by Robin Green
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do you need a ride?” he asked. I nodded gratefully. He went inside and came back with the keys to someone’s car and drove me to the motel.
“Take care,” he said. I thanked him and he waited there behind the wheel until I’d unlocked my door, turned, and waved.
* * *
Chapter Four
A Bitch Is Born
Before the junket to New Mexico, I had been sent on one other story, to a Bee Gees concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in LA. The assignment set the pattern for my future at Rolling Stone. While other writers were covering Neil Young and the Stones and Dylan, the editors had picked up an ironic tone in my Marvel piece that disposed them to send me after the lamer stuff—the Bee Gees, David Cassidy. Or the sophomoric and pretentious—Black Sabbath, say, and the Dennis Hopper/Larry Schiller/Kit Carson mess. Go be ironic.
As for the Bee Gees, the concert was undersold—the group was in a slump and what I hadn’t realized was that the review of their recent album in Rolling Stone describing it as “banal, graceless, trite, [and] melodramatic” had helped put them there.
I was an avid reader of Random Notes in Rolling Stone and the magazine’s interviews and features, but I rarely read the concert or record reviews. I wanted to listen to the music, not read about it. Besides, I wasn’t the one who bought the records, my various boyfriends did.
If I had read the Bee Gees review, it probably would have saved me a trip the day after the concert to the Malibu house on the Pacific Coast Highway where I’d learned the group was staying. I might not have rung the doorbell, then knocked when no one answered, then knocked harder. Robert Stigwood, the imposing Brit they’d hired as manager when their record sales began to flag, finally came and opened the door a crack. I told him who I was and that I wanted to sit down with the Bee Gees.
“I have no intention of letting you near those boys after that stinking review your paper gave them,” he said. And he shut the door in my face.
I hadn’t researched Dennis Hopper either. If I had, I might have learned that he wasn’t everybody’s iconic hero—he wasn’t a hero to his ex-wives, for instance, or pretty much anyone involved in making Easy Rider—that neither Peter Fonda nor anyone at the studio could stand him, that he was a paranoid and violent egomaniac who felt he deserved full writing credit, that he’d aced Terry Southern out of points in the profits, and that, most disillusioning of all, he hated motorcycles.
I’m not sure even now if it was laziness in those pre-Google days or a lack of real curiosity or interest in my subjects that led me to go into their midst without research. Or maybe it was some innate New Journalism sense that I’d experience a scene more fully if I had no preconceptions. Whatever it was, I’d experienced Dennis Hopper and Hollywood-in-Taos on that junket with an open/empty mind and now, at home in my Berkeley aerie, I had to write something.
I typed up my notes and transcribed my tapes, an arduous process involving the Panasonic and a foot pedal to stop and start the thing, busywork that forestalled the inevitability of actual thinking and writing but also, I would discover, forced me to relive what I’d experienced, which also reminded me of all that I hadn’t got down on tape. It helped too that I’d been blessed (and cursed) with the genetic ability, inherited from my mother, to remember every word of every incident, especially if it involved some insult and/or the hypocrisy of a rival or enemy. As a girl, I’d hear her on the phone for hours saying Lila said this and Pearl said that. And like my mother, I remembered every real or imagined injustice.
I’d suffered some humiliation in New Mexico, as well as boredom and revulsion, but what do they say—he who laughs last laughs best? They also say the pen is mightier than the sword, something I’d heard when I was a kid and thought, Aha. The concept landed in my psyche and stuck there. My brother was older and stronger than me, even as the undersized pipsqueak that he was then, but I could cut him with my words if I wanted. Writers who say that they don’t, and that writers shouldn’t, write for revenge are lying to themselves.
I decided to relate everything I’d experienced, from the Albuquerque airport to the screening of the documentary to dinner and the drive through the desert to Hopper’s compound, in the third person, casting a cold eye on events as an observer, calling myself “the journalist,” Annie “the photographer” (something my writing teacher John Hawkes, when I sent him the article, referred to as “my amusing anonymity”).
