The Only Girl

One day in late summer 2007, a weird blast from the past showed up in my e-mail, an e-vite to the fortieth reunion of ex-employees who had worked at Rolling Stone in its first ten years (thus the X in RSX, meaning both "ten" and "ex"), from 1967 to 1977. It would be held in San Francisco, where the magazine was then headquartered. I had been there, all right, in the early seventies, my name on the masthead as contributing editor along with Hunter Thompson and Joe Eszterhas, Jerry Hopkins, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Gene Marine, and the Timothys—Ferris, Cahill, and Crouse—and editors David Felton, Ben Fong-Torres, Paul Scanlon, Charles Perry, and Grover Lewis. And me. I was the only girl writer on the masthead when I landed there and would remain so for three years, until editor in chief Jann Wenner took my name off.

No question that I was going to the reunion, even though I lived in New York and I'd have to fly across the country. I had to go to LA anyway on TV business, I told myself, and San Francisco was sort of on my way. Still, I blew off college reunions, even, later, my big five-oh in May 2017; I had no interest in going, no curiosity, no loose ends. Both professors I loved were dead.

But Rolling Stone? I found myself yearning to be there the way you'd yearn for a long-lost lover. One you'd never really gotten over. Never thought about. Didn't want to think about, I should say. I liked telling people I'd been at the magazine in those late, great days but didn't go into much detail—not to them or to myself either—such as why and how it all ended, and I'd fled the Bay Area to start my life again somewhere else. But now here it all was with the e-vite, staring me in the face; such a high point for me, professionally and personally, and then such a low point. Why did I blow it? Did I blow it? Why did I care? What happened back there?

The party was downstairs from the old Rolling Stone offices on Third Street, a computer-game company by day that had been rented for nostalgia's sake, its workers gone home for the night and the dark, cavernous space now echoing with reunion laughter and cries of recognition. And it was nostalgic to be back in that building. Nostalgic but also weird to find myself standing at the edge of a chattering throng of people I didn't know who were falling into each other's arms with happiness. Who were they? What was I doing here anyway? Except now, in shafts of harsh overhead light, I began to make out faces from the past I did know.

There, in fact, was Alan Rinzler, who spotted me too and was making his way to me, his Jew-fro now gone snow white, but still as greyhound-thin and handsome as the day I met him, when he was publisher of Straight Arrow, Rolling Stone's book division, and I'd come here to this very building looking for a job, any job.

"Hey!" he said, smiling ear to ear. "Robin, meet my son. I always tell him you saved my life." (A son, I'd years later learn, who was a daughter going through a phase.) Alan's attitude tonight was a relief, because I'd never known how he felt about the long-ago Sunday when I'd found him a weeping, stumbling drunk in his house in the Berkeley Hills, dumped all his liquor down the sink, and driven him to the Herrick Hospital loony bin. He was a psychologist specializing in writers now and, like half the people at the reunion, it seemed, in AA or some such and drinking Perrier.

Like David Felton, who now appeared, pale and pasty-skinned as always, glass of sparkling water in hand, dressed in a shiny, garish sport coat typical of him, the man who had been my editor and whom I'd loved and slept with and run away to Chicago with—until he ditched me to go back to his wife and kids in LA—and who even now I could hardly bear to tear myself away from.

There were other girls at the party, grown-ups now, who had also been on the masthead but listed farther down the column as editorial assistants, which was pretty much all girls could expect to be in those days, especially in the boys'-club atmosphere that was then Rolling Stone, girls like me who'd gone to good colleges and were drawn to publishing but had landed, for one reason or another, in the wild and woolly Bay Area, where the music, and the magazine it spawned, came from.

Sarah Lazin, Harriet Fier, Christine Doudna—pretty girls then, beautiful women now, who'd risen to editorships and heads of departments at the magazine and moved on to stellar careers elsewhere and, like me, had ended up in Manhattan, Sarah and Christine in my very neighborhood. I remembered their eyes on me way back then when I'd come to the office to hand in a story or meet with my editor/lover in his cramped little cubicle, regarding me with what I thought was suspicion. Did everyone know about me and Felton? Did they think I'd slept my way onto the pages of Rolling Stone?

