Shana Alexander
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Shana Alexander (October 6, 1925 - June 23 2005) was an American columnist. Although she became the first woman staff writer and columnist for Life magazine, she was best known for her participation in the "Point-Counterpoint" debate segments of 60 Minutes with conservative James J. Kilpatrick. She was the daughter of Tin Pan Alley composer Milton Ager and columnist Cecilia Ager. Her ashes are interred, with her daughter Kathy's, at Westwood Village Memorial Cemetery in Los Angeles, with those of her parents, and in Sag Harbor, New York.
Alexander graduated from Vassar College in 1945, majoring in anthropology. She fell into writing when she took a summer job as a copy clerk at the New York newspaper PM, where her mother worked. She worked as a freelance writer for Junior Bazaar and Mademoiselle magazines before becoming a researcher at Life for $65 a week in 1951. During the 1960s she wrote "The Feminine Eye" column for Life.
In 1969 she became the first female editor at McCall's, but quit in 1971, complaining that it was a token job in a sexist environment.
She was writing a column for Newsweek in 1975 when she replaced Nicholas von Hoffman on 60 Minutes, and debated Kilpatrick for the next four years. She played down this part of her career, commenting in 1979 that prior to that she "had been a writer, a columnist for Life magazine and for Newsweek -- that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I'm not a quack-quack TV journalist."
She died of cancer in Hermosa Beach, California at the age of 79 on June 23, 2005.
She had been married and divorced twice. Her only daughter, Kathy, died in 1987 after jumping from Alexander's Park Avenue apartment.
She was rumored to have had a longtime affair with the late Eugene McCarthy. Senator McCarthy left his wife in 1968 but never divorced her.
Books
- Anyone's Daughter
- Happy Days: My Mother, My Father, My Sister & Me (1995), autobiography
- Very Much a Lady
- When She Was Bad
- Nutcracker
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