The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone by Robin Green

Author:Robin Green [Robin Green]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
ISBN: 9780316440028
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

A young British couple I’d befriended at the American Colony Hotel offered to let me stay in their London apartment for two weeks while they finished their tour of Israel. I’d never been to London, or anywhere in Europe—and what else did I have to do?

They lived in a lovely book-lined flat in Hampstead Village. I walked the wild heath and tried to like the food at a pub in the quaint little town—Scotch eggs, bangers and mash. I went into the city to Harrods, had tea and crumpets in a little shop on a side street, dined on the Strand, stopped outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard. I walked through Hyde Park, where I saw secretaries strip down to their underwear to bask in the first thin sunlight. No one bothered them. No one bothered me. It was all so civilized, especially after Israel, where everybody ogled and catcalled, pushed and cut in line.

It was all so English. It was just like the England in the books I’d read, all cultivated and refined. I told the young couple when they came home that I thought I might stay in London forever. Rolling Stone had an office in the city; I’d pay them a visit. I was sure they’d have a story for me to do or that they’d at least let me use a desk and phone.

The young couple had a friend named Earl, an editor at a publishing house. The garden apartment of his house was vacant; maybe I could live there. Earl turned out to be handsome, erudite, charming. He seemed to like me too—an American girl on assignment, tanned and wearing a jade necklace. He read Rolling Stone, thought he might even have read me.

I went to his house with my suitcase. He had made a picnic for me in the garden—the greenest, neatest lawn and hedges I’d ever seen—and had a blanket spread with sandwiches from the deli, a bottle of wine. We drank to my future in London.

It was my first night in the sparsely furnished garden apartment. It had nothing but a mattress on the floor, but Earl said he’d help me fit it out later. I invited him to stay. Which proved to be a mistake because afterward he couldn’t get away fast enough. In his polished British accent, he politely excused himself (manuscript to read, early appointment the next day), and went out and upstairs to his house, his disappointment and even revulsion palpable.

I lay there feeling I’d ruined everything, that I’d soured London and anything that might have happened between me and Earl. And I soon realized that I had fouled this nest in more ways than emotionally. There was a bad smell, and I realized it was me. The end of my period, maybe. Or maybe I was malodorous from the pubic lice I didn’t yet know I had—though I could have gotten them that very night from Earl or Earl’s mattress.

In the morning, embarrassed and humiliated, I fled.

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