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

by Robin Green

  But as I was to discover, there was another reason for David’s warmth. I really wasn’t aware of it at the time and didn’t think about it much, but now that I’ve seen that 1971 photo of myself and heard from people who worked at Rolling Stone then, I can see that, with my miniskirts and legs, I was something of a babe. (But who among us wasn’t in our twenties?)

  I didn’t know what to make of David. Pasadena-born (where exactly was that, anyway?), an Eastern Ivy Leaguer he was not. In what was probably an attempt to look rock-and-roll-ish, he looked clownish—saddle shoes and bell bottoms, a striped jacket with giant shoulder pads and outsize buttons. The cigarette holder would come later (see Rainn Wilson’s ditzy portrayal of Felton in Almost Famous). He had a flat face, a mop of frizzy, straw-colored hair, wide-set, beady blue eyes that darted like a lizard’s, and a scraggly mustache over extremely thin lips. His leap from the chair when he rose to greet me was spastic and awkward, as if his mind was a good second ahead of his body. His flesh, when he shook my hand, felt cold and dry, also like that of a lizard (and, come to think of it, very much like the hard, dry palm of my best friend, Ronnie). I probably fell in some kind of love with him right then and there.

  For one thing, he seemed genuinely interested in me, both personally and professionally, and this kind of warmth and attention from any male other than my father or a professor was new to me. Also, despite his clothes, he was a grown-up, a man with talent and published books to his credit and an actual job as an editor. My editor. I had already been passed from Alan Rinzler to Jann and now to David Felton, and, looking back, I can see that what happened between us was in part because I wanted to stick with this editor, to and by whom I was both attracted and repelled, this weird and powerful man (who I would later realize resembled no one more than Beavis and/or Butt-Head, which would lead me to wonder if it was this resemblance that had drawn David to write for that show in the nineties. And was that why Beavis and Butt-Head hired him?).

  He told me he really liked what I’d written, he had only a few notes. He asked me about myself and told me his story, how he’d been a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, how a series he’d written on Haight-Ashbury got Jann’s attention. How he’d started writing for Rolling Stone and how after missing deadlines, Jann insisted he relocate to San Francisco where he could keep an eye on him—and where, even under supervision, he’d kept the slow work habits that had caused him to be referred to as “the Stonecutter” at the Times.

  David had some new good news. They’d all discussed the Marvel story at their editorial meeting and agreed it was strong enough to be a cover. They’d commission original comic art, maybe one of the characters, maybe Hulk. I listened, stunned. My first article was going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone?

  Well, yes, but not right away, he quickly cautioned. They’d be holding it until summer, many months away, when advertising was down and when they burned off the weaker inventory.

  “Weaker?” I said, feeling suddenly sick.

  “Not the article, just—business. It’s a different kind of cover for us than music, and the advertisers—look, you did a great job, really,” he said, reaching out to give my hand a reassuring squeeze. Our eyes met. And that’s when it began, because I could see something in his eyes that set something off in me and that I continued to feel sitting with him at his desk as we went over his notes on my story, a kind of pleasant nervousness that settled in my groin. I didn’t mind his notes. There weren’t many and they made sense. And, besides feeling something, I was learning something.

  He had told me he was married, that he had two young children, that they’d stayed behind in Pasadena. Well, maybe he was married, but it didn’t feel that way. I had never really been conscious of another person’s desire for me and also had never felt so palpably the desire the consciousness of his desire set off in me.

  When we finally did take our clothes off and get in bed together, I had never been so present in the act of sex, had never looked into someone’s eyes as we touched each other and seen his pleasure at the same time I was feeling mine.

  Sex became something I craved. Instead of accommodating my old boyfriend’s constant need, I was the one who got to do the wanting, to desire him when he was away some weekends tending to his family (that was how he made it sound) and when he was busy at work, which, given his glacial pace, was most of the time.

