Wandering across book ideas.

After moving to Beijing to collaborate with a Chinese publisher on one book, the next book I wrote was about the experience of living in China, where, unlike most Westerners, the Chinese aren’t convinced there’s any one way of being right and there are very few ways of being wrong (this, partly, explains the great historic divide between the two cultures). Emerging from this awareness was whether my values were germane in an America that had just elected Donald Trump as its president the first time—someone with no qualms about lying. To me, the word “lie” conveys not only a factual judgment but also a moral one. So where did that leave me?

No single generation can claim a peerless contribution to ethical behavior, but in my parents’ time, morality was a rulebook: some parts enshrined as decent behavior; others, implicit. Sins were laid bare, and bad behavior had far-reaching and lasting consequences. That is no longer the case: what were once clearly designated ethics went from blurred to being obliterated. With what my son would describe as para-military methods, I taught him the difference between right and wrong (let us not get into the confusing morality of strident parental teaching); suffice to say his take on morality was not instilled by me as much as it was by the profound changes he experienced during his life: changes brought about by advancements in technology and science I don’t fully understand, and that my parents couldn’t have imagined.

I thought that if I tried to discover where and how morality was changing, I might be able to chart where it’s going. This was the uncharted territory I decided to explore in my next book, which is not so peculiar after all, given the times we are living in.

Research as process.

I tackled the multi-faceted subject of morality by dividing it into three categories: money, politics, and sex – the Holy Trinity of contemporary life, as it were. Each person interviewed would be linked with one of the three categories. Because they would be as geographically far-flung as they were diverse, I based myself in London. Like most international cities, London primarily accommodates the rich. Not being rich, I was grateful when an English friend alerted me to an affordable rental flat in his London neighbourhood. Once settled, I began writing letters to people I had heard or read about, who might be willing to explain how and why they had chosen to follow the moral status quo, fight to protect it, or act in outright defiance of it. My interviews broached morality’s sub-categories: the gratification and ramifications of right or wrong, and ventured into personal discussions about the moral choices they’d made in their life.

During the year, I explored morality with a convicted murderer; a CEO fired for blowing the whistle on a multinational corporation in Japan; an American futurist lobbying to program morality in robots (it was not Elon); the cheerfully unrepentant founder of a website based in Canada that facilitated affairs for married people (his website was later hacked and his customers made public – he did seem repentant then).

From a well-known neuroscientist, I was hoping for a biochemically confirmed answer to the question of whether there is a difference between how men and women consider what is right and what is wrong. And here I must disclose that my career in business had unfolded predominantly among men. I’ve witnessed enough decision-making among them to believe that various ill-advised mergers and acquisitions (and, certainly, a large number of hostile takeovers) might not have occurred had it been women weighing the benefits against the risks. After a careful and close review of the facts, one might even conclude that men often create obstacles to progress. This, according to the neuroscientist, does not mean that women are more moral than men; but nor is it illogical to assume that end-of-year balance sheets would benefit from more women weighing in along the way.

Does morality have a future?

Two years after I questioned whether my values were applicable in my country of birth, Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business was published. Ten years have passed since then. Donald Trump’s second go-around as President is a stunning repudiation of ethical values. If it is true that our collective morality reflects the behavioral standards by which we submit ourselves to others, then he has already succeeded in reimagining what we are.

In a world that has become—for right or for wrong—even more interconnected, I’ve concluded that to function—and, ideally, thrive—we’ll need to take our eyes off the mirror and look squarely at people with different truths and values. Only then will we be able to make the difficult decisions of when to be tolerant. At times, those decisions will require us to relinquish some part of our moral ground, and at other times they will call on us to protect the moral ground we are determined to hold.

This was recently posted on Tiktok. That we can still question what constitutes morality gives me hope.

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@deejaygabe1Morality isn’t as fixed as we like to believe. In Behaving Badly, Eden Collinsworth explores how politics, business and relationships constantly reshape our idea of right and wrong. Power, technology and culture all influence what society chooses to tolerate. The book doesn’t give easy answers, but it forces an important question. Are our values evolving… or are we simply redefining the boundaries of acceptable behaviour? What behaviour today do you think history will judge differently?

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@deejaygabe1Morality isn’t as fixed as we like to believe. In Behaving Badly, Eden Collinsworth explores how politics, business and relationships constantly reshape our idea of right and wrong. Power, technology and culture all influence what society chooses to tolerate. The book doesn’t give easy answers, but it forces an important question. Are our values evolving… or are we simply redefining the boundaries of acceptable behaviour? What behaviour today do you think history will judge differently?

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Making the decision to live in another country means that you already admire something about it.

Despite their persistent class consciousness, I respect the British for believing – at least for most of their history - that how a nation cares for its most vulnerable is a reflection of its humanity. After the book I wrote in China on Western business practices was released by government censors and sold in bookstores, I moved to England to write my next book— I Stand Corrected - about living in China while writing that one.

London: dug up and locked down.

It’s impossible to dig up the earth in the U.K. without hitting something ancient. Demolition in London requires a military expert to oversee the search for unexploded German bombs from the Blitz. If Roman ruins are discovered, a team of archaeologists are called in to ensure that those objects are carefully removed and relocated to one of the British museums.

For centuries, freehold property titles have been held by the Crown and a handful of ennobled families. Marylebone, the neighborhood where I rented a flat, is owned by the Howard de Walden estate, which dates itself to 1715. It is, as city parcels go, quite something. Contrary to my ingrained anti-feudalist way of thinking, I saw the benefits of an ancient land baron family when it unilaterally granted artists free studio space in retail shops that were forced to close during the COVID lockdown.

* * *

London was entirely British in the early 1920’s. The Empire still controlled roughly a quarter of the Earth’s land surface and ruled over 458 million people. Some 40% of London’s population consisted of people born in another country . . . and, while it’s true that, like most capital cities, London is overwhelmed by internationally familiar stores, its character can still be found if explored on foot.

During the COVID lockdown, London residents (with the exception of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and quite a few members of his staff ) followed the strictly enforced restriction of two precious hours outside each day. Being among the subset of people who remained in empty, silent, stationary London, I spent my allotted two hours seeking out the city’s infamous Blue Plaques affixed on the façades of old buildings in which lived or worked a disparate range of past foreigners far more illustrious than myself.

Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729. He became an actor, composer, and writer, and was the first African to vote in a British election and to be given an obituary in British newspapers in 1780.

Mary Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda, where she endured brutal conditions working in the salt ponds. She was sold multiple times before being brought to England by her enslaver in 1828. She escaped her master in London and sought refuge with abolitionists, which led to the transcription and publication of her firsthand account of slavery in the British colonies that played a significant role in the British anti-slavery movement.

Astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848) migrated from Germany in early adulthood. One of several comets she discovered is 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, which bears her name. She became the first woman to be paid for her contribution to science (by King George III) and the first to be awarded a Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was expelled from Paris in 1849 and arrived stateless in London, where he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital in the British Museum Library.

