Lillian Roxon and the Counterculture: An Australian Writer’s Legacy

Robert Milliken addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 26 October 2010. Milliken is a Sydney based journalist and the author of Mother of Rock: the Lillian Roxon Story (Black Inc, 2002; revised edition 2010). The story of Lillian Roxon may have been lost to Australians but for Milliken’s work. The author of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, Roxon was loved and remembered by a host of rock music legends and counterculture personalities around the world. Lillian Roxon grew up in Brisbane with émigré parents. Her life has now inspired the film documentary Mother of Rock: the life and times of Lillian Roxon – shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2010 and also on SBS TV in early 2011.

LILLIAN ROXON AND THE COUNTERCULTURE – AN AUSTRALIAN WRITER’S LEGACY

ROBERT MILLIKEN

Lillian Roxon grew up in Brisbane and Sydney, but spent the bulk of her adult life in New York, where she died in 1973 at the age of 41. I met her only once late in 1972, a few months before she died. I was a young journalist working in London, when she was visiting to follow the British glam rock group, Slade. I was a fan of her writing, then at the cutting edge of New Journalism. I was also intrigued by how her role as a writer had made her a star figure in social upheavals that helped define the 1960s and early 1970s: the counterculture, rock music and the birth of rock writing, and the women’s liberation movement.

Three years earlier, Lillian had written Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, the world’s first encyclopedia of rock music. The book was, and remains, a vivid account of the youth culture behind the music that exploded with the coming-of-age of the baby boomer generation in the 1960s. Germaine Greer, with whom she famously feuded, had dedicated The Female Eunuch, her momentous book on feminism, to Lillian. After it appeared in 1970, Lillian wrote to friends in Australia: “Germaine Greer in London has just written a book called The Female Eunuch with lots of four-letter words. She is seven feet tall and a bully, and about the only female I know who is not a eunuch.”

Physically, she was Germaine’s antithesis: so small I could barely make her out in the big chair across the foyer of the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill where she stayed.

The fractious tone of their relationship continues to this day, 37 years after Lillian’s death. When Germaine was invited to launch a new documentary on Lillian Roxon at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2010, she did so – in the presence of Nicola Roxon, the federal minister for health, and Lillian’s other nieces and Australian family – by calling Lillian “the world’s biggest bitch”.

The woman I met in London in December 1972 hardly seemed that. Physically, she was Germaine’s antithesis: so small I could barely make her out in the big chair across the foyer of the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill where she stayed. The cortisone she was taking to fight asthma, that soon killed her, had made her overweight. The glamorous woman I had expected to meet was actually insecure. She started out apologising for the way she looked. But the beauty for which she was remembered from her youth in Sydney shone through, chiefly in her ravishing smile and sparkling eyes. And her energy and talent as a conversationalist were undiminished.

Shortly before I met her, an American book called Mug Shots had listed Lillian among the 200 leading figures of America’s “alternate culture”, those who “propose to supplant – in one way or other – the existing way of life in America with a culture less rigid, less materialistic, less self-consuming”. The authors described these 200 “social outlaws” as being among America’s “most creative, dedicated and humane people”. Lillian’s fellow outlaws included Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Herbert Marcuse, Marshall McLuhan, Kate Millett and Andy Warhol.

About 10 years ago, I set out rather foolhardily to write a biography of Lillian Roxon. I discovered a gold mine of her papers in the Mitchell Library, donated by her late younger brother, Jack Roxon, and her Sydney friend, Margaret Fink. Lillian was one of the last great letter writers before the age of electronic mail. Her correspondence included exchanges with a who’s who of the cultural world, from David Malouf in Australia to Tom Wolfe in New York. Most had survived Lillian, and the mention of her name in both cities opened doors for interviews.

SBS television is due to show the film in early 2011. Another Sydney production company has since optioned the book to develop a feature film.

