Sassy
's competition lambasted the magazine for its sex coverage. “I don't think that feature is responsible,” Robert Brown, associate publisher of
Teen
, has said about the article “Losing Your Virginity.” “I think it's offensive.”
That depends, of course, on your definition of responsibility. To the
Sassy
staff, it was irresponsible, in light of the threat of AIDS and the possibility
of unwanted pregnancy, to pretend that teens weren't having sex; it was irresponsible to talk to teenagers about sex in a way that wouldn't connect with them; it was irresponsible to shy away from subjects that were important to teenagers simply because writing about them might piss off advertisers. Not to mention that it was more irresponsible to pretend that all of its readers were the consummate good girls, that their parents were always right, that sex wasn't the issue that loomed largest in their minds.
In other words,
Sassy
's definition of responsibility was radically different from
Seventeen
's. “You weren't like, âOh, we've got to give those girls the truth,'” says Crichton, who was in charge of all the articles, of the magazine's traditional role as an extension of the patriarchy. “You were like, âWe've just got to give those girls what's good for them.'”
It's an attitude she probably learned from her boss, Midge Richardson, the editor in chief of
Seventeen
and an ex-nun. Midge grew up in a Catholic family in Los Angeles, a former child star who had appeared in a movie called
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
with Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple. But she put aside her Hollywood life when she found God, joined a convent, and became Sister Agnes, then a Mother Superior. She was heading a high school in her home city when she was stricken with psychosomatic blindness. The doctors told her that she would never regain her sight if she didn't make some major life changes. So she left the conventâand apparently that's all it tookâand wrote a memoir about her experience called
The Buried Life
. While she was doing press for the book, an editor at
Glamour
magazine called her up and offered her a job. She accepted.
One day, Alexander Liberman, the legendary Condé Nast editorial director, spotted her in the elevator and asked around about the cute girl who looked like a nun. “She
was
a nun, until recently,” he was told. But she was quite fetching without her habit on. In fact, she caught the eye of
Vogue
photographer Gordon Parks, who sent her to France for a $10,000 makeover, including a chic new haircut from Vidal Sassoon. All of which is to say, by the time Jane Pratt appeared on the magazine scene, Midge wasn't totally uncool: she wore Ungaro and Chanel; she dated Burt Reynoldsâno rock star, true, but a furry-chested
Cosmo
centerfold all the same; and she later married Hamilton Richardson, a tennis star who had an apartment on Park Avenue, rented a huge house in Southampton, and owned a condo on Palm Beach.
“She was a tough lady. She considered herself always the educator, always tied to young people,” says beauty editor Annemarie Iverson. “And that's kind of the way she ran it; it was the mother superior running
Seventeen
.” Mary Clarke, who worked at
Seventeen
before getting her job as the beauty editor of
Sassy
, agrees. “She was like a school principal. She would walk down the halls and say, âGood morning.'” At Monday editorial meetings, she informed the beauty and fashion departmentsâwhich consisted of more than a few fair-haired ice queensâwhat they would cover (she didn't care much about the articles). She would try to fire people because they chewed
gum like a cow or didn't know how to bend over properly in their miniskirts.
“It's almost like talking dirty to kids,” Richardson said about the
Sassy
sex stories.
But her comments were likely politically motivated. For one thing, the two magazines were at war. (
Sassy
's 1994 entertainment poll asks, “Who's your favorite dinosaur? T. Rex, Barney, Aerosmith, or Midge Turk Richardson?”) For another, despite
Seventeen
's chaste reputation, some of the stories that ran were as explicit as
Sassy
's early sex articles. “We actually put in a lot of stuff that people didn't give us any credit for, under the radar,” says Crichton. But there were also articles like “How Do I Know if I'm Doing It Right,” which was about “performing well” when readers “kiss, hold hands, or express any physical form of affection,” and another on sexual dreams. There was even one onâget thisâblue balls.
But no one in the press ever mentioned
Seventeen
's sex articlesâeven in 1989, when the magazine ran a quiz titled “Are You Ready for Sex?” It sounded suspiciously like
Sassy
's loss-of-virginity piece, which had gotten its fair share of attention from readers, the religious right, and the competition. In fact, during Crichton's tenure,
Seventeen
increased its coverage of sex, cutting, divorceâthe darker side of teenage lifeâand its circulation increased exponentially. But while its stories increasingly portrayed the real pathologies affecting girls, the tone was always removed and journalistic, which helped the magazine retain its patina of innocence, even among high-school librarians, most of whom shelved the magazine and looked at it closely.
A new magazine with an unexpected voice,
Sassy
was a much more vulnerable target. The religious right wasn't about to go up against the industry's kingpin, which had a pristine reputation among the millions of mothers who happily bought it for their daughters. “
Seventeen
's dirty little secret is that it's really hard to know whether any of the girls read it. We knew moms read it and filled out subscription cards and renewed it,” says David Abrahamson, a professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. “It wasn't for daughters to enjoy, but for moms to feel good about their daughters possessing.”
The companies who ran ads in the publicationâand who certainly wanted girls' allowances to line their coffersâkept quiet about the magazine's sexual content as well. “Most people on the advertising side of the business thought of it as a fashion magazineâbecause that's where the money came from,” says Caroline Miller. “But the reality of it is if you talk to girls and you read all the surveys, which we did a lot of, very few people bought it for those fashion stories. They bought it for the personal stuff.” Luckily for
Seventeen
, its reputation for covering the lighter side of female adolescence remained an effective cover.
