One thing was becoming distressingly apparent to the Gurley sisters: Cleo harbored some assumptions about human relationships that were so off-base, so glaringly detached from reality, that it seemed she had been raised in a cave. As her anxious brain spun possibilities for sources of financial support, she could not or dared not give them voice. Out of pride or shyness, Cleo never asked outright for anything. Yet she seemed convinced that others would know what she was thinking and step up with exactly the right sort of help. A few times, she sent her younger daughter to make the pitch, though she never adequately prepared Helen for the missions.
Helen was confused and miserably uncomfortable when Cleo dropped her off alone to visit an elderly man up north in Green Forest. He had been fond of Ira, hunted with him, and possessed a valuable gun collection. Cleo’s assumption, communicated to no one until afterward, was that surely the old gent would want to gift poor Ira’s daddyless little girl with one of his guns. They could sell it for cash. As Helen later concluded, Cleo simply expected people to anticipate her needs. No commemorative weapon was handed to the child. Both parties ended the visit on a note of baffled embarrassment.
Mercifully, there was never a hidden agenda in the Gurleys’ regular excursions to the Oaklawn Park Race Track in nearby Hot Springs, Arkansas. A day with the ponies was pure pleasure—for Cleo, most of all. Still a devotee of equine speed and beauty, she adored the whole spectacle. Cleo and Elizabeth’s mother, Aleta Jessup, took turns chaperoning Helen, Elizabeth, and Mary to the track on Sundays in February and March. Every racing season, Cleo ran up new outfits for herself and the girls. Each had a glorious four dollars to wager, and they never lost it all. This was because the girls hedged their bets and simply put a dollar down on a favorite horse just to show. Helen, a girl who would learn the arts and merits of compromise, contented herself with minor expectations at the track. Her reasoning: winning something is better than just plain losing. This was a modest precursor to her adult business motto: never ask for something you don’t think you can get.
Cleo’s race day buoyancy always deflated once they left the track. More than ever, Helen and Mary preferred their friends’ homes to their own. The Jessup house was a lively spot, even though Elizabeth had a busy working mother and was often cared for by her stricter grandmother. The Jessups had experienced their own Depression reversals. Elizabeth’s father worked at a bank; his salary was cut by a third, then by another third. But at least his bank didn’t close. Still, Helen noted, unlike her own home, “there wasn’t any sadness there.” Aleta Jessup treated Helen like a second daughter. Surely, she took a close look and recognized a very needy little girl. Nearly sixty years later, Helen wrote to Aleta to reminisce and thank her for the respite: “Let’s just say things were never very happy at my house … When I came to your house there was always laughter and fun and certainly music, not to mention wonderful things to eat!”
There was a good deal of joyful noise at 523 North Ash Street. When Mrs. Jessup was at home, she was often surrounded by Elizabeth’s friends, girls and boys, who gathered around her piano to belt out popular tunes: “These Foolish Things,” “Got a Date with an Angel,” “Blue Moon,” “Goody Goody.” Aleta Jessup enjoyed young people and music; she was unconventional and fun-loving enough to hold a real, grown-up dinner party for a dozen boys and girls, Helen among them, that ended in a girls-only sleepover. She conducted the junior and senior choirs at the Winfield Methodist Church, where she also played the five-tiered “wedding cake” organ. At the home sing-alongs, she assigned everyone a solo, regardless of skill. No one liked the songfests better than Helen, who judged her own voice a “get-by alto.”
Helen had followed Elizabeth and her mother to the Methodist choir. Up in the church loft, things were getting flirty between the girls and boys. Helen found that rehearsals and performances “had a sexual tinge” as twenty girls and boys spent hours together sharing hymnals and sidelong glances. As everyone approached puberty, getting close had its complications in the warmer months. Helen and her girlfriends found personal hygiene a challenge; as there were no deodorants, talcum powder flew several times a day, “like dusting an apple strudel endlessly.”
