The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone

by Robin Green

  They all took on more responsibility and, rising through the ranks and on the masthead, pushed to attend editorial meetings, pitched ideas, and organized office women’s consciousness-raising groups. They called themselves women now. It was Marianne, in fact, who decreed that Detroit backup girl groups now be referred to as women’s groups on the pages of Rolling Stone.

  Landau recalls Sarah, Marianne, Christine, Harriet, and Barbara (he and Barbara have been married thirty-some years now) as great editors who improved his writing “by a factor of approximately fifty percent.” Chris Hodenfield agrees, crediting them with turning him “from a chaotic hog-slopper into something resembling a writer.”

  Sisterhood had become powerful, and it stayed that way until Marianne Partridge took off, leaving the position of managing editor vacant. It was Sarah’s thought when Jann talked to her about it that the women of editorial could run the department by committee, so it took her, Christine, and Barbara by surprise when Harriet Fier stepped up to take on the job. They felt burned; they felt betrayed, especially by Harriet’s new access to Jann and the upper echelon.

  By the end of 1978, both Christine Doudna and Paul Scanlon had left Rolling Stone, and Sarah Lazin had taken the reins of the newly formed Rolling Stone Press. Only Barbara Downey stayed behind to work for Harriet Fier.

  When the second Big Sur editorial conference was held four years later in September of 1975, I had already decamped from Berkeley to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, but I would learn later that this time, in contrast to the first and in the spirit of the sea change that had occurred at the magazine, the entire Rolling Stone staff—editors and assistants alike, everybody in the art and advertising and circulation departments—were invited and they all went.

  Howard Kohn, a staff writer from ’75 to ’78 who, with David Weir, published an exclusive on the Patty Hearst kidnapping and political seduction, a huge coup for the magazine, wrote about this Big Sur retreat in the fortieth-reunion newsletter.

  [It was] one of those spas where you go about in a steamy half-naked state. [Notice he said half-naked.] And yet, when it came time for the class picture we were all Midwestern stiff. The photographer, kind of gawky, with glasses, wasn’t so California cool herself, but finally she got us settled by the side of the pool. Standing on the opposite side of the pool, frustrated by the group’s Midwestern stiffness and her inability to fit everyone into camera range, she simply jumped into the pool, several cameras round her neck, for a better shot. “Watch me,” she said, and, with camera to eye, she took a giant step backwards into the pool. The look on our faces! It was then I knew Annie Leibovitz had a future in this biz.

  It all sounds kinda…square, doesn’t it? At least in contrast to the first one, when Hunter tore up the highway and brought on the cops, when he later smashed up a wooden bench and dragged it into his room to use as firewood (his logic being that if they put a fireplace in your room, they ought to supply something to burn in it), and when he later pulled his car up over the curb to block the door to his motel room so as not to be disturbed while he—and Annie, who was with him in there—did whatever they were doing.

  Also, this conference wasn’t at Esalen, where, because of the above antics and everyone’s wee-hour carousing in the baths, Rolling Stone was no longer welcome, and, PC and egalitarian though it might very well have been, the conference was held instead up Route 1 at the less-hippiefied and considerably more luxe and straight Ventana Inn.

  I hadn’t been happy when David Felton told me that I wasn’t invited to that first Big Sur editorial conference, not at all. He agreed that it didn’t seem fair. But that’s as far as it went. I didn’t complain. And when he told me that I could come down the second night, when wives and girlfriends—and Laurel Gonsalves—were invited, I didn’t say no. Instead, on that second day, I got in the car I’d bought from Annie—a little navy-blue Sunbeam Alpine convertible—and drove, top down, to Big Sur.

  Was that bad? Should I be ashamed? Should I have had more pride than to go there on someone else’s coattails, some dude I was banging, for shit’s sake? Well, I went anyway.

  And if I hadn’t gone, had taken some stand, had told Jann to fuck himself, I might have a brave story to tell now, but I also might have missed one of the most vivid, transcendent, and beautiful moments of my life.

