by Anne Summers
The new April cover was an arty, grainy image of the chest and lower face of a naked woman, her arms crossed to cover her breasts. It was sensual and visually attractive but in no way did it represent the Hedda Nussbaum stories inside. We had quickly switched tack, making the cover story a report about the dangers of estrogen and relegating the Hedda and Joel package to just a cover line. I justified my caving to advertisers as a survival tactic, but I sometimes had to ask myself what I was doing in this mad magazine world. I was used to serious journalism. Now I was having to pander to advertisers whose only journalistic criteria, seemingly, was that an article be inoffensive. Three of those that pulled their ads in the April issue did not come back, including the cosmetics company, and Bristol-Myers did not come in with their pharmaceutical products, but Metrinko was able to save Chevrolet’s two-page spread and got commitments from the others that they would be back for the May issue. She also managed to haul-in several totally new pages so, although we did not make budget, the issue was not a total disaster.
The passions aroused by the Hedda Nussbaum case were quite extraordinary. There had been petitions and rallies, as well as warring public op-eds and bitter private arguments. Susan Brownmiller later wrote that her opinions in the NYT and Ms. were seen by ‘enraged battered-women’s advocates … as a stab in the back to the movement’8 and reported that ‘some of my movement friendships never recovered from the debate’. Gloria Steinem publicly associated herself with the pro-Hedda forces, speaking at a rally in Hedda’s defence on the steps of the criminal court building (and in 2006 would write the introduction to Hedda’s book and appear with her to promote it), and she wanted Ms. to back her. She seemed to assume she was still entitled to influence the editorial. I felt caught. While I frequently consulted Steinem, and often found her advice valuable, I also needed to put my own stamp on the magazine and that included abandoning the women-can-do-no-wrong mantra that seemed to underpin the editorial in the ‘old’ Ms. I wanted to take a more modern and nuanced approach that acknowledged women were not perfect and, in some cases, actually wrong. But in the end I compromised, or as Brownmiller put it, ‘the new team at Ms. capitulated, adding their names to the Hedda petition and printing a few self-serving words from Nussbaum in a subsequent issue’.9 (I ran a one page article by Hedda Nussbaum.)
This episode made brutally clear to me that while I was nominally editor-in-chief of Ms., I was not fully in control of the editorial agenda. The advertisers would not allow it and neither, it seemed, would Gloria Steinem. She still loomed large over the magazine in most people’s eyes—including, apparently, her own. She no longer owned the magazine but she could not let go. Maybe we should have opted for a clean break, and not retained Steinem, and Carbine, as consultants. It was often tricky for me to explain my vision for Ms. In April 1989 I was on an American Society of Magazine Editors panel ‘Remaking a Magazine’, along with Mort Zuckerman who talked about his makeover of US News and World Report. Tina Brown, who was editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, chaired the session. ‘That must have been tough,’ she said to me sympathetically during the break, ‘having to talk about what was wrong with Ms. with Gloria’s boyfriend there’.
I had disregarded Steinem when she’d tried to dissuade me from running an interview with Betty Friedan to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique. There was tremendous enmity between Steinem and Friedan and, I was astonished to discover, Friedan’s name had never once appeared in Ms. These two giants of the women’s movement barely spoke to each other. They represented different strands of feminism. Steinem was more utopian and visionary, whereas Friedan was a pragmatist who wanted clear political victories now. Their political differences spilled over into the personal realm and they barely had a civil word to say to, or about, each other, but I did not see that as a reason for me not to acknowledge one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. I interviewed Friedan in her tiny apartment in a sprawling block across from Lincoln Centre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and published the article, together with a photo of the two of us, in the December 1988 issue. Friedan’s insights mirrored many of my own. I, too, was puzzled why, when women’s lives had changed so dramatically in so many ways, they were still reluctant to seize political power and change the world. ‘What is wrong that a new generation of women leaders has not arisen?’ Friedan said to me. ‘We can’t leave until they come’. That, it seemed to me, should be a key question for Ms. to pursue. If I could only get some clear air.
In early May, Holmes à Court told us he would not proceed. He had been our last hope as, one after another, the major media companies had been deterred by Sassy’s deteriorating situation. Holmes à Court had signed a letter of intent, so we thought it was a done deal, but he had changed his mind. We were under-capitalised and could never succeed, he told us. Of course, without his injection of cash, that now seemed inevitable. After that, events were largely taken out of our hands, as the cash flow got worse and a controversial article in the June issue of Sassy sent the bankers into a total tailspin. The article was a very matter-of-fact account of a girl’s experience of incest with her grandfather. It was written in such a way as to warn girls about such relationships. I could see nothing wrong with it and nor did we lose any further advertisers, but for the bankers it was the last straw. They were the ones who could no longer stand the heat, who wanted this mess behind them, and they took precipitous action, insisting that Sandra resign, that an external CEO be appointed and that I take charge of Sassy’s editorial. It was devastating for Sandra to have the media company she had created taken from her. The day it happened, she and I locked ourselves in her office with a bottle of Scotch. It was just 21 months since our lunch at Café Un Deux Trois. In that short time, Sandra had reinvented magazines for teenage girls. Our adventure was over, but her legacy would stretch far into the future. It did not seem that way at the time, of course, although Sandra put on a show of extraordinary grace as she addressed the hastily brought-together staff of the two magazines, and told them she was leaving.
