Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  I got a ride to New York with a Cuban woman who had been visiting her family in Lexington. In the trunk of her car, I stowed my matching set of blue Samsonite luggage and my long file drawer of notes. Several of my college friends planned to join me in the city within the next few weeks. I checked into the Hotel Taft on Times Square, and the next day I went straight to the Museum of Modern Art to see the fabulous paintings I had just studied in my art-history course. I was spellbound; the paintings really existed—Picassos and Cézannes and Pollocks. Professor Hazel had spoken knowingly of contemporary artists like Motherwell and Kline, as if he had been in their studios at moments of great inspiration. I was surprised that up close the paintings had so many blemishes and irregularities. Seeing them was like spotting movie stars without their makeup. At the museum café I met a man who promised to call me. That afternoon he had to go visit his mother’s grave or he would have asked me for a date right there, he said. He did leave me a message later at the hotel desk, but I didn’t return his call.

  I knew no one in New York. I wasn’t used to walking on sidewalks in high heels. My feet were killing me. A creepy man followed me down Broadway, muttering to me. He followed me into a shoe store where I bought a pair of low-heeled shoes. There, he became bored with me and drifted off. In my new shoes, I charged down Broadway, enclosed in a throng, with buses whooshing by. It was summer. The trash bins on the streets were painted gold that year, with Miss Rheingold ads.

  I had no prospects, no contacts, not even a résumé or letter of introduction. However, I had one possibility. During one semester in college, Life magazine had hired me to write a weekly advertising column for the student newspaper. My column, “Bobbie Mason Looks at Life,” previewed the coming week’s Life. I hoped this would lead to a writing job. The Time-Life Building was my favorite building so far, with its fountains and breezy plaza. A brisk young woman in personnel told me that unfortunately Time-Life had no writing or editorial openings, but she talked to me for an hour, offering me guidance and job-hunting tips. “Call me if you need help,” she said. People were exceptionally friendly in New York, I thought.

  I studied the classified ads and went to a publishing house that advertised for an editorial assistant, but that position required two years of publishing experience. All the jobs advertised seemed to require experience. Although I had a stringbook of my college newspaper pieces and had minored in journalism, it never occurred to me to present myself to The New York Times. I was sure I needed more experience to write for a large newspaper.

  I applied for several clerical jobs, then answered an ad for a secretarial job at a synthetic textiles (Acrilan and nylon) company. It paid a hundred dollars a week. The personnel manager was from North Carolina, and she was enthusiastic about me.

  “Do you play Scrabble?” she asked.

  “I never have. Why?”

  “It’s a prerequisite,” she said with a smile. “All the girls play it at lunch.”

  She sent me in to talk to the vice president, a dour pear-shaped man with hair that fell onto his forehead in wads. He was dutifully garbed in his synthetics. He jabbered about his company for a while, and I pondered his dark surroundings. He reminded me of a groundhog in its hole. After reviewing my typing test, he offered me the job.

  “We’ll start you Wednesday at nine,” he informed me. “May I ask you as an afterthought just what you hope to contribute to this company? What does the job mean to you?”

  “I hope to get some experience,” I said quickly. “I want to learn a lot so I can succeed. I’m interested in writing.”

  At that, he advised me not to work for him and dismissed me. “It seems clear this job is wrong for you,” he said, shooing me from his burrow. “I want somebody I can rely on to be right here. I don’t need high turnover.”

  When I left his office and explained to the woman from North Carolina what had happened, she tried to console me. “I was rooting for you,” she said brightly. “Us Southerners have to stick together, you know? New York can be a hard place, honey, but you’ll find something you’ll like better than this.”

  I wasn’t sorry I had flubbed the interview. I thought any fool could do the jobs I had applied for, so I was hopeful of finding something more agreeable. At Macy’s, I applied to be an advertising copywriter. I had designed newspaper ads in a journalism class, those old-fashioned clutters of drawings of everything from hats to toasters strewn willy-nilly across a double-page spread. To that interview I wore blue mascara and a large black Panama-straw hat like the one Audrey Hepburn wore in the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  “How much salary do you expect from this job?” I was asked by a skeptical middle-aged woman with a lacquered hairdo like a hornet’s nest. She glanced askance at my hat. Her Bronx accent sounded hard to me.

