How Sassy Changed My Life

by Kara Jesella

  Of course, there were advertisers who understood Sassy. Calvin Klein and Guess Jeans were still fans, and the Coast Guard debuted an ad in Sassy depicting a female captain whose boyfriend brings her lunch. In fact, Sassy often had as many ad pages as did YM. But while most magazines were allowed to produce two or three editorial pages per advertisement, Lang didn’t want to spend that kind of money, so Sassy could produce only one. “So if we had only thirty-five advertising pages, then we had seventy pages total,” says Mary. “If people said, ‘Well, why aren’t we selling on the newsstand?’ I’d say, ‘Because it’s a pamphlet! ’ Nobody’s going to buy a pamphlet at a newsstand when they can buy this big YM, Cosmo, whatever.” Newsstand numbers began to drop, and soon, fewer advertisers wanted in.

  Sassy was undoubtedly the underdog when it came to circulation—Seventeen, YM, and Teen were all in the millions, while Sassy’s readership had stalled at 800,000 (a bigger audience, it should be noted, than those of many of the next generation of teen magazines). And yet it was more expensive to advertise in Sassy than in its competition. In the early years, the magazine had justified the extra cost by touting Sassy’s high-quality paper stock, bigger size, and high-end photography and design. But after Cheryl and Neill decided to move on to new jobs elsewhere, Sassy underwent a series of unsuccessful redesigns. Art director Noël Claro did one in March 1992 that, while cute and zine-y, looked younger than previous incarnations. A 1993 redesign, though overseen by Cheryl, who returned briefly from Australia to work on the project, was boring and uninspired, from the smoothing out of the original paintbrush logo to the white backgrounds on almost all the covers. Mainstream stars like Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling, who were poked fun at in the pages of Sassy, suddenly graced its covers. The mandate was to keep the cover lines peppy and upbeat, make sure the model looks happy and approachable, keep the sex lines to a minimum (and small), and make sure the celebrities were plentiful; this was not the way to attract the kind of disaffected outsider girl who would create the next generation of Sassy readers. But the covers were battled over between the magazine’s business and editorial departments. The end product was a diluted, compromised version of what each camp wanted, which made for a result that made no one happy.

  Cohen thinks that the new look ultimately had a devastating effect on the magazine, with the unsophisticated design attracting a younger, less upscale, less coveted demographic: the average age of the Sassy reader, and the amount of discretionary income she made per week, dropped to below the levels of Seventeen’s readership. Sassy no longer stood out as a magazine for older teens, which had been key to its positioning.

  In fact, the business concerns were endless. Most of the advertisers wanted to put their money into fashion- and beauty-focused publications, and Sassy had a reputation as being issue-oriented. Advertisers long had the mistaken idea that because Sassy readers thought of themselves as outside of the norm, they didn’t want to buy the products other girls were buying; but if Sassy readers didn’t want to buy Maybelline’s frosty pink lipstick, they may have wanted to buy the red one. And even if they didn’t want to buy pink plastic Caboodles makeup kits or Lane cedar chests, they were still avid consumers who wanted to buy Doc Martens and sailor tees to assert their identities. But the insider-y, hip, closed-off world Sassy increasingly represented made the magazine unappealing to big corporations. Cohen complained to Lang in a memo that companies thought that Sassy was “creating a subgroup of outcasts.” She called the magazine “an elite club of alienated girls.” Many of the magazine’s readers would have agreed with her. So, in fact, would Jane: “When I went to the talk show, Sassy didn’t have quite the clarity of vision. Mary Kaye was sort of a transitional person, and under Christina it definitely became edgier; circulation was lower, however, and the number of people who resubscribed was also lower. I definitely am more ‘mass’ than Christina is, and that’s one reason the magazine did start to lose circulation.”

