First Job

Jenny Apostol

In the early 1980s, I was an unemployed, bilingual Spanish major with some dreamy ideas about translation and communication which I hoped would apply to work. In my journal, I sketched out a theory of how career stages should go: 

Early life: charm and grace. 

Mid-life: theory and practice (art, media)

Late life: science: natural history and philosophy. 

Clearly, I was still in the early stage. Yet, beyond such abstractions of theory, practice, and philosophy, I was basically clueless about how to make a living. If someone asked me about my professional aspirations, my mind went blank. Had a benevolent spirit offered a glimpse of my future self, I would have disavowed the vision. With no tangible goals other than to avoid the poverty associated with my artist parents, and even unclear about my preferred language, I set off to find a job. 

So far, I’d scored an internship for no salary at my local PBS station, Channel Thirteen, in Manhattan. This involved watching documentaries that filmmakers had sent to the station, writing up the subject matter and approach, then making recommendations to the programmers about which films to air. Looking back, it’s astonishing that I was encouraged to pass judgement on other people’s work, considering I possessed neither. Thanks to my looks, aka “charm and grace,” that elusive quality of self-assurance was often assumed even by many of my friends. But I was actually quite shy, still cosseted by silent fantasies about whom and what I might become. 

Television was my mother’s idea—a younger industry meant more opportunities for women she reasoned. Stuck at home in her Brooklyn apartment I bristled at first: wouldn’t any suggestion of hers inhibit the full expression of my independence? 

If you don’t know what you want to do, producer is the perfect career. It requires a grab-bag of skills from research and reporting to marketing, directing, and editing. One could make a virtue of knowing very little about a wide range of subjects from literature, history, science, art, photography, and language, all extensions of my liberal arts degree.  

But a more personal notion won me over: I saw making television as another form of translation: combining moving pictures with narrative argument to transpose one version or idiom of experience into another. I didn’t realize it yet, but I was still operating purely by instinct. Drifted into situations, and now employment, the same way I veered into relationships with potential boyfriends, attracted subconsciously, more aware of what I did not want, rather than who or what I did. Like a figure that emerges from a piece of chiseled marble, I was shedding the opaque mystery of existence until the core of my future would be revealed.

And so, a few months into the internship (technically a labor violation since I was no longer a student), I landed my first gig: a network television mini-series, starring Martin Sheen and Blair Brown, needed a researcher. My well-connected boss—a woman I greatly admired—must have known someone on the project; it was she who told me to apply. So, one cold April day, I marched down West 58th Street to a cramped, chaotic, brightly lit production office, to check out a real job on Kennedy. 

Perhaps twenty people whirred around a large communal desk. Some yammered into phones, their voices buffered by the thrum of multiple typewriters clacking at once. One man tacked scene cards to a wall labeled with various episode themes: Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Luther King. After a 30-second tour through a maze of filing cabinets and folding chairs, including a head nod from the harried British producer, the production assistant filled me in. The series would premiere in November—the 20th anniversary of JFK’s assassination was in fewer than six months—and the production needed some information right away. There was no interview, and nothing remarkable about the guy except that he was about to hire me. His instructions were brief. 

“Go to the library and look up this stuff for Mr. Sheen,” he said, handing me a list of news items. My job was to research the historical context of the period and answer questions the star himself had raised: about the President and First Lady’s trip to Ireland; the work of Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in Congo and elsewhere; the war of independence in Kenya and President Jomo Kenyatta’s rise to power. The report for Sheen would help the actor refine his portrayal of the magnetic and brilliant young president. A man who shined on a global stage convulsed by revolutions, social justice movements, and incipient tragedy. I was a baby during the Kennedy administration, so most of this history was new to me. But for an Ivy League grad the assignment would be a cinch. If it went well, they would extend my contract, maybe through the remainder of the shoot.

