by Anne Summers
Peter Blazey offered money. Blazey, as everyone called him, was a very old friend, an Australian, a journalist, political activist and all round good time boy, described by his publisher as a ‘millionaire wastrel’, who was now working his way through his Hortico inheritance, living in Los Angeles in a dilapidated mansion in the Hollywood Hills that had once belonged to Barbara Stanwyck. When Chip and I had swum in the pool during a visit to LA, Blazey had taken a series of great pictures of us in the cool blue water, documenting our early relationship with accompanying louche commentary about Chip’s good looks and my even better good fortune. ‘How much do you need?’ Blazey had said to me over dinner in New York. I had no idea how much money Blazey had, or was willing to part with, so I hedged. ‘Would $50,000 do it?’ he asked. I almost burst into tears, at his generosity and his innocence. That was the trouble. None of my friends could comprehend the sums involved. How could they? Two years earlier I, who had never even heard of mezzanine debt, could not have imagined that I would become so blasé about the massive sums that were needed to rescue us. I gently turned down Blazey, who underneath his often coarse patois was the sweetest of men. He died of AIDS in 1997, and left behind Screwloose, a wonderfully wicked memoir, whose munificence was one of the few consolations during those bleak days.
I was grateful for another kind of consolation when I was a guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in June 1989. My host was Chancellor Donna Shalala, who would later become a Cabinet Secretary in the Clinton administration. It was a nice break from the fundraising ordeal although I could not help myself from telling my audience about the impending disaster for Ms. They were sympathetic, but uncomprehending. No one outside the small media world seemed to be able to get their head around the disaster that had befallen us. Who could blame them, especially those in the otherworld of academia? I got to spend time with two giants of women’s studies: Gerda Lerner and Linda Gordon. They had both been intellectual heroes of mine in a previous life, back when the only work-related stress I suffered were sore eyes after a long day at the library trying to decipher hand-written manuscripts. Linda Gordon had been an examiner for my PhD who had praised the work unreservedly. I thought she lived in Boston, so was surprised to finally meet her, in Madison. ‘Do you miss women’s history now that you are doing something really important?’ I was startled to hear her ask. ‘You were so good at it. It’s a pity you no longer do it.’ For a moment, I almost regretted that I had abandoned that life—one where I had been content to analyse the wrongs of the past, for the one I had now, and the at times almost unendurable pressures of trying to make the future a better place for women.
In August 1989 with all other options exhausted, Citibank agreed that Dale Lang could buy both magazines. Despite being a board member of Matilda Publications, the entity that was being sold, I was increasingly sidelined as Steve Sherrill and Dale Lang negotiated one-on-one. On the advice of a friend, I had hired a big-time corporate lawyer, Irwin Jay Robinson, who I knew from work he had done for Fairfax. Robbie, as everyone called him, had a courteous demeanour that belied his Machiavellian assessment of situations and his tough negotiating tactics. He ultimately got me back to the table, preserved my contract and ensured that I had work, and recognition, at the new owner’s company. Part of Robbie’s strategy had been to boost my public profile and he frequently took me to New York’s hottest restaurants for lunch. I have to admit I loved watching heads turn as I strutted behind the maître’d, turned out in the best outfit I could possibly manage, towards the prominent table where Robbie would already be waiting. Although it was part of a war game, it was still a welcome break from the corporate trenches and the wearing ego clashes and bitter betrayals that came to characterise this deal. When it was finally sealed, in mid-October 1989, Lang had acquired 70 per cent of Matilda Publications while Citibank retained 30 per cent.11 What was not made public, but which Robbie and I knew from the deal sheet that he insisted on perusing on my behalf, was that Lang had paid no purchase price. Nor had he committed to invest in the two titles. Citibank had forgiven half its debt, agreed to freeze interest payments on the rest until ‘break-even’, and would invest a further $3 million. In other words, Lang had been able to pick up Ms. and Sassy for nothing.
