Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  In so many ways, for a car-crazy girl from a landlocked southern state, Southern California was a dream. Their home, with its wheelchair parked out front and the necessary clutter of braces and compresses, may have been more dreary than the Gurleys’ house back east, but there were more varied and accessible means of escape. Cleo had discovered the racing scene at the gorgeous and nationally renowned Santa Anita Park, a sumptuous track built four years earlier at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. The best horses ran there; during the time the Gurleys were race regulars, runty, heroic Seabiscuit won the Santa Anita Handicap in the final start of his career. To the sisters’ delight, the Hollywood thoroughbreds also turned out. The movie mogul Hal Roach was one of the track’s owners, Bing Crosby and Al Jolson were stockholders, and fealty was expected from the studio A-lists. Come they did: Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Jane Russell, Betty Grable. A day at the races was heady catnip to inflame the girls’ movie madness.

  As the calendar turned to 1939, Helen sat down to write out her New Year’s resolutions. The ten-point list included some December 31 standards: don’t drink very much, listen to Mother and Mary, get exercise and a tan, buy good clothes. She vowed to concentrate on one person while talking to him or her, never to talk maliciously or gossip, and to keep more personal things to herself. The teenager who would become global champion of the average-girl “mouseburger” placed this near the top of the list: “Look out for the underdog.”

  “RELAX” floats commandingly at the center of the page, scrawled in large letters. And then, number ten, a final vow that might draw gales of laughter from those who knew her in later life: “Not be cheap.”

  The year 1939 was eventful for Helen. She would be voted third most popular girl in her class and elected valedictorian, and would begin some hard planning toward her goal of the college education her mother had been denied. Helen was more than ready to field those “What next?” questions from the yearbook committee. She had already run a five-day information program with visiting college representatives, an early version of the college fair.

  Miss Gurley was going places. The faculty recognized her leadership by electing her to the elite Ephebian Society, “the highest honor to be won by students of the Los Angeles city schools.” Helen was among nine Poly students to make the cut that year, along with her good friends Setsuko Matsunaga, Florence Stanley—and the dreamy Hal Holker, president of the student body, varsity letterman in track, aspiring to become an architect—a package that, in Helen’s opinion, added up to a “Wow.”

  A profile of Helen in the Optimist celebrating her election to the Ephebians reported: “Guppie likes having her back scratched and frosted cokes, and dislikes being called ‘Good Time’ … Her ambition is to become a successful businesswoman.”

  In her breathless campaign to excel, Guppie sometimes spread her talents a bit thin. Heeding the sweet and transcript-plumping blandishments of Calliope, muse of poetry, she published verse in school pamphlets that suggested her artistic limits. From “Thoughts at Eventide”:

  Sometimes at eventide I find

  That thoughts of nature throng my mind

  Senior Prom was on St. Patrick’s Day of 1939; the theme was all shamrocks and leprechauns. Helen hustled with her chores on the refreshment committee, all but ignoring the elephant in the crepe-papered, green-and-white gym: by that afternoon, Good Time Gurley still did not have a date. Up stepped the “Wow” himself, Hal Holker, lathered from his last-minute preparations on the orchestra committee and prom chairmanship. It was Kismet for the two overcommitted seniors; he asked Helen to be his date, and she accepted without hesitation. Helen emphasized that he did explain his eleventh-hour invitation: “It wasn’t because he considered me a wallflower and probably not booked but, on the chance I wasn’t, thought I’d be perfect.”

  How so? Holker was sure that this capable girl would require little maintenance during the dance: “Gurley could take care of herself … good dancer … lots of friends … wouldn’t have to worry about her while doing stuff you have to do as a prom chairman.”

  Thus that first date was almost a business arrangement, but their relationship did blossom into romance, according to the Wow himself. Still living in California at ninety-three, Hal Holker had a strong recollection of that Gurley girl when reached through his daughter, Janet Kessler. Though a serious hearing loss left him unable to do an interview on the phone, he was pleased to answer questions relayed through Kessler. He certainly had kept track of the famous Mrs. Gurley Brown over the years, had even read some of her infamous writings. Of her presence on campus he said, “She was fun to be with and always had a wisecrack.” Gurley was never loud, though, never pushy. “She was behind the scenes, but her voice was known throughout the school because of the newspaper.” Yes, he was smitten after their prom date; yes, they kissed on that first date, and he did indeed take her out again the following week.

