Her only distress regarding this predatory and abusive office sport? Helen was never chosen as Scuttle prey. She might have taken the exclusion quite personally, as was her wont, but she realized that it was not because the men found her too ordinary-looking to “pants”; they simply wanted to stay out of jail. Helen’s acne had gone into near-complete abeyance, she had acquired some slightly detectable contours, and had begun a stringent lifelong habit of charting her bust, waist, and hip measurements. While attending Woodbury, she was five foot three, 103 pounds, and stacked like a garden rake at 28″ x 18″ x 28″. Helen had noticed a group of the men eyeing her from the corner in deep conference. She heard them murmuring, “I don’t know … seventeen, eighteen?”
Just before the job ended, upon Helen’s graduation from Woodbury in early December 1941 with a bachelor’s degree in secretarial science, she had edged up to a salary of twenty dollars a week. She could manage 130 words a minute as a stenographer, but her typing skills did not compare favorably. Helen would leave her mark at the station in a few memorable keystrokes when she sent her first teletype to all of KHJ’s affiliates. The programming message was simple: “2:30 to 3:00 all stations fill.” This meant the affiliate stations could choose their own programming for that half hour. Helen typed the first part correctly, then slid her fingers off the keys partway through the last word. When she put them back—a bit west of where they should have been—she typed the last word, “fill,” and the teletype went out this way: ALL STATIONS FUKK.
There were a few choice return teletypes:
From Bakersfield: KEEN IDEA. NEED HELP WITH YOUNGER GIRLS.
From San Francisco: AFRA ACTRESSES DEMANDING MORE THAN SCALE.
For a working girl’s first office experience, KHJ was special indeed. Pitiful pay, unbridled sexual harassment, and ever so much fun.
* * *
Helen continued to expand her constellation of beaux. But in the wider dating pool beyond Poly’s fairly civil corridors, she found herself subject to some bruising, humiliating slights. She would revisit and rehash the worst of them for the rest of her life. Even when her progression of therapists urged her, over a few decades, to let it all go, Helen held fast to the hurts. In that respect, she was surely Cleo’s daughter; the snubs and unkindness that other girls might have gotten past, Helen kept reliving, in the way that a tongue seeks a sore tooth. Should an episode be excruciatingly public, it was guaranteed a long and toxic half-life in her heart and in her memoirs. One such incident unfolded right on the Sunset Strip.
Woodbury Business College allowed sororities with all the trappings—rush, initiation, formal dances. In an eleventh-hour scenario much like her prom experience, Helen found herself still dateless for a party to follow a sisters-only Eta Upsilon Gamma dinner she had just attended. She stood outside a restaurant called Bittersweets on Sunset Boulevard, in the company of sorority sisters she likened to “the Rita Hayworths and Betty Grables of their time.” They were knockouts, all. Every one of them had a swoon-worthy escort for the dance. Helen was about to call her mother to come pick her up when hope flickered. The sisters marched a pair of their superfluous males toward Helen for a look-see. They paraded past, gave her the once-over, and just walked away. So much for sisterhood. Left alone on the steps as the elite scrum moved off to the party, Helen awaited the mercifully dark and private sanctuary of Cleo’s Pontiac. When she finally pulled up, Helen could be assured of sympathy—with a curdling soupçon of “Didn’t I tell you?”
Beyond her damning-with-faint-praise mantra (“You are beautiful enough”), Cleo had a habit of nitpicking at exactly the wrong moment. Helen often left for a date beneath a buzzing cloud of insecurities. Before any social outing, Cleo worried aloud about her daughter’s presentation, the suitability of her outfit, the competition. Could she maybe fix her hair a bit higher and neater? Wouldn’t that yellow chiffon be more flattering? You know how people are …
It took Helen years to shake off the negativity. “In my own life later,” she wrote, “looking at pictures of myself during those warning-from-mom years, I gleaned that I actually looked perfectly okay and didn’t need to be so looks-worried but her assessment sunk in and never really left town.” The proof is indeed in the photos. Candid backyard shots of Helen at twenty, shared by Hal Holker’s family, show a well-turned-out girl in a flowered dress with a fuzzy angora chub tossed over her shoulders. Her hair is glossy and carefully done. Lounging in a lawn chair or leaning against a car, she looks directly at the camera; her smile is natural. She looks like fun. Holker’s sister wrote to him: “Helen Gurley stopped by the other night. She is really one of the most attractive girls I’ve ever met. And very sweet.”
