Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  No one could have predicted the colossal mess that Cleopatra would become—not even David Brown, who had pitched the idea for a remake in the first place. Five years earlier, in 1957, Skouras had asked David to come up with “a big picture” on “a big subject.” It was while digging through some studio records that David learned Cleopatra was actually a Fox property. In 1917, Fox Film Corporation had made a film about the Egyptian queen starring the silent-screen star Theda Bara. Working for Paramount, the director Cecil B. DeMille later remade Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert in 1934.

  More than twenty years later, this was the film David watched in a small screening room with Skouras and Fox’s head of production, Buddy Adler. DeMille’s version was in black-and-white, but if 20th Century Fox made their Cleopatra in full color with the right stars, it could be the Hollywood epic they needed.

  Instead, in the otherwise capable hands of producer Walter Wanger, it became an epic disaster. After a year of production, two key original casting choices dropped out—Rex Harrison eventually replaced Peter Finch as Julius Caesar, and Richard Burton stepped in for Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony—and the original director, Rouben Mamoulian, was replaced by Joseph Mankiewicz. Elizabeth Taylor caught “the Asian flu,” fell into a coma, and underwent a tracheotomy, further delaying the film. Scripts were written, rewritten, and discarded. Elaborate and expensive sets were built, destroyed, and rebuilt. (“Only the Romans left more ruins in Europe,” David later quipped.) Meanwhile, forced to keep the cast and crew on salary through multiple shooting delays, Fox was hemorrhaging millions and having to answer to furious stockholders. The future of the company looked bleak.

  Fortunately, David was having more success managing his wife’s career than his own. After months of pitching an adaptation of Sex and the Single Girl around Hollywood, he finally got some good news.

  EARLY ONE EVENING during the summer of 1962, the Browns sat in their sunroom with Helen’s seventeen-year-old cousin from her mother’s side, Norma Lou Pittman, and celebrated a deal that had been in the works for some time. Sex and the Single Girl was becoming a movie—and for the rights to the book, Warner Bros. was offering $200,000, the largest sum ever paid for a nonfiction work in Hollywood history. Even more incredible was the fact that the studio was willing to hand over that much cash for a book with no plot and no substantial character other than Helen Gurley Brown. Word around town was that Warner’s bought the book for its title alone. “Sex and . . .” was clearly a formula that worked, but that wouldn’t help the screenwriter. How was anyone supposed to write a scene around making an omelet with leftovers from the fridge, or wearing Band-Aids instead of a bra? The question of how to adapt a seemingly unadaptable book would be left to the film’s producer, a friend of the Browns named Saul David. During the negotiations with Warner’s, David Brown insisted that Helen be relieved of any responsibility to turn her book into a usable screenplay so that she could focus on other projects, such as writing her next book and developing a syndicated newspaper column aimed at the single girl.

  Selling the rights to Sex and the Single Girl was a huge professional coup for David, who was also busy trying to sell the stage rights to develop a musical based on the book, similar to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. For Helen, the victory was personal. How many times had she been snubbed by celebrities and patronized by studio executives and their wives, who were nice to her simply because she was David’s girl? And now, Warner’s wanted to pay her to use her name and likeness in a movie based on a book she had written. Out came the champagne. Pop! Helen offered a flute to Norma Lou, whom she had started calling “Lou” at the girl’s request. “You’re old enough, do you want a little sip?”

  Lou was nervous, but didn’t say it. She took a sip for Helen. It was her first taste of alcohol.

  No one back home would have believed it, but Helen actually took time off work to spend with Lou, who would be staying with the Browns for six days before visiting a girlfriend who lived in the area. She had come a long way, flying from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she still lived with her parents. The trip to California was her graduation present from Helen, who grew up playing with Lou’s mother, Rosemary, who was her second cousin and four years older. When Helen described her Arkansas relatives as hillbillies who peed in the woods, she wasn’t thinking of Rosemary, with her lush dark hair and dreamy hooded eyes. Helen called her the Beautiful Princess.

