“She just sort of looked over the shoulders of everyone and asked us questions constantly,” says Neill McCutcheon,
Dolly
's art director, about Jane's time in Australia. “And you know, it was funny for us, because we were going, âThey hired her? Really?'”
If
Dolly
's Australian staff wasn't yet quite convinced that the bouncy young American in miniskirts, anklet socks, and heels was right for the job, neither was Jane thrilled that she was inheriting a number of employees. Despite her exalted new job status, Jane didn't have complete control over staffing decisions. Sandra's boss had hired Cheryl Collinsâ
Dolly
's former art director, who had spent the last eight months in the United States at
Mademoiselle
âto head
Sassy
's art department even before Jane was brought on board. Jane hired Neill as associate art director. Jacinta Dobson,
Dolly
's Australian fashion editor, was also being shipped over to
Sassy
. Manhattan-born and -bred, RISD-educated Mary Clarke, who had toiled in the bland domesticity of
McCall's
(where she had recently been fired), and before that had worked at
Seventeen
(where she was scolded for wearing jeans and vintage clothes), was signed on as beauty editor.
Jane wasn't pleased to find out that one of the magazine's writers had already been hired. Karen Catchpole was a Californian who had skipped out on her last year of high school to move to Australia. She was working at a trade magazine about publishing and advertising, where her assignment was to write a story about Fairfax's launch of
Dolly
in the United States. “So I'm on deadline and I'm writing the story and I think to myself, âThat's where I want to work,'” says Karen, who had written exactly one freelance articleâa profile of a male modelâfor
Dolly
. It was seven o'clock at night, but she called Sandra, who picked up. “I made some probably completely transparent pretext asking some question about the story, and then I basically just said, âI want a job at this new magazine that you're doing,'” says Karen. There was a long pause. “Oh, yeah, you're American,” said Sandra. Jane felt pressure to hire someone that Sandra liked, and, even though she was less than thrilled with Karen's ideas (Jane thought Karen's proposal to call the letters column Vox Pop was lame), hired her with the plan to “edit her like crazy.”
Instead of arguing with her new boss, Jane concentrated on filling the remaining two writing slots. Jane had edited Catherine Gysin, an assistant with minimal writing experience, at
Teenage
. And though they weren't great friends, they had talked about
Dolly
and Jane's vision for the new magazine. Catherine was a midwestern girl who loved Yeats; had seen
On the Waterfront
thirty-six times; nursed a deep, abiding love for Sting; and was very close to her family. Jane thought Catherine was suited “to be the serious girl, the bookish kind of girl” the magazine needed. So she called Catherine late one night and offered her the job and a hefty raise. Catherine accepted immediately. “Being a staff writer was what I always wanted,” she says. “I was thrilled.”
There was just one slot left. A help-wanted ad in
The New York Times
had attracted a lot of prospective candidates, but most of them weren't very promising. It wasn't that they didn't have enough experience; plenty of people from publications that were both reputable and cool, like
Rolling Stone
, had met with Jane. But what Jane was looking for in a writer was “less about the way they wrote and more about the way they spoke, and their actual personalities.” So far, no one had the right voice. She liked the way one cover letter that had come in was worded, but she kept bypassing the candidate, Christina Kelly, who certainly wouldn't bring any cool cred to the new magazine: Christina was an inexperienced writer who worked at
Footwear News
, a trade publication that covered the shoe industry in excruciating detail. But Jane was getting desperate, so finally, with nothing to lose and without interviewing her first, she asked Christina to do an edit test, a mock version of a story she would write for the magazine. The topic: friends talking behind your back.
Elizabeth Larsen remembers the day they received Christina's test. Jane's new assistant, Elizabeth, had just spent three months in South America after graduating from Barnard. She, too, had answered a
Times
ad, though Jane's requirements for her position were notably less stringent. (Elizabeth claims she was hired for the boundless enthusiasm she showed for the magazine's prototype; Jane claims she was swayed by Elizabeth's resemblance to Shirley Temple.) “[The test] was what we would later recognize as vintage Christina. And Jane and I were looking at each other and being like, âThis is it!'” says Elizabeth. They were particularly impressed by a reference to pop princess Lisa Lisa of Cult Jam. “It sounded like a teenager speaks,” says Jane. “It was perfect.”
