Rona Jaffe (1931 – 2005) was twenty-six years old when her debut novel, The Best of Everything, was published. Jaffe had pitched the unwritten book to Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb and the Hollywood producer Jerry Wald, both of whom wanted a lucrative sensation along the lines of the 1956 bestselling novel Peyton Place, turned by Wald into a box office smash in 1957. When it appeared in 1958, Jaffe’s novel was an instant phenomenon, spending five months on the New York Times bestseller list, and soon turned by Wald into a film.
For this novel about the lives of four young women in the Manhattan publishing world, Jaffe drew on her own experience working at Fawcett Publishing. She described her characters’ pursuit of husbands, sexual harassment by executives, bedroom experiences (virginal and not), fashion, dating sociology, careers whether embarked upon or abandoned for marriage, and endless obsession with the men in (and out of) their lives.
Critics rolled their eyes at the middling literary quality of the novel, but countless women read it and Jaffe received an astounding hundred thousand dollars for the film rights. Nor has the book stayed out of popular consciousness, propelled back into print and laudatory commentary in the twenty-first century by the success of its latter-day television progeny Sex In The City and Mad Men.
The 1959 film adaptation is a marvel of Cinemascope and New York City design and fashion, from the lines and colors of the typist pool to the décor of the executive offices, from the secretaries’ outfits to the signage, cars, and light of the Manhattan street scenes. The cinematographer was William Mellor, who had rendered the skin of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift so sensuously in black and white in A Place in the Sun. Adele Palmer was costume designer, and the accomplished trio of Lyle Wheeler, Mark-Lee Kirk, and Jack Martin Smith share credit for art direction.
Art critic Benjamin Marcus on his Architecture of Film blog highlights the buoyancy and promise of the film’s opening:
In the opening credits to THE archetypal working-girl-in-the-big-city movie, as the empty midtown streets of a Manhattan morning fill with office workers, jaunty diagonal views accentuate the animated hubbub of 1959. A polarized color palette renders every shot with the iconic quality of a Life Magazine layout, and a central cast of character-types covers everyone’s mis-remembered fantasy of the glamorous Big City: grey-flanneled business men & white gloved secretaries; ladies-who-lunch & shoppers who shop; taxis, buses & subways thrust the teeming throngs of workers to their appointed destinations. And while Johnny Mathis croons about the promise of romance, the pictures tell a different story: it’s in the glass and steel and concrete City that you’ll find your dreams and realize your aspirations for…. The Best of Everything.
The film’s trio of working girls are pretty Caroline (Hope Lange), the college graduate who eventually is made a reader and then an editor; Colorado yokel April (Diane Baker) who gets taken advantage of in the big city; and Gregg (Suzy Parker), the aspiring actress who falls tragically for a narcissistic theater director.
The team of male villains includes Robert Evans in a perfectly reptilian role as the rich playboy who knocks up Baker and then tries to force her to get an abortion; Brian Aherne as the senior editor who gropes and pinches and (after a few more drinks) assaults the working girls; Lange’s college fiancé who seems perfect but then marries a more financially advantageous woman and tries to rope in Lange as his mistress; Robert Jourdan as the emotionally unavailable theater director; and, perhaps worst of all, a boring young tax lawyer. (Jaffe’s novel, a kind of anti-Marjorie Morningstar, is preoccupied with the psychic dangers for women of nice, dependable husbands and the bourgeois lives they offer.)
We also get two characters who dramatize the movie’s—and the time’s—preoccupation with the question of women’s careers and marriage. Stephen Boyd plays a kind-hearted but emotionally crippled divorcé who warns Lange that having a career is a danger to her mortal soul, as she will become ambitious and so unable to make a happy marriage. Joan Crawford is the evidence for Boyd’s conviction. She plays a bitchy senior editor who has spent years as the unhappy mistress of a married man (though she softens at the end of the movie after belatedly trying for ordinary domestic happiness).
The movie, like the society at large, isn’t quite sure how to resolve the career-marriage conundrum. Lange stays in her job, but the movie ends by pairing her off, a little ambiguously, with Boyd. In Jaffe’s novel, Boyd’s character is put to the side and Lange’s character finally runs off to find happiness, or at least excitement, with a deus ex machina movie star.
