Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  “She had a nickname: the Iron Butterfly,” Vene Spencer says now. “We knew she had that moxie in her. She’d come across very sweet and timid and delicate, but she had the fighter in her. She was fierce.”

  When Life ran the article in November, it was with the headline “Soaring Success of the Iron Butterfly,” and it was a major PR coup for both Helen and Hearst. In the article, Welles corrected a persisting misconception that the company was bleeding money. On the contrary, earnings were up, and the company was reportedly worth more than $100 million.

  As for Cosmopolitan, which had been aimless and unprofitable under the direction of its former editor, it was making publishing history, thanks to Helen Gurley Brown, who, in addition to hitting the million-copy mark in circulation, had brought in a torrent of new advertising, raising the third-quarter ad revenue 50 percent over 1964. In just a few months, she had managed to turn the magazine into a flashy, phenomenal success. When Welles asked Frank Dupuy Jr. for a comment, the publisher was ecstatic, but not everyone was so supportive. A former freelancer for Cosmopolitan, Betty Friedan, called Cosmo’s new outlook “quite obscene,” showing “utter contempt for women.”

  “It an immature teenage-level sexual fantasy,” she grumbled to Welles. “It is the idea that woman is nothing but a sex object, that she is nothing without a man, that there is nothing in life but bed, bed, bed.”

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  RESOLUTIONS

  1966–1967

  “This is it. The turning point. Black, white and gray are out of the living room. Red, green, blue, yellow, vermillion, fuchsia, magenta and company are in—very, very in.”

  —“TV Set Buyers Guide,” TV Guide, 1966

  In the beginning of 1966, President Johnson ordered U.S. warplanes to resume air strikes in North Vietnam after a thirty-seven-day pause in bombing failed to bring about a peaceful settlement with Hanoi. A few days later, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 landed on the moon. Across the country, Americans tuned in to brand-new RCA Victors and Westinghouse Jet Sets to watch grainy footage of soldiers fighting their way through rice fields, and images of the lunar landscape, which turned out to be hard and rocky, not blanketed with dust, as scientists previously believed.

  There was another force battling the war and the moon for airtime. Her name was Jacqueline Susann, and she burst into living rooms in full color: a vision of bronzed skin, glossy dark-brown hair, Day-Glo eye shadow, and loud Pucci dresses. She was made for color TV, and in a sense, so was her new book, Valley of the Dolls, the salacious saga of three fame-seeking friends who become addicted to pills, or “dolls,” while attempting to make it big in showbiz. Long before she touted her novel on talk shows and game shows, her husband, the movie producer and former press agent Irving Mansfield, screen-tested potential book covers to make sure that the title would read clearly when Jackie held it up for the camera. They eventually went with a crisp white jacket, scattered with brightly colored pills. “A new book is just like any new product, like a new detergent,” as Jackie would put it. “You have to acquaint people with it. They have to know it’s there.”

  In February, Valley of the Dolls exploded onto the scene like a supernova. Bantam published the book, but the team at Bernard Geis Associates nurtured, edited, and publicized it. As usual, Letty Cottin Pogrebin launched the publicity campaign in style, mailing out teasers written on faux prescription pads: “Take 3 yellow ‘dolls’ before bedtime for a broken love affair; take 2 red dolls and a shot of scotch for a shattered career; take Valley of the Dolls in heavy doses for the truth about the glamour set on the pill kick.”

  Using Sex and the Single Girl as a model, Irving and Jackie embarked on a promotional tour that would go down as legend. Jackie went everywhere, and so did Dolls. It sold in bookstores and in delicatessens, to suburban housewives and the Hollywood elite. Soon everyone was talking about Jackie’s pill-popping heroines, Anne, Jennifer, and Neely, while gossip columnists speculated about their similarities to real-life celebrities. (Was troubled Neely based on Judy Garland?) In early May, Dolls took the number-one slot on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for twenty-eight weeks.

  Even after extensive edits, the book itself wasn’t exactly great literature, but it was a game-changer in terms of marketability and mass appeal. As Jackie told Life, she had no interest in turning a phrase like Henry James. “What matters to me is telling a story that involves people. The hell with what critics say. I’ve made characters live, so that people talk about them at cocktail parties, and that, to me, is what counts.”

