I now knew the answer to that question: I didn’t have the skill, the rigor, the sheer moxie required to get on with the job of writing. I didn’t trust myself enough.
Just before midnight, I picked up the phone and called Eric, repeating this self-pitying rant to him. I ended with the plaintive comment: “I suppose I can always stick to editing.”
“What a tragic denouement,” he said, with more than a hint of irony.
“I knew I could count on you for sympathy and understanding.”
“I simply don’t understand why you can’t just write the damn thing—and get it over with.”
“Because it’s not that damn simple!” I said, adding: “And yes, I do know I sound overwrought.”
“At least you haven’t lost your capacity for self-knowledge.”
“Why do I ever tell you anything?”
“God knows—but if you want a piece of writerly advice, here it is: just sit down and punch it out. Don’t think—just write.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Anytime,” he said. “Good luck.”
I hung up the phone, I staggered into my bedroom, I fell on my bed, I nodded off (having hardly slept the previous night). When I came to again, the bedside clock read 5:12 AM. I sat up, startled. Thinking: I’ve got a deadline to make in less than five hours.
I threw off all my clothes. I took a very hot shower, finishing it with a punishing thirty-second blast of ice-cold water. I dressed. I put a pot of coffee on the stove. I glanced at my watch. Five thirty-two a.m. The deadline was ten. When the coffee was ready, I poured myself a cup and carried it over to my desk. I rolled a piece of paper into my Remington. I took a fast sip of the still-scalding coffee. Then I took a very deep breath.
Don’t think—just write.
All right, all right. I’ll try . . .
Without thinking, I hammered out a paragraph:
The real estate agent was a woman in her fifties. Her face was heavily rouged, her smile rigid, fixed. I saw her studying my ringless left hand, and the elaborate engagement ring which I had just recently transferred to my right hand.
“Was he a bum?” she said.
“No,” I said. “It just didn’t work out.”
I stopped for a moment. I took another gulp of coffee. I glanced at the six typed lines on the page. I started writing again.
“So you’re looking for a fresh start?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’m just looking for an apartment.”
Not bad, not bad. Keep going. I downed the rest of the cup. I looked back down at the keyboard. I started typing again.
When I looked up again, it was 8:49 AM. Morning light was flooding the living room. And four typed pages were stacked beside me at the desk. I pulled the final page from the Remington, and placed it at the bottom of the pile. Then, reaching for a pencil, I read through the feature—quickly excising a few clumsy phrases, tightening up the grammar, rewriting a small block of dialogue. Another fast glance at my watch: 9:02 AM. I reached for ten clean sheets of typing paper, one of carbon. I sandwiched the carbon paper between two sheets. I carefully rolled it into my Remington. I started retyping the story. It took just under forty minutes to finish the job. 9:42 AM. No time to lose. I took the top copy of the story, tossed it into my briefcase, grabbed my coat, and charged for the door. I hailed a cab going downtown on Riverside Drive, and told the driver I’d give him a hefty tip if he could get me to Rockefeller Center just before ten AM.
“From here to Rockefeller Center in twelve minutes?” he said. “Forgeddaboudit.”
“Just do your best, please.”
“Lady, that’s all any of us can do.”
Besides being something of a philosopher, the cabbie was also a maniac behind the wheel. But he did get me to 50th and Fifth by 10:04. I gave him a buck fifty, even though the meter only read eighty-five cents.
“Remind me to pick you up again,” he said when I told him to keep the change. “I hope you get whatever you’re rushing to get.”
I charged into the lobby of Saturday/Sunday. The elevator was crowded, and made a lot of stops before it reached the fifteenth floor. Ten eleven AM. I walked briskly down the corridor. I knocked on Imogen Woods’s door, fully expecting her secretary to greet me. But Miss Woods opened it herself.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Just a few minutes.”
“And you look harassed as hell.”
“The traffic . . .”
“Yeah, yeah—I’ve heard that one before. And let me guess: your dog ate your copy.”
“No,” I said, fumbling with the clasps on my briefcase. “I actually have it here.”
