Helen Gurley Brown promoting her second book, Sex and the Office, 1964.
Throughout the years of this persistent telling and retelling, however, one aspect of Helen’s life eluded her capture, and that was her food story. She talked and wrote about food all the time, but never with the sure-footedness that characterized her leaps and twirls across every other subject. Sometimes she said eating was a pleasure, one of the three best things in life (the other two were sex and breathing). Sometimes she said she enjoyed starving herself, gorging only on vitamin pills. In one interview she declared that she made a lot of pasta—“I like it with a light cream sauce with mushrooms, peas and ham.” In other interviews she said her favorite meal was tuna salad. “Eating is sexy,” she announced in a Cosmopolitan story that appeared in the second issue she edited. Years later she told a reporter, “If I eat I feel guilty. And I’d rather feel hungry.” At various times she described herself as a poor cook, a “struggling” cook, “a pretty good cook,” and an expert cook who made a hot breakfast and a full dinner for David throughout their marriage. Once she described her routine at the end of the day: she went straight into the kitchen after work and started cooking, she said, without even stopping to pull off her high heels. Even her editorial instincts, in general so perfectly tuned she was able to reinvent an entire genre of journalism in her own image, went awry when she took on food. A brunch menu in Sex and the Single Girl could have run in Woman’s Day ten years earlier: “Lots of canned sausages piping hot; canned peach halves with grated orange peel, brown sugar, cinnamon and a maraschino cherry on top, baked half an hour; really good coffeecake from the bakery, heated . . .”
But if we follow her culinary paper trail through the archive, zigzagging from hot-fudge sundaes to protein powder to homemade fish cakes, we start to see that even in a maze of contradictions, Helen always knew how to find her way home. All she had to do was focus on dieting. It was as if a pile of celery sticks constituted one ruby slipper and a small portion of broiled fish the other. As soon as she fixed her attention on the challenge of eating as little as possible, she was in a safe space. “Skinny to me is sacred,” she proclaimed—an affirmation of faith that bordered on the ecstatic. When she prepared the sugar-free Jell-O she describes in the excerpt at the top of this chapter, she liked to mix the powdered gelatin with only one cup of water instead of four, so that the dense, rubbery results would deliver the strongest possible hit of chemical sweetening. “Heaven!”
For Helen, dieting was a mission that went well beyond weight loss. It was a crusade against every enemy she had ever imagined lurking in her future, from poverty to spinsterhood to a pitiable old age. Fat—measured by a tiny increase in the number on the scale, a tiny change in the fit of a skirt—was the enemy that stood in for all the rest. Yet the skinnier she was, the more persistently she proclaimed her passion for food, whether she happened to be analyzing cottage cheese as a delicious staple of her diet or black-bottom pie as a delicious temptation to be shunned. Maybe she was always hungry. Or maybe her real passion was for the act of eating, a ritual she carried out with the care and precision that the faithful bring to the telling of the rosary. “Heaven!” she called that heap of rubbery Jell-O. Food and comfort, food and safety, food and emotional support—it’s the oldest relationship there is, and since when did it arrive only in the form of a good chocolate mousse? Every time Helen took a spoon, or possibly she needed a knife and fork, but at any rate, when she came back to her favorite Jell-O night after night, she was tasting perfect calm and sweet security.
• • •
Helen, who was slim and not at all worried about her weight, nevertheless started dieting during the summer of 1959, when she was thirty-seven and engaged to David Brown. She had been planning to marry him since the night they were fixed up at a dinner party, and after their yearlong affair he had reluctantly surrendered to her ultimatum and agreed to become engaged. In her published writing, she treats this chase lightly; but the unpublished version exposes an awkward underside. “He makes me feel like a nothing,” she complained in an undated manuscript filed at Smith with her other papers. The first Christmas they were together, he gave her a string of “beautiful pearls” before going off to New York to spend the holiday with his family. When she took them to be appraised so that she could have them insured, she found the necklace was worthless: he had spent $44.46 including tax. She was astonished and furious. She had seen the way David spent money, he was lavish with it, never stinting when there was a chance to be generous toward friends or family. The maître d’ at Romanoff’s, his favorite restaurant, had gotten a check for $50 as a Christmas tip. Meanwhile Helen, a self-described miser who was normally just as stingy at Christmas as she was the rest of the year, had gone ahead and bought David an expensive pair of cuff links and a box of cigars. In hysterics over his gift, she called her psychiatrist for the first time in two years.
But she didn’t break up with David over the pearls. She didn’t even confront him. She tucked the insult out of sight and resumed her campaign, because she desperately wanted to marry him. David was rich, smart, and presentable, a studio executive with a glamorous Hollywood life; and Helen, as she admitted outright in one of her unpublished memoirs, had been planning to marry money ever since she was a little girl. By the time she met David she had been in Los Angeles for more than twenty years, focusing her zest and a very sharp mind on earning, saving, and strategizing. The long-term goal was a good marriage—good in the sense of both love and finances—but she was also committed to having an enjoyable career and a great social life. Her widowed mother and an older sister confined to a wheelchair were back home in Little Rock, and Helen had put herself through business college before starting out to make a living as a secretary. Every scrap of the polish and charm she brought to a dinner party she had acquired on her own. Now she was doing well as a copywriter in one of the big advertising agencies—so well she had just bought a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL and paid cash for it, an achievement she still recalled with pride decades later—and she firmly believed that she deserved David Brown. But David was resisting. It was nearly a year before he was willing to give her his home phone number; until then she had to call his answering service. Even after he agreed to marry her, he didn’t want to set a date. She spent the summer of 1959 making wedding plans and canceling them five times over because he kept backing out. With each disappointment she grew more frantic and depressed.