  Critical reaction to Sex and the Single Girl had been brutal, but it was nothing compared with the reception of Dolls. Most reviewers simply dismissed the book as trash, not bothering to review it, even as it sold out in stores.

  The Browns thought Valley of the Dolls was a near-perfect novel. Months before it was published, David bought the movie rights for 20th Century Fox and asked Gloria Steinem, by then a well-known name in New York media circles, to write the screenplay.

  “He must have gotten very far down the list because I’d never written a script in my life,” Steinem says. “I read it, and I said no—this is one of the worst books ever written by a human hand.”

  The Browns remained undeterred. David cast around for another screenwriter, while Helen secured an excerpt for her readers in Cosmo’s June issue, later giving Jackie a blurb for the paperback edition of her book. “MADDENINGLY SEXY,” she raved. “I wish I had written it.”

  IN FACT, HELEN was at work on a new book with Bernard Geis Associates, Outrageous Opinions, a collection of her columns for “Woman Alone.” She was also developing a new TV talk show by the same name and appearing in panels and talks around the country on subjects ranging from blush to age to the new tide of women in advertising. Helen titled the last talk “What Business Men Should Know About Girls.”

  “Women are interested in everything men are interested in,” she told the Adcraft Club of Detroit. “In fact, women are much like men—more than you think. Their emotions are the same. They have massive egos. They love publicity. They’re vain.” More and more, women were entering the man’s world, she continued, and they had a lot to offer. “Let the girls into your agencies. Not just that one gal you have for status. Let them all in.”

  Life was busy, but that’s how the Browns liked it. Toward the end of 1966, they went to Europe on a whirlwind tour. The first-class pampering began the moment they stepped onto TWA’s overnight flight to London, where they both had business meetings. It was an eventful week, filled with breakfasts with writers, lunches with British agents and magazine editors, cocktails at the Savoy, and post-dinner plays.

  Walking with David past pubs in the early evenings of fall, Helen thrilled to the sight of so many men, spilling out onto the streets in their suits. London was such a male city, and it made her feel so female, switching along in one of her favorite Rudi Gernreich dresses, in tiger or zebra print. In New York she felt as though her hemlines were usually two inches shorter than anyone else’s—anything longer would have drawn attention to her wide hips—but on Carnaby Street, she fit right in. Almost. She was about twenty years older than the kids in their thigh-high space boots, cropped tops, and Mary Quant miniskirts.

  From London they continued on to Sutton Place, in Surrey, for a tête-à-tête with the World’s Richest Man, Jean Paul Getty, who solicited Helen’s advice on women as they drank tea. From there, they went to Palma, Majorca, where they spent one day with Fox’s president and David’s boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, and another with the travel guide scribe Temple Fielding, who literally wrote the book on Europe, and served up an eight-hour lunch with pink sangria at his villa overlooking the glittering water. Next up: Athens and then Rome. One mustn’t appear unkempt while touring the Acropolis, and Helen didn’t. She came equipped with dark sunglasses, silk scarves, false eyelashes, and several chic dresses. When she traveled, she traveled in style, and it always cost her.

  In 1966 alone, Helen spent $3,
343.30—the equivalent of nearly $25,000 today—on dresses, shoes, suits, coats, purses, jewelry, lingerie, and one luxurious lynx coat. The same year, she meticulously recorded her measurements. On March 1, 1966, her bust was 34; her waist was 24½; and her hips were 38½. Shortly after Thanksgiving, she had plumped up to 35-26-40.

  Helen was obsessive about her weight, and she had a will of steel, which friends who ate with her witnessed firsthand. “We lunched at the Tea Room,” says Lyn Tornabene. “I would be eating blini or something enormously fattening, and Helen would be eating a lettuce leaf, staring at my food, saying, ‘Oh, that looks so good. Is that good? It looks good.’ I wanted her to take a bite, but she wouldn’t. In my presence, in all the years that I knew her, she probably never consumed at one meal more than 150 calories.”

