How Sassy Changed My Life

by Kara Jesella

  The irony of it all is that Sassy was begun as an alternative to Seventeen’s blond, bland uniformity. But to some readers that nonconformity became a new uniformity. “I wasn’t represented in these pages,” says Rita Hao. “The staff was all hanging out in the East Village and dyeing their hair. But just because I was trying to go to law school didn’t mean I wanted a boring life.”

  Many Sassy readers feel like they haven’t lived up to the magazine as adults, as if anything short of adopting Ethiopian babies, starting an all-girl noise band, or working in publishing in New York would live up to Sassy’s standards of cool adult living. “I wanted to learn how to grow up and not make compromises—how to stay true to myself,” says Hao. What she didn’t want was a new, equally confining standard to live up to.

  chapter 7

  The Fall

  the talk show

  When a magazine succeeds in selling a distinct paradigm to its readers, like Sassy did, there’s always the temptation to expand the brand into a lifestyle. Sassy had a perfume (not exactly a hit with their much-needed beauty advertisers, who resented the competition); binders, T-shirts, and fanny packs emblazoned with the Sassy logo; and a behind-the-scenes video called Even More Sassy. The magazine’s conspiratorial tone and young, photogenic staff lent themselves well to other media, so it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling. An agent at Creative Artists Agency, Bruce Vinokour, pitched a pre-MTV Real World to the magazine. The series was to be a combination of sitcom and reality, revolving around a young girl who had come to New York to intern at Sassy. The staff would have guest spots on the show, which also promised to have very earnest, un-Sassy, after-school special “serious messages,” as Sassy’s executive vice president and publisher Bobbie Halfin remembers.

  Not only would a TV show be a good way to give Sassy a wider audience, but it would also elevate Jane’s status as an arbiter of teen taste. This wasn’t something she was opposed to. “She was trying to become a celebrity, and becoming more enamored with celebrities. Which were two things that were very un-Sassy, with a capital S,” says Mike, noting that Jane had acquired numerous new famous friends. She appeared on the game show To Tell the Truth and was filmed getting her nose pierced on First Person with Maria Shriver. She was even rumored to be taking acting lessons. The proposed Sassy sitcom never got off the ground, though; negotiations fell apart when Jane failed to show up to an important meeting (a meeting Jane says she knew nothing about).

  But that didn’t mean Jane didn’t want to be on TV. In February 1992, with the blessing of publicity-hungry Halfin and Lang, Jane gave up her day-to-day duties at Sassy to start her own talk show, simply called Jane, on Fox—something that, in the early-1990s heyday of Sally Jesse Raphael and Jenny Jones, was a popular career path. Jane wanted a new challenge, and the magazine’s owners thought it would be good PR for Sassy, whose newsstand sales were declining. (Lang was happy to oblige; according to Jane, he was to receive half of her host salary.) Lang, however, claims this wasn’t true. For Sassy fans who had a hard time waiting each month for a new issue, the prospect of having Jane’s talk show—a living, breathing version of the magazine—in their homes every day after school was thrilling.

  Except it didn’t quite work out. Jane tackled Sassy-esque topics like young women and AIDS and gay teens coming out of the closet. But it also had more sensationalistic themes like “X-Rated Ways I Worked My Way Through College,” “I’m Not Stupid, I’m Just Blond,” and “Men Only Date Me for My Big Breasts.” Unlike Sassy, Jane was not a critical success. One writer in The Village Voice called a piece about the show “The De-Sassyfication of Jane Pratt.” In New York’s Newsday, her show was dismissed as “doing everything that’s been done before on the afternoon talk shows—except it’s for teenagers.” And Jane was called the “biggest hypocrite in a business filled with hypocrites.” Julie Gerstein remembers watching the show and finding it “sort of embarrassing. What was she thinking?” Jane, such a natural writer and editor, came across as not only stiff and uncomfortable on television, but also as a phony.