  In a few years, after I’d gone to live with him in Chicago, he would leave me and go back to his wife. A few years after that, they’d divorce. He’d have other affairs at the office and an apartment in the Castro with a dentist chair in the living room and a tank of nitrous oxide nearby. In 1977, he’d move with Rolling Stone to New York and, in time, become the kind of drunk who passed out on the curb, had his pocket razored and his wallet stolen, before he finally gave up booze and drugs and joined AA.

  But in 1971, we didn’t know any of that. We’d smoke dope and have sex, drop mescaline and have sex, drop mescaline and go see 2001, Bette Midler, Randy Newman. We’d ride up the coast in Hunter’s back seat, get naked with the whole office in the Esalen hot springs, and, that first year, when my article was finally published in the September ’71 issue, go together to the printer’s in Berkeley at three a.m. to watch my first cover of Rolling Stone, the cover with Herb Trimpe’s big green Hulk, roll off the presses.

  My first cover, true. But before that there were many more assignments, my byline in print for the first time, a pay hike to the princely sum of ten cents a word, and now Rolling Stone was paying my expenses—taxi, car rental, hotel, flight, per diem, you name it. These were my first real jobs as a journalist, and they took me into new and unfamiliar territory, unlike the story about Marvel, where I already knew and liked everybody and everyone knew me and I wouldn’t have my boyfriend-since-childhood David Leach by my side taking pictures.

  I would have, instead, the magazine’s recently hired staff photographer, a big-footed and taciturn galumph of a girl in aviator glasses and baggy clothing, a Jewish air force brat (though my father had served in the army in World War II, I’d had no idea there was even such a thing as a Jewish career soldier) who’d become accustomed as a child to moving from base to base, to adjusting to and toughing out any and all strange environments. Not a cold person, exactly, but Annie Leibovitz didn’t seem like the kind of gal you’d, say, confide in about how apprehensive you were about something.

  It wasn’t so much anything she said that made her intimidating; it was more that she didn’t seem to find it necessary to say anything at all. She could wither you with a look, shaking her head sadly at the uncoolness of you, as she did at my twenty-seventh-birthday party when she gave me a twenty-dollar coupon for a Lyle Tuttle tattoo and I said thanks but no chance. And I wasn’t the only one intimidated—her subjects were too. I was there when she talked David Cassidy into taking his clothes off for the shoot—he wanted to be cool, didn’t he?

  Annie and I would work together many times in the two or three years to come and, mostly due to her friendship with David Felton, hang out some, but our paths would diverge. Even as Annie’s star rose and rose at the magazine and in the public eye, she’d find herself sinking into a near-deadly drug addiction, and I’d drift off into my own less dramatic and decidedly less public miasma.

  On this particular spring morning, April 1, 1971, however, Annie and I were flying from SFO into an unknown future. We were on a press junket to attend a private premiere of The American Dreamer, a documentary about Dennis Hopper, who had become a countercultural icon after making Easy Rider and who was now living in Taos editing his latest effort, The Last Movie, which would in fact turn out to be his last film for a good long while.

  “The cream of the underground press,” the invitation had called us, we would be flown in from all over the country for the event—though Felton had made it clear to me that Rolling Stone, unlike the other hippie rags, would be paying my and Annie’s expenses. We would owe nobody nothing; the magazine’s services as a PR t
ool could not be bought!

  We landed at the Albuquerque airport and met up with the other journalists, a ragtag group, us included, sleepy from the morning flight but primed for whatever lay ahead, and then all of us were greeted by two men in suits from Universal Studios—young and eager Steve from Publicity and jaded Eddie from the executive suite.

  While Steve ushered the other journalists to vans that would drive them the hundred and twenty miles to Taos, Eddie culled Annie and me from the herd. If those scribes were the cream of the underground press, he let us know, Rolling Stone was the fucking crème de la crème, and he led us onto the tarmac, Annie with her camera bags and no-nonsense, giant’s stride, me in faded Levi’s with leather patches I’d sewn on the ass where I’d worn the denim through, to a plane that looked like a VW Bug with wings. We climbed inside and buckled in; the pilot fired up the engine and we bumped down the runway, then finally wobbled into the sky to fly jarringly and low over miles and miles of bumpy mesa air.