Lang had claimed he had little interest in Sassy, saying he really only wanted Ms., and that turned out to be partly true. He wanted Ms. so he could kill her. To Madison Avenue it looked as if Lang was trying to undermine Ms., reported Peggy Orenstein in her account of Ms.’s fight for survival.12 He fired our advertising staff then engineered a collapse in ads for our December issue by excluding Ms. from a group discount deal being offered for Sassy and his two magazines. Even though the December issue was ready for pre-press, he ordered it not to be printed. He demanded we hand over our subscriber lists, then folded them into Working Woman to take it to over one million circulation for the first time ever. Our subscribers were unpleasantly surprised when Working Woman landed in their mailboxes instead of Ms. Lang then made us cancel the circulation deal with NOW, demanding we get them to do a similar deal to boost the circulation of Working Woman. All that was left of Ms. was a totally demoralised editorial staff and no apparent future. Our publication was cancelled, we had nothing to do but we hadn’t been fired either, so we were in a weird kind of limbo. We occupied ourselves cleaning out our desks and playing endless games of Scrabble.
It was a welcome distraction from this state of uncertainty when on 6 November Marcia Gillespie and I went to lunch at the White House along with other top women’s magazine editors from New York. I was pleased to see that no other Lang people had been invited. Our host was Barbara Bush, the First Lady, and she mightily impressed us all by having the lunch in the private quarters and treating us to a tour first. We got to see the Lincoln Bedroom, which contains the only signed copy of the Gettysburg Address, the Queen’s Bedroom where Winston Churchill says he saw Lincoln’s ghost, and the Bush’s sitting room which had been Ronald Reagan’s study. We had lunch in a large and pretty room that used to be Alice Roosevelt’s bedroom. But first we lined up for our one-on-one photos with Mrs Bush. Just before I stepped forward to shake the First Lady’s hand, I felt a voice whisper in my ear, ‘Put your bag on your other shoulder so it doesn’t show in the picture.’ It was Jill Krementz who passed on this sage advice. She was a top photographer in New York, and married to the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and she was standing behind me. As a result, the photograph of me with Mrs Bush, which my mother displayed proudly in her sitting room for many years, was unsullied by an unsightly shoulder strap. I got to sit at Mrs Bush’s table although she made no effort to talk to me, confining her efforts to the powerful editors, Anne Fuchs from Woman’s Day and Myrna Blyth from Ladies’ Home Journal, on either side of her. I had to settle for Marilyn Quayle, wife of the much-mocked Vice-President Dan Quayle, but I interpreted the seating as some kind of positive affirmation, a nod in the direction of feminism. Not that it would save me from what lay ahead. Also at my table was a woman whose husband used to be the governor of Oklahoma and who had become a strong supporter of women’s industries in his home state. We were each presented with a Raggedy-Ann doll. It was Barbara Bush’s ultimate joke on us all, having those sophisticated New York editors walk out of the White House with a doll under their arms.
When he first took over Lang had had me develop various new editorial proposals for Ms. I had complied reluctantly as I did not believe he was sincere, but I’d worked up the two options he requested: an eight-page 24-times-a-year newsletter, and a six-times-a-year publication printed on pulp stock. Lang then conducted a very public recruitment process for a new editor; several well-known and competent women turned him down but, astonishingly, Robin Morgan, the well-known feminist, agreed to take the job. She had just agreed to start on a project with the UN Development Program to write a big book on AIDS, and a staff researcher at Ms. had resigned to go work with her, so this turnaround was bewildering. So was the revelation that it w
as Gloria Steinem who had recruited her to the job. Once the deal with Lang was inevitable Steinem had—surprisingly—agreed to meet with him and soon was conferring regularly with him to plot the future of Ms. It seems that Dale Lang had come to the realisation that he could have his cake and eat it too. He could remove Ms. from the advertising and mainstream circulation market, and thereby protect Working Woman, while earning kudos, and the eternal gratitude of Gloria Steinem and all that that debt would entail, by enabling her to do a massive makeover of what she could once again claim as her magazine. Dale Lang ‘saved’ Ms., he said in an interview in 2013, when he ‘helped Gloria hatch the plan to ask readers, ‘Does the world still need Ms.?’ then came up with the campaign that ‘convinced them to vote with their wallets by paying three times more for the product, enabling its publisher to break even and Ms. to go ad free’.13