I'd learn later that they didn't really know or care because pretty much everybody there was sleeping with pretty much everybody else.

Jann Wenner wasn't at the reunion. Someone told me he hadn't been invited. Was that because he had fired and/or antagonized so many of us, even gone to court with a few? Or because, as he'd told one of the three on the RSX committee, if he came it would be all about him? Which probably would have been true. Even when he hung out with everybody he seemed to keep himself separate and apart—and above—and you found yourself always holding your breath a little around him. Even when you see him today, as I did not long ago at a Bette Midler Parks Conservatory benefit in New York, he still seems bigger than life, or bigger than you, anyway, a star.

Really, it was just as well for the tenor of the event that Jann wasn't there and we could relax and have fun. As longtime Rolling Stone writer Chris Hodenfield said in the reunion newsletter, "Magazine write-ups all focused on Jann, but to me it was the hooligan spirit in the hallways," a vibe that sprang from hard work, long hours, and a sense that something really good was being created. It made for the genuine camaraderie so evident here tonight, all of it coalescing in the shared experience of the unpredictable: Hunter Thompson in his fishing hat and madras shorts, muttering and swilling beer and ranging around the office with his Marx Brothers stride; John and Yoko sweeping through, stopping at a desk in the subscription department to shake a clerk's hand; a new-hire editorial assistant ushered into an editor's lair, handed a short straw, offered a line of cocaine laid out on the desk, and told, "Welcome to Rolling Stone."

Nobody ever offered me a line of coke when I was there—not at the office, anyway—although Oscar Acosta, Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing "Samoan" sidekick and attorney, did bring a small mountain of the stuff when he came with Annie Leibovitz to a party for my twenty-seventh birthday at a friend's house in Berkeley.

We'd all been asked to write something for the reunion newsletter, published in newsprint in the tabloid format of Rolling Stone. Fond memories, favorite assignments, inside stories about celebrities, embarrassing incidents…

Here's how mine began:

The incident with the cops happened, all right, but I wasn't there. It happened on the first night of the conference with just Annie, Hunter, and David. I was in the car with them on the second night, when wives and girlfriends and one or two girls from the office had been invited and when Hunter made that crazy ride again. But I'd heard the story many times and seen Annie's photos, so when I wrote that piece for the reunion rag, I could have sworn I'd been along that night.

My choice for best story I'd written was the very first of mine to appear in Rolling Stone. I'd been sent, I wrote in the newsletter, "to Dennis Hopper's house in New Mexico to see The Last Movie, his last for a while. He was such a beast, so cruel, so high, I was so frightened by the whole scene (though everything frightened me in those days), the piece was so good."

It was good. So good that it's in a compendium of "Ten Interviews that Shook Hollywood," mine listed third after stories by Truman Capote (on Marlon Brando in the New Yorker, November 1957) and Rex Reed (on Warren Beatty in Esquire, October 1967); so good that after it was published, Joan Didion, my hero, asked a mutual friend to phone and tell me how much she liked it and, soon after, an editor at Esquire called the RS office to ask, "Who's the new bitch?"

Bitch? Really? I was so thrilled about Esquire calling, I never stopped to think about what it meant to be called a bitch. Is that what I was? It is true that, as it happened, the Dennis Hopper story and pretty much every story I wrote from then on at the very least stung my subjects and at the most cost them their careers or landed them in prison.

Which brings me to something else that happened not long after the Rolling Stone reunion. I was packing up my mother's things to move her into an assisted-living complex (where she didn't want to go) and came across a photograph in a cheap drugstore frame on a shelf in her TV room: a black-and-white photo of a beautiful young woman in a bikini top, her dark hair long and messy, her flesh juicy, her smile beatific.

I'd never seen the photo before and had no memory of its being taken or of who took it, but I could see that it was a photograph of me. Who was this girl who I knew was myself but had absolutely no memory of ever being? Why was she smiling?

