The Good Girls Revolt (14 page)

CHAPTER 7

Mad Men: The Boys Fight Back

T
HE FIRST SIGN OF TROUBLE came only weeks after the agreement was signed. Oz Elliott moved over to the business side as president of Newsweek Inc., leaving Kermit Lansner in charge of the magazine’s day-to-day operations. Kermit was an intellectual and a creative man but he often was oblivious to what was going on around him. A paunchy man with the waddle of a duck, he would wander around the eleventh floor staring vaguely at the ceiling. Once, when he was walking through the copy area, a visitor saw him and said, a little too loudly, “What does that float represent?”

Kermit couldn’t be bothered with enforcing our agreement, so the editors made the easiest changes first. They invited more women to Top of the Week lunches, panels, and public events and sent out several researchers to the bureaus on reporting internships. But when it came to giving women the chance to write, they were recalcitrant. Since we felt that most of the senior editors were biased, we had devoted five paragraphs in the memorandum to how reporting and writing tryouts were to be conducted. Each step—from requesting and evaluating the tryout to deciding whether she had made it as a writer—was to be done with the approval of top management.

The first researcher to ask for a writing tryout was Mary Pleshette, who had been freelancing for small publications. Jack Kroll, her senior editor, was immediately defensive, saying that he disagreed with her quote at the news conference—that discrimination was a “gentleman’s agreement” at
Newsweek
. He agreed to give Mary a tryout but then gave her only a few pieces to write. There was no formal assignment schedule or evaluation of her writing. In fact, none of the pieces she wrote for him ever made it through the complete editing process; they just stalled on his desk. First Mary was annoyed and then she was angry. “I felt he gave me the tryout because he had to,” she recalled. “At a certain point it was clear he was just going through the motions.” At one point, Jack told Mary that he really liked a piece she wrote on Patsy Kelly, who played a sidekick in the old movies, but he never ran it. Instead, she sold it to
Newsweek’
s syndication unit for publication in newspapers around the country. “Nobody wanted you to succeed,” she later said. “I didn’t feel the editors were doing hatchet jobs, but I felt it was an exercise in futility. There weren’t many teeth to our agreement.”

Lester Bernstein offered Pat Lynden a tryout in “Where Are They Now?,” a section in the front of the book recapping what had become of once-famous people. Pat accepted but was wary. At the time, she confided to friends that “no matter how well I did, I thought I might fail so that the editors could point to me as evidence that women didn’t have the right stuff to write for
Newsweek
.” She later said, however, that “it was also clear that declining the offer was not an option. I had been one of the most outspoken women in our suit, I had the so-called track record, and “Where Are They Now?” was probably the easiest section in the magazine to write.” Pat decided if she didn’t make it, she could live with it. “I intended to leave
Newsweek
in a year or so,” she recalled. “I was newly married, working on starting a family, and planning to move out west. I could afford to fail and if I did, it would show the editors’ bad faith.”

Pat’s pieces ran for several weeks but she didn’t get any feedback. “I didn’t have a ‘rabbi’ among the top male writers or editors like the men who tried out always had,” she said. Then
Newsweek
decided to do a feature on child care. Pat was given the assignment because she had written a cover story on the subject for the
New York Times Magazine
in February 1970. The senior editor on the story, Joel Blocker, told Pat to come to him with any problems or questions about the assignment and that he would be glad to help. She took him at his word and gave him her first draft. “The next thing I knew, he called me in to his office to say he’d turned over the assignment to Jerry Footlick,” she recalled. “I asked what the problem was and said I wanted to fix it. But Joel shook his head and said Jerry was doing the story. That was the end of my tryout and I returned to the New York bureau.”

This was the problem we had anticipated in arguing for more women writers: the judgment of what is good reporting and good writing is purely subjective. “The senior editors are idiosyncratic,” admitted Rod Gander in the negotiations, defending the editors. “Their views of what constitutes good
Newsweek
writing differ.” Maybe so, but the editors were united in believing that no woman could do it. One was either “born” with the
Newsweek
style or not, they said, and it seemed that only men were born with it—whatever “it” was. According to Rod, it was “nearly impossible to make any kind of empirical set of credentials as to what makes a good
Newsweek
writer. We have had many writers who cannot do it although they produce beautiful stuff in other media. We have found people of no experience who can do it.”

