The year 1975 was going to be, to my way of thinking, a make-it or break-it kind of year. I was determined to try and succeed as a freelance journalist by selling my research, reporting, writing or photographs.
I was living communally in a purple Victorian in the Haight, six adults and my neice, then around seven years old. So living costs were very low, and our old white van had been replaced by a 1966 red Volvo 122-S sedan with a B-18 engine, and supposedly the easiest car to repair then on the road.
Sadly, as I have recounted before, my skills at repairing cars were limited to changing the windshield blades, and even then, I tended to buy the wrong size, or install them backwards, etc.
This was still no small matter of low self-esteem for me, only a few years out of Michigan where everyone knew how to repair cars. Not only that, they knew how to build houses, raise crops, fly airplanes, and shoot game.
By contrast, in the mirror of my own soul, I was a faux-male. I couldn't do any of those things reliably; rather, it seemed to me there must be a type of magic that if you only could tap into it, would help you make mechanical things get right again.
It would be decades before I learned that logical thinking and patience were all that were required.
Sadly, I possessed neither.
Not to digress further, the year 1975 dawned with me determined to make something of myself. As I look at photos from that era, I see a striking young man, tall, slender but athletic, with dark hair to his shoulders, intense blue eyes, and an easy smile. No wonder most people considered me one of the most "normal" people they knew.
After all, this was post-Sixties San Francisco. I would have been embarrassed to admit that unlike virtually everyone I knew, I had never tried LSD, cocaine, or mushrooms. I had smoked dope, of course -- everyone did that -- it was like drinking a latte today.
But, in retrospect, even good old marijuana yielded bad trips for me. The first time I smoked it, in college, a girl convinced me to go to a party and do it. I was game, but I quickly became so paranoid I felt certain she, and everybody else there, was trying to get me. (For what, I wasn't sure.)
I remember stumbling home that night in Ann Arbor, seeing this girl and others behind every tree.
Now, I wonder: What was that all about? I came to be able to smoke it casually, as everyone did, soon after. But neither drugs nor alcohol held much appeal; I could easily alter my state, if I wanted to, just by revisiting my childhood battle with rheumatic fever, or my much more recent week of delirium under the cloud of typhoid/salmonella in India in early 1971.
In fact, my unpublished novel from that era contains weird scenes about elephants trampling me and faces peering down at me in the night, under mosquito nets, seeing whether I was regaining consciousness or not.
Most of time, in reality, I was not. But the weird thing was, even when I was unconscious, I think I could hear some of what was going on around me, like the snatches of conversation that sweep back to you from the people ahead, walking into the wind out on the Berkeley Pier in the Bay.
***
Whenever you move a piece of furniture in this place, you encounter some forgotten bag or box of stuff. Lots of it belongs to my kids, big and small. Some of it is leftover from girlfriends or wives. This week, my ten-year-old recovered a file I had long since misplaced. It was hiding behind the couch, nestled among what I gather is a major cache of his favorite, long-missing "Star Wars Miniatures."
So, he got his and I got mine.
Here is what mine says:
I was a spectacularly unsuccessful freelancer through August of that year. My total gross earnings were $945.50 from nine sales. I earned $145.50 for four articles for Pacific News Service, all of which were syndicated widely to newspapers around the country. New Times magazine in New York paid me $275 for three different types of work -- a research job, one article, and one photo.
(My notes indicate that my wife actually took the photo but that I was given the credit, and I don't want to even speculate why that was the case. Also, I recorded that the payment was three months late. In 1975, the $75 photo fee represented substantial income and was badly needed.)
I got two other checks during this eight-month period. Rolling Stone paid me $75 for a photo, and then (jackpot!) $450 for an article.
The topics behind all this effort?
* Chemical threats.
* Search for Patty Hearst.
* The Klamath Indians in Oregon.
* The LA skid row Slasher.
* Timothy Leary as a snitch.
***
Why, dear reader, would I bother you with this odd set of detail? Because, as it turned out, this was the last stretch of time before I became what Americans consider to be a "success."
The very next month, after these records stopped telling their story, I and my partner, Howard Kohn, broke the biggest story of that year, and the biggest story in Rolling Stone's then-still young history.
Our boss, Jann Wenner, was immensely generous. I remember a job offer (which I accepted) and a huge bonus ($20,000, I believe). He bought me my first suit, at Wilkes Bashford.
The rest of 1975 is unwritten in this old, yellowed, hand-written spreadsheet. But the rest of that year is well documented for history, in the form of thousands of newspaper articles and tapes of all three major US network TV broadcasts. We scored what in media terms was a major homerun.
So this old, yellowed paper is from the precious months before "success." I never had an inkling about what it would feel like to suddenly be thrust into the public eye. To have reporters following your every move; to have prosecutors issuing subpoenas to try and force you to reveal confidential sources; to have radicals issuing you death threats; to have groupies begging you to meet them after work.
I was so naive and so unprepared for all of this, back in 1975.
I did my best, which is to say I muddled through. But I also managed to escape the limelight and melt back into a different corridor, one that felt like the right fit. Still within Jann's organization there on Third Street, I coordinated an investigative unit that did stories about all sorts of important issues. A brief golden age of original investigative reporting on political and economic and environmental issues ensued at the magazine.
The results over the rest of 1975, 1976 and early 1977 are a legacy I am proud of. I introduced Lowell Bergman to Jann, and Lowell was hired. Together, we did some great stories.
When it all came crashing down, half a year after my first daughter was born, just before Christmas 1976, the dye had been cast. Lowell and I and a very special gentleman named Dan Noyes would go on to create the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Jann would go on to become a billionaire. Many of his other writers as well as Annie Leibowitz would become legends.
Tonight, as I look at those hand-written entries from so long ago, I am reminded that not only is the darkest hour just before dawn, but for any young freelance writers out there, your success awaits you just around the next corner, so persist.
You never can tell what may happen next. Just keep writing.
-30-
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