What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  Apart from the research and imagination she put into planning Femme, Helen knew nothing about magazines; David said later he didn’t think he’d ever seen her read one. She was appropriately nervous about taking on the equivalent of a gut renovation in a world where she could barely recognize a hammer. But she had written Sex and the Single Girl—an achievement that was already her personal touchstone, a constant reminder that, yes, she was at one with the female zeitgeist. She started at Hearst in March 1965, and her first issue was on the newsstands in July, perched alongside the other women’s magazines like an audacious stranger making herself at home in a startled neighborhood. The model on the cover evoked neither a mom nor a career girl; instead, she looked a lot like Emma Bovary at that picnic. Thick blond hair fell almost to her shoulders, and she wore a low-cut, ruffled pinafore. Her eyes were heavily made up, and she gazed out with a cool, blank stare, holding her pale pink lips slightly open. Next to her, heralding the stories inside, were the suggestive cover lines that would become one of the most famous features of the magazine. “The new pill that promises to make women more responsive” was the most prominent, and right under it came “World’s Greatest Lover—What it was like to be wooed by him!” Helen was intent on reaching the only reader who counted—namely, herself. “I always knew exactly what I wanted,” she told a media industry publication fifteen years later. “My motivation for changing the magazine was to make it the kind of magazine I could produce. It didn’t matter what readers said or what advertisers said. I only knew how to do one thing.” By November the magazine’s sagging circulation had jumped to a million copies per issue, advertising was up by 50 percent, and she was a legend in her brand-new profession for pulling off what Life called “one of the fastest and most remarkable successes in the history of publishing.”

  One of Helen’s earliest and most definitive acts at Cosmopolitan was to seize control of the writing. Unlike most editors in chief, she was not willing to leave the details of sentence structure, vocabulary, and punctuation to staff members lower on the masthead. Every night she took home a pile of manuscripts and rewrote them until story after story rang with her own distinctive intonation, the one she had first floated in Sex and the Single Girl. Not until her second year at the magazine did she relax her personal grip on the prose and assemble a list of writing rules—sixteen pages’ worth, along with eight pages of clichés to avoid—and distribute them to her staff with instructions to wield them on every article that came in. Most of these rules were unsurprising (“Every new paragraph must have some connection with the paragraph before”), but some were extreme. Helen wanted prose that had been stripped to its essentials, and she deleted every word she judged useless, including “the,” “an,” and “a” if they appeared more than twice per sentence. Then, once the paragraph had been reduced to bare scaffolding, she added the accessories—chiefly ellipses, exclamation points, and italics. The voice that emerged became her trademark. “You and I are such old friends—ten years together now—that I have this odd desire to tell you about myself!” she wrote in a 1975 editor’s column. “I rise at 8:00 A.M., fix David’s breakfast if he’s in town, exercise for an hour and ten minutes (nothing interferes . . . I’ve only missed two days in eight years), dress, do my hair, makeup, arrive at the office at 11:00. Once there I usually stay—lunch, unless I have a business date, comes with me in a brown paper bag.”

  Not everybody found this kind of prose as attractive as she did. “If Mrs. Brown never italicizes another word or uses another exclamation point, she’ll still have used both devices more than one woman should in a lifetime,” commented a critic at the Miami News, reviewing Sex and the Single Girl. Nora Ephron, who wrote for Cosmopolitan a few times early in her career, said it drove her crazy to see every story bombarded with “italics, exclamation points, upbeat endings, and baby simpleness.” But Helen cherished the way she sounded in print: she used this voice in all her books, and she was proud of imposing a literary style on Cosmopolitan that made it, she declared, the equal of any magazine in the country, including The New Yorker. “I would say the writing in Cosmopolitan is 60 to 70 percent of our success,” she told an industry publication. “It’s non-boring writing . . . and even if it happens to be about how not to have jitters on your first date, it is just as carefully crafted as a book about Henry Kissinger’s White House years.” True, books about Henry Kissinger rarely included terms like “pippy-poo” and “depthy,” which were two of Helen’s favorites, but she never apologized. As she told an interviewer from Playboy, “Let’s just say I’ve made a thing out of writing very girlishly.”

