not just by commenting on their also came up through music, so we had traversed the same landscape. He’s older Twitter feed but by actually, like, inviting them over” than I am [by eight years], but it felt like we had gone down the same paths, sleep- release, a demise akin to the breakup of the Beatles for those ing on the same couches on tour. It was almost like we had been reared on the passion and fury of riot grrrl music. “Creatively, going along the same track, so there was an instant comfort.” we still felt very relevant. I mean, Sleater-Kinney was lucky, That instant comfort only deepened as the two began see- we didn’t ever really have a moment that faltered,” Brownstein ing more of each other. “When we really started to work on says. “We really had a full career. Even though it felt like we Portlandia [in 2009], there just was such a sense of being fam- ended prematurely, 11 years now seems like a long time to do ily and protecting one another. If one of us needed the other anything. It’s a whole lifetime.” person, they would come over any time and spend the night on Deciding to discontinue what you’ve spent a whole life- the couch, you know, during whatever we were going through. time doing is a terrifying prospect, but as the women got And for he and I, we just haven’t had that a lot [in our lives]. So deeper into their 30s, Sleater-Kinney and the lifestyle it re- when we realized we each were each other’s constant, it was quired no longer seemed sustainable. Tucker had become a such a relief.” Spending months on end together filmingPort - mom, making road life difficult. And despite her ability to rule landia has only strengthened their friendship, and during the the stage, Brownstein was fighting crippling anxiety that led writing process, they see each other every day. (In fact, Brown- to panic attacks and hospital visits. “I just felt like I was tour- stein says she’s meeting Armisen for dinner after our shoot.) ing emergency rooms as much as I was touring clubs and the- “We are very careful about preserving [our connection]. You w e ore.co m ay aters,” she says with a subdued laugh. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that have to be kind of intentional about friendships as you get old- Denver ER is great. Oh, the London ER is also pretty nice. Le- er, because people drift apart so easily with their own lives or icester, England? College town? No, not as nice. Kind of a dive, families or just physical distance. The friendships you want to that ER.’” And making such high voltage music—which music maintain, you really have to protect—not just by commenting writer Ann Powers dubbed “suffragette rock”—took an energy on their Twitter feed but by actually, like, inviting them over,” they didn’t necessarily want to put forth anymore. “It was the she says, laughing. “[You can’t just say] ‘Dude, I liked all of your kind of band that required an insularity and an intensity that’s Instagram photos, so we’re best friends, right? Why didn’t you very hard to maintain,” Brownstein explains, as she absent- invite me to your wedding? Every meal you’ve eaten I’ve com- mindedly removes bobby pins from her messy bob. “In order to mented on!’” keep that galvanizing quality, there has to be volatility. That’s It’s this jokiness that makes Brownstein resemble the Car- harder as you get older. It’s like, who wants volatility? You start rie of Portlandia more than the one we might remember from to want things that feel more comforting.” Sleater-Kinney, though of course it’s all the same to her. Com- edy might seem like a leap from Brownstein’s rambunctious t took Brownstein a while to figure out what those things band days, but she assures me it was only a difficult transition were. And emerging from such a high-profile chapter for her fans. Her penchant for performing was never exclusive of her life only added to the pressure. “The identity that to music; it was a personality trait she’d nurtured since child- Imost people related me to was suddenly going to become hood. “I was always putting on plays or going to theater camp something historical. But I want to be measured by what I’m or, you know, trying to orchestrate little moments that brought doing now. So what’s next? It was very scary. But it was also a attention to me,” she says. Brownstein grew up in Redmond, relief,” she says. A short stint at uber-hip Portland ad agency WA, and loved watching SNL— and Jane Curtin

Wieden + Kennedy gave her what she’s called an “existential especially—and The Kids in the Hall, a show that deeply influ- We Wore, the w silk top b y Wren, w renstudio.co m ; P erspex necklace T he Way N avy

42 . aug/sept 2014 . BUST ir, inmyair.com; S hoes alencia R omper b y I n M A ir, inmyair.com; b y A sk lice G eorge M ang askaliceshoes.com G reen and b lue V

43 “When I’m Googling other people, autofill always suggests ‘dating,’ or ‘feet.’ And I’ll think, ‘OK. I was curious about their feet as well. I’m glad Google will answer this question shortly for me.’”

44 . aug/sept 2014 . BUST enced Portlandia. “Kids in the Hall was so strange,” she muses. well. I’m glad Google will answer this question shortly for me.’” “They would air it in blocks on weekends and I would tape The interest might also be because she’s very particular them all and re-watch those VHS tapes over and over again. about keeping her private life private. Though it’s been ru- Those sketches were very absurd, all the cross dressing, all the mored that she’s dating Portlandia guest star and musician weird voices, all the minutiae they explored.” extraordinaire St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark), when her pub- It’s that same kind of minutiae that she and Armisen now licist snaps a pic of her on set at our photo shoot, she says that often explore on Portlandia, driven by characters like Toni she can use it for her Tinder profile. (Either she was being sar- (Brownstein) and Candace (Armisen), whose “Feminist Book- castic, or every single person in Portland should start swiping store” segments make Brownstein’s politics most apparent. immediately). But Brownstein’s not interested in talking about Dressed in oversized cardigans and peasant skirts, the two say her love life, or anyone else’s for that matter. “It kind of height- things like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying atten- ens the experiences and maintains a mythical quality to some- tion,” and, “Every time you point, I see a penis.” “I think of those one’s work, especially music, when I don’t know what they ate characters as superheroes,” she says. “Like, we somehow man- for lunch, who they’re dating, or what their favorite beer is,” aged to make two feminists the most popular characters on our she says, playing with the delicate gold bangle on her wrist. “I show.” In Other Words, the bookstore where those sketches are just don’t care. It doesn’t help me enjoy their music.” filmed, has even become a popular tourist attraction. “The fact It’s no surprise that she keeps her romantic cards close that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore—no to her chest. Brownstein was burned by media oversharing matter what the impetus is for them getting there—the fact that very early on, and the experience seems to have shaped her they go in there and look around and shop for books or statio- reticence with the press ever since. In August 1996, Spin pub- nery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me,” Brown- lished a profile on Sleater-Kinney, after their second album stein says. “As a feminist, I just think that’s cool. So even though was released. In it, the writer outed Brownstein there’s a silliness to [our sketches] and it’s very pop culture, we as Tucker’s former lover (as Brownstein told Marc Maron on also express a multidimensionality that feminism has always his WTF podcast in 2012: “Corin and I dated for, like, a sec- embraced, even though people have often tried to make the ond”), when the fact that she sometimes dated girls was some- movement seem less than multidimensional. We show that hu- thing she had not yet discussed with her family. “It was very mor can be part of it, and always has been.” disorienting,” she says. “We were so excited about that [inter- In fact, under its easily digestible sketch façade, Portlan- view], it was one of the first big articles [about us] so mostly dia has lots of subversive qualities. For example, the charac- I just was annoyed ’cause it took all the excitement out of the ters Nina and Lance are lovers, but Brownstein plays Lance, experience. But I think it instilled in me very early on a sense the man, and Armisen plays Nina, the woman. “Both Fred and of wanting privacy and not being very interested in having I get to explore gender fluidity, and that’s a real bonus of being personal information be tantamount to the work itself. Like, it a performer. You can do that in music too, but to literally bind didn’t make anything about that article more interesting at all. my breasts and put on a mustache is really fun. When we’re Except that I then had to explain a lot of things to my family,” writing the dialogue it’s very liberating,” she says. “I like the she says with a wry chuckle. “That was interesting.” way Portlandia feels like a very weird, kind of queer feminist When it comes down to it, the work seems to be what show sometimes. Like when we had k.d. lang, who’s an iconic Brownstein values the most. Despite her desire for privacy, she’s lesbian artist, hook up with ’ character [in sea- working on a memoir that will be out next year—though she son four]. Because our show’s a comedy, we can explore that swears it’s not a tell-all. (“I hate writing. There’s that great Doro- kind of duality and contradiction, without being too didactic. I thy Parker quote, ‘I hate writing, I love having written,’” she says. really like putting that out into the culture.” “It’s so true.”) In addition to another season of the show, there’s also a Portlandia-inspired cookbook coming out in October. Next ne of the reasons Toni and Candace, and Nina year, she’ll make her feature-film debut in the mov- and Lance, and really all the Portlandia charac- ie Carol. And, though her most recent band (with Mary ters, inspire such devotion, is because of the obvi- Timony, Rebecca Cole, and Janet Weiss) recorded just one al- Oous chemistry between Brownstein and Armisen, bum, there’s always the possibility of more music. “That’s always which raised a lot of questions about their romantic involve- going to be something I love,” she says. “It’s hard because the ment when the show first aired. Brownstein has admitted to kind of music I’m drawn to has an urgency to it, so I have to ap- having an initial crush, but also maintains the two were never proach it with hunger. It can’t be manufactured. I really have to an item. But curiosity about Brownstein’s dating life hasn’t want it, to need it.” Nothing Brownstein does feels manufactured, waned. In fact, it’s one of the first auto-fills when you Google and despite how tiny we’ve made her look in our photo shoot, her her name. When I tell her this, she laughs. “Really? Not even, feminist infiltration of mainstream pop culture is only continu- like, Portlandia or something? Jesus,” she says. “Well, yeah, I ing to grow. “You hear people referencing you or your music as guess that’s what people want to know. I do notice that when something that really was formative for them, and it just makes I’m Googling other people [autofill always suggests], ‘dating,’ you feel lucky,” she says. “‘Cause that’s all you have in the end, you

anicurist: Whitney b y urning torch, urningtorch.com; S hoes A sk lice G eorge M ang ; anicurist: w hite tank krisinit.com; jumper b y kristinit, b lack w ool katya I ntern: S ofia ’ s P rop H eaven; G i b son; R etouching: V iolaine Bernard @ Ba ydoll S tudio, violaine .com; tudio: 5200 enice tudios LA inc.; P rops: L ennie M arvin @ 5200 V enice S tudios LA inc., J oseph Quixote, R ose A podaca + tore, iolaine Ba b ydoll & E ric M errell Bresciani; S pecial T hanks to D onato or ‘feet.’ And I’ll think, ‘OK. I was curious about their feet as know? You want to pass something on.”

45 Peace, Courtney

Love,and Understanding

From raw, raging, rocker to chill, chanting, charmer, Courtney Love has commanded our attention for the past 20 years. But even though her life’s been filled with tragedy and turmoil, she’s somehow managed to rise from the ashes of each disaster and start anew. Here, she tells us about her men, her music, and her mental health, and proves that you can’t hold a real riot grrrl down

BY DEBBIE STOLLER PHOTOGRAPHED BY AMBER GRAY STYLED BY JAMES ROSENTHAL MAKEUP BY David Tibolla HAIR BY Charley Brown

40 . june/july 2013 . BUST dress: JOSE DURAN; bra: FEIN SHOWROOM; bracelets: MADE HER THINK 42

. june/july 2013

.

BUST

dress: saint laurent; bra and shorts: stylist’s own ourtney Love is not happy. She’s not happy with the pretty hairdo that the stylist has just worked on for an hour, not happy with the lovely look the makeup art- ist gave her, and not happy with the designer clothes the wardrobe stylists have picked out. And she’s defi- nitely not happy with how she appears in the photog- rapher’s first test shots. It’s not that she doesn’t look great, but something’s clearly not sitting right with her. After studying the digital images on-screen, the 48-year-old musician has an idea. “Just give me five minutes—alone,” she says, and retreats to the dressing room. Finally, she reemerges. She’s selected a vintage white lace minidress from the stylist’s rack, added dark plum-colored lipstick to her makeup, and rearranged her coif into her trademarked tousled head of bright blond hair. She looks amazing. She looks like Courtney Love. And no one is better at creating an image for Courtney Love than Courtney Love.

