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

by Robin Green

  “I’m going to California for Christmas but I’ll be back right after,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “Okay,” I said. He reached out and gave my white wool scarf—the one I’d knit in Chicago and that my mother had mocked—a little adjustment against the cold outside. When he touched me, I felt like I might faint.

  True to his word, he was there in the Cedar Rapids airport when I got off the plane from Oakland. My heart sank at the sight of him, his soon-to-be twenty-five years to my thirty-one years, his scraggly beard and mustache, his cheesy, nipped-in-at-the-waist, double-breasted gray wool coat. He held a bouquet of carnations—red, white, and blue ones, because it was 1976, he said. I had a gift for him too, a small ceramic fried-egg pin I’d bought on Telegraph Avenue, which I fastened to the overwide lapel of his coat.

  We drove to Iowa City in the 1970 Ford Montego he’d “bought off” his dad. It was yellow save for a Bondo-patched fender painted blue, and it had a hole in the floor on his side through which the frigid air of Iowa winter blasted in. We went to the one Italian restaurant in town and he didn’t know what to order, didn’t seem to know what anything was. It was as if he’d never been to a restaurant, let alone taken a girl to one.

  He drove me to my apartment on Dodge Street. Nancy was still in Lincoln. We were alone. We went to bed and I would like to say that bells rang and so on, but it was, for me at least, an awkward, detached, and uncomfortable act. It was also the beginning of a sexual relationship that would span, off and on, forty-some years, a relationship in which an entire Italian city’s worth of bell towers would come to ring.

  His apartment was a few blocks away: waterbed on the floor, little kitchen, and, in the living room, a decorated Christmas tree he’d “drug in” from a friend’s apartment across the hall. Naked on the carpet by the Christmas tree, we again had sexual intercourse. I remember pine needles stabbing me in the ass from when he’d “drug” the tree in.

  He learned then that I had no feeling for or history with Christmas. I’d learn he’d met only one or two other Jews in his life. We’d both learn what we did have in common: we both used Oral B toothbrushes. I got up in the middle of the night and went back to my apartment and he let me know the next day that I’d better not do that again.

  Now it was New Year’s Eve. We lay on the couch in my and Nancy’s apartment in each other’s arms making small talk. There wasn’t even enough conversation to last until midnight. We fell asleep. The next day, I said I thought the whole thing was a bad idea—the age and cultural differences, the fact that I’d been his teacher. He put on his awful coat and headed out the door.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “Home,” he said.

  “Please don’t go,” I said.

  “What?” he asked, incredulous.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said.

  He looked at me like he thought I was crazy, but he came back in.

  I was awarded my MFA in June, but I stayed in Iowa another year to wait for Mitch to earn his BA in history. He was on the GI Bill; that was why he’d joined the army. It was the end of the Vietnam War era and he’d figured he wouldn’t be sent somewhere to be killed, and even if he was, it would be better than loading oat sacks onto freight cars or slogging through pig blood in the slaughterhouse/packing plant where he’d worked after high school.

  That last year in Iowa, he found a pretty little apartment for us on Dubuque Street with lots of windows and good light. I hung a large Divan Japonais Toulouse-Lautrec poster on the wall and cooked us Indian food that so pleased him, he took pictures of it. The army paid him three hundred dollars a month, which covered his tuition and the rent, and I got a secretarial job at the university medical center in a residential treatment center for autistic boys.

  My boss, Alan Horowitz, ran the treatment center. A wide-assed Jew with a medical degree from Harvard—this was who I was supposed to be with, not some Iowa undergraduate hick. He invited us to his house for Passover dinner. I felt awash in shame: ashamed of Mitch, the ultimate goy. Ashamed of myself for being with him. If I had only known then that in twenty years, Dr. Alan Horowitz would earn a ten- to twenty-year sentence for molesting children in his Boy Scout troop and that when he got out, he’d skip parole, flee to India, and be captured as one of America’s most wanted sex offenders. He was probably molesting those poor autistic boys at the center even then.