  It happened when we were in the hot springs in the side of the cliffs at Esalen. I was naked in the cool night air, but I was all heated up from the mineral baths, so I could stand there looking out onto the ocean, feeling the ocean breeze on my body, the water evaporating from my skin. The full moon shone in the night sky, laying before it a stream of white light on the undulating black sea. The mescaline had brought everything into sharp focus and at the same time slowed everything waaaay down, so I could see what I now saw: moiling sea and, in the distance, backlit by the moonlight, shiny and sleek black creatures, preposterously huge, things big as Cadillacs propelling themselves out of the water up and into the air, then arcing and plunging back down headfirst into the sea. They were whales, of course, a pod of them fluking one after the other on their migration south, and even at the time, stoned out of my gourd, I knew this was a peak experience—a heightened sense of wonder, awe, ecstasy, a defining moment of self-actualization, something my boyfriend David Leach had searched for since he’d read Maslow in the early sixties and led me in his pursuit of tripping on psychedelics in Vermont, where we saw the pixelated rainbow of colors that compose the white of the snow, and later gamboling on a beach in Mexico, where a Frisbee sailed toward me sooooo slowly that I could merely reach out and pluck it from the air. And now here I’d found one on my own, my own peak drug experience, in a seaside cave in Big Sur surrounded by my luminous cronies at Rolling Stone.

  Situated on California’s Central Coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific, Big Sur is known as one of the most beautiful coastlines anywhere in the world. Its name derives from the original Spanish, el país grande del sur, meaning “the big country of the south”—south of Monterey, that is, then the capital city of Alta California, ceded to the U.S. by Mexico in 1848, a region all but unreachable until the 1930s, when the Carmel–San Simeon Highway was completed. Still protected and preserved, Big Sur remains isolated, rustic, mythic.

  Henry Miller lived there; Jack Kerouac visited, and Edward Weston, Richard Brautigan, Ferlinghetti. I read recently that Hunter himself had worked right there at the hot springs in 1961 as a security guard and caretaker before he’d been kicked out for some infraction.

  I loved Big Sur. I’d been there in the years before the Rolling Stone editorial conference and I would go after with the man who became my husband and even once with my mother. But the very first time I saw Big Sur was in June 1969 with David Leach in the Firebird on our way up the coast to make a life in Berkeley. David and I had left Chicago the month before and taken the scenic route west. He was the driver and that was his way—back roads and detours and frequent stops. Me, I’d be on Route 80, blasting toward my uncertain future. Whenever I’m lost on the road, even now, my tendency is to drive faster.

  Not David Leach. On our trip west, we detoured to Carbondale, Illinois, where he’d heard there was a beautiful swimming hole, then to St. Louis to see the arch. We stopped in the middle of nowhere so he could photograph a fence, and we stopped at the Grand Canyon to stand at the edge of what looked to me then, fearful of the future as I was, like too vast a vacancy. Then it was on to New Mexico, where we stayed for days and days, first in the dusty little town of Cerritos, not far from Santa Fe, to visit ex-junkie U of Chicago friends of David’s, there to rehabilitate themselves and the town’s decrepit opera house, to which they hoped to attract performers and artists. We slept in a sleeping bag on hard earth and woke at dawn to the sight of a stud horse in a corral not fifteen feet from us, his long, dry stud’s penis hanging hugely to the ground.

  Soon, with other of David’s friends who were there—Steve Ford and
Chris, who later showed up at our place in Berkeley—we drove into the Jemez Mountains, parked, and hiked in. Having led a denatured suburban life, I’d never hiked in the woods, never camped, never slept in a sleeping bag until days before. I’d never squatted and pissed and shat in the woods, had had no real idea we were animals.

  When at last we emerged from the mountain and stopped at a dusty little general store, I caught a glimpse of myself in one of those ridiculously small mirrors they have on sunglass displays and was amazed and gratified to see how like a savage I looked. My beautiful city boots, made of fine leather and brass clasps, were shredded from the hike, and I threw them in the trash.

  David and I drove on to Los Angeles and stopped for a night just off Mulholland Drive at the home of the parents of another of David’s Chicago friends, the aspiring artist Andrea who would later come and live with us on Fox Court in Berkeley and who would be one of the reasons I got the fuck out of there.