  For Helen, staying thin was a lifelong vow, and it was one that she honored. In her January 1967 editor’s letter, she wrote down some of her other resolutions for the new year. In addition to buying “fewer but better clothes,” she resolved to try to keep her face relaxed, no matter how stressed she felt; buy some nice stationery (no more typing paper); and monitor David’s diet, which also affected hers. “There’s no use resolving anything major, of course,” she wrote. She could tinker around, but it was too late for a total overhaul: For better or worse, she was stuck with herself.

  HELEN WASN’T ALWAYS the best listener, but she did take an interest in some of Cosmo’s young secretaries, whose adult lives were just beginning. Sometimes she treated editors and assistants to lunch for their birthdays. Once, she even brought Les Girls to the famous “21” Club. “None of us had ever been there or would have dreamed in a million years of ever gaining entry to a place so posh,” Vene Spencer says. The club opened its doors for presidents and movie stars, not secretaries, but Helen knew the staff, and they treated Les Girls like la crème de la crème. Without her there they never would have gotten past the wrought-iron gate, let alone the brick wall that hid the secret wine cellar. Watching the steady parade of waiters carrying silver wine buckets and preparing steak Diane tableside, Vene felt grateful to Helen, even though she didn’t stick around. She had work to do back at the office. “But you ladies stay,” Helen said, waving her hand like a wand. “I’ve arranged for you to have a private tour of the wine cellar.”

  As a rule, Helen couldn’t stand the loud girls who took up her time with long-winded stories about their roommates or their noisy neighbors. She gravitated toward the shy girls who watched her, just as she once had watched her bosses. The quiet ones were often the smartest, and she liked to draw them out with questions: “Where do you live?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you want to get married?”

  Vene Spencer (middle, in white collar) and her friends, photographed on the town in the 1960s. (Courtesy of Vene Spencer.)

  If one of those assistants had a dream and the will to make it happen, Helen helped her. If a girl wanted to get her nose done, she recommended the plastic surgeon. (Helen had her nose done at age forty.) “Both Robin and I got our noses fixed, and it was Helen Gurley Brown’s doctor,” says Vene, who was going through a divorce at the time. “She would feature an article about how to move on after a divorce—move on, don’t grieve—and there was something in one of the articles that said, ‘If there’s something you don’t like about yourself, get it fixed.’” When Cosmo published articles like “Do Be an Actress,” they spoke directly to Vene, who lived for doing summer stock and dinner theater and the occasional TV interview, but felt self-conscious about her profile. So, she got her nose fixed—no more bump, no more slump, and she had Helen to thank for it all.

  Not that her support was totally selfless. In recognizing their individual talents, Helen got the most out of her assistants, like the time she summoned Vene into her office for an impromptu rehearsal. They rarely spoke one-on-one, and Vene worried that she had done something wrong as she walked down the hall, but Helen quickly explained what she needed. She had been invited back as a guest panelist on the game show What’s My Line? (In December 1966, along with show mainstays Arlene Francis, Steve Allen, and Bennett Cerf, she had to guess the identities of a tour guide to the Egyptian pyramids, a maker of billiard balls, and Steve Mc-Queen.) Everyone in America would be watching, and she had to be prepared. She wanted Vene to run lines with her—a practice session, a trial run before the taping.

  For the next couple of hours in Helen’s office, they played What’s My Line? Vene took on different identities, and each time Helen asked questions trying to uncover her occupation. Once in a while, Helen broke in to compliment Vene’s responses, but she didn’t appear to be having fun. It wasn’t just a game; it was a test, and one she had to win. “She wasn’t taking any chances,” Vene says. “She didn’t want to go on and make a fool of herself. It was work. This was her public image that she had to maintain.”

  At the end of their session, Vene got up to go back to her office, and Helen opened her desk drawer.

  “I hope you will accept this as a little token of my appreciation. You were wonderful,” she said, handing Vene a small package. “You’re still young. You can get away with this.”

  “Thank you so much,” Vene said, opening the package to find a pair of sequined false eyelashes. “They are lovely.”

  “I was laughing to myself, thinking, Where am I going to go with these?” Vene says now. “But it was so typical of her. She was very feminine. Everything about her—except her work ethic.”

