by Kara Jesella
Before Sassy, teen magazines presented girls with two options: “Be like your parents want you to be, or like the boys want you to be,” says Jen Hazen. “Not: think for yourself. They didn’t treat their readers like intellectuals.” Or, in the words of Julianne Shepherd, “It felt like the writers of Sassy were talking with me, rather than telling me how to be like more like them, or more like an idealized notion of the popular debutante teen.”
Sassy was a refuge from airhead teenybopper magazines, and in its first two years, the magazine established its worldview. Girls weren’t encouraged to be smart for the sake of getting good grades or getting into a good college. Instead, they were encouraged to be themselves. Sassy touted higher education’s bastions of bohemia, like Oberlin, Evergreen, Sarah Lawrence, and Colorado College, as well as all-female colleges like Bryn Mawr and Smith. An article called “These Are the Ten Sassiest Colleges in America,” from the November 1989 issue, explains the list’s criteria. Among them: “colleges that look for students who are die-hard individuals, creative, quirky, even,” “education that is wide-ranging and free-thinking,” “professors who encourage self-motivation and different points of view,” “a tight, tolerant, nonelitest student body that is supportive rather than competitive,” and “an emphasis on community service.” It’s as good a summary as any of what, in the magazine’s microcosm, was important in the world, and what should be important to its readers.
It seemed like Sassy was trying to help its readers unlearn what they had learned in other publications. “I never got to go to Daytona Beach when I was in school … this major deprivation of my teenage years has really scarred me for life,” Christina wrote in April 1989’s “The Dirty, Scummy Truth About Spring Break (or, Where the Jerks Are).” In the article, she revealed the underbelly—including the drunk, assholish guys—of what had been sold to girls as a rite of passage. And in August 1989’s “Cheerleaders as a Concept,” she debunks the institution: “What bothers me is that it ultimately becomes this elitist activity where only the most ‘popular’ girls cheer on the most ‘popular’ guys. It’s an outmoded system that stereotypes people. And that makes people like me feel inferior. Yeah. That’s why I have a problem with cheerleaders. Not because they get more guys. I swear it.”
Sassy questioned all the tenets that other teen magazines held dear. The magazine regularly made fun of celebrities; it exposed the tricks of the fashion industry in articles like May 1988’s “How We Make This Girl Gorgeous”; it didn’t deify models.
creating the characters
But what made Sassy really stand out was the way the magazine showcased its staff.
Sassy was cool in a distinctly impossible-to-focus-group way that was a direct result of the inimitable collective personality of the people who worked there. “When I hired the writers, I felt like I was casting a TV show, and trying to come up with characters so that every reader could relate to one of them,” says Jane.
In the first year, she used her “Diary” column to familiarize readers with each staff member. Sassy introduced all of its writers and editors as specific archetypes with their own beats: after Jane, their fearless leader, there was Karen, the precocious straight-shooter who covered relationships; Catherine, the serious one who wrote the hard-hitting stories; and boy-crazy Christina. (Jane nicknamed her three writers “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll” for their respective areas of expertise.) But it wasn’t just the writers whose personalities were known: Mary, for instance, was the cool, artsy one and Neill was the incorrigible flirt. “I wanted the hunky guy,” says Jane of Neill’s potential allure to readers and coworkers alike. “I made sure to get his picture in. He dated, like, half the girls on the staff. All the readers had crushes on him, and we would fight because sometimes he would get more reader mail than I would.” (Some of the letters, he recalls, were quite suggestive.) Even Cheryl, who had no interest in appearing in the magazine, got dragged into a picture for the editor’s letter about her, though only half of her appears in the frame. One can assume Jane thought the shy girls would relate.