  Lou also thought her mother was a natural beauty, but Helen was more glamorous. No one in the family understood why Helen considered herself unattractive, but Lou thought maybe it had something to do with living in California, the land of the gorgeous—all those girls with their blond hair and tans. Lou had blond hair and a bit of a tan herself from riding horses back home, but she also wore glasses. Her mother had bought her the frames, a pretty pale blue with tiny gemstones on the sides.

  Norma Lou, photographed in 1962, the year she came to visit Helen and David in California. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)

  Lou was wearing her glasses and a new travel suit when Helen picked her up at the shuttle stop downtown. She had made sure to pack her Brownie box camera in preparation for her trip, but nothing could have prepared her for the culture shock. From the moment she stepped into Helen’s Mercedes-Benz, she felt a long way from home, a feeling that further sank in as they drove to Pacific Palisades. Along the way, they stopped at an outdoor market so Helen could buy some big lemon leaves and flowers for the house, which to Lou’s eyes seemed more like a European villa. Helen told her that an entire Asian family took care of the terraced garden.

  And then there was Lou’s room, next to the library downstairs. It was spectacular, with arched ceilings and huge windows forming a semicircle of glass. Lou looked out at her view and felt suddenly overwhelmed. She’d never seen the ocean before.

  She didn’t want to be a bad houseguest, but a couple of days into her trip, Lou began to tear up unexpectedly. She had a hard time hiding her puffy eyes from Helen, as much as she tried. She missed her parents and her home—the farthest she’d ever traveled alone before was to her grandmother’s house and Girl Scouts camp, forty-five minutes away.

  “Do you think you might possibly be homesick?” Helen asked her that weekend. “David and I have been talking, and we think you need to get out of the house.”

  Helen knew that Lou loved horses, so she and David took her to the Will Rogers Polo Club to see a polo match, and afterward they went out to eat. Helen also knew that Lou went to church on Sundays, so she brought her to a service at a beautiful Methodist church, even though David was Jewish and she never went. “I won’t pretend that we go to church,” Helen told Lou. “I know that you go to church, and it might be fun to go someplace different.”

  Now that she’d finalized the film rights to Sex and the Single Girl, Helen wanted to celebrate, so she sought Lou out again one morning over breakfast.

  “We’re going to go shopping!” Helen said.

  “What are you going to get?” Lou asked.

  “Oh,” Helen said, “let’s shop for you.”

  Helen had seen Lou’s clothes. Other than her travel suit, Lou had sewn almost every piece of clothing she’d packed in her suitcase. After breakfast, they drove to the village shopping district to look around. As Helen parked her Mercedes, she suggested that they find Lou a new dress.

  “Well, I’ve got two dresses,” Lou said, admiring the lacquered cars lining the streets. She had packed both of her homemade shirtwaists for the trip and had chosen the light blue one for their outing.

  “You know, a girl can always have more than two dresses,” Helen said, walking toward the stucco buildings.

  They went into one shop, a small, minimalist boutique. Glancing around the store, Lou felt uneasy. There were no racks of clothes—just a dress here and there on a form. She wondered where they kept the rest. They left after about a minute, and Helen politely thanked the saleslady.

  “How about a bathing s
uit?” Helen offered next. If anyone was prepared to help a girl find the right fit of bathing suit, it was Helen, who had worked on the account for Catalina Swimwear.

  But Lou told her that she already had a bathing suit.

  “A cover-up,” Helen said as they continued past boutiques selling sundresses and swimwear. “A cover-up would be good.”

  “Well, I actually made a cover-up out of a towel,” Lou said. “I made it with pockets, and I really like it.”

  Helen looked at her cousin. She was wearing loafers.

  “How about some shoes?” she asked.

  Lou was doubtful, looking at the sophisticated heels on display in the windows. She wore loafers to school, low flats to church, and cowboy boots to the stable. What was she supposed to do with a pair of strappy high-heeled sandals back in Oklahoma?

  “WHERE ARE ALL the bags?” David asked when they got home. “When girls go shopping, you come home with lots of bags.”