Love is having her photo taken for our cover not only because blowing in her face, and a photographer snapping away—makes Cit’s our 20th anniversary, but also because she has a new music it clear that this is the sort of situation where she feels most com- endeavor that she is anxious to promote. Shortly after I arrive fortable. But that’s no surprise. Love is, above all, a performer, at the photo studio in N.Y.C.’s Chelsea district, she directs me to and a powerful one at that. While she first came to pop-culture the dressing room, where she has me plug my earbuds into her prominence as the wife of Nirvana frontman , it was laptop so I can listen to her new songs. There are, for the mo- her ability to channel her anger on stage that made her such a ment, only two, which are both set to be released on iTunes. “I compelling—and controversial—figure. Hole’s 1994 album, Live have two excellent songs, and I have two new really good songs, Through This, released just a few days after Cobain’s suicide, and I’d rather just release the two excellent songs—like an old- was a runaway critical and financial success, and brought Love school single,” she explains. “The first song, ‘Wedding Day,’ the kind of mainstream attention and accolades she had always is impeccably great as a slab of really raw rock with an insane longed for. In her babydoll dresses, combat boots, and smeared hook. The second song is called ‘California’—clearly a leitmotif. red lipstick, she looked a bit like Cindy Brady all grown up, but I’ve written ‘Malibu,’ ‘Pacific Coast Highway,’ and ‘Sunset Strip,’ on stage she transformed herself into an icon of female rage the so if I want to call something ‘California,’ it had better be good.” likes of which hadn’t been seen since Medusa. It earned her the Although the songs sound exactly like what you might expect devotion of a generation of women taught to sublimate their an- from the lead singer of Hole, the band will not be called Hole, but ger, but it also made her the target of much media criticism. She instead, Courtney Love. “My name symbolizes a lot of things, and was vilified for being a mess, for being a drug addict, for having I have to sit in these rooms with lawyers and be called a ‘brand’ a big ego, for not being a great parent—in other words, all of the often, so I was just like, ‘Fucking name it after me!’ I don’t care.” things we expect in a male rock star. The band, such as it is, consists of Love, her guitarist Micko Lar- This latest project is her first foray back into music since kin, drummer Scott Lipps, and bassist Shawn Dailey. For now 2010’s Nobody’s Daughter, a record that began as a solo project, she’s the only girl in the group, but that’s not for lack of trying. “I then morphed into a release featuring her current collabora- put an ad on Craigslist that said, ‘Band in the style of Hole look- tors. The album bombed. “I put my fucking money and my ass ing for bassist in the style of Melissa Auf der Maur.’ I got exactly and my shit on the line for Nobody’s Daughter, and that record one response. There’s just not a lot of chick bass players.” is a masterwork,” she tells me. But even without a recent musi- Now Love has toned down her lip color and is in front of cal success, there is still plenty of demand for Love. “I’ve been the camera, masterfully striking poses in a fluid stream of mo- offered money to do an oldies [tour] sort of thing,” she explains. tion. The confidence she exudes—even with 10 people standing “It’s just not me.” She’s not averse to performing some of Hole’s around, lights bearing down on her from all directions, a fan greatest hits, though. “I don’t mind making a crowd happy. I still

43 really like ‘Malibu.’ I play ‘Miss World’ sometimes. I don’t like then I catch her reflection in the glass wall. She is hunched over ‘’ anymore; it’s just a simple song, like three chords, her smartphone, texting. and it kind of drives me nuts.” One thing that won’t ever happen, After about 25 minutes, Love gets up, and I follow her out. she says, is a Hole , “for reasons that I cannot even begin Despite what may have gone down this evening, I know that to get into,” but then she does get into them, at length. What it Love has genuinely devoted herself to this practice for the past comes down to, it seems, is that she has seven years, and I ask her why she does some serious beef with Hole guitarist it. “At first you chant for yourself, for . things that you want, but as you advance, In between photo setups, Love re- you chant for others, for the world,” she turns to her chair in the makeup room, explains. We grab a cab and head for talking nonstop. In fact, she’s been talk- Greenwich Village, where she’s renting ing ever since she got to the studio, regal- I haven’t a brownstone in the most beautiful part ing us with stories about her numerous of the neighborhood. I get a quick tour financial and legal woes, how she posed slept“ with of the majestic house, which is more for Saint Laurent’s latest ad campaign, than 100 years old: three floors, several and how she can fix anyone’s credit a musician fireplaces, loads of original details, and score. She’s very entertaining, but also more rooms than I can later remember. a bit overwhelming. At one point while In a sitting room outside the master bed- she’s speaking, I find myself staring at in ages. I go room, Love plops down on the couch, her clear blue eyes and wondering what picks up a remote, and clicks on the TV. is really going on behind them. Because for the safe “I just want to chill out and watch some as far as I can tell, her mind is like a car- episodes of 30 Rock first,” she explains. nival of thoughts and ideas, featuring business But we don’t actually watch the show at bumper cars driven by lawyers, a Ferris all, because Love has a lot to say, even be- wheel of potential litigants, and a roller guys, and fore the interview has really started. coaster filled with lovers, past and pres- As I listen, I quickly realize two ent. “She’s a genius,” the makeup art- things. One is that Love is smart as a ist sighs as soon as she’s left the room. then they see whip, tossing off words like “hubris” and Then there’s silence—the first silence in “gestalt” and “autodidact” with the ease a long, long time. [the Nirvana of a Rhodes scholar. The other is that After a few more hours, the photo shoot she is going to control this interview is done, but I still haven’t had a chance to publishing the same way she controlled the photo do the interview. “Why don’t we just do shoot. I might as well just crumple up the it at my house?” she asks. “I just need to rights] and piece of paper I’m holding, with all of my go chant first. Do you mind?” We head neatly typed up questions, because Love downstairs, hop in a car, and soon arrive is going to talk about what Love wants at a Japanese Buddhist center. The place they go, to talk about. And one of the things she feels more like a night school than a sanc- wants to talk about is her suspicion that tuary—it’s all fluorescent lights, linoleum ‘Boing! You everyone around her is plotting to gain floors, and hallways. We go upstairs to access to her piece of the Nirvana pub- the chanting room, which is like a large, should sell lishing rights, rights that she, together brightly lit classroom with rows of fold- with daughter Frances , inherited ing chairs facing a small shrine. About that shit!’ after Cobain’s death. Well, not everyone, 20 other people are there, reciting “Nam- but a lot of the people she encounters myoho-renge-kyo” over and over until have an underlying agenda, she fears. they begin to sound like a field of buzzing Even the boyfriends might have ulterior bees. Love takes a seat toward the front, motives. She once said of her romances removes her sweater, and bows her head. something like, “Everyone wants to be From the back of the room, with her messy hair and bare, boney where Kurt’s been,” but when I ask if that’s still the case today, shoulders, she looks almost vulnerable. I think about what a rare she scoffs. “Nobody gives a shit about where Kurt was. That moment this must be for her, how the chanting must be a warm was rock-star guys,” she explains. “I haven’t slept with a musi- refuge from the swirl of lawsuits and finance and insanity that” cian in ages. I go for the safe business guys, and then they see surrounds her. Here, Love is just a girl with problems, hoping [the Nirvana publishing rights] and they go, ‘Boing! You should to chant them away. The thought almost brings me to tears, but sell that shit!’”

44 . june/july 2013 . BUST “The Nirvana stuff is fucking cursed in my opinion,” she star?’” Then she answers the question herself. “I wasn’t ready continues. “I mean, how much of this interview has been just to, I didn’t want to, I didn’t know how to.” directed to that death and the consequences of that death?” I I remind Love that the first place I interacted with her was don’t bother pointing out that I haven’t asked a single question some 20 years ago, on the Hole bulletin boards on AOL. That’s about it, but she goes on. “It’s not the defining point of my life….” where so many of her fans congregated, especially in the wake She pauses. “Yeah, that’s not true. Someone shoots themselves, of Cobain’s suicide. It was all just typical fangirl stuff until that’s a pretty defining point of your life.” And along with own- Love’s stepfather, Hank Harrison, showed up and told us that ing a piece of the publishing rights—and its profits—comes a he’d been printing out all our posts and giving them to Love to very heavy burden. “Somebody has to guard the gates of this read, and that they were making her happy. Shortly thereafter, thing,” she says. “Because you know what would happen? The she began posting to the board herself. “I was really raw in that second I sell [the rights], it becomes a jukebox musical, makes moment,” she tells me. “I was in bed most of the time, and my a billion dollars, and you’ve got hands on Broadway. Or husband had just shot himself, and I heard there was this place he’ll be in Gatorade commercials. I will never sell the fucking online where they were talking about me. When I went on there, stakes I have in it, because no one else will bother protecting I saw that some people were saying things that weren’t true, so him.” At times, it all becomes too much. “Some days I look at I defended myself.” In fact, Love was possibly the very first ce- my passport and I’m like, Can I just leave? Because it’s so much lebrity to engage with her fans online this way. Unfortunately, pressure. And my daughter is really all I care about the most. it’s that same willingness to interact directly with her audience And to lose my daughter over lawyers and money is beyond….” that has since gotten her into hot water, particularly in relation She trails off, avoiding getting into the to some nasty tweets she wrote. “I didn’t specifics of her relationship with Fran- really understand how to deal with these ces Bean, from whom she is currently social networks,” she admits. “I was be- estranged. “I’m thinking of maybe nam- ing the same person that I was back in ing my fucking album ‘Died Blonde,’ 1994. I still thought Twitter was like because I’m in such a morbid space. AOL and you could say, ‘Oh, fuck you, you You know what I mean? It’s not that I’m ‘Crazy’ is a dirty bitch!’—and then I got a lawsuit.” unhappy. And it’s certainly not that I’m Her tendency to fly off the handle, crazy. It’s just that I know all this shit, word“ that coupled with her erratic behavior, has and I don’t know what to do with it.” led to many a “Courtney Love is crazy” What does make her happy, she tells doesn’t story, especially online. Since most peo- me, is performing. “That’s my only break. ple feel emotionally singed whenever When we were doing photos today, fash- affect me. they read anything negative about them- ion, art, reading—that is my only fucking selves on the Internet, I ask her how she break.” She’s keeping herself busy with deals with it. “Oh, the crazy thing is real- quite a few projects these days, but one ly easy,” she says. “If anybody could have thing she doesn’t seem to be doing is act- ever proven me to be crazy, they certain- ing. “I just spent a week in L.A. and ex- ly would have. And it’s never happened. perienced a lot of ennui, because if you’re in L.A. and you’re not Technically, in the sense of being bipolar, manic-depressive, working, it’s a really weird feeling.” It’s a bit surprising, actu- or any of that stuff, it’s just not true. I mean, have I gone online ally, that Love hasn’t continued her ascendancy in Hollywood, and ranted and raved about my finances? Abso-fucking-lute- as her film career got off to a very promising start. She had” a ly. Without any filter on. I mean, there’s a part of me that just bit part in the 1986 flick Sid and Nancy, but it was her role as doesn’t fucking care. And if that’s defined as crazy, then I need Larry Flynt’s wife, Althea, in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt to find a psychiatrist who will diagnose that. I mean, maybe I’m that really made Hollywood sit up and take notice. The role, more antisocial. I even asked my shrink, ‘Am I bipolar-ish?’ And for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best he’s like, ‘No, you’re not.’ And I said, ‘Not even ish?’ And he said Actress, instantly gave her “credit in the straight world,” to no. It’s just not there. So ‘crazy’ is a word that doesn’t affect me.” steal the title of a Hole song. It also resulted in her second- She’s also, she tells me, clean and sober. “I was taking Adderall, most-publicized relationship: that with her co-star Edward but I stopped taking it this summer because it serves absolutely Norton. The relationship seems to have had a profound impact no purpose and is just speed.” on her, and she still makes frequent references to it, but after It may be hard to imagine a sober, serene Courtney Love, but three years, it fizzled. “I had my movie-star moment,” she says these days she’s even something of a homebody. She’s working of that time in her life. “I watched the VH1 special about me, on a memoir for HarperCollins, and the deadline is putting a Behind the Music—it got the highest ratings of any of them— crimp in her social life. “It’s one of the reasons why I stay home but the last half hour was an absolute wash. It was just like, and watch 30 Rock,” she says. “Because I have to write this god- ‘Why didn’t she marry Edward Norton and become a movie damn book and I know it.” It’s scheduled to be published next

