I puffed, trying to keep my cig lit in the stale air. “I think Morris is wiser now. He knows that men and women have to find a way to work together.” I forced a smile as I reached over and tousled Pody’s short, blonde hair. “Don’t worry.” I looked at my watch. It was now midnight. BeJo was home alone with Johnny Carson. She’d be livid that I hadn’t even called.
Suddenly, the boardroom door creaked open.
“The jury’s in!” June shouted.
I jumped to my feet. The bodies on the landing moved toward the door.
A shock of white hair appeared. It was Morris. Quickly he stepped aside, and, with a wave of his turquoise-laden hand, motioned a second figure behind him to come forward. All eyes fixed on the bony, bearded face of GCSC’s President of the Board, Dr. Benjamin Teller, an MD psychiatrist. I kept my eyes on Morris. I knew he would be the doctor’s ventriloquist.
Teller stepped toward us and stopped. The single sheet of paper in his right hand trembled. Why is this man afraid of us, I wondered, trying not to feel sorry for him. He held the power.
The good doctor coughed and cleared his throat. “Ahem,” he began. “The Board’s response to…ah…the…your petition is that…we the Board reserve the right to appoint all people to all positions, including management. Therefore, for the fifth position on the management team we have selected a person not on your list. That person is—”
A loud, collective groan drowned out the name Teller uttered. We lesbians had been disenfranchised once more. Then suddenly, everyone turned to gawk at Pody’s newbie friend. Her name was Rachel. Teller had spoken her name. But I barely knew it and couldn’t believe it! The Board had deliberately chosen someone who was new to the movement and the Center. Someone who couldn’t possibly stand up to Ken Bartley, and worse, someone not on our list. They’d openly denied that workers had the right to self-management.
“Fuuuuck!” June hissed.
“Wow!” choked Pody.
“Shit!” someone exhaled.
The petite woman Rachel stared at us, a deer caught in the headlights. I could see the wordless question mark forming in her mind, as it had in all of ours, Why me?
My eyes returned to Morris just in time to see his lip curl in a sly smile. I heard him whisper to Teller, “Finish it.”
“There’s more,” Teller said, clearing his throat. “In order that your complaints, I mean…concerns…will be represented at the highest level, and to show that we are listening to you…we have also decided to invite Jeanne Córdova to sit on the Board of Directors.”
Mouths fell open once more, including my own. The landing was so still I could have dropped a full volume set of Das Kapital on the floor and not a single pair of eyes would have shifted away from the doctor’s face. The bony-faced Teller’s eyes grew frenetic, as if they were waiting for the first stone. Morris said nothing.
Slowly, confusion replaced shock on my co-workers’ faces. What did this mean? The Board refuses our principle—worker self-representation on the management team—and then turns around and invites one of us to sit on their precious Board? It made no sense. I wanted to scream at Morris and beat on his conniving chest. But how could I? The man had just invited me to sit with him on his Board. I felt mind-fucked.
No one spoke. Collective shock silenced us all. If Teller’s words signaled hope, how come defeat filled the air? I was afraid to turn around and face my comrades. If this was victory, why weren’t we clapping?
Morris re-opened the door behind him. His motion made me realize that our audience was about to end. Remembering my pact with June, I lurched forward. In a voice that masked my fear I demanded of my mentor, “Did the Board instruct the management team to operate as a collective?”
Morris stopped, his exit halted. Above his horn-rimmed glasses, Teller’s eyebrows reached toward his hairline, as if praying for divine intervention. His sheet of paper had gone limp in the humidity of our humiliation.
“No,” Teller said. “That will not happen. It is believed that the workers can address their concerns by having their representative—you, Miss Córdova—on the Board.”
The simplicity and genius of Morris’s strategy began to unfold in my mind. He’d launched an end-run around our demands. Inviting me on the Board made me one of them. If I accepted a seat at the high table, I would be alone on the Board, silenced and cut off from rank and file employees. The same held true for Rachel’s appointment to management. It was going to run as a sham, not a team.