The photo never made it to assisted living. I took it home and put it on my own shelf, where it remained a mystery. The background was out of focus but I knew it had to have been taken on a beach, and I could think of only two possibilities: a wild hippie beach in Mexico where I'd spent a month in 1970 with a boyfriend who had a Nikon, and Canochet Beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island, where my parents had a cabana.

Finally, it occurred to me to take the photograph out of its frame and look on the back, and there it was, the reason I looked so happy: the photo had been taken by the family dentist, friend and photographer, the summer of the year my name was added to the masthead of Rolling Stone. I had always wanted to be a writer (maybe not a journalist, but still), and now I was—published, paid, read, praised. The year was 1971 and I'd just turned twenty-six.

Looking at the photograph now, knowing it was Canochet, brings a cascade of memories, some difficult to face, chief among them the last time I was there, a hot day in June 2012, five years after the Rolling Stone reunion and six months after my mother's death alone in assisted living.

My brother and I had left our spouses in the car in the parking lot across the street to read the Sunday Times and mind the dog, and the two of us paid to enter the public beach. We went through the turnstile, walked across the wooden boardwalk and down the steps to the hot sand, took off our shoes, and, barefoot now and in our street clothes, picked our way through the umbrellas and beach towels and sweaty, half-naked Rhode Islanders to the water's edge, where we headed north toward Narrow River on the hard, wet sand.

My brother carried a Dartmouth bookstore shopping bag that looked like it might contain a weighty picnic lunch but in fact held the crematory tin with our mother's ashes. Waves crashing to our right, we continued up the crowded public beach to the sands of the less-populated, members-only Canochet Beach Club my parents had belonged to and where the photograph had been taken, and then, farther up the beach, passed by the tony Dunes Club, where, when we were growing up, as my mother pointed out a thousand times, they didn't allow Jews like us.

We finally came to the dunes at Narrow River where it empties into Narragansett Bay and sat down on the low, muddy riverbank. Surreptitiously, because what we were about to do wasn't legal, we dug a hole with our hands in the mud of the bank beneath our knees. With little ceremony, furtively glancing over our shoulders, we took the tin out of the shopping bag, opened it, removed the plastic bag containing our mother, and emptied her oily residue into the hole.

What kind of mother gets this kind of send-off? And what kind of children give it? What kind of daughter? We told ourselves that we were burying her here because this was where she had been happiest. And that was true. My father was a greeting-card salesman with a route that sometimes took him to southern Rhode Island, and some days he would join her on the beach after he'd finished his calls. And even years after he died, at seventy-four in 1984, she'd recall how, sunning in her low beach chair near the crashing waves, she'd keep an eye on the faraway canopied Cabana Club entrance until she saw him come in, her husband, Ira, trim and handsome in a pale poplin suit that set off his hazel eyes, loosening his tie with one hand, smiling and waving at her with the other as he headed for the cabana to change his clothes.

We all loved my father—our family and the friends that always gathered around him—and we had all been happy on that beach. He'd make us gin and tonics with cut-up limes in little plastic glasses, and my mother would set out salty cocktail peanuts; there'd be laughter, jokes told, some in Yiddish, then we'd all go after-cocktail bodysurfing in the bracing green evening waves. That year, 1971? Would Ronnie B., my best friend from birth whom I loved more than anyone and whose parents shared a cabana with mine, have been there that day? Or would she have been locked up again in McLean, the private mental hospital near Boston made famous by James Taylor and his brother? Why did I survive and flourish and not her? Why did I have to be the last of us who saw her in LA in 1979 on what we all afterward realized was a farewell trip cross-country in the van her parents had bought her, stopping at my apartment the very week before, at Leo Carrillo State Park (named for the conservationist/actor who played the Cisco Kid's sidekick, Pancho), she put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger?

