David’s reassurance gave her some relief, but she still went to bed feeling like she would be starting a prison term in the morning. At least she could get out after a year.
IN 1965, WHAT is known today as the Hearst Tower wasn’t yet a tower, but rather an imposing six-story sand-colored building that took up a full block along the west side of Eighth Avenue between Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Streets. In 1926, William Randolph Hearst, the founder of the Hearst Corporation, commissioned the virtuoso architect Joseph Urban to design the structure, soon to be known as the International Magazine Building, to house the twelve publications he owned at the time. Though it was intended to be a skyscraper, the Great Depression intervened, and the builders never saw their vision fully realized.
Born in Vienna, Urban had built his reputation in the theater as a stage designer, working on countless plays, musicals, operas, and other productions throughout Europe, before coming to America in 1911. A few years later, in New York, he met Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. and began designing sets for the legendary producer’s Follies. When Ziegfeld later introduced Urban to Hearst, the designer and the publishing giant found a shared love of spectacle—which explains why the Hearst headquarters turned out the way it did. Urban pulled out all the stops, drawing from Art Deco, Secessionist, and Baroque influences. Built from cast limestone, the building features an arching main entrance flanked by tall fluted columns and statues representing the arts. On one side: Music and Art. On the other: Comedy and Tragedy. (Today, the cast-stone structure of the original International Magazine Building serves as the base for the new Hearst Tower, a geometric, glass-paneled forty-six-story skyscraper, which was completed in 2006.)
When Helen reported for her first day of work, Cosmopolitan wasn’t located in the main Hearst headquarters. It was about a block away in the General Motors Building, at the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Broadway. Walking into the lobby, she wasn’t completely sure how she had gotten this far, but here she was, preparing to meet her staff. It was a fair, blue-skied day, and she had chosen a look to match, wearing a simple light blue jersey dress with a ruffle around the neck.
Helen had little idea of what to expect, and her staff knew even less. A few days earlier, a rumor pinballed around the offices of Cosmopolitan. By Monday, Atherton would be out, replaced by a new editor-in-chief, a semi-celebrity. For the rest of the day, the halls buzzed with anticipation and uncertainty about the fate of the office. “Who do you think it is?” secretaries asked each other. “Well, who’s around?” “Who’s been making headlines?”
Vene Spencer, a petite brunette with big brown eyes, dimples, and bangs, was the unofficial leader of the pack, having worked at Cosmopolitan for longer than most of the other secretaries. As the assistant to the fiction editor, she even had her own office, but it was impossible to ignore the chatter of Les Girls, which is what she called Cosmopolitan’s secretaries, herself included. (An aspiring actress, Vene chose the name in honor of the Gene Kelly movie Les Girls.) Each of the major editors had a well-coiffed office girl to fetch coffee, type up line edits, or sort through the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts. They had names like Robin and Diane and wore belted dresses and brooches, nylons and pumps, just as Helen had worn in her day as a secretary, but it never occurred to them that their new boss would be a former secretary herself—or a woman, for that matter. Standing outside Vene’s office, they might as well have been trying to guess the Mystery Guest on What’s My Line? Was Mr. X a controversial figure? Someone who had written for Cosmopolitan in the past? George Plimpton, maybe? Tom Wolfe?
Hearst didn’t officially announce Helen Gurley Brown’s appointment to the press until she showed up for work. Many of Cosmopolitan’s staffers learned the news along with the Associated Press, which also reported that Robert Atherton would be named international editor of Hearst Magazines. Les Girls, for one, couldn’t believe it. “It came as a complete shock,” Vene says. “We, the younger women, thought, ‘Oh, boy! This is going to be fun!’ We knew her now by reputation: ‘Sex and . . .’ We’d all read it. But she was the furthest thing in our minds because no one had ever talked about changing the direction of the magazine.”
