Oral History

“It Was Us Against Those Guys”: The Women Who Transformed Rolling Stone in the Mid-70s

How one 28-year-old feminist bluffed her way into running a copy department and made rock journalism a legitimate endeavor, putting six women on the Rolling Stone masthead in the process.
A photo illustration depicting the cover of Rolling Stone and a woman on an oldfashioned telephone
Photo Illustration by Michael Houtz; Photographs by Bruce Mozert/Three Lions, from Mirrorpix, both from Getty Images.

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“It was just us against the world, and us against those guys.”

In early 1974, Rolling Stone was the epicenter of American youth culture. Not quite seven years into its run, the magazine’s focus had widened beyond the stoned musings of rock stars, and was offering journalistic deep dives into everything from Patty Hearst’s kidnapping to Karen Silkwood’s murder. This period was Rolling Stone’s much-celebrated golden age, a period that helped define New Journalism, breech-birth gonzo journalism, and, quite crucially, formalize rock media’s language, context, and canon.

For the most part, it was entirely men leading this charge. Robin Green was the first woman to write at the magazine, in 1971, but her tenure was brief. In the early 70s, the only women on the editorial floor were secretaries, ambitious young women with master’s degrees and years of experience primarily charged with answering phones. In January 1974, a 28-year-old feminist named Marianne Partridge began to change that, quietly changing the shape of Rolling Stone from inside, and eventually putting six women on the Rolling Stone masthead. Their stories have historically been obscured by the long shadows of the men they worked for and wrangled—Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Eszterhas, Cameron Crowe—but the history these women recall is the story of how Rolling Stone became a true journalistic endeavor, and the story of women learning to speak for themselves decades before topics like sexual harassment and equal pay became mainstream.

“Some of it was about drugs, and some of it was about sex,” recalls Sarah Lazin, who went from editorial assistant to director of Rolling Stone Press over the course of a decade. “But it was really about doing challenging work, and being on the cutting edge of journalism and history.”

“I FELT VERY LUCKY TO BE IN THE BOYS’ ROOM”

Sarah Lazin: In June of ’71, after getting my master’s and having lots of jobs—at type centers, proofreading—there were only two places I really wanted to work: the San Francisco Comic Book Company and Rolling Stone. I had no journalism experience at all, but I had a lot of secretarial experience, and I got the job. Editorial assistant was my title.

Christine Doudna: In 1970, I was living in Africa, teaching French at the University of Lagos in Nigeria. I had a subscription to Rolling Stone that arrived about three months late by boat wet and damaged, but [was] passed around with friends like it was the grail. It was unlike anything any of us had ever read before—it had our truth. I started there in the late summer of ’73. I had a master’s in comp lit and French, and I just wanted to be in publishing. The job was to be Joe Eszterhas’s assistant, which is a glorified secretary.

Barbara Downey Landau: The war really dominated my college experience, and after I graduated, I was a little bit or a lot lost. I did not want to be part of what was going on, so I ended up going out to California. I was working at an entertainment giveaway magazine and heard that Rolling Stone was looking for a proofreader. I said, Well, I could do that.

Marianne Partridge: I was working for The New York Times in Los Angeles, and I went up to San Francisco to interview for a job at a TV station, and the guy said “Oh my God, no. You can’t be on TV. Your glasses are terrible, and your nose is too big.” I heard there might be a job at Rolling Stone. I just cold-called and talked to John [Walsh]. I came over to interview for copy chief, but I didn’t know [that] until I got there. I said, “Of course you need a copy department. Of course I could form it.” I knew nothing about copyediting aside from what I’d observed.

Vicki Sufian: Back then, ads were either “Help Wanted: Males” or “Help Wanted: Females.” I’d interviewed with the editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he said, “You want to be a reporter here? Look around this newsroom. Do you see any women here? There is one woman here, and she does the women’s page. That’s all we need.” That was the atmosphere. I worked for three years as a reporter at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Then, in 1975, I was hired as a researcher and fact-checker at Rolling Stone.

Lazin: I was the only editorial assistant at Rolling Stone and really needed help. Christine shows up. She’s beautiful. She’s all thin and blonde—right out of Kansas—wearing a silk shirt with no bra. Joe Eszterhas hires her in a minute. I’m like, Shit, that’s all I need, but she’s incredibly sweet, generous, a hard worker, and really smart. We were all in the same situation, so we became very good friends.