I wrote partly to avenge my scorched feelings (and maybe young Steve the publicity guy’s too) and partly, literature major that I’d been, on behalf of D. H. Lawrence, who had lived in that very desert compound, had written there, and was in fact buried on its grounds and whose tenure seemed denigrated by the dopey Hollywood freaks defiling the landscape, driving raucously through the neighboring sleeping Native American pueblos at night (with me in the car), hanging the walls of the former Dodge house with Andy Warhol posters declaring the worthlessness of reading, plus stocking the place with art like Hopper’s own sculpture, the Spontaneous Erection Machine, an ugly white and chrome contraption that looked like an arcade game and had huge chrome balls and a phallus that rose and fell when he flipped a switch.
The last third of the article included a verbatim transcription of the “interview” on the living-room carpet, which I’d taped. It was a valuable lesson for future work: if I thought a scene might get so hairy or intimidating I wouldn’t be able to remember what was said, a recorded backup was a necessity.
Using carbon paper for my copy, I wrote the article, then counted the words. This time there were only five thousand and some, half the length of the Marvel article, but since I’d been given a raise to ten cents a word, I’d still be paid five hundred dollars—that is, if the article was accepted.
Now I had a new old car, a black 1951 Chevy coupe with better rings, and I drove it across the bridge to the office, a sick feeling in my stomach—the same feeling I still have whenever I hand anything in. Writers put their kishkes on the table, as my journalist friend Margy says, for everyone to judge. And as my novelist/TV producer friend Barbara says, any writer who doesn’t throw her stuff outside the door, ring the doorbell, and run like hell probably isn’t any good.
Again, the callback came mercifully fast. David Felton loved the article; everyone at the office did. It was soon published. Not a cover this time, Peter Fonda had the cover, but it was still a game changer for me. The editor from Esquire called and asked, “Who’s the new bitch?” And my name was added as contributing editor on the masthead, where, among all those guys, I was the only girl.
Where were the other Rolling Stone girl writers? Susan Lydon, wife of one of the magazine’s founders, had written an occasional short piece, but her byline disappeared early in 1968. Judith Sims had appeared for a time on the masthead as LA bureau chief, but, though she filed an occasional short piece, she was gone from the masthead by the time I landed there.
And all the other girl writers in 1971? Back in New York, a lot of them were writing for women’s magazines, a few for the New Yorker. Nora Ephron was a reporter on the Daily News then, but it wouldn’t be until 1972 that she’d be given a column in Esquire. As for New Journalists, at the very end of 1971, Kate Coleman would publish an article in Ramparts about prostitution, a piece for which she herself turned a trick so she would know what it was like (talk about embedded journalism!).
Years before, in the early 1960s, Gloria Steinem had donned a bunny suit to go undercover in a Playboy Club and written about it in a magazine called Show, but it wouldn’t be until the end of 1971 that New York magazine would test the first, tentative issue of Ms., written and edited by women, as an insert in its pages.
Of course, there was Joan Didion, who all through the 1960s had been proving that New Journalism could be literature—and that a woman could write it. There wasn’t a New Journalist, male or female, who didn’t have a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem on his or her shelf. As I did, there in my ro
om on Tamalpais Road, which was where I was the night that I got that crazy-great phone call.
“Howdy,” a familiar voice said. “It’s Kit Carson.”
I stood there with the phone at my ear, my heart pounding. I didn’t know what to expect, despite his kindness in Taos, since my article hadn’t been all that kind to his documentary.
“Well, listen,” he said in his slow Texas drawl in which I could hear only a smile and pleasure as he went on. “I’m down here in Malibu at my friend Joan Didion’s house. She just read your piece in Rolling Stone and she asked me to call you up and tell you how much she liked it.”
“She did?” I managed.
“I liked it too,” he said. “She’s right here in the room with me now. She asked me to call you. She thought it was really good. I thought you’d want to hear that.”
I must have thanked him. He must have said goodbye. He might even have said that he’d like to look me up if he was ever in the neighborhood. I truly can’t remember. What I do know is that it was one of the best moments of my life and still is.
