9
These Boots Are Made for the Valkyrie
Nancy Sinatra’s boots, 1966
1965: Jersey City, New Jersey
What was Lee Hazlewood going to do about Nancy Sinatra? The moment he entered her family’s stately New Jersey mansion, he realized he was in for a hard sell. He expected a quiet sit-down with the girl, and maybe her parents, but what were all of his music industry friends doing here? Was that garlic he smelled? And for Pete’s sake, how’s it hanging, Bobby Darin, wasn’t expecting to see you here, man. Someone had done their research; the bar was stocked with Chivas Regal, which was Lee’s drink. Soon enough he had a tumbler of the good stuff in hand, was sniffing it under his broad brown mustache, and had nearly forgotten why he’d come.
It was a command visit, ordered by Mr. Sinatra himself. Lee hadn’t been too optimistic about the meeting, but he knew, even if the invitation was secondhand, that no one said no to the Chairman of the Board—just ask Tommy Dorsey. Lee, a swaggering southern songwriter and producer, had enjoyed modest success in the business, deejaying a popular radio show in Arizona that put him on the map after he played a little-known Memphis-bred track that just happened to be recorded by the kid who turned out to be Elvis. Around the same time, he crossed paths with a talented teenage guitarist named Duane Eddy, and with Lee’s help, Texas twang made its way to the recording industry’s hub in Los Angeles. Lee got his kicks in the City of Angels for a while; then the so-called British invasion hit, and four dweeby mop tops, singing about the kinda love that goes hand in hand with soda pop, all but commandeered the airwaves.
That music just wasn’t Lee’s style. He was thinking about retiring at the ripe old age of thirty-six—going back to Texas or maybe bumming around Europe, but then the Sinatra girl’s name came up, and he was penciling her in. Truth be told, Nancy was a cute little thing. Her mama was still pretty, and as far as Lee could tell, as sweet as pie, and Nancy had her father’s big blue eyes, which were clearly worth their weight in record sales. Unfortunately, the Sinatra name hadn’t done enough for dear Nancy’s rising star. The old man’s label, Reprise Records, who’d signed Nancy in 1961, was, sans a hit, just about ready to give up on her. Lee knew a thing or two about music, but he wasn’t sure if he was the right man for the job.
Yet here he was at the Sinatra house, and nobody was talking about logistics. He could hang out with his buddies until the Chivas ran dry, but then the front door opened and closed, and in walked Old Blue Eyes himself, passing through like he’d just put on a show and was waving to the regulars on his way to the car. Frank and Nancy Sr. had been divorced for years, and, in fact, Frank was coming up on wife number three (Mia Farrow with a pit stop at Ava Gardner—what a life). Yet he sauntered toward the kitchen like he still lived there, saying hi to Nancy and flashing that million-dollar smile.
Frank didn’t emerge for another hour, during which time Lee Hazlewood wondered if he’d even get a chance to meet him. Suddenly, Frank Sinatra materialized, looking full and self-satisfied. He offered his hand.
“I’m glad you kids will be working together,” he said without discussion, before taking off again.
Lee Hazlewood had recently written “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” down in Texas, but he hadn’t envisioned Nancy as the singer. In fact, he’d originally imagined the narrator to be a man: himself. As Hazlewood told French documentarian Thomas Levy, “I wrote it in 1965 cause my friends down in Texas—especially ladies, the girlfriends of my friends and the wives of my friends—says, why don’t you ever write a song about love? And I says, OK, I’ll write one, especially just for you.” But the first time he performed it at a party—Lee, who never performed at parties, but couldn’t resist showing off his new wicked little ditty—the churchgoing women in the room dispersed in disgust. “Boots” wasn’t about love at all, but rather its less righteous counterpart: lust. The first verse (and one of only two verses, when Lee first wrote it) was particularly naughty, sung in a man’s voice that’s part honey, part gravel: “You keep sayin’ you got somethin’ for me / Somethin’ you call love, but confess / You’ve been a’messin’ where you shouldn’t’ve been messin’ / Now someone else is gettin’ all your best . . .”