American writer Henry James (1843-1916) moved to London before settling in the Sussex town of Rye. He sought citizenship in 1915, a year before his death, as a gesture of loyalty to Britain at the beginning of the First World War.

The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was forced to seek exile in Britain when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He lived in London until the end of his life.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) moved from America to England where he took citizenship.

More recently, Britain offered resettlement schemes to 36,000 Afghans, 140,000 people from Hong Kong, and 250,000 Ukrainians. That was before the country, pining for the forces that once fuelled Great Britain’s global power, decided to pull up its drawbridge and vote for Brexit.

The Oxford Tube Station.

Despite—or because of—Brexit, “multiculturalism” is a word in Britain that stands for the complex relationship between a country’s perceived national identity and how that interacts with people who arrive and do things differently. But it seems to me that, regardless of the personal views of its citizens, they show a willingness to embrace non-conformity.

Neurodiversity describes variations in brain function, particularly in how the brain processes the world. There’s no one autistic experience, but a characteristic of individuals who are autistic is the ordered and structured focus on complex patterns. It makes for remarkable problem solvers. If not in practice, then in theory, trains are meant to follow consistent schedules and routes. London’s Oxford Tube station—one of the busiest in the world—has made a point of employing a man with autism to deal with the hordes of passengers coursing into the station, asking which train on what platform will take them to their intended destinations.

Gender fluidity seeps into London’s male-only clubs.

Another positive indication that diversity is taking root in Britain can be found, paradoxically, in its private clubs.

The forerunners to London’s all-male establishments were solidarities formed in the 1600’s, the most famous of which was organized by Sir Walter Raleigh at a tavern called the Mermaid. By the 18th century, the settings for men to converse and socialize over drinks and food were upgraded by British upper-class males and housed in stoically dignified buildings.

To accommodate the rising middle class male in the 19th century, more clubs began to appear in Mayfair offering memberships not limited to hereditary privilege or special favour. The number of men’s clubs in London climbed to over 400. Currently, there are no more than 40. They share the same characteristics: excellent wine, indifferent food, ducal architecture but primitive facilities, and the kind of service not found in the real world.

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This man has hailed a taxi to return him to a different era. Meanwhile, to make things more convenient for the Beefsteak Club’s all-male membership, every waiter there is addressed as “Charles.”

Established in 1868 and located in Central London, the Saville club made a point in the past of resisting change. For almost 160 years, it has been a bastion of gender segregation in its insistence that no women be allowed.

Though UK law permits exclusion of women in men’s clubs, U.K law also encompasses the Equity Act of 2010—the cause of a dilemma at this club. By assigning a “protected characteristic to a person proposing to undergo a process for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex,” a man cannot be forced to resign from an all-men’s club before, during or after his transition to woman.

It is for this reason that the Saville club had its first female member without actually admitting her to its ranks. In the wake of understandably conflicted feelings, club members behaved as the old-school English are meant to behave: with forbearance.

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Looking back, it appears that my career unfolded in ten-year increments. First, as a book publisher. Next, as a magazine editor. Then, as a corporate executive at Hearst (or, “suit,” in the parlance of the times). At the beginning of this particular ten-year period, in what is pictorially referred to as “false dawns” (when it’s still dark outside but birds begin to belt out their “here I am” calls), I wrote my first book—a novel. You’d be right to ask what possessed me. I’m not sure, but the first line of the descriptive copy reads “Isabel was able to remember the precise moment she tried killing her husband.” Remarkably, the book is still in print.

Given his well-travelled upbringing, it wasn’t unexpected that, when my son, G., finished his French education, he decided to attend a British university and major in Chinese. This occurred at the same time I was approached to become the chief of staff of a global think tank whose remit of conflict resolution was—and is still—focused on international security issues. My career was solidly planted in media, which made the offer unexpected. The reasoning, I was told, had to do with a consensus that I would be “a calm, well-suited manager of an international institute that dealt with the perma-crisis state of the world” (things have changed very little). Their take on my background was an overreach, but the challenge was intriguing, and, aware that I wouldn’t have been offered such an experience anywhere else at any other time, I accepted the offer. Had conventional wisdom been allowed to interfere, I might have addressed any number of salient issues before signing on: the first being that I had no background in international policy.

Friends wondered if I’d taken leave of my judgement. When one asked if the institute was staffed predominantly by men, the question called forth my initial impression of its offices in New York and Brussels, whose drably painted walls and heartless furniture suggested there was nary a woman on the premises.

“It must be tough,” she said. “Have the men made you cry yet?” she asked. “They can be rather assertive,” was her ladylike way of expressing the obvious.

Tears would have been considered a shameful display of weakness when confronted by male assertion in the office. Mine were held back until after business hours when, returning home, I drew a hot bath and gave myself permission to break down in private. This is not to say that I regretted taking up the challenge: it forced me to work against habit and took me places I wouldn’t otherwise have gone. Our offices were in New York, Washington, D.C., Brussels, and Moscow. Home for me was Brussels and New York. Being on call across five international time zones, seven days a week, desiccated my private life and nasal passages (so many long airplane flights). The experience was unique in every way but, after six years in my role at the institute —and, having put aside savings enough to cover my son’s continued education—I decided to take a chance at full-time writing.

There is more to the story, of course. Writing would require moving (again) – this time to China, because I had decided - in a combined state of ignorance and enthusiasm (and possibly madness)—to author a book for Chinese—in Chinese— about Western business practices[1].

In previous visits, hired translators shielded me from the fact that very little English is spoken outside universities and office buildings. Now, I am on my own to grasp the tonal differences of a language where the slightest slip can move the meaning of a word in the most unexpected direction. That I tried communicating an address in Chinese to a taxi driver, but instead—to my deep embarrassment—offered him sexual services, was enough to convince my son, fluent in Chinese, to come to Beijing and help.

China—“The Middle Kingdom”—was designated in name in 1000BC.

From whence my own people hail, I have little knowledge, but it’s obvious that their lives weren’t set on immutable coordinates. On my father’s side of the family’s ancestry chart was Sherman Billingsley. After a stint in Leavenworth for selling bootlegged liquor on the East Coast during Prohibition, he established the Stork Club, a watering hole for New York’s café society. At the same time my father left the South for a Harvard education in the North, my mother arrived in America from Europe with an enigmatic family history. Hers was a separateness belonging to a timeless place of forgotten manners, of what is sayable and what was not. She would have appreciated the early Chinese who believed they were living in the civilised middle ground of the earth, surrounded by barbarians.

Arriving in China, I’m not so much a barbarian as laowau—a foreigner, who is determined to experience adventure from the ground level. Dongzhimen is the site of what was once Beijing’s northeast city gate, leading to the countryside. Bicycles and tuk-tuks weave in and out of honking cars and horse-drawn wagons loaded with produce. Sidewalks are flecked with fruit and vegetable stands and kiosks, each under the stewardship of someone offering to upgrade old shoes or repair broken bicycles. At night, these same sidewalks are lit by the glow of small burners from food stalls.