Within hours, Helen’s red vinyl diary filled up with lunches and interviews with reporters from Time and Newsweek, but her top priority was to meet the staff, and she started by inviting her new employees into her office. Over the weekend, Atherton had moved out and Helen Gurley Brown had moved in, or at least some of her stuff had. (It was only right to set up a lunch with Atherton for the following Tuesday at the Lotus Club.) Fresh flowers filled the spacious corner office, with its brown-and-orange color scheme, neat bookshelves, and bulletin board. Window blinds and heavy drapes obstructed an otherwise clear view of Huntington Hartford’s newly erected Gallery of Modern Art, a ten-story, white-marble monstrosity with Venetian-style pillars. In the center of the room was a large and rather manly desk, and Helen made a point of standing in front of it, not behind it, as she welcomed the staff into her office one by one.
Earlier that morning, Vene had been filled with apprehension about meeting her new boss. She had dressed extra nicely, but she couldn’t quite quell the flurries of nervous energy as she stood in a sort of reception line to meet Helen. To Vene’s surprise, Helen knew all about her.
“You’re Vene—Vene Spencer,” she cooed, extending a delicate hand. “You live in Brooklyn Heights. Your husband’s an actor.” Vene beamed. She was bowled over. How did Helen Gurley Brown know so much about her life? This woman is a marvel, she thought, as she walked away. She did her homework.
Helen had indeed been researching, including learning and memorizing a few personal details about every employee she met that morning. But some things she just couldn’t have anticipated. Just as David suggested, Helen asked her managing editor, Betty Hannah Hoffman (who was actually listed as “Executive Editor” on the masthead), out to lunch. She had hoped to glean important information about the production schedule and future editorial material, but Betty promptly turned her down. She already had lunch plans, she said.
Instead of dining at the Russian Tea Room, one of her favorite spots to see and be seen, Helen ate a sandwich that someone had brought her. She knew that people didn’t take her seriously—talk was already getting back to her. Along with a failing magazine, she had inherited a relatively small staff, including the previous editor’s assistant, Robin Wagner, and gossip spread quickly. She knew that her underlings had more magazine experience than she did, not to mention bachelor’s and graduate degrees from elite colleges and universities.
In the opinion of more than a few people on staff, Helen Gurley Brown was an impostor and a hack, just an ad woman who had written a sex book—and overnight she had become the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan. “The magazine is bubbling with enthusiasm over its new editor, even though she has no editing experience,” Time reported in late March, quoting Cosmopolitan’s publisher, Frank Dupuy Jr., who churned out the hype: “She is the most exciting woman in the world!”
What was Hearst thinking? Almost instantly there was mutiny in the ranks. Much of the staff began job-hunting, using their expense accounts to treat well-connected friends to lunch, hoping for a phone call on their behalf in return. A few editors considered quitting—a better option than being fired or, worse, having to report to some pseudo-celebrity who didn’t know the first thing about how to run a magazine. Someone started a rumor that Helen Gurley Brown was going to take over Cosmopolitan and clean house, picking off longtime employees one by one, but she had no such plans. At this stage it was more important to find allies.
She started by announcing that she didn’t intend to fire a soul (at least not yet). When she asked to see what was scheduled for future issues, she was surprised to learn that there wasn’t a formal schedule—nothing in writing unless you counted Betty’s chicken scratch. April was on stands, and May was almost finished, so there was no use in complaining about “Dental Reciprocity,” a mind-numbingly dull f
eature about the national shortage of dentists. Helen looked over the stories for June. Wary of alienating her single, working-girl readers, she might have done without a beauty story on bridal makeup and a political article about female protestors titled “Women Dissenters: The New Breed,” but it was too late to make any major cuts, and it was more pressing that she not anger her staff by trashing their hard work. What else did they have planned? Not much, she was told. Nothing that was ready, anyway.
Helen was still getting a feel for the layout of the offices and the different departments, but there was no shortage of article manuscripts. They were everywhere: stacked on top of desks, pouring through the slush pile. In the coming days she would go through them, hoping to find something she could salvage. To her disappointment, many of the submissions were months old and outdated. She could have assigned a junior editor the chore of reading through the manuscripts, but she couldn’t rely on someone else to enforce her editorial vision for Cosmopolitan. So she began the Sisyphean task of reading each and every manuscript herself.
