The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone

by Robin Green

  After college in 1967, I left Providence and over the next few years worked a variety of menial jobs. I went from Martha’s Vineyard to Boston to New York to Chicago and finally to Berkeley and San Francisco with detours to New Mexico, Mexico, and the California coast from LA to Mendocino. I lived in sin (as it was called then), smoked dope, dropped acid, and hiked with my boyfriend into the Jemez Mountains, where we slept in a cave and, naked and on all fours, grazed on the watercress that grew around a hot spring. I waitressed, made jewelry, mooched off that same rich boyfriend. In short, I was not so different from any of the other girls at Rolling Stone.

  At last at Rolling Stone I finally found work that I loved and success—until it all went to shit. Which brings me back to the little piece I wrote for the reunion tabloid, recounting in vague terms the end of my time at Rolling Stone:

  My favorite celebrity story is one I don’t want to talk about—it goes into a tell-all memoir, though I’ll never write one. [I know, right?] But it’s the reason I got fired, or taken off the masthead in my case. I’d been working on a story about the children of Robert Kennedy for months, never wrote it, though stuff I found out would surely have put me on a larger map. But by then I’d lost my taste for my style of irony, for telling true tales. We were in Israel—Jann was there with a bunch of people Max Palevsky [a big RS investor] had brought over to witness the dedication of a wing of the museum to his parents, and I was there on a story for Oui [which I also never wrote], and I was with Jann and the others at a nightclub and he took me out to the patio and told me if I didn’t turn the story in he’d have to take me off the masthead. And I said okay.

  I was ready to go, but I also felt my life was over, in a way, having to go back to live in obscurity and all, that’s how it felt. But somehow, I managed to go on…and on…

  What’s not written there was that after Jann told me he was taking my name off the masthead—kind of like a sergeant being stripped of his stripes—and I’d shrugged and said okay, he’d put his arms around me and given me a big hug and said, “But do me a favor, will you, Robin? Never write about me, okay?”

  Well, sorry, but that’s part of what I have to do, write about everything, including Jann, starting with the three minutes of our first meeting and up to and beyond the one night I spent with him in his room at the Sherry-Netherland (the details of which are blurry, probably because of the quaaludes).

  And I also have to write about what I said I was saving for that tell-all memoir I’d never write, the story of why I didn’t do the Kennedy piece: because I had crossed a journalistic line and gone to bed with an interview subject (okay, it was Robert Kennedy Jr. in his dorm room at Harvard), and I felt I couldn’t write the kind of truthful story I prided myself on without revealing that. And I wasn’t about to reveal it. Not to a million-plus readers. Not even to Jann as an explanation of why he wasn’t getting the pages. Not to pretty much anyone at all, except maybe strangers in bars or at parties when I was trying to explain why I wasn’t on the masthead anymore.

  It’s all so poignant. Also ironic and paradoxical. Because at that point I was sleeping with everybody. We all were—women’s lib, free love, pre-AIDS, and all that—so why wouldn’t I jump at the chance to go to bed with this tall, handsome, long-haired boy, a fucking Kennedy, for God’s sake? Well, because you’re not supposed to. But that’s the ironic paradox. Because I think it was also some kind of journalistic curiosity and an instinct for story that made me make that leap into a subject’s bed, a leap I’d never taken before (unless you count a David Cassidy roadie, which I don’t).

  Because what I learned about the Kennedy male, this one, anyway (and isn’t this sort of thing, like, genetic?), spending the night on that vast and undulating waterbed on the floor of that college dorm room with the falconry equipment displayed on the wall and the small bust of the slain father on the credenza, seemed to be what lay at the very foundation of the Kennedy male’s power, confidence, his very Kennedy-ness.

  Also, in addition to way-too-personal details, I’d learned uncomfortable truths about the kids—for example, earlier that night, I had gone with this one to a street corner off Harvard Square so he could score drugs—and I felt the Kennedys had had enough horror in their lives without my adding to it on the pages of Rolling Stone.

  And there’s more of the cruel irony. Because after the magazine moved to New York in the late 1970s, Jacqueline Kennedy became a frequent visitor to the offices and a valued, much-vaunted pal of social-climbing, star-fucking Jann (a description even he would cop to), and no way would she have done or been so if I had fulfilled my obligation and actually forked over the Kennedy piece Jann had so wanted from me so many years before.

  Ah, well, the whole thing had become a big ball of no fun anyway, both personally and professionally. After Israel and though I still occasionally wrote for Rolling Stone and other magazines, I was lost and floundering. Finally, in 1975, I left the Bay Area for good and went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to begin my life again.

  I didn’t read Rolling Stone much anymore and I forgot those heady years—well, most of the time. There was one cold winter day when I was in Manhattan and found myself lingering on the sidewalk outside the building where the magazine had its offices, looking like Mildred Pierce in that movie, pulling my coat around me for warmth, hoping (vainly, as it turned out) to catch a glimpse, maybe have a conversation with Jann, someone, anyone…

  And that brings me finally to the end of the reunion article, which about sums up and becomes a sort of prelude to the story of myself I didn’t know I was going to need to tell but am about to.

