Obituary: Pulitizer Prize-winner who wrote about her own experiences with toxic shock syndrome, alcoholism dies

From The New York Times:

Nan Robertson (pictured), a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who was widely known for her book “The Girls in the Balcony,” which chronicled the fight for workplace parity by female employees of The Times, and for writing candidly about her alcoholism and battle with toxic shock syndrome, died on Oct. 13 in Rockville, Md. She was 83 and lived in Bethesda, Md.

The apparent cause was heart disease, said Jane Freundel Levey, Ms. Robertson’s stepdaughter-in-law. After retiring from The Times in 1988, Ms. Robertson taught journalism at the University of Maryland and elsewhere.

A reporter at The Times for more than three decades, Ms. Robertson received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Toxic Shock,” published in The New York Times Magazine the year before. The article unsparingly described the author’s swift, brutal encounter with the illness, which resulted in her losing the ends of eight fingers:

“I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 a.m.

“Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene.”

Ms. Robertson, who after a grueling rehabilitation was able to resume her career, wrote two books. The first, “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (Morrow, 1988), was both a history of the organization and a narrative of the author’s recovery from alcoholism. The second, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and The New York Times” (Random House, 1992), was in part about the suit brought by female employees against the newspaper in 1974.

Reviewing “The Girls in the Balcony” in The New York Times Book Review, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called it a “warm, salty, wisecracking book.”

Nancy Robertson was born in Chicago on July 11, 1926, the daughter of Frank and Eva Morrish Robertson. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1948 and afterward worked in Europe as a reporter for several newspapers, among them The Milwaukee Journal and the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune.

In 1955, Ms. Robertson joined The Times, where she was assigned, as women often were then, to the women’s news department. Her early articles for the paper — hundreds of them — were about fashion, shopping and interior decorating. She became a reporter on the newspaper’s metropolitan staff in 1959.

In 1963, Ms. Robertson began a decade as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times, where, as she said in an interview many years later, her de facto job description was to cover the “first lady, her children and their dogs.” Her years in Washington would furnish her with the title for “The Girls in the Balcony,” a reference to the cramped second-story space in the National Press Club to which female journalists were then relegated.

“The Girls in the Balcony” was an account of the events surrounding Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. The New York Times, a federal class-action suit filed on behalf of 550 women at The Times over inequities including pay, assignments and advancement. (Ms. Robertson was not among the seven named plaintiffs in the suit.) In 1978, the suit was settled out of court for $350,000, with The Times agreeing to an affirmative-action plan.

Leaving Washington in 1973, Ms. Robertson spent two and a half years as a correspondent in the Paris bureau of The Times before debilitating alcoholism forced her to return to New York for treatment. As she recounted candidly in “Getting Better”:

“I began drinking seriously when I was 22, just out of college and beginning my career as a newspaperwoman. My generation of newspaper people consisted of two-fisted drinkers. In the circles I moved in, drinking was not just socially acceptable, it was an emblem of maturity.”

As Ms. Robertson described it, her drinking worsened precipitously after the death of her second husband, Stanley Levey, in 1971. Her first marriage, to Allyn Baum, ended in divorce. Her third, to William Warfield Ross, ended with his death in 2006. Ms. Robertson is survived by a sister, Jane Robertson Paetz; five stepchildren, Bob Levey, John Frank Levey, Mary Houghton, James Houghton and William P. Ross; and nine step-grandchildren.

After undergoing residential treatment for alcoholism and severe depression, Ms. Robertson was able to stop drinking. She continued her work at The Times, first as a reporter for the Living and Style pages, writing often about the lives of women, from the primatologists Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall to students at Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta. She was later a reporter in the newspaper’s culture department, where her work included articles about the writers Mary McCarthy and Bernard Malamud, the poet Adrienne Rich and the actress Claudette Colbert.

In 1981, while visiting her family in Illinois, Ms. Robertson fell ill with toxic shock syndrome. Caused by a bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, the syndrome is most closely associated with tampon use. But Ms. Robertson, then 55, was among the small number of postmenopausal women (along with some men and children) who come down with it.

She spent two days in a coma. Most of her internal organs were severely poisoned by toxins released by the bacteria, and she suffered serious muscle damage. Gangrene set in, and as a result the end joints of all eight of her fingers — the thumbs were spared — had to be amputated.

After two months in the hospital, she returned to New York. “I could not turn a single knob on any door, or any faucet, or the stereo or the television set,” Ms. Robertson wrote. “I could not wash myself, dress or undress myself, pull a zipper, button a button, tie shoelaces.” She despaired that her career was over.

She underwent months of painful physical therapy and more operations. Little by little, she relearned to use her hands.

“My deepest fear did not materialize,” Ms. Robertson wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning article, published less than a year after she became ill. “I have typed the thousands of words of this article, slowly and with difficulty, once again able to practice my craft as a reporter. I have written it — at last — with my own hands.”