by Gail Sheehy
Wagner sucked in a breath and let go. “All I know is, if I were Nelson, every morning when I woke up I would count the bridges and tunnels to see if they were all still there.”
“What have you got for me?” Clay demanded when Kramer strode into the office. The greenhorn delivered the ex-mayor’s punch line with the same cold scorn used by Wagner. Mouth agape, Clay marveled: “You’re the greatest reporter of all time!”
BYRON DOBELL WAS THE EDITOR Clay hired away from Esquire with the promise that he could come up with one fresh cover story idea every month. Byron had an antic mind, attuned to art, history, love styles of the rich and famous, you name it. I recall laughing until my sides hurt when Byron and I got up a wicked fantasy piece for the Valentine’s Day issue of New York, about a radical woman holding up a sperm bank, titled “The Great Valentine’s Day Uprising.”
Jack Nessel was the quirkiest of the three line editors. A rumpled Berkeley graduate with a California sensibility, he was first to embrace the edgy humor of Lenny Bruce. I loved working with Jack. His DNA tended toward the sarcastic, but if you could make him laugh, you had him. He never gave up on me when we suffered hours of prose scrubbing and line cutting on pieces that then ran as long as eight thousand to ten thousand words.
Clay spotted Steven Brill while he was still on scholarship at Yale Law School. Brill was a poor kid from Queens, but when Clay took him to lunch at the Four Seasons, the kid puffed up and talked with jaw-jutting bluster about the business of law. Clay hired him on the spot. Why? Because, as Clay told me, he wanted to find out more about Manhattan’s powerful law firms. Brill’s most memorable story for New York dug into the anti-Semitism that prevailed within white-shoe WASPy firms. Brill predicted that with the advent of hostile takeovers in the 1970s, it would be two Jewish lawyers—one a fat, habitually farting proxy fighter named Joe Flom, the other the son of a Jewish immigrant factory worker named Martin Lipton—who would elevate their respective firms to the pinnacles of success within ten years. Indeed, as corporate raiding become the rage on Wall Street, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz would become the go-to firms. And Clay would later turn to both Flom and Lipton to save himself.
Brill asked Clay to help him launch his own magazine, American Lawyer, and one of the first reality shows, Court TV. All Clay had to do was call the moneymen who would later back his purchase of Esquire and tell them he was sending over one of his writers with a terrific idea for a new magazine. It took Brill all of thirty minutes to persuade the British press lord, Vere Harmsworth, to invest in the young man’s winning idea.
THE FAMILY HAD TWO MOTHERS. Jane Maxwell knew the boss, literally, inside and out. He told her to go into his pockets after lunch and pull out his Hermès diary to note his guest in his expense record. “His entire life was the magazine then.”
The other mother figure was Dorothy Seiberling, a senior editor at Life when Clay started out as a young reporter. Dottie had taken Clay under her wing and together they had made a romantic grand tour of Europe where she tutored him in the masterpieces of art and architecture. She was able to soothe the ruffled feelings of staffers on whom Clay unloaded one of his cloudbursts of pique. “Don’t take it personally,” Dottie would say, “he’s already forgotten about it. Clay is just so passionate about what he’s doing, he expects everybody else to be the same way.”
“Clay created an atmosphere that encouraged maximum quirkiness,” remembers Debbie Harkins, the demon fact-checker who saved us all. “He let us be who we all were, and we loved him for it.”
Ruth Gilbert was the Mother Goose of the place. She always looked as if she was about to hatch a bunch of chicks, but instead, she hatched her own eccentric page to write about whatever she felt was stylish in the city at the moment. Furtive in her mischief, she might insert a ribald verse at the top of a page just before the issue closed, for example,
hoorary, hooray,
the first of may
outdoor fucking
begins today.