  I never saw Jann again until a couple years ago at an Annie Lennox concert. I went over and said hello, met his boyfriend [now his husband]. I told him that my years at Rolling Stone were some of the best in my life—but also the worst. And his boyfriend said, you can’t imagine how many of you come up to him and say that.

  Chapter One

  How to Become a Journalist

  It was sometime in 1970 when I borrowed my boyfriend David Leach’s metallic-blue-green Pontiac Firebird convertible dual-exhaust overhead cam 6 and drove from our apartment in Berkeley, California, across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco to apply for a job at Rolling Stone magazine, which was then headquartered there. I’d been in Berkeley about a year, mooching off David, watching him live.

  A rich man’s son, David was strung along by his dad on a monthly stipend of three hundred dollars, just enough money in those days to cover the bills and buy his exotic teas, pipe tobacco, and weed. And just enough to sap him of all ambition and drive.

  He’d get up late, say noon, meticulously fix himself a pot of smoky Lapsang souchong tea with sugar and warmed milk, and then, wearing only a dark green velour bathrobe, go to the living room and sit like a pasha on the elegant woven cushions of a beautiful wood chair imported from Persia, unabashedly letting the bathrobe fall open to reveal his round, hairy belly, his genitals resting between his thighs, a chubby man comfortable in his own skin.

  Sometimes he’d glance to the kitchen, where I’d be tidying up, see me watching, and flash me his Cheshire cat grin. He was the only child of a second marriage; his young mother had doted on him and he was accustomed to being watched.

  It could be hours that he sat there, sipping tea, reading the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, at some point adjusting his position slightly to begin the preparation of the first of that day’s joints—crushing of buds, gleaning of seeds, sifting of pot, then the rolling, licking of paper, producing a perfect, thin doobie, which he’d light and toke on deeply from time to time, his head soon surrounded by a halo of pot smoke as he sipped tea and turned the pages of a newspaper, one index finger twirling a strand of his thick, curly brown hair as he read.

  His was a seductive way of life. Not to have to get a job? Go to work? I don’t know what roused me one morning to get up and go out and find work, but I did, hiring on as a waitress at HS Lordships, a faux-British, cor
poration-owned roast-beef house at the end of the street in the Berkeley Marina. David marveled that someone could do that, leave in the morning and come home with a job.

  I made good money, but it wasn’t long before I started to wonder what I was doing in the stupid getup they made me wear—little serving-wench outfit complete with push-up bra and ruffled apron—me with my higher education, the first generation of my family ever to go to college, and an Ivy League one at that.

  I was a talented girl, had turned down a full ride at the Rhode Island School of Design to go to Brown—Pembroke College in Brown University, as the girls’ campus was then called—where I became a star of sorts, a townie with a chip on her shoulder on state scholarship who was John Hawkes’s pet and who wrote poignant yet earthy short stories and skulked around campus in black turtlenecks, jeans, and black boots, a would-be bohemian made editor of Brown’s literary magazine and as such the only girl on the editorial staff of the Brown Daily Herald that year, just as I would later be the only female contributing editor on the masthead of Rolling Stone during my years there and, still later, the only female writer/executive producer of The Sopranos for the first five of its six seasons.

  Because of my editorship at Brown, I was given a room of my own in Metcalf, the singles dorm, also known as the weird girls’ dorm, the only room with its own phone—a big deal in that pre-cell-phone era. A girl with a future, you’d think. Except here I was at HS Lordships working split shifts, slinging bloody slabs of rib roast to tables of leering, cheapskate middle-management types.

  It was about this time that my only friend from college, from the weird girls’ dorm, telephoned. She was getting married at the family home on Long Island in June and wanted me to be a bridesmaid. She also wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. She herself was climbing up the ladder in the New York publishing world. In fact, she’d been working for an editor at Macmillan, Alan Rinzler, who had just quit to go out west and be a publisher of Straight Arrow, the book division of Rolling Stone magazine. She would tell him about me. I should look him up.

  Rolling Stone magazine? Are you kidding? I loved Rolling Stone magazine! Besides the Berkeley Barb and the occasional Ramparts, it was just about the only thing I read anymore and I devoured it. I remembered the first time I’d opened one up; it would have been in 1968, a year after it was founded. I was living in New York and headed back to my secretarial job after lunch break and I was on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-Seventh waiting for the light to change. It was the issue with Eric Clapton on the cover, handsome, with a mustache and a full head of hair then, in jeans shirt and bead necklace. And there I was, waiting for the light in Midtown in a sea of men in suits and ties and briefcases, women in heels and pencil skirts.

  I didn’t know then that in a few years I’d make my way out to California, where Rolling Stone was published. And that it would have a book division. And that I’d have an in, an actual name of someone to call there.

