I Was a Glamour Don’t: Reflections on Working at Glamour Magazine by Margaret McMullan

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“So, you’ve lived in the Midwest,” the Glamour editor said. She was wearing a pink linen suit. Sitting at her desk, she used the tips of her pink nails to flip through the portfolio of my newspaper clippings. “Think you’re really ready for New York?”

It was 1982. I was twenty-two years old, wearing my one wrinkled interview suit. I’d spent the previous night unable to sleep on a friend’s futon. I’d written for Countryside Reminder News, a weekly in Barrington, Illinois, where I’d spent college summers working as a reporter.

I’d promised my parents that if I didn’t land a job in New York within two weeks, I’d come back home. This was my second week. I’d already had nine job interviews, and this interview with the editor in pink was my last.

“I’ve lived in the Midwest,” I said, smiling. “I’m SO ready for New York.” For good measure, I added the truth. “This job will be my life.”

Then came her truth: she hated to write. She said she needed to eat a brownie for every paragraph, and she’d already gained twenty pounds. She looked great to me. She said the only way she was going to lose the weight was to stop writing. She said she just wanted to edit someone else’s work.

I agreed to write under her name, and I was hired as the assistant entertainment editor at Glamour.

I grew up reading women’s magazines—maybe because my mother did, too. As a twelve-year-old immigrant from Vienna, Austria, my mother learned how to cook, sew, and dress as an American woman reading Charm, Vogue, House and Garden, and Ladies Home Journal. (Charm was folded into Glamour in 1959.) She learned how to style her hair herself. She clipped recipes for an endless parade of casseroles, coupons for canned soup, and, later, paper dresses. She scoured these magazines for Simplicity dress patterns, drapes, and furniture coverings. She saved stories, poems, and even piano sheet music from some issues. For both my mother and me, reading women’s magazines was a cheap, fun way to educate ourselves quickly on the basics of living, so that we could get on with the serious work of living.

At Glamour, I learned to cop a certain voice—a cheerful, unremarkable “female” voice, using a lot of alliteration, dashes, and exclamation marks!

I got into the habit of making lists, which I learned could also be articles. I learned tricks, too. Headlines with odd numbers sold more copies than headlines with even numbers. Surprisingly, seven ways to wear a scarf sold more copies than ten ways.

I learned how to write How-To articles, always thinking in the second person. Soon, I was writing seven days a week, not five. I even found time to type letters to my mother on Glamour stationery, sending along clippings of my ghostwritten articles. Years later, after she died, I found the stacks of these letters and clippings she’d saved.

I rented a studio apartment on the Upper East Side and settled into my New York life. When my best friend Ken wasn’t traveling as an airline steward, we’d go out dancing into the wee hours at Studio 54, the Mudd Club, Area, Palladium, and Limelight. Ken was tall, thin, Black and as graceful as any dancer. I was a white girl with Tina Turner hair and shoulder-padded everything.

I loved dancing with Ken and regaling him with funny behind-the-scenes stories.

“You should get a makeover,” Ken said each and every time I saw him. Ken knew all about Glamour’s “Before and After” makeovers.

My main task in Entertainment was to find an unlikely or embarrassing question to ask celebrities in on-the-spot interviews. At Tavern-on-the-Green, I asked Mick Jagger about his favorite body part (Like Elvis, it was his pelvis). On the phone, I asked Raquel Welch what her first job was (weather girl) and what she liked to do after sex (wrap gifts). I shook Michael Jackson’s gloved hand while he stood beside Brooke Shields inside a dinosaur skeleton at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan before I could ask him about his new nose. In a hotel in Queens at the U.S. Open, while her dog ate fruit salad, I asked Martina Navratilova about her ex-girlfriend, Rita Mae Brown. She offered me a bagel and told me about her carb diet instead. I talked to Nobel winner Barbara McClintock about genetics and corn, and, once, when I went to interview Deborah Harry, she didn’t want to talk, and I ended up wrestling with Andy Kaufman. I won and we became friends.

There were bad days, too. Alice Walker said she didn’t have time for my nonsense and hung up on me. When I interviewed Bruce Weitz, who played Sgt. Belker in “Hill Street Blues,” he said something crude, and I stood up and left the room. LaToya Jackson turned off my tape recorder when I asked about her family. Bernadette Peters stopped talking when I asked her about Steve Martin. When I interviewed astronaut Sally Ride, I hesitated long and hard before I forced myself to ask her the embarrassing question I was assigned to ask her: “What do you do when you have your period in space?”

She sighed and said, “I’m hanging up now.” But she stayed on. I could hear her breathing.

“Never mind,” I said. “Can you tell me what it was like to be up there?”

“When you can feel that close to something [the moon] you’re used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.”

What she said moves me still, and I used it in the tiny thumbnail column about her.

Over time, I began to question the specific questions I asked.

I got quicker, editing my copy to fit a 3”x 5” square of print on a humming IBM Selectric III using blue lined paper. This was back when the editor in chief, Ruth Whitney, ran a tight, no-nonsense work environment and walked to your office when she wanted to tell you you’d done a good job. I loved when I heard her sensible pumps coming down the carpeted hall.

Ruth was from the Midwest, too. She didn’t care much for celebrities, but she loved Cybill Shepherd and articles that explained politics clearly.

She told me to think of nurses and school teachers when I wrote. I still do. And I think of Ruth, sitting in her Condé Nast office at 350 Madison, shoes off, surrounded by all her framed Glamour covers.

Within a year, my editor lost all her brownie weight, and Ruth gave me a raise, a promotion, and my own byline.

