by Kara Jesella
No one had anything to do, but the staff technically still had jobs, so they would while away their time with projects born of frustration. “We would all come in every morning to see if there was any news. Sort of mope around, put through invoices. I remember we were taking Polaroids,” says Christina. They put the photos up on a big board in the office, chronicling the final days. The shots included “Christina signing Virginia O’Brien’s expense report for the last time” and “Janet takes down the disco ball”; and, Christina remembers, “There were pictures of me holding up the sign WILL EDIT FOR FOOD.” The bored staff also made a fake mock-up of the next issue. “It was filled with all these stories that we were obviously never going to be able to write, making fun of specific advertisers, because we knew that the end was coming,” Margie recalls. Instead of working, Mike would go see matinees of Pulp Fiction, and would sometimes stop by to see if anything was happening in the office. People sat in their cubicles and updated their résumés. He remembers, “I was under the delusion that we’d all have no problem getting jobs because the industry just loves Sassy. And, you know, we’d be snatched up in no time.” (But it turned out that with the recession in full bloom, it wouldn’t be so easy for them to land full-time employment.)
Then, for a brief, shining moment, it was rumored that Jann Wenner might be the staff’s unlikely knight in shining armor. Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone and the Wenner media empire, was known for being difficult. Still, he was admired as an editor who was eager to go against the grain—and, as an added bonus, he had cushy offices. On October 12, Publishers Weekly reported that Wenner had put in a bid for Sassy. The report turned out to be untrue.
On Friday, October 14, the daily staff debriefing at four p.m. ended with the news that on Monday would be their final meeting. That night, everyone went to a party that Karmen and Amy had been planning for a while, at a loft on the Bowery. Amy says, “It became the end-of-the-magazine party and it was a blast, a great night.”
That Monday, October 17, after a morning spent shuffling between the conference room and their desks, nervously waiting for news, the staff was called together. Lang announced that Sassy had been sold. Christina remembers Halfin saying that Lang had spent his fortune on the magazine. “And I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ I’d been there for seven years, and I got one month’s severance pay.”
The buyer was Los Angeles–based Petersen, proud publisher of such trade publications as Guns & Ammo, Hot Rod, and a Sassy archnemesis, Teen. It was the only company to bid on Sassy that could come through with the money, which Dale needed to keep the rest of his titles afloat. “Petersen felt it was a good fit with Teen and gave them a larger share of the teen market between the two magazines,” says Lang. Teen was largely read by girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and Sassy was supposed to appeal to older readers. “It was the wrong place, absolutely the wrong place for Sassy to go because it was totally run by bookkeepers. I’m sorry I ever had to sell it,” Lang admits. Ira Garey, who had been a publisher of Seventeen, was brought in as joint publisher of Sassy and Teen. He recalls that Sassy was relatively inexpensive and that Petersen paid a little over a million dollars for it.
The night they found out that Sassy was sold, the staff went to the International Bar in the East Village. “I have a really good idea for the next issue,” someone joked, or “That’s such a good band for ‘Cute Band Alert’!” Christina says they were just trying to make fun out of their bad luck. “We were just pretending that we were crazy people who didn’t realize that we didn’t have jobs anymore.”
The next day, the unemployment office was the site of an impromptu Sassy staff reunion for Christina, Virginia O’Brien, Amy Demas, and Andrea Linnett. Jane, of course, wasn’t there; she was busy with her new project. “I think that kind of soured people,” says Mary. “I think they felt like, ‘Well, we just lost our jobs, and Jane already has this great gig.’” The staff was shell-shocked. In fact, Christina had met with Petersen a few months prior when they were looking for an editor in chief at Teen. “And I think at that point they were considering buying Sassy, and I guess they were trying to assess what the situation was,” she says. She told them she didn’t think Sassy could be run from L.A. They thanked her for her time and dismissed her.