Something was happening to Helen’s best friend, a transformation that perhaps boys noticed first. The girls were in junior high, dressing in a locker room after a swim, and Helen was stunned by the sight of Elizabeth, Aphrodite-like, leaning down to snug her breasts into … a brassiere! She had acquired booo-soms, as Helen would call them the rest of her life. Helen’s memory of the moment is rhapsodic: how perfect those new breasts were, how unexpected and breathtakingly beautiful. Suddenly the girls were different, in a hushed but profound way. Helen did not recall being envious of Elizabeth’s new developments but simply, pleasantly aghast.
Despite this developmental gulf, coming of age together was a sweet and comforting partnership. Their chatter was kind, never competitive. The two girls grew to “loving boys in the yeasty, sensuous, long simmering summers of Little Rock.” Even when they were too old for dollhouses, they would sit on the floor of Elizabeth’s bedroom, indolently moving the dolls about in an innocent ménage à trois, the dolls representing Helen, Elizabeth, and Freed Matthews, a boy they both adored. It was nothing naughty; the dolls only had flirty conversations. It may not have been clear on those dreamy afternoons, but Helen would conclude later, “We were surely as much in love with each other as we were with Freed Matthews.”
To their astonishment and horror, Freed became one of the first local victims of the rising polio scourge; he died swiftly. Little was known of that increasingly dreaded disease poliomyelitis except that it liked to claim its victims in the warmer months; given their mild climate, the southern states would see outbreaks year-round beginning in the 1930s. Theories on transmission ran the gamut, from mosquitoes to houseflies to swimming pools. Cleo added another unknown evil to her heavy rucksack of fears.
Freed was gently, briefly mourned. Life went on, and other boys caught their fancy. Girls still spoke about their crushes in rosy abstractions and ideals; the grubby, furtive side of nascent sexuality seemed to be the province of boys with moist palms and a secret semaphore of urges and dares, especially when they were in packs.
Helen had a brush with their feral groping one Halloween. “I was out in the neighborhood during trick-or-treat, and a couple of boys made a pass at me. What was that? They had their hands on my backside or something. And I was such a good Mommy’s girl, it took me weeks to get up the courage to tell her what had happened. She [Cleo] was never punitive about it. I told her that these boys had been sort of fresh, and she was glad that I told her about it, and she didn’t even say that they were bad, naughty, terrible boys. She just said, ‘Well, you don’t want that to happen.’”
Between the priapic young uncle, the movie theater creep, and neighborhood booty-grabbers, sex had not yielded very romantic or uplifting transports for Helen. Cleo’s calm if cautionary reactions had probably helped put boys’ impulsive behavior in some reasonable perspective. Whatever she told Helen after the scary incident in the Cleveland theater, Helen did not, in her telling of the story, seem permanently traumatized. She traced her curiosity about sexual matters as far back as age eight, when she and her Spruce Street neighbor Betty Engstron sat on the living room floor and peered closely at their own genitals. Helen also thought back to the times she and Mary would pore over the medical-equipment section in the Sears Roebuck catalog, wondering about trusses, bedpans, enema equipment, getting “mildly titillated … just tiny twigs of sexuality getting started.” This was a young girl who would pay close attention to her own stirrings. She was, by her own admission, always interested.
From an early age, she was also committed to improving her chances for attracting a dreamboat. Helen and Elizabeth delighted in the standard pubescent beauty excursions. They hopped the streetcar to the Woolworth’s downtown and circled the cosmetic counters, heads bent in protracted deliberations over which type and shad
e of lipstick to buy. Tangee was their brand of choice; it was cheap, chastely tinted, and sold everywhere. Between World Wars I and II, it was the most popular brand in America.
Unknowingly, the girls, their schoolmates, and their mothers were boosting one of the few industries to come through the Depression more robust than before. Cosmetics, and lipstick in particular, given its low cost, were hardly salves for the nation’s huge problems. But the gay, vivid swivel tubes of molded beeswax, deer tallow, castor oil, and the vermilion hues of crushed beetle carapaces proved an inexpensive if momentary balm. A survey of buying habits in the 1930s revealed that Depression households were as likely to buy a tube of lipstick as they were to purchase a jar of mustard to enliven meager fare.