  “Oh, a hundred dollars,” I said breezily, thinking hopefully that was a typical amount.

  “Sorry. This job pays seventy to start. Perhaps you should pursue your dream elsewhere.”

  Afterwards I learned that advertising copywriters could advance rapidly and make lots of money if they had a flair. Too late, I was sure I had a flair. Didn’t my hat say so?

  A friend named Lamar, another aspiring writer, was bringing me my hi-fi and typewriter from Kentucky. He was one of the dozen or so U.K. graduates I knew who were moving to the city. He had already written a novel, and he had spent a year in Hollywood playing bit parts in movies—Flaming Star with Elvis Presley and Tammy Tell Me True with Sandra Dee. But he said he found the life in Hollywood hollow, so he had returned to school.

  To my astonishment, I ran into Lamar on the sidewalk near Rockefeller Center.

  “You’re never going to believe this,” he said. “I just got here today. I left the car for two hours, and when I got back it was gone.” Bewildered, he waved his hand across his face, as if to block out the swarming crowd on the street. “Say good-bye to your hi-fi and typewriter! They were sitting in the backseat. I’ve already been to the police.”

  I was crestfallen. Life without a typewriter or a hi-fi looked bleak.

  “Does your family have theft insurance?” he asked.

  “I’m sure they don’t.”

  “Call them and see.”

  “No, I’ll give them a scare if I call.”

  “But it might be covered under their general policy.”

  “They don’t even have health insurance.”

  Lamar insisted. He couldn’t file his claim until he knew for sure. I knew my family didn’t have insurance. All they had was burial insurance for their children. They paid twenty-five cents a week per child to the insurance man who came around and collected it. My parents had kept up the payments on me. No doubt, they expected to need the policy since I was off in New York and my body might be found in a gutter any day.

  Reluctantly, I telephoned home. Long-distance calls always signaled disaster. My parents were disturbed by my news. Of course they didn’t have theft insurance. They had known I’d get in trouble. They had expected this and worse. But they were glad to know I had arrived safely, at least.

  “Do you have a job yet?” Mama asked.

  “No. I just got here a few days ago.”

  “It hasn’t rained a drop since before you left,” she said. “The corn’s drying up.”

  Briefly, I felt homesick. LaNelle was now ten, and Don was five. Mama and Daddy were like a pair of birds raising a second brood as soon as the first ones left the nest. I missed the little ones.

  After a frustrating week of answering ads for clerical and editorial work, I signed up with an employment agency. The agency would take approximately the first month’s salary. “What will I live on?” I asked Miss Rabinowitz.

  Cheerfully, Miss Rabinowitz said, “Oh, people live on spaghetti.”

  Spaghetti? I had hardly ever eaten spaghetti.

  Miss Rabinowitz found me an interview for an editorial-assistant position at a fan magazine group. I wore one of my Kentucky sun-back d
resses and my Holly Golightly hat. The editor wanted two years of experience, but she was impressed that I had written for my college newspaper. She gave me an assignment. I had to write a story about Troy Donahue, a costar of Surfside Six. The editor gave me a copy of TV Star Parade as a guide, a headline (“Troy Donahue’s Secret Date with Sandra Dee” or some such wording), and some clippings and photographs. I whipped up some fluff based on the material and landed the job. I was filled with relief that I didn’t have to settle for a dull clerical or sales job—or worse, a slot in manufacturing. I didn’t want to sit on a stool and sew. But I felt uneasy about working for a fan magazine. I’d left the Hilltoppers and fandom behind. Now my job—my future—would be like writing Hilltoppers Topics. TV Star Parade was the same magazine that had once listed my Hilltoppers fan club in its Betty Burr column. I learned that Betty Burr, who had once been an honorary member of my fan club, was only a name, like Miss Lonely-hearts. Part of my job at the fan magazine was to write Betty Burr columns about fan clubs.

