“Gurley! Come over here! Guy sez to his mother in law…”
Gurley got it all down, 130 yuks a minute. Short, fat Marvin was a laugh riot even outside the office. He had a habit of turning to Helen in the crowded hotel elevator, thumbing a wad of bills, and asking, “How much you say it was, Myrtle, fifteen or twenty?” It always set the captive audience howling; not so Marvin’s red-faced foil. Marvin could be a damned troll, but when it was just the two of them, he made Helen laugh, too. Soon he was also churning out buckets of comedic corn for Bob Hope. For years after they worked together, Marvin called Helen to try out his bits.
Hey, kiddo … Guy sees a rabbi out on the golf course …
8
The Keptive
A secretary offers the only kind of polygamy we recognize in this country, the chance to have a second wife while you have your first and not go to jail … Turning your secretary into a girlfriend has one big advantage. You know where she is all the time.
—HGB, Lessons in Love, on LP, 1963
DURING THE PERIOD that Helen referred to as jobs “three through seventeen,” Yvonne Rich met a good number of the men who streamed through her friend’s life. She generally cannot remember their names, but one of them she recalls more vividly than most: “She had a real good-looking boyfriend, very handsome. This one was an attorney.” In Helenspeak, he was a Wow.
His name was Paul Ziffren. He was from Chicago, the protégé of a well-known political fixer there, a city alderman named Jacob Arvey. Ziffren had been a junior partner in Arvey’s law firm. When he relocated to Los Angeles with a tight web of connections from his mentor, Ziffren soon found himself in need of a new secretary; the one he had made it plain that she loathed legal work. Helen’s boss at yet another showbiz job, a publicity firm, brokered a trade; Miss Gurley admitted that she “didn’t get on well in publicity.” She went to work at Ziffren’s firm, Loeb and Loeb. “I hated legal work, too when I found out about it,” Helen said, “but a girl has to eat.”
She landed in the right spot for that. On her first day of work, her new Jewish boss, already a very connected guy in his adopted city, gifted her with a precious slab of trafe: ten pounds of bacon. Though most rationing had ended, it was still almost impossible to get except on the black market. He also gave her a Max Factor makeup kit in a leather case. Paul Ziffren was darling.
In short order, he and Helen began a brief affair. Ziffren was indeed handsome, affable, generous, and married. Helen harbored no illusions that he would divorce his wife for her. She continued to work with him after their fling. Possessed of a certain Henry Higgins–like pedagogy, Ziffren sought to help his Eliza Doolittle, the miss from Arkansas. Helen’s gaffes and malapropisms could indeed be charming, but Ziffren knew that, without intervention, some of her lapses in education and taste were bound to handicap her. He seemed to have empathy for the pressures of her family obligations. At that point in her life, Helen wrote, “I was frequently a metastasized case of the sads … I was so wantonly depressed—and careless—that I even told men about my sadness and problems at home … It didn’t depress the men usually, just removed them from my side!” Ziffren, noticing an especially deep wilt one day, took her to lunch and declared he was henceforth going to call her Atlas, “because you are obviously carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
Much later, when Ziffren was terminally ill, Helen wrote to thank him for the pains he had taken in civilizing her on the job: “Having not gone to college and landing in the secretarial pool at MCA not too long after highschool [sic], I knew nothing. Would you believe—it’s true!—you turned me on to Shakespeare and Emerson. You thought Ralph Waldo’s essay on self-reliance might do a little something for me but mostly you were mad about his words.”
Ziffren read her a favorite passage from that classic essay: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” He read her Antony’s speech following Caesar’s death and pointed out its duplicities. If he deemed it necessary, he told her some unpleasant but true facts of life. When Helen begged him to introduce her to a wealthy Loeb client “so that I could marry for money,” Ziffren gently lowered the boom regarding her prospects. She just wasn’t pretty enough. “You weren’t all that blunt about it,” she assured him in her letter, “but you explained these men could have about anybody they fancied and they often fancied actresses or glamour-girls.” It stung, but she took it as wise counsel—sort of: “It probably set me on the road to achieving though I would definitely have played it the other way if you had been more encouraging!” In her farewell letter, Helen appended a final accolade to the dying man: “You were very good in bed … strong and ardent and caring.”
