by Anne Summers
On 9 October we signed the deal with the Ms. Foundation. Pat Carbine burst into tears while she and Sandra were signing all the various documents. Gloria and I were in the adjoining room, disguising the tension we each felt by looking at magazines, making small-talk, not referring to the historic event that was taking place a few steps away. We had not thought to bring a photographer so we resolved to do so when we actually handed over the money, once the New York Attorney-General had approved the sale. Exactly one month later on 9 November, Sandra, Jeanne Shelley, the accountant from the Fairfax’s New York office, and I handed over the cheques. It was such an extraordinary moment that my body felt utterly unconnected with my emotions. I was physically present in the room but I felt as if I were somewhere else. It was a sign, I suppose, that I was still coming to terms with the tumultuous changes taking place in my life. There was less tension in the room than when we had signed the papers. Whatever emotion Steinem and Carbine felt, neither of them showed it. For Steinem in particular, this moment represented the end of her fight to keep the magazine alive. Ms. was now someone else’s problem. She probably felt relieved, I surmised, although something told me that she would never really be able to let go. It was too much a part of who she was. Steinem’s biographer, the late Carolyn Heilbrun, had addressed this in her 1995 book and concluded that ‘the magazine had become like her invalid mother.’ As a very young teenager, Gloria had had to assume responsibility for caring for her mentally-ill mother. Her parents had divorced and her older sister was in college so for seven years, living in a rat-infested basement apartment in a poor neighbourhood in Toledo, Ohio, Gloria became, in Heilbrun’s words, ‘her mother’s mother’.2 It was a very tough time for her, and she only confronted its lasting impact after the sale of Ms. In her 1992 book Revolution from Within, she revealed her own lack of confidence and ‘self-esteem’ and argued the need to recognise and nurture the ‘child within’ each of us. Steinem concluded that her relationship of co-dependency with her mother had dictated how she related to the world. When it came to keeping Ms. alive, Heilbrun writes, ‘There was no choice, just as there had been none in Toledo’.3 Steinem remained an adolescent until she was well over 50, contends Heilbrun; she had never been allowed to grow up. Or to complain, or to show emotion. I suspected her lack of emotion the day we signed the papers was probably not unusual. It seemed to me that the warm, generous, caring person the world mostly saw was in fact a carapace which concealed a brittle, seemingly emotionless creature that was the real Gloria Steinem. She faced the world with a smile, and never revealed what was really going on behind those sparkling eyes.
After the signing, Sandra presented Pat and Gloria with gold Dupont fountain pens. When I returned to the office there was one waiting for me. I had not thought to get Sandra anything. I was still grounded in the gruff, pragmatic world of newspapers, I realised. People in the magazine world constantly gave each other gifts and flowers and threw parties on the flimsiest excuse. I needed to adapt. Not that it would be difficult. The Sassy launch, a crowded buzzy cocktail party at the Cadillac Bar, New York’s hottest hot spot, on 16 October, a week after we signed the papers to buy Ms., showed me that the magazine world looked like it would be a lot of fun.
The stock market crashed on 19 October, with the Dow losing 22.6 per cent of its value. I lost quite a bit of money on the few Australian stocks I had just recently bought. ‘When people like me get into the market,’ I had said ruefully to friends, ‘you know it’s time to get out.’ But I was less concerned about my own losses than with the economic consequences of the crash and what these might mean for Ms. advertising. I did not even consider whether it might have any impact on our longer-term future, on Young Warwick’s bid and all the corporate unravelling that was still underway. For a few brief moments that day I missed being back at the Financial Review and the tension and excitement of writing a big news story. Instead I was worrying about advertising revenues. That was a sign of how much had changed for me in just a few weeks.