I’ve moved into a middle-class Chinese compound where my rented, semi-Westernized apartment features a bedroom, a small kitchen with a washing machine, and an enclosed porch with a pulley system to hang clothes to dry. From here, I write my book about Western attitudes for a Chinese readership. Its publication is blocked by the government and, while waiting for the censors to review the words I’ve written, I am careful to avoid conveying any opinion when lecturing at the Beijing University. China has come by its reputation for censorship without apology. Logging on to any public server—including those at the increasing number of Starbucks coffeehouses—requires my cell phone number. It has an unsettling effect.

In time, this too.

When my closest friend, Candida, was dying of cancer, she told me not to be sad.

“I’ve had a good run,” was what she said. “And I’ll finally meet the Jew God.”

Candida left instructions that there was to be no funeral . . . and that her ashes be buried behind her Stonington, Connecticut house, next to the trellis covered in night-blooming jasmine. She was the daughter of Italians who settled on New York’s Lower East Side. I had no idea what, if any, religion she practiced, but whenever she referred to a higher entity, it was simply “Jew-god.”

Christian or Jewish, Shiva or Buddha—the name makes little difference. It’s the belief that gives us comfort. Families in China consult the almanac for advantageous dates before sending out pink invitations if the deceased is eighty years or older—an acknowledgement that mourners are expected to celebrate the person’s longevity. Candles are lit so loved ones can see how to get to the afterworld, and paper money is burned—a wire transfer of sorts—to eliminate any financial concerns upon arrival. What a reassuring way to depart life. For whom among us would not wish for a rent-stabilized beyond?

[1] Remarkably, the book became a bestseller there.

Fifteen years after I married, I became unmarried in a way that put my heart through a woodchipper.

No doubt you will be impelled to ask questions about this admission. I will tell you that love is the assassin of logic. To be both happy and sad is not so shocking. I will remind you that, regardless of the honesty to which most of us aspire, seldom is there complete truth to personal disclosures, but I will divulge that marriage exhausted me. I will admit that I considered ending it but imagined that my life without my husband would be a lesser one. I will acknowledge that it was profoundly sad—but not entirely unguessable—that there would come a time when it was impossible to continue with the person I loved without question.

The tenuous assumption that life can go on.

Our son, G., was left in my care. My way of coping was to provide him with a sense of safety.

家

The Japanese word “home” appears in the form of two characters—one under the other—which, combined, convey the meaning of a “safe place.” Home for us was a New York apartment.

Often people mistake one place—their place—for everyplace . . . for everything.

Christopher Columbus, well-travelled and persistent though he was, failed to convince those in multiple kingdoms to support his belief that he could reach the riches of the East Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean. The king of Portugal rejected the theory outright. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain were enthusiastic about the prospect of found wealth but thought the downpayment Columbus demanded was unacceptably high. He didn’t help his cause by insisting that he retain ten percent of whatever riches he brought back (not an unreasonable demand, given what agents collect from authors and the royalty rates publishers pay writers).

It’s impossible to know why, then, several months after Columbus left the court empty-handed, the Spanish king and queen did a U-turn and agreed to sponsor his journey. One theory had to do with a slim, untitled book describing the same route to riches Columbus had when he initially lobbied for funding.

First circulated between 1357 and 1370, the book purported to be the memoir of Englishman Sir John Mandeville. It’s now believed that Mandeville was a fictitious character . . . and that the real author probably travelled very little, if at all. It didn’t seem to matter that the book described a mix of things proven to be true and outlandish claims that had not been, or that it was impossible to tell which claims were false. The book’s tabloid quality, along with its accessible text that could be enjoyed in snippets, made it a popular read (I hope not unlike this Substack).

Mandeville’s Travels, as it is generally called now, was found among the personal items in the admiral’s cabin of Columbus’s flagship. The book’s more alarming passages told of “men whose whole heads do grow beneath their shoulders. It described hills of gold guarded by ferocious ants; a race of humans who used their single giant “shadow foot” to shield them from the sun; and another with holes in place of mouths who sucked their food through pipes.

There were sheep that grew on trees, geese with two heads, people with the heads of dogs, and cave dwelling creatures that hissed like snakes.

During the 35 days Columbus sailed westward searching for a passage to China and India, his copy of Mandeville’s Travels would have reminded him that upon arrival in a foreign land, he would inevitably encounter foreign things. Like most of us, he probably didn’t consider that, as soon as he arrived, he would be the foreign thing.

The Changing circumstances of a traveller.

Infected with an interest in what goes on in foreign places, I travelled on my own before I was married. While married, I travelled with another person with whom I gladly shared the intrigues of other places. As a single parent, I travelled with my son so that the strangeness of being two when there once was three might lose its place to adventure.

This compelled me to work around his school schedule and the need to support us both.

Due to online notifications of discounted air fares and out-of-season hotel prices, we could afford to visit a foreign city every other month. This required booking an overnight, direct flight on Thursday that would return us to New York in time for Sunday dinner and school the next day. We were globetrotting purists, traveling without guidebooks and limiting ourselves to carry-on luggage. Our destinations depended entirely on bargains, chance, and, usually, shared interests. It was a joyful, peripatetic existence.

G.’s devotion to Agatha Christie’s mysteries was the reason we stayed in Istanbul’s Pera Hotel, where, in room 411, she wrote Murder on the Orient Express. A jarring combination of strong tea and sweet cake charged us with enough energy for two days of exploring. Another two-day trip to Rome placed us in the Hotel Nazionale, famous for its long history with writers. My room request (Room 312) was the same in which Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre stayed when they spent a month in or two every summer in Rome during the 1950s and 1960s. G. had a bent for independence and was happy when given his own small room on the hotel’s top floor.

“Above all other countries we loved Italy,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “and above all other cities, Rome; so there we stayed.”

My own happiness was changeable. Sadness sometimes reappeared with a vengeance. Traveling for me was a form of exile from my husband and his undeflected notice of everything. There had been no end to him until there was. But, for G.—who had acquired a taste for Tin-Tin adventures, with their globe-trotting capers in faraway places— excitement came from the very act of being on the way to somewhere else.

Trip by trip is how our lives moved forward. It was an unconventional way to raise a boy to be a man, but there was a screwball buoyancy about it, and nothing in our saga was as preposterous as the fact that it seemed to work.

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Ten years after BUZZ magazine was launched in L.A., it was sold, and I am ready to move on.

This time, we pack for Paris where we plan to live off our savings while I enjoy a much-needed break. G. is fluent in the language. W. speaks it well enough. I am hopeless with French but determined to learn it.

In the plaza in front of Notre Dame is a simple bronze marker considered Point Zero of Paris. All road distances in the country are measured starting from this point.

“God would be perfectly happy here,” Saul Bellow once wrote, having experienced Paris for two years on a 1948 Guggenheim Fellowship while writing The Adventures of Augie March.

