Wallflower at the Orgy

by Nora Ephron

  Claiborne was so furious about the book, in fact, that he managed to intensify what was, until then, a one-sided feud between James Beard and himself. Beard, a genial, large, round man who receives guests in his Tenth Street house while seated, Buddha-like, on a large pouf, had been carrying on a mild tiff with Claiborne for some time. Just before the first Time-Life cookbook was published, the two men appeared together on the David Susskind Show, and in the course of the program, Beard held up the book and plugged it on the air. Afterward, Claiborne wrote a letter to Susskind, with carbon copy to Beard, saying that if he had known he was going to appear on the same show with the Time-Life cookbook, he never would have consented to go on.

  (That Julia Child has managed thus far to remain above the internecine struggles of the food world probably has more to do with the fact that she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, well away from it all, than with her charming personality.)

  The success of the Time-Life cookbook series is guaranteed, Claiborne’s review notwithstanding. Offered by mail order to subscribers who care not one whit whether the soufflé on the cover is actually a meringue, the series rapidly signed up five hundred thousand takers—for all eighteen books! (The New York Times Cookbook, itself a blockbuster, has sold only two hundred thousand copies.) “The books, whatever their limits, are of enormous quality,” says Field. “Every recipe works and is honestly conceived.” Yet a number of those intimately connected with the books have complained about the limits Field parenthetically refers to, and most particularly about the technique of group journalism that has produced the books: apparently, the text, recipes, and photographs of some of the cookbooks have been done independently of each other.

  “It’s a joke,” said Nika Hazelton, who is writing the text for the Time-Life German Cookbook. “First there is the writer—me, in this case, but I have nothing to do with the recipes or illustrations. Then there is the photographic staff, which takes recipes from old cookbooks, changes them a little, and photographs them. Then there is the kitchen, under Michael Field’s supervision. I think Michael knows about French and Italian food, but he doesn’t know quite as much about other cookery. The cook is John Clancy, a former cook in a short-order house who once worked for Jim Beard. I’m the only person connected with the project who knows languages besides French. There is a consultant who hasn’t been in Germany for thirty years. My researcher’s background is spending three years with the Morgan Bank. It’s hilarious. I’m doing it only for the money.”

  The money that is available to members of the Food Establishment is not quite as much as they would have you think, but it is definitely enough to keep every last one of them in truffles. James Beard—who commands the highest fees and, though a purist, has the most ties with industry—recently turned down a hundred-thousand-dollar offer to endorse Aunt Jemima mixes because he didn’t believe in their products. Retainers offered lesser stars are considerably smaller, but there are many jobs, and they suffice. Nevertheless, the impression persists that there are not enough jobs to go around. And because everyone in the food world is free-lancing and concerned with putting as many eggs into his basket as possible, it happens that every time someone gets a job, the rest feel that they have lost one.

  Which brings us to the case of Myra Waldo. An attractive, chic woman who lives on upper Fifth Avenue, Miss Waldo published her first cookbook in 1954, and since then she has been responsible for forty-two others. Forty-two cookbooks! In addition, she does four radio spots a day for WCBS, is roving editor of Family Circle magazine, is retained by Pan American Airways, and recently landed the late Clementine Paddleford’s job as food editor of This Week magazine. Myra Waldo has never been a favorite in the Food Establishment: she is far too successful. Furthermore, although she once made forty-eight soufflés over a July Fourth weekend, she is not a truly serious cook. (To a visitor who wanted a recipe for a dinner party, she suggested duck in a sauce made of frozen orange juice, Melba sauce, red wine, cognac, lemon juice, and a can of Franco-American beef gravy.) For years it has been rumored that Miss Waldo produces as many cookbooks as she does because she clips recipes and pastes them right onto her manuscript pages, or because she has a gigantic staff—charges she denies. But when she landed the This Week job, one that nearly everyone else in the Food Establishment had applied for, the gang decided that too much was too much. Shortly afterward, she went to the Cookbook Guild party, and no one except James Beard even said hello to her.

  Said Beard: “You could barely move around at that party for fear someone would bite you in the back.”