Other major changes in the film adaptation include the elimination, except as a background character, of a fourth young woman, a divorcée and single mother. Divorce and the question of how to move on from it is a far larger theme in the novel than the movie. One of the girls in the typist pool is the novel’s voice of 1950s conventionality, and she tells the other girls:
there are only two ways to live, the right way and the wrong way. If you live the right way you’re happy, and if you live the wrong way you’re miserable. If you get married it doesn’t mean positively you’re going to be happy, but if you get married and walk out on it then you can’t be happy. You’ll always know you gave up on a responsibility.
Another feature of the novel absent in the movie are the gays in the novel’s background. These are not characters but periodic, noticeable references, for instance to “Kingsley the confessed office fairy,” or to the eligible men being “Married or Queersville,” or in one exchange:
“Oh, whose darling cat is that?”
“Two faggots who live downstairs,” he said.
“Two what?”
These notes from the novel are left out of the film, although another movie of the time, Bell, Book, and Candle, would cleverly allegorize an entire subtext about gay romance in New York.
Despite the cuts, and a running time of just over two hours, The Best of Everything loses steam as it chronicles its trio of relationship dramas. It doesn’t really say anything, and the characters—as in the novel—are mostly bland. Perhaps its pace and amorphous relationship to its subject matter would have better suited it to the medium of its television offspring.
*
Two decades after her death, Rona Jaffe is something of an enigma. A popular novelist with a string of bestsellers, she was frequently savaged by critics as trite and artificial, even as her books tackle contemporary subjects and hint at secret sorrows. Launched in her career as an oracle about the social and sexual lives of women of her generation, she wrote extensively about romance, marriage, and infidelity. Yet she never married and, more strikingly, her own romantic history, except for an occasional hint, seems to have been successfully concealed from the press, despite her celebrity.
In her 30s she wrote a memoir, and a number of her fictional characters recognizably draw on her person and experience. Yet, having now read her first seven books, published from 1958 to 1972, I still find myself unsure who this person was. There is an elusiveness, a blankness, when she seems most autobiographical and self-revealing.
Television appearances in the wake of her debut novel show an attractive young Jewish woman with big eyes, expressive smile, elfin prettiness. A talk show host on Canadian television interrogates her about her love life as if she is not an author but a co-ed returning to the dorm after curfew. An avuncular Robertson Davies is seated next to her and seems to want both to come to her rescue and indict her novel. Jaffe needs no rescuing, her demeanor both childlike and bemusedly knowing.
She appears to be having a much better time on the first episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, sitting with Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce, Nat King Cole, and a number of playmates of the month, jazz tinkling in the background. This may be because everyone is drinking: the format of the show was an actual cocktail party. (And, unless you are inebriated yourself, is as barely tolerable to view as to attend.) But Jaffe is engaging to watch. Lively and confident, flirty and clowning, she fields tough questions about negative reviews of her debut.
Her second novel, Away From Home, was published in 1960 by Simon and Schuster, and is a chronicle of the marital problems of a trio of American couples living in Brazil. One of the novel’s wives is at least partly based on Jaffe, to judge from the initial physical impression and the New York Jewish upbringing. The twenty-five year old Margie Davidow is described as “a smallish, dark girl with an excellent figure and an even more spectacular clothes sense, and an incredible neatness and femininity of person that passed for beauty and actually managed to substitute very well for it.” Margie “had been brought up in a way that was so similar to hundreds of other upper-middle-class Jewish girls in New York.” We are told that she “had her teeth straightened while she was in high school, and her nose shortened a year later, and she wore invisible contact lenses for her nearsightedness.”
Margie is sexually frigid, a condition that leads to the break-up of her marriage. Growing up, she finds herself physically indifferent to boys and then men. She wonders if she is lesbian but has no more interest in women. As a teen, she does not share her friends’ preoccupation with keeping or losing her virginity: it was, Jaffe writes, a mere “fact of her existence, like the fact that she had dark brown hair and was five feet three.” She loves her husband Neil, but has an intense physical aversion to sex with him, and which she is too ashamed of to discuss with anyone. Neil is sad but understanding and at first does not want them to split up; they agree to sleep in separate rooms.