  In one undated memo, in a section titled “Offensive Collage,” Cohen takes the editors to task:

  Many articles seem to be inflected with anger, negativity, and offensive remarks. This is portrayed in such references as “Do you have a stick firmly lodged up your butt,” and Christina’s response to a reader letter, “Eat Me.” Glossary definitions such as “Goob,” meaning to cough up and spit out a ball of mucus from the back of one’s throat or “Gadar, [sic]” which is the innate ability to tell at a glance if someone is gay, enabling “you to pinpoint whether an attractive morsel rides in your ranch or not” are inappropriate. One READ IT column reviews this book: “The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit,” which is the story of a mole who emerges from his hole to find that another animal has “taken a dump” on his head and so goes in search of the culprit. This subject is unsuitable for a teenage mainstream magazine and offends our advertisers. The same is true for the as yet unmarketed device that allows a woman to stand up and pee. Language such as “This Sucks,” “Bleed, Baby, Bleed,” a reference to menstruation, and “You’d better thank me, bitches,” is offensive. This anger is reflected back to us when we receive and print reader sentiments such as “When people say, ‘I’m gonna kick your ass,’ they don’t kick your ass. They hit you in the face.” Lynn and LaRue from Dugway, Utah, thought this magazine should be rated R. They said, “If you [print] a twelve-year-old’s [letter] in your magazine, don’t you think twelve-year-olds read it? We can tell by the way that you talk that you are a bunch of imbeciles.” When it’s turning off our audience, it’s turning off our advertisers.

  The Sassy editors hated Cohen. Margie remembers the staff putting their faith in one member of the ad staff who they thought understood them. “We were very hung up on this one ad salesman, Mike Fish.” Fish worked primarily with record labels, but the lifeblood of any teen magazine is fashion and beauty advertisers. Fish’s clients would not be enough to buoy the magazine, no matter how much the staff liked him.

  Sassy was losing its buzz. Jane, preoccupied with her failing talk show and herself less a source of interest now that Sassy had reached its adolescence, wasn’t bringing as much attention to the magazine as she used to. Cohen complained in a memo that “Our readers know all the editors—the public only knows Jane. We need to saturate the market with all the editors.” The media world never caught on that there was more to Sassy than its editor in chief, and Lang wasn’t willing to put more money into a PR and marketing budget to rectify the situation, which Mary blames for the demise. “When it ended, it really had more to do with money—whether Lang had the money or didn’t want to spend it on Sassy—and less to do with advertising,” she says. “If the magazine had been owned by Condé Nast or Hearst and supported in a certain way, I think it would have been fine.”

  “There is a formula for consumer magazine success in America,” says Professor David Abrahamson. “You have to come up with a very specific kind of editorial content that is of clear interest to a clear group of people to whom advertisers who tend to advertise in print want to sell products.” Sassy solved the first two points—it had a clear voice and an audience that advertisers wanted to reach—but Sassy was not the vehicle advertisers wanted to use. Its singular voice was in many ways its downfall, and the decreasing ad pages and shrinking content wore on the staff in ways that only made matters worse.

  “Writing, editing, and art direction is a job that’s fun but requires a bit of passion. You could do other things and make more money. That’s why it’s a young person’s sport,” Abrahamson continues. “To do that under really contrary circumstances, from a defensive position, is really, really hard to do—there needs to be nurturing and protection to flourish. Once that shared enthusiasm on the part of editors gets severely dented, it’s not too long before the product starts to show it. You can see magazines that are tired. There’s no sort of binding energy, nothing animating.”

  In September 1993, Sassy hired Diane Paylor. “As Sassy’s first African American writer, I knew I
would be asked to write about issues of color. Who better to spew a little venom about racial prejudice than an everyday victim of it, huh?” Diane wrote in one story. Sassy had long been criticized for not being as racially sensitive as it could be. Kim regularly wrote about hip-hop, though it was never covered as much as the indie rock that Christina was partial to. Kim also wrote June 1991’s “It’s a Black Thing,” about her experience as a white person interacting with the hostile members of Afrocentric black groups. The staff fought to get African-Americans, like Sassiest Girl in America Sala Patterson, on the cover. (The magazine industry has long believed that a black cover model is the death-knell to that month’s circulation. But since publications didn’t want to appear racist, they would put a black girl on the cover maybe once a year, usually in February, the shortest month and the one that got the smallest circulation numbers, anyway.)