  Hoping for some alternative, I telephoned the Time-Life personnel manager who had been so helpful to me. “You’re too nice a girl to work on such scandal rags,” she said. “Go to a temporary service. Get odd jobs, and then you’ll have time to look around and find something you really like.”

  But what would I like? I knew I wouldn’t truly enjoy any job. I didn’t want to work at all. I wanted to study at N.Y.U. or Columbia. But each course cost about three hundred dollars, and I would have to save some money to take a night class.

  So I stayed put. Fan magazine work turned out to be easy, a leisurely job that left me little chunks of time to scribble a bit on my own. My colleagues kept a bemused, professional distance from the stars whose lives they ground through their editorial machine. At home, most people I knew were in awe of movie and TV stars. But this was New York, where people in the rural South could be dismissed as hicks—gullible customers for fan magazines. I tried not to think about this.

  That first summer in New York, my wardrobe consisted of my Kentucky sundresses. New Yorkers wore long sleeves to work. I had never worn long sleeves in the summer. The editor, a pert, pixie-haired woman from Maine, said to me, “You may want to bring a sweater to the office, because the air-conditioning gets cold.”

  I moved to the Shelton Towers, a hotel on Lexington Avenue, where I could room more cheaply by the week. I sat in my cramped room and read Heart of Darkness. I tried to write in a notebook, but I had nothing to write yet. The words would flow better from a typewriter, I thought. Lamar found his car, empty, and he was eventually able to give me a little money from his insurance, but it was not enough to buy a typewriter.

  In the mornings, I ate cereal at the hotel coffee shop. I ate hot dogs at Nedick’s. I ate pasteboard blocks from vending cases at the automat. Sometimes I ate at Hector’s, a cafeteria near Times Square. I was always hungry. I grew very thin that year in New York. I walked more than I was used to. The horde of high heels rumbled along the sidewalks like a regiment in battle dress. I wore tennis shoes to work, then changed into heels in the telephone booth in the lobby of my building. No one else did this. I was ahead of my time.

  Mama wrote:

  Your Daddy won’t let you borrow the money for that employment agency. You was offered better jobs. He said with a college education you should have got a better job. Those agencies are just a racket. By the time you get them paid off you either quit or they lay you off and they grab another sucker. There you’ve been out all that money. Why didn’t you go to the unemployment office and they could have placed you in a field of work you are qualified for? We’ve had to have lots of work done on all these old cars and truck since you were home. Our expense is more than your daddy makes, so we keep dipping into that Build & Loan fund until there’s not much left. The money you left here with should have been enough to see you through till you got to working, if you hadn’t signed up with that agency. If you see that you’re going to be broke without money maybe I can send you a little money until you can get started. With no more than you will make, how will you ever get paid back now what you owe?

  How well did you know that boy that carried your typewriter and Hi Fi to New York? I don’t want to think this, as he was nice enough to carry your things for you, but maybe he did something with them himself.

  I didn’t share her suspicions, of course. I could hear Daddy saying “You brought it on yourself, Rollo!”—a saying he had picked up from the Katzenjammer Kids. I remembered that Daddy had been stationed awhile in New York when he was in the Navy. His ship had been docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He knew things about New York that now fed his intolerable imaginings about his vulnerable daughter up there alone in that sinful city. Murder, assault, rape—I’m sure such images must have haunted him. But it wasn’t physical danger I feared in New York. It was smells and sounds and intimacy. Men breathing garlic fit snugly against me in the gut-wrenching roar and gnash of the subway.