Kit did come to see me in my treetop room in Berkeley. In his forest-green Classic Morgan Roadster with leather belted hood, he took me north to a cabin on the Russian River to visit Jim McBride, his director on David Holzman’s Diary. I dropped in on Kit in Texas once and he came to see me from time to time. In 1974, after my name was stripped from the RS masthead and after I’d moved to a tiny house in someone’s backyard on Francisco Street in the Berkeley Flats, Kit knocked on my gate with a present—a balloon full of nitrous oxide—inspiring me to write my final article for Rolling Stone, titled “After Acid, Wha’?”
In June 1975 and at extremely loose ends, I called Kit one night to ask advice on how to find work writing for movies.
“I’m kinda busy right now,” he said, then explained that he was getting married in the morning to the actress Karen Black.
“Yeah, but still,” I pressed, “what should I do?”
“Move to LA,” he said.
I went to Iowa instead, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But a few years later I did move to LA and I did find screenwriting work, not in movies but in TV. Kit came to see me in my office at Lantana when I was writing on Northern Exposure with the man who would become my husband, and years later in New York the three of us had dinner in a restaurant near our house. Kit didn’t look well, and he wasn’t. He died soon after, in 2014, at seventy-three years old.
After the Hopper piece was published, Rolling Stone sent me on story after story—to write about Black Sabbath in Providence, about the filming of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight in New York, about Tricia Nixon’s marriage (a cover story, written under the byline White House Staff), plus weightier fare—the investigation of a low-rent guru in Oakland that was later reprinted along with articles on much more evil sorts, Charles Manson and Mel Lyman, in the Straight Arrow book Mindfuckers.
In Providence, I watched Ozzy Osbourne towel down in a pool of his own sweat backstage after a concert. In New York, I let Jimmy Breslin talk my ear off in a booth in a bar at a movie set, and later that night I opened the door of my hotel room to a fellow journalist from Chicago who had a cock of such girth that intercourse was impossible.
“Don’t feel bad,” he told me. “It’s not the first time it’s happened.”
I loved Rolling Stone. I never really thought of working for any other magazine, though on that film junket to New York I did accept a meeting at Esquire with the young editor who had called the office after the Dennis Hopper article came out to ask who I was. Only a few years earlier, I would have given my right arm just to sweep the floors of Esquire, and now here I was, at an editor’s invitation, an almost pathologically shy girl writer with a reputation as a badass.
We shook hands, sat, and settled, the editor behind his desk in his bow tie and blue blazer. He complimented my work and asked if I had any ideas I wanted to pursue for Esquire. This confused me. I blinked. At Rolling Stone, I was given all my assignments. I didn’t have to, like, think of anything.
“Um, not really,” I said.
Now it was his turn to blink. Here I’d been given a chance to move into the big time and I was looking with a dazed expression at the ball he’d tossed my way and that I’d dumbly let drop.
“Well,” he said, “okay.” He shuffled some papers on his desk and came up with a page. “Here’s something that might be a good fit.”
It was an assignment to write about a woman whose cat kept winning blue ribbons at cat shows—because it was the only cat of its breed!
“Oh,” I said. “Ha!”
“So?” he said. “Eh?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think so,” I said. It got very quiet in there. “But thank you anyway.”
“Okay, then,” he said, getting to his feet. I gathered my things and headed to the door.
So much for my career at Esquire. Although, years later, in the 1980s in Los Angeles, I did go to work for the fabled editor who had then been the young editor’s boss at Esquire, Harold Hayes. He had come west to edit California magazine and hired me as a writer and, later, an editor.
In time, we became friends, Harold and I and his wife, Judy. They lived in a charming cottage in Brentwood, the walls lined with books and hung with George Lois Esquire cover art and the signed work of photographers Harold had discovered, like Diane Arbus.