In Brazil she is surprised to find herself experiencing “strange, disturbing sensations, a burning and fluttering, a shortness of breath” when around other attractive men. She is still more surprised when her husband tells her that he has met another woman and wants a divorce. The divorce is more than amicable: when Margie begins a relationship with their mutual friend Mort, Neil gives his blessing. And with Mort, Margie is able to enjoy ze hot sex on a secluded beach.
While more vivid and daring than her first novel, Away From Home still has a blandness about it, as if the personality and specificity of one fully realized person has been parceled out among all the novel’s characters. Jaffe’s protagonists have little felt existence outside of their plots and relationships, in contrast to, say, a Moses Herzog or Rabbit Angstrom, characters who are all receptive neurons, personality and response everywhere.
In 1961 Jaffe published a children’s book, The Last of the Wizards. The book is so lazy and indifferent that I wonder if it was a task foisted on her contractually by Simon and Schuster. A characterless boy named Peter, who lives in “a big city in the world of Now,” is visited by a similarly characterless wizard who grants him wishes, asked for in dull rhymes. Peter is at least shrewd enough to wish for more wishes, which catches the wizard by surprise. Wished-for animals and objects fill up Peter’s house, and the wizard finally leaves in a huff. Peter wonders what he will tell his mother when she gets home, and the book ends by asking: “What do you think Peter did?” I don’t care what Peter did, and I don’t think Jaffe cared either. This is The Cat in the Hat (1957) minus any sign of liking for children.
Jaffe followed this in 1965 with Mr. Right is Dead, a collection of undistinguished stories. The best is the title story, about a party girl who goes by the name of Melba Toast and her dissolute life, as witnessed by a narrator who seems to be a stand-in for Jaffe. Like a number of Jaffe’s narrators and central characters, this one is vague and elusive about herself, distantly fascinated by her hedonistic friend but not wired for that kind of emotional circus life. Melba is the flashy, sexually adventurous distraction from the narrator—and possibly from Jaffe. At the end, the narrator briefly tries to live like Melba, using sex to get a man to pay for her upkeep, but she doesn’t have the stuff to keep her hooks in him, and he casts her off after four days.
The stories detail a dispiriting kind of mid-60s libertinism: girls dressed as mermaids, plentiful martinis, bachelor pads, Brazilian music on the hi-fi. There’s an orgy in one story, but it’s oblique and the main character—typically—doesn’t participate. If the Margie character in Away From Home is sexually frigid, Jaffe’s other characters are similarly cerebral, disembodied, somehow at a remove from the physical reality of their surroundings.
In her early 30s, Jaffe published a curious, quasi-memoir, The Cherry in the Martini (1966). This, her fifth book, is the best and most compelling of all her early works, fascinating for its combination of revelation and concealment. It should be brought back in print.
The book’s title refers to a story Jaffe wrote when she was thirteen, about an “old maid” who would eat dinner alone every night in the same New York City restaurant. “She stared morosely,” wrote the thirteen year old Jaffe, “at the cherry in the martini.”
This anecdote tells us a lot about the emerging writer; her fierce and precocious literary ambition, her fascination with adult sophistication undercut by uncertainty, and her abiding concern with loneliness. The title story in Mr. Right Is Dead opens as follows:
Eventually, people are willing to admit most of their flaws—greed, jealousy, pride, hostility—but the feeling they’re most ashamed to admit is loneliness. I guess that’s because it’s the one weakness we all secretly feel should be the easiest to overcome, and we secretly feel guilty that we can’t.
The Jaffe-character in her next novel reflects: “You could make yourself forget about sex and babies you didn’t have, but it was hard to forget about loneliness.”
The Cherry in the Martini gives us Jaffe as an only child, emotionally manipulated by her mother, and for whom writing and the need for love were intertwined.
All through high school and college it was the one dream of my life that I would be walking down the street with a friend, and as we passed a newsstand, I would say, “Stop!” Then I would fling open a copy of a current magazine, preferably The New Yorker, and point to my first published story. And in that one moment my friend would start to love me.
Jaffe sought in writing a way of earning love, even as it was also a pursuit that opened up a distance between herself and the conventional expectations of an upper-middle-class Jewish woman of her generation. “People said to me that of course when I married, I would stop writing,” she recalls, “as if writing were a harmless little hobby I had taken up to appear interesting enough to find an educated husband.” Continuing to do so after marriage “would be offensive to my husband.”