I’m not sure that God would be consistently happy in Paris. The city’s history didn’t always enjoy a smooth narrative: the first in a long and tumultuous conga line of civil rebellions was a two-year strike by the University of Paris in 1229. More strikes, revolts, and rebellions followed and culminated in the French Revolution which lasted a decade and was followed by The Reign of Terror.

The Reign of Terror, lasting a year, was an efficient enough engine to send some 17,000 aristocrats and traitors to the guillotine while another 10,000 died in prison without the benefit of a trial.

A century later, Paris was still marinating in dissatisfaction. To prevent fractious mobs from taking a stand and blockading the narrow streets, Napoleon III gave Georges-Eugène Haussmann the near-impossible task of changing the city’s layout.

It was Haussmann’s German genes—not his French birth—that enabled him to unsentimentally raze large sections of the city, eliminate entire neighbourhoods, and demolish hundreds of buildings . . . all for the sake of order (imagine a German Robert Moses). He systemised Paris into distinct parts—arrondissements, starting at the Louvre in the First Arrondissement and, like the spiral of a snail’s shell, counting out clockwise to the Twentieth.

Each arrondissement has its own distinct character. We chose the quiet and residential Sixteenth for its village of Auteuil. In addition to a lycée (France’s public school), Auteuil has affordable rental flats in attractive limestone buildings that are on elegant narrow streets which channel its residents toward a quaint square.

* * *

For the first time in G’s life, my daily routine is set to his.

Our morning walk to the lycée takes us through the bustle of the open food market, where, earlier in the morning, the lycée’s cook purchased fresh ingredients for the students’ hot lunch.

The school’s concierge lives in the ground-floor apartment off the vestibule. At precisely 8:30AM, the sound of the building’s enormous wood door rattles from the inside and Madam concierge’s small dog waddles out. I watch G.—a tall, rangy American boy in a single line of French children—walk into the next chapter of his own story.

* * *

I am what the French refer to le salarié: my income has always been our family’s financial anchor. Lacking it, we can’t afford to stay in Paris beyond the school year . . . nor can we return to New York. And so I take an executive position at the Hearst corporation that requires my bi-weekly commute from New York to Paris for the remainder of G.’s school year. I am no longer unemployed.

Memories occur over time, but time is not a linear thing—it’s much more web-like.

Returning to New York, I encounter the younger version of myself at a time when Donald Trump was careening heedlessly into debt from his failed real estate holdings . . . at a time when Bette Midler performed at the Continental Baths and played characters like Delores DeLango, a mermaid in a wheelchair who, in between musical numbers, makes fun of herself and the audience . . . at a time when homelessness, crack, and the first decade of AIDS bedevil the city . . . at a time when the city’s West Side was filled with intellects, psychiatrists, writers, emigres and was mirrored by Manhattan’s East Side of money, social status, and women dressed in beige. Harlem was tricky. Wall Street had yet to become a casino. Chain stores weren’t allowed to mushroom. Apartments weren’t bought as investments by people with no intention of living in them. Rent was reasonable.

Things in New York have changed. What hasn’t is its visceral energy.

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Committed to succeed as a book publisher in New York in the 1980’s, I worked my way through my twenties without stopping. Common sense took an early lead, and what held the middle distance was an increasingly mature sense of when to stand my ground and when to defer. I learned not to allow personal grievances to hinder progress. I also learned that the only thing a man likes less than being wrong is hearing that from a woman. Eventually, however, through dint of hard work, preconceived notions about my age and gender became secondary to my accomplishments.

In my role as publisher, I often came to L.A. on business. It was difficult to ignore there were changes taking place in L. A. that suggested opportunity and the possibility of life beyond New York, with some risk (there has always been a cultural disconnect between America’s two coastal cities: condescending New York making self-invented Los Angeles defensive). Still, I knew what I knew – and most of what I knew had to do with writing talent, of which there was no dearth on the other coast.

The editorial side of my brain recognized there were other L.A. magazines, but none that invited nationally known writers and journalists to cover its industry, science, and the arts. The business side of my brain told me that Los Angeles was the richest and most populous metropolitan area in the United States, likely to lure upscale national advertisers. That was enough to get me thinking. Then, in 1990, Arbor House, which had been sold to the Hearst Corporation, merged with a much larger publishing company they also owned, William Morrow (an early glimpse of the consolidation to come). That was enough to get me moving. Never mind that I had never raised capital for a start-up venture, and it happened to be a challenging time to do that in this milieu. Also: I had never lived in Los Angeles nor worked on a magazine (these were considerations, too). I did my due diligence and found this was the worst period for magazine advertising in well over a decade, coinciding with a moment when city magazines were reeling from retail advertising declines, and in a city that may well have had too many magazines already (oh, and I was pregnant at the time).

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that I am impossibly obstinate, but it also must be said that tenacity is what entrepreneurs are made of (I didn’t feel like one, however). And so, in a combined state of wilfulness and enthusiasm (and possibly ignorance), I cast common sense aside to start a new magazine in L.A.

* * *

That way madness lies, as the English would say. And I would have to agree—it was a fairly mad thing to do. My husband, W., was a walking definition of “freelance.” There was a baby on the way. I would have to secure funding for the magazine (or go through my limited savings trying). W. was a cartoonist for The New Yorker. His cartoons became the currency that paid for consultants I couldn’t compensate in cash. I took on a partner, Allan Mayer, a former journalist at Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. We were joined by Susan Gates, who had experience in developing advertising and circulation plans and budgets.

Deciding to call the magazine BUZZ—short and to the point—we showed its business plan to a variety of private investors. I formed a corporation, Buzz Inc. A friend, who was a lawyer, drew up the documents and agreed to defer his billing (I sent him a cartoon). By selling 30 percent of the stock, we raised one million dollars within nine months. Investors came aboard in various ways. Chance was not unkind. From her upgraded seat on a flight from New York to San Francisco, Susan told the man sitting next to her about the magazine. He gave her his card and asked her to send him the business plan. Dubiously, she did. He turned out to be Lawrence Ellison, the founder of Oracle Corporation. Ellison became the magazine’s primary investor.

The business plan, which called for an investment of five million over the first three years, contained two pivotal stipulations—that the first direct-mail test achieve a 2.8 percent response, and that the first issue contain 35 pages of advertising. The direct-mail test received a remarkable 11 percent response, and the first issue had 52 pages of paid advertising. It was an auspicious beginning.

* * *

A year of non-stop work produced a glossy magazine with an edgy mix of news, gossip, reflections, and commentary written by well-known journalists and authors, including Pico Iyer, Jan Morris, and Charles Bukowski. Eight issues a year were planned, with an initial circulation of 50,000 - 22,000 paid subscriptions, 20,000 newsstand sales (including 5,000 in New York and San Francisco), and 8,000 unpaid subscriptions to a selective list of power and society people – the pre-influencer canon, as it were. The circulation goal was 150,000 within five years.

But . . .