  Lou showed David the copy of The Good Earth that Helen finally bought for her at the bookstore. “I like books better than clothes,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “You’re my kind of girl.”

  It turned out that, even though she had just graduated from high school, Lou had read many of the same books that David had read, classics like Les Misérables, authors like Dickens. They talked about books a lot, and sometimes they talked about boys. Specifically, they talked about boys who were the same age as David’s son, Bruce, who had been skipping school more and more—to do what? His father didn’t really know.

  “What do boys at your age do?” David asked Lou once.

  “Well,” Lou said, thinking of her boyfriend, her brother, and his friends. “They go to school, and on the weekends they might take their girlfriends to the movies, or they might work on their cars.”

  “How does it work when they skip school?” he asked.

  “I don’t know any boys who skip school,” she said.

  David said Bruce was so smart he could show up for tests and make an A without studying. But Lou could see that David was distressed about his son, and she felt sorry that he worried so much. Both David and Helen talked quite a bit about Bruce—his mother, Liberty LeGacy, was David’s first wife—though Lou didn’t meet him on that visit. She wasn’t sure where he was, but he wasn’t at their house.

  Lou could tell that David liked her company, and she suspected that Helen enjoyed having a little “home person” around—someone to remind her of the Ozarks without actually having to go there. She knew that Helen appreciated her updates about the family, especially about her sister Mary, who was living in Shawnee, but it was hard for Lou to know what Helen liked about her, specifically. Helen just took an interest in her life. She always had. “You’re going to college, right? You need to do that,” Helen told her one day. Yes, Lou said, she had enrolled at the University of Tulsa. She was thinking of studying French, maybe becoming a translator. Helen looked pleased and emphasized how important it would be to stay in school and receive a degree.

  When Helen gave advice, Lou listened. Her cousin had been her “glamorous go-to,” the person she consulted with about all of her worries, since she was fourteen. It’s not that Lou didn’t get along with her mother—she did—but sometimes they crossed ways. Helen always knew just what to say to make her feel better. Lou first got to know her when she would come to stay at their house in Tulsa while on business. When Helen was a copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding, working on the account for Catalina Inc., she used to visit department stores around the country. In Tulsa, Helen invited Lou to watch her sell swimsuits and help customers find their perfect fit. In her neat cardigan and high heels, Helen looked so sophisticated at work, Lou couldn’t help but feel good when Helen sought her out back at the house. Helen used to ask Lou to wake her up in the mornings before school so that she could see her outfits. “Now turn around,” she would say, admiring whatever was her choice. “You ironed and starched that blouse. Must have taken you all morning!”

  During one of those visits, Lou stood in shorts in front of the full-length mirror to show Helen her legs. “They’re deformed,” she said despondently. Her skinny legs didn’t touch at the places they were supposed to—thighs, knees, calves. Only her knees touched. Helen laughed and laughed. Then she told Lou that if her legs touched at age fourteen, she would be fat by the time she was twenty.

  Lou’s mother told her she was pretty, but her compliments seemed vague in comparison, reflecting a mother’s love rather than the truth. Helen knew how to make you believe you were special. She found one feature that made you different and zeroed in on it. Looking past Lou’s glasses, Helen told her that she had the prettiest hair in the family.

  When they started writing letters to each other, Lou was still a kid who wore Peter Pan collars and loved nothing more than her parents, books, and horses. She and Helen were different in so many ways, but they both loved to write letters, and no one was better at it than Helen, who had a way of making any missive sound like a fan letter—and making you feel you were the most interesting and important person in the world. When Helen’s letters arrived, Lou would pore over them. She always asked for details about Lou’s life, rarely sharing any details of her own. “Helen’s really busy,” her mother would say; “don’t write her right back because she’s so good to write to you.” But Lou couldn’t help it; she just had so many questions. Sometimes she felt bad because she would lose her temper with her mother or she would tell a white lie about being at a friend’s house when she was really going out. She was obsessed with making good grades. Helen was always so reassuring. “You don’t have to be perfect,” she’d say, or, “I think you need to quit worrying about being a good girl.” Lou instantly felt better; if Helen said it was okay, it probably was.

