Archive of Our Own

By E.B. Wexler

There are women whose beauty is immediately understandable. The eye takes in the face, the dress, the figure, the practiced smile, and the mind puts everything neatly into its proper drawer. Beautiful woman. Movie star. Model. Society wife. The judgment may be admiring, even breathless, but it remains manageable. Then there is Lucille Robinson, who has spent much of her adult life making otherwise sensible women discover that the drawer system was badly designed.

The problem became especially acute in Los Angeles this spring, when Robinson accompanied her wife, Phoebe Whitford, to what was ostensibly one of the film industry’s important evenings. Whitford had work to do. Robinson did not. She was there as a guest, a spouse, a woman with no award to present and no speech to make, and yet by the time she had crossed the carpet in a sea-green gown, five-inch heels and an upswept arrangement of blond hair secured at either side with small seashell clips, a substantial portion of the arrival coverage had stopped behaving as though anybody else had turned up.

This may sound like the beginning of a fashion column. It is not, although Robinson gave fashion writers enough material to keep them occupied for a week.

She is very tall. This is hardly news. Newspapers have been calling her six foot four for years, an estimate that has acquired the bureaucratic solidity of something nobody remembers measuring in the first place. In the heels she wore that evening, she passed seven feet with such ease that more than one photographer could be seen quietly reconsidering the published arithmetic. The gown was the sort of blue-green that changed its allegiance according to the light, greener when she stood still, bluer when she moved. It did not attempt to disguise her height, break up her length or perform any of the tricks tall women are routinely advised to perform so that the rest of the room may recover emotionally. Its entire argument appeared to be that Lucille Robinson was already Lucille Robinson and that improvement would therefore consist primarily of excellent tailoring.

The hair completed the offense.

Robinson wore it up, not flattened, not carefully restrained in deference to the ceiling, but arranged with height and softness around the crown, the two pale seashells sitting against it like deliberately modest punctuation marks. It exposed her neck, shoulders and face, which in photographs created an impression of almost absurd physical confidence. She stood with one hand on her hip, smiling toward the photographers without giving them the coy over-the-shoulder arrangement women are still expected to perform whenever a camera discovers they possess a body. She looked directly pleased to be there.

Several women around this reporter stopped talking.

One sighed.

Another, who had spent the previous twenty minutes describing herself as immune to celebrity nonsense, said something that cannot be printed in *Marquee* without changing the magazine’s postal classification.

This reporter is heterosexual.

That sentence has become unexpectedly useful during the past several years.

It is useful because there is now a particular species of American female conversation that begins with a woman establishing, sometimes unnecessarily, that she likes men, and ends with her saying something about Lucille Robinson that suggests this preference may contain one remarkably tall exception.

There are enough such women that the phenomenon has acquired a name.

“Lez for Lucille.”

Nobody appears certain who coined it. Several people claim to have heard it first in New York. Someone at a Los Angeles radio station insists it began among women working in television production. A Washington correspondent swears congressional secretaries were using it years ago, although Washington correspondents will claim the Potomac invented anything if given sufficient coffee. The expression can be serious or playful depending upon the woman using it. For some it means nothing more complicated than admitting that Robinson is an unusually compelling woman and enjoying the joke of one’s own susceptibility. For others, the joking tone has provided safe cover for a more genuine reconsideration of what they are capable of wanting.

That distinction matters.

It would be silly, and more than a little insulting, to suggest that one beautiful lesbian has single-handedly reorganized American sexuality. Robinson herself would probably dislike the idea. She has never presented her personal life as a recruitment drive, and there is something peculiarly male in the assumption that a lesbian woman must secretly exist to tempt heterosexual women out of their designated lanes. Yet “Lez for Lucille” has persisted because it describes something larger than one celebrity crush. American women are speaking about attraction with an openness that would have been difficult to imagine twenty years ago, and they are increasingly willing to admit that the neat categories printed on official forms do not always describe every feeling they have ever had.

A woman may remain straight and still acknowledge that another woman is beautiful enough to make her stare.

Another may discover that what she once regarded as admiration is not entirely admiration.

Another may realize that the word bisexual describes her better than the word she has been using.

Another may simply laugh, say Lucille Robinson is the exception, and go home happily to her husband.

The significant change is not that every woman who says it means the same thing. The significant change is that women are saying it at all.