The job came with a perk: I would be allowed to present my report to the actor in person. I don’t recall feeling excited about this. In fact, the idea may have inspired more alarm than incentive. Sure, Martin Sheen had played the handsome young murderer in Badlands, a film we revered in high school. And his unhinged, hallucinatory performance as Captain Willard, in Apocalypse Now, was legendary. Two years before, I’d watched the film dubbed into Spanish with friends from the University of Costa Rica, where I’d spent a semester junior year. Rumors about Sheen’s method—punching a mirror while shooting a scene actually drunk—sealed his reputation (in my mind at least) as prickly and unpredictable.  

I put Sheen out of my mind.

I set off immediately on foot—what a relief to get out of that baffling office—and made my way to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. I’d wandered into the famous landmark before but had never spent any time there, nor done any archival research for a film. Fluency in Spanish, along with a moderate ability to render a likeness in watercolor or clay, were my best skills. Both carried over from childhood. On a practical level, my elite, liberal arts education had trained me for very little. 

Rather than slog through tedious history books (or find the right ones to slog through), I consulted the gigantic encyclopedias perched on mahogany stands in the enormous central reading room. Once I zeroed in on key dates, I was directed to a small room downstairs where, without so much as a library card, I was allowed to scroll through reels of microfilm of the New York Times and other journals. I remember being given a short demonstration on how to select materials by date, then load and run the projector. The stern male librarian warned not to whip through the reels too quickly, which could tear them. 

Rushing through hours of microfiche, I felt elated as the historic events came to life in my mind. At the same time, I worried I was skipping over important facts. I took notes on how Mrs. Kennedy charmed ambassadors and prime ministers; her love for Ireland, birthplace of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy clans; the president’s speeches before the Irish Parliament and at the Berlin Wall. I learned about the U.S. role in colonial Africa, and the controversy surrounding Dag Hammarskjold’s death, when his plane crashed in what was then Northern Rhodesia. I have no recollection of taking a break or eating anything or even going for a drink of water. I was fearful about screwing up the projector, and fearful that if I left the booth I would never be allowed back inside. Imagined being squeezed out by hordes of better credentialed New Yorkers eager to conduct more legitimate investigations. 

Scanning page after page of several years-worth of newspapers was taking forever. The premiere date! I didn’t admit it to myself, but this job was starting to upset me. I had no qualms about taking the subway at night to hang out at the Mudd Club or Danceteria. Yet, the agitated scrum of the production office, my general ignorance of the film industry, plus spending hours alone inside a dark booth underneath Fifth Avenue, with the implicit knowledge that the fine art of bullshitting teachers would be of no use here—all of this made me feel fairly nauseous with apprehension. 

I wish I could remember how many days I spent in that dank screening booth. Perhaps I crashed through the job in one eight-hour period. One thing I do remember, though, is the curious way I typed up my findings. 

In college, I had written hundreds of papers with original hypotheses supported by footnote citations. Yet, when it came time to write up my report for Mr. Sheen, it did not occur to me that such academic standards would be relevant in the real world. How to present oneself professionally was still a vague notion. I opted for a kind of opportunistic minimalism. In addition to Spanish, I’d studied Ecology, from which I’d adopted some quaint notions about the conservation of resources. Applying that scientific logic here, conservancy involved two elements: avoid full sentences in favor of outlines of the main points, and, waste as little paper as possible. 

To convey such vast chronological narrative in a suitably condensed form, I typed the report as one continuous paragraph, covering each iconic milestone of history in a dense bloc of single-space lines. Each new subject-heading (Kenya! Ireland!) was underlined. There were no breaks in text, no indentation to signify a new paragraph or fact. One topic merged into the next, spilling forth word after word of information, from the Mau Maus to MacMillan. 

In a bow to practicality and my ecological aesthetic (or out of sheer panic), I did not use typing paper for the Kennedy report. Instead, I ripped blank sheets from the back of a large book (a dictionary, or an art book) and typed out my notes on those. When I ran out of space on the first page, I simply flipped it over, re-fed the sheet into the IBM electric typewriter and resumed on the back side. My only nod to comprehensibility was to wait for the white-out to dry before typing over mistakes. One hopes no library books were mutilated.

