by Nora Ephron
In a recent article in the Antioch Review linking Cosmopolitan and Playboy, Peter Michelson wrote, “Cosmopolitan, or more likely the Hearst hierarchy, recognized how Playboy was making the world safe for pornography, and it very neatly cut itself in on the sex-profit nexus.” That explanation, while interesting, gives the Hearst Corporation more credit than it is due. In 1964 about all the Hearst people realized was that Cosmopolitan was in bad shape. Circulation had dropped to under eight hundred thousand copies a month, below the advertising guarantee. Advertising was down to twenty-one pages an issue. Early in 1965 Helen Gurley Brown came to see Richard Deems, president of the Hearst Magazine Division, with a dummy for a new magazine. He had vaguely heard of her, had no idea she was at all controversial, and had never read her 1962 best seller, Sex and the Single Girl. But he liked her, he liked her idea for a magazine aimed at single women, and most of all, he liked her long list of companies that might be willing to advertise in such a magazine. It is safe to say that if Deems had thought that Helen Gurley Brown was going to turn Cosmopolitan into something that would repeatedly be called the female counterpart to Playboy, he would not have employed her. “We happen to be a company with a conscience about what it publishes,” he said. “Our paperback division is the only book company that doesn’t have a married-sex book. We’re very studious about this kind of thing.”
There are, of course, many similarities between Cosmopolitan and Playboy. Both magazines contain nudity. Both are concerned with sexual freedom of a sort. Both are headed by people who are the products of repressed, WASP backgrounds. Both publish the worst work of good writers. Both exalt material possessions. Both are somewhat deprecating to the opposite sex: Playboy turns its women into sexual objects; Cosmopolitan makes its men mindless creatures who can be toppled into matrimony by perfect soufflés, perfect martinis, and other sorts of perfectible manipulative techniques.
Recently Helen Gurley Brown even commissioned a Playboy-type foldout picture—of actor James Coburn, nude, his vital parts somewhat obscured by a potted palm. “It was a very pretty picture,” said Mrs. Brown. “But … I don’t like to be in the position of turning James Coburn down … but the particular picture I needed didn’t come out of this shooting. The pictures were very hippie and mystical, strange and ethereal and a little sad, and Jesus, that isn’t what I had in mind at all. I wanted a cute, funny, wonderful foxy picture, with that great mouth and marvelous teeth. I am going to do a foldout—I’ll take another whack at it—but I haven’t got the picture I want yet.”
There is one major difference between Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The Playboy man has no problems. The Cosmopolitan girl has thousands. She has menstrual cramps, pimples, budget squeeze, hateful roommates. She cannot meet a man. She cannot think of what to say when she meets one. She doesn’t know how to take off her clothes to get into bed with him. She doesn’t know how to find a psychiatrist. She even gets raped, though only by rapists with somewhat unlikely dialogue. (In “I Was Raped,” Cosmopolitan introduced the only rapist in history who lay down on his victim and murmured, “Let’s make love.”)
“It drives my management wild to be compared with Playboy,” said Mrs. Brown. “We are not like Playboy. We are all the things we’ve been talking about—onward, upward, be it, do it, get out of your morass, meet some new men, don’t accept, don’t be a slob, be everything you’re capable of. If you’re a little mouseburger, come with me. I was a mouseburger and I will help you. You’re so much more wonderful than you think. Cosmopolitan is shot full of this stuff although outsiders don’t realize it. It is, in its way, an inspiration magazine.”
There is very little that has happened to Helen Gurley Brown that she has not managed to extricate a rule from. Or learn a lesson from. Or make a maxim of. Or see, in hindsight, that it was all part of a plan. If it weren’t for her unhappy childhood, she says, she wouldn’t be enjoying herself so much now. If it weren’t for her years of difficulty, she would never have had such a drive to improve her lot. She has led a hard life, a perfect life out of which to build inspirational books and an inspirational magazine.
