Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  Susan didn’t especially like Helen, but she got along with her. Eye’s art director, Judy Parker, did not. She boldly opposed Helen’s ideas and didn’t hesitate to take a stand against her. Eye had a small staff, and it was no secret that Helen and Judy were a bad match, or that the magazine was struggling. In May, Women’s Wear Daily caught wind of a rumor that Eye was “on the blink.” Around the same time, Judy was fired, less than a year after she was hired. The way it happened was especially brutal.

  Shortly after the firing, Susan got a call that Hearst was changing the locks on the doors, presumably so that Judy and her boyfriend, Eye’s chief photographer, Michael Soldan, couldn’t get into the office and steal valuable artwork—a concern that struck Susan as insulting and unfounded. It was a Friday, and they left. That was the last time anyone heard from them. Tragedy struck over the weekend, when Judy, Michael, and another photographer went sailing on Long Island Sound in the middle of a storm, and drowned. Susan got the news from a friend of a friend who called her before information about the accident went public, but it spread soon enough. “I remember hearing that they were on acid, and that the waters were rough,” says then–fashion editor Donna Lawson Wolff. “We were all really heartsick about it.”

  It’s possible that drugs played a role in the accident. “Perhaps they were handicapped in handling the boat, or high on the storm experience, and that affected their ability to function,” Susan says now. But at least a couple of Eye’s young staffers also questioned Helen’s involvement, as they grappled with the sudden loss of their friends. If she hadn’t been so stifling, if Judy hadn’t been fired so coldly, if the locks hadn’t been changed . . . maybe Judy and Michael wouldn’t have gotten on that boat that day.

  In retrospect, it seems unfair to suggest that Helen was somehow responsible for the sad turn of events—people get fired all the time and survive—but all these years later, the theory that she wasn’t exactly blameless is still hard to shake.

  ONCE THE SHOCK of Judy’s and Michael’s deaths subsided, the reality settled in, and it was disturbing. Susan already felt disillusioned when she heard that Hearst was interviewing other people for her job. When her lawyer advised her to start looking for work elsewhere, she took his counsel and quit.

  Along with Richard Deems, Helen personally interviewed thirty-five people, searching for Eye’s next art director and editor-in-chief. Meanwhile, at Cosmo, she had just managed to hire a replacement for her former features editor Harriet La Barre. She found a star in Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner, who became Cosmo’s new articles editor, but with Susan’s sudden exit, Helen felt she had no choice but to send Jeanette downtown to edit Eye.

  She had solved one crisis, but there were countless others, and by August, Helen was close to hysterical. Sitting at her desk one night at seven thirty, she felt sorry for herself for still being at work when everyone else was at home or on vacation.

  Usually Helen consulted David about her problems, but he was in California until tomorrow. She needed someone to talk to tonight, but she couldn’t go to Dick Deems. He was the one who had asked her to get involved with Eye in the first place. She didn’t want to let him down, but the fact was, she couldn’t stand it anymore. Now that Judy and Susan were gone, Helen estimated that Eye was taking up nearly a third of her time—time that she desperately needed to spend on Cosmo.

  At one point Helen tried seeing her publisher, Frank Dupuy, but he was away. So she fed a piece of typing paper into her typewriter and began writing a letter to the vice president of Hearst Magazines, John R. Miller.

  “Dear John, I’m in trouble,” she began. But where to begin, really? She was so overwhelmed, she wasn’t even sure what she needed from him—or so she said. “I seem to be snap-crackle-popping under the strain and it’s not a case of $5.00 more for this one or add one more secretary or get the fiction editor a raise . . . it seems to be the TOTAL EDITORIAL PICTURE.”

  Her staff at Cosmo was falling apart at the seams. Two secretaries had left just a week before. Another girl had turned in her notice even after getting a raise. They’d also lost an assistant art director and a paste-up girl, and they were about to lose someone else in the copy department who was leaving to have a baby.

  Every other day, it seemed, another staffer left Cosmo and someone new and green came in. Helen had been searching for months for a decorating editor who could write and spiff up a room on a shoestring budget, but she was most upset about losing Wagner to Eye, even though she was the one who recommended her for the position in the first place.