Using the staff members as personalities in the magazine wasn’t a brand-new idea. It had been done in small niche publications—mostly hunting and outdoors magazines—and it was a hallmark of Dolly, where employees would take turns writing the editor’s letter. But though Dolly’s staff members sounded cool, they appeared at irregular intervals and were hard to differentiate. Jane decided to take the star system and ratchet it up a notch, giving the editors a real presence in the magazine, with lots of pictures, first-person stories, and references to one another. The staff would even interject the others’ stories in countless parenthetical remarks. (“Once again I got the dream assignment,” says Christina in a story on four up-and-coming male actors. “Yeah, we noticed,” Karen and Catherine respond.)
Catherine had aspired to writing the entertainment articles, but quickly acclimated to her more serious beat, contributing some of Sassy’s most memorable stories, including a profile of an eighteen-year-old on death row and an article on a teenage stripper. While working on these pieces, she would go into “what we’ve come to know as ‘Cath’s serious obsession mode,’” as Jane described it in a December 1988 “Diary.” Jane made sure to let readers know that, like those straight-A honor roll students who were reading, Catherine did her homework, including studying a 432-page tome on child preachers while writing her article “Children of God.”
In an early issue, Jane introduces Karen, who was known for covering the fun, flirty side of being an adolescent girl, changing her hair color with every issue, and doling out important sex and relationship advice. The staff had an average age of twenty-four; Karen was the youngest, at twenty. Even though she was barely older than her target audience, she was known around the office for being wise beyond her years. “She has a motherly knack for putting things in perspective, like her multipurpose ‘Who gives a flying——,’ used whenever Christina’s worrying about what some celebrity will think of her interview or I’m deliriously murmuring that the magazine will never be done on time,” wrote Jane. Plus, Jane says, she is “the only person I know—mothers included—who can talk about masturbation, boys’ most intimate body parts, and the proper usage of each birth control method without blushing even once.”
Christina’s boy obsession was more libidinous than theoretical. In the early days, Jane portrays her as a kind of party girl. “No, Christina’s not exactly camera shy. Or any kind of shy, really,” says Jane in “Diary,” noting Christina’s “explosive laugh, which comes echoing out of her cubicle every, oh, fifteen seconds or so. And her ‘Ohmigod!’ squeal—you know, a la Moon Unit Zappa circa her ‘Valley Girl’ phase.” Christina’s main job was “getting to meet cute, famous guys and interview them.” (Actors Billy McNamara and Alex Winter, and Kirk Pengilly—“the other cute INXS guy”—are a few examples.)
Readers got to know the staff so well that by the end of the first year, writers signed their stories with their first names only. True aficionados would read a Sassy story with the byline covered, then try to guess who had written it. The clues were so obvious, and the staff’s personalities so defined, that it was hard to lose at this parlor game.
life at the office
As it is at almost any start-up—and certainly at a start-up where it’s most of the staff’s first or second jobs—the initial year at Sassy was chaos. Mary’s boyfriend would come by and question whether anyone was actually working. Often, they were laughing at Andrea Linett, who, Mary says, is “the funniest person alive.” The twenty-one-year-old Boston University graduate had started as the staff receptionist (she greeted Christina in striped over-the-knee socks, a baby-doll dress, shorts, and Doc Martens). She spent the first few months smoking in the reception area and taking phone calls—or not: other staff members were constantly trying to hang out with her, and if she was deeply involved in one of their stories, she’d simply hang up on whoever called. She became the fashion assistant (and later the fashion
editor).
But it wasn’t just Andrea who provided office entertainment. Art assistant Danny Pfeffer would put on clothes that had been called in for shoots and catwalk through the office. Catherine says, “You’d try to think of reasons to go to the art department,” where Neill blasted INXS from his cubicle (and mocked Catherine for playing Les Misérables in her own). Christina chattered on incessantly about a variety of male celebrities, addressed everyone (boys in particular) as “lovelamb,” and paraded around in her wide-brim hats and “asking for it” micromini dresses (“I’d say, ‘Christina, are you sure that’s not a bathing suit?’” remembers Catherine). The time Eric Stoltz was in the lobby, a small parade of women walked by, one by one, trying to meet him.
