Magazine Divas--The First Pants Suit at the Office

 ( I recently read an amusing article about the history of women wearing pants suits, slacks, bloomers, whatever you call them, and I thought I'd re-visit this post about my early working days at Ladies Home Journal when we all were shocked to see a stylish female editor walk in wearing a pants suit.  I first posted this in November of  2009 and saw my first pants suit at the office in the mid-1960's
.)

(Looking for an illustration for this post, I googled for images from the great 1959 film --and novel by Rona Jaffe-- “The Best of Everything” about young women who work in a NYC publishing firm—The diva editor is played by Joan Crawford. They suffer terrible fates until they realize that they will be happier in quiet domesticity as housewives instead of living a miserable life as career women.

I was thrilled to find the image above—our heroine Hope Lange standing on Park Avenue in front of Lever House, because that was where I worked at my very first job. For six months after grad school I worked in PR for Lever Bros. I quit six months later after my (male) boss in P. R. kept taking credit for my work, including the coup of getting a news article positive to our company in the NY press.)


After the month as a MLLE. guest editor, having developed a taste for caviar, I revised my plans for the future. I’d return to the Midwest, finish college, and then head straight back to New York City and a magazine job. Maybe they’d even hire me at MLLE! I wanted more Lester Lanin dances, Central Park photo shoots, strolling at night in the Village with Peter S., the young man who introduced me to my first Communist (in the White Horse Bar) and taught me how to eat an artichoke.

I had not yet realized that the women on the staffs of Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle-- all the Conde Nasties-- had to have trust funds in order to pay for food, rent and expensive clothes. No one was making a living wage. (And no one, let’s be honest, is ever allowed to dress in the clothes from the Fashion Closet despite what you see on “Sex and the City” and "The Devil Wears Prada". You can borrow a dress for a working night out, but you have to return it.)

Three years later, in 1964, I was back in Manhattan looking for a job, armed with my Master’s in journalism. I tried out for a post as fiction-reader at the Saturday Evening Post and my written tryout was labeled “brilliant”, but when the legendary fiction editor Rust Hills met me and learned that I had neglected to read "Henderson the Rain King", I was out the door in minutes. So I settled for a post as editorial assistant in the Ladies Home Journal food department and considered myself lucky.

I was paid $80 a week and worked with two other young women in a windowless room next to the LHJ Test Kitchen. Shortly after the Beatles invaded New York in 1964, our kitchen became a popular gathering spot because word got around that you could scrape the insides of banana peels, toast the result and get high smoking it. Mellow yellow! We tested, but it didn’t work.

My boss was a celebrity food editor—Poppy Cannon. She was known for many things including "The Can-Opener Cookbook" and her multiple husbands, among them Walter White, the founder of the NAACP and Chef Phillipe of the Waldorf. Her sister was the designer, Anne Fogarty. (Since we’re talking the Pleistocene era here, I don’t expect you to recognize any of those names.)

Poppy was, as she often told us, the first woman elected to the Chevaliers de Tastevin. She would occasionally organize wine-tastings in the LHJ food kitchens, and I would assist. She would take a mouthful of wine, roll it around in her mouth like the connoisseur she was, then spit it out into a silver cup before cleansing the palate with a little bread and going on to the next wine. My job, which did not really require a master’s degree or a Phi Beta Kappa key, was to hold the cup into which Poppy spit.

Poppy was a glamorous and, yes, Amazonian woman who liked to wear long, sweeping dresses and matching turbans which increased her height to well over six feet. She often displayed various medals on her ample chest, pinned to sashes like royalty. She was, in fact, very sweet and not intimidating like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, but Poppy was rather needy and helpless.

She often didn’t feel like coming into the office, so I would have to go to her Park Avenue home. While she reclined on a chaise longue, wearing one of a dazzling wardrobe of peignoirs and muumuus, she would dictate her column for the magazine while I took notes. During the whole time I knew Poppy, the stove and oven in her kitchen did not work, so she would send me out to get lunch for both of us. And usually she had no cash on hand, so she’d tell me to expense it.

In the end, I wrote many of her articles myself, because, after a while, I got the hang of her uniquely florid style. Poppy also once invited me and a colleague out for a weekend at her house in Danbury. We were driven by a car and chauffeur, but it turned out that we were there to clean the house and serve at the table.

