Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

“Not everyone is going to be charmed by you,” Letty said. “There are some people who are going to think that you are morally vapid, or worse.”

  The only way to get Helen past it was to practice—to put her through her paces. Letty made herself the interviewer in an impromptu press conference, right there in the living room. How would Helen respond when people blamed her for corrupting the minds of young girls? What would she say when they accused her of being a home wrecker? How would she answer when asked what kind of husband would let his wife write such a book in the first place? A girl like her didn’t deserve a husband—she was a manipulator, a phony!

  If all went according to plan, Helen and her book would be featured on the local and national news, on the Today show and the Tonight Show, and on every major radio station in every major city. She needed to have an answer for every question, or at least an out, and she needed to keep cool and stay focused. She had a job to do—and that was to sell as many copies of her book as humanly possible.

  For now, they would start from the beginning. Most people tended to ask an unoriginal opening question, along the lines of, “How’d you come to write the book?” “Unless they’ve read the book—and most people will have only dipped in—you basically have to control the interview,” Letty said. “If people aren’t asking the questions that you want the reader to know the answers to, you have to answer no matter what the question.”

  She shouldn’t answer too literally, though, Letty advised. No one would care about the technicalities. Readers would want the rags-to-riches story about a poor little girl from a nowhere town who thought she’d never get out. They would want to hear about the father who died young, the crippled older sister, and the poverty-stricken mother, all territory that Helen had covered in her book. Most of all, they would want to hear about how that poor little girl eventually made good, working her way through seventeen secretarial jobs and surviving countless broken hearts before becoming a successful career woman—and (at the ripe age of thirty-seven) landing the husband of her dreams. Because if Helen could do it, maybe they could, too.

  From hillbilly to Hollywood: It was as exploitable a story as the hooker with the heart of gold, but Helen had to do more than tell her story. She had to sell her story. She had to do more than talk to her audience—she had to get people to talk among themselves. The most precious commodity would be word-of-mouth advertising.

  “So, Helen,” Letty asked, “how did you come to write this book?”

  Once again, Letty was aware of David’s presence in the room, and though it was distracting at first—not to mention a little weird—she soon saw the added benefit.

  Long after Letty left, David would still be there to run Helen through whatever questions he had thought up, so she would not fall apart when the time came to step into the studio lights.

  ( 4 )

  THE STORY EDITOR

  1959–1962

  “If you would please your woman, put her to work and help her succeed.”

  —David Brown, in an early interview with Cavalier

  How did Helen come to write Sex and the Single Girl? The story the Browns decided to share with the public was Hollywood-simple. Helen was out of town visiting family when David came across carbon copies of letters she had written. In the press, Helen claimed the notes in question were to her former boss, Don Belding, when she was his executive secretary at the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding, but David also discovered some love letters she had sent to another man.

  His name was Bill Peters, he was married, and he worked as an account executive at the Manhattan ad agency J. Walter Thompson. Helen met Bill on a flight from Los Angeles to New York in May 1949 (she was twenty-seven), and after that initial meeting, they wrote to each other for nearly two years. In letter after letter, Helen regaled Bill with engaging, funny stories—about a miserable party she threw for her girlfriends (“I kept thinking what an intolerable waste of gin it was”), a chic new haircut she got (“With a ukulele and a striped blazer, I could be a 1927 flapper”), and a visit home to Osage (“I swam and ate fried chicken and pondered the unprogressiveness of Arkansas”). He wrote back eagerly, always delighted to hear from her, and gradually, she fell deeply, madly in love. Nothing ever did come of their flirtation in the form of an actual relationship, but it yielded an unexpected result a decade later when, not long after they married, David stumbled upon the carbon copies in a storage room of their house. When Helen came home from her trip, he admitted that he had read her letters, which he thought were original, witty, and warm. She could really write, he told her. Maybe she should write something for publication, but what?

