The one food sure to tempt Helen Gurley Brown from childhood throughout her skim-milk-and-diet-Jell-O adult years: tuna fish. She was so mad for the stuff it turned her into a guilt-ridden hoarder. She opened the first precious can while Mary was still asleep, having waited until Cleo left for work. “I had tuna fish cereal, tuna fish eggs, and tuna fish toast,” she told the Bilheimers, confessing that she hid the remains of the can for another binge.
Helen regaled the newlyweds with tales of her odd but pleasant Christmas Day in Los Angeles. She had gone to an open house at the home of a Hollywood writer. The house was perched on a mountainside; inside, a fire roared. The company was lofty and a little loony. One of the guests claimed that he was the only man on earth able to speak seagull and that he had “translated all the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into sea-gull. Nothing the matter with him!”
Helen was on her way in that tectonically unstable, mobile city that seemed to thrive on flux. Two secretarial jobs down, she mercifully had no idea how many more bad ones were in store for her. At least, in most of her subsequent positions, she would indulge deeply, freely, in one of the great pleasures and torments of her single life: men. For the longest time, she would pursue the unattainable “Him,” tarrying with the married, the uninterested, or the downright psychotic. Helen would play a long game, alternately glorious, fulfilling, wretched, and demeaning. She would stay single way past thirty, which grimly tolled “spinster.” She would enter relationships that engendered years of psychotherapy. Yet she had no doubts whatsoever: mastering that romantic/professional tango would save her life. It just had to.
7
Not Pretty Enough
Now the hidden assets of an attractive girl can be as fascinating as the dark side of the moon. Plumbing the depths of a raving beauty may be like plumbing the depths of Saran Wrap.
—HGB, Sex and the Single Girl
LIKE SO MANY PATRIOTIC AMERICAN WOMEN, Helen Gurley went to war in an olive-drab rucksack. Photos of wives, girlfriends, sisters, cousins, especially taken for the purpose, were carried from home to eternity as the sweet, portable talismans of lives and loves left behind. Helen said that the professional portrait she had taken of herself in 1944 went to “multiple boyfriends in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.”
The hand-tinting of the portrait is clumsy and slightly garish, but her look was very much of the moment. The brown hair was swept and rolled into a lustrous, high pompadour. The eyebrows were carefully penciled, the lips flaming red. She wore a string of demure pearls. Beneath the fuzzy yellow-green sweater rose a pair of high and perky breasts of such exacting circumference and symmetry as to suggest a bit of legerdemain.
“Padded,” she would later confess. Helen would never acquire the natural means to jut, jiggle, or jounce. But in terms of genre poses, the portrait was clearly influenced by the forties bloom of “sweater girls,” such as Lana Turner and Jane Russell, who achieved fierce warhead effects with their Perma-Lift “bullet bras” thrusting vigorously against soft, straining angora. Ads for the mighty sling contraptions promised “the lift that never lets you down.”
One of the men who shipped out with Helen’s portrait was her high-school beau Bob Brown. An active-duty snapshot of Brown shows him lying on his bunk in a South Pacific Quonset hut, with a stogie in his mouth and Helen’s framed portrait on a shelf behind him. Their letters back and forth have a playful, no-strings-attached tone, at least on Helen’s part. Bob was not a keeper, but he was a heck of a nice guy. It was the least she could do.
On the home front, Helen’s war efforts mixed pleasure and duty. After the MCA flameout, she was briefly the secretary for the Abbott and Costello radio show, which was often broadcast from nearby military bases. “I learned how it felt to be very, very popular!” she chirped; “… sometimes singer Connie Haines and I would be the only girls on the entire base for a day.” On her own time, she danced at USO canteens at bases in the Los Angeles area, with servicemen on leave or about to ship out. More taxing, as the fighting went on, were her Wednesday evening trips to dance with patients at Sawtelle Veterans Hospital, a large medical facility built on federal land west of what is now the 405 freeway. Many were suffering from what was then called “shell shock.” Helen remembered it as an unsettling sort of volunteer work; the young men were so terribly damaged that sometimes she had to force herself to go.
