The Battle for Gotham (8 page)

After NYU, when I joined the
New York Post
as a copy girl, I had to cease all political involvement but continued to hang out with some of the friends I had made while active in citywide politics, including Jack Newfield, who was then an occasional freelancer for the
Village Voice
and eventual staff writer. We spent many a Friday afternoon sitting in
Voice
editor Dan Wolf’s office with other regular Friday “drop-ins.” The
Voice
had been founded in 1956 by Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer as an alternative weekly focusing on the arts, especially the off-Broadway scene. It evolved into the center of outsider arts and politics, while covering a lot of issues not well covered, if at all, in the mainstream press.

I mostly listened as big news events were debated among regular visitors. Michael Harrington and Nat Hentoff were among them. That is where I first met
Voice
writer Mary Nichols, who became a good friend. Jane Jacobs was an occasional participant, but I don’t remember meeting her there. Village Democratic Reform leader, future congressman, and eventual mayor Ed Koch always seemed to be there. Koch was the first politician I met who knew how to laugh at himself. Koch and then may-oral hopeful John Lindsay were among the few politicians whom Wolf supported editorially. City politics was always the hottest topic of debate in these afternoon sessions, especially the campaign to overthrow the long-entrenched Democratic machine. Both Koch and Lindsay were in their ascendancy. Not long out of college, I was in the thick of city life, as I had wanted to be.

THE NEWSPAPER

“Boy!”

That was the call that made me hop to my feet when I started at the
New York Post
in March 1963 as a copy girl. “Boy!” It was a lowly position, equivalent to errand runner. But after the first African American copy boy was hired the next spring, the shout gradually changed to “Copy!”

“Copy!”

“Copy” is what a reporter’s story was called, typed on a manual typewriter in triplicate and needing to be picked up from the reporter by a copyboy, carried to the editors’ desk, and subsequently carried from the editor out to the composing room where typesetters set it in lead type and makeup men laid out each page before sending it along on the printing process. The term
hard copy
, an actual printed page, remains in use today, even in the age of computers.

That City Room would seem prehistoric today. An assorted collection of wood and metal desks held mechanical typewriters in a sunken center section. Paper and carbons were scattered everywhere. Cigarette butts littered the floor. Paper coffee cups with Greek symbols sat around for days. Wrappings from drinking straws hung from the ceiling, blown there by impish and bored copyboys. One end of the wrapping was torn off and the other end dipped into the jelly of the donuts. Blowing through the straw would propel the paper to the ceiling, and the jelly would make it stick. The sports department was in one corner, and the fashion and food section took up a smaller space in another corner. The chatter of the Teletype machine of the AP and UPI wire services never ceased.

New York had seven daily newspapers (the
Herald Tribune
,
World Telegram and Sun
,
Daily Mirror
, and
Journal American
no longer exist) when I started at the lowest rung of the City Room ladder, the promised first step to being a reporter, which, it turned out, didn’t always happen. Because of a seven-month strike that affected all the city papers, copy boys resigned in droves, leaving precious job openings when the strike ended. I grabbed one. At a salary of $52 a week, I needed my parents’ assurance of supplemental support since my monthly rent was $154.

A New York newspaper job fresh out of college with no out-of-town newspaper experience, the prescribed route for landing on a New York paper! Leaving New York again for me was out of the question. It was either get a New York newspaper job or pursue another field. So even the offer of a lowly copy boy position was a coup. This was the city of my birth from which I had been taken unhappily, but I couldn’t wait to return. I was back soaking up the excitement of the city and determined never to leave again.

DIVERSITY IN THE CITY ROOM

While my New York City youth was totally Manhattan-centric, my new colleagues at the
Post
came from all over the city and beyond. The City Room overflowed with talent. Pete Hamill. Ted Posten. Oliver Pilat. Gene Grove. Helen Dudar. Fern Marja Eckman. Bill Haddad. Barbara Yuncker. Norman Poirier. Judy Michaelson. Ed Kosner. Don Forst. Nora Ephron. Stan Opotowsky. Just watching them churn out great stories and well-turned phrases was the best possible journalism school.

