In 1973 I was the Managing Editor for the Boston Phoenix arts and entertainment section, roughly half the newspaper each week. In addition I was still its Books Editor and I was expected to keep writing regularly.
One of my first unfamiliar tasks as managing editor was authorizing that week’s payments for our section’s freelance writers. A number of writers wrote for us regularly but were paid as freelancers (as I had been with my Book Reports column) but I discovered that the amount of those payments varied wildly. Pretty much without anyone’s authorization, I increased the fees for those getting much less than others. I got away with it.
I made a number of changes to the section, discontinuing some regular features and adding others, setting up rotations for the coverage other than the major areas of movies and pop music, and so on. These and other changes were also meant to give the section an identity.
The Arts Editors for music (Ben Gerson) and movies (Janet Maslin) continued to write lead pieces and to assign other pieces in their area. I dealt directly with regular contributors and freelancers in other areas, as well as books. I didn’t hire staff on my own but I assigned to new freelancers. I had the final edit on all copy for the Second Section. In several cases I was pleased to do for others what had been done for me: give that first assignment to writers who went on to writing careers. Most of the time I advocated for writers when there were problems, but there were also situations in which they were disappointed and there was nothing I could do. Listening to people's problems--and bearing their secrets-- was part of my job, and also part of my social life.
I attended the weekly staff meeting but the business there mostly involved the news section. Ideas for our stories got generated through conversations with the Arts Editors, staff members, freelancers and others, and (pretty often) out of my own head. I fielded some calls and a lot of mail from organizations and venues looking for coverage.
That was the first thing to greet me when I arrived at the office—our receptionist Martha handed me a pile of pink slips with my accumulated messages, along with bigger piles of mail (including books.) She handled all calls first. We must have had some kind of intercom system or perhaps she just rang my phone with the line number of my incoming call. Working the phone was occasionally pleasant, mostly a chore, and sometimes maddening.
In general text editing was something of a challenge—deciding whether first impressions and sense of the piece were right, versus second or third reading. Copy- editing was a pleasure if I was relaxed enough—I was good at it. I became aware of the temptation to change things just to show I’d worked on it, and fought it off as best I could.
Once I had enough copy in hand, and I factored in the photographs our staff photographer (Michael Dobo) had either taken or would take, and the advertising staff told us how many pages we could run, I met with the layout editor to solve the jigsaw puzzle of every page—where the copy, the ads and the photos would go. There was often a little leeway, and decisions to be made later, not infrequently at the last minute. Often the layout had to be completed before I had all the copy. An event near (or sometimes past) deadline was being covered, or essential copy that simply came in late. Space was saved for those.
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| Janet Maslin |
Ben Gerson’s music pieces were always meticulously written, but also invariably late. They were so late at times that he took his piece directly to the composing room at the last possible moment to fill the space waiting for it, thereby coincidentally also avoiding any editor messing with his copy.
There would be one day in the week that could last well into the night when the paper had to be put to bed, and I was wrestling with late copy as well as making adjustments when stories came in too long or too short, photos were missing or didn’t work, or ads that got dropped or added. I wrote headlines and captions, copy-read the printed copy on what I believe we still called the flats, then approved each page before it could go to the printer.
The next day there would be “blue pages”—the paper as printed, except on a different kind of paper with blue print. A few corrections were still possible at this stage. When they were made, the issue was done. And it was time to start work on the next.
I started out working in the office next to the Editor’s office that used to belong to Kate Herriges. Kate had been my strongest supporter when I started out in 1971, but she’d moved on. Eventually the paper took over a large room on the building’s third floor, and I set up my headquarters there. At one point, I shared that office with staff writers R.D. Rosen (eventually to be the author of the book and therefore part of the language: Psychobabble) and Jim Lardner, also a subsequent author, whose grandfather was Ring Lardner (and Ring, Jr. was his father.)
