The Good Girls Revolt (5 page)

The daughter of a prominent surgeon who was a pioneer of plastic surgery, Liz had graduated from Connecticut College and joined
Newsweek
on the mail desk in 1958. She showed so much talent that in 1962, she was the only woman on staff to be promoted to writer. Two years later, she was assigned to the Paris bureau. But as recounted by Oz in his memoir,
The World of Oz,
Liz later told him, with some bitterness, that she never felt she was treated fairly. After Oz announced her posting, proudly telling her that
Newsweek
had never sent a woman abroad, Liz hesitantly asked whether the job would mean a raise—it was after all, a promotion. According to Liz, Oz responded indignantly, “What do you mean? Think of the honor we are paying you!”

As a single woman in a highly visible job, Liz led a busy social life in Paris and flaunted it. Returning to the office at night to type her files, she would often end her telexes to New York with “You guys are ruining my sex life.” From time to time, she would bring me along on assignments, including a memorable Balenciaga fashion show, or ask me to report a “Newsmaker,” the gossipy items about international celebrities that New York regularly requested. But Liz was also status conscious and didn’t want to diminish her star in any way. She once asked me to join her one evening because her date was bringing along a male friend. I was surprised at this bit of camaraderie but I was flattered and quickly agreed. Before we left the office, she turned to me and said, “Just say you are a reporter in the bureau, not the secretary.”

In Paris, I began to have glimmerings of ambition, of finding something to do for the rest of my life. Surrounded by reporters and writers, I naturally began to think about journalism. But that was complicated for me. My father, Shirley Povich, was a famous sports journalist and a very stylish writer. Afraid of measuring up to him—or with what his success represented—I had purposely avoided anything having to do with journalism in school. Then there was the terror of just putting oneself out in the world, to be judged by others. As I wrote to my best friend back home, becoming a writer would be “my first exposure to a real challenge, something which will prove whether I’m really intelligent and disciplined and eager to do something. This is it, baby, either you start to do something good now or forget it—kinda scary, huh?”

After more than a year in Paris, I returned to the States to be with my boyfriend. I had met Jeffrey Young on Christmas vacation during my senior year at Vassar. He was a first-year student at Harvard Law School and also a Washingtonian (his father owned the famous Paul Young’s restaurant). With his dark brown hair and dreamy brown eyes, Jeff was bright, handsome, and charismatic, charming everyone in his path, including me. We got serious quite quickly, but with Jeff having two more years in law school, I decided that I would not give up my plan to go to Paris. After a year and a half abroad, I returned to New York in November 1966 to plan for our wedding the following June, when Jeff graduated. But in the spring of 1967, he suffered a serious depression and took to his bed. He managed to go to classes and finish his degree, but the depression lasted several months. I was very worried about him and visited him every weekend in Cambridge. But I wasn’t willing—or able—to look deeper into what this might tell me about him or mean for our marriage. At twenty-three, I was in love.

When I returned to
Newsweek
in New York, I requested a position in the back of the book since Liz Peer told me there was more reporting in those sections. The magazine was informally divided into two parts: the front of the book, which comprised three sections—National Affairs (which we called Nation), International (referred to as Foreign), and Business—and the back of the book, which included Life & Leisure, Press, TV-Radio, Sports, Religion, Education, Medicine, Science & Space, and the Arts. I was put in the Life & Leisure section, which appealed to me. A Vassar course on Victorian England had gotten me interested in social behavior after studying the hypocrisy of the Victorians’ strict moral code with the prevalence of prostitution. Life & Leisure covered social trends as well as fashion, which in the ’60s was a vivid reflection of how men and women were changing and why. I loved reporting on
Newsweek’
s many fashion covers and interviewed every designer from Betsey Johnson and Mary Quant to Yves Saint Laurent and Halston.