Robinson has become an unusually visible focus for that change because she combines physical glamour with something that celebrity culture often has considerable trouble manufacturing: the impression of a complete adult personality.

It is easy to understand why photographs of her circulate. It is harder to explain why women who have met her tend to talk about the meeting longer than women who have merely seen the photographs.

Robinson does not possess the frantic social brightness that often passes for charm in public life. She does not appear to enter a room asking silently whether everybody likes her. Her manner is warmer than her photographs sometimes suggest, but the warmth comes without the faint pleading quality of professional charisma. She listens. Not the nodding, preparatory listening practiced by people waiting for their own turn to speak, but the increasingly rare kind in which the other person can actually see the conversation being retained.

A costume assistant who encountered her at a benefit several years ago remembered Robinson asking about her mother’s surgery. Six months later, at an unrelated event, Robinson asked how the mother had recovered.

The assistant had forgotten telling her.

Robinson had not.

A driver who worked with the Whitford household for several weeks remembered that Robinson learned the names of his children within days and subsequently asked which one had finally made the school baseball team. A nurse who knew her during an earlier period described her as “the sort of person who notices whether someone has eaten.” A photographer who had expected difficulty arranging a portrait because of Robinson’s height instead found her asking what position would make his work easiest.

These are not heroic acts. Robinson would probably object to their being listed as evidence of anything exceptional. They matter precisely because they are ordinary acts of attention, and ordinary acts of attention become conspicuous when performed consistently by somebody famous enough to avoid them.

Her reserve has also been repeatedly mistaken for severity. Robinson has a face that settles naturally into concentration, and at her height, concentration can acquire unfairly intimidating dimensions. A person seeing her across a room may expect frost and receive instead a quiet question about whether the air-conditioning is too cold. She has a dry sense of humor rather than a performative one, and it tends to emerge most clearly when she is comfortable enough not to care whether strangers realize she has made a joke.

The contradiction is part of the appeal. Robinson can look formidable without behaving imperiously. She can be physically imposing without appearing obsessed with being imposing. She possesses the authority of someone who has been required to remain useful under difficult circumstances and no longer mistakes noise for strength.

Her history explains much of this without reducing her to it. She came from Cork, served as a Navy nurse during the war, built an adult life in the United States, raised a family, moved through public attention without becoming visibly addicted to it and eventually became one half of one of the most scrutinized marriages in American political life.

It is worth handling that last point with some care.

Phoebe Whitford is Robinson’s second spouse.

That fact has occasionally been presented in profiles with the breathless tone reserved for hidden scandal, which seems both unnecessary and discourteous. Robinson had a life before Whitford. So did Whitford before Robinson. Adults arrive at later relationships carrying history. Second marriages are hardly exotic in America, even if the second marriage in this case happens to involve one of the country’s best-known political women and a former Irish nurse who can cause an entire press line to forget its assignments simply by putting on shoes.

Nothing in Robinson’s public manner suggests embarrassment about the earlier chapter, nor does she appear interested in turning it into entertainment. Those close enough to the family describe the matter as part of her biography rather than a wound she carries theatrically into every room. Her marriage to Whitford belongs to the present because that is where they live, not because everything before it has been erased.

The distinction is especially important because Robinson’s appeal rests partly upon the sense that she has actually lived.

She does not resemble the peculiar American ideal of the adult woman preserved indefinitely at twenty-seven. There is experience in her face, and she does not appear interested in removing it. Her smile changes her dramatically because it arrives across features that look equally plausible in seriousness. She can appear elegant, maternal, intimidating, amused, tired, intensely attentive or almost mischievous without seeming to change character between them.

She is also a grandmother.

This appears to cause some difficulty for people who prefer their fantasies uncomplicated.

The family does not parade its youngest members through the press, although the existence of Robinson’s granddaughters is hardly secret. Dana and Holly are known names to anybody who follows the family closely, while another granddaughter, Veronika, has remained considerably farther from public attention. Robinson herself does not appear to regard grandmotherhood as a contradiction of glamour, presumably because she has the advantage of not being employed by a magazine attempting to invent one.

