by Lynn Povich
Under Oz, Newsweek became the “hot book” in the media and on Madison Avenue. Coinciding with the 1960s, life at the magazine not only was fascinating, it was a fun and even wild place to be. Since most of the writers were in their thirties and nearly all the researchers in their twenties, the culture inside the office mirrored the “Swinging Sixties” on the street. Everyone, including Oz, was on a first-name basis, which gave a feeling of equality even to us utterly powerless. After work we went out drinking either to the Berkshire Bar, a front-of-the-book favorite, or to The Cowboy, where Pete Axthelm, the Sports department’s wunderkind writer and champion drinker, held forth every night.
Waiting for the files to roll in at the beginning of the week, or for the edits on Friday nights and Saturdays, we spent hours joking around in the office. “I loved the intense but nutty, freewheeling atmosphere on Saturday afternoons,” recalled Pat Lynden, “drinking wine, strumming guitars, playing baseball in the hallways.” Peter Goldman and Ed Kosner used their downtime in Nation to cowrite a never-finished parody of a dirty novel. Dwight Martin, a senior editor in the back of the book, moved an old Steinway upright into his office so he could practice piano in the afternoons; at cocktail time he poured sherry for his staff.
One Friday night, Betsy Carter, the media researcher, was so bored waiting for her story to be edited that at 2 A.M., she decided to make a copy of herself. “I just lay on the Xerox machine and copied my body piece by piece,” she recalled. “I stapled them all together and mailed it to my parents with a note that said, ‘Here I am at work and I thought you would like to know.’ I think my mother said something like, ‘Do you think you’re working too hard?’”
The back-of-the-book researchers had a classic “office wife” relationship with their bosses. While the front-of-the-book researchers sat in an open bullpen and checked stories by different writers every week, each of us sat in a twenty-five-foot-by-twenty-five-foot office with our section writer. The men’s desks were by the window, of course; we perched by the door. To add some personality to our steel-gray work spaces, we pinned up pictures of our idols or celebrities we had interviewed. I put up photographs of nearly naked models Veruschka and Marisa Berenson from Vogue, prompting several writers to ask me if I was a lesbian. Sitting only six feet from our writers, we were on intimate terms with them, sharing more than we ever wanted to know about their personal grooming habits, their intimate medical issues, and their heated arguments with the ex-wife or girlfriend.
The back-of-the-book and the Business sections worked Monday through Friday, but the official week didn’t begin until Tuesday morning, when Oz held a 10 A.M. story conference in his eleventh-floor office. After the story line-up was set, the writers sent queries to the bureaus asking for on-the-ground reporting. The color-coded files arrived on Thursday and Friday: blue from the international bureaus, green from Washington, and pink from the domestic correspondents. Then the creative rituals and angst would kick in. Pacing the halls in their socks or rocking in their chairs, the writers would cull the information from our reports and the rainbow-colored files and weave it all into a smart, colorful analysis or description of the week’s events. Harry Waters, my boss, would pepper me for the right word or phrase, nervously asking, “How does this sound?” or “Listen to this.” Paul Zimmerman, a movie critic, was called “the talking blue” because he proudly read aloud to any passerby the blue-inked mimeographs of his latest review. The entire magazine was written and edited in forty-eight hours, culminating in Friday nights that lasted until one or two in the morning because the Wallendas would take a two-hour, martini-soaked dinner break at Giambelli’s across the street.
Describing the weekly routine, Carole Wicker, a researcher at Time, wrote a typically sexualized, over-the-top piece for Cosmopolitan magazine titled “Limousine to Nowhere . . . if You’re a Girl at a News Magazine.” In it she quoted an unnamed Newsweek staffer on what it was like to be a researcher: “It’s a mini-marriage, between researcher and writer, with the orgasm coming at the end of the week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, everything goes easy. By Thursday, the pitch is higher. Friday afternoon you’re flying, and by Friday midnight you go over the top.” “What she’s saying,” explained Wicker in the piece, “is that the researcher is drawn into the writer’s pattern, inch by inch, pressure by pressure, until she’s lost her own being and becomes an extension of her boss.”