Jane called Christina in. “During my interview she was like, âSo what do you want to do?' and I was like, âUm, I want to interview celebrities and cute boys,'” says Christina. It was the correct answer, but Jane was worried by how quiet Christina was in her interviewânothing like the attitude-filled article she'd written. So Jane had her come in again. Christina says she just knew that this was her ticket out of
Footwear News
. She called Jane “persistently, constantly,
and then finally Jane was like, âI have to get her off my back,' so she hired me.”
In October 1987, the full launch staff finally arrived at
Sassy
's offices, located in prostitute- and peep showâinfested pre-Giuliani Times Squareâ1 Times Square, to be exact. Though there would eventually be desks in their pink cubicles, on the first day there were just typewriters strewn around the pink shag carpet. Jane's office had just recently been finishedâit fit nicely into the color scheme, and was soon to be dubbed “The Pink Cave”âand everyone crammed in, arranging themselves on the floor for the first of many editorial meetings.
“I think we looked at
Dolly
and wanted to model ourselves after that,” says Elizabeth. “But Jane had her own ideas.”
There were plenty of
Sassy
columnsâlike the horoscope, quiz, and fiction sections, plus fawning profiles of no-name actors like Charlie Schlatterâthat mimicked the usual teen-magazine fare. But there were many other aspects of the magazine that didn't resemble anything else in the genre, like “On the Road,” which featured real kidsânot modelsâtalking about what's cool in their towns. (In the first issue, it's Miami.)
In the inaugural “Diary,” a monthly note from the editor in chief, Jane is photographed wearing a T-shirt and denim jacket and, oddly, a faux Chanel baseball cap. She presents her persona as part hapless, part hip. “We're all still trying to figure out what being an editor in chief means,” she says, then introduces each of her staff members, who appear again, just a few pages later, as reviewers for “Listen Up” (the record reviews) and “Watch This” (the movie reviews).
Jane wanted everyone to have a voice and used the magazine's first relationship article to establish her cast of characters. “It was a typical Wednesday-morning meeting,” the piece opens. “Elizabeth and Catherine were having their usual argument over who's better-looking, Dweezil Zappa or Sting. Karen was cramming her second blueberry muffin into her mouth. And Jane had that I've-got-a-brilliant-idea look on her face. âWhy don't we do a story on how to flirt?' she said. âGetting ready is the biggest part of flirting, ' counsels Karen. âI'm not admitting that I flirt, just that I think I'm good at it,' says Neill, in one of his earliest appearances as the magazine's resident lothario. âI hate that word,
flirting
. It's such a giggly word,' says Mary derisively, adding that she never does it.” Besides giving the reader a peek into how magazine stories are made, the piece's use of first-person journalism acknowledged that there wasn't only one way to flirt and that, in fact, it was totally acceptable not to partake at allâa potentially validating acknowledgment for the magazine's less sexually precocious readers.
The writers' voices were even apparent in their more serious pieces. “I caught the flu while working on this story. I gained five pounds and
smoked a cigarette for the first time in a year,” says Catherine in “Life After Suicide,” a story about three teenagers who killed themselves and the devastating effect it had on their families. In a less grim but equally enlightening piece, “Backstage at Miss America,” Catherine clued her readers in to the dark side of an event that teen magazines normally sold to girls as something to aspire to. “The judges have a complicated list of abbreviations that they write down next to each girl's name to keep track of the various body parts. For example, WC stands for weak chin. H means heavy. But my personal favorite is BB, which stands for big butt. Ah, the wisdom of the judges. As I overheard one judge say, âThis girl has to represent America. Someone with a big butt just doesn't do that for me.'”
