By THIRSTY
Robin Green won four
Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes, two Peabody Awards, one Producers Guild of
America Award and one Writers Guild of America Award for her work on hit
television programs that include Northern
Exposure and The Sopranos. She is
also the co-creator and Executive Producer on the long-running television
series Blue Bloods. Her career in
writing began with her first job at Rolling
Stone Magazine in 1970 and her latest project is a memoir entitled The Only Girl – My Life and Times on the
Masthead of Rolling Stone.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was thrilled to visit with Robin Green at
her home in New York City for this Conversation and to find out what it was
like to be The Only Girl.
STAY
THIRSTY: In your memoir The
Only Girl you chronicle your life as a woman aspiring to become a writer
and eventually becoming a very successful one. What motivated you to write your
story at this time in your life?
ROBIN
GREEN: Sarah Lazin, one of the Rolling Stone office-chicks way back then, now a New York literary
agent, told me I should write it, that I had a story that should be told. After
30 years in television, I’d done pretty much everything I wanted to do and I’d
just turned 70 – a good time to stop and reflect. Plus, it seemed like now or
never. Besides, Mitch and I were spending winters on St. John, V.I., long
months where I had to do something
besides swim. So, I wrote a book.
STAY
THIRSTY: Even though you were the first woman to make the
masthead of Rolling Stone, you write
of always feeling invisible at the magazine. How were you and your thinking
impacted by the culture and an era that clearly discriminated against women?
ROBIN
GREEN: I felt invisible period, even more so to the women there.
I was amazed when Sarah told me that she and other girls in the office watched,
admired, envied me. As for the (all male) editors, I didn’t feel the fact of my
being female had much bearing, that
it was only my work that mattered and that they were glad to have it. In fact,
male-domination at the magazine was to be short-lived. Only a year after I left
its pages, Sarah and the others rose to editorships and increasing respect and control.
STAY
THIRSTY: You recount meeting and working with some of the
icons of the l970s and 1980s that included Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz,
Dennis Hopper and, of course, Jann Wenner. You write about them in The Only
Girl with the reverence of a young, aspiring writer and yet your work has
eclipsed them all in terms of awards and accolades. How does that make you
feel?
ROBIN
GREEN: It makes me feel great!!! Just kidding. I remain awed
and impressed by all their accomplishments, though I can sense Hopper and Hunter
spinning in their graves at the very notion that I’d outstripped them. Jann and
Annie, however, are sincerely proud and happy for what success I’ve had –
something I know because they’ve told me so.
STAY
THIRSTY: To the observer, your life was, in many ways, an
embodiment of and testament to the “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” lifestyle of
the times. Did that freedom of spirit cool as you grew older or does the
“hooligan spirit” that pervaded the Rolling
Stone offices continue to burn within you?
ROBIN
GREEN: What a great question! Yes, I emerged from the
excesses of those years, like so many of us, chastened. But the hooligan flame
never entirely went out. I continued to love rock and roll, smoke dope now and
then and, most importantly, particularly in the workplace, speak truth to power
– though I sometimes got fired for it.
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| Robin Green |
STAY
THIRSTY: You have written and produced some of the
most-watched television during the past thirty years. How hard was it to switch
gears from television dialogue to writing a memoir?
ROBIN
GREEN: Writing is writing. Sit in chair. Focus. Still, journalism
had to do with thinking. TV with heart. Memoir used every part of me and I
loved writing it more than I’ve ever loved writing anything – the sustained
effort of it, the patience to wait for the sequence of things to announce
themselves as I wrangled 70-odd years of people, places and jobs, success and
failure. When the book was done, I loved reading it, and then I loved reading
it aloud for the audiobook. There’s only one questions now: what do I write
next?
STAY
THIRSTY: You relate many stories about your friends and
enemies in The Only Girl. Do you feel
you did justice to those you loved and those who betrayed you? Do you look back
at your early struggles with anger or with a fondness of a moment in time?
ROBIN
GREEN: I hope I did everyone justice. If I was hard on
people, I was just as hard on myself, honesty-wise. Or tried to be. I look back
on my time at Rolling Stone with
great fondness – Jann Wenner himself called it a loving portrait. As for TV,
some of the scars are fresher, but even there the fond memories far outweigh
the bitter ones. I’ve been lucky in all of it.
STAY
THIRSTY: You lived a counter-culture life when you were young
and later changed the American culture with shows like The Sopranos. If you could do it all over again, which period of
your life would you relive and why?
ROBIN
GREEN: That first year on The
Sopranos, without a doubt! I was working by then with my husband, Mitchell
Burgess. We had seen David Chase’s pilot, quite simply fallen in love with it
and then quit a lucrative job to join him in writing and producing the show. We
and everyone else – actors, other producers and writers, crew – were working in
a vacuum, meaning the shows wouldn’t air until they were all in the can, and we
were working, all of us, for the sheer, creative joy of it, not knowing if
anybody in the world out there would love it as much as we all did – and then
they did! That was a great year. And I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t want to
relive what happened next – the limos and award shows broadcast around the
world, the hair and make-up and borrowed diamonds.
STAY
THIRSTY: In the end you say, “No longer the mute, frightened
girl I’d been, staring out harmlessly from under my bangs. I’d found work that
I loved; I’d become a woman of means.” What was the one milestone in your life
that was most responsible for your change from the “frightened girl” to the
“woman of means?”
ROBIN
GREEN: The short answer is when, after a year in TV, I’d saved
enough money to buy – never mind a room of my own, a house of my own! But the real answer was the day long before that in
1970 when I borrowed a car and drove across the bay to San Francisco to ask for
a job, any job, at Rolling Stone, because
that was the day that my life as a person in the world began, the day I chose
and went after what I wanted. I didn’t get a job that day but was offered the
chance to write an article for the magazine and I did, I wrote the shit out of it
and after that, well, it all pretty much worked out.
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