Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  I knew this was my never-to-be-repeated opportunity to demonstrate my editorial credentials to the New York media which was watching to see what I would do with Ms. The Pat Schroeder piece would provide the perfect vehicle to announce to the world that Ms. was now a journalistic force to be reckoned with. Just two women had previously run for the Presidential nomination, Senator Margaret Chase Smith for the Republican Party in 1964 and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for the Democratic Party in 1972. At this rate, of one woman a decade vying for the Presidency, it was hard to see when the US would ever elect a woman to the White House. The pool of politically qualified women was small and it was shallow. There were only 25 women in the 99th Congress of 1985–87, two of them senators, and just three states had female governors. It seemed the influence of feminism had not yet been felt in electoral politics. This would be the context for my cover story (just as it informed my wanting to introduce regular political coverage into Ms.). I was looking for a serious journalistic appraisal of what had happened, the kind of big read one might find in Esquire or Rolling Stone, but with feminist assumptions. I did not want a soft, predictable piece, an apologia for Schroeder’s failure, or a shying away from examining why women were not stepping up in the numbers needed to be a force in US politics. I told the editors of my plan. There was a problem, I was told. What kind of problem, I asked impatiently. I want to do this story, I warned, and I will. The problem was that prior to my arrival someone else had been assigned to write an essay on what the Pat Schroeder decision meant. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘We’ll kill that assignment. I want my own person.’ Looks of horror greeted me. ‘We can’t kill the piece,’ someone said. ‘It’s Jane O’Reilly.’

  I had to be told that Jane O’Reilly was a founding member of what the editors liked to refer to as ‘the Ms. family’. She had written the famous ‘click’ article in the first-ever issue of Ms., the one that documented those recognitions that today might be described as ‘light-bulb moments’, where you see sexism (or, as it used to be called, ‘male chauvinism’) in action. I was assured that Jane could easily turn her essay into the kind of piece I was looking for. I was unconvinced. I wanted my first cover story to bear my stamp, not to be a compromise negotiated with the old guard. I started making calls, working my way through my list of preferred, well-known writers. Every single one of them turned me down. Or, rather, their agents did. In the nicest possible way, of course, but letting me know nevertheless that it was simply unheard of to expect writers of this calibre to drop whatever they were doing to take on an assignment of this kind, especially one that had to be turned around in a matter of weeks. Didn’t I know that in the US magazine stories were assigned months in advance? No, I did not, but I was fast learning that my own assignment was going to be considerably tougher than I had imagined. I wondered if Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, then one of New York’s hottest magazines, got the same reaction when she wanted a timely piece.

  I had to go back to the editors. ‘Okay,’ I told them, ‘let’s get Jane to change her focus and make it a major piece, a cover story. I’ll go and see her.’ It was quickly made clear to me that would not be a good idea. ‘Jane is temperamental,’ I was told, ‘she does not like to deal with people she doesn’t know. Best to let Gloria handle it.’ Gloria, in this case, was Gloria Jacobs, one of the senior editors, and someone Jane trusted. I liked Gloria. In the short time we had worked together, I had found her ideas interesting. She might be someone who would survive the transition, I had ruminated. She and I discussed what I had in mind for the article and I crossed my fingers, while she trooped off to the Upper West Side where Jane lived in a shabby but sprawling multi-roomed apartment overlooking Central Park.

