SALON

Jesse James

Tuesday, Oct 15, 2002 9:24 PM UTC

“Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War” by T.J. Stiles

The latest and best-ever biography of Jesse James tears down the myth to reveal not a latter-day Robin Hood, but a greedy, press-savvy bandit.

By

First-time biographer T. J. Stiles’ “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War” is perhaps the finest book ever written about this American legend. It is also a book that should have been unnecessary. With the possible exception of Billy the Kid, Jesse Woodson James is America’s most famous outlaw. As Stiles points out, when James was killed on April 3, 1882, he was probably as famous as the president of the United States.

He is no less famous today. Jesse James has been the focus of countless movies, including everything from last year’s execrable “American Outlaws” to three fine films: Walter Hill’s “The Long Riders” (1980), Philip Kaufman’s “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid” (1972) and Henry King’s “Jesse James” (1939). He has inspired art both high — three superb novels, “The Chivalry of Crime” by Welsh writer Desmond Barry (2000); Susan M. Dodd’s “Mamaw” (1988), based on the life of Jesse’s mother; and Ron Hansen’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (1983) — and low, from dime novels in his lifetime to Pokémon characters in our own.

Why did someone whose legend is so much with us have to wait 120 years for a definitive biography?

The answer, as one soon discovers, is that the decades have added layer upon layer of iconography to the original Jesse James story. So many outlaws after Jesse, from Butch Cassidy to John Dillinger, have been seen as following in his footsteps that the path that leads us back to the original has been obscured (just as the path that would have led us from Jesse back to the bandit many compared him to, Robin Hood, has been all but erased). “Jesse James” eschews the usual trappings of the outlaw-buff variety; there are no tedious and irrelevant genealogical trees, no reliance on “Uncle Ned”-style history (as in “My Uncle Ned knew the real story …”), and no irritating insistence on reinterpreting the entire saga in the light of new information that’s unavailable to the public.

Which is not to say that Stiles hasn’t discovered new sources — or at least rediscovered old, forgotten sources. Stiles’ interpretation of James’ life and legend isn’t revisionist; in many ways it’s an old-fashioned biography that treats its subject with more reverence than the countless tomes written by Jesse’s apologists. One might say that it’s more reconstruction than deconstruction, as Stiles’ major revelation, contrary to most recent accountings, is that the James story has more to do with the Civil War and its aftermath than with the conditions that produced frontier outlaws such as Billy the Kid.

Or, as Stiles writes, “Jesse James himself looked South, not West; he, his brother, and his bandit colleagues were proud products of the Confederate war effort.” (Stiles perhaps errs in not differentiating the term “West” from “frontier.” While it is true that Missouri, where James was born, was a slave state with an established market economy, it was nonetheless west of the Mississippi River and shared a number of characteristics with an overwhelmingly pro-Confederate state, Texas. Texas, while itself not entirely a frontier state, was undeniably part of the West. But Stiles’ points survive his exaggerations.)

James was born in 1847, in what Stiles correctly calls “the most hotly ideological era in American history” and in the border state destined to be the site of the most vicious internecine fighting of the Civil War period. One does not have to sympathize with him to agree that the boy was fated at birth to be a killer.

His mother, Zerelda, was an overpowering figure and an ardent supporter of slavery and secession. (Jesse’s father, a preacher, died in California trying to evangelize gold miners.) His older brother, Frank, rode with the infamous, bloodthirsty guerrilla leader William Clarke Quantrill. Throughout his early teenage years, young Jesse watched in horror as Unionist sympathizers, often his former neighbors, burned and looted the houses and farms of pro-Confederates, many of whom were murdered in cold blood. Atrocities committed by secessionists were equally, if not more, mind-numbing.

At 16, infuriated when his mother was arrested and forced to take a Union loyalty oath, Jesse joined the worst of all guerrilla leaders, Bloody Bill Anderson, and perhaps even took part in the most shocking mass murder of that time and place: the gunning down of a platoon of unarmed Union prisoners at Centralia. By the time he was 18, Jesse James was battle-hardened and fueled by an ideological rage, schooled in the ways of the bushwhacker by older, more jaded colleagues like Arch Clement and Cole Younger (whose fame for many years would rival Jesse’s) to fight “not as a victim, but as a warrior in a cause.” By the end of the war, he was living proof of Philip Caputo’s statement from “A Rumor of War” (quoted by Stiles) that “One of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy.”