By the late spring of 1944, there was some encouraging war news: The British Royal Air Force and the U.S. Eighth Air Force were pounding Germany with round-the-clock bombing runs. To the particular relief of West Coast residents, Japan’s last aircraft-carrier forces were defeated in the Pacific; a single battle with U.S. carrier forces destroyed 220 Japanese warplanes. On D-Day, June 6, Allied troops landed on Omaha Beach in the Normandy Invasion.
On June 28, as more war casualties continued to flood into County Hospital, a long, quiet struggle there was over. Leigh Bryan died, at age forty-eight. Cleo was fifty-one. For her, there would be no other. “Cleo slept with a total of two men in her life,” Helen observed, “both of whom she married first.” She was deeply sorry for her mother, but otherwise not much affected by her stepfather’s passing. Helen was of troubled mind about so many other things. Since she was ten years old, their household had absorbed so much sorrow and uncertainty. She was surprised to find herself still struggling with what she termed daddy issues, with her shaky self-esteem, and with the growing pressure of supporting the family. As a young adult with an uncertain future, she had no trusted elder whom she could ask for advice. Though Cleo was supportive, her greatest expertise seemed to be in deploying fear and doubt; she still knew very little of the wider world that Helen had paddled off to. Cleo had hauled her family to land’s end in California in one of her panics and found that she hated it; Los Angeles was too big, too fast, and way too far from home. Her menial job cowed and further depressed her, and Mary’s care was a constant strain. Worst of all, Cleo had had so little time with the man she had waited for so long before she became his caregiver, too.
Helen badly needed attention as well; she wanted wisdom, reassurance, a more sophisticated ear. Something within was beginning to frighten her. She made a decision fairly unusual for the times, certainly unheard of in her family. “In 1944, I went to a therapist—at 22,” she wrote. “Since that time, I have never been without one.”
That lifetime commitment is remarkable, given her initial experience, with a psychotherapist in Pasadena. In their first session, having heard a cursory rundown of Helen’s love life, he asked, nastily, whether her mother “put out” as well. At first Helen was confused. “I didn’t even know what that meant,” she said. She thought that maybe “put out” meant lying down on command and being taken against one’s will. Then it was explained. “Translation: he didn’t approve of my single-girl sex life and wondered if I had possibly learned it from Mom.” Finding the good doctor downright sadistic, she discontinued treatment and kept looking for Dr. Right: “I think I went through psychiatrists like I went through jobs.”
There were three recurrent leitmotifs throughout her lifelong therapy: men, work, and not being “pretty enough.” She noted some doctors’ impatience with her stubborn inability to move on past her old hurts and slights, and her preoccupation with beauty. But Helen was a brave and eager analytic subject who invited challenge; she had no interest in the sort of therapy that merely validated one’s basic personality, foibles and all. She cried a lot in sessions. But she really did hope to change. Whenever she was sounding like a broken record—and wasting her own money at it!—she expected to be called out for it.
“I was always attracted to psychiatry,” she said, “… but it was so expensive; it was twenty-five dollars an hour, which was half of my weekly salary—even in the forties it was twenty-five dollars an hour.” With some therapists, she cut deals for discounts. Yet she wanted top-drawer talent. She researched area therapists and decided that she would go with, as she put it, “the famous-est and the best-est.�
� At the time, that was Dr. David H. Fink, author of one of the earliest self-help books. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1943, Release from Nervous Tension was a huge bestseller in a stressed and war-weary nation. Despite Fink’s stature, Helen was able to talk him into an affordable rate—there was something about that Gurley girl. Fink would preside over the breathless recitations of her first big affair and the frustrating liaisons that followed.