  Shortly after Helen’s Senior Prom, on March 23, 1939, another long-in-the-bud romance was finally consummated. Cleo Sisco Gurley and William Leigh Bryan stood before a Methodist minister, in the presence of a witness named Ardath Davies. After five years of what Helen and Mary supposed to be a final silence between the two after their clandestine meetings in Cleveland, Cleo and her long-lost love were married somewhere in Los Angeles, possibly at the county clerk’s office. It is unclear whether her daughters stood with them, nor did Helen provide any indication of when Bryan came west from Cleveland, or when and how Cleo told her girls. Helen wrote little of the household’s newest member and minced no words describing her lack of esteem for her stepfather. She declared him a decent sort but “embarrassing and ineffectual.” Bryan cooked, which was a mercy, considering his new wife’s barely edible efforts. But Helen could find little else positive to say.

  Whatever Helen’s assessment, Bryan was man enough to walk into a house with three very stressed and needy women, relentless medical bills, and one very sadburger bankbook. He rode in on a white steed of sorts—one that creaked and dripped once it was tethered outside the house. Helen was deeply ashamed of the new vehicle that had assumed a place beside Mary’s wheelchair out front: a Good Humor pushcart. The love of Cleo’s life, the bookish, sensitive boy with an ear for poetry, was pushing a cart through her adopted city, hawking ice cream bars.

  Bryan’s was a strict and exacting servitude. Jobs were still scarce, but Good Humor ice cream treats, a diversion as inexpensive and pleasurable as tubes of lipstick, also enjoyed a boom during the Depression. The expanding company drove its workforce with very long workweeks, strict dress code in GH whites, and only commission pay for street vendors; most of their wares sold for a nickel a bar. Bryan’s contributions to the household economy were modest at best; another of Cleo’s expectations for better times melted away.

  * * *

  As graduation approached, Helen continued the romance with Hal Holker, which made her happy and proud. Overall, her dogged race seemed won: in two years, the Bashful Babe had won the Big Man on Campus, been voted class valedictorian, gathered a circle of good girlfriends, and had every intention of going to college. The acne had even begun to subside a bit. On Thursday evening, June 22, 1939, friends and family crowded into the auditorium for Poly’s commencement. Its theme was “The Genius of America.” Suki Matsunaga offered a piano étude; Helen, having popped up and down for various honors during the proceedings, delivered her valedictory speech, titled “This Is My Own, My Native Land.”

  That summer, she and Hal Holker continued to date. He brought her home to meet his parents. Her assessment: “Some of the best smooching of my life was in those sweet summer months.” Mr. Holker said, somewhat cryptically, “I thought we were girlfriend and boyfriend, but she thought we were a couple.”

  He was headed to Alaska to work as a commercial fisherman in hopes of earning college tuition; he had been accepted to Princeton, but in the end couldn’t even afford the cross-country transportation costs. He began studying architecture at nearby USC,
entered into a long and happy marriage, and eventually, with multiple degrees in urban planning and land management, built a distinguished national career in city housing, urban renewal, and planning.

  Helen had settled on her next move, mainly decided by fiscal considerations. She would start at Woodbury Business College in Los Angeles in the fall, in the hopes that she would still make it to a four-year college somehow. Given the uncertainty of the family finances, the next two years saw a disjointed sort of education, traceable through matriculation records and rather vague references by Helen to the endless bus rides that took her between institutions and summer visits to Osage.