It was in that room that we entertained Ted Solataroff, editor of the New American Review (recast as American Review), one of the great publications of the era. What I recall most about the afternoon he visited was basking in the sunshine coming through the high window, and speaking in euphoric and awestruck tones about the magnificence of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That book, especially at that time, was the most magical literary work I’d ever encountered. For years, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a book, I gave them a copy of this one, and it never failed, from Cambridge sophisticates to a western Pennsylvania waitress.
The Burgess interview came out when I was filling in for our regular theatre critic Carolyn Clay. I was also writing about music and movies, which at that point constituted mini-vacations from managing, editing and books. In February 1973 I wrote about a Neil Young concert. His current album was Harvest, his biggest seller and the top album of 1972. He did three concerts in Boston that week, two of them at the huge Boston Gardens and one at the smaller Music Hall. His surprise opening act was Linda Ronstadt, who sang on his biggest single, “Heart of Gold.”
In Young’s last appearance in Boston, he’d been nursing a bad back and did an all-acoustic tour, mostly seated and playing guitar and harmonica, and piano. This time he was playing a mixed set with the Stray Gators, the session musicians on Harvest, but his back wasn’t completely healed, so he again sat in a chair for part of the gig. My piece began like this:
I then quoted Linda Ronstadt’s comments from the stage on the Boston Garden show the night before. “Usually at these big concerts the kids come in and then get messed up, until they’re ready to be taken out in stretchers at the end. Last night it was like they came in on stretchers.” It was the beginning of the Quaalude era in pop music audiences.
The concert itself included songs from Young’s entire career, already extraordinary, and was taped for possible inclusion on a live album. At that point in my life, he was the songwriter and rock musician I most identified with.
At some point in 1973 I met Harry Nilsson at a press affair. I've forgotten this entirely but found a letter I wrote to him later with some information he wanted, which I also don't recall. Apparently we had an actual conversation.
Meanwhile the Phoenix was undergoing a couple of major changes. A managing editor for the entire paper was hired—a genial Englishman who was startingly older than the rest of us, though probably not by much. But it was the new Editor that became consequential.
The search for a new editor came down to a few remaining candidates (several top choices had dropped out of contention.) I thought we’d found a pretty solid one, but then another candidate showed up, and exuded a cheerful charm. I can’t say I was entirely immune to it—he quoted the likes of Wordsworth and Yeats, and offered bold ideas, like reviving the Dickensian tradition of serializing novels—this time in the Phoenix. But I was also suspicious—I’d seen the damage so-called charismatic figures could do, not to mention con artists. In Dickens tradition therefore, let's just call him Wily Brass.
Others also had misgiving but in the end, an editorial meeting vote was taken and Wily Brass was selected. He was the third of the three finalists; the top two had turned down the job. Steve Mindich took the recommendation and hired him. At first Brass and I got along very well—after a pleasant dinner conversation, we walked around Boston until he found what he wanted to show me—an historical marker commemorating a reading of his work given by Charles Dickens on one of his two American tours (probably at the site of the old Tremont Theatre.)
But things quickly devolved between us, and between him and everybody else. His bold plans, like the serialized novel, went nowhere. He was perceived to be arbitrary and unresponsive, petty and abusive, and borderline incompetent. We had a number of staff and freelance defections, often to the Real Paper. At one point I discovered that he was intercepting packages of books meant for review, including those addressed to me personally (once he purloined a personal gift), and keeping those he liked for his personal use.
Over those months, Brass chipped away at my innovations and authority. I told at least one staff confidant that I was sure he intended to take control of the arts section, even if it meant driving me out.
At the same time there was a movement to unionize the paper, including editorial staff, and become affiliated with the United Electrical Workers. It had begun the year before but was getting more intense in early 1973. I thought the affiliation was a bit absurd but I supported the efforts to organize. There was a lot of discontent, and a lot of reasons for it. It didn’t occur to me at first (or seemingly anyone else) that I was actually management now, so I attended some meetings. After one, I was called into the publisher’s office where the paper’s lawyer grilled me on what I knew. I simply refused to talk to him, and only Steven’s intervention kept it from becoming a shouting match or worse.
