In a day or two, though, she began looking through the papers for another job. Very close to New Year’s she got an interview at Ace Books for a job as an editorial assistant.
She told them she was twenty-one to get the position. When I spoke to her the evening after the interview, she said, somewhat pensively: “The editor-in-chief — his name is Wollheim — told me I’ll probably get the job … because I’m Jewish. He said Jews have a hard time getting into publishing, and so he always favors Jewish applicants.”
9.1. We were both excited over the prospect. Ace published a good deal of the science fiction we both enjoyed reading. As well, they’d published a cleanly and elegantly written novel called Junkie by one “William Lee.” It was an open secret among those who spent time around the Village that “Lee” was a pseudonym for William Burroughs. We’d both been impressed by the fragments of Burrough’s Naked Lunch we’d read in Big Table. Though it was still unpublished in its entirety, the book had been referred to as one of genius any number of times in print.
And a man named Carl Solomon also worked at Ace (he was the publisher’s nephew and his title was Idea Man), who had figured prominently in an energetic and passionate poem published a couple of years before in that small black-and-white pamphlet by Allen Ginsberg — Howl.
It seemed like an exciting place.
9.11. “There’s a guy who works there,” Marilyn told me after her first day, “—he’s twenty-five — who used to be a reader for Scribner’s. He told me this afternoon that he rejected Nabokov’s Lolita when he was there. He said he still doesn’t think it’s a good book.” She shook her head. “He’s still bragging about it. And he’s Jewish.”
We both laughed.
Well, one strike against them.
9.2. The dreams (nightmares, I’ve called them since, though they clung to memory, lurid, fascinating, and as pleasurable as they were unsettling) returned for the sixth or seventh time in five or six weeks, and I resolved: yes, I’d try to catch their hypervividness in words. I’d weave some science fantasy novel through those light-shot locations, one that might even appease Marilyn’s complaints about the books she was now editing.
And with the first of the year, my own job dropped to part-time.
9.3. Marilyn had been working for Ace perhaps two weeks when she learned that a young man named Ed (friendly, blond, and — incidentally — Protestant), hired as an editorial assistant at the same time as she had been, was making eighty-five dollars a week — twenty dollars a week more than Marilyn’s sixty-five. Out of curiosity, she asked the office manager why. It was Ed’s first publishing job as well. On the record, Marilyn and Ed were the same age: twenty-one. The office manager, a rather brassy older woman (incidentally Jewish) explained it was just customary to start men at a substantially higher salary.
Shortly a phone was installed in the office Ed and Marilyn shared — on Ed’s desk. By this time Marilyn was doing rights and permissions work, which meant she was pretty constantly on the phone to other publishers. Ed was basically reading manuscripts, writing reader’s reports, and copy editing. So Marilyn had to get up from her desk and go use the phone on Ed’s whenever she had to call the rights department at another publisher. After a couple of weeks, she mentioned this to the office manager. “Oh,” the woman said, “we never give phones to women employees. They make too many personal calls.”
In 1961 nobody even thought such a statement insulting — or might need to be dissembled just for the sake of manners.
About a week after this, Marilyn came home upset by an encounter she’d had that afternoon with Ed. As I said, Marilyn needed the phone for her work. Most of the calls that came into their office, however, were (personal) calls for Ed. In the first week, simply because her work required she use the phone to call out so much, she’d taken to answering it — putting down the paperwork she was doing, getting up from her desk, going over to Ed’s. But now that it had become clear what the phone pattern was, she’d realized Ed still expected her to do the same thing. He was quite prepared to sit and read, while the phone rang seven or eight times at his elbow, till Marilyn got up, came over, answered it, and said, “Just a moment. I’ll get him … it’s for you, Ed.”
That day after lunch, Marilyn — who was correcting galleys — had simply decided she wasn’t going to answer the phone anymore. The next time it rang, she let it ring — till Ed looked up and asked, “Are you going to get that?”
“Nope.” And Marilyn went on with her galleys.
There was no blowup. Ed had answered the phone — which was for him. Later, though, he’d asked Marilyn if she would at least answer the phone when there were writers or other editors in or around the office. He went on to explain that he didn’t mind answering the phone, since most of the calls were for him. But it would make him uncomfortable if anyone saw him answering the phone and it turned out to be for her. In short, Marilyn had realized he wanted her to pretend to be his secretary. But he was discommoded by the notion of anyone’s mistaking him for hers.
This bothered her enough for us to talk about it through an evening.
Still, Marilyn was popular at her job. The surly elevator man, who took the editors up to the dingy offices in the old slab-doored elevator (both the elevator and office lobby floors were covered with maroon battleship linoleum), was famous for not speaking to anyone save in grunts. Marilyn’s pleasant “Good morning,” had elicited the first “Mornin’, ma’am,” from him anyone remembered.
When, a few times, I went to pick her up after work at the dismal, ancient office complex, it was all anyone of the staff seemed able to talk about.
9.31. On Wednesday morning, at Ace, there were editorial meetings, to which assistant editors were not invited. Marilyn had already realized that the only way to survive the work situation was to move up as quickly as possible. She had been a prodigy.
Over several evenings, she put together a six-month publishing program for educational reprints of public-domain classics in demand in school programs, as Ace had already been dabbling in the educational market. She showed the program to editor-in-chief Wollheim, who showed it to the publisher, A. A. Wyn — who decided that Marilyn must be a “pretty bright girl.” The next week, Marilyn and Ed were invited to the Wednesday editorial conference.
No, Ed had had nothing to do with the program, with its drafting, or with its presentation. But it was customary (the office manager told Marilyn) to invite male editorial assistants to the editorial meeting after they had been with the company six months as a matter of course.
No, women editorial assistants were not invited to editorial conferences at all.
But since an exception had been made in Marilyn’s case, it had been decided to move up Ed’s invitation by four months so as not to make him feel bad that Marilyn had been invited before he had.
At the same time, I was having my own problems at work back at Barnes & Noble. The store was hooked into a kind of Muzak where vast 16-rpm records played the dullest semi-popular sop imaginable over the store loudspeakers all day long. Led by a young woman clerk named Sue, who was also a graduate student up at Columbia University, a bunch of us got together and got hold of some 16-rpm Mozart divertimenti (the original Muzak — but oh-so-much-better done!). The store manager, someone had told us, actually had a degree in music from a western university. A deputation of us went to her and asked her if we wouldn’t all be happier if she swapped the Mozart for the Muzak.