“Well, well—wonders do happen.”
I reached inside and handed over the five pages. She took them from me, then opened the door again.
“I’ll call you when I’ve read it,” she said, “which might take a couple of days, given how goddamn behind I am on everything. Meanwhile, go buy yourself a cup of coffee, Smythe. You look like you need one.”
I actually treated myself to breakfast at Lindy’s: bagels and lox, accompanied by lots of black coffee. Then I walked one block uptown to the Colony Record Shop and dropped $2.49 on a new recording of Don Giovanni, featuring Ezio Pinza as the great womanizer. Feeling that I was being just a tad profligate, I opted for the subway home, kicked off my shoes, stacked the four new discs on my phonograph, pushed the lever marked On, flopped on my sofa, and spent the next few hours doing nothing but listening to Mozart and Da Ponte’s sublime, dark tale of carnal crime and punishment. The music washed over me. I was exhausted, depleted. And totally bemused as to how the hell I had managed to get the story written. Though the carbon copy was on my desk, I didn’t want to read through it right now. There was time enough to discover whether it was good or not.
Around three that afternoon—just as Don Giovanni was descending into hell—the phone rang. It was Imogen Woods.
“So,” she said, “you can write.”
“Really?” I said, sounding uncertain.
“Yeah. Really.”
“You mean, you liked the piece?”
“Yes, Oh Unconfident One—I actually did like it. So much so that I’m going to commission another feature from you . . . if you’re not too full of self-doubt to handle another commission.”
“I can handle another commission,” I said.
“That’s what I like to hear,” she said.
The commission was for another “Slice of Life” piece—only this time she wanted me to do something funny and smart on that most unnerving rite of passage: the first date. Once again, the length was a thousand words. Once again, she insisted it be in within a week. Once again, I pulled my hair out until—following Eric’s advice—I sat down and simply wrote the thing straight through. Telling the silly story of the night that Dick Becker—one of my classmates at Hartford High, a tall, nervous science whiz with bad skin and an overbite—invited me to a Square Dance at the local Episcopalian church. It wasn’t exactly the most lascivious first date in history. Rather, it was very awkward, very sweet. At the end of the evening (I had a curfew of nine thirty), he walked me to my door and chastely shook my hand.
Nothing terribly memorable happened, I wrote. Neither of us did anything embarrassing, like clunking our heads together while attempting a kiss. Because there was no kiss. We were both terribly formal with each other. Formal and proper and oh-so-innocent. Which, after all, is the way a first date should be.
This time I made the deadline with twenty minutes to spare. On my way back home from the Saturday/Sunday offices, I had breakfast again in Lindy’s, then went to the Colony and bought a new recording of Horowitz playing three Mozart piano sonatas. As I walked back into my apartment, the phone started ringing.
“Now, in my jaundiced opinion,” Imogen Woods said, “a first date should end with me waking up the next morning and discovering that I’m in bed with Robert Mitchum. But, of course, I’m not a nice girl like you
.”
“I am not a nice girl,” I said.
“Oh yes you are. Which is why you’re the perfect Saturday/Sunday writer.”
“So you liked the piece?”
“Yeah—give or take the occasional dumb line, I liked it. Mucho. So what next?”
“You want me to write something else for you?”
“I love a girl with impressive powers of deduction.”
My third commission was for a piece entitled “When You Just Can’t Get It Right,” a moderately amusing thousand-word stroll through that perennial tonsorial problem called “a bad hair day.” Yes, I knew this was lightweight stuff. Yes, I knew that this sort of thing would never win me a Pulitzer. But I also knew that I had a facility for wry observations on small domestic or personal subjects. I could—to quote Imogen Woods—write sharp. More importantly, I had discovered that I could actually write again . . . a discovery which astonished and delighted me. It wasn’t fiction. It wasn’t high art. But it was tightly constructed and had some wit. For the first time in years, I felt curiously confident. I had a talent. A small talent, perhaps—but a talent nonetheless.