45 year, and with the manuscript due in May, she’s feeling the ‘Everyone take off your shirts!’ Everyone took off their shirts! I pressure. “I never thought I would write this book. It’s fucking was like, Wow, you’re an obedient bunch.” exhausting,” she says. “But I would rather redefine myself my- I’ve been listening to Love speak for hours, barely able to get self than have anybody else do it.” In addition to writing, she is a word—or a question—in edgewise, but finally I manage to ask also working on a fashion line called Never the Bride, and re- her what we ask every celebrity we interview: Do you consider cently had a show of her artwork. “Making art is kind of meet- yourself a feminist? “I think the word ‘feminist’ has been pol- ing my own destiny, as my mother always wanted me to be an luted, horribly. I raised my daughter as a feminist, and she won’t artist. I went to Art Institute, but I didn’t learn identify as one, because the word has been so fucking polluted anything there.” She brings out a bound book of her work and by boomer media in the sense that it means that you’re ugly, or leafs through the pages with me. The images look to have been you’re fat, or you’re a lesbian—nothing wrong with being all three hastily created in watercolor and pencil. Many of them include of those things—and every time I read an article in the main- a sketch of a girl, mostly naked, with stream media, it’s like, ‘Feminism’s dead! words and colors scrawled all over the Dead! Dead, I tell you! Dead!’ And I’m like, picture. “I started by doing kind of ass- No, it’s really not—not in me. Do I believe kissy pictures of girls, and there’s a lot in feminism? Of course I do, I’m a fucking of sex and death and romance,” she says. feminist. Do I believe that there are a lot “This one I made for Gwyneth [Paltrow]. of us out there? No. I really don’t.” This I did the day of Amy Winehouse’s Sex The phone rings. She tries to ignore funeral, with Frances behind her.” She it, but when it goes to her voicemail she points out a few more of her favorites, isn’t“ my decides to answer. When she hears who then autographs the book and gives it to it is, she lights up and tells the caller that me, for keeps. currency. she’s in the middle of an interview. “Oh, But even with the music, the book, I’m glad I answered that call,” she says. the fashion line, and her art, the issues “My savior. Yet another daddy issue. An- surrounding the Nirvana rights seem to If we have other 70-year-old man who knows every- consume most of her time, energy, and thing. But, you know, this one—it could be thoughts. I can imagine what a relief it to talk him. Chant. Chant for a good one.” At this must be to have an outlet for all that an- point, I’m not sure if she’s talking about a ger, and tell her it’s exactly her ability to about new lawyer or a new lover. Later on she transform her anger into artwork that tells me a story that sounds like it might has been so groundbreaking. She nods. currency, be about the same person. “I was smok- “You know what this guy said to me? He ing a cigarette outside of [this guy’s] of- said, ‘Your problem is that women aren’t fice and he was like, ‘Why are you smok- going to let their husbands go see you, I guess ing in a doorway?’ And I said, ‘Because because they’re going to think about you.’ it’s illegal,’ and he said, ‘I’ll pay the fee! I’m like, ‘Wait, sex isn’t my currency. If rage is my I own this fucking floor! I wanna see a we have to talk about currency, I guess beautiful woman smoke!’ I fall for that rage is my currency.’ He goes, ‘Do you get currency. old ‘fakata’ shit,” she says, mispronounc- a lot of women who say, “I grew up with ing the Yiddish word verkakte, meaning you, you saved me in college?”’ I’m like, dumb, crappy, bullshit. “I really do.” ‘Yeah, I get that every day.’ And he goes, Lawyer or not, after all the dark sto- ‘Why do you think that is?’ And I’m like, ries she’s been sharing with me this eve- ‘Because I express this rage that no one ning, it’s nice to see Love get giddy over expresses.’ It’s kind of simplistic to say, but there it is.” And so, a guy. But this mushy side of her is not one I’m familiar with. even after 20 years, Courtney Love is still the girl with the most “I present myself as an archetype, as an incredibly strong, al- rage. “Listen, no one’s really come for my crown,” she says.” “I most a dominatrix type. But my actual persona as a woman is mean, I’d be the first to fucking pass the torch.” Yet sometimes really submissive—in terms of business, very submissive. So I’ll she wonders why her audience can’t just let it all out, the way rant and I’ll rave and I’ll moan and I’ll write the fucking craziest that she can. “Maybe it’s that gene of not caring,” she says. emails, but when I’m facing that really, really smooth guy, it’s re- “Maybe that’s the same gene that got me in all that trouble on ally hard for me to say no. And I will keep looking for saviors and Twitter, the same gene that got me into flame wars on AOL, and looking for saviors, but the truth is, there is no Daddy Warbucks. the same gene that allows me to get up in front of 600 people in Nobody’s gonna pull up in a limousine and say they’re going to Lubbock, Texas, or 100,000 people in Poland—where they love save you. That’s not how it happens. You save yourself from fascist dictators, so I might have missed my calling—and say, drowning, that’s how you do it.” B

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47 sheshe’’ss allall thatthat

Orange is the New Black ’s Laverne Cox is an accomplished actress, outspoken trans-rights activist, and boundary- busting sex symbol whose unique pop-culture platform is helping her change the world

By Sara Benincasa × Photographed by Danielle Levitt

Styling by Jessica Bobince × Hair by Ursula Stephen @ Starworks Group Makeup by Deja for DD-Pro using MAC Cosmetics

42 . june/july 2015 . BUST OTH; SKIRT: MI LLY MI N KPI K/MODC L OTH; SKIRT: SHIRT:

43 : O r la : shirt . bottom lef t an ts : j os e ph t e r : d . a; ne ck la c e: th ea g an : s wea t e r : m a rc b y J cobs ; p : s wea ti n o r e d . top ri g ht : valen : D i nny Hall; bottom ri g ht an ts : j os e ph ; shirt ; SHO E S: P LEA S R : Ni na R icci ; B r a c ele t : ja ck e t an d p D SKIRT: MI LLY BR A AN D SKIRT: top lef t ly; S kirt Ke i ly;

44 . june/july 2015 . BUST ’ve interviewed a few celebrities in my and emotional violence. “I think ‘bullying’ is almost a nice day, but Laverne Cox is the first to mention “cis- word for being beat up, held down, and kicked by groups of normative, hetero-normative, imperialist, white kids. ‘Bullying’ makes it all sound nice when it’s straight up supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” within the first violence. So I have a history. I’ve dealt with a lot of street ten minutes. Or, you know, at all. By the time we’re harassment, so violence against trans women is something done chatting in N.Y.C., I’m convinced that this actress, ad- that’s terrifying.” And then Cox asks the question central to Ivocate, artist, thinker, producer, college speaker, “bell hooks- her work as both an advocate and an artist: “How do we re- a-phile,” karaoke-slayer (more about that later) and trained ally begin to dismantle a culture of violence, of culture? dancer ought to add “intellectual badass” to her business What does that look like?” card. Because while I entered our meeting as a starstruck This is the point where Cox mentions what feminist fangirl, I left feeling like I’d been taken to church, school, and author bell hooks calls “imperialist, white supremacist, possibly intersectional feminist heaven. Quite plainly, the capitalist patriarchy” and says she amends it to include woman is a fucking whirlwind of smarts, beauty, and guts. “cis-normative and hetero-normative.” It isn’t the only time “Three or four years ago I could barely pay my rent,” the she mentions hooks, a longtime influence, and I bring up a Emmy-nominated star of Netflix’s hit showOrange is the conversation the two had onstage at in the New Black tells me over lavender mint tea. “So it’s nice to be fall of 2014. The women agreed on much, but hooks called in demand.” We’re sitting in a well-appointed, quiet two-sto- into question Cox’s presentation of femininity—how her ry restaurant with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. When long blond wigs, dresses, and traditional feminine beauty the Alabama-raised actress takes off her sunglasses and embody what some feminist women have attempted to reject hood—a standard-issue celebrity disguise that looks incred- or avoid. Onstage, Cox responded in part, “If I’m embracing ibly chic on her—she seems a little sleepy. She’s just finished a patriarchal gaze with this presentation, it’s the way that a speaking tour of Ontario; shot a CBS pilot; and is gearing up I’ve found something that feels empowering…I’ve never been to do press for the third season of OITNB. “In demand” seems interested in being invisible and erased.” like the understatement of the year. Cox, who remains in touch with hooks, tells me “every- Cox warms up quickly as we delve into the topics that body” asks her about that exchange. I ask her if it’s insulting seem closest to her heart: art and advocacy. The transgen- to suggest that her high-femme presentation is, in fact, a der actress, an alum of the Alabama School of Fine Arts and capitulation to the patriarchy rather than an empowered Marymount Manhattan College, plays inmate Sophia Burset choice, and she responds carefully. “What bell hooks would on OITNB. She received a historic Emmy nomination for say to that is that we make choices—and this is me being a her performance, but her career doesn’t stop there. I tell her huge fan of bell hooks—but there’s something almost binary I’ve never seen a speaking schedule as rigorous as hers is—in that suggests either you are moving against cis-normative, one recent month, she crisscrossed the states speaking at six hetero-normative, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist different universities from Connecticut to California—and patriarchy, or you are complicit with it. That kind of binary wonder how she balances her passion for acting with her is really, deeply problematic. I think it’s more complicated. obvious dedication to trans advocacy. “I’m an actress first I’ve gone through all sorts of aesthetic phases. I had a shaved and always an actress first,” she says. “I have to prioritize head in college. I wore makeup and I was gender-noncon- that work. At the end of the day, most of what I do in terms formist. I also had box braids and a mohawk in college and a of advocacy is talking. I talk a lot. I’ve also been involved in little bit after. So I’ve gone through all these different phases elevating some trans people’s stories that maybe didn’t have aesthetically. I love where I’m at now. I feel like I’ve evolved the same platform that I’ve had, and I’m proud of that.” into being more myself.” But, she adds, “I think at the end of To that end, Cox is a major creative force behind Free the day, I am very much working within the system.” CeCe, a documentary about woman CeCe Mc- She contrasts her own experience with that of her twin Donald, who served time in a men’s prison in Minnesota. The brother, the noted musician, composer, singer, and multi- film, expected to debut in 2016, focuses on trans- media artist M. Lamar, who played a pre-transition Sophia and violence against transgender women of color. on OITNB (and who first introduced Cox to the work of bell “I love CeCe,” Cox says. “Her case came to me because hooks). While he’s received critical acclaim in such esteemed violence against trans women has always been something outlets as , particularly for his 2014 mul- that hits me in my gut.” Cox is not unfamiliar with physical timedia gallery piece Negrogothic, a Manifesto, the Aesthetics

45 of M. Lamar, Cox says outsider work like Lamar’s, “rarely genital reconstructive surgery and hormone therapy, would transfers to financial stability.” She muses about this differ- actually be placed in a women’s prison in real life. Cox ex- ence between their work and where it has taken them. “Even plains that in many states, the decision of where to house a though there’s something about me that isn’t fully main- trans person in the correctional system is based exclusively stream, there’s something about the choices I’ve made that on surgical status. Which brings us to our culture’s obses- exists within a system more so than other people.” I get the sion with genitalia, specifically with knowing whether a sense she doesn’t think this is particularly fair. I also begin to trans person has had “bottom surgery.” She admits she hasn’t realize that while Cox is giving me a lot of answers, she also always been immune to that curiosity herself, and recalls a spends a lot of time asking questions—of herself, of the cul- time when she wondered about the surgical status of a friend ture in which she finds herself, and of the world at large. of a friend. True to form, she used it as an opportunity to We talk about the task of being the Laverne Cox: the advo- critically analyze her own way of thinking. “When we meet cate, the actress, the star of creator Jenji Kohan’s women-in- someone who is cis-gender or non-transgendered,” she says, prison magnum opus. I ask what it’s like to have every ele- “we generally make assumptions about what their bodies ment of her being analyzed because of what she represents. Everything from her hair to her career to…. “To my basic humanity and gender?” she interjects. “Yeah,” I say. “Your right to exist. Your lipstick. Everything.” “I had this fantasy that “That’s how patriarchy works,” she says. “We are all con- stantly scrutinized based on aesthetics and appearance and once I was famous and judged on that stuff. I think that’s part of being a woman. It’s a part of being an actress on a popular TV show—thank God. accepted by society, this I’m grateful for that. It’s a lot of spiritual work for me as I deal with and figure out how to be a famous person who’s recog- guy would be like, ‘Oh, I’m nized. A lot of my work is to stay grounded, is to stay spiri- tual. It is to disconnect from what other people say about dating Laverne.’” me, but also to try and be connected to the joy and the love. I think this is where I’m struggling now.” This reminds me of something Cox posted on Instagram recently. It was an image from her recent trip to Canada, are like. But when we meet someone who is trans we can’t do with a caption that read in part, “I am not always open to re- that. So for me in that moment, I got this crazy anxiety and ceive all this love. Sometimes it’s too much. I feel so grateful asked the question, ‘What does it mean for us to be able to sit to be open today.” I ask her about it—the simultaneous open- with anxiety?’ A lot of times, we don’t know how to do that.” ness and resistance to adulation from strangers. “This week, In previous interviews, Cox has mentioned that some I allowed myself to be open and really present with it, which romantic partners have not introduced her to their families. I’m not always able to do because I’m distracted,” she says. I wonder if it’s gotten any easier now that she’s achieved pro- “Because I think when you let in the good stuff, then the bad fessional success. “There’s a man that I was involved with stuff is going to come in, too.” on and off for eight years,” she says. “I never met any of his She grins and adds, “I feel like Mariah Carey when she talks friends or family. We barely even went out in public together, about how her fans make her feel better. It’s almost corny to so that tells you the nature of the relationship. What’s deep to say that, but it’s the truth. Yet in an airport or on the street, I’m me about that is that I think I had this fantasy that once I was not always able to receive that. As much as I love and am grate- famous and accepted by society, this guy would be like, ‘Oh, ful for my fans and supporters, I have to set boundaries with I’m dating Laverne. I can show her off now.’ And it’s actually them. I have to set boundaries with everybody.” the opposite of that. He’s engaged to someone else now.” Actually, she may well be an idol of Mariah-like stature to I’m struck by how heartbreaking that must have been, the rabidly devoted fan base of OITNB. Cox calls the show “a and also by how clear it is that Cox has done the work to gift” and says with evident amazement, “It’s like, who gets deal with and understand it. “What I realized is it’s not famous just from one show?” “The characters are so nuanced about me,” she says. “It’s actually about that man’s shame and so profoundly human,” she says, “which is a gift from around being attracted to me. And his own issues of being Jenji Kohan and all of our writers. She discovered so much seen as less of a man. He has deep, deep, deep insecurities. unknown talent—like , , Danielle There are many men who date transgender women and Brooks, . There’s just all of these amazing actors who engage with us only sexually and don’t want anyone who no one knew about until this show, who are brilliant.” to know about it. They’re straight identified, and there’s a I ask Cox if her character, Sophia, who has undergone huge stigma around men who are attracted to and have sex