That didn’t describe most of us but there was definitely a caste system at Newsweek. “For every man there was an inferior woman, for every writer there was a checker,” said Nora Ephron. “They were the artists and we were the drones. But what is interesting is how institutionally sexist it was without necessarily being personally sexist. To me, it wasn’t oppressive. They were just going to try to sleep with you—and if you wanted to, you could. But no one was going to fire you for not sleeping with them.”
By the mid-’60s when the sexual revolution was in full swing, the magazine was a cauldron of hormonal activity. Protected by the Pill, women felt as sexually entitled as the men, and our short skirts and sometimes braless tops only added to the boil. Mix in a schedule culminating in long days and nights, and it ignited countless affairs between the writers and editors and the researchers. For the most part, the office flings were friendly and consensual, and a few turned into marriages. “The way we related to men was through sexual bantering,” recalled Trish Reilly, a former researcher in the back of the book. “It was the way a compliment was made at Newsweek.” “Flirting was part of the game,” said Lucy Howard, “and you knew how to handle it. You had to be charming and witty and not cringe at their dirty jokes. It was a Mad Men kind of atmosphere.”
There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in. When she was visiting one time in New York, Liz Peer sat in on a story meeting. “The dialogue was eighth grade boys’ locker room,” she told a reporter at the Village Voice. “To see the powerful decision-makers of a national magazine talking about tits and asses and farts! I thought, I’m working for these clowns.” Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. “The ‘hubba-hubba’ climate was tolerated,” he recalled. “I was told the editors would ask girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.”
Many guys looked at us as people they wanted to cheat on their wives with—and many women were happy to accommodate them. It was easy with suburban-based writers who stayed at hotels in the city on late Friday nights, but there was also sex in the office, literally. The infirmary, two tiny rooms with single beds, was the assignation of choice. Often a writer would go there to “take a nap” for an hour or two, albeit with a female staffer. The offices in the back of the book also served as action central. “You would open the door sometimes and there were these two heavy bodies against the door,” recalled Betsy Carter, “and they would both be on the floor drinking Jack Daniel’s or having sex under the desk.” The outrageous behavior often spilled out into the corridors. Pete A. and Pete B. (Axthelm and Bonventre), the bawdy Sports writers, would stand outside their twelfth-floor office and audibly rate the women on their physical attributes as they walked by. “It was loose and fraternizing and I thought it was a lot of fun,” remembered Maureen Orth, a former back-of-the-book writer, who hung out with the Sports guys. “But women were clearly subordinate.”
I, too, was caught up in the sexual energy of the place. In January 1968, Jeff and I married and moved to Greenwich Village to be closer to New York University, where he had enrolled in film school. After graduation, Jeff won an internship with Arthur Penn on Alice’s Restaurant and lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for several months; I visited on weekends. It looked as if his career was taking off. He made a short film with Viveca Lindfors and in 1969 was hire
d by Paramount—in the post–Easy Rider days—to make a movie based on Richard Fariña’s popular counterculture novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.
But there was something missing in our marriage and I felt emotionally abandoned. I didn’t realize just how unhappy I was until I found myself getting involved with a colleague at work. I wasn’t the only married researcher who was having an affair, but it scared me. One night I told Jeff about it because I knew the affair had more to do with problems in our marriage than with the guy. Jeff was furious, but then confessed that he, too, had been sleeping with someone. Maybe I had sensed it, I’m not sure. But I certainly wasn’t feeling loved. After several long, tearful conversations, we decided to stay together and each of us began psychotherapy.
