Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  The next ten months, until I was fired as Ms. editor in December 1989, would be the most stressful time I have ever lived through. My father’s description, in a letter he’d written to me the previous year, that trying to please bankers was ‘like walking through fire in shoes filled with kerosene’, turned out to be apt for the situation in which Sandra and I now found ourselves. We had no option but to look for new money, so once again we called in Wilma Jordan who had advised us on the buyout from Fairfax. She began quietly sounding out an A list of potential partners about taking a 50 per cent share in the company, in return for a $10 million injection of capital as well as assuming our $20 million of debt. The New York Times Company and Time Inc. both expressed interest, as did the Hearst Corporation, although they wanted Citibank to retire some of its debt because they did not agree that the company was worth $30 million. I had already made unsuccessful approaches back in Australia, to Trevor Kennedy at Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press and to Frank Lowy who had recently moved into the media business by buying the Ten Network from Rupert Murdoch. Sandra talked to Si Newhouse and Bernie Leser at Condé Nast but their position had not changed from a year ago; they were interested in Sassy but would not even consider Ms.

  To our surprise, the strongest expression of interest came from Robert Holmes à Court, the Australian businessman who had made his name as a corporate raider who bid for very large companies and, often and surprisingly, managed to win them. He had outwitted the legendary British entertainment mogul Sir Lew Grade to acquire his Associated Communications group, whose assets had included a string of London theatres, a number of film and other entertainment properties, and the rights to 112 Beatles songs. More recently he had made a bid for BHP, Australia’s largest company, in what was initially dismissed by the Melbourne establishment as a reckless move by a rank amateur. They quickly changed their tune when Holmes à Court secured a key stake in the company’s share register. Now he was looking at us, a tiny indebted company that could not have been less like any of his previous plays. But on 22 February, when Sandra, Wilma and I arrived for our meeting with him at Heytsbury’s (the Holmes à Court company) as yet only partially furnished offices on the 24th floor of a swank building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, we were told that Holmes à Court was in London. He wanted me to ring him to discuss the deal. This was most unusual as such conversations would normally be with the bankers, but then Robert Holmes à Court was a most unusual man. I was worried, though, because of a phone call I’d made to him when I’d been with the Financial Review—to talk about some $20 million in taxes he’d neglected to pay. He’d sought to deflect me with charm and flattery, but I had written the story anyway. So what was he up to now? Was this trophy hunting or were our financial woes an opportunity for revenge for my article?

  When I finally reached him, in Perth, not London, he answered the phone himself, and immediately launched another charm offensive. He told me he’d enjoyed my book on the 1983 Australian federal elections, and mentioned a couple of things from the book that indicated he had indeed read it. He then steered the conversation onto Canberra politics; he especially wanted to talk about Paul Keating, who he referred to as a friend. When I managed to get us onto our deal, he told me he wanted to enter the US media market because it was ‘an intellectual activity’ populated by ‘interesting people’, and he was looking for a cheap, opportunity. At $10 million we were certainly cheap, although he said he thought we were too thinly capitalised. He also told me that he liked to invest in immature companies that had a capacity for growth, or companies that had problems that needed solving. He cited as an example of the latter BHP, and its reliance on government steel subsidies. He did not stipulate which category he thought we fell into. I would have ventured that we actually fit both: we definitely had capacity for growth, and we undoubtedly had a problem with our reliance for revenue on advertising, which reduced our editorial independence and made us vulnerable to boycott, although that was an industry-wide structural weakness that would not change for several decades.

  After our conversation I felt absurdly optimistic. Here we were dealing with a principal, someone who called the shots, not one of the corporate eunuchs who needed to refer everything upwards. He said he’d study our document over the weekend and probably come to New York next week to meet us.