  This was my first time in a private plane, my first time in a Cessna, my first press junket. I was at once puffed up by the special treatment, terrified of the turbulence, and awed by the beauty of the terrain over which we flew—raw mesa cliffs looking like some behemoth had chewed them out of the harsh red earth, hazy mountain ranges to the distance on each side, the blue gash of the Rio Grande winding through it all.

  I didn’t know it yet but I was flying into a nightmare—not quite up there with a Michael-Herr-touching-down-in-a-Vietnamese-jungle type of nightmare, but my own personal nightmare. If I had any fear that strangers could be nasty, competitive, and posturing or drunk and drug-addled and ass-kissing, I’d find it all here: an underground press trying to be cool while they jockeyed for Dennis Hopper’s attention; Eddie, sent by Universal to keep an eye on Hopper’s movie editing, instead bragging about his bag of real organic mescaline, beautiful stuff, that was going to keep him blasted till Sunday; and Dennis Hopper himself, at this particular low point in his life, a complete and major asshole—loaded to the gills, feeling put-upon by our presence and cruelly resentful of both journalists and Universal flacks, and an absolute pig to the groupies with whom he’d stocked his house. Though I would one day get to know Hollywood some, I had never encountered it before, and now here it was in New Mexico.

  The two who’d made the documentary we’d been flown there to see—Lawrence Schiller and L. M. Kit Carson—seemed like pinnacles of dignity and maturity in this setting. This should give you an idea of the environment, since Schiller was a known, if not sleazebag, then certainly a kind of ambulance chaser, having made his name chronicling the death of Lenny Bruce and, in collaboration with Susan Atkins, the killing of Sharon Tate. (He’d later go on to apply his ghoulish pen to Marilyn, O.J., and JonBenét.)

  Kit was a different story. A Texas cowboy dressed head to toe in black (Schiller was all in black too, actually), he had impeccable hipster credentials, having starred in Jim McBride’s cult classic David Holzman’s Diary, a deadpan spoof of pretentious ’60s cinema verité. Anybody who can spoof pretention can’t be pretentious, right?

  Then what could have made him—and Larry Schiller too—think a documentary about Dennis Hopper’s making of his (incomprehensible and all-but-unreleasable) film The Last Movie was a good idea? Not a hint of irony or humor here, nothing but Hopper-worship, with Hopper philosophizing to the camera for the ninety very long minutes we press were trapped in a theater watching him say things in Kit and Larry’s film like “I’d rather give head to a beautiful woman than fuck her, really…I’m just another chick, a lesbian chick” and “I don’t believe in reading…by using your eyes and ears you’ll find everything that there is” and “We could drop our clothes as little children and be a lot closer to the truth of life…Wanna look at my ass? Okay, here’s my ass. Ass, to the world.” We got to see Hopper’s ass onscreen four times.

  After the movie, there was a Q and A with Dennis Hopper, which was more of the same sophomoric babble, then dinner at a Mexican restaurant, where I was seated with Larry and Kit and heard them talk about their documentary, then we went out of Taos proper to Dennis Hopper’s desert compound, a few of us chosen to be in Dennis Hopper’s Jeep, driven by Dennis Hopper himself. Somewhere in the middle of this ride, it occurred to me that I was going to have to interview Dennis Hopper. At that moment, I probably would have preferred a Vietnamese jungle.

  At the house, tequila and scotch were poured; joints, pills, and powdered peyote were passed around in baggies. Kit reminded Dennis he’d agreed to sit down with Rolling Stone, gesturing in my direction. Dennis was fried but shrugged and sighed and said he’d do it. We headed into the living room, a few of the other journalists close on Dennis Hopper’s heels.

  “Mind if we join you?” Art Kunkin of the Village Voice asked, meaning himself and Michael Goodwin, though they’d asked me earlier and I’d said no; the last thing I wanted was an audience at what was to be my first celebrity interview.

  “Could they?” Dennis asked me. “Really, it’s cool.”