Back in the offices, the staff hadn’t even been allowed to clean out their desks; everything belonged to Petersen now. Jennifer Baumgardner got the building’s handyman to take her from the Ms. offices to the now-abandoned Sassy offices. “I walked in there, and all their files were still there, all their computers were still on. I mean, they were just told to leave,” she says. Even the fruit chandelier, which had been immortalized in “Diary,” was on the floor. “They just cut it down like they were cutting down a hanged person, and it just crashed onto the ground and was broken. And none of them ever came back to their offices,” she says. “It was like Pompeii.”
stepford sassy
After a curious three-month absence, loyal Sassy readers eagerly plucked the March 1995 issue from the newsstands. “I knew right away something had happened—the logo was in this horrible shade of neon, and the girl on the cover looked really corny and fresh-faced and false,” says Julianne Shepherd. Someone else’s signature was on “Diary,” and “What Now” didn’t have a single snarky reference, nor any hint of Christina’s crankiness. In fact, there was no Christina. And no Mary, Margie, or Andrea. And who were Betsy and Caroline and Nina?
After anxiously wondering where the magazine had disappeared to, readers soon discovered that Sassy had undergone a complete change of staff and editorial philosophy, rendering it a kind of “Stepford Sassy,” as Bust magazine called it. “It was as if a best friend, someone we used to go on pro-choice marches with, staying up late eating Mallomars and talking about vibrators, had turned up after a long trip with a bad case of amnesia—giving us blank looks when we started talking about ‘restrictive gender roles’ and blowing us off to go to the movies with her boyfriend,” said Bitch magazine cofounder Lisa Jervis in “Kicking Sass,” an article in Salon.
“The original vision for Sassy, there was really nothing wrong with,” Jay Cole, Sassy’s executive publisher (who was also Teen’s publisher), told Daniel Radosh in a New York Press article at the time of the relaunch. “It was designed to give teens a sense of inner self-confidence, to develop self-respect, to empower young women. That concept is something we’re planning to continue.” Sound okay so far? “We’re planning to use a lot of personalities, celebrities who have accomplished something, to give teens a sense of how they can be the best that they can be.” And, he continues, “There will be a lot more fashion and beauty.”
The new vision was incredibly misguided. Nothing about the new Sassy earned the trust of its old audience. Cole opined that “there were some issues of Sassy that were somewhat irresponsible. We have to be responsible not only to readers, but to parents and advertisers as well.” He cites the “fringe-type” articles that were so beloved by readers. “There’s no point in saying, ‘the prom sucks,’” he says, sounding like he has zero knowledge of the teen-girl psyche.
So, in a sneaky ploy, the revamped Sassy tried to substitute the same breathless content so perfected by Teen—but flavored with the same outspoken style as the old Sassy. The language, which was affected and laughably “hip,” was especially off. Compare the old Sassy’s “Mary asked me to go to Los Angeles for a beauty symposium. I thought, ‘Bummer, there goes the weekend,’” with the new copy: “So you look mah-ve-lous in your high-school prom pic, but the then-love-of-your-life has since turned out to be a major creepo-la. What’s a gal to do?”
The Petersen-owned Sassy kept a few of the magazine’s original columns, but they were the same in name only. “It Happened to Me” remained, but now included cheesy YM-style reenactments of the action contained within, like the shadowy portraits of a model looking on in disgust as her “mom” snorts a line in “My Mother Was a Coke Fiend.” “What Now, What Next?” was supposed
to be a revamp of the much beloved “What Now” column, but it lacked Christina’s deadpan writing style and any sense of what was cool or important. “I was horrified to discover that concepts I invented were being defiled monthly by this clueless new staff,” Christina wrote in Ms. Every month the column began with a “Sassy or Sissy” list, which was the new staff’s way of conveying what was in and out. (Sassy and sissy are, in their warped version of the teenage universe, as follows: hackers and slackers; cuddlecore and riot grrl [sic]; thongs and bongs; skydiving and stagediving; Mattus nonfat ice cream and cellulite cream.) The new Sassy covered zines, but often missed the point that they were cut-and-paste affairs—one “Zine of the Month,” Foxy, is a colorful endeavor produced by a big-name skate company.
