Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Helen began to yowl; she had wanted a splashy print, too. She fussed all the way home and detonated once inside the house. Facing her mother, Helen ripped the dress she had worn to school—one of the frocks that Cleo had spent hours making—straight down the front and tossed it aside. Cleo spanked her darling, but good.

  Fear was getting the better of Cleo; she was constantly lamenting the family’s declining net worth, yet she continued to spend down Ira’s settlement on treats for the girls. But she was hatching a plan, a bold endeavor that might set things right in her life once and for all and leave the paralyzing anxiety and regret behind them. She might even have a chance at happiness. She kept her scheme to herself; once she had decided on her first, exploratory phase, she presented it to the girls in the guise of a very special treat. Helen was ecstatic when Cleo announced that they were going to the Chicago World’s Fair, due to open in May 1933; right away, Mary made it clear that she had no intention of going with them. As a teenager, she may have had keener radar than her little sister when it came to detecting adult guile. Using their dwindling funds for a distant and costly vacation was simply not like Cleo. When did she ever accompany Ira and the girls to a fair, even in Little Rock?

  Helen and Cleo boarded the Missouri-Pacific or “Mo-Pac” train north from Little Rock’s Union Station in the evening and alit the following afternoon in a glimmering midwestern Oz. The four-hundred-acre fairgrounds were right on Lake Michigan; there was an Enchanted Isle for children and a freaky, sideshow-like attraction, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium, boasting a man who pulled a small wagon with his eyelashes and a woman who appeared to swallow her own nose. The bright lakeside sky flew past above the Gurleys’ heads as they rode open-top buses specially built by General Motors; a giant Morton’s box poured salt from one billboard, and a river of Pabst beer flowed from another. Goodyear blimps floated lazily above Belgian villages and “real” underground diamond mines that exhibited live Kaffir and Zulu laborers drilling, in one of the exposition’s more racist attractions. Cleo was indulgent, letting Helen ride the wondrous “electric stairway”—what we now call an escalator—up and down, over and over. They goggled at the exotic marine life in the Shedd Aquarium.

  Helen wore her white scandal suit. Mother and daughter, ostensibly bound for sheer pleasure yet powered by Cleo’s hidden agenda, wandered together through an exposition that would attract a paid attendance of more than 39 million, an astonishing figure for the height of the Depression, when a quarter of the nation’s workforce was idle. General admission cost fifty cents. With its motto, “A Century of Progress,” the fair reflected American and global trends that may not have seemed obvious or relevant to the crowds gaping at robotic, life-sized dinosaurs in the Sinclair Oil Pavilion and chomping Belgian waffles on faux-cobbled streets.

  Six years before the coming world war, Germany and Italy mounted extravagant martial and technical exhibits that were potent indicators of their darker ambitions. Thousands of Chicagoans lined the shore as the Italian aviator General Italo Balbo roared in off Lake Michigan, heading a formation of twenty-four powerful new planes. Graf Zeppelin, the iconic 775-foot-long German airship, flew over the city in a careful pattern that made only one of its silvered linen flanks visible to the crowds—the better not to display the twenty-foot swastikas of Hitler’s National Socialist Party painted on the port-side tail fins.

  U.S. domestic affairs were the fair directors’ most pressing concerns. Keenly tuned in to the growing possibilities of American consumerism, they insisted that exhibitors display practical applications of new technology, things that impressionable fairgoers might step up and buy someday. By far the most attentive to that call to consumerism were the car men of Detroit. While poor white Okies were still fleeing the Dust Bowl in rattletrap Model Ts, automobile makers built massive chrome-and-glass shrines devoted to the future glories of the internal-combustion engine. Helen’s recollections of her two trips to the fair do not mention automobile exhibits, but, given their popularity and Cleo’s mad love of cars, it’s doubtful they passed up some of the fair’s most spectacular pavilions.