46 . june/july 2015 . BUST t pi ge o n s b y T i na P r a cht en u g a. k .a. M oth e rpi ; sho e s : za r a; F el D A M E S/PI N U P G IR L C OTHI NG DR E SS: D EA LY B E CK LEY TOP AN D SKIRT:

47 trick en s an c e: Ath a ; SHORTS: CH A R L OTT E RO N SO ; SHO S: ZA T E R: D.R A ; SHORTS: S WEA DR E SS: AL IC ’S PI G /MODC L OTH; S t yl i ng Assist K irkp A n dr ew s , Ca r l os Ac eve do an d Emi ly

48 . june/july 2015 . BUST with and date trans women. They’re arguably even more [after college], I realized I also needed therapy because stigmatized than we are.” of the trauma in my childhood. I wasn’t just having the “I used to believe that if I was smart enough, if I was good therapy and thinking, ‘OK, now I’m leaving critical theory enough, if I were pretty enough, that this man all of a sudden behind. Now I’m leaving politics behind.’ The trauma that would love me and want to fully integrate me into his life,” I was experiencing was happening in this context of cis- normative, hetero-normative, imperialist, white suprema- cist, capitalist patriarchy—these things were happening together. So for me, the healing is very political, and the “What I like to say to the personal is political as well.” Speaking of the personal, we circle back to the aforemen- world is that men are just tioned ex-love, this time, in the context of feminism. “What I like to say to audiences, and to the world, is that men are as hurt by patriarchy as just as hurt by patriarchy as women are. That man I alluded to earlier…I never met any of his friends and was never real- women are.” ly a part of his life. He just objectified me sexually. I believe he was in a tremendous amount of pain because he was not able to be fully authentic. At one point, he told me he loved me, [but] his masculinity would have been called into ques- she adds. “What I have come to learn is that it does not mat- tion in a way he was not comfortable with, so he was not ter how successful I am, how accomplished I am, how smart able to live fully authentically, I would argue.” I am, how good in bed I am. None of that matters if a man “He was afraid,” I say. is just not available. I cannot choose those people. I have to “He was afraid,” she agrees. “I’ve dated so many men who choose differently.” I’ve seen patriarchy destroy because they’re not able to re- In reflecting on all that she’s accomplished in her life— ally allow themselves to be vulnerable. To lean in to their and on all the insights she’s shared with me in the space of vulnerability or the parts of themselves that may be a little barely an hour—it occurs to me that there must have been feminine. So patriarchy is a system that not only harms somebody in her early life who held her to high standards. women, but also harms men.” “My mother,” she says immediately. We’ve gone through a good amount of that wonderful Cox speaks admiringly of her mother’s elegance. “My lavender mint tea, and our time together is nearly at an mother is very put-together,” she says. “She’s the one who end. But there’s one last question that weighs on my mind, goes out of the house with makeup, a dress, and handker- and it’s one I’ve wanted to ask since I first took a look at chiefs. I don’t carry handkerchiefs,” she adds, smiling, “but Cox’s jam-packed public schedule. “Do you ever get to re- that’s what I grew up with. My mother held me to high lax?” I ask. standards and I internalized it.” Cox’s mother was also She grins. And that’s when I learn that Cox is a huge— devoted to educating her children well. She grew up in the and I mean huge—karaoke buff. She calls it “one of my big segregated South and plied her children with black his- cathartic things.” In fact, the night before, she and some tory books. It seems there was no question that the twins pals got to a karaoke joint at 8:00 p.m. and stayed past mid- would grow up to be outstanding in their fields of choice. night. I ask if she has a go-to jam. Turns out, she’s been into “My brother and I have been talking about this,” she says. Phantom of the Opera lately. “I’m not saying I sing it well,” “In black culture, there’s a tradition of excellence. We’ve she says, “but it’s something I’ve been doing a lot. I also had to be amazing to get ahead in a white supremacist do Frankie J’s version of ‘More than Words’—Frankie J’s culture. I aspire to be in that lineage of black excellence.” version as opposed to Extreme. I did ‘Listen to Your Heart’ As examples, she names opera singers Jessye Norman and because a girl did it on The Voice this week. I’ve been doing Leontyne Price (“my idol”) as well as actress Cicely Tyson, karaoke since college, so ‘My Immortal’ used to be my go- singer/actresses Diahann Carroll and Eartha Kitt, authors to song by Evanescence. Do you know that song? It got me Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, and adds “the list through a breakup. It really did.” goes on and on and on and on.” I tell her that’s a pretty great place to stop, considering The discussion of race leads to one about Cox’s femi- we’ve gone from bell hooks to Phantom of the Opera. She nism, an ideology grounded in a combination of academic smiles, and I turn off the recorder. As we bid each other theory and lived experience. “When I found critical theory goodbye, she puts her disguise back on and I watch her walk and I found feminism, it gave me a space to heal and a away. She carries herself in the same way that she speaks: way to understand the world around me,” Cox says. “I was with grace and elegance. I instantly think of a million able to look at the world critically. Then, a few years later, more things I want to know about her, but the moment has when I needed to go to therapy because of my transition passed. Laverne Cox has left the building.

49 Feminist rock icon Kathleen Hanna opens up about her illness, her abusive childhood, and learning not to “take shit every fucking day, in every fucking way”

By Lisa Butterworth Photos by Mary Ellen Matthews

Stylist // Kemal Harris

Hair // Linh Nguyen @ Kate Ryan

Makeup // Tsipporah Liebman using MAC Cosmetics

nails // Alexaundra McCormick @ honey artists

set design // Shawn Patrick Anderson/ACME Studio k pants, and heels; bla c k pants, t o p, Opening Cerm o ny lavender L ettering: ni co le dadd o na

38 . june/july 2016 . BUST 39 his doesn’t seem very Kathleen Hanna, I “I feel like there are parts of [the album] that are so fuck- think when I walk into the business-casual Bel- ing vulnerable it makes me want to puke,” she says, her speech gian brasserie that the 47-year-old frontwoman peppered with enough likes to rival my own Valley girl accent. picked for our N.Y.C. lunch date. That’s when I “Like, I can’t believe I did that. And I’m embarrassed about it. stop myself. What the hell do I know about a per- But I’m also happy.” Happy, in part, because it includes a song son I’ve never even met? I’m sure I’m not the only called “Calverton” that she wrote to thank her mom for help- T feminist who feels like she knows Hanna. As the ing her survive a childhood she wasn’t sure she would make it founder of , the legendary punk band that helped through. “She made me think that I could be something in this shape the ’90s riot grrrl movement; Le Tigre, the electro-dance world when everyone else was telling me I couldn’t. I always trio that made political party music in the early 2000s; and just think, How is someone like me living this life? How am I now , her latest and most intimate venture, Han- even still alive?” she says, before our food even arrives. “I’ve na is a feminist icon. And when it comes to the political, she felt for a long time like I’m living for all the girls who didn’t makes it feel very personal. Revolution Girl Style Now!, Bikini make it out, because that’s how dangerous my childhood felt. Kill’s first record, was a sonic feminist manifesto, as visceral I didn’t know if I would wake up the next day, or if my drunk and relevant now as the day it came out in 1991. It felt more dad would get into his gun collection and decide, ‘Well, I’m like a call to arms than an album, and Hanna, with her disrup- just going to do it.’ He could literally be voted most likely tive ideology and a shriek that could shake your very soul, was to shoot his family and then shoot himself. Actually, most the mouthpiece likely to shoot his en- women hadn’t re- tire family and then alized we’d so des- run away because he perately needed. didn’t have the guts She made it OK to “I’ve felt for a long time to shoot himself. And get pissed about I don’t care if you’re gender inequali- like I’m living for all the reading this, Dad.” ty, to stop taking Letting go of car- the blame for sex- girls who didn’t make it out, ing is something Han- ual assault, to be na’s done a lot of in the loud and demand because that’s how danger- last few years, first by change and do it all donating all of her old without apology. ous my childhood felt.” fanzines and journals Later, in Le Tigre, to NYU’s Fales Li- when she donned brary Riot Grrrl Col- eye-popping outfits and did coordinated dance moves to an- lection in 2010, then by giving director the OK thems about misogyny and overcoming it, she even made fem- to make a documentary about her: 2013’s moving The Punk inism fun. And she’s always advocating for women off stage as Singer. But these weren’t arbitrary decisions. At the time, a well, volunteering with Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls and dire health issue was propelling Hanna to open up and docu- rallying tirelessly for Planned Parenthood. ment her legacy—she was deathly ill with late-stage Lyme dis- When she walks through the restaurant door, her signa- ease, a tick-borne illness. (“We camped across the country ev- ture half-pulled-through high ponytail gives her away before I ery summer,” Hanna says. “I got bit by so many fucking ticks even see her face. “I’ve never been here before,” she says, when and my parents would burn them out of me with a lighter be- I wave her over to the table. I’m briefly reassured that the Han- cause that’s what the ’70s and early ’80s were like.”) It gave na in my heart is not too far off from the one sitting across rise to debilitating symptoms that were misdiagnosed as ev- from me. As she orders a steak and fries (only after making erything from Crohn’s Disease to MS. “There were times when sure it won’t gross me out), I think about the reasons I feel I thought I wasn’t going to make it through the night,” she says. like I do know her: In her music, and her public life, Hanna But finally getting properly diagnosed was only the beginning. goes where most people won’t, speaking her mind no matter “I had a suitcase for my medicine, like, an old-fashioned suit- who it offends and sharing herself, darkness, flaws, and all. case,” she says, miming a shape with her hands that seems im- Her new record, Hit Reset, by the Julie Ruin—her band with possibly large. She also had a PICC line—a constant IV that Kenny Mellman, Sara Landeau, Carmine Covelli, and former fed medication straight to her heart—for the better part of a Bikini Kill-member —is no exception. year, which made everyday activities like opening heavy doors

40 . june/july 2016 . BUST Lisa Perry yellow dress; iiJin sneakers; I Still Love You NYC pink plastic sunglasses; Alexis Bittar purple lucite bracelet 41 42

