I Remember Nothing [12]
For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead. And then she died, and it wasn’t one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person would wish her mother dead? No, it wasn’t one of those things at all. My mother had become a complete nightmare. She drank herself to death at the age of fifty-seven.
I was thirty when she died. After five years as a newspaper reporter, I’d become a freelance magazine writer. I wrote for Esquire in the last days of editor Harold Hayes and for New York magazine in the first days of Clay Felker. It was a heady time. Magazines like Esquire and New York were the zeitgeist, and the (mostly) men who wrote for them were cocky and full of beans. They thought they had invented nonfiction, which they hadn’t, and they even thought they had invented hanging out together in restaurants and staying up late. It was an era when people really cared about magazines, when the arrival of a new Esquire on the newsstands was a bombshell, and it was seriously fun to be part of it. I became an Esquire writer. I wrote a column there, about women. In the world of print, the small world where I lived, I became a little bit famous.
I had never met Lillian Ross, but I wondered about her from time to time. I’d read all her early work and admired it greatly, but she’d stopped doing bylined profiles and wrote mostly unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker. She was rumored to be having an affair with the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, and she seemed (from a distance) to have fallen under the evil spell of blandness that he’d cast over the magazine.
At the time, there was a cold war in the magazine world, between those of us at Esquire and New York, and those of them at The New Yorker. They lived enviable lives—they had contracts and health insurance, and they could take months writing pieces; we, on the other hand, were always overextended and scrambling for dough. They were feigning modesty and disdaining success; we were self-aggrandizing and climbing the greasy pole. They were the anointed; we were pagans. They worshipped the famously reclusive “Mr. Shawn,” and they dropped his name in hushed tones as if he were the Ba‘al Shem Tov; we, on the other hand, jumped from Harold to Clay and back again. They thought we were egomaniacs; we thought they were weird.
I was the sort of person Lillian Ross would hate, if she even knew who I was, or so it seemed to me one night in 1978 when I was pulled across a room to meet her. I was at a party at the home of Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live. Lillian Ross had been reporting a profile of Lorne for eight years. “You two must meet,” Lorne was saying, as he brought us together. I could see in an instant that Lillian Ross did not share this imperative. “You have so much in common,” he said, as he sat us down on the sofa.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” I said.
“And you,” she said.
She was a tiny woman with short curly hair and bright blue eyes, and she smiled and waited for me to begin.
I had one goal: to find out if my mother’s story was true and to find it out without giving anything away. I didn’t want Lillian Ross to know that she was a character in our family saga, and I didn’t want to betray my mother by giving away the fact that Ross had lingered on, in our home, for so many years after her cameo appearance there. I wanted my mother to win the duel, whether or not it had actually happened.
But how to ask the question? “Is it true my mother threw you out of the house?” seemed a little bold. “I think you once met my mother” seemed coy, especially if Ross remembered the incident.