In addition to all this, I edited a Book supplement that spring. I wrote the cover piece on Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel, Breakfast of Champions (which soon became the NYT top best-seller), a review of DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, reviews of poetry collections by James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates, and a number of short notices of forthcoming books. I solicited a piece on the new collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from my Knox professor and ongoing friend, Doug Wilson. Much to my embarrassment there was not enough room for it, but it was later published in a literary journal.
It was shortly after the books supplement came out in May that I took several weeks off. I flew to Minnesota where I was hosted in St. Paul by Barbara Azer, sister of my Knox classmate, Mary. I’d never been to the Twin Cities before, and Barbara and her roommates were excellent guides. We picnicked on a bluff overlooking the place where the Mississippi began, and drove up past the immense devastated landscape in the iron range near Duluth to a little cabin on Lake Superior (where now there are expensive condos.)
We even did some literary touring, visiting fields where Robert Bly lived (I got out of the car to imitate him reading poems about them), and a hotel bar once frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I asked the bartender reputed to have served Fitzgerald what he was like, and he gave the perfect answer: “He was a good tipper.” Whether or not he actually had been there that long, it was a ready, pointed and potentially lucrative response.
So on my first visit to downtown Minneapolis, the first person I saw was Mary Tyler Moore. This was the second such coincidence of that spring, and it wouldn’t be the last. The first was while making my way to the Twin Cities. Just before I left, I’d put the Phoenix second section to bed, leaving space in the music section for a review by Peter Herbst of the Paul Simon concert occurring the next night. It was in fact Paul Simon’s first concert as a solo performer—that is, without Garfunkel, for he had lots of musicians and singers as part of his show.
I went to that show, and the next morning to the Boston airport, where I picked up a copy of the Phoenix and read Peter’s review on the plane. He hadn’t liked the concert as much as I did (or as Jon Landau did, writing in The Real Paper.)
He was standing near a ticket counter chatting with a young woman wearing the uniform of an airline. I realized I had a copy of the Phoenix in my hand, and took it over to him. “Here,” I said, “you can read about yourself.” As he opened the paper, I suddenly realized it was not my review in there but Peter’s more mixed one. I quickly tried to cover: “I was at the concert, too, and I loved it.” At which point the young woman looked puzzled, and I realized she didn’t know who he was, just some guy chatting her up. For him perhaps a rare normal moment, charming someone who didn’t know he was a celebrity rock star. “Don’t say anything else,” Paul Simon warned me. I backed away, saying only, “I’ve got to a plane to catch. Nice seeing you… Fred.”
After the Twin Cities I flew back to Pittsburgh and spent the rest of my time off visiting my parents and other family and friends in and around Greensburg. My mother had suffered through treatments for breast cancer over the past several years. My recollections of what happened when are hazy, partly because in those years no one talked about these things (especially cancer, as if you could spread it by saying the word)—certainly not my family, and specifically not my father. I was home for part of the time and I kept in touch when I wasn’t, but mostly these treatments and her health were distant backdrops to everything else. At this point the cancer was in remission. She was getting close to the five year survival point, which at the time was believed to signal something like a cure.
But I had a hard time sitting still. Even in Minnesota, surrounded by even younger energies than mine, I had trouble gearing down from the relentless demands of my job, the frenetic hours of phone calls and conferences, quick evaluations and instant decisions, generating story ideas for the endless appetite of the Second Section, keeping track of rock concerts and promo events, while juggling a hundred things in my head that had to be done. I was often tired and I experienced things at a distance, as if I wasn't really there.
So in Greensburg I went out with old friends, hung out with my sisters and their crowd. Eventually my mother said she was disappointed I didn’t spend more time at home. As was typical in our family, she said this when it was too late for me to do anything about it. I was due back in Boston.
