Daring (2 page)

In my first months at the
Trib
, I turned in the kinds of feature stories that Eugenia considered unsightly at best and radical at worst—about antiwar protesters, abortion rings, New York women doctors volunteering in Selma to sew up beaten civil rights workers, Harlem women on rent strike—while my boss was writing about Gloria Guinness and Wendy Vanderbilt and Betsy Bloomingdale and disease-of-the-month charity balls.

“Bellows wants to see you.”

Jim Bellows was editor of the
Herald Tribune
. This could only mean one thing. I had violated the Chinese wall between news and fluff. He would growl something like “Whaddya think you're doing?” and tell me to stick to the soft stuff or get lost.

Bellows was a tensely coiled man with blazing dark eyes. That was the only way one knew he was passionate about what he did, since he spoke as softly as a schoolboy trying to deflect attention from his zits. “Are these yours?” he asked, holding up several clippings of my stories. I stopped breathing and nodded.

“I like this gritty stuff,” Bellows mumbled, “in the middle of all the fluff. Keep it up.”

Being anointed by Jim Bellows was an epiphany for me. Finding, or being found, by the right editor was as important as finding the right husband. The rare editors could be mentors, even more than mentors, coaches who dared you to surprise them, who scared you by insisting you stretch, who wanted to see you perform the equivalent of a triple Axel jump and fall on your ass on the ice until you perfected the maneuver and then went beyond.

I soon learned that Bellows was the
Trib
's quiet radical. Named editor in chief of the poststrike paper, he saw himself as a young David with slingshot aimed at the Goliath of the
New York Times
. He was dead set on smashing the old conventional newspaper model and replacing it with bold graphics and offbeat writers. He had hired Clay Felker to tear up the old Sunday supplement and create something entirely fresh. Bellows never played it safe. He was always ready to stick his neck out to support writers or editors who challenged the status quo. I could go back to this editor and tell him the truth.

“Mr. Bellows, I'm pregnant. But don't worry! I'll work until they're ready to roll me into delivery! Meanwhile, I have an idea for using my, um, condition, for a story.”

“Shoot.”

I wanted to do an investigative series on the maternity clinics of New York. The city had one of the worst records on infant mortality. By now, I was at the five-month mark in my pregnancy, exactly the point where a good prenatal exam was the best defense against complications for mother or child. If, like so many women, I could not afford to buy private insurance for obstetrical care, my chances of premature birth would be doubled. I told Bellows I would pass myself off as an uninsured waitress whose only recourse for care was public clinics. He gave his blessing.

It was a sobering experience. I sat in dingy waiting rooms and chatted with women who accepted routine abuse from the men in their lives. The bodies of most of the women were bloated with junk food, and their ankles were swollen from stand-up jobs they were sure to lose once the pregnancy showed. I could have been one of these women. We were poked and probed with indifference by trainees who didn't offer their names. No one gave us information on birth control. A day's pay was lost in the waiting. We passed the time making up nasty nicknames for the rude staff. No wonder so many uninsured women resisted this degrading and more or less medically useless experience. I swore I would reveal this disgrace.

After dragging through thirteen public clinics from East Harlem to the Lower East Side, I found it took little effort to write a series exposing unprofessional staff and dangerously careless exams. Some clinics were shut down and supervisors fired. Plans were okayed to create satellite clinics closer to poor neighborhoods. Eugenia said nothing.

ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY
20, 1964, I was on night duty at the
Trib
making up the women's page. That meant descending to the depths of the composing room and waddling between the rows of linotype operators to deliver last-minute copy changes. By 10:30
P.M.
a proof was run off. I read backward and corrected it. Salem, the composition man, ran his razor between the leaded lines to tidy up the trays of type and off they went to be baked into the morning paper. “Looks good,” Salem said. Then, noticing my ninth month of baby bulge, he sweetly suggested I take a taxi home.

“I'm fine.” I had just enough energy left to take a bus to the Lower East Side where we had recently moved to dirt-cheap digs. I climbed the four flights of stairs and settled down on the sofa with the cat and a chicken pot pie. I knew I couldn't ask for time off before I had the baby; that would have classified me as a woman who was not as professional as a man. When the grinding began in my belly, I ignored it and went on watching the eleven o'clock news. The contractions began coming with some regularity every four minutes. I called my husband. He was on duty, of course, and told me to come to the hospital. I didn't ask why he couldn't get off to accompany me, but it made me sad that he didn't offer.

It was the dead of winter. February. Snow sifted under the streetlights as I took the slippery stoop step by step. One
A.M.
by now. It was not normal for a heavily pregnant woman to be wandering around in the wee hours without a husband, except for one reason: imminent delivery. That scares off taxi drivers. I had to ask a waiter inside Ratner's, an old-time kosher restaurant, to hide my telltale suitcase. I walked to the curb of Second Avenue and turned my back to hide my girth and hail a cab. It took some time. I heaved myself in, the waiter slid my suitcase on my lap, but the address gave it all away.

“St. Vincent's Hospital, please.”

“Hold on, little lady; you'll make it or we're both in trouble.”

I was set on natural childbirth, considered a way-out choice at the time. My husband had protested: “It's not evidence based.” Ten hours later, after a long doze when the contractions stopped, I found the lever to release the baby's gateway to the world. Every cell in my body felt alive and in sync. A few painful thrusts and a minute later, the unmistakable cry of a healthy infant made my heart soar. Only then did my husband poke his head in. “Nice work,” he said. “You did it your way.” We had a daughter.

We chose the Irish name for Mary, one that meant “great” in Gaelic but was softened with vowels—Maura—it came to our lips at almost the same time.

Gail brings newborn Maura to an editorial meeting in the
Herald Tribune'
s “estrogen zone.”

