The kindest way to describe her is to say she is difficult. Perhaps this is unfair to Valerie, but the passage of time has yet to soften the memory of the year I endured in her employ. It was a very hard year—for she was a tough taskmaster who demanded perfection from the people who worked for her. But in fairness, she demanded no less from herself—if anything, she drove herself harder than she drove her staff. It couldn’t have been easy for her to claw her way from the very bottom of the food chain to the position of executive editor of a major national magazine like Street Talk by the time she was forty—and there were undoubtedly many bodies left in her wake. Magazine publishing is still pretty much an old boys’ club, so for a woman to rise so quickly she had to be tough—tougher than they were, and not be afraid to get her hands dirty or to play rough. Valerie certainly had no scruples when it came to getting what she wanted out of life.