That summer Helen’s job took her to Long Beach, California, where the Miss Universe pageant was about to take place. In preparation for the telecast, which would feature interviews with the contestants, she was supposed to meet with them and collect information about their families, their hobbies, and their goals in life. She spent two weeks with these women, most of them in their late teens and early twenties and all of them stunning. Helen had always been pretty and popular, there had been plenty of men in her life; but even so, she had never been forced to compete for attention with eighty of the prettiest young women in the world. Not that she had to go up against them onstage, of course, but she did have to follow them around and ask them questions, and the women were constantly surrounded by mobs of admirers and autograph seekers. To her dismay, she found that she had become invisible—too old and too ordinary looking. “People would walk right through me clawing to get at the girls,” she wrote in Sex and the Single Girl. Meanwhile, she still didn’t know where she stood with David. Would he marry her, or would she end up a lonely, rejected old maid? She drove home more demoralized than ever. On the way she stopped at a store she had heard people rave about for years—Lindberg Nutrition.
Gladys Lindberg was one of the most influential health food authorities in Los Angeles, a city long known as the health food capital of the nation. She and her husband, Walter, had opened Lindberg Nutrition in 1949, stocking it with vitamins, liver powder, soy flour, and all the other products associated with medicinal eating. Her “Serenity Cocktail,” mix
ed by the pint in a blender, was famous across Hollywood and beyond: pineapple chunks, soybean oil, calcium lactate, vanilla, fresh milk, powdered milk, and brewer’s yeast. “Have half mid-morning, half mid-afternoon,” Helen instructed when she published the recipe in Sex and the Single Girl. Her description of that first visit to Lindberg Nutrition had all the elements of a conversion narrative in which a lost soul discovers the source of truth. Gladys, she wrote, was perpetually surrounded by devotees—“like Gandhi”—but on that first visit she asked Helen to stick out her tongue and quickly made a diagnosis of acute fatigue and vitamin deficiency. Helen, who had walked into the store miserable, was so grateful to hear kind words of advice that she burst into tears. Then she bought everything Gladys encouraged her to buy and drove home dazzled with a new philosophy of how to eat.
Her goal at first wasn’t weight loss—she wasn’t fat and never had been—she simply wanted to feel better. The soy-flour pancakes, the glasses of milk, the heavy doses of vitamins were all meant to boost her physical and emotional health; and she swore they worked. They certainly gave her the energy to keep prodding David toward a wedding date as he twisted and squirmed. On September 25, to her immense relief, he finally showed up at City Hall, and a brief ceremony took place. Helen had arranged a small reception at the Hotel Bel-Air, followed by a dinner with friends—nothing elaborate, since she was so afraid of having to cancel at the last minute. It all went smoothly. Then David sprang one last defensive move. It was symbolic at that point, but it gave a nasty flourish to his surrender. After dinner he took everyone to see his favorite stripper, Candy Barr, at the Largo on Sunset Strip. Helen didn’t complain, then or ever. “Candy is a damned fine stripper and I thought it a perfectly fine place to spend our wedding night,” she wrote. She was always gracious in victory.
More important, she had a new source of inner strength, and she would draw on it for the rest of her life. She was dieting. “Suffice it to say I used to spend half my life in doctors’ offices, which is very expensive on a secretary’s salary, and I don’t anymore,” she wrote in Sex and the Single Girl. And she did live until ninety, crediting her nutritional philosophy all the way. But better health was only part of the reason she changed her approach to eating. Helen was nearing forty as she wrote Sex and the Single Girl, and she dreaded what she saw coming: she was about to lose her personal claim on the title “girl.” There was nothing about the designation “woman” that commanded respect in the 1950s; popular terminology wouldn’t start shifting for another couple of decades. Girls had the glow and the sex appeal, whereas women were dumpy and forgettable. Helen was determined to fight. “Whatever your age you can stay cute and petite and sexually attractive,” she told an interviewer years later, and it was the core belief of her life. No, she couldn’t control the calendar. But she could control her appearance. She could look young no matter how many years piled up.
