Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER 1: How did those years change you as a writer, as a person?

SPEAKER 2: I don't know if it was a change. It was more a growth, I would say. For all my life, I was identified with on the range, before the First World War. I was there with the strike of the iron miners. I always identified myself with the people's struggles. But there, of course, it was more intense. And I think I began writing more about it and having an audience for writing.

But I don't separate journalism and my journalism, at least. I think that's true of the establishment journalism. But in the radical movement, there's no such thing as objective journalism anyway. I mean, you're on somebody's side. But we wrote as partisans, we call it. You're on the side. Like I was marching, I don't say anything about the troubles of the Manufacturers Association or any sympathy for them. I just identified with the strikers.

And I think that's a very poetic piece. I mean, I didn't write objectively either. I mean, I didn't make the distinction of poetry and prose, which I think also is a masculine-- is a patriarchal idea. So I don't think there should be that-- whatever happens should be emotionalized and personalized in the person. In the same way with prose and poetry, my anthology, you'll see that it's all poetry. I mean what we call poetry, which I don't know what that is. But I mean it's not just factual or not just analytical.

SPEAKER 1: Starting in the '20s and from then up until now, you held a series of very unusual, and varied, and sometimes unglamorous jobs. You ranged from being a stuntwoman in Hollywood in the '20s to being the voice of Betty Crocker. Yes, on the radio. Is it true? Why don't you talk about some of the best and the worst over that time?

SPEAKER 2: Well, we all tried to make a living. And at some periods in that, there was the only place you could make a living was in what I call the establishment or the corporate world. So you try to make bargains to make enough to live on if you could, like the Betty Crocker. I made enough to write for three years. I was there about 10 months, I think.

And I did it on purpose. I was going to save my money and to bargain with the devil, as I used to call it, for time to write, which is important right now. I see the young women try to do this also. So I did everything that I could to do that, to make enough money and to be able to write.

I worked in factories and just about everything, waitresses. I was a bartender once. So all those jobs were, to me-- even the job of stunt job, I would very carefully-- see, I lived for about a year off of what I cached away from that stunt job. And it was very dangerous because you might be killed. They killed a lot of extras. And you had to sign a paper at the beginning of the day that, if you were killed or injured, they took no responsibility.

And it was very dangerous. I was almost killed the first job I got.

SPEAKER 1: What were you doing?

SPEAKER 2: I was to jump off a burning ship. And I was a very good athlete and I was a good swimmer, but I was a good swimmer in Minnesota lakes. I heard the ocean was salt, but it really is something when you-- and then, besides, I didn't know anything about the tides. The tide, fortunately, took me in instead of out, or I wouldn't be here.

But I was really almost-- the ship was burning, and I was almost killed that day. If you lived, you made about $25 a day. And that was a lot-- for the more dangerous jobs-- and that was a lot of money at that time. You got closer to $25 a week in an ordinary job. So I was really trying to write and get enough money to write.

And when I was here, too, I used to-- Faucets started in Minneapolis in Robbinsdale. Robbinsdale was the head of the Faucet publication that later became True Confessions and True. And then they started with the money from Outhouse Fables, it was called. Billy Faucet, you probably don't know all that history.

But they started the True Confessions out in Robbinsdale a little office there. And you could run out there and with a story and get $100 flat for it if they took it. And then I'd reverse the story and go out the next week. Just reverse it, who was the heroine or whatever happened, the opposite happened. So I made some money to ride on there.

SPEAKER 1: Some of these jobs, and I guess I'm thinking again of the Betty Crocker job and the stuntwoman job, I know you had trouble with eventually that you lost the jobs either because I don't remember what the reason they gave you in Hollywood was. They wanted to make you a starlet, but you wouldn't have your nose done or something? And then they--

SPEAKER 2: They had what they called a stable of women in Hollywood then. There was a stable. You got beautiful women and you trained them. Like the mares, it was just like a training for the race. And you sign a contract for one year or two years and they've trained you. That's the way Gloria Swanson and all those-- they taught you how to walk-- and Joan Crawford-- how to talk.

This guy wanted me to sign. And the first thing I had to do was change my nose because he said every heroine in the movies had to have a pug nose. And my Semitic nose would not do. I don't know what made me not do it. I just didn't think I was going to do that.

