by Kara Jesella
“She was a tough lady. She considered herself always the educator, always tied to young people,” says beauty editor Annemarie Iverson. “And that’s kind of the way she ran it; it was the mother superior running Seventeen.” Mary Clarke, who worked at Seventeen before getting her job as the beauty editor of Sassy, agrees. “She was like a school principal. She would walk down the halls and say, ‘Good morning.’” At Monday editorial meetings, she informed the beauty and fashion departments—which consisted of more than a few fair-haired ice queens—what they would cover (she didn’t care much about the articles). She would try to fire people because they chewed gum like a cow or didn’t know how to bend over properly in their miniskirts.
“It’s almost like talking dirty to kids,” Richardson said about the Sassy sex stories.
But her comments were likely politically motivated. For one thing, the two magazines were at war. (Sassy’s 1994 entertainment poll asks, “Who’s your favorite dinosaur? T. Rex, Barney, Aerosmith, or Midge Turk Richardson?”) For another, despite Seventeen’s chaste reputation, some of the stories that ran were as explicit as Sassy’s early sex articles. “We actually put in a lot of stuff that people didn’t give us any credit for, under the radar,” says Crichton. But there were also articles like “How Do I Know if I’m Doing It Right,” which was about “performing well” when readers “kiss, hold hands, or express any physical form of affection,” and another on sexual dreams. There was even one on—get this—blue balls.
But no one in the press ever mentioned Seventeen ’s sex articles—even in 1989, when the magazine ran a quiz titled “Are You Ready for Sex?” It sounded suspiciously like Sassy’s loss-of-virginity piece, which had gotten its fair share of attention from readers, the religious right, and the competition. In fact, during Crichton’s tenure, Seventeen increased its coverage of sex, cutting, divorce—the darker side of teenage life—and its circulation increased exponentially. But while its stories increasingly portrayed the real pathologies affecting girls, the tone was always removed and journalistic, which helped the magazine retain its patina of innocence, even among high-school librarians, most of whom shelved the magazine and looked at it closely.
A new magazine with an unexpected voice, Sassy was a much more vulnerable target. The religious right wasn’t about to go up against the industry’s kingpin, which had a pristine reputation among the millions of mothers who happily bought it for their daughters. “Seventeen’s dirty little secret is that it’s really hard to know whether any of the girls read it. We knew moms read it and filled out subscription cards and renewed it,” says David Abrahamson, a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. “It wasn’t for daughters to enjoy, but for moms to feel good about their daughters possessing.”
The companies who ran ads in the publication—and who certainly wanted girls’ allowances to line their coffers—kept quiet about the magazine’s sexual content as well. “Most people on the advertising side of the business thought of it as a fashion magazine—because that’s where the money came from,” says Caroline Miller. “But the reality of it is if you talk to girls and you read all the surveys, which we did a lot of, very few people bought it for those fashion stories. They bought it for the personal stuff.” Luckily for Seventeen, its reputation for covering the lighter side of female adolescence remained an effective cover.
the end of the innocence
While preparing for the June 1989 issue, the Sassy staff spent a day going through boxes and boxes of “It Happened to Me”s, looking for submissions about incest. They decided to ring a bell every time they found another one, and that bell rang more than any of them had expected.
The reason for this depressing exercise was that the editorial staff was trying to prove to the business side that an article on incest was imperative. Says Mike, who remembers that there was hesitation, “We were trying to tell them that we’re constantly getting letters from girls about having been victims of all this.” But not only would an article on incest deal with the most taboo form of sex, it would also tell girls that sometimes their parents are horribly wrong. And undermining the place of parents in their daughters’ lives was a tricky undertaking. Still, the staff prevailed, and six months after their last sex article, “Real Stories About Incest” ran. Written by Catherine, it chronicled the tales of three girls who had been through it.
It would prove a Pyrrhic victory, though, as Sandra was asked to step down a month before the piece ran.
