The Good Girls Revolt (7 page)

By the mid-’60s when the sexual revolution was in full swing, the magazine was a cauldron of hormonal activity. Protected by the Pill, women felt as sexually entitled as the men, and our short skirts and sometimes braless tops only added to the boil. Mix in a schedule culminating in long days and nights, and it ignited countless affairs between the writers and editors and the researchers. For the most part, the office flings were friendly and consensual, and a few turned into marriages. “The way we related to men was through sexual bantering,” recalled Trish Reilly, a former researcher in the back of the book. “It was the way a compliment was made at
Newsweek
.” “Flirting was part of the game,” said Lucy Howard, “and you knew how to handle it. You had to be charming and witty and not cringe at their dirty jokes. It was a
Mad Men
kind of atmosphere.”

There were elements of
Mad Men
at
Newsweek,
except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in. When she was visiting one time in New York, Liz Peer sat in on a story meeting. “The dialogue was eighth grade boys’ locker room,” she told a reporter at the
Village Voice
. “To see the powerful decision-makers of a national magazine talking about tits and asses and farts! I thought,
I’m working for these clowns
.” Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the
Newsweek
of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. “The ‘hubba-hubba’ climate was tolerated,” he recalled. “I was told the editors would ask girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.”

Many guys looked at us as people they wanted to cheat on their wives with—and many women were happy to accommodate them. It was easy with suburban-based writers who stayed at hotels in the city on late Friday nights, but there was also sex in the office, literally. The infirmary, two tiny rooms with single beds, was the assignation of choice. Often a writer would go there to “take a nap” for an hour or two, albeit with a female staffer. The offices in the back of the book also served as action central. “You would open the door sometimes and there were these two heavy bodies against the door,” recalled Betsy Carter, “and they would both be on the floor drinking Jack Daniel’s or having sex under the desk.” The outrageous behavior often spilled out into the corridors. Pete A. and Pete B. (Axthelm and Bonventre), the bawdy Sports writers, would stand outside their twelfth-floor office and audibly rate the women on their physical attributes as they walked by. “It was loose and fraternizing and I thought it was a lot of fun,” remembered Maureen Orth, a former back-of-the-book writer, who hung out with the Sports guys. “But women were clearly subordinate.”

I, too, was caught up in the sexual energy of the place. In January 1968, Jeff and I married and moved to Greenwich Village to be closer to New York University, where he had enrolled in film school. After graduation, Jeff won an internship with Arthur Penn on
Alice’s Restaurant
and lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for several months; I visited on weekends. It looked as if his career was taking off. He made a short film with Viveca Lindfors and in 1969 was hired by Paramount—in the post–
Easy Rider
days—to make a movie based on Richard Fariña’s popular counterculture novel,
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

But there was something missing in our marriage and I felt emotionally abandoned. I didn’t realize just how unhappy I was until I found myself getting involved with a colleague at work. I wasn’t the only married researcher who was having an affair, but it scared me. One night I told Jeff about it because I knew the affair had more to do with problems in our marriage than with the guy. Jeff was furious, but then confessed that he, too, had been sleeping with someone. Maybe I had sensed it, I’m not sure. But I certainly wasn’t feeling loved. After several long, tearful conversations, we decided to stay together and each of us began psychotherapy.

Looking back, there was a lot of inappropriate behavior at
Newsweek,
the kind of “sexual favoritism” and “hostile work environment” that today might be considered illegal. The Nation researchers were referred to condescendingly as “the Dollies.” When a back-of-the-book researcher handed her senior editor some copy, he told her she had “perfectly pointed breasts.” One Saturday afternoon, as Betsy Carter was fitting her story into the allotted space at the makeup desk, a writer she barely knew walked by, leaned over, and planted a soft kiss on her neck. Jane Bryant Quinn remembered that when she was on the mail desk, “randy writers and editors would cruise the newcomers, letting them know that their so-called careers would be helped if they joined the guy for drinks.”