  Just the other day, she had finally hired a promising text editor for Cosmo. Well, it turned out he was an alcoholic! Joanne Hearst was another disaster. Helen hired the young heiress to help out in the fashion department, and all the other girls resented her, probably with good reason. Most days, Helen couldn’t even find her, and she wasn’t paying her $175 a week to disappear. And speaking of vanishing acts, her managing editor was MIA. “Where is George Walsh, my strong right arm?” she asked Miller, before supplying the answer: He’d left at lunch to head to Cape Cod.

  George’s weekly jaunts to Cape Cod were hardly her biggest concern, but, she confessed, she was beginning to think about replacing him with someone who cared more about the job—and about her sanity. There was always some looming catastrophe keeping her at her desk until 10 p.m. She worked in the office when other people were at home sleeping. She worked at home when she should have been sleeping.

  She simply couldn’t handle it all.

  “John, I have told you before I am someone who has to be SAVED from herself,” Helen wrote, making sure to mention a couple of job offers she’d had recently. Norman Cousins had asked her to edit McCall’s, and Mary Campbell from Glamour had also approached her. She was bringing it up simply to emphasize her point that good editors were hard to find—and she desperately needed some backup. Something was wrong, and if it didn’t get righted soon, she wouldn’t last another six months.

  As it turned out, it was Eye that wouldn’t last. Hearst suspended publication after the May 1969 issue. Once again, Helen would be able to focus her attention on Cosmo.

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  A GROOVY DAY ON THE BOARDWALK

  1968

  “As they glide back and forth across your television set, you can’t help but wonder for a moment if Mary Quant, John Lennon, Vidal Sassoon and Dr. Timothy Leary ever did happen.”

  —from “There She Is . . . Miss America,” Eye, April 1968

  Having so winsomely put Miller on notice about her unhappiness—and those other job offers—Helen eventually used Cosmo’s newsstand success as a bartering chip for a bonus, while negotiating for a pay raise and a new-and-improved contract. She had no problem playing the damsel in distress, if it helped her get what she wanted from a man, but a new movement was brewing, and its members didn’t pretend to need rescuing. They needed a revolution.

  In 1968, a civil rights activist named Carol Hanisch came up with the idea of protesting the Miss America Pageant to call attention to the women’s liberation movement. Robin Morgan, a poet and member of New York Radical Women who was well versed in guerrilla theater tactics, joined her in crafting a plan and a press release titled “NO MORE MISS AMERICA!”

  All were invited to join in a daylong demonstration on the boardwalk, in front of Atlantic City, New Jersey’s Convention Hall, where the pageant was being held that September. “The Annual Miss America Pageant will again crown ‘your ideal,’” Morgan wrote. “But this year, reality will liberate the contest auction-block in the guise of ‘genyooine’ de-plasticized, breathing women. . . . We will protest the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us.”

  Interested participants were encouraged to bring any bras, girdles, and other “woman-garbage” they had around the house to throw into a giant Freedom Trash Can. “Lots of other surprises are being planned (come and add your own!)” the release read, “but we do not plan heavy
disruptive tactics and so do not expect a bad police scene. It should be a groovy day on the Boardwalk in the sun with our sisters.”

  The organizers discouraged men from joining the demonstration, but invited sympathetic husbands and boyfriends to volunteer as drivers. Other women coming from New York City took a bus. By 1 p.m., more than one hundred women had gathered on the boardwalk. Some sang the lyrics of a new protest song written by the folksinger Bev Grant: “Ain’t she sweet, making profits off her meat. Beauty sells she’s told so she’s out pluggin’ it.” A few of the demonstrators were already famous or would be soon, such as the civil rights lawyer Florynce “Flo” Kennedy and the artist-scholar Kate Millett, but mostly they were unknown members of a still largely unknown cause.