After the war, the James and Younger brothers found themselves unable to lay down the sword — or rather, the new cartridge-loading, rapid-fire revolvers that turned an experienced guerrilla band into a small marauding army — and they embarked on a series of still-legendary bank and train holdups as far east as Huntington, W. Va., as far south as Muscle Shoals, Ala., and, finally, as far north as Northfield, Minn. Northfield was the end of the line for the James-Younger gang. After years of dodging professional law officers and Pinkerton detectives, they met disaster in the town full of stubborn Minnesota pioneers, some of them Union veterans, who reached for their rifles at the first sign of trouble. (One of the gang’s members may have been a relative of the author.)

The Youngers were captured and sent to prison. After the largest manhunt in American history, the James brothers crawled back to Missouri where the introspective Frank “sought Shakespeare and solitude” in an honest attempt at reform while Jesse kept going for six years until 1882, when he was killed for blood money by two of his gang members, the Ford brothers. Frank James never spent a day in jail, and on Cole Younger’s release from prison the two former guerrillas wrote biographies and hosted, briefly, a Wild West show. (Frank died in 1915, Cole Younger a year later.)

Stiles soundly rejects the neo-Marxist concept of Jesse James as a “social bandit” or his gang as “Bandits [who],” in the words of British historian Eric Hobsbawm, “belong to the peasantry.” Stiles finds “no evidence that they did anything with their loot except spend it on themselves” and that most of the banks they robbed were, contrary to popular tradition, “not the target of popular financial discontent but [small institutions] dependent on [local capital].”

Also contrary to 12 decades of dime novels and Hollywood films, Missourians had no hatred of the railroads, and the railroads, for their part, scarcely took notice of the Jameses and the Youngers. (It was the express companies that felt victimized and hired the Pinkerton detectives.) Only once, near the end of his life, did Jesse condemn the railroads — not, says Stiles, “as the enemies of the small farmers or as economic oppressors but as his personal foes.”

Peeling back myth after myth, Stiles finally arrives at the reason why Jesse James, and not his more experienced brother Frank or associate Cole Younger, was singled out by history to symbolize an era. And the reason, interestingly enough, turns out to be Jesse himself. “The reality of rural Missouri,” writes Stiles, “was far different from the simple, apolitical society imagined by Hobsbawm. (Let alone Marx.) And the real outlaw was far from an inarticulate symbol created by others. When the unspoken assumptions are cleared away, a truly substantial Jesse James emerges, strikingly more significant — and purposeful — than historians have imagined.”

The real Missouri bushwhackers both before and after the Civil War combined political violence with ordinary crime, targeting banks with ties to rival political groups, intimidating free blacks, terrorizing voters with reconstructive sympathies and, in general, trying to push the calendar back before the Emancipation Proclamation.

It has long been know that what singled out Jesse from his bushwhacker colleagues was his relationship with former Confederate officer and later Missouri journalist John Newman Edwards. Edwards, who saw James as a symbol of the Southern ideals that he still hoped to impose on post-Civil War Missouri, gave Jesse, in essence, a platform from which to justify his robberies as an extension of Confederate policies. Prior to Stiles, no historian has devoted such care and energy to analyzing Jesse James’ famous letters to Missouri newspapers, missives that were picked up and quoted throughout the country.

While Edwards edited and almost certainly embellished Jesse’s words, a painstakingly detailed study proves conclusively that the author was indeed Jesse James. James was the first American criminal to be obsessed with his own public image, the first “who sought to push himself into the news … more than one of his confederates would observe that he planned robberies with an eye on the public reaction.”

With the passing of time and the distance from the Civil War, it became harder for Jesse to sustain the illusion that his crimes had a political significance. During one train robbery after Northfield, James ranted in front of the passengers about how the railroad and the governor were out to get him. “He had never been more defiant,” says Stiles, “never more famous, and never more hollow.”