Similarly, instead of pro-girl, unapologetically feminist articles, the new Sassy offered outdated and offensive advice about just about everything. On flirting: “Men think about sex all the time—some studies show as much as six times an hour. So any given time you’re flirting with one of them, there’s a chance he’s wondering what you look like without your clothes on.” Sounding like it was from a blame-the-victim, well-she-asked-for-it school of sexual assault, the magazine then went on to warn girls not to flirt with anyone inappropriate. In contrast to the original Sassy’s groundbreaking health stories, which put a primacy on female pleasure, there was now a sex column from two men: the conservative TV doctor Dr. Drew and former MTV Headbanger’s Ball host Riki Rachtman. Sex education, in the Petersen Sassy, insisted that most “girls get emotionally attached after they’ve had sex with a guy. Guys usually do not.” The empathy that Sassy had always shown its teen subjects was decidedly absent. For instance, the article “(Un)planned Pregnancy: Teen Moms Tell All” calls one girl it profiles—a teenage mother of a baby who is again pregnant—“a living, breathing statistic.”
And forget the original Sassy’s love-your-body-as-it-is ethic. “The prettiest things under the sun are super body-conscious (and, luckily, so are you)” read the copy of one fashion article, effectively shaming the reader into an image obsession or fueling the one she likely already had. Instead of “13 Reasons to Stop Dieting” there was “Safe Munching: Are You Sabotaging Your Diet?” In the place of Kim, Mike, and Margie sampling junk food, the new Sassy advised readers in “The Munchies: Defined and Defeated” to eat fruit when they craved candy, advocating the kind of calorie-counting lifestyle one would expect from Seventeen. The few times the new Sassy used the F-word—feminism—it was usually to discredit it, with the words feminist PC thought police appearing, in one article, in extra-large type. Another article that tackles women’s rights, “Feminism 2000,” states that “if it’s hard for you to relate to the rules written by old-school feminists (you know, the ones who broke so much ground and burned so many bras back in your mom’s day), you’re not alone.”
For former staff members, seeing Sassy reincarnated as the very teen drivel they despised was like a slap in the face. “I still have [the new version],” says Mary. “It is so awful.” And “I remember the first issue,” Jane says. “It had the calorie counts of your favorite fast foods on a page. And I actually started to cry there, at the newsstand, so I didn’t finish reading it. I thought it was the most horrible, upsetting thing in the world. It was one thing to shut Sassy down. It was another to perpetuate the very thing that we had been fighting so hard against for eight years. I was like, ‘Here we go, backwards.’”
Receiving the new, bad Sassy in the mail was also a defining moment for many fans. “I remember pulling that issue with Liv Tyler on the cover out of my mailbox and thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’ Then I opened it, and the new editor had her hair in a ponytail, with a sporty scrunchie. I cancelled my subscription that very day,” says Laura Padilla. Alice Tiara spent an evening with a friend, systematically ripping the issue to shreds. Disposing of the new Sassy was a way for fans, in a small way, to voice their dissent. “All I remember is that I got the Petersen Sassy and hated it so much that I threw it in the fireplace,” says Maria Tessa Sciarrino.
Elisa Ung, a Sassy fan who was in high school at the time of the change, remembers her first glimpse of the new issue and realizing that everything she had loved about her favorite magazine was gone. “It was such a shock to my fragile teenage system. It was like someone had died. It was like all of my crew had jumped ship.” She emailed Sassy’s old address in a desperate attempt to reach someone on the New York staff, saying that even though the old Sassy was gone, she would always be grateful because it taught her to have her own voice. “Margie wrote back and said thanks and that my email was wonderful. Her response was seriously a highlight of my teenage years.” Kate Tentler was using her period of unemployment to lie on the couch and watch the O. J. Simpson trial, when she got a call from a thirteen-year-old reader from Vermont, who had found her number through information. She wanted to know what the staff was up to, and had one more question: Why don’t they just start their own magazine? Readers, reared on zines and blissfully ignorant of the costs of mainstream publishing, wondered why the staff had let the powers-that-be at Petersen get them down.