In those days, I was at an editorial luncheon when some of the women began reminiscing about the "Delineator". What, I asked, was the Delineator? That was like Amanda in The Devil Wears Prada saying “Can you spell Gabbana for me?” The journalists fell about laughing and sneering (“She’s never heard of the Delineator!”) and informed me it was one of the finest magazines ever published for women. When I looked it up later, I learned that it was published between1873 and 1937 and went out of business four years before I was born.

In my early years on MLLE and LHJ, I met a number of glamorous, larger-than-life women from the post-Pleistocene generation whom I call the Best of Everything editors-- because they are the ones Rona Jaffe was writing about in her book. Their names belong on the roll of visionary, intelligent, glamorous and sometimes impossible women who carried the torch in an era when Ladies Home Journal staff members were given aprons with the slogan “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”

There was Bruce Clerke, my personal editor at MLLE, who suffered my Midwestern naiveté with great good humor and tact, as when I tried to drink the shrimp cocktail at La Fonda del Sol during our first lunch. Bruce was a beautiful southern belle, (a college Azalea Queen, if I remember correctly). Perhaps her trademark silver hair inspired Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Miranda Priestly.

The fiction editor at LHJ was Phyllis Levy, a slender and vivacious woman who entranced a series of men but, to my knowledge, never married. (Her good friend Rona Jaffe wrote about Phyllis’s chameleon personality in the story “Rima the Bird Girl.”) One morning, as I was answering reader mail in my closet off the test kitchens, Phyllis dashed in clutching a bottle of champagne and a tin of caviar. “Put this in the refrigerator,” she commanded. “I met the most fabulous man and he’s flying me to Paris tonight.”

And the late Lois Benjamin Gould was the first editor to stride into the office wearing a pants suit. She looked thin, tragic and beautiful. Our jaws dropped. Anything that Lois did, we knew, must be the Next Big Thing. I believe this was after Lois’s husband had died and she dropped out of sight for about a year while she wrote Such Good Friends about discovering her husband’s adultery, another “fiction” book, like The Bell Jar and The Devil Wears Prada that was really faction.

At this time I was sharing an apartment on 14th Street with three young women, all in some form of journalism. Two were researchers on news magazines and, it’s true, the female researchers were expected to travel with the reporter, to help, research, support and socialize with him, but never to write. In those days, believe it or not, nobody got by-lines on the articles in Time, except for columnists. Nowadays, everybody who has anything to do with a piece gets his/her name at the end. Which is only fair.

We had fun, living in that sordid apartment with cardboard furniture and orange-crate shelves. We each chipped in a dollar a day for food. When Time closed on Friday nights, there was always a big buffet on the top floor and our Time/Life researcher roommate would often bring home leftovers. There was no swag for magazine assistants-–certainly not the way there is today--but I remember one Christmas when Restaurant Associates sent me a box made of chocolate with my named spelled out on the lid. Once in a while the Fashion Department would sell off clothes at a bargain-basement price and I snagged a dress that was originally worn by Twiggy in a fashion spread. When there was a subway strike, we’d compete to see who could walk to mid-town on time without stopping for a Chock Full O’Nuts doughnut on the way.

No doubt we were abused, underpaid, overworked and discriminated against because we were women, but that was before we’d ever heard terms like “glass ceiling” , “women’s liberation” and “car service” or read manifestos like TDWP. We didn’t even realize that we were storing up fodder for future exposés.

Footnote about Anna Wintour: I’ve never met her, but when I first had an article published in Vogue, she sent me a handwritten note saying that she liked it. I thought that was a very gracious thing to do.
#

A Movie about the Barbizon Hotel’s Glory Days

 Four years ago on A Rolling Crone, inspired by seeing “The Devil Wears Prada”, I wrote a post called “Those Fabulous Magazine Divas –A Memoir.”

It told tales of eccentric and glamorous magazine editors I’ve worked for, long before the days of Anna Wintour (the current Vogue Editor who was allegedly the template for Meryl Streep’s character in the film.)

In that post I wrote about my first taste of glossy fashion magazine work—when I came to New York as a Mademoiselle Guest Editor in 1961. I was one of 20 college girls who won the contest that year and were housed at the Barbizon Hotel at 63^rd and Lexington for the month of June during their dizzy whirl of activities at Mlle. Magazine.

