She was ready in the summer of 1936. Once again, there was the announcement of a road trip presented as a treat. They would drive to Dallas, visit the State Fair of Texas, and see Ira’s brother James Gurley, also in Texas then, as well as one of Ira’s married sisters and her family. The cousins would all have a fine time and get to know one another better. After Texas, they would head straight west to Los Angeles, where Ira’s brother John lived and worked sporadically as a mechanic. They would have a nice visit and see the Pacific Coast. Some part of that itinerary must have interested Mary, and she agreed to go along.
They did everything that Cleo promised. When the girls expected it was time to head for home and the start of Helen’s school term, Cleo fessed up: she had sold their heavily mortgaged house and furniture back in Little Rock. There was nothing left to go home to. They would be setting up housekeeping in Los Angeles, where Helen could finish high school. Surely, Ira’s brother John would help them.
Mary hopped a bus back to Little Rock as soon as she could.
PART TWO
Los Angeles
Good times were the core conviction of the place.
—Joan Didion, Where I Was From, on early California
5
What Fresh Hell
My shrink says that, given the set of problems I had growing up and as a young woman, it’s quite astonishing I’m not locked away in a mossy little cell somewhere.
—HGB, Having It All
UPON REACHING LITTLE ROCK, Mary Gurley moved in with some girlfriends and took business courses. Cleo hadn’t argued; Mary was eighteen by then, and strong-willed. But her plan to make a stand in Little Rock soured quickly. She was unable to find any sort of job there. One of her roommates wrote to Cleo in Los Angeles and suggested that she talk her daughter into returning to live with the family, and soon. At a dead end, without income and having clearly worn out her welcome, Mary reluctantly went west to rejoin her family.
The Gurleys were getting by in a small rental not far from the family of Ira’s brother John and his wife, Nita, who lived on Fifty-Ninth Street. True to her pattern of unreasonable and unfulfilled hopes, Cleo had not received any financial support from that hard-pressed branch of the Gurley clan. But there was the comfort of some family nearby and occasional adult companionship. They knew no one else in that bright, sprawling city. Since Ira’s death, Cleo had shot out in all directions in the hope of a lifeline: Tulsa, Texas, Chicago. Finally, in California, the earthly edge of possibilities, she had better make it work.
On a Sunday afternoon in April 1937, Helen was out in the yard playing catch with her younger cousins Bob and Virginia when a deeply shaken Cleo arrived bearing terrible news. The “grippe” or cold that Mary had been suffering with turned out to be the dreaded and still-mysterious poliomyelitis. She was paralyzed from the waist down and in all likelihood would never walk again. Her arms were affected to a lesser degree.
Cleo’s nameless terrors had metastasized into something horribly real. With no support base, and scant understanding of the brutal disease, Cleo was frantic to save her girl. Though Mary’s suffering was by far the worst, the diagnosis was devastating to all three Gurleys, financially, emotionally, and socially. There would be many more hasty moves, but no more of Cleo’s blind and inchoate flights; all future relocations, some of them cross-country, were planned according to the exigencies of Mary’s care and its impact on the family finances.
While Mary struggled through the terrifying and acute onset phase of the disease in the hospital, her mother and sister moved to a rented bungalow situated on—of all places—South Hope Street. Cleo chose it for its proximity to Mary’s best chance for any kind of relief, the Orthopaedic Institute for Children (OIC), which was just across the street. The hospital was founded in 1911 by Dr. Charles LeRoy Lowman, a man Helen credited as being of tremendous help and support to the traumatized family. Lowman was one of the few pediatric orthopedic specialists between New Orleans and San Francisco; by the 1930s, he knew more than nearly any practitioner on the West Coast about birth defects such as spina bifida, clubfoot, and spinal curvatures, as well as the diagnosis and effects of infantile polio. Though the paralytic disease had been seen and documented since the late eighteenth century, the first recorded incidence on American soil was in Rutland, Vermont, in 1894, an outbreak that struck 132 people. The twentieth century saw a great rise in the number of cases. Mary was infected in the escalating series of small local outbreaks that would reach a crescendo in the worst U.S. polio epidemic, in 1952.
