Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Little by little, aspects of Helen’s consorting with the enemy leaked out to her boss. Miller spewed imprecations upon hearing of her previous employment in that nest of Hebraic vermin, MCA. He thundered condemnation of Cleo’s gross negligence; how could she have failed to educate her daughter about this peril within? Upon finding out that Barbara and Helen’s other dear friend Berna were Jewish, that she had even more Jewish friends, he bellowed, “My God! My God!… I just never dreamed the agency would send me a … a … a … Jew lover!” After that outburst, they ultimately reconciled, but Helen observed that “he was never quite himself again.” He forbade her to see any of the offending girlfriends and Helen acquiesced. The isolation was suffocating.

  Though all of her accounts of the affair make it clear that she felt the man was “a nutcase,” it would take decades for Helen to address the morality of staying in the relationship and participating in Miller’s offensive Jew-hunting safaris amid the power lunchers in Hollywood. She devoted a paragraph to the dilemma in I’m Wild Again: “Was I abandoning principle with my attempted Jew discernment, forsaking not only friends but ethics? I was being fearfully tacky, yes, but I didn’t then or even now feel too bad about my pursuit. I wasn’t trying to learn who they were so that I could hate anybody ever … This was just me trying for a little enlightenment for a Special Situation, temporary eschewal of a particular group until the arrival of Financial Security.”

  How did Helen “blow it” this time? Again, it was a matter of Miss Maladroit’s youth and ineptitude. Subtlety, patience, and impeccable timing have enriched many an experienced courtesan. But in her mid-twenties, Helen had no such qualities. She told Tornabene about the Sunday that Miller picked her up in his immense Cadillac and drove her to a hilltop in Bel-Air; he parked on a prime lot that he owned, just across the street from Ginger Rogers’s house. They made love in the car, a fetish of his. “He actually said the lot could be mine and he would build me a little house.” About a month later, Helen called him on it, baldly. She reminded him that he had not yet transferred that lot on top of Bel-Air to her, the one he had said she could have. He was not pleased to be accused, however sweetly, of breaching his promise.

  She was sure that had she played it correctly, she could have had the Bel-Air lot with a darling love shack built on it—and more. Miller told her that “Marcella,” his previous secretary/mistress in a New York bank, had wound up with more than $100,000 in cash and goodies. “And this man was not a liar,” Helen said, convinced of Marcella’s bonanza. “But I blew it.” Asking directly for the property deed was not proper mistress etiquette. But how could she know the current acceptable practices of that ancient art? “I was totally inept,” Helen wailed of the hilltop confrontation. “It was just the absolute frontal attack. The man was appalled by such gaucherie.”

  Not surprisingly, Miller’s movie business went belly-up within months. He had to sell it off to a savings and loan company at a huge personal loss. Soon after selling the business, Miller moved Helen to a larger, two-bedroom apartment with the promise that she could send for Cleo and Mary. Committing yet another mistress taboo, she had begun to hector him about being so much alone. She knew it was silly, but she had become wildly jealous. His wife kept their calendar full. Given their many social engagements, Helen was relegated to after-work quickies and Miller’s visits on Sunday afternoons.

  By then it was not making love, she wrote later, but “two people copulating.” To her surprise, the preternaturally orgasmic Helen had to fake it, time and again. Her body refused to cooperate. “Maybe I wasn’t conscience-dead,” she ventured. The little bird was expected to stay in her cage, always available, yet always alone. When Miller left her in the flat at 6:30 on weekdays to meet his wife for their evening plans, Helen passed the long hours reading or writing letters to Mary and Cleo. She binged on dinners that did not require a kitchen. This included bear claw pastries and a potent comfort food that prefigured the classic sour cream and onion soup–mix California dip of the fifties. “I would squash up a batch of Philadelphia cream cheese, mash up several cloves of garlic, wolf the globby treat down with a massive bag of potato chips, gargle Listerine before work the next day.” By the time Helen would come to edit Cosmo, such empty-calorie therapy would be pitiable, unthinkable. But her emotional/editorial street cred would be unassailable. Pussycats, she’d been there. She understood.

  One Sunday when Miller failed to show up, she was plunged into despair. “I really thought I was going to die,” she recalled. “I had blown all my close friends, I had no boyfriends obviously, I belonged to him.” Her humiliating mission as a kept seductress had failed; there would be no windfall to make life more tolerable for herself, Cleo, and Mary. She spent all of Sunday downtown at the movies, as she had in those days after Ira died.

  Tucked amid Helen’s unpublished writings—some typed, some in a stack of legal pads handwritten from edge to edge in her loopy script—there is material that suggests that this “keptive” relationship Helen joked about in her bestsellers had in fact been deeply troubling to her. The small trove includes some frank erotica, short stories, and love poems such as “I Love My Bruises.” The prose, if sometimes florid, is creditable for its detail and consistency of voice; the tone is always pauvre tristesse, a woman used and unfulfilled. Taken together, the short pieces evoke a melancholy seraglio of female souls thinking aloud, whispering those subjugated woman blues. There is a roughly deflowered virgin, bleak couplings with uncaring and abusive male lovers, a sad miscarriage. There is, most clearly, a barely fictionalized version of Helen’s front seat tryst in the Bel-Air hills with Mason Miller. The dialogue is convincing if unsavory, the sex act brutish, the mistress achingly forlorn.

