Back in the late seventies, Dominique Browning reports, she often felt “physically frightened” while working as an editorial assistant at Esquire, so randy and temperamental were Gay Talese and his ilk. “One of the older secretaries who had survived 40 years of layoffs and lay downs opened her drawer to show me her survival kit: a bottle of bourbon, and a gun,” she writes. Times have changed. We’ll cop to having a half-finished bottle of tequila in our drawer, but firearms are no longer necessary. These days, all you have to do to scare off a magazine writer is ask them to write a blog post.
Dominique Browning On Esquire in the ’70s; ”Mad Men’ is Tame by Comparison’ [Speakeasy/WSJ]
