Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  Like Helen herself, the magazine was in a constant state of improvement, and soon she developed a system. Cosmo came out once a month, and each issue used up a few dozen ideas, which meant that they needed a fresh crop of articles to assign to writers every week. Editors were responsible for generating story ideas, which they shared once a week during a meeting in Helen’s office. Every four weeks, they reviewed the last issue of Cosmo to determine what they could have done differently. Looking over a feature on swimsuits slated for May, Helen wished that all of the models had been shot underwater, instead of one on a rock and another in a hammock—but the photographer wanted to vary the scenes, and he had gotten his way. She’d had more success with a writer whom she made revise an article about polygamy—too historical the first time around—but she found plenty of other examples to pick apart.

  “Every time an editor sees a new issue of her magazine (unlike the mother who believes her child is perfect), she’s apt to decide, ‘Oh dear, we really could have been a little more amusing here,’ or ‘How did we get so boring there?’” Helen confided in her readers in her May editor’s letter. “She always thinks it could be better.”

  Helen leading a staff meeting in the mid-1960s. She often stood in front of her desk, instead of sitting behind it. (Copyright © Ann Zane Shanks.)

  IN JANUARY 1967, Helen typed up her first memo to the staff on the subject of writing and editing. It was thirty-five pages. “Everybody—and especially me—needs editing!” she began. Recently, she had seen too many mistakes in okayed manuscripts that editors had passed on to her desk for approval. Rather than sigh and stew in her irritation, she decided to teach her staff to do things her way. She started by laying out twenty-four editing rules to live by. “RULE 1. WRITING SHOULD BE CLEAR: Nobody should read a sentence in Cosmopolitan and say whaaaaaaat?” It was imperative that Cosmo’s articles be accessible to the average girl.

  A select few writers could muse on whatever they pleased. To amp up Cosmo’s music coverage, Helen hired Nat Hentoff, a music critic known for writing eloquently and eruditely about jazz in publications like the Wall Street Journal. Working from home, he had complete control over his column, “Cosmo Listens to Records,” and he liked the idea of reaching an audience he might not have found otherwise: young women. On a single page, Hentoff wrote about chamber music, bluegrass, flamenco, and Donovan, the latest singer-songwriter to join the scene, with his album Sunshine Superman. But even Hentoff, whom Helen admired and personally edited, still had to follow the golden rule.

  “She was always interested in clarity. If I used a multisyllabic word, she might say, ‘Maybe you could make that shorter,’” Hentoff says now, adding that he once received a similar piece of wisdom about composition from Dizzy Gillespie. “He said it took him most of his life to learn what notes not to play.”

  For Helen, the point was to reach as many people as possible—to enlighten, not to frighten away. Editors of food and decorating features shouldn’t assume that Cosmo readers owned a soufflé pan or knew what it meant to cut something on the bias. “All instructions for making anything should be understandable to a ten-year-old girl,” she reminded them. Articles should be inspiring and entertaining, but above all they had to be in service to the reader, and, as always, Helen used herself as a model.

  “She edited the magazine for three Helens,” Walter Meade says. “For instance, she kept all the how-to stuff, the decorating in particular, really dumb. She would read ‘How to Make Your Window Shades out of Wallpaper’ very closely, and she would not print something she herself could not do.

  “Then there were the super-sexy covers, which was what Helen the party girl wanted to be,” he continues. “She was ashamed of her small breasts and insisted that her cover girls have ample ‘bosoms,’ as she always called them. The sexy articles and advice columns were written for that girl.

  “The interior well of the book had serious pieces, usually written by very good writers—and that fed her need to be intelligent and wise.”

  Helen was acutely aware of her lack of a formal college education, and through Cosmo, she educated herself and her girls. She gravitated toward erudite people, chief among them David, who sometimes used his own intellectual prowess to school her. (“I just didn’t get David in his boutonnière,” says Lyn Tornabene. “I thought he was the most pretentious man.”) Helen didn’t necessarily share her husband’s taste for great literature, but thanks to David, she knew enough about the classics to drop the occasional literary reference—and to appreciate one that was well placed in an article. Some writers needed to be studied a little, which was fine as long as the story was worth the time put into reading it. Whether she was writing about marriage or the Maharishi, Cosmo contributor Gail Sheehy could do no wrong.

