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

by Robin Green

  “That’s all right,” she said in a calm, even tone. “I understand.”

  I apologized some more; I begged; I cajoled. But the damage was done. I had fulfilled my grandmother’s curse: she had a mean daughter just like her.

  Two weeks later, on a Monday, when for the first time my mother didn’t appear in the dining room at Wheelock Terrace for lunch or dinner, her one friend there, a cigarette-smoking (outside, in all weather), Harvard-educated landscape architect twenty years her junior with incurable lung cancer that had spread to her brain and with whom my mother played Scrabble in the facility’s living room for hours every day of her stay there, went upstairs, also for the first time, to my mother’s rooms.

  In the weeks and even months before that phone call, my brother told me after she died, her health had been deteriorating, her energy flagging, and she was spending most of her time on the bed, no longer even wanting to read or watch TV—in fact, she had asked him to remove all books from her bedroom—hauling herself up and onto the walker gizmo she used only to make her way oh so slowly to the elevator to go down to meals. She was living, as her doctors said, on pure will.

  Whether or not it was my cruel outburst that finally sapped her of her last bit of it, this final Monday she told her friend, who was sitting at her bedside, that she simply couldn’t gather herself to go downstairs.

  My mother said, “This is it for me,” the friend told me later.

  “Robin’s coming tomorrow,” the friend said to her. “Don’t you want to wait?”

  I asked the friend what my mother had said to that.

  The friend made a dismissive gesture with her hand, as if batting the idea away, a gesture I recognized as my mother’s. The friend immediately realized what that said and tried to walk it back, telling me, “She said she didn’t know.”

  My mother died the next morning. My brother and Sue didn’t go to Virginia. Instead, Becky came up with the boys and we all had Thanksgiving dinner, along with Jordy and his wife and their boys, in the restaurant of the soulless and stark new hotel in town. And it was—it was a lot of fun.

  There remained, of course, the matter of what to do with her now that she was dead. There had been a conversation on one of those days I’d just hung out with her, an afternoon when we were lazing around on her bed. She’d put down the magazine she was reading and said, out of the blue, “I don’t want to go to Lincoln.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Lincoln Park Cemetery in Warwick, Rhode Island, where my father was buried.

  “Wait, what?” I said. “You don’t want to be buried next to Daddy?” She knew there was already a plot that had been bought for her long ago right next to him.

  “It’s the other ones,” she said. “I don’t want to be there with them.” She meant her mother-in-law and poor, sad Uncle Lenny. She had nothing against my father’s father that I knew of.

  “Are you sure?” I said. Was she really that crazy?

  “I want to be cremated,” she said, and she went back to reading her New Yorker.

  At some point later, another day lying around, I asked what she wanted done with her ashes. She said she didn’t care. I said we would have to do something with them.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “what do you think?”

  “Maybe at Canochet?” I said, meaning the beach she loved so much.

  “Okay,” she said, “that’s a good idea. Or maybe somewhere outside at Ronnie’s house.”

  In the early 1980s, as a journalist in LA, I attended a press event at the Playboy Mansion, a must-see and mythical place for a girl like me whose life had been affected by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine philosophy, David Leach, with his hedonism, his pipe, and his attitudes toward sex and marriage, having been an early adherent.

  Described as Gothic-Tudor Revival, the twenty-two-room, twenty-thousand-square-foot monster of a house was set on more than five acres of groomed prime real estate in Trousdale Estates, though we reporters were allowed only in the downstairs public rooms—the bunnies and Hef lived upstairs—and outside in something called the grotto, where the sex orgies supposedly took place.

  I suppose Hef was somewhere around in his silk paisley pajamas and bathrobe, but it was the Playboy girls who caught my interest. They were such singular creatures, whip-thin as nervous little Italian greyhounds, but with these preternaturally big round breasts stuck on, looking like nothing else on earth except each other.

  I started up a conversation with a friendly bunny, introducing myself as a journalist, asking some question or other about whatever this event was for before asking her about herself. Yes, she lived there. Hef? He was really, really nice. She was smiley, engaging, and sweet, but I saw something else in her eyes, a kind of vulnerability, a mute appeal that said, Don’t say anything mean about me, okay? Be nice to me. I’m helpless.

  And I understood at that moment what it must be like to be a man attracted to women like these and how appealing it must be to take one home and put her on your bed like a pretty stuffed animal, a woman who was helpless, who’d be grateful, who’d want nothing more than to be protected and taken care of, petted, and clothed.

  And later I wondered if this was what my father had been trying to tell me when I’d complained about what I saw as my mother’s indolence and uselessness and he’d said that I had to remember that she was completely dependent on him. And that there were two messages in that. One, that her helplessness made him feel like a man. The other…to make sure for my own good that I myself turned out to be something other than that.

