Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  But the statistics don’t tell the whole story. They don’t capture the essence of the reader—her wants, her needs, her insecurities, her goals and dreams. Again, before you imagine who this woman is, remember who she is not. She is not a housewife interested in reading about how to make the perfect jelly roll for the holidays or how to banish mildew from the basement, in traditional women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. She is not the urban sophisticate targeted by upmarket fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar or even the collegiate girl next door reflected in the pages of Mademoiselle and Glamour. She is too old for Seventeen.

  Now imagine a single, working-class woman; let’s say she’s twenty-nine. It’s possible that she never got a chance to go to college and never will. She might be looking for a husband, but then again she might enjoy being on her own. Femme is for the woman who likes men—and, more important, who likes herself. She may seem shy and ladylike, but she is actually quite frank, and if you scratch the surface, you might find that she is as ambitious, cutthroat, and egocentric as any man. She is tired of reading women’s magazines edited by men who assume that she is a sweet, sheltered, easily shocked little cream puff unable to talk about real subjects, like sex. She is weary of being force-fed the message that women love serving everyone else. And she’s not the only one. Don’t forget the Betty Friedan disciples: married women who had good educations and inquisitive minds that were no longer sated by articles about cookie swaps and easy ways to save time in the kitchen.

  “This woman’s magazine will never deal with the problems of school lunches, PTA, laundromats and making over the attic,” the Browns wrote. It would start frank discussions about sex, money, careers, apartments, fashion, and beauty—oh, and men, men, men. “It will view the woman on her own as potentially, if not actually, the most desirable, affluent and interesting segment of our female population,” they added.

  Now, just for a moment, pretend you are a magazine publisher in desperate need of a circulation boost and advertising revenue. What if the Browns could promise that this new audience of career-minded women on their own would also have money of their own? What if the Browns told you that they would do everything in their editorial power to ensure that those women spent their hard-earned cash on advertisers’ products? That this new readership would also be a distinct, largely untapped market for companies looking to hawk makeup, swimsuits, shoes, bras, jewelry, home appliances and décor, soda, liquor, cigarettes, cars, airlines, travel resorts, TVs, candy, banks, brokerage firms, drugs, stationery, and slenderizing products?

  Not sold yet? What if they told you that the editor of this prospective magazine, Helen Gurley Brown, was such a valuable commodity herself that it would cost a fortune to create and promote such a spokeswoman, starting from scratch? And what if they told you that, in hiring her, you’d also be getting former Cosmopolitan managing editor David Brown’s editorial insight and expertise as a bonus?

  Would it matter that his wife had never worked at a magazine before, let alone edited one?

  FROM THE BEGINNING, the Browns pitched Helen as Femme’s editor-in-chief. That variable never changed. But this one did: In an early draft of the proposal, David pitched himself as the magazine’s publisher, highlighting his early editorships at both Liberty and Cosmopolitan as well as his role in originating the Sex and the Single Girl franchise and managing his wife’s career. Once again, he was restless at work, and in the short biography of himself that David included in their packet, he announced he would be leaving his post at New American Library in order to focus on Femme.

  By the time Bernard Geis was circulating the prospectus to various publishers in the winter of 1964, David had renamed himself as an editorial consultant. Geis was also listed as a consultant, someone who could bring a considerable amount of promotion and publicity to the magazine. But first, he had to get the proposal to the right people, which proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated. Esquire had seemed like a natural ally—Berney once worked at the magazine as an assistant editor—but he was having a hard time convincing anyone there to even look at the outline. By November he was still waiting to hear from Look, although he finally heard back from Playboy, where he knew the editorial director, A. C. Spectorsky, or “Spec.”

  “Spec said that he and Hefner would be glad to look at the prospectus,” Berney wrote to David Brown. “He said that they already have more projects than they can handle, but you never can tell.”

  After reviewing the prospectus, Hefner turned the Browns down. He was too busy managing the Playboy empire and the failing Show Business Illustrated magazine. He wasn’t interested in starting a new magazine—not this one, not now.

  Despite the tepid reaction Femme was getting, Berney refused to be daunted, playing a never-ending game of who-do-you-know. Meanwhile, David personally brought the magazine prospectus around town to try to sell it. He pitched executives at Macfadden-Bartell, and he called on an old friend, George T. Delacorte, the extremely wealthy founder of the Dell Publishing Company. More rejection.

  Then David went to lunch with his friend John O’Connell, also known as Jack. Back in the day, they had worked together at Cosmopolitan, and in 1950 O’Connell had gone on to be the editor-in-chief, a position he kept for nine years. While they were waiting for a table, O’Connell mentioned that Hearst didn’t know what to do about Cosmopolitan, which was flailing. “It looks as though they may fold it. But they’re taking one more shot,” O’Connell said, adding that Hearst wanted to turn Cosmopolitan into a women’s magazine, targeting single career women. David just listened, but after lunch, he called Berney with an urgent question: “Don’t you know the president of Hearst Magazines, Richard Deems?”

