Over the next few weeks, Susan threw herself into the epic adventure of editing a magazine for teens, rounding up material for the March issue, Eye’s debut. Pete Hamill made a provocative case for drafting women into war, Warren Beatty pondered the pros and cons of the Pill, Lisa Wilson (daughter of Sloan Wilson, who wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) wrote about why she dropped out of college in the States to study abroad in Europe, and Eye’s advice columnist answered questions from young readers, hungry for independence.
Unlike Cosmo, which sounded like a single person with a singular voice, Eye sounded like the generation that created it—and this was a generation that had absolutely nothing to do with Helen Gurley Brown. Then again, she never claimed to be an expert on this crowd. Other than offering some line edits, Helen gave Susan free rein to assign and edit the features she wanted.
Her real issue was with the look of the magazine. Helen wanted it to be slicker and sexier—like Rolling Stone meets young Cosmo. From the start, she butted heads with the art director, who wanted the design and photography in the magazine to be as experimental as the culture it would be covering. For the first issue, Judy planned a pullout psychedelic poster—perfect for tacking on a dorm room wall—and color-saturated photos capturing the trippy, battery-powered electric dresses of designer Diana Dew. (Among other moody settings, she sent the photographer to shoot models “in the quiet setting of Woodstock, an artists’ colony in New York State.” The music festival named for the town was still almost two years away.)
Judy also worked on a profile of the model Cathee Dahmen, who was known for her kooky, curly black hair—the result of a permanent that made her look like a cross between Harpo Marx and Betty Boop. On the day of her shoot for Eye, Dahmen wore a men’s dress shirt with a tie—and at one point, no makeup. Judy loved how she looked naturally and wanted to run the “before” picture of her bigger than the “after,” but Helen wouldn’t hear of it. “Helen and Richard Deems would come down in the limousine and would look at the layouts,” Susan Edmiston says, “and they would insist that she use the photo with the makeup as the full-page photo.”
Susan stayed out of it. She had her work cut out for her conceiving, assigning, and editing so many articles, but sometimes she heard Helen and Judy arguing in the art department. “I was not really directly involved with the conflict, and, in fact, Judy maybe didn’t feel that I supported her enough,” she says now. “I believe that Deems and Helen wanted me to oppose Judith, and Judy wanted me to stand with her against them. I was not directly involved in the conflict. I just kept my head down and did my work.”
UNLIKE Cosmo, Eye didn’t have a prototypical girl. The only constant in the models’ looks from month to month was a shot of irreverence. Headlines were flip: “Should a Proper Young Woman of Impeccable Upbringing Wear an Ankle Bracelet?” read an April feature on hippie anklets. In fashion stories, beautiful people modeled irony and an anything-goes mentality as much as the clothes. Girls wore ties and military fatigues, their hair loose and free. Guys wore necklaces and pink-lensed glasses. Occasionally the magazine ran a beauty feature like “Follow the Dots,” a guide to painting on faux beauty marks and freckles, but for the most part the emphasis was on being made-down instead of being made-up. Trying too hard, an overabundance of hairspray, and skintight dresses were on the way out. Authenticity and earthiness were in. “You could call it cosmetics of the soul—the art of being as beautiful inside as outside,” the rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote of the latest beauty trend.
Eye’s fashion editor, Donna Lawson (now Donna Lawson Wolff), wanted her section to reflect the counterculture, not the Cosmo culture—Janis Joplin was her idea of a style icon—but Helen wasn’t having it.
“I had a meeting with her once—I think Judith was there—and she told me how wrong she felt the beauty and the fashion was,” Donna says now. “She tried to explain, and I held fast to my point of view, because I was young and pretty obstinate, but I really felt it should express the kids at the time, and she disagreed: They looked poor, they looked unkempt.
“She was from another generation, and she just didn’t get it,” Donna adds. “It was beyond her comprehension what we were trying to do.”