About six months later, in May of 2010, I again mentioned the Barbizon in a post called  “Bring Back the Mlle. Guest Editor Contest!”  in which I made the point that there are no opportunities today for young women with talent in writing or art to get a foot up the ladder of success-- only reality shows which encourage bad behavior and drama instead of actual talent.

Those reminiscences about the Barbizon brought me to the attention of Melodie Bryant, who is a New York-based documentary filmmaker with 20 years of experience in television and film, as well as a composer who has provided sound tracks for many top television shows.

Melodie interviewed me by phone about my stay at the Barbizon and then on camera when I was visiting New York last year.  During her research she has flown from coast to coast interviewing women of a “certain age” who remember the experiences that gave the Barbizon such a glamorous aura and mystique, especially during the forties, fifties and sixties.

 The Barbizon, beginning in1928 as a residence for single women, attracted the best and most beautiful girls from respectable families, young women who came to New York to conquer the city.  Parents insisted their darling daughters stay at the Barbizon, secure in the knowledge that their morals, dress, behavior and social life would be carefully monitored.  The rules were strict: no men were allowed above the first floor. (You can guess how well that worked.)

Former residents of the Barbizon, in addition to all the Mlle. guest editors and the students at Katie Gibbs secretarial school and the Eileen Ford Models, included Grace Kelly, Ali MacGraw, Joan Didion, Nancy Reagan, Joan Crawford,  Dorothy McGuire, Liza Minelli, Cybil Shepherd, Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson, Betsey Johnson and, famously, Sylvia Plath, who wrote The Bell Jar about her stint as a Guest Editor in 1953 during which she had a nervous breakdown, threw her fashionable new clothes off the roof of the “Amazon Hotel”, then went home to Connecticut and her first suicide attempt.  (What she published as fiction was completely faithful to her actual experiences at the Barbizon, as Melodie has found out by interviewing some of Plath’s Barbizon buddies.)

I can’t wait to see the finished documentary, because in talking to Melodie I’m getting hints of stories even stranger than Sylvia Plath’s—tales of men smuggled upstairs, rebellion against the strict parietal rules, even suicides leaping from the Art Deco roof terrace.

Now Melodie has prepared a trailer of her film, which she will post on sites like Kickstarter  to raise interest and funds for its completion and distribution.  I think it’s a good trailer, which effectively evokes the aura of the Barbizon in its glory days—even if it does include a clip from my interview which leaves me devoutly wishing I’d at least had my hair and makeup done first! 

Here's the Barbizon movie trailer

Daughter Eleni wrote on Facebook: Watch my mama, Joan P. Gage, talk about the Barbizon hotel in it's early 60s heyday. Here's a companion drinking game: take a swig of sauvignon blanc every time she says "slacks"

Eleni (and everyone else who has seen the trailer and is under 70 years old) thinks both my Midwest accent and my use of the word “slacks” are side-splittingly funny.

Then last weekend I did a two-hour telephone interview with a young woman from California, the thirty-something author of well-reviewed novels, who is researching the Barbizon in its heyday as the background for her next book.

In 1981 the Barbizon began to allow men in as residents and in 2006 the building was converted into condominiums.  And in 2012 it was declared a New York landmark. Although its glory days are long past, I think the Barbizon is about to have another moment in the sun.

(For more information about the  upcoming documentary,  see www.Barbizonmovie.com.)

Magazine Divas Part 2--The Party's Over

(Looking for an illustration for this post, I googled for images from the great 1959 film --and novel by Rona Jaffe-- “The Best of Everything” about young women who work in a NYC publishing firm—The diva editor is played by Joan Crawford. They suffer terrible fates until they realize that they will be happier in quiet domesticity as housewives instead of living a miserable life as career women.

I was thrilled to find the image above—our heroine Hope Lange standing on Park Avenue in front of Lever House, because that was where I worked at my very first job. For six months after grad school I worked in PR for Lever Bros. I quit six months later after my (male) boss in P. R. kept taking credit for my work, including the coup of getting a news article positive to our company in the NY press.)


