by Kara Jesella
Tiffani-Amber Thiessen’s publicist, Matt Labov, wasn’t exactly pleased with the interview. He sent Sassy a scathing letter that stated he would
like to go on record with my outrage and disbelief. With any feature interview, talent can be subjected to a fair share of non-positivity, but this “feature” not only crosses that line but plants a flag in the ground proudly saying “negativity.” This kind of press goes far beyond the acceptable motives of keeping readers and advertisers happy; it reveals a hidden agenda of mudslinging and terrorist tactics. It’s what we generally expect from tabloids, a category into which this kind of writing puts your magazine, a category we will not work with.
Sassy published his diatribe under the headline “But Shouldn’t Bimbodom Be a Crime?”
Labov’s ire notwithstanding, the profile was an instant classic with readers. Amy from Hudson, Wyoming, wrote in, “You verified that she is a Marlboro Lights–smoking, complete fake, wannabe, poser, overrated, Brian Austin Green–dating, asinine beast from hell! Oh, yeah, and she obviously has too much air in her head for a brain! Tiffani-Amber, if you’re reading this, you’re a waste of landmass for a real-life nineties woman.”
Instead of feeling disillusioned by hearing the warts-and-all truth about their favorite celebs, Sassy’s readers delighted in the magazine’s bitchiness, perhaps because Tiffani-Amber’s type—the pretty, popular girl who’s a little dumb, a little mean, but takes herself very seriously—was instantly recognizable. Mary Ann’s unapologetic loathing of her was the wish-fulfillment of anyone who had ever weathered high school. Sassy’s trademark cranky celebrity coverage rang true; Jessica Nordell, in a open letter to Jane Pratt in the Harvard Crimson, writes that part of the joy of Sassy “was that it applauded the idea that movie stars are little more than pretty faces and talking heads, and that real people doing real things were a lot more worthy of our attention. Isn’t the fact that we get excited when a star says something coherent an example of the exception that proves the rule?”
On the other hand, Jane says, “We were very excited about the people who were worth being excited about. When Christina would fly off to interview Johnny Depp, we would literally be jumping up and down.” Jane was also particularly excited about R.E.M., and made constant reference to her friendship with the band. (They were such good friends that singer Michael Stipe felt it necessary to tell her that he didn’t think Sassy was such a great name for a teen magazine “because it had the word ass in it and if you change the first two letters it says pussy.”) When singer Stipe would telephone during a staff meeting, Jane would always take the call. “I remember us all sitting on the floor. She’s sitting at her desk and would turn around and be like, ‘Hiiiii’ and curl up,” says Jessica Vitkus, who started working at Sassy in 1989. Later Jane gushed in her “Diary” column about appearing in the band’s video for “Shiny Happy People.”
Perhaps the best example of this symbiotic relationship appeared in the December 1989 issue, where all copies of Sassy included a flexidisc—a very thin, bendable plastic record—of R.E.M. covering Syd Barrett’s “Dark Globe.” “We had wanted to do a flexidisc for a long time. Because I was friends with R.E.M., I just asked them if they would give us one,” says Jane. Paying for the rights to the song would have cost about $25,000—way over the budget of cash-strapped Lang Communications—so the band covered the expense as a favor to Jane. The record became an instant collector’s item. On the day the issue came out, Jane was walking by Tower Records on Fourth Street and saw that they had sold almost every copy of the issue. She was elated—until she saw a trashcan full of Sassys right outside. Fans of the band—but not the magazine—had torn out the flexidisc and ditched the publication.
Sassy fans loved it, too, though. “We were introducing R.E.M. to the younger generation. At the time that Sassy came out, their audience was more college-age,” says Jane. “We were bringing in the new kids on the block—the teen girls.”
Beyond bringing more fans to celebrities who didn’t necessarily target teens, Sassy could also help change the images of more mainstream stars. Actress Mayim Bialik was first discovered playing the kid version of Bette Midler in the weeper Beaches and went on to star in the sitcom Blossom, where she was seen as just another cute kid actress. She was a longtime Sassy fan and was thrilled to meet Christina, who saw something more in her. She loved Bialik’s quirky thrift-shop style and atypical Hollywood looks; Sassy went on to feature her on the cover of their November 1992 issue.