  In midsummer of 1939, Cleo took the girls east, leaving her husband to ply his trade in the scorching L.A. summer. Mary and Cleo were heading for President Roosevelt’s therapeutic center in Warm Springs, Georgia. Helen visited friends and relatives back home in Arkansas, then headed home and enrolled at Woodbury Business College on September 9, 1939. In January, she withdrew from secretarial school to attend the spring semester at Texas State College for Women in Denton, just north of Dallas. She enjoyed her tenure there, but, like her mother, she was forced to withdraw after a single semester for lack of funds. After yet another summer visit to Osage, Helen had decided to re-enroll at Woodbury; she could live at home and work at a school-arranged job to help with tuition.

  Helen boarded a Trailways bus in Harrison, Arkansas, for the long haul back to Los Angeles, rolling west toward her shaky future quite alone. She would be living with other girls until she and her mother, sister, and stepfather settled into their next ramshackle home. The plan was simple yet daunting: she would attend secretarial school and work, both to help with tuition, as planned, and to begin contributing to the support of the struggling household. Cleo had forced herself to take a miserable and anxiety-provoking job pinning small tags onto garments in the basement of Sears Roebuck for fifty cents an hour. She was so frightened of the workplace and strangers that just getting her prepared for work and out the door and onto the Western Avenue bus each day was a family effort. But since her new husband was a disappointment as a wage earner and Mary’s medical bills kept mounting, she had to keep the job.

  Helen never invited friends or beaux to visit the crowded, unhappy little house. She never imagined that the family’s next move would isolate them further—worse, that the next cheap rental would come with some highly undesirable co-tenants.

  6

  Sinking In

  Nobody likes a poor girl. She is just a drag.

  —HGB, Sex and the Single Girl

  MOST AMERICAN RAGS-TO-RICHES NARRATIVES have a well-known poverty signifier, invoked again and again in histories and interviews: Abe Lincoln’s log cabin, Sam Walton’s family milk cow, Oprah Winfrey’s potato-sack dresses. For Helen Gurley Brown, it was a plague of gophers.

  She cited the rodents often when spooling her Single Girl origin myth—and they were only one aspect of her housing issues. From the end of 1939 through the mid-forties, her family landed in their worst rental yet, a small, rickety house on West Fifty-Ninth Street, south of Slauson Avenue. It was at the heart of the unfashionable east side of Los Angeles, in a stark and charmless neighborhood hemmed by the Santa Fe and commuter-line railroad tracks. Settling into this outliers’ limbo, the family was startled by a thunderous and frequent roar. “The Super Chief or something went by twice a night,” Helen wrote. “Talk about suspended conversations!”

  The Super Chief was the glamour liner of the Santa Fe railroad, running between Chicago and Los Angeles. In later iterations, its engine was painted with a flashy feathered war bonnet. The train was often studded with celebrities commuting from Hollywood to the midwestern hub and points east. Schedules and Santa Fe route maps through Los Angeles from that time suggest that Helen’s notion of being tormented by the elegant Chief might have been a bit fanciful; most likely, it was quotidian freight and commuter trains that rattled the windows. As they whooshed on down the line and quiet was restored, the scourge from below became audible. The tunneling gophers were most active beneath the bedroom shared by Helen and Mary.

  Helen remembered their sorties as relentless: “You could hear the little bastards scratching away. Scratch, scratch, scratch. We never knew what night they might make it on through.” When the varmints started pushing up the floorboards, something had to be done. “We once put a hose down a gopher hole, let it run several hours—talk about big spenders on our budget—actually flushed up a gopher! Poor drowned little thing, we didn’t try to revive him. Maybe there’s a secret cruel streak in all of us but this gopher was eating our carnations and trying to sleep in our bedroom.”

  Of course, it wasn’t just one gopher; some of the five species populating Southern California can breed up to three times a year. And if you were raised beneath the dark, rolling cloud of Cleo Sisco Bryan’s well-earned misgivings, the persistent clawing from below could also be heard as the harbinger of more imminent disaster: the very ground beneath their feet might dissolve, disgorging pestilence and more misfortune. There was no question of moving; they couldn’t afford a better place, even though all oars were in the water and pulling hard.