I delivered “When You Just Can’t Get It Right” a day ahead of its due date. As always I celebrated with breakfast at Lindy’s and the acquisition of a record at the Colony (a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, performed by Wanda Landowska—a bargain at eighty-nine cents). I heard nothing from Miss Woods for nearly forty-eight hours. By the time she called, I had convinced myself she’d so hated this new piece that my career at Saturday/Sunday was over.
“Well, His Godship the Editor and I have been having words about you,” she said as soon as I picked up the phone.
“Oh, really,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
“Yeah—he hates your stuff and wanted me to break the news to you.”
After a long pause, I managed to say: “Well, I guess that’s to be expected.”
“Jesus Christ, will you listen to yourself. Little Miss Fatalistic.”
“So he . . . uh . . . wasn’t asking you to fire me?”
“Au contraire—His Godship really likes those three pieces you wrote. So much so that he wants me to offer you a contract.”
“What kind of contract?”
“What kind of contract do you think? A writing contract, you dolt. You’re going to have your own weekly column in the magazine.”
“You can’t be serious.”
But she was. And during the first week of 1948, my column—“Sara Smythe’s Real Life”—made its first appearance in the magazine. It was, at heart, a continuation of the three “Slice of Life” pieces I had already written for Miss Woods. Each week, I would take an incident or a minor problem—“The Guy With Bad Breath,” “How I Can Never Boil Spaghetti Well,” “Why I Always Buy Stockings That Run”—and turn it into a light, fast divertissement. Without question, the column celebrated the trivial, the prosaic. But it was reasonably droll—and because it was rooted in the mundanity of day-to-day female existence, I never ran out of weekly ideas.
Initially I was paid fifty dollars a column for forty-eight columns per annum. To me, this was incredible money—considering that the piece never took more than a day to write. Within six months of its inauguration, however, His Godship renegotiated my contract—after the Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s Home Companion tried to poach me. Because, much to my complete surprise, “Sara Smythe’s Real Life” had become something of a success. I was getting around fifty letters a week from women readers across the country, telling me how much they enjoyed my allegedly funny observations on what Imogen Woods called “girly stuff.” His Godship himself—Ralph J. Linklater—was also beginning to receive positive reader feedback about the column. Then two things happened which suddenly made me valuable—(a) four of Saturday/Sunday’s advertisers asked for their copy to be run alongside my column, and (b) I was approached by those two ladies’ magazines, and offered a considerable raise in pay if I would defect to them.
I was astonished by these offers. So astonished that I mentioned them, en passant, to Imogen Woods—dropping it halfway into a phone conversation about my next column. She sounded instantly worried.
“Honestly, Imogen,” I assured her. “I wouldn’t dream of leaving the magazine. That wouldn’t be ethical.”
“Well, God bless your George Washington conscience. But promise me this: don’t respond to those letters until I’ve spoken to His Godship.”
Of course, I promised not to respond to the competing magazines. Call me naive—but I was perfectly happy being paid fifty dollars a column. Especially as it had become so straightforward to write. I didn’t intend to use the other offers as a bargaining chip. When His Godship himself personally called me at home the next morning, I suddenly realized that that was what they had become.
I had met Mr. Linklater just once before this conversation—when he invited me out to lunch (with Miss Woods) a few months after my column had started. He was a large, portly man who reminded me a lot of Charles Laughton. He liked to run the magazine in a grandfatherly way—but was notoriously harsh with anyone who contradicted him. As Miss Woods warned me before our lunch, “Treat him like your favorite uncle, and he’ll love you. But if you try to flash your smarts at him—not that you would—he won’t respond to that at all.”
Of course, my Smythe family manners meant that I was instantly deferential to this man of authority. Afterward, Miss Woods told me that His Godship thought I was “just peachy” (an exact quote), and “precisely the nice, clever sort of young woman we like writing for the magazine.”
His phone call came at eight a.m. I had been up late the night before, finishing next week’s column—so I was still groggy when I reached for the phone.
“Sara—good morning! Ralph J. Linklater here. Haven’t woken you, have I?”