At first, I had thought it would be cool to spend time with the groovy young team at Sassy. It would be a refreshing change from Ms. where it was a constant struggle to convince the editors that we had to change the sensibility of the magazine. Even when they agreed we needed to change, the long-term staffers often simply could not adjust their mindsets and, all too often, they seemed to want to make it their mission to make me adapt to theirs. It was exhausting, especially on top of the ongoing financial struggles. Sassy would be fun. While the advertising director was trying to convince jittery advertisers that it was safe to come back, I needed to ensure the magazine did nothing to jeopardise this. I insisted on seeing page proofs, so I could peruse every tiny detail, captions as well as headlines, in addition to having already being briefed on the overall contents. I found myself utterly ill-equipped to deal with the content. I knew nothing about teenage culture and worried that Jane Pratt and her staff were trying to hoodwink me. Was there really a band called the Butthole Surfers? Because I had not seen anything wrong with the incest piece, I now became ultra-cautious about anything that might backfire. I pulled an article on one-night stands, and another on animal testing of cosmetics, and soon found myself the object of sullen resentment by the Sassy staff. Jane was aware of our financial troubles, but she and her team did not act as if they understood just how vulnerable their magazine now was. In just a few months Sassy had gone from being the hottest thing in town to facing the real risk that if we could not find a buyer she—and Ms.—might have to close.
1989 still stands as both the best and the worst year of my life. It was the year I lost the magazines, lost my job and, I feared, the very foundations of my identity, but it was also the year that I met the man who would become the love of my life. My marriage had ended 30 years earlier, although John Summers and I had not got around to divorcing. I’d had romances in Sydney in the 1970s, a couple of which had lasted a year or more, b
ut the 1980s had been a bleak time for me, in Canberra and in New York. It was so long that I could scarcely remember what it felt like to lie in someone’s arms, to surrender to passion, to experience that kind of joy. I realised I had become something of a constant voyeur of other people’s love lives, with no emotional life of my own. Even so, I was utterly confident that I was going to meet someone. I was undeterred by the Newsweek cover story a few years earlier that asserted a woman over 40 in New York had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist attack than of getting married. Not that I wanted to get married, but I did want a soul mate. I don’t know what made me so sure, but I never doubted that it would happen. Eventually. I just never expected that when it did he would turn out to be an exceptionally good-looking, smart-as-a-tack Texan, who was nineteen years younger than me and who worked at our company.
Chip Rolley was employed in the marketing department of Ms. but I had had limited dealings with him until late one night I had found him in the photocopier room. I had asked that every member of Congress be sent Ms. each month and I had provided copy for a cover letter to accompany the issue. I was astonished to find Chip painstakingly inserting a small slip of paper with my signature onto each letter before copying it—535 times!
‘There’s no need for them all to be signed!’ I said to him. ‘You will be here all night.’
Chip seemed a little embarrassed that I had found him doing this, but he insisted that the letters should be signed. ‘It won’t take me that long,’ he said.
After that, I began to notice him. Although he was one of the few men in our mostly female organisation, he was neither intimidated nor defensive. In fact, he had quite a mouth on him, always ready with a quick comeback or a witty retort. After our finances collapsed and we had to undertake a drastic reorganisation to save as many positions as possible, Chip had agreed to leave marketing and work—temporarily, he was assured—as Sandra’s PA. That meant he was on a different floor from me, so I didn’t see him often, but I did make a point of inviting him to a farewell party I was throwing at my apartment for Joanne Edgar, one of the founding staffers of Ms., who was leaving to pursue philanthropic work. It was an all-staff party, everyone was relaxed, and I found myself flirting with Chip. At the end of the night, I asked if he would stay back and help me clean up. He readily agreed.
The next day I felt tremendously guilty. Although there was certainly no coercion involved, I wondered if I had abused my position. As a part-owner of the company that employed him, I was, technically, one of his bosses, even though he did not report to me. But we very quickly developed a strong attachment to each other, based on an attraction that was not just physical, and which seemed to transcend any technical workplace considerations. I told Sandra and, while she laughed wickedly and teased Chip mercilessly for the rest of that day, she could not see a problem. Within a very short time he had moved into my apartment and, although he kept his room in the apartment he shared with a friend in the Beacon Hotel just around the corner until the end of the year, we have been together ever since.