  How much longer life in the Food Establishment—with its back-biting, lip-smacking, and pocket-jingling—will go on is hard to tell. There are some who believe the gourmet explosion that began it all is here to stay and that fine cooking is on the increase. “Of course it will last,” said Poppy Cannon, “just in the way sculpture will last. We need it. It is a basic art. We ought to have a National Academy of the Arts to represent the art of cooking.”

  Others are less sure. They claim that the food of the future will be quite different: precooked, reconstituted, and frozen dishes with portion control. “The old cuisine is gone for good and dying out,” says Mrs. Hazelton. “Ultimately, cooking will be like an indoor sport, just like making lace and handiwork.”

  Whatever happens, the Food Establishment at this moment has the power to change the way America eats. And in fact, about all it is doing is showing how to make a better piecrust and fill a bigger breadbox.

  “What fascinates me,” says Mimi Sheraton, “is that the more interest there is in gourmet food, the more terrible food is for sale in the markets. You can’t buy an unwaxed cucumber in this country, the bread thing everyone knows about, we buy overtenderized meat and frozen chicken. You can’t buy a really fresh egg because they’ve all been washed in hot water so the shells will be clean. And the influence of color photography on food! Oil is brushed on to make it glow. When we make a stew, the meat won’t sit on top, so we have to prop it up with oatmeal. Some poor clod makes it at home and it’s like buying a dress a model has posed in with the back pinned closed. As a result, food is marketed and grown for the purpose of appearances. We are really the last generation who even has a vague memory of what food is supposed to taste like.

  “There have been three revolutionary changes in the food world in past years,” Miss Sheraton continued. “The pressure groups have succeeded in changing the labeling of foods, they’ve succeeded in cutting down the amounts of pesticides used on foods, and they’ve changed the oversized packages used by the cereal and cracker people. To me, it’s interesting that not one of these stories began with a food writer. Where are they, these food writers? They’re off wondering about the boeuf en daube and whether the quiche was authentic.”

  Yes, that’s exactly where they are. “Isn’t it all a little too precious?” asks Restaurant Associates president Joseph Baum. “It’s so elegant and recherché, it’s like overbreeding a collie.” But, after all, someone has to worry about the boeuf en daube and whether the quiche was authentic—right? And there is so much more to do. So many soufflés to test and throw out. So many ways of cooking asparagus to discover. So many patés to concoct. And so many things to talk about. Myra’s new book. The record Poppy is making. Why Craig finally signed on to Time-Life Cookbooks. Michael’s latest article. So much more to do. So many things to talk about.…

  “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come With Me. I Was a Mouseburger And I Will Help You.”

  I don’t know anyone who has had professional contact with Helen Gurley Brown who is not fascinated by her. You probably don’t believe that, but it’s true. In the three years I wrote for Cosmopolitan, she managed to drive me absolutely crazy with her passion for italics, exclamation points, upbeat endings, and baby simpleness. She once insisted on translating all the common French phrases I had used in an article—and translated almost every one of them wrong. But still, there is something about her.…

  Fe
bruary 1970

  They are still screaming at her after all these years. They are still saying that Helen Gurley Brown is some kind of scarlet woman, for God’s sakes, leading the young women of America into reckless affairs, possibly with married men. And every time they say it she sits there, little puckers beginning in her chin, and waits for the moment when the talk show will be over and she can run offstage and burst into tears. You might think that by now they would stop screaming—after all, this small, thin, dreadfully sincere woman is not to blame for the moral turpitude in America; you might think that by now Helen Gurley Brown would stop crying—after all, her attackers simply do not, cannot understand. But no. Just the other night, it happened again. On the Merv Griffin Show or the Joey Bishop Show. One or the other. She was just sitting there, talking in her underslung voice about how a single girl must go to lunch with married men, that a single girl with no other men in her life must somehow make the men who are there serve a purpose. She finished her little spiel and the screaming began. A singer on the panel started it. “Is this the kind of thing we want the young women of our country to listen to?” he said. “I wouldn’t want any daughter of mine to go and date a married man.” Then he turned to the audience and said, “Everyone out there who agrees with me, raise your hand or clap.” And it began. Thunderous applause. Hundreds of hands flapping on the monitors. And as soon as the show was over, Helen Gurley Brown began to cry.