  “Iowa’s most dissolute couple” was how workshop director Jack Leggett referred to us when Mitch waited on him at the bookstore. It didn’t sound like a compliment. Together, we looked it up in the dictionary. Dissolute (adj.). Lax in morals, debauched, decadent, intemperate, profligate, wild, promiscuous, drunken.

  Were we any of those things? All? It was true that we drank, were thrilled to party it up with Ray Carver in his bad old unreformed days, that we caroused at the workshop morel-mushroom-hunting picnic at Vance Bourjaily’s house (carved in the fireplace’s stone mantel: DOLCE FAR NIENTE), Mitch running around with me riding piggyback, the sexual heat between us there for all to see.

  We couldn’t get enough of each other. When I picked him up at Logan Airport that first summer to take him up to my brother’s house in Vermont, we didn’t make it an hour out of Boston before we had to pull off the highway to find some woods and privacy, mosquitoes eating our bare asses as we rutted on a bed of old leaves on the hard ground.

  Other than the African poet, I’d been chaste at Iowa, even when given the opportunity, such as the morning in the student union that I saw Anthony Burgess, esteemed author of Clockwork Orange, sitting alone and went over to tell him how much I’d enjoyed his lecture the night before, how much I loved his books. He invited me to sit and shortly asked if I’d like to come to his room for a drink. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I said I had to be in class.

  In that same cafeteria, I was having coffee with Henry Bromell, the writer who’d led the seminar on Proust and who, at twenty-four, had won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for his short-story collection The Slightest Distance. An Amherst grad, he was the son of a high-level CIA operative who, now retired, manned a kiosk in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts lobby, demonstrating the art of putting little ships in bottles.

  I’d never met anyone with so exotic an upbringing, someone who had lived in such places as an Egyptian compound, where helicopters landed within its walls to whisk his father away on secret missions. He was so WASP-y, wore expensive-looking sport coats ever so casually, wrote with such a delicate sensibility.

  I didn’t know then that I’d know Henry all his life, that we’d work together on TV shows, that he’d go on to run Homicide and Homeland, to write and direct movies, to write more excellent, literate books, or that we’d find ourselves one afternoon in 1991 in my office at the CBS show Northern Exposure where we worked, Henry lounging languidly on the sofa, the sleeves of his blue oxford shirt rolled up just so on his perfectly shaped forearms, and he’d say, “Robin, what’s to stop us from fucking right here on this couch right now?”

  “Ha!” I said. “Everything!”

  And we both laughed and let the moment pass. It came up once again twenty-one years later, in February 2013 at a party at the house in Santa Monica where he lived with his third wife, Sarah, and their infant son. I’d flown from New York to LA to attend a WGA event at which Josh Brand and John Falsey, who had given me my start in television, were to be honored, and Henry was throwing a bash for the guys the night before.

  “I guess I’m just a Mrs. Dalloway at heart,” Henry said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Mrs. Dalloway?” I knew it was a book by Virginia Woolf but couldn’t remember anything else about it.

  “She liked to throw parties,” he said, shrugging. “C’mon, a bunch of us are in the library.”

  We went back to the elegant writer’s lair he’d built in the garage and had drinks with Josh and John before joining everybody in the house
. It was a great party, Henry’s young wife padding around in bare feet, so many people we’d worked with over the years. I was saying goodbye to Henry and his old friend and fellow producer Ian Sanders at the door, and I guess I must have looked pretty good that night, or happy, or flirty, because Ian asked, apropos of something that had been said, “How about you two? Did you ever…”

  Henry and I looked at each other, big smiles coming to our faces as we simultaneously remembered the moment in my office we’d let go by so many years before.

  Henry died of a heart attack only a few weeks later, at the age of sixty-five. Ian died three years after that, at sixty-eight.

  But for now, we were young, and Henry was my teacher—in a writing seminar as well as the Proust course—and he seemed way out of my league, mostly consorting with lady poets with last names like Pendergrast and with a WASP-y element in the fiction workshop as well—Jane Smiley and her pals.

  That morning in the student union, Henry and I looked up from our coffee to see the famed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges moving by, old, blind, being led by a small young Asian woman he had introduced at an informal seminar the day before as his translator. Henry gave me a look that said he was wondering the same thing I was wondering, about what was really going on between her and the great man. Now, however, she was simply carrying a tray with his breakfast and they sat and she opened his small box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and poured its contents into a bowl and we watched him carefully spoon the dry cereal into his mouth.

