Profile of an Interesting Woman

Bryn Mawr College’s mock trial team underwent drastic renovations in the spring of 2023 due to the fact that the team had impeached its entire executive board. In the midst of this anarchy, I realized that our team lacked direction and an authority figure. I decided that, as the newly-elected president, the best solution would be to get a coach.

That summer, I sent emails to a dozen Bryn Mawr alums with legal experience and asked if they would be so generous as to coach our mock trial team. 

Only one person–Anette Klingman, Bryn Mawr Class of 1963–replied. Her message read:

“Dear Ella: For the past 18 years I have represented an estate in New York Surrogate Court pro se against family members who looted my parents’  $7.5 million estate and refused to settle. I won a $2.1 million Judgment in 2018, but it has been appealed 3 times. The first 2 appeals have been denied; the 3rd is still pending - which is holding up enforcement of the judgment. I employed competent New York attorneys throughout this litigation to advise me how to proceed pro se, and to represent the estate once the looting executors were removed. They are handling the current appeal and foreclosing on appellants’ assets to satisfy the judgment. There is no Stay of Execution, but local judges have been loath to approve foreclosures when there is an appeal still pending. I am still making appearances when necessary and reviewing pleadings before filing, but basically, I just have to live long enough to see this resolved.”

And then, 

“Meanwhile, I’d be pleased to act as Mock Trial Coach if I can be useful.”

What kind of crazy person was she? What was she going on about?

On Tuesday, September 24th, 2024, Anette invited me to her home for our interview. She waved enthusiastically at me from behind the glass door, grinning widely as I entered her home, which was a narrow little townhouse with the garage refurbished into a library. Standing side-by-side with me, she was a small woman who reached just below my chin, with a curved spine, walking cane, and short, burgundy-dyed hair.

She led me up the stairs, passing by a heap of her late husband’s medical equipment, as well as several framed photos of airplanes.

She had prepared us a dinner of pork loaf, green beans, carrots, and potatoes, which I painstakingly ate while we talked for four hours.

Anette was raised in Long Island City in New York. “You know where that is?”

“Yeah, yeah, Long Island.” 

“Not Long Island. Long Island City, in Queens.”

In the early 1940s, Anette was born to a French immigrant father and an Italian immigrant mother. The couple had four more children, making Anette the eldest daughter in an immigrant household–only one of the many impressive jobs she would hold in her lifetime.

“All the new immigrants lived there. It was the slums.”

Her parents had a rule that Anette couldn’t date unless the boy came up to their door and asked her out. Nobody would do that, because the neighborhood was so dangerous that boys would be too scared to get close enough to knock on the door. 

That’s why at fifteen, she begged her parents to move somewhere else. She called the realtor herself, gave him a price range, and dragged her parents on house tours for the next year until they finally moved to a six-bedroom, five-bathroom house in Forest Hills Gardens, a neighborhood where Rockefellers and Noble Peace Prize winners lived.

“We had become very wealthy all of a sudden, because my father was a genius.” 

Her father had been an errand boy at a lightbulb factory, but at heart, he was a talented machinist. At a time when lightbulbs were being made by hand, he learned how to mechanize the process. Essentially, he introduced the mass production of lightbulbs at his factory, got a patent for his invention, and sold it for lots of money.

In Forest Hills Gardens, Anette spoke briefly about a Donald she and her siblings knew and hung out with as kids.

“That’s why when people ask me, how do you know Donald’s not a good person, I’m like, because I knew him!”

“I’m sorry, Donald who?”

“Mr. Trump.”

“You knew Donald Trump?”

“Yeah, he lived in Brooklyn at the time. But he’d hang around the house with my brother. They went to the Hudson Military Academy together as teenagers. That’s where all the rich people send their delinquent sons.” 

From sixth to twelfth grade, Anette and her siblings were subject to a Catholic school education.

“At the public schools, teachers wouldn’t hit the kids. But the nuns at Catholic school would. That’s why my parents sent us there.”

Anette told me she was goody-two-shoes growing up. At the same time, she said she received hundreds of conduct marks throughout her time in school.

“What were you getting in trouble for?”

“One thing was reading the New York Times.” They were only allowed to read The Tablet, a Catholic newspaper.

“The nuns hated me. I always got in trouble, but I was also always top of my class.”

