Bachelor Girl

On Dr. Kildare, a “No, thank you” to an internist seems to lead right away to a leukemia diagnosis. On the precursor to E.R., Medical Center, the one who says no, in the span of twenty minutes, contracts breast cancer.

During the early seventies, there was a popular Friday-night show called Love, American Style. According to TV Guide, more people were likely to see it in a given week than to experience anything like love of any genuine style in their lifetimes.

DAYS OF MACE

Back on August 28, 1963, a petty thief named Richard Robles broke into an Upper East Side apartment and killed the two young women who lived there. Years later, when such single killings had become commonplace, New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud wrote with complete accuracy: “The brutal slaying of a young single girl… probably causes more shock and public horror than any other.”

But the “single girl murders” as they became known across the country that fall, were a shocking devastation. The perpetrator had chosen the address, 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, because he’d seen an open window, there was no doorman, and he thought no one was home. When he got through it, intending to steal jewelry or money, Janice Wylie, a blond twenty-one-year-old Newsweek researcher, ran in from the other room. Robles grabbed a kitchen knife and raped her. Emily Hoffert, a new roommate, entered the apartment, shrieking that she would remember his face, identify him—and something snapped. Robles began clubbing both girls with glass soda bottles, then for an hour slashed and stabbed them with knives.

The case is remembered now as the one that led to passage of the Miranda rights legislation; the wrong man, not properly questioned, spent years in jail before Robles was apprehended. But what remainded in consciousness, of course, was the girls. Emily had just started work as a teacher. Janice wanted to be an actress and looked so hopeful, ready to go!, in all her pictures. Her father, Max, a well-known adman and writer—who, with a third roommate, found the naked bodies—later committed suicide. (An ironic footnote: It was his brother, Philip Wylie, who wrote such misogynist tomes as Generation of Vipers, the World War II diatribe that accused those neurotic “Lost Sex” women of ruining men, killing them, destroying their souls.)

An entire litany of single female names would follow, perhaps most famously Kitty Genovese, a twenty- nine-year-old bar manager who’d decided, in a highly unusual move, to stay in the city when the rest of her large Italian family made the move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She was stalked at 3 A.M. after exiting a Queens train and stabbed repeatedly en route to her apartment; notoriously, neighbors all around the complex heard her shrieking but none called the police. The one man who considered it later confessed that he’d seen her stumbling and, thinking her drunk, changed his mind.

Two years later, in Chicago, Richard Speck pushed his way through the front door of a student nurses’ dorm, dressed like a disheveled James Dean—a tattoo, BORN TO RAISE HELL, on his arm—and demanded money. No one, he swore, would be hurt. Twenty-four student nurses lived there, most of them Filipinas. About half were home at the time and he forced them all to a room, had them lie down, and tied them up with strips of torn bedsheets. Girls were returning home every few minutes, and as each came in, he tied her up. Then he lifted one or two at a time and dragged them into another room. He’d return, take another five. Another three. Until the room was empty, and he fled. He’d missed one, however, a small young woman who had managed to roll herself under a bed and stay hidden. She’s the one who found the carnage—her friends, strangled, mutilated, stabbed in the eyes and breasts. Somehow, still tied up, she crawled out onto a fire escape shrieking.

“The nurse under the bed” became a set piece in scary games girls played during my childhood. The message was clear: If you live by yourself without a husband, you’d better learn how to hide.

By the seventies, and the full blossoming of the bar scene, single murders began to fall into a category of their own. This kind of dispatch was commonplace: In October 1973, Carol A. Hoffman, thirty-one, a publishing assistant, was stabbed and then brutally strangled with panty hose in her apartment. The most shocking aspect of the Hoffman case was that she had let the killer into her apartment because she’d felt sorry for him. He had appeared at her door in distress and told her he was looking for another resident of the building who’d raped his wife. While the man was there, elaborating on this story, Ms. Hoffman’s boyfriend happened to call. He advised her to get the guy out quickly and even spoke by phone to the distraught visitor. He raced over, but by the time he arrived she was dead. Building residents were horrified—but not, it seemed, all that shocked. Here was a “mostly singles” apartment, no doorman, with a history of muggings. One neighbor, identified as Marti, a graphic designer, recalled bringing home a strange man who, after three hours of conversation, attacked her. She’d escaped by racing down the hallway, banging on doors. “How could I report it?” she asked the reporter. “What was I going to report? Oh, hi, I brought a man home with me, and look what he did!”

The women who wrote these stories—Gloria Emerson, Judy Klemesrud, Charlotte Curtis, Nan Robertson, among others—were on their own emerging as singular voices. They had come up the usual journalistic route: from file clipper or researcher, then moving, after a few years, to the 4F sections or pullouts. (4F: “food, furnishings, fashions, family” was still the journalistic female ghetto). Some of them had been quiet forces in the sex desegregation of the New York Times help-wanted ads in 1967 and had been active in the landmark class-action sex-discrimination suits brought against the Times, Newsweek, and other news corporations during the early seventies. (Without these actions, it’s unlikely their bylines would ever have appeared anywhere outside the 4F cookie/sweater slum.)

Their stories of singular peril began to take on an eerie similarity. Imagine modern Bowery gals, a group of friends dressed up to go out one weekend night, to a place that seemed like a wild carnival midway. It was loud and friendly, but there was also an unmistakably dangerous undercurrent. Patrice Leary, Roseanne Quinn… their names blurred with their stories and photos. Just regular young working girls, in their twenties, hair parted down the middle, found dead after leaving a bar alone or with a man they did not know. Their friends, who resembled them, would be photographed huddled together outside the bar. Sometimes their words made up the captions: “There is no such thing as too cautious.” “To be realistic in this city means to be paranoid.” “I sleep with a baseball bat next to my bed.” “The uglier I look, the safer I’ll be.”

An acquaintance of mine recalls:

In the early to mid-seventies—that was when New York made its big turn…. It was not just edgy in some places, but filled withdrug addicts and people who weren’t wearing shoes and talking to themselves…. It seemed very dangerous all of a sudden…. I remember the week I was flashed by three guys, once right in the subway and, I swear, he was looking straight at me; once when I came home—I lived in the Village—and found a guy on the steps with his dick hanging out, and once as I waited to be buzzed in at a friend’s…. I had been at the bar [W. M. Tweed’s] where Roseanne Quinn disappeared, I still remember that, and I left and walked over to this apartment and there was the man with his dick out…. That’s when I got a purple belt in karate.

As journalist Lucinda Franks wrote of young women in the early seventies, “Anxiety had slipped around their lives like a back brace.”

It seems in the spirit of the times that Jane Fonda won the Oscar for Klute (1971), in which she played a prostitute stalked by a crazed john. Another hugely popular film, Play Misty for Me, flipped the roles, updating the noir B movie Detour, in which an inexplicably demented woman stalks a man she’s casually met, here a radio deejay played by Clint Eastwood. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, concerned a seemingly plain Irish-American schoolteacher who, in response to upsetting events in her past, starts to pick up men in bars, night after night, year after year, until finally one of them kills her.

But despite its seeming death sentence, single life in New York City continued to thrive. New Yorkers, after all, like single women living anywhere, had been forced to cultivate and maintain a sense of humor—satiric, or sardonic, and that adjective so often stapled to the single woman, masochistic. The most perfectly preserved example of sardonic female masochism may be found in the Gail Parent novel Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1970). Sheila, who’d moved from Franklin Square, Long Island, to the city, has, after several years, decided that she has no hopes of marriage. Every girl in New York City has the same