Seventy years later, Leonard Lauder, chairman of the Estée Lauder Companies, would tout an economic measure he called the “leading lipstick indicator.” As The New York Times reported, “After the terrorist attacks of 2001 deflated the economy, Mr. Lauder noticed that his company was selling more lipstick than usual. He hypothesized that lipstick purchases are a way to gauge the economy. When it’s shaky, he said, sales increase as women boost their mood with inexpensive lipstick purchases instead of $500 slingbacks.”
Lipstick, with its phallic shape and glistening oral enticements, became both acceptable and politicized in future gender wars—as it was in skirmishes past. In 1912, the feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others led a suffragette rally in New York City with lips boldly painted as a gesture of emancipation. Tangee’s 1934 advertisements claimed both allure and propriety for females of all ages: “Don’t risk that painted look. It’s coarsening and men don’t like it.” That hardly mattered to two girls at the Tangee display in the Little Rock five-and-dime. They were thrilled to have permission to buy a specially formulated “one shade fits all” lipstick just right for teens entering the cosmetic market.
* * *
By junior high school, the girls were made to understand the basic rules of feminine comportment: Never overstate your availability. Look and act like a lady and marry well. Cleo wanted that for her daughters. But she also communicated a slightly subversive message drawn from her own disappointments. “Having babies isn’t all there is,” she told them, adding that, of course, she loved them both. She encouraged her girls to use their brains, but her ambitions for them were limited. Helen was never pushed hard toward anything; she felt that her mother’s hopes for her never exceeded what she thought Helen could do. Cleo was hedging her bets again. Helen’s theory: her aspirations for her daughters were limited by her own fears.
Cleo, a poor cook, reluctant wife, maimed by childbirth, and a virtual shut-in, was hardly able to school her girls in the finer domestic and social requisites of southern womanhood. Helen was encouraged to spend as much time as possible with girls from wealthier families, possibly to educate herself in the social niceties so utterly foreign to her mother. The homemaking education offered by the public schools was of little help. Helen recalled: “In my home-economics class in Pulaski Heights Junior High School in Little Rock in 1935, where we cooked baby meals, blancmange, a delicious, sugar-packed little vanilla pudding, was accorded all the gravity of meat loaf and string beans.”
The lack of information on proper nutrition was on a par with the sketchy sort of sexual information she received. “I couldn’t have had a more repressed sexual education than in Little Rock, Arkansas,” Helen declared. “A, it was Southern. B, it was in the 1930s. And you were thought to be a very bad girl—a trashy girl, tacky, unacceptable—if you should have sex before you were married. But the real concern was that you would get pregnant. There was no birth control. And to be pregnant and not married—there was no abortion, either. Therefore you would have had to go to another city and spend the rest of your life in a nunnery or kill yourself.”
In Cleo’s vast panoply of anxieties, the premarital seduction of her daughters loomed large, perhaps disproportionately so, considering their worsening financial problems. She fretted aloud about the potential consequences of premarital sex, but did not offer any opinion on the act itself. Sex education per se was just not on the table.
“[Cleo] wasn’t a zealot,” Helen said. “She wasn’t of the Catholic persuasion, nothing like that, but she wanted her daughters to be raised as nice Little Rock Southern, honorable, respectable young women and get married. And I’m sure she told me you have sexual relations after you’re married. But we didn’t really discuss it—it wasn’t a topic of conversation in my house.”
Instead, there was more of Cleo’s oblique vocal apprehension, particularly when it came to the older Miss Gurley. Mary had emerged as the feisty, headstrong sister with a temper that no one wanted to cross. Given her volatility, Cleo did not dare push back when her elder daughter refused to go on those impulsive road trips. The little sister got an earful of her mother’s growing misgivings. “She was terrified that my sister would be seduced or somehow get involved with a boy and get pregnant. She was terrified of that. I heard a lot about that: ‘Mary’s running with a fast crowd; oh, if we could only get her away from them.’ And my sister was not popular. Was that because she was running with a fast crowd? And the nice girls had dropped her? Or had the nice girls dropped her and then she started running with a fast crowd? It [Cleo’s] was a lot of concern about popularity and the correct people to be with. How did I escape? How did I escape from this?”