  While we waited to see if Holmes à Court would come to our rescue, Jane Pratt, the editor of Sassy, and I needed to be especially vigilant to not publish anything that might further antagonise advertisers. Our cash flow was so tight we were already stretching payables. This was causing great anxiety with our editors, who had to manage distressed calls from writers who were being made to wait for their money. We could not afford to lose a single ad from either magazine; rather, we desperately needed to increase business. We had had a good start to the year with Ms.’s Women of the Year issue (a tradition that I thought should continue), published in January 1989, a very healthy 166 pages book size. The women we had chosen to honour included Oprah Winfrey; movie star Anne Archer, chosen for her pro-choice views; gun control activist Sarah Brady; and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a 98-year-old journalist and novelist who’d saved The Everglades in Florida;1 and they all attended a splashy breakfast at the Waldorf Astoria with movie star Alan Alda, our MC, conferring the awards. We’d achieved a lot of positive media coverage. You would never have known that morning the trouble we were in and the desperate measures we were taking to keep our little empire afloat.

  In early February, I decided that our April issue should feature as our cover the harrowing story of Hedda Nussbaum, a former Random House children’s book editor who had been charged, along with her partner, Joel Steinberg, a lawyer, with the murder of their six-year-old adopted daughter, Lisa Steinberg. It was a horrifying story of the tiny neglected girl beaten to death in a filthy apartment in an elegant old brownstone in the heart of the Greenwich Village, in a house where Mark Twain had once lived (and where I had been tempted the previous year to rent an apartment). But in deciding to commission several articles to address this story, I had no inkling that it would lead to a mass advertiser exodus and a rupture with Gloria Steinem, together a perfect storm that had me concluding that Ms. was probably doomed.

  It was a story that electrified New York: middle-class people in one of the city’s most iconic neighbourhoods, revealed to have lived a hellish existence of drugs, degradation and extraordinary brutality. Constant complaints from neighbours to police about cries and crashing noises from the apartment had not ended the nightmare. Instead, in the early hours of a November morning in 1987, medics from a nearby hospital entered the squalid apartment—one of them said later it resembled a ‘cave’—to find the unconscious six-year-old on a bathroom floor, another small child tethered to a playpen, sitting in his own excrement and drinking spoiled milk and the severely injured Hedda. The two went on trial in October 1988, but early on the charges against Hedda were dropped and she became the major prosecution witness against her former partner. The trial was the first ever to be televised ‘gavel-to-gavel’ live on a major network, and the entire city watched transfixed as the visibly still injured Hedda told the story of what had happened that night. She was a polarising witness. The judge told the jury they could not rely on her evidence except to corroborate other testimony, and it was later revealed that the jury had largely disregarded her evidence.2 In late- January 1989, Joel Steinberg was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and given a lengthy prison sentence.

  The question of how much culpability Nussbaum should have for Lisa’s death divided the city, but it was tearing the women’s movement apart. The opposing sides could be characterised, broadly, as the Brownmiller and the Steinem camps. Susan Brownmiller, whose early 1970s masterpiece Against Our Will had redefined the way we understood rape, had written an op-ed piece for the New York Times that argued Hedda Nussbaum bore at least some responsibility for the death of Lisa Steinberg. She had just published a novel Waverly
Place that was based on the Nussbaum/Steinberg story. I asked Susan if she would cover the trial for Ms. I knew she would turn in a well-written, powerful account of the crime and the court case, but she would also take a position on Hedda’s responsibility for Lisa’s death (and she did not disappoint). I also commissioned Marilyn French, author of The Women’s Room. Her essay, which we titled ‘A Gothic Romance’, argued Hedda’s dependency on Joel fit an archetype of male power/female bondage that still had a powerful hold on women’s imagination, even in this feminist era. The rest of the package would comprise my essay and several other pieces on various aspects of domestic violence, written by staff members. When Gloria learned that Susan was writing, she called me. Hedda Nussbaum was a total victim, Gloria argued, who in no way could be blamed for Lisa’s death and she put to me most forcefully that it would be a betrayal of everything Ms. had ever stood for if the magazine were to publish the Brownmiller position. This view encapsulated for me so much of what I saw as being wrong with the ‘old’ Ms. The magazine tended to adopt purist positions as articles of faith, allowing for no discussion or contrary views. This alienated many women who had tried to read Ms.—they felt shut out or, worse, patronised, if their own views differed. ‘With fewer real victories to report, and an acute fear of revealing divisions within the movement to the voraciously hostile outside world, Ms. fell into a pattern,’ wrote Peggy Orenstein in Mother Jones in a scathing assessment of where the magazine had ended-up shortly before our acquisition. ‘It continued to remind its readers that the same old inequities were still the same old inequities, and it found smaller, individual victories to exult in, victories that often seemed sugar-coated.’3 I thought Ms. would be more relevant, and appeal to a wider audience, if we explored issues, including highly charged and difficult subjects such as this one, by bringing in different voices, including dissenting ones. Guide our readers, rather than preach at them. Many years later, in her memoir about the women’s movement, Brownmiller praised me for giving her this commission: ‘We agreed it was time to stop excusing the behaviour of all battered women by claiming each one was a helpless victim, a politically correct but, to our minds, a psychologically and morally untenable stance that damaged the movement’s credibility’.4

