New York in the '50s (9 page)

When I told C. Wright Mills I'd taken a job on a weekly paper in Princeton, he puffed on his pipe, shrugged, and said, “Small-town stuff. You'll be back.”

He was right, of course. I came back sooner than even I had hoped, courtesy of a job offer from Mills himself. In the meantime, I was proud and relieved to tell my parents I had not only graduated from college—I had a job.

As I found out, getting your first job in New York wasn't easy, and some of us realized the challenge while still in college and wisely planned ahead. Because of my injury from the auto accident, I was not eligible for the draft, but other young male college graduates faced two years of military service that further complicated their career plans. Max Frankel, the ace Columbia correspondent for the
New York Times
, was hired by the paper when he graduated, but the draft was hanging over him.

“I was terrified that if I left for two years in the Army, no one at the
Times
would remember me when I got back,” Frankel says. “But there was a law that if you had a job for one year and you were drafted, they had to take you back when you returned from the service. I went to my draft board and got a year's deferment to get an M.A. in political science, then asked the
Times
if I could have my two days off in the middle of the week—I could take a full load of five courses by going to class on Tuesday and Wednesday.”

When Max returned from two years of Army service, a guaranteed job at the
Times
was waiting, and his first assignment was police reporter. “My first year I was in the police shack, hanging out with guys who only covered cops. I rode around with these guys who had guns in their glove compartment and talked rough cop talk. The newspaper scene in New York then was vibrant. It was hotly competitive, with papers of every conceivable stripe, from the
World-Telegram
, which was sucking up to the establishment, to the Hearst papers, the
Mirror
and the
American
. The
Daily News
was a terrific tabloid, and we also had the liberal
Post
. There was very little TV then.”

Few of us planned our careers so well ahead. If we had no previous experience or connections, we turned to family or friends. Just as I got my job with the aid of my high school history teacher, the future novelist Bruce Jay Friedman got his through what he calls “the Bronx mothers' Mafia.” After a hard day of making the rounds of employment agencies when he came home from the Air Force in 1953, Bruce had dinner with his mother at the House of Chan in Manhattan. “We were having those drinks everybody used to have then, the ones with the orange slice and the cherry, when my mother spotted this woman she knew from the neighborhood sitting at the bar. My mother invited her over to our table and introduced me. She said, ‘This is my son, and he wants to get started in writing.' This other Bronx mother nods and says, ‘My son-in-law works for Magazine Management Company. He'd love to meet your son, maybe he could help him.'

“I started in 1953 with Magazine Management and stayed until 1965, but I never did get formally offered the job. I was given my own magazine to edit—
Swank
, a tepid harbinger of what girlie magazines were to become—then I was put in charge of four other magazines the company owned, called
Male, Man's World, Men
, and
True Action
.”

Joan Didion knew she wanted to be a writer and live in New York after her stint as a guest editor at
Mademoiselle
, the summer after her junior year at Berkeley. When she returned to the University of California, she entered a
Vogue
magazine contest for college seniors, which would bring her back to New York if she won it, and she did.

“The prize was your choice of a two-week trip to Paris,” Joan recalls, “or a thousand dollars in cash and an interview for a job at
Vogue
. I took the money and the interview. The day I was interviewed I had a fever of a hundred two, but I got the job. I wrote promotional copy, merchandising copy—the kind that was sent to stores as advertising support. I'd sit there and think up things to write, like ‘
Vogue
says pink.' I threatened to quit and take the job of college editor of
Mademoiselle
, so then
Vogue
put me in the features department, mainly writing captions. I didn't get to write any articles until some writer who was assigned to do a piece on jealousy didn't come in with it, and it was already on the cover. I wrote the
piece and they liked it enough to give me a byline, which wasn't part of the deal. This piece turned out to be popular, so I got to write others like it.”