So what was the problem?
In a word, Cleo. Helen’s mother always insisted that she was just trying to soften the inevitable disappointments. Cleo’s basic self-improvement message was a dour version of the one Helen would banner with big-sisterly cheer in her own bestsellers and in her magazine: Honey, do the best with what you have.
After the Sunset Boulevard humiliation, Helen’s resolve to avoid such wounds became something of an obsession. Once again, she realized that it was all up to her. Just as she had worked to overcome her Bashful Babe mien in high school, Helen charted a plan for securing a certain womanly dignity, along with sufficient dates. Her new strategy was the opposite of trying to stand out, as she had in school. Referring to the sorority incident, she reasoned, “There were hideous turn downs like that, which convinced me that I had to be there and make an impression and sink in to somebody. I couldn’t just do it by walking around the room.”
She understood the fierce tyrannies of conventional beauty. For Helen, there would be no fateful glances across a crowded ballroom, no smoldering coups de foudre. This wasn’t the movies. But she did live in Movieland, with an endless conga line of sable-lashed studio wannabes checking hats, slinging hash, and clinging to the frayed cuffs of low-level “talent scouts.” Those girls would always be first off the shelf, and, from what she had seen, they were fairly disposable. Helen Gurley did not want to disappear.
Sinking in would become her signature skill, a flexible double whammy of psychological and sexual seduction. It would be built upon the timeless art of how to induce a certain … frenzy. On how to tantalize and become habit-forming. Eventually, sinking in to a man and a market would secure Helen’s marriage and her fortune. Sinking in—generally through an orchestrated and dogged campaign of self-improvement—would become the mouseburger game plan that launched a global empire of Cosmo. But at twenty, Helen simply hoped it would afford a skinny poor girl some degree of insulation. It hurt her so, the quick and careless judging.
She did not approach the project with any sense of drudgery or dread. Sex was dandy. Helen had thoroughly enjoyed testing the powers of temptation while holding on to her virtue in high school, “jumping out of cars” when the action got too heated. She wasn’t sure why, but she was aroused, easily and deeply, by the struggle itself. “I wouldn’t take anything for the sexy hours when you struggled your brains out with boy or man, passionate, steamy struggling … foreplay that didn’t actually lead to play … Since I could be brought to orgasm by kissing, why ask for anything more, and whoever he was put up with it. What the poor creature did when he got home was his affair.”
Vive la lutte! And too bad about anyone’s forlorn and unrequited arousal. She would get to matters of sexual reciprocity and mutual gratification soon enough. Helen’s frank embrace of her own pleasure was bold and unusual in an era of largely dutiful and reactive female sexual response. She realized early on that hers was a healthy libido that would not be denied.
As she was about to finish up at Woodbury, she decided that she was at last ready to cross the great divide. She chose a very sweet young man who was crazy about her, to the point of declaring a private holiday, “Helen’s Day,” with a cascade of presents: Chanel No5 cologne, an ankle bracelet engraved “R to H,” a baby-blue cashmere sweater. He was
employed at a shipbuilding plant and soon would be off to war as a second lieutenant in the air force. His devotion, according to Helen, was most gallant: “[He] had been my beau for two years, putting up graciously with Never Getting There (I didn’t know what a penis looked like, had never seen one, was easily brought to orgasm by somebody not doing a great deal—let’s don’t elaborate.)”
It finally happened when they had come back from a swim and were taking showers in his apartment, after a Sunday at the beach. She described “the deflowering” this way: “The first time I had intercourse I was a virgin, everything was sealed over, I think I bled a little bit, I’m not sure about that, but I did have an orgasm, and this darling man went to the biggest jewelry store in Los Angeles and bought me earrings, so he was darling.”
