Kohn, Ilana
Christina Kelly
Issue #31
All hail the queen: The teen-magazine tastemaker recalls her Sassy days
By Amy Schroeder
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Christina Kelly was one of Sassy magazine’s top editors, Jane Pratt’s right-hand weapon, and an arbiter of cool. She was the Oprah of the alternative teen magazine world — if she gave your album or zine a glowing review, you were bound to succeed.
She was the writer who, in 1990, got Johnny Depp to talk about his love for Iggy Pop, Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, and his 18-year-old fiancée, Winona Ryder. Kelly interviewed Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love for Sassy’s April 1992 cover story, before they got hitched and right when Cobain was blowing off Rolling Stone and the New York Times. To her readers, Kelly was more than just one of the publication’s biggest bylines. She inspired thousands of young readers who aspired to be just like her.
Kara Jesella, co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life, says that though she had “writer crushes” on a number of Sassy staffers, Kelly was the standout — not only as a pop-culture writer but as an activist. “Her voice was so strong and she was often the one who rallied against injustice,” Jesella says. “When you’re a teenager, you sort of get up in arms, and she acted like a teenage girl in that way.”
When Kelly talks about Sassy now from her New Jersey home, she speaks of it fondly. Although she says it’s difficult for her to recall every second of her Sassy experience, her memory is vivid, and she still has copies of the magazine in her attic. “I think that [former Sassy beauty and fashion director] Mary Clarke and I are the only ones who have a full collection,” she says.
Kelly worked for Sassy for its six-year lifespan, starting when she was 26. After the magazine folded, she worked in the top ranks for a number of others, including US (before it became a weekly tabloid), Jane (Pratt hired her before anyone else), Seventeen, YM, and ELLEgirl (for the latter two, she was editor-in-chief).
When setting up the phone interview with her in January, she suggested we talk after she picked up her child from school and after the O.C. Kelly says she’s focusing on being a mom of two — “It’s great. It’s really hard. It’s a difficult job and you never get a break.” Burned out on the magazine world, she’s working on a book, the details of which she kept to a minimum. “It’s fiction,” she says. “It’s not about working at a magazine. It goes further back into my life.”
What were you like as a teenager?
I was a really good student and did a lot of creative writing. I wasn’t cool at all. I was really concerned with being perfect. I liked getting straight As and getting into a good college, and it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I found out about the Ramones and cool music like that.
How did you get your job at Sassy?
Through an ad in the New York Times. I thought, “This is it. This is my new job.” As soon as I saw the ad, I knew I was going to get the job. I just had this feeling. I sent in my clips, but it took a while for them to call me.
What accomplishments were you most proud of at Sassy?
It’s hard to remember things. When I was doing the interview for [How Sassy Changed My Life], the authors had to jog my memory. That was a lifetime ago for me. It’s hard for me to say what I was most proud of. I think that we were proud of the connection that we had with the readers and we were proud of the fact that we didn’t do any dieting articles. We took the readers seriously, and we cared about them. But it wasn’t just me — there was a whole Sassy unity on those issues.
What were some of the best and worst aspects of working for Sassy?
For the time that I worked there — especially in the beginning — it was basically my whole life. My social life and everything was based around Sassy. It allowed me to meet a lot of people and do a lot of fun things. It wasn’t like the jobs I had after that where I kept my work separate from my life. It all sort of blended together, and it was really fun. The worst things were that you get so caught up in it. I had people that I worked with, was friends with, and lived with. And of course you’re going to have interpersonal issues related to that. It was a lot of fun, and then as it wore on, there was a lot of stress involved in it. In the beginning, I was like, “Wow, this is so cool.” Then as some of the things that you always wanted to do become old, the stress starts to take over.
As one of the most popular Sassy writers, you inspired a lot of people to go into magazines. How does that make you feel?
It’s flattering that your work would influence somebody to want to do the same thing. I’ve had people tell me, “It seemed like it was going to be a lot of fun based on reading Sassy, and I found out it really wasn’t that fun.” And I’m like, “Well, sorry.” Working at Sassy was a lot more fun than most magazines.
You’re known for having been Sassy’s music tastemaker. What are some of your favorite bands now?
I really don’t listen to that much music anymore. We got that new My Chemical Romance album, and my husband and I listen to that and I like that, but it’s really haphazard — what I end up checking out — because I just don’t make it my business to keep on top of it anymore.
How are teenagers different or the same now compared to when you worked at Sassyin the 1990s?
They’re a lot the same. Like the letters, there were so many similarities between the letters we got at ELLEgirl, YM, and Sassy. Only teenagers would have the kind of passion for a magazine that the readers of those magazines did, and there’s that viewing of the world in black and white that is just a part of being a teenager no matter what time you’re living in. We would get the same complaints and positive letters. It was kind of eerie. The “your models are too skinny” letter was sort of the prototypical. “You’re hypocrites because you say one thing and do another.” You could take a letter from 1990 at Sassy and one from 2006 at ELLEgirl, and they’d be virtually the same.
Teenagers are more pressured by school and getting into college, so that’s different. There’s less prudishness — in Sassy, you couldn’t even make a mention of birth control without having the entire Christian right against you. And now magazines, TV shows, music, and movies are much more sexually explicit.
Are there any Sassy letters that you’ll never forget?
Yes. I wrote an article about New Kids on the Block that wasn’t positive — it was during the top of their popularity — and got a sick amount of letters. One of them included a voodoo doll with a letter explaining why all the pins were in the voodoo doll. One was through my ear, so I could never hear the New Kids on the Block’s wonderful music again. One was in my ovaries, so I would never bear children to follow in my footsteps. It was pretty hilarious.
In 2002, when you were editing YM, you decided to stop running stories about dieting. How did that go over?
It was right when I got promoted from executive editor to editor-in-chief. I had pitched it to the previous editor-in-chief and she didn’t want to do it. It was to make a declaration about those types of articles, and they let me do a big media campaign when I first got promoted. It went over really well, actually. By then, it was different from when we were at Sassy. By then a lot of the people in the advertising industry were behind the idea. There were things like the Dove campaign, so it was an idea that was out there. It was not only to not run dieting articles, it was also to show models of all shapes and sizes. By then there were a bunch of people who were really supportive of the idea, but of course it’s never enough because there will always be people who will think that you haven’t gone far enough with the mix of models. It’s really an uphill battle — that whole thing with thin models in fashion and the fact that you have to re-educate the entire fashion industry: the photographers, the make-up artists, the modeling industries. It’s something that’s probably not going to be solved anytime soon.
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