Bialik had appeared in plenty of other magazines, which always had the same attitude: that celebrities could do or say no wrong. “They would write that you’re the sweetest person on the planet no matter what,” she says. The staff at Sassy, she says, “interpreted people as they were and not as their teen audience would want to see them.” In other words, Sassy was discriminating. “We wouldn’t just profile somebody because they had a popular movie out,” says Mike. “It had to be somebody we liked and respected.”
It felt like the bond between celebrities and Sassy was real, not orchestrated. In the article “How Sassy Changed My Life” in the March 1993 fifth-anniversary issue, various stars gush about the magazine. Courtney Love says, “When I first saw Sassy, I got really jealous of teenage girls ’cause all I had was yucky Teen magazine and white, white, white Seventeen magazine. If I had Sassy as a teen I’m sure I would have turned out with a stronger moral fiber, but I probably wouldn’t have started a band. If I had Sassy, I would probably be teaching retarded children.” Mayim Bialik, bands Ween and Sonic Youth, MTV VJ Tabitha Soren, Bratmobile’s Erin Smith, designers Todd Oldham and Anna Sui, and director John Waters offered similarly heartfelt rhapsodies.
indie invasion
And speaking of Courtney Love, she and Kurt Cobain—rock’s most infamous couple—appeared on the cover of Sassy in April 1992. It was Kurt and Courtney’s (or “Kurtney,” as Christina called them in the pages of “What Now,” heralding the era of Bennifer, Brangelina, and TomKat) first magazine appearance together and, given that they’d had offers from every major music magazine, a real coup for Sassy. Love’s publicist at Hole’s then label, Caroline, was a friend of Christina’s, and she made the article happen. “We got in there just before everyone else wanted to,” Christina remembers.
Strangely, Nirvana’s circle was less than six degrees of separation from Sassy’s: in an early issue, Sassy had included a short blurb on a new deodorant called Teen Spirit. They gave the product a rave review (the ad for it was, after all, on the facing page) but said “gag on the name.” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill was rumored to have read the piece and spray-painted SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT on Kurt’s wall. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became the name of Nirvana’s first single from Nevermind, the Seattle-based indie trio’s major label debut. It climbed to the top of the Billboard charts, beginning the popular phase of the grunge era.
A Nirvana fan since their days on Sub Pop, Christine Muhlke was Christina’s intern at the time. When she heard that Christina was going to interview Kurt and Courtney, Christine begged her to be allowed to come along. The band was in New York to tape an episode of Saturday Night Live. Kurt and Courtney were so late to the interview that there was some question of whether the couple would even show up; when they finally arrived, they both seemed to be on something. Either way, it was a memorable interview. “Courtney was so fantastic, talking about how Kurt liked her and didn’t like skinny models,” says Christine. She adds that “Kurt barely got to speak, but when he spoke, he was so beautiful and articulate and lovely, and we just kind of sat there and we were so overwhelmed by these really powerful, truly punk people.” She said half the fun was watching Christina interact with the hyperactive Courtney. “I think she was intimidated,” says Christine. Christina may have been a New York scenester, but Courtney Love was like Nancy Spungen come back to life.
The interview was a high point in the annals of both indie rock and Sassy. Kurt would eventually succumb to a drug-addled depression; a
documentary would accuse Courtney of murdering her more-famous husband; their daughter, Frances Bean, would be forcibly removed from Courtney’s home; and, years later, Courtney would be dragged out of her Manhattan apartment wailing about a botched abortion. But that spring, the couple was on the verge of making major pop-culture history, and they were very much in love. In a now famous moment in the much-reprinted interview, Courtney apologizes to Christina for a blemish on her face: “Sorry about this zit,” she says. “Zits are beauty marks,” an enraptured Kurt replies. “It’s poignant for me to think about even now,” one twentysomething told Sassy fan Rebecca L. Fox in “Sassy All Over Again.” Fox opines, “As another reader whom Sassy assured could be loved, zits and all, I know exactly how she feels.”