I returned to the Phoenix to find an editorial staff in turmoil. An ongoing conflict (I no longer recall what it was about) had come to a head. The staff was united against Editor Brass, and conspired to steal the copy for an entire issue to force him to confront the issue. I joined them. When Brass realized what was going on, his dismissive arrogance turned to beet-red fear. He gave in, temporarily settling things down. Though I wasn’t particularly a leader in this action, it didn’t escape his notice that it happened once I was back.
Meanwhile the unionizing efforts were stalling, and there were secret conclaves to discuss the possibility that there was an agent provocateur among the staff.
That night I went out with the band to a large all-night restaurant. I was sitting in a booth with bassist Kenny Aaronson, listening to him comically complain about the absence of all these groupies he’d heard about, when I glanced across the room and into the somewhat hostile stare of Kurt Vonnegut. He was there with a group of people apparently after a university speaking engagement.
The last was perhaps less of a coincidence than a portent. One night in late June, probably after I’d put the Second Section to bed that week, I was walking home from the subway station at Central Square, when I cut through an alley from Mass Ave. Ahead of me I saw a car’s headlights coming towards me, and a kitten facing me. The car ran over the kitten. I was more than upset—I felt immediately that it was a portent, and that night I called a woman at the Phoenix for whom I had, let us say, romantic feelings, of which she was well aware. She reassured me and calmed me.
After some problems with missing mail at my Columbia Street apartment, I had added a post office box at the main Post Office on Mass Ave. in Central Square. The next day I picked up mail there and got on the bus to work, down Mass Ave. to Bolyston Street in Boston and the Boston Phoenix offices, to wrap up the week and start on the next. There might have been an early birthday card in the mix, but there was a business-sized envelope with the orange Boston Phoenix return address but no name.
Inside was a very short note written by the woman I’d been pining for, the one I’d spoken to the night before, telling me that in my time away from Boston she and one of my closer friends had begun an affair. At the time it seemed grudging and cold, though perhaps it was trying to be gentle and even affectionate. But both of them were on the Phoenix staff and I worked with them every day. It felt like a betrayal, as well as a humiliating, impossible situation.
And suddenly there I was, approaching the Boylston Street offices. I walked up the long stairs, then up another flight to my third floor office, unusually empty. Perhaps I examined the blue pages one last time. I wrote a brief letter of resignation, gathered what personal belongings I wanted to take, left the letter in the reception area, and walked down the dark stairs to the bright street.
I’d been on the edge of quitting once before this. The incessant demands, the tawdry office, and the constant onslaught of emotional and auditory noise, had me shattered by my day's end. Steven assured me then that over time I’d get used to the pace and intensity of the job. But since I’d been back I’d struggled to gear up again, after my vacation had been marred by my anxious inability to slow down. I felt oversaturated and isolated, especially with added layers of shifting conflict. All the egos and agendas, the moods and misunderstandings, the hormones, the noise, everything out of proportion. Surrounded constantly by so many people, I was often exhausted and lonely. This final sudden situation was almost a metaphor for it all, as well as the paradigmatic last straw.
Meanwhile, Editor Wily Brass was so eager to prevent any second thoughts or attempts by others to persuade me to return, that he accepted my resignation that same afternoon—by telegram. I don’t think I’d ever received a telegram before, or since. (As I learned later there were such attempts to get me back, but Brass was intransigent.) Within a few days, I was later informed, Brass mumbled aloud his plans to take over the Second Section himself, fulfilling my prophecy.
My name, as usual, wasn’t mentioned—I don’t think Fraiser ever mentioned me—probably a networking error on my part. And this time I didn’t read the column at Purity Supreme. It was hand-delivered to my mailbox by Phoenix poetry editor and friend Celia Gilbert, along with a note and birthday greetings. That particular Saturday I had turned 27.
I eventually heard from a few other editorial staff and writers (or just ran into them) but as was to be a pattern in my departures, the most open regrets came from support staff.