“I never decided to sell Sassy—I never would have,” says Sandra. “Citicorp Venture Capital, who controlled sixty percent of the company, asked me to resign. Clearly they believed someone had to be held accountable for what had happened, and that person was me. It remains the most painful episode of my working career.”
“Someone kind of had to take the fall for the boycott,” agrees Mary Kaye.
The magazine’s buyer, in October 1989, was Lang Communications, owned by Dale Lang. Lang was one of the few small, independent publishers left among the conglomerates. Lang owned a number of feminist-y magazines designed to appeal to the women’s movement’s growing numbers, including Working Woman, Working Mother, and Success. Lang’s publications were dedicated to women’s newfound fiscal independence: an idea advertisers—eager to be the recipients of women’s money, regardless of whether it was earned by them or their husbands—warmed right up to. Advertisers were especially pleased that the magazines weren’t particularly political.
Lang himself was dapper and charming, a businessman known as a bit of a swashbuckler, a medium-time player with big dreams, and he was excited by the opportunity to take a flailing publication and turn it around. “I bought Sassy because I thought it was a great, great publication. I loved the idea that it was kind of the anti-Seventeen,” says Lang. He was less attracted to Sassy’s sister property. But Citibank, who controlled the sale, wouldn’t budge: if Lang wanted Sassy, he had to buy Ms., too. “The last thing they wanted to be left with, frankly, was Ms. magazine,” says Lang. “If somebody was going to have to bury Ms. magazine, they were going to take a lot of heat for that—and it wasn’t going to be Citibank.”
Ms. was an albatross of a business property. “If the editors really gave the readers what they wanted in Ms., the advertisers would run away screaming,” says Lang. What they wanted, presumably, were stories like the exclusive the editors scored on the effect the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan had on women. The article generated buzz, but it also made Revlon—a cosmetics company the magazine had pursued for years—jump ship. Why? Revlon was upset that the woman on the cover—a Russian peasant—wasn’t wearing any makeup.
That Ms. editors refused to bow to the advertisers the magazine relied on for its existence was a constant bone of contention between Steinem and Lang. According to the latter, “I said, ‘Gloria, don’t you realize that unless the magazine can stop losing money, it can’t live? You know? It doesn’t have to make money, but it just can’t lose money.’”
“Dale Lang was an extremely schlocky guy,” counters Steinem. “He was not impossible to work with, because he listened and he wanted to be liked and he wanted to do well. But he had no clue about content at all.” (Nor, she says, did he actually understand Ms.’s activist mission. “The Ms. staff would take off the Martin Luther King, Jr., day as a holiday or go to political rallies in Times Square and the Lang people would say, ‘You can’t do this because everyone will want to do it.’”)
The two finally came to a kind of truce, agreeing that the magazine couldn’t serve both its audience and its advertisers. After ensuring they had enough reader support, they converted the magazine to an ad-free, subscription-only publication.
And in their way, the Sassy staff had a similar sense of mission. Initially, the boycott had seemed a bit funny. It had even, to a certain extent, fed the staff’s rebellious fantasies, drawing them closer, making them feel more fiercely committed to their work at the magazine. “We were all so young; we kind of did
n’t give a shit,” says Jane. “I remember Christina and I talking about this many times. But we wanted to be thrown out rather than fade away. We much preferred the idea that we had made an impact on teenagers and on the culture in general and that generation, and that years later people would be talking about Sassy and the impact it had—much, much rather that than modify what we were doing, than do something softer and exist for fifty years. We were twenty-five years old—who cares about existing for that long?”
But as the boycott played itself out and Sassy lost ad pages and its beloved founder, the situation became less amusing. “It was terrible. We would come in, for years and years and years—we joked, but it was true—we would come in to work not knowing if our desks were still going to be there. We just thought the magazine was going to fold any day,” says Jane. “And then we did have to make changes; that was the toughest part of all.” Ms. may have won editorial freedom under Lang, but Sassy did not. The magazine couldn’t talk about sex for years.
