by Robin Green
My mother’s sad attempt to prettify and feminize me at age one. (Robin Green)
Mom, big brother, and me. She’s holding him up to make him look taller. (Stanley Summer)
As editor of Brown University’s literary magazine, I was the only girl. (Robin Green)
I showed up in Providence in a dress that looked like somebody’s college bedspread. (David Leach)
One ear up, one ear down, Reuben the Dog was up for anything. (David Leach)
We chicks peered at the world of men from under our bangs and posed with our heads tilted coquettishly. We weren’t threatening anything—yet. (David Leach)
Me with Reuben under the loft on Fox Court. David’s Persian chair is at the right. (David Leach)
Annie Leibovitz in 1975. (Marc PoKempner)
At my twenty-seventh birthday party, Hunter’s sidekick Oscar Acosta put a small hill of coke on the kitchen table. Annie gave me a $20 gift certificate for Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor. That’s Felton with them, center. (Robin Green)
A birthday card for me: To “Little Bird,” signed “Brown Buffalo [what Hunter called Oscar], and Doggie Diner [Annie].” The diner was where all the take-out food at the office came from. I don’t know why Annie called herself that, and she doesn’t either. (Robin Green)
Marianne (standing) saw the brain power she had in (left to right) Sarah, Barbara, Christine, and Harriet. (Max Agulera Hellweg)
At a time when Annie and Jerry Garcia were circling each other, she and I drove up to Stinson Beach, ostensibly to get his autograph on her photo for the January ’71 cover as a birthday present for me. He wasn’t home, so she left the print—with this result. (Annie Leibovitz)
At my brother’s house with David Leach in 1970, a goofy, happy, possibly stoned girl—a girl (if you didn’t know what a sexual fake I was) very much in love. (Ron Green)
The hardest part about leaving David was leaving Reuben. (David Leach)
My first cover of Rolling Stone. Herb Trimpe drew The Hulk. (Robin Green)
Cassidy wanted a cover, so we gave it to him. (Robin Green)
At work on the rooftop on Tamalpais Road. (David Leach)
In my backyard in the Berkeley Flats. Off the masthead, miserable, and homely. And what’s with the dress? (David Leach)
“Iowa’s most dissolute couple,” Jack Leggett called Mitch and me. The sexual heat between us was there for all to see. (Robin Green)
We drove from Iowa City to L.A. in a $200 Impala that we bought from Mitch’s little brother, Bryan, far right in the photo above. (Robin Green)
I showed Ronnie this photo of Mitch. She said he looked conceited. (Robin Green)
Mitch and me, back together again but wary. (Robin Green)
At the 2003 Emmys with Sopranos creator David Chase. Cent’anni! (Getty Images)
Acknowledgments
I am no longer the only girl. My professional and private lives teem with girls, like Sarah Lazin, my literary agent, who urged me to write this book, and Christine Doudna, who urged her to urge me. And Judith Clain, my editor, who LOVED my proposal and the book—in fact, every so often she wrote in the margins next to something she liked: “LOVE!” And sometimes even “LOVE!!” How I loved to find those “loves”!
And there are more girls still: my friend Ruth Reichl, whose work ethic shames me into one of my own, and the cadre of Food Warriors she’s gathered around her—Nancy Silverton, Caryl Kim, Lissa Doumani, Margy Rochlin, Laurie Ochoa, Jessica Green—career girls all, with whom I travel on what we call Girl Trips, eating and drinking our way through France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, Japan, and all over the United States, though sometimes we let our husbands, boyfriends, and various children come along too.
My old Rolling Stone colleagues were a great help in setting the record straight—David Felton, Sarah and Christine (see above), Annie Leibovitz, Laurel Gonsalves, Paul Scanlon, Alan Rinzler, Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, Joe Eszterhas, Don Katz, Jann Wenner. I thank my TV colleagues Josh Brand (and his stunning wife, Brooks McEwen), Barbara Hall, and Ann Biderman for their support. Also old friends Mark Lediard, Mark Goldschmidt, and Mark Barad (lotta Marks in my life, it seems), and of course my brother, Ron, and his wife, Sue.
I’m so grateful to David Leach’s widow, Jean Cacicedo, for the use of David’s photographs here, and the same goes for Claudia Summer for her father’s work. I thank Max Hellweg and Marc PoKempner for photo permission too.
There’s a whole team at Little, Brown Company to whom I am grateful: Reagan Arthur, publisher; Craig Young, deputy publisher; Carrie Neill, publicist; Lauren Velasquez, marketer; Pamela Marshall, production editor; Lauren Harms, jacket designer; and John Pelosi, legal reader.
Judy Clain’s assistant, Alexandra Hoopes, not only handled the million tasks that come with publishing a book, endlessly patient in guiding me through this new-to-me field of endeavor, but sent me morale-boosting emails, writing one rainy day that the assistant girls from publicity had discovered my book and were reading it aloud in the lunchroom and squealing with laughter and that one of them had called me a goddess!
Sarah Lazin’s assistant was Julia Conrad when I started all this, and she too wrote me words of encouragement when I was doubtful or blue. She has since gone on to graduate school in Iowa City, replaced in Sarah’s office by Margaret Shultz, another patient and astute millennial. A shout-out to girl assistants! The future is yours! And you can have it.
The biggest burden of my gratitude, of course, lands in the lap of my husband, Mitchell Burgess, who makes everything possible. And I mean everything.
About the Author
Robin Green is an award-winning TV writer/producer known for her work as an executive producer and writer for The Sopranos on HBO and as the creator with her husband, Mitchell Burgess, of the CBS drama Blue Bloods, now in its ninth season. She is an alumna of Brown University and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Green lives in New York City with Mitch and their little dog, Silenzio.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author Disclaimer
Introduction: RSX The Rolling Stone Ex-Employee Fortieth Reunion
Chapter One: How to Become a Journalist
Chapter Two: Face Front! You’re on the Winning Team
Chapter Three: Good Vibes All-a Time
Chapter Four: A Bitch Is Born
Chapter Five: My Little Life, Part 1
Chapter Six: 1971
Chapter Seven: Big Sur
Chapter Eight: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll
Chapter Nine: Poison Pen
Chapter Ten: A Big Journalistic No-No
Chapter Eleven: Bankruptcy
Chapter Twelve: Fields, Fields, and More Fields
Chapter Thirteen: Ronnie
Chapter Fourteen: Therapy
Chapter Fifteen: The Bitch Is Back!
Chapter Sixteen: Television 101
Chapter Seventeen: Changing Television Forever
Chapter Eighteen: Sellout Sunday
Chapter Nineteen: My Little Life, Part 2
Chapter Twenty: RIP
Chapter Twenty-One: RIP RSX
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
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