BOOK EXTRACT : The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone by Robin Green
BOOK EXTRACT
EXTRACT: THE ONLY GIRL TAKES US BEHIND THE SCENES OF ROLLING STONE WITH ROBIN GREEN, THE FIRST WOMAN ON THE MASTHEAD
Sex, drugs and deadlines in the age of women’s lib, free love and rock’n’roll
The writer on the roof of her house in the Berkeley Hills, when she was working for Rolling Stone
It was midnight and we were speeding north on the Pacific Coast Highway with the headlights off, squealing around curves and taking hairpin turns on two wheels. Hunter S Thompson was driving, Annie Leibovitz, the editor David Felton and I with him, swigging from a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, all of us stoned on the little blue mescaline pills in a baggie perched on the console. I wasn’t afraid. I was laughing. Screeching with pleasure. We all were. We knew that any misstep — an animal in the road, say, or an oncoming car with its lights also off — could send us sailing over the guardrail-less edge and rolling to our deaths on the rocks below. It occurred to me that I seemed not to care. I felt alive. Immortal. Lucky to be in that car, living on the literal edge. And if we went crashing down that cliff into the Pacific Ocean, so be it. What better way to die?
I had just turned 26 and it was 1971, a glorious year all round — for rock’n’roll, for Rolling Stone, and, despite the ridiculously long hours and low pay, for everybody who worked at the magazine. Just to be part of what was going on inside that converted warehouse on Third Street in San Francisco, in those labyrinthine cubicles and copy desks and drawing boards and deadlines — it felt like being inside the heartbeat of the most happening thing on the planet. It became part of our very identities. An atmosphere enhanced, no doubt, by the frequent consumption of mind-altering contraband — not by everyone, not all the time, but there was an aura.
Only the previous year, I had borrowed my then boyfriend’s metallic blue-green Pontiac Firebird convertible to drive from our apartment in Berkeley, California, across the Bay Bridge to apply for a job at the magazine.
At the time, I was working as a waitress at a faux-British, corporation-owned roast-beef house, doing split shifts, slinging bloody slabs of rib roast to tables of leering, cheapskate middle-management types. I made good money, but it wasn’t long before I started to wonder what I was doing in the stupid get-up they made me wear — little serving-wench outfit complete with push-up bra and ruffled apron — me with my higher education, the first generation of my family ever to go to college, and an Ivy League one at that. I was a star of sorts at Brown, a townie with a chip on her shoulder on state scholarship who wrote poignant yet earthy short stories and skulked around campus in black turtlenecks, jeans and black boots; a would-be bohemian made editor of Brown’s literary magazine and the only girl on the editorial staff that year, just as I would later be the only female contributing editor on the masthead of Rolling Stone during my three years there.
When it came to the interview, I decided that, for once, I wouldn’t dress in the secretary disguise I’d usually worn for job interviews. This time I’d go as myself, in sandals, denim miniskirt and tank top. Plus, I’d borrow a friend’s jeans jacket that had a large patch sewn on the back, of two people fucking. And just for good measure, I’d take my dog, a big black mutt called Reuben that friends had left with us on their way to Mexico. If they didn’t like the fucking jacket and they didn’t like the fucking dog, fuck ’em.
We — Reuben and I — took the elevator to the fourth floor and when the doors slid open, I felt like I was home. It was a stripped-down loft with brick walls, framed posters of covers of Rolling Stone, big oak desk and behind it a hip and pretty receptionist turning the pages of the latest issue. (I’d learn later that being pretty was a job requirement for girls at the magazine.) She didn’t say anything like “Nice dog” or “I’m sorry, no dogs here”, didn’t mention the dog at all; she just, without taking her eyes off her reading, buzzed somebody on the phone, said I was there, hung up, and gestured vaguely off to her right.
“You can go in,” she said.
Rolling Stone sent me on story after story — to write about Black Sabbath in Providence, where I watched Ozzy Osbourne towel down in a pool of his own sweat backstage after a concert; about the filming of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight in New York, where Jimmy Breslin talked my ear off in a booth in a bar; about Tricia Nixon’s marriage (a cover story, written under the byline White House Staff); plus weightier fare: the investigation of a low-rent guru in Oakland that was later reprinted in a book along with articles on much more evil sorts.
Everybody at the magazine, I’d learn much later, was sleeping with everybody — editorial assistants with editors, editors with interview subjects, ad reps with celebrities, and everybody in the art department with each other; including me with my editor, David Felton, whom I loved and slept with and eventually ran away to Chicago with — until he ditched me to go back to his wife and kids in LA.
We — the girls in the office and I — had come of age in the 1960s and, heeding the voices of our inner rock chicks, had landed, for one reason or another, in the Bay Area, where, in America in 1971, everything was happening. Our cultural shift went beyond hairy armpits. We liked to smoke dope and get high and listen to music. We were game and adventurous, enjoyed being desired, and were up for it — we had the pill. We were liberated — from our parents, at least, and in society, if not in the workplace. We didn’t see ourselves as victims. We were proactive in our sex lives. We were hungry for experience and beat men to it. If it was OK for men to fuck around, why shouldn’t we? We sought equality in this way. It didn’t feel like promiscuity; it felt like freedom. It felt powerful.If there was an emotional — or even professional — cost,it wasn’t apparent, not then. Consequences weren’t even on the radar.
