by Robin Romm
I am trying to write about Q without any judgment what soever, because what feels important to me is not whether Q’s choice is more valid than mine or vice versa. What feels important to me is my absolute clarity that if I married a rich guy and stopped making art (not that any rich guys are banging down my door or ever have), I would become suicidal. If you took away my artistic drive, I am not even sure there would be any me left to become suicidal. What I am saying is I work hard, therefore, I am.
I know the suggestion driving this anthology is that women are afraid or embarrassed to be ambitious, or that they are socialized not to be ambitious because it reads less attractive on them than it does on men. Like many things that are blamed on men these days, I don’t doubt the truth of the phenomenon because I have experienced it in the world. But it is definitely not the whole truth, and even if it were the whole truth, it would not make me feel personally let off the hook in the ambition department. Also, too much ambition of the most ruthless, thoughtless kind is ugly on everybody, men and women alike.
Here is a bit of a koan. The richest people I know well, without exception, are the unhappiest people I know well. And yet, all of the people I know well who are struggling financially believe they would be happier if they got rich. But ambition and money are two separate things, you say—and I say—certainly, but then again, nothing is ever completely separate from anything else.
It is not precisely true to say that my mother stopped working after she married my father. For a while, she kept doing summer theater. When she gave that up, she landed roles in TV commercials and bit parts on soap operas: the long-lost cousin, the visiting aunt. For several years, she was Betty of Betty’s Roadside Stand in a series of Post Raisin Bran commercials, and she predated Jane Russell as the face of “I Can’t Believe It’s a Girdle.” Yet, for every day she went off to New York for an audition or shoot and came home glowing and singing, there were ten other days when her task list read: laundry, dinner, dry cleaning, Pam to dentist, cat to vet.
And then there is this. Even in the “Betty’s Breakfast” years, when her residual checks added up to more than his income, my mother handed her checks directly over to my father. He gave my mother $200.00 for household money every two weeks to buy groceries, clothes, and every single other thing the family needed from the time I was born till I left for college with no adjustment for inflation. My father carried more than that $200.00 in his wallet at all times, bought Cadillac convertibles and Italian suits while my mother made our clothes on the sewing machine and scoured magazines to find interesting things to do with leftovers. The song that was on continuous repeat in my childhood kitchen was my mother reasoning or flirting or begging for an advance on next week’s money, and him shaming her, no matter what the circumstances, for spending it too fast.
My fifth-grade teacher, the wonderful Mr. Kashner, looked me in the eye one day and said, “You have the smarts to get the hell out of here.” I don’t know if he really said hell to a fifth grader, but that is the way I heard it. There were a whole lot of things Mr. Kashner did not have to say out loud for me to hear them. Like, “I get how bad things are at your house.” Like “I know how it feels to get straight As and win every prize and excel at every extracurricular activity and still invoke your father’s wrath.” Like, “One day not so long from now this place is going to be in your rearview mirror, and I will be standing in the middle of the road cheering.”
Oh, Mr. Kashner. Was it you who created this tailwind of good fortune that I am still somehow riding on? If so, I want to pay it forward a thousand times. I want to say to my students every day: I see you. I see your suffering and also see all that you are capable of.
For all of my childhood and some of my adulthood, I believe that if it were possible and relatively painless, I would have sucked myself right back up into the ether if it would have given my mother her ambition back, and with her ambition, her hopes and dreams and joy. In lieu of that I got straight As forever (never a single A minus), I learned to mix a martini very dry (you just pass the bottle of vermouth over the top of the glass without actually letting any spill out), and I rode my bicycle every single place I needed to be.
Eventually my own ambition made itself known to me, and I stopped wanting to trade my life for hers. But it would be years before I stopped trying to be perfect. Decades, even. Probably still am.
When I say I love to work, what I mean specifically is that other than walking down a dirt trail behind the butts of a couple of Irish wolfhounds or sitting in a baseball park on a hot June day, work is the only thing I can count on, 100 percent, to make me feel better. Like Ebenezer Scrooge. Except unlike Ebenezer Scrooge the biggest reward for me isn’t the money, it is the work itself.
Work is my pleasure, my refuge, my comfort, my challenge, my driver, my definition. And by work, I don’t mean just the sexy work of writing a short story or a novel or reading at the Library of Congress. I mean reading a ten-inch pile of student manuscripts in an intro to creative writing class. I mean writing a semi-positive review of a book I didn’t love written by someone I’ll have to see at a conference later in the year.
When the shit hits the fan emotionally, when a houseguest becomes radically problematic, or my partner’s ex is driving us crazy, or when I have a sick animal that has been treated and now we just have to wait, all I want to do to is turn on my computer. When the work is going well, or even if it is just going, it is a little hammer tapping me on the shoulder saying everything is going to be okay.
