Street Gang by Michael Davis Read Free Book Online

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