In the baffling and desperate polio wars, Dr. Lowman was a hands-on gladiator. He threw everything at the deadly paralysis, using all the resources he could cobble together; he even turned an OIC fishpond into a children’s hydrotherapy facility. He developed a new surgical technique, “fascia transplants” of muscle tissue, that allowed some polio victims to walk again. The hospital started the Orthopaedic Foundation to help parents afford their children’s care. It is still active today, also specializing in children’s hemophilia treatment. But in the late 1930s, given the lifelong expenses they were facing, the foundation was only of modest help to the Gurleys.
Not long after the diagnosis, desperate to cheer her sister, Helen sat down and wrote to five movie stars and to President Roosevelt, whose own struggles with a paralysis diagnosed as polio had led him to buy a run-down spa/resort in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1926 and convert its twelve hundred acres with inns, cottages, and pools into therapeutic facilities. He ran it as a nonprofit open to all people immobilized by polio. Helen was sure this man would be empathetic. Having written her brief request and included Mary’s hospital address, she signed off: “Thank you with all my heart, Mr. President.”
None of the movie stars responded. The family was thunderstruck when an official-looking letter finally did arrive for Mary. The president had found a moment to dash off a handwritten letter, expressing his sympathy and his hopes for a complete recovery. The framed FDR letter moved with Mary for decades and, after her death, ended up on the Browns’ apartment wall in Manhattan.
Having spent an apparently forgettable sophomore year at Belmont High in the Westlake section—Helen never mentioned it in any of her memoirs—she transferred to the public school closest to home and hospital, John H. Francis Polytechnic High School on Washington Boulevard and Flower Street. She enrolled as a junior in the fall of 1937. After school and in the evenings, she was often across the street, at her sister’s bedside. During the months when Mary was in the hospital, Helen and Cleo fell into intimate rituals of utter frustration and despair. “Sometimes she [Cleo] would lie on the bed with her face to the wall, weeping, and I would lie down beside her, wedging myself up against her back, spoon fashion, and try to find out what was the matter. Sometimes she just cried from general loneliness. Whatever set her off, I learned about depression early and well and I can always slip into it as comfortably as a kimono.”
When family dolor threatened to suffocate them in the bleak house on South Hope Street, they tried the mobile therapy that had always buoyed them in Little Rock. Mother and daughter climbed into Gloria Hibiscus and drove around and around the City of Angels aimlessly. But these were hardly joyrides. Oh, sic transit Gloria! The beloved Pontiac, chariot for the brightest of aspirations when Cleo first wheeled it into their Little Rock driveway, became a grim utilitarian buggy and a mobile wailing wall. Wrote Helen: “We would drive around Los Angeles streets … and just cry up a storm … about the acne, about my sister, Mary, being in a wheelchair. About our not having a daddy, about money problems and life’s general sadness.”
There seemed to be little hope of improvement for either Mary’s condition or Helen’s aggressive acne. The remedies were completely counter to today’s recommended treatments with topical medication and oral antibiotics. Twice a week, a discount doctor lanced Helen’s cysts and pustules, perpetuating a moonscape of new eruptions and dark, hard scabs. Helen recalled being sent out into the world with a face that “look
ed as though it had been smeared with strawberry jam.” Her tormented skin was also subjected to X-ray beams, an ill-advised and unregulated procedure that, she was told, made her skin thin and fragile in later life. Helen’s assessment of the therapies available to both sisters was sadly correct: “At that time the medical profession didn’t know any more about acne than they did about polio, and mine was virulent.”
Particularly for a girl preoccupied with the notion of being “not pretty enough,” the relentless disfigurement—and it was that—proved life-changing. At fifteen, with the acne’s full onslaught, Helen was no longer the gregarious girl who had danced, teased her friends, and performed on any stage available back in Little Rock. At “Poly,” they were already calling the Arkansas import “the Bashful Babe,” though not unkindly.
