I Remember Nothing Read Free

phone, made an appointment for me, and sent me right over to the Newsweek Building, at 444 Madison Avenue.
    The man who interviewed me asked why I wanted to work at
Newsweek
. I think I was supposed to say something like, “Because it’s such an important magazine,” but I had no real feelings about the magazine one way or another. I had barely read
Newsweek;
in those days, it was a sorry second to
Time
. So I responded by saying that I wanted to work there because I hoped to become a writer. I was quickly assured that women didn’t become writers at
Newsweek
. It would never have crossed my mind to object, or to say, “You’re going to turn out to be wrong about me.” It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule. I was hired as a mail girl, for $55 a week.
    I’d found an apartment with a college friend at 110 Sullivan Street, a horrible brand-new white-brick building between Spring and Prince. The rent was $160 a month, with the first two months free. The real estate broker assured us that the South Village was a coming neighborhood, on the verge of being red-hot. This turned out not to be true for at least twenty years, by which time the area was called SoHo, and I was long gone. Anyway, I packed up a rental car on graduation day and set off to New York. I got lost only once—I had no idea you weren’t supposed to take the George Washington Bridge to get to Manhattan. I remember being absolutely terrified when I realized that I was accidentally on the way to New Jersey and might never find a way to make a U-turn; I would drive south forever and never reach the city I’d dreamed of getting back to ever since I was five, when my parents had thoughtlessly forced me to move to California.
    When I finally got to Sullivan Street, I discovered that the Festival of St. Anthony was taking place. There was no parking on the block—they were frying zeppole in front of my apartment. I’d never heard of zeppole. I was thrilled. I thought the street fair would be there for months, and I could eat all the cotton candy I’d ever wanted. Of course it was gone the next week.
    There were no mail boys at
Newsweek
, only mail girls. If you were a college graduate (like me) who hadworked on your college newspaper (like me) and you were a girl (like me), they hired you as a mail girl. If you were a boy (unlike me) with exactly the same qualifications, they hired you as a reporter and sent you to a bureau somewhere in America. This was unjust but it was 1962, so it was the way things were.
    My job couldn’t have been more prosaic: mail girls delivered the mail. This was a long time ago, when there was a huge amount of mail, and it arrived in large sacks all day long. I was no mere mail girl, though; I was the Elliott girl. This meant that on Friday nights I worked late, delivering copy back and forth from the writers to the editors, one of whom was named Osborn Elliott, until it was very late. We often worked until three in the morning on Friday nights, and then we had to be back at work early Saturday, when the Nation and Foreign departments closed. It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly come to believe that you are living in the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.
    There were telex machines in a glass-enclosed area adjacent to the lobby, and one of my jobs was to rip off the telexes, which usually contained dispatches from the reporters in the bureaus, and deliver them to the writers and editors. One night a telex arrived concerning the owner of
Newsweek
, Philip Graham. I had seen Graham on several occasions. He was a tall, handsomeguy’s guy whose photographs never conveyed his physical attractiveness or masculinity; he would walk through the office, his voice booming,