'There was graffiti everywhere and your car was constantly broken into. “In the 80s, everyone worried about getting mugged,'' Friedman recalled. In those days, visitors to New York were still being warned not to ride the subway after dark. She's had an adventurous life.''Īt the time the picture was taken, Times Square had not yet become the tourist mecca some later disparagingly likened to Disneyland. There really wasn’t and isn’t anyone else like her.''Ĭhase said the last piece she asked Carroll to write was about an all-woman rafting trip. 'I think we called it women who run with no clothes on because at some point in the trip all the women took off their clothes and rafted naked down the river, which I'm sure was her idea. In the mid-nineties I hung out with her quite a bit. 'She was the coolest woman journalist around – daring, had a ton of guts, and was as funny as the guys. Jean or known of her since at least the ’ ’80s,'' Bushnell said in an email sent to USA TODAY in 2019. 'Carroll, though, is wilder than Ephron, content not just to set a scene but sometimes to steal one, too.”Ĭandace Bushnell, the writer whose 'Sex and The City'' column in the New York Observer inspired the iconic HBO show of the same name, was a fan. 'Both are fiendish reporters who find their subject matter in left field,'' Kirkus Review wrote in a critique of 'Female Difficulties: Sorority Sisters, Rodeo Queens, Frigid Women, Smut Stars, And Other Modern Girls,' a book Carroll penned in the 1980s. And she was.''Ĭarroll also drew comparisons to famed filmmaker and writer Nora Ephron. 'There weren't a lot of women who were being hired by men's magazines. 'In the literary journalism world, she was a player, which is saying a lot,'' Chase said. Thompson, whose biography Carroll wrote, and Tom Wolfe, it was a school of storytelling in which journalists often made themselves part of the tale, offering up humorous – sometimes outrageous – personal experiences.

She was a person out talking to people.''Ĭarroll became known for a style of writing and reporting dubbed gonzo journalism. You had to get up, put your hat on and get the story. 'That was the tabloid era,'' Roger Friedman, editor-in-chief of the entertainment news website Showbiz411, said in a 2019 interview.įriedman, who edited Fame magazine from 1987 to 1991 and later wrote New York magazine's Intelligencer column said : 'People were chasing scoops.

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