Then there was the apartment of the architect Alan Wanzenberg, who had decorated his residence in dark, heavy mission oak arts-and-crafts furniture, with Andy’s former dachshunds and Andy’s former boyfriend—Jed Johnson, a designer, who had left Andy for Alan. Jed died tragically in that TWA 800 crash near Fire Island that remains a mysterious accident.
I don’t remember so much about Hardwick’s décor: I was too in awe of her and her splendid home. It was dark, though. I guess everyone who lived in that building had some kind of need to return to the past. But how remarkable to think that you could, at that time, be a writer and an academic but have enough money to live in such a vast, splendid place!
When I was still at Barnard, Elizabeth was suddenly very happy: Robert Lowell had decided to leave Caroline Blackwood and return to her. This was in 1977. He got off the plane, took a taxi, carrying a painting by Lucian Freud he was going to hang in their apartment; but when she went down to meet him in the cab, she discovered that he had died on route.
Now she’s gone too, but I’ll never forget what she said about my writing to some publication that did a piece on me. “It’s not Chekhov,” she told the reporter. “It’s Tama Janowitz.”
There could be no higher compliment. As much as I adore Chekhov, I would still rather be original.
i was a guest editor at mademoiselle
I won the contest to be a guest editor at Mademoiselle, like in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Of course, her era was back in the 1950s, and it didn’t occur to me that things might be different. The makeovers, the wardrobes given to these women, staying in the Barbizon Hotel, the dinner dances with Yale boys on the roof of the St. Regis—and culminating no doubt in job offers at a magazine.
I bombarded the judges of the competition with as much “extra-credit” material as I could. The only part I remember was an article I wrote called “The Real Ales of England” with photographs of pubs, although I knew nothing about real ale or false ales, whatever they were. I did, however, know a little bit about England since I had spent the previous year there as a student at Goldsmiths’ College.
When I won the contest in 1977, it was different. The Barbizon was now somewhat seedy, one of the last of the “residences for women” in New York City where no men were allowed past the lobby, a concept dating back from a time when no respectable single woman would stay in a hotel where there were men. But by then, college boys and girls shared dorm bathrooms. Then, too, several years previously the winners of the competition had complained they didn’t get any real work to do at Mademoiselle, so we were put to work, which was not something I thought of as part of a prize package.
Living in New York City for four years had already made me somewhat jaded, and I was not so thrilled about going out to see Annie on Broadway or receiving a pair of Frye boots, which at that time had not been revamped and were seriously out of style. My hair was chopped off unflatteringly and I was set to work writing an article about bicycle touring in New England, snipping quotes from previous articles and publications.
My four years of college had been spent going to early seminal nightclubs such as Max’s Kansas City, in its last days before it shut down; Le Jardin; and the Ice Palace, which, it was said, had caught on fire during a tea dance. I had wandered the city unable to afford the croissants on Madison Avenue.
At Mademoiselle in those days Mary Cantwell was one of the top editors, and the guest editor program was co-ed—at the end of our one-month residency the boys went into her office and were offered jobs; at my interview she said nothing, and after looking me up and down for five minutes while I sat, terrified, I was excused.
She was one of the many New York women I met who succeeded by acting utterly cold, superior, and malevolent. I found out that many of them simply were not able to speak. If they did, they sounded like morons, so they had learned over the years to keep their mouths shut and not smile, and, in this manner, managed to seem infinitely powerful. I did not learn intimidation through silence.
In Mary Cantwell’s case, I do not know how stupid she was, but she had certainly learned how to intimidate. She went on after her tenure at Mademoiselle to write a number of nonfiction books about her life, the highlight or most exciting part of which was her lengthy affair with a married man who did not, ultimately, marry her—and though his name was never mentioned in her books, she later acknowledged that her lover was James Dickey, the alcoholic poet and novelist. This was many years after my time under her aegis at Mademoiselle, but I was surprised. The endless description of this love affair with this man she so obviously looked at as a god, who had promised to marry her and who then did not, that was the big thrill of her life? Kind of pathetic, really. And surprising that she ended up being just another woman gushing on and on about some idiot married guy who dumped her. If you had told me while I was trembling in her office that here was a woman who went home and prettied herself up for some drunk poet who might or might not be in town, and if in town might or might not stop over, I wouldn’t have believed it.
While guest editor, I was switched from the travel department to beauty and sent to work on a photo shoot. The article was about some young, married, attractive woman who lived in an apartment off Third Avenue, I think. Now, I realize it was just a decent apartment, but at that time I was overwhelmed that people could be so beautiful and live in such luxurious surroundings, and I stood in amazement until I was commanded by someone there to iron a blouse the woman was to wear in her next shot.
It was a lovely white satin blouse, much nicer than anything I had ever had or seen.
“Is the blouse ironed yet?” someone said.