Jimmy Wechsler was the editorial-page editor. He had been the executive editor, famous for standing up to J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy and for breaking the story of the scandal that led candidate Richard Nixon to deliver the tearful Checkers speech on television. Paul Sann was now the skillful executive editor. With his cowboy-booted feet up on the desk and his antique two-part candlestick phone, Sann seemed like the editor after whom Walter Burns of
The Front Page
was fashioned. The
Post
City Room looked like the stage set out of
The Front Page
era. In fact, for a revival of the play, the star, Bert Convey, came to observe and get a “feel” for his role.

The
Post
occupied the first few floors of an early-twentieth-century office building in Lower Manhattan, 75 West Street, only a few blocks south of what would become the World Trade Center. This 1920s building was converted to an upscale condominium in 2003. That district was then a bustling collection of electronics stores with a thriving wholesale produce market just to its north. I watched all that disappear under the bulldozers of so-called progress defined by the extraordinary excavation that made way for the Twin Towers. That excavated dirt became the landfill on which Battery Park City was created, directly across the West Side Highway.

The Hudson River and expanding landfill were the view from our office window until, in 1969, the
Post
moved to the other side of Lower Manhattan, at 210 South Street (former home of the
Journal American
), between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and just north of the Fulton Fish Market. There, we watched the South Street Seaport Museum and mall fill up the restored historic buildings. Some of the fishmongers stayed in the Fulton Fish Market despite the city’s efforts to relocate them up to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, but the great fish restaurants—Sweets, Sloppy Louie’s—disappeared. By 2004, the fishmongers too had left for either the Bronx or out of town. With their move from the Fulton Market, more of the smaller fish businesses closed, and big ones have gotten bigger.

THE LUCKY BREAK

Within my first year, I moved up from copy boy to editorial assistant, a move hardly worthy of the word
up
. I answered phones and wrote plot lines for TV listings in the feature department, but all around me was the buzz of the real news business and I soaked it up.

In August 1963 I traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the March on Washington. It was one of the most memorable events of my life. Editorial-page editor James Wechsler, who, like many people, didn’t anticipate the significance of the event, asked me many questions about it when I returned. He regretted not going and said, “This is something you will be happy to tell your grandchildren about.” He was correct.

Months later, the hot topic in the City Room was all the political jockeying unfolding before the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. I was dying to go. But the
New York Post
management was notoriously tightfisted. The editors were happy to have me work at the convention as editorial assistant if I took vacation time to go, paid my own way to get to Atlantic City, and covered my own expenses. Once there, I was paid my normal salary. Of course, it was worth it. Mostly I ran errands, but it took me to the convention floor among the delegates.

The convention was an emotional one, less than a year after Kennedy’s assassination. I watched from the press box as Robert Kennedy addressed the cheering crowd and received a twenty-minute standing ovation before he said his first word. Tears welled in his eyes.

My big editorial break came on the last day of the convention. All staff reporters were off on assignments. I was alone in our makeshift office with managing editor Stan Opotowsky. A press release came in announcing that President Lyndon B. Johnson would celebrate his birthday on the boardwalk with a big cake. Stan sent me up to take notes. The cake was in the shape of the United States. Johnson took his first slice out of the state of Texas. A more obvious story lead could not be handed to the most inexperienced reporter. I came back and instead of typing notes, as Stan had asked, wrote the story, starting with LBJ taking the first slice out of Texas. Stan was caught by surprise, edited the story, and sent it in immediately. It made the front page—no byline—under a photo of Johnson slicing the cake. The word spread around the City Room that it was my story, and many of the reporters cheered. They were now my friends and rooting for me.