In the final analysis, Jesse James remains with us today not because he was brave, ruthless, romantic, loyal and occasionally bloodthirsty — though he was in fact all of these things, at least to many of the people who knew him best. He survives because “In his political consciousness and close alliance with the propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes, and his denunciations of his enemies, he resembles a character well known to our own times. In many aspects, Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist.”

Allen Barra's next book is "Mickey and Willie -- The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age," from Crown. More Allen Barra.

Thursday, May 5, 2011 8:28 PM UTC

Breaking: Jesse James is still the worst

The "American Outlaw" tries to win back the public by dissing Sandra Bullock's skills in bed. Classy move

By FILE - This photo taken March 7, 2010 shows Jesse James arriving for the Vanity Fair Oscar party in West Hollywood, Calif. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer, file)(Credit: Peter Kramer)

In case there was any question lingering in your mind whether Jesse James is still a raging jackass, his latest attempt at public relations should remove all doubt. Promoting his new memoir, “American Outlaw,” the man who cheated on America’s Sweetheart with a White Power enthusiast and then bragged of being “the most hated man in the world” seems determined to drum up even more ill will. During a Wednesday visit on Howard Stern’s Sirius show, Stern questioned the thrill-seeking entrepreneur/reality star about whether his fiancée, Kat Von D., was better in bed than Sandra Bullock, and James unhesitatingly replied, “That one’s an easy no-brainer … Yes sir, 100 percent.” Way to win back your public, James! Maybe he’s jealous of all the attention Osama bin Laden and Charlie Sheen have been getting lately.

James, who did a 30-day stint in an Arizona treatment facility last year, certainly has a right to move on and be happy after a childhood that he says included terrifying abuse and an adulthood wracked with ill-starred marriages to porn stars, custody battles and, ultimately, embarrassing revelations about his dalliances. He is a man who today is obviously madly in love with his bride-to-be, and you know what they say — fourth time’s the charm. He told People this week his tattoo artist lady “loves me like no woman ever has, 100 percent.” If you’re doing the math, that’s 200 percent sex and love, right there. James has in recent months been downright schoolgirlish in his public declarations of ardor.

Yet as he attempts to salvage his public persona, the man who’s been riding the bad boy shtick his whole career won’t go the blubbering Republican adulterer route. Nooooo, he’s got to be the tortured, self-hating rogue who still wants the world to know he is having hotter sex than anyone has ever had before in the history of sex. And though a year ago he was admitting of his affair that “I knew it was horrible. It made me feel horrible. It was me trying to self-sabotage my life,” he’s now going into more depth about the causes, including a game-changing car ride in which Bullock asked him to turn down the radio. “I lowered it. Of course I did,” he writes in his memoir. “That’s what any husband would do for his high-class wife. She wasn’t some whore in the back of a Daytona nightclub; she was a lady, with gentler tastes. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but feel kind of cheated. It was like I was Huckleberry Finn, when Widow Douglas decides to adopt him. They were ‘sivilizing’ me, and I didn’t know how to make them stop.” So he did the only thing a man whose wife is not some Daytona whore could do to make him feel less “Mentally at a loss, desperate for something to make me feel like I had some sense of freedom … to assert my independence over my life.” He banged a lady with a tattooed face.

Were James writing from some great emotional distance, as a man who has made his amends and can tell the world, “behold the cautionary tale here,” his saga might have a wry, redemptive appeal. But the dude is still talking like he’s taking jerk pills. On “Good Morning America” Wednesday, he shrugged to Vicki Mabrey that “I can’t worry about [Bullock] anymore. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last five or six years worrying only about her and what she thinks and what I should do and controlling all my movements and everything else. It’s time to worry about Jesse, and what makes Jesse happy.”

And what makes Jesse happy is talking about himself in the third person and boasting about his girlfriend. He told Howard Stern Wednesday that Kat Von D. is “a vixen, man, the way she gets in my head. It’s a mental thing; [we're] connected on a whole different level.” He also added (hinting perhaps that he is far more magnanimous than his ex-wife Sandy) that “If she cheated on me, I’d forgive her and still love her.” I hope he throws that clause in the wedding vows.