My aim, as someone coming only fitfully into womanhood, was to take up as little space as possible, both on the page and frankly, as a person. “Be my strengths,” I advised myself elsewhere in the journal. “Unneedy, beautiful, alert, smart, imaginative, spontaneous.” Among this catalogue of winning qualities, “unneedy” seems the most complicated and ironic—I needed so much. I secretly hoped that I already possessed the other qualities, even if I didn’t always recognize them in myself. But to appear needy or reliant on anyone or anything—even just to raise a question or ask for help—was the ultimate sin. I still felt sad over splitting up with my boyfriend, yet no way was I going to show heart break. Owning nothing, bearing no obligations to anyone, felt liberating. I didn’t need the guy. And I didn’t need this job, either. 

Once the report was finished, I stapled together three-and-a-half not especially rectangular pages of dense, margin-less copy. Then I headed back to the office. The production assistant was too busy to look over my work. Distractedly expressing surprise at my speed, he gave me the address where to deliver the “backgrounder” to Mr. Sheen. I should leave right away. 

The hotel was nearby, just off of Columbus Circle. In those days, hotel security was lax, especially given this one’s central location as a temporary home to celebrities. I marched straight past the front desk into the elevator and down the hall to Sheen’s suite. I found his room and knocked gently on the door. At last, this vexing job was almost over. I felt nervous and sweaty after running a few blocks up Central Park West. It is possible, by this point, I had convinced myself that to meet Martin Sheen would be cool, a kind of adventure. But if you can be simultaneously self-conscious and unconscious all at once, that was me at age 22. 

Through the door, I could hear the famous voice crest and recede in volume as the actor moved closer or farther away from the hallway. It sounded tight like someone speaking from the back of the throat, before swelling into a louder, deeper register. I could tell Sheen was in the middle of an argument. Maybe he was yelling. Or maybe actors always projected big emotion as they spoke. I knocked again.

“Yeah?” The door swung open and Martin Sheen stood before me barefoot, phone cord straining behind him, the telephone receiver cradled to his neck. Did he know I was coming? He wasn’t a tall man, and his eyes bugged out slightly in a highly recognizable way with the white portion around the pupils dominating in an expression more annoyed than curious.

“Here,” I said blankly, and handed Sheen the ragged clip of nearly illegible writing. He looked down, flipping both sides of each heavily inked, uneven page. Suddenly, his dark hair bristled upward like the fur of an animal about to pounce on its prey. Looking wild, and every bit as terrifying as Captain Willard, he peered now at me as if for the first time, then jutted his chin over the threshold of the door jam, near to where I stood. He breathed.

“What is this shit?” he shouted. Then he slammed the door and resumed screaming once again into the phone. That was it. Martin Sheen’s dismal reception was the only feedback on this debut job performance I would ever receive. The Kennedy series went on to film on sound stages around New York and other locations, and premiered to mostly favorable reviews and strong ratings with no further assistance from me. 

A day later, I was back at my internship desk at Channel Thirteen. Over the next couple of months, I developed a special about El Salvador. Peasants were being slaughtered by death squads, part of a grotesque, fantastical policy to suppress communism in a dirty war supported by the United States. I was deeply affected by what I’d learned about Central America while I was a student in Costa Rica. I’d even spent one terrifying night under curfew in a bullet-riddled hotel room in downtown San Salvador. The program premiered that July, and by August I was hired as an associate producer. I worked at the network for seven more years learning the business of documentary television until I bumped into a filmmaker on West 57th Street one afternoon, who told me about another job. I ended up at National Geographic for 24 fascinating years producing innovative, popular programs about the natural world, during which time many more struggles for independence were fought and eventually won.