It never cost anything to talk to her girlfriends, and they were plentiful, loyal, and terrific at helping her lighten up. Like so many other places around the nation at that time, Los Angeles was very much a city of women, many more of them working now than before the men left to soldier. They were more visible, more mobile, and seen around town enjoying one another’s company. Helen kept up with friends she met on various jobs and with her sorority sisters, working girls all. They occasionally held sewing nights to repair and restyle their work wardrobes; thanks to Cleo, Helen was a fair hand with a needle and thread. Hems rolled up and down; buttons and trims changed, beneath laughter and a cocktail or two.
One longtime friend from that era was Yvonne Rich, who said they met at an Eta Upsilon Gamma alumna function. It was held in a restaurant on the west side; Miss Helen Gurley, class of ’41, was front and center when Rich walked in. “The first time I ever saw her, she was sitting at the bar with her legs crossed and wearing those black fishnet stockings,” said Rich. “Just making herself look as come hither–ish as possible.” As the restaurant filled, Rich was not the only one to think, “Who’s that girl?”
Like her beloved tuna sandwiches, fishnet stockings would become an HGB signifier; she wore the vampy hose to her ninetieth birthday party. In the mid-1940s, only known bad girls—strippers, hookers, burlesque queens—dared snap them to their garters. When crossed and dangled from a bar stool, those legs encased in spidery webbing had a certain “hey, sailor” semaphore. Helen must have loved the look, to have flouted propriety so boldly; perhaps they added a bit of contour to her very thin gams.
“Well, that was just … Helen,” Rich said. They hit it off immediately, and remained friends for more than forty years. Rich said that she was never one to judge what she calls “Helen’s sex thing.” Certainly, they both enjoyed men. Rich said that Helen was the maid of honor at her first wedding (there were four of them), as well as a witness in “one of my divorces.” When she spoke about their long friendship, Rich was ninety-five and living in her sprawling, memorabilia-crammed home of many years in Altadena, California. Helen and David Brown had been frequent visitors there, as she was to their home in Pacific Palisades. Rich still has stacks of correspondence from Helen and misses her old friend. “All four of my husbands are dead,” Rich said, “and my latest boyfriend says he’s worried.” She is at work on her own memoir, which will surely feature some adventures with Helen. Rich said she had to admit it: even when it was happening, she could not keep track of all of Helen’s jobs and boyfriends.
The persistent allure of showbiz drew Helen back to MCA for a second tour of duty. This time she had a better boss—or so it seemed. She was secretary to Mickey Rockford, head of the radio division. MCA was expanding so quickly that management had begun to let a few guppies out of the typing pool. “I was one of the girls who got to sit outside my boss’s office,” Helen said, “because he had the hots for me.” Rockford was short, stubby, and far from a matinee idol. He liked having Helen outside his office, called her in often, and made his infatuation clear. Helen enjoyed her new vantage point for its improved view of the agency’s male “possibles.” One agent, Herman Citron, used the same term when discussing that new Miss Gurley with another agent. “Possibles” had an earthier connotation when used by MCA males. He wondered whether she would go out with him.
Helen’s description of Citron is that of a sharpie on the make: “He looked a little bit like Eddie Cantor … but not bad … kind of ugly, but very sexy. Very sexy.” The 10-percenters of the day affected a “say, check me out” sort of sartorial flash: “They had white on white shirts and white on white ties,” Helen recalled, “… sort of a slicked up Guys and Dolls thing.” While wrangling talent back east in the crowded paddocks of Broadway songwriters, gag men, and hoofers, Citron had surely played the part of an operator straight out of Central Casting, chorus girls and all. He told Helen he’d left a girl in New York who was in the line at the Copacabana; she thought that was really showbiz.
On the hunt for profitable clients, Citron was feared by lesser deal-makers, who called him the Iceman. Mel Shavelson, a radio and film writer who was then a client of Citron’s, put it this way: “Herman was a quiet-spoken man. So, I understand, was Attila the Hun. Citron’s reputation in a cutthroat business passed belief. He represented a large percentage of Hollywood’s top stars, and his handshake could be deposited in the Bank of America and draw interest.”