  Taking note of the fact that more than 150,000 people a year toured Ford’s assembly lines in Michigan, General Motors built its own factory right in the fairgrounds; it quickly became the most popular industrial exhibit at the fair. As crowds looked down from a balcony at two assembly lines, GM built twenty-five Chevrolet Master Sixes per day and gave away one $580 car each week to a fortunate fairgoer. A mechanized talking Indian, Chief Pontiac, narrated the story of steel. For the car companies and for American business in general, it was a bold venture during the Depression; industrial exhibitors spent more than $32 million to sell their visions.

  Women’s interests did not benefit much from such open-palmed investments. The Depression-era sea change in women’s issues is documented in Cheryl R. Ganz’s penetrating study, The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Revisiting the fair along with the Gurleys affords a bird’s-eye view of American sexual politics in flux while Cleo was raising her girls.

  The “first wave” of American feminism that had resulted in the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment had crested; thereafter, women’s issues lost traction in a trough of economic retreat and backlash. The regressions for women’s concerns in this fair dedicated to “Progress” were appalling. The closest thing to a celebration of female achievement was a tepid curtsy to the American hausfrau’s concerns: General Electric’s Talking Kitchen. Its vision of progress for the fairer sex was sweet indeed: technicians demonstrated that the 143 steps once necessary to make a cake could be streamlined to 24 in a truly modernized kitchen. Women were tossed a few more random crumbs. There was a quilt exhibit, and the stately maternal presence of the popular painting Whistler’s Mother, on loan from the Louvre. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did speak at the fair on “Women’s Day” that November. Her topic was also fighting fear—fear of losing one’s job, of being evicted, of being hungry and alone.

  Far from the First Lady’s righteous podium, on the fair’s crowded and decidedly lowbrow midway, a perfectly scandalous woman held millions in thrall. Raised poor in the Ozarks, brazen and unapologetic in her sexuality, and gifted with a canny head for business, that woman was credited with saving the fair financially. Her success, her outrageous public statements and financial savvy, made for an early, cruder model of the mighty global enterprise that resulted in Helen Gurley Brown’s rescue of the badly listing Hearst Corporation three decades later. Sex was at the center of this World’s Fair triumph; commerce and erotic “art” waltzed gaily beneath a steady rain of cash.

  That woman called herself Sally Rand. She was saucy, sly, and headline-grabbing, and she was the talk of the fair and beyond. So it is not surprising that Cleo steered her eleven-year-old daughter to the fair’s midway and its Streets of Paris venue. The long lines outside were about 70 percent male. But women were curious as well and queued up to view the show described by some outraged citizenry as “a cess-pool of iniquity, a condition of depravity and total disregard of purity.”

  The Gurleys wedged themselves into the packed theater, which generated so much cash the fair accountants were forced to set up a separate banking facility with eight overworked auditors just to monitor the Streets of Paris daily receipts. The midway also sold alcohol for the first time in fourteen thirsty years. In March 1933, just two months before the fair’s opening, President Roosevelt had signed the Cullen-Harrison Act into law, allowing the public sale of beer and wine. Between admissions, food, and drink, the “Streets” were pulling in an astonishing hundred thousand dollars a day.

  As the lights went down, the music welled up. It was not the squealing brass of carnies and cooch dancers, but classy selections—Debussy and Chopin. Out from the wings came a beautiful blonde, gliding across the boards effortlessly as her strong, shapely arms deployed twin fans of ostrich feathers, each four feet wide. As graceful as Terpsichore, smiling directly at the rows of spellbound gawkers, Rand manipu
lated the fans to rising cries.

  Was she indeed naked beneath the feathers? Dancing toward a large, backlit scrim, she dropped the fans, and all was revealed behind the thin gauze—the perfect upturned breasts, the muscular curve of haunch. There were gasps and screams as she retreated behind the fans and traversed the stage once more, whirling like a top with the fans held across the front and back of her torso. As the feathers flashed on a fast, deft pivot, there it was! Just a glimpse of breast and thigh—then back behind the scrim, fans down, in a bold chest-forward victory pose for an audience driven to a frenzy of tumescence, throaty roars, and shrieks.