In business—as in life—timing can hold success hostage. The day we entered our second stage of financing, the stock market plummeted five hundred points. Larry Ellison pulled out. We bought time by collateralizing ad revenue from our multi-issue contracts. This allowed us to borrow enough money to publish two more issues. Sales continued to climb. But there was still no funding forthcoming. Unable to reach terms on new financing, we suspended publication after three issues. I paid the writers, but not the gas bill for the house we were renting, which was also the BUZZ office. Rental furniture was reduced to the bare minimum (we kept our beds and my son’s highchair).

Then . . .

The one phone rang. It was an unknown Englishman calling from Bangkok asking after the magazine.

How on earth did a copy of Buzz make its way into the hands of an Englishman in Bangkok, I wondered.

“Is the company that owns the magazine private,” asked the Englishman.

“Yes, . . . ?“ I said, more question than answer.

“I represent the proprietor of a major media company who is looking for an investment in the U.S., preferably in L.A.,” is what the Englishman had to say.

The Thai media mogul he represented was Sondhi Limthongkul, who, after his failed bid for United Press International, decided to finance BUZZ.

With newfound cash flow, we expanded the Magazine’s offerings. There was Buzz Weekly, an arts and entertainment guide. There was Buzz On-Line, an interactive digital extension of the print edition. There was Buzz Books, a co-venture with St. Martin’s Press in New York. And, hoping to capitalize on Hollywood’s newfound

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appetite for magazine articles, we negotiated a first-look agreement between the magazine and Paramount Pictures (which Larry Ellison is now trying to buy – one could say he has fared better than I).

But . . .

Despite the operational expansions .. . despite the metrics indicating its rapid growth . . . despite the exceptional roster of writers . . . despite the positive reaction by media directors and magazine critics . . . despite the fact that it was one of the fastest-rising regional magazines, despite all of this, financial challenges made BUZZ impossible to continue. Nature didn’t help: in circumstances that belonged in disaster movie, our direct mail campaigns—intended to add subscribers—coincided, first, with a major earthquake, then, wildfires, and, finally, mudslides.

This was me, trying to keep my head above water.

* * *

There is a Chinese proverb: “If you want to know about the road ahead, ask someone who has come back.”

Launching a publication—print or, now, on-line—isn’t for the faint of heart. BUZZ ceased publication a decade after it was launched.

I wouldn’t have missed those ten years for the world.

In 1781, the Spanish Governor of what was then New Spain (and is now Mexico) tasked a small group of pioneers to journey some 1,000 miles to establish a vital agricultural outpost in the north. According to the first census for El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles (“The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angles), the settlers, known as the Pobladores, were of various ethnicities and divested of class: of the twenty-two, nine were Native Americans; one, a Spaniard born in New Spain; another, a Spaniard born in the mother country, Spain; there was someone of “mixed Spanish and Indian;” eight were “mixed Spanish and Black;” two had full African ancestry.

Some 160 years later, Los Angeles would beckon English and German writers, artists, and musicians. Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg were among those lured by lucrative employment, uninterrupted sun, and the promise that nothing about being there would resemble their past.

In 1990, with 10 years of book publishing in New York behind me, I left for Los Angeles—said place of transients, settlers, and dreamers. Two partners and I managed to raise enough seed money to launch the magazine BUZZ, which we envisioned as a general interest, editorial-driven monthly. First stage investors included a friend, who took a flyer; Larry Ellison, who had recently launched Oracle; and Ted Field, co-founder of Interscope. Leading the magazine’s second round of financing was a Thai media tycoon who, one day, would be the nearly assassinated leader of Thailand’s yellow-shirt movement.

William Wegman agreed to shoot the magazine’s debut cover—a first for him: he focused his camera on a human (Carrie Fisher) rather than his Weimaraner dog, though this does resemble a canine pose.

The magazine came together in a rented Richard Neutra house perched on a hill above Mulholland Drive, where I worried that my son (who, for public consumption, I will continue to refer to simply as G.) would be dragged off by coyotes. My husband, (referred to as W.), a straight lean line man at 6’5” and difficult to miss, was often stopped on the roads during his daily afternoon walks by the police suspicious he was on foot instead of driving.

A year later, we moved into a house of our own. Unoccupied for more than a decade, it was struggling under the overgrowth of bamboo; encroaching vines had crept around the corners of the walled courtyard; and there was a freakishly large koi living in the abandoned fish pond. That he had been left to his own devices for so long, but was the size of a small dog, begged the question of what his diet consisted of.

* * *

Gertrude Stein accused California of having no there there. She was half-right. Instead of a single “there,” there are many. L.A. is a hybrid of languages, customs, and ideas. 40% of the population was born in another country; almost 50% are Hispanic or Latino; it is home as well to Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, Little Bangladesh, Chinatown, and Little Armenia (it is distressing to imagine what Los Angeles would look like if it were being populated from scratch today).

W. and I discovered several of our own there’s while scouting grade schools for G.

There was a difficult-to-get-into lab school affiliated with one of the universities, which apparently made a strategic decision not to teach grade schoolers how to construct a sentence for fear of discouraging their creativity.

There was a public school, whose playground view featured a grid of crackling power lines that I feared was throwing off enough radiation to shower the children with leukaemia.

There was a progressive school where youngsters sat in a semicircle on the floor during lessons, talking with their mouths full of organic snacks.

There was something called an “educational learning centre” designed by a world-famous architect whose first-grade classroom featured a one-way mirror so the children’s well-being could be monitored.

There was Le Lycée Français, situated on Clara Bow’s old estate. Its old-style Hollywood backdrop added to the school’s intrinsic out-of-place aura. When I tried to introduce myself in French to the first-grade teacher, she replied in English.

“So nice that you are working on your language skills,” she said, making clear this was not a compliment.

Napoleon Bonaparte devised the French lycée system, whose syllabus has not changed since. Homework is done in a notebook, le cahier, where nothing can be erased and corrected for the unforgiving reason that only a fountain pen is used, even when completing arithmetic problems.

To understand the French mentality, I relied on Camus’ existential proposition that in life, one should “imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Trusting that our son would be able to survive a French education by combining the absurd with the fatalistic, we enrolled him at the lycée, whereupon I was informed that class grades would be posted on the bulletin board each week, presumably a tactic of humiliation that the French believe motivates a six-year-old. The list of school supplies required me to purchase the Larousse French-English, English-French dictionary. One of the items on the school list was a “large band to tie books together.”

* * *

Los Angeles was a quirky city in other ways. It laid on a major fault, for example. There was, for me, for us, the prospect of death looming. Determined to put the idea of earthquakes in psychological perspective for both of us, I brought G. with me to Trader Joe’s to prepare his requisite steel earthquake kit before school started. While G. thought of it as an adventure, as if we were on a kind of final treasure hunt, my anxiety increased with every item dutifully crossed off the list as we cruised the wide aisles.