But I had rested the iron facedown on the blouse and burned the sleeve off. I just stood there in shock. I had been sent out on assignment and had just totally destroyed this expensive blouse, and the woman—with her lovely apartment and her good looks and whatever else she had—now had nothing to wear and I was going to be held responsible for it.
They found me standing over the ironing board sobbing and apologizing. There were gasps of horror and sighs of disgust.
A small conference of editor and stylist and photographer and whoever else was there gathered to see what was going on. “Wait here,” they said to me, and went to another room.
A beautiful young man with a shock of blond hair came in. He was the hairstylist. “What’s going on?” he said. “Why are you crying?”
“I was told to iron a blouse and I burned it,” I said.
He picked it up from the ironing board. It was now a shirt for a one-armed person. “You burned this?” I nodded, crying. “You burned a blouse and you’re crying?” He had a Dutch accent. He began howling with laughter. I was furious. How cold, how callous. Here I was, utterly devastated. I had committed this terrible act; I had burned a blouse with a sixty-dollar price tag I would never be able to repay. My life was as ruined as the blouse.
Would this have happened to Sylvia Plath? She had been a guest editor and went to dance with Yale men on the roof of the St. Regis hotel during her time at the magazine. There was no mention in The Bell Jar of being sent out to iron. But if she had been, she would have ironed beautifully, I am sure. My life and any future career possibility were over.
An editor returned and handed me an envelope. “Please take this back to the office and deliver it.”
At least I now had something to do. In shame, sticky with tears, I went back to the Condé Nast building and went to my editor. “What are you doing back?” she said.
“I . . . I was told to come back and deliver this to you,” I said, and I gave her the envelope. She opened it. There was nothing inside.
Mademoiselle was a great magazine for a long time. It was directed at college-age women, who were called co-eds back then, which meant, kind of, something voluptuous and dumb, who maybe were taking home economics, but eventually, things changed.
This magazine published many fine articles, some with real substance. It published fiction by Carson
McCullers, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, and many others.
Some years later it was brought down by yet another brittle, superior woman, this time English—one of the editors Si Newhouse brought over during that time in New York history when a British accent was a gold ticket to a job.
I had known her, socially, for a long time—but as soon as she got her position of power, she was horrifically rude to me. And, almost single-handedly, she made a fine magazine—which had a niche, a real market audience—into a piece of pulp. And the magazine was terminated.
The damage these Brits did out of stupidity and snobbery during their reign of terror in New York City publishing was horrendous. The British accent was entrée into publishing, magazines, the art world. For magazines it was a bit peculiar, though, because if you ever picked up a British magazine at that time, they were basically unreadable. They didn’t make any sense. American magazines were light-years ahead of what they were publishing over there, but the USA still handed over the colonies of magazines to the Brits. Brits came and took over the magazines of America, which began to fizzle and sputter.
Maybe it would have happened anyway.
looking for work
After my graduation, after my guest editorship, I applied for a job at the Condé Nast magazines. Everyone who ever did this after having a guest editorship was pretty much always offered a job, even if only a miserable entry-level position.
Weeks went by and I was back home in Mom’s bleak little tract house by the interstate highway outside of Boston. I was still upset about the blouse.
My mother was indignant that my job had been to iron. “You’ve never been able to iron!” But she suggested I write a letter to the editor apologizing and explaining how this terrible incident had occurred. We wrote it together. It started out reasonably, and then, as the two of us perfected it, became a masterpiece easily equal to Eudora Welty’s short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”
Now this was a letter. If you ever want to know what it was like to have fun, it was my mom and me writing this letter. Writing things like “Well, ’nuff said.” Could three words be more supremely irritating? Could three words be more wrong?
If you write a letter like that, it’s letter-as-performance-art.
I sent the letter to the editor and my mother and I eagerly awaited a response.
There was none, nor was I offered a job at Condé Nast.
A few years later, I found myself back in that building on my same old floor. Many faces were the same. Some kept a wide berth. Finally an editor did stop by briefly and asked, “Aren’t you the one who wrote The Letter?” Her eyes widened with fear as she scuttled off down the hall.
WHEN I DIDN’T GET A JOB with a New York magazine, I moved home to my mom’s tiny house on the side of the eight-lane highway and started applying for work.
I had always thought I should go into advertising. It seemed to me that this was a very legitimate and honest form of writing. Because what you did there, as a writer, was to try and sell a product. You were not pretending otherwise. You were not making bad art or literature under the guise that you were an Artist. You were doing a job, a real working job, that sold a product. You were earning a living, and you were doing something somewhat creative, but you were not pretending it was for any other reason than to sell something. Since my mom and I lived alone together, we read and read and had very pure, isolated ideas about Art and Writing. So much had been published, which, in its day, was touted as being great, but wasn’t. And the books and works of art that were, in their time, given great critical acclaim and praise ended up being—to us, anyway, really bad. I’m not talking about Catcher in the Rye, which had always seemed pretty stupid to us. I’m talking about Raintree County and By Love Possessed, Boston Adventure, Look Homeward, Angel and Ulysses, and an entire first two-thirds of the twentieth century dominated by male writers who were actually pretty lousy but about whom you weren’t allowed to say anything.
