Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Like many adoring children, Helen grew up with a somewhat inflated and incomplete understanding of her father’s career. Records from the Arkansas State Legislature, along with election results and editorials in the Carroll County newspapers, offer a more accurate assessment of Ira’s political moxie. On November 5, 1918, he won a seat in the state House of Representatives in a squeaker, 1,187 votes to the 1,023 cast for John Wells, an older Republican who would not soon forget the humiliation. The vote was unusually close for a heavily Democratic state.

  Legislative sessions are short in Arkansas; during Ira’s two-year term, the representatives met only from January through March, every other year. So Ira sensibly left his wife and child in Green Forest when the House was in session. By the time the next election neared, in the fall of 1920, the vanquished Mr. Wells, running for Ira’s seat again, had some arrows in his quiver. He excoriated Ira’s record in the hometown paper:

  Page 503 he voted to abolish Fish and Game Commission

  Page 733 he voted for 8 percent interest bill

  Page 506 he voted to abolish Actuarial Bureau

  Page 572 he voted against dog tax

  And on it went. In a paid notice directly below Wells’s charges, Ira invited his opponent to a gentlemanly debate: “Will you attack my record to my face as you do in my absence and let me defend myself?”

  In the end, it was not campaign skirmishes but some disgruntled constituents that mounted the biggest challenge. With a political newbie’s best intentions, Ira threw his energies behind a road project that many Carroll County voters had clamored for. Archival records of the session suggest that this was most likely Act 151, one of three bills he voted for that term, described as an “Act creating Carroll County Highway District No. 3 and for other purposes.” Governor Charles Hillman Brough signed it on March 1, 1919.

  Getting his constituents what he thought they wanted seems to have done Ira in. Wells prevailed by forty-two of the nearly twenty-four hundred votes cast. The November 1920 election results ran in the same edition of the Star as notices of livestock auctions, ads for Purina Pig Chow (“puts the gain on”), and a paid “invitation” announcing the formation of a local chapter of the five-year-old Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The paper also had a sympathetic paid notice from a supporter deploring Ira’s defeat and insinuating that he was turned out of office by a passel of “not-in-my-backyard” locals living smack-dab in the way of progress: “In the matter of the bill for the good road south from Berryville to Madison county line nearly the entire population signed a petition asking for this bill to be passed and for passing it it seems the people along this road became dissatisfied and voted against him for re-election.”

  It closed on a philosophical note: “Mr. Gurley is a young man and will learn that the path of duty often leads in curious ways.”

  Young Mr. Gurley wisely retreated to the relative security of clerk’s positions in the House, as well as in the state’s Fish and Game Commission, the very body he had once voted to abolish. Its offices were also quartered in the shining white capitol building set atop a hill in central Little Rock.

  It is unknown whether Ira Gurley was in Little Rock or Green Forest when his wife felt the dreaded onset of labor on February 18, 1922, and wondered, quite reasonably, whether she and her second child would survive. Though the doctor attending Helen Marie Gurley’s arrival was more skilled than the first, the result was just as bloody and perilous. So often did Cleo recount to her girls the tales of their harrowing births that Helen was still confessing her guilt, at age seventy-eight, at not being more sympathetic to her mother’s ordeal:

  Cleo also told me a hundred times—two hundred?—through the years that her body was torn up giving birth to both Mary and me. Country doctors didn’t know from Caesarians then, just “let her rip”; she still had pain. Did I ever bring up the subject of her residual pain…? No. I knew my father, Ira, had taken her to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for repair work because Mary and I went along, surgery not real successful. For me that seemed to take care of the subject.

  It is not a great leap to assume that the gory tales, constantly rehashed and with the specter of near death, did not make the idea of childbirth appealing to Helen or Mary.

  Despite their excruciating entry into the world, Cleo did love her daughters; she would cook, sew, and fear for them, hover over their homework, comfort them, keep them in long underwear until April, spoil them beyond measure, and drive them witless with her own disappointments and depression. Through the crises yet to come, enduring it all together in the cramped intimacy of a series of small, ugly, and all-too-intimate homes, Helen acknowledged the inescapable tug of the mother knot. Whether it constituted a noose or a lifeline—she would always seem of two minds about it—there were a couple of evident truths:

  “She didn’t ruin my life, she was the making of it.”