  VENE WAS A valuable assistant, but she proved herself to be indispensable after Bill Guy had a heart attack in the office. One minute, everything was fine, and the next he was panting: “Loosen my tie! Loosen my tie!”

  Unsure of what to do next, Vene went screaming down the hall. Somebody called an ambulance, and suddenly her boss was being carted off on a stretcher. Over the next few days, Vene visited Bill at the hospital and kept him up to date about what was happening at the office. As the days of his recovery turned into weeks, she started doing his job in addition to her own. “I was buying the fiction, negotiating with the agents,” she says. “Actually, when he was sick in the hospital, we got submissions that really interested me. Among them was Joyce Carol Oates.” Bill never liked her style—too downbeat and dark—but Vene loved it, and she pushed one of her short stories through to Helen’s desk while Bill was laid up.

  Bill eventually came back to the office and worked a couple of hours at a time, but his Cosmo days were almost over. When he resigned, Vene quit to fully devote herself to acting. Around the same time, Walter Meade turned in his notice to take a job as managing editor at the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club.

  In a matter of months, Helen had lost her fiction editor, her articles editor, and a resourceful assistant. She was sorry to see Vene go, but she was also proud of her. Vene was a true Cosmopolitan Girl, seizing the day and the spotlight. When she started landing lead roles in musical theater productions in New Hampshire, Helen was the first to congratulate her on a glowing review and put it up on the bulletin board. Not many people managed to do what they really loved to do and get paid for it—and the office couldn’t stop talking about her, Helen wrote to Vene, who held on to her letter for nearly fifty years.

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  THE 92 PERCENT

  1967

  “Everyone has an identity. One of their own, and one for the show.”

  —Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

  In 1967, Helen made her TV debut with Outrageous Opinions, a half-hour talk show syndicated in eighteen cities. Every weekday at 2 p.m., New Yorkers could tune in to Channel 9 to watch Helen ask famous people about their sex lives. Casino Royale’s blond bombshell Joanna Pettet gamely dished about her first real-life girl-on-girl encounter, but more than a few guests were unlikely interview subjects, to say the least. Woody Allen confessed his perverse attraction to mailmen (“Probably the uniform and the leather pouch get me,” he joked), while Norman Mailer fielded Helen’s questions about his masculinity. “You’r
e the first lady analyst I’ve ever seen in pink,” he fired back.

  Canceled after one season, Outrageous Opinions was a failure, one of the few Helen ever had. She was faring better at the office, playing Masthead Musical Chairs. In addition to hiring a new art director, a Danish woman named Lene Bernbom, she found a new articles editor, Junius Adams (he later became the fiction and features editor), and she soon hired back Barbara Hustedt, who had graduated from college, to fill Vene’s old post as assistant in the fiction department. She let Harriet La Barre focus on editing the travel pages, now that Mallen De Santis was in charge of beauty.

  A tall and striking woman with the understated elegance of a Vogue editor, Mallen came to Cosmo from Brides magazine, where she served as editor for one year, after editing beauty features for the teen magazine Ingenue. She was also a published author: Her 1963 book, Bubble Baths & Hair Bows: A Little Girl’s Guide to Grooming, dispensed tips for the eager-to-please child on everything from how to brush her hair to how to wash her little white gloves. Under Mallen, Cosmopolitan’s beauty section soon became a grown-up version of Bubble Baths & Hair Bows, only unlike the little girl featured in the book, the Cosmo Girl wanted to please a man, not her mother.

  A graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, Mallen not only knew the latest Coty perfume or cure for stretch marks, but she was well-read in many other areas, and Helen consulted her on matters far beyond the beauty section. “I did what Helen referred to as ‘material evaluation,’” Mallen says. In addition to planning her own section six months ahead, Mallen read Cosmo’s major stories—the territory of the feature editors—and sent her notes back to Helen, who welcomed the extra set of eyes. (“She really relied on Mallen being her guidepost,” says Eileen Stukane, a former features editor, sounding sympathetic toward Helen rather than begrudging of the beauty editor. “She thought Mallen was the staff intellectual. Mallen would sort of make pronouncements, and Helen would rely on her as being the smart one.”)