There were
Newsweek
writers who seemed to be born with the gift: Dick Boeth, Jack Kroll, Harry Waters, Pete Axthelm, and Liz Peer. The best was Peter Goldman. “Some of the top writers could go 180 degrees wrong, but Peter never went wrong,” said Steve Shepard, the former head of the Nation section who edited him for four years. “I never saw any writer do as much work before actually writing the story. Peter spent hours reading the files from the reporters and background material, underlining everything in different color pens and pinning the files on his wall. When he sat down to write, he had so absorbed the reporting he was able to integrate it and compress it into a poetic style that was brilliant.” But that was rare.

Most writers had to learn the newsmagazine formula, which differs significantly from the newspaper style. Newspapers use the “inverted pyramid” construction: the lead sentence or paragraph consists of the most important facts—who, what, where, when, why—and subsequent paragraphs contain information of decreasing importance, which allows editors to cut from the bottom for space. The newsmagazine story, at that time, was written in an authoritative voice that told the reader, “Here’s what you have to know.” Unlike newspapers, magazines put a premium on stylish writing with a beginning, middle, and end, and compressed as many details and as much color as possible onto the page. Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine’s Business section, used to call
Newsweek
writing f—k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard—why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending). Dwight Martin, a senior editor at
Newsweek
and a former editor at
Time,
described it simply as “literary bricklaying—you’re not born with it, it’s a skill to be learned.”

“It’s such a constipated writing style and yet they elevated it to some mystical form,” remembered Margaret Montagno. “Some guy who graduated from Harvard and came to
Newsweek
over the transom had it—he was a writer—while some woman who graduated from Radcliffe was only a researcher.” Even women who had journalism experience, such as Mary Pleshette, Pat Lynden, and Susan Brownmiller—or who had worked on their college publications, as Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, and Betsy Carter had—were still hired as researchers. When Kermit Lansner was asked once why women such as Nora Ephron had to leave the magazine to write, he snapped, “
Newsweek
isn’t a training ground, you know.” But it clearly was for men.

Some men questioned whether forcing management to promote women from within was a good idea. One was Ray Sokolov, a
Harvard Crimson
alum who was writing in the Arts sections. “The researchers were problematic as a category,” he recalled. “Almost none of them had a background in journalism.” It is curious that none of the
Newsweek
editors had hired—or considered hiring—experienced women journalists from other publications. “There really was sexism at work in some way that made no sense,” said Ray. “They could have found six women reporters in any of the daily journalism publications and not have had to wait for their potentially capable researchers to make it as writers.”

In the mid-1960s, there were a few women writing at
Time,
where
Newsweek
editors often looked for talent. Some magazines, such as
BusinessWeek,
hired women as writers right out of college and all the major newspapers carried female bylines. When Katharine Graham suggested in the early 1960s that former
New York Times
art critic Aline Saarinen be hired as an editor at
Newsweek,
the editors dismissed her out of hand, she wrote, “condescendingly explaining that it would be out of the question to have a woman. Their arguments were that the closing nights were too late, the end-of the-week pressure too great, the physical demands of the job too tough. I am embarrassed to admit that I simply accepted their line of reasoning passively.”

After the agreement, however, the editors began pursuing female writers from outside the magazine as fast as they were scuttling the tryouts of women inside. The first woman they hired was Barbara Bright, who had been a stringer for
Newsweek
in Germany. She had returned to the United States and became a writer in Foreign. Then they approached Susan Braudy, an experienced freelancer for the
New York Times Magazine,
who went on to become a writer and editor at
Ms.
magazine and the author of several best-selling books. I had met Susan when we were reporting on the first Congress to Unite Women in August 1969, and we had become good friends. In December 1969, Susan wrote a freelance piece for
Playboy
on women’s lib, but it never ran—Hugh Hefner spiked it. Hef’s memo as to why he didn’t like the piece was later leaked to the press by a
Playboy
secretary (who was promptly fired) and it became a cause célèbre. “What I want,” Hef said, “is a devastating piece that takes militants apart.... What I’m interested in is the highly irrational, kooky trend that feminism has taken. These chicks are our natural enemy.... It is time to do battle with them.... All of the most basic premises of the extreme form of the new feminism [are] unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that
Playboy
promotes.”