  But most writers could do wrong and did. In an article about drinking, for example, a writer might insult an advertiser whose ads ran in Cosmo’s pages—they lost several pages of liquor ads that way. (“RULE 22. DON’T ATTACK THE ADVERTISER!”) In celebrity profiles, too many writers gushed over their subjects—a sure sign of amateurism—instead of really getting to know the person by talking to their friends, family, colleagues, and lovers. In self-help articles proffering advice, they made girlish promises they couldn’t keep—“25 men will follow you down the street,” for instance—when the point was to give practical tips and set realistic goals that regular girls could accomplish. Worst of all, many freelancers were just lazy, turning in flabby sentences. “Show no mercy toward sloppiness,” Helen exhorted, citing some examples of mistakes made in the past. “Edit ruthlessly.”

  Helen edited ruthlessly, just as she had been edited by David. She liked her sentences as she liked her figure—tight and taut. She commanded the editors to cut sentences in half, to watch out for repeating words, to use complete sentences with subjects and predicates, and to banish clichés. Why not aspire to be a little more like the ad copywriter who had to grab people on their way to work by saying something in a new and surprising way?

  Speaking of which, some words were just out: groovy, fun as an adjective, gizmo, and gals. Dirty words were another no-no. Calling someone a bastard? Fine. Calling someone a good lay? Not fine. Cosmopolitan was a sexy magazine, but its articles had to be tasteful for it to survive. A man could go to bed with a woman, but he could not put his hand up her skirt. They could “make love,” but they couldn’t have “sexual intercourse,” and the writer mustn’t use anatomical parts.

  Some of these rules might as well have been written on a blackboard in a high school English class. Helen was a stickler about grammar and syntax, and she honored other rules to keep the peace with Hearst management and outside advertisers. When it came to actual editorial content, she took a slightly different tack. On her watch, Cosmo published more than a few phony diets and faked letters to the editor.

  “It wasn’t that we didn’t get letters—just that they weren’t necessarily as punchy as we might have liked,” says Barbara Hustedt Crook, who edited the letters section for years and wrote many of them herself. “I can’t remember Helen specifically writing any letters, but have no doubt she did—especially at the beginning, when I wouldn’t have been around.”

  “We made up things all the time!” adds Mallen De Santis, who dreamed up nonsense regimens like the Grapefruit and Hard-Boiled Egg Diet. “In our articles, a lot of the quotes were made up, fictional people. You know, we never really thought much about that. We didn’t have to observe time-wasting rules.”

  HELEN NOT ONLY allowed writers to make up material; she encouraged them, particularly when it came to Cosmo’s case histories. “It’s pretty tough, as you know, to make ‘fake case histories’ sound real,” she told her staff in the same January 1967 memo. While some writers used only authentic sources in their articles, she conceded that not everyone had the time or the research skills to “ferret out the ‘realies.’” But this was nothing that a little creative reporting couldn’t solve. To make her point, she relayed a recen
t conversation she’d had with George Walsh about a feature on widows. Helen had wanted George to call up the writer, Jane Howard, to ask how long one of the widows had waited to go back to work after the death of her husband. But it would be difficult to get the answer she wanted—the widow in question was a composite of five different girls. “Very good!” Helen wrote. “I hadn’t realized she was a ‘fake.’ The challenge is always to try to supply enough details to make the men and women sound real.”

  Likewise, writers should feel free to change the subject’s background—fewer case histories should be set in New York City. Say they were writing about a secretary from Manhattan. Why not make her be from Reno or Raleigh? “Only 8 per cent of our readers live in New York City,” Helen reminded her editors. They needed to focus on reaching the other 92 percent.