“It was everyone’s first big reality check,” says Karen. The staff didn’t realize how easy it was for business concerns to trump editorial ones. “We were so spoiled,” agrees Christina. “We lived in this little idyllic world where we didn’t have to worry about advertising; we were just told to make a magazine that teenagers would respond to. And that’s just not the reality of publishing. And once our fairy godmother was gone—once Sandra was gone—it became more real.”
When Sandra left, Sassy changed. “It was different. It was always stressful in the office,” says Cheryl. The editors “did the best they could do, and it was still a good magazine, and readers still loved it. But in some ways, the Moral Majority had done its work.”
chapter 4
Celebrity
teenage riot
One day in the summer of 1990, the publicist for the legendary New York noise-rock band Sonic Youth called Christina. To promote their latest album, Goo, the band requested press in two publications: The New York Times Magazine and Sassy. The band had been fans of Sassy for a while. “I remember thinking how I wished there was a magazine like Sassy when I was a young girl,” says bassist Kim Gordon.
Christina told the publicist that Mike wanted to do the interview, but Sonic Youth had other plans. “She called me back and said, ‘No, they don’t want some guy, they want you,’” remembers Christina.
Sonic Youth has always been known for their innovation in the way they play music. But the real genius of the band has been their ability to spot talent, forging relationships with the coolest artists of the moment: handpicking opening bands like Nirvana, featuring designer Marc Jacobs’s clothes in their “Sugar Kane” video, and using artists like Mike Kelley, Gerhard Richter, and Raymond Pettibon for their album art. By seeking out Sassy, Sonic Youth not only established the magazine as a vanguard for underground music long before Nirvana broke to mainstream audiences, but enshrined Christina as one of the premier music critics of the early nineties (her taste was so revered that she was once offered a job in A&R for a record label).
“Sonic Youth on $100 a Day,” Christina’s interview, features her shopping with the band at a downtown flea market. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m interviewing Sonic Youth, I have to have really good music-journalist questions, so I look like I know what I’m doing,’” Christina recalls. But as soon as she started asking Kim Gordon how the band got together, Gordon groaned and asked, “Do we have to answer these kinds of questions?” So Christina changed direction and asked her what her favorite color was (it’s blue). “Kim was so much happier after that,” Christina says. In a nod to the Tiger Beat school of teen idolatry, the entire interview is made up of questions about the band’s favorite colors (Steve: “green and gray together”), what they were like in high school (Kim: “read Nietszche in class to rebel”), what their least favorite band is (Lee: “Stone Roses and Happy Mondays”), and what they look for in a girl (Thurston: “roundness”).
why all the celebrity worship?
Sassy had an ambivalent relationship to celebrity from the very beginning. In the second issue, Karen wrote a story called “Dating a Rock Star.” Not only does she make it seem tedious (long hours on a tour bus, band drama), she even makes the sex seem bad. Other reasons to avoid metalheads and troubadours: “There’s the smudged mascara (he’s always too exhausted to take it off before bed); the bad case of the breakouts (from all that stage makeup); the pale, sickly skin (because he’s only really awake when it’s dark outside); the flabby, out-of-shape body from too much Howard Johnson food and not enough time to use that new rowing machine on the tour bus.” That same issue featured another article by Karen, on a certain redheaded teen pop sensation, called “How Tiffany Ruined My Weekend,” wherein she gripes that she spent the day “waiting for a call from a girl whose only New Year’s resolution was to grow her own natural fingernails.”
In a 1989 ode to Debbie Gibson, Christina notes, in an aside, “I thought she looked good, but then she put on this heinous denim jacket … I say this as a friend offering constructive advice.” With every issue the magazine seemed to become less self-conscious; soon, Christina was regularly taking on the cultural bread-and-butter of teen magazines, dismissing “Top 40 hell” and huffing that “the creativity of the major networks leaves me breathless.” She connected her hatred of individual celebrities to the inanity of the star-making machine: “What is wrong with our society that we elevate sleazoids to celebrity status, take their opinions seriously, and make them rich?” she asked.