After the month as a MLLE. guest editor, having developed a taste for caviar, I revised my plans for the future. I’d return to the Midwest, finish college, and then head straight back to New York City and a magazine job. Maybe they’d even hire me at MLLE! I wanted more Lester Lanin dances, Central Park photo shoots, strolling at night in the Village with Peter S., the young man who introduced me to my first Communist (in the White Horse Bar) and taught me how to eat an artichoke.

I had not yet realized that the women on the staffs of Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle-- all the Conde Nasties-- had to have trust funds in order to pay for food, rent and expensive clothes. No one was making a living wage. (And no one, let’s be honest, is ever allowed to dress in the clothes from the Fashion Closet despite what you see on “Sex and the City” and "The Devil Wears Prada". You can borrow a dress for a working night out, but you have to return it.)

Three years later, in 1964, I was back in Manhattan looking for a job, armed with my Master’s in journalism. I tried out for a post as fiction-reader at the Saturday Evening Post and my written tryout was labeled “brilliant”, but when the legendary fiction editor Rust Hills met me and learned that I had neglected to read "Henderson the Rain King", I was out the door in minutes. So I settled for a post as editorial assistant in the Ladies Home Journal food department and considered myself lucky.

I was paid $80 a week and worked with two other young women in a windowless room next to the LHJ Test Kitchen. Shortly after the Beatles invaded New York in 1964, our kitchen became a popular gathering spot because word got around that you could scrape the insides of banana peels, toast the result and get high smoking it. Mellow yellow! We tested, but it didn’t work.

My boss was a celebrity food editor—Poppy Cannon. She was known for many things including "The Can-Opener Cookbook" and her multiple husbands, among them Walter White, the founder of the NAACP and Chef Phillipe of the Waldorf. Her sister was the designer, Anne Fogarty. (Since we’re talking the Pleistocene era here, I don’t expect you to recognize any of those names.)

Poppy was, as she often told us, the first woman elected to the Chevaliers de Tastevin. She would occasionally organize wine-tastings in the LHJ food kitchens, and I would assist. She would take a mouthful of wine, roll it around in her mouth like the connoisseur she was, then spit it out into a silver cup before cleansing the palate with a little bread and going on to the next wine. My job, which did not really require a master’s degree or a Phi Beta Kappa key, was to hold the cup into which Poppy spit.

Poppy was a glamorous and, yes, Amazonian woman who liked to wear long, sweeping dresses and matching turbans which increased her height to well over six feet. She often displayed various medals on her ample chest, pinned to sashes like royalty. She was, in fact, very sweet and not intimidating like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, but Poppy was rather needy and helpless.

She often didn’t feel like coming into the office, so I would have to go to her Park Avenue home. While she reclined on a chaise longue, wearing one of a dazzling wardrobe of peignoirs and muumuus, she would dictate her column for the magazine while I took notes. During the whole time I knew Poppy, the stove and oven in her kitchen did not work, so she would send me out to get lunch for both of us. And usually she had no cash on hand, so she’d tell me to expense it.

In the end, I wrote many of her articles myself, because, after a while, I got the hang of her uniquely florid style. Poppy also once invited me and a colleague out for a weekend at her house in Danbury. We were driven by a car and chauffeur, but it turned out that we were there to clean the house and serve at the table.

In those days, I was at an editorial luncheon when some of the women began reminiscing about the "Delineator". What, I asked, was the Delineator? That was like Amanda in The Devil Wears Prada saying “Can you spell Gabbana for me?” The journalists fell about laughing and sneering (“She’s never heard of the Delineator!”) and informed me it was one of the finest magazines ever published for women. When I looked it up later, I learned that it was published between1873 and 1937 and went out of business four years before I was born.
In my early years on MLLE and LHJ, I met a number of glamorous, larger-than-life women from the post-Pleistocene generation whom I call the Best of Everything editors-- because they are the ones Rona Jaffe was writing about in her book. Their names belong on the roll of visionary, intelligent, glamorous and sometimes impossible women who carried the torch in an era when Ladies Home Journal staff members were given aprons with the slogan “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”

There was Bruce Clerke, my personal editor at MLLE, who suffered my Midwestern naiveté with great good humor and tact, as when I tried to drink the shrimp cocktail at La Fonda del Sol during our first lunch. Bruce was a beautiful southern belle, (a college Azalea Queen, if I remember correctly). Perhaps her trademark silver hair inspired Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Miranda Priestly.

