by Betsy Israel
Everyone was equal and everyone was beautiful and cooked. Of all the memories of that time, I still see mostly the bowls and bowls of spaghetti. And I remember what they looked like the next morning, when I came down and, as one of two women, found them waiting for me… I was never really able to have roommates after that. If there was one night and things didn’t get put away, I became this insane despot…. I think it’s true about a lot of single women—they have their weird baggage. They’re pretty much always there, living alone, for a reason. And that reason is usually other people, no matter how many times they make the mistake again and again…. I think most of us end up where we want to be.
In Mary Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments (1977), we meet a young woman who’s devoted her entire adult life to caring for a pious father. Like a nun, she leaves the house for a walk just once a week; the rest of the time she organizes his papers, infuriating the local widows who desperately want the job. After his death, the widows seek their revenge, joining with the church leaders of this small Catholic community in trying to sell her off to some other old person in need of a secular nun. They manage to give her a hideous spinster haircut. But she is rescued by a trio of childhood friends who have watched over this stunted single life for years. One day they force her into the car, into the city, into a life of her own.
One asks if she wants to get married.
No, she doesn’t. “I want a terrific pair of high-heeled shoes… like Rosalind Russell… I want a very small apartment and I want people to refer to me as a bachelorette.”
“The term now is swinging single,” one of them tells her.
“And they call that progress,” she responds, knowing that they could have called it anything and called it an improvement.
SINGLE SLASHING
If singles were an increasingly diverse group, there was still one stereotype that reporters loved most of all—the “swinger”—that college grad with fake eyelashes and daiquiris or the faux hippies holding joints and daiquiris. By 1968, New York’s famed “singles ghetto” had been renamed the “girl ghetto.” And its residents came under unkind, often vicious, scrutiny. Tired of writing about bar etiquette, reporters began to meet subjects at their apartments to get the inside view, often the morning after a singles night out. Many of these apartments were in upscale buildings—three and a half rooms, the rent at about $225 per month, making a three-way share just affordable. No matter how lucky they might have felt, whatever it was they’d got away from, girls could never quite convey to male reporters just what it was they found so thrilling about their own interpretation of single life. That’s because reporters did not want to know.
These pieces (“Living It Up on Broadsway”) always began with an inventory of the girl’s appearance. She was usually dressed in a bathrobe or some kind of unflattering caftan or muumuu, one shoulder forward, so that it formed a bony shelf for messy hair. Mascara was always smudged and eyelashes glued together in tiny triangles. Here was the perfect way to survive articles you didn’t really want to write: Apply New Journalism techniques to an otherwise dreary scene. Stories told of freshly washed coffee mugs that “still had on them lipstick traces” and, once, brilliantly, a lipstick-stained school-size milk carton. They noted what was on the couch—a heart-shaped pillow, cat-shredded tasseled pillows, teddy bears—and what was under it (always a cache of cigarette butts, magazines, a shoe). These sorts of stories often included tours of the refrigerator, where some vegetable had metaphorically dried and shriveled. And they had a real time of it when it came to the medicine chest. Tranquilizers? Laxatives? And “depending on the carefulness of the housekeeping”… the Pill?
Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman wrote about the new single life for herself. The only prerequisite seems to have been that she find it, with six months’ retrospect, disappointing and scary. In 1966 The Washington Post Magazine ran an unusual parallel assessment of the city’s single life, from the point of view of a white writer, Judith Viorst, and a black writer, Dorothy Gilliam. The lead paragraphs:
Judith Viorst: Washington is full of single girls between 20 and 30 who are having a ball, cracking up from loneliness, being mistresses, living in deadly fear of rapists and purse snatchers, trying to decide which man to marry, or trying to face the dismal fact they never will.
Dorothy Gilliam: There are single Negro women all over Washington who live and breathe and laugh and weep and take tranquilizers and fret that there are too few men and too little culture. They aren’t poor or on welfare. Their lives are parallel to white working girls’ but with exceptions—exceptions that extend from the fact of their being Negro.