I saw her story as a writer’s journey from the birth of popular culture after the second world war, to the centre of the counterculture in 1960s America. And I wanted to explore how much the insights that made her such a central figure came from her rebellious Australian perspective: a mind that questioned the conventions and expectations of her middle European Jewish parents, and of life in 1940s Brisbane and 1950s Sydney.

I could not have predicted that 10 years later the book would inspire a documentary, Mother of Rock: the life and times of Lillian Roxon. The film was produced by Robert de Young, a Melbourne filmmaker, whose earlier credits include a documentary about another Australian, Errol Flynn. The director was Sydney filmmaker Paul Clarke, whose previous films include Bombora: the story of Australian surfing.

The Roxon film premiered at the Melbourne film festival in August 2010, and was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival a month later. It has since been invited to the Rome film festival, the New York documentary festival and the Brisbane film festival. It won Best Documentary – Biography at the Australian Teachers of Media awards for 2010. SBS television is due to show the film in early 2011. Another Sydney production company has since optioned the book to develop a feature film.

I was not so surprised, though, that the story of Lillian Roxon and her New York world seems to endure with the passing of years. On a visit to New York in September 2010, I discovered an exhibition at the Steven Kasher gallery on West 23^rd Street called “Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll”. It was a look back at Max’s Kansas City, the New York bar and restaurant where Lillian once held court among America’s “alternate culture”. The show’s photos included Andy Warhol, Abbie Hoffman, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Deborah Harry and Lillian Roxon.

So who was Lillian Roxon?

Brisbane

She was born in Savona, on the Italian Riviera, near the idyllic seaside town of Alassio where her Polish Jewish parents had settled. Her father was a doctor. He got the family out of Italy in 1938, and eventually to Australia, where they settled in Brisbane, Queensland then being the only state that recognised his European medical qualifications.

She seemed to be full of sex and wisdom and boys talk. I would have thought it was all talk, but she seemed to have an awareness so well ahead of her time.

Lillian went to Brisbane State High, an academic school that attracted bright students. Her classmates included Barbara Blackman, the future writer, and Roger Covell, the future music professor. Lillian’s rebelliousness troubled her parents for the rest of their days, especially her mother Rose who, from all accounts, was a cultured middle European woman spiritually marooned in wartime Brisbane.

It also troubled her teachers. Grace Garlick, the 1948 girls’ captain at State High, who also went on to become a journalist, told me: “Somebody like Lillian had never hit the place. She seemed to be full of sex and wisdom and boys talk. I would have thought it was all talk, but she seemed to have an awareness so well ahead of her time. No wonder the teachers didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Like most immigrant children, Lillian quickly became Australian. She advised the family to get rid of their original name, Ropschitz, and chose Roxon for them. And she quickly found her way to the Pink Elephant, a café where young artists from the literary group known as Barjai gathered. The Pink Elephant was really the first of Lillian’s salons, a teenage version of later ones where she also became a central personality: the Lincoln Inn coffee shop of the Push crowd in Sydney, and Max’s in New York.

She lived with George Clarke, her architecture student boyfriend, in a charming old house in Jamison Street, off George Street, a bold domestic arrangement for a young, middle class single woman then.

Louis Green, another State High pupil, later a history professor at Monash University, recalled the teenage Lillian Roxon’s qualities that pretty much carried her through the rest of her life: “Even at that age, Lillian was fairly overwhelming. She was very intelligent and very provocative. And she was tremendously good at involving people in her life.”

Sydney

That power really bloomed when Lillian moved to Sydney in 1949, at the urging of her elder brother, Milo, who preceded her as a student at Sydney University. Sydney then was a city of just 1.5 million people, its raffishness tempered by a legacy of Edwardian primness. Lillian gravitated to the Push, the group of anti-authoritarian libertarians centred initially on the university, but later in city hangouts such as the Lincoln Inn, Repins coffee shop and the Royal George pub in Sussex Street. She lived with George Clarke, her architecture student boyfriend, in a charming old house in Jamison Street, off George Street, a bold domestic arrangement for a young, middle class single woman then.

