Sex & the Single Stiletto

After a Valentine's Day column this year about her crush on an unnamed guy that didn't pan out, Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott wrote that she was using "the precious column inches that every pundit in America covets to take out a personal ad redolent of crumpled cocktail napkins and Dorothy Parkerish wisecracks disguising heartache."

From the early days of feminism, Dowd, a self-described "shy and sensitive" child, felt she didn't fit in. She liked Barbie, she loved Cosmo, she didn't care for recreational drugs or the no-makeup, unisex jeans look. Growing up in Washington with three brothers and a dad who was a D.C. police detective, getting her education in Catholic schools, "it seemed right that men should be running the church and the world," she says. (Her mother, who recently died at 97, was her closest confidante.)

Dowd liked the idea of dating among equals and that women were expected to split the check. "Men would want us because we'd be more fascinating," Dowd says. "Then we realized a lot of men don't really want fascinating. A lot of men just want women who are awed by them."

At the Star, where she started as a dictationist (in the pre-laptop days when reporters phoned in their stories), she dated reporter John Tierney. But she was "so obsessively private," Dowd says, that she didn't want anyone to know. "He thought I was treating it as an affair. Finally he said I should go to a shrink." Now Tierney is in the adjoining office -- they still share a bathroom, she jokes -- as the newest Times op-ed man.

Says Tierney: "When Maureen refused to admit we were going out, I just assumed she was understandably ashamed of me. I now know that secretiveness is one of the key parts of her charm."

Some friends attribute Dowd's behavior to an innate shyness, which makes her brief bursts of literary soul-baring all the more painful.

"It's like Greta Garbo finally speaks," says Jane Mayer, a New Yorker writer. "She is truly private. It's not an act. She was raised that way. . . . It was her dread that this would become an exploration of Maureen's dating life."

What seems to aggravate Dowd most is that post-feminism doesn't resemble the snappy Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy encounters she adores. Instead, says Dowd, women expect male suitors to pay, are obsessed with looks, sport "plastic breasts," and "appointments with dermatologists are the new status symbols. It's hard to find women to talk about books and politics. They all want to talk about skin."

Not that Dowd, who always looks chic at Washington parties and once spent $195 for a seaweed concoction favored by Sharon Stone -- purely for research purposes, she says -- is immune to that sort of thing.

With her looks, glamour and caustic wit, Dowd would be a natural for television, except for one minor problem. By her own account, with her whispery voice and penchant for saying "you know," she sounds like a Valley Girl. On the rare occasions she has mustered the courage to appear with Tim Russert, she says, "It's so terrifying. When you hear that 'Meet the Press' music, I want to faint. Sometimes I'm scared I won't have anything original to say."

The Reluctant Columnist

The path to the pinnacle of punditry wasn't an easy one for Dowd.

When she became a Star reporter, the Catholic University graduate spent five years covering Montgomery County. "Even my mom stopped reading my stuff," she says. "I was trying to do humorous landfill stories."