There is no doubt that Ziffren presented as a kind and gallant friend, but there was a whiff of sulfur beneath his savoir faire and fine tailoring. Either Helen did not detect it, or she chose to overlook it. Since she admittedly paid as little attention as possible to his legal work, she might not have known that her boss had an ugly penchant for enriching himself through the misfortunes of others. At about the time he hired Helen, Ziffren was busy on a special investment scheme. In The Last Mogul, his biography of the MCA titan Lew Wasserman, Dennis McDougal provided a thumbnail portrait of a man on the make as Ziffren became a Hollywood, then a political player: “When Ziffren first came to L.A. during World War II, he demonstrated just how well Arvey [the Chicago alderman] had taught him the lessons of political exploitation, by organizing a consortium of investors who bought property vacated by Japanese-Americans during wartime internment. Ziffren worked closely with attorney David Bazelon, yet another Arvey protégé, who had been appointed by the Truman administration to oversee ‘alien’ land sales.”
It may have been smoother and cleaner than the Nazi confiscation of the property of interned and murdered Jews, but the sanctioned thievery was just as bold and unapologetic. When Japanese Americans were eventually released from internment camps, they returned to the Los Angeles area to find new stores, restaurants, and movie theaters—with new owners—where their homes, farms, and businesses had been. After this efficient scouring, President Truman rewarded Bazelon with a federal judgeship.
Ziffren made money, very quietly. He had a few other questionable activities on the down-low. By the time he was California’s Democratic National Committeeman, in the early 1950s, Ziffren would also be known to the LAPD as an elegant, pinstriped procurer. According to a police report, he was “observed delivering two known call girls to a Tahoe gambler in the bar of the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Police found Ziffren’s name in many of the call girls’ “trick books.”
Helen’s fling with Ziffren was the first of a few liaisons with men possessed of healthy bank accounts and dubious moral fiber. Her dalliance with Ziffren hadn’t been too important to either of them, she concluded. Of the affair’s end: “Who knows who left whom?” Helen wrote. “I was finding myself.”
Watching Helen flit from job to job, therapist to therapist, man to man, Cleo made a difficult decision. Helen was still allotting a good portion of every paycheck toward household support. Given her family obligations, she could not yet afford a place of her own in perhaps a slightly better neighborhood. Besides, Cleo was more than ready to quit California; living there had only enveloped her in further anxiety and grief. In 1946, Cleo decided to move back to her parents’ home in Osage with Mary. She told Helen that the cost of living there was much lower, and perhaps some of the brothers and sisters Cleo had carried on her hip would help out with Mary’s care. Helen saw it as an acknowledgment of her need for independence: “Cleo’s separating me from them was a courageous, unselfish act … she could easily have sacrificed me to be a handy, unpaid bound-by-blood helper forever.”
Even after her family went east, Helen sent them support checks, if slightly smaller. She closed the door on the rodent-plagued house on Fifty-Ninth Street and moved into a small studio apartment on the top floor of a Spanish-sty
le white stucco house at 144 South Elm Drive. This was workaday Beverly Hills, with neat two-story homes, many divided into rental apartments, and the occasional scraggly palm, just a few blocks from the glistening “Wilshire Corridor.” It was the first of a string of bachelor-girl apartments. After a short stint on Elm, Helen moved in with her friend Barbara nearby on South Canon Drive. They entertained other young Angelenos there under the gimlet eye of their landlady, Mrs. Tuttle.
It is just as well that Mary and Cleo were tucked back in the Ozarks, though Helen wrote to them daily, without fail. Helen’s romantic life was about to take a darker, troublesome turn toward patently transactional sex. About to take her fifteenth job in six years—she had sorely vexed her employment agency, but they placed her yet again—Helen went to work for a movie mogul wannabe, a wealthy dilettante who was, she later concluded, “a psychopath.”
It was clearly a piercing and regrettable life experience. She wrote about the man many times, in carefully shaded versions and guises. Helen’s public retellings were generally breezy and comedic, with the eager Miss Gurley depicted as somewhere between the fifties TV ditz My Little Margie and Irma la Douce. Throughout her writing career, Helen’s published confessions and Single Girl vignettes were wrought with the illusory skills of a fan dancer—Sally Rand caliber—giving us versions of herself and her lovers. Their pseudonyms and their peccadilloes flicker and morph with each telling. So it was with this man.