TWO YEARS INTO her reign, Helen knew exactly what the ideal Cosmo Girl looked like—unfortunately, her art department did not. Many afternoons at Cosmopolitan, she held a new layout in her hands, crumpled it up, and hurled it into the trash can. If she didn’t like a photo, she didn’t ever want to see it again, and her photo editors learned not to try to show her the rest of the take. If she didn’t like the look of the girl or the style of the dress, it was out.
Nothing angered her more than a failed attempt that she actually had to run, like the August 1967 cover featuring Raquel Welch, who emerged as the sex symbol of the decade after starring in the 1966 adventure film One Million Years B.C. Playing a curvaceous cavewoman named Loana, Welch uttered only a few lines, but no one cared what she was saying. Audiences cared about what she was wearing: a teeny-weeny doeskin bikini that clung to all the right places.
With her new role as “Lust” in the campy British comedy Bedazzled, Welch was an obvious choice for a Cosmo cover girl, but the images from her session with William Connors left Helen cold: He’d given her head shots when what she really wanted to see was Raquel’s great body. Wild-haired and wearing nothing more than a patterned orange Fieldcrest towel, Raquel oozed sex appeal from the waist up, but the whole reason for dressing her in a short towel was to show her off from the waist down. “Raquel Welch was to have been shot in full figure,” Helen wrote in a memo to her art department after the issue went to press. “This was an opportunity to do something different on the cover.”
Unfortunately, against the yellow background, the orange towel looked washed out. Plus, they already did bright yellow for April’s cover, and they had another yellow one planned for the fall. “From lack of communication and because so many people were involved, I didn’t get what I asked for,” Helen fumed. She didn’t care that some of their regular photographers complained about matching the models’ outfits to the no-seam background paper used on set. She wanted hot models in hot “costumes” posing against hot colors—red-on-red, orange-on-orange, pink-on-pink—a different one every month so that readers would know instantly that a brand-new issue of Cosmopolitan was out.
On weekends, David tried to lead Helen away from her typewriter, but it was no use—she never stopped working. She went to bed thinking about the magazine and woke up with new ideas about how to make it better, more visually stimulating.
She wanted more color, more optimism, more energy. She wanted more smiling girls who looked, as she wrote in another memo, “SOFTLY SEXY,” as opposed to Playboy girls who looked “‘chippily’ sexy” or Glamour girls who sometimes looked like tomboys. She wanted more originality in the styling of models—bare arms were sexy, but so were furs and feather boas—and in the magazine overall. Instead of hiring professional models for lifestyle stories, why not use more real-life girls? Instead of letting the article dictate the artwork, why not try it the other way around? A stunning nude photo, a sexy picture of two people kissing, a bold psychedelic design—anything could be a potential launching pad for a story idea.
In general, she wanted “more boy-and-girl-together-pictures” showing couples kissing, hugging, and holding hands—and she wanted the chemistry to feel real. Why use a homosexual male model when they could hire a heterosexual one? The point was for the models to look like they enjoyed sex—and like they were about two seconds away from having it. “We are the one magazine for women which can show so much love,” she reminded her staff. And while men were an important part of the package, she also wanted to picture beautiful women with a sexual identity and desire that were all their own.
Perhaps she explained what she wanted best to the photographer David McCabe, who walked into Cosmo’s offices right around this time to hear about his first assignment for the magazine—a lingerie
shoot—straight from Helen herself.
The fact that she, and not the art director, would be the one briefing him about the assignment was the first surprise. In his years working for magazines like Vogue and Mademoiselle, Mc-Cabe almost never met the editors-in-chief—“they were always off somewhere in an office being treated like gods,” he says—but Helen was hands-on. And she was very clear about what she wanted for the shoot.
“David,” she said silkily, after they had sat down, “I want you to make these girls look, you know, really . . . wet.”
McCabe stared at the prim woman before him, unsure if he had heard her correctly.
“You mean, you want me to shoot them in the shower?” he asked.
“No, silly boy,” she purred. “I want you to make them look excited.”