That sentiment was a part of a June 1992 article, a celebrity snark manifesto of sorts, called “Why All the Celebrity Worship?” in which Christina spews forth her trademark vitriol about Beverly Hills, 90210’s resident hunk Luke Perry (Sassy had a deep love-hate relationship with the hugely popular teen drama). “What has [he] done to redeem humanity? At press time, nothing,” she writes, then calls her fellow teen mags “mindless pawns in the celeb-making game.” She wonders about Sassy’s relationship to the entertainment world, since the magazine covered celebrities as much as their competitors did. “Either we are part of the problem, or we are making fun of the whole thing. It depends on how you look at it.” That kind of tortured relationship with celebrity became the magazine’s signature: celebrating pop culture and hating it at the same time.
Suffice it to say, there was no other teen magazine out there indulging in this kind of postmodern criticism. But Christina’s articles could have appeared in another publication that was enjoying its heyday around the same time as Sassy: Spy. “The New York Monthly” was a hugely influential magazine that was unafraid of the consequences of its celebrity bashing (they once featured a nude photo of pre-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger next to a picture of his father’s Nazi membership card). Sassy and Spy, along with The Village Voice, Spin, and 7 Days, were part of a mini-revolution that was happening in magazines’ treatment of celebrities in the late eighties and early nineties. Many young journalists working at these publications had graduated from small liberal-arts colleges where low culture was a subject of scholarly inquiry. And a revolution was happening in pop culture itself: comedian Sandra Bernhard was also deconstructing the celebrity machine in her one-woman show Without You I’m Nothing. Even Bernhard’s then best friend, Madonna, was analyzing her own fame in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare.
Regardless of outside influence, Christina thinks Sassy’s tone was set by the celebrity handlers. “I think I was just annoyed at the way I was being treated by the publicists,” she says. Part of her job covering entertainment for Sassy was to take handlers’ calls. But she also edited the fiction and wrote “What Now” and two or three additional articles a month. So she usually didn’t have time to call publicists back. Why bother? If they yelled at her on her answering machine, it made good fodder for the rest of the office to laugh at. Unfortunately for magazine editors, celebrities were outselling models and increasingly becoming standard for magazine covers in the early nineties—which meant that th
e dreaded publicists gained more and more power. Sassy needed to sell at the newsstand, too, and that meant a little more celebrity and publicist ass-kissing was in order. “I was having this visceral, juvenile reaction to it,” Christina says. So she decided she wouldn’t sugarcoat what stars said or did during interviews, or pretend that everything went well. “And,” she shrugs, “nobody stopped me.”
So a January 1993 cover line reads: “Shannen Doherty, Pathetic Loser.” Christina calls Tori Spelling “Miss Plastic Surgery” in the pages of “What Now.” The abrasive Kennedy is called the “most hated MTV VJ” on a cover, and the article itself is simply titled “Deserving of Our Hatred?” Melrose Place star Andrew Shue, according to Maureen Callahan, a writer who joined the staff in 1993, “isn’t really an apathetic, dim-witted underachiever. He just plays one on TV.”
Surprisingly, the most infamous of Sassy’s celebrity smackdowns wasn’t written by Christina. Mary Ann Marshall, a writer who started in late 1992, penned “Something Does Not Compute,” an interview with ditzy Saturday morning TV star Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. Instead of fawning over the brain-dead former beauty queen, Sassy refers to her as “Saved by the Bell’s Demi-Bimbo”—right on the cover—and makes fun of her when she says she likes “a lot of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works … like Hamlet.” Mary Ann writes, “Oh, I hadn’t heard of that one.” You can practically see her eyes roll. Reading the article felt like gossiping with your meanest friend. When Tiffani-Amber points out that she was valedictorian of her class of “forty-five, fifty kids,” Mary Ann responds—italics her own—“No, she’s smarter than all those people?”