  Little Helen may have been confused by the hoopla, but she was impressed. Later, from their hotel, she wrote to her sister in Osage: “Mary, you ought to see this woman with fans … She switches them all around from her front to her back so you can’t see anything but the audience makes a big commotion.”

  Sex, “tastefully” presented, did indeed save the Chicago World’s Fair from insolvency, despite some predictable and fairly empty huffing. The “fan dancer” Rand got arrested four times in a single day at the fair for dancing naked or nearly so behind those huge, artfully deployed fans. The arrests were mere gestures on the part of law enforcement; everyone adored Sally, and fair organizers had a deep respect for Mademoiselle’s attractive bottom line.

  Just who was this pearly-skinned Valkyrie who led the charge? Born Harriet Helen Beck, she fled her mountain home in Elkton, Missouri, as a teenager. As Sally Rand, she had landed at the Chicago fair by way of a Kansas City chorus line, the Ringling Brothers Circus, vaudeville, and a modest Hollywood career that dimmed with the advent of talkies; it seemed that the comely Miss Rand had an incorrigible lisp. Rebooted as an exotic dancer artiste, Rand campaigned for and won a spot on the Chicago fair’s midway with a Lady Godiva stunt. Astride a white horse, she crashed a fancy-dress pre-opening party for Chicago’s elite wearing little more than an anklet of posies and a cascading blond wig.

  Once installed in her own exhibition on the midway, Rand alternated between wearing a court-ordered pubic “fig leaf,” a sheer body stocking, and just the special body makeup concocted by her Hollywood friend and ally, the peripatetic Max Factor. He painted her naked body with artfully Deco jagged stripes, and got arrested along with her at one Chicago raid. Rand’s populist stance was catnip to the Depression-weary crowds looking for an affordable thrill. In her study of the fair, Cheryl Ganz concluded, “Rand became the fair’s enduring icon for optimism and hope, a true Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches figure.”

  Helen was far too young to be impressed by anything other than the sheer spectacle and the mad excitement of Rand’s audience. Overall, the Chicago World’s Fair was all about escape. It touted boundless, blue-sky optimism, miraculous new products, and a progressive, somewhat more permissive future. All of it was good news for that key aspect of the American economy that had been on life support—consumer spending. FDR was so bullish on long-term effects of the fair’s economic boosterism that he urged exposition officials to hold it open for another season, in 1934. They agreed.

  Once they arrived home, Helen burbled to her sister and friends about the wonders she had seen, the exotic things they had eaten and ridden upon. It was just dreamy. She would not learn until a year later that the Chicago excursion was also a dry run for Cleo, a sly bit of recon involving train routes, city transport, and geographical distances for the secret itinerary she had in mind. Saying nothing about her plans, Cleo bided her time. The family settled back into the more somnolent pace of their own city. Summers in Little Rock, Helen observed, “were still as a postcard.” It was so hot, even the streetcars seemed to roll in slow motion. When it was bearable, there were neighborhood games of Kick the Can, Run Sheep Run. Cleo had a terror of her girls participating in athletics, especially swimming in local dipping spots such as White City. As the girls cooled off, Cleo paced on dry land; she did not breathe easy until they were toweling themselves dry.

  Helen and her girlfriends were hardly boy-crazy, but they were interested. Very interested. Helen talked about her sexual awakenings in a frank 1996 interview with David Allyn, for his book Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History. “We played naughty games with a couple of the neighbor boys, nothing serious. We played Post Office, that was just kissing. At age ten in Little Rock, and even at fourteen, kissing is serious—you know, you feel vernal feelings. You feel—what’s the word? Not all the way to sexual, but you feel stirrings. And to play Post Office at age ten and fourteen is pretty far gone.”

  She remembered that game as a simple and very safe transaction. “You sent somebody a letter, and then when he got the letter you went some place in another room in the house and you kissed. Well, we were so innocent we didn’t even kiss, we just sent each other letters and special deliveries. It was so sweet.”