The fiction editor at LHJ was Phyllis Levy, a slender and vivacious woman who entranced a series of men but, to my knowledge, never married. (Her good friend Rona Jaffe wrote about Phyllis’s chameleon personality in the story “Rima the Bird Girl.”) One morning, as I was answering reader mail in my closet off the test kitchens, Phyllis dashed in clutching a bottle of champagne and a tin of caviar. “Put this in the refrigerator,” she commanded. “I met the most fabulous man and he’s flying me to Paris tonight.”

And the late Lois Benjamin Gould was the first editor to stride into the office wearing a pants suit. She looked thin, tragic and beautiful. Our jaws dropped. Anything that Lois did, we knew, must be the Next Big Thing. I believe this was after Lois’s husband had died and she dropped out of sight for about a year while she wrote Such Good Friends about discovering her husband’s adultery, another “fiction” book, like The Bell Jar and The Devil Wears Prada that was really faction.

At this time I was sharing an apartment on 14th Street with three young women, all in some form of journalism. Two were researchers on news magazines and, it’s true, the female researchers were expected to travel with the reporter, to help, research, support and socialize with him, but never to write. In those days, believe it or not, nobody got by-lines on the articles in Time, except for columnists. Nowadays, everybody who has anything to do with a piece gets his/her name at the end. Which is only fair.

We had fun, living in that sordid apartment with cardboard furniture and orange-crate shelves. We each chipped in a dollar a day for food. When Time closed on Friday nights, there was always a big buffet on the top floor and our Time/Life researcher roommate would often bring home leftovers. There was no swag for magazine assistants-–certainly not the way there is today--but I remember one Christmas when Restaurant Associates sent me a box made of chocolate with my named spelled out on the lid. Once in a while the Fashion Department would sell off clothes at a bargain-basement price and I snagged a dress that was originally worn by Twiggy in a fashion spread. When there was a subway strike, we’d compete to see who could walk to mid-town on time without stopping for a Chock Full O’Nuts doughnut on the way.

No doubt we were abused, underpaid, overworked and discriminated against because we were women, but that was before we’d ever heard terms like “glass ceiling” , “women’s liberation” and “car service” or read manifestos like TDWP. We didn’t even realize that we were storing up fodder for future exposés.

Footnote about Anna Wintour: I’ve never met her, but when I first had an article published in Vogue, she sent me a handwritten note saying that she liked it. I thought that was a very gracious thing to do.
#

Those Fabulous Magazine Divas –A Memoir

(A trip to Manhattan last weekend and a week on the West Coast starting tomorrow have played havoc with my plan to post the third part of my Ghost Extravaganza —but it is coming soon—a summary, based on 100 letters from people who live in haunted houses, of what a ghost really is and how you know there’s one around. Meanwhile, I’m going to post –in three parts--something I wrote as an homage to the legendary magazine editors I worked for long before Meryl Streep took on the role of Anna Wintour avatar Miranda Priestly)

I’ve read the book The Devil Wears Prada and seen the film—two rather different stories, but both about abused and self-pitying young female editorial assistants—and I want to tell any fledgling fashionistas struggling on the mastheads of glossy magazines: it used to be worse. In my day, we editorial assistants found ourselves serving cocktails, ironing our bosses’ linens and even collecting their spit. And in those days, it didn’t occur to us to complain, much less write a get-rich-quick tell-all.

When I set out to find a magazine job in New York, armed with a B.A., a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I, like Andrea Sachs in TDWP, considered myself a Serious Journalist. So naturally I applied at the Time/Life empire. A nice, not-at-all haughty woman in Human Resources told me in confidence, “If you really want to write—to be a reporter—then you shouldn’t apply for a job at Time/Life because women here cannot get higher on the masthead than researcher.”

I did not protest in outrage nor hunt for a lawyer, because this was 1964. I gathered up my resumé and my portfolio and thanked her for her honesty and went to look elsewhere. Eventually I ended up in the Food Department of Ladies’ Home Journal although, also like Andrea, I always thought The New Yorker was more my speed.