  In many ways, David was essentially a talent scout by profession. Early in his career, after a stint as a freelance writer, he formed a company called David Brown Associates, tapping his longtime friend Ernest Lehman to be an associate. The goal of the company had been to find people with great stories to tell but without the ability to do them justice; David and Ernest would do the writing. In the late Thirties, one of their first clients was a journalist named Martin Proskauer (later Proctor), who had fled Germany as Hitler’s attacks on Jews were escalating. Proctor had a story to tell about how Jews and other refugees had smuggled their wealth out of the country—diamonds were being hidden in snowballs and tossed over the Swiss border to catchers in carefully choreographed snowball fights—but he had difficulty writing in English. Harper’s eventually ran the piece, “Black Money,” with Martin Proctor’s byline, but David and Ernest had ghosted it. Around the same time, they wrote about the aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, who had grown up poor and orphaned in northern Florida before becoming a shampoo girl at a salon, eventually meeting Floyd B. Odlum, the successful businessman she would marry. It was a classic rags-to-riches story, and as those tales tend to be, it was also one of self-invention. After interviewing Cochran in Manhattan, David wrote up the piece and sold it to Glamour.

  David had a nose for a good story, and he developed it first as the nonfiction editor at Liberty magazine, where he later edited fiction and eventually became editor-in-chief. By 1949 he was working as managing editor at Cosmopolitan; he was hired with the personal approval of William Randolph Hearst, known as “the Chief.” While there, David reported to Herbert R. Mayes—the editor-in-chief of another Hearst title, Good Housekeeping—whom the company had put in charge of overseeing Cosmopolitan during a rough transition. Originally called The Cosmopolitan when it was started in 1886 by Paul Schlicht, a founding executive of Schlicht & Field Company, a Rochester, New York–based manufacturer and distributor of office products, the magazine had been through a few revamps already. It was conceived as a family magazine, featuring a mix of fiction and homemaking articles, but within a few years it was facing bankruptcy. Its next owner, a wealthy automobile entrepreneur named John Brisben Walker, reenergized the publication, introducing illustrations and attracting literary all-stars like Mark Twain and Willa Cather, before selling Cosmopolitan to William Randolph Hearst in 1905. A newspaper magnate with political ambitions, Hearst briefly turned Cosmopolitan into a muckraking magazine, before it became a literary magazine once again.

  Over the years, Cosmopolitan published works by John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway. Hollywood producers regularly mined it for material: Mary Orr’s 1946 short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” became All About Eve, starring Bette Davis. For a while, Cosmopolitan enjoyed great success, but by the Fifties it began to suffer from a chronic identity crisis, along with other similarly broad-based, general-interest magazines, such as Liberty, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. The more generalized Cosmopolitan became, the less impact it seemed to have. Was it upscale or popular? Targeting housewives or their husbands? What was the vision, and when it came to attracting both readers and advertisers, could it compete with television?

  Herb Mayes was a legend, a Harlem-born high school dropout who had risen to become one of the most influential editors in the country. Over time, he became a ment
or to David, who worked harder to impress Mayes than he had for almost anyone else, partly because Mayes was so hard to impress. Mayes got the best ideas out of David because that’s what he demanded. Once a week, David and two other editors from Cosmopolitan would make the trek to Mayes’s house in Stamford, Connecticut, to pitch story ideas for the magazine. The goal was to sell him on as many ideas as possible in one hour, while trying not to get blotto on gin, scotch, or bourbon; may the best man win. Mayes tried everything to save Cosmopolitan, but its circulation was plummeting. David had some ideas of his own about how to guide the magazine, but he wasn’t going to hang around forever as the second in command, and it didn’t seem likely that Hearst was going to hire him to be the next editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan.