  Still, in Sassy’s pages, race never got as much play as did gender. For Diane’s very first issue, the editors conjured up an article that was supposed to illuminate the disparity between blacks and whites. Diane and Mary Ann were both supposed to do regular day-to-day things like shopping at an expensive jewelry store and trying to get a cab at night. The goal was to see how differently Diane was treated because she’s black. And a number of times racism was clearly an issue—Diane was falsely told that the store didn’t sell men’s jewelry, for example. But most of the time she was treated the same way that Mary Ann was. And when she reported back to the Sassy staff, they told her to get back out there and try again, because not being treated badly wasn’t a story.

  “Finally she came into our office in tears and said, ‘You don’t understand what this is costing me. You don’t understand what you’re asking me to do, which is go and look for prejudice, which I live with every single day,’” says Kate Tentler, the magazine’s final managing editor. “And we were like, ‘Oh, fuck. Look what we’re doing, we’re just completely participating in this.’”

  They told Diane to write about just that: about how her PC-spouting, injustice-fighting, liberal-minded editors were better at talking the talk than they were at being racially sensitive to the black people in their lives. Her resulting story, “With Friends Like These,” chronicles the way an African American experiences ingrained prejudice at the hands of her supposed friends and colleagues. Sassy readers were mostly sympathetic. One wrote in to say, “Your story made me cry”; another said, “As an African-American reader, I understand exactly where you’re coming from.”

  “I don’t want to speak for Diane at all in this respect, but I did feel like it changed her feelings about being there,” says Kate. “You live a lifetime of having to deal with this crap and then you think you’re in a place where you’re going to be safe and it clamps down on you again and it’s just like, whoa. And particularly because Sassy’s MO was that it was an encouraging, accepting, inclusive place.” (Diane was the only Sassy staff member who wouldn’t speak on the record for this book.)

  Editors and writers were fighting one another, and the only thing they were really bonded by was a shared venom toward their so-called leader. “It was like the magazine kept sinking, but things kept getting better and better for Jane,” says Mike. Jane’s fame continued to rise despite the fact that she had little involvement in the daily operations in the magazine that made her famous and her main project—the talk show—was a critical disappointment. Even the business staff was sick of the young, mediagenic editrix who had once brought them so much attention. “I have enjoyed working with Jane, but she hasn’t been able to demonstrate a clear vision for this magazine,” Cohen wrote in a memo to Lang.

  If Sassy wasn’t losing staff to burnout and boredom, they were losing them to larger publishers like Condé Nast. “I used to say to Si Newhouse [the company’s chairman], ‘I’m running a farm system for you over here. Every time we develop somebody into a talent you pick them off,’” says Lang. “And it wasn’t just the money they were after. It was the great Condé Nast limousines, and all the perks.” As the core staff began to turn over, finding new writers who could write in the Sassy voice without imitating any of its existing writers was difficult. “After Sassy had been out for a little while, people would come to work there—writers in particular—who had been reading Sassy and were trying to adopt the voice. That’s never what I wanted. I just wanted them to write in their own, genuine voices. I can’t tell you how many people would write in a style that was a parody of Christina Kelly, a not-as-good version of Christina Kelly,” says Jane, who felt that the original three staff writers (Christina, Karen, and Catherine) were the strongest they had. As Mike recalls, “Toward the end, there were pieces that were crap as far as I was concerned. I don’t know how exactly it happened, but I think it was maybe the text itself wasn’t as sparkling as it had been. And we were pretty beaten down by that point. I don’t know if that’s an excuse or a reason, but we just were.” Said Cohen, in a memo, “What used to be a fun slumber-party conversation that made everyone feel welcome seemed more like a conversation that would take place in a smoky New York coffeehouse.”