The fascination with glamorous grandmothers says considerably more about the people doing the fascinating than about Robinson. American culture has developed an odd habit of acting as though becoming somebody’s grandmother requires a woman to surrender not only sexuality but recognizable personhood. The approved grandmother is meant to materialize fully formed in a cardigan, carrying cookies and possessing no evidence that she has ever been desired by anybody.

Lucille Robinson ruins the arrangement.

She can speak affectionately about family and then appear at an evening event in a gown cut close enough through the waist to cause three heterosexual women in the press section to forget what they were discussing. She can behave with unmistakable maternal patience toward younger relatives without transforming herself into a cultural symbol of sexlessness. She can be a grandmother and still be the woman Phoebe Whitford looks at as though somebody has unexpectedly presented her with the moon.

Whitford’s reaction to Robinson deserves its own study.

Political marriages are often photographed so aggressively that the public learns to recognize the standard poses before the couples themselves have finished assuming them: the hand at the elbow, the shared laugh for photographers, the supportive glance staged at exactly the right moment. Whitford and Robinson certainly know how to stand for a camera. They have had enough practice.

Yet there are photographs of Whitford looking at Robinson in which the professional machinery falls away completely.

One appeared after this spring’s Los Angeles appearance. Robinson was facing the photographers, one hand resting at her hip, while Whitford had turned slightly toward her. Whitford was not smiling for the cameras because she did not seem aware of them. She was looking upward at her wife with an expression of uncomplicated delight.

For a woman famous for controlling rooms, Whitford looked thoroughly conquered.

One sympathizes.

What makes Robinson particularly dangerous to women who insist upon retaining heterosexual credentials is that the attraction does not end when she opens her mouth.

There are beautiful public figures whose mystique benefits enormously from distance. Ten minutes of conversation can restore the population to emotional stability. Robinson appears to have the opposite problem. People who work around her tend to become more enthusiastic.

She is intelligent without making intelligence into an announcement. Her nursing background gave her a practical relationship with crisis that has remained evident long after she stopped working in hospital wards. People around the Whitford household describe her as difficult to rattle, which is not the same thing as being emotionally cold. Robinson is capable of strong feeling but does not appear to believe that intensity must be performed at maximum volume in order to count.

Her patience has limits, however, and nothing seems to test them more reliably than repetitive questions about her height.

This reporter made the strategic decision not to ask where Robinson buys trousers.

It may have saved a life.

Tall women will understand the reason immediately. Every exceptionally tall woman in America has apparently been assigned the task of explaining clothing manufacture to strangers. Robinson has been asked about sleeves, shoes, beds, cars, doorways, stockings and presumably the dimensions of bathtubs often enough to qualify for a government pension in patience. She does not seem ashamed of her height in the slightest. The boredom is directed at the questions, not the body.

That distinction was obvious in Los Angeles.

A woman uncomfortable with being extraordinarily tall does not voluntarily put herself in five-inch heels before walking into one of the most heavily photographed gatherings in the country.

Robinson did exactly that and then added volume to her hair.

There was almost something instructional about it, although she was not attempting to instruct anybody. Women are subjected from adolescence onward to an elaborate system of correction. Tall women are advised how to look shorter. Short women are taught how to appear taller. Broad women are told to narrow themselves. Thin women are told where to add shape. Older women are taught which features must now be hidden. Every body arrives accompanied by somebody prepared to explain how it ought to impersonate another one.

Robinson’s approach appears simpler.

She puts clothes on Lucille Robinson.

The result on that particular evening was not merely glamorous but coherent. The dress did not argue with her body. The shoes did not apologize for it. The hair did not attempt to erase it. Even the seashell clips, an eccentric detail on paper, worked because they were small enough to reward a closer look rather than shouting from across the carpet. Robinson smiled more than usual for the cameras, and the smile softened the scale of her without reducing it.

She looked happy.

This turns out to be devastating.

A considerable portion of female beauty culture depends upon effort being visible enough to inspire aspiration but concealed enough to maintain fantasy. Robinson seemed simply comfortable. She did not have the brittle alertness of somebody wondering whether every photograph was catching the correct angle. When photographers asked her to turn, she turned. When they asked her to hold the pose, she held it. When one apparently asked whether she might remove a wrap so the dress could be seen more clearly, she did so without making the interaction feel like a royal favor.

Then there is the voice.

