Scream (13 page)

A few years later, in the early eighties, a book came out about graffiti, and there I am in another photo, at the Fun Gallery, surrounded by a gang of kids—Keith Haring, Futura 2000, I forget who else—who are all busy tagging my leather jacket with paint markers. I can't find this book, not right now, or I would include this picture too. I have the book, somewhere. It's buried in one of the boxes.

an influential teacher

M
y teacher at Barnard, and later at the Columbia M.F.A. program, was Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the founders of
The New York Review of Books.
She came from an era in New York City when literature, books, and the written word were powerful, consuming, important—being a writer or an editor or publisher was something that carried merit and weight in a totally different way than it does now. She was brilliant—married to Robert Lowell, who at that time had left her for Caroline Blackwood and was living in England or Ireland. My mother had taken class with Lowell in Boston. Hardwick was a wonderful teacher, a bit mad-scary as she addressed the woefully inadequate undergraduate women. She brought in and read aloud to us anything that interested her: E. L. Doctorow's
Ragtime,
when it was first given to her in galleys; excerpts from Nijinsky's
Diary.
I knew, even though I was of no importance, her enthusiasm, intelligence, and passion for books were unique.

Her writing, too, was very fine—particularly her eloquent essays—although you could never read one without wondering afterward, “What actually is the point?” It was so skillfully done—she wrote so well without really saying anything, about Henry James and so many other topics.

She was something of a mentor to me. As an undergrad taking a writing class with her, I wrote a story, “Maggie, Angel,” and she generously submitted it for publication in the Intro Anthology series, an annual book of winning stories by creative-writing graduate students—I think my story was the only undergraduate work ever accepted. Her praise, though sparse, meant everything.

She was less of a mentor to me when I took class with her in graduate school, although she was still more encouraging to me than others. One student came to her office for a conference. “Now, wheah did I put your story?” Hardwick said, in her soft, fluty Kentucky drawl. “Wheah can I have put it? Oh, why, heah it is! I put it in my garbage pail.” And she slyly fished it out.

She had me to tea once, in her apartment in the Hotel des Artistes building, on West Sixty-Seventh Street, which was never a hotel but a unique apartment building above the Café des Artistes. Over the years I went to a number of apartments there. Each apartment, on entering, had a huge, dark wood-paneled room two stories high, with a staircase that led to a balcony on the second floor, off which extended bedrooms.

Apart from Elizabeth's, I saw the home of Stuart Pivar, a friend of Warhol's who was very wealthy from the plastics business (although everyone said he had invented the Ziploc bag). His place was decorated with crumbling Jacobean and Italian Renaissance furniture, heavy red velvet drapes everywhere, like a set from a Gothic horror movie. There was a gecko who was loose and hid behind the refrigerator, emerging to devour cockroaches. Stuart had weekly events hosting Julliard music students who played baroque and classical music, or opera students who sang, but you could never sit down because most of the chairs were too rickety to be of use.

Then there was the apartment of the architect Alan Wanzenberg, who had decorated his residence in dark, heavy mission oak arts-and-crafts furniture, with Andy's former dachshunds and Andy's former boyfriend—Jed Johnson, a designer, who had left Andy for Alan. Jed died tragically in that TWA 800 crash near Fire Island that remains a mysterious accident.

I don't remember so much about Hardwick's décor: I was too in awe of her and her splendid home. It was dark, though. I guess everyone who lived in that building had some kind of need to return to the past. But how remarkable to think that you could, at that time, be a writer and an academic but have enough money to live in such a vast, splendid place!

When I was still at Barnard, Elizabeth was suddenly very happy: Robert Lowell had decided to leave Caroline Blackwood and return to her. This was in 1977. He got off the plane, took a taxi, carrying a painting by Lucian Freud he was going to hang in their apartment; but when she went down to meet him in the cab, she discovered that he had died on route.

Now she's gone too, but I'll never forget what she said about my writing to some publication that did a piece on me. “It's not Chekhov,” she told the reporter. “It's Tama Janowitz.”

There could be no higher compliment. As much as I adore Chekhov, I would still rather be original.

i was a guest editor at
mademoiselle

I
won the contest to be a guest editor at
Mademoiselle,
like in Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar
. Of course, her era was back in the 1950s, and it didn't occur to me that things might be different. The makeovers, the wardrobes given to these women, staying in the Barbizon Hotel, the dinner dances with Yale boys on the roof of the St. Regis—and culminating no doubt in job offers at a magazine.

I bombarded the judges of the competition with as much “extra-credit” material as I could. The only part I remember was an article I wrote called “The Real Ales of England” with photographs of pubs, although I knew nothing about real ale or false ales, whatever they were. I did, however, know a little bit about England since I had spent the previous year there as a student at Goldsmiths' College.

When I won the contest in 1977, it was different. The Barbizon was now somewhat seedy, one of the last of the “residences for women” in New York City where no men were allowed past the lobby, a concept dating back from a time when no respectable single woman would stay in a hotel where there were men. But by then, college boys and girls shared dorm bathrooms. Then, too, several years previously the winners of the competition had complained they didn't get any real work to do at
Mademoiselle,
so we were put to work, which was not something I thought of as part of a prize package.

