One To One; Guest: Janet Groth, Author Of "The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker"

Hello, I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York. Welcome to One to One. Each week, we address issues of timely and timeless concern, with newsmakers in the journalists who report on them, with artists, writers, scientists, educators, social scientists, activists, government leaders. We speak with each one to one. If Helen Gurley Brown had written fiction, she might have transformed Janet Groats early life into a racing novel. It's a real life story from before the women's live movement. It's a story about one woman's innocent and intelligence, her luck, and lies a fair. Janet Groats spent 21 years as a receptionist at the New Yorker magazine. All of them in the so-called Golden Age, when the fabled William Sean was editor. Aside from six months she spent in the magazine's art department, she never rose above

that entry-level perch. But what advantage pointed gave her to observe the inner workings of the magazine and the lives of its fascinating writers, artists, and editors? She would go on to receive a PhD and become a university English professor and a noted biographer. But it's her interactions with the likes of Joseph Mitchell, Muriel Spark, and John Berryman that capture us. Her memoir, The Receptionist, an education at the New Yorker, has just been published by the Algonquin Books Imprint of Workman Publishing. Welcome. Thank you so much, Harold. So Janet, how did the daughter of an Iowa grocer who attended the University of Minnesota wind up at the New Yorker? It was one of those confluence of events that perhaps is only worked out in the stars. We don't know, but it was very unusual for anybody from CBS Television to be out in Minnesota. They were out there covering a balloon ascent into the stratosphere that pre-seated John Glenn's flight.

We're talking about 1957 now. And as I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I took a job as a gal Friday, as they called it in those days, rather the writer-director of this science show for CBS, Arthur Zigart, and he knew I wanted to come to New York and be one of those millions of people who come to New York and seek their fortune. He said, well, send me a resume when you're ready to come. I did so, and he received it when he was in Maine, fishing with E.B. White. Mr. White never saw people when he was in New York at the magazine. In fact, that is, he never saw people on job interviews. He seldom wanted to see people he didn't know anyway. He was a legendary shyness, and the fact that he agreed to see me as testament to his fondness for Mr. Zigart and how lucky I was. Does anybody get a job, or did anybody get a job at the New York without knowing somebody?

I think not. I've never, well, maybe some people come in off the street or just send in a resume, but I haven't heard of any. I'm right. So you sort of asked you what you were interested in, and you said you had deliberately not learned a type very well, because you didn't want to wind up in the typing pool. What jobs were open to women in 1957? Was it pretty much a receptionist or typist? It was about the size of it. Now, men very often got asked to start in the checking department, but it was unusual for women to get into the fact. Fact checking. Oh, yes, that's right. So you got this job as receptionist on the 18th floor. Was there something special about the 18th floor? Was that where all the writers and editors were, or was it just a very small sort of adjunct floor, sharing space with something called the Exide Battery Company in the days that I first went there, maybe a half dozen writers and editors were down there, no cartoonists at all.

It was only after my ill-fated six-month stint up in the art department that Exide Battery left, the New Yorker expanded into the 18th floor and about 40 writers and six cartoonists had offices down on 18, and that became the writer's floor. So what did your job involve? Oh, it was only a matter of taking messages when they were away from their desks and seeing two of the editors always knew where to find them, when they were out on a story, perhaps they were in Africa or in the West Coast or somewhere on a story, and I would know at all times how to connect with them. We didn't have cell phones, of course. Do you remember what your salary was at the time? I do. I was a great pack rat, and I have salary slips that indicate I was getting $80 a week. Wow. Wow. Did you see a lot of crushed egos on the 18th floor? Was that typical at the New Yorker?

Well, I tell you, they had a system that did, in fact, deflate egos, although plenty of writers had egos of a sizable report intended to be shaky, which perhaps accounted for the fact that a big portion of the insurance that the New Yorker carried for its staff was, and its contributors, was to cover shrinks. In any case, there were egos, yes, and there were drawing accounts that placed strain on these writers, drawing account involved paying a regular salary, which was discounted when you sold a piece to the magazine. So people would be more or less in debt to their employers unless and until they sold a piece. It's made for a lot of tension.