  Who were the 92 percent? They were the girls living in small towns and suburbs across the country, riding buses to work, and blowing their hard-earned money on lunch when they should have been saving up for their first apartments. They were the girls who called Cosmo’s offices, looking for some answers and tying up the receptionists with their urgent questions, because they didn’t know who else to ask about what dress they should wear for a date on Friday night or whether it was okay to call a guy who hadn’t phoned for three days. They were the girls who depended on Cosmo for advice on how to survive a job interview or an affair.

  They were mostly white, but not all. Some were black women who might have been pleasantly surprised to see an article called “The Negro Girl Goes Job Hunting,” about the bigotry dark-skinned women regularly encountered while looking for employment. “Hey, beautiful dark girl,” wrote Ruth Ross, then an assistant editor at Newsweek, “go on out there and get your job!” (Despite this rallying cry, Helen’s own staff at Cosmopolitan was overwhelmingly white in the late Sixties, a black woman named Mary being the exception. She was known as “the mailroom girl,” though she appeared on the masthead as an editorial assistant and took on many other responsibilities, growing close with Helen in later years.)

  Other women recognized themselves in Cosmo’s first-person essays like “I Didn’t Have the Baby, I Had the Abortion,” described as “a true story, told by a young woman for whom you cannot help but have sympathy.” “I’m still shaking! That girl is me—two years ago,” a reader from Boston wrote in. “Everything she said, her innermost thoughts—they were mine.” Helen rarely gravitated toward political articles, but certain issues directly affected the lives of her 92 percent, and none more so than the war. Every month, the draft claimed thousands more of America’s men—many of them young, white, and middle class.

  Helen regularly ran articles about where to find eligible bachelors, and in 1967, Vietnam was an obvious, if ludicrous, place to look. Shortly after more than one hundred thousand antiwar protestors gathered in Central Park to demand a stop to the bombing that April, Helen published a shockingly tone-deaf article selling the glamorous side of Saigon, where a girl could soak up the sun and lap up the attention of so many single young men. What was a little artillery fire in the background compared with the bachelorette’s battleground back home?

  “COULD YOU WORK IN VIETNAM?” Cosmo asked readers in the July 1967 issue. Reporting from Saigon, the writer, Iris George, interviewed several career girls. One was an American Red Cross recreation aide whose responsibilities included going on coffee runs and entertaining the troops with games of charades and tic-tac-toe.

  “The boys think we’re pretty special,” she confided. “You have to watch it. The constant attention can go to your head.”

  “A stateside girl in Vietnam feels like Miss America,” added a program director for the USO. “It’s not that we’re all beautiful, but there are so many of our men here and so few women.”

  It wasn’t the first time Helen promoted the benefits of looking for men off the beaten path. In Sex and the Single Girl, she had recommended taking up sailing, going to AA, or joining a political club (Democratic, Republican, or both) to get a little closer to the opposite sex. She could be shameless, but she really topped herself when she sold the pluses of manhunting in a war zone.

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  NOBODY OVER THIRTY

  1967

  “The trouble with most teen magazines is that they’re too parental. They always seem to be talking down and teaching. Eye won’t be that way because we’re all nearly the same age.”

  —Susan Szekely, “Nobody over Thirty,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 11, 1967

  They came by thumb and by Greyhound bus, braless and barefoot, with feathers and flowers in their hair. Some came because they were disillusioned with the war or with the fight for civil rights or with their parents, and they wanted to be with other people who understood their ideals. Others came because it sounded like fun. They came for free food and free love and free drugs and free music. They came to be free. In 1967, spring break turned into the Summer of Love as tens of thousands of high school kids and college students from all over the country flocked to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, home to Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and a new breed of young hipsters who called themselves hippies.

  That May, Hunter S. Thompson explained their kind to readers of the New York Times—“The word ‘hip’ translates roughly as ‘wise’ or ‘tuned in.’ A hippy is somebody who ‘knows’ what’s really happening, and who adjusts or grooves with it,” he wrote—but by then, images of flower children saturated the media, beckoning more than 75,000 young people to join a revolution that started long before they got there.