Living in New York City for four years had already made me somewhat jaded, and I was not so thrilled about going out to see
Annie
on Broadway or receiving a pair of Frye boots, which at that time had not been revamped and were seriously out of style. My hair was chopped off unflatteringly and I was set to work writing an article about bicycle touring in New England, snipping quotes from previous articles and publications.

My four years of college had been spent going to early seminal nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City, in its last days before it shut down; Le Jardin; and the Ice Palace, which, it was said, had caught on fire during a tea dance. I had wandered the city unable to afford the croissants on Madison Avenue.

At
Mademoiselle
in those days Mary Cantwell was one of the top editors, and the guest editor program was co-ed—at the end of our one-month residency the boys went into her office and were offered jobs; at my interview she said nothing, and after looking me up and down for five minutes while I sat, terrified, I was excused.

She was one of the many New York women I met who succeeded by acting utterly cold, superior, and malevolent. I found out that many of them simply were not able to speak. If they did, they sounded like morons, so they had learned over the years to keep their mouths shut and not smile, and, in this manner, managed to seem infinitely powerful. I did not learn intimidation through silence.

In Mary Cantwell's case, I do not know how stupid she was, but she had certainly learned how to intimidate. She went on after her tenure at
Mademoiselle
to write a number of nonfiction books about her life, the highlight or most exciting part of which was her lengthy affair with a married man who did not, ultimately, marry her—and though his name was never mentioned in her books, she later acknowledged that her lover was James Dickey, the alcoholic poet and novelist. This was many years after my time under her aegis at
Mademoiselle,
but I was surprised. The endless description of this love affair with this man she so obviously looked at as a god, who had promised to marry her and who then did not, that was the big thrill of her life? Kind of pathetic, really. And surprising that she ended up being just another woman gushing on and on about some idiot married guy who dumped her. If you had told me while I was trembling in her office that here was a woman who went home and prettied herself up for some drunk poet who might or might not be in town, and if in town might or might not stop over, I wouldn't have believed it.

While guest editor, I was switched from the travel department to beauty and sent to work on a photo shoot. The article was about some young, married, attractive woman who lived in an apartment off Third Avenue, I think. Now, I realize it was just a decent apartment, but at that time I was overwhelmed that people could be so beautiful and live in such luxurious surroundings, and I stood in amazement until I was commanded by someone there to iron a blouse the woman was to wear in her next shot.

It was a lovely white satin blouse, much nicer than anything I had ever had or seen.

“Is the blouse ironed yet?” someone said.

But I had rested the iron facedown on the blouse and burned the sleeve off. I just stood there in shock. I had been sent out on assignment and had just totally destroyed this expensive blouse, and the woman—with her lovely apartment and her good looks and whatever else she had—now had nothing to wear and I was going to be held responsible for it.

They found me standing over the ironing board sobbing and apologizing. There were gasps of horror and sighs of disgust.

A small conference of editor and stylist and photographer and whoever else was there gathered to see what was going on. “Wait here,” they said to me, and went to another room.

A beautiful young man with a shock of blond hair came in. He was the hairstylist. “What's going on?” he said. “Why are you crying?”

“I was told to iron a blouse and I burned it,” I said.

He picked it up from the ironing board. It was now a shirt for a one-armed person. “You burned this?” I nodded, crying. “You burned a blouse and you're crying?” He had a Dutch accent. He began howling with laughter. I was furious. How cold, how callous. Here I was, utterly devastated. I had committed this terrible act; I had burned a blouse with a sixty-dollar price tag I would never be able to repay. My life was as ruined as the blouse.

Would this have happened to Sylvia Plath? She had been a guest editor and went to dance with Yale men on the roof of the St. Regis hotel during her time at the magazine. There was no mention in
The Bell Jar
of being sent out to iron. But if she had been, she would have ironed beautifully, I am sure. My life and any future career possibility were over.

An editor returned and handed me an envelope. “Please take this back to the office and deliver it.”

At least I now had something to do. In shame, sticky with tears, I went back to the Condé Nast building and went to my editor. “What are you doing back?” she said.

“I . . . I was told to come back and deliver this to you,” I said, and I gave her the envelope. She opened it. There was nothing inside.

Mademoiselle
was a great magazine for a long time. It was directed at college-age women, who were called co-eds back then, which meant, kind of, something voluptuous and dumb, who maybe were taking home economics, but eventually, things changed.

This magazine published many fine articles, some with real substance. It published fiction by Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, and many others.

Some years later it was brought down by yet another brittle, superior woman, this time English—one of the editors Si Newhouse brought over during that time in New York history when a British accent was a gold ticket to a job.

I had known her, socially, for a long time—but as soon as she got her position of power, she was horrifically rude to me. And, almost single-handedly, she made a fine magazine—which had a niche, a real market audience—into a piece of pulp. And the magazine was terminated.

The damage these Brits did out of stupidity and snobbery during their reign of terror in New York City publishing was horrendous. The British accent was entrée into publishing, magazines, the art world. For magazines it was a bit peculiar, though, because if you ever picked up a British magazine at that time, they were basically unreadable. They didn't make any sense. American magazines were light-years ahead of what they were publishing over there, but the USA still handed over the colonies of magazines to the Brits. Brits came and took over the magazines of America, which began to fizzle and sputter.