Years before Kurt and Courtney became household names and helped usher alternative culture into the mainstream, Sassy supported independent music. Christina launched “Cute Band Alert”—the title was a parody of teen-magazine speak—in “What Now” (once described in Sassy as “the monthly column of what Christina likes, who Christina thinks is cute, what outrages Christina, people Christina hates, and people Christina really hates”) in February 1990. “It was supposed to be a one-off,” Christina remembers. She got a black-and-white glossy of the band Bullet LaVolta in the mail and thought they were cute. There were so many write-in requests for a follow-up that in January 1991 the section became a regular column in “What Now.” Publicists and band members alike started lobbying Christina to be featured. “All these cool bands wanted to be in it,” she says. In fact, the alumni list of “Cute Band Alert” reads like an encyclopedia entry for nineties alternative music: Bikini Kill, Blonde Redhead, Chavez, Heavenly, Sloan, Ween, and That dog. It is also the place that massively successful and notorious indie bands like Guided by Voices, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Superchunk got their first piece of teen press.
Sassy was one of the first nonmusic magazines to cover underground music. “In the eighties, there was an us-versus-them situation: us being the underground and them being mainstream American culture. They just never met. They were in two parallel universes,” says K Records founder and “What Now” regular Calvin Johnson. “The mainstream press mostly saw indie labels as vanity publishing, as if the band was not on a ‘real’ record label because no one else would put it out. The fact that Christina accepted us at face value was startling.”
Sassy’s love affair with all things indie (not just indie rock, but indie actors, directors, and comic-book artists were featured in its pages) was, according to Christina, entirely organic. “What I was writing about evolved with what I was interested in. Through people I met in my job, I got exposed to all these different things,” she says. “It was like a privilege to be there because people thought Sassy was cool, so they’d gravitate toward us.” In turn, the punk-rock and indie world got a frisson of excitement seeing themselves in a magazine you could find on grocery-store shelves. “The funniest thing about Sassy’s coverage was that it was so inside,” says music critic Ann Powers. “Here was something that should have been the organ of mainstream pop culture, taking the indie-rock stance.”
There was, of course, the inevitable backlash from older veterans of the music scene, who frowned upon appearing alongside reviews of bland mainstream pop acts like Samantha Fox (even though Mike thought her album merited less than a star). Teen girls’ taste was so derided that no “serious” musical act courted their devotion. “A lot of punks picked on Sassy for bringing bands like Blonde Redhead to the forefront,” says fan Annie Tomlin (who was such a Sassy devotee growing up that she and her friends would stage mock photo shoots based on layouts they saw in the magazine). But Tomlin feels that Christina’s coverage of indie music was an important lifeline for teens like her. “For girls who grew up in the proverbial middle of nowhere, it was our big connection to something different. It planted a cultural seed that wound up making me interested in different cultures that I couldn’t have discovered without the magazine.” Constance Hwong remembers that, pre-Sassy, “I thought indie meant ‘from India.’ I started listening to Sonic Youth, 7 Year Bitch, Liz Phair, and probably a bunch of other things, all because of Sassy and their music reviews.”
Covering bands geared to the college crowd gave the magazine indie cred—something previously unheard of in the teen market. Because let’s face it: Seventeen and company had never been particularly hip—or even discerning—in their celebrity coverage. Of course, in Seventeen there was the occasional nod to the token alternative act that had found mainstream success, like the Cure or R.E.M. Sarah Crichton remembers pushing for a Beastie Boys story in the late 1980s. This was when the group had naked girls dancing in bamboo cages onstage—before they found Tibetan Buddhism and started dating feminists. The shoot was all set when Crichton’s phone rang: “Midge was calling from a plane, and she told me that the Beastie Boys were performing with a giant penis onstage, and she said, ‘Cancel that shoot!’” She pauses, “Well, the Beastie Boys did not appear in Seventeen.”
By 1990, Seventeen was noticing Sassy’s emphasis on alternative culture and taking baby steps toward upping its cool quotient. On the one hand, it would feature an obscure indie band no one had ever really heard of, like the Lilac Time, but then it would also run a story on Swedish metal-lite band Roxette. By 1992, it would feature a big photo and review of gray-haired Leonard Cohen (an odd pick for a teen magazine) alongside a write-up of British shoegaze band Slowdive and compare their ethereal music to—shudder—Wilson Phillips. That same year, they pushed the feminist girl-rock envelope with the article “Babes in Boyland,” where they asked “the coolest women in rock” (including Kim Gordon) what it’s really like “when you’re the only gal in the band.” By the early nineties, Seventeen had gotten the memo that times were changing, and they tried to reflect that in their celebrity and music coverage, but they lacked the inner compass of cool—namely, Christina Kelly—that Sassy had.
