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Fresh out of Barnard College and the Speedwriting Institute, I was hired as a secretary to the editor of Coupon Magazine. Tiny circulation, but a real job. So now I had an income and an apartment in Manhattan: heaven for a young woman from a small town on Long Island.
For six months, I was living the Sex and the City life. Like so many women of my generation, I went straight from college to secretarial school to learn shorthand, or speedwriting, despite the fact that I had already co-written a book called New York on $5 a Day. So I learned the ropes, or at least I tried.
Now, we worked out of a hotel penthouse suite, and the place had become a crash pad for my boss's hard-partying friends. Just to get to my desk some mornings I had to step over Lenny Bruce, the foulmouthed comedian, or his buddy Weegee, a news photographer. (The comic community now considers Lenny a legend, and Weegee's photographs grace the walls of museums and galleries. At the time, I'd never heard of them.)
As a former lefty turned righty, thanks to an overzealous teacher, I had distinctly illegible handwriting -- so bad that after taking dictation, I couldn't translate it. The magazine was advertising dependent, so in letters to the heads of major corporations, I was told to offer them the opportunity to place their ads in four colors in our magazine for the mere price of $10,000. Inadvertently, the d in ads became an s, and the president of one of those big companies was invited to "have his ass in four colors" in our publication.
Guess what? He didn't like it, and demanded my, well ... you get the idea. I was fired, but luck showed her face. The editor was desperate for a copywriter. I was heading for the door, dejected, afraid of what my parents would think, when I heard her call out, "You -- Joan! Can you write better than you can type?" I said, "Yes, of course." A copywriter was born.
When the magazine folded, and the off-off-Broadway troupe I was in (I was also a struggling actress) lost a lot of its audience (mostly my relatives), I got a chance to audition for a two-hour daily radio program on a major New York station. To everyone's surprise, I got the job.
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