When the future novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne got out of the Army in September 1956, he went to New York to try to get a job on a magazine. The problem was, he says, “I had never published anything, and I didn't even write for my college paper or literary magazine at Princeton. I wanted to be a writer in the sense that I wanted
to have written
. I had a box of story ideas, and a completely plotted-out novel about a movie director. I had never met a movie director and I hadn't the remotest idea of what one did. I didn't actually write. I would sit and make notes, write down ideas, and I had the title and the first line of my novel. It was called
Not the Macedonian
, and the opening line was ‘They called him Alexander the Great.'”

Unlike Joan Didion (his future wife), John Dunne hadn't won any magazine contests, and unlike me, he had no manila folder of clippings, so he used his imagination. “I went to the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square,” he remembers, “and got a Colorado Springs newspaper. I'd been stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado, and I remembered the paper from Colorado Springs didn't run bylines. I got back issues and cut out stories and fabricated a portfolio. I figured the paper was far enough away so no one would check. I went to an employment agency and they called the paper. It was a horrendous moment. But the portfolio landed me a job through another agency, at a magazine called
Industrial Design
. It was an artsy-craftsy publication on East 50th Street, across from St. Patrick's. I got a job as a writer—never having written diddly—based on this spurious portfolio. I was getting $100 a week. When you crossed from $70 to $100 a week, that was big. And I cut the mustard. I began writing articles the magazine liked and published. By '59 I had a
real
portfolio of stories, and I went on to
Time
magazine.”

Meg Greenfield had some help in getting her first jobs in New York from friends she'd met in England and Italy after graduating from Smith. She had gone to study at Cambridge, because one of the leading literary critics of the day, F. R. Leavis, was teaching
there, but just as Marion Magid, at Barnard, discovered that “Trilling was for the boys” at Columbia, so was Leavis only for the boys at Cambridge.

“I went there
for
Leavis, but they didn't let women be tutored by him,” Meg explains. “You had to go to a women's college.” She did, however, meet and become friends with some of the American boys who were studying with Leavis, like Robert Gottlieb, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Ellsberg. “When I came back from Europe to live in New York, Bob Gottlieb called and said there was a woman where he was working at Simon and Schuster—he'd just started there—who was helping set up a Volunteers for Stevenson headquarters, and there were lots of openings. I was given a volunteer job filing cards. If you were minimally intelligent and diligent, you were valuable. I went to my boss after several weeks and said I noticed that on some of the cards the word ‘Negro' was written in big letters beside the name. I wasn't an expert in these matters—I was just a grad school dropout—but I felt this was not the right thing to do. I said, ‘If I were to come in here and find “Jew” written beside my name, I'd be upset.' Well, this nice sort of socialite lady said, ‘You're absolutely right, dear. Make all new cards for these people, and instead of “Negro,” just put a capital
N
beside their names.' I should have known right then Adlai didn't have a chance.

“I was later promoted to a paying job as director of research, presiding over the clipping files. My first regular job was filing clippings for
The Reporter
. I got my job there not just because of my experience filing for the Stevenson volunteers, but because Claire Sterling, the
Reporter
's foreign correspondent who I met in Rome, wrote to the managing editor, saying something like, ‘This young woman hasn't done anything yet, but she'll be good.' While I did my filing at
The Reporter
, I worked on an article about Nixon. It took me about six months to write and was called ‘The Prose of Richard Nixon.'” This brilliant satirical piece got her promoted to staff writer.

Most of my friends and I lucked out in the first jobs we got. Even if they didn't lead to something better, most were entertaining. Ann Montgomery was hired through an employment agency as a receptionist for the New York City Anti-Crime Commission: “We kept track of which restaurants the Mafia people went to eat in.”

There were also just plain lousy jobs, ones that were not what they promised. After graduating from Barnard, Jane Richmond was thrilled to work in an office that purported to be a literary agency, but it turned out to be more like a sweatshop. “There were forty women in a room rewriting people's novels,” Jane remembers. “I was rewriting a book by a woman who had been a rumrunner during Prohibition. A lot of the writers were black girls who had been English majors and couldn't get a job in publishing. So the man who owned this agency said he was a great liberal by hiring them. He charged the clients fees for rewriting their work, and then I learned he never even sent the manuscripts out to publishers, but for another fee published the books himself. It was really a vanity press posing as a literary agency. He used to pay us in coins, and had us hold our hands out like supplicants, then he would break these packages of coins into our waiting hands. When I told him I was quitting he was furious, and he actually told me, ‘You'll never work in New York again.'”