Looking back, there was a lot of inappropriate behavior at Newsweek, the kind of “sexual favoritism” and “hostile work environment” that today might be considered illegal. The Nation researchers were referred to condescendingly as “the Dollies.” When a back-of-the-book researcher handed her senior editor some copy, he told her she had “perfectly pointed breasts.” One Saturday afternoon, as Betsy Carter was fitting her story into the allotted space at the makeup desk, a writer she barely knew walked by, leaned over, and planted a soft kiss on her neck. Jane Bryant Quinn remembered that when she was on the mail desk, “randy writers and editors would cruise the newcomers, letting them know that their so-called careers would be helped if they joined the guy for drinks.”
The short, gray-haired sixty-year-old man who ran the mail room was particularly sleazy. “After a while he would say, ‘I want to take you out for a soda at the ice cream parlor around the corner,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “I went with him once. He would tell you his life story, including his war stories and that he had a war wound on his back. Then he would say, ‘You have lovely hands,’ and would ask you to go to his apartment to massage his back. Nobody did, but nobody said anything and no one turned him in. We just tried to avoid him. Finally somebody thought it was revolting and reported him and he was fired. He was just a creepy little guy.”
One Monday my senior editor, Shew Hagerty, assigned me a story on a trendy new club in New York. It was a lascivious lounge where everyone disrobed, tied sheet-like togas around their bodies, and reposed on mattresses floating on pools of water as they were served cocktails. Shew was a gentleman and a good boss, but I was stunned when later that week he asked if he could come along with me. What could I say? To assure me that he was on the up-and-up, he invited Elisabeth Coleman, another of his researchers and a good friend of mine, to join us. I was never more humiliated than when I was lying on a large white cushion in a toga, with nothing underneath, across from my mustached, pipe-smoking boss, who sat there smiling, so pleased to be taking in the scene.
Nation researcher Kate Coleman (not related to Elisabeth), a proud member of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, described reporting a Newsweek cover story in 1967 on the rising use of marijuana. Her senior editor, Ed Diamond, asked if he could come to her apartment and smoke some pot—to better understand the phenomenon. Not wanting her to think he meant just the two of them, he asked her to invite some of her friends as well so he could witness the whole experience. Then, at the last minute, Ed asked Kate if she would mind if he brought along his wife, Adelina. According to Kate, who left Newsweek in 1968, both Ed and Adelina came to her pot party and they both took more than a few tokes. Ed later claimed that he never got high; he said he only got a “slight buzz.”
A few guys had a habit of hitting on women in ways that would qualify today as sexual harassment. One Thursday afternoon in Nation, Dick Boeth, a talented but volatile writer, kept harassing Margaret Montagno, who tried to ignore him. He hovered over her desk, speaking quietly but clearly hammering at her. When she didn’t respond, he said, very audibly, “Well, if you want to continue playing the thirty-year-old virgin from Columbus, Ohio, you go right ahead and do that.” Everyone in the bullpen heard it and Margaret, in tears, fled into Peter Goldman’s office. She closed the door and pleaded, “Can’t you do anything about him?” “I didn’t know what to do,” Peter later confessed. “When Dick was in one of his crazies you couldn’t deal with him. All the women were kind of scared of him. I should have nonviolently punched him out but I couldn’t. After Meg calmed down, she went back to work. I had work to do and I couldn’t do it in the eye of that storm, so I packed up and went home.”
Several editors and writers were known for having affairs with women who reported to them directly, most likely a firing offense—or at least a reassignment—today. One writer told me that his editor was sleeping with his researcher, putting him in an awkward position, to say the least. A married senior editor, who regularly used the infirmary for his trysts, had a liaison with a researcher in his section and then lobbied for her promotion, which she received. Several editors and writers, married and single, had flings with their researchers. One writer dated both his researcher and his reporter at the same time.
Jack Kroll, the Arts senior editor, was a notorious flirt and played favorites with his young researchers. When Mary Pleshette first started working as the Movies researcher, Jack, who was divorced, asked her out to dinner and then a second time. It was collegial at first, talking about movies and actors and Zero Mostel, a friend of Mary’s family. But when Jack asked her to dinner the third time, she told him she didn’t feel comfortable accepting his invitation. “In those days,” she recalled, “everyone knew that the third date meant you had to put out.”