Still living with her parents in her 20s, she writes that she “dated a succession of Nice Eligible Young Men (lawyers) and Catches (doctors) and Young Men Who Might Have a Nice Friend (textile magnates). They all terrified me.” One would-be suitor told her: “You’re just Marjorie Morningstar. You think you’re going to be a writer, but you’re not. You’ll end up married and living in Scarsdale.” The fear of being trapped in a conventional marriage and its expectations is pronounced in The Best of Everything, and takes on new forms in Jaffe’s subsequent novels—and perhaps her life.
The Cherry in the Martini is elliptical when it comes to ordinary biographical detail—names, dates, events—but revealing, up to a point, in terms of Jaffe’s psychosexual development. She recalls the sado-masochistic sexual fantasies of her childhood, involving the imagined punishment of other girls, as well as a game she played obsessively with her best friend and that they called “Ritz Top Torture Academy.” Her first crush was on an older girl at her all-girl private school, and at thirteen she had a romantic infatuation with the songwriter Adolph Green. Exceptionally intelligent, she graduated high school at fifteen and matriculated at Radcliffe.
Much younger than most of her peers, college seems to have been romantically baffling for Jaffe. She remained a virgin through college, despite being proposed to by a 27 year old professor who sought an open marriage. She writes that she was mainly drawn to “Harvard homosexuals.”
I seemed to have a talent for meeting secret homosexuals at school (all of whom intended to reform as soon as they were graduated, and none of whom did) because I was so innocent and militantly virginal that none of them were afraid of me.
The Cherry in the Martini ends oddly, with a short story told in the third person. The main character, a young actress, has broken off a relationship with a married man, and started an ambivalent new romance with a filmmaker. “Criticism and unkindness always made her dependent and affectionate,” Jaffe writes, “they reminded her of the way her mother had treated her.”
There is drinking and betrayal, police harassment of the film crew on location in Texas out of suspicion that they are making an “integrationist” film, and a conclusion that is vague except for its suggestion of continuing unhappiness. As the epilogue to the book, she writes: “But why is that when you win you must also lose?” The story is almost Didionesque, yet the effect is generally less spare or cool than it is stubbornly opaque. Jaffe seems to be recounting experiences from her personal life, while obscuring the details—and the motivations and significance.
Actors, filmmakers, and celebrities are central to several of Jaffe’s early fictions. There is Gregg, the unstable actress in The Best of Everything, who falls to her death after she is caught snooping on the theatrical director she is infatuated with. There is the movie star John Cassaro who enters the same novel abruptly at the end to save Caroline from her heartbreak over her ex-fiancé: “She had liked John Cassaro ever since she had been a teen-ager sitting in a dark movie theater enraptured with the romantic substitute for the boys who were still young to take her out.” Unlike the movie, Caroline and Cassaro disappear happily into the tabloids at the end of the novel.
The story “Guess Who This Is” from Mr. Right Is Dead, features a young film celebrity couple, “brilliant inventions of the new Hollywood,” who amuse themselves by calling random people from the phone book. Even Margie, from Away From Home, decides at sixteen “that when she was graduated from college she might try to be a movie actress, playing character parts.”
This all points toward Jaffe’s involved yet unchronicled connections with the theater and film worlds. Of course, she had experience of a major film production early on when her first novel was adapted for the screen. Yet she already seems to have had a connection, through a friend, to the Hollywood producer Jerry Wald, which brought about the novel’s commission. Robert Evans, in his memoir, says that Jaffe campaigned for him to get the role of the cad Dexter in the film, and told him that the character in the novel was modeled on him. If accurate, this suggests that Jaffe already knew movie people.
More intriguingly, a 1991 New York Times profile mentions in passing that Jaffe studied with Lee Strasberg at the storied Actors Studio in New York from 1960 to 1966: “Fellow students included Marilyn Monroe, Shelly Winters, Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page and Paul Newman.” Say what? The only explicit reference to the studio in these early books is from the narrator of “Mr. Right Is Dead,” who would pursue a career in acting more strenuously were she not so shy:
The first few times I went to be interviewed, just to see if I could read for a part, I spoke so softly that three producers decided I was a member of the Actors Studio, a misapprehension they probably have to this day. Actually, I could never be a member of the Actors Studio because I would die of fright before I got to the audition.
