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For Mark
“I have always thought her pretty—not strikingly pretty—but ‘pretty enough,’ as people say; a sort of beauty that grows on one.”
—JANE AUSTEN, Mansfield Park
Preface: The Trouble with Helen
I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself …
—Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
BEFORE I BEGAN THIS PROJECT, I was conflicted at best, dismissive at worst of the Helen Gurley Brown oeuvre and her golden-thighed creation of tall ambitions and bigger hair, “that Cosmo Girl.” I did not read Cosmopolitan magazine as a young woman, though I do recall my mother canceling her subscription in the late sixties because “that woman” had gone and sexed it up.
As a young writer apprenticing at a frowsy if well-intentioned women’s magazine, I longed to be Nora Ephron, who was gleefully tipping sacred cows like the food establishment and pan-searing Erich Segal’s treacly bestselling weeper, Love Story, for Esquire. How I envied the detached Ray-Ban cool of Joan Didion, hanging out with the Doors for Life. I had no idea at the time that both writers had already tangled with Helen Gurley Brown, with results hilarious, grudgingly tender, and icily cutting. She had that sort of effect on people.
To escape the Casserole Gulag of granny-square quilts and “man-pleasing” meals, I needed to scare up some writing assignments elsewhere. I wangled a meeting with an assignment editor at Cosmopolitan. I had heard that the boss lady kept a thick binder full of article ideas. There was no need to come up with queries; HGB’s was a singular Vision. And so it turned out: the gentleman who oversaw the articles list set the binder between us with a thud.
We settled on a seven-hundred-word piece on how to buy the right cat, on spec. I researched Abyssinians, Persians, and rescue tabbies; I studied hair-ball propensities and scratch-pole requisites. I turned the article in, and it came back swiftly, rejected. No kill fee, no do-over. The single comment, scrawled in a strong but loopy hand I have come to recognize so well: “Not sexy enough!”
Of course, Helen was right and I remain grateful that she showed me the door. Things worked out just fine elsewhere. Along my way, I had a couple of light brushes with HGB. The editor Clay Felker set me to the fun task of parodying the Cosmo Girl ethos during his brief tenure at the New York Daily News. Over the years, I would see Helen in restaurants favored by media types, generally leaning toward a young male lunch date held rapt by her laser gaze. I interviewed her once, for a story about marriage proposals. She was a reporter’s dream, dispensing chewy quotes like chocolate truffles; she was charming, self-deprecating, and, above all, helpful.
I thought I knew who she was. Silly rabbit. How she has astonished me. I have found her in the strangest and most intriguing places, a Zelig in Pucci frocks: Long before she was famous, in her years as a striving “mouseburger,” there was Helen, watching her ad agency boss help craft his friend Dick Nixon’s strategy against JFK, Helen putting calls through from Eisenhower and E. F. Hutton and meeting after hours with the mysterious emissaries of Howard Hughes. I found Miss Gurley in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, chilling with a war-hero general during a time when the general was lobbying President Truman, successfully, for “the Super,” or hydrogen bomb, program. And there she was again, captured in the glare of flashbulbs at Los Angeles’s storied Mocambo club. Helen was on the arm of a prizefighter twice her age; he was dubbed “the Manassa Mauler,” a brawler of such renown that his last championship fight took up half the front page in The New York Times.
How’d she do that?
The deeper I looked, the more delicious it was. Hers was such an epic and tragic family story, her rise out of poverty attained with so many jobs and so very many men, all vastly different. She was the unlikeliest of sirens: “not pretty enough” in her own estimation, yet formidable men were fools for her. The composer Irving Berlin so adored Helen that he faced down the famously dour waiters at Peter Luger Steak House to get Helen’s pricey filet charred. (Quoth HGB, “Girls from Little Rock don’t eat rare meat.”) Though her knees knocked with hostess anxiety, she charmed her dinner guest the poet Carl Sandburg and discussed her lifelong struggles with depression with fellow sufferers Mike Wallace and Art Buchwald on Martha’s Vineyard.
Helen could also get her crazy on. I turned up a few breathtaking examples of public and private tantrums—even an airport arrest—that sprang from a deep channel of molten rage; given her miserable family travails, she was devoted to and dependent upon psychotherapy from age twenty-two on. Few Brown familiars knew that. Over and over, I heard a version of this disclaimer from her friends: “I adored her, but I can’t say as I really knew her.”
She led an active public life, sailed on Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, and walked the Oscars red carpet on the arm of her movie producer husband, David Brown, but she kept a good deal to herself. In public, she sketched a broad, sometimes burlesqued version of her “hillbilly” roots. But Helen’s Depression childhood held a series of staggering tragedies that make her achievements more astonishing and, in a way, more understandable. Most of her closest New York friends were unaware of a piercing family grief cloaked in silence and, it seems, obscured by nameless fixers. It was the source of a deep and lasting sadness closely held within her half-century marriage.
