MEDIA MOGULETTES IN NEW YORK CITY
Our media empire was just three-weeks-old when catastrophe struck. We were totally blindsided when we learned that Sassy, the star of our little stable, the title that was going to be the financial engine of our company, was about to be brought to her knees by a terrifyingly effective boycott organised by right-wing religious groups. When we did the buyout, Sandra and I had taken on tremendous responsibilities, we knew that, and we were both totally ready to do whatever it took to make it work. We now had 75 staff dependent on us; we had a series of tough bank-imposed financial performance hurdles to meet each month; and a large debt to service. We had to maintain Sassy’s momentum and to continue to build Ms. The frenzy of interest in buying Sassy by America’s largest media companies had convinced us we had a winner. We merely had to keep Sassy on course, and although we knew it would be a hard slog with Ms., we did not doubt for a moment our ability to make this venerated but ailing magazine a commercial success.
For those first few weeks in July, we had basked in our success. If before we had been celebrated, now we were the talk of the town. We discovered that, contrary to its reputation for being cool and blasé about accomplishment, New York loves a success story. The media could not get enough of us. Everyone was keen to get a look at the two Aussie women who in raising all that money on Wall Street to buy the two magazines had achieved what no American woman had done. Even more compelling was the sub-text: we, the unknown outsiders, had been able to do what Gloria Steinem, the feted local celebrity, had never been able to do. We had bought Ms. magazine. We were on top of the biggest town in the world and we were revelling in it.
The invitations poured in. Both of us were now on everyone’s A-list for parties, openings and fundraisers. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone to three or four events every night. I was thrilled to be invited to a party at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. He now lived in the famous Dakota building on West 72nd Street where, I knew, Yoko Ono still lived; so did Lauren Bacall. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the invitation had a price tag. Like almost everything else in New York, this was a fundraiser and it would cost $5000 to attend. I had had a big pay rise as part of the deal but it wasn’t that big. I still took the subway to work, I still worked in Times Square and I still shopped at Loehman’s, the renowned discount outlet in the Bronx, although now I could afford to venture into stores where the labels were not cut out. I had a generous expense account and I could call anyone in New York or Washington and be confident they would accept an invitation to lunch. Sandra was invited to deliver a prized keynote to the Magazine Publishers Association annual conference, the leading industry event that this year was being held in the Bahamas. It was a gratifying acknowledgement from her peers. I, too, received scores of invitations to speak—women’s groups, editors’ seminars, political events and even the Harvard Business School. In that talk, which I called ‘Media Mogulettes: Organizing a Media MBO in New York City,’ I described to a class of some 50 handpicked, already-successful business leaders from around the world in the Executive MBA program, how we had done the buyout, concentrating on the deal-making and money-raising aspects. I used the word ‘mogulettes’, I explained, not because we were women but because, compared with other media empires, we were small. With just two publications, we scarcely deserved to be called moguls. Not yet at least. Wilma had estimated that within five years Matilda Publications would be worth $100 million. With our 40 per cent equity, Sandra and I would be rich—at least on paper. By then, we fantasised, we would have started, or acquired, other titles and would be on our way towards building a media empire. Or empire-ette. It was mind-boggling. Just a year earlier I had been miserable, lonely and broke and was seriously thinking of abandoning New York for the safe haven of Sydney. Look at me now, I thought, scarcely able to believe it myself.
On 17 July I flew to Atlanta for the Democratic Party Convention, and enjoying my new status as someone able to hang out with the crème de la crème of the party, I spent the four days going from gathering to meeting to cocktail party to dinner. I even looked in on a couple of sessions at the actual convention. Peggy Simpson, our Washington correspondent, escorted me around and she knew everyone. I was thrilled to be introduced to Ann Richards, just before she went on stage to deliver her famous keynote speech mocking Vice-President George H.W. Bush: ‘Poor George, he can’t help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.’ Richards was the state treasurer of Texas and two years later would be elected Governor. She was a tall, slim woman whose piled-up silver hair made her look very striking. ‘Neither snow nor rain can move my hair,’ she liked to say. Her clear blue eyes would engage you immediately and deflect from a face that probably had more lines than it should have at her age. Maybe it was the Texas sun or perhaps it was her former habit of filling her water glass with vodka ahead of dreary meetings. She had already given up the drink by the time I met her. Sadly, she lost her battle for a second term as governor of Texas to George W. Bush, the son of the man she had mocked in Atlanta in 1988.
The 1988 convention nominated Michael Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, to be the party’s presidential candidate. He would turn out to be a poor choice, easily demolished by the Republican nominee George H.W. Bush, and his hard-nosed team. For some people, the 1988 convention was memorable for the terrible speech by Bill Clinton, a little-known governor from Arkansas, who had been chosen to nominate Dukakis. New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, had instantly gained a national profile in 1984 when he delivered the keynote that attacked Ronald Reagan, as did the relatively unknown state senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, with his speech at the 2004 convention in Boston. But Clinton spoke for too long, had nothing memorable to say and was jeered off the stage. Four years later, when he accepted his party’s nomination to be its presidential candidate, at the convention at Madison Square Garden in New York, Clinton drew laughs when he said he was there to finish the speech he had started four years earlier.
I met a dazzling array of political and other luminaries. At one party I was introduced to Joan Didion. She told me she was covering the convention.
‘I thought you weren’t writing about politics anymore,’ I said spitefully.
‘Whatever gave you that idea,’ she asked?
I realised her agent had not even bothered to tell her about the Ms. assignment. Too paltry? Too demeaning? How would I ever overcome the poor opinion so many people had of Ms.? I would have a similar experience later that year when I met Susan Sontag at a political fundraiser. She was not interested in Ms. magazine, she said to me, and certainly would not dream of writing for it. As soon as someone more interesting appeared—in this case Joe Papp, from the Public Theatre—she turned away from me in mid-sentence and began an animated conversation with him. In October I picked up the New York Review of Books and there was ‘Insider Baseball’, Didion’s essay on the Democratic convention. It would become one of her most famous political pieces, quoted and reprinted for many years afterwards. It was exactly what I had wanted for Ms. I was starting to realise that I would perhaps never be able to attract writers of this calibre.
I returned to my hotel to find a message from Sandra. ‘Call me urgently,’ it said. ‘No matter how late.’ It was after midnight when I reached her.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, thinking nothing could be that urgent.
‘We’ve had our top six advertisers cancel today.’ Sandra spoke with a calmness that merely underscored the calamity she was outlining. ‘That’s $25 million in revenue, doctor, in case you were wondering.’
I listened, stunned, as she explained that the women who had written to complain about Sassy had turned their objections into a fully-fledged consumer boycott, targeting any company that advertised in Sassy. Some weeks earlier we’d received a letter from three women in Wabash, Indiana, who called themselves Women Aglow. Lit by the fire of Jesus, apparently. One of them had a teenage daughter who had got one of our direct mailers seeking subscriptions for Sassy. This mailing had been extraordinarily successful, so it had clearly hit the spot with large numbers of its target market. In just seven months, Sassy’s circulation would reach 450,000. It had taken Elle, previously the hottest new magazine launch in New York, a year to reach that number from its identical launch circulation of 250,000. The material in the mailer that the Wabash women objected to had never actually appeared in Sassy; it had been taken from Dolly, the Australian teenage girls’ magazine that had been Sandra’s model for Sassy, but that was immaterial to the storm that was about to descend on us. Sandra and I had not treated the letter seriously. These women were obviously members of the lunatic fringe, we decided. We did not need to worry about them, especially as the magazine was so clearly such a success with teenage girls—its target market. We could not have been more wrong.
When they failed to get a response from us, Women Aglow took their case to Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority; to Focus on the Family; and to the American Family Association, all of them conservative—I would say right-wing—organisations. They took the women from Wabash very seriously and deployed their considerable resources into a letter-writing campaign. Soon we were getting hundreds of letters daily from around the country. We were definitely concerned about this, but we still thought it was a nuisance, nothing more. We did not for a moment consider that the commercial success of Sassy could be undermined by an organised letter-writing campaign. But these organisations then provided their members with the names and addresses of the men who ran the parent companies of products advertised in Sassy and organised letters to them. No company received more than 500 letters. Most received about 100 but, we were astonished to discover, a small number of what were clearly form letters could influence the advertising decisions of a major American corporation. It made no commercial sense. Why on earth would Tambrands, the makers of Tampax tampons, on the basis of a hundred letters from post-menopausal women, withdraw advertising that was reaching hundreds of thousands of girls who were about to make lifelong choices about which brand of feminine protection they would use? It was the same with the cosmetics giant Revlon. These companies were more sensitive to the complaints of the few than the consumer potential of the very many. Revlon, Tambrands, Noxelle, Schering-Plough, Gillette and even the supposedly progressive Reebok were among the advertisers that cancelled their scheduled advertising and threw our little company into financial turmoil. Then, having tasted victory by hitting our advertising revenues, Falwell and his followers went after our newsstand. Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, agreed not to stock Sassy, now purported to be an evil magazine. That was bad enough, but small groups of religious women then began visiting drug stores, supermarkets and convenience stores around the country, urging their managers to drop us. Ultimately, 53 chains delisted Sassy, reducing the number of copies in circulation by one-third. We had lost almost all of two of Sassy’s three sources of revenue and the third, subscription revenue, would only hold up so long as we could continue to produce a magazine that sizzled with irreverent content and glossy advertising.