Jaffe’s quasi-revelations, reticences, connections with celebrity culture, and ambivalence toward same all erupt like a sulfurous geyser in her sixth book, The Fame Game (1969). A decade after the struggles over virginity, career, and marriage in The Best of Everything, Jaffe gives us a Hollywood Babylon-esque carnival of celeb decadence with everything from drag culture to amphetamine addiction to pedophilia. It is hard to imagine lines like “I hear he has a cock like an elk” in that first book.
The Fame Game’s main protagonist is Gerry Thompson, similar to other Jaffe protagonists in that she is weirdly muted and generic, with little presence except as witness to the characters and events around her. She is hired as the personal assistant to PR guru Sam Libra, who manages the careers of a select group of celebrities, from musicians to fashion moguls to screen stars. This set-up allows Gerry to witness the goings-on of late 1960s popular culture from both outside and inside, not so much as social critique than as a demented kind of soap opera.
The most interesting character is Vincent, a young gay man who loves drag and is so convincing as a woman (he goes by Bonnie Parker) that Gerry’s boss launches him as a supermodel. As Bonnie, he—or she, as Gerry calls him—is even ballyhooed for the lead in a Marilyn Monroe biopic. Jaffe gives us a fairly detailed dive into drag, from tucking to Vincent’s consideration of hormone treatments and surgery.
Yet the real significance of Vincent/Bonnie is as a mirror for Gerry’s own sexual questions, sense of her own femininity, her ambivalence about relationships, marriage, desire, men. Vincent becomes Gerry’s roommate and put on their false eyelashes together, kibbitz, and push boundaries.
Gerry sensed the rough play changing. Bonnie had never really felt or held a girl before, and now her tickling and teasing was turning into curious touching disguised as mischief. She had her hands on Gerry’s breasts and was trying to get her fingers under Gerry’s skirt. Was she just trying to see what a girl had that she didn’t have, or was she really more of a boy than either of them had thought?
Vincent’s sexual conquest of the heretofore straight Dick Devere, a lawyer with whom Gerry had a romance, reads to some extent like Gerry’s vicarious and ambiguous revenge fantasy. At the end of the novel, Vincent goes through a late growth spurt and is no longer convincing as a woman. Gerry saves him from his autogynephilic despair, convincing him that he can live his life now as a very successful male model.
One wishes that Jaffe would offer some authorial, analytical clarity about all this but, as with The Cherry in the Martini, her characters seem to have been abandoned on a psychiatrist’s couch with no one else in the room.
This ambiguity is especially the case for Gerry who, surrounded by movie stars and sex fiends, acts as if she had stepped out of Jaffe’s first book and is now wandering lost in the counterculture.
She wondered if anybody would ever marry her. At college she had thought that she would be very brave and wait until she was an ancient twenty-four before settling down. But twenty-four had come and gone, and she had found no one she wanted to settle down with, or if she had wanted him, he was too happy being single—or married to someone he claimed he couldn’t stand—to give it all up. Maybe Libra was right and nobody got married anymore. She thought of her married friends: Were they really as happy as they claimed to be?
Gerry does find her Prince Charming in the novel. His name is Moishe Fellin, but as the wildly popular star of a surreal television show for children he is known as Mad Daddy, and surrounded by barely pubescent groupies. He is also a pedophile.
Mad Daddy, formerly Moishe Fellin, was in the bathtub of his room in the Albemarle Hotel in Atlantic City, accompanied by a floating Dennison of the Deep toy, about a quart of bubble bath, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Marcie, who had come backstage to ask for his autograph the night before. Marcie was a tall, gloriously sun-tanned blond girl with slender, nymphet limbs covered with the most delicate frost of platinum hair. Right now those limbs were also covered with a froth of bubble bath, and with her long straight hair held up out of the bubbles with a barrette, a few tendrils damp and escaping, he thought she was one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen. He pushed the rubber fish toy to her and she pushed it back, giggling.
“Mad Daddy” and Gerry fall in love. He cooks Gerry spaghetti dinners and they watch old comedies on TV. With Gerry, Fellin is redeemed from what he calls “that rather embarrassing urge for fourteen-year-old girls.”