  • • •

  Cosmopolitan was famous for sex, not food; nonetheless Helen ran stories about cooking and eating in every issue. She ran dieting stories, too, including a monthly column called “Dieter’s Notebook.” But she was eager to attract food and liquor advertising, which meant she had to offer her readers regular, vicarious experiences with delicious meals. The other important categories in Cosmopolitan were men, beauty, work, and love, and Helen had no trouble whittling these topics into stories that slipped easily into each month’s editorial package. But she flailed for years trying to figure out how best to package a food-and-recipes story.

  As we’ve seen, she bushwhacked her way across this terrain when she was trying to figure out the right culinary approach for Sex and the Single Girl, but the challenge of a monthly magazine was more daunting. Her own experience, which typically guided her like a miner’s lamp whenever she dreamed up a story or edited one, wouldn’t have been wide-ranging or pliable enough to be useful even if she trusted it. “Cooking is part of wooing when you have a live one, and I can’t count the dinners I cooked old David Brown,” she had written in Sex and the Single Girl, and the image of herself as a wife who cooked was one that she brandished often throughout her career. Yet she felt most comfortable with this image when she was keeping it as far away as possible from any actual food. She liked reciting David’s breakfast menus, but that was as close as she was willing to get. When she chatted in interviews about making dinner for him, she rarely spoke in specific terms: she mentioned “regular food” or, later in life, the kinds of frozen meals she kept on hand. It’s possible, of course, that she never did cook, despite her various claims otherwise. But somebody had to get the meals together when she and David didn’t go out, and Helen hated the idea of paying anyone else to cook. As a confirmed skinflint, she was certain that anyone she hired would just sit around the kitchen all day downing filet mignon at Helen’s expense. What jumps out from these dinner references and much of her other personal food writing is a deep reluctance to give life to a specific dish by naming it—unless the context was a diet. Only when she was writing under that rubric did she feel safe enough in the presence of a plate of food to discuss it. She wrote often about the desserts she adored, for instance, but chiefly when the surrounding prose made it clear that she had no intention of eating them. Then she was able to name each item—a frozen lemon mousse, a slice of black forest cake, a pint of ice cream—and castigate it like a righteous Puritan. Any morsel that wasn’t low-calorie was “sinful,” “naughty,” “gobble gobble gobble,” “heavy sinning,” or “a cruel but devastating lover.”

  Just once, in an unpublished autobiography she began drafting in the early 1960s, did she try to put meals onto the page as if they constituted a normal, nonthreatening aspect of her daily life. She was writing about her newlywed years, depicting herself as a young wife happily cooking for David and doing a much better job of it than his inept housekeeper. Here, in the very specific context of youthful wedded bliss, she was able to insert occasional references to what they ate, including lamb chops, avocados stuffed with orange ice, lima-bean casserole, “Poulet Negresco,” Caesar salad, and raspberry Jell-O mold. Some of these dishes are implausible: “Poulet Negresco,” which she described as roast chicken basted with honey, was in fact a chicken-and-pasta casserole. But even if one or more of these bo
uts of culinary activity were imaginary, they constituted—like Marianne Moore’s definition of poetry—imaginary cooking with real food in it. Helen named all the dishes, and she placed them front and center in a self-portrait that showed her consuming normal meals. Not dieting, not bingeing—just eating.

  It never happened again. She put the manuscript away, and from then on she indulged in mentions of mouthwatering food or drink only when she was advising readers how to avoid it. At parties, for instance: “I have dumped champagne (which I adore) into other people’s glasses when they weren’t looking or, in a real emergency, into a split-leaf philodendron, wrapped eclairs in a hanky and put them in my purse, once in an emergency, sequestered one behind the cushion of an upholstered chair—in a napkin of course,” she wrote, the sentences sounding a little hiccupy because of the writing rules. “To get myself to abstain I help other people fill and refill their plates, have passed a hundred thousand brownies with whipped cream in my time without having any. . . .” Real food would always be enemy territory; she would never feel safe near it.