Becoming HGB was a journey through three American cities and nearly a century of turbulent eras, from Jim Crow through the Information Age. It began in the Ozark Mountains of Green Forest, Arkansas, and in Little Rock, landlocked, segregated, and caught in the grips of the Depression. Helen escaped to make her stand in two land’s-end cities. Los Angeles and New York would be the making of her, places with endless vistas east and west and fertile, forgiving urban centers, where reinvention of self is welcomed, even expected. As they defined and shaped Helen’s life, those three places give this book its structure.
* * *
Let it be understood at the outset: sex has imbued the soft core, hard times, and glory days of this story—sex surrendered, sex wielded, lavished, and reveled in, sex merely endured and sometimes coolly transactional, sex reimagined, promised, and packaged on glossy magazine covers for global dissemination in the still-emerging foreign editions of Cosmopolitan magazine—sixty-four at last count. They appear in thirty-five languages and are sold in more than one hundred countries.
The young women in hijabs now reading Cosmo in Kazakhstan may never have heard of Helen Gurley Brown. The same goes for American women clicking into Cosmo online. But Helen, who never got the hang of using a computer, would crow at the digital/global deployment of her vision. Today’s Cosmopolitan, using its “mega DAM,” an asset man
agement system that serves as a digital library of a magazine’s images, articles, and covers, will soon be able to put up digital editions from Mongolia to Botswana. Current “connectivity” to today’s young women in print, digital, and social platforms: 68 million, making Cosmopolitan the largest young women’s magazine in the world.
It is all because of a little woman who could. And when other girls didn’t dare, she would. With pleasure. Helen was the first to suggest to single women, without shame and very publicly, “Perhaps you will reconsider the idea that sex without marriage is dirty.” Sex propelled Helen Gurley Brown into the pop/publishing legend “HGB” when she loosed her incendiary bestseller Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, then turned a moribund general-interest magazine, Cosmopolitan, into one very hot women’s book that rescued the huge and foundering Hearst Corporation. Sex secured Helen’s advantageous marriage to David Brown and kept it “frisky” for half a century; sex built her wealth and shaped her public persona. Behind closed doors, sex thrilled and sustained Helen well into her eighth decade. As the late Joan Rivers told me, when it came to conversations about sex, anywhere, anytime, “Helen leaned right in. She was always interested.”
Helen’s impressive ascent from the Ozark hollers to her pink-and-faux-leopard command post at Cosmopolitan was also shaped by the maddening tenacity of sexism; it bedeviled her in its many degrading forms, from her first grubby secretarial jobs to the boardrooms of ad agencies and the tower of the patriarchal, privately held Hearst Corporation. It follows that the entrenched sexism of the 1940s and ’50s, her vaunted Single Girl years, turned young Helen Gurley into a determined and flexible contortionist. The systemic abuse and injustice she took for granted is jaw-dropping. Her wily and often over-the-top coping strategies won her the admiration of millions of grateful women and got her picketed by others who saw her seductive, girlie, “man-trapping” ways as pandering to the patriarchal status quo.
A bad feminist? A traitor to her sex? A retro geisha? Aw, pippy-poo, as Helen would say. In her view she was merely being realistic; as a very poor and traumatized child of the Depression, she grew into a practical woman who simply, resolutely “did not want to go down the drain.” She scrabbled like crazy and held on for dear life. What some saw as character flaws and thorny contradictions, she saw as perfectly viable coping mechanisms. Helen’s business ethos was a less funky variant of soul man James Brown’s tribute to enterprising women: “Hot Pants, Part 1: She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants.”
There is no question that she made some devastatingly bad choices, personally and in her editorial pages. The “gaucheries” that mortified her as a young woman of limited education and means continued, magnified by her stature and visibility. So, if you want to know Helen Gurley Brown, you must have a strong tolerance for messy contradictions. What else is a woman’s life?
I came to this biography as neither an apologist nor an antagonist. I do find much of the revisionist analysis and HGB meta-dissection to be tedious, solipsistic, and drearily beside the point. It is a common misfortune of some American masters of self-invention who outlive their own revolutions—just ask Elvis. I have little patience for the latter-day “third- and fourth-wave” feminists, those who never knew life before the convenience of pantyhose and the NuvaRing, scrapping online about Helen’s heroism and/or betrayal of the sisterhood. Helen didn’t sell little girls down the river to objecthood any more than Madonna or Miley has. She was always about choices. (Though, as a tango fanatic, she’d take a dim view of twerking, I’m sure.)
Context is essential here; one must take a long and careful walk in her tiny shoes. Helen’s sincere and underrated feminism was somewhat case-specific; it played out and evolved over ninety years of women’s history. It was very personal; she watched her mother’s dreams crushed by a father who damned women’s suffrage and made his wife give up the work she loved. At bottom, Helen’s narrative is just too good a story to be circumscribed by gender politics. As a biographer, I am far less concerned, then, with What Helen Gurley Brown Meant for Women than I am with the reasons she could and did make her audacious stand, against impossible odds. As a sucker for true, amazing (and, yes, somewhat crackpot) American stories, I set out looking for answers to the very question Helen asked herself aloud one day when she was trying (unsuccessfully) to hammer out a Broadway play about her extraordinary life:
“How did I get to be this global editor?”