  Alan Rinzler was expecting my call and said he’d see me. I decided that for once, I wouldn’t dress in the secretary disguise I’d worn for job interviews in Boston, then New York, then Chicago. This time I’d go as myself in sandals, denim miniskirt, and tank top. Plus, I’d borrow a friend’s jeans jacket that had a large patch sewn on the back of two people fucking. And just for good measure, I’d take the dog, a big black mutt called Reuben that friends had left with us on their way to Mexico. If they didn’t like the fucking jacket and they didn’t like the fucking dog, fuck ’em.

  The sun was shining; I had the Firebird’s top down, the radio blasting, Reuben on the seat next to me, nose to the wind. We drove down University Avenue in David’s throaty car and took the 80 South, then swung onto the ramp to the long, grand, eastern expanse of Bay Bridge to Yerba Buena Island and from there to the western expanse of bridge, the fairyland city of San Francisco shining before us. I double-shifted down onto the first exit off the bridge and veered not to the right, where most traffic was headed, to downtown and North Beach, but to the left, a less-traveled industrial area. I soon pulled up to the converted warehouse on Third Street where Rolling Stone had its offices.

  I set the emergency brake and looked at Reuben. Already on his feet, wagging his tail and up for anything, Reuben looked at me. This was a great dog—one ear up, one ear down, a Lab-shepherd mix with shiny black fur, a long snout, and a constant smile. (The hardest part about leaving David, as I would do in the not-too-distant future, was leaving Reuben, who had stayed with us even after our friends came back from Mexico. Reuben lived with David until he had to be put down, and his ashes were kept for years on the mantel in the living room of the house in the Berkeley Hills where David lived and sold coke and accumulated firearms and where he himself died in 2010 of a heart attack at sixty-five years old.)

  We, Reuben and I, took the elevator to the fourth floor and when the doors slid open, I felt like I was home. It was a stripped-down loft with brick walls, framed posters of covers of Rolling Stone, big oak desk, and behind it a hip and pretty receptionist turning the pages of—what else?—the latest issue of Rolling Stone. (I’d learn later that being pretty was a job requirement for girls at Rolling Stone.) She didn’t say anything like “Nice dog” or “I’m sorry, no dogs here,” didn’t mention the dog at all; she just, without taking her eyes off her reading, buzzed somebody on the phone, said I was there, hung up the phone, and gestured vaguely off to her right.

  “You can go in,” she said.

  Alan’s office was across the hall. When he saw me, he sprang to his feet and reached over a desk piled with manuscripts and books to shake my hand. He was another dream come true, not only handsome and hip—a whip-thin Harvard man with a Jew-fro, bandanna tied around his neck—but there in the corner also getting up to greet me and especially Reuben was Alan’s own dog. He had his dog at the office! Not a mutt like Reuben, of course, but a Harvard-man-worthy pedigreed chocolate standard poodle with a hairstyle kind of like Alan’s.

  A few years before, I’d worked as a secretary in the marketing department at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin, across the street from Boston Common, for six soul-crushing weeks, and I’d stealthily taken a tour through the editorial department to check it out, especially the men, to see if there was anything I liked. I didn’t. The whole place seemed so hushed and oppressive, the editors (all men) frowning in concentration at their desks in their white shirts and ties, not one of them even bothering to look up and check me out.

  And now here was Alan Rinzler, literate, chatty, exuding enthusiasm. He seemed delighted to see me. He seemed delighted period—nothing like the weeping, stumbling drunk he would become and whom I would one day drive to patient intake.

  I told him how much I loved Rolling Stone, that I’d do anything to work there, just to be in its aura. I could type, I’d had experience as an editorial assistant, but also I was very organized, I could file or be a receptionist…

  Alan seemed amused. Why would I want to do that? My friend from school had told him that I was a very good writer. Didn’t I want to write something for the magazine?

  “Write something?” I said. Truthfully, the thought had not occurred to me.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not? I’ll set up a meeting with Jann.”

  When I say that the thought of writing something for the magazine had not occurred to me, it’s because the thought had really not occurred to me. Of course I knew that people wrote the articles, but it never occurred to me that the person who wrote them could be me. My thought was more along the lines that I’d get a job at the magazine and…and…I dunno, learn about magazines, about which I knew next to nothing? If I was lucky, find something I was good at? Editing, eventually, maybe? That was about as far as my thinking went.

  I suppose I might have taken a journalism course or two at Brown—if they’d been offered. But there was no such thing on the curriculum from 1963 to 1967, the years I was there, or before that and for some time after. As was true then of the Ivies, it wa
s all literature—poetry writing and fiction. At my school, students could work on the Brown Daily Herald, but no girls did. I was on the masthead, sure, but my literary magazine was something separate and apart—we published “art.”

  But though Brown wasn’t registering it yet, journalism was starting to become art with the emergence of New Journalism. Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, would be sending Jean Genet and William Burroughs to cover the Chicago convention in 1968, and already, real writers like Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Truman Capote, and others were publishing nonfiction in their own strong voices and points of view in magazines. And there was Joan Didion. A woman. And one not confined to the pages of women’s magazines but published all over the place right alongside the men, pieces that would be collected in 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, writing that was as good as any man’s yet completely particular to her, a woman.

  This is what she wrote in the preface to that book: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”