  I wasn’t alone in New York for long. Soon after Lamar appeared, I connected with some other U.K. graduates, including my college roommate, Kyra. She and I found a studio apartment on the Upper East Side and furnished it from Goodwill. Kyra got a job on the fan magazine too, and we shared an office with our editor. At work, we wrote about TV stars on programs we never saw. (We had no TV.) We wrote about Dick Chamberlain (Dr. Kildare) and Vince Edwards (Ben Casey) and Mike Landon (Little Joe on Bonanza). A fan magazine piece was a concoction of news angles, speculation, and file clippings. The editor would buy a set of photos from a traveling salesman. The pictures could be of young TV stars Susan and Dan walking on a beach together. The editor would dream up an idea about these pictures, based on something in the news—their new TV series, perhaps. Then she would write a provocative headline: “The Scary Secret Susan Shared with Dan on a Lonely Beach.” The art department would create a layout, placing the photos and sizing them, with the provocative headline, space for subheads, and a block of lines designated for the copy—usually only a couple of paragraphs. The story would be continued in the back of the magazine. My job was to write the story, including a tantalizing come-on about the scary secret, enough to carry the reader to the jump page. The secret would turn out to be something innocuous: Susan is nervous about her new TV show and worries that she will fail, as her mother did at the same stage of her own career. Before this is revealed and worked out, the reader gets a rundown on the star’s mother’s mental illness, her father’s fatal car crash, etc.—all the familiar facts from clippings in the files. Fan magazines then were not the lurid tabloids of today. They were relatively wholesome, chatty glimpses of stardom, exaggerated but faithful to the facts, and written with the purpose of making the reader finish the story with a feeling of satisfaction and consolation. Elizabeth Taylor was good copy because of all her scandalous marriages. At the end of the stories about her, the reader felt superior because fame was tough and Liz couldn’t have children.

  Sometimes we actually talked to TV and movie stars. Richard Beymer (West Side Story), Robert Vaughn (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), and Robert Goulet (Sir Lancelot in Camelot) stopped by our office. Goulet got us tickets to Camelot on Broadway. The young Greek in Elia Kazan’s America, America flirted with me and telephoned me later, but I missed his call and he returned to Greece. I went to lunch with beach-blanket bunny Annette Funicello and her publicist, and Annette said she envied me because we were the same height—five three and a half—but I was five pounds lighter.

  Fabian, a singer in the Frankie Avalon–Annette Funicello bubblegum pantheon, was very cute. And he was very polite, which surprised me. We met in a ground-floor apartment that had an office, where his publicist arranged our talk. The movie magazine didn’t run interviews the way a newspaper would. These meetings were just P.R. chitchat, so it didn’t matter what we talked about.

  “I just got out of college and I’m saving money to take some more courses,” I told Fabian.

  “I wish I’d gone to college,” he said. “I’m
trying to educate myself a little.” He showed me a book he was reading. It was lying open and facedown on a desk: History of the Peloponnesian War. I was impressed that he was reading something that sounded like a college course requirement. I also liked his grin.

  “I read The Catcher in the Rye,” he said. “That was good.”

  “Oh, have you read Franny and Zooey? Read the stories. Read ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ ” I bubbled along. I thought we hit it off. He was only a year or two younger than me.

  Naturally I waited for him to call me, but he didn’t. It must have been the ordinary seersucker shirtwaist dress I had worn, I thought. I couldn’t afford any new outfits. Sometime later I learned that Fabian had married a former Miss Rheingold.

  My year in New York was a hodgepodge of discoveries and indulgences, with a backdrop of scrounging. I brought egg salad sandwiches to work and ate at my desk, leaving my lunch hour free for rambling through Peck & Peck, Korvette’s, Arnold Constable’s, Lord & Taylor. I glided up the old wooden-slatted escalators at Gimbel’s. Sometimes I went to the public library and looked up Salinger stories in old New Yorkers. On weekends, I went with Kyra and our friends from Kentucky to museums and movies and to bars on Third Avenue where you could get a draft beer for fifteen cents. We yearned for something enthralling to come our way, something glamorous that would lift us out of our lives. We were deliriously hopeful. When I review the letters I wrote to friends during that period, I am embarrassed by the gushing accolades, the naïveté, the youthful diatribes, the rampant hyperbole. The letters verify the state of mind that accompanied me on my sojourn in the city—and the endless walking, the search for satisfying food, the hungry drifting through the racks and racks of fashions in the Fifth Avenue stores. We saw The Night of the Iguana on Broadway, The Fantasticks off-Broadway. We went to art galleries, the Museum of Modern Art. We went to live TV shows and Atlantic beaches. At the Coney Island beach we gazed, incredulous, at huge women with elephant legs. My legs were slim and hard from all the walking I did around the city.