The deluxe litter box for Randolf the cat sat under Ruth’s desk. He was a congenital plagiarist, always getting into Clay’s open briefcase and eating up other people’s stories. “Randolf, get out of there!” Clay would scold. Randolf would wait until evening to retaliate, then climb up the cork walls to claw the pushpins out, sending the artwork to the floor. Clay never did fire Randolf.
TWO OF THE SUPREME CARICATURISTS of the last forty years brought their own visual storytelling to enhance the articles. Edward Sorel’s covers skewered our political and artistic pretensions with hilarious visual irony. David Levine’s pen-and-ink drawings got under the skin of the people being profiled and rendered them vulnerably human. Some issues featured serious oil paintings of major national events by Julian Allen, Jim McMullan, Burt Silverman, and others. Even establishment newsmagazines such as Time, and elegant monthlies such as the Atlantic Monthly and Fortune, sought face-lifts by New York’s design duo, Glaser and Bernard.
At that time it was possible to run a magazine from the point of view of its editor and art director without the chill hand of a corporate owner weighing on their shoulders and carrying an implicit threat. The heyday of magazines spanned the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, before a general decline of editorial voice began as a handful of large media companies came to control all print media.
“Every week, you couldn’t wait to see the cover of New York, couldn’t wait to read it; everywhere you went it was the conversation at lunch or dinner,” a latter-day editor of the magazine told me over lunch at Michael’s. Joe Armstrong, an amiable Texan, recounted with vivid nostalgia the galvanizing effect it had on so many lives. “It made New York the most exciting city in the world. Clay’s New York had the greatest impact of any magazine.”
It was the Golden Moment.
CHAPTER 10
Hiding Out at Woodstock
WHILE THINGS WERE RAMPING UP in my career, a slow-motion train wreck began accelerating in my family. The origin lay in the year our father abandoned the family. My sister’s life had come apart. Tuition payments stopped, promises forgotten. Trish had dropped out of college in the winter of 1967 and ski-bummed until spring when she came to live with me in the East Village. It was a sweet interlude. She took care of Maura during the day while I was writing Lovesounds, and she got a waitressing gig at night. Glad to be freed from preppydom, she shopped for the most ethnic sandals and began wearing the earrings she strung and sold and a leather jacket with long floaty skirts. She still failed to pass for a hippie—too adorable and clean.
Her down-to-earth sense of humor kept me laughing. We could even chuckle about “Pretty Boy,” her nickname for our narcissistic father. We had a plan. I would take her to Paris in the summer, certain I could get an assignment from Cosmopolitan with her as my assistant. The next fall she hoped to start at the School of Visual Arts. I would find a way to help her with the fees.
All bets were off when I came home one day to find a note she had left under my door. She had moved in with a “friend” in the East Village. No forwarding address. Maura was downstairs with my Ukrainian neighbor. Beneath my sister’s bold declaration of independence, I sensed a cry for help. When I returned from another presidential campaign trip in June, I tried desperately to reach her again. People at the restaurant where she worked said they hadn’t seen her in two months.
Trish lived in my blood as thickly as if she were made there. I had to find her. My neighborhood being a haven for wigged-out runaways, word on the street finally tipped me that she “belonged” to a well-known druggie who lived near a Hell’s Angels clubhouse.
The Angels’ fortress dominated a block in the East Village not far from my apartment. Outside Dr. Cornblaster’s drugstore on the corner I found an old man pulling open the grate across his shop. I asked if he had seen a girl who looked like me. “But much younger.”
“The shiksa goddess?”
“Maybe so.”
“She’s with the doctor,
so-he-says doctor. Blue door, upstairs.”
A doctor? She hadn’t mentioned any friend who was a doctor. Then I remembered with a shudder of guilt. I’ll call him Nate. The previous winter when Trish was living with me, new and lonely in the city, I had invited Nate to come for dinner. That’s when Trish met a man I should never have introduced to her. He was just back from Ibiza, Spain, looking drop-dead handsome, shirtless to show off a deep tan from hanging out in the yard. “The yard?” we’d asked. “The prison yard,” he said casually. “Trumped-up charge, a girl overdosed.” I couldn’t get much more out of Nate, except that he was acquitted.
