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

by Robin Green

  Besides the longer pieces and cover stories, I was assigned other stuff. Again under the byline White House Staff, I compiled from various newspaper items an account of Nixon’s visit to China, the first by any U.S. president, accurately if sarcastically quoting him as saying of the Great Wall that it “looked like a postcard” and was, indeed, “a great wall.” (Ironically, and weirdly, Nixon’s trip to China and what might have caused his attraction to the place would prove to be one of the reasons I fell in love with my husband. But that would occur years from then.)

  I was also, under my own byline, sent out to cover local Democratic caucuses proposing delegates to the party’s Miami convention in April, which I dutifully reported, though I have absolutely no memory of having been there, not even when years later I came across the article I wrote about it. My heart just hadn’t been in it. I was no political reporter, and I would prove this on my next assignment in May, when Jann sent me to cover a fund-raising concert at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium for candidate George McGovern.

  This story I did remember doing. Jann was there because stars were there volunteering to perform and usher on McGovern’s behalf. Judy Collins, Merry Clayton, Chicago, and Mama Cass were set to sing, and Goldie Hawn, Jon Voight, and Michelle Phillips were among the ushers greeting concertgoers in the foyer. And—

  “Look, there’s Jack Nicholson,” Jann said. And there he was, lounging against a wall outside a door to the auditorium.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Wow.” I’d seen Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces and now there was Jack Nicholson, in person, mere steps away. I stood there gaping.

  “Well, be a reporter, go talk to him,” Jann said with his usual impatience. “Go on. Ask him why he came out for McGovern.”

  I steeled myself and walked over. “Hi,” I said. “I’m a reporter from Rolling Stone and I was wondering if you could say what brought you here tonight on behalf of George McGovern?”

  Jack Nicholson gave me a level Jack Nicholson look. Then he said in his flat Nicholson voice, “Gimme a break, okay?”

  What could I possibly say after that? I was wondering what in the fuck I should do next when all of a sudden Warren Beatty, who’d been talking to Jann, made a beeline from Jann to me.

  “Hey,” he said, “I wanna talk to you, come on.”

  He took my hand and pulled me along into the auditorium, down the left aisle, and to the stage. Everyone seated could see me, Robin Green from Providence, Rhode Island, being led backstage by none other than Warren Beatty himself from Bonnie and Clyde and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, arguably one of the foxiest guys on the planet.

  We went up some stairs and behind the curtain, and while a band was setting up, he sat me down on a backstage sawhorse and sat himself down inches away facing me and proceeded to talk to me, or at me, rapid-fire and practically spitting in my face, about McGovern, about why he had come out in support and why he had convinced these stars and more like them to do the same, here and at six venues around the country, that it wasn’t just about money from the concerts, it was about signing up young people to go out and knock on doors, and how important it was, how absolutely imperative, that Nixon be defeated.

  Meanwhile, a backstage door to the outside opened, and Julie Christie, his then-girlfriend, appeared and hung there, a limousine behind her in the fading California light, calling in a plaintive English accent, “War-ren, c’mon, the driver’s here.”

  Warren Beatty held up his hand to signal he’d be a minute and continued his harangue against Nixon.

  “C’mon, War-ren,” Julie Christie said, “we’re going for Chinese food.”

  Whereupon Warren Beatty told me that he lived at the Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills and if I were ever in LA I should give him a call and come over and we’d finish the conversation.

  Warren Beatty left. I sat there for a moment watching as he joined Julie Christie and they slipped away. What does it say about me that I much preferred Jack Nicholson?

  I never ran into Jack Nicholson again, and I didn’t feel anything like his vibe until September 1976, in my second year pursuing an MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and my first year as a teaching/writing fellow, for which I’d been tasked to instruct undergrads at the university in the art of writing fiction.

  I’d asked my students to come to my office individually so I could learn a little about them, and this one kid came in. He wasn’t a kid, really, he was older than the other students and rougher-looking, had been late to class that first day, had come in sweating and out of breath and taken a seat behind me, and I could sense him breathing there and I was nervous enough teaching my first class of anything ever without some sweaty grown man breathing down my neck—and now here he was in my office for a student/teacher conference.