  Now it was my turn to shrug reluctantly and soon it was a crowd scene around us on the floor: the reporters, the two guys from Universal, and Kunkin and Goodwin, cross-legged and in starfucker heaven, hard by Hopper’s side. I set my clunky Panasonic cassette recorder and microphone on the Native American carpet and pressed Record. Dennis looked at the Panasonic.

  “Oh, it’s one of those,” he said. “First a tape recorder, then an ashtray,” he said. “What we need is a roach clip.”

  “I might have been right the first time,” Kunkin said to me. “You aren’t going to get the interview.”

  “You might have been left the first time. But you were right the second time,” Dennis said, then he repeated this and chuckled, Kunkin and the others along with him.

  Hopper was considering the carpet. “Now, this is very strange to all you readers out there,” he said, “but dig this. Is that balls and a cock on the rug? What is going on here? Readers, we’ll never be able to explain this but they’re all exposed here.” He grabbed the microphone. “They’re trying to drug me. Help, Panthers. Black Panthers listening to me, listen, brothers, help me.”

  It went on like that. Kunkin fetched an empty Campbell’s soup can to serve as an ashtray and Hopper mused about Andy Warhol, Goodwin chiming in, until Eddie, Hopper’s Universal watchdog, between pinches of powdered peyote from his baggie and slugs of scotch to wash it down, asked Dennis if he’d done what he had to do. Dennis seemed puzzled.

  “Did I do what I had to do?” Dennis said. “I don’t have to pee and I don’t have to shit. I ate today. I drank enough. I smoked. What did I have to do?”

  Eddie pointed at Steve, the young publicity guy, and gave Dennis a big stage wink. Dennis finally realized what Eddie was talking about, thanked him for reminding him, said no, he hadn’t done it, and asked Eddie if he’d like to do it for him. Eddie said no, so Dennis said, “Well, okay.” Then, to the group, “Watch how cool this is.”

  Dennis started saying something to young Steve but broke up laughing until finally, after a couple tries, he managed to get it out. “Would you leave your secretary with me tonight?” he said. “Of course, this is unreasonable, but if you would…”

  We all looked to Steve, who, struggling to adopt a cool attitude, said, “Well, yeah, I’ll leave her here. If I forget her.”

  Now Eddie and Dennis were both fighting to restrain laughter that came from knowing what was coming next.

  Steve was looking around. “Where did she go, anyway?” he asked.

  And now, the punch line he and Eddie had been waiting for. “To get her clothes from the car!” Dennis blurted out.

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” Eddie said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.

  And it was terrible. Steve looked stricken and everyone else had gone quiet, just watching and waiting. Dennis was quiet now too, studying Eddie.

  “Can I tell you something, Eddie?” he said. “You’re common trash, Eddie. Com
mon trash super-pig.”

  “Right, Dennis,” Eddie said, serious now.

  “I can certainly see your point of view,” Dennis said, laughing again. “But you can be used, Eddie.”

  “Scotch and water!” Eddie shouted, pushing a glass at Hopper. “Have some scotch and water!”

  I couldn’t sit there anymore. What was the point? I wasn’t going to get an interview. I hadn’t asked one question and, truthfully, hadn’t prepared any to ask, and for all I knew, I could be Hopper’s next target. I had to get out of there. Shamefaced and self-conscious, imagining the eyes of the other journalists on me, all of them knowing I’d failed, I gathered up my things—my tape recorder, microphone, notepad, and pencil—and without a word to anyone, I blindly found a door and was gone. Not such a swift move, I realized, because, though I could at least breathe out here, it began to dawn on me that I was alone in the chilly and dark desert night, miles from anywhere, from my motel certainly, with no jacket and no ride. Annie might have known what to do, but she had gotten her pictures and left the scene to go back to the motel hours before.

  I was fucked and freaked out, but I’d walk if I had to. Even if I got run down by drunks on the highway or lost and died of exposure or thirst in a ditch in the desert, it would be better than going back inside. Just then, the door to the house opened and I watched a figure come toward me, backlit by the lights inside. It was L. M. Kit Carson with his kind eyes and black clothes, blond eyelashes and cleft chin. “You okay?” he said in his aw-shucks Texas drawl. “That was quite a scene in there.”