Felton went on to have other affairs at the office. In 1977, he’d move with Rolling Stone to New York and, in time, become the kind of drunk who passed out on the curb, had his pocket razored and his wallet stolen, before he finally gave up booze and drugs and joined AA. But in 1971, we didn’t know any of that. We’d smoke dope and have sex, drop mescaline and have sex, drop mescaline and go see 2001, Bette Midler, Randy Newman. We’d ride up the coast in Hunter’s back seat, get naked with the whole office in the Esalen hot springs, and, that first year, when my first cover was finally published in the September ’71 issue, go together to the printers in Berkeley at 3am to watch it roll off the presses.
Many of the editors and writers — males, every last one of them — had been drafted from old-line newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and the LA Times, and most left wives and families behind (at least for a time; at least, for one guy, until his wife threatened to put her head in the oven if her husband didn’t stop fooling around at work). They found themselves suddenly let loose in the epicentre of the countercultural sexual revolution, surrounded at the office by the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone: editorial, art, ad and production acolytes there at all hours helping bosses with the work of putting out a magazine, and also doing their filing, fetching their coffee, fucking their brains out.
In the nomenclature of the times, we were “chicks”. The term was aspirational. It was cool to be a chick — a hip chick like the chicks in swinging London, a Marianne Faithfull or Jane Birkin, or the more relaxed and sartorially deconstructed hippie-chick version from Berkeley or the Haight. As chicks, we peered at the world of men from under our bangs, or posed for cameras with our heads tilted coquettishly, projecting a harmless and nonthreatening vibe. And we weren’t threatening anything — not yet, anyway.
It wasn’t until the following year that I crossed a journalistic line. Jann Wenner, the editor-in-chief, had asked me to write an in-depth article on the children of Robert F Kennedy. There had been 10 zillion stories about John-John and Caroline after Jack Kennedy was killed — the public couldn’t get enough of them. But who knew anything at all about these kids of Bobby’s? There were 11 of them then.
Instead of trying to contact them — I was afraid that would make it too easy for them to put me off — I decided I’d start by going to Harvard, where Bobby Jr was a freshman, and track him down. Which I did, asking around campus to find out which dorm he was in. I didn’t have to lie in wait for him, since there was Bobby leaving the building just as I was walking up.
He wore worn jeans and his hair was long and he was tall and lanky, with a crooked smile and a distracted air. Something like thought seemed to go on behind his Kennedy-blue eyes, which just then were at half-mast. Which made sense, as this was the Kennedy who as a young teen had been busted for possession of pot. He said he couldn’t talk now, he was supposed to meet somebody. He scratched his head and pondered, then shrugged and said maybe I could come with him, it wouldn’t take long.
Back in his room, I asked him what he’d scored, and he said it was Dilaudid. This is maybe where I could have asked why he was resorting to such a powerful painkiller and referenced the little bust of his father in his dorm. It might have opened up a whole world of discourse about his feelings and his loss. But I didn’t. Instead, we took our clothes off and had sex on the waterbed that covered practically the entire floor.
A big journalistic transgression, I know. The act made it seem impossible to write the Kennedy piece. Because how could I, who prided myself on honestly depicting what I saw and experienced when I covered a story, how could I write anything about the Kennedys without saying what I’d done? And I wasn’t about to reveal it. Not to 1m-plus readers. Not even to Jann as an explanation of why he wasn’t getting the pages. For a long time, I didn’t tell anybody — no one, except maybe strangers in bars and at parties to explain why I wasn’t on the masthead any more.
It’s all so poignant. Also ironic and paradoxical. Because at that point I was sleeping with everybody. We all were — women’s lib, free love, pre-Aids and all that — so why wouldn’t I jump at the chance to go to bed with this tall, handsome boy, a Kennedy, for God’s sake? In addition to way-too-personal details about Bobby, I’d also learnt uncomfortable truths about all the kids and I felt the Kennedys had had enough horror in their lives without my adding to it on the pages of Rolling Stone.
It was during an assignment in Israel that the issue of the Kennedy story came to a head. I got a call from Jann, who also happened to be there; he invited me to join him and a few others at a club somewhere in Jerusalem that night. We had gone outside to the patio to get some air and have a smoke (cigarettes). He asked me — after all the time I’d taken, not to mention the expenses I’d racked up — where the hell the story was. I was sorry, I said, but he wasn’t going to get it.
As he absorbed this, he turned away and blew a stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth, then looked at me and shook his head sadly. “You realise,” he said, “if you don’t write it, I’m going to have to take you off the masthead.”
I said that was OK. And, really, it was. I was, in fact, relieved.
“OK?” Jann said that night. “You sure?”
I still occasionally wrote for Rolling Stone and other magazines after that, but I was lost and floundering. Finally, in 1975, I left the Bay Area for good and went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to begin my life again, and eventually started what would become a 25-year career in TV writing. I rose from staff writer to story editor to co-producer and on up to executive producer on The Sopranos (where I was, for all but four months of my time there, the only girl at the story-room table) and finally co-creator, with my husband, Mitchell Burgess, of my own show, Blue Bloods, now in its ninth year and in syndication around the world.
I didn’t see Jann again until late in 1999 (the year The Sopranos hit big) at an Annie Lennox concert. I went over and said hello, met his boyfriend (now his husband). I told him that my years at Rolling Stone were some of the best in my life — but also the worst. And his boyfriend said: “You can’t imagine how many of you come up to him and say that.
”The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone by Robin Green (Virago £18.99) is published on August 21
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