  Jane, who was accustomed to having creative control over everything that went into the magazine, suddenly had to answer to Fox executives. “I really had hardly any say,” she says in her own defense. But the show’s saving grace was that at the very end of each episode, there would be a quick shot of the cover of the latest issue, which would spike newsstand sales. “It deserved to have a bad rating but they were actually good,” says Jane. Nonetheless, the Fox show was cancelled after just one season. But the magazine was doing so well that in March 1993 Jane’s new show, called Jane Pratt, debuted on Lifetime. The general feeling among Jane, her agent, Lang, and Bobbie was that Lifetime—even though it had a smaller potential audience—would produce a show that was not exploitative and was more in keeping with the Sassy message. It tried hard, even having a riot grrrl show featuring zine editor Jessica Hopper, Kim Gordon, Christina Kelly, and the (decidedly not riot grrrl) Dutch indie band Betty Serveert. But it didn’t repair Jane’s image as a D-list talk-show host, and ran for only five months. “I dated someone who said that you were doomed if you go on that show. You fail the second you go onto the show,” remembers Jennifer Baumgardner.

  “The talk show was like a nightmare,” says Jane. “I would wake up and go, ‘I had this horrible dream that I was hosting Oprah’s show.’ Only it was true. It wasn’t a dream. Everything in me was fighting it, and you could see that when you saw it. I thought it was undermining everything I had built at Sassy.” Halfin echoes the sentiment: “The whole thing was horrible.”

  The unlikely beneficiary of Jane’s misfortune was actress Rikki Lake, who took over Jane’s spot on Fox. Lake’s show was not a critical success, but was on the air for eleven seasons. Later, she approached Jane at a party. “She came up to me and said, ‘I’m so glad you left and kept your integrity, because I made a whole lot of money,’” says Jane, laughing.

  The talk show’s failure had a devastating effect on morale at the magazine. “We shouldn’t have even tried,” says Lang. “When the show finally went away it was a big let-down, and it was kind of like we were over, the good days were behind us.”

  resentment

  With Jane basically M.I.A. during the run of the talk show, Mary Kaye became the de facto editor, and Christina was promoted as well. Under Mary Kaye, Sassy’s office politics heated up. “Jane was very good at being the good cop. I didn’t want to be the bad cop, but you have to get the articles done. The staff all hated me,” she says. Even the way the office was set up contributed to the tension, with Mary Kaye in the back and everyone else up front. “Every time I’d walk into that room, everyone would stop talking. It felt like high school,” she says. Some staffers were loyal to her, while others didn’t like her editing approach. She felt so embattled that she even went so far as to hire her mother as her assistant. Mary Schilling, a Lucky Strike–smoking, no-nonsense woman who regaled the office with tales of youthful love affairs with Canadian Mounties, was an effective shield for her daughter.

  Jane was able to keep her editor in chief title, and her name still signed off each month’s “Diary” column, but the reins of the magazine had definitely been handed over. Attentive readers began to notice that lists and guest writers began to dominate Jane’s column. “For some reason I don’t remember Jane Pratt as strongly,” says fan Annie Tomlin. “She was definitely a presence, but it always seemed like the magazine was produced collaboratively.” Jane’s absence from the magazine was Sassy’s dirty little secret. And certainly, from its inception, Jane had gotten most of the attention in the media. Upon the launch of her talk show, Jane was the subject of features in Interview, Newsweek, and New York magazine. “The fact that the media bought that Jane was still running the magazine was more shocking to me than when they asked me to run it. I don’t blame this on Jane; it was just funny that people thought she could do both of these things at the same time,” Mary Kaye remembers.

  Resentmen
t had been building among the staff for years. “The problem really started for me when she left to do the TV show,” says Mary Kaye. “There was this incredible love-hate thing for Jane because she got all the credit.” With Jane gone at her talk show, the rest of the staff was taking on more and more responsibility without any kind of recognition, and they were getting seriously disgruntled. “We felt like we were just as integral to the magazine as she was,” says Christina. “And I remember feeling like, ‘Why is it always about Jane?’ Because she was this mini-celebrity.”