  The piece was due in early December. Even then it would need a very quick turnaround to get it ready for the February issue that ‘closed’—the term used to describe that frantic final week when a magazine is put to bed—in the second week of December. By the end of the first week it had not been delivered and I started to panic. Gloria Jacobs tried to reassure me, but I could tell she was worried. Repeated phone calls to Jane went unanswered. Eventually Jacobs went to her apartment, insisted she be let in, sat down at Jane’s word-processor, printed out the piece and brought it back to the office. It was 40 rambling, incoherent and inconsistent pages. It was not an article; it was not even close to being an article. I decided it was unusable. What on earth was I going to do! I had commissioned George Lange, one of New York’s top magazine photographers, to do the cover shot. He had produced a sensational image of Pat Schroeder wrapped in the American flag which, I was confident, was going to cause a protest from the American Legion. That would be great publicity for our initial issue. I had a cover shot, but no cover story. Jacobs said she could rescue the piece. I looked at her dubiously, but I had no choice. For almost four days she laboured over the manuscript and when she brought it to me, I could hardly believe the miracle she had wrought. I no longer needed persuading about the value of what American magazine editors do. She had salvaged what I had judged to be an unpublishable piece and turned it into a creditable article that still retained something of Jane’s voice. I thanked her profusely and approved it to go into production. The dramas weren’t over. Jane O’Reilly sued to have her name removed from the story. The issue had already gone to film, and it would have cost a lot of money to halt production. Lawyers had to be brought in; eventually it was resolved. Welcome to magazine publishing, Anne, I thought to myself.

  I pushed on with my plan to open a Washington Bureau and advertised the position of bureau chief. I had wanted a top Washington journalist for the job—another signal that I was shaking things up—but although I received more than 200 applications, none was a big name, or someone from a major news organisation. I was forced to acknowledge that no one was going to leave a prestigious media job to leap into the risky world that I was offering. I interviewed 25 women and selected Peggy Simpson, who had wide Washington experience, knew absolutely everyone, was indefatigable and was able to turn around a story quickly. This was important because I was about to introduce a regular section called the Ms. Reporter. It would be printed on salmon-coloured paper (very similar to the Financial Times, only glossy) to distinguish it from the rest of the magazine, and would feature short, newsy items on political issues and people. We were, in effect, introducing newspaper-type deadlines to this section of the magazine and Simpson’s newspaper background meant she was well-equipped to ensure we always had sufficient, and good, material. Peggy was also consistent and reliable and she never got anything wrong. Indispensable in a journalist. She was a great hire.

  The Ms. Reporter was to be very popular with readers. They appreciated getting news that no one else published and our focus on political leaders, especially women, and the forthcoming 1988 presidential election made us unique among women’s magazines. In 1979, buckling under sky-rocketing cost increases for paper and postage, Steinem and Carbine converted the magazine to not-for-profit status by transferring the ownership to a foundation they also named Ms.. They saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in postage costs6 but they paid a high price, in that they could no longer take political positions and rate candidates. Now we were freed from that constraint and I wanted political coverage to be a Ms. hallmark. It would distinguish us from other women’s magazines and, if we did it properly, would generate news that would be covered by other media, giving us free publicity. One of my ideas was for a regular Ms. poll, but when I told Steinem about this she had argued, persuasively it had seemed at the time, that polls were not reliable in a country where voting was not compulsory. I don’t know why I listened to her. Political polls and their findings generate regular news stories. We could have polled voting intentions and all kinds of social issues. It could have been a major part of our rebranding, and I still regret that I did not do it.

  Our Washington launch party was held on Capitol Hill on a frigid January night in an elaborate large room, ju
st off the Senate chamber, which meant that a good few senators dropped in during the evening. Peggy Simpson and Ann Lewis, another well-known Washington insider who had also interviewed well and who I had hired to write political commentary, had together ensured that all the major women’s organisations and lobbyists were there. Gloria Steinem had delivered the co-chair of the event, the very well-connected Pamela Harriman, who later would be appointed Ambassador to France by President Bill Clinton. Her presence was enough to put us on the Washington map. The room was packed with guests and gate-crashers—the sign of a hot party. Our VIP list included all of the very few women members of Congress, including the diminutive Senator Barbara Mikulski, newly elected from Maryland. She was one of just two women senators then; when she retired in 2017, she had served longer than any other woman in the history of Congress. Pamela, Gloria and I all spoke. I outlined my plans for Ms.’s political coverage. It was a presidential election year and Ms. would cover the candidates and the issues. We planned to produce a guide to the best candidates for women, I told them.

