Working

by Studs Terkel

  I’d like to say I’m sick and can’t make it, but I seldom turn something down unless I think it’s really awful. Usually I’m just rushing and do the job. I feel guilty if I say no. When you’re working for one agency, they expect you to be on call. Otherwise the client may think you’re too pampered.

  You go out of your house with your closetful on your arm. Different colors and shoes to match and purses and wigs. Every time I get a taxi, they think I’m going to the airport. They’re upset when I’m going ten blocks away. I’ve never found one to help me in or out of a cab. And I’m a good tipper. So I’ve developed these very strong muscles with one shoulder lower than the other from carrying all the wardrobe about. (Laughs.)

  In the middle of the winter it’s really horrendous, because you’re fighting all the people to get a taxi. I have three or four pieces of luggage. It’s pretty heavy. Then I struggle out of the cab and upstairs to the studio. You’re supposed to look fresh and your hair is supposed to be sparkling. By the time you get there, you’re perspiring like crazy, and it’s difficult to feel fresh under all those hot lights when you’ve had such a struggle to get there.

  What’s your first reaction when the phone rings in the morning and it’s a job call?

  Oh, crap.

  “I hadn’t set out to be a model. I worked as a receptionist in a beauty shop during high school. This was in South Dakota. A woman who had worked for Eileen Ford and had been in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar said to me, ‘Why don’t you go to New York and be a model?’ I didn’t know what a model was. I thought they were dummies in catalogues. I thought the people in the photographs were just cutouts. I didn’t think they were really people. I paid no attention to advertising,.

  “I wanted to go to college, but I had saved only three hundred dollars. So I went to New York at eighteen. I had never put anything on but lipstick and had never worn high-heeled shoes. I walked up and down Lexington Avenue for three hours ’cause my room at the Y wasn’t ready. I didn’t dare turn left or right. I just kept walking. A hamburger in South Dakota was twenty-five cents and in this drugstore suddenly it was a dollar and a quarter.”

  At Eileen Ford, they told me I was too long-waisted and that maybe I should think about something else, and it was too bad since I had come all the way from South Dakota. I was so green.

  I looked in the telephone book. Huntington Hartford had just bought this agency. So I went there. I was so bashful I couldn’t even give my name to the receptionist. About a half an hour later, this guy who had just taken over the agency—he’d been a male mode—came in. He was the first man I’d seen in New York, close up. I was just staring at him. He said, “You! Come into my office!” I thought I had really been discovered. He probably called me because I was staring at him and he liked himself a lot. (Laughs.)

  A week or two later there was a cocktail party. I’d never had a drink in my life. They said you should be there at five o’clock. At five I was the only person there. They asked me what I wanted to drink. I didn’t know. I said, “Bourbon and water is really nice.” It was awful. The party was for Sammy Kaye. I’d never heard of Sammy Kaye.

  The guy just wanted us to be there. He was having fifteen of his favorite models over. You just go. No pay. If there’s an opening at a photography studio or whatever you go, because advertising people are there and you should be seen and you should make sure they remember your face. All the ridiculous things . . . That’s what happens to a lot of girls who go into modeling. They’re very vulnerable. They don’t know what they’re doing. Usually they come from very poor families. This seems glamorous. Most of the girls I met were from Ohio or Indiana or some place like that.

  I had fifty cents left in my pocket when I got my first job. I worked two hours and made sixty dollars. It was absolutely incredible to me. I pinned a corsage on a guy. It was some hotel ad in a trade magazine. It was a very silly shot that was terribly simple. I was getting all this money for smiling and pinning a flower on a guy. It didn’t turn out to be that simple.

  Most people have strange feelings about standing before a camera. You have to learn to move and make different designs with your body. Some girls know how to puff their nose in and out to make it change or their lips or cheekbones. They practice in front of a mirror.

  Usually you’re competing with anywhere from thirty to sixty girls. They’re cattle calls. Sometimes they take you in ten at a time. You wait from forty-five minutes to an hour before you’re called. They narrow it down and ask for three or four to come back. It’s like going out on a job interview every day. Everybody is very insecure. You walk into a room and see thirty beautiful girls and say, “What am I doing here?” Immediately you feel you should leave. But you think you might get three out of fifteen jobs, so . . .

  There’s no training needed, no kind of background. People spend thousands of dollars going to charm schools to learn make-up. It’s ridiculous. They just take money from young girls. You learn while you’re working. I didn’t think it was funny the first few years because I was so nervous. After you relax, you see how absurd it all is.

  I’ve always had a problem gaining weight. I told a photographer I had gained two pounds. I was happy about it. The agency said, “She’s too fat, tell her to lose weight.” They wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t told them.

  I think the shyest people get into show business or modeling. They were wallflowers in their classes. You never really feel at ease and you force yourself to do things not natural to you. It’s always something that you really aren’t, that someone else wants you to be.

  You feel like you’re someone’s clothes hanger. One day someone will say you’re great. In the next studio, they’ll say you’re terrible. It changes from minute to minute: acceptance, rejection. Suddenly it doesn’t mean anything. Why should you base your whole day on how you look in the morning?