While Sandra and the Sassy advertising team worked the business side trying to lure back the advertisers, prevent further defections and bring in new ones, it was agreed that I would pursue political remedies. We both assumed that once it became known that our right to publish, and even our very livelihood, was being threatened by this boycott there would be public support. Maybe we’d even become a cause celebre. In August I made contact with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and spoke with Melanne Verveer who ran People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group that had been founded in 1981 by television producer Norman Lear and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan to fight ring-wing extremism, especially by television evangelists. Verveer, who President Obama would appoint as America’s first Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues in 2009, was sympathetic and had some practical advice. She compared our situation with the Christian attacks on the recently released Martin Scorsese film, The Last Temptation of Christ. ‘The movie’s producers had got religious leaders to view the film and give frank assessments,’ she said. We needed to follow that example and get credible people—parents, adolescent development experts, even kids—to speak out for us. It was good advice and Sandra and I were grateful for her support. But, to my astonishment, the ACLU was dismissive. The right to free speech was paramount in their eyes, which gave the boycotters equal rights with us publishers; they declined to help us. I soon formed the view that the ACLU’s purist stance made them useless, both politically and morally. They have a long track record of defending Nazis and other extreme right-wing groups’ right to speak and to march, even when such gatherings have led to violence, such as occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Then, a young woman was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd.
It soon became depressingly obvious that no person or organisation was spontaneously going to speak out in our defence, and we did not have the resources to organise such support. We learned that other media organisations experienced similar boycotts but they kept very quiet about them, taking the view that publicity might encourage other boycotts. Besides, these larger companies could absorb the lost revenue in a way that was impossible for a tiny, indebted outfit like ours. The other way, of course, would have been to fight back, to deny this punishing minority the right to impose its anachronistic views on the majority but there was not much of that in the Reagan years in America. Sandra and I were astounded at the passivity, and the lack of courage, of those we had hoped might stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside us. We even detected a certain amount of glee at our predicament from an industry that was jealous that Sandra had turned the teenage category upside down. Despite what was happening right now, teenage magazines would never again be the same. Sassy attracted envy, criticism and—that most reliable arbiter of success—imitation, although it would be fifteen years before the launch of Teen Vogue, the magazine that most faithfully followed in the footsteps of Sassy. To many in the industry, we were Aussie upstarts, politically naíve, and lacking savvy about the American right-wing.
In September 1988, just weeks into the boycott, we had been unable to meet our first-quarter interest payments. Just three months after we had launched our company, we were technically in default. We had a shortfall in income of between $800,000 and $1 million a month, as a result of the collapse in Sassy’s revenue and slower-than-expected ad sales for Ms. The precipitous decline in the company’s revenues meant that our ambitious plans for Sassy and Ms. first had to be cut back then, very rapidly, abandoned. Hiring was frozen, and we cancelled our trade advertising plans and direct mail campaigns. We were now having almost daily meetings with the panicked bankers, who did not want to have to report back to their bosses that this high-profile deal was already in trouble. But our performance hurdles were so high, based on the assumption that Sassy’s income would continue to rise, that while we did our best to maintain business as usual, it was not long before we were looking at disaster. In late January 1989, the State Bank of NSW advised us that we could not draw down the $200,000 revolving line of credit that we needed to meet our payroll, and by mid-February we had completely run out of money. Citibank said they were no longer prepared to put more money in; they proposed that half the company be sold.
The next ten months, until I was fired as Ms. editor in December 1989, would be the most stressful time I have ever lived through. My father’s description, in a letter he’d written to me the previous year, that trying to please bankers was ‘like walking through fire in shoes filled with kerosene’, turned out to be apt for the situation in which Sandra and I now found ourselves. We had no option but to look for new money, so once again we called in Wilma Jordan who had advised us on the buyout from Fairfax. She began quietly sounding out an A list of potential partners about taking a 50 per cent share in the company, in return for a $10 million injection of capital as well as assuming our $20 million of debt. The New York Times Company and Time Inc. both expressed interest, as did the Hearst Corporation, although they wanted Citibank to retire some of its debt because they did not agree that the company was worth $30 million. I had already made unsuccessful approaches back in Australia, to Trevor Kennedy at Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press and to Frank Lowy who had recently moved into the media business by buying the Ten Network from Rupert Murdoch. Sandra talked to Si Newhouse and Bernie Leser at Condé Nast but their position had not changed from a year ago; they were interested in Sassy but would not even consider Ms.
To our surprise, the strongest expression of interest came from Robert Holmes à Court, the Australian businessman who had made his name as a corporate raider who bid for very large companies and, often and surprisingly, managed to win them. He had outwitted the legendary British entertainment mogul Sir Lew Grade to acquire his Associated Communications group, whose assets had included a string of London theatres, a number of film and other entertainment properties, and the rights to 112 Beatles songs. More recently he had made a bid for BHP, Australia’s largest company, in what was initially dismissed by the Melbourne establishment as a reckless move by a rank amateur. They quickly changed their tune when Holmes à Court secured a key stake in the company’s share register. Now he was looking at us, a tiny indebted company that could not have been less like any of his previous plays. But on 22 February, when Sandra, Wilma and I arrived for our meeting with him at Heytsbury’s (the Holmes à Court company) as yet only partially furnished offices on the 24th floor of a swank building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, we were told that Holmes à Court was in London. He wanted me to ring him to discuss the deal. This was most unusual as such conversations would normally be with the bankers, but then Robert Holmes à Court was a most unusual man. I was worried, though, because of a phone call I’d made to him when I’d been with the Financial Review—to talk about some $20 million in taxes he’d neglected to pay. He’d sought to deflect me with charm and flattery, but I had written the story anyway. So what was he up to now? Was this trophy hunting or were our financial woes an opportunity for revenge for my article?
When I finally reached him, in Perth, not London, he answered the phone himself, and immediately launched another charm offensive. He told me he’d enjoyed my book on the 1983 Australian federal elections, and mentioned a couple of things from the book that indicated he had indeed read it. He then steered the conversation onto Canberra politics; he especially wanted to talk about Paul Keating, who he referred to as a friend. When I managed to get us onto our deal, he told me he wanted to enter the US media market because it was ‘an intellectual activity’ populated by ‘interesting people’, and he was looking for a cheap, opportunity. At $10 million we were certainly cheap, although he said he thought we were too thinly capitalised. He also told me that he liked to invest in immature companies that had a capacity for growth, or companies that had problems that needed solving. He cited as an example of the latter BHP, and its reliance on government steel subsidies. He did not stipulate which category he thought we fell into. I would have ventured that we actually fit both: we definitely had capacity for growth, and we undoubtedly had a problem with our reliance for revenue on advertising, which reduced our editorial independence and made us vulnerable to boycott, although that was an industry-wide structural weakness that would not change for several decades.
After our conversation I felt absurdly optimistic. Here we were dealing with a principal, someone who called the shots, not one of the corporate eunuchs who needed to refer everything upwards. He said he’d study our document over the weekend and probably come to New York next week to meet us.
While we waited to see if Holmes à Court would come to our rescue, Jane Pratt, the editor of Sassy, and I needed to be especially vigilant to not publish anything that might further antagonise advertisers. Our cash flow was so tight we were already stretching payables. This was causing great anxiety with our editors, who had to manage distressed calls from writers who were being made to wait for their money. We could not afford to lose a single ad from either magazine; rather, we desperately needed to increase business. We had had a good start to the year with Ms.’s Women of the Year issue (a tradition that I thought should continue), published in January 1989, a very healthy 166 pages book size. The women we had chosen to honour included Oprah Winfrey; movie star Anne Archer, chosen for her pro-choice views; gun control activist Sarah Brady; and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a 98-year-old journalist and novelist who’d saved The Everglades in Florida;1 and they all attended a splashy breakfast at the Waldorf Astoria with movie star Alan Alda, our MC, conferring the awards. We’d achieved a lot of positive media coverage. You would never have known that morning the trouble we were in and the desperate measures we were taking to keep our little empire afloat.
In early February, I decided that our April issue should feature as our cover the harrowing story of Hedda Nussbaum, a former Random House children’s book editor who had been charged, along with her partner, Joel Steinberg, a lawyer, with the murder of their six-year-old adopted daughter, Lisa Steinberg. It was a horrifying story of the tiny neglected girl beaten to death in a filthy apartment in an elegant old brownstone in the heart of the Greenwich Village, in a house where Mark Twain had once lived (and where I had been tempted the previous year to rent an apartment). But in deciding to commission several articles to address this story, I had no inkling that it would lead to a mass advertiser exodus and a rupture with Gloria Steinem, together a perfect storm that had me concluding that Ms. was probably doomed.
It was a story that electrified New York: middle-class people in one of the city’s most iconic neighbourhoods, revealed to have lived a hellish existence of drugs, degradation and extraordinary brutality. Constant complaints from neighbours to police about cries and crashing noises from the apartment had not ended the nightmare. Instead, in the early hours of a November morning in 1987, medics from a nearby hospital entered the squalid apartment—one of them said later it resembled a ‘cave’—to find the unconscious six-year-old on a bathroom floor, another small child tethered to a playpen, sitting in his own excrement and drinking spoiled milk and the severely injured Hedda. The two went on trial in October 1988, but early on the charges against Hedda were dropped and she became the major prosecution witness against her former partner. The trial was the first ever to be televised ‘gavel-to-gavel’ live on a major network, and the entire city watched transfixed as the visibly still injured Hedda told the story of what had happened that night. She was a polarising witness. The judge told the jury they could not rely on her evidence except to corroborate other testimony, and it was later revealed that the jury had largely disregarded her evidence.2 In late- January 1989, Joel Steinberg was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and given a lengthy prison sentence.