Mike Flaherty, who was hired away from Playboy to be the copy editor in time for the fifth issue, was the only editorial staffer with a CD player, so he briefly hosted dance parties in his cubicle. If something amused Christina, “she’d just latch on to it and you’d hear about it every day,” he says. So there was a “Low Rider” period during which six or seven staffers would groove to the War anthem for a few minutes each afternoon. “We were really into shtick,” says Mike.
Even though everyone on staff was really different, “We were all close, and when we weren’t working we’d go out together,” says Elizabeth. There was a karaoke period. There was bowling. There was Nathan’s and KFC for lunch. They even dressed alike: the summer Dirty Dancing came out, everyone in the office—except, presumably, Mike and Neill—started wearing three-quarter-length cutoffs and Birkenstocks. They also accused the less-cool kids—in this case, nerdier teen magazines—of copying them. They used words like daggy, Australian slang for gross, and published their definitions in the magazine, hoping they would catch on. (Alas, despite their valiant efforts to use it regularly in articles, you won’t find daggy in the OED.) So though the staff often worked late into the evening, “We didn’t notice the long hours,” says Elizabeth. No one wanted to be anywhere else.
Certainly, there were cliques: the writers in their row of pink cubicles; the fashion department; the Australians—each had their own little circle. And there was a lot of personal drama, reminiscent of the volatile love lives of the teens they were writing about. Christina was in love with Neill, who was in love with Catherine. Elizabeth had a crazy boyfriend and was on the verge of joining a cult. Karen’s marriage was ending. The staff was practically on top of one another. They could overhear one another’s phone conversations. There was a lot of crying.
They even lived together: Neill spent his first few months in the United States sleeping on Cheryl’s couch. He later lived across the hall from Mary Kaye Schilling, the executive editor, a former YM staffer and dead ringer for Kate Pierson of the B-52’s. She helped Jane with the day-to-day demands of editing the magazine. A promotional video shows them in their pajamas watching Sunday-morning cartoons together. Christina and Andrea moved in together. Jane lived across the street from Christina.
“Everything about the way we behaved was so adolescent,” says Christina, who was, quite possibly, the biggest offender. “It was like something about dealing with the material of teenage life made us all act like teenagers.”
But this was good for business. Some of the magazine’s most popular stories covered life in the Sassy offices. In August 1988, the staff members switch jobs for a day. Karen finds out that copy editor “Anne’s Job Sucks,” while Anne wonders “Why Do I Have to Be Neill?” And “Cheryl promised that as art director I’d get to meet and talk to all the new boy models to decide if they should be in the magazine,” says Christina. “But the old troll made me design the cover instead.” The accompanying image shows the results, which includes headlines like “HUNK!”; “So You Want to Date a Rock Star?”; and “Nude Poster.” Mary, filling in for Christina, forgets the questions she wanted to ask the pop group that she’s interviewing, so “All we talked about were makeup and clothes!”
sassy is my friend
In the days before the World Wide Web and reality television, Sassy was like The Real World and a blog rolled into one: readers who picked up the magazine for an interview with their favorite celebrity or were titillated by a frank sex coverline kept buying it month after month because they wanted to hear from their favorite staff members. “I liked how personal it was,” says Heather MacLean. “It was like a conversation with all these cool women every month.” “It was like reading a long, loving letter from your big sis,” says Max Weinberg. “It completely stood out from everything else, like there was actually a magazine out there that was designed for me,” says Alicia Peterson, “written by people I wanted to know, featuring people I wanted to be, and seeming like it was made by friends. It was reassuring to know there were grown-ups out there who ended up doing something really cool with their lives and making an amazing magazine that meant something.” Julie Gerstein agrees: “These girls were so snarky and witty and fun and you just knew that you would totally be friends with them if you lived in the same town.”
The magazine got masses of letters. “They weren’t ‘Dear Sassy,’ they were ‘Dear Neill,’ ‘Dear Jane,’ ‘Dear Christina,’” says Jane. Most subscribers had a “writer crush,” a Sassy staff member they most admired and emulated. It was the staff—not the actors or writers or models they covered—who were the stars.