  “Amazing,” Henry said.

  The day before, a small, worshipful group of us had gathered at Borges’s feet to hear his answers to our questions.

  “Tell us, Mr. Borges,” a young male student finally worked up the courage to ask, “why is it that you only write short stories, not novels?”

  As his pretty young translator spoke in his ear, Mr. Borges nodded thoughtfully, looking blindly into the air at God knows what, like Stevie Wonder.

  “Becuss,” the great writer finally said in his soft Argentine voice, “the novel, it is too long.”

  It was moments such as these that defined Iowa, moments like Leonard Michaels’s diatribe in class on Catcher in the Rye: “What kind of asshole,” the edgy New York writer said, “hates a nun because she’s carrying a crappy suitcase? What does that even mean?”

  Talks by John Irving and Robert Coover and John Cheever—it seemed like every writer in America passed through Iowa City. You’d get to hear what they had to say and then drink with them in some bar or at a party at somebody’s house.

  I didn’t write much, just enough to make Lenny Michaels like me, just enough to complete the pages needed for an MFA. Maybe I was dissolute after all. Though I was an early adopter in Iowa of the jogging craze that was gripping the country, running miles on the lunch break from my secretarial job—well, not running, exactly, more like trotting.

  I ran, or trotted, in Iowa City’s first 5K run in 1978. Nervous and excited at the starting gun, I began with the pack but very soon fell far behind. So far, in fact, that I lost sight of them minutes later, after we’d left town, and found myself trotting past cornfields (not corn for humans, mind you, there was no corn for humans growing around there). Now there wasn’t a runner in sight, so I decided to head west¸ toward the river where I’d at least know where I was, soon arriving back in the civilization of the Iowa City suburbs. A man was mowing his lawn.

  “Excuse me,” I yelled as I trotted by in the road, “but have you seen a bunch of runners?”

  He shook his head. “Runners?” he said. “No.”

  I trotted on, cut through campus, and finally met up with the others as they headed en masse for the finish line, joining them somewhere in the middle of the pack.

  I was thin as a whip then. It was June 1978; Mitch had graduated. I wanted to go back to California, to LA this time, as Kit had suggested. I probably harbored vague notions of finding work in the film industry, but it wasn’t something I consciously admitted to myself or anyone else. We’d befriended a few other people who were going out west: a fellow workshop student, Michelle Huneven, who was returning home to Pasadena, and a couple she’d introduced us to who were to become lifelong friends, T. C. Boyle and his wife, Karen.

  Michelle and I scoffed at Karen because she was a mere writer’s wife, whereas we two were actual writers. Lost on us then was the fact that she held a master’s in special ed and held a job with which she supported Tom the long years he worked toward his PhD in literature, all the while typing short stories on his Olympia portable at the small desk in their bedroom, the wall in front of which was completely plastered with pink rejection slips.

  Tom would publish ten acclaimed novels and more than a hundred short stories, win the PEN/Faulkner Award, and become a tenured professor at USC, but he didn’t know that in 1978 as he headed there to take a teaching job. And Karen didn’t know that her instinct for buying and selling the homes they lived in would take them from a tiny tract house in Tujunga to one with a pool in Woodland Hills and finally land them in a Prairie Frank Lloyd Wright house, which they meticulously restored, in a butterfly preserve within walking distance to town in Montecito.

  Mitch and I didn’t know what would happen to us either.

  “Should I go to California or do you think I should stay here?” Mitch asked me one afternoon when we’d stopped on a street corner in Iowa City, heading back to our apartment from the bookstore.

  I didn’t know what to say and I said so. “That’s something you have to answer for yourself,” I said, but I was and remained plagued by the question. Was this the price I paid for getting involved with someone who had been my student, someone younger? Would I be responsible for his fate and future if he came with me?

  Should I have told him to stay if there was any doubt in his mind? If he had stayed, would he have become the great fiction writer he’d shown signs of being? Like Dubus, Faulkner, O’Connor, or any of them, would home soil have been more likely to bear literary fruit?

