by Robin Green
I didn’t really know what she was talking about when I first read the book and before I became a journalist myself. But I’d find out. In spades. All I knew at this point was that Alan Rinzler had arranged for me to see Jann Wenner, the editor in chief and founder of Rolling Stone.
I decided not to send a résumé. Instead, I got hold of a box, the kind in which you’d receive a gift sweater from, say, Saks, tissue paper and all. I put in it stuff from my life—a copy of a Brown literary magazine I’d edited, a short story I’d written, a few Marvel Comics (I’d worked as Stan Lee’s secretary there; that’s where I’d been heading after my lunch break that day I opened my first Rolling Stone)—and some chocolate chip cookies I’d made for him to eat while he went through it all.
Was this a girly thing to do? Would it charm him? Or would he think it was beyond lame? I would never know, for when I met with him, although the box lay open on the round oak table that was his desk, he didn’t comment on it.
This time I didn’t bring Reuben, but I had on the same outfit I’d worn for Alan Rinzler—the short skirt, the jacket with the ribald patch—although this, too, as far as I could tell, went unnoticed. Like Alan, Jann sprang to his feet. But the resemblance ended there. A baby-faced butterball of a man in jeans and shirttails, sleeves rolled up, he was all energy and eagerness. Alan had energy too, but in Jann’s case, it was more a vibe of being in a hurry, like, C’mon, I’m busy, let’s do this and get it over with.
“Sit, sit,” he said, indicating a brown leather couch beneath a giant autographed photo of John and Yoko, the one of them naked, facing away from the viewer, peering over their shoulders at their self-timed camera; the picture had been the controversial cover of their recent Two Virgins album. But Jann, sitting opposite me at the edge of a matching leather chair, motor revving, eyes vibrating, gave me no time to gawk at or remark on or ask about it.
“So, you went to Brown,” he said, teeth set in perfect prep-school lockjaw.
“Yeah,” I said. I could see he was impressed by the Ivy thing. For some reason, I glanced down and noticed that his nails were bitten to the quick. I glanced back up at him. Did he see me noticing? Was that bad? What should happen now? Should I ask him something? Tell him an idea? But he was already talking.
“What was it like to work at Marvel Comics?” he said.
“What?” I said, caught off guard.
“It said you worked at Marvel Comics,” he said, gesturing toward the box. “What was it like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was okay.”
I was not much of a talker at that point in my life, and up till then, no one had expected me to be. But I could see that Jann was waiting for me to say something, so I let myself say what I was actually thinking, and then I seemed not to shut up.
“Really, it was just a job,” I said. “Mostly just a bunch of nerdy older people. I answered letters from pathetic fans. I answered the phone for Stan. He was nice, kind of nerdy. He wore a wig. His name was really Stanley Leiber. His wife and daughter used to swan in and out of the office in between shopping. They treated him like some sort of joke. But in the New York publishing world, he pretty much was. The superhero comic books, a joke.”
I stopped, looked at Jann, who was regarding me, head cocked.
“Well,” he said, “if you’re going to New York anytime soon, maybe you could write an article about it.”
“About…Marvel Comics?” I said, thinking but not saying, Why?
“If you’re going.”
“No, I am, I’m going in June,” I said, “to be in my friend’s wedding in Long—”
“Great,” he said, cutting me off. “We’ll pay you five cents a word.” He was already on his feet and headed to his table.
“Five cents?” I said to his back. It didn’t sound like very much.
“That’s what we’ll pay for a first-time article,” he said over his shoulder. “If it’s accepted. If not, we give you a kill fee, fifty percent of what you would have gotten for the article.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“Great,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Good luck with it.”
And so it was, in this random yet logical way, that I became a journalist.
I left in a daze—Had that really just happened? Did I really have an assignment to write an article for Rolling Stone? The white noise in my head finally cleared as I was driving back over the bridge, at least enough for me to realize that when Jann asked if I was going to New York anytime soon, what he was really saying was that Rolling Stone would not be paying my expenses. Well, why should it? I was a first-time magazine writer and didn’t know myself if I’d be able to deliver.