  To be fair, Jane’s behavior during this time was actually normal business practice. At any other magazine, it’s accepted that the editor in chief makes more money and gets the accolades (they also take the fall; they’re the first to be fired if a magazine is deemed unsuccessful). Furthermore, from the 1960s on, magazine editors like Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan, Anna Wintour at Vogue, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, and Tina Brown at Vanity Fair were becoming celebrities in their own right. Jane was ascending as a young, name-brand editor. “I think Dale looked at Jane as irreplaceable, and we really made her hot,” says Bobbie Halfin, who, along with Lang Communications’s publicist Andrea Kaplan, promoted Jane in the media. There was no way Lang was going to take Jane’s name off the masthead or hire a new editor in chief just to pacify mutinous employees.

  Still, Jane was one of the youngest members of the staff and Sassy had, as Mike puts it, “an inner sense of egalitarianism” about the process of putting together a magazine. After all, wasn’t the fact that Sassy was such an overtly collaborative effort part of what made the magazine stand out in the first place? “I don’t envy them,” Jane says, of her staff. “I was getting the credit for a lot of the work they were doing. But that’s sort of how it is: the editor in chief gets the attention. But at the time I guess I didn’t know that, and I felt bad, and I felt like I was exploiting them.”

  dale lang

  After just four years of publishing, Sassy was not just a hot up-and-coming magazine, but an unmitigated success. But it wasn’t easy to keep that up. Unlike larger publishing companies, Lang Communications lacked the funding to pay for things like preferential newsstand placement, mall tours, advertising, or direct-mail campaigns that could sustain or bolster the magazine’s success. Sassy also wasn’t Lang’s highest priority; that would be Working Woman, Lang’s biggest revenue producer. And ironically, as Sassy was making its financial comeback, Working Woman was on its way down, taking all the other magazines in Lang’s stable with it, partly a casualty of that era’s recession.

  Lang needed an infusion of cash to run the company. But “Cute Band Alert” apparently wasn’t as beloved on Wall Street as it was in the East Village. “I dealt with different investment banks, and these guys were the worst. You couldn’t get a banker to understand Sassy at all,” says Lang. He found an investment bank that promised them money. “At the last minute they said, ‘No, we’re not going to do it.’ And I wasn’t really willing to just accept that, and I really got in their face and said, ‘Why? What turned you off all of a sudden?’ It turned out it was Sassy. They did not want to invest in a crazy teen magazine.” Since the “crazy teen magazine” was pinpointed as the problem child in the Lang Communications family, it wasn’t long before the powers-that-be started thinking that Sassy might need to be sold in order to save the rest of the company.

  The truth might have been that the problem lay less with Sassy and more with Lang himself. Lang didn’t command a great deal of respect in the industry. While he had been an important publisher in the 1980s and early 1990s, he was becoming known as a bumbling businessman, and some of his practices were considered suspect. (There were rumors that Lang was falsifying circulation for some of his publications.) As Jane’s talk show was failing, her relationship with Lang began to deteriorate. He wanted to trademark her name so that no one else could use it. “I think somebody tried to use the name ‘Jane’ and I asked my lawyer to set up a copyright on it, so we’d own the name Jane, and he couldn’t do it,” says Lang. It was a power struggle with no easy resolution: Lang had helped make Jane into a celebrity, and with her newfound star status she wanted to achieve greater fame than his relatively small company could manage.

  Life at Lang Communications kept getting worse, not that it was lavish to begin with. This was a company where, as Mike says, “We had to fight to get a fax machine.” Sassy didn’t have any kind of message system for its office phones—there wasn’t even a receptionist, so if staffers were in a meeting or out to lunch and missed a call, well, too bad—they missed the call. Instead of donating to charities the money they made selling beauty-product samples, like most magazines do, Mary had the idea to put aside the cash toward an answering-machine fund.