I met the Ms. editorial staff for the first time just after we had signed the papers. Although the deal was still not finalised it seemed a courtesy to try to reassure what Sandra and I assumed would be an anxious group of people. That turned out to be an understatement. Very few of the staff knew of the magazine’s parlous financial state, or that negotiations for a sale were underway, so when the announcement was made they literally went into shock. I walked into a room where the apprehension was palpable; they had learned of the impending sale only a day or two earlier. A space had been reserved for me at the top of the table with every other seat taken and the remaining staff standing around the walls staring glumly at me. I was taken aback that Steinem was not there. I had assumed she would steer the meeting. This was terrible for me: no introduction to ease my way in, no assurances to the staff that I was a ‘real feminist’ they could trust. Steinem’s absence that day spoke volumes about how she really felt about the sale and, presumably, about me. She might have sold us the magazine but she was not going to make it easy. In her absence I had no choice but to plunge in alone. I took a deep breath and, after introducing myself, began telling the group what I had done in the past and how proud I was to be joining this legendary magazine. I knew this would be difficult for them, I acknowledged, but said I was looking forward to working with them. I invited questions and I realised that Steinem had at last arrived and was standing behind me when, in responding to a comment someone else had made, she mentioned in that low chuckly voice of hers that she had just come from lunching with Jacqueline Onassis at the Russian Tea Room.
My first day at Ms. was 6 November. I had already recruited a secretary, Eileen Moriarty, but when the two of us arrived at the magazine’s shambolic offices at 119 West 40th Street, we found no office had been provided for me. The hostility was not overt; it was more passive-aggressive. I asked for a desk. There wasn’t one, I was told. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I will take over the conference room.’ This was hardly an auspicious start. How would I get on with the staff, I wondered, and how difficult would it be for me to start introducing my editorial ideas? Eileen Moriarty had taken a huge leap of faith in agreeing to work for me. She had been earning a high salary with a prominent investment banking firm but she hated the job, she said, and was willing to drop pay to go somewhere she felt would be more humane. She was a cheerful woman with blonde curls and a strong New York accent who was totally unfazed by her new environment; she quickly organised rental furniture and soon the two of us were ensconced in the room whose only window faced a so-called light-shaft, which admitted a few faint rays of sunlight in the morning but was pitch dark by late-afternoon. There was another problem, too. The conference room was at the other end of the floor from the large open space that served as the editorial offices, and could only be reached by negotiating one’s way through the advertising and circulation departments. This meant that Eileen and I were constantly tramping backwards and forwards as I tried to assume editorial control of the magazine. Not one editorial staff member ever ventured back to see me. We might have bought the magazine, but it was becoming apparent, we had not bought any kind of cooperation from the staff.
Sandra and I had arranged for the staff to be presented with a small token when they came to work on the first day of our formal ownership. We left on each person’s desk a white rosebud tied with a rose ribbon and attached to a card that said ‘In friendship’ inside and, somewhat gauchely I now see, ‘GDay’ on the card’s envelope. I could hear the exclamations of surprise begin shortly after 10 o’clock as the editorial staffers, cardboard beakers of steaming coffee in hand, began drifting in. The gesture seemed to be appreciated.
Later that day I called an editorial meeting to present the refreshed logo and redesign for the magazine. I knew that we needed a strong visual statement that signified the new direction I intended to take with Ms. We had to be well-designed and classy so I had hired Nancy Butkus, the hottest magazine art director in town, to do a redesign and I’d
decided to accept her suggestion that we refresh the logo. That would be a strong signal that we were changing. Nancy’s cover roughs were sensational: a clean and strong design that made exactly the kind of statement that I knew was necessary. One cover showed a baby dressed in a pinstriped business suit; a perfect metaphor for the ‘having it all’ anguish of the 1980s. Nancy’s new logo removed the full-stop after the ‘s’ in ‘Ms.’, turned it into a diamond shape and repositioned it underneath the s. At first I was dubious. Was a diamond too frivolous? Nancy persuaded me, however, that it maintained the old logo’s simplicity while giving it an eighties lift. I worried that the staff might see it as subverting Ms.’s legacy, but I was ready to discuss and defend what I’d done. But when I laid the boards out on the floor, there being nowhere else to present them, not a single person said a word. They simply stared at them and returned to their desks. I had found it remarkable that Steinem and Carbine had not told them of the magazine’s insurmountable financial problems and the possibility of a sale. I understood that their hostility masked sadness, and that most of them were having difficulty coping with this suddenly altered reality. Someone must have said something to Steinem because a week or so after we took over, she arranged a day-long counselling session for the staff.