Robinson’s accent has changed over decades in America without disappearing. Cork remains present, particularly in certain vowels and whenever she speaks quickly. She has the low, controlled vocal quality common to people accustomed to being heard without having to shout. Combined with the height, it can create an initially imposing effect that vanishes surprisingly quickly when she becomes amused.

Women notice the voice.

One ought to admit these things if one is going to write an article with any integrity.

This reporter noticed the voice.

She also noticed the hands, which are large without being coarse, and the way Robinson bends slightly from the waist rather than hunching when listening to someone much shorter. She does not fold herself down continuously, but she will adjust when proximity makes it sensible. This reporter also noticed, purely in the service of journalism, that the sea-green gown left Robinson’s shoulders uncovered.

There comes a point at which professional objectivity becomes an unnecessarily cruel standard.

“Lez for Lucille” exists somewhere in that gap between joke and confession.

For this reporter, it remains a joke in the technical sense. Men continue to be of interest. There has been no midnight revelation, no dramatic reorganization of the personal filing system and no need to telephone former boyfriends with explanatory amendments. Yet there is also no point pretending that Robinson’s appeal registers in some purely abstract category called appreciation.

She is attractive.

Very attractive.

The more interesting question is why so many straight women are now willing to say so in language once reserved for men.

The answer is partly Robinson and partly the country around her.

Female desire has spent generations being treated as a reaction rather than a force in its own right. Women were expected to be desirable while maintaining an oddly theoretical relationship with desire themselves. A heterosexual woman could admire another woman’s dress, hair or beauty, but there were strict linguistic boundaries around the intensity of that admiration. Cross them, and somebody would begin policing definitions.

Those boundaries are weakening.

Some of that change comes from gay and lesbian Americans refusing invisibility. Some comes from younger women who have inherited fewer reasons to panic at ambiguity. Some comes from bisexual women insisting that attraction need not obey the either-or architecture imposed upon it. Some comes simply from women becoming more comfortable saying what they see.

Robinson happens to be standing directly in the middle of that cultural shift, seven feet tall in heels and therefore unusually difficult to overlook.

Her being openly lesbian matters. So does her marriage.

If Robinson were merely an unattached glamorous woman onto whom heterosexual female fans could project a theoretical exception, the phenomenon would be easier to dismiss as fantasy. But Robinson is not coded, ambiguous or coyly marketed. She loves women. She is married to a woman. The woman is Phoebe Whitford, who does not appear inclined to share her for the sake of sociological research.

That clarity gives “Lez for Lucille” its particular charge.

The joke acknowledges that the object of admiration is not performing heterosexual availability. Robinson is not flirting with female fans in order to sell records, films or perfume. She is not presenting lesbianism as an exotic accessory. She is simply living openly enough that women admiring her must encounter the fact alongside the attraction.

For some women that encounter changes nothing.

For others, apparently, it changes quite a lot.

Letters to women’s magazines over the past several years have contained variations on the same confession. A reader describes herself as married, straight and perfectly content, then admits an inexplicable fascination with Robinson. Another writes that Robinson was the first woman she ever consciously found sexually attractive and that the realization eventually helped her recognize attraction to other women. Another insists she would never actually pursue a woman but would “make an exception if Mrs. Robinson asked,” a hypothetical made considerably safer by the near-certainty that Mrs. Robinson will not.

The playful examples should not obscure the serious ones.

A woman who discovers bisexuality at forty because an impossible celebrity crush gave her permission to examine a feeling is not playing a game. A woman who has always known she was lesbian but first saw an adult lesbian relationship presented publicly without shame may attach meaning to Robinson that has little to do with glamour. A straight woman who simply enjoys finding another woman beautiful has also gained something if she no longer feels required to deny the obvious.

The speed of the change can be startling.

Ten or fifteen years ago, a mainstream celebrity magazine would have treated widespread female attraction to an openly lesbian woman either as scandal or comedy. Today the comedy remains, because human beings quite sensibly joke about being overwhelmed by attractive people, but the scandal has diminished. “Lez for Lucille” can be silly, affectionate, earnest, exploratory or deeply personal, and the fact that all of those meanings can coexist in ordinary conversation says more about changing American sexuality than another hundred solemn television panels probably could.

Robinson herself has never seemed particularly interested in becoming a symbol for anybody’s orientation.

That may be one reason she works so effectively as one.