As the sixties wore on, the reporting moved from “realistic” to what may safely be called “hostile.” Writing about a bar in Washington, D.C., another Post reporter lightly described the patrons, then got down to it.
To walk into Wayne’s Luv is both an admission and an assertion. She is admitting to anyone who cares to notice that she has not been found attractive enough to have a date that night; and she is asserting that she is realistic enough not to worry with the mundane games of dating propriety that were encountered by an earlier set of singles. In a sense, she assumes a more active role of enticement, hoping in her own mind that somehow he will saunter out of the amber haze and notice and speak and want Her…. it beats the Great Grey Tube.
No stories ended without a reference to television. In Washington, D.C., clerks were stuck at home watching Get Smart. (Although Agent 99 had a fairly exciting single-girl life.) Secretaries in Chicago all had colds in the winter and nothing but Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Lost in Space reruns to keep them company. Some stuck in their mate-meeting high-rises might have tuned in to one of the popular doctor’s shows, many of which carried a special message for uppity single women. In a 1989 essay, academic Diana Meehan relates the sad fates of three single-girl guest stars on these 1960s hospital dramas. First, on the popular Marcus Welby, M.D., Welby protegé Steven Kiley makes an advance on a nurse and she rejects him. Within hours she is thrown from her horse and paralyzed. On Dr. Kildare, a “No, thank you” to an internist seems to lead right away to a leukemia diagnosis. On the precursor to E.R., Medical Center, the one who says no, in the span of twenty minutes, contracts breast cancer.
During the early seventies, there was a popular Friday-night show called Love, American Style. According to TV Guide, more people were likely to see it in a given week than to experience anything like love of any genuine style in their lifetimes.
DAYS OF MACE
Back on August 28, 1963, a petty thief named Richard Robles broke into an Upper East Side apartment and killed the two young women who lived there. Years later, when such single killings had become commonplace, New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud wrote with complete accuracy: “The brutal slaying of a young single girl… probably causes more shock and public horror than any other.”
But the “single girl murders” as they became known across the country that fall, were a shocking devastation. The perpetrator had chosen the address, 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, because he’d seen an open window, there was no doorman, and he thought no one was home. When he got through it, intending to steal jewelry or money, Janice Wylie, a blond twenty-one-year-old Newsweek researcher, ran in from the other room. Robles grabbed a kitchen knife and raped her. Emily Hoffert, a new roommate, entered the apartment, shrieking that she would remember his face, identify him—and something snapped. Robles began clubbing both girls with glass soda bottles, then for an hour slashed and stabbed them with knives.
The case is remembered now as the one that led to passage of the Miranda rights legislation; the wrong man, not properly questioned, spent years in jail before Robles was apprehended. But what remainded in consciousness, of course, was the girls. Emily had just started work as a teacher. Janice wanted to be an actress and looked so hopeful, ready to go!, in all her pictures. Her father, Max, a well-known adman and writer—who, with a third
roommate, found the naked bodies—later committed suicide. (An ironic footnote: It was his brother, Philip Wylie, who wrote such misogynist tomes as Generation of Vipers, the World War II diatribe that accused those neurotic “Lost Sex” women of ruining men, killing them, destroying their souls.)
An entire litany of single female names would follow, perhaps most famously Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old bar manager who’d decided, in a highly unusual move, to stay in the city when the rest of her large Italian family made the move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She was stalked at 3 A.M. after exiting a Queens train and stabbed repeatedly en route to her apartment; notoriously, neighbors all around the complex heard her shrieking but none called the police. The one man who considered it later confessed that he’d seen her stumbling and, thinking her drunk, changed his mind.