The short, gray-haired sixty-year-old man who ran the mail room was particularly sleazy. “After a while he would say, ‘I want to take you out for a soda at the ice cream parlor around the corner,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “I went with him once. He would tell you his life story, including his war stories and that he had a war wound on his back. Then he would say, ‘You have lovely hands,’ and would ask you to go to his apartment to massage his back. Nobody did, but nobody said anything and no one turned him in. We just tried to avoid him. Finally somebody thought it was revolting and reported him and he was fired. He was just a creepy little guy.”

One Monday my senior editor, Shew Hagerty, assigned me a story on a trendy new club in New York. It was a lascivious lounge where everyone disrobed, tied sheet-like togas around their bodies, and reposed on mattresses floating on pools of water as they were served cocktails. Shew was a gentleman and a good boss, but I was stunned when later that week he asked if he could come along with me. What could I say? To assure me that he was on the up-and-up, he invited Elisabeth Coleman, another of his researchers and a good friend of mine, to join us. I was never more humiliated than when I was lying on a large white cushion in a toga, with nothing underneath, across from my mustached, pipe-smoking boss, who sat there smiling, so pleased to be taking in the scene.

Nation researcher Kate Coleman (not related to Elisabeth), a proud member of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, described reporting a
Newsweek
cover story in 1967 on the rising use of marijuana. Her senior editor, Ed Diamond, asked if he could come to her apartment and smoke some pot—to better understand the phenomenon. Not wanting her to think he meant just the two of them, he asked her to invite some of her friends as well so he could witness the whole experience. Then, at the last minute, Ed asked Kate if she would mind if he brought along his wife, Adelina. According to Kate, who left
Newsweek
in 1968, both Ed and Adelina came to her pot party and they both took more than a few tokes. Ed later claimed that he never got high; he said he only got a “slight buzz.”

A few guys had a habit of hitting on women in ways that would qualify today as sexual harassment. One Thursday afternoon in Nation, Dick Boeth, a talented but volatile writer, kept harassing Margaret Montagno, who tried to ignore him. He hovered over her desk, speaking quietly but clearly hammering at her. When she didn’t respond, he said, very audibly, “Well, if you want to continue playing the thirty-year-old virgin from Columbus, Ohio, you go right ahead and do that.” Everyone in the bullpen heard it and Margaret, in tears, fled into Peter Goldman’s office. She closed the door and pleaded, “Can’t you do anything about him?” “I didn’t know what to do,” Peter later confessed. “When Dick was in one of his crazies you couldn’t deal with him. All the women were kind of scared of him. I should have nonviolently punched him out but I couldn’t. After Meg calmed down, she went back to work. I had work to do and I couldn’t do it in the eye of that storm, so I packed up and went home.”

Several editors and writers were known for having affairs with women who reported to them directly, most likely a firing offense—or at least a reassignment—today. One writer told me that his editor was sleeping with his researcher, putting him in an awkward position, to say the least. A married senior editor, who regularly used the infirmary for his trysts, had a liaison with a researcher in his section and then lobbied for her promotion, which she received. Several editors and writers, married and single, had flings with their researchers. One writer dated both his researcher and his reporter at the same time.

Jack Kroll, the Arts senior editor, was a notorious flirt and played favorites with his young researchers. When Mary Pleshette first started working as the Movies researcher, Jack, who was divorced, asked her out to dinner and then a second time. It was collegial at first, talking about movies and actors and Zero Mostel, a friend of Mary’s family. But when Jack asked her to dinner the third time, she told him she didn’t feel comfortable accepting his invitation. “In those days,” she recalled, “everyone knew that the third date meant you had to put out.”

Jack was a Falstaffian character. His belly seemed to inflate and deflate with the seasons. Hidden behind a desk stacked with books in an office piled high with dirty shirts (he couldn’t be bothered with sending them to the laundry), Jack was a polymath who could write brilliantly on just about anything. When Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down by Jack Ruby in a Dallas police station basement, the editors called him in to write the story. The lead was classic Kroll: “It was,” he wrote, “as if Damon Runyon had written the last line of a tragedy by Sophocles.”