( 35 )
THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL BYLINE
1968
“We just wanted one cover with somebody with small breasts. It was sort of chic at the time because we all went braless, but Helen wanted her bosoms. And man, we never got one sock thrown to us.”
—Barbara Hustedt Crook
By 1968, everyone knew the ideal image of That Cosmopolitan Girl. On covers, she wore very little clothing—an orange boa and nothing else, or green crocheted pajamas with peekaboo holes—but whatever she wore was bright. Her style was sexy. Given a blouse, she might lose the top button. Given a tunic-and-trousers combo, she might lose the trousers. Her smile was sultry, not innocent. Her stance was confident, and her gaze was direct. As a rule, her breasts were big, and her hair was long and tousled, though occasionally she wore it in a doorstopper beehive or a heap of sausage curls or a quirkily askew updo studded with tiny pink bows. Styles shifted, but Helen remained adamant about one rule. As she later told her art department: “Girls must ALWAYS look man-loving.”
For the cover Helen used only professional models, but inside the book she wanted to picture more “civilian girls,” at least one a month, especially for beauty stories and lifestyle features on subjects like food and decorating. In general, civilian girls were great for trend stories and career roundups, but no matter the subject, they had to look like the Cosmo Girl, attractive and ambitious. After Valley of the Dolls came out, Helen ran such a story about girls in publishing. Rex Reed wrote the piece (after firing him as a film critic, Helen hired him on a freelance basis to write other features), which spotlighted Helen’s former book publicist at Bernard Geis Associates, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who posed in a photo alongside her bestselling author Jacqueline Susann. “For a jazzy company, which BGA is acknowledged by competitors to be, Letty is perfect,” Reed wrote. “She projects the right image, gives the feeling of now.”
In 1968, Helen reached out to another young woman who projected the right image and gave the feeling of now: Gloria Steinem. A few years before in Newsday, Harvey Aronson anointed her the World’s Most Beautiful Byline. “That’s it, that’s her, that’s who. That’s Gloria Steinem, the sweet belle of success, the queen of the slicks, and the sweetheart of the slickers,” he wrote breathlessly. “That’s Gloria Steinem, a career girl who has conquered New York in print and in person.” For the July issue, Helen asked Gloria to conquer the subject of her hair for a larger feature all about brunettes. Cosmo would illustrate the package with photos of famous brunettes throughout history, including Gloria herself.
Despite her initial misgivings about writing for Cosmo, Gloria took the assignment for one simple reason—she needed the cash. She and her roommate had just moved from a cramped midtown studio into a more expensive apartment in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of the Upper East Side. It was a beautiful space, occupying the parlor floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone on a leafy street off Park Avenue, but the rent was high, and Gloria was tired of worrying about money. “I used to get up in the morning and think, Oh, God, we spent ten dollars. Where are we going to get ten dollars?” Steinem says.
Cosmo paid well, so she took the job, sat down at her Olivetti, and pounded out the deepest thoughts she could muster about her hair. She liked it long and loose, and the previous summer, she had bleached two sections of it blond to frame her face.
“I always wear a center part,” read the final article, which bore Helen’s signature italics; “it’s my trademark.”
GLORIA WASN’T THE FIRST of her friends to appear in Cosmopolitan. A few months before, the magazine had profiled her roommate, Barbara Nessim, in an article about working girls with irregular hours. (Barbara, an artist, was featured alongside a professional bassoon player and an owner of a pop-art necktie business.) But unlike other “civilian girls” whose pictures ran in Cosmo, Gloria was a semi-celebrity—she had been a recognizable name ever since she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show. It wasn’t the first time she would be posing as a model, either.
In the early Sixties, working as a contributing editor for Glamour, Gloria frequently posed as the girl model, or model girl. In 1964, when Glamour sent her to London to interview an emerging star named Vidal Sassoon in his Bond Street salon, she wasn’t just the reporter, but the girl in the hairdresser’s chair—she was photographed with a sleek new bob. When Glamour decided to do a story on how to throw a swinging holiday party, a writer and photographer followed Gloria home to the cramped midtown studio she and Barbara shared at the time and captured their effortless cool. “Gloria and Barbara didn’t try to make their apartment into something it isn’t,” Glamour reported. They simply strung up some twinkly white lights, served their guests hot dogs and champagne, put on the Beatles, and frugged their hearts out. “Dear Gloria Steinem,” wrote one reader from Atlanta, “How do I get to be Gloria Steinem?”
