Nancy Rommelmann: Beyond the Office of the Super Vixens

I am in the process of re-publishing the pieces that vanished when I deleted my old blog, Leaving Los Angeles. The following was originally posted on November 4, 2003. Previous post here.

Catchy subject line, yes? Us magazine (where Hillary and I occasionally contributed in 1995/96 and where we regularly faxed our letterhead) thought so, and ran a photo on its cover of the "Friends" gals beneath the banner, Super Vixens!

Hillary and I started our company thus: She wrote an article for the LA Times about the Hollywood Wax Museum, in which she interviewed the owners, who had an office in a building on Hollywood Blvd. just east of Bronson, an earthquake-condemned structure on the south side of the street, overhanging the 101 Freeway.

"The offices are $75 a month," Hillary said. "Want to split one?"

The idea of getting out of the house to write was enormously appealing. We moved two desks, a printer the size of R2D2, and a Tiki bar into the 8 x 8-foot space, and still had room for a coral leather loveseat, donated by one of my former boyfriends, who, watching us mix a batch of martinis with liquor bought across the street at Liquor a Go-Go (a minimart that has an exploding cannon on its sign and where I once bought a pair of pre-run pantyhose), named our venture Beyond the Office of the Super Vixens.

It was spring 1995. Hillary and I both had columns at Buzz, and were also writing for the Times. She was also passing on to me stories/venues she'd outgrown, including for a magazine called Sassy, where I became a contributing editor in something like three weeks, and for which I was writing so many pieces I needed two pen names, for squeamy teen-fare like, "I Had an Affair With my Teacher," ostensibly written by a seventeen-year-old, and a monthly series called "50 Questions About..." The last one was "50 Questions About Masturbation" (Hillary's question: Do animals masturbate?), which my editor thought a great public service but which the powers-that-be at Petersen, which published Guns & Ammo as well as Sassy, became apoplectic over. The editor was soon fired, and I was out of a gig.

Hillary at this time was writing some smart think pieces for various publications, as well as a lot of movie star cover profiles for places like Town & Country and Harper's Bazaar. This is necessary, unglamorous work for which one is well-paid, sort of like scarping barnacles off the hulls of ships. The special joys of navigating the waters between publicist and star I will save for a later entry, and instead stick with the treacherous vortices that are most women's magazines. Every woman writer I know has a horror story about Cosmopolitan--the nineteen edits, the checks that never come, the smarmy, supercilious editors. Why are women's magazines in particular so hellish? Because the offices are full of women; women who really and actually care about Kate Hudson's maternity fashions and who contemplate Botox at 28 but admit only to 25 because they're not yet married, boo hoo hoo, and did you see her ass? my god you can see the cellulite right through the fabric... oh hi! You're crazy, you didn't gain an ounce! Kiss! Women who all start to ovulate at the same time in the same overheated offices and work late to get ahead to make money so they can afford $950 Narciso Rodriguez suede boots which will be ruined during the first big slush in New York, boo hoo hoo, but it's okay, because Coolie slippers are the new must lust.

Why a man would voluntarily work in this environment is beyond me, but Hillary got one, for a profile she was doing on Antonio Bandares. The editor was giving her a terrifically hard time; she'd written three drafts, and he still couldn't tell her what he wanted, only that she was failing, failing, failing. I knew this because her desk and mine were fifteen inches apart; I heard everything she said on her line, she heard everything I said on mine. And so I stepped out of the room to give her a little air, and in the hallway ran into our landlord Rusty, a big-hearted, big-gutted biker with red hair, who'd lost a leg and his old lady in a Harley accident. Rusty walked me back to the office.

"YOU'RE FUCKING ME IS THE ASS, DO YOU KNOW THAT!" Hillary was shouting. "FUCKING ME IN THE ASS!"

Rusty and I stayed in the doorway as she slammed down the phone. Was she sure she wanted speak to the editor that way? I asked. Not that she didn't have grounds...

"Oh, that wasn't him," she said. "It was Charles," the packager of the book Hillary and I had just signed on to write, about the MTV show, The Real World.