On graduation day 1962, Nora got into a rented car and drove to New York. She had already leased an apartment at 110 Sullivan Street, down in the coffeehouse, folk-scene part of Greenwich Village, and she had already been to an employment agency where she said she wanted to be a writer. She was sent to Newsweek.
At $55 a week, Nora would be a “mail girl.” That was the title, the job description, and the limitation. Women, she was quickly told, did not write at Newsweek—although in actual fact, one of them did, but Liz Peer was in the faraway Paris bureau, where she could be overlooked as much as possible.
Right off the bat, Nora got a lucky break. She was made the personal mail girl of the magazine’s editor, Osborn Elliott, and became what was known as an “Elliott girl.” She sat right outside the big man’s office and watched as he transformed Newsweek from a traditional news magazine—more or less a wrap-up of that week’s events—to a journal that didn’t wait for the news to happen but set out to make some itself. By the end of the decade, Newsweek had pitched itself into the civil rights struggle, devoting three covers written by Peter Goldman to the movement, and had also come out against the Vietnam War.
Newsweek was about to become what Madison Avenue called a hot book. Just a year before Nora’s arrival, the magazine had been bought by the Washington Post Company. The deal was the work of Philip L. Graham, an extremely bright but extremely troubled Floridian who had married Katharine Meyer, whose father, Eugene, in 1933 had bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction. Graham was an energetic and ambitious owner, and Newsweek soon became an energetic and ambitious reflection of himself. It was a fun place to work.
Newsweek was on the make, attempting to catch up to the older and more established—not to mention politically conservative—Time magazine. It never succeeded—not in circulation or ad revenue, but attention was a different matter entirely. In 1957, the magazine had hired the adventurous Ben Bradlee as its Washington bureau chief. Bradlee, who later became the editor of the Washington Post, had helped arrange Newsweek’s sale to Graham. In 1961, his Georgetown neighbor and friend, John F. Kennedy, had become president. The magazine was very well situated.
Being an Elliott girl had its advantages—proximity to power, and therefore to office skinny, most of all. In the days before email there was just mail, and it had to be delivered and picked up at each desk or department. The mail girl got to circulate, to get an overview, to meet everyone, and, no small matter, to make an impression. Someone who was as smart and personable as Nora was bound to be liked and, in due course, consulted: What was going on? Is this a story? What do young people think? And, much more important, what was going on within the bureau? Who was sleeping with whom? Who was drinking too much? Who was being transferred to London and who in London was coming home? Has so-and-so been fired and is so-and-so pregnant? Mail girls knew so much.
This particular mail girl was more than well informed. She was already well connected. She had already dated Victor Navasky, soon becoming the first degree of separation for so many New York writers. While at Yale Law School in 1960, the polymorphic Navasky had founded a satirical magazine called Monocle, which he promised to publish more or less regularly. (He called it a leisurely monthly.) After law school, he went out to Michigan to work for the progressive governor, G. Mennen Williams, and then returned to New York, bringing Monocle with him. He soon collected a coterie of young writers, Nora among them. They met weekly for drinks, in totally self-aware homage, at the storied Algonquin Hotel. Calvin “Bud” Trillin, already a Time magazine writer, called it the “square table.”
Through Navasky and his soon-to-be wife, Anne, Nora connected with other writers. It would be natural to label her a networker or a social climber, but as much as she sought out interesting people, so interesting people sought out her.
From the telling, it seems that she did not so much move from Wellesley to New York as simply take her proper place in the city. She was the child of screenwriters and playwrights. She knew her way around the Algonquin dining room because her parents stayed in the hotel when they were in New York. She effortlessly dropped names, and it was impossible to tell—at least I never could—if the relationship was close or merely passing. She could excite a gathering with a single question—at a stiff Scarsdale dinner party, she shocked Anne Navasky by asking the women at the table if they had vaginal or clitoral orgasms. She was young and something more than attractive; she was magical. She not only made things happen, but things happened to her. She trailed buzz like a cartoon character does fairy dust.
Through the Navaskys she met young literary New York. She became a fixture at Elaine’s, the saloony restaurant established by Elaine Kaufman in 1963, which soon became a writers’ hangout. The Navaskys introduced Nora to her first husband, Dan Greenburg, an already established writer, and through him she met her eventual best friend, Judy Corman.
Victor Navasky connected her with Lynn Nesbit, who would ultimately become her agent. And Lynn would later hire Amanda Urban. Binky, as she was better known, became Nora’s lifelong literary agent and her very close friend.
Nora dated Tom Wolfe. She dated Ward Just. She dated Charles Portis. They were all newspapermen making the long turn into magazine work or novels. Wolfe and Portis were at the New York Herald Tribune; Just had been at Newsweek before following Ben Bradlee to the Washington Post. They were all big names at the time—and, with the exception of Just, would go on to phenomenal success as novelists. (Just’s success was more d’estime than commercial.) Nora dated Esquire and Playboy editors. She dated her Newsweek colleagues. She dated a lot. Mastheads spilled from her lips.
It was a phenomenal period. Sex had not only awakened from its 1950s dormancy but become a political statement. Blacks were being liberated. The Vietnam War was being protested. Students were duking it out with the faculty. Drugs were everywhere. Abortion was demanded as a civil right. Turmoil, turmoil, turmoil.
The Pill, the contraceptive, had been approved by the government in 1960, and although it was legally unavailable to single women in some places, Manhattan was hardly one of those places. Now women, too, were being liberated. They were not just demanding equal rights and being called by their own names—not the “Mrs.” before their husband’s—but they were having sex and were only slightly more likely to get pregnant than men.
