I Remember Nothing [5]
When I finally got to Sullivan Street, I discovered that the Festival of St. Anthony was taking place. There was no parking on the block—they were frying zeppole in front of my apartment. I’d never heard of zeppole. I was thrilled. I thought the street fair would be there for months, and I could eat all the cotton candy I’d ever wanted. Of course it was gone the next week.
There were no mail boys at Newsweek, only mail girls. If you were a college graduate (like me) who had worked on your college newspaper (like me) and you were a girl (like me), they hired you as a mail girl. If you were a boy (unlike me) with exactly the same qualifications, they hired you as a reporter and sent you to a bureau somewhere in America. This was unjust but it was 1962, so it was the way things were.
My job couldn’t have been more prosaic: mail girls delivered the mail. This was a long time ago, when there was a huge amount of mail, and it arrived in large sacks all day long. I was no mere mail girl, though; I was the Elliott girl. This meant that on Friday nights I worked late, delivering copy back and forth from the writers to the editors, one of whom was named Osborn Elliott, until it was very late. We often worked until three in the morning on Friday nights, and then we had to be back at work early Saturday, when the Nation and Foreign departments closed. It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly come to believe that you are living in the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.
There were telex machines in a glass-enclosed area adjacent to the lobby, and one of my jobs was to rip off the telexes, which usually contained dispatches from the reporters in the bureaus, and deliver them to the writers and editors. One night a telex arrived concerning the owner of Newsweek, Philip Graham. I had seen Graham on several occasions. He was a tall, handsome guy’s guy whose photographs never conveyed his physical attractiveness or masculinity; he would walk through the office, his voice booming, cracking jokes and smiling a great white toothy grin. He was in a manic phase of his manic depression, but no one knew this; no one even knew what manic depression was.
Graham had married Katharine Meyer, whose father owned The Washington Post, and he now ran The Post and the publishing empire that controlled Newsweek. But according to the telex, he was in the midst of a crack-up and was having a very public affair with a young woman who worked for Newsweek. He had misbehaved at some event or other and had used the word “fuck” in the course of it all. It was a big deal to say the word “fuck” in that era. This is one of the things that drives me absolutely crazy when I see movies that take place in the fifties and early sixties; people are always saying “fuck” in them. Trust me, no one threw that word around then the way they do now. I’ll tell you something else: they didn’t drink wine then. Nobody knew about wine. I mean, someone did, obviously, but most people drank hard liquor all the way through dinner. Recently I saw a movie in which people were eating take-out pizza in 1948 and it drove me nuts. There was no take-out pizza in 1948. There was barely any pizza, and barely any takeout. These are some of the things I know, and they’re entirely useless, and take up way too much space in my brain.
Philip Graham’s nervous breakdown—which ended finally in his suicide—was constantly under whispered discussion by the editors, and because I read all the telexes and was within earshot, even of whispers, I was riveted. There was a morgue—a library of clippings that was available for research—at Newsweek; morgues are one of the great joys of working in journalism. I went to it and pulled all the clips about Graham and read them between errands. I was fascinated by the story of this wildly attractive man and the rich girl he’d married. Years later, in Kay Graham’s autobiography, I read their