Joel Blocker, by now a senior editor in the back of the book, first contacted Susan because, he told her,
Newsweek
wanted to do a “sympathetic” story on the contretemps, which ran in May 1970 (her own piece eventually ran in
Glamour
in May 1971). The following year, he offered her a tryout. Susan wrote in the back-of-the-book sections but struggled with writing
Newsweek
style. She and I talked often about this, but I was having my own problems with Blocker and wasn’t much help. After a year, she left in the summer of 1972. “They wouldn’t let me do my own reporting,” she recalled, “and I didn’t understand the condensation, the formulaic writing, and the kickers at
Newsweek
. But I learned a lot. I learned to write when I didn’t like what I was writing.”

Diane Zimmerman, a star reporter in the back of the book, had been writing occasional stories for the Medicine section and others. After we filed the complaint, she asked her editor, Ed Diamond, for a tryout. “With all his peculiarities, Ed was very fair and pushed for me,” she remembered. “The Wallendas said they would do it but that they weren’t ready yet. I tried to get a tryout for at least eight or nine months and I couldn’t get one. The Wallendas didn’t approve it.” Diane left in 1971, when Shew Hagerty moved to the
New York Daily News
and hired her there.

There were also pockets of resistance by some writers and reporters. In February 1971, I received the following story suggestion via telex from Jim Jones, the crusty Detroit bureau chief: “A group of women’s lib sows here, who are members of the Detroit Press Club, are demanding that they be admitted to the club’s annual ‘Stag Steakout,’ a gridiron-type affair where the insults and language are a deep blue.... Now it appears the club’s board of governors may bend and admit the broads at the do in March (partly this is because a governor or two has a mistress or two among the libbies and are afraid that they’ll get cancelled out if they don’t vote favorably). This is a teapot tempest, but I’m advised the
NY Times
is working up a story involving the hassle, and maybe you’d want to take the edge off that.”

Infuriated, I telexed Jones back ordering a fifty-liner, with a zinger at the end. “Allowing for your clearly sexist item, appreciate as objective an account as possible.” For that, I was called into Rod Gander’s office and, with Jones on the phone, told we had to settle our differences amicably. We grudgingly did but the story never ran.

By March 1971, the women’s panel realized that management wasn’t living up to even the spirit—much less the letter—of the agreement in recruiting women writers, inside or out. Once again, we contacted Mel Wulf at the ACLU, who wrote to the editors requesting a meeting “since there are failures involving the pace of implementation” of the agreement. He also noted that “it is unethical and a breach of the agreement to set up your obligation to seek out blacks as in some way mitigating your obligation to rectify the imbalances effecting
[
sic
]women.” Eleanor Holmes Norton, now chair of the New York City Human Rights Commission, also sent a letter recommending that the women’s representatives no longer meet with management unless accompanied by an attorney. The editors immediately promised that the meetings would be more productive without a lawyer present. We reluctantly agreed, continuing to meet over the summer and into the fall.

One of the major problems in recruiting women writers was that vacancies were not posted. The editors simply continued to recruit through the old-boy network. At one meeting, Oz admitted that the editors didn’t have any “resources” for finding writers; they just asked friends and colleagues in the business, obviously all male. Nor did editors honor their commitment to report what efforts had been made to find a woman when a man had been hired. Asked whether the Nation editor would show the panel some proof that he had searched for a woman in filling a recent opening, Oz simply said no, adding that if a good writer “came down the pike,” he would not want to go searching for a female just to show us they had looked for one.