The bulk of the material was boring and bland: stuffy, self-conscious writers writing to impress instead of to communicate. It wouldn’t suit her girls. Disappointment dawned, then fear. If these articles were unusable, how was she supposed to fill the July issue, her first?
By the time she left the office, she was exhausted. If Betty had said yes to lunch, Helen might have been able to ask her about how to fill holes in future issues, stick to the budget for articles and art, find freelance writers, turn ideas into assignments, or how to delegate at least some of the above to her staff, but Betty made no accommodation, no attempt to reschedule her lunch date and help Helen out.
At least she had David. “You don’t need literary people,” he told her that night over dinner at the Russian Tea Room. She needed writers who could deliver the types of pieces she wanted, and she had a few contacts already, he added. “Just get those articles assigned. Don’t pay attention to what people are saying. The only people who matter are the ones who are going to read your magazine.”
After dinner, he offered more reassurance, and they went to bed. As Helen later recalled in David’s memoir, Let Me Entertain You: “I went to sleep but it didn’t take. About four in the morning, David came and found me under my desk in the den. There was just room enough to get into a fetal position and I don’t know exactly how long I had been there. Maybe hours. He brought me back to bed and for the first time, among many times in subsequent years (about three a year) told me this job wasn’t the end of the world; that, of course, I could do it but if I didn’t want to, I didn’t have to—I could leave.”
Helen would tell the story of this night countless times over the years. Like her story about how she wept in front of the Waldorf (“I don’t want to be a magazine editor!”), it became a part of her repertoire of charming, comical little scenes in the madcap movie of her life. She cast herself as the smart but sometimes silly working girl who was always getting in over her head, and David as the charming gentleman who was always bailing her out.
Frequently, she was in over her head—and David did bail her out—but as with some of her other stories, the details of this tale changed slightly with each telling, and people who knew Helen well cast doubt on such scenes. She wouldn’t have crawled under her desk or gotten down on the floor (unless she was doing exercises).
“That wasn’t her,” says Walter Meade (he now goes by Walker Meade), who worked with Helen for many years, first as an articles editor and later as a managing editor, her second in command. “She may have felt like she was threatened, and that’s how she rendered it, but she would never have done that.”
It’s more likely that she would have had a Joan Crawford moment, standing by a window and wanting to curl into a little ball at the thought of what lay ahead. Of course, that’s not nearly as fun to imagine. As Meade puts it: “When it seems to you as though she’s being a storyteller, she is.”
( 19 )
THE JULY ISSUE
1965
“I hope to have a magazine that reflects life as it is lived, and that does indeed include sex. But nothing will be dragged in. It’ll just come along naturally.”
—Helen Gurley Brown in Newsweek, March 29, 1965
A former secretary herself, Helen couldn’t believe the incompetence of a couple of the assistants who worked for her. Her own secretary didn’t take dictation, at least not up to snuff. Occasionally Helen got so swamped she borrowed another editor’s assistant to do it, paying her extra. Sometimes after she finished dictating, Helen passed by the girl’s desk and saw all of her letters stamped and neatly stacked on a ledge, as if waiting for an invisible wind to carry them to their destinations. Apparently mailroom runs were beneath her.
It wasn’t just that secretary. Half of Cosmopolitan’s staff seemed to be against her. Some people had been there for decades, and they resented the sudden change of guard, as Helen’s assistant Robin explained to her one day.
“Mrs. Brown,” Robin said, “it just seems to me that it would have been more fair if they’d brought you in as a managing editor so everybody could get used to the idea—and then you took over.”
Helen looked at the pretty girl standing before her and bit her tongue. Robin was only trying to help, to tell her in the nicest possible way that people thought she didn’t belong here, and they wanted her out.