  My feelings are ambivalent. I like my life because it does give me freedom. I can have half a day off to do things I like. I couldn’t do that if I had a normal job. I could never be a secretary. I make as much money working three hours as a secretary makes in a week. If I had to sit in an office for eight hours a day filing, I would find that more degrading than modeling. I don’t look down at secretaries. Most are talented women who could do better jobs than their bosses probably, but will never get the chance—because they’re women.

  I’d probably join women’s lib, but they don’t believe in make-up and advertising, so I couldn’t very well go to their meetings as I am. At school, where I’m studying photography, they said if I had any interest in women’s lib I wouldn’t be modeling. I was trying to tell them women are so underpaid that I couldn’t earn a comparable wage at any other job. They disagreed, but in the next breath they were talking about something they’d seen advertised and wanted to buy the next day.

  I feel guilty because I think people should do something they really like to do in life. I should do something else, but there is nothing I can do really well. I’m established and make a steady living, so it becomes pretty easy. It’s not very fulfilling . . . but I’m lazy, I admit it. It’s an easier thing to do.

  You stop thinking when you’re working. But it does take a lot of nervous energy because the camera goes one, two, three very fast, and you have to move very fast. There’s a kind of thinking about what you’re doing. If your left knee is at the right angle . . .

  I usually don’t tell people that I model. I say I’m an actuary or something. You’re a celebrity because your picture is in a magazine or there’s the negative connotation. If strippers or whores are arrested, they usually say, “I’m a model.” There’s also the thing about models being free and easy. I’ve never had the problem of men making passes at me. I’ve always managed to maintain a distance. I would never have become a model had I known . . .

  Mrs. Paley—what’s her name? Babs Paley—said the greatest thing is being very thin and very rich. I’m afraid that turns me off. I don’t like to look at my pictures. I don’t
like to ride by and see some advertisement and tell everyone that’s me.

  Most models, after one or two years, can’t be very interested in it. But they get involved with money, so it’s difficult for them to quit. And there’s always the possibility of the commercial that’s going to make you twenty thousand dollars at one crack. You can work very hard all year on photos and not make as much as you can on two television commercials.

  Male models are even worse. They’re always talking about that lucky streak. They’re usually ex-beach boys or ex-policemen or ex-waiters. They think they’re going to get rich fast. Money and sex are the big things in their life. They talk about these two things constantly. Money more than sex, but sex a lot. Dirty jokes and the fast buck. You see this handsome frame and you find it empty.

  I go off into my own world most of the time. It’s difficult for me to talk with the others, because most people I work with are very conservative and play it safe. I usually get emotional, so since I’m not going to change them and they’re not going to change me, we sort of talk about everyday gossip. You end up smiling and being nice to everyone. You can’t afford not to be.

  POSTSCRIPT: “When I visit that Baptist family back home, they ask if I drink and what do I drink. When I say, ‘Seven-Up,’ they don’t believe me. When I come home once a year, I try to make my people happy or bring them gifts. Probably like the guilty father who brings gifts for his children . . . ”

  ANNE BOGAN

  We’re on the thirty-second floor of a skyscraper, the office of a corporation president. She is his private secretary. The view of the river, railroad yards, bridges, and the city’s skyline is astonishing.

  “I’ve been an executive secretary for eight years. However, this is the first time I’ve been on the corporate end of things, working for the president. I found it a new experience. I love it and I feel I’m learning a lot.”

  I become very impatient with dreamers. I respect the doers more than the dreamers. So many people, it seems to me, talk about all the things they want to do. They only talk without accomplishing anything. The drifters are worse than the dreamers. Ones who really have no goals, no aspirations at all, just live from day to day . . .

  I enjoy one thing more than anything else on this job. That’s the association I have with the other executives, not only my boss. There’s a tremendous difference in the way they treat me than what I’ve known before. They treat me more as . . . on the executive level. They consult me on things, and I enjoy this. It stimulates me.

  I know myself well enough to know that I’ve always enjoyed men more than women. Usually I can judge them very quickly when I meet a woman. I can’t judge men that quickly. I seek out the few women I think I will enjoy. The others, I get along with all right, but I feel no basic interest. I don’t really enjoy having lunch with them and so on.

  You can tell just from conversation what they talk about. It’s quite easy. It’s also very easy to tell which girls are going to last around the office and which ones aren’t. Interest in their work. Many of them aren’t, they just don’t dig in. They’re more interested in chatting in the washroom. I don’t know if that’s a change from other years. There’s always been some who are really not especially career-minded, but they have to give a little bit and try a little harder. The others get by on as little as possible.

  I feel like I’m sharing somewhat of the business life of the men. So I think I’m much happier as the secretary to an executive than I would be in some woman’s field, where I could perhaps make more money. But it wouldn’t be an extension of a successful executive. I’m perfectly happy in my status.

  She came from a small town in Indiana and married at eighteen. She had graduated from high school and began working immediately for the town’s large company. “My husband was a construction worker. We lived in a trailer, we moved around a lot. There’s a lot of community living in that situation and I grew pretty tired of it. You can get involved, you can become too friendly with people when you live too close. A lot of time can be wasted. It was years before I started doing this.”