While preparing for the June 1989 issue, the
Sassy
staff spent a day going through boxes and boxes of “It Happened to Me”s, looking for submissions about incest. They decided to ring a bell every time they found another one, and that
bell rang more than any of them had expected.
The reason for this depressing exercise was that the editorial staff was trying to prove to the business side that an article on incest was imperative. Says Mike, who remembers that there was hesitation, “We were trying to tell them that we're constantly getting letters from girls about having been victims of all this.” But not only would an article on incest deal with the most taboo form of sex, it would also tell girls that sometimes their parents are horribly wrong. And undermining the place of parents in their daughters' lives was a tricky undertaking. Still, the staff prevailed, and six months after their last sex article, “Real Stories About Incest” ran. Written by Catherine, it chronicled the tales of three girls who had been through it.
It would prove a Pyrrhic victory, though, as Sandra was asked to step down a month before the piece ran.
“I never decided to sell
Sassy
âI never would have,” says Sandra. “Citicorp Venture Capital, who controlled sixty percent of the company, asked me to resign. Clearly they believed someone had to be held accountable for what had happened, and that person was me. It remains the most painful episode of my working career.”
“Someone kind of had to take the fall for the boycott,” agrees Mary Kaye.
The magazine's buyer, in October 1989, was Lang Communications, owned by Dale Lang. Lang was one of the few small, independent publishers left among the conglomerates. Lang owned a number of feminist-y magazines designed to appeal to the women's movement's growing numbers, including
Working Woman
,
Working Mother
, and
Success
. Lang's publications were dedicated to women's newfound fiscal independence: an idea advertisersâeager to be the recipients of women's money, regardless of whether it was earned by them or their husbandsâwarmed right up to. Advertisers were especially pleased that the magazines weren't particularly political.
Lang himself was dapper and charming, a businessman known as a bit of a swashbuckler, a medium-time player with big dreams, and he was excited by the opportunity to take a flailing publication and turn it around. “I bought
Sassy
because I thought it was a great, great publication. I loved the idea that it was kind of the anti-
Seventeen
,” says Lang. He was less attracted to
Sassy
's sister property. But Citibank, who controlled the sale, wouldn't budge: if Lang wanted
Sassy
, he had to buy
Ms
., too. “The last thing they wanted to be left with, frankly, was
Ms
. magazine,” says Lang. “If somebody was going to have to bury
Ms
. magazine, they were going to take a lot of heat for thatâand it wasn't going to be Citibank.”
Ms
. was an albatross of a business property. “If the editors really gave the readers what they wanted in
Ms
., the advertisers would run away screaming,” says Lang. What they wanted, presumably, were stories like the exclusive the editors scored on the effect the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan had on women. The article generated buzz, but it also made Revlonâa cosmetics company the magazine had pursued for yearsâjump ship. Why? Revlon was upset that the woman on the coverâa Russian peasantâwasn't wearing any makeup.
That
Ms
. editors refused to bow to the advertisers the magazine relied on for its existence was a constant bone of contention between Steinem and Lang. According to the latter, “I said, âGloria, don't you realize that unless the magazine can stop losing money, it can't live? You know? It doesn't have to make money, but it just can't lose money.'”
“Dale Lang was an extremely schlocky guy,” counters Steinem. “He was not impossible to work with, because he listened and he wanted to be liked and he wanted to do well. But he had no clue about content at all.” (Nor, she says, did he actually understand
Ms
.'s activist mission. “The
Ms
. staff would take off the Martin Luther King, Jr., day as a holiday or go to political rallies in Times Square and the Lang people would say, âYou can't do this because everyone will want to do it.'”)
The two finally came to a kind of truce, agreeing that the magazine couldn't serve both its audience and its advertisers. After ensuring they had enough reader support, they converted the magazine to an ad-free, subscription-only publication.
And in their way, the
Sassy
staff had a similar sense of mission. Initially, the boycott had seemed a bit funny. It had even, to a certain extent, fed the staff's rebellious fantasies, drawing them closer, making them feel more fiercely committed to their work at the magazine. “We were all so young; we kind of didn't give a shit,” says Jane. “I remember Christina and I talking about this many times. But we wanted to be thrown out rather than fade away. We much preferred the idea that we had made an impact on teenagers and on the culture in general and that generation, and that years later people would be talking about
Sassy
and the impact it hadâmuch, much rather that than modify what we were doing, than do something softer and exist for fifty years. We were twenty-five years oldâwho cares about existing for that long?”
But as the boycott played itself out and
Sassy
lost ad pages and its beloved founder, the situation became less amusing. “It was terrible. We would come in, for years and years and yearsâwe joked, but it was trueâwe would come in to work not knowing if our desks were still going to be there. We just thought the magazine was going to fold any day,” says Jane. “And then we did have to make changes; that was the toughest part of all.”
Ms
. may have won editorial freedom under Lang, but
Sassy
did not. The magazine couldn't talk about sex for years.
“It was everyone's first big reality check,” says Karen. The staff didn't realize how easy it was for business concerns to trump editorial ones. “We were so spoiled,” agrees Christina. “We lived in this little idyllic world where we didn't have to worry about advertising; we were just told to make a magazine that teenagers would respond to. And that's just not the reality of publishing. And once our fairy godmother was goneâonce Sandra was goneâit became more real.”
When Sandra left,
Sassy
changed. “It was different. It was always stressful in the office,” says Cheryl. The editors “did the best they could do, and it was still a good magazine, and readers still loved it. But in some ways, the Moral Majority had done its work.”