by Robin Green
It wasn’t long before Ronnie developed mixed feelings about the rock. Was that the only way she could get her father’s approval, by swimming to the point of exhaustion across a choppy, one-mile expanse of bay?
We, the children of upwardly striving East Side Jews, were expected to perform—get into Ivies, become doctors or marry them—to reflect well on our parents and boost their status in the community.
We were, as Bob Dylan wrote of soldiers of war, only pawns in their game. But the times, as he also wrote, were a-changin’, and it was a change Ronnie and I could feel. We began to spend time in the attic of my house, a dirty, dusty storeroom that became a kind of clubhouse where we read Beat poets, even copying one we particularly liked by Gregory Corso onto the wall:
My mother hates the sea
my sea especially
I warned her not to
it was all I could do
Two years later
the sea ate her
Ronnie was at my side—or, more accurately, I was at hers—when we first heard Bob Dylan on the record player in Ronnie’s older sister’s friend Laurie Bernstein’s front hall. Laurie had been living in Greenwich Village, had played an autoharp in a band behind Dylan, and brought home his first album, the one with the picture of him on the cover wearing a worker’s cap and a serious expression.
I felt his music spoke right to me, but Ronnie was finding her own way into the music of protest now, soaking up Odetta, Mahalia Jackson. We’d spend long hours in her bedroom, Ronnie picking out chords on her guitar, singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “House of the Rising Sun,” and “Amazing Grace,” this last so soulfully it would bring me to tears—or glee, as happened one afternoon when the family’s big black maid Rosa came storming into the room.
“That there’s a religious song,” she yelled at Ronnie, “and you is ruining it!”
Rosa stormed out. We were stunned, and then we collapsed into helpless laughter. But Ronnie was bothered. She got sad. We were moody teenagers by then, but Ronnie was moodier than most. Afraid that Rosa had heard us laughing, worried that she had really offended Rosa, she put her guitar back in its case and went to find Rosa and apologize. It was time for dinner anyway, so I went home.
When we were in first grade, most of the kids were Jewish, occasionally Irish, always white, but in second grade, two African-American girls showed up—Pat Chapman and Clarice Caldwell. Ronnie thought it would be a good idea to bring them home with us after school for milk and cookies.
While her mother was in the kitchen fixing our snack and we four were in living room, Ronnie’s half-deaf grandmother Lizzie, who lived downstairs, came in. She saw all of us playing on the floor and hurried back to the kitchen, and we could hear her too-loud, deaf-lady, Russian-accented voice saying, “Pearl! Pearl! There’s shvartzes in the living room!”
Was this Ronnie’s way of smoking out the racial prejudice she sensed her parents and their friends felt? Is this why, in sixth grade, she chose as her boyfriend Harry Bailey, the only African-American boy in class? It is certainly one of the reasons why her parents decided not to let her go to Nathan Bishop, the public junior high right across the street from their house, and sent her instead to Gordon, a private school downtown.
This was the year I began to lose Ronnie, although I never lost her completely, not even in my glory year, 1971, when I became what I had always dreamed of being, a published writer, and Ronnie was locked up on her second stay at McLean, a mental hospital outside Boston.
* * *
Chapter Six
1971
The year 1971 was a glorious one all around—for rock and roll, for Rolling Stone, certainly for me as a freelancer, and, despite the ridiculously long hours and low pay, for everybody who worked at the magazine. Just to be part of what was going on inside the brick walls of that converted warehouse on Third Street, in those labyrinthine cubicles and copydesks and drawing boards and deadlines—it felt like being inside the heartbeat of the most happening thing on the planet, or at least in the world of journalism. It became part of our very identities.
As one associate editor at the time put it, “We were young—we were mainly in our mid- to late twenties—the energy level was intense every day, and we were putting out a word-perfect, national magazine every two weeks.” An atmosphere enhanced, he might have added, by the frequent consumption of mind-altering contraband—not by everyone, not all the time, but there was an aura.
Everybody, I’d learn much later, was sleeping with everybody—editorial assistants with editors, editors with interview subjects, ad reps with celebrities, and everybody in the art department with each other.