But of course everything is not going to be okay. First, there is climate change, and then, there are super bacteria outsmarting our super antibiotics right and left. There is the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and any armchair economist will tell you where that plan invariably winds up. And what place will books even have in the apocalypse, more and more of them foretell? When Manhattan disappears into the Atlantic and we start killing each other over aquifers and penicillin reserves, will I wish I had spent more time rubbing the donkey’s heads and sitting on the porch watching the cloud shadows move across the mountains? Will I wish I had had a little less ambition and a lot more fun?
“But what could ever be more fun than work?” I ask.
And Ebenezer laughs back, “Nothing!”
If the question is “where does ambition end and workaholism begin?” I think the answer is “somewhere around my thirtieth birthday.”
My mother did not appear in the first draft of this essay. In fact, this essay has been in so many drafts that it has taken me twenty thousand wrong words to get to four thousand right ones. Because my mother mostly stayed at home and my father mostly went to work, I began writing with the hypothesis that I had gotten my ambition primarily from him. But then I realized my father’s feelings about work were tepid, really, compared to the arias my mother sang daily to her bygone showbiz days. If your mother runs away from Spiceland, Indiana, to Broadway at thirteen, if she spends the last thirty years of her life asking—begging, really—her husband for the money back that she earned to pay for his freshly starched shirts, if the single most powerful and omnipresent emotion in your family’s home is her soul-shattering grief over the absence of meaningful work in her life, that is likely to inform your relationship with ambition. And if most of my striving has therefore been away and not toward, does that mean I am not, in essence, as different from the ambitionless women as I thought I was? Does this mean that in some Condoleezza Rice–like way that I have drunk the Kool-Aid too? Did my mother drink the Kool-Aid? Who made the Kool-Aid? Who sold it to my mother for five cents a glass?
I often tell my students that no matter what happens to them in the publishing world, no matter how much money they make or don’t, no matter what literary prizes they win or don’t, nothing will feel better than when they nail a scene, when they keep pounding away until the understory finally reveals itself, when they get up from the computer wrapped in that cloud of giddy joy and self-
satisfaction (even if they read it the next day and think it sucks).
Not every good thing has happened to me in the world of publishing, not by a long shot, but enough good things have happened to allow me to understand them for what they are: momentary flights of fashion. I know this to be true: ambition’s greatest reward is to do the thing you love most, and do it, at least momentarily, well enough to satisfy yourself.
There are still things I have ambition for. I want to be kinder, smarter, bigger, broader, more compassionate, more generous. I’d also like to sail the entire coast of Turkey, and go to the Arctic on an icebreaker. I hope to have a stage play produced in a reasonably sized city. I want, most embarrassingly and perhaps more than anything, to be chosen to edit The Best American Short Stories before I die.
My first book, a collection of short stories called Cowboys Are My Weakness, was unexpectedly successful. My publisher printed five thousand copies as a first run, and they went back to press eight times before the book was even a month old. My biggest dream at that time was getting a book of my stories out into the world. I had no ambition regarding what would happen to it once it got there: selling hundreds of thousands of copies or being on All Things Considered and Good Morning America. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, even as it was.
My editor, Carol Houck Smith, asked me to call her every night I was on tour so I could tell her my good news (how many people came to the reading, how many books sold), and she could tell me her good news (which lists the book had popped up on, which magazines wanted to do a profile)—it was a sweet and heady time.
One night, two weeks after the publication date, I was in Seattle giving a reading at the old Elliott Bay Book Co. in Pioneer Square. So many people came that they were packed into the window wells and doorways, pressing into the reading room from the café next door. I called Carol and told her how they had held up their lighters for an encore. People holding up lighters for an encore would not have made my very longest list of ambitions.
Carol told me the paperback auction had been that day. She told me she had very good news and that I should go to the minibar and get out the bottle of champagne. My tour had already been extended several times by then, and I was using the American Express card—the one I had wisely applied for as a college student to establish my credit rating—to buy new plane tickets and to check into the kinds of hotels I had only seen on TV. To say I was setting an American Express personal best record that month would be a grotesque understatement. I was a graduate student making $4,500 a year when Cowboys Are My Weakness came out. I knew W. W. Norton would reimburse me, but I didn’t know how that worked or when it would happen, and there was just no way I was going to add a thirty-six dollar hotel champagne split to the burgeoning, stultifying amount.
“Do you have the champagne?” Carol asked.
“Yes,” I lied.
“I want to hear the cork pop!” she said, and I made a noise I had learned to make in summer camp by pulling out my thumb quickly from the inside corner of my cheek.