  Love and bad luck would bind them to an ineluctable destiny.

  “We were close as stitches.”

  2

  Daddy’s Girl

  I’m just a little girl from Little Rock

  I lived on the wrong side of the tracks.

  —from the score of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  IT WAS TIME TO LEAVE THE MOUNTAINS. By 1923, Ira was more secure in his employment with a succession of clerkships in the state house. As had been hoped, he was doing well enough to tender a little financial support to both the Gurley and the Sisco households. Helen was barely a year old when Ira packed up his young family and moved them to a new suburb of Little Rock. Though parts of the area are now called Hillcrest, it was first christened Pulaski Heights and advertised in the Arkansas Gazette by its developer in 1904 with this come-on: “Why live in the slums of the city or in the miasma of the flats when you can own a home on the Heights for half the cost?”

  There were other promises: “negro cabins and shanties will be unknown” in the Heights, though black domestic servants would be allowed to live in their employers’ homes. In addition, covenants were attached to each building lot, prohibiting their sale to anyone “other than those wholly of the white race.” Henry Franklin Auten, a Michigan industrialist, conceived and organized the Pulaski Heights Land Company with an initial purchase of eight hundred hilly, heavily wooded acres northwest of the city’s center. He lobbied for and obtained an extension of Little Rock’s streetcar franchise into Pulaski Heights. By the time the Gurleys arrived, the development had indeed become a modern “streetcar suburb” with electric cars that could drop a man of business right downtown.

  When Ira settled his family into the small clapboard cottage at 404 North Spruce Street, civilization had arrived in the Heights in the form of a few churches, a waterworks, and a diverse mix of housing options that made the area a livable suburb for a wide economic range of residents. Bankers, attorneys, and executives commanded elegant Craftsman and Colonial Revival homes that rose over the smaller cottages of railroad workers, tradesmen, and low-level civil servants. The modern conveniences—indoor plumbing, reliable electricity, and, before long, a telephone—must have thrilled even gloomy Cleo. Restaurants, movies, and department stores were just a short six-cent ride away.

  The whole family could hop the 8 Pulaski Heights streetcar to Franke’s Cafeteria downtown. Pronounced “Frankie’s,” the company began as a doughnut shop and bakery; Franke’s fleet of door-to-door bakery trucks were known around town as “wife savers.” Once the sprawling cafeteria opened on West Capitol Avenue downtown, much of churchgoing Little Rock ended up there after services for Sunday dinner. A man could treat his family well there: full, button-bursting dinners were fifty cents. Franke’s basic fare was southern, sweet, and carb-loaded: sliced roast beef, breaded fried okra, candied sweet potatoes, egg custard pie, and the house specialty, a thick slab of syrupy “Karo Nut” pecan pie.

  Nine reasonably good years followed the Gurleys’ move. Though their domestic life was still tinged with undertones of sadness and regret on Cleo’s part
, the girls had two loving parents who cared for them well and dispensed affection in reserved but genuine ways. How the couple treated each other is a subject Helen’s memoirs and interviews do not address, save to suggest that her mother did not seem a sexual sort of woman, and that Helen thought Ira tried to please his wife. The family road trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to address Cleo’s ongoing gynecological woes suggests a decade-long struggle with the childbirth injuries and an understandable reluctance to risk having another baby.

  Cleo kept close to home, brooding and reading a lot. Mary contracted a bad case of German measles, which permanently affected her eyesight; she began wearing thick glasses. Already she was showing signs of a deep melancholy and anger. She was beset by what Helen called her “goblins,” which sometimes took the form of fierce tantrums. Soon they would harden into a habitual, sullen rebelliousness. “Some terrible need must have been in her,” said Helen, and it “tore my heart.”