  Senator Edward Kennedy dropped by and headed straight towards Gloria. She introduced us. His face was a deep unhealthy red, his skin was puffy. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ he said, locking eyes with me. Teddy Kennedy’s drunken carousing was the talk of the town and the subject of avid media reporting. He and fellow Senator Christopher Dodd from Connecticut frequently cavorted together, often reportedly engaging in sexual activities in public view in restaurants, including a notable incident in 1985 at La Brasserie, one of Kennedy’s favourite Washington haunts, that became known as the ‘waitress sandwich’.7 There was plenty of public speculation about the possible reasons for why the ‘the last brother’, as one biographer dubbed him, was seemingly embarked on some kind of existential suicide mission. Some argued that Teddy had become a reckless drunk after the assassination of his brother Bobby in 1968; others pointed out that the public degradation of women was in the Kennedy DNA and that his brother John, while President, had shamelessly seduced women in semi-public situations, often while his wife was in a nearby room. He did not follow through on the lunch invitation, but a few months later I got to hear Kennedy deliver an address at a Women’s Legal Defense Fund conference in Washington. Listening to him espouse women’s issues I was struck by the incongruity, given his notorious womanising, of the adoring response of the audience, all them women, presumably feminists. and all aged 40 or more. I’d always been puzzled, and a little repulsed, by the way so many feminists fawned over Kennedy, looking the other way at his treatment of women in return for his votes on issues that mattered. Now I was observing this in action. His Kennedy charm, his glamour, his wealth and his ‘feminism’ seemed to be an irresistible combination for these women. It occurred to me then that perhaps his feminism was acquired, an act of atonement for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne who had been drowned in Teddy’s car off Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. It had been almost twenty years ago, but the stain of that evening had never been erased. In the early 1990s, married again and seemingly calmed and rehabilitated, Kennedy became a very different man, one who ultimately earned respect for his championing of health insurance, civil rights and women’s equality. It was hard to see that man the night I met him in Washington.

  A few weeks later, when I got an early copy of my first issue of the magazine, I turned the pages with mixed feelings. I was both proud and amazed to have in my hand a copy of Ms.—Ms. magazine!—that I had edited. Here was the concrete manifestation of the dramatic change in my life. I loved the cover photo of Pat Schroeder wrapped cheekily in the flag but when I examined the issue I was hypercritical, seeing mostly its faults. I hated this colour, that headline wasn’t sharp enough, the cover lines—the words that are meant to ‘sell’ the inside content—were banal. It was okay, but it didn’t knock my socks off. Sandra tried to reassure me, but I knew I had fallen short of what I had wanted to do. I had been so relieved that Jane O’Reilly’s piece had been salvaged that I did not allow myself to mourn what could have been. I resolved I was never again going to let myself get caught like this. I wanted to make my mark with big political stories so, I would plan ahead. I called Joan Didion’s agent to commission her to cover either the Democratic or Republican Conventions—or both—for Ms. They would be held in mid-1988, and it was now early January. Surely that was plenty of notice.

  ‘Sorry, but Miss Didion is not writing about politics anymore,’ I was told.

  I felt totally deflated. She was the first big name to turn me down. Even Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and the first woman to hold that position, had left the door open to a future approach when she’d said no to my request to take part in my Conversation series. This was where I paired well-known women from similar fields to talk about their lives and work. The tennis legends Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova had been the conversants in my first issue. Later, I would pair writers Andrea Dworkin and Erica Jong. I had thought Kirkpatrick would be well-matched with Bella Abzug who had agreed. At least it wasn’t an outright No from Kirkpatrick. Most people were at least curious about the new Ms. and I found that heartening. Maybe I was going to be able to make this work.