  As it happens, Helen Gurley Brown cries quite a lot. She cried for three hours at Trader Vic’s the night Jerry Lewis attacked her on the Tonight Show. She cried one day in the beauty parlor just after returning from a trip to see her mother. She cried the day a Hearst executive refused to let her run a cover of Cosmopolitan magazine because there was too much boosom showing. (That’s the way she pronounces it. Boosom.) She cried the day Richard E. Berlin, President of the Hearst Corporation, put his foot down over a cover line that said, “The Pill That Makes Women More Responsive to Men.” She cries all the time because people don’t understand her. Jerry Lewis does not understand her, her mother does not understand her, and from time to time, the Hearst Corporation does not understand her. They don’t understand what she is trying to do. They don’t understand that she knows something they don’t know. She knows about the secretaries, the nurses, the telephone-company clerks who live out there somewhere, miles from psychiatrists, plastic surgeons, and birth-control clinics. Only eight per cent of Cosmopolitan’s readers are in New York City—the rest are stuck in the wilds, coping with their first pair of false eyelashes and their first fling with vaginal foam and their first sit-down dinners and their first orgasms. These are the girls who read Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook and learn—yes, learn—that before guests arrive for dinner it is smart to put out the garbage. These are the girls who buy Cosmopolitan and swallow whole such tidbits of advice as: “Rub your thighs together when you walk. The squish-squish sound of nylon … has a frenzying effect.” These are the girls who have to be told How to Tell If He’s a Married Man. You don’t believe there are girls who cannot tell if a man is married? Listen, then, to this letter to Helen Gurley Brown from a young lady in Savannah, Georgia:

  My problem is a common one. I am an expectant unwed mother.… The father of my child turned his back on me after he found out. Besides, he was married. However, I was not aware of this until after our affair had begun, and too weak to break it off until I realized he had never been serious about me. By this time it was too late.

  Helen Gurley Brown knows about these girls. She understands them. And don’t you see? She is only trying to help.

  We are sitting in her yellow-and-orange office across the street from Hearst headquarters at Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue in New York. On the floor is a large stuffed tiger. On the bulletin board is a picture of her husband, David. She calls him Lambchop. On the wall is a long magazine rack containing, along with a number of popular periodicals, the last twelve months of Cosmopolitan magazine. Read all about it. Why I Wear My False Eyelashes to Bed. I Was a Nude Model. I Was Raped. I Had a Hysterectomy. On her desk—along with some dental floss she uses before all editorial meetings—is a tearsheet of the next in a series of advertisements she writes for Cosmopolitan; this one, of a luscious girl, her hand poised deftly over her cleavage, has the following to say:

  What does a girl do if she’s wearing a hairpiece and she and her date are getting quite romantic? Well, we all know that a hairpiece can’t live through very much in the way of stress and strain so I just take out the pins and take mine off. So far no boy I’ve known has ever fainted dead away because everything that basically counts is me … adding extra hair is just an accessory. When I think of all the subterfuge and pretending girls once had to go through I’m thankful I live now when you can be truthful … and there’s a wonderful magazine to help me be the honest female-female I really am. I love that magazine. I guess you could say I’m That COSMOPOLITAN Girl.

