What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  If Helen could have chosen a national anthem for women, it would have been the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein song “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” which had an opening line worthy of being inscribed on her stationery: “I’m a girl, and by me that’s only great!” Absent a song by way of introduction, she made a point of projecting girlish charm, and she worked it expertly. A reporter from Life magazine described what it was like to meet her: “When she receives a male visitor in her office, she will smile bashfully, float away from her desk to a couch, curl up her legs, wrap her arms around a pillow, raise her eyebrows and begin talking in a soft, very intimate voice about how small and tiny she is and how she uses a padded bra and Pan-Cake Makeup and wears a wig and false eyelashes.”

  Helen was devoted to this particular version of herself, and year after year she played the role with determination. “I’m the geisha girl,” she used to say. Sometimes she even cast herself as a submissive little wife who turned over her paycheck to hubby—an image considerably at odds with her strong belief in financial independence for women. Indeed, it was an image at odds with her own marital history. As a bride she had been eager to jump into the family finances, and as soon as David opened the books to her, she scanned them disapprovingly and introduced a few economies. In the course of the 1960s, however, she pulled back from the job of family accountant, or at least she changed the tone of her public utterances. By 1976, she was telling the press that she could write herself a check anytime she wanted, but she much preferred having David give her an allowance. “Money is sexy,” she told a reporter, and snuggled up to her husband as she said so.

  Money was sexy, but asserting control over her own earnings, at least in public, was not. “Sexy” may well have been the most important adjective in Helen’s vocabulary; she used the term in every possible context from pedicures to stock portfolios, always to bestow an impression of perfect desirability. But the qualities that made a woman sexy were overwhelmingly identified with her being, as Helen put it, “a geisha.” Helen believed in equality between the sexes, but she wanted it to operate silently in the background, like good air-conditioning. Out front she liked to see the natural order of things—girls who were cute and appealing and men who were powerful. She was the rare feminist, possibly the only feminist, with an unabashed commitment to male supremacy.

  • • •

  The persona eventually identified with “Helen Gurley Brown” began to take shape about a year after David and Helen got married, when Helen’s career in advertising suddenly swerved off course. Without notice, her boss informed her that she was making more money than any other female copywriter; consequently he had decided to cut her salary in half. David urged her to quit at once, but Helen accepted the pay cut. Justifying this decision in the autobiography she drafted years later, she explained that she didn’t really need the money and that she would not have been able to find another good copywriting job. After all, she pointed out, the number of women copywriters and the number of decent jobs available lined up just about evenly. Neither of these points makes much sense: needy or not, Helen kept a death grip on every dollar in her possession, and to relinquish a huge chunk of her potential earnings would have been agonizing. What’s more, she was climbing steadily higher in her profession, albeit on the female side of it. She didn’t have to bow to this extraordinary insult: she was employable. Yet she bowed, and the reason can be gleaned from her description of what happened when she heard the bad news. Helen was personally, not professionally, devastated; all she could utter in response was, “Don’t you like me anymore?”

  She didn’t ask him about the quality of her work, she asked him about herself: was she suddenly unlovable? Not pretty enough, not young enough, not skinny enough? Something had gone badly wrong, and she panicked. Of course she would stay in the job. Of course she would work as hard as ever. As for the loss of income, she soothed herself by stealing stamps and carbon paper and smuggling them out of the office.

  But she also began to wonder what else she could be doing, and one day she asked David, who had left the movie business temporarily and was working in publishing, if he had any ideas for a book she could write. He said yes, he had just outlined an idea and sent it to an editor in New York—maybe it would suit Helen. The book would be about single girls and how they arranged their sex lives—what they wore, how they set up their apartments, how they learned to talk and flirt. “I said, ‘That’s my book! Get it back!’” The two of them went to work, Helen drafting quantities of material and David editing—“ruthlessly,” she said later. “We had bloody battles, none of which I ever won.” David insisted on rewrite after rewrite, especially when they were working on the chapter about how to conduct an affair. Helen had to revise it three times. Later on she regularly gave him credit for the book’s success, phrasing her own role in strangely passive terms: “In other words, though he only wrote a few lines of it, David was able to produce a hit out of me.”