After college in 1967, I left Providence and over the next few years worked a variety of menial jobs. I went from Martha's Vineyard to Boston to New York to Chicago and finally to Berkeley and San Francisco with detours to New Mexico, Mexico, and the California coast from LA to Mendocino. I lived in sin (as it was called then), smoked dope, dropped acid, and hiked with my boyfriend into the Jemez Mountains, where we slept in a cave and, naked and on all fours, grazed on the watercress that grew around a hot spring. I waitressed, made jewelry, mooched off that same rich boyfriend. In short, I was not so different from any of the other girls at Rolling Stone.

At last at Rolling Stone I finally found work that I loved and success—until it all went to shit. Which brings me back to the little piece I wrote for the reunion tabloid, recounting in vague terms the end of my time at Rolling Stone:

What's not written there was that after Jann told me he was taking my name off the masthead—kind of like a sergeant being stripped of his stripes—and I'd shrugged and said okay, he'd put his arms around me and given me a big hug and said, "But do me a favor, will you, Robin? Never write about me, okay?"

Well, sorry, but that's part of what I have to do, write about everything, including Jann, starting with the three minutes of our first meeting and up to and beyond the one night I spent with him in his room at the Sherry-Netherland (the details of which are blurry, probably because of the quaaludes).

And I also have to write about what I said I was saving for that tell-all memoir I'd never write, the story of why I didn't do the Kennedy piece: because I had crossed a journalistic line and gone to bed with an interview subject (okay, it was Robert Kennedy Jr. in his dorm room at Harvard), and I felt I couldn't write the kind of truthful story I prided myself on without revealing that. And I wasn't about to reveal it. Not to a million-plus readers. Not even to Jann as an explanation of why he wasn't getting the pages. Not to pretty much anyone at all, except maybe strangers in bars or at parties when I was trying to explain why I wasn't on the masthead anymore.

It's all so poignant. Also ironic and paradoxical. Because at that point I was sleeping with everybody. We all were—women's lib, free love, pre-AIDS, and all that—so why wouldn't I jump at the chance to go to bed with this tall, handsome, long-haired boy, a fucking Kennedy, for God's sake? Well, because you're not supposed to. But that's the ironic paradox. Because I think it was also some kind of journalistic curiosity and an instinct for story that made me make that leap into a subject's bed, a leap I'd never taken before (unless you count a David Cassidy roadie, which I don't).

Because what I learned about the Kennedy male, this one, anyway (and isn't this sort of thing, like, genetic?), spending the night on that vast and undulating waterbed on the floor of that college dorm room with the falconry equipment displayed on the wall and the small bust of the slain father on the credenza, seemed to be what lay at the very foundation of the Kennedy male's power, confidence, his very Kennedy-ness.

Also, in addition to way-too-personal details, I'd learned uncomfortable truths about the kids—for example, earlier that night, I had gone with this one to a street corner off Harvard Square so he could score drugs—and I felt the Kennedys had had enough horror in their lives without my adding to it on the pages of Rolling Stone.

And there's more of the cruel irony. Because after the magazine moved to New York in the late 1970s, Jacqueline Kennedy became a frequent visitor to the offices and a valued, much-vaunted pal of social-climbing, star-fucking Jann (a description even he would cop to), and no way would she have done or been so if I had fulfilled my obligation and actually forked over the Kennedy piece Jann had so wanted from me so many years before.

Ah, well, the whole thing had become a big ball of no fun anyway, both personally and professionally. After Israel and though I still occasionally wrote for Rolling Stone and other magazines, I was lost and floundering. Finally, in 1975, I left the Bay Area for good and went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop to begin my life again.

I didn't read Rolling Stone much anymore and I forgot those heady years—well, most of the time. There was one cold winter day when I was in Manhattan and found myself lingering on the sidewalk outside the building where the magazine had its offices, looking like Mildred Pierce in that movie, pulling my coat around me for warmth, hoping (vainly, as it turned out) to catch a glimpse, maybe have a conversation with Jann, someone, anyone…

And that brings me finally to the end of the reunion article, which about sums up and becomes a sort of prelude to the story of myself I didn't know I was going to need to tell but am about to.