Mad Daddy had always felt it was kind of unseemly to want to be with all those little Lolitas because, after all, what could you really talk to them about? People would think he was mentally retarded if they knew. The thing that had always made him feel guilty about it was not that he wanted to go to bed with them, because they always made the first pass somehow, but that he enjoyed their actual company so much. He could communicate with a sense of guilt and revulsion. Now that he loved Gerry and belonged to her, and she to him, those little girls seemed nauseating, obscene. He was obscene. How could he have mauled those delicate little limbs, kissed those children’s mouths?
Fellin is inadvertently killed when mobbed by a group of his adoring teen girl fans, “those sexless, horny children,” as he refers to them. Gerry is devastated, taking off to a beach house in Malibu to mourn the great love of her life.
After all this, a resounding WTF is in order. The novel is certainly a reminder of how normalized the idea of sex with underaged girls was in the 1960s. The Fame Game was savaged by critics in the New York Times, twice; neither reviewer registers any shock at Jaffe’s sympathetic treatment of Gerry’s guy and his “unseemly” habit. Indeed, they castigate the novel for being cliché, convictionless, both voyeuristic and fake. The novel, says one critic, is an exercise in literary slumming for easily shocked female readers, and warns such readers to “remember that Miss Jaffe and not God put those thoughts in those heads.”
Today, though, that is the interesting part: why did Jaffe put those thoughts in those heads. What was going on her own head as she did so?
Jaffe followed The Fame Game with The Other Woman, published in 1972. After Gerry Thompson, and Margie Davidow, and whoever the person narrating The Cherry in the Martini is, we now get Carol Prince. Even more of a seeming alter ego for the author than any of her previous characters, Carol is nevertheless once more shrouded in a haze of impersonality.
Having grown up on the Upper East Side of New York with her strict and proper parents, Carol nevertheless rejects the expectations of her generation concerning sex and marriage. At twenty-one she takes an older man to bed to lose her virginity efficiently. “She did not intend to be anyone’s wife or mother,” Jaffe writes, “she intended to be a journalist and travel the world.” A psychiatrist tries to convince her that her disinterest in marriage is abnormal and can be cured. After getting his professional opinion that she is neither suicidal, alcoholic, nor lesbian, she tells him “I’m going to work out the rest of my problems by myself,” and quits after one session.
In the 1960s, she is aware of second-wave feminism, but it does not speak to her, caught idiosyncratically between the conservatism of the 50s and the rebellions that followed.
Carol was glad about Women’s Lib, but she didn’t see any reason to join in. She hadn’t been able to wait for them, she had liberated herself long ago, in her work, in her life, in her head. Now people stopped asking her why she had never married. She was no longer a freak, she was a heroine. But to herself she was no heroine, she still had questions.
She meets Matthew Fitzgerald, who is wealthy and married, but lives apart from his wife and children. Carol and Matthew’s relationship—improvised, romantic, slightly tainted by the illicit but therefore safe from conventional expectations even while offering material comforts—is everything she wants. Meanwhile, her married friends all seem to be divorcing; some express envy of her permanent boyfriend.
Jaffe conveys almost no sense of either character’s personality. They seem like pale ghosts, with vague motivations. They live together for several years with no intervention on the part of Matthew’s wife.
One day she asked him, “Would your wife ever leave you?”
“Never,” he said. “She likes being married.”
Strife finally enters the picture when Matthew proposes to divorce his wife so that they can marry—exactly what Carol does not want. But since both she and he are blanks, it is hard to say what any of this means.
The novel falls far short of a movie that came out the same year, Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris. In that film, a man and a woman also agree to have a relationship detached from any conventional context, and it is also threatened when the man wants to bring the relationship into the world of social norms. But the film is passionate and vivid, while Jaffe’s characters have the substance of sunbeams.
Jaffe would write another ten novels, several of them bestsellers, including Mazes and Monsters, about Dungeons & Dragons players, adapted into a 1982 film with Tom Hanks. I plan to read them, as I remain curious about Jaffe, her writing career and her evidently very private life. Of the generation, if not the literary strength, of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Tom Wolfe, she similarly registered the pressures and unease of the American 1950s, 60s, and 70s, achieving sales if not artistic durance. In what I have read so far, Jaffe’s authorial voice and performance are always muted and elusive, whether because Jaffe was hiding herself or because that was the self she had to reveal to the world.