She was born in Green Forest, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, the second daughter of Cleo and Ira Gurley. Both her parents were schoolteachers, but her father turned to politics and was elected to the state legislature. In 1925 he moved his family to Little Rock. He was killed in a freak elevator accident in the State Capitol Building seven years later. His daughter Helen was ten and his daughter Mary was fourteen.
“That really changed our lives considerably,” Helen Gurley Brown remembered one day recently. “That sort of finished things, finished a phase of my life which I never will get back. The security…. They say a great deal of your life is formed by the time you’re about seven, so these drives and rages and ambitions and yearnings and needings and cravings of mine must have been formed before that time, some of them. I never have gotten to the bottom of all that. Why am I so driven? It seems logically to have derived from things that happened to me after my father died, but some of it must be residual from very early. I don’t know.
“But anyway, here we are in Little Rock, little fatherless children. I don’t think my mother and father were particularly happy together, but my father’s death was a horrendous thing in her life. She and my father had been very poor. She gets disgusted with me because I keep carrying on about how poor I was. I always ate. I always looked okay. I really never was eating pork and beans out of a can and putting cardboard in the soles of my shoes. But it’s what you get in your head, it’s how it seemed to you that motivates you. Whereas my parents were really poor, and just about the time things were beginning to go rather well, she and my father resolved whatever differences they had, poosh, he’s taken away, snapped off.
“We stayed in Little Rock for about three years after my father’s death,” she continued. “But he left a limited amount of insurance and our house was mortgaged to the hilt. So because Mother felt we couldn’t keep up the nice little standard of living in Little Rock on this particular stipend she had been left, she decided we’d all go move to Los Angeles. It was very brave and gutsy of her. But my sister didn’t want to go to California. I didn’t either. And my mother didn’t level with us, because you didn’t in those days. She said, ‘Oh, I think it would be nice to go to California, we have relatives there.’ So we move to California and Mary gets polio.” She paused. “She was nineteen. There was no March of Dimes and there was nobody to help. Shlurp, in one big thing, in one year, it took all the money we had. I really got good and scared out of my wits about that time.” Another pause. “I just didn’t know what was going to become of us. It was still the end of the Depression, jobs were very hard to get and my sister—she’s never walked again. I don’t know, we were sort of a pitiful little tribe.” Her voice cracked and she began to cry. “My word,” she said. “I never talk about this anymore.” She daubed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Well, this is the way I was for years. It was the three of us sort of huddled together. My sister was in a wheelchair and needed constant care. My mother couldn’t go back to work or do anything for a number of years.” Tears continued to roll down her face. “I was terrified,” she said.
The Gurleys moved to the East Side of Los Angeles near the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, and Helen enrolled at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School. Her memories of that period—aside from her sister’s illness—have mainly to do with having acne. “I was kind of a cute little girl, but who could see past these pus pustules?” Like that. She became a student leader, graduated as valedictorian, and was taken to the prom by the student-body president. “It was the coup of the year,” she recalled with some amusement. “He had a real case on me, because he got close enough to find out what I was like. I always have to get men close enough to me to be interested in me. I have to do what I call Sinking In before they pay attention. I’m never anybody that some man sees at a party and says, ‘Get me her.’ Never. But once they get near me and I turn on what I call Pl
ain Girl Power—well, it worked with the student-body president.”
Following high school and a year at Woodbury Business College, Helen went to work answering fan mail at radio station KHJ to pay for her second year at college. Her mother worked in the marking room at Sears Roebuck. Her sister did telephone work for the Hooper rating service. Then Mrs. Gurley and Mary moved back to Arkansas and Helen was left as a single girl in Los Angeles. Friends who knew her in the 1940s, when she held eighteen consecutive secretarial jobs, remember her as a shy, self-effacing, attractive girl who always did the sorts of clever things that seemed astonishing twenty years ago, like putting egg in spinach salad. She was, they recall, completely neurotic about money. She sent one week’s salary each month to her family and she was convinced no one would ever marry her because of her financial obligations.
