Read this book, and this briefcase could be yours, the package seemed to say. And yet the briefcase spoke louder than the book itself. Berney had made his cuts.
Sex and the Office was successful, but it didn’t have the impact of Helen’s first book, which spawned other imitations—among them, Saucepans and the Single Girl, Sex and the Single Man, and Sex and the Single Cat. “A publisher asked me to write a ‘me-too’ book—about sex and the college girl,” says Gloria Steinem, who was more interested in critiquing Helen Gurley Brown’s new book. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, Steinem put Sex and the Office into a political context, comparing the recent spate of books about the problems facing women to books about the problems facing blacks.
“Both have suffered allegations of smaller brain and other natural inferiorities,” Steinem began. “Both have gone (or are going) through periods of imitating the former master—in the case of women, being more masculine than men; in the case of Negroes, of being more middle-class-white than the whites.” The common wisdom was that women, like blacks, were supposed to have some kind of deeply ingrained expertise on the problems of their kind, Steinem argued, but “knowledge by nature” could take a person only so far. Who had appointed Helen Gurley Brown as the spokesperson for the American woman?
Certainly not Steinem. She dismissed Helen Gurley Brown’s writing style as “an ingenious combination of woman’s-magazine-bad and advertising-agency-bad,” before likening Helen to another famous mogul whom she respected even less.
“Sex and the Office doesn’t quite fit into George Orwell’s category of ‘good-bad-books,’” Steinem wrote, “but, like Hugh Hefner’s ‘Playboy Philosophy,’ it is worth studying as an unusual example of a standard American mashed potato mind at work—unusual, because it is not the sort of mind that frequently produces books. Future governmental commissions on American Goals may read it and weep.”
( 15 )
IN THE MAIL
1964–1965
“What is it like to be the little princess, the woman who has fulfilled the whispered promise of her own books and of all the advertisements, the girl to whom things happen? It is hard work.”
—Joan Didion, “Bosses Make Lousy Lovers,” Saturday Evening Post, January 30, 1965
Helen looked ten years younger on television, and she was the first to admit why. On TV, she wore a wig, false eyelashes, powder, two kinds of rouge, lipstick, eyeliner, pencil, and shadow. The great thing about radio was that it was all about the voice, and Helen’s voice was made for radio—or rather, she remade it for radio. Soft and silky, it glided across the airwaves like aural lube. Callers could rant about her ruining American morals, hosts could call her names, but they never got her to raise her voice. “I’m kind of outspoken and controverseeyal,” she would coo in agreement.
When Joe Pyne, a former marine turned talk show host known for his confrontational interviewing style, called her a “terrible woman” for giving girls explicit instructions on how to have a lunchtime affair with a married man, including advice on what kind of lingerie to wear, Helen didn’t flinch.
“Well, Joe, it’s just that I think if a girl is going to be involved in a matinee relationship, she should do it in style, that’s all.”
A rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at all the hard work (and makeup) that went into being the public Helen Gurley Brown. (Copyright © Ann Zane Shanks.)
“You know, I expect that you’re soon going to have a book on murder! You’re going to say, ‘Now, If you’re going to murder someone—which I don’t recommend, but if you do murder somebody—pick somebody who really deserves it!’” Pyne fumed.
“Oh, Joe Pyne,” Helen purred, “you really can’t equate murder with girls having affairs. I think you have a kind of puritanical, funny, rigid attitude about things.”
As 1964 came to an end, so did Helen’s twenty-eight-city promotional tour for Sex and the Office. One day she climbed into a white, two-door Volkswagen Beetle with no air-conditioning that would be her chariot around Southern California. Her driver was Skip Ferderber, a twenty-three-year-old press agent who worked for an independent publicity company hired by Bernard Geis Associates to promote Sex and the Office in Los Angeles, and whose mission was to bring Helen to as many TV and radio interviews as possible in seventy-two hours.
There was another passenger in the car, too. Sitting in the backseat of the White Angel, as Helen dubbed her ride, was a diminutive young novelist who was quietly scribbling notes about Helen Gurley Brown for a profile of her in an upcoming issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Finishing up the final stretch of a thirteen-week promotional tour of England and the United States, Helen was hanging on, but just barely. In Los Angeles, Joan Didion found “a very tired woman indeed, a woman weary of flirting with disc jockeys, tired of parrying insults and charming interviewers and fighting for a five-minute spot here and a guest appearance there.”