Many of the editors and writers—males, every last one of them—had been drafted from old-line newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and most left wives and families behind (at least for a time; at least, for one guy, until his wife threatened to put her head in the oven if her husband didn’t stop fooling around at work). They found themselves suddenly set loose in the epicenter of the countercultural sexual revolution, surrounded at the office by the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone, editorial, art, ad, and production acolytes there at all hours helping bosses with the work of putting out a magazine, and also doing their filing, fetching their coffee, fucking their brains out.
One male staffer at the 2007 San Francisco RS reunion said, “I miss how smart everybody was, which, in my mind, was the single sexiest thing about working there.”
Like the editors, and like me, the girls of Rolling Stone had escaped straighter fates—the publishing world of Manhattan, academia. We girls stopped shaving our legs and underarms, let the hair on our heads go wild, went braless. Picture me in a salmon-colored bridesmaid’s gown at my college friend’s wedding on Long Island in June 1970, poofs of armpit hair poking out. The mother of the bride was not happy.
And neither was my own mother when I’d shown up in Providence after the wedding with the clothing of a Berkeley hippie, outfits like the floor-length Indian-paisley-print wrap dress that I wore to a barbecue at Ronnie’s parents’ house. A few winters before, in Chicago, I’d knit a long white wool scarf, and I wore it that day as a shawl. To mock me, my mother, embarrassed by my hair, my dress, and especially my shawl, came to the cookout wrapped in a commodious white wool afghan crocheted by my grandmother.
“Robin looks beautiful,” Pearl Barad scolded her. “You only make yourself look foolish.”
Of course, Mrs. Barad had bigger problems. A few months before, having recently been released from McLean the first time, Ronnie had come to the family dinner dressed like a nun, confounding poor old deaf Grandma Lizzie.
“What’s going on?” she had wailed. “Is she a Catholic now?”
Compared with a nun’s habit, a hippie dress that looked like someone’s college bedspread was nothing. Besides, I’d come east with an actual assignment to write an article about Marvel Comics for a national magazine, even if no one there had ever heard of the magazine. Shouldn’t my mother be cutting me a little slack?
My success the following year, after that first assignment, served to justify everything—the waitressing, the wandering, the money spent on what seemed like a wasted education. Whereas a year ago, when someone asked my parents about me, I’d been the butt of a joke, the two of them rolling their eyes, saying I was trying to find myself and right now thought I might be in California.
Well, ha! I had found myself, and here I was in the summer of ’71, when that photo on the beach was taken, a star! In Providence again, but this time for a story on Black Sabbath, I took my parents’ friend Jane Sackett with me to their concert and then later quoted her in my article when a Cranston metalhead kept asking her how old she was and she finally saucily said, “Fuck off.”
Now Jane had her fifteen minutes of fame and I was famous in my parents’ circle for having given it to her, me, an East Side Jewish girl who had made it on my
own in the big world. The only other girl known to have made it out of our golden ghetto into a writer’s life was a doctor’s daughter, Jane Kramer. Her story was myth: Born in 1938, a private school, then a Vassar BA with honors, an MA from Columbia, and then, and then—a writer with her own column in the New Yorker, Letter from Europe, no less. The New Yorker, for crying out loud! Besides Life and Time, it was the only magazine in my house growing up. The holy magazine grail beside which my own awesome journalistic achievements would forever pale.
Jane Kramer wrote books, made documentaries, lived in Paris, married a famous anthropologist by the weird and wonderful name of Vincent Crapanzano. As fate would have it, I finally met Jane Kramer—and Dr. Crapanzano—two years ago at a party given by creative intellectual types at an apartment on Central Park West. She lived downstairs. Someone introduced me to her. My eyes slammed open.
“You’re J-Jane Kramer?” I stammered. “From Providence?”
It was like meeting Gandhi or Simone de Beauvoir. Someone who inhabited unreachable realms. But now here was this tiny Jewish woman, seven years older than me and looking it, though her eyes still shone with the bright, mischievous gleam of the French-looking gamine I’d seen and envied in photos on book jackets and in the Times.
“I’m from Providence!” I said. “I’ve heard about you all my life! I can’t believe I’m meeting you!”