SPEAKER 1: What about the Betty Crocker job? How did that end?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I was only going to take that-- two of the women prior to me were in the insane asylums. It was a very, very-- and I decided I'd just take it for 10 months. And that's hard to do because you say, well, one more month. All that money is tremendous. And there was a lot of other little jobs. You really make quite a bit of money, or, for me, anyway, it was.

So I was going to quit. And fortunately, they finally one day called me and said my voice was too sensuous for the kitchen. And I knew that. I'd been I've been practicing keeping it up, and light, and domestic.

SPEAKER 1: But it was too low? Was that the problem? It was too low?

SPEAKER 2: Sensuous, they said.

SPEAKER 1: Sensuous. And you were blacklisted in the '50s.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: Talk to me about it a little bit. What happened? How you survived, what it was like?

SPEAKER 2: Well, everybody that did anything or was alive was blacklisted. You didn't have to be a far left. And everybody from the middle. If you signed a peace, the Stockholm peace thing, or just by guilt by association, it was a terrible-- the FBI did a really good job at that, at psychological terrorism, like Hitler did.

But he could isolate families. Like my brother had to repudiate his family to keep his job and Lockheed. And just like Hitler did and made you become a stool pigeon against your family. And isolate you, make you a non-person. Well, you know the Hollywood Ten and they went to prison.

And so it was really a whole era of terrorism. It's hard to really realize, except that, now, they're trying to pass a bill which will make the McCarthy period look just like a rehearsal, I think. You won't be able to even think. But they could isolate you completely and make it impossible to earn a living and harass you.

Even my children's books couldn't be sold. I had five children's books by Knopf, published by Knopf. Very respectable books, but they couldn't be sold. It had to be sold under the counter like contraband. And I used to make a lot of my living here by teaching, writing. Well, my writing class was destroyed. And people said, well, the FBI visits my husband if I take your class.

So then I thought I'd have a correspondence class. I got a box in the Saint Paul post office and put some ads in national papers, and I got quite a lot of response. In three months, everyone who took my course said the FBI had visited them, so they opened my mail, apparently also.

So then I couldn't get a job as a waitress around here. I'd get a job and then in two weeks or one week, they'd say, well, you're OK, but the FBI's been here. I have to fire you. So they really did isolate you. They made you an innuendo and gossip. And I think that the intellectuals, like the university here, really fell down. They didn't defend. They were frightened.

There was something to be frightened of. You'd become a non-person. You'd lose your job. They burnt their books before they were asked to here. And so it really was a terrible-- and it's very hard to describe how it could be possible that an organization could actually isolate you in your own community.

It was a preparation for fascism, I think. Now, you look back at it, it was just about just what Hitler did. I mean, the whole pattern, it's just a miracle that we didn't have it. The American people are not the German people, I say. You Not led into that. As soon as they find out what's happening, they really kill the un-American committee. Then McCarthy-- I don't know-- strangely, died also. Physically, it was very strange. But when you look at that period, you know, after Roosevelt died, it's very frightening to see the progression of fascistic power that grew up there.

SPEAKER 1: You've said in stories that these later years of your life, the last 20 years, have been the best in terms of your writing, the most productive for you. Talk about that a little bit. Why is that so?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I think there's a lot to be understood about women, especially in our culture. After the menopause, you're supposed to be non compos mentis, no life, no creative ability. I feel, since then, that I have more creative intelligence and work. I work more now than I ever did in my life.

And I think it's better. I think it's more clear, what I've been trying to say. And I feel I probably even speak more. I just finished 14 dates in California. I say a younger person couldn't have done it. But I think there's a lot to be learned about women and the myths that we have of women. Actually, in the Indian culture, a woman after her family is raised and after the menopause, can become a shaman, a historian. She enters her real power because she doesn't have to-- how much energy it takes to feed your children.

A great writer in New York asked me one time why I didn't write that great novel. You have to write something big. I said, because I don't have a wife. And it's true. I said, you have a wife who does your cooking. I have my own children. She has your children. She protects you. He turned really white because he hadn't-- but that's true. I never had a full time-- I have full time to write now. That's one thing. I can write all night if I want to. I don't have to get breakfast for anybody or anybody's living. This is the first time in my life that I had my entire time and energy to write.