Helen loved being so adored, but she was not in love with her darling, a nice Jewish boy named Bob Platt. “He was off his rocker about me,” Helen said, but he never did get to proposing. She assumed that it was because he wouldn’t marry outside his faith. This was fine with her; she preferred to inhabit the immediate, comfortable, and libidinous moment. She said of their time together, “As far as I remember, I always had an orgasm … It was just, pleasant. It was nice to have a beau who adored me, though I wasn’t terribly proud of him.” She did not want to get married; mother and daughter had some of the worst arguments of their lives over Helen’s intransigence on the matter. Cleo was horrified that her daughter was flatly uninterested in getting this young man to the altar.
When Helen and Bob Platt made love, they were never reckless. The terrible fear of pregnancy, Cleo’s ultimate doomsday scenario, had also sunk in. Asked to describe her birth control methods at the outset of her adult sex life, and for a decade and a half afterward, Helen fairly shouted at her interviewer: “Condoms! Condoms!”
Bob was considerate in that sense and many others. “We were good playmates,” Helen said. Once he was inducted into the air force, she did go to see him during basic training, and saw him once on leave; during his service, he flew what Helen believed to be a hundred missions. But they “drifted” after the war, which was fine with Helen.
Family exigencies, rather than romance, ruled Helen’s criteria for marriage-worthy men. She rejected suitors with the chill, clinical appraisal that some boys had applied to her looks. The difference: Helen’s gold standard was earning potential. She couldn’t marry the boy who boxed groceries, or an assistant soundman at the radio station. Marrying simply for love was not an option. There were too many mouths to feed and doctors to pay. For Helen, it had to be a package deal, not unlike the agreement Ira Gurley had made: Marry me, help support my family. There was one major flaw in the plan: “I had hoped to marry somebody wealthy and solve all of my family’s and my problems. Alas, I didn’t have the credentials—looks, family background, emotional stability. (I did have the youth … we all get that.)”
She made light of this harsh reality in a snippet of poetry:
Oh well he’s got that je ne sais quoi
While I, my dear, am from Arkansas
A few years into Cleo’s second marriage, an unspeakable development rendered any notion of her happiness firmly, permanently out of the question. Leigh Bryan was diagnosed with incurable stomach cancer. He would spend the next few years in a slow and agonizing slide toward death. Watching Mary suffer had nearly undone Cleo, but it had seemed they were through the worst of it. Bryan’s diagnosis was a knockout blow. The doctors had made it clear: there was no hope of saving Bryan, or even keeping him comfortable past a certain point. In terms of available treatment, cancer was not much ahead of polio. Helen wrote: “Those visits to him in the Los Angeles County Hospital with Cleo were as pain-filled as anything you would ever want to know. She loved him, and she deserved a little happiness.”
Crueler still was the fact that Leigh and Cleo’s tragedy was playing out beneath the shadow of another world war, with its attendant anxieties and scarcities. For a naturally fearful person undergoing one of the worst crises of her life, the stress level was breathtaking. Even trips to the hospital for treatment or to visit during Bryan’s stays would have to be carefully planned with the advent of gas rationing.
All citizens of Los Angeles had a right to the jitters. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese threat to the American West Coast seemed all too plausible. “Tojo” had submarines, planes, and terrifying audacity, as the Hawaii attack illustrated. City officials scrambled toward preparedness. Los Angeles’s first trial blackout was held while the Pearl Harbor wreckage was still smoldering. Santa Monica Bay was soon ringed with antiaircraft guns mounted from Malibu to the Palos Verde Peninsula.
The Los Angeles County Hospital, a sprawling institution originally built for the care of the city’s destitute, was gearing up for increasing war casualties as Cleo ferried her husband there for treatment. Given her overwhelming concern with his worsening illness, Cleo might barely have noticed the sudden disappearance of her favorite escape—the ponies. That same year, 1942, war had driven the Thoroughbreds away from Santa Anita. The track’s newly installed magnetic starting gate was dismantled, and work crews hammered in different sorts of fencing as the racetrack was converted into an assembly center for Americans of Japanese descent headed to internment camps. More than nineteen thousand men, women, and children were housed in hastily constructed barracks in parking lots and in the stables, which still reeked of manure. They were allowed to bring only what they could carry. Each arriving inmate received a cot, a blanket, and a straw tick to sleep on. It’s likely that the families of some of Helen’s Polytechnic classmates were among the detainees.