She wasn’t rude, exactly. She just seemed basically uninterested in hearing about Providence, in talking about it, or her escape from it, or mine. But when I mentioned later in the conversation that it was my work on The Sopranos that had brought me and my husband to New York, she went apeshit.
“Vincent!” she called to the little white-haired man across the room, her husband. “Come here! These people wrote for The Sopranos!”
I don’t know if Gandhi or de Beauvoir would have had the same reaction to The Sopranos, but Joan Didion had and so had her husband, John Dunne, when I’d finally met them face-to-face at a party at their apartment on the Upper East Side years before. They’d gone completely and surprisingly and gushingly apeshit over The Sopranos.
But all of this was decades and a continent away from 1971 and San Francisco and the life of a girl at Rolling Stone. Jane Kramer and Joan Didion had grown up in the 1950s and had formed themselves in the world of Manhattan publishing and intellectual life, but we—the girls in the office and I—had come of age in the 1960s and, heeding the voices of our inner rock chicks, had lit out for the territory and landed, for one reason or another, in the Bay Area, where, in America in 1971, everything was happening.
Our cultural shift went beyond hairy armpits. We liked to smoke dope and get high and listen to music. We liked to dance to it. We liked to get sweaty. We were game and adventurous, enjoyed being desired, and were up for it—we had the pill. We were liberated—from our parents, at least, and in society, if not in the workplace.
We didn’t see ourselves as victims. We were proactive in our sex lives. We were hungry for experience and beat men to it. If it was okay for men to fuck around, why shouldn’t we? We sought equality in this way. We felt like we’d found it. It didn’t feel like promiscuity; it felt like freedom. It felt powerful. If there was an emotional—or even professional—cost, it wasn’t apparent, not then. Consequences weren’t even on the radar. There was no such thing as AIDS.
In the nomenclature of the times, we were “chicks.” The term was aspirational. It was cool to be a chick—a hip chick like the chicks in swinging London, a Marianne Faithfull or Jane Birkin, or the more relaxed and sartorially deconstructed hippie-chick version from Berkeley or the Haight. As chicks, we peered at the world of men from under our bangs or posed for cameras with our heads tilted coquettishly, projecting a harmless and nonthreatening vibe. And we weren’t threatening anything—not yet, anyway.
In this world, the world of rock and roll, men ran the show. They were the rock stars. The journalists and editors were men too. Even before that, in college, it was guys who’d been the ones to grab the microphones at sit-ins and demonstrations. A chick’s mandate: to be by their sides at the revolution, looking hip.
There were three main chicks serving as editorial assistants at Rolling Stone in the years I was there: Sarah Lazin, Harriet Fier, and Christine Doudna. They were beautiful girls—a job requirement; Harriet told me that she’d been told that straight out at her interview—and all three wildly overqualified to be office slaves.
Sarah, who signed on in 1971, she of the pale gray eyes behind her granny glasses and untamed explosion of hair, had a master’s in history from NYU, had lived in Rome, Milan, and Paris, had gone to see a boyfriend in the Peace Corps in India and then come to San Francisco for another boy who had been living in Mendocino in a tree and who, she had discovered, was strung out on drugs. They’d set up house in the Haight, but she left him in ’69 after he was busted for robbery in Marin.
In 1972 came bright-eyed, brown-haired Harriet, a recent cum laude graduate of Smith who, visiting college friends in San Francisco, had stumbled into a part-time night-switchboard job at Rolling Stone and from there into the office proper. A crew from French television had come to film a documentary about Jann and Rolling Stone, and Sarah had done her best, translating with the French she knew, but then Harriet took over the task, and once Jann heard her perfect, fluent French, she was made.
Christine was next, a tall, willowy blonde who showed up in a white silk blouse, no bra, for her interview with Joe Eszterhas, who felt he needed an assistant who catered mainly to himself. Sarah, who had more than enough on her plate, remembers seeing Christine and thinking, Oh, brother, this is all I need, but Christine turned out to be another workhorse, one who’d pulled her weight at the Washington Post in Hong Kong, taught French at a university in Lagos, come to San Francisco fresh from a liberating divorce, and was out of a job when the city’s short-lived incarnation of Saturday Review folded. There had been a second girl up for the job but it was clear that Joe wanted this beauty, though she would prove to be the rare girl there he didn’t bed.
