Even with all of her accomplishments, Robin Green—who served as executive producer and writer for The Sopranos on HBO and is cocreator with her husband, Mitchell Burgess, of the CBS drama Blue Bloods—admits to being “very anxious” about the reception of her first book.
The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone (Little, Brown, Aug.) details what it was like as the first female journalist on Rolling Stone’s staff at the height of its popularity in the early ’70s. At the same time, Green adds, “I’m really proud of this book. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Claiming that she and other young women in her constellation back then never felt a #MeToo moment, Green recalls how they worked, played, and even slept with colleagues—and anyone else who caught their eye. “Girls,” as she likes to refer to her younger self and other young women she knew during that era, felt “empowered,” she says. “Every girl in that office did what we wanted to do. It was a macho atmosphere, but it was a free atmosphere: no one got heavy.”
In 1970, when Green was hired at the age of 25, Rolling Stone was headquartered in Berkeley, Calif. Her assignments ranged from interviewing Hunter S. Thompson, who at the time was working on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and then–teen idol David Cassidy to visiting Dennis Hopper at his house in New Mexico.
Green’s career at Rolling Stone ended in 1973 not because of something she wrote but something she didn’t write. Publisher Jann Wenner had assigned her to do an exposé on the younger members of the Kennedy clan. Green interviewed Robert Kennedy Jr., who at the time was a Harvard freshman. But the story foundered because she ended up having sex with him.
Green says that she wrote The Only Girl after attending a 40th anniversary reunion of 1970s-era Rolling Stone employees. Seeing so many of her former colleagues, she says, brought back a rush of memories. “It was one of the best times in my life,” she says. Noting that others have written about Rolling Stone during its heyday, Green dismisses them, saying, “They’re outsiders; they don’t get it right. I got it right. I was there.” After all, she says, The Only Girl isn’t just a memoir about her: “it’s all of the girls’ stories.”