I soon learned that Chip was the name Americans use for a ‘Junior’, someone who shares their father’s name. His actual name was Chester. His father was in the military and returned to Vietnam shortly after Chip’s birth. The new baby was given his name, Chester Harrison Rolley—with Jr added. Many ‘Juniors’ are known as Chip: it signifies the person is a chip off the old block. We soon stopped being conscious, or even aware, of the difference in our ages. It was something other people noticed—and occasionally had a problem with—but for us it has always been immaterial except for an occasional disagreement about music—impossibly, he does not care for Bob Dylan—as our younger selves grew up to different sound tracks. We saw things in each other we liked and admired and that was what brought us together. He liked my fierceness and my willingness to speak my mind and not worry what people thought of me. I was knocked out by his wisdom and calmness, and what today we would call emotional intelligence, qualities that were unexpected in a man in his mid-twenties. He had acquired a strong feminist outlook from his mother, which meant that he and I had a common frame of reference through which we both viewed the world. More than that, he was not at all intimidated—or threatened—by me. Men of my age tended to be defensive around me, as if they were expecting me to direct my feminist wrath at them if they got out of line. I found this exhausting and it was refreshing to meet someone who was totally relaxed with me. Not only that, he would take me on. That was a change; few men I’d been involved with in the past felt able to do that.
Chip had endured some very tough times as an adolescent, so he had had to grow up fast. He had developed a protective armour that he used when he needed to navigate stressful situations of his own and it was this, I think, that enabled him to understand and comfort me during what was undoubtedly the most stressful time of my life. There were times when I did not think I would be able to keep going. When things were at their most grim, with me having to fire people or not pay them or front up for yet another futile meeting with a potential investor or cope with further resentment from editors at Ms. or Sassy, I would come home, pour myself a glass of Scotch—and burst into tears. All my life I have made sure never to cry in front of work colleagues and I never have, but for those few months in 1989, when I was wrung dry and was physically and emotionally a spent force, I would let it all out once I was safely inside my apartment. I was amazed Chip did not run a million miles from the wreck of a woman I was during that time. Instead he was soothing, or said nothing, just listened as I poured out my frustration and anger at the situation I had so unwittingly found myself in. His just being there helped me stay sane. It must have been very hard for him. He knew more than most employees about the company’s precarious financial situation because of his job with Sandra, and he knew his own future could be in doubt, but he managed to set aside his own anxieties while I vented and raged and gathered the strength to face another day. I have never stopped being grateful because I wonder how I would ever have got through it without him.
By June we had reached the end of the line. There was just one offer remaining on the table, and it was totally unacceptable. I told Steve Sherrill this and he offered me Ms. for $10—provided I could raise the operating capital. Fat chance! But I went on one, final, last-ditch search for funds because unless I was able to find a new partner, I would be unable to deflect Citibank from selling Ms. and Sassy to Dale Lang, the owner of Lang Communications, publisher of Working Woman, Working Mother and until very recently the mass-circulation McCall’s. ‘Whatever you do, don’t sell to Dale’, Gloria Steinem had said to me several times during the long and difficult struggle to find new financing. She and Pat Carbine had been horrified when I’d told them of Lang’s interest. During their ownership, his Working Woman ad sales staff had cruelly targeted Ms., circulating to advertisers blown-up copies of classified advertisements that contained the word ‘lesbian’. Back then, that was a lethal weapon. This was before Ellen Degeneres, before The L Word, before same-sex marriage, before the widespread acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex individuals (as evidenced by mainstream politicians, even candidates for the US Presidency, now feeling required to reference LGBTQ communities). This tactic had cost Ms. advertising business and they were rightly bitter about it. They had staved off Lang once before—and sold to Fairfax. It was unconscionable that the man Steinem referred to as ‘the Pilsbury Doughboy’—a strikingly accurate reference to his pudgy appearance—could now get his hands on Ms. We made a pact: ABD. Anyone but Dale. Which is how I came to be in some pretty strange places while I frantically tried to find other money.
Wilma Jordan arranged for me to meet with TorStar, the publishers of the Toronto Star. More talk, more balance sheets and deal points, and more inconclusive discussions. For one mad week, I had talks with Harlequin Enterprises, a subsidiary of TorStar, and publisher of the internationally best-selling Mills and Boon romance novels, who were seriousl
y interested in both magazines. I could imagine the jokes: ‘Feminist icon teams up with bodice-ripper.’ It would be worth it, I thought, if it kept us afloat, but in the end this deal, too, collapsed. I was amused almost fifteen years later, when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the company and all the jokes were at his expense; even the New York Times speculated that the newly-single media mogul might be ‘suddenly in the mood for love’.10 Anita Roddick of the Body Shop was helpful although she had no funds of her own to invest. She introduced me to Josh Mailman, a wealthy young Manhattanite who two years earlier had co-founded Social Venture Capital Network, an organisation designed to connect good causes with socially aware investors. As I travelled down in the elevator after leaving Mailman’s posh Upper East Side apartment, the doors had opened to admit Carl Bernstein, the celebrated Watergate journalist. He expertly undressed me, the only other occupant, with his eyes and clearly not attracted by what he saw, turned back to face the door. I flew to San Francisco to the Social Venture annual conference, but these well-heeled philanthropists were looking to invest hundreds of thousands. I needed millions. And their favoured causes tended to be cutting-edge New Age or counter-cultural, not tired old feminists and their faltering magazines.