James’ penchant for living outside the box is the essence of his fame. But while it’s one thing to be the guy with the motorcycle and the hot fiancée, it’s another to essentially badmouth the woman you cheated on. It’s ungracious and petty and it doesn’t make you look, as you claim, like you’re “moving forward, thinking clearly and becoming a better person.” Better people don’t compare the sexual prowess of their partners on Howard Stern, no matter how much Stern may goad them to do so. Better people don’t subtly blame others for their screw-ups. Even authentically cool bad boys don’t do that. And while he may well be on the road to redemption in both his personal and professional life, Jesse James could still stand a little improvement. About 100 percent.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Friday, Jan 21, 2011 4:10 PM UTC

Jesse James’ relentlessly public love

The man who cheated on Sandra Bullock can't stop oversharing about fiancee Kat Von D. Are we right to be annoyed?

By Jesse James (left) and Kat Von D.

Just because your second wife was a convicted tax offender porn star who’s been arrested for assaulting you and whom you took to court for being an “unfit parent,” and just because you cheated on your third wife with a Nazi-saluting tattoo model who had the words “white power” spelled out on her fridge, that does not mean you aren’t entitled to enjoy the rest of your life and happiness. But Jesse James, good luck.

This week, the motorcycle entrepreneur, death-defying reality star and man who broke Sandra Bullock’s heart announced that he is making an honest woman of his girlfriend of five months, tattoo artist and “LA Ink” star Kat Von D. Uhhh, mazel tov?

It was only a year ago that Sandra Bullock was tearfully clutching a Golden Globe and thanking her then husband, James, “There’s no surprise that my work got better when I met you, because I never knew what it was for someone to have my back.” The next month, James was gushing over her at the Oscars, saying, “She’s beautiful. She’s amazing. She takes my breath away.” Two weeks later, in the wake of embarrassing revelations about his extramarital activities, James was issuing a public apology for “my poor judgment” in hooking up with Michelle “Bombshell” McGee and saying that “I deserve everything bad that is coming my way.” Yet James seems to have bounced back quite nicely from all the bad karma he once professed to have coming his way.

Speaking to People magazine Thursday, James said: “You know, sometimes the public and press gets it wrong. This is one of those times. 2010 was actually the best year of my life because I fell in love with my best friend. An amazing woman who stood behind me when the world turned their backs. I have never met anyone so kind and loving and committed to making the world a better place every day. My love for her is beyond description. So honored that she said ‘yes.’ Growing old with her is going to be a f—-n’ blast!”

And the public declarations of ardor just keep coming. Last week he shared his love via Twitter, stating, “They say True love will always shine through. The only reason I started Twitter again? so I could publicly profess my love for @thekatvond.” Since then, it’s been a nonstop litany of similar tweet nothings: “Epic day comes to an end. Closing my eyes to dream about @thekatvond” “I miss @thekatvond the Most. Hurts.” “@thekatvond para siempre mi amor.” I know he’s in love and all, but does the rest of the world really need to be in on all of this? Hasn’t he ever heard of Skype? Or a diary? Unsurprisingly, the Internet community has cast a skeptical eye on the forthcoming nuptials. As comedy writer Caissie St. Onge sighed, “Oh, Kat Von D, don’t you know every time Jesse James looks at you he’ll be picturing *her* face tattoos.”

James and Ms. Von D have as much right to — and given the staggering American divorce statistics, probably as good a chance at — future connubial bliss as anybody else. And for two public figures who’ve built their careers on their edgy, reckless personae, it would be unusual to conduct a romance that didn’t include elements of impetuousness, oversharing and high school-level Spanish. James is not the kind of guy to take bride No. 4 with an abashed sense of “Let’s give this one a shot.” And anyone who’s ever felt the sting of seeing an ex post happy photographs with a new love on Facebook (it’s called the friend filter, and it’s awesome) might feel a sympathetic pang for James’ much-liked recent ex-wife Bullock. For him to discreetly, abashedly enter into his latest matrimonial gambit would not be in character for a man whose last girlfriend had the phrase “Pray for us sinners” written on her face. It’s true that it all seems a little tacky and too soon. But it’s his life. And he probably doesn’t expect anybody to send a blender this time around anyway.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010 4:13 PM UTC

