Another Life (37 page)

Very shortly, I was writing pieces for
Glamour
at a fast clip, one after the other. From time to time, I asked myself if the writing might eventually interfere with being an editor, but there seemed no good reason why it should—other men had hobbies like golf or stamp collecting. But the truth was that having two simultaneous careers
did
have a downside. Like a lot of other men, I was working at the expense of my domestic life. One could argue that working hard and making more money was good for everyone, but I knew better. I would probably have spent hours every evening editing manuscripts even if I had been obliged to pay S&S for the privilege and continued to bang away at my portable typewriter on the weekends. Workaholism, like alcoholism, has its own logic and invariably justifies itself. Anybody who can crank out a readable piece about almost anything is always in demand, and pretty soon I was writing for all sorts of magazines. It was not the kind of work that was likely to make me rich, but it
was
writing, and the sight of my byline meant more to me, for the moment, than the size of the check. I took pleasure in seeing my words in print to the extent that I even agreed to write the copy on the labels of Sherry-Lehmann’s house brands of liquor.

The great thing about magazine writing is that you start ahead of the game, with somebody else’s idea. Magazine editors, unlike book editors, mostly know what they want and have a fairly clear idea of who their average reader is. As a freelance writer, I never truly became a
member of the
Glamour
family, but I gradually began to develop a feel for what might interest the
Glamour
reader, though without the cast-iron certainty that the editors had about the tastes and limits of their subscribers. Shortly after my debut,
Glamour
’s editor in chief, Mrs. Kathleen Aston Casey (it was then almost mandatory for the editors of women’s magazines to have three names), expressed an interest in the fact that more and more women were engaging in dangerous sports. Like most topics seized on by magazine editors, this nugget of information reached her from a fellow guest at a dinner party—in the world of women’s magazines at the time this constituted serious research. Mrs. Casey conceived an issue dedicated to the clothing necessary for the pursuit of these dangerous sports, whatever they might be—her fellow guest had not been clear on their exact nature—to be introduced with a feature article by me.

I took on the assignment happily enough, fairly confident that I would find women doing all sorts of unlikely sports. This indeed proved to be the case. Over a period of a few weeks I talked to women rugby players, a woman jockey, women scuba divers, women rock climbers, women hockey players, and even an embattled, if privileged, team of women polo players. The women’s movement as such had not yet even begun—Gloria Steinem had yet to go underground as a
Playboy
“bunny,” Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer had not yet written their books—but already it was apparent that women were eager to “push the envelope,” as test pilots say, and confident that anything men could do they could do as well or better. I even met the first woman telephone lineperson, who had attracted national attention when she was photographed climbing a telephone pole in her overalls, work boots, and hard hat, but of course repairing telephone lines was not exactly a sport. All this was interesting but failed to satisfy Mrs. Casey’s vision of danger.

Eventually, I made contact with a group of women sky divers in New Jersey who were willing to be interviewed and photographed. After several drinks, dinner, and a couple of bottles of wine, I felt the atmosphere was loose enough to enable me to ask just what they got out of parachute jumping. Was it excitement, the thrill of danger, a sense of liberation—what, in short, made them jump out of an airplane once a week when the weather was right? We batted this back and forth, but no answer was forthcoming, at least none that I thought would satisfy Mrs. Casey. Eventually, late in the evening, a schoolteacher, blushing prettily,
leaned close to me and confessed that while excitement, danger, and liberation were all part of it, she, personally, always had an orgasm on the way down, right after opening her chute.

This
, it seemed to me, was something to bring back to Mrs. Casey. Women’s magazines were at that time just beginning to take the plunge into the deep end of the sexual pool that eventually resulted in Helen Gurley Brown’s triumph in resuscitating the moribund
Cosmopolitan
with the “
Cosmo
girl,” who was as outspoken about her sexual needs as she was insecure about her weight, manicure, and fashion savvy.
Glamour
was a long way from that but moving ever more quickly in that direction. The days when its readers could be satisfied by articles on accessorizing, fashions for office wear, and what to say on that first, crucial date were long since gone, and the word
orgasm
was off the list of taboos—indeed, half the articles seemed to be about sex, and one had the feeling that the magazine was running as hard as it could to catch up with its readers. Still, with any magazine, it’s hard for an outsider to gauge the prevailing, generally unspoken moral code. It was clear that Mrs. Casey ran the magazine with an iron fist, but since we had never met, I wasn’t sure just where and in what areas her limits lay. Sometimes I got away with things that I thought she would never print; on other occasions, things that seemed to me perfectly harmless produced a flurry of anguished calls from Amy and Karlys Daly, the beauty editor. One thing was clear: There was no appeal. Like most women’s magazine editors, Mrs. Casey was an unapologetic tyrant. In my mind’s eye, I thought of her as the Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland
, ready at any moment to shout, “Off with his head!”