While working for Glamour, Gloria wrote witty articles offering readers advice on how to put up with a difficult man, how to pick up a man on the beach, and how to identify their own personality type and then change it. (When asked about her type, she quipped that she aspired to be “Audrey Hepburn in the CIA . . . with bosoms.”) She also landed assignments for Vogue and the New York Times, but the truth was that the career she had cobbled together for herself bore little resemblance to the kind of important writing she once envisioned doing after graduating from Smith magna cum laude. By day she might be writing about textured stockings or tropical vacations, but after hours she was volunteering for political campaigns, attending antiwar demonstrations, and fund-raising for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, a group of migrant farmers led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Gloria Steinem during her days as a “girl reporter,” interviewing Michael Caine, the star of the 1966 film Alfie, for the New York Times. (Copyright © Ann Zane Shanks.)
It wasn’t until she started writing for New York, a magazine that she helped found with editor Clay Felker, that her life and her lifework truly began to merge in her column, “The City Politic.” By the summer of 1968, she would be covering the upcoming elections as well as fund-raising and campaigning for presidential candidate Senator George McGovern, whom she would soon join at the Democratic National Convention. But all of that was still a few months away when Cosmo came calling.
When she originally agreed to do the Cosmo shoot, Gloria thought it would be with the former Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown, who had retired the previous year to start an acting career. (One of her first assignments for New York would be to profile Brown, who later claimed that they had an affair, in his memoir, Out of Bounds.)
“I knew him,” Gloria says now. “Also, nobody told me that I had to wear anything except my own clothes.”
Gloria found a scenario completely different from the one she had agreed to when she arrived at the studio of a young British photographer named Gordon Munro, who worked out of a building at 100th Street and Fifth Avenue. Instead of the football player, Cosmo wanted her to pose with the TV actor Vince Edwards, who showed up sporting dark sideburns and a shamrock-green turtleneck, which he would wear for the photo. Though Gloria was under the impression she, too, would be wearing her own clothes,
the magazine had another plan for her, and it involved “some truly ridiculous costume with, like, snakes around your breasts or something like that,” she says.
Gloria refused to wear the first outfit, but she grudgingly put on the second: a low-cut purple romper with bloomer-style shorts, black stockings, and a bejeweled serpent arm cuff. “I remember her saying, ‘You mean I really got to do this?’” says Munro, who ultimately had to satisfy Cosmo’s beauty editor, and Helen herself. “I had to say, ‘Yeah, you do,’ even though it was the editors who were standing over me with the ax. Once she sort of realized that she was going to do it, she did it, and she was great.”
Looking back now, Gloria realizes she could have refused the whole setup. She could have walked out, but she stayed. Why? “I’m trying to think of an analogy where the whole thing is wrong and you try to fight for details, when actually you should just forget the whole thing?” she offers. “But it was very difficult. The whole thing was set up, and, you know . . . It was a case in which I was a mouseburger, I think. I just went along with it.”
If it had been even a year later, she probably would have done things differently. For that matter, the photographer might have done things differently, too. “I didn’t really know who Gloria Steinem was at the time, to be honest,” says Munro; he was more familiar with Edwards, who played a doctor on TV’s Ben Casey. His biggest concern was figuring out how to create an interesting composition using a white set, two models, and a cluster of green grapes—Cosmo’s nod to Cleopatra. “They had this idea that Gloria was supposed to be this brunette bombshell, and she was enticing this famous man,” Munro says. “She was supposed to be feeding the grapes to him, but [Edwards] didn’t like that idea, so luckily it didn’t happen.”
Enter Helen Page 23