I wanted to know, too: How did she pull it off?
There is a map of sorts. To watch the progress of “little Helen” across the march of history, particularly during the rise of the age of advertising, is to watch the obvious and the subliminal perform a fascinating and seductive pas de deux. As an ad copywriter and a magazine editor, Helen Gurley Brown was one strong and canny persuader. In its demand for women’s equality in the bedroom and the boardroom, Helen’s message was inherently feminist. But her Single Girl cri de coeur would have been drowned out or ignored in buttoned-down 1962 if she hadn’t had the skills to pitch it, hard and fast and right over the plate.
Helen was always the first to say she couldn’t have done it alone. She was a die-hard champion of the single woman, but she also believed in marriage and in pleasing and standing by her man. Her union with David Brown was unlikely but lasting, outwardly glamorous yet remarkably, devotedly bourgeois—right down to the diet Jell-O and Lean Cuisine dinners à deux in their majestically towered Manhattan aerie. Conspiring together, the Browns became media titans, two who left an indelible mark on popular culture, from the birth of the summer blockbuster with Jaws to saving the once-mighty Hearst empire by reviving its sinking property, Cosmopolitan, with a fizzy hormonal infusion of what Forbes magazine termed “do-me feminism.”
They did it all together—he wrote the outrageous Cosmo cover lines, she did the shameless logrolling for David’s films in her magazine. She was the more visible, intriguing, and quotable of the two; he didn’t mind being “the guy married to Helen Gurley Brown.” They lived a rich, exciting life, compiled a fortune in the hundreds of millions, and left it all to educational programs and institutions. Any serious portrait of Helen requires a tight close-up on that marriage.
* * *
Helen Gurley Brown died in August 2012 at the age of ninety, but as I researched this book, she was having a bit of a moment. In the fall of 2015, full-page ads in The New York Times ballyhooed the fiftieth anniversary of Helen’s Cosmo. And her legacy as pop/cult muse was also finding more traction. In New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, a copy of Sex and the Single Girl was enshrined under glass, along with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, The Stories of John Cheever, and David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. They were key period references used by Matthew Weiner as he envisioned and wrote the hit cable series Mad Men, about the advertising business in the sixties and seventies. Lena Dunham, the star and creator of the HBO series Girls, had a bestseller with her own single-gal memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, which cited HGB’s 1982 book, Having It All, as an inspiration. Dunham bought it at a thrift store for its kitsch value but found herself fascinated. Yes, some of Helen’s ideas were “bananas,” as Dunham said, but she had a bead on certain Essential Girls’ Truths. Enough, one can assume, to help carry Dunham’s next HBO series, Max, based on a character trying to rise in the world of women’s magazines in 1963. An HGB movie and a Broadway play were also in the works.
There is a relatively new “beauty” phenomenon afflicting young girls of the digital age that would have broken Helen’s heart. Her own physical insecurities made “Not Pretty Enough” a natural title for this book. I wish I could say such obsession with female standards of beauty belonged to her unenlightened Depression-era upbringing, safely in the past. But within a year of Helen’s death, girls aged nine to fourteen began flooding YouTube with self-produced “POU” videos of themselves inviting anyone to judge them: “Am I pretty or ugly?” A study in the online magazine Slate estimated that half a million POU videos had
gone online by 2013, calling it “a new form of self-mutilation.” I also found that, particularly in teen categories, there are quite a few book titles similar to this one. The problem persists and goes viral; the selfie-stick can be a vicious cudgel.
* * *
Though she never published a formal autobiography, Helen Gurley Brown told us everything she thought we should know about her, and then some. Half a century before any Real Housewife or loudly ovulating Kardashian inflamed the medium cool, HGB was the doyenne of oversharing. Her star winked out before Snapchat and Instagram, but, given the stunning volume, range, and verve of her typed correspondence, it’s a bit terrifying to think of her on social media. She wrote as she spoke, with italic emphasis.
In conversation and as a writer, Helen was a spewer. After Sex and the Single Girl, she published more than a dozen books and anthologies, most of them rather slapdash remixes of earlier memoirs and breezy advice tomes. She best described her own literary style: “Smatterings and Spatterings.” Untold thousands of words sit in the Helen Gurley Brown Papers held by the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Thrilled by the invitation from a Seven Sisters college, Helen donated everything from unpublished 1940s fiction to consignment shop receipts, book drafts, and her handwritten New Year’s resolutions—from 1939. She wrote to her mother, Cleo Sisco Bryan, of her pride in being archived at Smith: “I’m so happy I’m there.” Despite the existence of that rich trove, this has been a most problematic biography to research and write; the reasons bear some explanation here.
* * *
Helen’s collection at Smith contains a slim typed manuscript, the treatment for a Broadway musical based on her life. Her attached note to the archivists explains the project’s fate: “Several people considered—nobody bought!”
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