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
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(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.
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Aging Gracefully vs. Cosmetic Intervention

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

When I saw the large photograph of Dr. Fredric Brandt, the “King of Collagen” on the front of last Sunday’s New York Times Styles section, I was startled by the image of an expressionless face with red over-puffed lips and a gold halo around his head like that of a saint on a Greek Orthodox icon.

My first thought was that it was Bruce Jenner, father to the Kardashian klan, who seems to be turning from a man into a woman with the help of cosmetic fillers and plastic surgery.

But no, it was an article on dermatologist Fredric Brandt, who is evidently the leading doctor of choice with celebrities like Madonna and Stephanie Seymour, thanks to his ability to keep them looking ageless.  According to The Times, “Dr. Brandt is the designated magician responsible for keeping faces both well known and otherwise in states of extraordinary preservation. …The 64-year-old physician acts as the syringe-wielding wizard responsible for using techniques like his signature Y lifts—in which fillers are injected below the cheekbones—to hold back time for any number of supermodels, trophy wives, celebrities and industrial titans of either sex.”

The author of the article, Guy Trebay, responded to a comment by Dr. Brandt that some Hollywood stars want to cut too soon, to overfill, “When there’s too much pulling, too many procedures, you lose the softness along with the personality of the face…” by asking him if he felt his experiments on himself had produced that effect.  Brandt replied, “People think I look pretty good.”

Now I’m not in a position to criticize people for using cosmetic surgery, since I’ve written several articles for Vogue magazine on the subject of my two facelifts over the past 20 years and a go-around with “Fraxel: Repair” laser treatment five years ago. (I’m now 73.).  But my gut reaction to The Times’ photograph of Dr. Brandt was that he’d be an ideal candidate to play a vampire in one of those films that have become so popular recently. His skin is so taut and his face so pale (except for the red puffy lips) that he seems embalmed.

This was much like the reaction my husband had to the sight of Kim Novak in her much-discussed appearance at the Oscars.  (I missed it, but looked her up later.  The problem that both Kim Novak and Dr. Brandt seem to have is:  too much filler and too much Botox, eliminating all the expression lines that make a face individual.)

On Sunday I saw the article on Brandt, then on Tuesday I looked up the reactions on-line to the piece.  I wondered if I was the only one appalled by the famous doctor’s work on himself, but after reading 106 comments, I learned that the vast majority of the reactions echo my thoughts—that the doctor’s appearance is “super creepy” and, as one person wrote.  “When a doctor can't even perceive his own disfigurement, how could you possibly trust his aesthetic decisions?”

 Monday night, on the Turner Classic Movie channel, I saw an hour-long interview with Eva Marie Saint, talking about her life in films and the leading men and directors she’s worked with.  She said straight out that she was 88 years old (and has been married to the same man for over 60 years.) People, she’s turning 90 on July 4, 2014!

I thought she looked wonderful—she had wrinkles, sure, but they were nice wrinkles.  I can’t tell you if she’s had any “work” done, but her neck did have the turkey wattle effect that is so hard to avoid.  I remembered Eva Marie Saint vividly from her role in “On the Waterfront” with Marlon Brando.  It was her first film and she won an Oscar for it in 1954, when I was 13. It was a shock to see once again in the clips from the film what a young, innocent, almost vulnerable girl she appeared.  But now, at 88, she was confidant, vivacious, funny, smart and she moved with youthful grace—all of which made her seem much younger than her years.

I listened avidly to what she said about her life, hoping to catch some clues as to how she remained so vital.  One thing she emphasized was:  “You have to walk every day—walk for an hour every single day!”  It was also a matter of genes—her mother had lived into her nineties.  And she remarked several times that she had a very happy childhood and a long, loving marriage to a husband who was a director—and thus understood her art as an actress.  But she felt that if she had married a fellow actor—or a lawyer or doctor—there might have been a clash of egos that would doom the marriage.

First I heard about all the plastic surgery digs on the social networks during the Oscars, then last weekend I read about Dr. Brandt and saw the results of his work. Finally, after marveling at how Eva Marie Saint has maintained her verve and beauty for 88 years, I think it’s time for me to stop fighting.

In the last year or so I’ve acquired those fine crepe-y wrinkles around the mouth and eyes. Everyone knows that  people like me, with fair skin and blue eyes, wrinkle sooner and worse than those with darker skin, but I’ve decided to let time take its toll without further cosmetic intervention---except, maybe, just a teensy, tiny shot of Botox between the eyebrows now and then, when I notice that those frown lines are back, making me look perpetually angry.   

