Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [129]
The great thing about magazine writing is that you start ahead of the game, with somebody else’s idea. Magazine editors, unlike book editors, mostly know what they want and have a fairly clear idea of who their average reader is. As a freelance writer, I never truly became a member of the Glamour family, but I gradually began to develop a feel for what might interest the Glamour reader, though without the cast-iron certainty that the editors had about the tastes and limits of their subscribers. Shortly after my debut, Glamour’s editor in chief, Mrs. Kathleen Aston Casey (it was then almost mandatory for the editors of women’s magazines to have three names), expressed an interest in the fact that more and more women were engaging in dangerous sports. Like most topics seized on by magazine editors, this nugget of information reached her from a fellow guest at a dinner party—in the world of women’s magazines at the time this constituted serious research. Mrs. Casey conceived an issue dedicated to the clothing necessary for the pursuit of these dangerous sports, whatever they might be—her fellow guest had not been clear on their exact nature—to be introduced with a feature article by me.
I took on the assignment happily enough, fairly confident that I would find women doing all sorts of unlikely sports. This indeed proved to be the case. Over a period of a few weeks I talked to women rugby players, a woman jockey, women scuba divers, women rock climbers, women hockey players, and even an embattled, if privileged, team of women polo players. The women’s movement as such had not yet even begun—Gloria Steinem had yet to go underground as a Playboy “bunny,” Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer had not yet written their books—but already it was apparent that women were eager to “push the envelope,” as test pilots say, and confident that anything men could do they could do as well or better. I even met the first woman telephone lineperson, who had attracted national attention when she was photographed climbing a telephone pole in her overalls, work boots, and hard hat, but of course repairing telephone lines was not exactly a sport. All this was interesting but failed to satisfy Mrs. Casey’s vision of danger.
Eventually, I made contact with a group of women sky divers in New Jersey who were willing to be interviewed and photographed. After several drinks, dinner, and a couple of bottles of wine, I felt the atmosphere was loose enough to enable me to ask just what they got out of parachute jumping. Was it excitement, the thrill of danger, a sense of liberation—what, in short, made them jump out of an airplane once a week when the weather was right? We batted this back and forth, but no answer was forthcoming, at least none that I thought would satisfy Mrs. Casey. Eventually, late in the evening, a schoolteacher, blushing prettily, leaned close to me and confessed that while excitement, danger, and liberation were all part of it, she, personally, always had an orgasm on the way down, right after opening her chute.
This, it seemed to me, was something to bring back to Mrs. Casey. Women’s magazines were at that time just beginning to take the plunge into the deep end of the sexual pool that eventually resulted in Helen Gurley Brown’s triumph in resuscitating the moribund Cosmopolitan with the “Cosmo girl,” who was as outspoken about her sexual needs as she was insecure about her weight, manicure, and fashion savvy. Glamour