Rock and Roll Book Club: Robin Green's 'The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone'
by Jay Gabler
March 06, 2019
Robin Green was the first woman writer to land on the masthead of Rolling Stone. For a while, she was also the last. Jann Wenner demoted her from contributing editor after she failed to submit a story she'd been writing about the Kennedy family in 1973.
At the time, Green didn't give her boss any details about why she wasn't turning the story in, but now she tells the tale: she tracked Robert Kennedy Jr. down at his Harvard dorm room, and they hit it off so well that they ended up having sex on his waterbed underneath some falconry equipment and a bust of his late father.
"A big journalistic transgression, I know," admits Green. "But I slept with almost every man I met in those days, so why wouldn't I have sex with this gorgeous Kennedy?"
The fact that it's posed as a rhetorical question tells you something about the tone of Green's new memoir, The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone. The culture of the rock era's all-time most influential publication has been under renewed scrutiny since the publication of Joe Hagen's 2017 authorized-turned-unauthorized Wenner biography, but Green isn't here to hogpile on Wenner. In fact, she writes that she regards Hagen's widely-praised book as wildly misleading.
The actual life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone were in fact delicious and a romp in many ways, but maybe you had to be there. Because the book just didn't get the times or Jann. Which left those of us who had been there feeling betrayed, especially those of us who'd spoken to the writer and saw how he'd twisted our words.
Looking back on those years from her 1970 job interview to her parting ways with the magazine, Green sees them as a golden era. Naked in a hot spring with the rest of the magazine's predominantly male staff, she didn't feel objectified, she felt purified. ("Has anyone ever mentioned what a great body Hunter had?") She slept with her married editor, and it was amazing.
Did everyone know about me and [David] Felton? Did they think I'd slept my way into the pages of Rolling Stone? I'd learn later that they didn't really know or care because pretty much everybody there was sleeping with pretty much everybody else.
It's just about the sunniest look back on the early '70s music scene I've ever read, and the fact that it's written by a woman makes it even more distinctive. "My husband always says that every generation has its own music," writes Green, "but was there ever one as great as ours?"
In fact, The Only Girl only tangentially touches on music. The book is a reminder that while Rolling Stone styles itself the publication of record for the rock era, it's always been about much more than music. Green's first feature was a cover story about Marvel Comics (she used to work as Stan Lee's receptionist), and the breakout story that landed her on the masthead was a feature about a Dennis Hopper interview where he essentially refused to engage with Green, instead using the time to chat with a circle of men (including journalists from other publications) about how he was going to sleep with his publicist's secretary.
Green wrote the story exactly as it happened, and caused a sensation. "The pen is mightier than the sword," writes Green, and the story illustrates why she remembers those years so fondly. The culture was misogynistic, but Rolling Stone gave her an opportunity to share her truth.
Maybe Green's most famous story was the cover story on David Cassidy. She was in the room when Annie Leibovitz convinced the teen idol to take his clothes off for her instantly infamous cover shoot. His publicists had advised Cassidy to do a Rolling Stone profile, hoping to change the perception of the former Partridge Family member as a twee teenybopper.
It backfired: Green, irritated at having to spend a week with Cassidy instead of Bob Dylan or Jerry Garcia, wrote a 10,000-word profile portraying the star as dull and shallow, the product of an industry that cared more about money than music. The publicist got fired.
The book also delves into Green's Rhode Island girlhood, and her time after Rolling Stone, during which she accumulated enough achievements to merit a memoir even if Jann Wenner had never sat underneath his signed naked photo of John and Yoko and offered her an assignment.
She went to the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where a student who looked at her like Jack Nicholson did (and she knows what it's like to be looked at by Jack Nicholson) was to become her husband. After a stint in computer PR ("we were helping introduce MS-DOS to the world"), she got into TV where she once again found herself "the only girl at the table"...except in this case, she was part of the team behind a little show called The Sopranos.
Green won an Emmy for that, and describes the corresponding sense of freedom as being comparable to what she wrote at Rolling Stone. HBO didn't care what the content was, as long as it was good. Sex? Drugs? Profanity? Hey, that's life.
In 2017, Rolling Stone turned 50. A half-century anthology of writing, celebrating the anniversary, somehow didn't include anything by Green. "I was disappointed," writes Green, but she was gratified when, at a reunion event, she was sought out by the great Greil Marcus.
"I've always wanted to meet you," said Marcus, noting that he appreciated (she remembers) "that I took on ambiguous and difficult stories and approached them with a sense of both modesty and amazement." She wasn't just trying to be the next Hunter S. Thompson...but she just loved that guy. Still does.