When I started writing for television, Harold said in his Southern accent that he was “tickled pink” and lent me his boxed set of the BBC series Singing Detective so I’d see that TV could be art. Years later, when I’d gotten back together with my future husband and we’d started writing TV together, I insisted he watch Singing Detective too. One of my biggest regrets is that he never got to meet Harold Hayes, who died in 1989, at age sixty-two, of a brain tumor. It didn’t occur to me at the time, as it does now that I am in my seventies, that he had died young.
I’d lost my best friend, Ronnie; my father; and now Harold. On my weekly phone call to my mother, I told her how much I’d loved Harold, how sad I was that he’d died. “Tsk,” she said, “you really have had a lot of losses in your little life.” I was so struck by her rare show of empathy, I didn’t think to ask what was so “little” about my life.
* * *
Chapter Five
My Little Life, Part 1
The story goes that I was conceived the morning of the day my father went off to war. My mother had forgotten to apply a fresh dose of spermicide to her diaphragm for what must have been an emotional and highly charged farewell fuck. It was November 1944. My father was thirty-four, old to be called up, and with a two-year-old son at home to boot, but he didn’t try to worm out of it like some men he knew. He went. He said goodbye to his family and told them not to come see him off, but as the train slowly pulled out of the station in downtown Providence, he saw at the edge of the crowd his own handsome father, tears in his blue eyes as he watched the healthier of his two sons be taken to war.
My father’s older brother, Lenny, had epilepsy, had in fact suffered his first grand-mal seizure onstage at his high-school graduation while making his valedictorian speech. He was halfway through when all at once he fell to the floor, rigid and convulsing, moaning and foaming at the mouth, eyes rolled back in his head.
This happened at a time when there was no treatment, years before 1936, when the drug phenytoin (later trademarked as Dilantin) was discovered to be useful for preventing seizures. A tall, handsome, and bright young man, Uncle Lenny had been admitted to Brown University, a rare privilege for a Jew in the 1920s. He began his freshman year, but his seizures on campus were so frequent, severe, and frightening to both students and staff that the school asked him to leave.
He went home and stayed home. My father’s diminutive mother, Dora, was ashamed and mortified, and she stayed that way. The family was fairly prosperous; they owned a factory that made caps, had new cars, a grand piano, dressed nicely. They took my uncle to European capitals looking for a cur
e but found none. This all coincided with a time when caps were going out of fashion. The business began to fail and so did my father’s father; taciturn to begin with, he became all but silent now.
With their piano and nice furniture, the family moved to the top-story flat in a tenement off Benefit Street, retreating into an assimilated Jew’s version of genteel poverty. My father recounted how his own father buried himself in the Providence Evening Journal while his miserable wife cried and raged in distress over her sick son and threatened to jump off the third-story porch.
“So jump,” my grandfather would say, turning the page of the newspaper.
The year 1945 must have been a hard one for my mother, pregnant now with me, living with her immigrant parents whom she could hardly bear and who could hardly bear each other. She hated their foreign accents, their screaming fights. She hated her bug-eyed, barrel-chested, Russian-born father’s crudeness, his former criminality (he’d been a gun-toting bootlegger through her childhood), and his womanizing, and she blamed him for her tall and regal Hungarian-born mother’s moods and depression that sent her on occasional trips to the sanatorium for “a rest.”
She often took her mother’s side but she hated plenty about her too, chafing at the woman’s Hungarian accent when she spoke English in public and at the Yiddish she spoke at home and with her friends.
“You fancy kike!” Grandma Rose once called her. “I hope someday you have a daughter like you!” A curse that, in its essence, if not its specifics, came true.
My mother had tried to escape life with her parents, had gone to New York City and found work with her tall and perfect size 10 figure as a manufacturer’s model in the Garment District. But she grew to hate life with her immigrant aunt and cousins in their crowded Queens apartment, with hallways that she said smelled of turnips and poverty, and she hated the clothing manufacturer, who was always feeling up her ass. She soon came home to Providence, where the man who would one day be my father, on a break from work as manager of a women’s discount-clothing store downtown, first laid eyes on her as she was getting off the train with her high heels, long legs, white gloves, and haughty posture, a broad-brimmed picture hat framing her brunette, shoulder-length pageboy do.