The schoolteacher’s experience, it turned out as the evening went on, had been mirrored by the others in the group. One of the older women confessed that it beat anything she had ever experienced with her husband, and another remarked, with a shy smile, that she sometimes made two or three jumps a day and came every time, “as regular as clockwork.”

The parachute ladies had another thing in common: They could drink me under the table. I returned to New York with the beginnings of a fierce hangover but happy to have a lead for my story—so happy that I actually decided to present it to the formidable Mrs. Casey in person.

An audience was arranged, and I arrived ahead of time, feeling rather like a Roman summoned to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. Far from providing a threatening atmosphere, however, Mrs. Casey’s sanctum
sanctorum was a riot of yellow and black: Every square inch that could be covered in fake leopard skin was. The walls, the carpets, the upholstery, the pillows were all done in leopard skin, and a profusion of leopard statues of various sizes, as well as drawings of leopards, made it clear what animal Mrs. Casey admired most. Even her signature pens were made of plastic formed to resemble a leopard’s skin, as was her wastepaper basket. I half expected her to have whiskers, fangs, and a snarling countenance, but in fact she was an attractive woman of a certain age with gray hair and a no-nonsense manner.

Tentatively, I outlined my article, then approached the lead. I described my afternoon and evening with the women sky divers and explained their startling confession. The word
orgasm
did not frighten Mrs. Casey. She stared at me, her expression ambiguous, nodding slightly to indicate that the subject was neither taboo nor unfamiliar to her. It would, I suggested, be a terrific way to begin the piece—a real attention grabber. (An “attention grabber” was a constant demand from the advertising department.)

Mrs. Casey looked thoughtful. She fiddled with one of her leopard-skin pens for a while. There were three or four other women in attendance, including Amy and Karlys, but none of them said anything. It was rather like being in the headmaster’s office at a boys’ school, after some awful infraction of discipline, or perhaps the Mother Superior’s at a convent. I half expected Mrs. Casey to lunge at me with a ruler, demanding that I hold out my hand. Finally, she spoke. Why, she asked, did I think these women experienced an orgasm while parachuting?

I had come prepared for this question, with a full Freudian answer. It was, I said, fairly obvious. First you had the physical excitement of the flight, then you stood up and a handsome young jump master put his hands on you—physical contact—and helped you leap into space. The Freudian elements were, surely, all there? Height, speed, adventure, the male touch that sends you spinning into space, the connection between sex and death, for there was always a risk involved when you jumped out of an airplane … I went on, quoting Jung and Reich and drawing on my knowledge of the orgone box.

Mrs. Casey was silent—by no means hostile but ever so slightly indicating with one elegantly raised eyebrow a certain impatience. When, at last, I paused for breath, she gave a small, ladylike snort of derision. “Nonsense,” she said firmly. “It’s the way the harness fits around the crotch.”

•  •  •

T
HE STORY
on dangerous sports ran without the parachutists, I’m sorry to say, but it taught me the lesson that the simple, functional answer is usually the correct one, even (and perhaps especially) when it comes to sex. It also taught me that women’s magazine editors, ranging from Helen Gurley Brown to Grace Mirabella, have a toughness of mind all their own. From then on, I avoided the
Glamour
offices but continued to contribute regularly to the magazine and even started to get fan mail. After a couple of years of writing long feature articles, Amy Greene asked if I would like to be
Glamour
’s movie reviewer. It was not something I had ever imagined myself doing—since almost everybody in my family was in the movie business, reviewers had always seemed to be the enemy, even (perhaps especially) when they were literate reviewers. My Uncle Alex had begun his career at the age of seventeen as the film critic for a Budapest arts weekly, and when he stepped behind the camera as a director for the first time, at the age of twenty-one, he remarked on how much easier it was to criticize a film than to make one. His attitude toward critics did not change over the years. My father’s comment on movie critics was simply, “Vat the hell do
they
know about it?” Still, it was too good an offer to refuse—not just a regular monthly income, but getting to see movies before everyone else and for free!