But Jack could also be volatile and vindictive. One evening after a cultural event, a good friend of mine who was one of his researchers asked me to come home with her because Jack was following her. She said he had been stalking her for weeks, sometimes waiting outside her building until two in the morning. When we got into her apartment, we doused the lights and looked out the window. There was Jack, walking up and down the sidewalk looking up at her window. She was terrified and didn’t know what to do.

When she started dating the guy she would eventually marry, Jack became crazed. He asked her to lunch one day at a nearby Irish pub. “We started talking and he took out a box,” she recalled. “He opened it up and there was a diamond ring. Then he took out an envelope with two tickets to the Iranian film festival, which was to be our honeymoon. I almost threw up. Thank God I was in therapy and had a man in my life. I said, ‘You know, Jack, I love you but I’m not in love with you. This is overwhelming, this is incredible, you’re such a close friend.’ And he said, ‘If you don’t marry me, you’ll have to leave
Newsweek
.’”

She refused his offer and he turned nasty. In the weeks that followed, she told me, “He would walk up and down the hall and yell, ‘Where’s that c—?’ No one said anything, no one did anything.” Finally, one of the male writers offered to help her find another job. She left shortly thereafter.

My boss, Harry Waters, told me that when he came to the magazine in 1962, “it was a discreet orgy. When I interviewed for the job, my editor said to me, ‘The best part of the job is that you get to screw the researchers.’ That,” he went on, “reflected the position of women at the newsmagazines, both literally and figuratively. It reinforced in young women that that’s their position—it’s underneath. That’s as far as they can get.”

CHAPTER 4

Ring Leaders

J
UDY GINGOLD WAS SITTING at her weekly consciousness-raising meeting in Judy Levin’s tiny Greenwich Village apartment when it struck her. Levin, a friend from Judy’s college days, was working at Ogilvy & Mather and heavily involved in the downtown political scene. The group consisted of eight women, among them a married architect, a social worker, and a woman who worked for the Clergy Consultation Service, a network of twenty-six Christian and Jewish clergy that helped women find safe abortion services.

A precocious New Yorker with a hearty laugh, Judy was intrigued by the new sense of power that women were exploring in their CR groups. Developed by the New York Radical Women, consciousness-raising was a process of using women’s feelings and experiences to analyze their lives and society’s assumptions about women. A member of that group, Kathie Amatniek Sarachild, who had changed her last name to reflect her mother’s lineage—a common move for radical women in those days—had popularized the practice of consciousness-raising in a paper in 1968, which was widely disseminated. Judy’s group followed the rules of the Redstockings, another group of radical feminists, which took its name from the seventeenth-century term for intellectual women, “Blue Stockings,” and substituted “Red” for revolution. The rules required going around the room so that each woman was forced to contribute to the conversation. By airing their intimate feelings, women were to discover that what seemed like isolated, individual problems actually reflected common conditions all women faced. In other words, the personal was political.

The consciousness-raising session at Levin’s Waverly Street apartment was a particularly memorable one for Judy. “Betsy Steuart, who was an assistant at NBC and very beautiful and capable, was saying, ‘If I were Barbara Walters I would get ahead,’” she recalled, “and everyone was saying the same thing—‘if I were better I would get ahead.’ All of us in that room felt inadequate. And that’s when I thought, wait a minute, that’s not right. It’s not because we’re undeserving or not talented enough that we aren’t getting ahead, it’s how the world is run. It made me see that the problem wasn’t our fault—it was systemic. That was my first ‘click!’ moment.”

The famous “click!”—that moment of recognizing the sexual politics of a situation. Jane O’Reilly would later coin the term in the 1971 preview issue of
Ms.
magazine. O’Reilly was writing on “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” such as watching one’s husband step over a pile of toys that needed to be put away. But in fact, she was writing about every woman’s moment of truth. “The click! of recognition,” she wrote, “that parenthesis of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds—the moment that brings a gleam to our eyes and means the revolution has begun.”