  Now the woman who had written her all those letters was the author of a bestselling book. Lou had learned what she could from family members. Other than Cleo and Mary, most of the family hadn’t read it, because of the racy title alone; the friends and relatives who had read it were shocked. It wasn’t just the sex: It was the fact that Helen had written about her own mother and sister, about their being poor and needy. One just didn’t air dirty laundry in public like that, they said to each other; one didn’t expose the family. Cleo, in particular, took offense at how Helen had portrayed them all as backwoods hillbillies. (“She sold her family down the river,” she later vented to relatives at Mary’s house.)

  Since she had arrived, Lou had been eyeing the boxes of books in the den. One day, before she left, she asked Helen for her own copy of Sex and the Single Girl.

  “Would your mother mind if you read it?” Helen asked her in return.

  “No,” Lou said. “I’m allowed to read what I want to read.”

  “Well, Cleo certainly wasn’t happy about it,” Helen said, giving Lou a copy.

  Back in her room, Lou stayed up all night reading. She was riveted. But she couldn’t help but wonder if Helen really believed everything she had written about life as a single girl—how it’s okay to sleep with guys before you get married, or have affairs with married men.

  “Do you really believe that?” Lou asked Helen the next morning.

  “Absolutely,” Helen said. “I believe the things I said. I just didn’t talk about how lonely it can be.”

  ( 9 )

  THE WOIKING GIRL’S FRIEND

  1962

  “She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk that she believes.”

  —O. J. Berman (Martin Balsam) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961

  By the end of the summer, Marilyn Monroe was dead, and Helen Gurley Brown was a household name. Lou was no longer the only young woman writing Helen letters and hoping for some advice or reassurance in return. She was one of hundreds, soon to be thousands. Across the country, Bettys and Pattys and Donnas and Brendas were sending Helen bushels of fan mail. Like Lou, they chose to confide in her, sharing the
ir most troubling concerns and insecurities with the one woman they knew would understand. Sometimes they just wrote to say thank you. “I’ve never been able to flirt before, and you made it so easy I’m flirting like mad!” a secretary from Milwaukee exclaimed. Five roommates sharing an apartment in Baltimore wired to say that they were going out to lease five separate apartments—they credited Helen for giving them the courage to strike out on their own.

  Helen received no shortage of passionate testimonials, but she wasn’t above faking the occasional fan letter. When The American Weekly asked her to contribute an article, Berney reminded Helen that no one could convey her message—that even a plain girl could attract men by following the guidelines in Sex and the Single Girl—better than Helen herself. “The best way to get this across would be by creating a few letters. If anyone has a talent for this it is you,” Berney told her. “You might create one letter from a girl saying that she had just about resigned herself to life as a plain Jane when she read the condensation of your book,” he suggested. “You have already received letters something like this, so it is just a question of making Nature follow Art a little more closely.”

  It’s possible that Helen took Berney’s advice, but she was busy enough trying to keep up with the demand for interviews. By the end of June, she had been on thirty radio and TV shows, including the Today show and The Mike Wallace Show. In the coming months, she’d be on dozens more. No station was too small, no amount of airtime too short—she did it all.

  She brought the same frenzied work ethic to her promotional appearances. She said yes to all kinds of meet-and-greets, autograph sessions, press club dinners, and cocktail parties at posh hotels, but she never lost her focus on single working girls. She spoke to single mothers at Parents Without Partners, secretaries on Secretary’s Day, and more secretaries and “female-type supervisors” on Female Day, a jokey luncheon organized for a group called Supervising Helpers in Television, otherwise known as S.H.I.T. “Once a year the dimly illuminated S.H.I.T. Society opens its creaky doors to the pretty side of the magic shadows business and invites GIRLS to gather together with us for lunch,” the invitation read. “So, go in, swat yer secretary in the customary manner and place, and tell her she is going to lunch with you next Friday.”