Two years later, in Chicago, Richard Speck pushed his way through the front door of a student nurses’ dorm, dressed like a disheveled James Dean—a tattoo, BORN TO RAISE HELL, on his arm—and demanded money. No one, he swore, would be hurt. Twenty-four student nurses lived there, most of them Filipinas. About half were home at the time and he forced them all to a room, had them lie down, and tied them up with strips of torn bedsheets. Girls were returning home every few minutes, and as each came in, he tied her up. Then he lifted one or two at a time and dragged them into another room. He’d return, take another five. Another three. Until the room was empty, and he fled. He’d missed one, however, a small young woman who had managed to roll herself under a bed and stay hidden. She’s the one who found the carnage—her friends, strangled, mutilated, stabbed in the eyes and breasts. Somehow, still tied up, she crawled out onto a fire escape shrieking.
“The nurse under the bed” became a set piece in scary games girls played during my childhood. The message was clear: If you live by yourself without a husband, you’d better learn how to hide.
By the seventies, and the full blossoming of the bar scene, single murders began to fall into a category of their own. This kind of dispatch was commonplace: In October 1973, Carol A. Hoffman, thirty-one, a publishing assistant, was stabbed and then brutally strangled with panty hose in her apartment. The most shocking aspect of the Hoffman case was that she had let the killer into her apartment because she’d felt sorry for him. He had appeared at her door in distress and told her he was looking for another resident of the building who’d raped his wife. While the man was there, elaborating on this story, Ms. Hoffman’s boyfriend happened to call. He advised her to get the guy out quickly and even spoke by phone to the distraught visitor. He raced over, but by the time he arrived she was dead. Building residents were horrified—but not, it seemed, all that shocked. Here was a “mostly singles” apartment, no doorman, with a history of muggings. One neighbor, identified as Marti, a graphic designer, recalled bringing home a strange man who, after three hours of conversation, attacked her. She’d escaped by racing down the hallway, banging on doors. “How could I report it?” she asked the reporter. “What was I going to report? Oh, hi, I brought a man home with me, and look what he did!”
The women who wrote these stories—Gloria Emerson, Judy Klemesrud, Charlotte Curtis, Nan Robertson, among others—were on their own emerging as singular voices. They had come up the usual journalistic route: from file clipper or researcher, then moving, after a few years, to the 4F sections or pullouts. (4F: “food, furnishings, fashions, family” was still the journalistic female ghetto). Some of them had been quiet forces in the sex desegregation of the New York Times help-wanted ads in 1967 and had been active in the landmark class-action sex-discrimination suits brought against the Times, Newsweek, and other news corporations during the early seventies. (Without these actions, it’s unlikely their bylines would ever have appeared anywhere outside the 4F cookie/sweater slum.)
Their stories of singular peril began to take on an eerie similarity. Imagine modern Bowery gals, a group of friends dressed up to go out one weekend night, to a place that seemed like a wild carnival midway. It was loud and friendly, but there was also an unmistakably dangerous undercurrent. Patrice Leary, Roseanne Quinn… their names blurred with their stories and photos. Just regular young working girls, in their twenties, hair parted down the middle, found dead after leaving a bar alone or with a man they did not know. Their friends, who resembled them, would be photographed huddled together outside the bar. Sometimes their words made up the captions: “There is no such thing as too cautious.” “To be realistic in this city means to be paranoid.” “I sleep with a baseball bat next to my bed.” “The uglier I look, the safer I’ll be.”
An acquaintance of mine recalls:
In the early to mid-seventies—that was when New York made its big turn…. It was not just edgy in some places, but filled withdrug addicts and people who weren’t wearing shoes and talking to themselves…. It seemed very dangerous all of a sudden…. I remember the week I was flashed by three guys, once right in the subway and, I swear, he was looking straight at me; once when I came home—I lived in the Village—and found a guy on the steps with his dick hanging out, and once as I waited to be buzzed in at a friend’s…. I had been at the bar [W. M. Tweed’s] where Roseanne Quinn disappeared, I still remember that, and I left and walked over to this apartment and there was the man with his dick out…. That’s when I got a purple belt in karate.