Except—why wouldn’t I? In college, I’d delivered when I had to. What did I know then about writing short stories? Only that I liked reading them. Brown offered courses in writing them but you had to submit something you’d written to get in, so I decided to try and write one like one that I liked. Hemingway’s “A Cat in the Rain” seemed simple enough to tackle. In it, a couple is trapped in a hotel room by the rain and the husband is reading and the wife is looking out the window at a cat crouched under a dripping café table and she’s feeling sorry for the cat, who was “trying to make herself so compact she would not be dripped on,” of course projecting her own feelings onto the cat until finally, at the story’s end, she bursts out in an epiphanic complaint to her husband about feeling ignored and isolated, about all that she really wanted.
So I wrote about me and my boyfriend David sitting on the rocks at Point Judith, Rhode Island, gazing out onto Narragansett Bay, him puffing his pipe, me nattering on about my happiness here by the ocean and how could he bear to leave it and go away to college in Chicago, so far from it (subtext: and me)? Not Hemingway exactly, but it got me admitted into “writer’s writer” John Hawkes’s fabled seminar, which eventually led to my editorship of the college literary magazine. It was advice I later gave my undergraduate students in 1976 when I was a teaching fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: copy a master. You probably won’t come close but you might at least have something that works.
It was a similar approach that got me a start writing for television a decade later. A colleague from Iowa had made it big in the business and asked me if I wanted to try writing a script. My first draft was awful but after he told me I’d find the tone he wanted in Updike’s short stories, particularly “Here Come the Maples,” I came back with a home run, a script produced as the first episode of A Year in the Life, with Richard Kiley, Adam Arkin, and Sarah Jessica Parker, and the start of my twenty-five-year career in TV.
In a blissfully altered state, I drove home to our apartment in Berkeley’s Fox Court, today a landmarked example of late 1920s Fox Brothers Tudor Revival architecture, a Hansel-and-Gretel-looking collection of small contiguous cottages that ran along a lushly landscaped courtyard. Ours was at the entrance to the courtyard, reached by climbing a curved outdoor staircase of rustic brick. The apartment itself was charming—a fireplace in the corner, its stones rising to a beamed ceiling so high it could accommodate a sleeping loft, which, with the help of a carpenter friend of David’s, we built, and beneath the loft a space for visitors to put down cushions and sleeping bags and stay—and stay they did, for days, for weeks, forever.
This month it was Steve Ford, a friend of David’s from his University of Chicago days, and Steve’s girlfriend, Chris, from Ohio, which was all I knew about her, even though she and Steve had been with us when we’d camped and grazed naked at the Jemez hot springs, because she was so constantly stoned she never spoke. And anyway, in those days, any kind of small talk I might have made—What’s your last name? What do you do? Where did you go to school?—was considered fatally uncool by Berkeley or any hippie standards. Also uncool, I felt when I got home to a cloud of pot smoke, would be any mention of the fact that I’d just gotten a writing assignment from Rolling Stone or, for that matter, any betrayal of professional ambition.
Steve had no job; being almost legally blind, he was on government disability and food stamps. Chris did work beside me for a time at HS Lordships in the little wench outfit, a chunk of hash installed between her inside upper lip and gum to keep her high on a shift. (A few weeks after my meeting with Jann, they would move on to the Big Island of Hawaii, find work and housing on a horse ranch—since horses could see, Steve could ride them—and then eventually break up, Chris moving home to Ohio.)
For now, however, Steve passed me a joint and I got stoned and Chris and I made Indian food for dinner from Yogi Vithaldas’s vegetarian cookbook, a meal that, since there was no table, we ate cross-legged on the floor.
That night in the loft, Steve and Chris in a sleeping bag below, I told David sotto voce about Rolling Stone and Marvel Comics and Jann. David nodded thoughtfully. “Huh,” he said.
“We could both go,” I said, and since he said he was “into photography,” by which he meant that taking and developing pictures was something he liked, not a career he aspired to or anything, I added, “You could take the pictures.”