I felt that my friends were savoring the daily challenge and adventure of Manhattan—not to speak of the nightly romance—while I was trudging the tree-lined, somnolent streets of suburban Princeton, covering sewer commission meetings and the local police courts (traffic violations were the hottest crimes) and ferreting out the latest rezoning ordinances of the town council, returning at night to the flocked-wallpaper prison of my nook in Mrs. Mulford's roominghouse. I took the commuter train from Princeton Junction into New York every weekend to stay with my friend Ted Steeg and his roommates on West 92nd Street, and made romantic forays with them into the Village or to the jazz clubs on West 52nd Street.

We used to come back and drink until dawn, reciting the purplish sentimental poem by the radical journalist of the twenties John Reed, chanting together with dramatic fun (yet feeling a tingle at the same time) his hymn to New York: “Who that has known thee but shall burn / In exile till he come again / To do thy bitter will, O stern / Moon of the tides of men!” We called New York the Stern Moon, as in, “Wakefield, when you returning to the Stern Moon?”

After only four months in New Jersey—it seemed like four years—a letter came from C. Wright Mills, offering me a job. I let
out a yelp of joy. Mills wrote that he'd been given a grant to hire a researcher for a new book he was writing on American intellectuals, and he'd like me to have the position. It meant taking a pay cut from the $70 a week I was making on the
Packet
to $60, and the job would last only six months, but those concerns seemed petty compared to the chance to get back to New York and immerse myself in literature and politics instead of deliberations of the town sewer commission. I gave Barney Kilgore notice enough to hire a replacement, and we parted with respect, if not rapport. I was on my way back to the Stern Moon.

I didn't have to look for a place to live in Manhattan, but moved right in with the group of guys I'd been staying with when I came up on weekends from my exile. There were three of them sharing a one-bedroom apartment at 312 West 92nd Street, and they looked on adding a fourth roommate not as overcrowding but as a chance to lower the overhead. The rent was $120, and adding another body meant each paid only $30 a month instead of $40. Three single beds were crammed into the one bedroom, dormitory style, and one person slept on the living room couch on a rotating basis.

We discovered a covey of girls, just graduated from Wells College in Aurora, New York, who shared an apartment not far away, on West End Avenue. They split four ways what seemed to us the extravagant rent of $200 for a roomy, nicely furnished two-bedroom apartment with high-ceilinged living room and dining room, paying shares from salaries of $40 to $50 a week earned from working on magazines and teaching school. We met through my high school friend Jane Adler, who had also gone to Wells, and I introduced the girls to the guys in our gang.

A series of “exchange” parties and dinners ensued, and we learned to love the more ambitious dinner dish of the West End Avenue girls, the famous tuna noodle casserole, held together with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. Our only complaint, which we kept a secret, was what seemed to us the skimpiness of the portions they served, and we took to stuffing ourselves with Ritz crackers before arriving for one of their meals. All of us became friends, and two couples became husbands and wives, and lived happily ever after. (Only in the fifties.)

Other apartments of young guys and gals new to New York were
meeting and mating in similar fashion. Like many young women during their first days in the city, Ann Montgomery had lived at a women's residence when she arrived: “My father, a classics professor at Miami University in Ohio, arranged for me to stay at the Parnassus Girls' Club at 112th and Broadway, knowing I'd be safe and have at least two meals a day.” But soon she met some friends from her college who were sharing an apartment on West 95th Street and were looking for another roommate: “There were five of us, and I think we each paid $60 a month,” Ann recalls. “We used to have pajama parties. The boys in the apartment upstairs would come down in their pajamas and we'd all drink beer, then the boys would go upstairs again. The exciting part was that we were in our nightgowns and the boys in their pajamas. One of the boys married one of the girls.”