My Life With the Bee

The lower class were the journalists, and they were so low down in the structure that they were barely noticed at all.

--Tom Wolfe,The New Journalism

THE CRIMSON, as legend goes, has been for most of its history the refuge of Harvard's Undesirables.

With the exception of the classroom, life inside the Ivy walls had little to do with merit, and everything to do with old money and "social grace." These lay at the foundation of the final clubs--always a blend of legacy status and the characteristics that Abbot Lawrence Lowell called "quality."

The Undesireables weren't quality. So they became reporters. Rather than the elegant tradition of Lowell, they identified with big city newspaper hacks--low paid, poorly educated men who slapped stories together for deadline, then sprung away to follow another story: Or to the nearest bar.

In the 1970s, college graduates started to choose journalism as a career, changing the face and nature of the industry. Tom Wolfe and the New Journalists invented the concept of non-fiction literature, newspaper and magazine writing that was actually good prose.

These days, then, newswriting is (almost) as respectable for the literati as law or teaching. In high schools like mine across the country, editing the paper is part of trying to be school superstar.

But at Harvard--even the Harvard of public school kids on financial aid--those superstars don't always head for student publications. They scramble off in a thousand different directions from the time their feet land in the Yard.

Sometimes, those directions are polar opposites,

To wit, my upstairs neighbor, a St. Paul's alum, strolled towards the Hasty Pudding club. I found myself in the newsroom of The Crimson.

INEVER REALLY was that interested in the final club scene. Still, that scene was never interested in me--a fact which threw a wrench in my grand scheme of self-righ-teousness.

To be honest, the final clubs, even in their elitist social cocoon, did appeal in some way. Parties. Beer. Abdicating all claims to social responsibility. Nevertheless, I avoided the final clubs. I turned down a friend's offer to punch me for the Phoenix.

Last fall, however, final clubs came back into my life. Rumors drifted into the newsroom about a group of women who had formed their own final club, called the Bee.

The rumors developed into genuine scuttlebutt, then matured into full-scale gossip. The stroy fell within my beat, so I began to poke around.

As it happens, the Bee was very much alive. I didn't know it, but there were early morning meetings for breakfast and outings to the ballet. By November, I squeezed a list of names out of a socialite friend of mine. She wasn't in the club, but she was a Wannabee. I called the women on her list.

"Hi. This is Josh Shenk from The Crimson. Listen, I'm doing a story about the Bee club and I understand you're a member."

Silence.

"Are you a member of the club?

"I'm sorry, I don't have anything to say."

"Does the club exist?"

"I'm sorry," they would finally say, "I can't help you with your story."

Kristen L. Silverberg '92, who is listed by the state as president of "Bee Corp.," gave me this answer. So did the club's treasurer, Allison K. Hughes '94. Clerk Bryn G. Zeckhauser '93 didn't return my phone calls. Neither did Silverberg's successor, Honey East '93.

I didn't really have any leads in this story, but I tried my best anyway. Some friends on The Crimson began to dig around, too.

Two sophomores got particularly excited. I would get messages on my machine like "Josh, call me immediately. I've got a real break in the Bee story."

I would call. The "break," was usually something like this: "Okay, now I've got a friend, I can't tell you her name, but I'm sure she's in the Bee. She won't exactly tell me she is. In fact, she won't really tell me anything. But I'm working on it. Call you tomorrow,"

One reporter was 100 percent certain that the club was being funded by the Fly.

A Fly member told me he heard some Porcellan alum bankrolling the whole operation. A Radcliffe Union of Students source said the entire Inter-Club Council was in on the act.

The only Bee member who would give me the time of day spent an hour trying to convince me that the Bee wasn't anything unusual. I told her that, with the century-old tradition of all-male final clubs, the first-ever female final club would be news.

She wanted to know, though, if we would spend so much time reporting on a new newspaper. I said probably, but this was quite different.

"How?" she said. "Some people are good at writing newspaper stories. Some people are good at going to cocktail parties."

By this time, the Bee became a joke around the newsroom. I was the butt. I was given a stuffed Bee around Christmas and a picture book called A Is for Animals.

So in December, we ran a story: "Campus Abuzz About New All-Women's Social Club." Officially, I couldn't confirm that the club even existed, but I sure as hell knew that everyone on campus was talking about it.

I ran another story about the club initiating new members and blackballing at least one prospective. I gave up the Bee story this spring when I took an executive position.

AFEW WEEKS AGO, I saw a woman who looked quite lost in The Crimson's hallway. She was looking for our rental space, she said. I showed her where it was. Trying to make small talk, I asked what sort of organization she was with. " Oh, it's not an organization," she said. "It's just a group of girls."

This woman was Kristen Silverberg herself. The woman of tight lips. The "I can't help you with your story" woman. The queen Bee.

It turned out that, entirely unbeknownst to the news editors, the Bee rented space from The Crimson for an evening of cocktails and dancing.

Turns out the club had grown to about 33 members. My initial non-Bee, Deep Throatesque source ("an Eliot resident familiar with the club") had even joined. That night, the women of grace thundered over the newsroom, dancing with their tuxedoed men to the Material Girl.

There was something terribly ironic to that night. I passed Kristin in the hallway. I said hello to Bryn's boyfriend. One woman, nearly tipping over in her high heels, stumbled into the newsroom to use our phone.

"We're at The Crimson," she whispered. "The Crimson. You know, it's next to Adams House." ("You know," I said to myself," it's across from the D.U.")

I've never understood why they came to us for their party. I also don't understand why the business board, with the president's approval, took their money. (They drank cocktails on the same furniture we sat on while writing the staff editorial which concluded, "Buzz off, you pathetic elitists.")

I also don't expect to know the answer any of these questions anytime soon. They still are sorry, but they can't help me with my story. But that's the difference between me and them, I guess. I try write what's on my mind and hope that anyone who has criticisms--and plenty of folks do--will talk to me.

This is all antithetical to the Bee. They thrive on not talking. That's the point. They don't want to keep their club a total secret (Honey East lists the club on the resume that she submitted to a Jackson, Mississippi beauty pageant), but they're not truly the elite until they shut people out. Beauty pageants, cocktail parties, a stir of rumors along the Eliot corridors--this sort of publicity is good.

But newspaper articles are bad. A friend of mine who made it into the Bee told me a long while ago that she would never have her name in a paper, with the exception of her wedding. She shuddered at the thought of being named anywhere but the society pages.

The Bee members' elitism, of course, is not as odious as Lowell's. This is not the early 20th century, and I'm certainly not the impoverished, socially excluded newspaper hack. We're all students at a top college with a wide array of choices. Still, we have very different ways of looking at the world.

Yep, the Bee and I were practically a family that night. They drank and danced and furiously climbed social rungs while I proofread stories and wrote headlines. We both ended up leaving the building around 3 a.m.

In a way, the Bee party was pitiful. Without a home to call their own, they had to have a party at a newspaper--not the "quality" establishment they preferred, I'm sure.

I should tell treasurer Allison Hughes that the Pi Eta building is for sale.

But she probably knows that already.