Helen cloaked his identity in “The Perils of Little Helen,” the job history appended to Sex and the Office, calling him “Mr. Wilson.” In other books detailing his unsavory traits, she also used pseudonyms. But close textual comparisons, alongside some of Helen’s unpublished fiction and her recorded conversations with Lyn Tornabene, make it possible to sync the salient details. Helen walked into the arrangement with this man thinking it might solve all her money problems. It is clear that at the affair’s outset, she didn’t anticipate the psychic and emotional cost to herself. The experience led her to call herself a “keptive,” bought and paid for, and forbidden to live a life of her own.
She had been looking for a sugar daddy; her new boss seemed to fit the bill. Helen said that his real name was Mason Miller; she claimed that he was a member of the Morgan banking family. No search of that family’s genealogy turned up anyone by that name; perhaps, given the revolting aspects of his personality, Helen considered it prudent to mask his identity. Whatever his pedigree, his demeanor was that of an East Coast snob torn from the pages of a Henry James novel, all Brahmin affectations, bespoke suits, and, beneath, a cruel and withered soul. Miller had an estate in Gatsby country, on Long Island. He and his wife took frequent trips to Europe, returning with antiques, Parisian fashions, and fine wines.
Miller arrived from New York with a healthy fortune and built his own motion picture studio from the ground up, though he knew nothing of the business. He was a womanizer, a dabbler, and a drunk. While Helen worked there as the only secretary, all but one of the studio’s nine new soundstages, still smelling of sawdust and paint, stood empty. Miller did make money in California real estate, Helen said. He had a knack for that. A little piece of land he owned in Bel-Air would be a catalyst for the affair’s undoing. She understood from the outset that Miller would never leave his wife. He was too fond of their socialite life. Instead, he would keep his sexy little secretary in the style in which wealthy men kept their “girls.” The boss let it be known that his previous mistress had done very well for herself: Real estate! Securities! Cash!
At the outset of her relationship with Miller, Helen carried her few misgivings straight to Dr. Fink. To her surprise and relief, her therapist delivered no stern lecture on becoming a kept woman. He reasoned that being kept nicely was an improvement over what she had been doing, and it sounded as if the man liked her better than the others had.
“Pretty hip advice for 1947,” Helen concluded later. She thought it was probably sage counsel as well: if she was going to keep getting mixed up with men of means, it might as well be with someone who seemed to like her and would not be exploitative. Money was still tight; Helen’s tax return for the previous year, 1946, lists three different employers, including the William Morris Agency; her declared dependents are Cleo and Mary, and her total income was just under $2,700. She surely would be relieved to stop paying rent.
In her book I’m Wild Again, Helen described the speedy start of the affair: “Interview Monday, sex Thursday. Our first carnal encounter took place in his office on a cushy Moroccan leather couch.” She didn’t have to keep her eyes closed. She described him as “not that bad. Not a beauty but not a mongoose. About 5′10″, WASP-ish features, a bit pinched, not that old … I could handle it.” At forty-three, Miller was nearly bald. He had a limp from an auto accident, and his signature scent seemed to be stale if expensive Scotch. There was no fuss about birth control, because he was infertile; he and his wife adopted children. Better yet, there had been some alluring talk during the job interview, with the sort of sweet nothings Helen had been longing to hear: “words like stock portfolio, bonds, investments, real estate were floated about and I would have my secretarial salary to live on.”
Having started her at thirty-five dollars a week, Miller would soon be paying Helen eighty-five, “when every other secretary in town was making forty.” Given the lack of studio business, Helen had little to do but read every Pearl S. Buck novel in the Melrose Library and munch Planters peanuts by the can. The office pace was desultory at best. The boss was nearly always hungover, to the extent that “the rustle of carbon paper was too much before noon.” When Helen was called in to take a letter, she made the most of it. “I would sit curled up like a little cupcake across from him with my pristine shorthand book.”