Jesse James: Self-hatred poster boy

An ABC interview with Sandra Bullock's ex proves nobody wrecks our lives like we do

By Screenshot from ABC's interview with Jesse James

When ABC correspondent Vicky Mabrey described him as the most hated man in America, Jesse James quickly corrected her. “I think the most hated man in the world now.” And as the daredevil, motorcycle enthusiast, and soon to be ex-husband of Sandra Bullock said those words, there was a nervous smile on his face. An odd bit of pride, even. Nobody screws up our lives quite like we do.

James, whose seemingly picture-perfect marriage to America’s sweetheart took an abrupt nosedive earlier this year with the revelations of his grandly ill-advised infidelities, is the subject of an entire edition of Tuesday’s “Nightline” (apparently there’s only so much of a public appetite for oil spills), a lengthy preview of which aired today on “Good Morning America.” Speaking out directly for the first time since his marital combustion, James repeated a familiar list of platitudes from the Philanderer’s Guide to Public Contrition, admitting, “I lied,” and, “I deserve everything bad that’s coming my way.”

But unlike Tiger Woods, who spoke in his apologia of his sense of entitlement and enjoyment of “the temptations,” James comes off as a man whose motivations are more baffling. One may not excuse a rich athlete for playing around with a coterie of porn stars, but one might comprehend the selfish allure of it. On the other hand, James’ dalliances with, among others, a woman with the words “White Power” on her fridge just seem self-defeating. And that’s exactly his excuse. “When I was doing it,” he said, “I knew it was horrible. It made me feel horrible. I knew I would get caught eventually, and I think I wanted to get caught … It was me trying to self-sabotage my life.”

Well, if his ultimate goal was to run out of feet to shoot, James certainly seems to have gone about it brilliantly. Maybe that’s why, while part of the fascination with this whole train wreck is the public sympathy that the likable Bullock engenders, part of it is also that uncomfortably familiar chord that James’ behavior strikes. Sure, most people get through life without betraying a loved one with an alleged white supremacist, but who among us has never pulled a muscle digging one’s own grave? Who hasn’t felt the terrible thrill of screwing it all up?

In the teaser for tonight’s full interview, Vicky Mabrey claims James will be revealing details of his — surprise! — childhood that may have motivated his recent poor decision-making and current stint in rehab. As he says, “I took a pretty amazing life, and amazing success and marriage … and threw it away by my own hands.” But even those without apparent addictions and heavy-duty personal problems know the nerve-wracking sensation of having things go well — the creeping fear that it’s not deserved, or that it’ll get taken away. And sometimes, somewhere, buried deep in the subconscious, is the idea that “I’ll show you, world. I’ll blow it up myself before you can take it all away.” Because the pressure to hang on to what you have, to be good and talented and honest and, perhaps, less of a big fat fake, tends to plummet the further down the heap you fall.

Think of the last time you gave a friend a compliment or congratulations. Was the response a simple thanks, or was it a “No no nooooo, it’s no big deal, it’s not that great, it’s probably going to end tomorrow anyway!” When was the last time you yourself said it? What the hell is up with that?

Part of it is likely those nagging self-esteem issues that, sadly, seem to come pre-installed with the human condition and get reinforced during phys ed, school dances, and holidays meals with the family. And part of it is no doubt the fear of attracting ill will through one’s good fortune. In case you hadn’t noticed — haters gotta hate. Behind every happy, successful person, there’s a gang with an ocean of bile and resentment waiting to cheer when they fall. While some among us are able to embrace the good things in life — and even the subsequent backlash that often comes with them — with grace, gratitude and egos in healthy check, there will always be plenty of room on the spectrum for frailer emotional constitutions. 

