The Vancouver Conversations Part One: A Few wOw Women Remember Traumas and Dramas in High School, First Jobs, First Children

Seated above from left to right are Cynthia McFadden, Mary Wells, Lesley Stahl, Joni Evans and Liz Smith.

Editor’s Note: Cynthia McFadden, Mary Wells, Lesley Stahl, Joni Evans and Liz Smith convened on Mary Wells’s yacht, Strangelove, in Vancouver for a glorious summer weekend of good friends and great conversation. Here’s what they talked about …

JONI: Hey, Liz, are you still the same person you were in high school?

LIZ: You’ve gotta be kidding. I mean that scrawny little know-nothing, aspiring, wannabe kid who would have done anything to bring attention on herself. You still think I’m that same person? I’m still the same. But in the process I became a snob, a semi-intellectual closet case, you know. All kinds of things happened to me that have been magical and wonderful. I feel much better than I felt in 1936 when I was reading Gone With the Wind.

JONI: But you are still the same person. You still have that, “I’m going to be somebody.”

LIZ: You know, I hate to be so trite, but going to the University of Texas did a lot for me. It changed me a lot. It sort of translated me from nothing into where I felt I had the equivalent of an Erasmus High School education, and so I could go on to New York and try to be somebody. I don’t think that would have happened without going to U.T.

JONI: Was that because you excelled in college?

LIZ: No, I just learned a lot and learned what I didn’t know and had wonderful experiences. I am the luckiest person in the world. I have been really lucky all my life. I showed up, like Woody Allen.

LESLEY: Women say they’re lucky and men don’t say that. Men say they made their lives.

LIZ: Well, I’ve worked hard. But I felt I … you know what? I was just translated up and up and up by working with fantastic men. I have only worked, really, in my whole life with one woman, Helen Gurley Brown. And that was late in my life, when I thought I was smarter than she was.

JONI: Were you?

LIZ: No. But, I don’t think that counted. It was men who translated me and pushed me to excel.

LESLEY: But when you came along there weren’t women you could work for. There were only men anyway.

LIZ: Yes. Well I worked for great men [Mike Wallace, Dave Garroway, Igor Cassini, Allen Funt].

CYNTHIA: You know what? I’m with Thomas Jefferson on that point. It’s amazing how the harder I work, the luckier I become. You know, it’s the truth. And of course there’s luck. It’s the person you meet that you would never have met who actually thinks maybe you have something or whatever. Of course there’s luck involved. But honestly, without the hard work and determination, the accomplishment and ability to achieve that, you know, you can’t turn the luck into anything but —

LIZ: Oh, well, let’s face it. I had a lot of charm and … and I was very cute when I was young.

MARY: When I started in work, everybody I worked for was a woman.

CYNTHIA: You had female bosses?

MARY: I went to New York to school and then everybody I worked for in New York and New Jersey, they were all women.

LESLEY: I thought you were the first woman boss in advertising.

MARY: No. No, I was the first woman that ever took an advertising agency public. I’m the first woman that ever was on the New York Stock Exchange. But there were lots of women in advertising.

LIZ: Mary, it was you who broke the glass ceiling, really, for all times.

MARY: That may be. But the women I worked for were tough babes and they were smart and they were really, really forceful. The woman running Macy’s, the woman running McCann Erickson, the woman running Doyle Dane Bernbach under Bill Bernbach. I mean, they ran the show. They were fabulous. They were great.