  What he produced “out of me” was a character, a literary construction that would personify the author of Sex and the Single Girl and, soon, everything else surrounding Helen’s name. The lifeblood of “Helen Gurley Brown” was always going to be her zeal for sex, hence the special attention David gave to the chapter on having an affair. But judging from an early draft of the book in the Smith archive, another chapter that needed a heavy edit was the one about food. The “Helen” that was under construction had to be able to pull off delightful meals and parties with the same airy self-confidence she brought to the bedroom, the office, the department store, and the hairdresser. For the real Helen, however, this aspect of her narrator was difficult to package. She had no trouble using her own experience as the basis for the nutrition chapter, for she was comfortable with the image of herself as a dieter. But despite the years she spent making breakfast and dinner for David, she was never comfortable with any single image of herself as a home cook. Hence the pileup of conflicting claims that marked her discussion of the subject over the years. Getting the meals on the table was one thing; writing about them was quite a different challenge. To type the words that would characterize her relationship with food, the most intimate and nerve-racking relationship of her life, seemed impossible. Helen didn’t trust herself around food; what sort of role model could she possibly be for a culinary “Helen”?

  The food world offered little help with this problem. It was the early 1960s, and the best-known names in home cooking—Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, Irma Rombauer, Dione Lucas—projected a warm and cozy domestic image that was the opposite of what she and David were after. Julia Child hadn’t started her television career yet, and in any event a character like Child wouldn’t have suited the book’s purposes, which called for someone young, chic, and seductive. Nigella Lawson would have been a good prototype; unfortunately, she was still a baby. So Helen cast about in popular culture for a stand-in she could place at the stove.

  The first one she came up with was a dimwit. “I can’t cook and I know it,” the draft begins, and continues with a litany of embarrassing flops—tough garlic bread, limp bacon, burned butter, clumpy eggs. Trying to make a cheese fondue, this particular “Helen” reports, she ended with a single impenetrable mass of coagulated cheese. She says she made frosting from a box of mix so old it had gone rancid, and she served fruit cup in scooped-out grapefruit skins left over from a previous party but perfectly clean since she had washed them in soap and water. As for cookbooks, they only created more problems; and to prove this point she quotes from Escoffier, adding her own despairing comments in parentheses. “(They assume I have a soup tureen.)”

  We can’t know whether Helen had I Love Lucy specifically in mind when she created this frantic female, but in the course of the 1950s Lucille Ball had become the most famous haphazard wife on television, throwing herself into one project after another with high hopes that invariably ended up in pratfalls. It’s easy to see Lucy as the cook in Helen’s imagined kitchen, especia
lly washing the grapefruit shells. In one or two places, we can also hear Helen channeling Peg Bracken, whose hilarious I Hate to Cook Book came out in 1960 and became an instant best seller, beloved for its heartfelt commitment to getting food on the table with the least possible creativity. Helen was choosing well, but she wasn’t accomplished enough to lift what she needed from these two experts and reframe it in a distinctive voice of her own, especially in the fraught realm of cooking.

  In the end she settled on a “Helen” whose years as a kitchen klutz are safely behind her. The disasters—“failing with the never-fail hollandaise a few times and all that”—are mentioned only briefly, and although the inane reference to Escoffier remains, it’s succinct. Most important, she sums herself up as “a pretty good cook,” which allows her to sound relaxed and confident as she gives advice on how to stage cocktail parties, picnics, brunches, and “fabulous little dinners.” But there’s a kind of shield between the cook and the food, a studied air of lighthearted sophistication that Helen sprays over the text like perfume. Put “Rumanian gypsy music” on the record player at your cocktail party, she suggests, and wear “a ruffled frock” to the picnic, “as Emma Bovary might have done.” And don’t forget, you’ll want to have the makings of a “hearty little breakfast” on hand at all times, since you don’t always know the night before that you’re going to have a guest in the morning. (“But there he is . . . ravenous!”) Whenever she zeroes in for a closer look at the food, however, the whole edifice collapses. Suddenly Emma Bovary is serving quick ’n’ easy vichyssoise made from frozen potato soup mixed with half-and-half. To start off a seductive candlelight dinner at home, “Rosa Rita frozen cocktail tacos are delicious.” As for that unexpected morning guest, he’ll sit down to a glass of tomato-clam juice and an omelet filled with canned mushrooms, canned pimentos, American cheese, and chopped onions. “Or use canned tomatoes instead of all of these.”