I kept very much to myself the rest of that summer, with strange long days awake—sometimes 24 hours straight-- followed by almost as much sleep. For awhile I entertained the fantasy of sailing on a transatlantic liner to Europe to visit Carol (though by then only the Queen Elizabeth II was left) but I couldn’t even focus the energy to visit a friend in Gloucester up the coast as promised, which ended that friendship. I couldn’t be around anyone for very long.
Since I opted for paperbacks to limit the costs to students, most of the books were months old, despite the course title. So instead of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (very new in hardcover), I chose Slaughterhouse Five. For the third class we read two fairly short novels: Don DeLillo’s End Zone and Margaret Drabble’s Thank You All Very Much. The books in subsequent weeks were Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates, You Might As Well Live (biography of Dorothy Parker), Norman Mailer's collection of pieces titled Existential Errands, Anne Sexton's poems based on fairy tales, The Book of Folly, and finally, the one I knew would be a winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although I didn't choose it, I would think I considered Kosinski's Being There. It’s interesting to reflect that in 1973 Marquez, DeLillo, Kosinski and Drabble were all relatively early in their careers, at least in America.
I spent much of my time trying to write myself into coping with and even understanding what I’d been through, mostly in the forms of fiction and poetry. (But also the inevitable Shakespearian parody, with Wily Brass as Richard III.) I was in revolt against concentrating exclusively on what was new—forthcoming books, new records. As I explained in a letter to Lester Bangs at Creem, most of the record companies had dropped me from their mailing lists when I became an editor, and now I was listening to music the way I used to—one or two albums at a time, repeated many times. My records that summer were John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses. Her "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" in particular.
I did something similar with books, turning my reading to non-new writers in old paperbacks. I had a definite Hemingway phase, which unfortunately showed up in my writing. I recall reading several novels by Balzac and Stendhal for some reason. I applied for unemployment when I became eligible, and stood in the long lines at the unemployment office (there was a recession on) reading The Red and the Black.
I emerged somewhat in September, when I wrote a cover story for The Real Paper on Marlon Brando. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a staff job yet, but I wasn’t offered one there anyway. Its editor confided that if I were a black woman he could hire me immediately. I pass this on now with the amusement I felt then. This was the social justice I’d supported, in action. That it might have personal consequences for me was a fitting irony—even if I believed him, which I’m not sure I did.
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Still, something should come of this wasted trip, so I took the T back to Harvard Square and bought a copy. I read it straight through, and then I read it again. Its protagonist, Danny Deck, was soon my current tortured alter-ego. McMurtry also was in the early phase of his long writing career. These writers of 1973--Vonnegut, Garcia-Marquez, DeLillo, Pynchon and McMurtry--would be mainstays of my personal literary arcana for decades to come.
Probably in October I spent a week on assignment for a magazine--fascinating in its way but basically disastrous. Carol returned on a visit from Europe for a week or so. She'd had a scare in Switzerland that her Hodgkins had returned, but her doctors at Mass General confirmed it had not. I went with her on the train to New York and she flew back from there. We continued to correspond regularly for about another year, but this was the last time I saw her.
According to contemporaneous notes and letters, I spent some of November back in Greensburg, which must have included Thanksgiving. My mother's health was of concern, though reports were typically vague. I returned to Greensburg from Cambridge for Christmas. It is also a blank in my memory, but I chanced upon a page torn out of a notebook that recorded my impressions of Christmas in Greensburg that year: the traditional dinner at my Severini grandmother’s, the annual visit to my Kowinski grandfather and his daughter’s family in United. I noted that my elders seemed noticeably older, and that my mother was experiencing pains again, and that her hair had started to thin. “Gone with the wind,” she said.
Then it was late January 1974 and I’d been back in Cambridge for awhile when I got a call one night from my father, who said my mother was in the hospital again, and I should come home as soon as I could. I had one housemate left at the time, and I quickly arranged for her to again take care of my cats, and booked the next flight to Pittsburgh I could manage.
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