  “Hi, c’mon in, have a seat!” I said in my briskest teacher-y voice. He sat down in the chair beside my desk, lounging more than sitting, like he was home in an easy chair watching baseball. I learned that he was from Cedar Rapids, about twenty miles north, and was attending the university on the GI Bill, having been newly discharged from the U.S. Army. It had been the tail end of the Vietnam War and he hadn’t seen battle; he’d been stateside for two years, guarding a safe in a small, locked room in a motor-pool office in Texas.

  “Still,” I said brightly, “the army! You should have plenty of interesting things to write about!”

  He regarded me levelly, as Jack Nicholson had, like he didn’t know who to feel sorrier for, me or him. “Lady,” he said, “nothing interesting happens to you in the army.”

  I was pretty much done for right then. His name was Mitch. He’d been living in his car. Before the army he’d worked in a Wilson meatpacking plant in Cedar Rapids and also for Quaker Oats, loading fifty-pound sacks of oats into freight cars. I didn’t know it then, but this was the man I would one day marry.

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  A Big Journalistic No-No

  The year 1972 was drawing to a close. The Dow Jones average was 1,020. The average cost of a new house was $27,550. A gallon of gas, fifty-five cents. In September, eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by Arab terrorists at the Munich Olympics, and in November and despite Warren Beatty’s efforts, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history.

  Then 1973 dawned, a year in which the Dow and gas prices would fall, housing costs would rise, Israel would defeat the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War, and Watergate would send Richard Nixon away in disgrace.

  My year also proved to be a mixed bag. It was a year in which, with four cover stories and a bunch of other work in Rolling Stone to my credit, I’d be sent off on a prize assignment, one that had real potential for national notice. A year in which I’d pack my few belongings, leave Tamalpais Road for good, and run away with David Felton. A year in which I’d travel the country and the world. Sleep with who knows how many more men.

  It was also a year in which I’d blow the prime assignment, lose my place on the masthead, blow an assignment for another magazine, break my leg in a bicycle mishap in Providence, and, trapped upstairs in my parents’ house with a plaster cast from groin to foot, discover that I had the crabs, an affliction that would have led my mother, were she to find out about it, to burn the sheets, my bed, and possibly the entire house—with me in it.

  But that would be the next July and now it was fall of ’72 and Jann was asking me to write an in-depth article on the children of Robert F. Kennedy. There had been ten zillion stories about John-John and Caroline after Jack Kennedy was killed—the public couldn’t get enough of them. But who knew anything at all about these kids of Bobby’s? There were eleven of them then (one of them later died of a drug overdose). The youngest had been in Ethel’s womb when her husband was murdered.

  More than four years had passed since RFK had been shot three times in the head at the Ambassador Hotel. Who were his kids? Had they seen the TV footage? How were they doing? How were they coping? There’d been t
alk—the older boys had been in and out of trouble, one kicked out of school for fighting, the other arrested for pot possession, and the younger kids were said to be allowed to run wild in the neighborhood, both at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod and Hickory Hill outside DC.

  The kids were all back east, Kathleen and Bobby Junior in college, but Jann could arrange for me to meet Joe, the oldest boy—the one who’d been kicked out of several prep schools for his temper and who, after a year at UC Berkeley, had recently dropped out but had remained in the Bay Area. (It wouldn’t be until after he’d gone back east the following summer that a Jeep he was driving overturned, fracturing one of his brother David’s vertebrae and permanently paralyzing David’s girlfriend, for which he was charged with reckless driving and had his license suspended.)

