The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich Page B

wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. “The ‘hubba-hubba’ climate was tolerated,” he recalled. “I was told the editors would ask girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.”
    Many guys looked at us as people they wanted to cheat on their wives with—and many women were happy to accommodate them. It was easy with suburban-based writers who stayed at hotels in the city on late Friday nights, but there was also sex in the office, literally. The infirmary, two tiny rooms with single beds, was the assignation of choice. Often a writer would go there to “take a nap” for an hour or two, albeit with a female staffer. The offices in the back of the book also served as action central. “You would open the door sometimes and there were these two heavy bodies against the door,” recalled Betsy Carter, “and they would both be on the floor drinking Jack Daniel’s or having sex under the desk.” The outrageous behavior often spilled out into the corridors. Pete A. and Pete B. (Axthelm and Bonventre), the bawdy Sports writers, would stand outside their twelfth-floor office and audibly rate the women on their physical attributes as they walked by. “It was loose and fraternizing and I thought it was a lot of fun,” remembered Maureen Orth, a former back-of-the-book writer, who hung out with the Sports guys. “But women were clearly subordinate.”
    I, too, was caught up in the sexual energy of the place. In January 1968, Jeff and I married and moved to Greenwich Village to be closer to New York University, where he had enrolled in film school. After graduation, Jeff won an internship with Arthur Penn on Alice’s Restaurant and lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for several months; I visited on weekends. It looked as if his career was taking off. He made a short film with Viveca Lindfors and in 1969 was hired by Paramount—in the post– Easy Rider days—to make a movie based on Richard Fariña’s popular counterculture novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.
    But there was something missing in our marriage and I felt emotionally abandoned. I didn’t realize just how unhappy I was until I found myself getting involved with a colleague at work. I wasn’t the only married researcher who was having an affair, but it scared me. One night I told Jeff about it because I knew the affair had more to do with problems in our marriage than with the guy. Jeff was furious, but then confessed that he, too, had been sleeping with someone. Maybe I had sensed it, I’m not sure. But I certainly wasn’t feeling loved. After several long, tearful conversations, we decided to stay together and each of us began psychotherapy.
    Looking back, there was a lot of inappropriate behavior at Newsweek, the kind of “sexual favoritism” and “hostile work environment” that today might be considered illegal. The Nation researchers were referred to condescendingly as “the Dollies.” When a back-of-the-book researcher handed her senior editor some copy, he told her she had “perfectly pointed breasts.” One Saturday afternoon, as Betsy Carter was fitting her story into the allotted space at the makeup desk, a writer she barely knew walked by, leaned over, and planted a soft kiss on her neck. Jane Bryant Quinn remembered that when she was on the mail desk, “randy writers and editors would cruise the newcomers, letting them know that their so-called careers would be helped if they joined the guy for drinks.”
    The short, gray-haired sixty-year-old man who ran the mail room was particularly sleazy. “After a while he would say, ‘I want to take you out for a soda at the ice cream parlor around the corner,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “I went with him once. He would tell you his life story, including his war stories and that he had a war wound on his back. Then he would say, ‘You have lovely hands,’ and would ask you to go to his apartment to massage