David Malouf, also from Brisbane, two years younger than Lillian, and in some ways a fellow outsider, first met Lillian at the Jamison Street flat. He remembers Lillian then chiefly as a figure who defied the conventional 1950s view that independent women did not exist at that time. Malouf told me:

She was really in flight from everything her parents represented. Jewishness, the feeling that there was a kind of burden on you that restricted you. She saw herself as being absolutely free, as someone who could make her own life in any way she wanted. A lot of women in the Push world were very docile objects of the men’s aggressive sexuality. Lillian was never one of them.

The Push world did provide Lillian with a core of her lifelong female friendships, Margaret Fink, Ruth Biegler, Judy Smith and others. But ultimately she found the Push as a group, and their endless philosophising, too restrictive, too inward-looking. “They used to bore me terribly,” she wrote to John Moses from New York. She and Germaine Greer at least shared the urge to break free of the Push and to make their marks on a bigger canvass.

Lillian’s path became the robust world of Sydney journalism, where Donald Horne discovered and hired her. In 1957, Horne had the unlikely role as editor of Weekend, a lurid weekly magazine Sir Frank Packer had enticed him back from London to run. There were articles about Hitler “by his sister, Paula Hitler”; on “Brigitte Bardot’s Phoney Honeymoon”; “The Things the Queen Hates About Us”; and “Elvis Presley says, ‘I’m Not Going to Marry an Australian Girl’.”

That same year, having exhausted Weekend, Lillian embarked on the final, most compelling and ultimately tragic stage of her journey and moved to America.

Horne nevertheless produced for the staff a series of critical bulletins (now among his papers in the Mitchell Library), which still serve as quite outstanding professional guides to the practice of popular journalism. For Weekend was really in at the birth of celebrity tabloid journalism, and a perfect training ground for the world Lillian was about to enter in America. “Teenagers”, as a word and an idea, first appeared in the 1940s. As affluence and consumerism spread in the mid-1950s, magazines such as Weekend hit on teenagers as a new marketing target. In 1959, it ran a series on “The Teenage Revolution” (a quaint concept now) as Australia’s first wave of pop stars – Johnny O’Keefe, Col Joye, Johnny Devlin – began to emerge.

That same year, having exhausted Weekend, Lillian embarked on the final, most compelling and ultimately tragic stage of her journey and moved to America. She was Horne’s favourite reporter on a staff that consisted almost entirely of men (Steve Dunleavy and Pat Burgess among them). Horne tried desperately and unsuccessfully to dissuade her from leaving.

New York

Lillian arrived in America just ahead of two political and cultural upheavals that helped define the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy’s glamorous, youthful administration came to power in 1960, ending the long, steady Eisenhower era that somehow defined the fifties. Then in 1964, an invasion of America by British rock bands, led by the Beatles, and the birth of America’s own rock music revolution, became a lightning rod for the counterculture: that loosely-defined movement that embraced protests around civil rights, the Vietnam war and traditional forms of authority, along with the advent of hippie, drug and youth subcultures.

In New York, Lillian was reacquainted with Zell Rabin, an old friend, lover and fellow journalist from Sydney – and, like her, from a Jewish family that had escaped Europe. Zell had worked with David Malouf on Semper Floreat, the University of Queensland student newspaper. As journalists, Lillian and Zell shared drive, brilliance and charisma. But as a woman in what was still essentially a man’s industry then, Lillian’s path was much tougher. Zell later became Rupert Murdoch’s first tabloid editor, after Murdoch took over the ailing Sydney Daily Mirror and made it the launching pad for his global empire. When I interviewed Murdoch for the book, he told me that of all the editors he had hired and fired since, Zell Rabin was the best.

Zell was the Mirror’s New York bureau chief when Lillian arrived, and he gave her a job. Lillian later wrote: “He knew he could get me cheap and fast and that, because I was a girl, he could intimidate me. We finished up intimidating each other, and I left after a year.”

Andy Warhol and his crowd were the first regulars. But the artists soon gave way to the singers, managers, photographers and writers who the exploding rock scene spawned.