The tedium of fact-checking on Fridays was the price I paid for spending the early part of the week doing interviews. Most of the researchers in the back of the book reported for their sections. But unlike many of my colleagues, my boss in Life & Leisure, Harry Waters, encouraged and mentored me. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School (on scholarship), Harry was a gifted writer who was raised in a working-class Catholic family by two older sisters and a strong mother. His politics were to the right of most of us, and he bristled at the Ivy League snobbery on the magazine, but he wasn’t afraid of smart women. In fact, he admired them. He gave me opportunities to report and tutored me on getting good quotes. When he sent me to cover the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, across the street from
Newsweek,
I nervously asked him whom I should interview. “Anyone who’s crying,” he said. He also edited my files so that I could sharpen my writing.

Since we had to provide colorful commentary, quotes, and background material, our files were often very long compared to what ended up in the magazine. When Harry assigned me to cover a traditional singles weekend at Grossinger’s, the famous Jewish resort in the Catskills, my report started on an upbeat note: “They came 1600 strong in search of ‘the One’ or just a good telephone number.” For pages, I described the typical Catskill “get acquainted” activities (“Simon says all the single fellows stand up—Simon says all the girls look them over quickly”), the compulsive mingling at the skating rink and on the ski slopes, and the false identities that everyone used to find a partner. “No one tells the truth,” said one woman. “We say we’re stewardesses one minute and the next minute we’re in television.” I ended with the scene at the buses back to the city on Sunday—“the last judgment” when everyone desperately exchanged information. “The girls practically have their phone numbers pasted on their foreheads,” one guy said. But as a woman bitterly told me, “The boys are up here to have fun and accumulate phone numbers while we’re here to get a husband.” And with that, my thirty-one-page file was boiled down to a two-page Life & Leisure feature titled “The Last Resort,” written by Harry.

The Business researchers also did a lot of reporting, since New York was the financial capital of the world. Because most of the material for Nation and Foreign stories came from the bureaus, the Nation researchers were sent out of the office mainly during political campaigns and crises, such as the riots. Those in Foreign spent their time in the library or on the phone, providing historical context for their stories and cultivating important sources in academia or foreign affairs. Some women, such as Fay Willey, the chief researcher in Foreign, loved that work. With a master’s degree in international relations and American constitutional law, Fay had more depth of knowledge of her subjects than most of the writers she was checking. She was promoted three times before she was twenty-four, and found the work intellectually challenging.

Fact-checking might be a decent entry-level job in journalism, but many of us chafed at the work once we realized it was a dead end. Occasionally a researcher was promoted to reporter. Pat Lynden had started on the magazine as a researcher in Nation, took a leave to do reporting, and came back as a reporter in the New York bureau. But most of the eleven female correspondents working in the bureaus in 1970 had been hired from outside.
Newsweek
never hired women as writers and only one or two female staffers were promoted to that rank no matter how talented they were. During and after World War II, there had been several women writers on the magazine, but they had all mysteriously disappeared by the early 1960s. Any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for a job was told, “If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else—women don’t write at
Newsweek
.”

Some of the more ambitious young women saw the lay of the land right away. Nora Ephron, Ellen Goodman, Jane Bryant Quinn, and Susan Brownmiller all started at
Newsweek
in the early 1960s, but left fairly quickly and developed very successful writing careers elsewhere. “I thought I’d work my way up—to the clip desk, to research, and eventually to writer—once I proved my worth,” said Jane Bryant Quinn. “But I discovered that I’d never become a writer, just an older and older researcher, making my younger and younger male writers look good.”

Ellen Goodman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the
Boston Globe
, said that for researchers, “the turnover was expected to be great because women didn’t stay in these jobs, either because they got married or because they left, but never because they were promoted. We’re talking 1963, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so sex discrimination was legal.” When an opening came up for a researcher in the Television department, Goodman, who graduated from Radcliffe (and never had a woman teacher), ended up working for her Harvard classmate Peter Benchley. “The only difference between Peter and me was gender,” she said. “I mean, there were other differences. His grandfather was Robert Benchley. But, you know, it wouldn’t have mattered if my grandfather had been Robert Benchley.”