“This is giving us nothing!” June wailed, stepping out from the pack.
The rumble of angry voices grew loud. A voice heckled Teller, yelling “Coward,” as he turned away. Brenda Weathers, the Alcoholism Program’s Director called out, “Give us something real!”
Damn, I thought, filled with rage. They’d told us to eat cake.
Morris hurriedly motioned Teller to return to the sanctuary of the boardroom. As he held the door open for the good doctor, his placid blue-eyes caught mine.
You screwed us! I screamed silently.
Better luck next time, he taunted with no words.
Chapter 7
The Vote
[Los Angeles]
April 24,1975
It was a gloomy mist-layered evening in April, the kind of night that wasn’t supposed to happen in Southern California; I might have taken that as an omen.
I stood at the foot of the staircase at GCSC, the boardroom beckoning me from upstairs. I’d taken the bait and joined the Board of Directors at GCSC two months ago. That had placed me in a more difficult situation, testing and stretching loyalties between my political godfather and my sisters, the workers. Now, three months later, staff versus management relations had gone from bad to worse. I was sitting in a position of supposed power, yet I felt more powerless than ever.
As I climbed the stairs to my third monthly Board meeting, I still questioned my decision. Tonight I’d purposely dressed in my best navy blazer and button down blue-striped shirt with my hair for once combed rather than tumbling. I bounded up the stairs, ready for anything.
A voice called out behind me, stopping me on the stairs. “Jeanne, I didn’t expect to run into you!” It was a woman’s voice, high and excited. I turned around to see Rachel standing below me, breathing heavily as if she’d been sprinting.
“I’m here for the Board meeting,” I told her. “What are you doing working so late?” It was almost eight o’clock.
“I’ve just come out of a management team meeting.” She grabbed onto the railing to brace herself. “I want to resign, I just can’t take it anymore,” she blurted, on the verge of tears.
My eyebrows shot up at the news. Like me, she had only been seated for a few months.
“I’m going to bring up the idea of resigning at the next workers’ meeting,” she continued in a hushed voice, looking around to make sure we were the only ones in the hallway.
Obeying an impulse to reach out and take her hand, I came back down the stairs.
“Why do you want to quit?” I asked.
Rachel leaned against the wall and sighed. “It’s been pretty much a shell game these last two months,” she explained. “The team never talks about important things. It’s as though Bartley holds pre-meetings with Morris and Don and they come to policy conclusions before the so-called management team gets together. Then Bartley makes announcements to us as if he’s Moses coming down from having received God’s word.”
“Did you bring up the move to the new location on Highland? Have they said anything about which programs are going to get which new spaces?”
“We’ve been asking him about the move every week,” Rachel said. “The program directors have been begging us for information and hammering us with requests.”
“And you’ve been able to tell them…what?”
“Not a damn thing,” she burst out, blinking to keep back the tears. “Bartley won’t tell us anything. And then tonight—” She shuffled through the stack of folders nestled in her
arm. “He presents us with this!” She thrust two sheets of paper toward me. “It’s a detailing of exactly where each program goes, with what staff and what equipment, practically right down to the last paperclip. This is the last straw!”
I took the papers from her shaking hand, peering at them closely. The first page had a diagram of the floor plan of the new building at 1213 North Highland Avenue. Each room was labeled with the program going into it.
“So this is a fait accompli?”
“Damn straight!” she said.
She was completely serious, but her use of “damn straight,” a heterosexual pun, made me chuckle. My laughter brought out hers and for a few seconds we let go with each other, sharing the irony that our new titles really meant nothing. Leaning against the banister, I marveled at her tone of defiance; the newbie had grown fast, quickly figuring out that the Board had chosen her to be on the management team precisely because of her naiveté. What the Board, and most of us workers, hadn’t known was that this lesbian-come-lately was well read and grounded in feminist theory. She’d evolved into being quite the worker’s champion.