Didion kept herself in the background; she was inscrutable even then. Still, she was clearly charmed by Helen’s gumption and impressed by her work ethic—if somewhat disparaging of her actual work. At the time of the interview, Helen had sold nearly two and a half million copies of her two books, combined, and Didion attributed the sales partly to various daytime and late-night radio talk shows, like Long John Nebel, that featured Helen as a guest and reached “a twilight world of the lonely, the subliterate, the culturally deprived.”
She also noted that a good number of the night owls who called in to shows to sound off on Helen Gurley Brown’s depravity hadn’t actually read her books, which were actually quite sweet and sincere. In fact, those listeners weren’t responding to her books at all, but rather to the idea of them; just as they were responding to the idea of her, a woman whose studied, seductive voice had been transmitted via hundreds of radio and TV shows over the past year, and, with any luck, would soon be on hundreds more.
But then a funny thing happened. After being shuttled around to countless tapings in Los Angeles, Helen suddenly had a hard time booking TV and radio interviews back home in New York. In November, Letty and a colleague wrote a memo to the Browns warning them that they were getting “over exposure signals on HGB.” Bookers at some of the biggest shows like The Tonight Show simply felt that Helen had been on too many times. Their audiences just weren’t interested in her at the moment, Letty reported: “No amount of idea suggesting, controversy proposals, or cajoling can change their minds it seems.”
Letty suggested putting Helen under wraps for a while, but Helen and David had another idea—they always had another idea. This was hardly the first time they had run into rejection. After Sex and the Single Girl first hit shelves, they churned out countless proposals for TV shows, some of which they pitched through the talent agent Lucy Kroll.
Among their ideas that never made it to screen: a food-themed quiz show (sample challenge: taste five types of milk, from skim to evaporated, and identify each); a game show in which ordinary people would present their ideas for new inventions in front of an audience (nearly forty-five years later, ABC’s Shark Tank would be based on a similar premise); and a cheeky talk show, Frankly Female, which Helen would host. Though aimed primarily at women, the show would also feature a male cohost to attract some men. In one proposed segment titled “EXPLAIN PLEASE!” the idea was that Helen would ask an expert a ridiculously basic question about a subject that the Browns deemed long had eluded women—such as the names of the seven continents—only they were too ashamed to admit it. A man from the Internal Revenue Service could break down a tax form to Helen on the air, for instance. Other experts could explain how to count using Roman numerals, or why World War I started in the first place. In answering, the expert would speak very simply as if to a child, using props if necessary. Easy enough for “how to change a tire,” though “How it started with the Jews and the Arabs and who’s right?” could prove more challenging.
The Browns never did convince a network to green-light Frankly Female. Nor did they have suc
cess with a comedy-drama series, Sandra (The Single Girl), about the adventures of a somewhat plain, but charming, single girl who works as a copywriter in an advertising agency. ABC rejected the idea for what were then obvious reasons. No one wanted to watch a TV show set in the world of Mad Men—especially not one that focused on a woman. “It is a series built around a female lead, and the unfortunate history of television indicates that this has been uniformly unsuccessful,” wrote the network’s bearer of bad news. (In 1966, Marlo Thomas would star as a struggling actress trying to make it in New York City in ABC’s That Girl, one of the first sitcoms to focus on a single, working woman who didn’t live with her parents. The Browns had been a bit too ahead of the curve.)
Sooner or later, something had to stick, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be The Unwind Up, a show that promised to feature a psychotherapist named Charles Edward Cooke, coauthor of the 1956 guide Hypnotism Handbook with sci-fi writer A. E. Van Vogt. Cooke would actually hypnotize viewers into a near-sleep state—with the help of soothing music and somnolent readings of telephone directories, Teamsters union bylaws, and The Communist Manifesto. Keeping the viewer in a hypnotic state, Helen pointed out, would be ideal for sponsors wanting to soft-sell their products. Not so ideal for the viewer, perhaps. “The only possible harm that could come to anyone from this kind of hypnosis,” Helen noted, “is that they might have left something on the stove before they fell asleep, failed to put out a cigarette, or left a child unattended.”