  Of course, many readers who came of age during Sassy’s twilight years vehemently disagree. “Maureen Callahan made me want to keep reading and reading,” says Max Weinberg. Liz Menoji’s favorite staffer was Margie, who “wrote like I felt.” Still, Sassy’s readers were growing up. Sassy’s initial teen audience was reaching college age and moving on to other magazines, or even to the sharp-tongued zines they had been introduced to in “What Now.” “Sassy started to get old, and the Jane Pratt show really nailed the coffin shut. It was cooler to buy Franklin Bruno records about Jane than to listen to the Sassy house band, Chia Pet. Once the corporate shuffles started, I dropped my subscription and looked elsewhere for reading pleasure,” says Marc Butler, a longtime Sassy fan who wrote for the first reader-produced issue. Jessica Nordell was sixteen in 1994 when she started drifting apart from Sassy. “I think I was kind of down on Sassy. I felt like it was trying too hard. I thought maybe there was more to life than just wearing thrift-store clothing and tromping around. It was suddenly easier for me to make fun of it, whereas three years before I worshipped it.”

  countdown to the end

  By early 1994, Jane hadn’t been a part of daily life at the Sassy offices for a few years. “Jane was completely not around,” says Christina. “I remember I was really not happy being the editor, and I went to her and said, ‘I think I’m going to leave and be a freelance writer,’ and she said, ‘Yeah, I think you should.’ I was expecting that she’d protest and tell me I had to stay, like she always had, whenever I’d gotten any kind of job offer. It was like she knew that something was being planned, that Dale was going to sell the magazine, so she was off trying to figure out what her next thing was.” Amy remembers Christina and Jane’s relationship as especially fraught during those last days. “Jane was not being super straightforward with her, and she’d been with Jane since the beginning. Christina was running the show every day and didn’t feel Jane was being honest with her—she didn’t feel she had the insider information. There was extreme tension between them. Everybody felt that. That was no secret.”

  Jane maintains that Lang didn’t make her privy to any secrets, but she had begun to look elsewhere for a new project nonetheless. “I was hearing from women in their twenties who were saying, ‘I’m twenty-six, I’m still reading Sassy. Come on, let’s do something for women my age, there’s nothing! There’s nothing for Sassy readers to graduate to.’ I felt like I had done what I wanted to do with Sassy. I really wanted to start the next generation,” she says. Lang Communications didn’t have the money to develop a new magazine, so in spring of 1994, Jane left for Time, Inc., to start a magazine for twentysomething women. Still, Jane swears, “I would have much preferred to stay and still have some involvement with Sassy.” Even though Jane had severed ties with Sassy and Lang Communications, it was business as usual in the pages of Sassy, with her signing “Diary” each month and stil
l being credited as editor in chief.

  Meanwhile, rumors of a sale were escalating and advertisers, thinking the magazine was unstable, were running scared. Lang sent a memo on September 27, 1994, to the Sassy staff: “It is with deep regret that I must inform you Sassy magazine is being put up for immediate sale … I want all of you to know I’ve done everything possible to avoid this action. Sassy is a potentially great magazine and you are a fine young group of professional magazine people. You both deserve a chance that I can no longer provide.”

  It was a long month. Christina immediately demanded an all-staff meeting, at which one of Dale’s underlings made an unconvincing bid to assure his employees that they shouldn’t worry about job security. Jane made a rare appearance in the office. But instead of calming the nerves of the staff she had, in one way or another, led for the last seven years, Jane announced the launch of her new magazine at Time, Inc.—six months after she had gotten the job. “I think she even said, ‘There’s all these rumors that I’m going to do another magazine. And it’s going to be called Jane,’” reports Mary. “It was kind of weird.” Christina remembers Jane saying, “When I start it I’m going to hire you all.”

  In the meantime, though, the Sassy staff was stuck in a limbo of quasi-employment. Management began holding daily meetings to inform the beleaguered employees whether they should show up for work the next day. At one, Lang announced that he was looking for a bidder that would continue Sassy’s editorial mission and that his goal was to make a seamless transition. Then the staff was told not to complete work on the January 1995 issue, which was to be celebrity-produced (a format Jane would later use at Jane), with Liz Phair on the cover.