The wink-wink, exasperated, bemused tone was completely unlike the vaguely disguised parental voice of
Seventeen
or the saccharine ditzi-ness of
Dolly
. The writers and editors spoke to girls in their own language, which didn't come across as condescending or fake, since they were mostly in their early twenties themselves. In “Talk Behind Your Back,” Christina's job-clinching story, her reader identifies with the heroine who is being ragged on by her friends. “You wonder what aspect of your personality has loosened the traitorous tongues of your friends, the wenches,” she writes, sounding like Shakespeare's sister. Still not knowing what she's being shunned forâ“Have you developed dandruff, severe acne, a nervous tic? Or is it your weight?”âthe beleaguered high-school student goes to class. Her hot English teacher informs the group that “âOscar Wilde once said that it is better to be talked about than ignored.' You derive some comfort from these words. More controversial people have said the same type of thing, including Madonna, who emerged from the mud bath of gossip a shining star.” Christina invokes the totality of a teenage girl's world, in which pop-music divas, great dead white authors, best frenemies, and alluring adults figure equally. And she assumes they all get the joke.
Even better is that Christina conjures the real ambivalence of adolescence. At the end of the article she writes, “In college, I got into writing newspaper editorials stating that fraternities were sexist institutions that should be abolished (there were eleven fraternities at my school, all filled with good-looking guys). I was talked about pretty brutally by some of these guys, who thought I was weird. They also didn't ask me out much.”
This level of honesty and intimacy was unprecedented in an American teen magazine. And both qualities were also particularly apparent in the magazine's first sex story. It's not that other teen magazines didn't cover this territory;
Seventeen
ran its clinical “Sex and Your Body” column every month. But in an article called “Losing Your Virginity: Read This Before You Decide,” written by Karen,
Sassy
sounds more like a cool older sister than a high-school nurse.
Sassy
looked as different as it sounded. All the other teen magazines were a mess when it came
to art directionâunsophisticated and mostly black-and-white.
Sassy
was extra-wide and full-color from front to back. Still, photographers looked down on the idea of shooting for a new teen publication, and it was hard for the magazine to get the kind of top talent it wanted. But the design was in good shape; by the time Jane appeared at 1 Times Square, Cheryl had already put together a prototype, pages of
Dolly
with the
Sassy
logo added, which the sales staff was showing to prospective advertisers. It bore the brushed-ink logo that she had come up with one night because she wanted something handwritten. And the art department was happy, because for the most part, Jane left them alone. “You'd go to Jane and say what do you think and she'd say, âYeah, whatever you want, whatever you think,'” says Neill.
Beyond being pleased with her new boss's hands-off approach, Jacinta was excited by the American fashion establishment. “The clothes were so much better here. The models were better. Budgets were bigger,” she says. In Australia, Jacinta had used lots of vintage because she didn't have access to big-name stuff. Here, she not only got to use the designer clothes, she got to go to the shows, too. “Betsey Johnson always gave us seats; Donna Karan wouldn't give us the time of day,” she says. But it didn't matter because her mandate was to buck what was on the runway. Their shoots “had nothing to do with what was going on in the fashion industry. You could come up with things to start a trend.” Jacinta, Cheryl, and Neill worked closely on choosing models, but Jane retained final approval. She was looking for girls who would “be not model-y”âthat is, a little off-kilter, not necessarily all-American.
To that end, “the cover was a big issue, trying to get the exact right feeling,” says Christina. So, although the girl on the magazine's first cover is a blue-eyed blonde, her bandanna gives her a quirkier look.
On the last page of the magazine, there's a picture of a smiling, pixieish brunette, along with a note from Jane.
It goes like this: There was this great idea for a new magazine. But it didn't have a name. Well, actually the big guys who were putting it together had a whole list of names
they
likedâbut whenever they asked anyone under the age of twenty-five, none of the names went over too big (to put it mildly). So one day, one of these guys went home and started explaining all of this to his daughterâthirteen-year-old Sara Walker. And she said, “Why don't you just name it
Sassy
?” Just like that. (Well, not just like thatâthe big guys then went and asked about two hundred more people her age what they thought, just to make sure.) So that's how
Sassy
was born ⦠Oh. You want to know what some of the other choices were? Well, okay ⦠things like
Chloe
and
Dawn
and
Amy
and
She
and
Me
and
Dee
.
Now aren't you glad Sara came along? So are we.