  In fact, although I had no hesitation about running articles representing a spectrum of views in our coverage of this excruciating case, I was actually very torn about Hedda. I knew from my experience at Elsie Women’s Refuge in the early 1970s, and from constant dealings since with women victims of violence, that relentless abuse can lead to total loss of agency. I knew the complex answers to the question ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ Hedda had left—five times.5 But she had always returned, despite warnings from colleagues that her own life could be in danger, and eventually she stopped working and became so socially isolated that there was no one to turn to. On the morning Lisa was discovered, Hedda’s injuries were massive, a broken nose, blackened eyes, a split lip, big clumps of her hair were missing, she was limping and looked dazed and confused.6 Her leg was so badly ulcerated that one observer described it as life threatening. Her nose was broken so severely it could never be repaired despite plastic surgery, and years later one eye wept permanently from a damaged tear duct, and she still walked with a limp. How could a woman so damaged herself possibly intervene to save a child? I was conscious, too, of the assumptions used by child protection agencies that women’s interests, and safety, were always secondary to those of the child. As a feminist I could not subscribe to that, but I also knew it was rare even for women who themselves had been battered into stupefied submission, not to try to protect their children. Often the catalyst for finally being able to leave was when the abuse of a child began. Feminists needed to champion the interests of women but how did we reconcile these with a mother’s failure to raise the alarm about her brutalised child? Hedda testified that after Lisa had sustained the injuries, Joel had laid her inert body on the bathroom floor and gone out to dinner. It is impossible to understand, and difficult to be sympathetic to why Hedda did not pick up the phone during the three hours he was gone. Was she so addicted to crack cocaine that she was unable to act? When Joel returned, he and Hedda free-based cocaine for most of the night. It was not until early the next morning that they rang 911. Lisa had been lying on that bathroom floor for ten hours. Medics said she could have been saved if she had received immediate medical attention. Instead, after three days, her life-support was turned off.7 In the end, I concluded that while Hedda’s failure to save Lisa was mitigated by her own horrendous abuse, it did not totally absolve her. She had a duty to Lisa that she was, or should have been, capable of exercising and she had failed to do so.

  The circulation department had been thrilled that I planned to run a newsy cover, featuring a close-up image of Hedda Nussbaum’s bruised and swollen face. Newsweek had had great newsstand success with a similar cover shot and our people were predicting that this would be our biggest-selling issue of the year. This was exactly the kind of boost we needed, but our advertising sales director, Marsha Metrinko, had a very different reaction. Metrinko, as she liked to call herself—and she always addressed me as ‘Summers’—was a hard-boiled character with statuesque good looks, tall with a helmet of short platinum hair that made her resemble Brigitte Nielsen. She mostly revelled in the challenge of selling advertising for Ms., but she cried foul when she heard about our cover. ‘Summers’, she said, talking out of the side of her mouth as if she was telling me something secret, ‘Summers, you’re breaking my heart. We’ve just cracked the beauty category. You can’t do this to me’.