But whatever benefits that session had for individual morale, it did little to persuade them I was not a hostile interloper. I went into the ladies’ room and found taped to the main door a cartoon from a magazine that derided Australian women as the Valley Girls of the 1980s, a disparaging and stereotyped reference to the air-headed young women from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. A few weeks earlier, New York Newsday had run a headline ‘Crocodile Dundee to edit Ms.’ Great. I was being introduced to New York as a rough and ready Australian, from the same mould as controversial newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch or Paul Hogan, who played the knockabout Crocodile Dundee in the hit movie of the same name. How could I convince this city that I was a different kind of Australian? A woman, for one thing, and someone who loathed the brash ocker stereotype. But also an Australian who wanted to lift the quality of Ms. magazine, not turn it into tabloid trash as was Murdoch’s style back then.
I soon discovered that Ms. was chaotic. There was no structure to the editorial staff, no hierarchy or at least not one that was acknowledged. On the masthead everyone appeared to be equal; no one had a title. Was anyone actually in charge? I was surprised to learn that Steinem was not in fact the magazine’s editor. That job had been Suzanne Braun Levine’s, although you would never know that from the masthead. Just as you would never know that there were in fact editors, a copy editor, a fact-checker and a production manager. Nor were there any secretaries or assistants. Everyone was supposed to do their own ‘shit work’, answer their own phones, open their own mail, sift through the piles of unsolicited submissions—in addition to doing the essential daily work of commissioning articles and seeing them through the production process. This approach to organisation might have been okay for the women’s movement in the 1970s, but it was no way to run a magazine. Nor was it an honest reflection of how power was actually exercised—and remunerated. While most Ms. staffers’ salaries were very low, those at the (unacknowledged) top paid themselves well, in a couple of cases extremely well.
Suzanne Braun Levine was expected to stand aside for me and she was not happy about it. There was no negotiating this as there was no room for two editors-in-chief. Nor was I prepared to include her name on the masthead as Editor Emerita, as Steinem wanted. The masthead had to reflect the new direction of the magazine, not be a tombstone to the past. Ms. was overstaffed given its income so some people would have to go, and I would not retain the various advisory bodies the magazine had been using. There would be fewer names on the masthead than in the past and we would list their job titles. As soon as the deal had been agreed, all staffers had been put on sixty days probation. The new masthead would reflect the new staffing, those Ms. staffers I retained as well as new hires such as the art director who had been recommended by Nancy Butkus, but it would also include Steinem and Carbine, who were being retained as consultants. It would not be a totally clean break.
I spent two days interviewing editorial staffers individually while Sandra reviewed the advertising, circulation and marketing people. I wanted to talk to people away from the depressing and enervating environment of the Ms. offices, and the hostile bravura of the group, so I’d hired a room in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which was convenient to the office and to transport. I asked each person to tell me their strengths and weaknesses, to let me know if they wished to continue in their current job or, if there was a choice, was there a job they would prefer to do? Steinem had been anxious to protect the jobs of all Ms.’s employees but we were not prepared to give such an undertaking. I needed to make my mark and that meant hiring some new people. Some of the existing staff would have to be cut but I also needed to put the magazine out. I would use my first issue to assess who was indispensable. There was at least one person who had to go right away; she had a serious drinking problem and would return each day after lunch, lie down under her desk and pass out. We insisted that she be dismissed before we got there. They agreed, saying they had been about to sack her anyway, but then failed to honour their undertaking. It was left to Sandra to do. I had found the meetings with the editorial people both depressing and terrifying. Their levels of passivity were astonishing, especially for such a high-energy place as New York. Everyone was completely happy with what they were doing; no one had any ambitions to move to other jobs, let alone other publications. The only requests I received were for pay increases. It was true the editorial staff salaries were extraordinarily low and Sandra and I had already budgeted to pay market rates. But we had also determined that if we were going to pay higher salaries we wanted competent, committed people in every single one of those jobs.