Later on, plastic surgery would become an important lifeline, but Helen’s first and most enduring commitment was to the bathroom scale. Be thin forever, she advised readers; be thin at any price. “If you are already mounds of pounds overweight, you must Do Something or you can’t hope to be blissfully single,” she explained in Sex and the Single Girl. “The few men who insist they like girls plump are usually the ones who prefer cleaning rifles or exchanging jokes in the locker room to flirtation.” Normally Helen encouraged women not to rule out any male over twenty-one without at the very least scrutinizing him with an open mind, but she did maintain a category of bad bets that included “the weirdies, the creepies, the dullies, the snobs, the hopelessly neurotics and mamas’ darlings,” and with them she filed all men who were capable of loving a fat woman. Happiness while being overweight was impossible, she decreed, a cruel fantasy. Any woman living in peace with an imperfect body, any woman who couldn’t be bothered to pare away every unjustifiable scrap of flesh, was plummeting to a lonely, sexless old age. “The fact is, you vote for or against being slender,” she told a reporter. “You vote for or against a sex life as you get older. . . . It’s a straight decision you make in your forties.” Helen made it a little earlier, the moment she noticed that her forties were barreling toward her. The nutritional principles she learned from Gladys Lindberg—eat mostly protein and ingest dozens of pills per day—remained the mainstays of her diet, but the rationale shifted from health to weight. “We health nuts are never fat!” she crowed in Sex and the Single Girl. “The foods that make you sexy, exuberant, full of the joie de vivre are also the ones that keep you slender.” Her fortieth birthday came along right on schedule, but she faced it in full battle dress, including wig and makeup. She had David safely in her keeping now, and she had a credo—“I diet every day of my life.” She would never let go of man or motto.
Not long after they were married, she and David spent an evening with friends that was so perfect, so “particularly happy,” that she treasured the memory for years. They invited people to a private screening in a projection room at the studio, and afterward the group went on to a party given by her advertising colleagues in honor of the newlyweds. There, surrounded by everyone important to her, she proudly showed off her movieland husband. All evening, the champagne flowed and David was at his most charismatic. Recalling that night years later, she wrote of the joy she felt as a radiant image kept racing through her mind: “I’m a wife,” she told herself over and over. “I’m a wife.”
Marrying David was an achievement she celebrated for the rest of her life. No version of her story appeared without David at the center of it, a living amulet that she couldn’t help touching constantly for luck. Every time she mentioned him, in print or in public, she garlanded his name with flattery, praising his brilliance, his good looks, his incomparable sex appeal, and his Hollywood successes. The daily routine of their married life, their luxurious travels, and their occasional squabbles appeared regularly in her books and magazine columns; and she gave him lavish credit for inspiring Sex and the Single Girl and guiding her through the remake of Cosmopolitan. Without him, she knew, she would never have been “Helen Gurley Brown,” a name that would resonate with sex and pizzazz around the world by the end of the twentieth century. But there was another, more fundamental reason why Helen placed her husband at the center of her existence. Simply put, he had married her. When she called him “MY WHITE KNIGHT” in an unpublished memoir, she meant it. What made the Single Girl such an enormously satisfying persona for her was that she wasn’t, in fact, single. She wasn’t dependent upon herself to generate an aura of desirable femininity. She wasn’t a nothing who got cheap pearls for Christmas or a lonely spinster envious of other, luckier women. She was the wife of a glamorous husband, an identity so important to her that she made it the heartbeat of her entire career.
“I am not your truly liberated woman,” Helen claimed in New York magazine, in an article dated August 31, 1970. Five days earlier, tens of thousands of women had marched down Fifth Avenue in the biggest demonstration for women’s rights in half a century, and thousands more had marched and rallied in some ninety cities across the country. It was the first nationwide outburst of the feminist movement, and in its honor New York magazine had approached eleven famous couples “to see how lib is affecting their lives together.” The article opened with Helen and David Brown, and the first thing Helen did was play down her professional ambitions. “I probably became a real hot-shot career lady by being married to David,” she offered. (This was five years after she had presided over a turnaround at Cosmopolitan so speedy and comprehensive, it made publishing history.) “My job just isn’t nearly as high-powered as David’s,” she added. “He’s a tycoon.” David protested that her job was just as important as his—“possibly more important”—and Helen acknowledged that they both operated in the world at a very high level. But she backed away from even the slightest hint that she considered herself David’s equal in the marriage, and she was adamant about how she defined her role. “When I go home, I’m a wife,�
� she declared, “and I do all the cooking.”
To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat—that was a different matter entirely—but to cook. As we’ve seen, Helen’s remarks on the subject of herself and cooking typically flew in all directions; but when she was talking or writing about David, she most often placed herself squarely at the stove. During their courtship, she said, she cooked for him all the time. And as soon as they were married, she fired his longtime housekeeper, whose cooking was terrible, and hired a better one. On the weekends, when the new housekeeper was off, Helen took over the kitchen herself. In later years, even if she was dining on vitamin pills, she continued making “regular” food at night for David, or else she personally heated up the Lean Cuisine she prescribed for him when she was watching his weight. “She’s most pleased when she’s cooking dinner for me,” he confided once, in a story about their “private life.” Most strikingly (and this became a running motif in her accounts of married life), she always cooked his breakfast. And it wasn’t just toast and coffee. He liked Welsh rarebit, eggs Benedict, roast-beef hash, and codfish cakes; and she cooked them from scratch, morning after morning, until she started worrying about his health and switched him to hot or cold cereal. “I take good care of David,” she said firmly.
What She Ate Page 21