  Which is what, in my life and time, I have tried to be.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-One

  RIP RSX

  In the years after the 2007 RSX—the Rolling Stone ex-employee reunion in San Francisco—there were more, albeit smaller, reunions right here in New York City. They seemed to occur randomly—a couple of luncheons at the Blue Ribbon Bakery at Bedford and Downing Streets in Greenwich Village; two potluck suppers at the town house on Grove, also in the Village, where Christine Doudna and her husband raised their two kids; and, more recently, a cocktail party for Ben Fong-Torres and his wife, Dianne, in town from San Francisco, at the book-lined apartment in a Bing and Bing building overlooking Abingdon Square where Sarah Lazin, her hair now a halo of white frizz, has lived since the magazine’s move to New York.

  Annie never comes—she didn’t come to the first—and neither does Jann. But David Felton does, and Paul Scanlon, Laurel Gonsalves, Harriet Fier (or she did; she recently died, after a long battle with cancer), Christine, and Sarah, as well as others who came after me—Barbara Downey Landau, Roger Black (who headed the art department for years after I left), and, on occasion, writers Don Katz and Greil Marcus, who was at the magazine from the beginning and who happened to be in New York the night of one get-together.

  Something pulled us there to one another, maybe to relive for a little while the time in our lives when we were having the time of our lives, when Rolling Stone was young and we were too. As Hunter Thompson wrote so eloquently on the magazine’s pages, it was

  the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special place and time to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

  We’d all come to the Bay Area and ridden that 1960s countercultural tide as long as we wanted to, or could, right into the 1970s. How lucky we all were to be there when it was happening and do our parts, whatever they were, in putting out a magazine that was more than a magazine—it was a state of mind, something all at once raucous and insightful and smart and funny.

  So what if the counterculture became part of the culture? So, eventually, did all of us.

  As head of Rolling Stone’s new book division, Sarah Lazin made her way into the publishing business an
d now heads her own eponymous literary agency. Harriet Fier worked as an editor at the Washington Post before founding a film business with the man she married and raising their children in Westchester.

  Christine Doudna went on to write and edit, married a tall, handsome partner at Salomon Brothers, and the two of them enjoyed a house on Martha’s Vineyard as well as the one on Grove. They had also eventually partnered with Marianne Partridge to publish the Santa Barbara Independent, with Marianne as editor, she herself having married a rancher with a huge Spanish land grant near Santa Inez. And me, married and living my bourgeois life in a town-house duplex on Washington Place, passing my winters in the warmth of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

  The year 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Rolling Stone. A fifty-year anthology of writing was put out (I was disappointed to see that my work wasn’t represented, though it had been in the twenty-fifth-anniversary anthology). It was a year in which Jann closed his Us and Men’s Journal magazines (having sold Outside long before), a year in which he finally sold off his controlling interest in Rolling Stone magazine.

  The year also saw the publication of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, described by Knopf as “a delicious romp through the heyday of rock and roll and a revealing portrait of the man at the helm.”

  Ben had gotten hold of a pre-pub bound galley, and at a cocktail-hour gathering for Ben and Dianne, it made its way through the party and fast became dog-eared as we all took turns ego-surfing through the pages to find ourselves. Later, after the book had come out and we’d had a chance to read it, there was a flurry of disappointed e-mails, Facebook posts, and blog postings, one ex-Stoner cc’ing some of us his outraged letter to the author, book reviewer, and publisher, none of whom bothered to respond.

  The actual life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone were in fact delicious and a romp in many ways, but maybe you had to be there. Because the book just didn’t get the times or Jann. Which left those of us who had been there feeling betrayed, especially those of us who’d spoken to the writer and saw how he’d twisted our words. Had I learned nothing? Me, of all people, who should have known that a writer was always selling somebody out, had put such blind trust in a reporter on the phone. I’m still left to wonder, though, what I could possibly have said to prompt him to write that, when covering Joe Conforte’s whorehouse in Sparks, Nevada, Annie Leibovitz and I had worn bikinis, which we most certainly had not.

  The morning after the party at RSX in 2007, we all gathered at a movie theater in San Francisco’s Mission District to see a short video and clips from a BBC documentary about the old days and afterward to take the mic and share any stories or thoughts. There were many antic tales of Hunter. Antic deadline stories. And antic-for-the-sake-of-being-antic tales, like photo editor Karen Malarkey’s story of her and Annie’s three-bridges game, which involved their doing a bump at Annie’s apartment on Union Street, then flipping a coin to see who’d get the better route—the Golden Gate to the Richmond Bridge to the Bay Bridge home. The loser of the toss was consigned to the reverse route. Then they’d set out, Annie in her Teardrop Porsche, Karen in her ’55 VW Bug with the rebuilt engine, and tear around the bridges, the first to get back to Annie’s rewarded with the next few lines of coke.

  Jann’s name came up a few times that morning in jokes about those he’d fired and then immediately rehired, like Felton, Fier, Doudna. The accountant at the time said she wished she had a dollar for every final paycheck she cut for David Felton. Someone else thanked Jann in absentia for not coming because “he would have tried to take over,” and then went serious, calling on us to remember that it was Jann after all who had brought us together. Michael Lydon, who’d been one of the first editors in 1967, said that Jann really pulled it off, he was the guy with the vision and needed other people to get his vision across and that was why we were all here.