At school, no one would hang out with her, or be seen with her at all, because she was a vocal proponent of birth control. During lunch time in the packed cafeteria with twelve seats per table, Anette would sit alone with eleven empty seats beside her.

At the age of sixteen, Anette’s parents forbade her from getting a driver’s license, so she went behind their backs and got a pilot’s license. “I hopped on a bus to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, forged my parent’s signature, took the forty required flying lessons, and got my solo pilot’s license.” 

I started believing less and less that she was the goody-two-shoes she claimed to be.

Finally, Anette’s Catholic school days were coming to an end, and she eagerly began applying for colleges. She applied to Cornell, Vassar, Barnard, and Bryn Mawr.

She received a letter from Cornell which denied her admission. She found this peculiar so called the admissions office and asked why.

It turns out that Cornell requested Anette’s transcripts from her school, but the school refused to send them. 

When she called Vassar, they said the same thing. There was no way they could admit a student if they didn’t know what her grades were like.

Anette told her father about the situation, and he drove her to the school and demanded to speak with the Reverend Mother. A sister told him the Reverend Mother was indisposed. Her father said they would wait until she was disposed again. 

When the Reverend Mother finally appeared, she explained to Anette’s father that it was against the school’s policy to send their students to non-Catholic schools, and so would not provide her transcripts. They suggested she go to Marymount Catholic School, for which she gained a full scholarship. (Anette had not applied there.) It was only when her father threatened to sue the school that they ceded. Anette got into every school she applied to. 

“Why did you choose Bryn Mawr?”

“It was the farthest from my mother.”

In her Bryn Mawr years, she lived in Pembroke East dormitory for three years and in Batten House her senior year. In that moment, I felt more connected to her than ever, because I had just spent the entire summer living in Batten House. 

She recalls her Batten House days with exuberance. “I was living with a bunch of freshman girls from the South. They would hang Confederate flags on the roof, and they were totally killer on the boys. The girls left those Haverford boys heartbroken. They’d loiter around Batten House, and I’d have to go and comfort them while they cried.”

Anette was a biology major on the pre-med track. She became more and more progressive about her beliefs on reproductive rights the more she learned about human physiology. She recalls being in the minority of women who believed in birth control. At that time at Bryn Mawr, students would get expelled if they became pregnant. 

She made it her mission to become Bryn Mawr’s resident sex educator, and sure enough, girls all over campus would come find her in Batten House and bashfully ask her about what sex was.

“It was something that no one talked about. I had girls coming up to me the day before their wedding asking me to explain it.” 

She recalled, also, that Bryn Mawr was a very academically rigorous school, and that she went from being the top of her class in high school to never getting As. “I’m so glad, though, because all the schooling I did after was a breeze.” 

Anette graduated college in May of 1963. She did not get accepted into medical school, because they didn’t really let women go to medical school. Devastated but unwilling to wallow, she accepted a position as a science teacher in Arizona.

She spent that summer at home in New York, and also bought a car. She borrowed sixteen hundred dollars from a bank and purchased a brand-new, stick-shift Volkswagen. 

“I took the subway to Sixth Avenue, picked up the car, looked at the driver’s manual for a while, and then drove it to Central Park.” At the time, Central Park was not divided into tiny sections, so she spent the rest of the day driving in circles around Central Park until she was familiar with the car. 

She drove it back home that night, still license-less. 

“What did your parents say when they saw the car?”

“They didn’t. I came home late that night and left early the next morning.”

“Where did you go?”

“I drove to Arizona. For my job.” In Phoenix, she finally obtained her driver’s license.

Anette only worked as a science teacher for one year before she was fired. 

“Why?”

“The first ever televised live birth took place in 1964, and some of my students had watched it while others hadn’t. The next day at school, the kids who watched it asked me questions about it, which I answered. The students’ parents found out, complained to the headmaster, and had me fired.”

Anette was unfazed. She went back to New York and joined the National Organization of Women when it was founded in 1966 and lobbied for abortion rights alongside prominent women like Betty Friedan, who she knew personally. 

She also enrolled herself in Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School and got a job on Wall Street as a secretary. During this time, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was gaining momentum, and because employers were no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, she decided to ask for a job as a securities analyst. She got it and quit her secretary post.