  Often, in summers past, the Gurleys had retreated to the cooler and somewhat less humid hills, staying with Cleo’s parents in Osage. They did so again for part of that summer of 1933. Helen, by then very much the city girl, found herself appalled by some of her relatives’ plain and uninhibited country ways. As she explained, “I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me—ordinary, hillbilly and poor—and I repudiated it from the time I was seven years old, though I didn’t have many means of repudiation. I didn’t like my little-girl cousin who peed in the creek in front of a lot of other people. I didn’t like all my cousins saying ‘ain’t’ and ‘cain’t’ and ‘she give five dollars for that hat.’ They were, and are, dear, lovely people who lead honorable lives in the Ozark Mountains, but I wanted something else.”

  That summer’s visit to the hills had other somewhat disconcerting aspects. Helen told Allyn, “My uncle, who was about four years older than I, tried to have sex with me. They lived up in the mountains at my grandmother’s house, and that was a hot and heavy summer.”

  Her teenage uncle shadowed her, panting and insistent as a randy coonhound. She wasn’t sure what was going on. Finally, he lured her to the attic. “I was 11, he was 15. Nothing like a country boy at age 15 who is horny. And yet, I too felt—what would you call them? Feelings, cravings, longings. We once even tried it, but I was, of course, hermetically sealed. I was a tiny little person, virginal as I could possibly be, never been touched before, and he couldn’t begin to get even close to me, and his heart wasn’t really in it. He knew that that was naughty.”

  Helen waited awhile before she told her mother what had happened. Cleo took it calmly. “He was her beloved younger brother,” Helen explained. “She wasn’t cross or cruel, she just said, ‘Well that just won’t do. He shouldn’t have been doing those things.’ I guess as I think about it she was fairly reasonable about the whole thing, considering that she herself I don’t think cared much for sex. My father, I think, was much more sensual than she.”

  At the time, Cleo was applying the bellows to some embers banked in her own heart, but she kept any longings for male companionship well hidden. At thirty-nine, she had been a married woman for fifteen years and widowed for a year. Neither daughter had a clue about her ulterior motives in 1934, when Cleo proposed a second trip to the fair in Chicago.

  4

  Roads to Nowhere

  “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

  —Eudora Welty, “The Wide Net”

  ONCE AGAIN, MARY WAS having none of Cleo’s sudden travel plans, and stayed with relatives when her mother and sister headed back to the World’s Fair in 1934. As the train neared the Windy City, Cleo insisted they bypass Chicago and get off in Cleveland, Ohio. Her explanation: It was raining in Chicago. Why not wait for good weather so they could best enjoy the fair? Cleo had always wanted to visit Cleveland! They would seize the day. Taking advantage of Depression pricing, mother and daughter checked into the grand, thousand-room Hotel Cleveland downtown.

  An exhausted and overexcited twelve-year-old Helen fell as
leep, and awoke in the strange room alone and frightened. She found a note from Cleo saying she’d be back soon. When her mother returned, her explanation was terse but truthful: she had gotten in touch with an old friend, and they went for a walk. The following afternoon, Helen was deposited alone in a movie house while Cleo had a second appointment to catch up some more. So vivid was Helen’s recall of that unnerving afternoon that she remembered the movie that was playing: Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, a detective mystery/comedy starring Ronald Colman and the ingénue Loretta Young. Helen’s absorption in the film dissolved with an ugly distraction. The man seated beside her unfastened his trousers and exposed himself. She moved to another seat. The man followed. When the lights finally went up and Cleo arrived to retrieve her daughter, a shaken Helen told her what had happened. They left for Chicago and the more benign transports of the fair the next day.

  Not long afterward, Helen and Mary learned that Cleo had been with her lost love, Leigh Bryan, the man she should have married. Cleo heard he had moved to the Cleveland area to try his luck, and was said to be getting by as an ice cream vendor. Over the two exploratory trips north to the fair, the resourceful Cleo had tracked him to his Cleveland neighborhood and made contact. Beyond that, the girls heard nothing further of their mother’s old sweetheart. They concluded that things hadn’t gone too well in Cleveland.