The question of how much culpability Nussbaum should have for Lisa’s death divided the city, but it was tearing the women’s movement apart. The opposing sides could be characterised, broadly, as the Brownmiller and the Steinem camps. Susan Brownmiller, whose early 1970s masterpiece Against Our Will had redefined the way we understood rape, had written an op-ed piece for the New York Times that argued Hedda Nussbaum bore at least some responsibility for the death of Lisa Steinberg. She had just published a novel Waverly Place that was based on the Nussbaum/Steinberg story. I asked Susan if she would cover the trial for Ms. I knew she would turn in a well-written, powerful account of the crime and the court case, but she would also take a position on Hedda’s responsibility for Lisa’s death (and she did not disappoint). I also commissioned Marilyn French, author of The Women’s Room. Her essay, which we titled ‘A Gothic Romance’, argued Hedda’s dependency on Joel fit an archetype of male power/female bondage that still had a powerful hold on women’s imagination, even in this feminist era. The rest of the package would comprise my essay and several other pieces on various aspects of domestic violence, written by staff members. When Gloria learned that Susan was writing, she called me. Hedda Nussbaum was a total victim, Gloria argued, who in no way could be blamed for Lisa’s death and she put to me most forcefully that it would be a betrayal of everything Ms. had ever stood for if the magazine were to publish the Brownmiller position. This view encapsulated for me so much of what I saw as being wrong with the ‘old’ Ms. The magazine tended to adopt purist positions as articles of faith, allowing for no discussion or contrary views. This alienated many women who had tried to read Ms.—they felt shut out or, worse, patronised, if their own views differed. ‘With fewer real victories to report, and an acute fear of revealing divisions within the movement to the voraciously hostile outside world, Ms. fell into a pattern,’ wrote Peggy Orenstein in Mother Jones in a scathing assessment of where the magazine had ended-up shortly before our acquisition. ‘It continued to remind its readers that the same old inequities were still the same old inequities, and it found smaller, individual victories to exult in, victories that often seemed sugar-coated.’3 I thought Ms. would be more relevant, and appeal to a wider audience, if we explored issues, including highly charged and difficult subjects such as this one, by bringing in different voices, including dissenting ones. Guide our readers, rather than preach at them. Many years later, in her memoir about the women’s movement, Brownmiller praised me for giving her this commission: ‘We agreed it was time to stop excusing the behaviour of all battered women by claiming each one was a helpless victim, a politically correct but, to our minds, a psychologically and morally untenable stance that damaged the movement’s credibility’.4
In fact, although I had no hesitation about running articles representing a spectrum of views in our coverage of this excruciating case, I was actually very torn about Hedda. I knew from my experience at Elsie Women’s Refuge in the early 1970s, and from constant dealings since with women victims of violence, that relentless abuse can lead to total loss of agency. I knew the complex answers to the question ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ Hedda had left—five times.5 But she had always returned, despite warnings from colleagues that her own life could be in danger, and eventually she stopped working and became so socially isolated that there was no one to turn to. On the morning Lisa was discovered, Hedda’s injuries were massive, a broken nose, blackened eyes, a split lip, big clumps of her hair were missing, she was limping and looked dazed and confused.6 Her leg was so badly ulcerated that one observer described it as life threatening. Her nose was broken so severely it could never be repaired despite plastic surgery, and years later one eye wept permanently from a damaged tear duct, and she still walked with a limp. How could a woman so damaged herself possibly intervene to save a child? I was conscious, too, of the assumptions used by child protection agencies that women’s interests, and safety, were always secondary to those of the child. As a feminist I could not subscribe to that, but I also knew it was rare even for women who themselves had been battered into stupefied submission, not to try to protect their children. Often the catalyst for finally being able to leave was when the abuse of a child began. Feminists needed to champion the interests of women but how did we reconcile these with a mother’s failure to raise the alarm about her brutalised child? Hedda testified that after Lisa had sustained the injuries, Joel had laid her inert body on the bathroom floor and gone out to dinner. It is impossible to understand, and difficult to be sympathetic to why Hedda did not pick up the phone during the three hours he was gone. Was she so addicted to crack cocaine that she was unable to act? When Joel returned, he and Hedda free-based cocaine for most of the night. It was not until early the next morning that they rang 911. Lisa had been lying on that bathroom floor for ten hours. Medics said she could have been saved if she had received immediate medical attention. Instead, after three days, her life-support was turned off.7 In the end, I concluded that while Hedda’s failure to save Lisa was mitigated by her own horrendous abuse, it did not totally absolve her. She had a duty to Lisa that she was, or should have been, capable of exercising and she had failed to do so.
The circulation department had been thrilled that I planned to run a newsy cover, featuring a close-up image of Hedda Nussbaum’s bruised and swollen face. Newsweek had had great newsstand success with a similar cover shot and our people were predicting that this would be our biggest-selling issue of the year. This was exactly the kind of boost we needed, but our advertising sales director, Marsha Metrinko, had a very different reaction. Metrinko, as she liked to call herself—and she always addressed me as ‘Summers’—was a hard-boiled character with statuesque good looks, tall with a helmet of short platinum hair that made her resemble Brigitte Nielsen. She mostly revelled in the challenge of selling advertising for Ms., but she cried foul when she heard about our cover. ‘Summers’, she said, talking out of the side of her mouth as if she was telling me something secret, ‘Summers, you’re breaking my heart. We’ve just cracked the beauty category. You can’t do this to me’.
She laid out the situation as she saw it. If we ran with the Hedda cover, we would lose seven pages of advertising. Not only that, Metrinko said, four advertisers would punish us by staying out for two issues while a new client, Bristol-Myers, which had four products it might place in Ms., had said they would never come in. I was angry that these companies even knew about our cover. This kind of blackmail was horrifying, and I would have liked nothing more than to tell them we did not want their lousy business. But I also knew that our only chance of survival was to meet or, if possible, exceed our advertising budget of 40 pages per issue. There was no guarantee that those who had pulled their ads would come back if I capitulated and changed the cover, but we were absolutely certain to suffer financially if I didn’t. Advertisers who did not like the editorial environment surrounding their ads simply refused to pay. Ms. had compromised in the past to avoid offending advertisers. They had not covered issues like the health impact of smoking on women, so as not to alienate cigarette advertisers and, Steinem told Peggy Orenstein, she had once changed a mention of Porsche in an article to ‘expensive car’, to keep Volkswagen happy.
We had worked hard to retain the automobile advertising. It was a lucrative category—they almost always wanted two-page spreads –and they did not demand supportive editorial. We did not have to run articles about cars, for instance, but it would have been foolhardy to criticise their product so I was stricken when Barbara Ehrenreich proposed her next column be a satire on fast cars. I explained to her how sensitive and demanding these advertisers were, how we could not afford to lose them. Would she be willing to change topics? ‘If it was anyone but Ms.,’ was her generous response.
These advertisers were influencing, even dictating, content. I could see no other way to look at it. We had to give them what they wanted—nice, non-controversial ‘happy edit’—or they simply would not grace our pages. The automobile makers did not stipulate content directly but they dictated the way they wanted readers to feel when they glanced at their pages: happy, not challenged or confronted by the story of a battered woman or a murdered child. Without them, there would be no us, because they paid our production costs. We had to comply. Only the cigarette companies, who knew they were living on borrowed time, acknowledged they were in no position to dictate editorial. Our readers hated the cigarette ads, and so did I, but I did not see how we could survive without them. We also all hated the ‘flying pad’, as we called the large image of a sanitary napkin that ran across two pages. It was reasonable enough for us to advertise such products, but did the ads have to be so, so ugly? Proctor & Gamble, America’s biggest advertiser of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, would only advertise if they were guaranteed that their ads would not appear in an issue that mentioned any of a stipulated list of topics, which included abortion, gun control and the occult. They did not care what position the editorial adopted on these topics, they could not even be mentioned. It was often difficult to create credible editorial while conforming to such guidelines. Sometimes we found ourselves having to concoct bland copy to place near these ads. When added to the other advertiser demands, that their ads run close to the front and on a right-hand page, the task of putting together the magazine became very challenging. I sometimes envied the fashion magazines who could easily slot-in pages of beauty, jewellery and clothing between the ads at the front, and run their feature stories in the ‘well’, that section in the middle of the magazine where there were no ads and where controversy could reign free. My background was newspapers where, as far as I was aware, advertisers did not have this kind of power. I had never been asked to change a story, or refrain from mentioning a topic, because of advertiser demands, so I was unprepared for these battles and the editorial challenges they created. We soon learned that the constraints Sassy and Ms. were experiencing were not unique. Throughout the magazine and broadcast industries, articles and on-air programs were being pulled, toned-down or simply not written, not because they might offend readers or viewers but because they could upset advertisers or religious groups. At the same time, special bland editorial was being manufactured to give advertisers the non-controversial ‘happy-edit’ they were increasingly demanding. We thought our situation was dire because we believed that our magazines had a special mission: we were not there just to create edit to place between the ads. We believed that the ads should pay for the edit we and our readers wanted. But increasingly, in an environment that was so competitive and so dependent on advertising, other media met the demands—at the cost of unfettered freedom of expression—and made it that much tougher for the rest of us.