  I have dinner with businessmen and enjoy this very much. I like the background music in some of these restaurants. It’s soothing and it also adds a little warmth and doesn’t disturb the conversation. I like the atmosphere and the caliber of people that usually you see and run into. People who have made it.

  I think if I’ve been at all successful with men, it’s because I’m a good listener and interested in their world. I enjoy it, I don’t become bored with it. They tell me about their personal life too. Family problems, financial, and the problems of raising children. Most of the ones I’m referring to are divorced. In looking through the years they were married, I can see this is what probably happened. I know if I were the wife, I would be interested in their work. I feel the wife of an executive would be a better wife had she been a secretary first. As a secretary, you learn to adjust to the boss’s moods. Many marriages would be happier if the wife would do that.

  ROBERTA VICTOR

  She had been a prostitute, starting at the age of fifteen. During the first five or six years, .she worked as a high-priced call girl in Manhattan. Later she was a streetwalker . . .

  You never used your own name in hustling. I used a different name practically every week. If you got busted, it was more difficult for them to find out who you really were. The role one plays when hustling has nothing to do with who you are. It’s only fitting and proper you take another name.

  There were certain names that were in great demand. Every second hustler had the name Kim or Tracy or Stacy and a couple others that were in vogue. These were all young women from seventeen to twenty-five, and we picked these very non-ethnic-oriented WASP names, rich names.

  A hustler is any woman in American society. I was the kind of hustler who received money for favors granted rather than the type of hustler who signs a lifetime contract for her trick. Or the kind of hustler who carefully reads women’s magazines and learns what it is proper to give for each date, depending on how much money her date or trick spends on her.

  The favors I granted were not always sexual. When I was a call girl, men were not paying for sex. They were paying for something else. They were either paying to act out a fantasy or they were paying for companionship or they were paying to be seen with a well-dressed young woman. Or they were paying for somebody to listen to them. They were paying for a lot of things. Some men were paying for sex that they felt was deviant. They were paying so that nobody would accuse them of being perverted or dirty or nasty. A large proportion of these guys asked things that were not at all deviant. Many of them wanted oral sex. They felt they couldn’t ask their wives or girl friends because they’d be repulsed. Many of them wanted somebody to talk dirty to them. Every good call girl in New York used to share her book and we all knew the same tricks.

  We know a guy who used to lie in a coffin in the middle of his bedroom and he would see the girl only once. He got his kicks when the door would be open, the lights would be out, and there would be candles in the living room, and all you could see was his coffin on wheels. As you walked into the living room, he’d suddenly sit up. Of course, you screamed. He got his kicks when you screamed. Or the guy who set a table like the Last Supper and sat in a robe and sandals and wanted you to play Mary Magdalene. (Laughs.)

  I was about fifteen, going on sixteen. I was sitting in a coffee shop in the Village, and a friend of mine came by. She said; “I’ve got a cab waiting. Hurry up. You can make fifty dollars in twenty minutes.” Looking back, I wonder why I was so willing to run out of the coffee shop, get in a cab, and turn a trick. It wasn’t traumatic because my training had been in how to be a hustler anyway.

  I learned it from the society around me, just as a woman. We’re taught how to hustle, how to attract, hold a man, and give sexual favors in return. The language that you hear all the time, “Don’t sell yourself cheap.” “Hold out for the highest bidder.” “Is it proper to kiss a man go
od night on the first date?” The implication is it may not be proper on the first date, but if he takes you out to dinner on the second date, it’s proper. If he brings you a bottle of perfume on the third date, you should let him touch you above the waist. And go on from there. It’s a market place transaction.

  Somehow I managed to absorb that when I was quite young. So it wasn’t even a moment of truth when this woman came into the coffee shop and said; “Come on.” I was back in twenty-five minutes and I felt no guilt.

  She was a virgin until she was fourteen. A jazz musician, with whom she had fallen in love, avoided her. “So I went out to have sex with somebody to present him with an accomplished fact. I found it nonpleasurable. I did a lot of sleeping around before I ever took money.”

  A precocious child, she was already attending a high school of demanding academic standards. “I was very lonely. I didn’t experience myself as being attractive. I had always fell was too big, too fat, too awkward, didn’t look like a Pepsi-Cola ad, was not anywhere near the American Dream. Guys were mostly scared of me. I was athletic, I was bright, and I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t know how to play the games right.

  “I understood very clearly they were not attracted to me for what I was, but as a sexual object. I was attractive. The year before I started hustling there were a lot of guys that wanted to go to bed with me. They didn’t want to get involved emotionally, but they did want to ball. For a while I was willing to accept that. It was feeling intimacy, feeling close, feeling warm.

  “The time spent in bed wasn’t unpleasant. It just wasn’t terribly pleasant. It was a way of feeling somebody cared about me, at least for a moment. And it mattered that I was there, that I was important. I discovered that in bed it was possible. It was one skill that I had and I was proud of my reputation as an amateur.