Suddenly, someone rushed out of a nearby room and collided with Rachel. It was April, my boss, the program director of Herself Health.
“Oh, excuse me,” April blurted. Rachel and I stared at a red-faced April who was buttoning a disarrayed blouse. Her hair looked like she’d spent the night driving in a convertible.
“I’m so late,” she mumbled as she ran past us and out the door.
“Well that was interesting,” Rachel said, blushing.
Before I could respond, the same door that April had shot out of spewed out a second person, Brenda Weathers, who seemed to be chasing April. She did not stop to talk.
“Are all the program directors working late?” I asked Rachel.
She smiled at me knowingly. “Brenda and April are lovers!” she announced, like she’d divulged a national security secret.
“No way?” I hooted in disbelief. The director of Herself Health and the director of the Alcoholism Program for Women were sleeping together. This was indeed political news.
“They’re trying to be discreet because they’re both directors,” Rachel said. “No one is supposed to know, but of course everyone knows.”
“Including Pody?” I asked, concerned that my buddy was being played the fool since her recent break up with April.
“Yes, Pody knows. Everyone knows. Except you, I guess.” Her eyes twinkled.
I smiled back, but I wasn’t happy that I’d missed such significant gossip. This kind of realignment of power could have real political significance. The large, all-lesbian APW staff was a power base within GCSC. Brenda had become one of the leaders of the movement for reform, and lately she had been more vociferous about pushing us toward a more confrontational posture with the Board. She was one of the architects of the latest workers’ proposal I planned to present to the Board tonight. No wonder Brenda had April’s full support! If Morris found out, he’d be livid and would want them both fired.
Rachel’s surprising gossip made me linger in the hallway. “Do you know why Brenda so adamantly wants APW to find another location right now?” I prodded my informant.
“Only that she still has no place to put APW’s fourteen residential rehab beds.”
“I heard she’s worried Morris is using her APW money to fund the Center’s move to Highland.”
“No kidding?” Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Can they really borrow APW’s grant money like that?”
“Technically, from a fiscal point of view, you’re not supposed to appropriate program money for management expenses,” I explained. “But social work agencies rob Peter to pay Paul all the time, hoping they can get new money back in time to meet the goals of the temporarily robbed program.”
“Oh,” Rachel said softly.
“Brenda is telling everyone that APW should be independent from GCSC, that a woman’s program should not be subordinated to male management.”
“The lesbian staff agrees with her,” Rachel said. “If APW has all women clients and an all-woman staff, why can’t women manage the program?”
“Because GCSC wrote the grant and the grant money flows through the Center. The Board of Directors wants badly to keep this cash flow.”
“All that money!” Rachel whistled through her teeth.
“Exactly.” I smiled, watching her pale eyes dance. It was fun to talk strategy with her. “I don’t think Morris or Bartley care if lesbian alcoholics have their facility now or next year.”
As I lingered with the newbie, the energy between us shifted from political to personal. I wondered if her smile could be any more inviting if she had fewer clothes on. Suddenly the few feet between us felt awkward.
“Christ!” I looked at my watch and began jogging up the stairs. “I gotta get into the Board meeting.”
“Some other time…” she called after me.
I entered the nearly empty boardroom, taking a seat at the far end of the table, opposite its head where Morris usually placed himself. From this seat I could observe where the underlying power alliances were. I was early. The only other person in the room was Sheldon Andelson, {1}a tightly compact, square-jawed, balding real estate lawyer in his early fifties. We knew each slightly, but he was famous. I suspected he liked me and I wanted his vote so I nodded at his three hundred dollar leather briefcase lying on the table.
“Is that Spanish córdovan leather?” I asked.
Sheldon nodded back, acknowledging my overture.
He was a self–made businessman who exuded command and quiet authority. The gay grapevine had it that the multi-millionaire owned most of the real estate on Santa Monica Boulevard between La Cienega and Doheny, an exclusive mile that included several gay bars and the 8709 Club, a notorious gay bathhouse.