As journalist Lucinda Franks wrote of young women in the early seventies, “Anxiety had slipped around their lives like a back brace.”
It seems in the spirit of the times that Jane Fonda won the Oscar for Klute (1971), in which she played a prostitute stalked by a crazed john. Another hugely popular film, Play Misty for Me, flipped the roles, updating the noir B movie Detour, in which an inexplicably demented woman stalks a man she’s casually met, here a radio deejay played by Clint Eastwood. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, concerned a seemingly plain Irish-American schoolteacher who, in response to upsetting events in her past, starts to pick up men in bars, night after night, year after year, until finally one of them kills her.
But despite its seeming death sentence, single life in New York City continued to thrive. New Yorkers, after all, like single women living anywhere, had been forced to cultivate and maintain a sense of humor—satiric, or sardonic, and that adjective so often stapled to the single woman, masochistic. The most perfectly preserved example of sardonic female masochism may be found in the Gail Parent novel Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1970). Sheila, who’d moved from Franklin Square, Long Island, to the city, has, after several years, decided that she has no hopes of marriage. Every girl in New York City has the same apartment she has, the same hairstyle, has read the same books and has the same recipes and goes to the same kinds of events to meet the same men. In the movies, Doris Day had moved to the city and day one found a spacious brownstone she paid for with her unemployment check. The next day she ran into Cary Grant, who accidentally spilled coffee on her, gave her a job, and eventually married her. As Sheila observes, her life has taken a slightly different course. Thus she’s decided to kill herself and spends most of the novel both looking for a mate and shopping for a nice, reasonably priced coffin.
But let’s put aside all the feelings of terror and doom and look at some of the more common low-grade anxieties that plagued the 1970s single pioneers. The best depiction of this ill ease, the widespread state of singular dislocation, may be found in a little-known film called T. R. Baskin (1971), starring Candace Bergen. Here is a young single woman, well educated and interesting, ready to experience life, yet self-protective and a little shy. Her circumstances, that is, the 1970s, don’t favor the self-protective and slightly shy. She has just moved alone to Chicago, has her own apartment, works at an anonymous office job, and on the weekends attempts to go out with her friends—but it’s always a struggle. In groups they go to restaurants and clubs or to apartments far more garishly decorated than her own. The parties always start up quickly. Never is she really a full participa
nt.
By the early seventies, the singles culture had reached the point where men very often assumed that single women they met wished to have sex with them. That’s the atmosphere here—uninvited male hands suddenly everywhere. Men attempting to feed our heroine Kahlúa, whiskey sours, and spilling the drinks down her shirt. More than once we watch T. R. struggling out of a male hold and explaining to friends, who tease her, call her a prude, so uptight (then practically a curse word), that she must go. Like a lot of reserved young women, T. R. is uncomfortable in the anonymous new single world. I think of the old shop girls and how the same questions applied: Will the heroine maneuver out of the dreary job and away from all those awful people? How can she avoid parties like sexualized rackets if they scare her? And what about the friends determined to find her a one-night guy? Why, as T. R. might have said, do I have to be this age and single right now?
THE BIONIC SINGLE
In many ways it was an excellent time to be young, single, never-married, or even divorced. Penny, a science writer, now forty-nine, says,
People don’t understand that the 1960s progressed very slowly in terms of actual change. On tape, it all looks like a… colorful streak! But for a long time girls had helmet hair and pleated skirts on, stockings with garters, not panty hose, plus squishy-toed heels. To go out, you prepared for upwards of two hours. You went out “put together” or you—my mother said this—“put your face on” and then, all “faced up,” you could face the world. Even though the fashions had this baby-doll quality, the little dresses and booties, you still had on so much makeup and support garments that you kind of looked armored…. Most girls, remember, got married—that’s what you did; you got married and that was the progression. A lot of people lived through all the weirdness of the 1960s in a married couple. But when things really crashed—in 1969 and I’d say 1970—they really crashed. The changes started seeping out from there, and there was no going back.