Jesse James likely has a whole dysfunctional laundry list for doing the naughty things he did, including the obvious one that his affairs may have, when not being “horrible,” provided some pleasure. And he similarly has plenty of motivation for speaking out now. He has a career that the ambitious, self-made part of him needs to salvage, and a strong desire to clear his image from the taint of being known as “a racist.” But watching him get tearful as he spoke of “decimating my life,” one couldn’t help detect a little masochistic relief on his face as well. Walt Kelly famously said that “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Some days, it’s hard to achieve détente, but James is today’s best reminder to consider how crappy the alternative is. Instead of that “amazing life” he says he once knew, his prize now is that he gets to triumphantly quaff from a “World’s Most Hated Man” mug of his own making. And for whatever weird satisfaction it may provide him,  if there were a competition for the person who hates him the most, Jesse James would surely win that, too.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Friday, May 21, 2010 6:46 PM UTC

Jesse James: I threw it all away

A promo of his interview with ABC's "Nightline" is packed with empty platitudes

By

Less than three months after word broke of his extramarital affairs, Jesse James is doing his public penance by submitting to a cross-examination on national television. Today, a promo was released of his sit-down with ABC’s Vicki Mabrey, and it’s just about what you would expect. He delivers teary-eyed platitudes like “I took a pretty amazing life and marriage and threw it away,” and there are compelling exchanges like this one: 

Mabrey: “You cheated on your wife.”

James: “Yup.”

Probing, illuminating! How will we survive until it airs Tuesday on “Nightline”? Presumably, there will be a little more emotional insight in the full interview, although his declaration that he’s “the most hated man in the world” suggests a certain lack of perspective.

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Tracy Clark-Flory

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory.

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2010 3:29 PM UTC

Sandra Bullock’s triumphant new role: Single mom

The actress loses one man in her life -- but shows off the new one

By

This is how you do it, ladies. No apologizing for your own “failing,” saying (as Silda Spitzer did recently), “The wife is supposed to take care of the sex.”  No stealthy, stand-by-your-man wall of silence. Just a few weeks after her personal life blew up with revelations her husband, Jesse James, was stepping out with a colorful array of tattoo models and exotic dancers, Sandra Bullock is on the cover of People, smiling, her ring finger blatantly unadorned, holding her brand-new adopted baby. So there.

In the story, Bullock confirms that she’s filed for divorce from James and is the new mother of 3-and-a-half month-old Louis Bardo Bullock. She says she and James initiated the adoption process four years ago and brought the child, who was born in New Orleans, home together in January. Bullock is finalizing the adoption as a single parent.

In choosing to go public with the latest developments in her family life — in the super softball arena of People — Bullock is, of course, deflecting a modicum of the intense scrutiny she’s been under in recent weeks. But she’s also making a strong case for keeping calm and carrying on. And she’s following in the footsteps of Angelina Jolie, whose marriage to Billy Bob Thornton crumbled soon after adopting her first child, Maddox.

Is there something about the stress of adoption that contributes to a marital decline? I can’t help recalling Jennifer Garner’s “Juno” character, Vanessa, who forges on as a single mother after her husband decides he’s in over his head. The added twist of Bullock showing off her new African-American son while her soon-to-be ex has been dallying with a woman with a swastika tattoo and the words “white power” on her fridge adds a whole other set of questions to the story. For some, it may have disturbing echoes of Bullock’s own Oscar-winning turn as Leigh Anne Tuohy in “The Blind Side” — not to mention the satirical plotline of another recent film, “Bruno.” But not everything — even in show business — has to be cynical. And it’s hard as hell to argue with a loving mom and a child who needs a home finding each other.

A baby is no consolation prize for a failed relationship — just ask any single mother. Bullock herself says of her marital situation that “I’m sad and I am scared.” But in the same week Miss Congeniality is getting apologetic faxes from her husband’s stripper mistress, it’s mostly just nice to see Bullock looking radiant and joyful. Given Jesse James’ apparent fondness for white supremacists, it’s probably also for the best that he won’t be little Louis’ legal guardian.

For the rest of us, Bullock’s decisive move is a refreshing reminder that a woman who’s been humiliated by a cheating spouse — whether she’s the first lady of the Empire State or a beloved Hollywood star or your best friend — doesn’t have to slink off into self-loathing and shame. Bullock’s million-dollar smile reminds us that even in its hardest, worst moments, life still goes on. And that happiness is always an option.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

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