My first glimpse of the heady world of women’s magazines was in June of 1961 when I won Mademoiselle magazine’s Guest Editor Contest and was transported, along with 19 other coeds from around the country, to the Barbizon Hotel (no men allowed above the ground floor), where we found a red rose on the bed in our tiny rooms with a month-long schedule of events that bore no relation to a real job.

The editor of MLLE was the legendary Betsy Talbot Blackwell, the mother of the makeover. She was one of the last of what I call the Pleistocene Era of magazine editors--a group of eminent women who, early in the 20th century, ruled their kingdoms with the proverbial iron hand in a velvet glove. (I suspect that very few of these early triple-named lady editors would fit into a size six, much less size zero dress.) They dictated to the women of America what to wear and cook and how to behave, and the women of America took their word as gospel. (I have a very early issue of Ladies Home Journal magazine that warns its readers sternly: if they dye their hair they will go insane.)

After our arrival at MLLE, each guest editor was given a personal welcome by BTB in her cavernous office. We were warned, before we entered for our few moments of personal face time, that if BTB should suddenly be seized by a fit of apparently terminal coughing, we should simply keep on talking as if nothing was happening. I did as I was told, but it was BTB who keep asking me if I was all right. Evidently the strain of having to take my final exams a week early, cramming all night while living on cigarettes, coffee, Mars bars and Dexedrine (a kind of speed, children, but it was legal) had saved my straight-A average but taken its toll on my gray complexion and stick-thin body.

Every year BTB threw a cocktail party for the guest editors in her magnificent apartment. All I remember is that she had champagne and caviar (I had grown to hate the sight of it), a strolling accordion player, a view of Central Park, a side chair once owned by Lincoln that no one was allowed to sit on and a cork floor that was badly scarred by the spike heels we wore. In her bedroom, free books sent for BTB’s perusal were in three-foot high stacks on the floor. That really impressed me—all those free books!

We stood in a receiving line at the cocktail party and my jaw dropped as the guest ed next to me suddenly decided to introduce herself with a French name. This same fiercely ambitious young woman also set her cap for BTB’s divorced son—something that evidently was as much a guest editor tradition as the strolling accordion player (who the following year, I’m told, accidentally sat on the Lincoln chair, reducing it to kindling.)

The great and, I would soon learn, totally anomalous thing about the Guest Editor contest was that you were chosen for your talent in various fields (writing, photography, art, cartooning, poetry, etc.) rather than for your physical beauty and fashion sense. This was the opposite of Glamour’s “Best Dressed College Girls” contest, which Martha Stewart won. Some now-famous women who were guest editors at the beginning of their career include: Betsey Johnson, Ali McGraw, Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Carol Brightman and of course Sylvia Plath in 1955. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the protagonist’s month as a guest editor drives her to throw all her stylish clothes off the roof of the Barbizon (Sylvia called it “the Amazon”). Then she goes home and tries to commit suicide.

Like Andrea in The Devil Wears Prada, most guest editors were dramatically changed by their exposure to a glamorized, surreal world. It can spoil you forever. Or it can traumatize you to learn that there are people smarter and more sophisticated than yourself, who speak three languages and went to finishing school. “Every time someone would start talking French, I’d dig my heel a little harder into her cork floor,” one guest ed confided.

Every morning some company threw a fancy breakfast for us, often featuring caviar. which I had never seen before. During the day we each were assigned to an editor at MLLE, but we never had to do any real work. Instead, we lived as if life was a movie montage. We got makeovers and were dressed alike to be photographed in locations around Manhattan. There were dinners and theater, a movie premiere, a bird’s-eye-view flight over Manhattan at dusk, and the chance to interview VIPs in our field of special interest (I got to interview artist Larry Rivers – who said I reminded him of his sister! Others met with Edward Albee, Oleg Cassini, Edward D. Stone, Philip Roth and Walter Kerr).

There was a formal dinner dance. The Lester Lanin orchestra played, and we were each provided with an escort scrounged for us by the staff of the magazine. Mine was very nice—stockbroker, lived in the Village. He asked me to the country on a weekend to visit his parents. I put on khakis, but the fashion Nazi in the lobby of the Barbizon would not let me cross from the elevator, seven yards to the front entrance, while wearing pants. She made me turn around and go upstairs and put on a skirt.


Next: From Mlle Guest Editor to Real Life Magazine Jobs—the party’s over!