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Sonia Rykiel blouse and dress; Paul Andrew platform heels; We Who Pray gold/pink shimmer ring tasks of Herculean proportions. Hanna, who’s now Lyme free, ously want to cry right now. Nobody’s ever asked me that,” she is down to a cosmetic bag for her pill bottles, but even coming says. “To a lot of people, Bikini Kill was a young band who got off the meds has had a downside. The constant nausea she ex- a lot of attention. The riot grrrl thing, blah blah blah, all these perienced as a result has led to a lot of weight loss, one of the rea- awesome women banding together. But that’s not the way I sons she’s eating a steak in the first place. “I’ve got to get some experienced it. I’m not saying that it wasn’t a good thing, but girth before I go on tour,” she says. “I’ve got to be strong.” And it was really difficult.” the recovery process isn’t only physical, it’s emotional as well. Hanna came to feminism and the underground music “It re-traumatizes you,” she says. “[First] feeling like you grew scene in search of a family. When it started to feel like the up in your house and you have no control. Then your body be- community she helped shape (along with many other people, comes your house that you’re trapped in and you can’t get out.” she makes clear) was turning against her, “it was so painful,” Perhaps the most insidious things about Lyme disease are she says. But maybe also to be expected. “Riot grrrl attracted how little is known about it and that it often has no outwardly a lot of people who had never been heard before, people who visible symptoms—factors that, for female sufferers, are like had been abused by family members or friends or just had a lot lightning rods for sexism. “Some asshole wrote me on Face- of violence visit their doorstep,” she explains. “It’s bound to be book or Twitter years ago when first came kind of a Molotov cocktail when you have a lot of people who out,” she says. “He sent me an article: ‘Why do more women felt voiceless coming to voice at the same time and feeling the have Lyme disease than men?’ Like, it’s a hysterical illness. rage that they pushed down for so long. Sometimes we would I was like, ‘Oh, this turn it against each is why.’ Because other. Me includ- they treat you like ed.” But it wasn’t you’re hysterical “There was a point where I only the internal so you don’t seek turmoil that was af- medical attention was like, ‘I’m not performing fecting Hanna. The until it gets really, outside reactions really bad. You wait anymore because I’m going were intensifying because we’re sup- as well. “There was posed to just take to get shot.’” a point where I was it. We take shit ev- like, ‘I’m not per- ery fucking day, in forming anymore every fucking way.” because I’m going to get shot,’” she says. “The hate mail and Being sick of taking shit is one of the things that made fem- the violence at our shows had gotten to a point where I was inism resonate so much with Hanna to begin with. Though she scared. So I took off performing for a while because I was like, was born in Portland, OR, her family moved around quite a bit, ‘I can’t change anything if I’m dead.’” and she first felt the fire of feminism at a rally her mom took As Hanna gesticulates, her short neon-pink-painted nails her to in , D.C., where Gloria Steinem spoke. She catch my eye, as does the wedding ring she wears: a scripted was only nine. After her parents divorced and she went back nameplate that reads Adam. Hanna is married to Adam Horo- to Portland with her mom as a teen, Hanna moved to Olympia, vitz of the (he wears a ring that says Kathleen), WA, to attend Evergreen State College, where she felt it even someone she often refers to in interviews as the love of her more acutely—especially after volunteering at a domestic vi- life. It was right around the time that Hanna took a break from olence shelter for women. She formed Bikini Kill in 1990 and performing that the two started dating in 1996. “My mom, of helped ignite the feminist movement percolating in the punk course, said the grossest thing when we first started going out. scene. As quickly as it coalesced, however, it began to splin- She [told Adam], ‘You remind me so much of the son I nev- ter. Mainstream media misconstrued the activist message of er had. You and Kathleen really could be brother and sister. riot grrrl and resentment brewed, especially toward Hanna, There is something about you.’ I was like, ‘Mom, that’s disgust- who had unwittingly become the de facto face of the new fem- ing,’” Hanna says with a laugh, her eyes crinkling. But her mom inist zeitgeist. When I say that I’m curious to know how it ac- was right, there was something about Adam: the two have been tually felt to be in riot grrrl—suggesting it was possibly more together ever since. And Hanna definitely inherited her mom’s traumatic than empowering—Hanna pauses, something worth “weird” sense of humor. “She always made fucked up jokes noting since she often talks quickly and off the cuff. “I’m sorry, with me, like, I would be in the bathroom taking a bath, and just you asking that question makes me feel empowered. I seri- she’d say, ‘Kathleen your kindergarten class is here. I’m going

43 to let them in.’ It’s funny right? Clearly, I knew she was kid- nists were actually saying that it’s a job and women should ding,” she says. “But when I first got together with [Adam], I’d get paid for it,” Hanna says. “Women who already feel to- do shit like shove crazy notes under the door while he was hav- tally under-represented are much more likely to strike out ing private time in the bathroom. Like, ‘What are you doing?’ against another woman than against the men who control And I shook the handle a couple of times to freak him out. I was the system. It’s easier. It’s a lot easier.” like, ‘This is for you, Mom.’” As a remedy to this kind of girl-on-girl aggression, Han- The early days of Hanna’s relationship with Horovitz were na suggests it’s time we change the conversation. “Tons of also around the time she retreated to her bedroom, got her big names have said stupid stuff when asked if they’re a fem- hands on a drum machine, taught herself production, and cre- inist, like, ‘No, I don’t hate men.’ [But] that has nothing to do ated the first Julie Ruin album as a solo venture. It’s no coin- with the conversation. The whole idea that feminists are man cidence that this is the project she decided to resurrect when haters is made up so that people won’t fight back against op- she was wanting to make music again during Le Tigre’s pression—and it’s totally obvious. I don’t care if women are and while Lyme ravaged her body. At its heart, the Julie Ruin like, ‘I’m not interested in [feminism].’ Like, fucking fine. is Hanna at her most stripped down. “I was in a deep depres- I don’t give a shit what you do, but don’t act like you know sion both times and I used the music as a way to help me out,” about something that you don’t,” she says. “Here’s the thing. she says. “It gave me something to look forward to.” If the first Why aren’t we asking men [if they’re feminist]? I want Justin Julie Ruin album helped her through the dissolution and dis- Timberlake to be asked if he’s a feminist. Are Vampire Week- illusion of the riot end? I’m actual- grrrl scene, getting ly curious. Why a band together in am I always asked 2010, and releasing “Women who already feel what it’s like to be their first album in in a band with oth- 2013, was her way totally under-represented er women and not of identifying with asked what it’s something oth- are much more likely to like to be in a band er than being sick. with other white But the new album, strike out against another people? I’d love to Hit Reset, certain- talk about racism ly reflects every- woman than against the men in the indie scene thing Lyme put her but people don’t ask through. “During who control the system.” that, they ask me the record I was about fucking Miley weaning off ste- Cyrus twerking.” roids that I had been put on because my adrenal glands were Ultimately, feminism has to “connect to something,” says just shot. And getting off steroids is no joke. In between takes Hanna. “It has to connect to ending oppression for everybody.” I would just lay on the floor and then get back up and drink And sometimes, that means men. She launches into a discus- like a triple espresso and just go for it,” she says. Just going sion of how sad and unfair it is that men are now often be- for it was the mantra that governed her writing process, too. ing objectified in ways similar to women, before interrupting “It’s still weird for me to give myself permission to just write herself. “If someone told me that when I was 19, I would’ve what I want to write and not have this weight of, ‘YOU HAVE been like, ‘No! They have all the privilege!’” she says. “So that’s TO WRITE A FEMINIST ANTHEM!’” she says, affecting a where my feminism has changed. I think seeing nuances and monster voice. “Because I didn’t want to. I just felt like writ- understanding compromise is what’s changed for me. The an- ing about stuff and the illness totally influenced me.” ger is still totally there, I just take out the knife when I need it. Hanna might not feel like she’s writing feminist an- I’m not carrying it outside of the sheath 24 hours a day.” thems, but doing what she wants is perhaps just the next On our way out of the restaurant, Hanna rolls her eyes and iteration of her feminist art, especially as the pop-culture juts her thumb at a table of suits, then hugs me goodbye on currency of feminism increases. “[Feminism is] becoming the sidewalk outside. As she walks off down Sixth Avenue, her this trendy thing that publishers use as a way to pit wom- pseudo-bun bouncing, I realize I still don’t really know Kath- en against each other. Like in the ’70s—there was a whole leen Hanna. I only know what she means to me, and to legions myth that feminists hated housewives. Even though femi- of women like me. And that’s enough.

44 . june/july 2016 . BUST iiJin pink and white sequin top, shorts, and boots 45 awn Be h rle; ring: Qiyada : C arla D awn t and J acke Ha

38 . dec/jan 2017 . BUST rose the riveting Known for years as a movie star, Rose McGowan has recently taken on a new role: feminist troublemaker. Here, she opens up about Hollywood’s “macho crap,” being the daughter of a cult leader, and how she plans to shatter the patriarchy interview By Amber Tamblyn photos by jill greenberg // styling by cannon @ judy casey // nails by mabelyne martin makeup by alex byrne @ EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS MANAGEMENT

39 lot has happened since Rose Mc- rules in her tenure as an actor, activist, and businesswoman— Gowan first graced the cover ofBUST 10 and she has no plans to stop anytime soon. years ago. Back then, McGowan was rid- I was one of the people whose attention McGowan caught ing a new wave of notoriety in the wake in the wake of “CastingGate,” so I reached out through a of her career switch from indie-film “It” mutual friend to give her my support. It wasn’t long before a girl—in flicks likeJawbreaker , Going All strong friendship was born between us, and we began texting The Way, and —to and talking almost daily. She came and supported my directo- TV titan as the witchy star of the popular rial debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past June, and WB series . In the years since we joined forces for a fundraiser in New York to unseat the Charmed ended in 2006, she made a judge in the Brock Turner rape case. In the time I’ve known memorable appearance in 2007's Grindhouse before her résu- her, McGowan has tirelessly proven herself to be a voice for the méA grew to include directing with the short filmDawn , in 2014. voiceless, a blazing fire for the matchless, and a beating heart Captivating on screen and off, McGowan could possibly at- for the broken. tribute some of her strong personal magnetism to her unusual I contacted the 43-year-old artist in Italy, where she’s upbringing—until age nine, she lived on an Italian commune working on a record of what she calls “galactic hypnotic” mu- inside a cult led by her father, called Children of God. sic, one of the many creative swords she wields that makes her In June 2015, however, McGowan transitioned from be- so damn fascinating. Rose McGowan is not a breath of fresh loved Hollywood babe to feminist badass in the eyes of women air. She’s a fresh tornado—an army of many in a single body, everywhere, when she tweeted to over 600k followers a photo ready to pulverize the patriarchy. of some casting notes she’d received for an proj- ect which read: “Please make sure to read the attached script It’s so interesting to me that you were on the cover of before coming in so you understand the context of the scenes. BUST 10 years ago. I feel like you have always been that Wardrobe note: Black (or dark) form-fitting tank that shows off rebel, that person who was not going to take shit from cleavage (push-up bras encouraged). And formfitting leggings or anybody. But maybe you hid it more then because you jeans. Nothing white.” Beneath the photo, McGowan captioned: were an actor and you were more vulnerable. “Casting note that came w/script I got today. For real. Name of I think that’s a perception that is not necessarily true. But I male star rhymes with Madam Panhandler hahahaha I die.” And have had a hell of a life, and acting is probably the least inter- while feminists everywhere cheered this rare example of an esting part of it. My history was intertwined with [acting]. In actress calling out Hollywood’s casual sexism, not everyone was Italy, I was born on a commune, and I was trained from an early pleased. A week later, McGowan tweeted, “I just got fired by my age to perform on the street for money. wussy acting agent because I spoke up about the bullshit in Hol- lywood. Hahaha. #douchebags #awesome #BRINGIT.” Obviously, your acting was the reason people began to Even in 2015, the consequences for calling out sexism at know who you were. And I think people should know work were swift and severe for McGowan. But at this juncture, what it’s truly like to be in the mind of a woman who acts. where many others would cut their losses and try to make nice, Nobody ever talks about it. McGowan doubled down. Two days later, she went on Good Morning America to discuss, “the systemic abuse of women Exactly, no one ever really talks about it. But you’re a in Hollywood,” and quit acting, after almost 25 years in the rare example of someone who speaks every type of truth. industry, to focus on writing, directing, and speaking out for So what I want to know is, in the years that you did act— women’s rights on and off social media alongside the hashtag when it mattered and it was a thing you did a lot—was #RoseArmy. Just this past month, McGowan continued to use there a moment when you realized you had more to offer her powerful voice on Twitter to shine a light on the entertain- the world, and you didn’t know how to do that? ment industry’s abuse of women by sharing a painful story I always knew. There was never a moment when I did not think about being raped by a Hollywood studio executive when she that what I was doing was beneath me. The content, the people was younger. I was working with—with a few exceptions—it was beneath me. In short: She’s not staying silent any longer, and she’s done People never talk about something being beneath them, but with masquerading as a sex object. Being encouraged to wear what I consider art was not in any way reflected in the world push-up bras and revealing clothing to get a job is not exclusive around me. I was perceived as this strange version of a movie to Hollywood; it is the spoken and unspoken law for women at star who wasn’t playing the role. Like, there’s a role—the smart, every level, in every profession. Be prettier. Smile more. Don’t thinking actress—that’s assigned to you by the media. But I was raise your voice. Don’t wear that outfit. Don’t be so angry. Keep literally just too beautiful. Nobody would listen to me. your ideas to yourself, or if you have ideas, figure out how to make a man in charge feel like they’re his ideas. Be a muse, not Yeah, you were a sex symbol. But I also think of you as a a matriarch. Don’t make a stink. Don’t fight back. Stay in your feminist guru. lane. Do as you’re told. McGowan has broken every one of these I am. I am the daughter of a fucking cult leader.

