THE ONLY GIRL
MY LIFE AND TIMES ON THE MASTHEAD OF ROLLING STONE
ROBIN GREEN Virago, 305pp, £18.99, Oldie price £13.92 inc p&p
A memoir centred on the three years Robin Green spent working on
Rolling Stone magazine in the Seventies makes you yearn for the copious sex and small hills of cocaine of the pre-metoo era during which, as she puts it, ‘We chicks peered at the world of men from under our bangs.’ Sexploitation was rampant but boy did they have a lot of fun. ‘Green’s descendants in the media will read her descriptions of working life with envy,’ wrote Ludovic Hunter-tilney in the
FT. ‘Writers were paid handsomely, expense accounts were lavish, authorial freedom extensive.’ Annie
Leibovitz and Hunter S Thompson were colleagues and among those she ‘skewered’ were Dennis Hopper and David Cassidy. Too soon, RS foundereditor Jann Wenner fires her when she fails to deliver a piece on Robert F Kennedy Jr – because she sleeps with him instead.
‘This is about a woman navigating the uncharted territory of a crazy new world with the self-awareness, humour and resilience that an “only girl” needs,’ wrote Barbara Ellen in the Guardian.
Nick Duerden, in the Independent, is awed by Green’s ‘candidness’. ‘the guy was hung. Halfway to his knees,’ she says of Kennedy. ‘Green and the other “chicks” of those unreconstructed days had hairy armpits, dope, music and the Pill,’ said Rose Wild in the Times. ‘There was great music. It was good to be young, and you could only feel sorry for the people who came after, who would never get to live that life.’