Her job paid for her to get an MBA at New York University, but she never finished because Montreal was calling.

In Montreal, her father ended up taking over a chain of fourteen retail stores, and he needed an accountant and a manager. He hired his daughter because she was the only person he trusted for the job. For one year, Anette collected, in cash, fifteen thousand dollars each night from each of the fourteen stores, counted it, and deposited it at the bank. She also hired all of the retail workers at these stores, interviewing them in French.

She earned a lot of money working for her father, and the first thing she did with it was return to her first love of aviation and lease an airplane. 

“Flying over Manhattan is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Seeing the skyscrapers, watching the way the light seeps into the windows of the plane. It feels like you’re the only person in the world.”

She then flew down to Florida and obtained her commercial pilot’s license. A few months later, a recruiter convinced her to join the Air Force. Anette was ecstatic, because they promised her the position of aircraft maintenance officer. While at office training school in Texas, she quickly realized that as a woman, she would only end up with the position of a glorified secretary, not working on airplanes like she hoped. She quit before she finished training. 

“It was so demeaning. They really did make you clean the floors with toothbrushes.”

Once Anette quit officer training, she decided to make a pit stop in California. There, she stayed with her boyfriend Larry in LA, and on alternating weekends, would visit her other two boyfriends in San Diego and San Francisco.

“I married Larry, because he was the first to propose. And because he was the tallest of the three.”

The couple had their wedding in April of 1969. Anette decided that since they were going to have children soon, and because she didn’t want her kids to have a dysfunctional mother like she did, she would go to school and learn how to be a mother. Anette went to UCLA to get a degree in early childhood development, and her son Ari was born in March of 1970.

“How was it? Being a mother for the first time?”

“Lot of work. They don’t tell you that ‘cause then the species would come to an end.”

From 1972 to 1976, Anette nursed her baby boy, taught at an elementary school in downtown LA where she learned Spanish from her Latino students, and also went to Southwestern Law School at night. 

She recalls Larry being a tremendous support system for her during law school, taking care of Ari while she studied.

“He also cooked for us. At the time, he was a cook for a fraternity house, so cooking for one family was nothing.”

Her second child Laura was born in 1976, right after she graduated law school. In 1977, she passed the Bar.

Anette wanted to work in entertainment law. She lived in Hollywood, after all, and her husband had gone to UCLA film school with buddies like Francis Coppola and George Lucas. 

She did not get hired at any of the firms she wanted to work at. She recalls an exchange between her and one interviewer:

“You’re the wrong age, wrong sex, and you didn’t go to Harvard.”

“You knew all of that when you looked at my resume! Why did you waste my time interviewing then?”

“You sounded interesting; I wanted to meet you.”

She ended up renting a friend’s garage and turning it into an office for her own practice. She practiced as a trial attorney for six years at her own firm.

“What was it like? Being an attorney?”

“It’s war.” 

She must have liked it enough, though, because she litigated for twenty-five years. 

“What was it like, raising a family and having such a stressful job?”

“It was awful.”

The 1980s passed in a blur. Then the 1990s did, too. Anette had been working at a big law firm until Larry decided to have a mid-life crisis. 

“He left me for a woman that was younger, thinner, and richer than me. He wanted a divorce, and he wanted to take everything with him.”

After thirty-eight years of marriage, Lawrence Klingman left Anette Klingman. 

In 2000, she moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to her daughter Laura, who was at Bryn Mawr College at the time. Anette enrolled in Drexel University to obtain a law librarian degree but couldn’t finish because of her abysmal mental state. From what I could make out, it was a very dark and confusing time, but she didn’t really care to elaborate. She just said that she had never expected Larry to leave.

“I guess I was pretty bummed out. But it’s okay. I had good shrinks and good drugs.”

At Drexel, one good thing happened. She met Ed. “He was such a nice guy. And he was tall. I love tall men.” They married and were together until he passed last year. 

Around this time, Anette was getting tired of talking. It was almost eleven pm. She asked me to just call her if I needed a quote to wrap up the story. 

I told her it was fine, that I had a lot of material to work with. And anyway, she did already give me a quote. The last thing she said during our conversation was, “I make it my mission in life to make everybody’s lives better than before they met me.” 

Anette is the farthest to the right. She is pictured with all of her siblings.