Sometimes the three Gurley women just got in the car, windows down, to air out the anxieties and unspent anger that suffused their small house. They were happiest on the move, with Cleo at the wheel. Dowdy as it was, the ’30 Chevy had served them well. But in 1935, car-crazy Cleo was ready for an upward sort of six-cylinder mobility.
That year, Pontiac laid out its most aggressive campaign ever, to capture the “lower cost” market with its new line. A surviving promotional film made for the company’s sales force boasts that the combined media buys—newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio—would create “seven billion, five hundred sixty million selling impressions” throughout America “day after day, week after week,” for a full year.
Cleo was snared, besotted, and, given their finances, half-mad with desire. With Mary in high school and Helen in junior high, she bought her first brand-new car. The Pontiac sedan cost a breathtaking seven hundred dollars. Cleo let it be known that it was the happiest day of her life. She piloted her beloved off North Monroe Street and into the narrow, rutted dirt driveway beside the house, where it dazzled. The humpback chassis was fronted by a vertical chrome grille, topped by a Deco hood ornament, a likeness of Chief Pontiac himself. The girls thought the car stunning, and it smelled like heaven; Helen and Mary sat inside for hours, just inhaling. Helen, who would anthropomorphize every subsequent automobile in her life, christened their new chariot “Gloria Hibiscus.”
Hallelujah! With gas prices averaging nineteen cents per gallon, the Gurley women could cruise Little Rock and beyond in comfort, style, and the heady assembly-line perfume of enhanced status. Helen loved seeing the gleaming sedan pull up to fetch her from after-school activities. Yet, though the car may have been a source of pride and pleasure, Cleo, as ever, had another, quieter agenda. She had bought her family a reliable getaway car. Cleo was contemplating another mad dash. Money was getting tighter; job prospects were still nonexistent. Suddenly, with no prior discussion, she announced a road trip. This was not a lark; it was to be permanent. She decided to move them all nearly three hundred miles away, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they knew no one.
Her logic for choosing that distant and unknown city was as half-formed as ever. The details emerged haltingly and made little sense to her daughters. Cleo knew that the older brother of Ola Stephenson, with whom she had shared a dorm room during that one semester of college back in 1914, lived in Tulsa. She had heard that Ola’s brother headed a law firm. Perhaps he would help them out financially, or give Cleo a job. The attorney in question had not been contacted or petitioned in any
way when Cleo hired movers and started packing the family up. Mary, seventeen and done with high school, was not having any of it; she took refuge with her grandmother in Osage. Once again, Helen was alone with tiny, hell-bent Cleo. Wedged into the tightly packed Pontiac, she sobbed bitterly at the loss of Mary, her dearest girlfriends, dance lessons, Aleta Jessup’s musicales, and life at Little Rock High.
They followed the moving van northwest to Tulsa. Exhausted and confronted with the rashness of her flight, the widow Gurley was beside herself as soon as they arrived, presumably at a rental she had arranged sight unseen. What were they doing in that strange place, all alone? What had she been thinking? Cleo strode around distractedly outside the car, Helen recalled, “like Ophelia strewing petals.” The moving men surveyed the pathetic scenario, conferred, and persuaded Cleo to head back with them that very day—at full freight, doubling the cost of her impulsive flight. The home goods went straight to Little Rock; Cleo and Helen reached Osage in the dead of night to fetch Mary. Back home, as the girls reveled in their reprieve, Cleo just wilted. A little sadburger, Helen called her—terrified, poor, and utterly without prospects.
After the Oklahoma debacle, which came on the heels of the car purchase, there was even less money. The strain of maintaining a certain genteel appearance was increasing. Cleo made it clear: falling again into poverty amid people they knew, sinking back to a grubby, subsistence sort of life such as they had had back in Green Forest, was simply insupportable. If they were destined to be wretchedly poor again, let it be someplace far away, where no one knew the depths of their fall. Cleo had resolved to avoid that humiliation at all costs. But this time she had to make a clean, clever break, and make it irrevocable. The deception needed to be seamless.
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