Some young women knew they wanted to be writers from the get-go. At fourteen, Jane Bryant Quinn discovered the comic strip
Brenda Starr, Reporter.
“She had glorious hair, impossible eyelashes, mysterious boyfriends—remember the patch?—and an internationally glamorous life,” she recalled. “I don’t remember that she reported on much, but wherever she was, something thrilling was going on. I wanted to be a reporter, too.”

Nora Ephron’s father
and
mother worked in Hollywood and Nora had written for both her high school and college newspapers. “My mother was a screenwriter, so of course we were all going to work and we were all going to be writers,” she said. “And all four of her daughters are writers—that’s a sign of her terrifying strength.” When Nora was a researcher in Nation,
Newsweek
did a cover story on McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy’s top advisor on national security. Ambitious and a self-starter, Nora volunteered to report on Bundy’s early years at Yale, where he went to college. “Her file was absolutely spectacular,” recalled Peter Goldman. “Everyone was passing it around like samizdat, it was so brilliant.” But within a year Nora left
Newsweek
for the
New York Post.
“I knew I was going to be a writer and if they weren’t going to make me one, I was going to a place that would,” she explained. “Had they said to me when I said I was leaving, ‘How would you like to be a writer?’ I don’t think I would have been any good at it. It’s a kind of formulaic writing that requires quite a lot of craft and quite the opposite of the kind of writing I was doing.”

Even now, I don’t know why the rest of us didn’t “get it,” why we just didn’t leave and try our luck elsewhere. Maybe because we were simply happy to have jobs in a comfortable, civilized workplace that dealt with the important issues of the day. Maybe it was because we, too, were elitists, thrilled to be at least a minor part of the media establishment. “Nora was eager to be a writer, so she was quite disgusted by the place,” noted Trish Reilly, a researcher in the Arts sections. “I was thrilled to be a handmaiden to the writer gods and thought it was all quite wonderful.” Or maybe we just weren’t ambitious enough—or angry enough—at that point in our lives to buck an inherently sexist system. “I certainly saw what was going on,” Ellen Goodman later said, “but I don’t think I was angry about it for years.”

For many of us,
Newsweek
was just a way to earn pin money before getting hitched. “At Radcliffe, the expectations were that you would leave college, work for a couple of years, get married, and then write the great American novel while your children were napping,” said Ellen Goodman. At least working at a place like
Newsweek
might increase your chances of meeting a more interesting Mr. Right—or even a Mr. Rich and Famous. That fantasy was fueled by Karen Gunderson, a reporter in
Newsweek’
s Arts sections. In 1965, Karen was sent out to interview Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist and librettist of
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot,
among many other musicals. They fell in love and the following year, Karen left
Newsweek
to become the fifth Mrs. Alan Jay Lerner (he married eight times).

Whatever our destinies,
Newsweek
was an exciting place to work. It mattered what the newsmagazines put on their covers in those days. Every Monday morning,
Time
and
Newsweek
set the news agenda for the week and in the 1960s, that agenda was filled with cataclysmic events. In the beginning of the decade,
Newsweek
was a pale also-ran to
Brand X
, which is what we called
Time
magazine. But that would change rather spectacularly under the brilliant hand of Osborn Elliott.

CHAPTER 3

The “Hot Book”

O
N THE SURFACE, it seemed unlikely that Oz would be a transformative editor. A balding man with a beak nose, Oz was the quintessential WASP: his Dutch ancestor, Stephen Coerte van Voorhees, had come to New Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century; he was raised on the posh East Side; he graduated from St. Paul’s prep school and Harvard; and like everyone in his family except his mother, he was a Republican (he switched to Independent when he became a journalist). But Oz had a rebellious streak that he credited, ironically, to the strong women in his life. His mother’s mother, Josefa Neilson Osborn, started a successful dress-designing business in 1898, after her wine-merchant husband lost his money. She held salons at the Waldorf, supplied costumes to the fashionable ladies on Park Avenue, and wrote a monthly column for the
Delineator,
the
Vogue
of its day. When Oz’s father lost his money and his partnership at Kidder, Peabody in the Crash of 1929, his mother went to work in real estate, where she became a top broker and the first female vice president of her firm.