Glamour didn’t cater to the New York reader, but instead, reached out to the American reader. We weren’t the coolest magazine to work for at Condé Nast, but back then, we had the largest paid subscription (about three million), the biggest circulation (about ten million), and we made the most money for the company. Mademoiselle had the history with Sylvia Plath and the college internship contest, but we had The Woman of the Year Awards and the Top Ten College Women Awards. Glamour was also the first American mainstream magazine to put the Black model, Katiti Kironde, on its cover in 1968, thanks to Ruth. We felt invincible.

I was keen to keep up with the competition, sussing out what other editors were working on at Elle, Self, Marie Claire, and Vanity Fair, where I had friends who would often spill the beans after a few free drinks at publicity events.

One day my friend from Accessories came to my office and asked me if she could take my picture. She needed someone for the “Don’ts” page.

Glamour’s “Do’s and Don’ts” page was a micro version of the “Befores and Afters” and the “Wrongs and Rights” pages. The “Don’t” Girls were the frowning young women in the “Before” pictures. These girls had a black bar across their eyes. The “Do” girls were the smiling young women in the “After” pictures.

My friend pulled my hair away from my face, clipping it back with a gaudy barrette.

I appeared in an issue four months later because that’s how long putting together an issue took back then.

There I am, typing at my IBM Selectric III, a black bar across my eyes, with the caption: Don’t wear a gala hair accessory to the office. This silk flower ornament would look lovely at a summer party, but it’s all wrong for a workplace.

My friend from Beauty appeared as the “Do.”

Ken thought all of this was hilarious and asked me for the leftover barrette, which he wore to Danceteria that weekend.

At the office, the “Don’t” girls were marked as potential makeovers, so inevitably Fashion and Beauty sought me out for their December Office Party spread, in which I am pictured in my own short black skirt and white blouse as a “Wrong.”

The copy read:

Not only were the skirt and blouse Margaret wore to her first Christmas party too young-looking, left, they were too sexy. The skirt is too short and the blouse too sheer. This outfit is both too naïve and too provocative, and neither of these messages is the one she wanted to send.

They even included a quote I didn’t recall saying: “It looks like I’m trying too hard.”

Next to my “Wrong” is my “Right.”

This year, Margaret will go to her office party feeling well-dressed…and confident. “It’s your chance to be noticed by people who don’t usually notice you,” she says. “In this, I look like someone who should be taken seriously.”

Fashion loaned me the skirt and blouse, remnants from a failed photo shoot. That year, I took Ken with me to the office Christmas party.

My friend in Fashion convinced me to say yes to the swimsuit makeover. I was to be the no-waisted one whom they transformed with a belt.

“Who wears a belt with a swimsuit?” Ken asked when he saw me in a hideous red and white one-piece in the summer issue.

Aside from the red toenail polish, they didn’t really make me over, either.

My indignity was short lived.

The year President Ronald Reagan said that AIDS didn’t exist, Ken was diagnosed with AIDS and his health deteriorated quickly. He would no longer meet up with me. Then he asked me to stop visiting him, because he didn’t want me to see how thin he’d gotten and how bad off he was. I called him every day. I sent him banana bread, videos, books, and tapes. He died alone in a hospital room in New Jersey.

“Any sorrow is bearable if you make a story out of it or about it.” That’s what Isak Dinesen wrote, and it felt terrible, wrong even, to agree with her.

I wrote about Ken for Glamour.

When I went through edits with the Articles editor, she asked me to change one sentence, the description of Ken. “He was a tall, handsome, lanky black man who didn’t date women.”

“We should cut the word black,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it shouldn’t matter if he’s black or white,” she said. Back then, everyone who worked at Glamour was white.

Even then, I knew readers would think Ken was white, if I didn’t say otherwise because that’s what readers do—assume everyone is white.

I had already sent the editor a picture of Ken and me in our college days, so I figured readers would see Ken for who he was. So, I agreed to cut the word black.

The essay appeared in the March 1991 Spring style issue. The cover was green, orange, and yellow and featured articles about counting calories, a guide to great hair, good looks, and a higher salary.

The illustration they used for the article about Ken was a drawing of a stick figure in bed with a flying horse and stars. The opening for the piece stated: This is a personal story of lasting friendship and requests honored, of opportunities missed and kindnesses bestowed.

There was no picture of Ken.

“When My Friend Died of AIDS,” was the first article Glamour published about AIDS. It was reprinted in Australia and India. I received letters from unlikely people—nurses, teachers, mothers, and people caring for their friends with AIDS.

I now had two major regrets. Not only had I not been there when Ken died, I felt I’d taken away the color of his skin and who he had been.

I was a Glamour “Don’t” way more often than I was a “Do.” A “Wrong” more than I was a “Right.”

When I quit, I made a commitment to myself to write more seriously, more truthfully. Ruth threw me a lovely going-away party with a sheet cake nobody ate.

I recreated those years in the eighties in my first novel, When Warhol Was Still Alive, which turns thirty this spring. “Warhol” is about Catherine who’s looking for how to do anything better, when really, she’s looking for some meaning in her life. Near the end, Catherine’s best friend Joey wears a barrette she gives him in the hospital as he lays dying. She stays there with him too, telling him stories, feeding him ice chips, making up for the wrongs and opportunities missed.

She was the “Do” I was not.

Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Hill, The Bulwark, The Morning Consult, The Morning Edition, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, National Geographic, The Sun, and Kveller. She received an NEA Fellowship and a Fulbright to research her memoir.