(2 of 2)
Sent to cover everything from circuses to fashion, Charlotte chafed at her lack of opportunity to make use of the sociology she had studied at Vassar. In 1961, after a short-lived marriage, she headed for New York. The Times took her on as a fashion reporter, but Charlotte kept submitting extracurricular stories—one on a college reunion, another on June weddings at West Point—that were too original in concept not to print. Two years ago, Clifton Daniel, then Times assistant managing editor and now managing editor, shifted Charlotte to the society beat and urged her to give her sociological approach to the subject full rein. "The Times has never been interested in social chitchat," said Daniel by way of explanation, "but in applying good journalistic standards to an area of news, society, that is important to all of us."
Like an Exam. In San Francisco, Seattle, Palm Beach, Paris, London, New Orleans, the Hamptons, Charlotte drew a fresh and unawed bead on society, a word she never drops without a qualifier: "Society with a capital S," "society—if there is a society," "socalled society." Invariably she arrived in a city armed with a better understanding of the natives than the natives themselves: "I bone up as if I were going to have to take an exam." Before descending on Boston, for example, she combed the libraries. She waded through Standard & Poor's ("Finance is such an important part") and a WPA history of Boston, digested The Education of Henry Adams and genealogies of the city's first families.
In two years on the beat, Charlotte has been asked by five publishers to do a definitive book on Society. Although she finally yielded to Atheneum, she is less than exuberant about the commission: "I've just started," she says. "I haven't been to Denver yet."