Movie reviewers, I soon discovered, are courted fiercely by the major studios. In those lavish days, every movie company maintained a glamorous, plush screening room in midtown Manhattan, most of them furnished comfortably with big easy chairs or sofas and a staff of people whose only job was to see that reviewers got to see each movie in the most comfortable circumstances possible.

It was apparent to me from the beginning that
Glamour
’s readers were not looking for reviews of meaningful foreign films that would, in any case, never play in their towns, nor were they anxious to read slashing intellectual attacks against major movies, still less cleverness for its own sake. Basically, they wanted to know which of the current movies was worth seeing—it was a service column, in short. Gradually, over the months, I hit my stride, and my fan mail, most of it positive, increased sharply—an important fact, since
Glamour
had an elaborate month-by-month system for determining how many readers there were
for each feature and column in the magazine, as well as their age, income, and so on. Fan mail played a part in scoring each writer’s work, so the more letters you generated, the better.

It never occurred to me that I would go on reviewing movies for nearly ten years—at three movies a week, about fifteen hundred movies—until, in fact, I could hardly even
remember
a time when my evenings weren’t taken up by screenings. I began by writing a review of each movie I’d seen, but before long it became like the obligatory essay at Oxford: something that was easy to put off until a day or two before the deadline, at which point there was nothing to do but cancel everything else, make a pot of strong coffee, and sit down with clenched teeth to
do
it. Doing it this way, the hardest part was trying to remember what movies I had seen, since most of them tended to run into a blur. Penelope Gilliatt, the formidable critic for
The New Yorker
, actually had a tiny flashlight in her purse so she could make notes during the screenings, but I relied on my memory, only to find, by the time two or three weeks had elapsed, that I couldn’t remember a thing except dim recollections of plots. Time after time, the approach of
Glamour
’s deadline produced panic in me, followed by a late-night session at my typewriter—then it was time to start all over again with another month’s worth of movies. The fact that I had taken on what some people might have considered to be three full-time jobs never dawned on me. I was a successful editor, with increasingly serious responsibilities for major authors, a monthly movie reviewer, and a freelance magazine writer. At the end of the day, I was making enough money to rent a house in Maine for the summer, and to dress fashionably, but I was working more or less constantly without noticing.

Though writing itself was a pleasure, seeing my own name at the top of what I had written was the ultimate thrill. I loved opening a new magazine and finding my name in it, even though some of the magazines I found myself writing for were very odd and “special” indeed—I seem to remember doing a piece on fetish clothing (God knows for whom) that brought me into what was then the fairly unknown bondage and S&M underworld of custom leather shops around Christopher Street, and another (possibly for
The New York Times
) on people who kept their own horses in New York City, which eventually led to my becoming one of them for over a decade. I had, it seemed, the dangerous habit of becoming part of my pieces. A piece on people who swam and surfed right through the winter led me to buy a wet suit, diving goggles,
and gloves, and I can vividly recall swimming out to sea from the deserted beach at Robert Moses State Park on a cold and windy Thanksgiving Day—an experience that one day was instrumental in securing the English novelist R. F. Delderfield for S&S. Looking back on it, I seem to have been willing to try anything, including all-night dinners with Gypsies camping out for the winter in the Coney Island amusement park, and swimming in a pool full of dolphins with a woman who was part of a U.S. Navy experiment in communicating with them (an experiment that was later the subject of a best-selling novel by the French author Robert Merle, which I published, which was later made into a movie by Mike Nichols). I went fishing with Paul Newman and target shooting after dinner at an Italian club in the Village with its own pistol range. At one point, I even went to the top of the Verrazano Bridge to watch Mohawk steelworkers perform miracles of balance as they completed the span and learned, in case I had ever doubted the fact, that there are harder professions than editing books. I was, to put it mildly, game for anything, which is a good thing for a magazine writer to be.