So you talked about the weekly meetings where they come in and see if they were going to use any of their cartoons or they have submitted? Well, that was another stress that cartoonists particularly were prone to, they routinely offered 10 or 12 rough drawings with captions and gags for each meeting, art meeting, and whether they sold any of the 12 was decided if Monday art meeting by about three people, Mr. Sean, and the art director, James Garrity at that time, and Carmen Pefia lay out, man. Now were the cartoonists, were they the ones who were most on pins and needles? Well, they tended to be under the greatest stress because they went through this process every week, and no matter whether they were the most famous cartoonists, the New Yorker had ever published, they might not sell all their ruffs, they were still on edge about did the New Yorker want to take their cartoon that week and print it two or three, a very

unusual week when they might take all of them, I don't know that ever happened. So you developed a pretty close relationship with a number of the men on the staff. John Newman too, one or two would be okay, okay, poet John Behrman was one. Well, I have to say this about my relationship with John Behrman, even though his poetry did appear from time to time in the New Yorker, never as often as he thought it should, the poetry editor at that time was Louise Bogan, and she was not all that keen on confessional poetry as his type of poetry was called then, but he did come into the magazine periodically, and it was on one of those visits that he found me there, and we took up a relationship that involved going out to dinner and lunch, and his deciding that I'd make him a good wife, but that all, that all...

Was it serious? Well, to the extent that he had made up his mind, he was going to get a wife and do better than he had on his first two marriages. I think that was probably the extent of his seriousness. He had been my professor out at the University of Minnesota, and it was sort of taking up a different stance. He had been a figure of great reverence in the front of the classroom for me when I was taking his humanities classes, and to think of him as a potential husband was a stretch, but he was very nice and very sweet, and to the extent of his abilities tried to convince me that I'd make him a good wife. Joseph Mitchell, one of the writers, was another person that you started Friday lunches with Joseph for a long time, for years. That's true.

He was interested in me as, well, I'm not quite sure. Not quite sure. On what level he was after all a devoted husband and father in this period, and there was a platonic field to these lunches after all, but it were not quite, I say, not quite innocent. I suppose there's always a subtext of sexual attraction when men and women start launching together, and we might have been talking about literature, which indeed we were. I suppose there was that slight buzz to the whole thing. Would you have some great lunches and lots of great restaurants all over the city? Yes, we did. For six years, every Friday, until I went up to teach at Vassar, and then we changed it to Monday for that year. Ah, okay. Do you think some of this, well, obviously that you were a young, attractive blonde? The blonde probably had a lot to do with it.

I wore my hair at that time in a 12-inch ponytail, which seems to have been an important ingredient in my... Sexual Allure. Well, I perhaps. That's not forget the 26, 36, 26. Well, no, we don't want to... That's pretty impressive. Your relationship with Muriel Spark. Yes, she was like a very godmother to me. She hired me as a kind of moonlighting secretary, in spite of this inability to type without looking at the keyboard, I did get taken on after hours as her private secretary. She was at that time wanting to devote all of her time to her writing. And she had a lot of... To her unwanted correspondence, a lot of it as a Catholic convert from what she called her priestlings, who wanted her to attend their ordinations or something else to do with their progress in the Catholic Church.

And I was to let them down easily and compose and write these letters of regret to them and to a great many other people that she felt she didn't have time for. Now, she had just finished... Or was finishing the prime of Miss Jean Brody at the time, but she was doing that and also writing for the magazine. Well, the first time she came to the 18th floor, she was seeing the prime of Miss Jean Brody into print. It was very unusual for them to use so much of the editorial content of one issue for a single piece of fiction. And they published it in a magazine. They did. And that was 1962 or three. And in 1964, she came to occupy a corner office on the 18th floor. That was one of the expanded, and she worked there on the Mandelbaum Gate and a number of other short stories and poems that appeared in the magazine in those days.