  Later in the chapter Helen sets out more formal menus, with many of the high-end touches popular in that era—lobster tails, French sauces, a cinnamon stick in every cup of coffee. She acknowledges that she “borrowed heavily” from sources including Joy of Cooking and The Gourmet Cookbook, and she certainly did: some of the recipes were copied almost word for word. But she was thinking about how to show off, not how to cook and still less how to eat. Her menus are arrayed as if for a food-styling session, with no need to apply a sense of taste. One dinner features fresh artichokes; another has a “Marinated Vegetable Platter” in which everything is canned. Fresh garlic appears, then disappears in favor of garlic powder. The chocolate soufflé is a classic version, complete with vanilla bean; it’s accompanied by a “Foamy Vanilla Sauce” made from a package of instant pudding. Helen didn’t mind. She never imagined herself tasting any of it, so the disarray was invisible to her. But she had just done the equivalent of sending “Helen” to a party wearing a cocktail dress and bedroom slippers.

  It’s fair to assume that very few readers of Sex and the Single Girl were bothered by its culinary incoherence: the book took off with such a roar that even Helen was taken aback. Her publisher, Bernard Geis, was well-known for masterminding torrents of publicity, and her book tour expanded into months of press interviews, speaking engagements, radio shows, and television appearances. David became her business manager and publicist, as well as chief adviser and most fervent supporter. At his urging she signed a contract with Geis for a second book, as well as an option for a third. She and David started to envision a media empire built around Helen’s now famous persona. And as David worked his innumerable connections in Hollywood and New York, the two of them brainstormed.

  What about Broadway? The hit musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying had been running for more than a year—perhaps Helen’s advice to single girls on getting ahead could be seen as a kind of female counterpart. She signed on with the theatrical agent Lucy Kroll, where she joined Martha Graham and Carl Sandburg on a distinguished client list. Kroll loved the book and thought it definitely had the makings of a musical, but Warner Brothers had already purchased the film rights, so the stage rights would not be available for the next several years. Reluctantly, they all shelved the project.

  Television? Surely there was a sitcom in the story of young Helen’s perils and exploits as a career girl. She and David wrote a synopsis for a series called The Single Girl about a young woman working in an advertising agency and sent it off to ABC. The company mailed it back with a discouraging letter. Building a series around a female lead was too risky, the Browns were advised, and the advertising business was a poor fit as a background since most people didn’t understand it. (Mary Tyler Moore and later Mad Men would prove that the Browns were ahead of their time on both counts.) They had no better luck with another of their sitcom ideas, this one for a show called Normal Like Me, set in a psychologist’s office. The heroine would be the receptionist, a young woman—like Helen—who manages to help all sorts of patients solve their problems. One week the patient might be a man fearful of women; naturally the receptionist can guide him to a cure. Another episode might focus on a woman who can’t seem to lose weight. As Helen saw it, this would be a madcap episode, yet it would have universal appeal, since with the receptionist’s help the woman would lose twenty pounds. “It’s a chance for everybody to live through his own dieting experiences again,” she wrote confidently.

  Perhaps a talk show? Helen drafted a proposal for a program called Frankly Female, which she would cohost alongside a man—“to say some of the things out loud that women have heretofore only said to themselves!” She also saw possibilities in a series of programs aimed at helping people relax. She herself was anxious and hard-driving by nature; and she was always terrified that a restaurant or hostess would serve her real coffee instead of Sanka—a mistake guaranteed to keep her awake and jumpy for hours. Hence she was certain that a show she titled The Unwind Up, to be led by a skilled hypnotist, would have wide appeal. She envisioned thirty minutes of “soothing, soporific talk,” interrupted every ten minutes with a round of actual hypnosis that would put the audience to sleep. She didn’t address the question of how sponsors would react to viewers dropping off en masse, possibly missing a commercial; it’s likely that David was not involved in this proposal.