  I remembered watching Mitch once when he didn’t know I was looking. He was sitting in the window of a bar in town, by himself with a beer, reading a paperback. That would have been his life if he had stayed here, a lone wolf in a weird gray coat, drinking and, maybe, writing.

  His father was a drinker, and a mean drunk, the way Mitch described it. I’d first met the family when Mitch took me home for Thanksgiving dinner. We’d gone up to Cedar Rapids the night before, and, having been told Lloyd Burgess liked a drink, I’d brought him the gift of a bottle of scotch.

  “Bad idea,” Mitch said.

  “Why?” I asked. “That way we’ll have something to drink before dinner tomorrow.”

  When we came back the next day, I saw what Mitch meant. The bottle was empty. His father had drunk the whole thing in the night.

  The family lived in a tract of small homes built after the war—World War II, of course. The little yellow, white-trimmed house, with its one bathroom and three tiny bedrooms, seemed small for the nine people who had lived there before the oldest three girls had gone off on their own, then Mitch, then his younger brother Bradley. Bryan and Becky still lived at home and were there, along with Bradley, for Thanksgiving dinner, which we ate in the kitchen, as there was no dining room.

  Mitch had shown me the room he’d made for himself in the cellar of the house behind the area that housed the boiler and the washer and dryer.

  In our working lives together much later, Mitch would say more than once of fellow TV writer-producers whose fathers had gone to Harvard or who had been physicians and raised their boys in posh neighborhoods and paid for their college tuition, “Let them start off in the cellar and see how far they got.”

  Mitch’s own father was a welder at a crane-manufacturing plant, now defunct, like all such manufacturing in Cedar Rapids. He worked the night shift—a good thing, Mitch said, because the kids didn’t have to run into him much.

  In my house growing up, my brother and I would jump
up and down with glee and say, “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” when we heard his car pull into the driveway after work, but at Mitch’s house, the kids would say, “Daddy’s home!” and run out the back door in pure dread as he came in the front.

  I liked Mitch’s father. He was a handsome man of Welsh descent, trim and of medium height, with flashing blue eyes and sharp features—unlike Mitch, fleshy-faced and tall, who more resembled his mother, née Virginia Colbert, whose ancestors had come from Alsace-Lorraine to be farmers in Iowa.

  Mitch’s father was from Birmingham, Alabama. His mother had died of appendicitis when he was a baby, and his father, also a drinking man, had placed Lloyd and his sister with his own sister (who was married to Jimmy Morgan, the mayor of Birmingham), where he was unhappy and unloved and a behavioral problem. He joined the Marines when he was underage and spent the war fighting in the Pacific. He met Mitch’s mother at a canteen in Washington, DC, where she’d gone to help serve the war effort as a secretary and also to see the big world, have some fun, and, as it developed, find a husband. “Ginge” was the promise of home to Lloyd and he returned with her to Iowa City and her big extended family.

  Lloyd was smart and quick—everyone at the table was, all of them book and newspaper readers, people with opinions who didn’t mind sharing them. It was a challenge to keep up with them in conversation. Still, years ago, at this same kitchen table with many of these same people, Mitch had put his cigarette out in his mashed potatoes, his mother had asked him please not to do that again, Mitch had told her, “If you don’t like it, don’t look at it,” and the next thing he knew, his father had taken a fork and stabbed Mitch’s hand clear through, pinning his hand to the table.

  However, it was also this same father Mitch had so beautifully and therefore lovingly described at the beginning of a novel he was starting, his father coming home from work at the factory, sitting at the kitchen table, and, with a pocket knife, paring the black grime out from beneath his fingernails, the black crescent moons falling into the ashtray below. He never wrote the novel. Instead, we bought his brother Bryan’s two-door, blue-and-white 1963 Chevy Impala with a modified steering wheel a foot in diameter and packed it up and drove it west on Route 80, over the Continental Divide and down through a moonscape of California desert into the smoggy sprawl of Los Angeles. We had nothing but each other, the thirteen hundred dollars we’d saved, and a two-hundred-dollar car.