After returning home, I sat at my desk trying to visualise the bleak circumstances that would require the earth kit’s final inclusion: a letter to G., which would be read to him by another adult if W. and I were buried under the rubble. I decided to keep it short. I wrote that, if G. remembered how much we loved him, he would always be safe. But, even at his young age, our son was more existential that I could have imaged: he mistrusted promises that lay beyond reality, so before sealing the envelope, I included a photograph. It pictured me with my arms around him. W. was behind, his arms encircling us. We were all three laughing at what I can’t recall. It would have to suffice.

I am, by nature, a results-oriented creature and, thankfully, the spectre of the earth opening up and swallowing us in a gapping fault line was replaced with my attention to the launch of BUZZ.

More will be shared in my next post.

When children write to Santa Claus, many times their letters wind up in the northern reaches of Finland. The country receives so many that the Finnish government commissioned author Tove Jansson to write an illustrated response to children on behalf of Saint Nick. Janson’s estate made the letter public, which I reproduce below; you can find the original here. I wish you a wonderful holiday season and the very best for 2026.

***

Dear little friend!

How are you? I’m getting to be a rather old Santa Claus. A little lonely as well, so I like letters. It’s great fun you see to think of the fact that all over the world, a lot of small kiddies that I’ve never seen are sitting, remembering me and writing me letters. Some of them write about presents for themselves or for other people. Some of them write to thank me, and some others just for a chat. But all of them have been thinking about me, and I like that. You see, all year long, I’m living by myself – rather a secretive and lonely life.

I’m waiting for the winter to come and trying to imagine what kiddies like yourself might be wishing for, and what you might need.

Then, one night I hear the first snow falling outside. Only I, Santa Claus, can hear the snow – it falls so silently and lightly, making all the world soft and white and friendly. By this, I know that Christmas is on its way: the very special Eve and Night that are unlike all other nights of the year, the darkest and longest of all nights with its millions of burning candles. The night when everyone tries to be friendly towards everyone else because the child Jesus was born on that night, once upon a time.

So I open my cottage door and sniff against the north wind and ring my silver bell. After a while, a rustling and a whispering are to be heard in the woods around my hut. Yule gnomes and brownies and many kinds of winter beings begin to arrive from all directions – on skis, on snowshoes, struggling on foot or riding on grey reindeer that have gentle and velvet-black eyes. Then I take out all the Xmas letters and all the wishes and dreams that have accumulated under my cap, and my people and I roll up our sleeves and get to work.

It is most important that everybody gets exactly the gift they want, within reason, that nobody is disappointed, that addresses turn out right and parcels tidy, that some space is left for surprises and that people who are too shy to ask for anything get a gift also.

Some of us turn up invisible and fly around the world like whispers – it is we who give parents their ideas for the right presents. Also, we remind people of those who would never get a Christmas gift otherwise. We have a wonderful time with it all! I’m never lonely in those days because I’ve got all the kiddies of the whole world and their expectations in my head.

And all the woods of Finland lie gleaming white in the sparkling light of the Aurora Borealis, and the snow on the ground around my hut is crisscrossed by little tracks of hurrying feet, and the heaps of gift parcels are growing steadily. Christmas night arrives, and all is silent and solemn. All the parcels have been sent off and received. And the stars are large and burning bright over the earth, and I walk up alone to the crest of Korvatunturi in my wolfskin coat, and I sit down in the snow, and I make a wish: that you will all be happy and like each other as much as possible.

And that you will not forget me.

All best wishes from yours ever,

Santa Claus

It is impossible to piece together the attraction of two people. Timing has something to do with it. And luck. I was thirty-two when an arbitrary introduction set in motion events that changed the rest of my life, but only now do I realize how words have propelled me across the globe.

The beginning of “us” started when I read a compelling essay in the New York Times that eventually led me somewhere between Iquitos and Leticia, bordering Brazil and Peru, where I married W., the essay’s author. The ceremony took place on a cargo boat transporting bananas down the Amazon River. Officiating was the boat captain, who toggled between Portuguese and Spanish. Among the witnesses was the crew’s pet tamarin, a squirrel-sized monkey capable of mischief. The makeshift dinner celebration featured hearts of palm spelling out felice on a platter of steamed yacca root.

When the boat docked near a tiny hamlet the next morning, W. and I disembarked to stretch our legs along the riverbank where we spotted a small hut constructed with reeds and built on stilts. Its owner gestured an invitation to meet his family. His mother, his wife, her mother, and a young son—all lived in the single room. Joining them at high tide were three pigs and a guinea fowl. So many living in such close proximity under one roof is to be admired, but whether the happiness of my own coupledom would extend to those circumstances was another matter. Having resided comfortably on my own for uninterrupted years, I wasn’t immediately bewitched by the idea of sharing living quarters with man, pig, or fowl.

* * * *

Before getting married, I was identified as that oxymoronic thing: a woman capable of running a company. To offset the notion that being married would dilute my professional commitment, I logged long hours in the office.

W. was a writer and cartoonist who had never worked in an office.

“I gather it can be stressful,” he told me with the sincerity of someone ignorant of what happens in one.

I won’t deny that the word “tired” crept into my conversations with him, and that I often arrived home with a glazed look. My day in the office was forgotten while I soaked in a bath and he read out loud from a book of my choice. One was Rudyard Kipling’s From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, which described the Shwedagon Pagoda.

Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the

Horizon—a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in

the sun, of the shape that was neither Muslin dome nor

Hindu temple-spire.

Built before Lord Buddha died in 483 B.C., the pagoda is a 326-foot gold-gilded stupa on a hill overlooking the banks of the River Burma. Kipling’s description of it reverberated with such figurative and literary appeal that we conspired to see it for ourselves.

Dating back some 2,600 years is a 326-foot gold-gilded stupa in what is now known as Myanmar.

W., who decided to spend more time in Burma than I could afford out of the office, left a week before the Burmese Embassy in Washington suspended my passport without approving a visa. “Publisher” is what I’d written in the field where the application asked for my profession. “Cartoonist” was how W. filled in his—an obscure word with a vague enough definition that allowed him to enter a country that was on the cusp of a military coup.

W’s confidence prevailed in whatever precarious situation he found himself in. This might have been due in part to his background. Background is no substitute for character but can explain a thing or two. Generations of W.’s rooted family had gifted him with a sense of where he belonged. From whence my own people hail, I have little knowledge, but it’s obvious that their lives weren’t set on immutable coordinates. On my father’s side of the family’s ancestry chart was Sherman Billingsley, who made money during Prohibition by distributing bootlegged liquor up and down the East Coast. After a stint in Leavenworth, he established the Stork Club, a watering hole for New York’s café society. At the same time my father left the South for a Harvard education in the North, my mother arrived in America from Europe with an enigmatic family history. Hers was separateness belonging to a timeless place of forgotten manners, of what was sayable and what was not. My childhood was dictated by a strict code of behaviour, which was fastidiously adhered to by doing things properly. Not so when I had a child of my own. Impropriety declared itself at G.’s Christening when, at the church altar and in front of an Episcopal minister, Candida Donadio, his enigmatic Godmother, made a vow to the “Jew God” that she would provide his spiritual sustenance. My mother, thank god, was not there.