The new April cover was an arty, grainy image of the chest and lower face of a naked woman, her arms crossed to cover her breasts. It was sensual and visually attractive but in no way did it represent the Hedda Nussbaum stories inside. We had quickly switched tack, making the cover story a report about the dangers of estrogen and relegating the Hedda and Joel package to just a cover line. I justified my caving to advertisers as a survival tactic, but I sometimes had to ask myself what I was doing in this mad magazine world. I was used to serious journalism. Now I was having to pander to advertisers whose only journalistic criteria, seemingly, was that an article be inoffensive. Three of those that pulled their ads in the April issue did not come back, including the cosmetics company, and Bristol-Myers did not come in with their pharmaceutical products, but Metrinko was able to save Chevrolet’s two-page spread and got commitments from the others that they would be back for the May issue. She also managed to haul-in several totally new pages so, although we did not make budget, the issue was not a total disaster.
The passions aroused by the Hedda Nussbaum case were quite extraordinary. There had been petitions and rallies, as well as warring public op-eds and bitter private arguments. Susan Brownmiller later wrote that her opinions in the NYT and Ms. were seen by ‘enraged battered-women’s advocates … as a stab in the back to the movement’8 and reported that ‘some of my movement friendships never recovered from the debate’. Gloria Steinem publicly associated herself with the pro-Hedda forces, speaking at a rally in Hedda’s defence on the steps of the criminal court building (and in 2006 would write the introduction to Hedda’s book and appear with her to promote it), and she wanted Ms. to back her. She seemed to assume she was still entitled to influence the editorial. I felt caught. While I frequently consulted Steinem, and often found her advice valuable, I also needed to put my own stamp on the magazine and that included abandoning the women-can-do-no-wrong mantra that seemed to underpin the editorial in the ‘old’ Ms. I wanted to take a more modern and nuanced approach that acknowledged women were not perfect and, in some cases, actually wrong. But in the end I compromised, or as Brownmiller put it, ‘the new team at Ms. capitulated, adding their names to the Hedda petition and printing a few self-serving words from Nussbaum in a subsequent issue’.9 (I ran a one page article by Hedda Nussbaum.)
This episode made brutally clear to me that while I was nominally editor-in-chief of Ms., I was not fully in control of the editorial agenda. The advertisers would not allow it and neither, it seemed, would Gloria Steinem. She still loomed large over the magazine in most people’s eyes—including, apparently, her own. She no longer owned the magazine but she could not let go. Maybe we should have opted for a clean break, and not retained Steinem, and Carbine, as consultants. It was often tricky for me to explain my vision for Ms. In April 1989 I was on an American Society of Magazine Editors panel ‘Remaking a Magazine’, along with Mort Zuckerman who talked about his makeover of US News and World Report. Tina Brown, who was editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, chaired the session. ‘That must have been tough,’ she said to me sympathetically during the break, ‘having to talk about what was wrong with Ms. with Gloria’s boyfriend there’.
I had disregarded Steinem when she’d tried to dissuade me from running an interview with Betty Friedan to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique. There was tremendous enmity between Steinem and Friedan and, I was astonished to discover, Friedan’s name had never once appeared in Ms. These two giants of the women’s movement barely spoke to each other. They represented different strands of feminism. Steinem was more utopian and visionary, whereas Friedan was a pragmatist who wanted clear political victories now. Their political differences spilled over into the personal realm and they barely had a civil word to say to, or about, each other, but I did not see that as a reason for me not to acknowledge one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. I interviewed Friedan in her tiny apartment in a sprawling block across from Lincoln Centre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and published the article, together with a photo of the two of us, in the December 1988 issue. Friedan’s insights mirrored many of my own. I, too, was puzzled why, when women’s lives had changed so dramatically in so many ways, they were still reluctant to seize political power and change the world. ‘What is wrong that a new generation of women leaders has not arisen?’ Friedan said to me. ‘We can’t leave until they come’. That, it seemed to me, should be a key question for Ms. to pursue. If I could only get some clear air.
In early May, Holmes à Court told us he would not proceed. He had been our last hope as, one after another, the major media companies had been deterred by Sassy’s deteriorating situation. Holmes à Court had signed a letter of intent, so we thought it was a done deal, but he had changed his mind. We were under-capitalised and could never succeed, he told us. Of course, without his injection of cash, that now seemed inevitable. After that, events were largely taken out of our hands, as the cash flow got worse and a controversial article in the June issue of Sassy sent the bankers into a total tailspin. The article was a very matter-of-fact account of a girl’s experience of incest with her grandfather. It was written in such a way as to warn girls about such relationships. I could see nothing wrong with it and nor did we lose any further advertisers, but for the bankers it was the last straw. They were the ones who could no longer stand the heat, who wanted this mess behind them, and they took precipitous action, insisting that Sandra resign, that an external CEO be appointed and that I take charge of Sassy’s editorial. It was devastating for Sandra to have the media company she had created taken from her. The day it happened, she and I locked ourselves in her office with a bottle of Scotch. It was just 21 months since our lunch at Café Un Deux Trois. In that short time, Sandra had reinvented magazines for teenage girls. Our adventure was over, but her legacy would stretch far into the future. It did not seem that way at the time, of course, although Sandra put on a show of extraordinary grace as she addressed the hastily brought-together staff of the two magazines, and told them she was leaving.
At first, I had thought it would be cool to spend time with the groovy young team at Sassy. It would be a refreshing change from Ms. where it was a constant struggle to convince the editors that we had to change the sensibility of the magazine. Even when they agreed we needed to change, the long-term staffers often simply could not adjust their mindsets and, all too often, they seemed to want to make it their mission to make me adapt to theirs. It was exhausting, especially on top of the ongoing financial struggles. Sassy would be fun. While the advertising director was trying to convince jittery advertisers that it was safe to come back, I needed to ensure the magazine did nothing to jeopardise this. I insisted on seeing page proofs, so I could peruse every tiny detail, captions as well as headlines, in addition to having already being briefed on the overall contents. I found myself utterly ill-equipped to deal with the content. I knew nothing about teenage culture and worried that Jane Pratt and her staff were trying to hoodwink me. Was there really a band called the Butthole Surfers? Because I had not seen anything wrong with the incest piece, I now became ultra-cautious about anything that might backfire. I pulled an article on one-night stands, and another on animal testing of cosmetics, and soon found myself the object of sullen resentment by the Sassy staff. Jane was aware of our financial troubles, but she and her team did not act as if they understood just how vulnerable their magazine now was. In just a few months Sassy had gone from being the hottest thing in town to facing the real risk that if we could not find a buyer she—and Ms.—might have to close.
1989 still stands as both the best and the worst year of my life. It was the year I lost the magazines, lost my job and, I feared, the very foundations of my identity, but it was also the year that I met the man who would become the love of my life. My marriage had ended 30 years earlier, although John Summers and I had not got around to divorcing. I’d had romances in Sydney in the 1970s, a couple of which had lasted a year or more, but the 1980s had been a bleak time for me, in Canberra and in New York. It was so long that I could scarcely remember what it felt like to lie in someone’s arms, to surrender to passion, to experience that kind of joy. I realised I had become something of a constant voyeur of other people’s love lives, with no emotional life of my own. Even so, I was utterly confident that I was going to meet someone. I was undeterred by the Newsweek cover story a few years earlier that asserted a woman over 40 in New York had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist attack than of getting married. Not that I wanted to get married, but I did want a soul mate. I don’t know what made me so sure, but I never doubted that it would happen. Eventually. I just never expected that when it did he would turn out to be an exceptionally good-looking, smart-as-a-tack Texan, who was nineteen years younger than me and who worked at our company.
Chip Rolley was employed in the marketing department of Ms. but I had had limited dealings with him until late one night I had found him in the photocopier room. I had asked that every member of Congress be sent Ms. each month and I had provided copy for a cover letter to accompany the issue. I was astonished to find Chip painstakingly inserting a small slip of paper with my signature onto each letter before copying it—535 times!
‘There’s no need for them all to be signed!’ I said to him. ‘You will be here all night.’
Chip seemed a little embarrassed that I had found him doing this, but he insisted that the letters should be signed. ‘It won’t take me that long,’ he said.
After that, I began to notice him. Although he was one of the few men in our mostly female organisation, he was neither intimidated nor defensive. In fact, he had quite a mouth on him, always ready with a quick comeback or a witty retort. After our finances collapsed and we had to undertake a drastic reorganisation to save as many positions as possible, Chip had agreed to leave marketing and work—temporarily, he was assured—as Sandra’s PA. That meant he was on a different floor from me, so I didn’t see him often, but I did make a point of inviting him to a farewell party I was throwing at my apartment for Joanne Edgar, one of the founding staffers of Ms., who was leaving to pursue philanthropic work. It was an all-staff party, everyone was relaxed, and I found myself flirting with Chip. At the end of the night, I asked if he would stay back and help me clean up. He readily agreed.
The next day I felt tremendously guilty. Although there was certainly no coercion involved, I wondered if I had abused my position. As a part-owner of the company that employed him, I was, technically, one of his bosses, even though he did not report to me. But we very quickly developed a strong attachment to each other, based on an attraction that was not just physical, and which seemed to transcend any technical workplace considerations. I told Sandra and, while she laughed wickedly and teased Chip mercilessly for the rest of that day, she could not see a problem. Within a very short time he had moved into my apartment and, although he kept his room in the apartment he shared with a friend in the Beacon Hotel just around the corner until the end of the year, we have been together ever since.
