The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  But even with the social winds in our sails and the women’s movement behind us, each of us had to overcome deeply held values and traditional social strictures. The struggle was personally painful and professionally scary. What would happen to us? Would we win our case? Would we change the magazine? Or would we be punished? Who would succeed and who would not? And if our revolt failed, were our careers over—or were they over anyway? We knew that filing the suit legally protected us from being fired, but we didn’t trust the editors not to find some way to do us in.

  Whatever happened, the immediate result is that it put us all on the line. “The night after the press conference I realized there was no turning back,” said Lucy Howard. “Once I stepped up and said I wanted to be a writer, it was over. I wanted to change Newsweek, but everything was going to change.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “A Newsmagazine Tradition”

  WHEN NEWSWEEK’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, Osborn “Oz” Elliott, responded to our lawsuit that Monday in March, he released a statement that served only to confirm the institutional sexism of the magazine. “The fact that most researchers at Newsweek are women and that virtually all writers are men,” it said, “stems from a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years.”

  That was true—and most of us never questioned it. Although we held impressive degrees from top colleges, we were just happy to land a job—even a menial one—at an interesting place. Saying you worked at Newsweek was glamorous compared to most jobs available to college-educated women. Classified ads were still segregated by gender and the listings under “Help Wanted—Female” were mainly for secretaries, nurses, and teachers or for training programs at banks and department stores such as Bloomingdale’s (that wouldn’t change until 1973, when the US Supreme Court ruled sex-segregated ads were illegal). But compared to jobs at newspapers, where women were reporters and editors—even if they were ghettoized in the “women’s pages”—the situation for women at the newsmagazines was uniquely injurious. We were confined to a category created especially for us and from which we rarely got promoted. Not only was research and fact-checking considered women’s work, but it was assumed that we didn’t have the talent or capability to go beyond it.

  That infamous “tradition” began in 1923, when Henry Luce and Brit Hadden founded Time, The Weekly News-Magazine. Positioning their publication between the daily newspapers, which printed everything, and the weekly reviews, which were filled with lengthy commentary, these two young Yalies decided to create a conservative, compartmentalized digest of the week’s news that could be consumed in less than an hour. But although Time would give both sides of the issues, it would, they said in their prospective, clearly indicate “which side it believes to have the stronger position.” In the beginning, the magazine was written by a small group of their Ivy League friends, who distilled stories from newspapers and wrote them, echoing Hadden’s beloved Iliad, in a hyphenated news-speak (“fleet-footed Achilles”) and a backward-running sentence structure (“Up to the White House portico rolled a borrowed automobile”). Time didn’t hire “stringer correspondents” until the 1930s, when the magazine decided to add original reporting.

  But from the very beginning, the editorial staff included “girls” known as “checkers,” who verified names, dates, and facts. Thus was created a unique group-journalism model, which, unlike newspapers, separated all the editorial functions: the reporters sent in long, colorful files from the field; the writers compiled the information and wrote the story in the omniscient, Lucean Voice of God; and the researchers checked the facts. Only “lady assistants” were hired as fact checkers, which, according to Oz Elliott, who worked at Time for six and a half years, was a “liberating thing for young fledgling women out of college because they could get into publishing without being stenographers or secretaries.”

  Years later, the honorific of “checker” was upgraded to “researcher.” At Time’s twentieth anniversary dinner in 1943, Luce explained that although “the word ‘researcher’ is now a nation-wide symbol of serious endeavor,” the title was originally conceived when he and Hadden were doing some “research” for a drinking club called the Yale Professors. “Little did we realize,” he said, “that in our private jest we were inaugurating a modern female priesthood, the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain, and managing editors learn humbly to appease.”

  When News-Week began in 1933, it copied Time’s “tradition” of separating editorial functions. But at Newsweek (which joined its name in 1937 when it merged with the weekly journal Today), women didn’t even start as researchers; we were hired two rungs below that—on the mail desk. At Time, office boys delivered the mail and relevant newspaper clippings. But at Newsweek only girls with college degrees—and we were called “girls” then—were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to “clippers,” another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn’t smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out relevant articles with razor-edged “rip sticks,” and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. “Being a clipper was a horrible job,” said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, “and to make matters worse, I was good at it.”