I was instantly conscious. “No, sir. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“And it’s wonderful to speak to our star columnist. You are still our star columnist, Sara . . . aren’t you?”
“Of course, Mr. Linklater. Saturday/Sunday has been so good to me.”
“Delighted to hear you say that, Sara. Because—as I’m sure you know—I like to think of all of us at Saturday/Sunday as family. You do consider us family, don’t you, Sara?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Linklater.”
“Wonderful. It’s so good to know that. Because we consider you such a valuable part of our family. So valuable that we want to put you under an exclusive contract to us and increase your fee to eighty dollars a week.”
The word exclusive suddenly rang alarm bells in my head. I decided to tread carefully.
“Gosh, Mr. Linklater, eighty dollars a week is really generous. And God knows, I really want to stay with Saturday/Sunday—but if I accept your offer, it means my income will only be eighty dollars a week. Which is kind of limiting, wouldn’t you agree?”
“A hundred a week then.”
“That’s very acceptable—but say” someone else offers me a hundred and twenty dollars—and on a nonexclusive basis.”
“No one would do that,” he said, suddenly sounding a little irritated.
“You’re probably right, sir,” I said, politeness itself. “I guess the only thing that troubles me is the idea that I’d be closing off other options, other potential markets. Isn’t making the best of your opportunities all part of the American Way?”
I couldn’t believe I’d spoken that line (even though I knew that His Godship was always writing “Thoughts from The Editor’s Chair” pieces on O.W.L.: Our Way of Life). I couldn’t believe I was suddenly in this high-stakes (for me) negotiation with our benevolent ruler, Ralph J. Linklater. But having entered into this negotiation, I knew I had to see it through.
“Yes, you’re absolutely right, Sara,” His Godship said with reluctance, “a competitive marketplace is one of the great glories of American democracy. And I really respect a young woman like yourself who understands the marketab
ility of her talents. But one hundred and twenty a column is the absolute maximum I can pay. And yes, that would be for the exclusive use of your talents. However, here’s what I’m also prepared to do. According to Miss Woods, you love classical music—and know lots about it. So say you also wrote an amusing monthly column for us about how to listen to Beethoven and Brahms, which record you should give your honey for Christmas . . . that kind of fun thing. We’ll call the column . . . uhm . . . got any thoughts on the subject?”
“How about ‘Music for Middlebrows’?”
“Perfect. And I’ll be willing to pay you sixty dollars per month for the column, in addition to the hundred and twenty you’ll be getting for ‘Real Life’. Does that sound like a peachy deal or what?”
“Very peachy.”
Within a few days, I had a contract from Saturday/Sunday for the terms agreed with His Godship. I paid Joel Eberts to look it over. He spoke to someone in the magazine’s legal affairs department, and after a bit of horse trading, got them to include a clause which allowed both parties to renegotiate the terms in eighteen months’ time. Once again, Mr. Eberts only charged me six dollars an hour for his services. And when he handed me his bill for twenty-four dollars, he said, “Sorry I took the extra hour, but . . .”
“Mr. Eberts, please. I can well afford it. I’m now making more money than I know what to do with.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure out ways of spending it.”
Actually, there was little I wanted to buy. My new music column meant that I was being inundated with free records from all the music companies. I had no mortgage, no rent. I had no dependents. I still had most of that five thousand dollars cash in the bank. Lawrence Braun seemed to be achieving reasonable growth on my twenty-thousand-dollar portfolio. I was suddenly earning seven thousand a year—giving me an after-tax income of five thousand dollars. Prudently, I started salting away two thousand per annum in my pension plan, but this still gave me nearly sixty dollars a week to live on. Back in 1948, a top-price ticket on Broadway or at Carnegie Hall was two dollars fifty. A movie was sixty cents. My weekly grocery bill was under ten dollars. Breakfast at my local Greek coffee shop was forty cents—and that included scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice, and bottomless coffee. A great meal at Luchow’s for two was no more than eight dollars tops.
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