More thoughtful nodding, and then finally: “I could do that,” he said. And he did; he came with me and took pictures at Marvel and for that brief moment he became a journalist too.
* * *
Chapter Two
Face Front! You’re on the Winning Team
When I opened up that first Rolling Stone in the spring of 1968 on the corner of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth after my lunch break, it was to my job at Marvel Comic Books that I was returning. I’d arrived in New York City that winter and, with money I’d saved waitressing in Martha’s Vineyard after graduation plus some Houghton Mifflin money, I had taken a room in the Martha Washington Hotel for Women in Murray Hill, a place I thought I’d read about in the 1950s Herman Wouk novel Marjorie Morningstar.
I’d gotten many of my ideas about life from reading that book when I was thirteen. A Jewish girl, like me, and like other Jewish girls expected to marry a Jewish doctor, Marjorie Morgenstern changes her name and leaves the family apartment on the Upper West Side to pursue an independent life and artistic career, ending up in Greenwich Village—well, for a while. Actually, she eventually gives up the dream, marries some doctor or other, and moves to Scarsdale.
I conveniently forgot this part of the story. And anyway, that was her and this was me and it was practically a generation later and though I’d had to make an even greater leap of faith to go from provincial Providence, Rhode Island, to New York City, maybe I’d realize my dream, vague as it was. With the sky-blue vinyl American Tourister suitcase my parents had given me as a not-so-subtle graduation present—it was all but unthinkable then for a college graduate to live at home—I took the train to Manhattan and a taxi to the hotel. I checked in and was shown to my room—a heart-sinkingly small, dark pit with one grimy window looking onto an airshaft, a sad single bed, a creepy little closet, and a stain on the carpet that looked like blood. I sat down on the bed and sobbed. I wanted to be anywhere but here. I wanted to go home. I wanted to die.
At the same time, this was always the way I’d felt (and would feel) when, as a young woman, alone and on my own, I confronted any new digs: That I would die of loneliness. No one was going to come and save me. No one even knew where I was. And no one cared. But really, so what? I thought bitterly. What good would it even do to cry if there was no one there to see it? I blew my nose and went to the window. I tried to open it, but it would lift only three or four inches—obviously, I thought, so girls like me couldn’t jump out.
Not that I would have. I was not the type—too interested in what lay ahead, too afraid to go deep into despair like a real artist, like Sylvia Plath, say, or Virginia Woolf or my best friend Ronnie. In fact, my having joked to myself about the window thing was a sign that I was done feeling sorry for myself, that I was coming back to the bleak sensibility and humor that had always been me, even when I was as young as six, when my mother was called to school so my art teacher could show her what I’d produced when all the students were asked to draw pictures of their houses. Instead of using the side of a pastel-blue stick to create a pretty blue sky like the other children did, I had borne down on the tip of a black stick and created a solid black sky.
Was I murderous? Was I angry? (No one worried much about child abuse then.) It was concluded that I was neither, but it is true that sixty-some years later, I turned out to be the daughter who buried her mother in a mud bank. So maybe child abuse would account for the black sky, if mild psychological torture counts as abuse.
Or I might have painted the sky black because I wanted to be different. Or because I enjoyed the attention. In any case, I kept the bleak humor, and it served me well when later I took the entrance exam for the Rhode Island School of Design. They set up a wooden chair and asked us to draw it, which I accomplished ably enough. Then they took away the chair and we were asked to draw it from memory, this time placing it in an imaginary setting. I put mine in a prison cell—cinder-block wall behind it, small high window with bars. (I decided it would be too much to draw it tipped over with a pair of feet and legs dangling above, though the idea had occurred to me.) Maybe the admissions people thought the drawing reflected a trapped soul or something interesting. Maybe they let me in in spite of the drawing and it was my good grades and okay SAT scores that did it, because at that time RISD was trying to up its scholastic ante. Whatever it was, I was admitted and offered a full ride.
