Street Gang (5 page)

For young Joan, adolescence changed everything. “I just flowered,” Cooney said. “I was a kind of grim, overwrought little kid, but the world’s happiest adolescent. All that I was as a child suddenly became a plus. A psychiatrist once said to me, ‘You’re the only patient I’ve ever had who had a happy adolescence.’ ”

Breaking free from her siblings was like being reborn. Paul and Sylvia each attended ninth grade at North Phoenix High School but were sent to parochial St. Mary’s High for grades ten through twelve. With no small sense of triumph, Cooney said, “They misbehaved and were sent there as punishment. After I had had a year at North High, my mother said it was time for me to transfer to St. Mary’s, and I just said, ‘You have
got
to be kidding. ’ The subject never came up again.”

Coming into her own as a teen, Joan could be willful and intransigent. “My mother used to say to me, ‘You want your own way at any cost,’ and that was probably true. Though I don’t look back and see any cost that was all that high.”

She entered ninth grade in 1943, not entirely prepared for Bud Brown, a provocateur of a social studies teacher who challenged a disputatious, perspicacious, and altogether sheltered thirteen-year-old. “He was the first teacher I ever had who talked about injustice, and it absolutely inflamed me and totally changed my life,” Cooney said. “At the time in Phoenix, minorities didn’t have to sit in the back of the bus, but the schools were segregated and blacks had to sit up in the balcony at the movie theater. My first awareness of Jim Crow began with Turner in the ‘crow’s nest’ at the movie house. I had taken segregation for granted, and my parents were not enlightened on the subject of race. My father liked many individual black people but he saw nothing wrong with segregation.

“I became very argumentative with him about all these issues. He was an enlightened man in that he wouldn’t say, “Well, I’m going to go over to North High and find out who is teaching you.’ It didn’t bother him that I was getting this point of view.”

Brown, a fancier of cowboy boots and Western wear, operated a weekend barn-dance center. But his worldview went well beyond the confines of the West. He used classroom time to discuss anti-Semitism in Europe, “which nobody was talking about,” Cooney said.

Other teachers had provided instruction; Brown was the first to make Joan think beyond herself. “Bud would say that the only thing you can count on is change,” Cooney said. “It got him—and another teacher at North Phoenix—investigated for being Communists in the 1950s.”

At home, Joan’s thoughts often turned to a relative in Germany, her father’s first cousin, Elsie Wolf. Her letters from Berlin had depicted a horrific anti-Semitic display in the streets that most likely was Kristallnacht. Cooney said, “We knew that she was in trouble, and then my father’s letters stopped being answered.” It was a chilling thought for an adolescent, the idea of a blood relative being rounded up and transported to an internment camp simply for being a Jew.

It wasn’t until after the war that the Red Cross informed Sylvan that his cousin had died of tuberculosis in a concentration camp.

 

While in high school, Joan appeared in school plays, small theater productions, and statewide drama contests. Her sights were set on Broadway, but before she entered college Sylvan squelched that plan, Cooney said. “He said he would never support me in any manner, shape, or form as an actress. ‘You have got to find something else.’ ”

Although the refusal stung at the time, Cooney later came to see the wisdom in it. “I bless him every night for stopping me. I had a better life because of it.”

Joan enrolled as a freshman at the Dominican College of San Rafael, a Catholic girls’ school near San Francisco, but after a successful year transferred to the University of Arizona. “I didn’t want to stay in a girls’ college, and my sister was down at UA. It sounded like a lot of fun, which is what it was, a lot more fun than being in a Catholic girls’ school. But I don’t regret the year [at Dominican]. I had a better education in one year than I really had in the subsequent three years [at the University of Arizona].”

The sisters of Kappa Alpha Theta gave her the nickname Guts, a sobriquet that was bestowed without irony. Education major Joan Ganz was neither shy nor tentative, characteristics that made her attractive to young men on campus who were confident and secure. She briefly dated Dean Burch, whom she described as “this darling, wonderful, funny, interesting, smart man.” After college, their lives would intersect in ways that neither could have imagined.