  Sandra and I learned, by accident, late one Sunday night in March 1988 that we were to be sold. Young Warwick was disposing of all Fairfax’s overseas assets, the New Zealand newspapers, the Spectator magazine in the UK—and Ms. and Sassy in the US. I had called Sydney that evening and picked up that something was happening. Sandra’s phone was not working so I walked the seven blocks down Broadway to her apartment to tell her the news. She came back to my place and we hit the phones. She was able to wangle a confirmation out of someone in Sydney but, rather than being distraught, it seemed only to spur her to action. I knew she had thought about what to do if this happened, but I did not know that she had a very big and bold plan. ‘We,’ she told me—she and I—‘would buy the magazines ourselves.’ I was amazed and admiring. I would never have had the business imagination, or courage, to come up with such an idea myself, but I was certainly up for it. The debut issue of Sassy had hit the newsstands a couple of weeks earlier and it was already apparent that Sandra had achieved the most successful new magazine launch since Elle in 1985. Sassy was the talk of the town. It was cool and it was groovy. Its editorial staff was young and hip so they could talk peer-to-peer, with articles written in teenagers’ lingo, rather than the ‘talking-down’ editorial by adults of the other teen magazines. It had funky art direction and fashion spreads that made the competition look staid. It seemed this new kid on the block was going to shake up the teen magazine category as it was an immediate, huge hit with the teenage girls who were its target audience and was also attracting a tidal wave of advertising. Everyone wanted to be part of Sassy. We had a hot property on our hands and Sandra knew exactly what she wanted to do with it. At around 1 a.m. she rang Wilma Jordan, a media broker and investment adviser, who had become famous when as a co-owner of Esquire she had negotiated the sale of this iconic magazine to the Hearst Corporation. Sandra briefly outlined the situation. We agreed to meet in Wilma’s office at 8 that morning. ‘Well, doctor,’ Sandra said to me, ‘We’ve got ourselves an investment banker. We are going to buy those magazines’. Within 24 hours she had secured an exclusive option to purchase Ms. and Sassy for $US14 million, an amount that made good what Fairfax had already outlayed. We issued a press release announcing that Sandra and I intended to do a management buyout—an MBO in the lingo of the day—of John Fairfax (US) Limited. We had five weeks to raise the money and, if we succeeded, it would be only the second-ever women-led management buyout in US corporate history.8

  ‘People don’t lend money to people who look as if they need it,’ Sandra said to me. ‘We’ve got to look like a million dollars’. In reality we had to look like $20 million, as that was the amount we needed: $14 million to repay Fairfax and $6 million to fund our forward operating costs. San
dra had already chopped $3 million off the operating requirements, because of the phenomenal forward ad bookings for Sassy. She thought we might not even need the $6 million but, she figured, it would not hurt to have some extra cash up our sleeves. Just in case. Wilma Jordan was lining up meetings with potential investors or partners. We already had one scheduled with Lord Rothermere, owner of the British media empire Associated Newspapers. We had to be ready with our numbers—and we had to look good.

  Sandra got herself a Valentino suit, a stunning red number with deceptively simple lines that looked both businesslike and classy. I was inexperienced at such purchases, but after someone steered me towards a personal shopper at Macy’s, of all places, I emerged with a classic Anne Klein two-piece suit, with padded shoulders, a hallmark of the time, a long collarless jacket that fitted snuggly over the short skirt. It was also red, a warm invigorating hue that I called Ronald Reagan red; it was the colour women White House correspondents wore for his Press Conferences, knowing he liked it, hoping he’d favour them with a question. I hoped it might favour me in the tumultuous venture we were about to embark on. I chose a soft white silk Georgio Armani crew necked, short-sleeved blouse to go under my suit. It was an astounding $600. I had no idea you could spend that much money on a mere blouse. We each paid $1000 for our suits. I confided to Sandra that while I loved my new outfit, felt it looked fantastic and made me feel totally in control, I was still in shock at how much it had cost.