  In the early Fifties, David was starting to get restless when Hollywood producer and studio executive Darryl F. Zanuck sent word that he wanted “the best editor in New York” to oversee 20th Century Fox’s story department. Zanuck envisioned the studio operating more like a national magazine, and he wanted David Brown to be in charge of finding and acquiring material that could be made into movies. When David broke the news to Mayes that he was heading to Hollywood, Mayes was disappointed to see him go and suggested that he must have accepted the job because of the money, as David later recalled in his memoir, Let Me Entertain You: “I said, ‘No, Herb, the truth is that I wasn’t able to get the top job here. For whatever reason, it was denied me. And just as companies fire editors, editors can fire companies, and I’m firing this company because it was unable to give me the job of editor-in-chief.’”

  In December 1951, Fox announced David’s appointment as managing editor of its story department in California. A connoisseur of theater and literature, David soon built a reputation in Hollywood as a man who zealously encouraged writers to develop their craft. (Three Coins in the Fountain, Peyton Place, and The Diary of Anne Frank were among the stories he persuaded the studio to purchase.)

  In fact, Helen suspected that he had wanted to turn his second wife, Wayne Clark, into a writer. They had met at Hearst, where Wayne, a leggy brunette with a Vassar education, was working as a senior editor at Good Housekeeping. When David brought her to live in Los Angeles, he also took her away from her career, and watched her become bored and unhappy in exile. They divorced after Wayne went back to work at an advertising agency, where she fell in love with her boss. Over time, it became David’s firm belief that a woman’s investment in her own career could save a marriage.

  On September 25, 1959, after a year and a half of dating and one stern ultimatum by Helen, she and David finally married in a modest ceremony at Beverly Hills City Hall, surrounded by their mutual friend Ruth Schandorf, David’s son Bruce, and David’s secretary, Pamela Hedley. Wearing a conservative long-sleeve dress and holding a bouquet of flowers, Helen was the picture of primness, standing next to David in a dark suit and tie—which, presumably, he loosened a bit when they headed to Largo’s nightclub on Sunset Boulevard to watch the bleach-blond stripper Candy Barr do her thing. (Originally from Texas, she was known to don a cowboy hat and six-shooters, along with her panties and pasties.)

  Soon after, Helen moved into the rambling house at 515 Radcliffe Avenue, where she began the arduous process of making David’s bachelor’s pad her home. By then she was already one of the most successful women working in advertising, but a few months into their marriage, she was miserable in her new job as an account executive at Kenyon & Eckhardt. At Foote, Cone & Belding, she had been something of a little mascot as the former secretary who had worked her way up to a copywriter—she was their status girl, their beloved pet.

  At her new firm, there were quite a few girl copywriters, and competition was fierce. Working on the Max Factor account, Helen guessed that she personally dreamed up 9,274 names for various beauty products, but everyone else came up with just as many. Say they were trying to name a red lipstick. First, Helen wrote down every shade of red that came to mind. Next, she came up with a list of every wild animal, mineral, vegetable, fruit, flower, spice, emotion, and exclamation she could think of. Then she simply mixed and matched: WHIPPED CHERRY, WELL-BRED RED, WARNINGFLARE RED, WACK-A-DOO-RED! WOW! WHEEEEE! WHOOPEE! The exercise was fun, but frustratingly pointless. Before these brainstorm sessions, Max Factor had preselected the product name anyway. The goal was simply for the agency to come as close as possible to guessing it, proving how clever they were in the process. It was a battle of wits between client and agency, but the game was always rigged.

  And then there were the commercials. Helen was terrible at writing for TV. She came up with one scenario where a girl took her hair to the shrink to see why it hated her, and another featuring a character named Mr. Acne who stalked schoolkids, looking for the perfect victim to attack. She doubted herself every time another girl’s work was chosen over hers, and she worried that she was falling short of expectations. Worst of all, she was just another cog in the machine: Kenyon & Eckhardt had lured her in with one of the highest salaries ever paid to a woman copywriter, only to submit her ideas to the scrutiny of countless middlemen until they were totally leached of style. To add insult to injured ego, after she married David, the agency decided they were paying her too much and cut her $20,000 salary by almost half.