Doudna: I don’t know what I ever did for Joe, other than flirt and have fun and answer the phones.

Partridge: [In January 1974,] John Walsh called and said, “You can hire whoever you want, but I’d like you to hire from inside. There’s some women here who might qualify.”

Downey Landau: The editorial department was all men until Marianne came along. There was a sign over Jann [Wenner]’s secretary’s desk in huge letters: “Boys’ Club.” I’ll never forget that.

Doudna: Jann gave John the mandate to go ahead and professionalize the office, because at that point, people would write and just got right into print. Nobody would check it for anything. Facts, style, spelling, grammar—nothing.

Lazin: I was an assistant to both David Felton and Paul Scanlon. I did a lot of transcriptions. The first thing I transcribed turned out to be Hunter [S. Thompson] and Oscar Acosta in Las Vegas. It was for the second part of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I had done a lot of transcribing in several languages, but this was pretty intense. [In] one of the tapes they’re in this restaurant, and they’re essentially torturing the waitress—yelling and screaming and throwing things—and I had no idea how to transcribe that. I remember asking Paul, and he said, “Just put down what you’re hearing.” I did, and a lot of it appeared in the piece. I felt very lucky to be in the boys’ room.

Partridge: Sarah [Lazin] had called me, and she was saying how much the women there were eager for me to be there. She didn’t say anything bad about anybody, but I realized that whatever was going on there had something to do with gender.

Lazin: I had a master’s, Christine had a master’s, Harriet [Fier] was Phi Beta Kappa from Smith. We’re all there serving these gods—and it got old. I went to Jann and said, “I don’t really want to leave, but I don’t see anything happening here” and Jann said, “Please don’t go. Things are going to change.”

Partridge: I interviewed Sarah, Christine, and Harriet, who were hoping to have the jobs—that was very obvious. Sarah and Christine had master’s degrees in history and literature. It was crazy! I mean it didn’t feel crazy to me because I, too, was working as a secretary. That was the way you entered, if you were a woman and had any hope of moving up. It wasn’t a question of quality; you had to be really well connected to move in journalism.

Lazin: At Rolling Stone, there were no women writers at all but Robin Green, and certainly there were no women editors, so there was no model. In New York, the major magazines did have women writers—not a lot, but there was Nora [Ephron] at New York and Joan Didion. They were few and far between, but they were there.

Doudna: Marianne just talked to each one of us and asked, “Do you want to train to be an editor or fact-checker or proofreader?” We all just leapt at the chance. She hired me to be a copy editor, Sarah to be a fact-checker, Harriet to be a copy editor, and Barbara to be a proofreader. She trained us all. None of us had had that kind of experience.

Partridge: I really was not qualified for this position. So the first time I got there [they were closing an issue], one of the women working in production took me on a tour of the flats. I was walking up and down the aisles and she was saying, “This is how we do this—what do you think we should do?” There was this impression caused by John Walsh saying, “I brought in a real professional here.” It was clear to me they were awaiting my arrival.

Lazin: I started the fact-checking department. I had no idea what that was—Marianne showed me how to do it. Harriet was with me at the beginning, and then Marianne took Christine and taught her how to copyedit and established a Rolling Stone style. None of that stuff had been applied there—it was just really catch as catch can.

From left, Sarah Lazin, Barbara Downey, Christine Doudna, Harriet Fier, David Young and Marianne Partridge in the back.

Photograph by Max Aguilera Hellweg.

“A ROUGH TRANSITION”

Partridge: There were serious writers who had never had a copy editor and definitely never had a researcher. It was a rough transition.

Doudna: It was very intense, partly because there was so much resistance to us from the guys. Marianne was very aware of that, and she wanted to make sure we were perfect. We knew that these people that had never been edited were not going to take to it well.

Lazin: The reaction was hysterical. And these were our friends! The guys would go over across the street to drink and talk about how stupid all of this was, and in the meantime, Marianne and Christine and Harriet and I were working on their pieces. Joe [Eszterhas] would lay his buck knife down on the table and threaten in his macho way. I remember Ralph Gleason, who was my mentor, calling me up, and he said to me, “O.K., Sarah. Dizzy and Coltrane are standing at the corner of 52nd and 7th, June 3, 1952. Fact-check that!” I was like, “Come on, Ralph. That’s not what we’re doing here.”