Poly, the second-oldest high school in the city, then served about fifteen hundred students. Besides a standard curriculum in math, English, history, and the sciences, the school offered technical training in everything from electrical engineering to auto repair and hairdressing. In her first months there, Helen found herself at sea for reasons besides her appearance. She realized that she had a southern accent. Also, to her dismay, there were no identifiable rich kids to glom on to, as there had been in Little Rock; the scions of wealthy Angelenos were cosseted in private schools.
“I got used to going to school with the very poor, the Japanese, the chinese [sic] and negros [sic],” Helen wrote. Poly absorbed the displaced children of several waves of immigration to the West Coast: Asians from the Pacific Rim, the children of destitute Oklahoma and Arkansas farmers who had fled the Dust Bowl shortly before the Gurleys rode west, as well as the growing Latino population from Mexico. It sure didn’t look like the peach-cheeked junior class in Little Rock. Despite her introduction to this rainbow array of classmates, Helen declared herself most astounded by the presence of “the negroes.” She had grown up amid almost complete segregation. African Americans descended from the slaves owned by Helen’s great-great-grandfather Sneed and others in Carroll County had fled the area generations before she was born; in a 2012 survey, her birthplace of Green Forest had just a .04-percent population of African Americans—or fewer than a dozen people. When Helen was growing up in Little Rock, her schools, church, and neighborhood were entirely white.
Given Helen’s upbringing, it was understandable that the mere presence of black students in her classes at Poly was cause for astonishment: “Would you believe, white students mingled with black … shocking! One year out of Little Rock, where a black man looking directly in the eyes of a white woman on the street could land in jail, where occasional lynchings still took place on Saturday night, I could have had a problem.”
She credited her ready acceptance of this new social reality to her belief that prejudice of any kind, Ira’s sexism notwithstanding, “had never been on the menu” in the Gurley home. This declaration might well have been genuine, though the language and the stereotyping were regrettable when she described her adjustment to Poly: “The dusky ones and I, after they got used to how funny I sounded, got along fine. Black boys were fabulous dancers, and the Amazonian black girls, towering over me on the basketball court, forgave my getting a ball—finally—into the hoop, but the hoop belonged to the other team.” One of Helen’s early Poly friends was a Japanese American named Setsuko Matsunaga, known as Suki. Back in Arkansas, some of Helen’s friends were flabbergasted by the company she now kept.
* * *
The Bashful Babe was not enjoying her new invisibility. It wouldn’t do, but the prospects for improvement seemed dim. Night after night, she pondered a version of the same question: “So, what does a sixteen-year-old with an invalid sister, depressed Mommy, terminal acne, and the financial pinchies do to cheer herself up?”
There was no booze or drugs, not in those days—nor was she ever interested in chemical escapes. Helen worked up her own Dale Carnegie–esque plan: just suck it up and get on with things. She could not accept a life on the sidelines, especially when home life was so dreary and sad. “I willed myself to become more outgoing, even extroverted, divert attention from the skin that was either forming pustules or scabbing up from excision.” It was hard, very hard. Helen confessed that during those two high school years she was the most extroverted she would ever be, before or afterward. She undertook the charade, she explained, “Because I had to not go down the drain.”
As she would for the rest of her life, Helen Gurley put it out there. Her plan was multifold—excellent grades, volunteerism, good rapport with teachers (she would be voted number-two apple polisher in her class). Recalling her best Poly teachers for an educational publication in Harrison, Arkansas, Helen admitted that her favorite academic heroine was a known and unapologetic bad girl. Her beloved Mademoiselle Davis was a French teacher and … ooh là là!
“Charlotte was sophisticated, fine-boned, brunette, alluring and a GOOD French teacher. She was also having an affair with the man who printed the school newspaper—married, I think—and he adored her. She was so unlike a staid, prissy, proper USUAL public-schoolteacher in those days … She was always interesting.”
Her second favorite was Ethel McGhee, an “ancient” forty-seven-year-old who took a special interest in Helen and had the kindness and patience to coach her for a public-speaking contest. There was no lectern Helen Gurley didn’t aspire to, and she invented other ways to put herself forward, writing quick skits that she could perform at variety shows that drew most of Poly’s student body. She admitted that many of her stage offerings were downright inane, even a tad desperate. But that didn’t stop her. The school newspaper, The Poly Optimist, reported: “A clever monolog was given by Helen Gurley, who enacted campaign speeches of various types of students running for office.”
