Trenchant tales of sexism, survival et moi
What to do when a tiny but muscle-y French celebrity jumps into your lap? Scant moments after his teenaged Swedish girlfriend has left the hotel room? And your reporter’s notebook is under his behind? Although, luckily for him, not your pen, which is still between your fingers, poised to make a note about the Swedette, who looks to be maybe 17 to his 50-something? Though it would have been luckier for me had the pen been strategically slanted on my lap when he vaulted into it so agilely, him being an ex-acrobat as well as an iconic crooner who was a protégé (uh-huh) of iconic Edith Piaf. But since he has found no such impediment to enlapping and is now snuggling in comfortably and murmuring Frenchily, what to do? Sitting there feeling like Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy?
How to protect my journalistic dignity, and his, not to mention salvage my big interview? I have already babbled: “But, your amie –” To which he has replied: “She eez shop-peeng. She nevair come back for how-airz.” Do I stand up and brush le icon off my skirt like so many cookie crumbs? Try to get him to join me in a chorus of “Je ne regrette rien?” Coo that my French is not quite good enough to comprehend his murmurous importunements, even though I can in fact pretty well get the gist of what procedures he wants to apply to which body parts?
Anyway, as fortune would have it, at that very moment the sound of the doorknob turning has him vaulting with that acrobat-grace off me and back into his chair, just as the door opens and in slips, gazelle-like, the golden Swedette, ostensibly to retrieve sunglasses – she speaks like someone trying to dub English in a Bergman movie, so it’s hard to follow – but one suspects there is a history of keeping tabs on her invaluable homme tout petit. To whom I trill a final question or two, remaining on my feet, and slip not quite gazelle-like out the door.
None of which was reflected in my piece for the New York Post, as per the norm in that ancient era of lips zipped from ear to ear and all the way around the back of your head. In those pterodactyl days, celebrity interference of any kind was completely – I mean utterly, totally barely even whisper fodder.
But ah, how times have changed, and oh, how often have I smitten – smoted? – my brow contemplating the compensation that might have been, the wasted chance for redress, or, at least, public shaming of the myriad great and quasi-great who attempted to interfere with me? And who have functioned as great dining-out stories, sure, but might have made my name, if not my fortune? What kind of justice is there in the bitter fact that most of the perps have either kicked the bucket or gone gaga? I swear, if I made a list from, A to V, of all the …
But let it be. This is about what it was like to be a young girl starting out in the newspaper biz in its golden olden days, the 60s into early 70s; practically the only young chick in smoky news dens of red-eyed men, and there was so much more to it than just acrobatic iconic …
How did I get started? My mother. She thought I was such a writing genius that she sent a Toronto Star friend copies of my letters home from Paris, where I had finessed my way into a job as rédactrice-traductrice on the rewrite desk at Agence France-Presse by forging credentials on a purloined Globe and Mail letterhead, lying being the only way to break in back then – my job was to translate into English, for English-speaking AFP clients in Africa and the China seas, U.S. wire stories that had been translated into French for our French-speaking clients. I nearly flubbed the tryout over a French wire story that came in, as was the norm, in caps and without definite articles or accents, about a brave East German who had escaped west – these were the days of the Wall – by hiding in his grandmother’s coffin, fording a river, stealing a VW, ramming into “FILS DE FER BARBELES” – which I took to mean “the son of Fer Barbeles,” some storied German patriot, I figured – and the escapee then went high-speeding to Checkpoint Charlie with the corpse draped over the VW’s front bumper.
Look, I only had high-school French, and since les fils de fer barbelés actually meant barbed wire, some might say I was hired just because I was cute, but the fact is …
But that’s another story; remind me to tell you sometime how it turned out.
So: now here I am at the Toronto Star, being given a tryout by one of those true off-the-wall originals who once lurked in newspaperdom’s dark corners, city editor Richard J. Needham, known for no apparent reason as Bob, later an off-the-wall humour columnist at the Globe and Mail. Needham assigned long arcane stories which would take me forever to write, and would then be greeted by desk chief Scotty Humeniuk with a snarled: “Needham give you this? Bleeaah!” before he ripped the piece in two and dumped it in the garbage.
I spent a couple of happy years there, before embarking on my avocation of serial marrier; and, in the wake of the first wedded debacle, fleeing to New York where I landed at the New York Post, then the offbeat fiefdom of heiress Dorothy Schiff, who assigned me to write a series about what her famous friends found attractive in the opposite sex – the list included a couple of Kennedys who, just as their reputations would have you believe, were pretty much …
But why jump on dead-people bandwagons? Sure, I suffered from sexism, and even ageism. Like the time I was assigned to cover a Hudson River press cruise for the newly-arrived Rolling Stones, then a surly gaggle of monosyllabic young Brits, and the flotilla of maddened teen girls at the railing shrieked like banshees as I boarded: “Mick! Keith! Take me, take me, not that old bag!” – me only just past 20, and don’t think it didn’t hurt.
As for sexism – in those days, we didn’t know that’s what it was; we thought it was a tribute to our babedom. How much more enlightened are today’s females! A sad truth is that, in those times, it was just as likely to spring up between news-sisters. I’m sure nothing like that happens now. For instance, there was my New York Post colleague and competitor bright-young-thing, the late, great Nora Ephron.
She was engaged to one Dan Greenburg, author of a bestseller about Jewish mothers, and he had been so scarred by his own progenetrix that they couldn’t have a wedding dinner because he threw up if his mother was at the table. This was according to Nora. She also gave out publicly and derisively that I would never be able to get anything out of the Kennedys, no matter how short I was wearing my miniskirts. It turned out she was right, and I may have stabbed back with some backstairs comments about her legs, which even she admitted weren’t great, and about the affair she was allegedly having with …
But that’s another story altogether and why go there now? Yes, there were other unsisterly sisters, like my editor at the Toronto Star in later years who gave out that her friends didn’t “get” my weird weekly column, and that I must be unbuttoning my shirt to get quotes, and making them up when that didn’t work … Well, my dear, the stories that made the rounds about her …
… Which I’m not about to delve into. So much dirty bathwater under the bridge, and after all, there were so many great indelible moments in the course of the best job ever, in the best time ever. Right up to the great Toronto Star strike of ’92, which was a beginning in the forever alteration of that universe and brimmed with its own indelible images.
Like the night the SWAT team and horse cops converged on our overnight picket shift, us sitting on the sidewalk to slow the delivery trucks’ exit, while, in a lighted window above, the publisher, flattened like a giant scarab against the glass, waited to see hard judgement rain down on his peons for the outrage of rebellion …
But that’s another story. Remind me; when we all have the time, I really will tell you.
SUSAN KASTNER has been a journalist, biographer, TV host, jingle composer, and 9-song 3-chord folksinger in a career that spanned quite a few countries, continents and marriages. Please don’t ask her to remember how many. Now back in her native Toronto, she is working on a kind of memoir.