At some point every day, Helen picked up the phone and called David, anxious to talk, and she was particularly desperate on the day her executive editor, Betty Hannah Hoffman, quit. It was only Helen’s first week as editor-in-chief, and suddenly she was left without a second in command. She needed to find a replacement, fast. She had told the staff that she would get back to them on important decisions, so they expected answers.
David always came to the rescue. Early on, he gave her advice about everything from budgeting to personnel issues, and he committed to reading all of Cosmopolitan’s fiction. Even though she had a fiction editor, William Carrington Guy—better known as Bill—David was ultimately the one who decided which short stories to snatch up and which novels to excerpt. He also reviewed articles. A few times when she was really desperate, David met Helen at work in the middle of the day so that they could hail a cab together and just drive around Central Park. As they drove past still-bare cherry and dogwood trees and the first of the ice-cream vendors with their yellow-canopied carts, he told her what material to buy, what not to buy, what to edit, and what to throw out.
After work the conversation continued at their apartment. In those chilly evenings of early spring, Helen brought home as many articles and stories as she could possibly stuff into her briefcase, as well as the production schedule. She read manuscripts at the office, and in bed, and by the end of her first week she had a clearer sense of the material she could salvage and what she still needed to assign. Maybe it was because she was a writer herself, but she got a real rush out of assigning stories to other writers and promising big money—$1,000 to $1,500 for a major piece.
For the July issue, she asked Doris Lilly, the society columnist and author of How to Marry a Millionaire, to update her strategy on winning a rich man in an article offering concrete tips. Ever aware of the marketing angle, she also slated a fashion feature all about the clothing brand Jax, essentially creating a giant advertisement disguised as a trend story.
Helen wanted the pictures to be sexy, and she got what she wanted from the artist and photographer J. Frederick Smith, whose illustrations of pert-breasted pinup girls she had clipped from the pages of Esquire as a younger woman. For his first Cosmopolitan assignment under Helen, he photographed models who personified her idea of the Jax girl: slender and small-waisted with “a bosom she doesn’t make much of a fuss about but everybody else does,” as the display copy read.
It was while going through Smith’s images from the Jax shoot with the fashion editor Harriet La Barre that Helen spotted The Girl: a honey-blond bursting out of her red-and-white gingha
m cotton dress (legend has it that the photographer turned the dress backward to show off her cleavage), her substantial breasts looking like the main dish on a picnic table. Staring straight at the camera with bedroom eyes and pale lips parted just enough to reveal her top teeth, she looks like she was caught by surprise.
“What’s this one?” Helen asked when she saw her.
“Oh, that’s just one of the rejects,” Harriet said.
“That’s it,” Helen said.
“That’s what?”
“That’s the cover,” Helen said.
“You’re kidding,” Harriet said. “My God, the bust is all hanging out.”
Helen smiled to herself. “What better thing could a bust do?”
HER NAME WAS Renata. Renata Boeck, when she was in the tabloids, but she had decided to not use her last name as a model since no one could pronounce it anyway. She was among the first German models to make it big in America, part of what Life magazine dubbed “The Fraulein Fad.” She was one of the first models to become known by her given name alone, years before Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort became, simply, Veruschka. And she was the first Cosmo cover girl under Helen Gurley Brown.
The truth is, Renata never really cared about modeling. Growing up in Hamburg, she considered it to be low-class. Instead, right after high school, she became a stewardess for a charter airline, a calling that eventually led her to America, where she intended to start a job with another airline, Flying Tigers, in San Francisco. The plan was to take a ship from Hamburg to New York, where she would stay for the week at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, before flying to San Francisco, but she never made it that far. In March 1961, her ship docked in Manhattan. Renata disembarked, and a cluster of photographers from various daily newspapers around the city spotted her right away. “They were looking for someone famous. There was nobody famous, so they all zoomed in on me,” Boeck says. “A few hours later, in three papers, I was on the front cover. It was really weird. I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t!”
Enter Helen Page 13