She joined a clutch of Poly’s fifty clubs and ran for school office—any office—if it seemed attainable. She reported as a busy “campus crier” for the yearbook staff and was elected president of the California Scholarship Federation, for which she moderated programs and organized events. Yearbooks and issues of The Poly Optimist were full of the unsinkable Miss Gurley, who also chaired a committee to choose “suitable” movies to be shown with the school’s new projector. Along with a Disney short (Silly Symphony), they settled on the reliable rectitude of a Gary Cooper vehicle, The Plainsman. Over time, she was winning friends and admirers. “Orchids to Helen Gurley for her true Poly spirit,” cheered the school paper. She had even earned nicknames: “Good Time Gurley.” “Guppie.” And, because she kept company with a certain Robert C. Brown, “Mrs. Brown.”
By the time she celebrated her Sweet Sixteen birthday on February 18, 1938, Helen sounded pleased and upbeat in her letters back to Little Rock. On that day, she wrote to “Tabby,” Betty Tabb, asking how she had felt to turn Sweet Sixteen. Helen confessed that she didn’t feel any different, though she had the real sense she was growing up. She didn’t want to, not just yet. She did relish the dating part of it. Helen held to the Little Rock term “beaux” for the boys who asked her out. “I wasn’t a belle,” she said, “but I wasn’t a blip.” Bob Brown was a nice, regular guy—a fellow member of her church choir—who would remain her ardent admirer, sending her a blizzard of letters and gifts during his war service in the South Pacific. Others were merely fun and companionable. Helen’s penchant for creating a sort of male stable—guys for all occasions—began at Poly and would coalesce into a network of epic proportions by her mid-twenties, as a working girl. She explained: “My theory from high school on is that until you can collect a prince, you create a court from who’s there, no matter how disparate the courtiers.”
Helen maintained that there was nothing hot and heavy going on in high school. “I was sweet and nice and cute, I guess; I always had boyfriends. And at age sixteen I was on a date, somebody kissed me for the first time, a real kiss, not a kiss under the mistletoe, but a real kiss, and I almost certainly had an orgasm—that’s all it took. So I must be highly sexed. It’s alw
ays been easy for me to have that happen.” There was some touching, yes. “In terms of petting, but that is with fingers. No genital kissing, that was hundreds of years later. But stimulation with fingers and kissing, yes. I didn’t have a bosom, so that didn’t really enter into the situation.”
She did not give off signals that she was a “fast” girl. In fact, Bob Brown and his friends thought her so respectable and chaste that they did not invite her to their unchaperoned and untrammeled parties. She was still a proper southern girl, she explained. “A Little Rock–brought-up girl didn’t go all the way ever.”
Two of her favorite high school gallants were especially fun, good-looking, and never grabby. “I would now say they were homosexual,” Helen said, “but, at the time the ‘condition’ didn’t exist and surely wasn’t talked about.” Close friendships with gay men were a constant in Helen’s life from the mid-1940s on. Joey and Lester, the two high school beaux in question, were probably just as pleased as Helen with the practicality and comfort of their nonromances. They simply had a ball. They went joyriding around L.A. and got a bit frisky from time to time: snatching a branch of blooms from the manicured parterre of a Bel-Air mansion was about as wicked as things got. They “baked” themselves at the beach, they picnicked.
How they danced. Everything seemed more dynamic and intense in Los Angeles, even Helen’s favorite pastime. She reported to Betty Tabb that the new dances were more intricate and wild than anything she’d seen back east, enough to leave her breathless and dizzy. But the steps were awfully cute. The “steps” probably included the Lindy Hop and swing dancing. The jitterbug would zap Los Angeles dance halls by 1939, four years after the bandleader Cab Calloway had a hit with “Call of the Jitterbug.” As ever, black Americans mastered the hottest dances before their trickle down to the Brylcreemed and white-buck-shod ballroom set. Helen watched the joint-popping athleticism at Poly dances, enthralled.
Not Pretty Enough Page 8