  Andrea’s father was a director of TV shows—Bonanza, The Rifleman, 77 Sunset Strip, shows I’d grown up on. I was awed. I’d never met anyone like that. As when the year before I’d looked longingly into those Eleventh Street Greenwich Village town houses on my way to work at Marvel, I had no idea how a person rose to these heights, this career, these sweeping San Fernando Valley views. I had no inkling that one day I’d have a career in TV and my own house in the hills above Sunset Strip with an even ritzier view, mine of the entire LA Basin from downtown past Century City to the Pacific.

  When, over cocktails, Andrea’s TV-director father asked me what my ambitions were, I shyly told him I wanted to be a writer—something I completely forgot I said until years later when I saw him at a party at his son’s house in Hancock Park in LA and he reminded me of the conversation. At that same party, moments later, the horny bastard pulled me into an alcove, pressed me against the wall, put his hands all over me, and tried to stick his tongue in my mouth until I managed to twist away from him. I’d heard about the rapaciousness of Hollywood types, but this was my first—and last—actual encounter.

  David had heard about Big Sur and after we said our good-byes to Andrea’s parents, rather than blast up Highway 5 straight to the Bay Area, we instead found our way to the coast at Ventura, bypassing Leo Carrillo State Park on the Pacific Coast Highway south where in ten years my friend Ronnie would take her life.

  But now, on a beautiful June day in 1969, we were heading north on California Route 1, passing Pismo Beach and Morro Bay, not bothering with Hearst Castle—of no interest to David Leach—finally reaching Ragged Point, where the coast road turned mountainous and hazardous. Top down, Miles on the console cassette player, the Firebird was in its element on this twisting, winding, unimaginably beautiful drive, the Pacific gleaming to the west, its waves crashing below against the rocky cliffs as we passed Lucia and entered the Big Sur region.

  The road darkened as forests of redwood rose around us. David spotted a road to the right ahead and we followed it into the redwoods, parked, and then walked in among the giant trees, soon finding a place to sit so David could roll a joint. He set to his task, and, as always, I watched him as he slipped a single, delicate paper from the pack, creased it lengthwise between his long-nailed fingers, held it gingerly with one hand as he carefully shook perfectly cleaned pot out of a film canister along the crease, set the canister down, rolled the joint between index fingers and thumbs, placed it entirely into his mouth, then drew it slowly out between his plush lips to wet and seal it, and voilà! One perfect, tight, and compact Chicago joint.

  He lit it, inhaled, and held the smoke in as he offered the joint to me. I never refused it. I thought I’d disappoint him if I did. I didn’t want him to know how I felt, which was extremely ambivalent. I never knew if it would have a bad effect. Make me afraid or paranoid. I told David none of this. I simply took a toke and held it in as long as I thought I was supposed to and/or until I couldn’t anymore.

  This time, however, the anxiety that was always in my chest receded. I could feel myself slowing down, relaxing. We were, after all, in a really, really beautiful place, I now realized, quiet and still, the sun filtering through the tops of the tall redwoods down to us on the soft forest floor. I looked around me and saw that we had landed, literally, in clover, a carpet of clover bigger than East Coast clover, heartier and greener. And then I saw it, right there next to me. I blinked. I couldn’t believe it. I reached out and plucked it from the ground.

  “David, look,” I said, holding it out to him. “A four-leaf clover! Isn’t that supposed to be good luck?”

  “Wow,” he said. He took it and looked at it and gave it back to me with what seemed like a hurt or sad expression on his face. It made me want to apologize because I’d been the one to find it. I wonder now if, had I been a better person or if I’d known then how it would all turn out, that it might have meant so much to him to have received a good-luck sign, would I have somehow arranged for him to be the one to find it?