Downey Landau: Marianne was willing to stand up to Jann, the editors, and writers. She was a real role model of what was possible.

Sufian: It was a great job. We would re-report the stories all over, call all the sources, research everything in it, so it was reporting. I once had to call Warren Beatty to fact-check, and he said to me, “You must have the most boring job in the world,” and I thought, He is so wrong.

Cameron Crowe did an interview with Jack Ford when Ford was president. I had to fact-check it, but [Crowe] had left on vacation and left notes. One of the things Ford said in the piece is “I don’t like being in the White House. I don’t get laid as much as I used to.” This is the great quote, and so I have to call the White House and ask Jack Ford if he said this. Ford says, “Please don’t print that. I didn’t say it.” I couldn’t find it in the notes and couldn’t find Cameron, and so we had to take it out. Cameron comes back and says, “I’m really sorry. He did say it.” A few years later, Jack Ford in Page Six—talks about the time he lied to a Rolling Stone fact-checker. Me. [A rock star lying to a Rolling Stone fact-checker is a central plot point in Crowe’s film Almost Famous.]

Doudna: Marianne’s big demand was that we be able to defend what we were saying to them. I remember trying to get some rock critic to try to change the word “girl group”—because we all wanted to be women at this point.

Partridge: We had to try to find ways to be very kind, but strong. The very big names, yes, they were carefully read, but nothing was being done—I mean totally unedited. When it could come to the copy desk, I began working with writers directly, instead of going through the editor, and that was an incredible experience.

Lazin: Marianne is an amazing editor. She will make you feel that you lived for this re-write.

Partridge: The first piece I edited was Ben Fong-Torres’s piece on Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door tour. I had to kill 40 inches to make it fit, and I did, and then [Ben] comes storming to where I’m standing, making sure that all the sentences fit together—this was maybe my second week. I step back and so he starts [to read], and he goes, “This is very good.” I thought, Oh, thank god. It was only excellence they wanted.

Downey Landau: It was very much “us against them.” You’re fighting for your legitimacy. You really have to fight about cuts and word changes. The guys on the staff didn’t like the authority that we felt we had.

Doudna: It’s sort of amazing that we were able to do what we did, and that Jann supported us. Marianne was one of the first women who really gained his trust. He was so dependent on her.

Lazin: We won everybody over, but there was a year where we were huddled all together next to each other, working 24/7. And then there was Hunter and filing on the mojo machine at three in the morning, and he would just file gibberish, and we’d have to put it together along with David Felton or Paul Scanlon. It was just us against the world, and us against those guys.

Doudna: We’d be lying on the floor, napping, and then another page would come in over the mojo and somebody’d get up, copyedit it, and send it to the printer or the art department. It took a village to get a piece of Hunter’s in the paper.

“ONCE I STOPPED BEING SO SCARED, I WAS HAPPY THERE”

Downey Landau: I felt elevated. I felt like I had more value. I had more agency than I felt like I had before, and with that feeling you are less likely to accept things the way they are.

Doudna: There was a kind of journalism that was being done [there] that was not being done anywhere else. Rolling Stone was a different world. It felt like the one that really mattered.

Lazin: We were fact-checking things like spellings of Keith Richards’s name, and there was no authoritative source to tell us if there was an “s” at the end of his name or not, and his record company had been changing the spelling. I loved fact-checking. I was really good at it.

Partridge: It was only maybe once or twice that I really flipped. This one particular writer that just kept coming to our desk, and it was just a fucking night—it was outrageous. So I just said, “O.K., put this through. Sarah, be sure that we don’t libel anyone, and put this through.” And so Jann reads everything—Jann was a wonderful editor. His secretary comes running over, “Marianne, can you please come in the office?” I said, “Sure.” I go in Jann’s office and he’s got the galleys. “What is this?!” And I go, “This is what your copy desk has been struggling with for a year. This is the shit we have to deal with,” and he looked up. I was scared a lot in the early days, but once I stopped being so scared, I was happy there. We were all there because Jann took the risk.

Doudna: It was a guy’s magazine. It was very male sensibility, always. That never really changed, even with our whatever we were doing.