For a woman who wrote everything down, Helen made surprisingly little mention of the war in any of her writings. Her reminiscences give far more attention to the Depression, which, in her telling of it, clearly had the greater impact on her life, since it coincided with her father’s death. There are glancing mentions of World War II privations—gas rationing, foods craved. Elizabeth Jessup did write to her of their Little Rock friends killed in fighting and basic training. Helen was mainly focused on her next job, the second of what would become a string of nineteen secretarial posts. Having forsworn trying to get close to L.A.’s reclusive rich while she was in high school, Helen had a new plan to cozy up to glamour and privilege as a career girl. She’d work in showbiz!
They were paying secretaries twenty-five dollars a week at the Music Corporation of America (MCA), by then a formidable Hollywood talent agency. Helen assumed that she would be working directly with show business people, the ones who seemed to have all of the golden things she was “ragingly longing” for: “Love, beauty, glamour, adulation.” She would be happy with mere proximity to the glow and the dough.
A male acquaintance had helped her get a job in the band department of MCA; it was a solid part of the business in those radio days of big bands. He told her, “You’re gonna flip out over the décor!” He spoke of a chandelier from the palace at Versailles, magnificent antique furniture—much of it, he suspected, bought on the cheap in war-torn Europe. The place had carpets thick enough to hide a kitten. There were newly working girls like Helen, platoons of girls, serving as stenographers and in the typing pool. Her friend warned her: The joint ran on girl power, sure, but you never saw them. Mr. Stein preferred them out of sight.
MCA’s founder, Jules Stein, was a former eye surgeon who had played violin and saxophone in bands to help finance medical school. He was so successful in arranging dates for bands, including that of the popular Guy Lombardo, that he founded a booking-and-talent agency in 1924. By the time Stein moved his offices to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, he had an impressive roster of clients, and a set of swinish rules and prohibitions for the women who kept the place running. When Helen arrived at MCA’s bright white two-story Georgian headquarters in Beverly Hills, it was estimated that Stein’s shop represented half of the movie industry’s biggest stars, including Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Eddie Cantor, Fra
nk Sinatra, Ingrid Bergman, and Jack Benny.
“I was scared shitless,” Helen admitted. She knew less about the booking business than she had known about radio. Getting her first glimpse of her new workplace, she declared it exquisite. All was as promised, the lavish reception hall and the fifty-thousand-dollar French chandelier. The new employee was led directly to the secretarial pool, where the women were squeezed into a small, airless, glassed-in room that Helen likened to a fish tank. “It had everything but a rock castle and snails,” she sniped. When supervisors did come by, they never greeted any of the women by name, and barely looked at them. If the men wanted anything, “they just rapped on the glass of our pool,” Helen wrote, “like when it’s time to feed the guppies.”
Once in a while, Helen was allowed into the office of her boss, Mr. Barnett, to take dictation. But for the most part, the men preferred the more antiseptic transaction of speaking into a Dictaphone; the blue wax cylinders that recorded their utterings were delivered to the typing pool and the finished letters picked up.
To her deep disappointment, Helen never even saw the stars. Word of their arrival would crackle through the building: Ronnie Reagan in tennis whites! Errol Flynn! Esther Williams! Alas, office girls could traverse the building only on a back staircase that was nowhere near the reception areas. No secretaries were allowed on the top, executive floor. Ever. This institutional shunning of the secretarial staff inspired a few risky revolutionary acts. Helen was among the foolhardy few who crept into Stein’s posh screening room to eat their lunches and nap on his buttery leather couches. “It was really chauvinist pig time around there,” Helen said. Of her own boss, Mr. Barnett, she said, “He didn’t treat me like a human being.” Soon Helen joined the discreet parade of disgusted women clattering down the purdah staircase and out of the building. Job number two, finito.
At least there was big and happy news from Little Rock. Elizabeth Jessup had married her high school sweetheart, and Helen began addressing her letters “Mrs. Roy Bilheimer.” A long letter to the happy couple in January 1943 begins with an effusive psalm of thanks. Helen had just opened the Bilheimers’ holiday package. From its size and heft, she expected some bath powder and cologne, but inside was something far more precious: four cans of tuna fish, all but impossible to find because of rationing.
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