The Only Girl’s tales make your hair curl
Robin Green was a rarity – a woman at Rolling Stone. Rose Wild enjoys Green’s tales of sex, drugs and more sex.
In the summer of 1971, the staff of Rolling Stone magazine left its headquarters in San Francisco’s Bay Area for an editorial conference at Big Sur. Founded four years earlier by Jann Wenner, the magazine was on a roll, with its coverage of rock music and politics, and featuring a cast of writers, including Hunter S Thompson, Greil Marcus and Joe Eszterhas.
As Robin Green, then the magazine’s only female writer, says in this colourful autobiography, it felt like ‘‘the heartbeat of the most happening thing on the planet’’.
Green rode to Big Sur with Thompson and Annie Leibovitz, Rolling Stone’s photographer. Thompson drove at high speed with his lights off ‘‘to see approaching cars better’’, drinking
Wild Turkey and scoffing mescaline like sweets. When the police stopped him and made him try to touch his nose he missed, but they let him go after he flipped his sunglasses over the back of his head and caught them one-handed behind his back.
The conference took place mainly naked, on mescaline, in the hot springs of the Esalen Institute, home of the raised consciousness of the New Age. In those days, Green says, everybody on the magazine was sleeping with everybody: editorial assistants with editors, editors with interview subjects, ad reps with celebrities, and everybody in the art department with everyone else.
Green was an east coast girl who had followed the 1960s zeitgeist to California. She and the other ‘‘chicks’’ of those unreconstructed days wore Indian bedspreads and peered sideways at the world from under their long fringes. They had hairy armpits, dope, music and the pill. It was free love all the way.
On the work front, Green specialised in the waspish debunking of celebrity vanities. After teenybop idol David Cassidy unwisely expressed a desire to appear in Rolling Stone, she and Leibovitz persuaded him to pose naked for the cover. The ensuing pubic hair horror caused a mass withdrawal of his sponsorship and advertising deals.
Her apotheosis was a press jaunt to Taos, New Mexico, where Dennis Hopper was holding court to publicise a turkey of a film, The Last Movie, which he had starred in and directed. Green’s journey had included a random sexual encounter with a cowboy, and when she got to Taos and her tape recorder wasn’t working, she was in no mood to indulge Hopper, drugged and giggling, flashing his backside at a roomful of awed acolytes and rambling about his life as a lesbian. Her story let him have both barrels, and the Esquire editor phoned to ask: ‘‘Who’s the new bitch?’’
But in 1973, after a crisis of conscience over a story she wouldn’t write, she was sacked. Green moved back east and, after some adjustment, therapy and teaching, became a TV screenwriter. With husband Mitchell Burgess she wrote four series of The Sopranos, created Blue Bloods and won three Emmys and two Golden Globes. The bitch was back.