  For now, however, he was just a big, affable twenty-year-old with a mouthful of large white teeth, kind of goofy and vague and lost. We’d agreed to take a long walk through San Francisco, and we met in North Beach on a sunny afternoon. I had thought I’d probably be intimidated and nervous no matter what kind of Kennedy he turned out to be because he was a Kennedy, after all, and the Kennedys loomed large in my psyche, in every American’s. I’d seen Jack Kennedy himself once from a distance as he stood on the steps of the Providence City Hall addressing the crowd and I’d been awed at how, even from far away, he was so vivid—the blue eyes, the shock of auburn hair, the expensive-looking dark blue winter coat. And I also vividly remembered that November day in 1963 when I’d driven to Boston to see my townie boyfriend Bumpy who was working in a parking lot there and I was in a sea of traffic inexplicably stalled in Copley Square and I looked over and saw that the burly driver of the taxi next to me was crying like a baby and I turned on the radio and learned that Jack Kennedy was dead. All of us who lived then remember that day.

  For the walk with Joe, I did what I always did when I was afraid I’d be so thrown off that I wouldn’t be able to remember what was said: I hid the big Panasonic in my pocketbook, pressing Record before I met up with him so I’d have it all on tape.

  We walked and talked about nothing in particular—that is, nothing that I would remember afterward when I sat down at the desk in my aerie room on Tamalpais Road, pressed Play on my tape recorder, and was horrified to hear only noise, cars and horns all but drowning out the muddled sound of our own voices, Joe’s and mine, the whole clangorous mess punctuated by a rhythmic thud that I realized was the sound of my pocketbook, heavy with the useless tape recorder, hitting my leg with every step I took.

  Shit. I tried, but I couldn’t remember much about him at all, hardly a word he said—except for one thing when we came to the end of our walk. We were at the water’s edge in the San Francisco Marina; spread before us were neat rows of small craft at harbor. Joe looked out over the boats. He was silent for a moment, then asked, “Do you sail?”

  Did I sail? I lived in a sixty-dollar-a-month room. I couldn’t even pay for insurance on my (used) car. I proceeded to blather about everything I could think of connected to sailing. That my father had sailed. That he’d been part owner of a sailboat until he married my mother and she’d made him sell it. That I’d taken sailing at college for the brief moment it took me to crash the little boat into the rocks along Seekonk River.

  Joe Kennedy wasn’t listening. He’d lost interest in the question, in my answers. We had come to the end of our time together and said goodbye. I hadn’t asked him about his father, about how he felt when, at sixteen, he learned he’d been killed, about what effect he thought it had had on his life to lose his father in this way, at that age. And I wouldn’t ask Kathleen when I met her either. Or Bobby Junior.

  It’s possible Joe would have wanted to be asked. Would have even expected to be asked. Maybe they all would. But these weren’t questions I could bring myself to pose, not even a few months later when I lay on the waterbed that covered practically the entire floor of Bobby Junior’s freshman dorm room at Harvard, taking in the falconry equipment displayed on the wall and the small bronze bust of his father on the credenza, an object that surely could have provided a natural segue into the subject.

  I had been to Hyannis Port and talked to passersby and shopkeepers in the area and learned that it was all true—the Kennedy kids ran wild, played pranks, begged money from neighbors. But would it be fair to write gossip about children? Or would it be of interest to readers of Rolling Stone? And anyway, would their mother even let me anywhere near them?

  I decided I’d narrow it down to Joe and the other two Kennedy kids launched and out of the house—Kathleen, a senior at Radcliffe, and Bobby Junior, in his freshman year at Harvard. Instead of trying to contact them—I was afraid that would make it too easy for them to put me off—I decided I’d simply go to Cambridge and track them down. Which I did, asking around campus to find out what dorms they were in.

  I started with Kathleen. No one answered when I knocked on her door, but just as I was about to leave, she came home. She didn’t want to talk to me but I pleaded with her and she reluctantly agreed and let me into her room, a suite, really, with a living room and fireplace. I sat; she didn’t.

  She was a guarded and stern girl, or she was with me, and who could blame her? I tried to draw her out about herself—what was she majoring in, planning to do after college? She answered but grew increasingly impatient. She really had to study. She didn’t have time for this. She had a paper to write. She shut down completely and so I thanked her and left.