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41 : 0770; t t en s Ch andra; Bel N ecklace: L ar u icci; R ing: i t ya : Ch ri st ian J oy; an ts : Monika Ch iang; S h oe s D r. Mar P J acke t

42 . dec/jan 2017 . BUST You are the daughter of a cult leader—that is true. But what’s so powerful about you, too, is that you use lan- “I was cast in films about guage and attitude in a way that is extremely unusual for a mainstream celebrity. So, was there a certain breaking people’s /whore issues. point that you reached as an actress that made you say, “Fuck this, I am done”? For me, it was on Tarantino’s [Grindhouse] set—it’s wasn’t him, It’s not my fucking problem that he was a cherry. It was all of it. The thing was, there was never really an Option B. And then there was a point when I was won- you have a problem with your dering, How do I get out of this? On those two [Grindhouse] films, where there was heaping amounts of macho crap going down, mommy. Get over it.” I was like, Why am I subjugating myself for some dickhead’s benefit so they can get their rocks off? This is not fun. This abuse is not fun. All of the women who support this system are not fun. The problem was, I got so good at being out of my body, I didn’t I don’t want to live this way. This means nothing to me. I have protect myself while I was in it. There was nobody protecting dealt with systematic hatred; was held up as an example of what me. You had your dad, and I had my father. But after [my father] to hate. I was cast in [films about] people’s Madonna/whore saw my first movie The[ Doom Generation], he asked me what it issues. It’s not my fucking problem that you have a problem with felt like being a whore. your mommy. Get over it. Wow. Are you still close with your dad at all? Yeah! I mean, I remember when I was 12 or 13, going on He died, actually. My father was a very difficult and interesting an audition for a movie that had a famous director in- human. He was the finest artist I’ve ever known. I’ve never met volved. I wasn’t even through puberty yet, but I remem- anyone as naturally gifted as that man was. But he also suffered ber wearing this really cute, red, Betsey Johnson dress from being a very handsome, manic-depressive man with a God- that I had bought with my soap opera money. I loved it complex. I’ve never lived within the confines of society and its so much, and I went on this audition, and the scene was, structures, so they don’t really apply to me. I never was good at this older man is in bed with a little girl and the cops bust being a celebrity. I probably could have been a huge star had I in on him, and I was playing the girl… given two fucks. But for me, it was like, Oh, I have to play the role Oh, lucky you! of an actress, and then play the movie? OK, cool, let’s go. And then, unfortunately, I got very lost while I was doing Charmed. For my …and I remember the director commenting, in the audi- kind of brain, that was like hell, to be honest. I know people have a tion room, on my body—because I was wearing this little lot of affection for that show, but for how I like to live my life and slinky dress. He literally said to me, “Well, I can see for how my brain works…my hair was falling out. I was sick all you’re starting to get breasts, and you probably have a the time. I gained 10 to 15 pounds. Acting felt like a punishment. little pubic hair, don’t you? So you’re that perfect age.” I It wasn’t exciting for me to be outside of my own body and mind, left and I got in the car with my dad, and I leaned the seat because my mind interested me a lot more than what was on the back and I lay there feeling sick. I didn’t understand what page. Most people go to a job and they still have the luxury of hav- had happened or why it made me feel like shit, but I felt ing their own thoughts, whereas I was professionally paid to not like shit. I told my dad what had happened, and he was so be me. I hated that. I resented that. angry. He drove out of there and was, like, “No way, fuck this.” My dad [Russ Tamblyn] was a child actor, so he was Lets talk about your directing. I imagine being a director maybe exposed to some form of that. He was so angry, he really allows you to put your own vision into it. Ninety- called my agent. I’ve never told that story before, but it eight percent of the directors I’ve worked with over 25 was extremely upsetting. years have been men, and even as a little girl, I learned how It’s casual, deep misogyny. to make my ideas the male director’s ideas, to make them Yes, absolutely. It was the moment when I went from be- feel like they thought of it. ing a cute little actress to suddenly thinking, My body Oh, I didn’t do that. They just blatantly stole ideas from me, and now matters and people have no problem saying that. not just directors. Like, any guy that I was with was like, “You’re And for the rest of my life, I have dealt with variations of, my muse.” And I was like, “You’re a thief. I’m not your muse, “Oh, she would be a huge movie star if she lost 15 pounds.” motherfucker, you’re a fucking thief.” What did you do, after you had that moment? Ugh, look at the contents of [Grindhouse], see what happens Did you feel that way at the time or did it creep up on you? to women, and draw your own conclusions. I just checked out. I was resentful. It pissed me off. I couldn’t figure out why some- Basically, I would astrally project out of my body. I read a book one would do that. I was like, “Oh, but wait, I wrote that. But wait, about astral projection when I was nine, and I was constantly that’s my song. Oh, but wait….” We’re taught that the greatest role trying to do it. I think in some ways, I’ve mastered that—I just in life that a girl can get is to be someone’s muse. [Makes gag- hover above and watch while my body is doing something else. ging noises.] Vomit. And that’s what I would be thinking on set,

43 every fucking time. So I have a line on the inside of my mouth Three months later, I was shooting. And now I just sold a show where I just gnaw the fuck out of it to hide my fucking rage at that I wrote and will be directing for —Children of God. the incompetence, the pettiness, and the abuse. But I knew the structure of it all, and I knew that there was no way to speak That’s amazing! up for myself, so I just kept my nose to the grindstone. But a I’m working completely outside the system right now. I won’t very smart person once told me, “Just because you can handle work with agents or managers. They brainwash you into think- a lot, doesn’t mean that you have to.” And that’s the thing that ing you need them. But I just employ someone to fill the gaps took the weight off my back. So now, I want to push back and to that I need filled, instead of giving somebody 10 percent of my teach others how to, also. income and hoping they can remotely understand what I’m doing and are able to sell that. Though the idea of me being There’s this sense that people, especially men, love to “sold” to anyone or anything is stomach turning. So I refuse to tell women like you that they need to be less angry and sell or buy anybody to anybody. The Amazon thing came about more happy. because the head of followed me on Twitter. I They can shut the fuck up. I don’t care what they tell me. I hear followed him back, and that’s how it happened. It wasn’t based that shit every moment of every day. It doesn’t interest me. on someone saying, “Oh, you really ought to read this script!” It Because frankly, their brains cannot comprehend the scale and wasn’t somebody doing the typical song and dance. Actors are level of my thought—the field that I play in is not available to not empowered. But if you’ve survived as an actor for a certain them. They have not done the work to get there. They have not amount of time, you are a businessperson—act like it. Figure it done what it takes to be me. out. You are your own CEO, so act like one.

That’s very true. I swear, I could sit and listen to you forever. “A very smart person once told Well, soon you can! I’m launching a digital platform [called] #RoseArmy. One of the features will be a live feed where I sit in me,‘Just because you can and just converse. Like, “In five easy steps, you, too, can be liv- ing a better and more informed life, instead of being an asshole handle a lot, doesn’t mean that who hurts animals, women, and children—you fucking dick. Just shut up and listen.” #RoseArmy is an army of thought.

you have to.’” Tell me more. What exactly are you talking about when you say you want to build a #RoseArmy? #RoseArmy is a growing group of likeminded individuals I brought it up because I think it’s something that affects who are pro-thought, pro-intellect, and pro-art. If a man can all women. We’re all told that we should be less of one plant a flag in the ground and say, “These are my borders, these thing, more of another. are my laws, these are my rigid, narrow rules within which Yeah, like, a tankini is too much coverage, and a bikini is too you have to live,” well, then I can create a virtual world that small. Fuck. That. I’m not interested in that. Recently, I walked rejects those beliefs. We all can. #RoseArmy members be- into a 7-11, and some guy working there says, “You’re going to lieve in pushing boundaries and fighting for justice. The site, walk in here and not smile or say hello? In my house?” And I rosearmy.com, is being built now, and it’ll become clearer what was like, “Excuse me?” And he was like, “You’re a woman, you I’m doing and why once it’s launched. I realized there was no say hello!” And I was like, “No, I don’t say hello. Asshole.” I one publicly advocating for thought. What I want is for every don’t. I do what I want. I don’t have to smile. And guess what? being in the world to be 10 percent more conscious in their You have fucking earned my anger. This anger is because of lives. I want people to think differently, and I want them to do people like you, and you are not unique. Men come up to me all better. I want to dismantle the status quo and I want to shatter the time, thinking they’re going to be unique and not kiss my the patriarchy. It is not working for society, and it is especially ass, that they’re going harass me instead. And I’m like, “You not working for women. I want us to be equal. I will not rest are one in a long line of basics. You are all the same.” I have met until it is so. I believe an army of thought will bring about the more people than most will in 10 or 20 lifetimes. And I have systemic change we so need. And it starts with us. So let’s go. lived a global existence that none of these people have, so they don’t get to touch me. Just because you write for a magazine, or One more question. Is there something you want to say you write for a blog and you’re from Chicago but you’re moving to people who read this magazine who may be feeling to New York…no. Sit. Down. Don’t come at me. lost, cornered, violated, or stuck? Yes. While you’re enduring crap, arm yourself. Prepare your- [laughing] I love it. So, tell me about your transition self for your new life, the life you’re really meant to live. I into directing. don’t mean with a gun, I mean with knowledge. Learn every- It started with the writers of [my 2014 short film]Dawn , Josh thing you can about the various things that interest you. Be Miller and Mark Fortin, who were both long-term friends brave. Leap and the net will appear. Your life can be bigger of mine. They just said, “It’s time.” And I said, “You’re right.” than you imagine.