She told me the amount the paperback sold for. It was $121,000. Half of that would go to W. W. Norton, the other half to my agent, and after she took 20 percent commission, the rest would come to me. I mention the amount partly so you will know it was not $5 million, but also so you will understand that it was more money than a graduate student making $4,500 a year could contemplate. (Months later, when the check finally came, the amount was, poetically, within single digits of the amount I had borrowed to put myself through college, an amount that because I was finishing graduate school, was about to come due.) A silence hummed on the line that I hoped Carol would take for shared satisfaction.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” she said, finally, and I said, truthfully, that I had no earthly idea.
“It means that if you want to, you can be a writer for the rest of your life.”
I don’t think ambition ever gets any better, or purer, or more satisfying than that.
What Came Next
THERESA REBECK
So I’m walking to a rehearsal in Midtown, and my agent calls me.
He runs me through one thing and another, and then he gets down to it. Had I heard that Steven Spielberg had set up a project at Showtime, a TV series about backstage at a Broadway musical?
“They want you to write it,” he informed me. “Mr. Spielberg read one of your plays over the weekend, and he called this morning to say that he is infatuated.”
Let me tell you something. When Steven Spielberg calls your agent to say he is infatuated with your writing, that is a good day.
The saga of what came next is so long and complicated it would take a book to write it all out. Sometimes I think of writing that book and sometimes I think that writing that book and reliving the whole thing would be somewhat akin to shooting myself in the head. But we’ll get to that.
So I took the job, I wrote the pilot, I created all the characters, I nurtured it through a transition from Showtime to NBC, I produced the pilot, and the show got picked up for an order of seventeen episodes. I was the show runner of the first season, which got terrific numbers and established itself immediately as an international sensation. The show was called Smash.
At the end of the first season, I was fired without cause. No one likes being fired, and guess what, I am no exception. As the dust settled, it became clear that at the management level a lot of dastardly stories had been invented about my character. Sometimes I try to parse them and fit them all back together; I have been, at times, desperate to figure out what actually happened. There was a destructive and incoherent madness to it that resists interpretation.
Mr. Spielberg, to give him much credit, called me the day I was fired and apologized. He told me that he blamed himself. He felt that the politics had gotten way out of hand, and they wouldn’t have if he had been around more. He was probably right.
And, of course, as soon as I was fired, all the men who had conspired to have me removed from my post realized that the show wasn’t going to survive without me and so they slunk away and went off to do other things.
The network then hired a whole bunch of other people to run it in my stead, and it fell apart, and one year after I had made that show into a bona fide hit, it was canceled.
Everyone told me the best thing to do was ignore it and put it behind me.
Then I couldn’t get hired for three years.
Then I fired my lawyer and I fired my manager and I fired my agent.
And then my new agent and new manager and new lawyer all sat me down and explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to take a step back, accept a demotion, and take a job below my skill set and pay grade. At this new job, I had to say yes to everything, and I had to prove that I played well with others. The whisperers had run around and told everyone that I was a lunatic. So this is what I had to do, if I ever wanted to run a show again: I had to keep my head down and prove that I was smart and hardworking and a team player.
God knows I had plenty to do during those years. I wrote two plays. I finished my third novel. I directed All My Sons for a major regional theater, and I wrote and directed an independent movie. My son started college; my daughter finished middle school.
But I was convinced that I had to return to television. I felt cheated by what had happened on Smash, and I was determined that the men who had cheated me would not have the last word on my talent and my character. It pissed me off that the men at my level who had been fired in similarly ridiculous circumstances somehow managed to bounce upward. I felt like what had happened to me was yet another version of the recklessly hideous way so many talented women are treated—silenced, kicked to the curb. I didn’t want to just slink away and disappear. I wanted to fight my way back into the game.
To successfully run a television show, you have to be a general. I was an excellent general. But in order to prove I could do it again, I had to be a good girl.
My ambition is wearing me out.
I’ve been on many different television shows over the years, and my husband is frankly enraged by the way people behave in this environment. He threatened to leave me, a couple of times, if I ever went back on staff of another TV show. He was kidding, but only sort of. He wants me to take my ambition out of the game and stay out of it.
He’s not necessarily wrong. I tell stories about the shenanigans that go on in writers’ rooms, and my friends outside the business roar with laughter or cringe in disbelief. Most of the shows I’ve worked on have at their center an institutionalized despotism so entrenched it truly is both silly and terrifying. The executives at the networks and the studios, none of whom are writers themselves, insist upon a systemic strangulation of the writing process called “note giving.” Sometimes, after they have shredded your work with hundreds of notes, they might just decide that the whole thing doesn’t work at all, and you have to throw the script out and start from scratch. They call this “blowing up a script.” You are expected to do every note you are given, no matter how inane, no matter how much they are blowing things up. You are also expected to be really cheerful and appreciative while you do it.