Helen and the Iceman began an affair, in spite of strict company policies against fraternization. Too embarrassed to have him pick her up at the gopher palace on their first date, she met him in Beverly Hills. She lied and said she was going to the movies—could he pick her up there? He pulled up to the Beverly Theater in “his slick little car” and drove her to Villa Nova, a hot spot on the Sunset Strip. They drank, talked, had dinner, and went back to a bachelor apartment she gushed over with the adjectives of the time: Jazzy. Nifty.
All in all, Citron looked to be the Ultimate Possible. He had a lavish lifestyle and movie star clients, and no man she’d ever been with was better in bed. She said that she had an orgasm every time—she thought this was the norm for people very attracted to each other. The sex was so spectacular, she said, that memories of it had never faded. “Wow!” she said. “I wish I could feel it again.” Straightaway, she realized that the kapow factor was mutual. Citron was fourteen years older than Helen, but he didn’t know what hit him with this skinny little creature.
It was the first time she truly observed and understood that “sex is power,” a new personal mantra that became a bolder iteration of the genteel art of “sinking in.” Helen had come to realize that sex was a surprising and thrilling equalizer between the sheets. She was only sorry that she had been unaware of its fullest potential during their affair. Citron was so sexually smitten, and remembered the interlude so fondly, that he would call Helen, generally on Fridays, for years beyond her marriage, just to hear the sound of her voice.
While they were together, Helen was still unaware of her full potential as temptress, and more bedazzled than he. She would often slink out to the MCA parking lot for a rendezvous. Like so many of her escapades, the practice ended up in one of her books, with only the names changed: “Veronica used to date one of the salesmen in this ‘hands off your co-workers’ atmosphere. She finished work before he did and would wait in his car, lying down to avoid the Gestapo eyes of the management or its informants (like her girlfriends!). Every time Ronnie opened his car door, he would suffer a momentary spasm of horror thinking he’d found a dead woman in the front seat!”
Citron did take her out on the town. They went to glamorous restaurants, places to see and be seen, yet he never introduced her to anyone. It took a while, but she came to understand: “I was so gauche. So totally gauche!” The night Citron did dare to take her to an industry event, a movie premiere, she chose a slinky black cocktail dress and a giant, broad-brimmed hat she thought was the height of glamour—just like Paulette Goddard!
To wear such a big and attention-getting chapeau to a movie theater was plainly idiotic; Citron was annoyed, and she was mortified. It was the first of many times during her single years in California when Helen was undone by her rather sweet if clueless “gaucherie.” She used the word often in explaining her failure to land the big fish. Nearly always, she blamed herself. Time and again, she lamented, “I blew it!” Still, with Citron, the sexual attraction continued to exert its pull. She felt she had him, all right. Helen was stunned when he made it clear that he was not in it for the long haul. He told her th
at, as a devout Jew, he felt she just could not fit into his family. She understood that he was right about that, but found herself brokenhearted.
There was no time for a slow glide to a gentle end. Helen’s boss, Mickey Rockford, got wind of the affair, and in a towering fit of jealousy—Helen had let Mickey kiss her a few times—he fired her. Apart from his vindictive rage, canning hot little Miss Gurley was simply the better business decision. Stenos were occupational chump change; fierce, insatiable agents like the Iceman could make it rain commissions.
Helen endured a few more forgettable jobs, including a short stint at the William Morris Agency. Stubbornly, she was still aiming for a suitor in show business. She said that she “fooled around quite a bit” with the actor Walter Pidgeon, very much her elder, whom she later described as “one of the biggest swordsmen in Hollywood.” She found him very sweet, and most valuable for buying groceries. She gadded about with a few band boys from her days at The Abbott and Costello Show. Then there was a man clinging to the edges of showbiz who seemed to want to marry her. Helen had a perfect horror of it. Marvin the Gag Writer, as she referred to him, was part of a stable of funnymen kept on staff by Eddie Cantor in rooms at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Helen was the secretary—yet another dead-end job. The four joke writers worked in a seedy bullpen stale with cigarettes, male funk, and overripe gags. They bellowed their zingers across the room to try out on their Girl Friday:
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