Of what? I persisted.
“Oh, just murder.”
Nate could make a joke out of anything, and we thought this story must be a joke. This man had been one of Albert’s best friends in medical school, after all. Nate Unterberg was a diabolically charming personality, a heartbreaker from the Bronx with riveting blue eyes and music in his fingers who could make all the girls cry, whether he played Chopin on his harpsichord or laid a guitar across his groin and belted out “The Ballad of John Henry.” In medical school he had had the brilliant idea of becoming the junkie’s doctor. He would have to experience every kind of drug, study its pharmacology, physiological effects, and so on, and then, of course, beat it. His experimentation was so “absorbing,” he told Albert, he had to drop out of med school. He was going to save his generation.
I found the blue door on East Third Street and walked through the unlocked entrance and upstairs past walls bubbling like fish roe in the humidity. Steel bars padlocked the doors. It looked like a slaughterhouse. I knocked on the first door.
Nate’s blue eye was unmistakable in the peephole. “Yes?”
“Nate? Do you have my sister in there?”
“Gail? Let me get some pants on.”
Through the dimness lit by a ten-watt hung over a mattress on the floor, I glimpsed Trish, stumbling off the mattress in a black baby-doll.
“We, uh, were just sleeping, for like, ten hours.”
“That’s a funny time to sleep, honey, through the whole day.”
“I’ll wash my face.” She reached for the Noxzema over the tub-in-kitchen and buckled in the knees. Her questions dribbled out. What time is it? What day is it? Do you want coffee? Where’s the cup? Nate will go next door for a cup. I stared at her eyes. Transparent. Nate came back with a cup. I asked why Trish was shaking. Nate said it was the middle of the night for Trish. How could anyone tell what time it was, in here?
“There’s nothing to you, honey.” I was staring at her legs. The calves were as bony as chicken wings.
“People tell me I look great! It’s nice to be on the thin side for once.”
“Your legs look like Mom’s when she was drinking.”
“Trish hasn’t had a drink since Christmas,” Nate announced with righteous indignation. Trish nodded. She nodded at everything that Nate said.
“Know what we had New Year’s Eve?” she said. “Chocolate mallows and milk.”
I noticed an empty jar of chocolate syrup and a box of sugar doughnuts on the counter. The apartment was furnished like a dollhouse, little boxes with tiny pillows for seats, a doll-size trunk from the street. I knelt next to my sister. “I’m really worried about you and I want to help.”
“I don’t need help,” she said, belying the plea in her note. “I’m happy and I’m doing what I want to do.”
“But we had a plan, remember, honey? You were going to stay with me and save money to go to school.”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
Looking up at Nate with her moon-blank eyes, she murmured that he had given her a wonderful gift on the first day of spring. The magic vitamin. Speed.
“Amphetamine?” I shuddered. Yes. It made her feel beautiful and confident and as if she belonged, she said. He could slip the needle in for her so it didn’t even hurt. The rush from vein to brain took seconds. The old Trish she hated had died. She was reborn. Nate had renamed her Joy.
I wanted to kill Nate. How could I have allowed this sociopath anywhere near my sister? She was just twenty-one. I had already crossed over into the enemy camp, having turned thirty. I took my sister’s hand and tried to talk her back to herself. “What does ‘Joy’ want from life?”
“Actually, I just want to think about the big things. So many things going through my mind . . .”
“What things?”
“Why time doesn’t really exist.”
Nate smiled, obviously proud of a fragile new mind under his control. Albert had told me that Nate claimed to have made it through hashish, barbiturates, and mescaline, relying on cocaine to keep him awake all night so he could study pharmacological texts. Nate boasted that he had even pulled people off heroin and shaken it himself.
“What about speed?” I asked Nate now.