She does not lecture women about what their attraction means. She does not appear to regard every admiring straight woman as secretly lesbian, which would merely reproduce the same rigid thinking from the opposite direction. Those who have raised the subject around her describe amusement rather than evangelism. Robinson seems willing to accept that people know themselves imperfectly and arrive at conclusions in their own time.

This tolerance reflects a broader quality repeatedly mentioned by people who know her: she is difficult to impress with categories when there is a person standing in front of her.

Her nursing years likely contributed to that. Bodies become less theoretical when one has spent enough time caring for them. Illness, childbirth, injury, exhaustion and death have a way of burning through decorative assumptions about dignity. Robinson’s manner still contains something clinical in the best sense: she tends to address what is actually happening rather than what everybody has agreed ought to be happening.

That pragmatism is visible in family life as well.

Public fascination with the Whitford-Robinson household has sometimes made it sound like an endless political salon populated entirely by famous adults. In reality, Robinson’s world includes children, grandchildren, ordinary meals, private worries and the domestic logistics that persist regardless of newspaper attention. Becoming a grandmother has apparently delighted her without changing her basic habits or persuading her that she must now behave like an illustration on a greeting card.

Those who have seen Robinson with younger members of the family describe a woman less imposing than careful. Her size is unavoidable, but she uses it gently. She has the physical ease of someone who has spent decades around children and knows that small people do not require adult fussing every time they climb onto furniture. She is affectionate without smothering, attentive without turning every interaction into a lesson and protective without confusing protection with ownership.

Again, none of this should be surprising.

Yet celebrity culture repeatedly behaves as though beauty, sexuality, intelligence, maternal affection and age are competing departments from which a woman must choose one or two.

Robinson insists upon being inconveniently whole.

She can be the war nurse and the glamorous spouse, the immigrant and the American public figure, the mother and grandmother, the lesbian woman and the object of heterosexual female fascination, the person capable of intimidating a room and the person who remembers somebody’s mother had surgery.

The physical details become more compelling because they belong to that larger person.

Her height would be remarkable on anybody. On Robinson it becomes part of an accumulated impression of scale without excess. She does not speak loudly to compensate for it. She does not exaggerate gestures. She is not one of those tall people who seem perpetually conscious that they are visible. She stands where she stands.

That composure may be the true source of the obsession.

Beauty attracts attention. Comfort with oneself keeps it.

There was a moment during the Los Angeles evening when Robinson had finished posing alone and Whitford crossed toward her between obligations. The photographers immediately began shouting for the two women together. Robinson looked down, Whitford looked up, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with the cameras.

It was not a grand gesture.

Whitford touched Robinson at the waist. Robinson’s expression changed slightly. Whitford said something that could not be heard from the press area. Robinson smiled in a way she had not smiled for the photographers.

The women watching noticed.

Of course they noticed.

For all the attention Robinson receives from women who joke about defecting from heterosexuality, the most compelling fact about her may be that she appears profoundly unavailable in the most emotionally satisfying possible way. She is not unavailable because she is aloof, because she despises admirers or because celebrity has sealed her inside a private fortress. She is unavailable because she is visibly in love.

There is something almost unfair about being that attractive and that happily married.

Phoebe Whitford, for her part, seems to understand the scale of her good fortune.

Whitford has never been shy about admiring Robinson. People close to the couple describe her attraction with affectionate resignation, as though everybody has accepted that there are certain outfits in which Lucille will cause Phoebe to temporarily lose interest in whatever serious matter was being discussed. The five-inch heels appear to belong to this category.

One can hardly blame her.

Robinson in ordinary shoes is imposing enough. Robinson in five-inch heels reaches a height that belongs more naturally to professional basketball centers than society photographs, yet she somehow makes the result look elegant rather than athletic. The gown’s long fall helped, but clothes cannot manufacture carriage. Robinson walked normally. She did not mince to protect the shoes or sway theatrically to emphasize them. The effect depended upon the absurd fact that seven feet of woman was moving through a crowd as though this were the least interesting fact about her.

Whitford looked delighted every time she saw her.

There is no evidence she recovered.

This reporter briefly considered interviewing Whitford about the broader cultural phenomenon of women developing inconvenient feelings for her wife.

Professional judgment prevailed.

There are lines journalism should not cross, particularly when the former president in question owns firearms.