To make ends meet, she took the bus to work, drove her car only on weekends with gas she pumped at the serve-yourself station on Beverly Boulevard, brought her lunch to the office in a paper sack, read other people’s newspapers, made her own clothes, traveled by Greyhound bus. She tried every angle. Because she washed her hair in Woolite, she wrote the president of the company to tell him—and he sent her a free box of the stuff. She wrote an unsolicited memo to the proprietor of the beauty salon in her office lobby telling him how to hype up business—and he did her hair for nothing. She entered the Glamour magazine Ten Girls with Taste Contest three years in a row, and finally won. “I used to enter all the contests,” she said. “I bought so many bars of Lux soap to enter the ‘I like Lux soap because …’ contest. I couldn’t enter under my own name because I worked in an advertising agency, so I would send them to Mary and say, ‘Please, Mary, have a picture made of yourself in a wheelchair and send these off.’ Well, that didn’t work. That’s one that failed. But I did it. I tried.”
She tried everything. Vitamin therapy. Group therapy. Psychoanalysis. Hair therapy. Skin therapy. Her persistent self-improvement dazzled her friends. “She decided the kind of person she wanted to be, the milieu in which she wanted to live, how she wanted to look,” said one longtime California associate. “In a very real sense, she invented herself.” There were a number of men in Helen Gurley’s life—two agents, a married advertising executive, and a Don Juan whom she spent nine years off and on with—but to hear her tell it, her job always came first. She became secretary to Don Belding, a partner in Foote, Cone & Belding, and after five years she was made a copy writer. “It was so heady,” she recalled in a near whisper. “I adored it. Instead of making a hundred dollars a week I’m making ten thousand dollars a year, and this is in 1955 and that was considerable money for a girl then, very heady. You know, everything adds up. It’s what I keep saying in my books and in Cosmo. If you do every little thing you can do in your own modest position, one thing leads to another. So do it and be it and write the letters and make the phone calls and get on with it. And this is what I was doing every hour of the day, every day of the year.
“But I’m still living in my frugal way. I’m still bringing my lunch to the office. And I was conservative enough to have saved a little money. I had managed to save eight thousand dollars.” One day Helen Gurley walked into a Beverly Hills used-car lot and paid five thousand dollars for a Mercedes-Benz. Cash. “The next weekend I went to the Beldings’ ranch in total shock because of this money I spent. It just was not like me. I was in pain, physical pain. Everyone told me all the reasons I should have that car—that I was a successful writer and a gifted girl—they pumped me up and held my hand. But every time they looked at me I was sitting over in the corner in a catatonic heap thinking of the money.
“A week or so later a friend of mine set up this famous date with David Brown, whom she’d been saving for me. I thought it was going to be a big thing. I felt it in my bones before I met him. She’d been talking about him for three years, and it felt right. It was an interesting, lovely evening. And he took me to my car after dinner. I could see him looking at this car, this nice car. And I said, ‘Yes, I just bought it and I paid all cash for it.’ And that was a nice thing, he liked the fact that I’d been able to save all that money, because he had been married to very extravagant women, particularly his last wife.”
Helen Gurley and David Brown were married one year later, in September 1959, at the Beverly Hills City Hall. He is now vice president and chief of story operations at 20th Century-Fox, and his wife continually says she could never have become what she has become without him. He gave her the idea of writing Sex and the Single Girl. He gave her the idea of aiming a magazine at single women. He was once an editor of Cosmopolitan; and in her early days there, he helped her run the magazine, rushing over in taxicabs for street-corner conferences about copy. He still writes all the cover blurbs for the magazine. Both Browns live work-oriented lives—long office hours, dinners out with business friends. They spend at least one night a week at Trader Vic’s with Darryl Zanuck; they travel to Palm Springs and the Riviera with Richard Zanuck. Several nights a week they eat at home, in their Park Avenue apartment, and spend the evening working.
At one point last year, Mrs. Brown was also emceeing a television show and overseeing the editing of Hearst’s Eye magazine. Both operations are now defunct, and she is left with just Cosmopolitan. Now selling 1,073,211 copies a month. Now pulling in 784 advertising pages a year—compared with 1964’s 259. There are still the little setbacks, of course: old friends who are jealous; reader complaints over increasing nudity in the magazine; the Hearst Corporation’s censorship. But though Helen Gurley Brown cries frequently, she cries much less now than she used to.