Partridge: Less than a year in, I became a senior editor. I was at my first story-idea meeting. All the writers had been brought in for this big meeting, and I’m the only woman in that room. I had worked on an idea with Ellen Willis. I’d called her and I had said, “Look, there’s never really been any writing on rape that’s been direct.” She found a case in Boston [to cover]. I presented this idea at the meeting. I was sitting next to Jann, and I started to talk and I realized my hands were shaking so bad, I put them in my lap. At the far end of the table, [Eszterhas] says, “Why don’t you just lie back and enjoy it?!” and everybody laughed. I was looking at Jann, and he was the only person at the table that didn’t laugh. He was nodding his head, like please continue. I got through, and he said, “That sounds great. How long do you think that’s going to take? O.K., four months. It’s going to run then.” Who knows why Jann did that, but he didn’t laugh, and I don’t care why. Ellen won [a legal award] for “The Trial of Arline Hunt” that year.

Doudna: Marianne was the only woman that got into editorial meetings until we were eventually all promoted. I became the news and opinion editor, and then senior editor—I specialized in politics. Harriet did the music stuff.

Sufian: By the time I arrived, the fight to have jobs other than secretaries and assistants had been won. They were all promoted thanks to Marianne.

“WORKING THERE MADE ME A BETTER JOURNALIST”

Doudna: Marianne left to go to The Village Voice, and when she did that I became the copy chief in San Francisco, and Sarah was by then head of the fact-checking department.

Downey Landau: Eventually, I became copy chief after that.

Lazin: Around ’75, Jann came back from a trip to New York with five or six book deals with Random House. One was The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, and he signed Jim Miller and Greil Marcus to be the editors of it, and The Rolling Stone Album Guide. Growing up in the 50s and 60s and having no one take music seriously at all—It’s just something for the kids, right?—there was no history. You can’t imagine how revolutionary The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll was. The idea of having a chapter on New Orleans music, a chapter on Stax Records, and then a chapter on Chuck Berry, just starting to pinpoint who was important by creating a history. So I said, ‘If we’re going to do this, it should be fact-checked. If we’re going to be the source, then it has to be accurate.” Pretty soon, I was managing it. I had no idea what I was doing, and I just learned on the job.

Sufian: Working there made me a better journalist. There was such an emphasis on accuracy and factual integrity. I spent a year at Rolling Stone in New York, and left and got a job in television. It helped me to begin my 40-year career in television.

Downey Landau: I didn’t think about leaving until after I got to New York and things changed—the idealism wasn’t part of the magazine anymore. I was disillusioned and confused about what I was going to do next. My life took a different turn when I met my husband. He was managing Bruce Springsteen and I had a chance to go to Europe with the tour, so I went and that was the end of my focus on Rolling Stone.

Doudna: I left in 1978 and started freelancing and editing, especially for Savvy, the magazine for executive women. Savvy doesn’t exist any longer, but it was early on the scene for reporting about professional women’s lives and work.

Lazin: By ’77, I was less engaged with the magazine and asked Jann if I could set Rolling Stone Press up as a division of the magazine, and sell things not just to Random House, but to Simon & Schuster and Little, Brown and everybody else. He said, “Go ahead. Just don’t lose me any money.” So then I started running it on my own. In 1983, I set up my own packaging company, Sarah Lazin Books. About a year later, I was brought back . . . and I continued to represent the magazine’s packaged books until they stopped the program in 2017. I also became a literary agent to writers and photographers, many of whom I had worked with at Rolling Stone.

Partridge: [In 1983,] I started a paper in Santa Barbara. I’m one of the owners, and the editor of the Independent, which is a weekly paper in Santa Barbara and an online daily.

Doudna: Marianne and I are still very good friends. We’re still actually partners in a newspaper out in Santa Barbara.

Sufian: Sarah and I have lived in the same building for the last 35 years, and Christine [moved] in here in June.

Lazin: [Working at Rolling Stone] was a very intense period of time for everybody. Some of it was about drugs, and some of it was about sex. But it was really about doing challenging work, and being on the cutting edge of journalism and history.

Doudna: I didn’t know what I wanted with my life, and that was sort of the environment where I started to find out. Out of that period came this incredible group of friendships that were really unlike anything I’d known before. A lot of us felt that way.