It took a certain amount of conviction on Sassy’s part to put underground celebrities in its pages, but once they did, even the magazine’s business side embraced alternative culture. Sassy frequently featured a half-page Social Distortion ad next to one hawking tampons. Companies who had previously advertised only in Spin and Rolling Stone soon began to purchase ad space in Sassy.
Sassy’s recurring coverage of Sonic Youth (sharing their fish-taco recipe; Kim Gordon getting her hair done with the staff), the Beastie Boys (baking a birthday cake for the magazine), Matador Records (the label of various “Cute Band Alerts”), and various other key figures in the nineties indie explosion made it seem like there was an alternative mafia represented in Sassy.
The column “Dear Boy,” where readers sent in their relationship questions for a famous guy to answer, was launched in June 1993. The column allowed Sassy to give yet more face time to indie-rock hotshots like Beck, Mike D. (of the Beastie Boys), Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins), and Iggy Pop. The questions were typical teen territory—“There’s this guy that I really like. He tells everyone that he doesn’t even like me as a friend, but when we’re alone together we do things that are reserved for people who think of each other as more than friends. What do I do?”—but the rock stars got to show a softer side. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth replied to the aforementioned question, saying, “The guy’s a jerk. I know that won’t discourage you from liking him, but he’s got a major personality flaw: disrespecting you. Next time you’re alone with him and he tries to get ‘friendly,’ tell him your friend Thurston Moore wants to kick his ass. And then tell him why.”
the sassy celebrity launch pad
The Sassy editors were able to pinpoint some ineffable quality in two other celebrities who would go on to become avatars of Generation X. The first is Chloë Sevigny. “Chloë was walking by on the street and Andrea just kind of grabbed her,” says Mary. Chloë became an intern at the magazine and modeled in a number of their shoots. She was there at the same time as Christine Muhlke, who says, “She wor
e really big hats that she made, and she had really big pants, and I just had a horrible, horrible girl crush on her.” This was, of course, before Jay McInerney catapulted her to It Girl status when he wrote about her in The New Yorker. Since Andrea launched her career, Chloë has become a major pop-culture figure, starring in Larry Clark’s Kids, garnering an Oscar nomination for her role in Boys Don’t Cry, regularly appearing in fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and in ad campaigns for favorite hipster brands like Miu Miu and M.A.C., and strutting naked down a catwalk in Sonic Youth’s “Sugar Kane” video. (She met the band through Sassy after former intern Daisy Von Furth recommended her for the part.)
It was Christina who made initial contact with Spike Jonze, another of the magazine’s favorite subjects, before he secured his import in late-twentieth-century culture by directing Beastie Boys videos and Oscar-nominated films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. Charles Aaron, a former “staff boy” (a notoriously ambiguous gofer-type position), remembers spotting Spike in the Sassy office. “He’s sitting on the floor, next to Christina’s desk, going through zines and making weird jokes.”
Spike’s relationship with Sassy happened entirely by accident. He was living in Los Angeles and working with friends Andy Jenkins and Mark “Lew” Lewman on Homeboy, a magazine that began in 1986 and that combined skateboarding and bike riders alongside comic-book creators, musicians, artists, and, as they put it, “weirdos and bums.”
One Homeboy reader felt dissed by the magazine and, as retaliation, sent out “bill me later” blow-in subscription cards with Homeboy’s address to a random array of magazines, including Pig Farmer, Guns & Ammo, Coal Miner Monthly, and Sassy. Out of curiosity, the editors flipped through the magazines; somehow, Sassy stuck. (Not least because despite their never having paid for the subscription, Sassy kept arriving each month.) “Nobody wanted to admit to reading it, but we all poked through it,” says Lew. Spike would occasionally read aloud from Sassy while they were driving to shoots. They had a certain fascination with the female Sassy reader. “We were eighteen or nineteen, and it was a window into how girls thought and felt,” Spike says.