Not long afterward, to my astonishment, I received a call from the New York Newswomen's Club informing me that I had won an award for the best feature series of the year. Unbeknownst to me, Eugenia had entered my series on maternity clinics. A formal awards dinner was to be held at the Plaza Hotel. Formal! I had a budget of $30 for a dress. I found a long flowered silk nightgown on sale at Henri Bendel. With a fake chignon from a hookers' salon, I could pass Eugenia's taste test.

NOW, A YEAR LATER, CROSSING
into the clackety-clack chaos of the
Trib
's city room plunged me into an alternate universe. Every desk was occupied by a man, and every man wore the same shirt and tie. Except two. I spotted Tom Wolfe. He looked different. His longish silky hair curled over the well-turned collar of an English-tailored tweed suit. He looked like a Tidewater Virginian gentleman, which he was. His lips were locked in a concupiscent smile. Of course, I thought, he must be flicking open his satirical switchblade to dice up the status strivings of some sacred cow who had no idea he was about to be skewered. (Tom had not yet effected the wardrobe of a contemporary Beau Brummel in white suits and spats, not on a salary of $130 a week.)

Picking my way through the scruffy desks and crumpled copy paper scudding along the floor, I saw a cloud of smoke. A blunt head covered with black Irish curls was vaguely visible.
That must be Jimmy Breslin
, I thought. Just the way his stubby fingers stabbed at the typewriter keys let you know: back off. I knew from his writing that he was an angry man. In one of the early issues of
New York
, he wrote about posting a sign on his lawn in Queens that read
WHY I HATE THESE NEIGHBORS,
and he published their names. His people were hustlers, bookies, bail bondsmen, kneecappers, and his sidekick, a professional arsonist called Marvin the Torch. Breslin started every day prowling the precincts and courts to check who was getting out of prison, then returned to the city room at six to bang out his story and make the seven o'clock deadline. To loosen up afterward, he'd cross the street to hold court at the legendary Bleeck's tavern and get drunk enough to insult nearly everyone.

Wolfe's prose was the opposite. He invented unforgettable code phrases—“the right stuff,” “the statusphere,” and “social x-rays.” He exuded excesses of hyperbole never before seen on a black-and-white page. He spotted the first “Tycoon of Teen,” Phil Spector, and he was the first to explain the vision of Marshall McLuhan. The most mind-blowing of Wolfe's early articles examined the LSD life of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

Wolfe's and Breslin's windows into New York life assaulted city dwellers with stories that rubbed their noses in the true textures of the city—from the pretentiousness of Park Avenue dinner parties to the barstool exploits of colorful hustlers. My feeling about these writers was a stew made of equal parts admiration and competition. The city room was not an alternate universe. It was
the
universe.

As often as I encountered Breslin in the elevator, he never even gave me a nod. To Breslin, women were irrelevant. Tom Wolfe did exchange a few words with me, in passing, and I hung on them. “The
Herald Tribune
is like the main Tijuana bullring for competition among feature writers,” he told me. “You have to be brave.”

I was little, but I liked to think I was brave. I had a taste for adventure. Why couldn't a woman write about the worlds that men wrote about? What about the world of prostitutes and pimps? The speed freaks creating a world of their own on the Lower East Side? The radical kids at Columbia beginning to make noise about Kennedy's excursions into Vietnam? But men ran the newspapers and magazines that mattered in those days. Men read the news on TV. Men wrote the editorials that told people what to think. Why should men dictate what women could and couldn't do?

Clay Felker was different. Not only was he open to women writers, he was actively recruiting and training them. Barbara Goldsmith, a socially prominent New Yorker who had a keen eye for cultural trends, was one of the first to spot Andy Warhol as the bellwether of the '60s. Her
New York Times
review of Warhol's book
From A to Z
caught Felker's eye. He not only started her writing about the art world, he came to depend on Goldsmith and Wolfe to give him feedback on other new writers he was cultivating.

Patricia Bosworth was then a young actress playing on Broadway in
Mary, Mary
. Felker got her talking about her gabfests with other leading ingenues. He encouraged Bosworth to take notes, and he published their backstage bitching. “It made my name,” Patty told me when she and I became friends. Patty dropped acting and went on to become a famous journalist and biographer.

These women were among the first female feature writers who busted into the
Trib
's Tijuana bullring, and I wanted to be like them. But women then needed a male sponsor. The blessing by Bellows initiated a period in my life that I came to recognize, retrospectively, as the Pygmalion Years. What began with Bellows led to the feet of Clay.

MY FIRST EXPOSURE TO CLAY FELKER
was his voice, a legendary voice. It roared out of his bullpen and whipsawed through the walls of the city room with the force of a busted steam pipe. None of the working reporters looked up; they had learned to ignore it. Outside his doorless lair, I had a chance to observe the man. Half-high partitions were slapped together to enclose, barely, a desk littered with newspapers and magazines, two chairs, a typewriter and a phone, which was affixed to Felker's ear while his feet rested on that desk. He was ruggedly handsome with a square John Wayne jaw and a forehead as broad as a search lamp. He further emphasized his presence by wearing an awning-striped shirt with gold cuff links. He was barking into the phone.

“What do you
mean
you don't have my reservation!
Clay Felker
, three for dinner tonight, my usual table, in the Pool Room.”

The poor devil on the other end must have dissolved into broth when Felker demanded to speak to the Four Seasons maître d'hôtel. Who knew better than Felker, having invented the term “Siberia” for tables to which no-count potted plants were shown, that he and the maître d'hôtel of the state dining room for the media and entertainment elite had an
understanding;
he would be seated as prominently as a marble bust in the entrance of the Met.