More seriously, the public affection surrounding Robinson deserves better than reducing her marriage to a punch line. Whitford and Robinson have endured the peculiar indignities reserved for same-sex couples in public life: invasive curiosity disguised as concern, demands to explain domestic arrangements nobody would ask heterosexual spouses to justify, speculation about who plays which role and the persistent assumption that openness entitles strangers to intimacy.

Their marriage has survived by appearing remarkably uninterested in these invitations.

Robinson does not seem to require the public to understand every detail of her life before she is allowed to live it. Whitford, who spent enough years in politics to understand the futility of satisfying everybody, appears equally unwilling to conduct her marriage as a national referendum.

That confidence has consequences beyond them.

A generation of Americans has now seen two women appear publicly as spouses often enough that the image no longer requires explanation every single time. Younger viewers may not appreciate how quickly that familiarity has developed. Older viewers do.

Women do.

Straight women especially, perhaps, because Robinson occupies territory that American popular culture once treated as impossible. She is openly lesbian without being desexualized for heterosexual comfort. She is feminine without presenting femininity as evidence that lesbianism is somehow temporary. She is married without becoming domestically invisible. She is older than the ingenues who dominate magazine covers without being treated as though attraction to her must be nostalgia.

And she is intensely attractive to women who had not planned on finding a lesbian woman intensely attractive.

Hence the Lucille problem.

The phrase “Lez for Lucille” will undoubtedly embarrass some readers, delight others and irritate a few who reasonably point out that lesbian identity is not a novelty hat for straight women to put on whenever an attractive celebrity appears. They are correct. The phrase becomes careless when it trivializes people whose sexuality has shaped their lives at considerable personal cost.

Used thoughtfully, however, it describes something real.

The joke works because the old certainties have weakened.

A woman can say she is straight and still discuss the beauty of another woman without believing her entire identity has collapsed. Another can use the joke as the first tentative language for a feeling she may later understand more seriously. A lesbian woman can roll her eyes at heterosexual newcomers finally noticing what she already knew. A bisexual woman can recognize the familiar comedy of other people discovering that attraction occasionally ignores paperwork.

Robinson need not be responsible for any of it.

She merely has to keep appearing.

Preferably, if this reporter may abandon objectivity one final time, in the heels.

There is a temptation in writing about somebody who generates this degree of physical reaction to turn the article into an inventory of features. The height. The legs. The shoulders. The hair. The voice. The extraordinarily irritating calm with which she seems to possess all of them.

But an inventory misses the point.

Lucille Robinson is compelling because the exterior does not appear to be compensating for an absence behind it. She is beautiful and has apparently never mistaken beauty for her principal accomplishment. She has been useful in circumstances where usefulness mattered more than appearance. She has cared for sick people, built a family, survived losses, made another marriage after an earlier one ended, become a grandmother, shared a life with one of the most complicated women in American public history and retained enough patience to tolerate journalists asking questions about shoes.

She is not interesting despite being glamorous.

The glamour is interesting because it belongs to her.

That may explain why women who would ordinarily dismiss celebrity crushes find themselves reacting differently. Robinson offers no obvious place to separate attraction from admiration. A woman may begin with the dress and end up talking about her steadiness. She may begin with the height and end up discussing the way Robinson listens to people. She may begin by joking that Phoebe Whitford is a lucky woman and discover, several paragraphs later, that the envy concerns more than five-inch heels.

This reporter has now spent an unreasonable number of words examining the matter and remains heterosexual.

Probably.

No official paperwork has been filed.

For the sake of Phoebe Whitford’s peace of mind, none is currently contemplated.

Robinson, meanwhile, appears unlikely to give American women much opportunity to recover. She will continue attending public events, occasionally dressing in ways that place unnecessary strain upon the heterosexual consensus, continuing to be married, continuing to become older without accepting that older women are expected to disappear, and continuing to possess the irritating personal qualities that prevent sensible observers from dismissing the whole business as a pretty face.

At some point the country may simply have to adjust.

It has adjusted to more difficult things.

As for the evening that prompted all this, Robinson eventually proceeded inside with Whitford, leaving behind a press line full of photographers comparing notes, fashion writers reconsidering their leads and several women having unexpectedly complicated conversations with themselves.

Apparently there was some sort of film festival going on as well.