These pieces (“Living It Up on Broadsway”) always began with an inventory of the girl’s appearance. She was usually dressed in a bathrobe or some kind of unflattering caftan or muumuu, one shoulder forward, so that it formed a bony shelf for messy hair. Mascara was always smudged and eyelashes glued together in tiny triangles. Here was the perfect way to survive articles you didn’t really want to write: Apply New Journalism techniques to an otherwise dreary scene. Stories told of freshly washed coffee mugs that “still had on them lipstick traces” and, once, brilliantly, a lipstick-stained school-size milk carton. They noted what was on the couch—a heart-shaped pillow, cat-shredded tasseled pillows, teddy bears—and what was under it (always a cache of cigarette butts, magazines, a shoe). These sorts of stories often included tours of the refrigerator, where some vegetable had metaphorically dried and shriveled. And they had a real time of it when it came to the medicine chest. Tranquilizers? Laxatives? And “depending on the carefulness of the housekeeping”… the Pill?
Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman wrote about the new single life for herself. The only prerequisite seems to have been that she find it, with six months’ retrospect, disappointing and scary. In 1966 The Washington Post Magazine ran an unusual parallel assessment of the city’s single life, from the point of view of a white writer, Judith Viorst, and a black writer, Dorothy Gilliam. The lead paragraphs:
Judith Viorst: Washington is full of single girls between 20 and 30 who are having a ball, cracking up from loneliness, being mistresses, living in deadly fear of rapists and purse snatchers, trying to decide which man to marry, or trying to face the dismal fact they never will.
Dorothy Gilliam: There are single Negro women all over Washington who live and breathe and laugh and weep and take tranquilizers and fret that there are too few men and too little culture. They aren’t poor or on welfare. Their lives are parallel to white working girls’ but with exceptions—exceptions that extend from the fact of their being Negro.
As the sixties wore on, the reporting moved from “realistic” to what may safely be called “hostile.” Writing about a bar in Washington, D.C., another Post reporter lightly described the patrons, then got down to it.
To walk into Wayne’s Luv is both an admission and an assertion. She is admitting to anyone who cares to notice that she has not been found attractive enough to have a date that night; and she is asserting that she is realistic enough not to worry with the mundane games of dating propriety that were encountered by an earlier set of singles. In a sense, she assumes a more active role of enticement, hoping in her own mind that somehow he will saunter out of the amber haze and notice and speak and want Her…. it beats the Great Grey Tube.
No stories ended without a reference to television. In Washington, D.C., clerks were stuck at home watching Get Smart. (Although Agent 99 had a fairly exciting single-girl life.) Secretaries in Chicago all had colds in the winter and nothing but Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Lost in Space reruns to keep them company. Some stuck in their mate-meeting high-rises might have tuned in to one of the popular doctor’s shows, many of which carried a special message for uppity single women. In a 1989 essay, academic Diana Meehan relates the sad fates of three single-girl guest stars on these 1960s hospital dramas. First, on the popular Marcus Welby, M.D., Welby protegé Steven Kiley makes an advance on a nurse and she rejects him. Within hours she is thrown from her horse and paralyzed. On Dr. Kildare, a “No, thank you” to an internist seems to lead right away to a leukemia diagnosis. On the precursor to E.R., Medical Center, the one who says no, in the span of twenty minutes, contracts breast cancer.
During the early seventies, there was a popular Friday-night show called Love, American Style. According to TV Guide, more people were likely to see it in a given week than to experience anything like love of any genuine style in their lifetimes.
DAYS OF MACE
Back on August 28, 1963, a petty thief named Richard Robles broke into an Upper East Side apartment and killed the two young women who lived there. Years later, when such single killings had become commonplace, New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud wrote with complete accuracy: “The brutal slaying of a young single girl… probably causes more shock and public horror than any other.”
But the “single girl murders” as they became known across the country that fall, were a shocking devastation. The perpetrator had chosen the address, 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, because he’d seen an open window, there was no doorman, and he thought no one was home. When he got through it, intending to steal jewelry or money, Janice Wylie, a blond twenty-one-year-old Newsweek researcher, ran in from the other room. Robles grabbed a kitchen knife and raped her. Emily Hoffert, a new roommate, entered the apartment, shrieking that she would remember his face, identify him—and something snapped. Robles began clubbing both girls with glass soda bottles, then for an hour slashed and stabbed them with knives.
The case is remembered now as the one that led to passage of the Miranda rights legislation; the wrong man, not properly questioned, spent years in jail before Robles was apprehended. But what remainded in consciousness, of course, was the girls. Emily had just started work as a teacher. Janice wanted to be an actress and looked so hopeful, ready to go!, in all her pictures. Her father, Max, a well-known adman and writer—who, with a third roommate, found the naked bodies—later committed suicide. (An ironic footnote: It was his brother, Philip Wylie, who wrote such misogynist tomes as Generation of Vipers, the World War II diatribe that accused those neurotic “Lost Sex” women of ruining men, killing them, destroying their souls.)
An entire litany of single female names would follow, perhaps most famously Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old bar manager who’d decided, in a highly unusual move, to stay in the city when the rest of her large Italian family made the move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She was stalked at 3 A.M. after exiting a Queens train and stabbed repeatedly en route to her apartment; notoriously, neighbors all around the complex heard her shrieking but none called the police. The one man who considered it later confessed that he’d seen her stumbling and, thinking her drunk, changed his mind.
Two years later, in Chicago, Richard Speck pushed his way through the front door of a student nurses’ dorm, dressed like a disheveled James Dean—a tattoo, BORN TO RAISE HELL, on his arm—and demanded money. No one, he swore, would be hurt. Twenty-four student nurses lived there, most of them Filipinas. About half were home at the time and he forced them all to a room, had them lie down, and tied them up with strips of torn bedsheets. Girls were returning home every few minutes, and as each came in, he tied her up. Then he lifted one or two at a time and dragged them into another room. He’d return, take another five. Another three. Until the room was empty, and he fled. He’d missed one, however, a small young woman who had managed to roll herself under a bed and stay hidden. She’s the one who found the carnage—her friends, strangled, mutilated, stabbed in the eyes and breasts. Somehow, still tied up, she crawled out onto a fire escape shrieking.