“If there is a God, Jew or otherwise, your friends have pushed him to his limits,” said my father as we walked a few blocks to the reception at the apartment W. and I were renting.

G. needed a nap – and possibly a new Christening - after his ceremonial responsibilities. One of my friends suggested that, since she had to use the phone in the room with the crib, she would watch G. until he fell asleep. In fact, she’d written a heavily reported piece scheduled to run the The Washington Post the next day and needed to confer at length with the paper’s fact-checker. When, finally, it occurred to me to look in on both, I found G. happily eating the marked-up typescript pages she had discarded in his crib. That was the least of it. Down the hallway, someone in our small kitchen was emitting sobs. Another guest had pulled aside a mutual friend to report that her husband was cheating on her, and with a spectacular range of women.

* * * *

--Unwittingly rude, but forgivable to a point.

--Unconsciously rude, but rude nonetheless.

--Deliberately rude, and deserving of rebuke.

I will explore how these various degrees of rudeness became categories of misbehaviour in future Substack posts.

Plaited hair worn by Egyptian noblewomen symbolised power and sophistication.

During the Middle Ages, the Christian church dictated that women’s hair be covered as a sign of modesty.

The Renaissance—with its interest in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations — reintroduced intricate braiding as a style statement.

18^th Century Europe ushered in hairstyles augmented with padding, powder, wires and adornments ranging from ribbons and jewels to flowers and small stuffed animals.

The19^th Century assigned a severe bun or an elaborate updo to Victorian women, depending on their socio-economic station.

The rise of the middle classes from the Industrial Revolution resulted in women incorporating hairpieces purchased from the new department stores.

1920s flapper culture marked a move from conservatism to rebellion with bobbed hairstyles.

War time in the 1940s called for a practical chin-length cut so hair wouldn’t be caught in machinery.

The 1950s offered a reinforced bouffant hairstyle lacquered into an unmovable place with hairspray

Rising high on the head like a soufflé was the voluminous, rounded hairstyle of the 1950’s.

1960s counterculture rejected societal norms and paved the way for 1970s women to make their own hair decisions. At the time I was promoted to book publisher, my hair had an abundant mass of Pre-Raphaelite waves that seemed to distract male colleagues, including the corporate officer to whom I reported. During our first encounter, he stood up to shake my hand, turned around, and walked into a wall. The incident convinced me that I should tie my hair back. I also dressed in sober colours and wore few obvious emotions on my face. In short, I exiled myself from the way I normally looked (and felt).

Efforts to disguise my instinctive femininity made no impact on existing preconceptions. One was that, in an emotionally propelled state of female unreason, I might make a poor business decision. Another was that, because I was a woman, I had no sense of direction (on this point, I would have to agree). It is also true that, unlike most men, I knew (know) how to ask for directions. These two gender assignments came into play when dealing with Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, a British explorer who had proposed a book that would chart his attempt to circumnavigate the globe, sticking to one meridian, traversing the North and the South Poles.

Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes’ central casting handsomeness matched his name.

Before negotiating Fiennes’ book contract, I taped a world map to the wall facing my desk and, after studying it closely, decided that his author advance should be paid in four equal instalments: each of the projected instalments was indicated on the map with a colour pin marking the arrival at an agreed-upon destination. An exception was made after receiving his telegram from the North Pole: “Lead sled dog dead. Need next payout early.”

The map remained in my sight line during Fiennes’ global journey—more than enough time to consider taking a trip of my own. His book, To the Ends of the Earth came out the same year as Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist. The allure of Africa’s exotic foreignness appealed to me.

***

“What on earth has possessed you to take this kind of trip,” the doctor at New York’s Centre of Disease Control wanted to know.

He warned of an insidious parasitic disease, Schistosomiasis, which is passed to and from humans and livestock when its eggs are voided in shallow streams and become microscopic larvae able to enter the pores of carriers who wade into the water.

There would be other issues, cautioned the doctor.

“Have you thought about what to do with your hair?” I was asked.

“He made my hair sound as though it would invite something unforeseen,” I complained to my brother, who had agreed to join me on the trip.

From New York, we flew to London and then on to Dur es Salam. In the late hours of the night, we connected with another flight—an antiquated twin-engine plane—which took us to Arusha. When I stepped on the plane’s rickety stairs in the dark, something happened. Something unforeseen. Hurling itself kamikaze style from out of nowhere, a bat dove into my hair.

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A British safari company agreed to drive us across the immensity of Tanzania where it was made abundantly clear that nothing would be complying with convenience. A series of absurdly failed attempts to pitch my tent exhausted me; when I woke up the next morning in the same dirty clothes, I was informed that there was enough water to brush my teeth but not to wash my face.

In order to locate the gorillas, we were joined by trackers in Rwanda. I fear these men were likely murdered during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, along with nearly one million ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

***

Gorillas forage in the misty upper regions of Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains, known for its seventy-two inches of annual rainfall. We threaded our way through choking vegetation for two hours before spotting a small group of gorillas.

Instructions were to remain sitting on the ground and to avoid making direct eye contact with the dominant silverback male, who would consider it a threat and was not entirely pleased to see me.

Three days had passed since my clothes were dry; ten days since I had bathed. Sharing a few moments with a tribe of mountain gorillas was worth the discomfort. I returned to New York with an unidentifiable rash and was greeted by my mother’s pronouncement that I’d become increasingly difficult to marry off.

“No man will find your wilful independence appealing,” she told me.

One did.

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***

Thank you for reading my Substack. I hope you are enjoying it, and if so, you might also like my recent book, The Improbable Victoria Woodhull (although I do not write about her hair in it).

Lucian of Samosata, a 2^nd century Hellenized Syrian, warned that those who write about leaving a place they know for another they don’t will always embellish what they have experienced once they arrive. This is not the case for the newly arrived in New York—a place where it’s impossible to downplay the characteristics of the locals who are famously straightforward, often impatient, and can be seen acting out their private grievances in public. Predominantly born in some other place, they have come together to share a pragmatic—some would say, cynical—worldview. Above all, they are resilient: it takes seven years for a missing person to be declared legally dead in New York, but requires ten years of living there to be considered a native New Yorker.

My father, who made good on a parental obligation to educate me, was of the mind that financial dependency weaves a sticky web of entitlement, which is why I arrived in New York at the age of nineteen with no means of support. Until I could find a place of my own, I stayed with a friend who compared the subways to a Fellini-like underworld.

“Be careful down there,” she warned me, “If you manage to get a seat, you’ll be at eye level for some random creep to expose himself.”

Additional context came when she explained that this was more likely to occur in cold weather.

“The guy pulls back his coat just enough so that no one sitting on either side of you can see what’s directly in front of you. It’s called ‘flashing’ because one moment, there’s a dick in your face, and the next moment, there isn’t.”

It had happened to her.

“No big deal,” was how she dismissed it. It seemed like a big deal to me.

I asked her if anyone had interceded. She pushed the question away.