  Leigh Bryan was working the night shift, selling ice cream. Cleo, “shy to the point of verbal paralysis,” still went shuddering to her job at Sears; sometime later on, her sewing experience got her a slightly better job in the pattern department of the May Company department store. Mary was working at home for C. E. Hooper, a radio ratings system. She telephoned listeners to find out which programs they were tuning in to. Overhearing her sister’s daily supplications, Helen judged this numbing and demeaning work: “For forty cents an hour she sludged her way through hundreds of numbers copied from the telephone book, put up with hang-ups, no-comprendes, and couldn’t-remembers, conscientiously recording data.”

  Perhaps the crucible of Mary’s illness had softened some of the anger and rebelliousness that had so worried Cleo in her older daughter. The three women may have wept together over their collective woes, but Mary was not given to dwelling on the life sentence of her own misfortune. It had helped a good deal that their next-door neighbor at the house on South Hope Street was also a wheelchair-bound polio victim. She and her construction-worker husband had, Helen noted, “somehow got beyond the sads and depression that go with invalidism.” The couple had been a huge help to an overwhelmed Cleo, taking Mary on outings and reminding her of all the things she could still do. Even when the Gurleys moved away from these supportive friends, Mary’s quiet acceptance and cheerfulness amazed Helen, who correctly suspected that her sister’s lifelong darkness had understandably deepened. “While my sister didn’t ever cry or complain ever, God knows what demons occupied her.”

  Sometimes Helen pitched in to help Mary with the calls, but her own schedule was tight, between morning shorthand and typing classes at Woodbury and her afternoon job at the radio station KHJ in Hollywood, arranged for her by the school. To help toward her tuition, she was to work as general dogsbody for an announcer named Mr. Wilson, whose early-morning show, Rise and Shine, announced listeners’ birthdays and anniversaries from information they sent in. Eighteen-year-old Helen made six dollars a week. There were some unfortunate moments when the pay seemed commensurate with her performance. By the time she got to work after classes, her employer had long since gone home, but if she had made some blunders in preparing his script, the atmosphere was sulfurous when Helen skipped in from the streetcar that brought her from school.

  “Some afternoons when I got to KHJ, somebody there in the morning would report Mr. Wilson having gone mangoes, shrieking to be heard all the way to Cahuenga Avenue that his idiot secretary had screwed up again.” It seemed that, thanks to Helen’s errors in typing up listeners’ requests onto index cards, sad little Deborah Jean over in Gardena had not found her birthday gift under her sister’s bed; Mr. Wilson had mistakenly hinted that it would be near her daddy’s toolbox. Twin brother and sister were being congratulated on their fourth
wedding anniversary.

  Helen bore down and managed a bit more focus. A few months later, she was hauling in seven dollars a week, having increased her skill set with some advertising duties. She was tasked with placing two Alka-Seltzer tablets into an envelope to be dropped in a glass of water for live advertising spots re-creating the brand’s soothing effervescence. This simple effect was derailed by the eager interventions of little Helen, who only wanted to help. She “tested” some tablets in a glass of water, wiped off the loudest and fizziest, and put them into the envelope; by airtime, the soggy discs were duds: Plop, plop. No fizz. It certainly was worse when a sponsor went mangoes.

  Despite the poor pay, Helen felt the job did have its perks: “The place was loaded with men. I’ve never seen so many men in one company with so few corresponding females to louse things up.” Radio men could be very naughty boys—especially the announcers. The layout of the station facilities provided for a separation of powers; the executives were in a main building, and the announcers, secretaries, music clerks, and engineers were all out back, in a separate stucco bunker that also held the studio. A certain frat-house mind-set back there led to an office game called Scuttle.

  It was the sort of behavior that could induce a coronary in any present-day HR manager. The game had a Cro-Magnon simplicity. Helen described it thus: “All announcers and engineers who weren’t busy … would select a secretary or file girl, chase her up and down the halls, through the music library and back to the announcing booths, catch her and take her panties off.” Imagine such a hunt: laughing, shouting men, a frieze of exposed flanks and pubic hair, of screaming, red-faced women. Helen described the proceedings with jaw-dropping nonchalance. After all, girls could get their panties back right away—if they wanted them.