I was fired as editor of Ms. on 19 December. A week earlier Dale Lang had called me over to his office and informed me he did not want me to continue. Lang’s headquarters were in the Pan Am building where eighteen months earlier Sandra and I had signed the deal papers that had made us media mogulettes. Lang said he proposed to appoint me editor-at-large of Ms., to honour my contract and provide me with an office and a secretary provided I wrote twelve articles a year for his various publications, including Ms. I had been expecting, and in many ways wanting, to be shown the door. Psychologically I did not see how I could work for this man who had been so untrustworthy, so manipulative and who had treated us all so badly. Financially, though, I was not sure that I could refuse. My contract had four years to run and I had a mortgage. Lang had said I could also write for any other magazine that was not in direct competition with his stable. That left practically every decent magazine in America; I could try to build a reputation as a magazine writer. I owed Robbie big time for my contract being honoured. A few weeks earlier, I had been dead meat. Of course, I should have known not to believe a word of it. I got no office, no secretary, and I had to battle to get assignments from Lang’s editors, including from Ms. Lang had promised not to dissolve Matilda Publications but that also turned out to be a hollow undertaking. Soon, our brave little company would cease to exist. Sandra and I were media mogulettes no more, but we could be proud that both magazines were at the highest-ever circulations: Ms. with 550,000 and Sassy at 450,000.
My last day at Ms. was 20 December. I’d tried to maintain morale among the staff, but I was so battle-weary by then that I was barely functioning. I felt tremendous guilt that I had let down the magazine, its subscribers and everyone who had helped me during my 27 months as editor-in-chief so I was incredibly moved on that last day when the staff presented me with a quickly mocked-up fake Ms. cover. In those days before Photoshop they’d had to make do with crude cut and paste. Our Woman of the Year was the main cover line, my head replaced Pat Schroeder’s on the image from my very first cover and each of the other cover lines had been reworked in tribute to me: ‘Who’s crying now! The Unsinkable Anne Summers’, ‘Editor’s Essay: Enough is Enough’ ‘Exclusive! The Harrowing saga of a Mogul with a Mission’ and finally, in what we referred to as the ear, that small slash in the top right-hand corner of the cover, ‘We will Ms. you!’
It was two years and three months since the Fairfax Board had agreed to buy Ms., two years since Young Warwick had decided to sell us and just seventeen months since Sandra and I had done our management buyout. We had started out with such joy and optimism about the wildly unexpected path we had carved for ourselves, but then we had crashed, and crashed hard. I did not know it was possible to absorb so much trauma. I was exhausted, emotionally and physically and probably more crazed than I realized, but I had not cracked up. I was still standing and although much of the fight had gone out of me, at least for now, I was not bitter. At least not yet. I went back to Adelaide and stayed with my mother, trying to get my body and soul back into some kind of equilibrium. At an absurdly early hour, the phone rang.
‘It’s for you,’ my mother called from the room where the phone was. ‘It’s the ABC.’
I did not want to talk to the ABC or to anyone else. I would simply have slammed down the phone, but my mother was much too polite. I staggered sleepily towards the receiver she was holding out for me.
‘Hello,’ I said, somewhat blearily. ‘What do you want?’
It was Pru Goward on the line. She was the host of an early morning national radio program and she was live on air. With absolutely no introduction (that presumably happened while I was walking towards the phone) she launched straight into it:
‘Anne Summers, you are back from New York. What does it feel like to be a failure?’
‘I don’t feel like a failure,’ I said feebly.
‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘you would say that wouldn’t you.’
Welcome home, Anne, I thought to myself, to the country where if you succeed they tear you down, and if you fail they dance on your grave. I was glad I was returning to New York the following week. I might not have a real job, but I would be in a city where effort was encouraged and where everyone was trying. If someone succeeded, everyone applauded because that showed it could be done and, who knows, next time it might be you.