“Acid is over. Speed is the real magic. It makes everyone feel like they’re eighteen again,” he exulted.
“But, Nate, you’re older than I am.”
He ignored my interruption. “Imagine what it can do for the revolution—young speeders, running on moon-shot time!” He was proud to say that he had enlisted Trish in his Grand Magic Vitamin Experiment.
“Which is?”
“I have so many subjects lined up for my study, I can’t take care of them all.”
“So you’re a dealer.”
“No. I’m the Pied Piper.”
“You’re going to lead the children to Nirvana on speed, is that it?”
“Believe me, they go willingly.”
I moved closer to my sister, putting my lips to her ear. “Come home with me, sweetie.” She looked at me blankly. “This is what you need to know. The Pied Piper led children to their deaths.”
FOR THE FIRST SIX MONTHS of 1969 I followed Nate’s Grand Magic Vitamin Experiment, now wearing my journalist’s hat. I won Nate’s cooperation by offering him the most potent drug of all for sociopaths—notoriety—saying I might write about him for New York. It kept me in touch with my sister. She and his other “study participants” assured me their efforts would be a roaring success by summer. Slowly they grew thinner. Their faces hardened with cunning. Help from city institutions was virtually nonexistent. My apartment became a pathetic substitute for a mental health clinic.
Mother drove down from Connecticut and as backup brought along her new boyfriend from AA. Big Al came from the tough-love school. He wanted me to call the police to arrest Nate. “Then put the girl in a state hospital and let them pull her off dope, and a psychiatrist can straighten out her thinking.”
I told Big Al that I couldn’t get Nate arrested; amphetamines weren’t illegal. The problem in Trish’s thinking was mind control. When I took Mom and Big Al to see Trish, they tried to use their own recovery from alcoholism as an argument. Mother’s boyfriend tried a Bill W. intervention.
“I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic,” Big Al said. “My life is already happy, joyous, and free, and I have another life ahead of me. But you people want to retire at twenty-one!’
Laughter broke through the generation gap.
Nate said he was gathering followers. It was easy work, and the future would be lucrative.
“But to retire before you’ve lived, why?”
No reply.
“Why can’t you answer these questions?” our mother wanted to know.
“They asked Einstein the same thing,” Nate said.
“Einstein had direction,” Big Al said.
“We’re finding beauty in Florida,” our mother said.
“The day we found beauty with speed, we made a sign,” Nate said. “It’s illegal not to be free.”
“That and thirty cents will get you a beer,” Big Al said.
“We don’t drink.”
“I NEVER KNEW ANYONE who stopped shooting by themselves,” Marge told me. She was a smart twenty-four-year-old veteran of speed who was a counselor at Encounter, the first drug treatment program to accept amphetamine addicts.
“Then how do people stop?” I asked.
“Three ways. Number one, death. Two, move on to heroin. Three, somebody pries them away from the provider.” She added as I was leaving, “I hope you’re aware, your daughter could kill herself any day.”
“My sister, you mean.”
“You called her your ‘daughter.’”
IT WAS SUMMER WHEN MY FATHER made an unannounced visit to my apartment on East Seventh Street. He was not as carefully dressed as the last time I’d seen him, two years before. His gray-striped seersucker business suit was rumpled. Beads of sweat ran from his forehead—maybe it was just from climbing my four flights. But new folds of flesh draped the corners of his eyes.
“Very California,” I said, trying to start things off on a light note. It didn’t help.
“That SOB,” he swore. “Marr promised me that job.”
I knew right away where this story was going. His San Francisco dream had collapsed. The company he was meant to inherit from the founder had gone bankrupt. He was back east and his new wife had to take a job at a local bank back in Wilton, Connecticut. Everybody he knew would see her there. The story got worse.
“I commute in from Connecticut every day,” my father said. “Well, not the same commuter train my old bridge buddies ride. I go later. Answer ads. Sit in waiting rooms. Nothing pans out.”