“I remember feeling really cheated, like it was way too soon for it to go. I was like, ‘No! I still need you!’” remembers Michael Kilmis. Sarah Lynn Knowles saw Sassy’s revamp as an indication of the generational divide: “It proved how little adults understood teen girls. I never felt a wider, more infinite gap between teens and adults. I remember feeling shocked, rendered speechless.” For fans of Sassy who were beginning to age beyond their teen years, Sassy’s demise was a metaphor for the compromised world of adulthood. “The sale happened my first year of law school,” says Rita Hao. “I was miserable and doing finals and kept wondering where my Sassy was. I was waiting for my grades to come back, and I got this crappy Sassy and it made me feel like all good things eventually sell out. I’m a sellout, too! I was totally depressed. I thought, ‘This is what happens to me for going to law school.’ I was in a bad mood for the rest of the summer.” She later started a Web page devoted to eulogizing the old Sassy and tracking the whereabouts of former staffers. Ocean Capewell felt similarly “adrift in the world” after Sassy was gone. “I remember writing a list of the bad things that had happened to me that year, and the death of Sassy was at the top,” she says. “I literally mourned the folding of that magazine and was depressed about it for months, as if it were a living, breathing thing that had died.”
Scores of readers voiced their dissent about the new content, writing angst-filled letters to the new publication. Sarah Kowalski was a sophomore in high school when the new Sassy appeared. Her letter, which she has now published on her blog, features such laments as “I am saddened and angered that such a beautiful, intelligent, and worthwhile institution has been corrupted. Everything I enjoyed and admired in the old magazine is dead.” Many other readers agreed with her about the new content, but predating the widespread technology of online bulletin boards by a few years, it was difficult for them to commiserate with fellow distraught teens.
In the January 1996 issue (which also featured an interview with Wilson Phillips singer Chynna Phillips on the joys of being young and married), the Petersen editors made the rather bizarre decision to publish fourteen letters on the magazine’s letter page—unaptly titled “Pushing the Envelope”—from livid Sassy fans. They titled the collection “Best of the Hate Mail.”
“The only reason I even look at the new Sassy is so I can phone my friends and trash it. My friend has burned her Sassys,” Samantha Conover wrote, adding that she suggests they “beg Jane, Diane, Margie, and all the old staff to come back, and maybe I’ll forgive you.”
Other fans also weighed in. Jenna Harrison wrote, “You have sucked every ounce of what the ‘old’ Sassy stood for out of the magazine. This magazine contains nothing but superficial garbage that needs to be thrown away forever. How could you do this to us? We depended on Sassy month to month for advice, security, and most of all, a good friend. You’re like a guy wh
o broke up with us without a real reason.” Others lament the loss of the old staff members with the kind of vitriol only a scorned teen could muster up: Kyla Brown says, “I miss Jane. What did you do with her? I pray every night that a huge earthquake hits California; maybe then I can have my old Sassy back!”
But even more bizarre than publishing hate mail that name-checked the old staff was the magazine’s response to its new readers, under the headline “Sassy Suggests: Get over It! Get a Clue! Get a Life!” It read:
Jane’s gone. She checked out way before Petersen Publishing bought Sassy (to save its individual voice within the youth market from extinction—you can only offend our readers, their parents, and your advertisers so many times before they call it quits) to pursue talk-show stardom and other flights of celebrity fancy (and we’re star-idolizing?).
As to many of the other old Sassy staffers, they are currently contributing to such groundbreaking, forward-thinking and mainstream magazines as Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Elle. While we respect their work, we’re not them, don’t want to be them, don’t want to adopt their writing style, and refuse to insult your intelligence by trying to sound like them. We’re us … and unlike the former staffers, or Madonna, Elvira, Iman, and Cher, we’re kind of attached to our last names!
As to the writers of the above-printed paeans to pissiness: First, we’d like to say that we’ve gotten tons of positive, encouraging mail—and our share of letters that made some wonderful suggestions on how we could improve our magazine. We appreciate that so much! But as to the nasty letters, when we first started receiving those missives, we found them amusing. But then we began to feel bad … a little for ourselves but also for you! That you are capable of such whiny evil is disheartening and pretentious. Quit your bitchin’, lighten up, and cut us some slack. We welcome all criticism so long as it’s constructive, but very few of the hate letters are the least bit enlightening or illuminating.