  They’d read about the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where Timothy Leary told a crowd of thousands to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” poet Allen Ginsberg led a Hindu chant, and the Grateful Dead expanded minds and the future of music in a cloud of incense and marijuana smoke. They had heard about the Diggers, a group of anarchists and guerrilla theater performers who spread their anticapitalist message by salvaging other people’s trash to provide the masses with everything from free stew to Free Stores, where nothing was for sale and everything was for the taking.

  By July, the Haight was overrun with gawking tourists and television crews wanting to catch a glimpse of “Hippieland” and the thousands of runaways, many of them barely into their teens, who slept in the park and loitered in the streets, hungry and half-conscious. By October, the same month that Hair premiered off-Broadway, the hippie was dead—symbolically, at least. As a final protest, the Diggers led a mock funeral through the streets to mourn “Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media.” They rejected the commercialization of their culture, but more important, as one of their members, Mary Kasper, later explained, “We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, don’t come out. Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live.”

  The revolution spread with every joint passed, every postage stamp laced with LSD, every thumb lifted, and every subscription to a new rock magazine that promised to document and celebrate both the music and the movement it spawned. In his editor’s letter for the debut issue of Rolling Stone, which featured John Lennon on the cover, the young publisher Jann Wenner captured the cynical idealism of a generation: “We hope that we have something here for the artists and the industry, and every person who ‘believes in the magic that can set you free,’” he wrote, wary of “sounding like bullshit” should he explain its mission much further.

  As promised, Rolling Stone spread the magic around the country—along with the message of a movement and a generation that advertisers wanted to reach. In some ways, selling anything to hippies was counterintuitive, but that didn’t stop the biggest corporations in the world from trying to cash in on their culture. “If you want to swing college, come to the type-in,” Smith-Corona quipped in an ad for its new electric portable typewriters. “Pick a flower. Power. Do a daisy. Crazy. Plant your stems in panty hose,” read an ad for Hanes nylons in daisy-printed, fluorescent colors. Canada Dry winked at Timothy Leary with its slogan for Wink, “Join the col
a dropouts,” while Diet Rite Cola invited everyone to “Join the Youth Quake,” not just kids.

  At Hearst, Helen Gurley Brown was busy creating a new glossy aimed at the bearded-and-braided set, when she wasn’t working on Cosmo. A kind of Life for college kids, Eye would target young men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty, part of the booming youth market that Richard Deems estimated to be about 26 million strong. He appointed Helen as Eye’s supervising editor, until they got the magazine off the ground.

  One of their first hires was a thirty-year-old art director named Judith (or Judy) Parker, who had overseen the design of New York magazine when it still appeared in the World Journal Tribune. Tall and thin with translucent white skin and her long, black hair parted and plaited in twin braids, she was beloved by artists and musicians in New York’s counterculture scene. Soon after hiring Judy, Helen found Eye’s editor in Susan Szekely, a twenty-seven-year-old Bryn Mawr graduate who would soon change all of her stationery to reflect her married name, Susan Edmiston. When Hearst plucked her from the New York Post, Susan had been writing her own nationally syndicated column, called “Teen Talk.” (Around one hundred pounds with dirty-blond bangs, she could have passed as a teenager herself.) Like her supervisor, Susan had no prior editing experience when she took the helm, but she had established herself as a national authority on all things teen, from the mods to the Monkees, and Helen desperately needed a guide.

  In September, Hearst announced its plans for Eye to the press, and soon afterward, Susan was featured in a big write-up by Eugenia Sheppard in Women’s Wear Daily, along with a taste of her plans to reach the Now Generation, with the help of “a dozen girls and men all under 30,” as Sheppard reported, making no mention of their much older supervising editor. Around the same time, the young staff moved into their new offices, located in an old art gallery just south of Washington Square Park on LaGuardia Place.