Not quite a love song, but hardly a reason for Bible-belting indignation. Hazlewood said guess again: “In our part of Texas, ‘messing’—What were you doing last night, I was out messing—was the four-lettered word, we didn’t say the four-lettered word, we said messing.” Translation: Lee took a request for a song about romance and instead delivered one about a woman who, quite literally, fucked around on him. But when Nancy heard it, among an informal showcase of Lee’s songs she could potentially record, she knew it was the one. “He played me a bunch of songs, and my favorite one was about boots,” she told CBS Sunday Morning in 2006. “I thought it was a hit record, I mean, first time I heard it. Because even on the guitar, that quarter tone [sings the opening notes] every time you hear that, you know what the song is.”
Lee, however, had reservations. Aware of the words he would be putting into a pop princess’s mouth, he let her in on the song’s secret meaning. “They’ll shoot us if we do this,” he told her, no doubt recalling the reactions of his female friends down south. “Boots” was good for a laugh, but was it really ripe for the airwaves?
Nancy was undeterred: “It doesn’t mean that in New Jersey! It doesn’t mean that in California.” Lee made a few phone calls, and sure enough, when he asked his northern friends about “messing,” and what it implied, nobody understood it as code for you-know-what. So Lee wrote the song’s third verse, and Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood set out to record “Boots.”
Lee knew that in order to capture the essence of the song, he had to do something about Nancy’s squeaky-clean image, which had failed to help audiences see her as anything other than Frank’s doll-faced daughter. Her voice, which was all but genetically guaranteed to be good, was also too high and cutesy for a song about stepping over a cheater and kicking up dirt. She was pushing herself to sing like an old-fashioned cheesecake pop star, fighting against her naturally lower register. He delivered an explicit direction: “Sing it like a fourteen-year-old girl who screws truck drivers.”*
“I can do that,” Nancy said.
She was ambitious. Already married and divorced by age twenty-five, she was ready to make a splash on the music scene. She knew that her father’s name afforded her unusual opportunities—when she called her agent wanting to do her first film, he landed her the lead in The Wild Angels opposite Peter Fonda—but music was her first love, a passion that transcended her appetite for celebrity. “It was always about the music,” Nancy remembered. “I never expected anything as big as [‘Boots’] was, never. The music was all I knew.” In 1965, her marriage to actor and singer Tommy Sands finished, she ditched the conservative brunette hair flip and buttoned-up pants suit that she wore for a 1965 performance of “So Long Babe” on Hullabaloo—a prime-time music variety series that ran from January 1965 to August 1966—and opted for a look better suited to her easy, flirtatious rapport with the camera.
Nancy dyed her hair, wore black false eyelashes all day, and slept in brown ones at night (“so I look gorgeous in the morning,” she told reporter Natalie Gittelson for the October 1966 issue of Harper’s Bazaar—an evocative statement suggesting that the unmarried star might have someone around in those early hours to look gorgeous for). For a second, 1966 Hullabaloo performance, this time performing her new single, Nancy appeared onstage as a coiffed, frosted blonde, in a long-sleeved blousy, white peasant top and an A-line black miniskirt that ended above the knee but was not nearly as revealing as some of her future hemlines. Bopping against a backdrop of four larger-than-life Edwardian-style boots, and surrounded by a team of energetic female go-go dancers, Nancy tapped her feet in a pair of tall white boots, which would later appear in publicity stills of the star. These pictures—of a thinner, blond bombshell version of Nancy hugging her knees in a white, open-backed micro minidress, with carefully tousled and teased long hair and smoky bedroom eyes—are iconic in and of themselves. They followed a sultry album cover of Nancy lying on her side and resting her chin on her hand as she stared down the camera. Wearing a form-fitting gray long-sleeved shirt, a red miniskirt, black-and-white striped tights, and red fold-over pirate boots, she was the fresh-faced personification of the independent American mod, who worshipped fashion as a way to express one’s own quirky, devil-may-care independence.
Though many fans attributed the makeover, which turned out to have a significant effect on her career, to Lee’s savvy, Nancy counters that it was simply an organic evolution of her personal style. “I went to London when my first [Lee Hazlewood] record came out, which was ‘So Long Babe.’ I had been there before with my more bubblegum type music, and I had seen some of the fashions already, but then when I went back . . . I went right to Carnaby Street. I couldn’t wait to get there, because I fell in love with the fashions.” A three-block stretch of boutiques in the center of London, Carnaby Street was the location of Mary Quant’s popular store, as well as ground zero for mods and hippies who enjoyed shopping for the newest disposable styles almost as much as they liked posing in them. Nancy felt herself at home among the cigarette-smoking, New Wave–watching cool kids, inspired by the atmosphere of youthful vigor and determined self-expression.