  Berney knew everyone. Yes, he knew Dick Deems. They had worked together at Esquire. David asked Berney to send their magazine dummy over to Deems, which he did, after negotiating a finder’s fee.

  A few hours later, Berney called David back. “You’re to telephone Deems,” he said. “He’s very interested in Femme as a replacement for Cosmopolitan.”

  The Browns met with Deems shortly after Berney’s call, and he explained that Hearst didn’t want to replace Cosmopolitan. The company wanted to graft a new format onto it, and the outline for Femme was a good place to start. Following their talk, Helen began to think more about what her idea of a perfect issue of Cosmopolitan would look like, before submitting a second presentation to Deems. In a new proposal for Cosmopolitan, she critiqued the previous eight issues of the magazine under the current editor, Robert C. Atherton, and, with David’s help, solidified her own ideas for how to improve it. She began with a close analysis of Cosmopolitan cover lines: “How many copies does ‘Our Unadoptable Children’ sell, whether you put that line in eighteen point type or twenty-four point type?” she asked. “Compare that with ‘The ONE Diet You Can Live With.’”

  At the request of Hearst, the Browns also included detailed mock-ups of several future issues, fleshing out ideas for new departments and features, as well as listing potential writers and what they would cost. Still, there was some concern that, in editing Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown would be a one-hit wonder. Despite her impressive track record with the “Sex and . . .” franchise, Hearst wasn’t convinced that she could keep up the momentum needed to sustain a monthly magazine. And then there was the looming question of what Cosmopolitan’s more conservative readers would make of her racy single-girl slant.

  Looking for another opinion, Richard Deems asked Ruth Manton, a valued Hearst employee who worked in marketing at Harper’s Bazaar, to get to know Helen a bit and report back on what she thought. Ruth set up a lunch, and it was a meeting she wouldn’t soon forget. Shortly after they sat down, Helen explained her theory that any girl, no matter how plain, can get the man she wants—if she knows what he wants.

  “One of the first things Helen said to me was, ‘I’m completely flat-chested, and I wear falsies because that’s what men are looking for,
’” Manton says. “I nearly fell off my chair! I’m not a prude in any way, but in the Sixties, a woman didn’t say this the first time you met her, not normally anyhow. I liked her immediately because she was so direct and honest. And she believed passionately in what she wanted to do.”

  When Deems later asked Manton what she thought of their new candidate, she was blunt. “I said I liked her, I was intrigued by her: ‘She’s got a whole new viewpoint for the magazine. I don’t know whether women are ready for it. How will they respond to an exploration of their sexuality? I can’t say.’ That’s how I left it,” Manton says, “and the next thing I knew, Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan.”

  Though David initially planned to be Helen’s publisher, he abandoned his bid in December, when Darryl and Richard Zanuck asked him to return to 20th Century Fox and fill a newly created position as head of story operations. (After the Cleopatra debacle, the studio was back on its feet thanks to the success of 1965’s The Sound of Music.) David accepted the job, and while his name never again appeared on the Cosmopolitan masthead, he played an instrumental part in its production, and in the continued advancement of Helen’s career.

  One wintry night in Deems’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers, it was David who negotiated a deal for Helen to edit Cosmopolitan.

  “I think Helen was cowering in a corner somewhere,” David later recalled, rendering the scene with a raconteur’s sense of irony. “She had never edited a magazine. I don’t think I had ever seen her read one.”

  While it’s possible Helen would have felt like hiding out, it’s doubtful that she actually cowered in the corner during the negotiations. Even more dubious is David’s implication that she didn’t read magazines before she was hired to edit one. But like Helen’s rags-to-riches rise, the tale of how she went from a meek wallflower to one of the most powerful editors in the world isn’t her story alone. It’s also David’s—and what good is a story editor who doesn’t set the stage for a dramatic journey?

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  FOR THE GIRL WITH A JOB

  1953

  “Helen Gurley got browner, browner, and browner—where else but on the beach at Waikiki?”

  —“Helen Gurley Wins a Holiday in Hawaii,” Glamour, May 1953

  Growing up, Helen inhaled magazines. She and her sister Mary pored over pictures of Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, and Jean Harlow in Photoplay and Silver Screen, though as she got older, Helen didn’t read for leisure so much as she did for escape, literally. In June 1949, she was still working as an executive secretary at Foote, Cone & Belding when she was one of thirteen women featured in Glamour after attending a job seminar hosted by the magazine. The next year, she was spotlighted again in an article about ambitious secretaries. Glamour was her bible, and in the years after World War II, a woman like Helen Gurley was the magazine’s target reader, to judge by its new tagline: “For the girl with a job.”

  Though she would have been attracted to any number of lifestyle articles, Helen took particular interest in Glamour’s annual competition, “Ten Girls with Taste,” which recognized ten women with modest incomes who still managed to show impeccable taste, whether hosting or dressing or decorating. After a friend of hers won the contest and its prizes—a trip to Europe and a new wardrobe—Helen entered for the first time in 1951, filling out a questionnaire that asked about everything from what she typically wore to work to how she would entertain guests for an evening to what she considered her life’s philosophy. Glamour chose her as one of twelve finalists and flew her to New York, but she never made it past the next round. In 1953, at the age of thirty-one, she entered again. This time she was one of thirty-nine thousand hopefuls—including receptionists, switchboard operators, and “home economists”—who answered a similar questionnaire.