I soon learned that Chip was the name Americans use for a ‘Junior’, someone who shares their father’s name. His actual name was Chester. His father was in the military and returned to Vietnam shortly after Chip’s birth. The new baby was given his name, Chester Harrison Rolley—with Jr added. Many ‘Juniors’ are known as Chip: it signifies the person is a chip off the old block. We soon stopped being conscious, or even aware, of the difference in our ages. It was something other people noticed—and occasionally had a problem with—but for us it has always been immaterial except for an occasional disagreement about music—impossibly, he does not care for Bob Dylan—as our younger selves grew up to different sound tracks. We saw things in each other we liked and admired and that was what brought us together. He liked my fierceness and my willingness to speak my mind and not worry what people thought of me. I was knocked out by his wisdom and calmness, and what today we would call emotional intelligence, qualities that were unexpected in a man in his mid-twenties. He had acquired a strong feminist outlook from his mother, which meant that he and I had a common frame of reference through which we both viewed the world. More than that, he was not at all intimidated—or threatened—by me. Men of my age tended to be defensive around me, as if they were expecting me to direct my feminist wrath at them if they got out of line. I found this exhausting and it was refreshing to meet someone who was totally relaxed with me. Not only that, he would take me on. That was a change; few men I’d been involved with in the past felt able to do that.
Chip had endured some very tough times as an adolescent, so he had had to grow up fast. He had developed a protective armour that he used when he needed to navigate stressful situations of his own and it was this, I think, that enabled him to understand and comfort me during what was undoubtedly the most stressful time of my life. There were times when I did not think I would be able to keep going. When things were at their most grim, with me having to fire people or not pay them or front up for yet another futile meeting with a potential investor or cope with further resentment from editors at Ms. or Sassy, I would come home, pour myself a glass of Scotch—and burst into tears. All my life I have made sure never to cry in front of work colleagues and I never have, but for those few months in 1989, when I was wrung dry and was physically and emotionally a spent force, I would let it all out once I was safely inside my apartment. I was amazed Chip did not run a million miles from the wreck of a woman I was during that time. Instead he was soothing, or said nothing, just listened as I poured out my frustration and anger at the situation I had so unwittingly found myself in. His just being there helped me stay sane. It must have been very hard for him. He knew more than most employees about the company’s precarious financial situation because of his job with Sandra, and he knew his own future could be in doubt, but he managed to set aside his own anxieties while I vented and raged and gathered the strength to face another day. I have never stopped being grateful because I wonder how I would ever have got through it without him.
By June we had reached the end of the line. There was just one offer remaining on the table, and it was totally unacceptable. I told Steve Sherrill this and he offered me Ms. for $10—provided I could raise the operating capital. Fat chance! But I went on one, final, last-ditch search for funds because unless I was able to find a new partner, I would be unable to deflect Citibank from selling Ms. and Sassy to Dale Lang, the owner of Lang Communications, publisher of Working Woman, Working Mother and until very recently the mass-circulation McCall’s. ‘Whatever you do, don’t sell to Dale’, Gloria Steinem had said to me several times during the long and difficult struggle to find new financing. She and Pat Carbine had been horrified when I’d told them of Lang’s interest. During their ownership, his Working Woman ad sales staff had cruelly targeted Ms., circulating to advertisers blown-up copies of classified advertisements that contained the word ‘lesbian’. Back then, that was a lethal weapon. This was before Ellen Degeneres, before The L Word, before same-sex marriage, before the widespread acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex individuals (as evidenced by mainstream politicians, even candidates for the US Presidency, now feeling required to reference LGBTQ communities). This tactic had cost Ms. advertising business and they were rightly bitter about it. They had staved off Lang once before—and sold to Fairfax. It was unconscionable that the man Steinem referred to as ‘the Pilsbury Doughboy’—a strikingly accurate reference to his pudgy appearance—could now get his hands on Ms. We made a pact: ABD. Anyone but Dale. Which is how I came to be in some pretty strange places while I frantically tried to find other money.
Wilma Jordan arranged for me to meet with TorStar, the publishers of the Toronto Star. More talk, more balance sheets and deal points, and more inconclusive discussions. For one mad week, I had talks with Harlequin Enterprises, a subsidiary of TorStar, and publisher of the internationally best-selling Mills and Boon romance novels, who were seriously interested in both magazines. I could imagine the jokes: ‘Feminist icon teams up with bodice-ripper.’ It would be worth it, I thought, if it kept us afloat, but in the end this deal, too, collapsed. I was amused almost fifteen years later, when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the company and all the jokes were at his expense; even the New York Times speculated that the newly-single media mogul might be ‘suddenly in the mood for love’.10 Anita Roddick of the Body Shop was helpful although she had no funds of her own to invest. She introduced me to Josh Mailman, a wealthy young Manhattanite who two years earlier had co-founded Social Venture Capital Network, an organisation designed to connect good causes with socially aware investors. As I travelled down in the elevator after leaving Mailman’s posh Upper East Side apartment, the doors had opened to admit Carl Bernstein, the celebrated Watergate journalist. He expertly undressed me, the only other occupant, with his eyes and clearly not attracted by what he saw, turned back to face the door. I flew to San Francisco to the Social Venture annual conference, but these well-heeled philanthropists were looking to invest hundreds of thousands. I needed millions. And their favoured causes tended to be cutting-edge New Age or counter-cultural, not tired old feminists and their faltering magazines.
Peter Blazey offered money. Blazey, as everyone called him, was a very old friend, an Australian, a journalist, political activist and all round good time boy, described by his publisher as a ‘millionaire wastrel’, who was now working his way through his Hortico inheritance, living in Los Angeles in a dilapidated mansion in the Hollywood Hills that had once belonged to Barbara Stanwyck. When Chip and I had swum in the pool during a visit to LA, Blazey had taken a series of great pictures of us in the cool blue water, documenting our early relationship with accompanying louche commentary about Chip’s good looks and my even better good fortune. ‘How much do you need?’ Blazey had said to me over dinner in New York. I had no idea how much money Blazey had, or was willing to part with, so I hedged. ‘Would $50,000 do it?’ he asked. I almost burst into tears, at his generosity and his innocence. That was the trouble. None of my friends could comprehend the sums involved. How could they? Two years earlier I, who had never even heard of mezzanine debt, could not have imagined that I would become so blasé about the massive sums that were needed to rescue us. I gently turned down Blazey, who underneath his often coarse patois was the sweetest of men. He died of AIDS in 1997, and left behind Screwloose, a wonderfully wicked memoir, whose munificence was one of the few consolations during those bleak days.
I was grateful for another kind of consolation when I was a guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in June 1989. My host was Chancellor Donna Shalala, who would later become a Cabinet Secretary in the Clinton administration. It was a nice break from the fundraising ordeal although I could not help myself from telling my audience about the impending disaster for Ms. They were sympathetic, but uncomprehending. No one outside the small media world seemed to be able to get their head around the disaster that had befallen us. Who could blame them, especially those in the otherworld of academia? I got to spend time with two giants of women’s studies: Gerda Lerner and Linda Gordon. They had both been intellectual heroes of mine in a previous life, back when the only work-related stress I suffered were sore eyes after a long day at the library trying to decipher hand-written manuscripts. Linda Gordon had been an examiner for my PhD who had praised the work unreservedly. I thought she lived in Boston, so was surprised to finally meet her, in Madison. ‘Do you miss women’s history now that you are doing something really important?’ I was startled to hear her ask. ‘You were so good at it. It’s a pity you no longer do it.’ For a moment, I almost regretted that I had abandoned that life—one where I had been content to analyse the wrongs of the past, for the one I had now, and the at times almost unendurable pressures of trying to make the future a better place for women.
In August 1989 with all other options exhausted, Citibank agreed that Dale Lang could buy both magazines. Despite being a board member of Matilda Publications, the entity that was being sold, I was increasingly sidelined as Steve Sherrill and Dale Lang negotiated one-on-one. On the advice of a friend, I had hired a big-time corporate lawyer, Irwin Jay Robinson, who I knew from work he had done for Fairfax. Robbie, as everyone called him, had a courteous demeanour that belied his Machiavellian assessment of situations and his tough negotiating tactics. He ultimately got me back to the table, preserved my contract and ensured that I had work, and recognition, at the new owner’s company. Part of Robbie’s strategy had been to boost my public profile and he frequently took me to New York’s hottest restaurants for lunch. I have to admit I loved watching heads turn as I strutted behind the maître’d, turned out in the best outfit I could possibly manage, towards the prominent table where Robbie would already be waiting. Although it was part of a war game, it was still a welcome break from the corporate trenches and the wearing ego clashes and bitter betrayals that came to characterise this deal. When it was finally sealed, in mid-October 1989, Lang had acquired 70 per cent of Matilda Publications while Citibank retained 30 per cent.11 What was not made public, but which Robbie and I knew from the deal sheet that he insisted on perusing on my behalf, was that Lang had paid no purchase price. Nor had he committed to invest in the two titles. Citibank had forgiven half its debt, agreed to freeze interest payments on the rest until ‘break-even’, and would invest a further $3 million. In other words, Lang had been able to pick up Ms. and Sassy for nothing.