It was Carnaby Street where she found many pairs of her famous boots—the majority of them were not, as many sources have since reported, designed by Beth Levine. “Some of the boots [came from Levine],” she remembers, “but I was getting boots mostly in London, and that’s not Beth Levine, I think that’s where the confusion came [in].” She goes on: “You know, Mary Quant, was my . . . fashion guru without knowing it, and that’s where the look came from. Beth Levine came in later when I started having boots made . . . and then my official boot maker was [Pasquale] Di Fabrizio here in Los Angeles, and he made a lot of wonderful boots that I used onstage.”* Her London-inspired style was right on trend; that same year, French sexpot Brigitte Bardot dismissed couture as “for grandmothers” and Yves Saint Laurent opened a prêt-à-porter (ready to wear) boutique on the Rive Gauche in Paris.
Lee Hazlewood might have been skeptical about working with twenty-five-year-old Nancy at first, but their collaboration would go on to make history. “Boots” hit number one on the U.S. and UK charts and topped in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Japan, Italy, and Belgium as well. As a concise tale of female empowerment that encouraged women to give a cheating man the boot should his lies become transparent, the song was a clear departure from the 1950s stand-by-your-man mentality (incidentally, “Stand by Your Man,” recorded by country sensation Tammy Wynette in 1968, peaked on the charts at number nineteen). With her inspiring message and shapely legs, Nancy spawned a generation of sartorial look-alikes. Soon the demand for boots was so great that Saks Fifth Avenue, long a leader in footwear sales, devoted a corner of its shoe department to “Beth’s Bootery,” named for husband-and-wife shoemaking team Herbert and, yes, Beth Levine. By the end of 1966, Nancy was poised to earn half a million dollars (the equivalent of approximately 3.3 million dollars today). Lee Hazlewood, the man who had been hired to turn Frank Sinatra’s daughter into a star, had done his job well beyond satisfaction. And boots, with their legacy as footwear for the powerful, spectacular, and brave, would shoe a generation of real-life Amazons.
In a way, boots’ long, historical lineage as activewear had already made them a symbol of women’s emancipation. At the end of the eighteenth century, women wore boots only for horseback riding until they were adopted for the sport of “pedestrianism” as well; as Jonathan Walford explains in The Seductive Shoe, “This was not a stroll, but rather a brisk activity that required good posture and stamina, what we would call hiking today, and was considered a suitable social exercise for young ladies.” In the nineteenth century, women hiked up their skirts and wore boots to go bicycling, and ladies across the social stratosphere turned to knee-high shoes to protect their feet in bad weather. Boots offered women freedom—to ride horses or bikes, or to go outside even when the elements were inhospitable.
But Wonder Woman, as the quintessential booted heroine, shaped the nation’s impression of the shoes as an accoutrement of power. In 1966, she celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday, meaning that a young woman Nancy Sinatra’s age never would have known the world without her. Though Wonder Woman is most commonly depicted wearing boots, her shoes varied through time and by artist: around 1950, her boots disappeared altogether and in their place emerged a pair of Greco-Roman flat sandals, with ballerina-like ribbons that crisscrossed their way up her calves. Like the original boots, these shoes fluctuated between flat and high heeled (1959), open- and closed-toed, and even showed up in gold once or twice. The sandals, with tweaks here and there, remained consistent until 1965 when, during a period of especially low readership, author “Robert Kanigher—the writer who’d succeeded Marston in the late 1940s—initiated a revamp of the series that attempted to replicate the 1942 look of the comic book.” John Wells, author of The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia, continues: “As part of that, Wonder Woman’s boots were restored, although they were now solid red as opposed to the originals [which had a white stripe down the front].” The redesign was an effort to capitalize on the public’s renewed interest in Golden Age comic books, but it failed to capture either the spirit of Marston’s stories or the effortless camp required to pique the interest of aspiring collectors.