  Soon, David tamped out the joint and put the roach in the film canister and we went back to the Firebird, where I slipped the four-leaf clover into the cellophane on the side of my pack of Old Gold Filters—I smoked one or two a day, though David said he didn’t understand how I could stand that cheap tobacco. He never mentioned the four-leaf clover again and neither did I, but when we settled in Berkeley I bought a cheap little carved box imported from India, the kind inlaid with shell and lined in maroon felt, and kept it in there—until, in the course of moving several times in the following years, I lost track of it. It and a lot else, including David Leach.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

  They say that if you can remember the sixties (and I suppose this applies to some of the seventies too), then you weren’t really there. And to some extent this is true, because it all had a dreamlike quality, fueled by raging young hormones and anxiety about the present and the future, also by marijuana and psychedelic drugs, sure, but it was mostly trippy because of the music then; we had “the winning ticket in the lottery of life,” as one rock critic said of our generation.

  Bruno Bettelheim had sniffed at us, calling what we called the counterculture nothing more than a prolonged adolescence, and maybe it looked like that to the stodgy old fart—our rebelliousness, our fuck-you attitude and stiff middle finger to it all. But we had plenty to be pissed off about, had lost both Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Che, and Malcolm X. We were pissed off someone like “I am not a crook” Nixon was president, pissed off about the war and Nixon’s lies about Cambodia and what we rightly saw as power turning an increasingly blind eye to Eisenhower’s warnings of a military-industrial complex. And don’t get me started on Ronald Reagan.

  And then in quick succession, we lost Janis, Jimi, and Jim Morrison, bang, bang, bang, and it was hard not to feel they’d somehow martyred themselves for us, giving us everything with their music, which had somehow cost them their lives.

  But it wasn’t all anger and protest. In Berkeley especially, we were even then becoming ecologically conscious—recycling, composting, flushing the toilet only when we shat. Some of us traveled north to plant vineyards in Napa and Sonoma where there had been very few grapes grown for wine. Others founded organic food co-ops and set about inventing a new American cuisine. We lived communally. We shared wealth. We concocted elaborate vegetarian Indian feasts, mixing together our own curries from electric red and yellow spices, fragrant cloves, cumin seeds, cardamom pods, and cinnamon sticks—who had even known that the ground cinnamon in our mothers’ spice racks came from curled bark like this, and that cloves were good for something else besides decorating a baked ham? We could feed thirteen people a vegetarian feast for ten dollars.

  And we were artistically creative, bought anvils and hammers and acetylene torches and learned how to forge silver jewelry, took belly-dancing lessons in storefronts on Telegraph Avenue, transcending our culture by emulating the fluid hip movements and rib-cag
e shimmies of the Middle East.

  We pored through the just-published Our Bodies, Ourselves to learn the stuff our mothers had been too uptight or ignorant to teach us. We gathered in women’s groups on the carpeted floors of funky Berkeley living rooms and with hand mirrors and speculums looked up inside ourselves and beheld for the first time the inner walls of our vaginas and the fleshy, tiny-holed knobs of our cervixes and saw that it was not, after all, the dark and dirty place we had imagined but something immaculate and pretty, pink and pearly.

  And all of the above—except for the communal thing and planting vineyards and founding American cuisine—was me. Stuff I did. How I lived my life in the Bay Area in those years.

  My husband says that every generation has its own music, but was there ever one as great as ours? My music and its life and times provide a veritable template for the sentimental education of my age cohort, starting in the 1950s in Providence where I was a teenybopper—Ronnie and I dancing the Locomotion and the Monkey and the Frug. Scarborough Beach had a jukebox on the boardwalk, and a summer teenage crowd would gather around Ronnie in her scandalous—to her father, anyway—pink wool bathing suit to watch her dance. She could dance white and she could dance Negro, as she would do professionally years later on a platform above a bar in what was known as the Combat Zone district of Boston during one of her temporary leaves from the loony bin, with a change of bikinis and switching a blond wig for an afro, seeming with her movements also to change race.

  On a summer day in 1962, when I was walking with Ronnie down Blackstone Boulevard on our way to sit by the Seekonk River and smoke cigarettes, a fire-engine-red 1959 Chevy Impala convertible, top down, tail fins flaring out like manta-ray wings, pulled along beside us. David Leach was at the wheel, Peter Winslow, a boy I knew from Hebrew school at Temple Beth El, riding shotgun. The car stopped. We stopped. Did we want to go for a ride?