  Sassy’s Christmas parties were also tellingly indicative of Lang’s bare-bones approach. There was an elegant soiree when Lang first purchased Sassy. “He was like, ‘I’ll keep the bar open for another hour,’ and we were like, ‘Wow, you actually may be Daddy Warbucks,’” Kim says, smirking. The next year, Lang offered ad space to a boat company called Spirit of New York in exchange for a free party. There were two other Christmas parties going on, so the Sassy staff was stuck in the basement of the boat. The food was free, but the drinks were another matter. “You had to pay for cocktails,” says Andrea. There were waiters ambling up to the staff singing, “Ooh, Spirit, working aboard the cruise.” Andrea remembers wondering, “Do you want to stop singing and come give us some drinks?” The next year was the nadir. The holiday party was held in the conference room, and the sole refreshment was an Entenmann’s cake, served straight from the box.

  end of days

  Given the obstacles, Sassy somewhat miraculously found itself celebrating its fifth anniversary in March 1993. The issue was Mary Kaye’s last; Christina was now Jane’s number two and the day-to-day commander in chief. A natural writer, Christina was the easy choice for Mary Kaye’s replacement, but she had never edited before and couldn’t finesse the business side of the magazine the way Jane could. Whereas Jane had easily cozied up to advertisers, Christina was notoriously headstrong. “With Christina, if anyone like Dale Lang said, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she would ignore it,” says Mary. Lang agrees: “She’s such a great person behind the scenes, but maybe it was too hard for her with advertising. I don’t think she likes doing it. It’s not her forte.” Christina, for her part, admits, “I don’t think they thought I presented so well, in my undershirts and jeans.”

  “I remember being a fly on wall in the art department when Karmen Lizzul [Sassy’s last art director] would present the cover and Christina worked out what should go on the cover,” Amy Demas, the magazine’s associate art director, remembers. Linda Cohen, the publisher, would come in and talk about cover lines—typical for someone in her position—and her input would drive Christina crazy. “There was so much tension in the room it was unbelievable,” Amy says. “And we sort of listened to what Linda had to say, but probably did our own thing anyway.”

  The business and editorial sides of Sassy had long been at odds. It was the business staff, after all, that had to deal with conservative advertisers, many of whom still wrongly thought of Sassy as a more risqué publication than Seventeen and YM. It didn’t matter that Sassy had barely covered sex for years. “Everyone talked about this magazine that was risky with the sex articles, which is so irritating because we weren’t even allowed to write about sex at all after the first issue, and it persisted for another six years,” says Christina, characteristically hyperbolizing a bit. “It was written about in one article, and then it got passed on, but it’s not true at all.”

  But because advertisers were nervous about Sassy’s image, there were still unwritten rules that they expected the magazine’s editors to follow. After the boycott, Halfin had pledged to companies that the magazine would straighten up, reminding them that Lang’s magazines had a history of squeaky-clean content. Still, Lang wasn’t taking any chances, and appointed Halfin to
approve the magazine’s table of contents every month. Halfin was so intent on getting and keeping advertisers in the fold that she was happy to breach the usual church-and-state divide. “There was one article that was very graphic about a boy who went to rape counseling, and I wasn’t sure if that was over the line or not, personally. So I basically sent the article to an advertiser just to get an opinion from her,” says Halfin. “And her husband was a rape counselor, and he thought it was fine.” That time the article ran, but more often than not the editorial side was held in check. “There were certain taboo things that we couldn’t approach. I think it was abortion, homosexuality—the very things we wanted and needed to talk about. We would have to cut things or change things for the advertisers,” Jessica says. “It was a creepy form of censorship because they weren’t saying you can’t do it, but rather ‘If you do it, you won’t get our money.’”