The world was more complicated in the mid- to late 1960s than it had been in 1942. World War II, although horrifying, united Americans as they sought to defeat the enemy: an us versus them mentality allowed citizens to see the world in black and white. On the other hand, after JFK’s shocking assassination, and then a second one that claimed the life of liberal Bobby Kennedy as he tackled the campaign trail, the sense that evil was among us, rather than outside of us, started to sink in. Meanwhile, politics proved divisive as President Johnson, John Kennedy’s successor, escalated the hugely contentious war in Vietnam, widening the chasm between conservative supporters of the war who’d stop at nothing to stanch the international spread of communism, and the liberal youth who felt that payment in American blood was too high a price. In April 1967, the birth control pill appeared on the cover of Time magazine sparking, alongside the demands of the Second Wave, an ideological deadlock on the subject of reproductive rights. The civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., gained significant traction, highlighting the cultural and generational gaps and then coming to a shocking halt when King was shot on the balcony of a Memphis motel.
It’s no wonder that a Golden Age comic book struggled to stay relevant. In the summer of 1968, DC Comics published an ad that promised a “really big change . . . coming to Wonder Woman.” It showed Diana Prince—the superheroine’s human, Clark Kent–esque alter ego—wearing a bright orange mod tunic over a gray-and-black-striped bodysuit, her sleek black ponytail dangling toward the small of her back. The ad presaged the October 1968 issue of Wonder Woman, which debuted an Avengers-era Diana Prince in stylized street clothes and holding a paint can. “Forget the old . . . the New Wonder Woman is here!” the text read. Explains John Wells: “The Diana Prince makeover was explicitly inspired by Emma Peel* but the real impetus was the Wonder Woman comic’s increasingly low sales. Convinced that the character had become utterly irrelevant to either male or female readers, writer Denny O’Neil and artist Mike Sekowsky did away with Wonder Woman’s powers and costume and brought in a vibrant—if now terribly dated—splash of late 1960s fashion and international intrigue.” O’Neil and Sekowsky hoped to breathe new life into the Wonder Woman comic, but the dramatic makeover had unintended consequences. Stripped of her powers, the scope of Diana Prince’s world shrank. Suddenly the character was less concerned with the machinations of good and evil than she was consumed by her complicated love life.
“The Diana Prince experiment ended with a well-intentioned but frankly painful story whose cover expressly declared it a ‘Women’s Lib issue,’ ” Wells recalls. “In essence, Diana was hired to be a fashion model for a Manhattan businessman and ignored complaints that he paid female salesclerks far less than men. Dismissing their concerns, she remarked, ‘In most cases, I don’t even like women.’ Which may be the most remarkable statement made by Wonder Woman in her seven decades of existence.” The lessons of the feminist movement hadn’t yet affected the world of comics.* Diana Prince, while a trained martial artist, spent as much time battling foes as she did second-guessing her relationships. Ultimately it was Gloria Steinem who came to the rescue, successfully lobbying DC Comics to end Diana Prince’s arc and rightfully restore a superhuman heroine—possessed of awesome powers—to the series.
The association between boots and women’s inherent capabilities was established. If high heels signaled the presence of an ambitious woman who used her sexuality to get what she wanted, boots became an indication of a female character’s physical and moral strength, her willingness to rise to the challenge—and to look good doing it. A femme fatale’s chief talent is manipulation, while the valkyrie—a woman who faces the dragon and leaves it panting for breath—surprises her companions only by surpassing their modest expectations. Femininity, often regarded as a fundamental weakness, becomes her greatest asset, and she uses it for good, rather than evil. Boots, for their alluring gender ambiguity, symbolize this intersection of “male” strength and “female” compassion—with a dash of sexuality tossed in for extra measure.