Lang had claimed he had little interest in Sassy, saying he really only wanted Ms., and that turned out to be partly true. He wanted Ms. so he could kill her. To Madison Avenue it looked as if Lang was trying to undermine Ms., reported Peggy Orenstein in her account of Ms.’s fight for survival.12 He fired our advertising staff then engineered a collapse in ads for our December issue by excluding Ms. from a group discount deal being offered for Sassy and his two magazines. Even though the December issue was ready for pre-press, he ordered it not to be printed. He demanded we hand over our subscriber lists, then folded them into Working Woman to take it to over one million circulation for the first time ever. Our subscribers were unpleasantly surprised when Working Woman landed in their mailboxes instead of Ms. Lang then made us cancel the circulation deal with NOW, demanding we get them to do a similar deal to boost the circulation of Working Woman. All that was left of Ms. was a totally demoralised editorial staff and no apparent future. Our publication was cancelled, we had nothing to do but we hadn’t been fired either, so we were in a weird kind of limbo. We occupied ourselves cleaning out our desks and playing endless games of Scrabble.
It was a welcome distraction from this state of uncertainty when on 6 November Marcia Gillespie and I went to lunch at the White House along with other top women’s magazine editors from New York. I was pleased to see that no other Lang people had been invited. Our host was Barbara Bush, the First Lady, and she mightily impressed us all by having the lunch in the private quarters and treating us to a tour first. We got to see the Lincoln Bedroom, which contains the only signed copy of the Gettysburg Address, the Queen’s Bedroom where Winston Churchill says he saw Lincoln’s ghost, and the Bush’s sitting room which had been Ronald Reagan’s study. We had lunch in a large and pretty room that used to be Alice Roosevelt’s bedroom. But first we lined up for our one-on-one photos with Mrs Bush. Just before I stepped forward to shake the First Lady’s hand, I felt a voice whisper in my ear, ‘Put your bag on your other shoulder so it doesn’t show in the picture.’ It was Jill Krementz who passed on this sage advice. She was a top photographer in New York, and married to the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and she was standing behind me. As a result, the photograph of me with Mrs Bush, which my mother displayed proudly in her sitting room for many years, was unsullied by an unsightly shoulder strap. I got to sit at Mrs Bush’s table although she made no effort to talk to me, confining her efforts to the powerful editors, Anne Fuchs from Woman’s Day and Myrna Blyth from Ladies’ Home Journal, on either side of her. I had to settle for Marilyn Quayle, wife of the much-mocked Vice-President Dan Quayle, but I interpreted the seating as some kind of positive affirmation, a nod in the direction of feminism. Not that it would save me from what lay ahead. Also at my table was a woman whose husband used to be the governor of Oklahoma and who had become a strong supporter of women’s industries in his home state. We were each presented with a Raggedy-Ann doll. It was Barbara Bush’s ultimate joke on us all, having those sophisticated New York editors walk out of the White House with a doll under their arms.
When he first took over Lang had had me develop various new editorial proposals for Ms. I had complied reluctantly as I did not believe he was sincere, but I’d worked up the two options he requested: an eight-page 24-times-a-year newsletter, and a six-times-a-year publication printed on pulp stock. Lang then conducted a very public recruitment process for a new editor; several well-known and competent women turned him down but, astonishingly, Robin Morgan, the well-known feminist, agreed to take the job. She had just agreed to start on a project with the UN Development Program to write a big book on AIDS, and a staff researcher at Ms. had resigned to go work with her, so this turnaround was bewildering. So was the revelation that it was Gloria Steinem who had recruited her to the job. Once the deal with Lang was inevitable Steinem had—surprisingly—agreed to meet with him and soon was conferring regularly with him to plot the future of Ms. It seems that Dale Lang had come to the realisation that he could have his cake and eat it too. He could remove Ms. from the advertising and mainstream circulation market, and thereby protect Working Woman, while earning kudos, and the eternal gratitude of Gloria Steinem and all that that debt would entail, by enabling her to do a massive makeover of what she could once again claim as her magazine. Dale Lang ‘saved’ Ms., he said in an interview in 2013, when he ‘helped Gloria hatch the plan to ask readers, ‘Does the world still need Ms.?’ then came up with the campaign that ‘convinced them to vote with their wallets by paying three times more for the product, enabling its publisher to break even and Ms. to go ad free’.13
I was fired as editor of Ms. on 19 December. A week earlier Dale Lang had called me over to his office and informed me he did not want me to continue. Lang’s headquarters were in the Pan Am building where eighteen months earlier Sandra and I had signed the deal papers that had made us media mogulettes. Lang said he proposed to appoint me editor-at-large of Ms., to honour my contract and provide me with an office and a secretary provided I wrote twelve articles a year for his various publications, including Ms. I had been expecting, and in many ways wanting, to be shown the door. Psychologically I did not see how I could work for this man who had been so untrustworthy, so manipulative and who had treated us all so badly. Financially, though, I was not sure that I could refuse. My contract had four years to run and I had a mortgage. Lang had said I could also write for any other magazine that was not in direct competition with his stable. That left practically every decent magazine in America; I could try to build a reputation as a magazine writer. I owed Robbie big time for my contract being honoured. A few weeks earlier, I had been dead meat. Of course, I should have known not to believe a word of it. I got no office, no secretary, and I had to battle to get assignments from Lang’s editors, including from Ms. Lang had promised not to dissolve Matilda Publications but that also turned out to be a hollow undertaking. Soon, our brave little company would cease to exist. Sandra and I were media mogulettes no more, but we could be proud that both magazines were at the highest-ever circulations: Ms. with 550,000 and Sassy at 450,000.
My last day at Ms. was 20 December. I’d tried to maintain morale among the staff, but I was so battle-weary by then that I was barely functioning. I felt tremendous guilt that I had let down the magazine, its subscribers and everyone who had helped me during my 27 months as editor-in-chief so I was incredibly moved on that last day when the staff presented me with a quickly mocked-up fake Ms. cover. In those days before Photoshop they’d had to make do with crude cut and paste. Our Woman of the Year was the main cover line, my head replaced Pat Schroeder’s on the image from my very first cover and each of the other cover lines had been reworked in tribute to me: ‘Who’s crying now! The Unsinkable Anne Summers’, ‘Editor’s Essay: Enough is Enough’ ‘Exclusive! The Harrowing saga of a Mogul with a Mission’ and finally, in what we referred to as the ear, that small slash in the top right-hand corner of the cover, ‘We will Ms. you!’
It was two years and three months since the Fairfax Board had agreed to buy Ms., two years since Young Warwick had decided to sell us and just seventeen months since Sandra and I had done our management buyout. We had started out with such joy and optimism about the wildly unexpected path we had carved for ourselves, but then we had crashed, and crashed hard. I did not know it was possible to absorb so much trauma. I was exhausted, emotionally and physically and probably more crazed than I realized, but I had not cracked up. I was still standing and although much of the fight had gone out of me, at least for now, I was not bitter. At least not yet. I went back to Adelaide and stayed with my mother, trying to get my body and soul back into some kind of equilibrium. At an absurdly early hour, the phone rang.
‘It’s for you,’ my mother called from the room where the phone was. ‘It’s the ABC.’
I did not want to talk to the ABC or to anyone else. I would simply have slammed down the phone, but my mother was much too polite. I staggered sleepily towards the receiver she was holding out for me.
‘Hello,’ I said, somewhat blearily. ‘What do you want?’
It was Pru Goward on the line. She was the host of an early morning national radio program and she was live on air. With absolutely no introduction (that presumably happened while I was walking towards the phone) she launched straight into it:
‘Anne Summers, you are back from New York. What does it feel like to be a failure?’
‘I don’t feel like a failure,’ I said feebly.
‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘you would say that wouldn’t you.’
Welcome home, Anne, I thought to myself, to the country where if you succeed they tear you down, and if you fail they dance on your grave. I was glad I was returning to New York the following week. I might not have a real job, but I would be in a city where effort was encouraged and where everyone was trying. If someone succeeded, everyone applauded because that showed it could be done and, who knows, next time it might be you.
Back in New York, for the first time in more than two years I was now free from the constant pressure of meeting financial as well as editorial deadlines. I no longer had to rush from meetings to lunches and back to the office and could start to enjoy the city again, the way I had when I had first arrived. I needed time to think about what I would do next, but I could not stop myself from thinking about the brutal events of the recent past. Part of me felt I had failed. I had been unable to make Ms. work. It would have been so easy to scuttle Ms. as Sandra and I did our various deals, but we had refused. We had kept her alive for another two years after she faced almost certain closure in 1987. That was something, I supposed. And I’d been proud of the editorial. When I look now at the issues I edited, I am surprised how good they are, so much better than I remembered. Trying to get some perspective on those two years, I wonder: did we merely survive? or did we actually manage to do some good during that pitiless time? There was no doubt that Sandra had changed magazine publishing for teenage girls with Sassy, but did I have any lasting impact on how to frame feminist editorial for the mainstream magazine market of the late 1980s? Looking back on that tumultuous time I can see that our little venture probably did not have a chance. The outsider status and courage that enabled us to succeed initially also hampered our longer-term prospects. There were too many things we did not understand about America. We were as blind-sided by the reticence of liberal groups to support us in the face of the boycott as by the effectiveness of the evangelicals who had instigated it. We were confounded that advertisers could effectively censor our plans to shatter genres and take readers on exciting new editorial journeys. But, most of all, we were just too small. We had no ballast when the storm struck. It was probably amazing we lasted as long as we did.