At least in advertising I would be avoiding this preposterous court of idiocy. So I put together a portfolio of copywriting and illustrated it. I included a lot of things I had done in college, like playbills for a theater group. And . . . I got an interview! This was a big deal, actually getting an interview for a job. I needed this opportunity.
I believed that I was interviewing for a position as a copywriter. The ad agency, however, thought I was there to interview for a position as a receptionist in the accounting department. I don’t know how this discrepancy arose, but I did know it was a good idea to dress up for an interview. So I put on my black spike-heeled boots and a suede mini-skirt and other punk items I had gotten in England the year before that had not yet reached the fashion shore of Boston and I strutted into that interview.
Because of the drawings that illustrated my copy, they called and hired me as assistant art director. Now that I was hired, I decided that as a working girl my costume should be a plaid kilt, brogues, a button-down shirt, and a cardigan.
On my first day of the job, everyone gathered around to greet me. Except for women in subsidiary positions, only men worked there. But as I resembled a 1950s schoolgirl, I was not the person they expected. Immediately, all my confidence vanished. The person they were waiting for was, I think, in retrospect, a dominatrix.
I was sent to a remote office and assigned various tasks. My first assignment was to draw a storyboard with a cowboy resembling John Wayne who walks into a bar and orders a can of Underwood Deviled Ham. I could not do this. First I had to find out what a storyboard was. Once I found out, I went to the library every night and traced pictures of cowboys and then tried to draw cowboys, and even if I could draw a cowboy from one angle I could not draw the same cowboy from a different angle. Night after night, I cried and cried.
At the end of the first week I was called into the conference room. “Are you ready to present your Cowboy Ordering Underwood Deviled Ham in a Bar?”
I held up my grimy five-foot-tall storyboard. The members of the ad team and the rest of the account executives looked at it for a long time and then said politely, “Thank you.”
Then they sent me back to my office.
They tried to find other things for me to do. My boss asked me to reframe some pictures for him by taking the pictures out of the frames and turning the mattes backward and putting them back in the frames, but when he came to collect them at the end of the day I was sitting on the floor crying and the pictures were ruined.
After that, they left me alone. A month or so later there was a new hire at the agency. Her name was Valerie. She was lovely. The agency was really trying to make things equal, where women would be hired as well as men!
Valerie and I went out to lunch. “So, Tama, what is it you do exactly at the agency?” she asked.
“Valerie, I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know. I don’t exactly do anything here. People have tried to find things for me to do, but thus far, I come here every day and I get a paycheck.”
After lunch, she told me she had a meeting with our boss.
After her meeting, I was laid off.
I would never be able to work in an office, or anywhere, I knew that now. With the stressful life I had led until that time, and the constant fear of poverty, truly, I would have been content with any job, a job with a paycheck, benefits, comradeship. But it was not to be.
transgender publishing outing
I went back to school. I found a one-year master’s degree program that offered a full scholarship plus a little money to live on at Hollins College, a lovely women’s college in Virginia that predated the Civil War.
It harkened back to an earlier era, to that time when women of fine backgrounds went to finishing school to be finished. In 1978 it was an undergraduate college that primarily consisted of women who brought their own horses and Mercedes. But twelve young men and women had been accepted into a new graduate creative writing program.
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At Hollins, I wrote my first book, American Dad.
I was taking an independent study, but when I handed in what I had been working on my teacher couldn’t be bothered to read it. I begged him, but he was disgruntled and didn’t want to take the time. What would become of me? Could I write? And what should I do with this book? I didn’t know what to do.
There was a visiting professor, William Goyen, who was helpful and kind and gave me the names of two editors at publishing houses. Six months after sending the manuscript to them, one sent it back. The other said she would publish it. She had me rewrite and rewrite and revise. She said if I did what she wanted, she would definitely publish it. After a year of rewriting she called and said, “It did not pass the editorial meeting. Sorry.”
I put it back, pretty much, to the way I wanted it. I sent out sections of this book to different magazines. I sent chapters to Esquire and The Paris Review. They were rejected.
The manuscript was written in the first-person point of view of a boy. I decided I would take those same chapters and send them out with a man’s name on them. I decided to call myself Tom A. Janowitz.
This time the work received a different response. A woman editor at Esquire wrote to me: “I really like what you are doing here, Tom. It’s not quite ready yet, but I think I can help. We can work together. If you are in New York City, how about I take you to lunch?”
I was too chicken. Her letter was a little flirtier than what I have described above.
Simultaneously, letters from Who’s Who of American Authors used to come in for my mom.
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