Why just the other day she managed to get through a major flap without crying once. It all had to do with the breast memorandum. Perhaps you remember it—one of her staff members leaked it to Women’s Wear Daily, and every newspaper in the country picked it up. The memo began, “We are doing an article on how men should treat women’s breasts in lovemaking. It will either help us sell another 100,000 copies or stop publication of Cosmopolitan altogether.” Its purpose? “To help a lot of men make a lot of girls more happy.” It went on to say … But stop. Let her tell the story.
“It started with my idea of how boosoms should be handled,” she said. “ Ninety-nine percent of the articles here are assigned by the other editors, but this particular thing was a secret of mine that I felt only I understood. I called my own writer in California and told her about it. She tried it and turned it in and it was beautiful, but God, it didn’t have anything to do with how men should treat women’s boosoms. It had to do with love and it had to do with companionship and the wonderful relationship between men and women, but it just didn’t have anything to do technically with the subject. I wanted techniques. What does she like and how does she tell him and what does he do and how does he shape up. So I called my writer and said, ‘This is your personal reminiscence of all your love affairs, and fascinating as it is, it doesn’t have anything to do with boobs.’ And she said, ‘I know. Can you supply me with any material?’
“That’s when I sat down and wrote my memo to the girls in the office. Just give me your thoughts about boosoms, I said. Has anybody ever been a real idiot in making love to you? How could men improve their techniques? What would you like done that’s not being done? I just got a wonderful response. All the girls responded except two. I’d like to know who the two were because I don’t think they’d be happy at Cosmopolitan, but I had no way of knowing because a lot of girls didn’t sign their memos. I’ve sent many memos before—give me your definition of a bitch, have you ever dated a very wealthy man—and this was just another one of those memos. Then I saw it in Women’s Wear Daily and I really did hit the roof. A lot of people said, Ho, ho, ho, how lucky can you be? You probably mailed it yourself in an unmarked envelope. But that’s not true, because I tread a very careful path with Hearst management and I don’t want to get them exercised about anything. If I just very quietly develop these articles and show them the finished produc
t, it’s much better. But this big brouhaha started because this little bitch, whoever she was, sent the memo to Women’s Wear, and I would still fire her if I knew who she was. Because then the turmoil started. My management said to me, We want to see a copy of the boosom article the minute it’s finished. I didn’t want this attention to be called to what I was doing. Furthermore, we have trouble with supermarkets in the South and I didn’t want them stirred up ahead of time.
“Well, the girls wrote their wonderful memos, I put two other writers on the story—because the girl in California suddenly got very haughty and said she didn’t want to deal with the material. She just went absolutely crackers about the whole thing. So these two writers took it on and between them they turned in wonderful stuff, their own ideas plus all my material. I got this fantastic article. But my management won’t let me run it. The actual use of anatomical words bugs them. Well, you cannot talk about love and relationships when you’re talking about how to handle a breast. You must be anatomical. You’ve got to say a few things about what to do. I’m not mad at them—they do it because they’re afraid we’ll have too much flack. But I plan to lie low for a while and come back with my boosom article later. I read it tenderly, like a little love letter, every so often. I’ll try it again after a while.”
One day a couple of years ago, a Cosmopolitan editor named Harriet LaBarre called me and asked if I wanted to write an article on how to start a conversation. They would pay six hundred dollars for one thousand words. Yes, I would. Fine, she said, she would send me a memo Helen had written on the subject. The memo arrived, a breezy little thing filled with suggestions like “Remember what the great Cleveland Amory says—shyness is really selfishness” and “Be sure to debunk the idea that it is dangerous to approach strangers.” I read it and realized with some embarrassment that I had already written the article the memo wanted, in slightly different form—for Cosmopolitan, no less. I called Harriet LaBarre and told her.