Although most of their ideas never panned out, the Browns didn’t stay discouraged for long. If anything, they saw rejection as a kind of creative fuel—a reason to keep trying. David had lost his job enough times to know the importance of having something “in the mail,” whether it was a book proposal or a new concept for a column. Whatever it was, he always had some idea floating around—something that might lead to the Next Big Thing. All it took was one great idea landing in the right hands at the right time.
As it happened, by the fall of 1964, there was something in the mail that was beginning to spark some interest.
( 16 )
FEMME
1964–1965
“Here’s a proposal for you from Helen Gurley Brown. While it is a marriage proposal, I’m afraid it’s your magazine she suggests living with happily ever after, not the boss.”
—1964 letter from Bernard Geis to Richard Deems, the president of Hearst Magazines
In December 1964, Helen’s epic tour finally slowed to a halt with a few last stops, including one in Miami, where she visited Tropical Park Race Track, appeared on Larry King’s TV show Miami Undercover, and signed autographs at Burdine’s department store. There were worse ways to spend a few days in winter than staying at the Doral Beach Hotel, a brand-new tower in Miami Beach with ocean views on Collins Avenue’s famous Millionaire’s Row, but Helen didn’t stick around. She was eager to get back home for a few reasons, not the least of which was that, on Christmas Day, the movie adaptation of Sex and the Single Girl, cowritten by Joseph Heller, whose novel Catch-22 had come out three years before, would be hitting theaters.
Sex and the Single Girl’s journey to screen had been fraught with its own catches and conundrums, starting with how to adapt a plotless how-to guide into a feasible film. Along the way, the original producer, Saul David, dropped out, but with director Richard Quine at the helm, the production attracted an all-star cast, including Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, and Mel Ferrer. The film’s star was Natalie Wood, who played a character named Dr. Helen Gurley Brown, a doe-eyed twenty-three-year-old research psychologist and author of the titular bestseller advocating sexual freedom for unmarried women. Other than those surface details, Sex and the Single Girl the movie had almost nothing to do with Sex and the Single Girl the book. But that didn’t stop single girls from lining up to see the film at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway and the Trans-Lux 52d Street, or the occasional critic from enjoying the Technicolor romp with its suggestive one-liners and jazzy score. “It’s not the worst picture ever made, girls and boys,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times the next day.
Sex and the Single Girl didn’t exactly get glowing reviews—“It was ridiculous, a horrible movie,” says Rex Reed, who claims that “even Natalie, who became one of my best friends, wouldn’t talk about that film”—but it did get Helen’s name out there once again, quite literally, along with the title of her bestselling book, which was featured as a recurring prop in the movie.
The timing couldn’t have been better. In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, Berney had been circulating a proposal for a new magazine concocted by the Browns. A self-help magazine aimed at single, working women, it was called Femme.
THE CONCEPT FOR Femme wasn’t exactly the result of a flash of inspiration—it was simply another idea in a chain of dozens that Helen and David had discussed. By the summer of 1964, she had been getting fan mail for two years thanks to her books. She still tried to answer letters individually when she could—a staggering number of girls wrote to her about being in love with married men, a subject she considered to be one of her specialties—but it was impossible to keep up with the demand. One day, after a new bag of mail arrived, David brought up the idea.
“You know, Helen, you really ought to have a magazine for these girls,” he said. “Most of the magazines are only talking about married girls. It’s motherhood and home and God. You ought to have a book for good-citizen swingers like you were.”
It was as simple as that. Not long after that conversation, Helen and David sat down at the kitchen table and started brainstorming. (At a certain point, Charlotte Kelly, a close friend of Helen’s from her advertising days, also pitched in.) Between them, they had two pads of paper, two pencils, and a gazillion ideas for new features and departments. Helen focused on the beauty pages, jotting down all the concepts she had tried and failed to sell to Max Factor, while David came up with eye-catching headlines and wrote a preamble about Femme’s enormous advertising potential. Once they had gotten everything down on paper, Helen typed up the keepers.