Nora was hardly an exception. By her own testimony, she had an abortion—although she might have said that as a political statement, an affirmation of sisterhood, rather than because it was an actual fact. At first, she went to Planned Parenthood for the Pill, and then only if she was in a relationship. Later, it became a matter of routine. She used drugs—marijuana, of course, but also cocaine on occasion. She had the best of all alibies: She was young. It was the sixties.
For a kid just out of college, Newsweek in the 1960s was a feast. Like many journalistic enterprises it had a very high estimation of its own importance. Yet it was true that if not the whole world then key parts of it—New York, Washington, and some European capitals—read it avidly and wondered along with more than about two million readers what would be on its cover.
After a slow start, Newsweek became the chronicler of the 1960s. The magazine’s cover stories from that era were the usual stuff of politics and war, but there, too, was a naked Jane Fonda (shot from the back) who had starred in the movie Barbarella, and more substantial and consequential subjects such as “The Negro in America” and separate issues on “Marijuana” and “LSD.” For the marijuana cover, the magazine allowed its reporter to buy dope—and use it.
But before Newsweek plunged into the chaotic 1960s, it held fast to the 1950s. Its covers were mostly a march of political or government figures—New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, House of Representatives speaker John McCormack, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, and a stark profile of John Fitzgerald Kennedy dated December 2, 1963, a bit more than a week after he was assassinated in Dallas. That was followed a week later by one of Lyndon Johnson.
With the exception of Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of newly independent Kenya, all the covers were of white men—or of themes such as “The Mighty U.S. Consumer.” There was nary a hint of the looming cultural unrest that would mark and mar the 1960s, and indeed the magazine itself featured a last-page column by Raymond Moley, a onetime New Dealer who had turned hard right. In the March 4, 1963, issue, he praised J. Edgar Hoover’s stewardship of the FBI in language so effusive Hoover himself might have scoffed: “As long as Hoover or the Hoover tradition is on guard, Americans need not fear the perils of a police state.”
Even as the sixties took hold, though, there was one tradition that Newsweek would not break: A woman’s place was in the mail room. Or the library. Or on the research desk. But not as a correspondent, writer, or editor. When, in 1970, the women of Newsweek filed a sex discrimination lawsuit, Elliott owned up not only to the truth but to the provenance of the practice: “The fact that most researchers at Newsweek are women and that virtually all writers are men stems from a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years,” he said in a statement. In other words, don’t blame Newsweek. Time magazine had been doing it even longer.
Nora was long gone from Newsweek by then, but she was so upset by Elliott’s statement that she wrote to Katharine Graham, who had succeeded her late husband as the CEO of the Washington Post Company. Nora wanted to know if Graham was aware of the situation. It turns out, she wasn’t.
According to Lynn Povich, a former Newsweek writer and the author of “The Good Girls Revolt,” an account of the sex discrimination lawsuit, Nora wrote something like “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but this is the situation. . . .” Graham, who was slowly and somewhat tardily coming to terms with the women’s movement—she wound up being personally tutored by Gloria Steinem—sent Nora a courteous non-reply reply by return mail. She found Nora’s letter to be very interesting, she wrote, and invited her stop by to discuss it. The two later became friendly, and possibly the Newsweek situation was discussed, but by then such overt sex discrimination was in the past.
Back in Nora’s day, the bright young women the magazine hired from the very best colleges were there to deliver mail, clip stories from newspapers for the library, known as “the morgue,” and work as researchers, which meant fact-checking and doing original reporting. They had one other function. They comprised an ever-refreshed sexual buffet—gentlemen, help yourselves. It wasn’t just that men—married or single—had affairs with the always-younger mail girls and researchers, it was that they sometimes even had sex in the office. In fact, one room—ostensibly an infirmary—was definitely not for the infirm.
Newsweek, like Time, kept an odd schedule. It started the workweek on Tuesday and ended it on Saturday night—often very late indeed. Nora was a researcher for the Nation section, where, on Tuesday morning, the editors met to discuss the week’s likely news. (Obviously, this could change daily and almost always did.) The most senior editors were called the Wallendas, after the Flying Wallendas, a circus high-wire act that defied both gravity and death but cheated by doing it sober. Newsweek’s editors, in contrast, pulled off their weekly high-wire act with an occasional snort.
Within three months, Nora was promoted to “clipper,” meaning she ripped out articles from the newspaper for filing in the library, and a short while later she was made a researcher. Ordinarily, that was as far as a woman could go, but before Nora in fact went, she left behind the kind of work that is remembered to this day. The magazine had scheduled a cover story on McGeorge Bundy, who was President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs. Nora was dispatched to Yale, where Bundy had been an undergraduate, to see what she could find. The result “was not just good, it was magical,” recalled Peter Goldman. (Alas, the file has been lost.)
The bulk of the story concerned Bundy’s Washington responsibilities, which, according to Newsweek, he discharged with breathtaking aplomb. (The piece itself is a virtual parody of the sort of star-struck journalism that Kennedy engendered—“In the Kennedy inner circle, Bundy shares a place with a handful of advisers, all of whom—like the man they advise—are tough, brainy and energetic.”) In news magazine fashion, the article was mostly reported by one person in Washington and written by another in New York. Almost all of what Nora contributed was, as she and everyone else expected, not used. It was, though, noticed.
“Word got around the shop that the kid had done something amazing,” Goldman continued. “Pretty soon, ditto copies of her file were being passed from cubicle to cubicle, like samizdats in the late Soviet Union. Jaws dropped. Eyes popped. It was Nora’s first big hit in the pro game, and nobody in the world beyond the walls of 444 Madison [Newsweek’s headquarters] got to see it.” In fact, by the time the Bundy cover came out, March 4, 1963, Nora had moved downtown.