Sheldon looked up at the ceiling, attempting to adjust the papers in his hands to catch more light. “We must get better lighting in here,” he remarked in a soft but irritated tone that suggested a secretary was standing by to take note of everything he said.
I slid my squeaky folding chair closer to him. “Why don’t you have your people tell our people to buy some decent chairs while they’re at it?”
He chuckled.
Good man, I thought, a sense of humor.
Like me, Sheldon was new to the Board, and, I guessed, not accustomed to being one among many. I assumed that he would soon make a judgment about whether or not this GCSC outfit was salvageable. If he chose to stay, I reckoned he’d soon be president. He was sharper than Doctor Teller and, as his rumored multiple millions attested, far more effective in the world. I liked him instinctively because he knew what he wanted and didn’t lie about getting it.
The only other woman on the Board, a psychologist named Betty Berzon, walked into the room with Board member Marty Rochlin, known around the Center as a lounge act piano player. I thought of Marty as a political innocent who rarely had any idea about what the subtext of a proposal might be. Morris had recruited him, I surmised, because he doubled as a Beverly Hills psychologist in his day job and had appropriate letters, Ph.D., after his name. Marty gave me a nod and a vague half-smile, as though his mind were more engaged in deciding which Judy Garland song to sing at his club tonight. Betty Berzon looked at me and offered a stiff, “Hello, Jeanne.”
In my activist life, I’d noticed that some lesbians had baffling reactions to me. Something about my attitude, looks, or reason for being, engendered strong feelings among certain women. What kind of feelings, I couldn’t figure out. I’d bumped into Berzon briefly at meetings or political parties and had always gotten a strangely intense vibe from her. Whether she disliked me, was afraid of me, or was attracted to me, I didn’t know.
A small pert woman in her late forties, Berzon took a seat next to Morris’s chair just as the chairman himself entered the room with his arm loosely slung around the shoulders of president Teller. Morris winked at Berzon as he sat down next to her with T
eller on his left. I had the uncomfortable feeling that this triumvirate arrangement was no accident. Morris, my comrade in organizing, hadn’t greeted me. Usually he had a list of non GCSC-related political business to discuss with me. Tonight, he didn’t even look me in the eye.
The six of us sat in the fluorescent shadows and stared at one another. I wondered where Morris had found these people. Certainly not trolling the grassroots. Three of the six Board members were shrinks in private practice, whereas I’d chosen community organization rather than the option of casework as my master’s degree specialty. I’d never wanted to spend my life sitting in a room trying to help one client at a time. I wanted to organize communities to change the world. Not one of these people was politically active in the gay or lesbian movement. They were a doleful lot and felt more like my parents than my peers.
I took the yellow folder which held the latest worker’s resolution out of my briefcase and laid it squarely in front of me. Maybe it was a good thing to avoid friendly chatter with Morris, since he wasn’t going to like the proposal I was charged with presenting tonight. Besides, I wasn’t there to make friends. I was there to represent the lesbian feminist employees and our issues. I studied the room. It was 1975 but not one of the members of the Board, except Morris, had any understanding that American women were in the middle of a revolution that was redefining our relationship with the male gender. They’d heard about gay civil rights, and thought GCSC was related to this struggle, but “feminism” was a word they’d only read in Time Magazine.
“Shouldn’t we begin?” Morris nudged Teller.
President Teller rapped his small wooden gavel on the table. “You all now have the agenda in front of you,” he said as he passed out a single sheet of paper. “I call this meeting to order.”
I lowered my eyes and reviewed the agenda, which I knew Morris had prepared for Teller. Its language, in Morris’s now familiar style, positing old-fashioned constructs such as “shall we” rather than the colloquial “can we” and the like. The brevity of the agenda shocked me. It had only one item: “Internal Business, Board Makeup.” Surely with the worker versus management chaos at the Center there were many things to discuss.
When We Were Outlaws Page 9