  We were all good at it—that was our mind-set. We were willing to start at the bottom if it led to something better, and in most cases, it did: to the glorified position of researcher. Working side by side with the writers, we were now part of the news process, patrolling the AP and UPI telexes for breaking news, researching background material in the library, chatting with the guys about their stories, and on closing nights, fact-checking the articles. The wires were clacking, the phones were ringing, and we were engaged in lively conversations about things that mattered. It was thrilling to feel the pulse of the news and to have that special pipeline to the truth that civilians couldn’t possibly have. “It was everything you wouldn’t think of growing up in Marion, Pennsylvania,” said Franny Heller Zorn, who still remembered the thrill of finding the first wire report about a breaking news event, in her case when Adlai Stevenson collapsed on a sidewalk in London and died later that day. “The guys were great, the women were terrific, and everyone was smart. It was a privilege to be part of the Newsweek culture and to have that job, even with all the crap we had to do.”

  Our primary job was to fact-check the stories and that meant checking nearly every word in a sentence except “and” and “the.” We underlined what we confirmed and in the margin, we noted the source—the reporter’s file, a newspaper story, or a reference book. All proper names had to be checked against telephone books or directories. If the only source was the reporter, we grilled him on the correct name, title, and spelling. If we had any questions about the accuracy, we would underline the suspicious word or sentence with a red pencil. A fact was not to be checked against a newspaper story unless it was the only source we had. The New York Times was considered the best newspaper, but even that wasn’t to be relied on for spellings or history unless it was a last resort. “If there was a difference of opinion between your research and the reporter, you had to call him up and gingerly say something like, ‘I’m really sorry and I’m sure you’re right, but the New York Times said it happened on Monday and you said Tuesday in your file,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “And the reporter would inevitably say, ‘Goddamn it, what is the point of sending me out here if you’re using the New York Times?’”

  Unlike our counterparts at Time, we also ran interference between the bureau correspondents and the writers and editors. If a Time researcher had a problem or question on a story, she wasn’t allowed to call the reporter in the field; she could only tell the editor. We were constantly on the phone with the correspondents. “I saw myself as an advocate for the reporter, to keep them out of trouble,” said Lucy. “I wanted to make sure
the writer didn’t screw up and spell anything wrong. But I thought it was more important for the reporters to file what they saw and heard rather than worrying that they got the name wrong.” Even Peter Goldman, who had the reputation of being an accurate writer, said, “I don’t think I wrote anything longer than eighty lines where one of the researchers didn’t catch something.”

  The modern, green-glassed Time-Life tower on Sixth Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street was only two blocks away from our modest, Art Deco building on Madison Avenue and Forty-Ninth, but the Newsweek culture was a world away from Henry Luce’s empire. Time was WASPier, classier, and better resourced than us younger, scrappier upstarts at Newsweek. At Newsweek, we spent hours in the thirteenth-floor library, rummaging for relevant information in the “morgue,” which housed valuable old (hence, “dead”) newspaper and magazine clippings and reporter’s files. At Time, the researchers would call up the library for sources, and carts would appear at their doors filled with files and books carrying the appropriate place marks.

  On Friday nights at Newsweek, the writers and researchers went out to the local bars or ordered greasy food from Harman’s or Beefburger on Forty-Ninth Street. At Time, the editorial staffers were treated to a buffet dinner of lobster or filet mignon on a table set with silver and china, all catered by the ritzy Tower Suite restaurant on the forty-eighth floor of the Time-Life building. While the men at Newsweek drank their Scotch and bourbon from bottles hidden in their bottom desk drawers on Friday nights (and many other nights as well), the senior editors at Time set up a full bar for their staffers in their offices or antechambers.