Though some of her sorority sisters married right out of college, matrimony was not one of Joan’s priorities. She was similarly uninterested in finding an elementary school teaching job, which was the expected thing to do. Though she earned a B for a semester of student-teaching second-graders, “I wasn’t a natural in the classroom,” she confessed. “In those days, mothers said to daughters, ‘Get a degree in education and get certified. If your husband dies, you will be able to get a job and be home when your children are home.’ ”

It was more out of a sense of adventure than defiance of her parents’ wishes that newly graduated Joan Ganz decided to leave home and relocate to an entirely unfamiliar locale. Without a job, she landed in Washington, D.C., moving in with a college friend, Virginia Grose, and Virginia’s mother and brother. In no time, she found a clerk-typist position at the State Department, working for a postwar program that brought Austrians and Germans to the United States for a year of study. It was, in a sense, a reverse-flow Fulbright fellowship, a hands-across-the-water cultural exchange akin to the vaunted program that provides Americans a year of study abroad.

It was during her year in Washington that Ganz encountered another teacher who reshaped her views and intentions, the visionary Roman Catholic priest Father James Keller. In 1945, Father Keller founded the Christophers, an organization whose name is derived from the Greek word for “Christbearer.” The embracing aim of the organization was to encourage believers to apply the teachings of the Gospel in everyday life.

In the early 1950s, at the peak of radio’s power, Father Keller took to the airwaves to preach a message adapted from a Chinese proverb: “It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” This call to activism asked each individual to become a missionary within his or her profession. That notion was life altering for Joan. Father Keller was particularly keen to encourage not just Catholics but Christians of all denominations to take jobs in media, where he saw a bountiful opportunity. As his popularity spread, Keller himself became a multimedia exemplar, as author, newspaper columnist, radio host, newsletter publisher, and, ultimately, one of the first spiritual leaders to exploit television. Unlike others who would follow, Father Keller’s approach was dignified, humble, and without pretense.

 

In 1952,
⁵
after “a wonderful year and one of the most fun, interesting, and memorable in my life,” twenty-two-year-old Joan Ganz did an unexpected about-face, moving home to Phoenix, where she was determined to plunge into a career in the media. “Father Keller said that if idealists didn’t go into media, nonidealists would,” Cooney once told a reporter from
Forbes
.
⁶
“I walked into the
Arizona Republic
and got a job.” While she had no formal training in journalism, she did have brainpower, good breeding, a well-respected surname in Phoenix, and an unbendable will. She also exuded credibility and self-confidence beyond her years. “Two weeks after I started [at the
Republic
] I got a byline. I moved up very fast.”
⁷

At first, Joan was assigned to write wedding announcements and social notes for the newspaper’s Women’s Department, often a dumping ground for female reporters back in an unenlightened age of journalism. Her weekly pay was fifty dollars. “But over time,” she said, “I was given more interesting general assignments, covering events. I covered a lecture on the book
Witness
by Whittaker Chambers. After my piece appeared, Eugene Pulliam, the paper’s owner and a passionate anti-Communist, called the city editor to ask who the Communist was on the women’s page. Fortunately, the professor who gave the lecture called the city editor to thank him for sending such an accurate reporter. So I was off the hook,” she said.

“Reporting is wonderful training because it is precise, it is detailed, and if you’re good, you’re getting exact quotes. I really cared about that, and that is why I did well as a reporter and later, a producer. I paid a lot of attention to detail and following through.”
⁸

Joan first saw television that year, at a neighbor’s home. The experience left her weak in the knees, not because of the technology of the squawking box but because of who was speaking through it: a balding intellectual who was about to accept his party’s nomination for president of the United States at the 1952 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “It was the moment when I fell in love with Adlai Stevenson,” Cooney recalls, still a little dreamy eyed.

After eighteen months at the
Republic
, Joan walked away from news-papering almost as quickly as she came to it, though her reporting and writing demonstrated promise. Had she persisted, she might have made an exceptional journalist, a woman who could have pushed aside gender barriers and proven herself the equal of any man in the newsroom, editor’s suite, or perhaps even the publisher’s office.