I became quite depressed for a time, unable to sleep or to work. I knew I now had a second—or was it a third?—chance to make something of myself in New York but I was having trouble revving myself up. I wondered if I had the toughness to survive in this town. On my last day at Ms. several people had told me that I was ‘just too nice’. It was not meant as a compliment. ‘You are the nicest person I have ever worked for,’ one of the editors had said, ‘but to succeed in this business you have to be a barracuda.’ I did not have what it takes, in other words. I had had my chance in the spotlight but, even with significant goodwill from most quarters, I had not been able to invent a new future for myself. Instead, I would find myself writing consumer reports on ‘the best cities for childcare’ for Working Mother and getting glummer about where I had ended up. ‘You’re only happy when you’re important,’ Elisabeth Wynhausen said to me one day. It was a cruel observation, but she was probably right. For the past fifteen years, since I started at the National Times, I had been in high-profile jobs, constantly in the spotlight, basking in the attention. It was who I was. Now I no longer had the armour of a job title, no one reported to me, my name was not in the newspapers, no one called. Had I lost my identity? I was starting again, on a new track, not knowing quite where I was going and just hoping that the best of my life was not already behind me.
We were a party of about ten who flew from Newark to Jacksonville, Florida where we were picked up by vans and driven to Yulee, the site of the 7400 acres White Oak estate, which had been owned by the Gilman family since 1938. David Hay, Chip and I were being escorted by Charlie Milhaupt, who had worked in film in California for many years, but who was now in New York working for our host Howard Gilman who was already at White Oak. In my post-Ms. life, I was exploring possible projects in film and in theatre as well as journalism, and had become friendly with Charlie who promised to open doors for me. The rest of the party comprised Natalie Moody, Howard’s long-term executive assistant, and a number of other guests, including Linda Fairstein, who was New York’s sex crimes prosecutor who was currently dealing with an especially lurid high-profile sexual assault and homicide case known as ‘the Preppy murder’, and her husband Justin Feldman. White Oak was a timber plantation that supplied the extremely lucrative Gilman Paper Company. Gilman was the grandson of an immigrant from Belarus, who when he had stepped off the boat in America had seen a piece of paper fluttering on the wharf. He took it as a sign of the business he should pursue in his new homeland. Within a generation, the Gilman company would become immensely wealthy and would support Howard’s enormously generous philanthropy in the arts, especially the ballet; his unparalleled collection of early photography, which he later endowed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there is a gallery named for him; and the nature conservancy, which he established at White Oak in 1982. Wealth sat lightly on Howard, a tall soft-spoken gentle man with white hair and a cool, observant eye. He was extraordinarily generous to friends as well as to individuals and organisations whose work he admired, and he surrounded himself with beautiful things and people, especially young men and prima ballerinas, but he spent nothing on himself. No holidays or luxuries of any kind. He appeared to own just one pair of shoes and his suits and weekend wear were years, if not decades, old. When he died suddenly, of a heart attack age 73 in early 1998, his estate had assets of more than $1 billion.
Because it was our first visit, Chip and I were put in the special suite in what was referred to as the Old Hunting Lodge, the main building where we had all our meals and where the walls were adorned with stag heads and other hunting trophies. Our wooden twin beds were said to have been owned by Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States, and the man who led the Union to victory over the Confederacy states. It was where ‘Mischa and Jessica’ always stayed, we were told. When the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from Russia in 1974, Howard Gilman had taken him in, taken care of him and set him up financially. More than a decade later, Howard was still managing Mischa’s financial affairs, hosting him and his partner Jessica Lange to regular weekends at White Oak and in 1990 would finance what became known as the White Oak Dance Project, a ballet studio where Baryshnikov and Mark Morris collaborated and created a program of touring works. This was the place where Annie Leibovitz shot her celebrated portrait of Baryshnikov, against a white roll in front of the pines of White Oak. Many eminent people were invited to White Oak. (There was no other way to get there, Charlie told us, as solicitations to visit were ignored; he recounted with sardonic pleasure how he and Howard had knocked back an overture from Madonna.) Nearly a decade later, it was the place where Bill and Hillary Clinton licked their wounds from the Lewinsky affair and plotted her Senate run. A few weeks later, we would be invited back. Isabella Rossellini, a good friend of Howard’s who served on the board of his foundation, was there with her twin sister Ingrid and on Saturday night we celebrated their birthdays, and Chip’s, whose was a week earlier.
But this weekend in May 1990 was all about the nature conservancy. Howard himself took us on the tour of several hours through this truly remarkable place that he had set up to breed endangered species. There were more than 300 animals, including rhinoceroses, giraffes, cheetahs, antelopes, buffalo, zebras and many other exotic and unfamiliar animals. They all had large enclosures and, unlike zoos, the animals could roam free. We were shown a video of the birth of seven cheetah cubs just the night before we had arrived, a further example of the continuing success of the breeding program at White Oak which boasted more than 100 births a year. It was strange to look from the window of our bedroom directly into the enclosure that contained three black rhinoceroses. In Florida!
Not all of the animals at White Oak were endangered. Howard bred horses, too, and had owned a quarter stake in the great racehorse Secretariat that had died just a few months before. Secretariat’s last foal, named Plantation, had been born at White Oak a week earlier. And the Bengal tigers were there because they had been confiscated by Florida police from various drug dealers and other loonies, who were keeping them as pets without a permit. Not knowing what to do with them, the police asked Howard if he would take them. Now White Oak had a special park, including a large lake, because they liked to swim and a very, very high fence that not even a Bengal tiger could leap over.
There was also a bird sanctuary which included some black swans from Western Australia and, I was soon to discover, Howard worked closely with the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo in outback New South Wales, donating a white rhino for their breeding program. Maybe Howard had a thing about Australians because he and I became very good friends, staying in touch by letter after I returned to Australia. He used to send me photographs of newborns at White Oak, especially the giraffes which he loved even more than the rare rhinos, writing engagingly about each one as if it were a new grandchild.
In July 1990, Ms. was relaunched as an ‘advertiser-free’ publication with Robin Morgan as editor-in-chief. The old logo was restored and the cover story, written by Gloria Steinem and titled ‘Sex, Lies and Advertising’, was an impassioned denunciation of advertising and the way it had constrained Ms. in the past. No longer a glossy magazine, its original mission of trying to create a mass-circulation commercial feminist publication abandoned, with fewer than 100,000 subscribers,14 and production values and design that made Ms. resemble a movement publication, it looked as if it had given up the fight.
After my own experiences with advertisers, I could totally empathise with Steinem’s desire to escape their yoke. I would have applauded this radical change in direction as a welcome and timely reimagining of the original goals of Ms., except that the new Ms. included several attacks on ‘my’ Ms. The strained friendliness with Gloria and her gang of the past three years seemed to have evaporated faster than you could say sisterhood is powerful. Robin Morgan’s editor’s letter contained a list, apparently supplied by readers, of topics they did not want to see in Ms. The list included fashion, celebrities (‘unless clearly feminist’) and gardening. This was clearly a crack at ‘Earthly Delights’, the column I’d created, which Gloria had named and which Robin herself had written for. She had sent me a beautiful poem ‘Upstairs in the Garden’ which she described in her cover letter as ‘my own rather unusual version of a gardening piece’. I had placed it in the December 1989 issue, the one that Dale Lang had refused to print. Now ‘gardening’ apparently was code for what was wrong with what I’d done at Ms. The ‘new’ Ms. also included a couple of very specific repudiations. It reprinted the ‘We’re Not the Ms. We used To Be’ trade ad in their ‘No Comment’ section of sexist or demeaning advertisements. This was the ad showing a hippie-looking woman evolving into a 1980s glamour puss that had upset Gloria and her friends three years earlier. They claimed it was meant to represent—and repudiate—Gloria and no amount of disavowal on our part would convince them otherwise. The masthead of the new Ms. confirmed that I was not being overly sensitive. My agreement with Lang stipulated that in return for relinquishing the editorship-in-chief (to make way for Morgan), my new title was to be ‘Editor at Large for Ms.’, and that I was to be listed as such in the magazine. Instead, I was there as Editor at Large for Lang, in the corporate section of the masthead. Nothing to do with Ms., in other words. Suzanne Braun Levine was there, however, with the Editor Emirata title that I had declined to give her. I wrote to Robin Morgan, pointing out the contractual obligation and ‘to respectfully request’—my lawyer Robbie had guided the drafting of this letter—I be listed correctly in future issues. She replied saying the title no longer existed. And that was that.
