The Good Girls Revolt (4 page)

Whatever happened, the immediate result is that it put us all on the line. “The night after the press conference I realized there was no turning back,” said Lucy Howard. “Once I stepped up and said I wanted to be a writer, it was over. I wanted to change
Newsweek,
but
everything
was going to change.”

CHAPTER 2

“A Newsmagazine Tradition”

W
HEN
NEWSWEEK’
S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, Osborn “Oz” Elliott, responded to our lawsuit that Monday in March, he released a statement that served only to confirm the institutional sexism of the magazine. “The fact that most researchers at
Newsweek
are women and that virtually all writers are men,” it said, “stems from a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years.”

That was true—and most of us never questioned it. Although we held impressive degrees from top colleges, we were just happy to land a job—even a menial one—at an interesting place. Saying you worked at
Newsweek
was glamorous compared to most jobs available to college-educated women. Classified ads were still segregated by gender and the listings under “Help Wanted—Female” were mainly for secretaries, nurses, and teachers or for training programs at banks and department stores such as Bloomingdale’s (that wouldn’t change until 1973, when the US Supreme Court ruled sex-segregated ads were illegal). But compared to jobs at newspapers, where women were reporters and editors—even if they were ghettoized in the “women’s pages”—the situation for women at the newsmagazines was uniquely injurious. We were confined to a category created especially for us and from which we rarely got promoted. Not only was research and fact-checking considered women’s work, but it was assumed that we didn’t have the talent or capability to go beyond it.

That infamous “tradition” began in 1923, when Henry Luce and Brit Hadden founded
Time, The Weekly News-Magazine.
Positioning their publication between the daily newspapers, which printed everything, and the weekly reviews, which were filled with lengthy commentary, these two young Yalies decided to create a conservative, compartmentalized digest of the week’s news that could be consumed in less than an hour. But although
Time
would give both sides of the issues, it would, they said in their prospective, clearly indicate “which side it believes to have the stronger position.” In the beginning, the magazine was written by a small group of their Ivy League friends, who distilled stories from newspapers and wrote them, echoing Hadden’s beloved
Iliad,
in a hyphenated news-speak (“fleet-footed Achilles”) and a backward-running sentence structure (“Up to the White House portico rolled a borrowed automobile”).
Time
didn’t hire “stringer correspondents” until the 1930s, when the magazine decided to add original reporting.

But from the very beginning, the editorial staff included “girls” known as “checkers,” who verified names, dates, and facts. Thus was created a unique group-journalism model, which, unlike newspapers, separated all the editorial functions: the reporters sent in long, colorful files from the field; the writers compiled the information and wrote the story in the omniscient, Lucean Voice of God; and the researchers checked the facts. Only “lady assistants” were hired as fact checkers, which, according to Oz Elliott, who worked at
Time
for six and a half years, was a “liberating thing for young fledgling women out of college because they could get into publishing without being stenographers or secretaries.”

Years later, the honorific of “checker” was upgraded to “researcher.” At
Time’
s twentieth anniversary dinner in 1943, Luce explained that although “the word ‘researcher’ is now a nation-wide symbol of serious endeavor,” the title was originally conceived when he and Hadden were doing some “research” for a drinking club called the Yale Professors. “Little did we realize,” he said, “that in our private jest we were inaugurating a modern female priesthood, the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain, and managing editors learn humbly to appease.”

When
News-Week
began in 1933, it copied
Time’
s “tradition” of separating editorial functions. But at
Newsweek
(which joined its name in 1937 when it merged with the weekly journal
Today
), women didn’t even start as researchers; we were hired two rungs below that—on the mail desk. At
Time,
office boys delivered the mail and relevant newspaper clippings. But at
Newsweek
only girls with college degrees—and we were called “girls” then—were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to “clippers,” another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn’t smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out relevant articles with razor-edged “rip sticks,” and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. “Being a clipper was a horrible job,” said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at
Newsweek
after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, “and to make matters worse, I was good at it.”

We were all good at it—that was our mind-set. We were willing to start at the bottom if it led to something better, and in most cases, it did: to the glorified position of researcher. Working side by side with the writers, we were now part of the news process, patrolling the AP and UPI telexes for breaking news, researching background material in the library, chatting with the guys about their stories, and on closing nights, fact-checking the articles. The wires were clacking, the phones were ringing, and we were engaged in lively conversations about
things that mattered.
It was thrilling to feel the pulse of the news and to have that special pipeline to the truth that civilians couldn’t possibly have. “It was everything you wouldn’t think of growing up in Marion, Pennsylvania,” said Franny Heller Zorn, who still remembered the thrill of finding the first wire report about a breaking news event, in her case when Adlai Stevenson collapsed on a sidewalk in London and died later that day. “The guys were great, the women were terrific, and everyone was smart. It was a privilege to be part of the
Newsweek
culture and to have that job, even with all the crap we had to do.”

Our primary job was to fact-check the stories and that meant checking nearly every word in a sentence except “and” and “the.” We underlined what we confirmed and in the margin, we noted the source—the reporter’s file, a newspaper story, or a reference book. All proper names had to be checked against telephone books or directories. If the only source was the reporter, we grilled him on the correct name, title, and spelling. If we had any questions about the accuracy, we would underline the suspicious word or sentence with a red pencil. A fact was not to be checked against a newspaper story unless it was the only source we had. The
New York Times
was considered the best newspaper, but even that wasn’t to be relied on for spellings or history unless it was a last resort. “If there was a difference of opinion between your research and the reporter, you had to call him up and gingerly say something like, ‘I’m really sorry and I’m sure you’re right, but the
New York Times
said it happened on Monday and you said Tuesday in your file,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “And the reporter would inevitably say, ‘Goddamn it, what is the point of sending me out here if you’re using the
New York Times
?’”