  Still, working at Newsweek was a dream job and I felt lucky to have landed there. Like many of my colleagues, I was a graduate of one of the Seven Sisters schools, which in the early ’60s were still mired in the ’50s. Vassar College, when I arrived in 1961, was politically apathetic and boy-obsessed. Student clubs had been abolished and even the campus newspaper, the Misc. (short for Miscellaneous), had ceased publication my freshman year. Every weekend the campus emptied out as girls boarded buses to Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other nearby men’s schools. Other than having female professors and a safe environment where women could be the first to raise their hands—and be heard—there was little left of the founder’s feminist legacy when I got there. Women were praised for their intelligence and commended for their capabilities but certainly not encouraged to have careers.

  I majored in modern European history but became enthralled by my French professor, Olga Bernal. She would invite her favorite students to her apartment, where we would drink white wine and talk about life, love, and French literature (I was taking her course on avant-garde French writers). It was what I had pictured life at a small college would be like and by junior year, I had a passion if not yet an ambition: I would go to Paris. Since my history degree wouldn’t get me a job, my only hope for employment was to be hired as a secretary. I was a fast typist, earning extra money by typing college papers, but I didn’t know shorthand. I scoured the local ads and found a course at a nearby high school. My last semester at Vassar, as I was writing my thesis on France between the wars, I spent my evenings walking to Dutchess County Community College to learn Stenoscript.

  Although I had taken French through high school and college, I applied only to US companies in Paris, including Pan Am, TWA, the USIA (the government information agency), Time, and Newsweek. At Newsweek, the chief of correspondents offered me a job in New York but I turned it down, determined to go abroad. At his suggestion, I wrote to Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief, Joel Blocker, who, unfortunately, had no vacancies. So I planned to go to Paris anyway and find a job when, just before my final exams in May, Blocker sent a telegram to my father, a celebrated sports columnist at the Washington Post: UNFORESEEN OPENING STAFF, NOW ALMOST CERTAIN JOB POSSIBILITY FOR LYNN IN PARIS BUREAU.... PLEASE ONPASS TO LYNN AND ADVISE SOONEST WHEN SHE ARRIVING AND ABLE BEGIN WORK. It turned out that Blocker’s secretary had suddenly quit. Thank God for Stenoscript.

  In June 1965, I packed two suitcases and left for Paris. For over a year, I worked in the Newsweek bureau as a secretary, photo researcher, occasional reporter, and telex operator. After the correspondents had written their stories, I would stay at night to type them—on a French keyboard—into the telex machine, which transmitted them to New York. Typing the files was a good lesson on how to report and write, even if it was a lonely one. Each night as he was leaving the bureau, the staff photographer would look at me, alone in the office, and say with a smile, “Good luck in your chosen profession.”

  Newsweek’s Paris bureau was on the third floor of the International Herald Tribune building at 21 Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Elysée. In addition to the bureau chief and his French secretary, Jacqueline Duhau, who befriended me, the office housed three correspondents and the magazine’s senior foreign correspondent, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a perennially tan Belgian nobleman known around Newsweek as “the short count.” I was closest to Liz Peer, the only female correspondent. A tall, sharp-featured woman with piercing brown eyes accentuated by layers of mascara, the twenty-nine-year-old Liz was Newsweek’s Brenda Starr. She could match the toughest foreign correspondent with her cigarettes, her swagger, and her fluent French. She was also a gifted writer and versatile reporter who covered everything from politics and the arts to fashion and food. (She loved tromping after the boars on the annual truffle hunts.) As I typed Liz’s files into the telex, I admired her ability to find just the right anecdote or quote and weave it into a lively, compelling report.

  The daughter of a prominent surgeon who was a pioneer of plastic surgery, Liz had graduated from Connecticut College and joined Newsweek on the mail desk in 1958. She showed so much talent that in 1962, she was the only woman on staff to be promoted to writer. Two years later, she was assigned to the Paris bureau. But as recounted by Oz in his memoir, The World of Oz, Liz later told him, with some bitterness, that she never felt she was treated fairly. After Oz announced her posting, proudly telling her that Newsweek had never sent a woman abroad, Liz hesitantly asked whether the job would mean a raise—it was after all, a promotion. According to Liz, Oz responded indignantly, “What do you mean? Think of the honor we are paying you!”