Soon after the Atlantic City convention in August 1964, a Young Democrats event was scheduled to take place at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York mayors. LBJ was now the presidential nominee, and much was being made in the news about Texas barbecue replacing the elegant French food served in the Kennedy White House. Walter Jet-ton was Texas’s most famous barbecue chef, and he was coming to New York. I was still only an editorial assistant at the
Post
, but I offered Dan Wolf the story for the
Village Voice
. He said yes.

The story depicted Lynda Bird Johnson’s New York political debut at this young citizens’ event at Gracie Mansion, hosted by Robert Wagner Jr., son of the mayor. The Texas-style barbecue and Texas-sized portions of food marked the abrupt transition experienced by these young sophisticates, many of whom had first been politically energized by the youthful “vigah” and style of the Kennedys, not to mention the dominance of French food and understated elegance.

I don’t know if that story in the
Voice
advanced my standing with the
Post
editors, but two months later, I started my three-month “tryout” as a reporter. On my first day, Judy Michaelson, a veteran reporter, advised me, “Take your first assignment, run right out of the office as if you know exactly what you are doing, and then call me from the nearest phone booth.” As it turned out, I didn’t need to. I was sent to cover a press conference held by proabortion advocate Bill Baird calling for legalization. Only a year or two earlier, I had had an abortion, forced to go to the infamous Women’s Hospital in Puerto Rico rather than succumb to the illegal, unsafe backroom procedure available in the United States. I knew more than any reporter—even a new one—needed to know about the subject.

A few years later, abortion would become one of the issues on which I focused as a reporter. I covered efforts to change the law, wrote a six-part series on the issue, and then wrote the cover story for
Ms.
when the
Roe v. Wade
decision was handed down from the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1973. That was the height of the women’s movement, and I was as much a part of it as my professional restrictions permitted. When editors allowed me, I wrote stories related to women’s issues, not something many editors allowed at other newspapers.

Rape was another topic that I covered in depth in the early 1970s before the laws applying to it were liberalized. There was little talked about and less written about a subject fraught with myth and pain. Susan Brownmiller’s
Against Our Will
, published in 1975, changed all that and catapulted the issue into the nation’s consciousness. But when I was writing this series a few years earlier, corroboration requirements were so onerous, a “woman’s word” so suspect, juries so doubtful, and policemen and district attorneys so unsympathetic that most women didn’t even report the crime, and if they did very rarely achieved justice. I wrote a six-part series on rape in 1972, spotlighting the inequity of the law. What I learned over the months of research and interviews for that series angered me greatly. Attitudes ranged from “women should relax and enjoy it” to “they ask for it.” Blaming the victim was common. My slowly emerging feminism ratcheted up to full speed.

PROMOTED TO REPORTER

In January 1965 I was promoted to full “general assignment” reporter, byline and all, loving the daily routine of being sent all over the city on whatever news story was unfolding. Murders, press conferences, “daily close-ups” (features on personalities in the news—authors, bank presidents, actors, philanthropists, and so on), and everyday mundane assignments consumed most of my time. But the full luxury of picking issues to write about came after several years of being a reporter.

The ’60s art scene, very much a new “scene”—auctions, museum openings, artist personalities—was another reporting focus. Art auctions were now making big news on a regular basis. I had grown up in a household where art was a daily interest. The Whitney Museum, the quintessential institution of the Village and then still on Eighth Street, was a favorite place for my mother, my sister, and me to visit. The Whitney moved uptown in 1954. Young, not yet well-known artists were my parents’ friends, including Mark Rothko and his wife, Mel, who lived in our apartment house, and Milton Avery, whose daughter, March, was my sister’s classmate and friend. My mother sold art by her friends, then still unknown, to her decorating clients.

And then, in May 1965, I married Donald Gratz, a metal manufacturer peripherally in the art and architecture business. Architecture was a new world for me, and I learned from him. My interest in art and architecture expanded, and I applied it to the reporting assignments I requested.