From now on, I had to accustom myself to hearing, or reading, almost non-stop criticisms of my tenure at Ms. Much of it was hurtful because it was so inaccurate. I got no credit for anything, even the widely praised political coverage. Instead I was criticised for how I had supposedly corrupted the magazine with fashion, celebrities and, of course, gardening. Steinem told her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun that I never consulted her about Ms. editorial, forgetting apparently our regular meetings, her generous annual consultancy fee—and the entire Hedda Nussbaum episode. At the same time, the story of how Sandra and I had managed to buy Ms., first via Fairfax and then through our MBO, was rewritten. In the retelling we were no longer ‘real feminists with real money’, we were ‘the Australians’ and, increasingly, this term came to refer not to us but to Fairfax. Steinem several times misrepresented how Sandra and I enabled Ms. to survive, by stating that the money we raised came from Australia rather than from Wall Street. As late as 2015, such inaccuracies appeared in interviews she did to promote her new book My Life on the Road. It was surprising, for instance, to read in the New Yorker, which used to pride itself on its fact-checking, about ‘the Australian media group that took over the magazine during a slump in 1987’ and that ‘two years later, a group of American feminists was able to buy it back, and eventually Steinem helped form a foundation to keep the magazine in print, ad-free, as a monthly.’15 Almost every single assertion in that sentence is inaccurate. The truth is that Dale Lang owned Ms. from 1989 to 1996 when he sold it to Jay MacDonald, an entrepreneur backed by a Florida-based media company. It was not until 1999—a full ten years after Matilda reluctantly relinquished control—that Steinem put together a consortium of wealthy women under the name Liberty Media for Women and, once again, got Ms. back.16
‘You have to understand,’ Pat Carbine had said to me over dinner one night in July 1989 when it was apparent that Dale Lang might end up as the new owner, ‘that Ms. is the child Gloria never had. She can never walk away from it.’ Perhaps this explained the attacks now being directed at me. It also now made sense of the time, over breakfast in the Pierre Hotel back in April 1989, just after the fiasco with advertisers over the Hedda Nussbaum cover, when Steinem had said to me with some bitterness, ‘You will never get advertising. You are wasting your time.’ I had been taken aback by the comment, and by the vehemence with which it had been delivered. I had thought—naively as it turned out—that if we worked harder, were more original, pitched better, etc., we would be able to crack advertiser resistance to Ms. Now here was Steinem not only saying it wasn’t possible, but almost sounding as if she did not want us to. For the first time, it dawned on me that she would never be able to let go, and so long as we did not succeed there was a chance for her. And then Dale Lang had come along, she had been able to set aside her revulsion and grab the opportunity he presented. Now that she had Ms. back, she seemed to be trying to expunge those years when her baby had slipped out of her hands. If they never existed, perhaps the pain they caused would go away. At times she talked as if she had never left. She told the Guardian in 2015 that she had once sent [Susan] Brownmiller to cover a domestic violence case in which ‘a man beat his wife and killed their baby and that Brownmiller had filed a piece for Ms. that blamed the mother’. ‘Not even the legal system came to this conclusion!’ said Steinem.17 This was a very unreliable recollection of what had happened at Ms. over the Hedda Nussbaum case, when I had commissioned the Brownmiller article and Steinem had tried to stop it being published.
In August 1991 I received a warm handwritten letter from the journalist Susan Faludi thanking me for my letter in which I had congratulated her on winning a Pulitzer Prize and saying she’d call me in September when she was in New York so we could get together. This was part of an exchange of letters with Faludi that had begun when she had asked me to sign a release, agreeing she could quote from the interview she had done with me for her forthcoming book about the backlash against women’s equality in America. So I was astonished when I received my copy of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women to find more than three pages attacking ‘my’ Ms. Billed as the next great book of the women’s movement and documenting the ways in which the achievements of the 1970s women’s movement were being undermined or reversed, Backlash quickly became a must-read in feminist circles. Faludi worked for the Wall Street Journal so she knew how to get information, marshall facts and report accurately—she’d just won a Pulitzer for a series in the Wall Street Journal—but Backlash was not just factually wrong about so much of what I had done, there was a tone to the writing that made it sound almost malicious. Why? I was stunned because in my several interviews with Faludi she had given no clue she was going to attack me in this fashion.
Faludi’s description of Ms. under my stewardship suggested I covered nothing but celebrities and that every issue was a celebration of fashion and makeup: ‘The magazine that had once investigated sexual harassment, domestic violence, the prescription-drug industry and the treatment of women in third-world countries now dashed off gushing tributes to Hollywood stars, launched a fashion column, and delivered the real big news—pearls are back.’18 She ‘reported’ that I had ‘pulled’ a photo of Hedda Nussbaum from a cover ‘to pacify advertisers’, and noted that now Ms. was not-for-profit again and could endorse candidates: ‘Instead’, Faludi wrote, ‘the magazine wound up endorsing beauty products.’19 She compared me with the editor of Good Housekeeping, more interested in upscaling the magazine than in covering issues. No mention of our Washington Bureau, our regular political coverage, our tough reporting on women’s health, violence against women, abortion and countless other topics.
As a journalist with a financial newspaper you’d think Faludi might have had some appreciation of the business pain our little media group was suffering because of the Sassy boycott and its impact on Ms. but no. Her take on what happened? ‘Finally, with the advertiser exodus threatening to push Ms. into financial collapse, Summers gave up,’ she wrote. ‘She turned the female-run publication over to male publisher Dale Lang …’20 I could not let this stand. It was inaccurate, it was cruel and it was going to be read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Once again, I called on Robbie. His initial tough letter of complaint to Random House landed a few days before the Time magazine cover promoting the book appeared. ‘Fighting the backlash against feminism,’ was the main cover line. ‘Susan Faludi and Gloria Steinem sound the call to arms.’ It made them sound like co-authors and the accompanying photograph suggested it really was the two of them against the world. In the weeks that followed, there was extensive correspondence between Random House and Robbie. Initially they merely offered an apology but then agreed to make substantial changes. Susan Faludi had not meant to attack me, her publisher said. She ‘feels badly’ about it. She would write a letter of apology. Ultimately, a very large number of changes were made to the section about Ms. and me in all subsequent US hardcover and paperback and all foreign editions. I was not satisfied because the new version still badly misrepresented what I had tried to do with Ms., and the tone was still sneering, but Robbie’s letters had already cost me several thousand dollars and I could not afford to take it to court. There was nothing more I could do but I was very unhappy. I still am. Faludi’s letter of apology must have been lost in the mail, because I never received it.
On 5 April 1992 several hundred thousand people marched through the streets of Washington DC, the route taking them past the US Supreme Court which was about to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania state law that would restrict rights to abortion. It was one of the largest marches ever seen in the national capital and it culminated in a rally at a park where a huge crowd gathered to hear speaker after speaker denounce the proposed threats to women’s right to choose. Gloria Steinem was one of the speakers, but during her address she departed from the abortion script to talk about the magazine: ‘We got Ms. back!’ she yelled at the crowd—who roared back their appreciation.
It was almost two years now since the relaunch of Ms., so Steinem had had her magazine ‘back’ now for almost as long as we had ‘had’ it. Except, I wondered, did she really have the magazine ‘back’ when Dale Lang was the owner and could ultimately call the shots? It was no longer my problem but still I could not rest in the face of yet another public denigration of me and what I had done. On 22 April I wrote her an angry letter, pointing out that if Fairfax had not come along in 1987 Ms., with its more than $8 million in debt, was most unlikely to have survived. I also got a few other things off my chest. Why, I asked, were she and Robin Morgan continuing their attacks on me, in the magazine and around the traps in New York, accusing me of having removed all ‘substance’ from Ms. by introducing ‘gardening’, celebrity covers and beauty and fashion editorial? I reminded her that Ms. had run celebrity covers and articles on fashion and beauty long before I came along. She might want to pretend those two and a half years never existed, I wrote, but then so would I: ‘Some parts of me, too, would like to be able to expunge the memory of what was in many ways a nightmare and which continues to have unpleasant consequences,’ I wrote. ‘It was bad enough having to deal with bankers who were inflexible, advertisers who were unyielding and fundamentalists who were determined to put us out of business. I did not expect, after that was all over, to be subjected to a campaign of denigration by mean-spirited feminists.’ She never replied.
In mid-2012, the City of New York hosted a morning tea function at City Hall to mark the 40th birthday of Ms. magazine. Presumably the City did this because Ms. had been founded in NYC, but it was now based in Los Angeles and had been for eleven years since its acquisition in 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation. This women’s activist group was run by the admirable Ellie Smeal, who I knew from when I was at Ms. She had served three terms as president of the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and she and her successor, Molly Yard, visited me early on. I was impressed by their pragmatism, their clear focus on the need for tangible wins and to protect rights, such as abortion, that were under threat. We quickly concluded a membership deal with NOW that would have given us an additional 150,000 subscribers by January 1990. Smeal had established the Feminist Majority as a lobbying vehicle in 1987 with the aid of a $15 million gift from feminist philanthropist Peg Yorkin and, more than a decade later, had been savvy enough to see that Ms. could be an effective mouthpiece to serve the organisation’s lobbying and activism.
Although Steinem and Morgan remained on the masthead of the new Ms., they did not appear to have day-to-day influence, judging by the generous article the magazine’s online news service published upon Betty Friedan’s death in 2006. Nor was there any antipathy to me; even today, back copies of ‘my’ Ms. are offered for sale on their website. I was visiting New York at the time of the City Hall morning tea and Letty Pogrebin got me invited. She and I had stayed in touch over the more than three decades. The gathering was small and characteristically laden with symbolism, comprising a bunch of much older women, the founders, and a group of girls representing the future. A large square Wonder Woman cake formed the centerpiece around which everyone gathered. Gloria Steinem was there, of course, but she studiously avoided any eye or other contact with me while she posed for the cameras, signed autographs and talked to fawning fans. Should I confront her? I debated with myself but then I decided: what was the point? This magazine was nothing to do with me anymore. I felt no nostalgia, or regrets. I was unfettered. I walked away.