Preserving Memory of ‘Tailhook’

ABC tonight airs a moderately good movie recounting the scandalous Tailhook incident that found chopper pilot Paula Coughlin going public with charges of being sexually mauled by many of her male naval colleagues at a 1991 convention in Las Vegas. Tailhook was a wake-up call.

Early derision of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s prominent policy role in her husband’s White House also suggests that, in their struggle for full equality, U.S. women are still pushing a heavy boulder up a steep hill.

Obviously, in this male-controlled society, there remains wide sentiment for the majority gender acting like Kathie Lee, not Regis, like Robin Quivers, not Howard Stern.

Nonetheless, strong women now surface regularly on television, from Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to Marcia Clark, lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial, who may not think of herself as a poster feminist, but whose formidable courtroom presence constantly affirms what women can achieve, despite media fascination with her hair and hemlines.

Connie Chung’s departure from the CBS Evening News is as cosmetic as was her arrival, but look at many of the women who regularly report the news from the field, including CNN’s bullet-dodging Christiane Amanpour. Look at the matriarchs of daytime TV, where Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake and other female talk-show hosts have established themselves, for better or for worse, as authority icons for the stay-at-home set. Look at daytime soap operas, where females are increasingly in control of their destinies.

Look at prime time, where females are increasingly visible in the executive producer corps, and where especially strong women prevail in several of TV’s best and most popular comedies--CBS’ “Murphy Brown” and ABC’s “Roseanne” and “Grace Under Fire.” On the latter, Brett Butler’s single mother is a hard hat at an oil refinery where she does what used to be known as a “man’s job” and where the male palookas around her are no match for her superior intellect and biting, sardonic wit.

Consider also the steely grit of the heroine of “Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story,” NBC’s February docudrama about a much-honored, spit-and-polish Army colonel who resisted being booted from the military after disclosing that she was gay.

And look at the mental toughness of Lt. Coughlin, the protagonist of ABC’s “She Stood Alone: The Tailhook Scandal.” Cammermeyer and Coughlin were abused in different ways by the military, one woman suffering discrimination because she was a lesbian, the other being physically handled like a chunk of meat and then being shunned when she publicly protested the incident after investigators and all but one of her male superiors either refused to believe her account or merely humored her.

At times pointedly intercut with footage of that year’s explosive Senate Judiciary hearings starring Clarence Thomas and his accuser, Anita Faye Hill, “She Stood Alone” portrays the Navy of 1991 as being commanded mostly by a collection of musty dinosaurs. Into her own Jurassic Park one weekend innocently steps 30-year-old admiral’s aide Coughlin (Gail O’Grady), who, as just another promising, ambitious officer, attends the Navy’s annual Tailhook convention. On the third floor of the Las Vegas Hilton, she and other female officers are humiliated and forced to run a drunken gantlet of gropers.

After Coughlin’s rear admiral boss (Rip Torn) dismisses the sexual assault as just “a little rowdy behavior” and the Navy’s internal investigation appears to stagnate, Coughlin goes public with her story.

The resulting scandal rocks the service, costing careers and motivating a more enlightened policy toward women in the Navy. The highest ranking officer to resign was Admiral Frank Kelso (Hal Holbrook), who was outraged by Tailhook and supported Coughlin, according to this script by Suzette Couture, but who sinks with the ship anyway.

“She Stood Alone” is surely watchable, and O’Grady (of “NYPD Blue”) is a credible Coughlin. But she can’t overcome this movie’s major failings. One is a lack of a wider vision to complement its regurgitation of the public record. The other is an inability in director Larry Shaw’s two gantlet sequences to convey a level of horror that validates the victimized naval officer’s description of the trauma she suffered at the hands of those Top Guns in the hotel hallway.

In 1994, Coughlin resigned her commission, saying “the covert and overt attacks” she suffered after Tailhook “have stripped me of my ability to serve.” Later that year she was awarded nearly $7 million in damages from the Hilton Corp. for the emotional distress she said she suffered due to the incident.

“A little rowdy behavior” had cost everyone dearly.

* “She Stood Alone: The Tailhook Scandal” airs at 9 tonight on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).