Bel Kaufman is 101 and Still Writing

                                                 Chester Higgins/New York Times

Yesterday I was leafing through the new August issue of Vogue magazine. It’s the “Age Issue” which annually features, as they put it in a cover line:  ” Wonder Women from 28 to 101.”

I was thrilled to find an article by Bel Kaufman who is, in fact, 101, and to learn that she’s as witty and wise and defiant of the status quo as ever. 

Long ago, when I was starting out as a “career girl” in New York, I read and loved her book “Up the Down Staircase” -- published in  1965 when Bel was in her fifties.  It was a thinly disguised saga of her experiences in defying bureaucracy when she taught high school in New York, and it spent 64 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Bel Kaufman is a granddaughter of the Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem, whose stories formed the basis of “Fiddler on the Roof”.  She went on after the success of "Staircase" to become a much-in-demand speaker who specialized in the subject of Jewish humor.  In fact last year, when the New York Times  interviewed her  about her 100^th birthday, she was teaching a course about Jewish humor at Hunter College, her alma mater.

I was overjoyed to learn yesterday that Ms. Kaufman at 101—thirty years older than I am—is still teaching and writing and sharing her wisdom with women born a century after her.  As she explained to both the Times and Vogue, she was born in Odessa, Russia, was a child in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, and her family was persecuted because they were Jews.  Food was scarce and as she said, bodies lay in the streets frozen in odd positions. “But a child has no basis for comparison.  Doesn’t every child step over dead bodies?  I didn’t know any different.”

Her family left Russia for New York when she was twelve (and she was placed in first grade because she didn’t speak English.)  Bel grew up being passionate about poetry, which she reads in Russian, English, French and German.   She got  her master’s degree in English and comparative literature at Columbia and decided she wanted to teach at the high school rather than the college level because “I felt that college students were already finished—I would be of no great influence to them.  I wanted to show high schoolers, for  whom I could still make some difference, the joy in reading and writing and learning, before the malaise of later life.”

Bel is now writing a book about her grandfather, Sholom Aleichem, inspired by a letter he wrote to her when she was a child.   Personally, I can’t wait to read it.

I hereby designate Bel Kaufman not Crone of the Week (a title I haven’t bestowed lately) but Crone of the Year—perhaps the decade.  And for those of you who don’t read Vogue, I want to quote a couple of paragraphs from her August article on the subject of teaching and of being old.

“Not too long ago, I was speaking at a retirement luncheon at the United Federation of Teachers in New York City and it was as if I was back in college, speaking to those seven-year-olds again. I told the teachers that while they may think they are retiring, they are not.  I can tell you, you are always a teacher.You remain alive in thousands of memories and thousands of minds of people you have taught, “ I said.  “It’s a kind of immortality.”…

“I’ve lived a long time, a very long time, 101 years, and I’m still here.  I’m done with the doubts and struggles and insecurities of youth.  I’m finished with loss and guilt and regret.  I’m very old, and nothing is expected of me.  Now, provided good health continues, I can do what I want.  I can write my memoirs.  I can edit my works for future eBooks.  I can even do nothing—what a luxury that is!  I have new priorities and a new appreciation of time.  I enjoy my family more than ever, and also a sunny day and a comfortable bed.  I keep up my interest in books and theater and people, and when I’m tired, I rest.  My former students write to me and visit me.  I had many problems and disasters in my life; fortunately at my age, I don’t remember what they were.  I’m glad I am 101.”

Does The New York Times Scorn Women?

If you read the New York Times announcement of my daughter Eleni’s wedding last year, you might think the mother of the bride was dead, hidden away in the attic, non-existent or had never held a job in her life.  The New York Times (free-lance!) writer, Devan Sipher, who wrote the announcement cited the professions of the mother and father of the groom and the father of the bride, but refused to mention the fifty years I had spent writing for national newspapers and magazines, even though 21 of the articles I’d written had appeared in The New York Times.

(You may remember Devan Sipher as the writer of the notorious “Vows” column in the Times celebrating a couple who dumped their spouses for each other after they met at their kids’ pre-kindergarten classrooms.)                                 .

While the snub was painful, I put it aside until yesterday, when I read a new post on my daughter’s blog “The Liminal Stage” called “Nice Work if You Kin Get It.” Eleni studied folk lore and mythology in college and will publish her second book “Other Waters” in February.  She usually writes in her blog about “psychological thresholds, times of transition…The biggies are birth, marriage, death.” The subject of yesterday’s post was “kin work” which she explains as  “the term anthropologists use to describe the ‘conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross boundary kin ties’” –in other words, hosting Thanksgiving dinner, remembering birthdays, sending Christmas cards…you get the idea.