The three were adventurous girls who happened to be, like me, among the scant 10 percent female readership of Rolling Stone and who came to work there because they thought the magazine was groovy and it would be a groovy place to be.
I knew none of this about them then. I didn’t have much to do with them. I was someone separate and apart. It was who I’d been at Brown too, skulking around the perimeters of the Ivy college scene in Beatnik black, a drawing board under my arm as I headed down the hill to RISD to indulge myself in a minor in art, the townie state-scholarship girl writer of short stories and editor of the literary magazine, a loner of sorts.
Was I shy? Socially backward and inept? Did I harbor an inferiority complex? A shame of being Jewish? Or did I think that I was better, cooler than everybody else, those smug, goofy frat boys, lawyers and bankers in waiting, and their counterparts at Pembroke, there for the sole purpose of finding husbands? All of the above. And it was simply the person I was and am. Like right now, as I enter these words into my computer, I am at a spa near Edith Wharton’s house in the Berkshires where I have come for a week to write and work out in the gym and do yoga and such, and I notice that I prefer to sit not at the communal table for single guests but by myself, where I can ponder everybody else.
In those days, when I slunk (or was it strode?) into the Rolling Stone office to deliver a manuscript to my editor or get his notes, I imagined I could feel the cold eyes of the editorial assistants upon me, could sense their hate rays, suspicion, and dislike.
“No, we envied you,” Sarah told me of those days. “We admired you. You were the only girl writer and you were really good. And you had this gorgeous body. We wanted to be you.”
Ironic, because now, looking back, I realize that while I might have felt like queen shit swanning (or was it ducking?) in and out, I felt envy too. Because those girls had one another, both in and out of the office. Sarah lived in back of a small Victorian i
n Noe Valley, the main house occupied by Jann’s beautiful British secretary, Stephanie Franklin (Jann loved her English accent answering his calls as well as the fact that she was trained in shorthand so he could dictate to her). Stephanie and her boyfriend had moved in when guitarist/heroin addict/future lover of Jann’s wife Sandy Bull moved out (leaving blood on the walls).
Managing editor Paul Scanlon—a mustachioed army veteran from a straight newspaper, a lover of jazz if not rock and roll—separated from his wife, and after he’d made his way through girls in the art department and publicity, he ended up with Sarah, who’d been patiently waiting. He moved in with her, and when Jann’s secretary decamped for New York, they moved into that flat and Harriet Fier moved into Sarah’s old place in back.
Their house—and the homes of other Rolling Stone employees—were party scenes. Ben Fong-Torres and Dianne, Harriet and her artist boyfriend, Sarah and Paul, and other staff members would gather even when they weren’t working. There’d be potluck suppers, Charlie Perry showing up with some esoteric Arabic dish he’d made and a bottle of the good wine he’d begun to break out at the office. (Christine had her own scene, her and her journalist boyfriend and his colleagues from Newsweek and the now-defunct San Francisco Saturday Review.) Together, they’d go to catch acts around town at the Boarding House and the Matrix, the Avalon and the Fillmore—Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, the Dead, Steve Martin, and Bette Midler in her pre–New York Continental Baths days.
But mostly the girls’ life was at the office, serving the boys—Jann and Paul and Ben and Charlie and David Felton and Grover Lewis, plus outside writers Tim Cahill, Tim Findley, Timothy Crouse, Tim Ferris, Pat Sullivan, Chet Flippo, and Tom Burke, plus a string of B-level freelancers, all men, an art staff always headed by a man, male typesetters, and male bosses on the business side (except for Laurel Gonsalves), all the way on down, including people in the mailroom. The in-house testosterone levels had doubled in 1971 when Joe Eszterhas was added to the mix, macho man with his big Hungarian face, pipe in mouth, and hunter’s Buck knife he liked to flash, writing prose like “the great stone canyons of New York City,” chronicling the seamy side—drug wars and executions, et cetera—although he’d find himself consistently out-macho’d by the presence on the magazine’s pages of Hunter S. Thompson.