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TURTLENECK SWEATER: NO. 6; DRESS: KAREN WALKER; POLYESTER/WOOL SHEARLING COAT: TOPSHOP; WHITE BRONZE RING WITH DALMATION JASPER: QUARRY greta the great interview by jenni miller photos by nadya wasylko styling by lara backmender @ honey hair by marco santini using davines @ tracey mattingly makeup by daniel martin @ the wall group

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An indie-movie queen with festival hits like Frances Ha, Mistress America, and Greenberg to her credit, Greta Gerwig made the leap to big screen writer/direc- tor in November with the unapologetically woman-focused Lady Bird. Here, she talks candidly about the female gaze, the New York dream, and writing scripts where “the central story is not a question of whether a woman will or will not end up with some dude”

hen Greta Gerwig sits down to to lead her classmates in a theatrical production of An- breakfast at Café Cluny in N.Y.C.’s West drew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express was never realized, Village, she is friendly and warm despite the multi-hyphenate made her filmmaking dreams come our masochistically early 8 a.m. meeting true this past November with the release of her directo- time. It seems impossible but entirely too rial debut, Lady Bird, a film she also wrote. Boasting Wtempting to believe her when she says she remembers powerhouse performances by Saoirse Ronan and Laurie me from previous interviews I’ve done with her over Metcalf, Lady Bird is a mother/daughter story bursting many years as a freelance film writer. That’s because, with heart and humor that established Gerwig as a film- based on her screen persona, she seems like the ulti- making force to be reckoned with. mate ride-or-die best friend every woman wants—no, But before she reached this career milestone, Gerwig needs. An hour-long conversation with Gerwig is cultur- made her name acting—first in micro-indies likeHannah ally nourishing; we veer from the joys of Virginia Woolf Takes the Stairs (2007) and Baghead (2008), and then and nighttime walks to the unmasking of Elena Fer- in festival darlings including Greenberg (2010) and the rante and even her love of passports. aforementioned Frances Ha. “You gotta wander around,” she says of her regular Now claiming her place among the current van- constitutionals. “It definitely helps the quality of thought. guard of female auteurs taking charge of their careers Actually, if I’m stuck, I always try to go walk, because and the movie industry—a group that includes Kathryn usually it solves something. Even if it just solves my bad Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, attitude.” She then adds, “I actually have trouble think- and Patty Jenkins—Gerwig is veering off the leading ing or talking when I’m sitting. Sorry.” There’s nothing to lady track and opting to go behind the camera. “What forgive, of course. Gerwig, 34, is endlessly charming and scared me most was the fact that I knew there was a fun to chat with, sitting or not. perfectly good lane in which I never did this,” Gerwig “I love getting passports, because when you get a explains when I ask about her decision to break into di- passport, it expires in 10 years, and you have this physical recting. “If I had never directed [Lady Bird], if I’d never object, and you think, ‘What are the next 10 years going to written this, I would have been fine. I would have fig- hold?’” she muses. “I got my passport renewed right after ured it out. I would have done things. But… if I wanted to I graduated from college, and I had to get it renewed carve out another path, no one was ever going to come again last year. I remembered holding my passport right to me. I would have to beat it out myself.” after I graduated from college and I thought, ‘What am I That path included a short stint in ballet before be- going to be like at 32? And what are these 10 years going ing told her body “wasn’t right”—“99.9 percent of bodies to be?’ Then when I got it again, I thought, ‘What’s 42?’ are not right for ballet,” she points out—and then a long I don’t know. The persistence of objects over time never stretch exploring other types of performance. Like her ceases to amaze me.” character in Frances Ha, “I kept dancing,” she says, “I still These anecdotes may make her sound as whimsi- love dancing.” But she also took up theater in high school cal as some of her onscreen characters, like her break- in California, including stints in community theater, through role in 2012’s Frances Ha—in which she plays an which her parents encouraged. “I don’t think people think aspiring dancer whose life is upended when she’s ditched of Sacramento necessarily as a place where you can see a by her best friend—yet Gerwig is anything but. lot of theater, but there is a lot of great community theater Greta Gerwig has known she’s wanted to direct since there. I was seeing one or two plays a week, every week, for

STRIPED LONG-SLEEVED TURTLENECK IN TIKKA: JOOS TRICOT; JEANS: RACHEL COMEY; WOOL BLAZER: NO. 21; BRASS LAUTNER EARRINGS: QUARRY JEANS: RACHEL COMEY; IN TIKKA: JOOS TRICOT; STRIPED LONG-SLEEVED TURTLENECK she was in kindergarten. Although her childhood desire my entire childhood.” Eventually, she went to Barnard for

39 undergrad, and during that time she continued to act while (Timothee Chalamet), a too-cool-for-school jerk whom studying English and philosophy, subjects that would help Lady Bird longs to impress. She also struggles with embar- her later as a screenwriter directing her own work. rassment over her family’s finances; they’ve never been as “My desire to direct and my determination to direct well off as her peers, but things become even more fraught was a feeling of, ‘I’ve been given all these gifts, and I know after her father, played by the legendary playwright Tracy all those women, and I know all those professors and all Letts, loses his job. Still, Lady Bird has her sights set on life the women who came before me,’” Gerwig says. “And it’s in the big city, and she’s determined to make it happen. not good enough if I don’t do it. I’m letting them down Like Gerwig, Lady Bird grows up in Sacramento; also and I’m letting the next generation of those women down like Gerwig, she dreams of college in where because—I felt like there was a sense of the gauntlet being she can pursue her artistic dreams. However, that’s where thrown down to all of us.” the similarities ends. “I’m in every character in it, because Gerwig has picked up that gauntlet with record speed, they all came from a part of me or a part of other people who starting with a co-writing credit on 2012’s Frances Ha, touched me,” Gerwig says. Relationships between women in which she penned with her partner, writer/director Noah Lady Bird are the connective tissue. Although the lead char- Baumbach. Gerwig currently lives in Manhattan with Ba- acter dallies with boys, her relationships with her best friend umbach, whom she initially met when he cast her in his and mother carry the narrative. “The idea of who women 2010 filmGreenberg, a veritable pageant of discomfort co- are when we’re not looked at by a man, that’s fascinating to starring Ben Stiller. Baumbach split with his then-partner me,” Gerwig says. “And to be a female filmmaker, what does it Jennifer Jason Leigh after making that film, and he and mean—is there a female gaze? What does that mean? How is Gerwig started dating in 2011. She and Baumbach also co- it operative? What am I looking for on a screen that’s differ- wrote 2015’s Mistress America, in which she plays a hipster ent than what a man in my position would be looking for?” hustler who becomes friends with her stepsister-to-be, “Maybe it’s not gender,” she continues. “Maybe it’s played by Lola Kirke. And in addition to writing, she con- something else. Maybe it just has to do with personality. tinued to kill it on the acting front with memorable roles in And I don’t ever want to reduce the accomplishments Mike Mills’ , Rebecca Miller’s Mag- of female directors by putting them in the category of gie’s Plan, and Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, among others. ‘female directors.’ But…how does gender play in art- Gerwig’s early work on so-called “mumblecore” indies making? It’s fascinating, and I think we’re just starting to (a subgenre of low-budget films characterized by natu- dismantle it.”

“I like writing about women in relation to other women—mothers and daughters, friends, sisters, mentors, employees and employers, et cetera—because men don’t know what women do when they aren’t there.”

ralistic dialogue and production) required her to learn Gerwig’s scripts for Frances Ha, Mistress America, everything from how to hold a boom to editing and find- and Lady Bird all pass the Bechdel test with flying colors: ing costumes—all skills that served her well as a director. each one features lots of female characters, these charac- She also soaked up everything she could while working on ters interact with one another, and the dialogue features larger film sets. Between this sort of on-the-fly film training women talking to each other about plenty of things other and a rapturous love for movies—you can find Gerwig and than men. “I’ve consciously tried to write female charac- Baumbach haunting N.Y.C.’s art house theaters all the time, ters where their central story is not a question of whether and our conversation is peppered with references to the she will or will not end up with some dude,” she says, add- Chantal Akerman filmJeanne Dielman, and French writer/ ing, “I love those movies, I really do, and I’ll probably make directors Claire Denis and Leos Carax—Gerwig realized she one someday. But if you force yourself to find another plot, was ready to take her script for Lady Bird and fly. you’ll find there are endless narratives that don’t include Lady Bird is a classic in the making, a quintessential com- it. I like writing about women in relation to other wom- ing-of-age story that’s usually the purview of male filmmakers en—mothers and daughters, friends, sisters, mentors, em- and their boyhood stand-ins. Saoirse Ronan sparks as Chris- ployees and employers, et cetera—because men don’t know tine, aka Lady Bird, a wild-haired teen who is prone to dramat- what women do when they aren’t there. These are power- ics like throwing herself out of a moving car during a fight with ful, complicated, rich relationships that deserve their own her mother, the harried and excellent Laurie Metcalf. place in of stories we tell ourselves about Lady Bird’s senior year is rife with discoveries, from what it means to be human.” her newfound love of theater to her interest in boys like The complex humanity of women is at the forefront

Danny (Lucas Hedges), her sweet onstage co-star, and Kyle of Gerwig’s work at all times, no matter who’s behind SILK PLAID WIDE-LEG TROUSERS: NIKKI CHASIN; MULTI IN HONEY GOLD: JOOS TRICOT; SOLID PEACH LONG-SLEEVED TURTLENECK EARRINGS: QUARRY ROBE JACKET IN EMERALD: NIKKI CHASIN: BRASS HEMATITE MORETTI BELTED

40 . dec/jan 2018 . BUST 41 STRIPED LONG-SLEEVED CREWNECK: JOOS TRICOT; MIXED METAL AND ACRYLIC EARRINGS: RACHEL COMEY AND ACRYLIC MIXED METAL STRIPED LONG-SLEEVED CREWNECK: JOOS TRICOT;

42 . dec/jan 2018 . BUST the camera. And that’s no accident for the self-professed to be able to share that is good.” feminist. “I think about feminism and what it means all As we speak, it’s unclear whether anyone at the café the time, and I’m always trying to figure out how to push it notices or cares that an actor/writer/director on the rise is forward,” she says. “I wonder about what I’m still holding in their midst or if they’re doing the cool “ignore a famous back, and how much of that gets internalized—that you person” thing New Yorkers are famous for. Either way, stop yourself because it’s fucking hard for women to do we’re left in peace except for the stellar waitress who keeps what we’re not really supposed to do.” bringing us endless utensils to replace the ones we both When she’s not on set, Gerwig eschews social media and keep dropping as we gesticulate. cool events in favor of living a low-key life with Baumbach “I think I’ve always felt that getting to live in New York in N.Y.C., where she can enjoy an anonymity unavailable in was living the dream,” Gerwig muses. “For me, just being here the Hollywood bubble. “I get so much joy out of slipping by always has a quality of fulfillment. It’s wonderful that I have unnoticed. That’s a big part of how I feel I get ideas, and move been able to act and write and produce and direct. But in a way, through the world,” she explains. “What I will say is, having a the enjoyment of being in New York has always been separate partner who knows what it is that I do, and the odd require- from that. I would want to be here no matter what.” ments of the job, is very helpful, because there’s a deep un- As we wrap up our interview, Greta Gerwig takes out derstanding of what it asks of you and what it doesn’t ask of her wallet and tries to split the bill with me. “Here, let me you, and how you ride these waves of certain things working throw some stuff down,” she says, relenting only when I and other things not working. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing point out that I can write off the breakfast as a work ex- job. You’re either working for 24 hours a day, seven days a pense. Then she slips out the door into the sunshine, unno-

STRIPED SHORT-SLEEVED CREWNECK: JOOS TRICOT; JACQUARD PRINTED SKIRT: CARVEN; SILVER DISC HOOP SILVER CARVEN; JACQUARD PRINTED SKIRT: CREWNECK: JOOS TRICOT; STRIPED SHORT-SLEEVED JASPER: QUARRY EARRINGS: ERIN CONSIDINE; WHITE BRONZE CUFF WITH DALMATION week, or there’s nothing. Which is an odd combination, and ticed, just the way she likes it.