Okay. And you actually will travel abroad, visit her abroad, and you had a wonderful relationship that I call something less than intimate, but something that really stretched over the years and became very important to both of us. And what kind of person was she? Well, she was to a great many people. She seemed to have a kind of astringent and perhaps even sharp personality. And she was capable of that, but to me, she was always very sweet. And she, we were opening her mail at one memorable day in, I think, 1965 or 6, and it must have been 66. And she got invited to a county ball called the lifeboat ball in England. Now a county ball sounds very barn-dancy, but it was actually the sort of thing that Princess Marina would go to and all of the notables and big charity affairs for aristocrats

in England. And she was being invited because I said, well, that sounds very partial. And I said, are you fond of lifeboats? And she said, is this isn't lifeboats, I own an eighth of a racehorse that whose name is lifeboat? And I've been asked to come to this ball on the strength of that. But she wrote to the people who were running the ball and said that I would be in England. She would not be in England during the great famous ball, but I would be a charming friend of hers from America named Janet Growth. And she would like to have some tickets for me to the ball. And she purchased them for me. And she would like my fairy godmothers to the ball. Right. That was great. We're going to be back with more with Janet Growth, author of the receptionist and education at the New Yorker after this. Welcome back to One to One. I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York, and I'm talking with Janet

Growth, author of the receptionist and education at the New Yorker. It seemed that there were quite a few perks associated with being the receptionist at the New Yorker. I would say they were a large part responsible for my staying there for so long, even though I was not being promoted. So you had long vacations in the summer? Yes. To Europe, that one of which involved the county ball, we were talking about. Right. And a number of them stretched to eight weeks or more. Wow. Now, you were also going to graduate school while you were at the New Yorker. Were they subsidizing that? Only to the extent, no, that perhaps has been a misunderstanding because I do credit them for or I say that I owe to them my PhD. When in fact, I was paying for each course out of that $80 salary, and that's why I took

so long. I could only afford one every semester. Now, you had come to the New York with the idea of being a writer? I had. I had it in my mind that I was going to be a novelist. And so that accounts for my being there for so long without actually thinking in terms of talking of talk of the town or some of the short casual pieces that people very often submitted to the magazine. I had a novel in the drawer, as did many people who were submitting journalistic pieces. But I concentrated so heavily on the fiction angle that I didn't think of myself as a potential writer of New Yorker journalism. Now, there was Evan, a writer there, with whom you started a project. I give him the name Evan's because I, because his behavior did not warrant a bill and

his bill. That's right. We would give him that cover. And he was a young cartoonist. He was one of those people who did not every week sell a cartoon to the magazine. He was under a lot of pressure, but he later manifested signs of alcoholism. He was drinking very heavily to mask his tension because not, what shall I say, even though he hadn't told me about it while he was pretending that maybe he was a potential husband for me, there was a wife in the wings. That is, she was a fiance in the wings, and whom he did not tell me about, and thereby hung the deception and the bad behavior. But he did send me into a tailspin for a time. You know, when I'm reading about some parts of your life, it reached like something out

of mad men. A lot of people have said so. The same kind of culture, and you know, sometimes you feel that people, people in the social plural and they're doing things, and sometimes you feel they don't even know why they're doing them. Oh, that's interesting. Well, they were all reaching for some sort of brass ring or a gold ring on the Marigah Round. But yes, perhaps there, perhaps there was some, some aimless flandering going on. I don't know what you're referring to, but there is a sense in mad men as I watch the show with great fascination now of recognition, particularly in the sense that women were often considered kind of perks of the man, that is, you know, that men all felt perfectly entitled to hit on the women around the office, whether or not they were married. And sometimes I felt, well, in mad men, in mad men, that you feel the women are getting

involved with these men and they're not quite, is it love or is it why they're getting it and why they're involved with them? Yes, yes, I think there was a lot of that. And certainly I was in a state of great confusion about who I was, where I was going, and it did take some of that magazine supported shrinking to help me find my way. Who were some of your, obviously, you met a lot of interesting people on the 18th floor, either who worked there or who passed through there? Who were some of your favorites? Oh, I was very fond in addition to Joseph Mitchell of a woman named Emily Han who was on my floor. Dwight McDonald was there, St. Clair McElway, Penelope Gilliette, and to a lesser extent in terms of my fondness for falling kale was there, in fact, the two movie reviewers were there at the same time, even though they were splitting the movie year six months each, I would always be in some state of tension myself about whether they were going

to meet in the ladies room the same time. Why would that be a problem? Well, there was certainly, on the part of people who were fans of each, they were so different that you were hard pressed to like the reviews of one, as well as the reviews of the others, so that there were kind of camps of Pauline Kale fans and Penelope Gilliette. Were there any people that you really dislike that you want to talk about? Oh, well, let's see that I don't give a false name to. But I'm not sure that I should say, even at this great stage, I was pretty famous for my discretion at that time, although there was a period, there was a moment early in my 18th floor expansion when I almost became the loose cannon on the 18th floor, and that was when Frank Modell and I, he was one of the cartoonists there, and I were getting together a Christmas party for the magazine, and we put up posters, Frank Drew, wonderful cartoon