  Her life, her feminine perspective, her therapy—all these struck Helen as excellent possibilities for TV shows, and so did her preocccupation with food. Cook’s on the Fire was a proposal for a daytime game show aimed at women, and Helen appears to have given this a good deal of thought: she described it in detail and added a list of possible sponsors. An emcee would pose increasingly difficult questions about food, cooking, nutrition, menu planning, and table setting, and each contestant would collect prizes for her correct answers. The set would be outfitted with a spice rack, cooking equipment, stove, and raw and cooked foods, all to be used in the course of the game; Helen wrote out six pages of sample culinary challenges. Which of these foods has the most protein per four-ounce serving? Which of these six greens is not suitable for a salad? You are going to see dancers performing five dances from five different countries—after each dance, go to the table and choose the food from that country. (Tacos, for instance, would be the correct choice in response to a Mexican hat dance.)

  Far-fetched though they were as TV shows, these proposals reveal something of how Helen’s mind worked whenever she had a creative project in front of her, be it a book or a TV script or a magazine. She was reluctant to think beyond her own instincts. Nothing else interested her, and the huge success of Sex and the Single Girl seemed proof that her body, her emotions, her mind, and her psyche constituted the single most valuable trove of research material she would ever possess. David felt the same way, and ultimately the two of them came up with a well-defined project for realizing more of the profits they could practically see hovering around Helen’s very being. They would produce a monthly magazine wholly identified with Helen: she would be the edito
r, and it would be aimed directly at the readers who were making Sex and the Single Girl a phenomenon of postwar popular culture. A tentative title for the magazine was Femme, but more important was the subtitle: “For the Woman on Her Own.” Just about anything could catapult women into this category: they could be single, divorced, or widowed; they could be “separated and otherwise neglected wives”; they could even be married—“the Betty Friedan set.”

  Helen, whose voice is apparent in much of the proposal, was emphatic about where Femme would be positioned among the competition. No lunch box suggestions, no laundry dilemmas, no tips on renovating the attic. Instead, Femme would take up problems that were far more pertinent to . . . well, Helen. She proposed stories on the difficulty of achieving a perfectly flat stomach, for instance, and on the “fight against aging.” She herself would write a column called “The Men in Your Life,” answering readers’ questions about their relationships. And she had it in mind to run a true story by an author she identified as “Anonymous” about how an older woman successfully fought off hordes of younger competitors and won “a superbly eligible man.” She also wanted the magazine to become identified with literary journalism: Femme would be “New Yorker size,” with paper quality the equivalent of Playboy’s. Nobody, she insisted, would ever mistake Femme for a typical women’s magazine.

  Perhaps that’s why nobody wanted to publish it. David shopped it around without success. Then, early in 1965, he took it to Hearst, the publishing conglomerate and owner of Cosmopolitan, where David himself had been an editor back in the 1940s. Cosmopolitan was nearly eighty years old and had once enjoyed an impressive reputation as a home for high-quality political writing and important fiction. After World War II, it began running more stories on fashion, marriage, and other female-friendly topics, but it never acquired a distinctive profile as a women’s magazine. By the 1960s its efforts to define itself had become largely incoherent—“Great Stars and Their Illnesses,” “Four Lousy Husbands Explain Why,” “Neglected Magic in Every Woman’s Voice.” Advertising revenues and circulation figures were dropping, and Richard Deems, president of Hearst magazines, had lost faith in the current editor. Deems wasn’t interested in starting a new magazine, but he was very interested in Helen’s potential as an editor and the possibility of reaching an untapped market of female readers. He offered her Cosmopolitan, a two-year contract subject to renewal, and a great deal of freedom.