Thus began her two parallel New York worlds. The first was the then large New York bureau of the Sydney Morning Herald, where she worked from 1963 until her death a decade later. Lillian’s colleagues in the Herald bureau included John Moses, Margaret Jones, Derryn Hinch. Don Riseborough and Peter Michelmore.

The other world – the one from which the Rock Encyclopedia was born – was Max’s Kansas City, the rock bar and restaurant on Park Avenue South, not far from Lillian’s tiny apartment on East 21^st Street. Mickey Ruskin, a Cornell University law graduate, opened Max’s in 1965 as a gathering place for artists. Andy Warhol and his crowd were the first regulars. But the artists soon gave way to the singers, managers, photographers and writers who the exploding rock scene spawned. Iggy Pop, the punk rock singer, who is still performing, has observed that many of these bright young people who went to Max’s really should have been working for the Kennedys; but the rock scene offered an outlet for their rebellious sides, and they went in a different direction. In 1966, Lillian wrote to a friend in Sydney about her fascination with this unfolding scene: “I understand what’s happening everywhere else, but the music thing is so big and so much more successful than anything else. It’s like Red China. It’s very big and it’s there and you can’t pretend it’s not for much longer.”

Lillian became a core figure at Max’s along with Danny Fields, an editor and rock group manager. Fields told me how he met Lillian at a New York press conference for Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, in 1966. Lillian broke the torpor of a series of deferential questions when she asked: “Mr Epstein, are you a millionaire?” It may seem small beer today. But to Fields then, it was the first question to recognise that rock music was destined to become a huge industry, with a power and influence perhaps second only to Hollywood’s. “I didn’t think people asked other people that kind of thing,” Fields told me. “It was my first introduction to Australian journalism and tabloid journalism, which I suppose are synonymous.”

She threw a party at Max’s Kansas City for the fledgling Australian Ballet, then making its first big American tour with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev as its guest stars.

It was that kind of capacity to command an audience, together with her seniority, that made Rolling Stone magazine later call Lillian “the Dorothy Parker of Max’s Kansas City…the unchallenged queen of the New York rock scene”. At the age of 34 then, she was a good 10 years older than most of the Max’s denizens. And unlike most, she did not drink, smoke or take drugs. All that helped when she embarked on writing the Rock Encyclopedia in 1968.

So did her Australian identity, which she held on to when many “expatriates” of that era dropped theirs. One of the Max’s figures recalled how “Australians were like Martians” in America then; so this only added to Lillian’s exotic side, which she carefully exploited in becoming a confidante of the stars and other sources for the Rock Encyclopedia among the nightly crowd at Max’s. She took visiting Australians to what was then the epicentre of New York’s underground scene, and once pulled off the ultimate blending of her two cultural worlds, Australia and New York. In early 1971, she threw a party at Max’s Kansas City for the fledgling Australian Ballet, then making its first big American tour with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev as its guest stars. Rolling Stone wrote: “Lillian could make things happen between people just as brilliantly as she could report on what was happening.”

Rock writer

She wrote much of the Rock Encyclopedia on the road while she was covering Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign for the Sydney Morning Herald. It was a brave undertaking because the mainstream press, including the New York Times, still treated rock music largely as a passing fad. She rightly saw it as something more permanent, the springboard for a revolution in lifestyles and art, and one that deserved to be properly chronicled. Lillian told David Wynne, a Canadian musician friend: “What I’m writing is history, the record of an era.”

Grossett and Dunlap published the 613-page book in New York in 1969, the year of the famous Woodstock rock festival, which consolidated youth culture as a massive consumer group. The book had more than 500 entries, from Acid Rock to the Zombies.

She was offered her own radio show, “Lillian Roxon’s Discotique”, syndicated to 250 stations across America.

As much as the rock groups, though, Lillian championed the new breed of writers who had emerged with them, the rock writers. She argued the writers were really the new star-makers because they had the power to connect the stars with their audience. In the book she acknowledged Danny Fields, Linda Eastman (later McCartney), Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and Maggie Makeig, an Australian editor, “for being stars as well as star-makers”.