Instead, at twenty-three she started anew, relocating to New York, once again without any firm idea of what she might do once she got there. She moved in with Sallie Brophy, an actress friend from Phoenix who had urged her to move to Manhattan. Together they shared the top floor of a crumbling four-apartment brownstone off Beekman Place. Monthly rent was fifty dollars.

“The Brophys were the Kennedys of Arizona, a big, wealthy Irish family of eight children,” Cooney said. “They had a fabulous house farther out than ours, and on Central Avenue. Big stars would come to visit in the winter, and the Brophys would be the ones to entertain them. But the Brophys themselves were glamorous. We were very close to the Brophy children because we all attended Saint Francis Xavier school together. My sister and I would spend parts of the summer on their fabulous ranch in Patagonia. I dated one of the Brophy sons when I was nineteen. My mother was still of that generation where you wanted to marry your daughters off to wealthy people. She was dying to have me marry him, making me crazy, actually.”

Brophy was the near-perfect roommate, Cooney said. “She was one of my sister’s and my closest friends. She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and moved back and forth between California and New York. In those days she got a lot of parts in television, and her being away so much was the reason our living together worked. The apartment had one bedroom, and when she was there, I slept in the living room.”

In the 1950s, Brophy brought home directors the way ordinary people lug home groceries. Among her suitors were Sidney Lumet, Hal Prince, and Arthur Penn. Sometimes the roommates traded off, Cooney said. “I went out with Hal Prince when he produced his first Broadway show,
The Pajama Game
, and through him I met George Abbott, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Lena Horne, and Jerome Robbins. One night, Sallie and I went out with Spencer Tracy to the Stork Club. She was the doorway to it all, and I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

Penn once blithely suggested to Joan that she undergo psychoanalysis. “Everybody does [in show business],” she remembers him saying. “When I told him I couldn’t afford it, he said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll make more money.’ Then I said, ‘Analysis works
that
well?’ He laughed and said, ‘No, you’ll have to change jobs.’ ” With that encouragement, Cooney found a psychiatrist, someone who provided a needed safety net. “He was a real human liberationist [who] kept urging me to fly and reminding me that I didn’t have to become a housewife and move to the suburbs.”
⁹

Brophy took Cooney along with her to the home of
New York World
executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope and his wife, Maggie.
¹⁰

For the literary crowd that frequented the baronial estate at Sands Point, Long Island, the compound brought to mind
The Great Gatsby,
and for good reason. In his 1925 meditation on the sociology of wealth, F. Scott Fitzgerald patterned Jay Gatsby’s fictional mansion after the Swope residence.

Cooney became a weekend regular at Sands Point, where on a summer’s day, the Swopes might entertain a swirl of authors, statesmen, comedians, stage actors, and the wits and sages of the Algonquin Round Table. An afternoon guest list might include Averell Harriman; Robert Moses; Harpo Marx; Martin Gabel and his wife, the actress Arlene Francis; CBS founder William Paley; and his friend and chief competitor, RCA president General David Sarnoff.

At one weekend party, Maggie Swope urged Sarnoff to take notice of this new arrival in town. General, she said, “Joan is such a nice girl. You have to give her a job.”

Joan, flattered and a bit embarrassed, suggested that she might be useful in the press department at RCA. “In those days, publicity departments were always hiring people who had been on newspapers,” Cooney recalled.

“Fine,” Sarnoff said. “Come interview at RCA.”

A position quickly opened up for the fresh-faced friend-of-a-friend of the Swopes.
¹¹
“My path was always marked by encounters with strong men,” Cooney said. “No one could understand why the General had brought me in, and rumors attended me. The General had a twinkle in his eye, and he was rumored to be a ladies’ man. And like so many great men, he was a real presence when he walked into a room. Men like that emanate some sort of electrical current. Everything stopped.

“But I was this innocent—a Candide, really—who was being thought of as an extremely sophisticated, manipulative, ambitious person, probably sleeping with the General.”