posters, and I went out and got some lights and tinsel and so on. And we were ready to have a Christmas party when Mr. Sean found out about it, and he sent down an demonstration and said, no, no, no, no, no, we can't possibly have a Christmas party. We've been making fun of office Christmas parties in our cartoons for years. We just can't be found to have one of our own. And so you didn't have any? No, we had to take down the print, the tinsel, and we had to take down the posters. I have one of the posters, but we had to take them down, and only a few of us just constantly sat around and had some scotch at five o'clock. Wow. It's a warded Christmas party. Frich, a struggling German playwright and master captain maker, a great love affair. Oh, yes, he was the love of my early life. That the bad boy that Evan was more or less sweeping me off my feet, and it was only later that I found time to ask myself, never mind that I had behaved like a betrayed woman

and certainly felt like a betrayed woman. I hadn't really been in love with him, whereas Frich stole my heart completely. And we were together in a little village apartment for several years, at which point it became clear that he was not one of those men who knew how to commit, probably should have taken some lessons from John Berman. But in any case, that pretty much broke my heart when he went on to a woman who didn't require marriage. So you went to a party girl phase for a while. Yes, I'm afraid I did, and while I say that to an outsider, it might have looked like a lot of fun, I was beating myself up pretty hard inside as a person who had failed in the search for Mr. Wright and didn't have what they call a good self-image.

And it showed in my behavior. But you went through a period of self-discovery, which seemed to have started taking off your trip to Greece. That's right. I used that chapter, which I call the journey in, to do some really serious soul searching. And to go back over my life as the little girl from Iowa, who, after all, had not had a high opinion of herself, maybe because I was the child of an alcoholic. I think children of alcoholics do have a kind of extra feeling of responsibility that maybe it's their fault, the dad, drag, whatever. And it was interesting to me to face up to a lot of the behaviors that I had been blaming on men and realizing that I had been not recognizing myself as having a seductive attitude or being honest about my emotions with men.

There was a lot of shaping up that I had to do, which I was helped to do when I got back and seriously entered analysis. And it does appear that, you know, for a lot of women who come to New York to make their lives, make their fortunes, that then they moan of their story seems to be therapy followed by meeting Mr. Wright. Yes, I was, and there he was under my nose all the time. My landlord. This may be the only case on record of a happy relationship between a tenant and a landlord. And it did take a long time. I had thought of him as a person I had wanted nothing to do with because that Evan Sim had idolized him as a kind of womanizer and a really hot person with the women and a man who had betrayed his own wife and had children. And I don't know, he had a bad reputation in advance of my getting to know him and finding out what a wonderful, the divorced man and much older man he was.

And when I told my analyst that Al, that was his name, said that women are just as good as men and it isn't men's fault if women don't know that. And I quoted that to Dr. Kappelowitz and I said, what do you think of them, apples? And he said, hang on to that guy. So after 21 years, you left a New Yorker to finish your PhD to become an English professor a biographer. Yes, let's take a nod to Edmund Wilson here. Right. Right. Right. That became my scholarly bread and butter. So how do you, you never had a piece in the New Yorker, but how do you assess that 21 years that you spent there? We got about two minutes in which you can do that. I say that when I look back over it and decide whether I was a victim or a beneficiary, I count all the perks. I count all those trips to Europe.

I count all that analysis. And I say when you add it all up, I'm not at all sure who is exploiting who. Well, it's certainly a fascinating book and it gives you another, there have been a lot of books about the New Yorker and that period, but you know, it gives us a whole other angle on what it was like to have been there and the people who were there. We're out of time. I want to thank Janet Groth, author of the receptionist and education at the New Yorker, which has just been published by Algonquin Books for the City University of New York and one to one. I'm Cheryl McCarthy. Well, you'd like to hear from our topics you'd like us to explore. Please let us know.

You can write to me at CUNY TV 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016, or you can go to the website at cuny.tv and click on contact us. I look forward to hearing from you.