It took less than a week for boss and secretary to agree on an arrangement, and Helen began the hunt for a love nest. A few stark motel and office couplings had convinced Miller that it was worth a modest investment. His chauffeur took Helen all over town and looked at apartments with her. She found a modest flat on South Curson Street, in the Wilshire–La Brea area. The apartment had no kitchen, but she wasn’t there to cook. It was carpeted and scantily furnished; their lovers’ bower was a Murphy bed tugged down from the wall. She was allowed to purchase a few pieces of furniture. Miller also urged her to add some tonier accents to her wardrobe. Perhaps some cashmere? Helen shopped for outfits befitting her new status, driven from store to store by the chauffeur.
In the office, they gossiped and talked for much of the day; for some reason, Miller had an almost anthropological fascination with Helen’s Ozark roots. He would press her for details, and, eager to please, she laid out the rudiments, the “hillbilly” aunts and uncles, the lack of electricity, the outhouses—replete with examples of the local accent. He couldn’t get enough detail on her “déclassé” tribe. Miller could bring out the worst in his new mistress, owing to her eagerness to please. For years, Helen had flirted with the hillbilly shtick, caricaturing her relatives to the men she dared not let pick her up at home. It was a hurtful habit, Mary had warned her. Nonetheless, when Miller pressed for more details of collards, fatback, and privation, Helen served them right up during the office cocktail hour, which began promptly at five—Haig & Haig Pinch Scotch in paper cups. Sometimes Helen opted for a more ladylike shot of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry. At six, she would wend her way home, “crocked,” to await Mason’s pleasure.
Occasionally, the boss’s wife would waft into the office to deposit a hamper of caviar and other jewel-like amuse-gueules from Jurgensen’s, a gourmet emporium in Pasadena. She was a beauty, a former repertory actress. She wore Balenciaga and Mainbocher. Helen knew that she was hopelessly outclassed. Yvonne Rich recalled that Helen’s “at homes” featured “a drink made from bourbon and vanilla ice cream and served in great quantities.” Not long into those Sunday brunches chez Gurley, said Rich, “we’d be down on the floor, reading the funny papers. Upside down.”
Helen learne
d quickly that her rich, well-positioned new lover was the least tolerant and compassionate of men. He told her about the many people he had “ruined” back in New York. He loathed commies, Catholics, Roosevelt, and noise of any sort before lunchtime. But he harbored a special, obsessive hatred for Jews. He railed, he roared, he spewed gobbets of cabalistic misinformation torn from the standard “Jews and world finance” conspiracy lit. Rather stupidly, Miller hadn’t realized that he had built his movie studio deep in enemy territory. He did not know that his own studio’s only tenants, the Justman brothers, were Jewish. Helen had been savvy enough not to mention her serial affairs with Jewish men. Still, she was faced with a singular dilemma: the pay was too good for her to quit, but she couldn’t very well feign hatred of Jews if she had no idea who was Jewish.
As best she could, she made light of the ugly situation: “In Little Rock, where I grew up, religious discrimination didn’t exist or none that I knew about. Maybe Jew-denigrating was buried deep down under Main Street … we were pretty busy with Apartheid.” She did ask Miller: Just what had Jews done wrong, aside from being Jewish, to make him so angry? “We never got it sorted out,” she said, since everything that the man offered as a solid reason sounded so silly. Though she was more perplexed than outraged by his anti-Semitism, Helen did submit to cultural instruction. These lessons were absurd, hateful, and patently insane: Miller took her to Hollywood power restaurants so that he could point out what he took to be Jewish hair and facial features among the lunchtime deal-makers. Stranger still, even her half-Jewish former roommate, Barbara, offered to help gin up a Jewish identi-kit of typical traits so that Helen wouldn’t continue to irk her employer by keeping the wrong company.
Many years later, this repellent racial profiling exercise was something Helen thought might work in her musical, in a lighter version. “I think that would make a wonderful song for us, Lyn,” she said to Tornabene. “It would be ‘How Do You Tell a Jew?’” Tornabene is Jewish, and had written an affectionate and popular humor book for Random House, What’s a Jewish Girl? She explained to Helen that Miller’s viciousness was just too dark and ugly to put on the stage, even as burlesque.
Not Pretty Enough Page 12