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

In this ribald memoir, Green describes her rise from aimless college graduate to rock journalist and writer/producer for The Sopranos and Blue Bloods. Green grew up in Providence, R.I., and attended Brown University in the late 1960s, where she became the only woman on the editorial staff of the Brown Daily Herald. In 1971 she got an interview with Alan Rinzler, an editor at Rolling Stone, and soon had her first assignment from Jann Wenner to write a feature on Marvel Comics, which became the cover story. While Green never goes deeply into how it felt to be the first woman on the masthead or her own personal and professional struggles at the magazine, she does write of her worries that others viewed her as “sleeping her way” onto the masthead (especially as she was in a relationship with an editor). Green wonderfully tells of her various assignments, including a failed interview with a stoned and evasive Dennis Hopper (so “cruel, so high”) and how she escaped his compound and later wrote an eviscerating article; riding in a car with Annie Leibovitz, with Hunter S. Thompson at the wheel loaded on Wild Turkey and pills; and sleeping with RFK Jr. in his dorm room at Harvard but refusing to write about him. Green stopped writing for Rolling Stone three years after she got the job because of disagreements with Wenner. Green’s book is an entertaining look at the early era of Rolling Stone and rock journalism. (Sept.)