After the Rock Encyclopedia’s success, Steven Gaines, one of America’s leading music writers, described Lillian as the “mother of rock and roll journalism”. The double meaning applied to her status both as a writer and mentor for the young talent she encouraged. She was offered her own radio show, “Lillian Roxon’s Discotique”, syndicated to 250 stations across America. The New York Sunday News hired her as a weekly columnist, the city’s first female rock writer in a mainstream newspaper. The News then claimed New York’s highest circulation, 4.5 million readers. Lillian used this exposure to settle some old scores, most notably in a devastating piece about Paul and Linda McCartney in April 1973. Lillian and Linda (as the photographer Linda Eastman) had been best friends, working together until Linda met Paul McCartney at a Beatles press conference, later married him, then cut off contact with Lillian and her other close New York rock writer friends. Lillian’s piece – in which she described Paul McCartney as “sweaty, pudgy, slack-mouthed” – was her payback.

It was an example of how such power came at a time when newspapers were having a last hurrah. Danny Goldberg, a prominent figure in the American music business, was one of the “stars” Lillian spotted at Max’s when he was a young writer. Goldberg later ran Atlantic, Mercury and Warner Bros record companies, and has recently written his own book, Bumping into Geniuses; he took the title from a saying by one of his former music company bosses that the way to get rich was to keep walking around until you bumped into a genius, and when you did – hold on and don’t let go.

Goldberg told me for my book that Lillian was writing when newspapers were still the main communicators of pop culture, just before the time when music videos, the electronic media, producers and “image-makers” took over that role. He said: “I don’t think there’s been anyone with the same influence as Lillian in newspaper journalism since then. You could be the greatest rock writer in the world today and not have the same influence, because journalism itself is a secondary format to the electronic media.”

She had pretty much lived the life of a liberated woman long before Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch and women’s liberation got going.

When I saw Goldberg again in New York in 2010, he reflected how the scene had changed yet again: the rise of the internet has devastated the music business, because people now download the music they want. Record shops have basically ceased to exist, and the number of people working in the music business in America has been halved.

Feminist

The other side of Lillian Roxon worth mentioning is her feminism. As Malouf observed, she had pretty much lived the life of a liberated woman long before Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch and women’s liberation got going. Lillian conducted a lively correspondence from New York with her mother Rose in Sydney. Rose was forever perplexed about Lillian’s life and nagged her about the need to get married and have children. One of Lillian’s letters in the early sixties could easily have served as a template for the women’s movement a decade later. She told her mother:

Your insistence that work and marriage are incompatible irritates me because it is wrong. When you say the job makes me old and tired, you forget one thing – not working and boredom can also kill that vitality…I am sure that a woman with your brains and understanding, had you lived here, would have made a career of politics or social work or something AND had children as well. This is why you can’t understand it because you were never fortunate enough to have the opportunity to use your intelligence and humane feelings to their fullest extent in some suitable work. I am sure that if you had worked too, it would have been easier for you to bear the problem of your unhappy marriage.

When Germaine Greer turned up in New York in 1968 and looked up Lillian, the pair should have been destined to get on: they were two of the brightest women Australia had produced, and were making their ways in a world where the odds were still stacked strongly against women. But their friendship quickly descended into a slanging match that puzzled the Americans who witnessed it around the Max’s Kansas City scene.

Jim Fouratt, a writer and political activist, summed it up when he said, “Lillian and Germaine had in common the fact that they gravitated towards intelligence.” Then he added, “There seems to be something about Australians criticising their own.” Donald Lyons, who was a classics teacher at New York University, and drama critic for the Wall Street Journal met both women at Max’s. Lyons described Lillian as “in many ways the anti-Germaine Greer. She wasn’t an ideologue. Lillian wrote about pop feminism. There was something indefinably modern about her, as there was about many of us in the sixties before these various liberations were codified”.

