Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [128]
Eventually, The Prince and the Showgirl was completed, for better or for worse, and the Greenes sailed for home. I lost sight of them until I myself went back to America, at which point I became a regular visitor to Milton’s penthouse studio on Lexington Avenue and to their house in Wilton, Connecticut, on weekends.
By then, Milton’s attempt to transform himself into a movie producer had failed. He had to go back to taking photographs because his experience at producing movies with Marilyn had plunged him into debt, but his heart was never in it. He was always looking for a way back into movie production or to Broadway. “I’m putting something together,” he murmured mysteriously if asked what he was doing.
In the meantime, he did magazine work, while Amy, much to Milton’s surprise, took a job as an assistant to the beauty editor of Glamour magazine. There, she quickly proved to be surprisingly ambitious and successful and soon became something of a gadfly at the magazine.
A great many unsuspected talents had worked at Glamour at one time or another, including Andy Warhol, who drew shoes and handbags for the magazine before his artistic career took off; Cybill Shepherd, who got her start as a cover girl; and Gloria Steinem. Glamour’s offices were full of people whose aspirations went beyond evaluating lipstick colors, so I should not have been surprised when Amy asked me to write a piece for the magazine. In 1962, Glamour was going through one of those crises typical of fashion magazines, in which the management begins to question the content of the magazine and wants it made more “relevant” to its readers. While Glamour’s readers wanted to know how to dress well and look pretty and were quite happy with the magazine as it was, the editors were forced to start looking for writers who could make contemporary trends and issues “relevant.” Thus it was that Amy asked me if I could write a piece on rock and roll.
I said that I thought I could. Pop music was hovering out there, hard to avoid, but without yet having much impact on traditional culture. People who read books or edited magazines were aware of music that was then usually lumped together as rock and roll but regarded it as a noisy teenage fad, connected inextricably with mobs of screaming girls, greasy ducktail haircuts, and a generally surly and rebellious adolescent attitude. Everybody had heard of Elvis, of course, but he was usually dismissed as another of those weird Southern phenomena, like “snake-chunking,” gospel revivals, and speaking in tongues. Bob Gottlieb, with his instinct for popular culture, was the only person I knew who actually listened to rock and roll, and he even owned some of Elvis’s albums. From him, I had developed an interest in pop music myself, though I made no claim to be an expert—still, I enjoyed the music (had, in fact, ever since being introduced to Eartha Kitt and Bill Haley and the Comets while I was at Oxford) and at least knew more about it than Glamour’s editors, who thought it was trashy and preferred Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. I agreed to write the piece—five thousand words—and sat down at my portable Hermes typewriter (a purchase made in the days when I still saw my future as that of a foreign correspondent in a trench coat, writing my dispatches at a café table) to do it.
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