Eleni went on to say that it’s usually women who do kin work and their work is usually unpaid and therefore undervalued. She continues:

“I also think it’s a question of identity. If someone goes into an office every day, society knows how to define him or her–by his or her title or job description. The fact that a person goes somewhere and does something that someone else pays them to do renders them, inherently, worthwhile. Those of us who work at home, juggling work that pays us along with kin work, are considered dilettantes.

“This was brought into high relief for me during my wedding, by the writer who wrote up our New York Times’ wedding announcement …

“The reporter asked where my mother, a writer, had been published in the past year. I said Vogue and Budget Travel. 

‘If that’s it, that’s exactly what the Times is trying to avoid–-part-time work,’ said the man, a freelancer himself.

“This angered me for any number of reasons: First, who gets to decide how many publications per year make one a full-time freelancer versus a part-timer? What if your sole publication is a groundbreaking article or book? (I mean, if my mother had been Harper Lee, would he have said, ‘And what has she published in the last 51 years since To Kill A Mockingbird?’)

“And second, what’s wrong with part-time work anyway? In an economy such as ours, and a world in which technology enables us to work from home, more and more people in any number of fields are going freelance. Does the fact that they don’t go into an office every day mean that they don’t really work?

“But what angered me most was the misogyny of it all. My mom had gone into an office before she started raising kids. As did I. And the fact that she re-shaped her career to make room for kin work, as well as paid work, had rendered her so unimportant in the eyes of a paper she had contributed to well over a dozen times, that she was omitted from the graph describing the jobs of the parents of the bride and groom in the wedding announcement of one of the children she’d made time to raised. So yes, as Mary Elizabeth Williams pointed out in Salon today, the New York Times does have female trouble.”

Eleni’s right. I did go into an office for many years—working first for Ladies Home Journal, then in London, editing a small magazine called “Homemaker’s Digest”, then, after returning to New York and marrying a reporter for the New York Times, I worked for a syndicated features service that published my articles around the world.  By the time the second of our three children was born, I only went into the office a few days a week, working at home on other days.

When our third child was born in 1977, our family was moved by the New York Times to Athens, Greece, where I raised the children while my husband spent most of his time in Turkey and Iran covering revolutions and war as the Times’ foreign correspondent for the Middle East. (He usually made it home for Christmas.)  During the five years in Greece, I wrote a number of articles for the Times about entertainers, politicians, artists, travel and archeology.

Among the journalistic gigs I’m proudest of is the series of essays I wrote for the Times “Hers” column in 1979.  People born since 1970 cannot imagine what a journalistic milestone it was for the Old Gray Lady to launch a weekly essay written by women about women’s issues.

During the 1980s I wrote a monthly column called “Kids in the Country” for  Country Living, and have continued to publish free-lance articles everywhere I can, including several in Vogue, as well as writing a number of movie scripts with my husband (which have been optioned but so far not made it to the screen.) So, from my point of view, it feels like I never stopped working

Daughter Eleni ends her blog post with a thought about her baby daughter Amalía: “This attitude towards women–and work–this idea that any work done at home is irrelevant, is something I struggle with now that I am doing more kin work than ever. How can I raise my daughter not to think that her father’s work is more valuable than mine because papi gets dressed and drives off to the office, and mama stays home and writes in between loads of laundry…Maybe by the time Amalía does kin work of her own, we’ll have figured out a way to reward it, beyond just giving it a name.”

I share that wish, and I hope that when Amalía gets married some 30 years from now, her mother will be included in the New York Times announcement, acknowledged as a real person who had a real career.

Is Plastic Surgery a Sin? (Re: My Vogue article)

The April issue of Vogue is out with my article on page 112 under the title “A Facelift Revisited”. There is a cover line that reads: “My Three Facelifts A 20-year Nip & Tuck Diary”.

That cover line really gave me a start when I saw it, because I have had two facelifts, not three – one when I was 51 years old —18 years ago -- another ten years later when I was 61. Last year, when I was 68, I had a third procedure that was NOT surgery but Fraxel - fractional laser re-surfacing-- using the new CO2-powered laser called Fraxel Re:pair.

If you want to find out how that worked, and how long the facelifts lasted, and if it hurt (which is the first question everyone asks) you’ll have to buy the magazine.