  But, overall, Helen’s recollections of their early years in Little Rock describe two lively little girls simply mad for Daddy. “My father was a very affectionate man and he accepted all the love I had to pour out,” Helen wrote in a 1975 Father’s Day essay for Good Housekeeping. “I don’t remember even once being pushed away or told ‘don’t bother me.’ He really enjoyed being with me and my sister and we had marvelous times together.”

  Ira took the girls on trips to the Arkansas State Fair every fall in North Little Rock and indulged them in the full range of treats: cotton candy, soda pop, ice cream, greasy burgers, and Ferris wheel rides. On Sundays, he took them out to Adams Field, the rough-and-tumble precursor to today’s Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, to watch the single-engine planes take off and touch down. One day, thanks to some pull from a state-house crony, Ira got himself a short trip into the blue; Helen and Mary, thrilled, watched him don goggles and a helmet, climb in with the pilot, and disappear into the clouds.

  Cleo always stayed home. She had no friends that Helen could recall; few adults came to the house except the occasional relative and Ira’s card-playing buddies, who settled in once a month to smoke, gossip, and sip coffee or lemonade; Prohibition was still in effect. Cleo was a talented seamstress, a deft copier of the latest fashions in adult and children’s clothing. She had begun sewing for other women to supplement Ira’s pay. She also saw to it that her daughters were beautifully dressed, despite their tight budget. In Helen’s view, Cleo “poured all her frustration and sorrow into making little dresses for Mary and me.” To her everlasting guilt and shame, Helen, like so many children who ascribe the greatest value to the store-bought and the brand name, did not like to admit that the exquisite little frocks were homemade. She stayed mum as her friends’ mothers exclaimed over the tiny, even stitches in the smocking, the crisp puffed sleeves, the ruffles, ribbon trim, and meticulous hand-rolled hems.

  One of Cleo’s clients made a deep impression on little Helen. A long, chauffeured Pierce-Arrow would glide to the curb outside the Gurley home, and out stepped the wealthy Mrs. Bruce. Helen was four when the tall redheaded woman in furs first swept in, bringing with her the scent of glamour and an armload of lavender silk. It was to be made into an exotic leisure-class garment she called a morning coat—probably an “at-home” dressing gown. Mrs. Gurley’s younger daughter made such a clamorous sort of fuss that Mrs. Bruce brought some silk remnants for her when she came for the next fitting; there was enough to make Helen a dress. In hindsight, the editor in chief who would later shamelessly, even gleefully wheedle free designer frocks, makeup, transcontinental flights, and discount hotel rooms seemed proud of her pre-kindergarten talent for snaring swag: “You can’t tell me I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Helen’s protracted fascination with the wealthy began in public school, where the children of bank presidents and railroad brakemen shared cloakrooms and confidences. She was not sure where her obsession came from and never blamed it on anyone but herself; Cleo and Ira did not discuss or have undue interest in wealthy people and never voiced any material aspirations beyond survival and comfort. But the rich people around town seemed enchanting to this small girl with hungry eyes—especially on the evening when Mrs. Bruce drove up with her teenage daughter, Edwina, in tow.

  Edwina’s birthday was coming up, and Mrs. Bruce had set Cleo to work on a sumptuous negligee as a gift. For days, Cleo had been submerged in whispery lengths of brown slub silk—a crisp and luxurious fabric given texture by the raised “slubs” in its weave. Mrs. Bruce, a playful, bon vivant sort, insisted that Edwina be blindfolded for the fitting, like a princess awaiting her dreamboat suitor. Once this was accomplished, Cleo slipped the shimmering garment over Edwina’s shoulders to make her adjustments. As her mother pinned and tucked, Helen gawked at the beguiling apparition in their parlor. Once again, she piped right up with her admiration and longing. Mrs. Bruce was again generous with her remnants, and Helen got a darling brown silk dress to wear to first grade.

  Despite Cleo’s glum sequestration, things were looking up for the family. Ira moved steadily through a succession of positions at the capitol as clerk in the Fish and Game Commission, clerk in the House of Representatives in 1925, then as chief clerk of that body by 1928. The new Pulaski Heights Elementary School, a two-story brick building still in use today, was finished in time for Mary and Helen to enroll. If you drive the route from the Gurley home on North Spruce along Lee Avenue to the school, it is easy to understand Helen’s complaints about the wear and tear on little legs. The hills are many and steep, but everyone walked to school, in all weather.