At first, Gloria Steinem and I seemed to get on well. She was warm and welcoming on my first day, presenting me with a large wooden planter box of Narcissus with a card that said ‘for the temporary office of a permanent gardener (of flowers and talent and a better world)’. This was an especially generous gesture since she disapproved, she told me, of my plan to introduce into Ms. a page where women wrote about their gardens. I had been struck by how many feminists loved to cultivate plants, even in window boxes or on small terraces, and my idea was to ask well-known women to write about their love of growing things. I had intended to call the page ‘The Joy of Growing’. Steinem had no interest in plants and grew nothing in her own apartment but her close friend Robin Morgan, the poet and editor of the feminist anthology Sisterhood is Powerful grew roses on her rooftop and would write for the page—as did Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, the novelist Marge Piercy and former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. Most people to whom I described the idea loved it and eventually Steinem came around; she even came up with ‘Earthly Delights’ a far better name for the page which l accepted gratefully.
The day after the initial papers were signed I had gone to Steinem’s apartment on East 73rd Street. She had invited me to discuss with her how she could help me with the transition. She understood the ‘tyranny of expectations’, she said, and did not want to burden me with excess information but she wanted to give me as much, and as many introductions, as I thought would be useful. I was impressed by the breadth of her ideas, and her amazingly wide array of contacts, as well as by her generosity in being willing to share these with me. I was already grateful that she had taken me under her wing socially as well, showing me a New York I had never experienced before. Just walking down the street with her, heads turned, people gawked and there was absolutely no problem getting a seat or a table wherever we might want to go. She introduced me to everyone—movie stars, editors and other luminaries and to her ‘gang’, Robin Morgan and the wonderful Bella Abzug who from 1971 to 1977 had been a member of the US House of Representatives. Both received me warmly and I felt absurdly excited knowing that I could now call upon t
hese trailblazing feminists, perhaps even become friends with them. One night in early November, Gloria took me to Nell’s, the smart new nightclub on West 14th Street that was part-owned by the Australian Nell Campbell. It was one of the hottest places in town and almost impossible to get into—unless you were with Gloria Steinem. There was no waiting in the street in the freezing cold behind a velvet rope when you were with Gloria. And of course once we were inside, she knew everyone. As we sat down on one of the club’s signature grungy old couches Iman, the gorgeous Somalian supermodel, who later married David Bowie, joined us. ‘And who do you most admire?’ she said to me. ‘Who are your heroes?’ I stumbled to come up with a smart answer.
The gap between Steinem’s rhetoric and the way she conducted herself would always puzzle me. Her feminist sentiments were impeccable and often expressed in eloquent and colourful language. She was especially adept at popularising the words of others, one example being the slogan ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ which was coined by Irina Dunn, an Australian. But some aspects of her seemed to be at odds with her rhetoric, as I found when I visited her apartment. I found it somewhat disturbing, like being confronted with intimate secrets. Gloria’s bed, a loft bed in the front room of her brownstone apartment, was reached by wooden stairs that, like the bed itself, were draped with flimsy white fabric. In Carolyn Heilbrun’s view, it resembled a baby’s bassinet. She writes that the novelist Alice Walker, at the time a close friend of Gloria’s, thought that ‘it represents the much-cared-for-baby Steinem believes she never was’.4 I was astonished to discover that Gloria had once been rather plump and that she had a sister who was grossly overweight. When we dined together she ate very little, whereas I greedily consumed all the offerings of New York’s finest restaurants. Once when we had breakfast at the Plaza Hotel, I tucked into Eggs Benedict while she made do with a toasted bran muffin. No butter. Maybe this was why she had a set of physicians’ weighing scales wedged in front of the small refrigerator in her kitchen. To open the fridge door, it was necessary to manoeuvre the scales out of the way. Strange stuff for a feminist. Especially one whose magazine regularly urged women to reject the body images foisted on them by the cosmetics and fashion industries. But then Steinem, like many feminists, had a complicated relationship with fashion. She was the beneficiary of designers who wanted to be able to boast that Gloria Steinem wore their label. Early on, I’d asked about a rack of garments being wheeled into the West 40th Street offices. ‘They’re for Gloria,’ I was told. ‘She’s always being offered clothes.’