  Outside, in the cold Cambridge fading light, I felt ridiculous. What a weird, oddly desperate thing to do, to lie in wait and impose myself on someone who clearly wished I’d go away. But what else could I have done? I had a job to do. I steeled myself and headed across campus to find Bobby Junior’s dorm.

  I didn’t have to lie in wait for Bobby Junior, since he was leaving the building just as I was walking up. He wasn’t surprised when I stopped him and introduced myself; Joe had said I might be coming to see him. He wasn’t preppy-looking like Joe. He wore worn jeans and his hair was long and he was taller and lankier, with a crooked smile and a distracted air. Something like thought seemed to go on behind his Kennedy-blue eyes, which just then were at half-mast. Which made sense, as this was the Kennedy who as a young teen had been busted for possession of pot.

  He said he couldn’t talk now, he was supposed to meet somebody. He scratched his head and pondered, then shrugged and said maybe I could come with him, it wouldn’t take long.

  We walked through campus and out into Harvard Square and then went down a side street to the next corner, a doorway from Hazen’s Diner, where, in 1965 I’d had my first waitress job while I was attending Harvard summer school to make up the only course I’d flunked at Brown (poli sci—I’d handed in a blank exam book, hadn’t even felt like bullshitting my way through an essay, had taken the course only because it was David Leach’s subject). It was at Hazen’s Diner where, for the first time, I heard the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and then “Get Off My Cloud,” where, when someone played either one on the jukebox, the whole place stopped and listened in awe, everybody looking at each other with expressions that read What the fuck is that? because nobody had heard anything like it before.

  But now it was 1973 and Robert Kennedy Junior said for me to give him a minute and he went over to a guy and they made some kind of furtive exchange. When we got back to Bobby Junior’s dorm room, he explained about the falconry equipment, something he used to do, hunt wild quarry with these kind of trained birds…then he shrugged and trailed off.

  I asked him what he’d scored, and he said it was Dilaudid. This is maybe where I could have asked why he was resorting to such a powerful painkiller and referenced the little bust of his father. It might have opened up a whole world of discourse about his feelings and his loss. But I didn’t. Instead, we took our clothes off and had sexual intercourse on the waterbed.

  A big journalistic transgression, I know. But I slept with almost every man I met in those days, so why wouldn
’t I have sex with this gorgeous Kennedy? Well, because I was pretty sure it was an unwritten rule that you weren’t supposed to have sex with the subject of an article you were writing.

  Still, it could have been—maybe it really was—a kind of journalistic instinct for the story that led me to it. Because what I found out on that undulating waterbed could have been key to understanding the Kennedy male. It wasn’t just his command of the situation—he told me it would go better if I braced myself against the undulation of the waterbed—but what he looked like naked when he knelt before me.

  How to say it delicately…okay, I’ll just say it. The guy was hung. Probably halfway to his knees. I had never seen anything quite like it before. And wasn’t that sort of thing, like, genetic? Were they all this way? Was that where the confidence, the drive, the very cockiness came from? What must it be like to go through life with something like that banging against your thigh all day? How could you keep from thinking about anything else?

  Well, journalistic instinct or no, the act made it seem impossible to write the Kennedy piece. Because how could I, who prided myself on honestly depicting what I saw and experienced when I covered a story, how could I write anything about the Kennedys without saying what I’d done? For a long time, I didn’t tell anybody—not Jann when he eventually threatened to take my name off the masthead if I didn’t turn the story in, no one, except maybe strangers in bars and at parties to explain why I wasn’t on the masthead anymore.

  Well, I did tell one person, David Felton, when I got home to Chicago where we were living in a sublet near the university while he was on a journalistic fellowship there. Feeling I’d backed myself into a corner, I wanted reassurance, advice on how to write the story anyway. Instead I was hit with what felt like the retaliatory news that while I’d been away, he had bedded one of the students in a seminar he was teaching. I went nuclear. He’d cheated on me? What I’d done wasn’t the same thing at all! I’d done it for science! What he’d done, he’d done in the middle of our life together! Did everybody know about it?