  I’d forgotten about the Saturday-morning gathering until, at a kind of mini-reunion—a dinner party at Christine’s a few years ago with just Mitch and me and Christine and her husband and Don Katz and his wife—Don reminded me of it. I didn’t know Don back then. He had come to Rolling Stone just after my time, in 1975, at age twenty-three, filing stories on politics from the London office. Then, in the summer of ’76, he covered the Democratic Convention, where he also wrote and rewrote speeches, including Ron Kovic’s speech, and it was Don who wheeled the Vietnam vet onto the convention floor, a scene that ended the Tom Cruise movie based on Ron Kovic’s life.

  After Rolling Stone, Don had gone on to write well-regarded nonfiction books and in the ’90s had founded Audible, since sold to Amazon, though he remained CEO.

  “You know, what you said that morning really stayed with me,” Don said at dinner.

  I had no memory of the event, let alone what I’d said.

  “You said you felt so lucky to be at Rolling Stone then,” he told us, “that the music was so great, that it was so good to be young then. That you felt sorry for people who were young today that they didn’t get to do it.

  “And that’s exactly the way I felt too,” he said. “How we all felt.”

  Laurel Gonsalves, an organizer of RSX with Sarah and Roger Black, supplied me with an audio CD of the event, and there was my voice, right after Felton told a story of his time living with Barbara Downey, when she was out one night at an office women’s consciousness-raising group at Marianne Partridge’s apartment, how Annie had come to their own apartment with Mick Jagger, and how, when they left, he’d called Barbara to tell her and could hear all the consciousness-raised women squealing and shrieking like teenagers in the background at the news that Jagger himself, in the flesh, had been at Barbara’s house.

  When I took the mic, I introduced myself, explained that I had been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, that I wrote cover stories. I told about David and Annie and my wearing those stupid disguises to Hunter’s speech in Chicago and about David’s taking me to the printer to see my first cover roll off the presses. And then I did, I said what Don said I said, that I felt so lucky to work there when I did. But I had also gone on to say that though it had been this huge high point in my life, such a big deal, and that I had had so much fun, they had been hard years in some respects…

  I realize now that’s why I traveled all the way across the country to go to RSX: to claim my place in that life and time and to fill in the blanks in a part of my past that was largely a blank. To see that Alan Rinzler had survived and flourished. To see Felton, married to a woman who didn’t seem to show up at these events and once again find myself seeking the safety of his company at the party, asking to sit next to him at lunches in New York, and, finally, seeing the look in his eyes when Barbara Downey showed up late to the last lunch, how he couldn’t keep them off her.

  I had always felt invisible at Rolling Stone, eclipsed by brighter lights (to all but maybe Felton or Rinzler), so it was a revelation when Don said what he said at dinner—to be told flat-out I’d been seen and heard—just as it had been to learn that Christine and Sarah had noticed, even admired me way back then, and it is such a gift that we have now become lifelong friends.

  There was another such gift at one night’s post-reunion reunion in New York when Greil Marcus came up and introduced himself to me—Greil Marcus, the holy grail at Rolling Stone, the music and cultural critic who had been there since the beginning and gone on to author 1975’s Mystery Train, which placed rock and roll in the context of American cultural archetypes from Moby-Dick to The Great Gatsby to Stagger Lee and was listed as one of Time’s 101 best nonfiction books since 1923.

  “Robin Green,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’ve always wanted to meet you!”

  You have? I thought but didn’t say.

  It took me a while to summon the nerve to ask him why. But when I did, he told me it was my work, that it had stood out, that I took on ambiguous and difficult stories and approached them with a sense of both modes
ty and amazement. I could have died of happiness right there, but he went on. My stories were so different, he said, from the panic mode of Hunter Thompson and all of his tough-guy imitators. The reader got the idea there were both real people in the stories and a real person behind them…

  Me. That girl in the photograph at the beach I couldn’t remember having been—who, I can see now, was a strong girl in some respects, a girl just beginning to come into her own as a person in the world.

  I finally also got to know Paul Scanlon, who’d been managing editor when I was there, when I was Felton’s writer and he and David occupied different, and opposing, camps, Paul’s supposedly workaday and David’s farther out. Paul had gone on to other magazines but eventually come back to Rolling Stone and even now had a cubicle in its offices on Sixth Avenue near Radio City Music Hall.

  We’d meet at the White Horse Tavern here in the Village for a drink or two, talk about the old days, his memory sharp and clear, his perceptions funny and deep. He took me on a tour of the offices once, leading me through hallway after hallway hung with every Rolling Stone cover that ever was, a literal trip down memory lane.

  I managed to screw up my courage with him too one day and ask him what he had thought of me then. I told him that I always had the feeling he and the other editors didn’t like me.

  “No,” Paul said, “it wasn’t that we didn’t like you. We didn’t know you.”

  I was glad for him finally to know me a little now. It seems important now for me to make myself known. And to that end, I have herewith written 89,715 words. I know how many because my computer counted every one.

  * * *

  Photographs

  I came across a photo of a girl I knew was me, but I had no memory of ever having been her. (Stanley Summer)

  When my father was away at war, my brother toddled around, gripping this photo and eventually wearing away the corner. (Robin Green)