  As a single woman in a highly visible job, Liz led a busy social life in Paris and flaunted it. Returning to the office at night to type her files, she would often end her telexes to New York with “You guys are ruining my sex life.” From time to time, she would bring me along on assignments, including a memorable Balenciaga fashion show, or ask me to report a “Newsmaker,” the gossipy items about international celebrities that New York regularly requested. But Liz was also status conscious and didn’t want to diminish her star in any way. She once asked me to join her one evening because her date was bringing along a male friend. I was surprised at this bit of camaraderie but I was flattered and quickly agreed. Before we left the office, she turned to me and said, “Just say you are a reporter in the bureau, not the secretary.”

  In Paris, I began to have glimmerings of ambition, of finding something to do for the rest of my life. Surrounded by reporters and writers, I naturally began to think about journalism. But that was complicated for me. My father, Shirley Povich, was a famous sports journalist and a very stylish writer. Afraid of measuring up to him—or with what his success represented—I had purposely avoided anything having to do with journalism in school. Then there was the terror of just putting oneself out in the world, to be judged by others. As I wrote to my best friend back home, becoming a writer would be “my first exposure to a real challenge, something which will prove whether I’m really intelligent and disciplined and eager to do something. This is it, baby, either you start to do something good now or forget it—kinda scary, huh?”

  After more than a year in Paris, I returned to the States to be with my boyfriend. I had met Jeffrey Young on Christmas vacation during my senior year at Vassar. He was a first-year student at Harvard Law School and also a Washing
tonian (his father owned the famous Paul Young’s restaurant). With his dark brown hair and dreamy brown eyes, Jeff was bright, handsome, and charismatic, charming everyone in his path, including me. We got serious quite quickly, but with Jeff having two more years in law school, I decided that I would not give up my plan to go to Paris. After a year and a half abroad, I returned to New York in November 1966 to plan for our wedding the following June, when Jeff graduated. But in the spring of 1967, he suffered a serious depression and took to his bed. He managed to go to classes and finish his degree, but the depression lasted several months. I was very worried about him and visited him every weekend in Cambridge. But I wasn’t willing—or able—to look deeper into what this might tell me about him or mean for our marriage. At twenty-three, I was in love.

  When I returned to Newsweek in New York, I requested a position in the back of the book since Liz Peer told me there was more reporting in those sections. The magazine was informally divided into two parts: the front of the book, which comprised three sections—National Affairs (which we called Nation), International (referred to as Foreign), and Business—and the back of the book, which included Life & Leisure, Press, TV-Radio, Sports, Religion, Education, Medicine, Science & Space, and the Arts. I was put in the Life & Leisure section, which appealed to me. A Vassar course on Victorian England had gotten me interested in social behavior after studying the hypocrisy of the Victorians’ strict moral code with the prevalence of prostitution. Life & Leisure covered social trends as well as fashion, which in the ’60s was a vivid reflection of how men and women were changing and why. I loved reporting on Newsweek’s many fashion covers and interviewed every designer from Betsey Johnson and Mary Quant to Yves Saint Laurent and Halston.

  The tedium of fact-checking on Fridays was the price I paid for spending the early part of the week doing interviews. Most of the researchers in the back of the book reported for their sections. But unlike many of my colleagues, my boss in Life & Leisure, Harry Waters, encouraged and mentored me. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School (on scholarship), Harry was a gifted writer who was raised in a working-class Catholic family by two older sisters and a strong mother. His politics were to the right of most of us, and he bristled at the Ivy League snobbery on the magazine, but he wasn’t afraid of smart women. In fact, he admired them. He gave me opportunities to report and tutored me on getting good quotes. When he sent me to cover the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, across the street from Newsweek, I nervously asked him whom I should interview. “Anyone who’s crying,” he said. He also edited my files so that I could sharpen my writing.