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Purdy urged Grant to take on more responsibility at the Times.  She probably would have done that without her friend’s encouragement, but undoubtedly his tutelage helped her develop the confidence to assert herself.  She read The Social Register, the book that listed all of New York’s prominent families, the family names etching themselves into her mind so deeply that she could list them well into her later years.  Knowing who was who helped her understand how the Society department picked its news.  Grant’s eagerness excited her boss, Society editor Wilbur F. Fauley, and he soon learned that he could benefit from it.  He helped Grant devise simple ways to record the stories that came in by phone, and later taught her how to compose them.  He liked what he saw.  Fauley realized, happily, that if Grant wrote much of the copy for the Sunday page, which she eventually did, he could collect space rates for it.

Not that Grant minded.  The Times in the early 20th century was mostly printed without bylines, in large part due to Carr Van Anda’s dedication to news rather than what he perceived as glamour.  “The Times is not running a reporter’s directory!” he was known to shout at his often cowering writers.  But all the internal copy that circulated among staff included authors’ bylines.  Even though Fauley was the one making money from Grant’s Society page writing, he included her name alongside his in the internal byline, and this made Grant inordinately proud.       

The relationship made them both happy, and it helped make Grant comfortable enough to venture into the world as a reporter for the first time.  When she fielded the Salmagundians’ call, she had been alone in the Times office, minding the phones as usual while all the male reporters were out working on stories for the night.  When the Salmagundians rather imperiously, and more than likely drunkenly, requested a reporter’s presence at their party, Grant saw her opening and jumped to take it.  She raced down the hall to the city room, which encompassed most of the third floor of the building and was the locus for the Times reporting staff.  It was as big as a ballroom and packed with desks, some of them alone like islands, some of them facing each other in rows; the floor was usually littered with cigarette ash and papers.  When Grant rushed in, however, the place was nearly deserted except for the night city editor and a few others.  She approached the editor, and, with as much importance as she could muster in her voice, told him that she would have to leave the office to report on an urgent story.

The editor listened to her indulgently as she described the Salmagundians’ phone call in detail and told her to go ahead.

But just being eager didn’t make her prepared.  She hadn’t yet recovered from the debauchery of the Greenwich Village scene when she arrived back at the Times office.  Her arms were still laden with flowers, which did not go uncommented upon when Grant wandered through the city room, now filling up with reporters who were coming back to file their stories.  When she got back to the room that housed the Society department and sat down to write her own story, she realized that, in all the time she spent at the Salmagundi Club, she had not taken a single note.  The only information she’d gleaned was what she had taken down from the initial phone call.  

She wrote and rewrote, trying to compose something that made sense of what she had seen. Frustrated, she tore up version after version.  When Fauley got back from his assignment reporting from a society ball, he wrote his own story and then rescued Grant.  He interviewed her about everything she saw at the club and wrote her story for her.  A small piece appeared in the Times the next day, which, as was common in the Society pages at the time, was mostly a list of who had been there.  The entire process left Grant bewildered but no less eager.  A reporting assignment and her own story in the paper was an accomplishment, and more than anyone familiar with the Times could have hoped for her.  But it was only the beginning.

Jane Grant went on to make journalistic history as the first woman ever to become a general assignment reporter at the New York Times.  In 1925, with her then-husband Harold Ross, she co-founded the New Yorker magazine.  Grant was also the co-founder of the Lucy Stone League, a feminist organization dedicated to helping women keep their maiden names after marriage. 

CELENE CARILLO, a June 2007 graduate of the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program, is a web writer at Oregon State University.  She is working on a book about Jane Grant.