Among their ideas for monthly departmental features: a dating column in which Helen would dole out advice, a health column in which a medical professional would answer women’s pressing questions about everything from diaphragms to male impotence, a financial column in which a female economist such as Sylvia Porter would advise readers on budgeting and investing, and a photo spread titled “However Do You Do That?” in which a model would simulate performing “masculine” household repairs that often eluded the woman on her own. (How to fix a leaky faucet, for example.)
Among their suggested headlines for major articles: U.S. PRESIDENTS WHO LIKED GIRLS (a look back at the last ten presidents and their taste in women), SEXUAL PROWESS IN MEN (asking the age-old question, “Is size important?”), ABORTION! (in which the following line was written and crossed out: “Femme is for it in many instances”), I’M NOT MARRIED TO THE BABY’S FATHER . . . AND NEVER WAS (written anonymously), THE NOSE JOB (a step-by-step account), BABY-BRAIN ASTROLOGY (men love girls who can tell them about their signs!), “IF YOU COMMIT SUICIDE I’LL KILL YOU!” (or, “How to help a suicidal person”), I LOVE GIRLS LIKE YOU LOVE MEN (“Article by a lesbion Lesbian”), THE WORLD OF FALSIES (with before-and-after pics), and perhaps the best-worst fashion spread ever imagined in the history of magazines, THE POODLE AND THE SINGLE GIRL, featuring “various costumes girls wear with poodles (and various poodles).”
Over time, Helen and David would go through several versions of the proposal, tweaking ideas for features and smaller, departmental articles. But from the very start, they imagined a magazine that looked as sexy as it read, with hot, color-saturated images that could compete with photo-heavy books like Look and Life. To get that vision across, they put together a crude editorial dummy, with “FEMME” written in black marker on a scrap of paper taped to the cover.
The girl on the cover was not famous; she was just a girl. Like Femme, which was only a t
emporary title, she was a placeholder. “The bathing-suit girl,” Helen called her—a nobody who looked like a somebody because she was beautiful, and clearly comfortable in her body.
But before you picture her, picture what came before her—close-up shots of serenely smiling faces belonging to housewives and celebrity spouses who regularly graced the covers of women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping wearing turtlenecks and tidy flips.
Now see the supple bathing-suit girl in her teeny, flowery bikini, her blond hair on the verge of looking unkempt. Her face is in profile, nuzzled against her bare shoulder smelling, you imagine, of summer and the slightest hint of sweat. Gaze at her for a few seconds and you begin to notice her sooty eyelashes, manicured nails, the way a small smile is just beginning to spread on her lips. You wonder why she is smiling, and whether she’s at the beach or perhaps basking in the sun on some swimming rock, her boyfriend just out of frame. But those thoughts come later, because at first glance, here’s what you see: chest, flesh, and navel. Soft skin in soft focus.
Look just to the right of her armpit, at another scrap of paper taped onto the page: “For the woman on her own,” reads the subtitle in black type. Closer to her breast, you’ll find the teasers for this sample issue: “U.S. Presidents Who Liked Girls” and “Where the Men Are.” (Compare those lines with the far more somber ones that ran on the covers of Cosmopolitan around the same time: “Do Religious Schools Teach Prejudice?” and “Diabetes: Will Your Children Inherit It?”)
The tour continues as you goose the bathing-suit girl’s thigh at the lower right-hand corner of the page and turn it to find the letterhead of Bernard Geis Associates, trumpeting the arrival of a proposal for a new magazine. Now that the gorgeous girl on the cover has gotten you this far, Helen and David will take over, telling you all about their discovery of a new audience and a new market, as a result of the phenomenon that is Sex and the Single Girl. They will tell you that, in an era of specialized magazines, there is one unique group that has been ignored: smart, financially sound women. They will tell you that Helen Gurley Brown, champion of single girls everywhere, recognizes the unmarried woman “as a first class citizen,” as opposed to a societal outcast, and has commanded a loyal audience practically overnight. After sharing some figures to illustrate the astronomical success of Sex and the Single Girl, the Browns will then guide you through a few more relevant statistics, pulled from recent census records, and show you just how America’s unmarried women, divorcees, widows, and other women on their own add up to a grand total of 27,381,000 potential readers—more, if you count married women who have an “independent attitude.”
Enter Helen Page 11