I didn’t leave my room at the Martha Washington Hotel for Women that night—not to go to dinner or to Max’s Kansas City or to a bar or anywhere. I was never one to be out after dark on my own—not then, not in Paris in my forties, not in New York City even now, except when I head out to the theater, where I actually like to go it alone. That night in my single bed, I read a dog-eared paperback Faulkner novel, slept, and then it was morning, a few strands of sun lighting up the dust motes, and here I was in New York City about to hit the streets to find a job.
I dressed in the clothes I’d laid out the night before—black Capezio flats, pantyhose, navy wool knee-length skirt, 34B white cotton bra, and light blue sweater set—and, armed with a BA in American literature and an inchoate desire to be in publishing, I walked uptown to an appointment at an employment agency, where they let me know right away that Manhattan was flooded with girls just like me and then sent me on three interviews that required a modicum of literacy and typing skills, two of them at ad agencies (I hated one, one hated me) and the third at Marvel Comic Books, where the editor in chief was looking for a new secretary. I met with the girl who was leaving and she liked me enough to send me in to talk to her boss, Stan Lee.
I didn’t know who he was, had certainly never bought a comic book, though my older brother had a few around when we were kids. Still, comic-book publishing was more in the ballpark than advertising, which had no appeal at all, the personnel ladies all uptight and corporate and full of themselves and the field of advertising. And while Marvel’s wasn’t the tony magazine- or book-publishing world I’d envisioned, the place seemed easy and relaxed; men—and even one woman—in casual clothes at drawing boards looked up to smile as I passed through. And then there was Stan Lee himself (“Call me Stan!” he said—everything he said ended in !), likable and friendly, with a sparkle in his eye just like my dad. Stan told the employment agency I could have the job and I took it.
In the Times real estate listings, I found a two-room, sixth-floor sublet in Greenwich Village on Tenth Street around the corner from where Balducci’s was and Citarella now is, and when that sublet ran out a few months later (I didn’t renew because I’d discovered a stash of pornographic pictures in the closet and was afraid the lessor/creep that put them there would show up), I got my own place on Bleecker Street across from where Magnolia Bakery now sits, a sweet little studio with a fireplace and a beam in the ceiling from which I hung a swing, and three large windows overlooking a weed-choked rear courtyard. I cried here too—the usual sadness exacerbated by the c
ockroaches that owned New York City in the 1960s and could be seen scurrying everywhere, including all over my toothbrush.
But this was the Village, where I’d always dreamed of living, ever since I visited as a teenager and read about it in books. Every morning I’d wake up in the heart of it, dress, and make my way through the dog shit (no pickup laws then) on Eleventh Street with its leafy sidewalks and charming old brownstones, sometimes stealing glances at the denizens within sitting at dining-room tables beneath chandeliers with their morning papers and coffee. I’d wonder who they were and how they got there, just as I’d wonder much later in LA how people came by all those Rolls-Royces and Bentleys they cruised around in, not knowing then that I’d live in my own Village town-house apartment one day and drive, in LA, if not a Bentley, a brand-new four-door BMW. These Village brownstones seemed such an impossible distance back then when I couldn’t even see how my parents, so deep in debt, had managed to buy and furnish our own little house in Providence.
But it was 1968 and I was twenty-two years old, a girl with $130 monthly rent and a secretarial job that paid $120 a week, squeezing onto the Uptown E at morning rush hour, squeezing out at Madison and Fifty-Third, stopping at the deli around the corner from work to buy a carton of milk and a linzertorte cookie to eat at my desk. I was living my dream. Except—was I?
In the deli on Fifty-Third, I’d see the women I thought I wanted to become, with their smart suits and briefcases, heading off, I was sure, to glamorous and fulfilling jobs as editors at Mademoiselle or Scribner’s. And the sight of them left me cold. Or, if not cold, then at least not filled with longing. If there is such a thing as destiny, I somehow knew this wasn’t mine. And along with that gut feeling came feelings of self-doubt and disgust: if I didn’t want that, then what the hell did I want?