  One Sunday, when Helen and David were out on their regular stroll in Will Rogers State Park, she vented about her job. “What am I going to do?” she asked David. “I don’t know of any other jobs. I don’t want to leave. They’re not firing me but nobody is paying any attention to my work and I’m miserable.” David had helped plenty of other people do some writing on the side, she pointed out. “How about me? Maybe I could write a book. Do you think so?”

  As it turned out, David had just met with someone from a publishing company in New York, and he had given the man a one-page outline he had typed up for a guide on how to have an affair. He also had shared the idea with a woman writer he knew, but she seemed lukewarm about it. “There’s a chapter on the apartment,” he explained to Helen now. “There’s one on cooking and one on how to clear the decks for action.”

  “David,” Helen said, “that sounds like my book. I think I could do something with that. You’ve got to get that outline back from whomever you gave it to.”

  David did get it back, and Helen began to brainstorm, scrawling her thoughts in a shorthand book. At first it was just a borrowed idea on borrowed time: something to do when she got bored at the office, a way to keep her mind occupied. She took a stab at writing a few pages, showed them to David, and waited. “It won’t work,” he told her after that first read. “It’s not yours. It’s tight—it’s not you.” She showed David several other starts, which he promptly rejected for the same reason. Her writing was too structured, her tone impersonal—it wouldn’t speak to people, it wouldn’t sell.

  David envisioned a cutesy manual for girls who wanted to get rid of the extra men in their lives so that they could home in on Mr. Right, but as Helen jotted down more and more notes about her days as a bachelorette, she realized that she was tapping into a much bigger theme: the stigma of the single woman. In July 1960, Look magazine had run a story titled “Women Without Men,” which reported that 70 percent of American girls married before the age of twenty-four. “From then on,” warned the writer, Eleanor Harris, “it’s a downhill slide.” In her piece, Harris portrayed singledom as a social illness worthy of psychiatric help. Single women generally felt that they weren’t “getting much out of life,” said one psychiatrist who was interviewed for the article. As a group, they were dissatisfied, anxious, and depressed. Those who weren’t on a “frenzied man hunt,” Harris added, possibly had a “sex problem” like Lesbianism (with a capital L). Others were content to settle for “a man-free life.”

  But what about all the women who weren’t ready to get married and didn’t want a man-free life? Did they really have to abide by the prissy advice in old-fashioned magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal? “There are two sound ways for a girl to d
eal with a young man who is insistent,” the Journal proclaimed in a May 1961 article about double standards. “She can marry him, or she can say ‘No.’” Of course, a girl could say “yes” before marriage and often did—and Helen, for one, believed she would be better off for it. A woman who had taken the time to date around and develop herself as a full person would be more interesting and prepared for marriage when she finally did find the One.

  Armed with new conviction, Helen sat down and wrote her opening lines—how she had managed to land a great man without being scintillating or all that pretty. She took it to David, and after reading it, he finally gave her the approval she craved. “I think you’ve got it,” he said. It was a go.

  Ideas came to her while she was in the shower, under the hair dryer, and at her desk at the agency. She developed her own outline, much more detailed than David’s, and by the time she finished adding to it, she had a sheaf of papers—it was almost a book. She wrote and rewrote the sample chapters until they sounded as if they had simply written themselves.

  David was her first reader and her connection to people who mattered. It was David’s trail of friends from the publishing world that eventually led to Bernard Geis, after a series of other publishers had turned the book down, dashing her confidence. As hands-on as Berney was, David was Helen’s live-in editor—and he was merciless. Sometimes he crossed out whole passages. He made her rewrite the big chapter, “The Affair,” three times over before he accepted it.

  It was David who told Helen to publish Sex and the Single Girl under her married name, even though he knew his own family would disapprove. For the book to be successful, he insisted, she needed to have authority, and in order to have authority, she had to be courageous enough to write about her own experiences and affairs.

  As Mrs. Helen Gurley Brown, she was living proof that a nice girl could have sex, like it, and use it to her advantage.