  Her first decision on Cosmopolitan’s food coverage was the best she ever made: she ran monthly excerpts from Mimi Sheraton’s The Seducer’s Cookbook, published two years earlier. Sheraton, the knowledgeable and sophisticated food writer who would go on to become the first female restaurant critic at The New York Times, took as her cheerful premise that the best way to get someone into the bedroom was to start in the kitchen. The text was good-natured and a little risqué—she included gastronomic guidelines for extramarital affairs as well as courting couples—and it’s easy to see why Helen loved the idea of defining the magazine’s culinary outlook this way. It’s also easy to see why the recipes struck her as just right for a women’s magazine that aimed to establish its own niche. Sheraton wasn’t writing about convenience or lunch boxes; she was writing about taste, enjoyment, the whole sensual experience of a fine meal. Her recipes ranged widely, from strawberries in white wine to filet of beef en croûte, but even the simplest menus radiated a sense of gustatory pleasure that was highly unusual in mass-market food journalism aimed at women.

  After this very smart move, however, Helen lost her nerve. Apparently she wanted to offer readers a range of cooking styles, but she couldn’t seem to come up with a catchy approach that would cover all the possibilities. She published dinner party classics such as poached salmon, blanquette de veau, and chicken with wine and cream, all simple versions made from scratch; and she published a vaguely Italian menu for a “Passionate Antipasto Party,” culminating in a dessert called “Lime Chiffon Capitoline” (lime gelatin mixed with whipped cream and topped with canned chocolate syrup). Frozen eggrolls and frozen crêpes suzette showed up; so did “Lobster Fra Diavolo,” and so did “hearty open-faced steak Tartare sandwiches,” recommended for Saturday afternoon after a baseball game. “Over coffee, join him in smoking a tiny-tip cigar fresh from your refrigerator! That’s one man you’ll see again.” A decade earlier, popular magazines had started to run food stories set up as photo essays, showing how the rich and/or famous entertained at home. Helen never missed a chance to put celebrities in the magazine, so she adopted the idea and produced her own culinary photo essays, featuring starlets who loved giving dinner parties. Dyan Cannon could be seen making quiche lorraine, and Barbara Ferris was pictured pounding away at minute steaks for steak Diane.

  Was she editing for a daring cook or a conservative cook? A skilled cook or a befuddled cook? She could never decide. In one issue she published the highly regarded wine writer Robert Misch, in another she made a pitch for organic produce because she admired Adelle Davis. Meanwhile she ran a recipe for “Exotic East Indian Meat Loaf” with ground beef, curry powder, garlic powder, and instant onion. Going over the “easy feast” menu scheduled for a Christmas issue, Helen advised the food editor to add detailed instructions on how, precisely, to baste the Cornish hens with melted butter. But if there were any novice cooks willing to tackle the recipes for a Japanese dinner (“Go Geisha!”), they found themselves attempting to deep-fry pork strips with no directions whatever.

  The dieting stories ranged widely as well, from relatively sensible to far-fetched to wild-eyed, but on this terrain Helen was at home. All the weight-loss tips blazed with her verve and confidence no matter whose byline was on the article. Eat everything, absolutely everything, on Saturday and Sunday, she urged in the first big diet story she chose for the magazine: “The Low Will-Power, High-Protein Diet (that allows for binges and slide-backs).” Fudge, cinnamon buns, heaps of vanilla ice cream on apple pie, “English muffins dripping with butter, candy bars at the movies”—pack them in all weekend. Then plunge to some 650 calories’ worth of raw vegetables and lean protein on Monday and practice self-denial nearly as rigorously throughout the rest of the week. Another story exulted in “the incredible, intoxicating joy of tasting” and encouraged readers to have just a single bite of whatever looked delicious to them. Soon they would reach their daily calorie limit, but without ever feeling deprived. “A sip of your husband’s gin and tonic won’t cost more than 20 calories and a bite of his pizza, 40 . . . one French fried potato (2 by 1/2 by 1/2 inches) 19 1/2 . . . . It’s not difficult at all, especially carrying one of the new, more complete, calorie counters.” Helen celebrated a diet based on the principles of hatha yoga; she celebrated never eating enough (“When you’re full, you know you’ve been naughty”); she celebrated every artificial sweetener on the market, advising readers to ignore the health warnings from “overconscientious food and medical columnists”; and she celebrated weight-loss drugs. (“Ask your doctor about Bamadex Sequels, a prescription pill for appetite control that’s mildly tranquilizing. Sometimes it does seem as if you’ll never lose those final three pounds, and you need something to calm your fears. . . .”)