Unlike our counterparts at
Time,
we also ran interference between the bureau correspondents and the writers and editors. If a
Time
researcher had a problem or question on a story, she wasn’t allowed to call the reporter in the field; she could only tell the editor. We were constantly on the phone with the correspondents. “I saw myself as an advocate for the reporter, to keep them out of trouble,” said Lucy. “I wanted to make sure the writer didn’t screw up and spell anything wrong. But I thought it was more important for the reporters to file what they saw and heard rather than worrying that they got the name wrong.” Even Peter Goldman, who had the reputation of being an accurate writer, said, “I don’t think I wrote anything longer than eighty lines where one of the researchers didn’t catch something.”

The modern, green-glassed Time-Life tower on Sixth Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street was only two blocks away from our modest, Art Deco building on Madison Avenue and Forty-Ninth, but the
Newsweek
culture was a world away from Henry Luce’s empire.
Time
was WASPier, classier, and better resourced than us younger, scrappier upstarts at
Newsweek
. At
Newsweek,
we spent hours in the thirteenth-floor library, rummaging for relevant information in the “morgue,” which housed valuable old (hence, “dead”) newspaper and magazine clippings and reporter’s files. At
Time,
the researchers would call up the library for sources, and carts would appear at their doors filled with files and books carrying the appropriate place marks.

On Friday nights at
Newsweek,
the writers and researchers went out to the local bars or ordered greasy food from Harman’s or Beefburger on Forty-Ninth Street. At
Time,
the editorial staffers were treated to a buffet dinner of lobster or filet mignon on a table set with silver and china, all catered by the ritzy Tower Suite restaurant on the forty-eighth floor of the Time-Life building. While the men at
Newsweek
drank their Scotch and bourbon from bottles hidden in their bottom desk drawers on Friday nights (and many other nights as well), the senior editors at
Time
set up a full bar for their staffers in their offices or antechambers.

Still, working at
Newsweek
was a dream job and I felt lucky to have landed there. Like many of my colleagues, I was a graduate of one of the Seven Sisters schools, which in the early ’60s were still mired in the ’50s. Vassar College, when I arrived in 1961, was politically apathetic and boy-obsessed. Student clubs had been abolished and even the campus newspaper, the
Misc
. (short for
Miscellaneous
), had ceased publication my freshman year. Every weekend the campus emptied out as girls boarded buses to Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other nearby men’s schools. Other than having female professors and a safe environment where women could be the first to raise their hands—and be heard—there was little left of the founder’s feminist legacy when I got there. Women were praised for their intelligence and commended for their capabilities but certainly not encouraged to have careers.

I majored in modern European history but became enthralled by my French professor, Olga Bernal. She would invite her favorite students to her apartment, where we would drink white wine and talk about life, love, and French literature (I was taking her course on avant-garde French writers). It was what I had pictured life at a small college would be like and by junior year, I had a passion if not yet an ambition: I would go to Paris. Since my history degree wouldn’t get me a job, my only hope for employment was to be hired as a secretary. I was a fast typist, earning extra money by typing college papers, but I didn’t know shorthand. I scoured the local ads and found a course at a nearby high school. My last semester at Vassar, as I was writing my thesis on France between the wars, I spent my evenings walking to Dutchess County Community College to learn Stenoscript.

Although I had taken French through high school and college, I applied only to US companies in Paris, including Pan Am, TWA, the USIA (the government information agency),
Time,
and
Newsweek
. At
Newsweek
, the chief of correspondents offered me a job in New York but I turned it down, determined to go abroad. At his suggestion, I wrote to
Newsweek’
s Paris bureau chief, Joel Blocker, who, unfortunately, had no vacancies. So I planned to go to Paris anyway and find a job when, just before my final exams in May, Blocker sent a telegram to my father, a celebrated sports columnist at the
Washington Post
: UNFORESEEN OPENING STAFF, NOW ALMOST CERTAIN JOB POSSIBILITY FOR LYNN IN PARIS BUREAU.... PLEASE ONPASS TO LYNN AND ADVISE SOONEST WHEN SHE ARRIVING AND ABLE BEGIN WORK. It turned out that Blocker’s secretary had suddenly quit. Thank God for Stenoscript.

In June 1965, I packed two suitcases and left for Paris. For over a year, I worked in the
Newsweek
bureau as a secretary, photo researcher, occasional reporter, and telex operator. After the correspondents had written their stories, I would stay at night to type them—on a French keyboard—into the telex machine, which transmitted them to New York. Typing the files was a good lesson on how to report and write, even if it was a lonely one. Each night as he was leaving the bureau, the staff photographer would look at me, alone in the office, and say with a smile, “Good luck in your chosen profession.”

Newsweek’
s Paris bureau was on the third floor of the
International Herald Tribune
building at 21 Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Elysée. In addition to the bureau chief and his French secretary, Jacqueline Duhau, who befriended me, the office housed three correspondents and the magazine’s senior foreign correspondent, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a perennially tan Belgian nobleman known around
Newsweek
as “the short count.” I was closest to Liz Peer, the only female correspondent. A tall, sharp-featured woman with piercing brown eyes accentuated by layers of mascara, the twenty-nine-year-old Liz was
Newsweek’
s Brenda Starr. She could match the toughest foreign correspondent with her cigarettes, her swagger, and her fluent French. She was also a gifted writer and versatile reporter who covered everything from politics and the arts to fashion and food. (She loved tromping after the boars on the annual truffle hunts.) As I typed Liz’s files into the telex, I admired her ability to find just the right anecdote or quote and weave it into a lively, compelling report.