  Helen gave it her all. Her typical work outfit hadn’t changed much since the first time she filled out the form, so she made up a new-and-improved one. She wasn’t much of a cook, so in response to a question about how she would entertain friends for dinner, she lifted ideas from the food section of Ladies’ Home Journal. As for her philosophy of life, it borrowed heavily from Edward R. Murrow’s radio show This I Believe, which broadcast the voices of famous public figures and everyday Americans, sharing their heartfelt, personal philosophies for the common good.

  In her final application, Helen Gurley painted herself as a hardworking but fun-loving California girl who enjoyed having friends over for Sunday brunch or for an evening of casual conversation and listening to records. While loyal to her boss, she also slipped in a little mention of the fact that she hoped to someday have a career in copywriting. But she really must have won the judges over with her generous heart, or at least the suggestion of it, cornily declaring that good taste “starts with that most basic commodity—one’s own self—and extends outward to speech, clothes and possessions. It reaches its supreme station . . . in kindness to another human being.”

  Helen submitted her application, and to her delight, Glamour chose her as one of seventeen semifinalists. After surviving the next round of cuts, she was named one of the ten winners and invited to collect her prizes: a new vacation wardrobe to go with a two-week vacation to Hawaii, where she would sightsee, sunbathe, and sip pineapple punch on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, all while being photographed for a feature slated for the magazine’s May issue.

  Fine as it was to hang out on the beach, her victory afforded her much more than travel. In the weeks after her win, the name Helen Gurley appeared in newspapers around the country. The magazine made her a mini-celebrity, the “Ideal Career Girl,” as one women’s editor christened her in the Hollywood Citizen-News. It also made her true ambitions known. Had she not confessed her desire to become a copywriter on the magazine’s contest form, she might have remained a secretary. Don Belding assigned Helen to her first account, Sunkist, after being hounded by Mary Campbell, the soon-to-be-legendary head of Condé Nast’s personnel office, who wanted to know why Belding hadn’t given her a chance to write copy of her own.

  Glamour was Helen’s passport into a more sophisticated world. Long before David brought Helen to Manhattan, her favorite magazine did, putting her up at the ritzy Waldorf-Astoria when she won. While in town, she also visited Glamour’s headquarters in Midtown—it was her first time in a magazine office.

  The second time was in March 1965, when she entered Cosmopolitan’s offices at 1775 Broadway as the magazine’s new editor-in-chief.

  ( 18 )

  THE MOST EXCITING WOMAN IN THE WORLD

  1965

  “She has no intention of turning the rather bland magazine into something racy.”

  —Time on new Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, March 26, 1965

  In the beginning of 1965, Helen got a new appointment book, a stiff red vinyl diary with gold writing that looked more like a motel Bible. She cracked it open to Tuesday, March 16. “FIRST DAY AT HEARST,” she wrote in blue pencil, under the small print on the upper right-hand corner of the page: “290 days follow.” And so the countdown began.

  David’s old mentor Herb Mayes was the first to call and officially congratulate Helen. The contract had been signed (David negotiated for a total annual compensation package of $35,000 for the first year of her contract, the equivalent of approximately $264,000 in 2015), and the public relations department at Hearst had written up a press release, calling Helen Gurley Brown “a spokeswoman for single women and girls with jobs.” “A lot of people will think we hired her because she wrote Sex and the Single Girl,” Deems would soon tell Newsweek, scrambling the message, “but actually we hired her in spite of those books.”

  It was too late to back out even if she had wanted to—and she had thought about it. Over the weekend, after having dinner at Christ Cella in Midtown with David and the author Irving Wallace, Helen put on a bit of a show, shedding tears over her new position while simultaneously using the moment to flatter their friend. “I don’t want to be a magazine edi
tor!” she cried, as they walked past the Waldorf-Astoria. “I just want to be a bestselling author like Irving!” For what must have been the twelfth time that night, David reminded her that the job was temporary, and she could decide how she felt about it later. All she had to do was show up and try her best, like she always did.

  Despite David’s confidence in her ability to succeed, Helen sensed that Hearst was waiting for her to fail. Just in case, her contract included a stipulation that if her editorship didn’t work out, she could use up the rest of her term writing articles for other Hearst magazines. It wasn’t so much a matter of if but when, they seemed to be saying, and she wrestled with her own insecurities. Being handed a magazine to edit without the benefit of any previous editorial experience was daunting, to say the least—she felt like someone had told her to suddenly become an astronaut or a brain surgeon. She didn’t have the slightest notion of what to do when she got to the office. “Ask the managing editor to have lunch with you,” David suggested. The managing editor would be able to tell her what articles had been assigned so far, and she could start by taking a look and seeing if she liked any of them.