In 1968, Jane Fonda played the intergalactic sexpot Barbarella, modeling a whacked-out space-age wardrobe designed by French visionaries Paco Rabanne and Jacques Fonteray that often involved little else but a pair of kinky boots and a bikini. She made cuissardes famous: skintight, thigh-high boots invented by André Courrèges, which Fonda wore as hybrid footwear-garters. Though she looked like a futuristic goddess, crowned with a mane of blond hair that, as Fonda later joked in her memoir My Life So Far, should have received its own billing, she was grappling with painful insecurities: “There I was, a young woman who hated her body and suffered from terrible bulimia, playing a scantily clad—sometimes naked—sexual heroine. Every morning I was sure that Vadim [Fonda’s husband at the time and the film’s director] would wake up and realize he had made a terrible mistake—‘Oh my God! She’s not Bardot!’ ” For Fonda, the list of her husband’s previous partners—Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot—loomed large enough in her mind that she pushed herself to live up to their legacy. This meant tackling the Swinging Sixties with surprising literal mindedness, overcoming “bourgeois” emotions like jealousy and sharing her husband, and sometimes even her bed, with a string of anonymous lovers. On March 29, 1968, Fonda’s erotic film and unconventional lifestyle landed her on the cover of Life magazine. Decked out in full Barbarella garb, including a pair of slouchy black low-heeled boots, the headline read “Fonda’s Little Girl Jane”—like Nancy Sinatra, Jane Fonda blossomed in the shadow of a dauntingly accomplished father. Still, a famous name didn’t stifle Fonda’s desire to topple the “Establishment”: “To Jane, a nude scene in a movie—‘within the artistic concept of the story,’ she emphasizes—is all in a day’s work. To achieve this point of view she has worked hard to cleanse her psyche of ‘hang ups,’ and it appears she has been, but for occasional lapses, successful. There are still outcroppings of prudery that annoy her.”
Via Barbarella, Fonda became the symbol of a new kind of liberated woman who acknowledged her sexuality and didn’t shy away from it, treating sex less like a delicate secret between husband and wife, and more like no big deal, a fact of life that distinguished the enlightened from the squares. By the late 1960s, monogamy, like stiletto heels, was looking terribly old-fashioned. In July 1969, Harper’s Bazaar published a novella-length exposé titled “The Erotic Life of the American Wife” by Natalie Gittelson, in which she proposed, among other things, that cheating was not just for husbands anymore. “For the first time in modern history,” she wrote, “the married woman has begun to regard herself frankly not only as sexual, but as a sensual creature, equal on both counts to her husband, entitled to the same privileges and prerogatives, sharing the same feelings and fantasies and accorded—by virtue of the same humanity—the same freedom of action.” For suburban couples, who appeared on the surface to be about as revolutionary as Ward and June Cleaver, a furtive life of steamy affairs resided just below the surface. “Contrary to popular legend,” Gittelson wrote, “the real threat to marriage is not the ‘dangerous divorcee’ of drugstore fiction. The little-discussed, all-American menace is Mrs. Peter Goodwife’s neighbor, Mrs. George Goodwife, who lives across the lawn or across town.” Mad Men’s Betty Draper is taking a lover not just in retaliation for her husband’s infidelities, but also to satisfy her own personal lust.
Jane Fonda fully embraced the new morality, in which monogamy—as Natalie Gittelson put it—“is no longer a moral dictum, but a matter of personal aesthetics and private taste.” Though Fonda later attributed her loosey-goosey attitude toward marital fidelity to a dangerous blend of Roger Vadim’s persuasive personality and her gnawing insecurities, there was a sense, in the 1960s, that boundaries were meant to be crossed, buttons were only there to be pushed. At first glance, Barbarella is little more than a campy sexploitation flick, but its world-saving heroine, with her capacity for transcendent love both emotionally and physically, survives as an over-the-top testament to the way the parameters of acceptable female behavior were moving. Just as fashion’s ruling class failed to respond to the changes taking place on the street as quickly as outsiders like Mary Quant did, so too did the powers that be react, at times frustratingly slowly, to the evolving role of women in America. As Lisa Parks points out in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, Barbarella premiered at a time when the notion of a female astronaut was still verboten: “Scientists suggested that the extreme unpredictability of the female body, especially during menstruation, made women unfit for astronautic endeavors.” Women could work in a limited capacity for NASA but couldn’t train for blastoff, and the issue of women in space was heard before the House Science and Astronautics Committee in 1962, as well as debated in the popular media. Sally Ride wouldn’t break the barrier until 1983. Interesting, then, to see a late-1960s woman in her best moon boots, whose body isn’t a liability but an asset: the only weapon strong enough to restore intergalactic peace and equilibrium. The line, in this tumultuous decade, between the abject and progressive was thin. The two were blurred such that Fonda herself “took decades” to appreciate why posterity has been indulgent toward Barbarella, like a mother trying to stifle her amusement at a young child’s antics. Ultimately it would take time for true equality to take hold, and for men and women to occupy the same space.