  • • •

  Real food or diet food, splurging or starving—no matter what was on the table, Helen made it a point of honor to cast her public relationship with food in rapturous terms. Everything she ate had to be “delicious” or “scrumptious” or “luscious,” especially when she was evoking a zero-calorie bouillon cube or a breakfast of protein powder stirred into diet orange soda. Again and again she described to readers and interviewers what she voraciously consumed each workday (tuna fish; cottage cheese with mozzarella chopped into it; one apple) or ate on vacation (“an incredible salad bar I simply rolled around in every night”). A writer from Esquire once asked her for a Christmas recipe, and she said she had invented a new version of hot buttered rum: “I substitute fake ingredients for all of the fattening ones, and it’s delicious.”

  SKINNY HOT BUTTERED RUM

  Into a mug or cup put:

  1 tablespoon “butter” made from Butter Buds

  1 packet of Equal

  1 oz. rum

  Put a teaspoon into the mug. Fill to the brim with boiling water. Add a few cloves on top. Savor.

  Back when she wrote Sex and the Single Girl, Helen was forty years old, five feet four inches, and slim, accustomed to a carefully monitored regimen of diet and exercise that kept her at 109 pounds. As soon as she started work at Cosmopolitan, however, it was apparent that she was a middle-aged woman in the land of the young, and vigilance was the price of survival. She decided she could afford fifteen hundred calories a day and not a single extra; if she gained a pound, she imposed a drastic calorie reduction or a total fast for at least a day. Exercise began first thing in the morning—“Thirty minutes on the body and 20 on the face”—and continued later in the day, whenever she had time to do a few leg lifts. “Age to me is a disease to be fought back like cancer, multiple sclerosis and typhoid,” she told a reporter. “I’ll do anything if it works.” Her weight dropped to 105, then 97; when it reached 95 her hair started falling out. “I may have carried it ‘too far,’” she admitted in her second-to-last memoir, The Late Show, and called herself, at the age of seventy, “a grown-up anorectic.” The term “grown-up”
would have been harder for her to utter than the word “anorectic.” As she once remarked, “I think you may have to have a tiny touch of anorexia nervosa to maintain an ideal weight . . . not a heavy case, just a little one!” Nonetheless, she allowed the scale to creep back up to 102. But eating normally never became a habit. A reporter who treated her to a champagne cocktail one afternoon described what it was like for Helen to confront an article of food that threatened to make her fat. “She carefully fished out the calorie-laden brandy-soaked sugar lump, took a couple of polite sips, praised it extravagantly as the most delicious thing she’d ever had, and went back to Perrier water.”

  Helen loved the way she looked: her flat stomach and tiny dress size made up for every brownie she didn’t eat. It was impossible for her to believe that she might have been badly served by decades of calorie counting and several rounds of plastic surgery, even when she read harsh remarks about her looks in the press. “Her face is strangely pinkish and immobile, and her stick-like arms make you wonder if she hasn’t rather overdone the dieting,” a reporter observed in 1980. USA Today once published the results of a survey in which respondents named the famous people whose looks they most admired and least admired. On the list of the least admired, the top four were Janet Reno, Roseanne Barr, Tipper Gore, and Helen. She was enraged—couldn’t anyone recognize self-discipline? When friends begged her to eat more, when doctors urged her to gain a few pounds, when strangers came up to her in the street and told her she looked skeletal, she concluded they were jealous. “I get seriously aggravated by people who hate me because I’m thin,” she complained. “I think I’m an affliction in some people’s lives.” She resented being teased for constantly ordering plain broiled fish in restaurants or refusing to taste the birthday cake at an office party. Helen rarely expressed vituperation in print about anyone; she made a habit of being nice to people under nearly all circumstances. But at the thought of hostesses trying to force her off her diet, she erupted. “Mostly the pushers are your ‘friends,’” she wrote bitterly. “‘For God’s sake, have a roll and butter, have dessert . . . you can afford it!’ Listen, if you ‘afforded’ it, you would be fat like they are.” Once, she wrote, a hostess handed her a cup of Sanka and waited until she finished it before announcing with a chortle that Helen had just consumed some chocolate chips, which had been slipped into her cup back in the kitchen. Remembering this betrayal, Helen was still livid. “Bitch!”