  They were white, black, Hispanic, old, young, wealthy, poor, fat, thin, aproned and oven-mitted, blue-jeaned and braless, freckled and wrinkled, long-haired, gray-haired, and Afro-haired. They were housewives, grandmothers, college students, artists, actors, lawyers, scholars, and career activists, and they had heard about the protest in a number of ways, through women’s consciousness-raising circles, antiwar organizations, and groups advocating birth control and abortion rights. Many were from New Jersey or New York City, and some came from as far away as Gainesville, Florida, and Bancroft, Iowa, but they had all come to Atlantic City for the same reason: to expose the Miss America Pageant for the sham it really was.

  “Atlantic City is a town with class!” they shouted as they marched down the boardwalk. “They raise your morals and they judge your ass!” As passersby gawked, they waved homemade banners, protesting everything from the pageant to the war. MISS AMERICA IS A BIG FALSIE. GIRLS CROWNED—BOYS KILLED. WELCOME TO THE MISS AMERICA CATTLE AUCTION.

  Somewhere, a live sheep bleated—and was crowned and festooned with blue and yellow ribbons in a mock ceremony. Elsewhere, a woman wearing a top hat and her husband’s suit conducted a mock auction, selling another woman wearing a miniskirt who had chained herself to an eight-foot wooden Miss America puppet in a red-white-and-blue bathing suit. “Step right up, gentlemen, get your late-model woman right here! . . . She sings in the kitchen, hums at the typewriter, purrs in bed!” she yelled at the crowd. “The perfect model, she doesn’t talk back . . . you can use her to push your product, push your politics, or push your war.”

  It was theater of the absurd, but nothing compared with the absurdity of the pageant that they were protesting—a beauty contest that, since its inception in 1921, had never selected a black finalist. (Later that night, the first Miss Black America would be crowned just a few blocks away in a separate pageant.) Inside Convention Hall, fifty life-size Barbie dolls in various shades of white paraded around in swimsuits and zombie smiles, waiting to be judged on their special talents and ding-dong answers to questions like “How can people live together more peaceably?”

  Meanwhile, outside on the boardwalk, demonstrators were throwing items of their oppression into the Freedom Trash Can.

  “No more girdles, no more pain! No more trying to hold the fat in vain!” someone shouted, dropping a girdle into the can.

  “Down with these shoes!” another woman cried, tossing in a high-heeled shoe.

  One by one, they stepped up to the can. A woman sick of doing the dishes slammed in a bottle of gooey pink detergent. Another tossed in a pair of falsies. Gradually, the can filled up with bras, false eyelashes, hair curlers, corsets, tweezers, wigs, dishcloths, and pots and pans.

  “Why don’t you throw yourselves in there!” shouted a man standing on the sidelines, one of several hundred bystanders. “Go home and wash your bras!” shouted another, in a growing chorus of insults.

  They were called communists, lesbians, witches, and whores. But they didn’t stop. One mother chucked her seventeen-year-old son’s copy of Playboy. “Women use your minds, not your bodies!” she yelled.

  Someone else threw in a copy of Cosmo. The October issue wasn’t out yet—if it had been, it might have ended up on the top of the heap. “Why I Wear My False Eyelashes to Bed” and “How Not to Get Dumped on His Way Up” were just a couple of the stories advertised on the cover that month.

  THE DEMONSTRATORS ATTRACTED tons of press, but the cameras never caught their crowning glory inside the Convention Hall. Just as the former Miss America, Debra Barnes, was giving her goodbye speech, Hanisch and another protestor hung a banner over the balcony, announcing their arrival in all caps: women’s liberation. As security broke up the scene on the balcony, two other women on the convention floor set off two stink bombs by the stage.

  The millions of viewers at home didn’t see the chaos; they saw just the tearful face of Judith Anne Ford, aka Miss Illinois, when she was crowned as Miss America for 1969. (An eighteen-year-old gymnast, she won over the judges with her skills on the trampoline and her perfectly sculpted platinum-blond hair.) But the message of women’s liberation got through in countless articles about the protest that ran in newspapers around the country in the following days.

  Some articles reported scenes of bra-burning on the boardwalk, but while a few women tossed their bras into the Freedom Trash Can that afternoon, nobody ever set fire to one. Still, women’s lib soon became associated with “bra-burning,” and Helen Gurley Brown, always a friend to advertisers, saw an opportunity to come to the rescue of bra manufacturers everywhere.