Back in New York, for the first time in more than two years I was now free from the constant pressure of meeting financial as well as editorial deadlines. I no longer had to rush from meetings to lunches and back to the office and could start to enjoy the city again, the way I had when I had first arrived. I needed time to think about what I would do next, but I could not stop myself from thinking about the brutal events of the recent past. Part of me felt I had failed. I had been unable to make Ms. work. It would have been so easy to scuttle Ms. as Sandra and I did our various deals, but we had refused. We had kept her alive for another two years after she faced almost certain closure in 1987. That was something, I supposed. And I’d been proud of the editorial. When I look now at the issues I edited, I am surprised how good they are, so much better than I remembered. Trying to get some perspective on those two years, I wonder: did we merely survive? or did we actually manage to do some good during that pitiless time? There was no doubt that Sandra had changed magazine publishing for teenage girls with Sassy, but did I have any lasting impact on how to frame feminist editorial for the mainstream magazine market of the late 1980s? Looking back on that tumultuous time I can see that our little venture probably did not have a chance. The outsider status and courage that enabled us to succeed initially also hampered our longer-term prospects. There were too many things we did not understand about America. We were as blind-sided by the reticence of liberal groups to support us in the face of the boycott as by the effectiveness of the evangelicals who had instigated it. We were confounded that advertisers could effectively censor our plans to shatter genres and take readers on exciting new editorial journeys. But, most of all, we were just too small. We had no ballast when the storm struck. It was probably amazing we lasted as long as we did.
I became quite depressed for a time, unable to sleep or to work. I knew I now had a second—or was it a third?—chance to make something of myself in New York but I was having trouble revving myself up. I wondered if I had the toughness to survive in this town. On my last day at Ms. several people had told me that I was ‘just too nice’. It was not meant as a compliment. ‘You are the nicest person I have ever worked for,’ one of the editors had said, ‘but to succeed in this business you have to be a barracuda.’ I did not have what it takes, in other words. I had had my chance in the spotlight but, even with significant goodwill from most quarters, I had not been able to invent a new future for myself. Instead, I would find myself writing consumer reports on ‘the best cities for childcare’ for Working Mother and getting glummer about where I had ended up. ‘You’re only happy when you’re important,’ Elisabeth Wynhausen said to me one day. It was a cruel observation, but she was probably right. For the past fifteen years, since I started at the National Times, I had been in high-profile jobs,
constantly in the spotlight, basking in the attention. It was who I was. Now I no longer had the armour of a job title, no one reported to me, my name was not in the newspapers, no one called. Had I lost my identity? I was starting again, on a new track, not knowing quite where I was going and just hoping that the best of my life was not already behind me.
We were a party of about ten who flew from Newark to Jacksonville, Florida where we were picked up by vans and driven to Yulee, the site of the 7400 acres White Oak estate, which had been owned by the Gilman family since 1938. David Hay, Chip and I were being escorted by Charlie Milhaupt, who had worked in film in California for many years, but who was now in New York working for our host Howard Gilman who was already at White Oak. In my post-Ms. life, I was exploring possible projects in film and in theatre as well as journalism, and had become friendly with Charlie who promised to open doors for me. The rest of the party comprised Natalie Moody, Howard’s long-term executive assistant, and a number of other guests, including Linda Fairstein, who was New York’s sex crimes prosecutor who was currently dealing with an especially lurid high-profile sexual assault and homicide case known as ‘the Preppy murder’, and her husband Justin Feldman. White Oak was a timber plantation that supplied the extremely lucrative Gilman Paper Company. Gilman was the grandson of an immigrant from Belarus, who when he had stepped off the boat in America had seen a piece of paper fluttering on the wharf. He took it as a sign of the business he should pursue in his new homeland. Within a generation, the Gilman company would become immensely wealthy and would support Howard’s enormously generous philanthropy in the arts, especially the ballet; his unparalleled collection of early photography, which he later endowed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there is a gallery named for him; and the nature conservancy, which he established at White Oak in 1982. Wealth sat lightly on Howard, a tall soft-spoken gentle man with white hair and a cool, observant eye. He was extraordinarily generous to friends as well as to individuals and organisations whose work he admired, and he surrounded himself with beautiful things and people, especially young men and prima ballerinas, but he spent nothing on himself. No holidays or luxuries of any kind. He appeared to own just one pair of shoes and his suits and weekend wear were years, if not decades, old. When he died suddenly, of a heart attack age 73 in early 1998, his estate had assets of more than $1 billion.