43 Female fans around the world are downright obsessed with Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s hit comedy series Broad City. Here, the pair gets real about Girls, plays “Fuck/Marry/Kill,” and recalls how Amy Poehler made them freak out

38 . feb/mar 2015 . BUST By Bridgette Miller Photographed by Danielle St. Laurent

Styling by kemal harris • Makeup by sarah eagan Hair by marcel dagenais for Oribe Hair Care • Prop styling by chelsea maruskin hand lettering by cristina martinez

39 bbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer they wanted it to be based on their lives as young women are two of comedy’s hottest stars, and in New York navigating a surfeit of awkward situations, they are about to drive a convertible but they needed the perfect name for the project. Glazer off a cliff. Rather, they are sitting in a recalls, “Abbi was spitting out names for it, and she said, borrowed convertible and they are not ‘Broad City,’ and I was like, ‘Fuck! That’s awesome.’ And driving it at all, especially not off any she was like, ‘OK, let’s keep going, though, just to make cliffs, because it is parked in a studio. Still, as sure…Broadville? Girl City? Titstown?’ And then we were they re-enact the iconic final scene ofThelma & Louise for like, ‘No, Broad City. Yeah!’” Later, I look up the history ourA photographer, their hands clasped together and raised of the term “broad” and come across an entry from Jane in the air, I get a bit of a lump in my throat. The characters Mills’ Womanwords: A Dictionary of Words About Women that Jacobson, 30, and Glazer, 27, play on their breakout that defines a broad as “a woman who is liberal, tolerant, Comedy Central hit Broad City, while exaggerated ver- unconfined, and not limited or narrow in scope.” That sions of themselves, are not exactly aspirational. The pair certainly applies to these broads, whose early YouTube of- are relatable, sure, and no doubt a refreshing change of ferings were short on time (the first episode ofBroad City pace for TV, with their endearing affinity for sex, weed, Lil’ clocked in at just two minutes) and production values, but Wayne, and each other; but here in this studio, in front of not on charm. Like Elaine Benes before them, Abbi and this green screen that someone will Photoshop a desert Ilana made the often-dubious day-to-day decisions of a onto later, the power of their friendship feels totally genu- New York lady look downright hilarious as they quickly ine and very strong. escalated in absurdity, like the episode in which Ilana Later, after the convertible has pulled away and the girls started hooking up with a guy just so she could use the have traded the day’s wardrobe of light-wash denim and washer and dryer at his apartment. dirt for clean faces and their own clothes, Glazer will tell But to compare Broad City to Seinfeld—or, as is more me what Jacobson told her while they were shooting that often the case these days, Lena Dunham’s Girls—would be moment: “This is like what we did.” I know she doesn’t reductive. When the expanded TV version of Broad City mean that they went out together in a blaze of glory after first premiered on Comedy Central in January 2014, in a crime spree and an epic standoff with law enforcement. the same hour as the network’s wildly popular Workahol- But I get it—it’s been a wild ride, and they couldn’t have ics, the bro-iest of the Workaholics fanbase were quick to done it without each other. Numerous times throughout accuse the newer show of simply inserting women into the discussion that follows, both Glazer and Jacobson the proven formula of feckless friends minus money plus mention how surreal it is to be where they are; indeed, drugs divided by ridiculous plot = success by way of failure. when it comes to origin stories, theirs is a pretty great one. But there is something different aboutBroad City, which “I thought she was Maeby from Arrested Develop- blends whip-smart subtlety with off-the-wall physical ment,” says Jacobson about the first time she met Glazer, comedy in a way that feels unlike anything else we’ve seen at a practice for their improv team. The two were taking young women do on television. Its imperfect-but-proud, classes at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, strangely empowered female protagonists are a breath of the storied comedy training school co-founded by Amy , even when that air is subsequently exhaled with Poehler, and according to Jacobson, “it didn’t seem crazy the familiar cough of a 20-something stoner hotboxing that [] would be on an improv team.” After before another shift at her crappy job. practice, while hanging out at a bar, Jacobson realized Asking Jacobson and Glazer how they really feel about that Glazer was not, in fact, starring on one of the funniest all those Girls comparisons has been done a million times television shows ever (not yet, anyway), but she was still by now, so when it comes up, I try not to linger on it, pretty cool. Jacobson snaps her fingers to demonstrate though I do note how strange and unfair it seems that crit- how the two hit it off that night. “We were quick friends,” ics so often praise one show by putting down the other. “I she says. “Immediate friends.” Glazer nods. “I met her, and read a piece the other day that called Broad City ‘the show I was like, ‘Yup.’ It was just solid.” that Girls would be if it were funny’ in its opening line,” I The two palled around for a couple of years before de- mention. “That just seems unnecessary and lazy to me.” ciding to start a Web series together in 2009. They knew Jacobson sighs. “It’s so insane,” she says. “I mean,

40 . feb/mar 2015 . BUST “We were quick friends, immediate friends. I met her, and I was like, ‘Yup.’ It was just solid.” age t goe s aro u nd come vin all clo t hing: wha

41 42 . feb/mar 2015 . BUST “Maybe that’s part of feminism− showing real women versus what we had seen on TV for so long.”

whatever; people can compare them. I’m just a little over feminism—showing real women versus what we had seen that, because it’s like, What? They’re not trying to be the on TV for so long.” same show at all. And they show really different forms of “Even dudes aren’t represented in a real way, though,” friendship. I really love Girls. And I’ve had those kinds of Glazer says. “Dudes on TV are really hot, but they’re con- friendships, and I love watching it because I’m like, ‘Oh, I sidered ‘normal guys.’ You know Dan on ? He’s a nor- know that.’” mal guy on TV. But [, the actor who plays him] Glazer calls both shows “legitimate and relatable repre- is hot. Jason Bateman on is fucking sentations.” She continues, “With TV and film, so often shit hot. But he’s supposed to be like, an average guy. Nothing’s is thrust upon people like, ‘This is you, right?! This relates real on TV.” to you!’ And, well, what if it doesn’t? It so rarely does. It’s That sentiment rings especially true when it comes to a real privilege to be on the creation side of it, and it’s also Glazer and Jacobson, who very clearly only play slackers just so strange. Our whole lives, we’re consuming, consum- on television. “I have this problem where I need to be so ing, consuming, and now we’re putting stuff out to be con- completely crazy-stressed busy,” Jacobson tells me when sumed; it’s bizarre. It feels really important to us—we do I ask what they do when they’re not really, really busy. “I take what we represent very seriously. Our goal in general need to write lists of things I have to do, and I have to have is inclusion. Unless you’re, like, a fucking asshole. Then you my next thing ready, and I’m trying to work on this other don’t need to be at the party.” project, and it’s like, what is fucking wrong with me? That’s my way of relaxing. All I want is, like, a day to work on this other thing. I don’t want to be like that.” his leads me to the portion of every BUST interview “We’re…it’s not competitive as much as it is, like, mutu- where we ask the person appearing on the cover of ally motivating,” Glazer says. “We motivate each other the magazine if she’s a feminist. In this case, how- and inspire each other to work, but we don’t inspire each ever, I don’t really have to ask, because Glazer and other enough to chill the fuck out. Maybe we will in, like, Jacobson have already said that they are feminists, our 40s?” Tmost notably at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards “I get this natural high from finishing something,” Ja- last June when PopSugar asked if they were “cool with” cobson says, and Glazer nods enthusiastically as Jacobson the word. referred to Broad City’s expounds on how much she loves making charts and lists, “sneak-attack feminism” back when it was still a Web se- a trait that has served her well ever since she was an ambi- ries, and other sources have called them “femininjas.” So tious kid stealing chores away from her brother to make I’m curious about just how conscious they are of feminist more money. issues when writing. It’s incredibly inspiring to hear two smart, successful “When we sit down in the writers’ room,” says - young women talk about their work with such passion, but son, “there’s not an agenda. But we hire people who have that doesn’t mean I don’t also want to play “Fuck/Marry/ the same….” Kill” with them. Glazer and Jacobson often incorporate “Ethics,” Glazer interjects. several rounds of the game into their monthly at “…As us,” Jacobson finishes. “So everyone we hire on our UCB; when I go to see the show a few weeks after our inter- show is a feminist, male or female, and it’s never an issue. view, they play with special guest Susie Essman (Curb Your The writers’ room is so difficult in terms of coming up with Enthusiasm) who shrieks, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” at most of the stories, and keeping it fresh and new and funny, that, like, options presented to her. “Alright,” I posit. “Fuck/Marry/ we don’t even want to have to deal with that ever. So it’s Kill: the original Ghostbusters.” just always there. We are two women, and we based [the “OK,” Glazer says, thinking hard. “There’s Jeff Goldblum, show] on ourselves, and we, without a doubt, are feminists, Harold Ramis….” so the show is seen in that way.” “Jeff Goldblum was not inGhostbusters ,” I remind her, “When we write for these characters,” Jacobson con- and we all crack up. tinues, “who are exaggerated versions of ourselves, I think Glazer recalls that Ernie Hudson was hot (after first the thing that we talk about the most is like, well; What checking with me to make sure he wasn’t Danny Glover), would we really do? It’s just real. And maybe that’s part of while Jacobson says there’s “just something about

43 .” even bigger than when she agreed to executive produce. Then Glazer wonders aloud, “What’s up with his dick?” We were freaking out. The way we reacted was as if we and this sets us off on a tangent about sexy senior citizens. had sold the show.” Glazer reveals that her boyfriend’s uncle is a total hottie, “When she said that she would do the Web series,” the kind of geriatric gentleman you’d actually want to bang Glazer says, “it was almost like we knew, in our hearts, that instead of just admire. (“It’s like, Sidney Poitier is a gor- we were gonna make the show.” She pauses, then adds, geous older man,” she explains, “but you’re not actually “We’re lucky that we have each other. If we were alone, I going to fuck him.”) I admit that I had a crush on Diagnosis don’t know if we’d be repeating this as much and knowing Murder-era Dick Van Dyke as an adolescent. “Is he still… our own personal history as well. It’s nice. It’s kind of like with us?” Glazer asks. I confirm that he is, and she re- having a sibling. You’re like, ‘Remember when Grandma sponds, “I’m glad. He got ill recently; he doesn’t do the New did that? That was weird.’” Year’s Eve thing anymore.” “Lucky” seems to be the word that is uttered most often “No, that’s Dick Clark!” Jacobson corrects her. throughout the course of our conversation, but it’s obvious “And Dick Clark is dead,” I add. that it’s not just luck that has landed the pair where they To help her process the difference between the two are. They’re ambitious and they possess a kind of natural Dicks, Jacobson starts singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” Van appeal that seems to radiate from their bodies, whether Dyke’s chimney sweep song from Mary Poppins, with an they’re dancing super hard to Black Box’s “Everybody, impressive Cockney accent. Then we swerve back to the Everybody” at UCB as a pre-show warm-up or slouching fuckability of non-Ghostbuster Jeff Goldblum (“You could in their chairs. They are also generous, especially to fellow totally hit that,” Jacobson assures me) before confirming comic actors (UCB alum make frequent guest appearances that the game has run its course. on the show) and to other women (the live show I caught featured a video by sketch writer Celeste Ballard, and a standup set by The Daily Show’s Jena Friedman). When hen I ask the pair to describe their earliest big I tell them how proud my UCB friends are of them, they Oprah-style “A-ha! moment” in terms of their visibly swoon. “That is so awesome,” Jacobson responds. career, they first make gestures of reverence at “That’s the best thing that we can hear, because we’re very the mention of Winfrey. “I’ve been waiting to conscious of that.” talk about Oprah,” Jacobson says. (On Broad “The timeline trips me out,” Glazer says of their rise to CityW, The Queen of All Media is a major source of inspira- fame. “When I think about myself 10 years ago, 18-year- tion for Abbi—her character reveals an Oprah portrait old me, and even two years ago, I think—was that real? It’s tattoo in the episode “Hurricane Wanda.”) “There are a crazy to get older, period. It’s weird. Your foresight grows.” bunch, actually,” she continues. “When we put out our Jacobson grins. “I thought you were gonna say….” first video, , who now writes for and directs “FORESKIN!” we all exclaim in unison. For what seems the show, wrote us to say, ‘This is something. I love what like the billionth time in our one-hour hangout, the ladies you guys are doing. I just want you to know that.’ She was of Broad City have made me laugh so hard I snort. We’ve someone we respected, and having her respond was really covered a lot of ground today, and I feel like I’ve really got- big for the Web series continuing. I think the biggest Aha! ten to know Jacobson and Glazer. But there’s one more moment, though, was when we had been doing the Web thing I need to find out, and that is which Muppets they series for, like, a year and a half, and we had also written a would have sex with. pilot and were planning on going to L.A. with it. We were “Gonzo is the one with the nose?” Jacobson asks, noting discussing the season finale [of the Web series] and we apologetically that she is “not a Muppet lady.” were like, ‘Let’s get somebody big to be in it. Let’s get some “His nose is a dildo,” Glazer says frankly, before reveal- celebrity we could never get.’ So we reached out, through a ing that she would “be Janice and fuck Animal.” friend, to Amy Poehler.” “Kermit’s a Muppet, right?” Jacobson asks. If you’re a fan of the show, you know how the rest “Kermit is dope,” Glazer responds, nodding. “Kermit is of that story goes. Poehler became the executive pro- husband material.” ducer of Broad City on Comedy Central (and also made “I think I’d have a degrading three-way with Statler and a memorable appearance in the first season finale as Waldorf,” I offer. a bitter chef fighting with her waiter boyfriend at the “That would be degrading,” Glazer says, laughing. fancy restaurant where Abbi and Ilana go to celebrate I ask Glazer how she feels about Sam the Eagle and she Abbi’s birthday). When she agreed to a cameo on the takes a moment to think it over. “He’s, like, mean-hot,” Web series, though—after letting the girls know she had, she observes, “which I’m not usually into. But if it’s a pup- in fact, seen the Web series—Jacobson says, “That was pet, it’s fine.”

44 . feb/mar 2015 . BUST “We’re lucky that we have each other. It’s kind of like having a sibling.”

45