Jack was a Falstaffian character. His belly seemed to inflate and deflate with the seasons. Hidden behind a desk stacked with books in an office piled high with dirty shirts (he couldn’t be bothered with sending them to the laundry), Jack was a polymath who could write brilliantly on just about anything. When Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down by Jack Ruby in a Dallas police station basement, the editors called him in to write the story. The lead was classic Kroll: “It was,” he wrote, “as if Damon Runyon had written the last line of a tragedy by Sophocles.”
But Jack could also be volatile and vindictive. One evening after a cultural event, a good friend of mine who was one of his researchers asked me to come home with her because Jack was following her. She said he had been stalking her for weeks, sometimes waiting outside her building until two in the morning. When we got into her apartment, we doused the lights and looked out the window. There was Jack, walking up and down the sidewalk looking up at her window. She was terrified and didn’t know what to do.
When she started dating the guy she would eventually marry, Jack became crazed. He asked her to lunch one day at a nearby Irish pub. “We started talking and he took out a box,” she recalled. “He opened it up and there was a diamond ring. Then he took out an envelope with two tickets to the Iranian film festival, which was to be our honeymoon. I almost threw up. Thank God I was in therapy and had a man in my life. I said, ‘You know, Jack, I love you but I’m not in love with you. This is overwhelming, this is incredible, you’re such a close friend.’ And he said, ‘If you don’t marry me, you’ll have to leave Newsweek.’”
She refused his offer and he turned nasty. In the weeks that followed, she told me, “He would walk up and down the hall and yell, ‘Where’s that c—?’ No one said anything, no one did anything.” Finally, one of the male writers offered to help her find another job. She left shortly thereafter.
My boss, Harry Waters, told me that when he came to the magazine in 1962, “it was a discreet orgy. When I interviewed for the job, my editor said to me, ‘The best part of the job is that you get to screw the researchers.’ That,” he went on, “reflected the position of women at the newsmagazines, both literally and figuratively. It reinforced in young women that that’s their position—it’s underneath. That’s as far as they can get.”
CHAPTER 4
Ring Leaders
JUDY GINGOLD WAS SITTING at her weekly consciousness-raising meeting in Judy Levin’s tiny Greenwich Village apartment
when it struck her. Levin, a friend from Judy’s college days, was working at Ogilvy & Mather and heavily involved in the downtown political scene. The group consisted of eight women, among them a married architect, a social worker, and a woman who worked for the Clergy Consultation Service, a network of twenty-six Christian and Jewish clergy that helped women find safe abortion services.
A precocious New Yorker with a hearty laugh, Judy was intrigued by the new sense of power that women were exploring in their CR groups. Developed by the New York Radical Women, consciousness-raising was a process of using women’s feelings and experiences to analyze their lives and society’s assumptions about women. A member of that group, Kathie Amatniek Sarachild, who had changed her last name to reflect her mother’s lineage—a common move for radical women in those days—had popularized the practice of consciousness-raising in a paper in 1968, which was widely disseminated. Judy’s group followed the rules of the Redstockings, another group of radical feminists, which took its name from the seventeenth-century term for intellectual women, “Blue Stockings,” and substituted “Red” for revolution. The rules required going around the room so that each woman was forced to contribute to the conversation. By airing their intimate feelings, women were to discover that what seemed like isolated, individual problems actually reflected common conditions all women faced. In other words, the personal was political.
The consciousness-raising session at Levin’s Waverly Street apartment was a particularly memorable one for Judy. “Betsy Steuart, who was an assistant at NBC and very beautiful and capable, was saying, ‘If I were Barbara Walters I would get ahead,’” she recalled, “and everyone was saying the same thing—‘if I were better I would get ahead.’ All of us in that room felt inadequate. And that’s when I thought, wait a minute, that’s not right. It’s not because we’re undeserving or not talented enough that we aren’t getting ahead, it’s how the world is run. It made me see that the problem wasn’t our fault—it was systemic. That was my first ‘click!’ moment.”
