MARY: Margo, what started you doing all that you do?

MARGO: I was sort of the Lana Turner of the newspaper business because Gene Siskel discovered me. I’d known Gene from the time he was nine years old and I was 15, because I dated one of his brothers. When I unloaded my starter husband I was in my late 20s —

JONI: But first you have to tell us how many husbands you had.

MARGO: Oh, my goodness. Well now I’m on No. 4 – the final one.

JONI: Good.

MARGO: We call him Dr. Pussycat, heart surgeon to the stars. Anyway, I was invited to a wedding in the Siskel-Gray family and they knew I was newly separated and they wanted me to be comfortable and so they said, "Gene will be your escort." Now, this is somebody I’d known since he was a little boy, and when this happened he was the 23-year-old, very young movie critic for the Chicago Tribune. And we just talked and talked and talked and I probably didn’t let him get a word in edgewise, and at the end of the evening he said, "Oh, you’re so funny and you know everybody. Do you write?" I said, "I don’t know." And he said, "If I have my editor call you, would you come talk to him?" And I said, "Well, sure." I mean, I would have loved something to do. And so I had an appointment. The feature editor of the Chicago Tribune was a marvelous man named Walter Simmons. Everyone was terrified of him. He’d been a foreign correspondent; then they made him a feature editor. And I loved him and started calling him Papa Bear and we had this great talk. He said, "Can you show me anything you’ve written?" And I said, "Well, I have one thing."

Before I decided to remake my life without the husband I thought, "Well, maybe if I have something to interest me I can just ignore all that’s wrong with the marriage." George Plimpton was all the rage then and I thought, "Well, I’m a better dilettante than he is," but I didn’t know if I could write. So I thought I would do a book about ten glamorous jobs for women, but very superficially, á la Plimpton. And an old boyfriend, Alan Hirschfield, took me to the head of Random House – might his name have been Bernstein?

JONI: Bob Bernstein.

MARGO: So I went to him and he said, "This sounds really wonderful. Of course, we would have to see something. Do a chapter for me and if this works, Chris Cerf will be your editor." And he was nowhere then either!

So because I lived in Chicago and knew all the Playboy brass, and Gloria Steinem had already done ‘em dirt by sneaking in, I went to Arnold Morton, the food and beverage head, and said, "Look, Gloria already did it to you. Let me in with your blessings." He said, "OK." So I’m a 28-year-old mother of three children, begging the seamstress to go easy, and I figured out – it was quite interesting, actually – everybody gets the cleavage whether you have something to work with or not. They put the bunny tails in there, underneath, to prop up your own whatever on top of the bunny tails. So they said, "Look, Margo, we don’t want to have a big lawsuit because you killed a customer by dropping a tray. We will make you the camera bunny." So I was the camera bunny for three days.

MARY: What’s a camera bunny?