  By the time Mary and Helen were school age, Cleo had begun her steady warnings that pretty girls got the best in life. They’d better learn to use their brains and wits. “She thought I was not pretty,” Helen believed. Cleo never said it outright. She just made it clear that everything good happens to pretty girls, “and I [Helen] was not one of the golden girls.” Though Cleo’s hints were oblique, the damage was lasting. “I’ll never recover as long as I live,” Helen declared. The effects of Cleo’s joyless upbringing in the shadow of her comely sister Gladys’s radiant glow, Helen concluded, “ruined her life and it ruined mine.”

  When they were children, neither Helen nor Mary paid too much heed to Cleo’s dour pronouncements. Then, one day, on the playground, Helen saw the stark truth of her mother’s forebodings. She was six years old when the incident took place, but the dénouement was so wounding that she revisited it many times throughout her adult life. At age fifty, she retold it to a friend as though the pain of that day was still fresh.

  Helen, who was in the first grade, was playing on the swings with a wealthy child named Ann Mahaffey. Ann was a perfect doll, an “exquisite little candy box Dutch girl.” She was blond, of course. The girls were facing each other on adjoining swings, pumping higher and higher, hair flying. Suddenly Ann lost her balance and fell off—mercifully, at the lowest point of the swing’s arc. Helen made herself slide off, too, also low to the ground. It was a calculated risk: the schoolyard was unpaved and pocked with potholes and rocks.

  Having relived the incident over so many years, Helen had a theory as to her probable motive: perhaps she had been hoping for a bit of attention and fussing-over if she took a spill as well. Seconds after the girls hit the ground, an older boy who was a “pager”—a playground monitor from the third grade—came running over. He sponged little Ann with tenderness and vigor. Helen hovered nearby, calling to the oblivious savior about her knees, her poor skinned elbows.

  Little Helen was left to tend her own scrapes, which probably didn’t smart as much as her feelings did. She had some sweet recompense later that afternoon, when she heard that Ann’s eager rescuer had subsequently been called to the principal’s office. Apparently, he had done a bit too much heavy sponging. Helen laughed when she told the story, but the memory of the snub had lodged deeply. Lesson learned: Yes, there always would be a beautiful girl who only had to stand there and reel in the men. Almost always, she
would be blond.

  Boys could be just dumb, period. Helen would never blame the objects of their clumsy affections. Girlfriends were too important to her. Elizabeth Jessup, who lived about six blocks away, on North Ash Street, would remain one of her closest friends for the rest of their lives. Elizabeth was petite, blond, and beautiful, and Helen never held it against her; if anything, she was outright worshipful. Elizabeth was popular, always at the center of a cluster of girls, but never did she ignore or slight Helen. Neither could recall how they came to call each other Sassafras (Elizabeth) and Kitten (Helen), but they did so—playfully and fondly—for more than seventy years.

  From grade school on, Helen and Elizabeth would do plenty of their giggling together in junior and senior church choirs. Despite the proliferation of churches back in the hills and hollers, Ira’s was not a God-fearing house. Cleo and Ira were not religious at all and did not attend church, but they saw to it that Mary and Helen were both baptized and, later, duly shipped off to Sunday school at Pulaski Heights Methodist Church because it was expected of the young ladies and gentlemen in Little Rock. They were back at church in the evening for a program called Christian Endeavor.

  The sisters loved winter Sundays, when there was no Endeavor and those family nights at home meant cocoa and toasted cheese sandwiches. The Sunday fare was a welcome respite from weekday suppers. Cleo, Helen judged, “was a lousy cook,” given to serving up gray canned peas and boiling or pan-frying the bejesus out of anything that had once resembled fresh food. “Our darling mother, what did she know about nutrition?” Helen said. “Cleo grew up in a farm family where lard was a staple in all baked goods, where turnip greens were cooked six or seven hours and flavored with bacon grease.”