  After the protest, she assigned an article about the bra industry that included a history of bras and a guide to buying the hottest styles. Want to talk about liberation? Then talk about Rudi Gernreich’s No-Bra Bra! Want to talk about change? Check out Pucci’s new line of mad, eye-popping prints for Formfit Rogers!

  “The WLM can put down bras all they like,” Cosmo told readers; “most American women are still putting them on.”

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  BEFORE AND AFTER

  1968

  ‘“We had all these young assistants who were basically secretaries, except they couldn’t type or take shorthand . . . they were fertile ground for makeovers.”

  —former Cosmopolitan beauty editor Mallen De Santis

  Many mornings, Helen and David took a cab together to work. He dropped her off at her office, and then continued on to his own, a few blocks away. When they didn’t head in together, Helen took the bus. She loathed the idea of wasting money on a private chauffeur or a taxi for herself, but that wasn’t the only reason why she rode the bus. She wanted to be with her girls: to see what they wore, where they went, what they read. She boarded hoping to see women with their noses buried deep inside Cosmopolitan, but her market research met with mixed results.

  Millions of women read Cosmo, but many preferred not to admit it—including Nora Ephron, who took care to remove her glove if she was reading Cosmo on the bus so that her fellow passengers would see her wedding ring. “I have not been single for years, but I read Cosmopolitan every month,” she confessed in her 1970 Esquire profile of Helen Gurley Brown. “I see it lying on the newsstands and I’m suckered in. ‘How to Make a Small Bosom Amount to Something,’ the cover line says, or ‘Thirteen New Ways to Feminine Satisfaction.’ I buy it, greedily, hide it deep within my afternoon newspaper, and hop on the bus, looking forward to—at the very least—a bigger bra size and a completely new kind of orgasm. Yes, I should know better. After all, I used to write for Cosmopolitan and make this stuff up myself.”

  In fact, when Nora was still a cub reporter at the New York Post, Helen was the first editor to ever offer her a magazine assignment: an article skewering New York’s famously catty fashion rag. When “Women’s Wear Daily Unclothed” appeared in Cosmopolitan’s January 1968 issue, it prompted threats of a lawsuit from Fairchild—a sure sign that Ephron had arrived. (Years later, she wrote to thank Helen for giving her the assignment, which she said was “one of the first things I ever did in which I found my voice as a writer.”) The same year, Mallen De Santis asked her to undergo a makeover for the magazine.

  Nora wrote about her redo in the May 1968 issue in a sequence of shor
t, funny diary entries that accompanied her before-after transformation. In her article, “Makeover: The Short, Unglamorous Saga of a New, Glamorous Me . . . ,” she gave a blow-by-blow account of the experience, from deciding on a new “nighttime look” with Mallen to arriving at Lupe’s hair salon the following day to be styled by the famous high-society Spanish hairdresser. Flourishing a pair of solid-gold scissors, Lupe told Nora his vision for her hair: “de ringlets in de front and de shaggy in de back.”

  Nora allowed “de ringlets in de front,” but ultimately nixed “de shaggy in de back” because it would take two years to grow back her hair if he chopped it all off. Three hours later, with her hair washed, cut, and set with rollers, she joined Mallen and the photographer in a limo headed to his studio, where the makeup artist would take over. After examining her closely, he decided she was “not pretty-pretty” and pointed out everything that was wrong with her face. (“Told me my face too narrow, eyebrows too arched, chin too long,” she later recounted.) He then went about correcting it through the magic of makeup and contour.

  At the end of the day, Nora left the photographer’s studio with glued-on lashes and bright red lips, as well as a seemingly wider face, softer brows, and shorter chin. She wrote the last entry of her makeover journal the next morning: “Ringlets have lost curls. False eyelashes sitting in medicine cabinet. Old me back in the mirror—the last person I expected to see.”

  IN 1968, NORA Ephron already had a recognizable byline, but many of the makeovers that ran in Cosmo were of complete unknowns. For her makeover models, Mallen De Santis didn’t go through an agency. She simply walked down the hall.