  Helen Gurley Brown is now in her fifth year as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan. She took it over when she was forty-three and it was in trouble, turned it around, breathed new life and new image into it, became the only editor in America to resurrect a dying magazine. She is now forty-eight and tiny, with tiny wrists, tiny face, tiny voice. “I once heard her lose her temper,” a former Cosmo editor recalls, “and it sounded like a little sparrow—she was chirping as loud as she could but you still couldn’t hear her.” She wears Rudi Gernreich dresses, David Webb jewelry, a Piaget watch, expensive hairpieces, custom-cut false eyelashes—but it never quite seems to come together properly. An earring keeps falling off. A wig is askew. A perfect matched stocking has a run. All of which not-quite-right effect is intensified because Helen Gurley Brown relentlessly talks about her flat chest, her nose job, her split ends, her adolescent acne, her forty-minute regimen of isometrics and exercises to stay in shape. She does not bring up these faults to convince you she is unattractive but rather to show you what can be done, what any girl can do if she really tries. “Self-help,” she says. “I wish there were better words, but that is my whole credo. You cannot sit around like a cupcake asking other people to come and eat you up and discover your great sweetness and charm. You’ve got to make yourself more cupcakable all the time so that you’re a better cupcake to be gobbled up.” That’s the way she talks when she gets carried away—exhortation, but in the style of girlish advertising copy. She talks about “hot-fudge-sundae-kind-of-pleasure” and “good-old-fashioned-popcorn-eating-being-transported-to-another-world-going-to-the-movies.” Ten years as an advertising copywriter pays off for this girl. Yes sir. She can package anything. Titles for articles fall out of her mouth involuntarily. A staff member will suggest an article idea, and if she likes it, she has the title in an instant. The Oh-So-Private World of the Nurse, she will squeal. Or The Bittersweet World of the Hillbilly Girl. Or The Harried, Happy World of a Girl Buyer. One day someone suggested an article about how most girls worry about having orgasms. “Yes!” cried Mrs. Brown. “We’ll call it ‘It Never Really Happens to Me.’ ”

  I am in Helen Gurley Brown’s office because I am interviewing her, a euphemism for what in fact involves sitting on her couch and listening while she volunteers answers to a number of questions I would never ask. What she is like in bed, for example. Very good. Whether she enjoys sex. Very much. Always has. Why she did not marry until she was thirty-seven. Very neurotic. Wasn’t ready. It all seems to pour out of her, her past, her secrets, her fears, her innermost hopes and dreams. Says her husband, David, “Whether it was group therapy or what, there’s nothing left inside Helen. It all comes out.”

  It all comes out—in interviews, on television, in editorial conferences, in memoranda, in the pages of her magazine. Helen Gurley Brown spends twelve hours a day worrying, poring over, agonizing about her magazine; if her insomnia is acting up, she may spend most of the night. She writes endless memos, in lower-case letters, to her writers, full of suggestions for articles she is particular
ly concerned about. “would like to go into a little detail about what goes through a girl’s head as she is unable to have an orgasm,” went one recent memo. “maybe a soliloquy. this subject has been treated so clinically … as though she couldn’t do pushups.…” She writes memos to her editors praising them, nudging them, telling them how to fix stories that need fixing. “She has a very clear picture of what will and will not fit her magazine,” said Hearst editor-at-large Jeannette Wagner. “If she sends you back an article with a note that says, ‘I want a lead that says thus-and-such,’ you go back and do exactly what she says.”

  She works over every piece that goes into the magazine, doing the kind of line-by-line editing most editors leave to their juniors—rewriting, inserting exclamation points and italics and capitalized words and Cosmopolitan style into everything. “I want every article to be baby simple,” she often says. Not surprisingly, most of the magazine sounds as if it were written by the same person. And, in a way, it is. Cosmopolitan is Helen Gurley Brown. Cute. Girlish. Exhortative. Almost but not quite tasteless. And in its own insidious, peculiar way, irresistible. Says Cosmo articles editor Roberta Ashley: “Helen manages to walk that line between vulgarity and taste, which isn’t easy. The magazine is like a very sexy girl—you don’t mind that her dress is cut down to her navel because her hair is clean. If her hair were dirty, you’d be revolted.”

  And if, at times, Helen Gurley Brown and her magazine are offensive, it is only because almost every popular success is offensive. Mrs. Brown—like Hugh Hefner and Dorothy Schiff, to name two other irritating publishing successes—offends because she is proving, at sizable financial profit, the old Mencken dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. She is demonstrating, rather forcefully, that there are well over a million American women who are willing to spend sixty cents to read not about politics, not about the female liberation movement, not about the war in Vietnam, but merely about how to get a man.