“Don’t even hope. I railed at the guy who had the gall to ask me what I thought I’d seen. I told him that it looked like a penis, only smaller.”

I knew that I would never possess my friend’s urban insouciance if confronted with an uninvited penis, but, eventually, I felt confident enough in the subway to say something to a man sitting next to me when he took a nail clipper from his pocket, crossed one leg over his knee, removed his shoe and then his sock, and proceeded to clip his toenails.

“I usually do that at home, in my bathroom,” I told him.

“Give me one good reason I should, bitch,” was his response.

No woman likes to be called a bitch, even though we have, at one time or another, invited that accusation (the suggestion I offered was only slightly bitchy).

“Well, if you look at my lap, where your toenail clippings are landing, we can count the reasons together.”

His response consisted of two words—verb and object conjoined—often heard in New York. “Fuck You.” No embellishment necessary.

A few weeks after arriving in New York with no place to live, luck led me to the floor-through of a partially renovated loft located above a Chinese fan-tan parlour in a crumbling brick building next door to a recently built Thai Buddhist temple in what is referred to as Little Italy. I needed an income to pay the $235 monthly rent. Dismal typing skills undermined my employment opportunities, and so I took the only available job on offer—as a substitute receptionist on the executive floor at the book publisher, Doubleday & Company.

Book publishing in the 1970’s was exclusive and masculine, not so much a business as it was a gentleman’s occupation. Items on my mahogany desk were restricted to an inter-office phone, a leather-bound directory listing people and their four-digit extensions, a pen, and a small, salmon-coloured message pad. My responsibilities included taking messages for those not returning to the office after their martini lunches and afternoon assignations (referred to as “matinees.”) The bulwark against boredom was permission to read at my station, but only books published by Doubleday. I wasn’t allowed to take books home, and I would often remain at my desk after business hours to read. On one such evening, there was a late incoming call and instead of allowing it to ring through to the answering machine, I picked up the receiver.

“This is Candida Donadio,” announced the person in such a deep voice that I assumed the caller to be a man.

Candida was a literary agent, as reclusive as she was renowned, who summoned the wherewithal to succeed in an era when women were routinely dismissed and her chosen profession was stacked against her. There were contradictory stories about her— all probably true. One of the few checkable facts was that her parents were Italian immigrants who settled in Brooklyn. She had an astute judgement in identifying literary talent without the benefit of a formal education – unusual in publishing - and was credited with the discovery of Thomas Pynchon (still at work), Philip Roth, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller (her birthday was October 22, a date that may or may not have factored into the naming of Catch-22.) Others she nurtured were Mario Puzo, Robert Stone, John Cheever, Cormac McCarthy, and Peter Matthiessen—all became seminal authors of their generation.

No part of Candida’s illustrious reputation was reflected by the physical surroundings of her offices, which were housed on the first floor of an unassuming brownstone facing the back of the Chelsea Hotel, a haven for writers and musicians where screaming arguments were often heard from the street in early hours of the morning (all in the service of art).

Janus Joplin, in front of the Chelsea Hotel where suicides and fires were not unusual.

The agency’s faulty wiring flickered its lights; its fireplace was fed rejected manuscripts when the heating became erratic during the winter. Candida would toss handwritten notes from her mezzanine office to her staff members below (two of them). Her in-coming and out-going calls were on speaker phone, enabling her to do needlepoint. She decamped New York on Thursdays for a 19^th century stone house in Stonington, Connecticut. There, she remained secluded until the following Monday when a train returned her to New York where she never attended publishing events. What began with me picking up a ringing phone at Doubleday after business hours ended with her surprising proposal that we meet.

The address was located on a cross street in midtown. I climbed the building’s stairs to the front door. Her name wasn’t listed on the intercom. Left ajar was a rusted iron gate to the basement apartment. There was no buzzer near the door. I knocked. Holding a scotch in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other was a short woman wearing a brown, shapeless dress. Her only adornment was a small gold cross worn around her neck. She had piercing dark eyes—the kind that peer out from a Roman fresco.

I was ushered into the studio apartment, low-ceilinged and odd by any measure. Needlepointed rugs covered every inch of the floor. Needlepointed pillows were stacked like tombstones on the couch that doubled as a pull-out bed. There was a peculiar sound coming from what I assumed to be a bathroom behind the galley kitchen. She suggested that I stay for dinner: pasta with olive oil and grated pecorino cheese for me, and another whiskey for her. Yiddish slang and Sicilian gestures were incorporated into her side of the conversation, which combined cynicism, compassion, and wit as it ambled from one subject to the next.

Before leaving, I asked to use the bathroom.

“The light is on the inside, right-hand side,” she told me. “The parrot is probably sitting on the shower rod.”

“There’s a parrot in the bathroom sitting on the shower rod,” I repeated, to make sure that I heard what was actually said.

“He prefers heights,” was the only explanation that came from behind a plume of Candida’s cigarette smoke.

Walking home, I was struck by several thoughts, not unrelated:

--Nobody could possibly have been more intriguing than the person I’d spent the evening with.

--Things can be more persuasive when less is explained.

--Book publishing, a place for meaningful pursuits, operated in an unchecked zone of unorthodoxy and might be an interesting way to earn a living.

***

The Chinese people refer with reverence to “The Four Inventions.” Celebrated for their historical significance are the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing. The last of the four, printing, is thanks to Bi Sheng (972–1051), an artisan and engineer who invented the world’s first moveable type by using fired clay tiles, one for each Chinese character. Nine hundred years later—while sitting behind a desk in Doubleday’s marketing department—I pecked at typewriter keys that produced inked letters which, gummed together with white out, melded into addresses on labels affixed to jiffy bags containing books that were mailed to reviewers. (I find it comforting, in this era of AI, that there are still people in publishing stuffing books into jiffy bags.)

By living on a diet of ramen, I was able to save just enough from my paltry income to replace the broken tiles beneath the loft’s bathroom where the toilet was listing to one side and, when using it, I sat at an acute angle. Advancements for me came at a much smaller publishing company, which was privately owned by a man who screamed. Occasionally, he threw things. Several years into my employment, he sold his company to the Hearst Corporation, which fired him when he hurled his inbox across the room, nearly hitting his secretary. Due to the constant staff turnover, I was the one staff member left with a working knowledge of the company’s operations. This was the only reason that—as a woman at an inexcusably young age—I was offered the job of publisher. First, I confirmed with the Hearst lawyers that the most valuable asset—the previous publisher’s extensive rolodex—was legally considered corporate property. Next, I had the locks to the office door changed so he was unable to gain access. Then, I phoned Candida and described the almost-impossible-to-believe situation.

There was a long pause.

“Well?” I asked.

“Give me a moment,” she said in her low, monotone voice. “My navel unscrewed and my ass has fallen off.”

Candida’s sardonic reassurance was that my young age would make it easier for male colleagues to forgive my gender, as if one improbability was a reassurance that I’m more an anomaly than a threat.

“But you’ll need to do something about your hair,” she told me.