  She laid out the situation as she saw it. If we ran with the Hedda cover, we would lose seven pages of advertising. Not only that, Metrinko said, four advertisers would punish us by staying out for two issues while a new client, Bristol-Myers, which had four products it might place in Ms., had said they would never come in. I was angry that these companies even knew about our cover. This kind of blackmail was horrifying, and I would have liked nothing more than to tell them we did not want their lousy business. But I also knew that our only chance of survival was to meet or, if possible, exceed our advertising budget of 40 pages per issue. There was no guarantee that those who had pulled their ads would come back if I capitulated and changed the cover, but we were absolutely certain to suffer financially if I didn’t. Advertisers who did not like the editorial environment surrounding their ads simply refused to pay. Ms. had compromised in the past to avoid offending advertisers. They had not covered issues like the health impact of smoking on women, so as not to alienate cigarette advertisers and, Steinem told Peggy Orenstein, she had once changed a mention of Porsche in an article to ‘expensive car’, to keep Volkswagen happy.

  We had worked hard to retain the automobile advertising. It was a lucrative category—they almost always wanted two-page spreads –and they did not demand supportive editorial. We did not have to run articles about cars, for instance, but it would have been foolhardy to criticise their product so I was stricken when Barbara Ehrenreich proposed her next column be a satire on fast cars. I explained to her how sensitive and demanding these advertisers were, how we could not afford to lose them. Would she be willing to change topics? ‘If it was anyone but Ms.,’ was her generous response.

  These advertisers were influencing, even dictating, content. I could see no other way to look at it. We had to give them what they wanted—nice, non-controversial ‘happy edit’—or they simply would not grace our pages. The automobile makers did not stipulate content directly but they dictated the way they wanted readers to feel when they glanced at their pages: happy, not challenged or confronted by the story of a battered woman or a murdered child. Without them, there would be no us, because they paid our production costs. We had to comply. Only the cigarette companies, who knew they were living on borrowed time, acknowledged they were in no position to dictate editorial. Our readers hated the cigarette ads, and so did I, but I did not see how we could survive without them. We als
o all hated the ‘flying pad’, as we called the large image of a sanitary napkin that ran across two pages. It was reasonable enough for us to advertise such products, but did the ads have to be so, so ugly? Proctor & Gamble, America’s biggest advertiser of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, would only advertise if they were guaranteed that their ads would not appear in an issue that mentioned any of a stipulated list of topics, which included abortion, gun control and the occult. They did not care what position the editorial adopted on these topics, they could not even be mentioned. It was often difficult to create credible editorial while conforming to such guidelines. Sometimes we found ourselves having to concoct bland copy to place near these ads. When added to the other advertiser demands, that their ads run close to the front and on a right-hand page, the task of putting together the magazine became very challenging. I sometimes envied the fashion magazines who could easily slot-in pages of beauty, jewellery and clothing between the ads at the front, and run their feature stories in the ‘well’, that section in the middle of the magazine where there were no ads and where controversy could reign free. My background was newspapers where, as far as I was aware, advertisers did not have this kind of power. I had never been asked to change a story, or refrain from mentioning a topic, because of advertiser demands, so I was unprepared for these battles and the editorial challenges they created. We soon learned that the constraints Sassy and Ms. were experiencing were not unique. Throughout the magazine and broadcast industries, articles and on-air programs were being pulled, toned-down or simply not written, not because they might offend readers or viewers but because they could upset advertisers or religious groups. At the same time, special bland editorial was being manufactured to give advertisers the non-controversial ‘happy-edit’ they were increasingly demanding. We thought our situation was dire because we believed that our magazines had a special mission: we were not there just to create edit to place between the ads. We believed that the ads should pay for the edit we and our readers wanted. But increasingly, in an environment that was so competitive and so dependent on advertising, other media met the demands—at the cost of unfettered freedom of expression—and made it that much tougher for the rest of us.