I’m expecting that this article will lose me some friends and will also label me as the poster child for plastic surgery. As I’ve already remarked to some, I suspect that the words “three face lifts” will appear on my gravestone (although, like I said, I’ve only had TWO.) In my defense, I am not Heidi Montag, a 23-year-old actress who made the cover of People because she decided to have ten surgical procedures in one day to improve what was already an excellent face and body.

Above are the medical photos (sans makeup) taken by Dr. Dan Baker back in 1992, before and after my first face lift. I was 51 and, as I think you’ll agree, looked considerably older than my real age in the “before” picture. The “after” photo looks quite a bit better. My goal in having that face lift was to stave off the jowls which I was certain were my inheritance from my father (while my mother never drooped or sagged or looked less than stunning until she died at age 74.)

Dr. Baker said the face lift would last about ten years and he was right. So I had another one, with a Boston surgeon, a decade later when I was 61. I was less pleased with the results, as I explain in the article. There were scars left on my eyelids and pull marks on the side of my cheek and, as I passed age 65, brown patches appeared on my jaw line. So I was in the market for some solution – although I didn’t want another surgery — when I learned about the new kind of laser and decided to try it and write about it for Vogue – to help off-set the cost, because by age 68, I had a lot less discretionary cash to pay for it than I did at the age of 51.

My New York friends (I lived there for 14 years) are okay with the idea of plastic surgery —many have had some experience with it—but not so my friends in Massachusetts. I belong to a woman’s group that meets in the Worcester area about once a month, and as soon as the rumor came up that I would do this article, about a year and a half ago, my closest friend in the group told me I should not even consider it. “All your sisters are opposed to you doing this, Joan!” she scolded me.

“All of them?” I asked in surprise, because I knew one or two had already opted for plastic surgery.

“Every single one!” my friend whispered, in a voice heavy with warning.

Well, I never considered rejecting the opportunity. I’ve been a journalist for nearly 50 years and have done a lot of strange things in the name of “research”. Also, I had been trying for several years to figure out a way that I could afford a “fix” for my brown patches, fine lines and those deepening parentheses on either side of the mouth.

Furthermore, I feel it’s my face and body, and now that I’m nearly 70, I can do what I want with it.

But that conversation did give me flashbacks to my high school days when my concern for the majority opinion of the other girls would have carried a lot more weight.

In high school, I was not pretty, athletic, nor self-confident. I did get high grades and academic awards. All these factors consigned me to the table in the cafeteria with the oddballs and outsiders, far from the table where the “Gang” held forth.

I’m still not pretty, athletic, etc. but somewhere around the age of 60 I decided I’d earned the right to do what I wanted without listening to the opinions of the “mean girls”. (This is one of the many good things about cronehood. As one former high school classmate remarked at our 50th high school reunion “Just by staying alive you level the playing field.”) Even in college I began to realize that there were places where good grades and talent did not make you a pariah. And life improved a lot.

So I’m not going to justify or explain to my women’s group the Vogue article and the laser re-surfacing procedure. And I do not feel plastic surgery is a sin.

(Although I was convinced, 19 years ago when I went to the hospital in New York for my first face lift that God was going to strike me dead as punishment for my vanity. He didn’t. But in the same hospital, in the years after my surgery, two or three women did die while undergoing elective face lifts. And one of them was Olivia Goldsmith, who wrote “The First Wife’s Club.” I heard that these tragic cases were mostly due to reactions to the general anesthesia. I think that’s better controlled now—and with laser resurfacing, there is no general anesthesia, just topical.)

Anyway, if I wanted to explain my latest round of plastic surgery to the women in my group, (which I won’t -- everyone is too polite to mention it) I would repeat something that I wrote in the Vogue article.

I am not undergoing “maintenance” on my appearance every decade or so with the purpose of looking younger than my real age. I have never lied about my age and everyone who reads Vogue or looks up my profile on Facebook knows that I was born on Feb. 4, 1941. Next year I hit the big seven- oh.

I do it for the same reason I try to exercise on the stationary bike an hour a day and go to Pilates twice a week – although I hate exercise.

As I said at the end of my Vogue piece:

This is an ongoing process, not meant to hide or deny my age, but to let me wear the years gracefully.
“You look good,” [Dr.] Baker told me as we said goodbye. “Fifteen years younger than your age.”
So that means I look….53. Or maybe, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem: In the twenty-first century, this is what 68 looks like.

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.
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