Perhaps their fights – one of them very public in Max’s – were all to do with their mutual competitive streaks. In the last two years of her life, Lillian had another platform in New York as a popular feminist, as well as a rock expert. After the Rock Encyclopedia’s success, Mary Cantwell, managing editor of Mademoiselle, a high-circulation Conde Naste women’s magazine, hired Lillian to write a column called “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex”.

She grew increasingly disillusioned with the passing of the rock scene’s golden age of innocence, and its takeover by a more hard-bitten, money-driven world, to say nothing of hard drugs.

And Helen Reddy, the Australian singer who won a Grammy award for “I Am Woman”, a 1972 song that became a de facto feminist anthem, told me it was Lillian who opened her eyes to the women’s movement and encouraged her to write the song.

For all that, Lillian herself never easily resolved the conflicts that freedom produced. As she turned 40, she grew increasingly disillusioned with the passing of the rock scene’s golden age of innocence, and its takeover by a more hard-bitten, money-driven world, to say nothing of hard drugs. Her problems with her health and punishing workload finally took their toll. Her death alone in her New York apartment from a massive asthma attack was a sad and unwarranted ending. Germaine does have a generous word about Lillian in the documentary, when she says the world is a poorer place without her.

Legacy

What has been the legacy of the counterculture, and Lillian Roxon’s role in it? It is now fashionable to dismiss the 1960s and all its freedom movements as a self-indulgent era that produced little of lasting value. Perhaps. But the successful battles that sprang from those movements – against book and film censorship, and for the rights of women and others who suffered discrimination – cannot be dismissed easily. We now take these freedoms for granted.

Yes, too many talented young people Lillian knew and wrote about died needless early deaths from drugs. But many others remain influential figures today. Lenny Kaye, a writer and guitarist for the singer Patti Smith, and who describes Lillian as his “heavenly go-between” from the Max’s days, still dedicates a song to Lillian Roxon from the stage whenever he tours Australia; he did so when Patti Smith performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2008.

Here are three assessments of the Roxon legacy.

Peter Coleman commissioned from her a terrific article called “Will Success Spoil Lillian Roxon?” – her own account of how she wrote the Rock Encyclopedia, for Quadrant magazine in 1971 (it’s in the appendix of my book). Coleman recently wrote in The Spectator Australia, that among the Australians who produced major contributions to the international literature of the counterculture – Germaine Greer, Dennis Altman and Richard Neville – “Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia best captured the lost illusions of that mad, sad epoch”.

Danny Goldberg, who now runs his own company, Gold Village Entertainment, in New York, says: “Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia set the tone for writing about rock and roll for years, with ripple effects that endure to this day…She was able to express the perspectives of both a teenager and an adult in the same passage, uniquely reflecting the mixture of emotions that existed in rock music, in its fans and in herself.”

And Jim Fouratt, the writer who knew Lillian from her earliest days in New York, says: “If you ask me who was the world’s first pop journalist, in the sense of translating sixties culture, art, fashion, music and politics in a popular way, Tom Wolfe got the credit but I think it was Lillian Roxon. The way she did it was to be in the scene yet objective about it, while Tom Wolfe was around the scene, and reported on it, but was never part of the scene like Lillian was.”

And what has been the fate of the key places in Lillian Roxon’s world? The Queenslander house in New Farm, Brisbane, where she spent her childhood, is still standing. The house in Jamison Street where she lived as a university student, and the Lincoln Inn coffee shop of the Push, in what was Rowe Street, are long gone; they were both too small and charming to survive the 1970s in central Sydney.

Max’s Kansas City in New York is also no more. The New Yorker magazine in August 2010 took Danny Fields back to its building to recall its time as the place where all the changes that the sixties brought in art, music, sex, the way people dressed and what they thought “got consolidated”.

He found the place is now a Korean establishment called the Green Café. The New Yorker reported: “Nothing remained. For all its importance in the formation of modern manners, there was no sign that Max’s ever existed. The manager of the Green Café had never heard of it.”