Sometimes writing letters wasn’t enough. Making a pilgrimage to the office and meeting the Sassy staff became a national pastime for readers. Peggy Lipton stopped by with her two Sassy-loving kids (by ex-husband Quincy Jones), Kidada and Rashida Jones, because Jane wanted to do a beauty story with the girls. “They sat in the art department with us and just sort of watched, and we explained to them what we did,” remembers Neill. But it wasn’t just famous people’s progeny who got to hang out at Sassy. “Kids would come in all the time,” says Neill. “And we made a point of being very open to it.”
To a lot of readers, the Sassy staff was as important as—or more important than—their real friends. “I turned to the writers and editors, who I knew by name, for support when the boys in my language-arts class made fun of my pairing a big tweed coat with a short purple skirt and green tights,” says Sarah Kowalski in an online Sassy eulogy. Millie di Chirico was just starting high school when she started reading Sassy. At that age, “The magazine was so personal it felt like a community, like people that you hung out with—that was very important. I was kind of an outsider type. I didn’t have a lot of friends in school. You wanted to find your people.”
Sassy, of course, vehemently dismissed the notion that the catty, claustrophobic, conformist halls of high school were as good as it got. The staff were candid about their own high-school horror stories, and by writing freely about their own adult lives—days spent hanging out with one another and with the various celebs who stopped by the office, nights spent at concerts—they implicitly assured their readers that adult womanhood was something to look forward to, and that though they were outsiders now, they’d be insiders eventually.
“We definitely felt like we really cared about the readers, and we didn’t want to hurt them the way other evil magazines had, the way that had been done to us,” says Christina. She adds, “The biggest dis on staff would be, ‘That person doesn’t really care about the readers.’” It was “a competition of who cared most.”
“I think for a lot of the people who worked there, it had nothing to do with the glamour, the money,” says Jane. “We didn’t make any money, anyway. It was really just about these girls. We weren’t faking that we wanted to be there for them, we weren’t faking that we were their friends. We were their friends.”
Though it was Sassy’s honesty and authenticity that readers responded to so strongly, in fact, the staff members’ personas were at least partially just that: personas. Jane wanted characters in the magazine because that’s what they had at Dolly, and she worked really hard on getting each character exactly right. She didn’t want to change their voices, but to “enhan
ce their voice, if anything. Tell them, ‘Do more of that.’” Elizabeth says, “I think in a way it was hyperbolized.” Certainly, it wasn’t made up. “I’m frighteningly well-adjusted,” says Karen. “You would be horrified at how well-adjusted I am. I was very much the grown-up, sensible one.” Still, she admits, “Did we hone in on one particular aspect of our personalities and really pump that up? Sure.” Even Christina wasn’t exactly as she appeared. In real life, she wanted more freedom to write issue-oriented stories, but her persona was all about boys and celebrities, so that’s what she covered.
jane becomes a superstar
“People like Karen and Christina were really beloved by readers,” says Mike. “They were like celebrities.” But if Karen, Christina, et al. were merely like celebrities, Jane was the real thing. The Los Angeles Times called her “queen of the prom.” “She’s so hot,” Quincy Jones told New York magazine. The media made much ado about Sassy’s young, charismatic, successful editor in chief, giving her full credit for the magazine’s early success. “She really was good at developing a persona,” says Mary Kaye Schilling. Jane was comfortable on television and being chauffeured around in cars. She always knew the right thing to say in interviews (“Now I’m the popular kid I wasn’t when I was sixteen,” she cooed to one reporter). During Jane’s first month on the job, she had to prepare for one of many TV appearances. “She saw this suit that she wanted in a magazine, some pink suit, and she made Elizabeth call the designer to get it, find out where there was one in her size and have it delivered. And I thought, ‘Who that young, in their first job, knows how to do that?’” says Mary Kaye. “I mean, she knew how to be a celebrity. And most celebrities know that instinctively, and none of us knew how to do that.”