  Even as Helen prepared to make light of the sorry keptive chapter in her Broadway play, she reminded Tornabene that she was in treatment with a psychiatrist at the time. It’s difficult to imagine what Dr. Fink might have made of the fanatical anti-Semitism; possibly Helen could not bear to tell him. She was not unaware of the deep sadness she had brought upon herself. She felt as though she were in solitary confinement in the keptive apartment. More than ever, she needed her girlfriends to confide in, but their comforts were forbidden her. She recalled it as one of the worst periods of her life. As ever, she blamed herself in the end.

  “I very carefully picked my predators.”

  The affair with Miller mercifully, quietly faded out. He was going to Europe for at least three months, he told her. Los Angeles was just not his best business milieu. Perhaps they would resume if and when he returned. But in the meantime, it would be a good idea for Helen to look for another job. “I don’t remember gulping in pain at the notice,” she wrote. “Applied for unemployment insurance the minute he left, first time ever and the last, not working was not my style.”

  Helen came away from the Miller affair with few material gains: a couple of cute sweater sets, some dresses, a bit of cheap furniture, and a seven-year-old, wood-sided eight-cylinder forest-green Buick station wagon with a hundred thousand miles on it. The wagon had been a utility vehicle on the Millers’ Long Island estate. The roof leaked badly and its new owner weathered downpours with an umbrella over the driver’s seat. She christened the heap Appletrees, the name of Miller’s estate. Helen had caught Cleo’s car lust and even a clunker gave her a new mobility and a sense of pride. She painted the name on its side.

  Before her first unemployment check arrived, Helen got job number seventeen at the Sam Jaffe literary agency, which sold properties to the movies. She promptly sent for Mary, Cleo, and their three cats. She splurged and brought them west in style on the Super Chief. “Alas, none of the felines or people were real happy in their new home,” Helen said. Two of the cats expired in short order. To Helen’s astonishment, there was much wailing at their demise. Cleo was heard to grumble, “Such fine healthy cats when we brought them here.” After six unhappy months, she and Mary decamped for Arkansas, with plans to find companions for the surviving feli
ne, Minnie. Until it was torn down for sheer decrepitude, the Sisco house in Osage would be known for spilling as many felines into the tiny hamlet as the family had once produced squalling babies.

  Alone again, Helen lost the literary agency job. Out of work and without Miller to pay the rent, she had to move to a smaller, more affordable apartment. Imbued with a new resolve—this mistress thing was too iffy and she would take care of herself, thank you—Helen stuffed her belongings into a few bags and hauled them to the next stark little flat. Feathering her nest would have to wait until she was settled in. There was the matter of job number eighteen.

  9

  Dear Mr. B …

  It was exciting to work for an important man.

  —HGB, Sex and the Office

  ON A SATURDAY MORNING just after her twenty-sixth birthday, in February 1948, Helen presented herself, without much enthusiasm, at another address provided by her employment agency. Downtown, again? She had finally installed herself in a decent, affordable flat on Bonnie Brae Street, also downtown, but she longed for the hills and a tonier address. She judged the heat-baked and bourgeois flatlands “possibly one of the most un-chic areas this side of the Ganges.” Having no hill or ocean vistas and no hot spots save the La Brea tar pits, downtown seemed a concrete and stucco hive for worker bees. Worse, a secretarial spot in an ad agency did not sound at all sexy.

  Helen’s spirits drooped further when she was ushered into the darkened lair of Don Belding, the chairman of the board of Foote, Cone & Belding. The brown suede drapes were drawn shut against the bright day. One small light shone on the desk. Belding’s secretary was leaving—his second helpmate lost to matrimony—and he needed to replace her. Once the reluctant applicant adjusted to the dark, her eye was drawn to a painting hanging behind the great man. It depicted two caveman types with spiked clubs doing battle in a misty glen; each had a stump gushing blood in place of an arm. The crimson blood spattered throughout the painting was the only bright spot in the room. The artwork’s title: The Ad Game.

  Could there be a more vicious work arena than show business? The man in the chair did have a rather forbidding mien. “Mr. Belding himself looked like Lionel Barrymore,” she observed, “… balding, lean, lion-like and quite handsome, despite having only one good eye.” The drapes were drawn because of his vision problem, he explained. This was the result of the first trauma in Belding’s benighted military career during World War I. His eye was badly injured during artillery training in Virginia; shipped too soon to France, he was treated improperly there and much too late. The muscles were torn badly enough to afford no control of the eye’s motion or dilation, rendering it permanently useless. Then Belding was gassed, landing him back home in a veterans’ hospital with a case of pulmonary tuberculosis the doctors deemed fatal. Don Belding had strongly disagreed.

  A few minutes into the interview, and despite her initial ambivalence about the job, Helen suddenly found herself “numb with fright.” There was a certain hawk-like fierceness to the man, cordial as he was. Trying to address his good eye unnerved her; in the deep gloom, she could not tell which eye was looking at her. As she peered around the office during an awkward silence, she was further discomfited by the bizarre dissonance of Belding’s office décor.

  Clearly he was a Man of Consequence; there were personally autographed photos of Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and the future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In jarring proximity was a chorus line of ad posters, all with daftly smiling women engaged in waxing linoleum, crafting sandwiches, and rinsing out their dainties using products hawked by the agency. There were strange curios as well. Belding kept a trio of stuffed and mounted birds, iridescent, long-tailed quetzals sacred to the Mayan and Aztec peoples. The quetzals, native to Central American rain forests, were accompanied by a display of pre-Columbian art and Guatemalan costumes arrayed under glass. A very large American flag stood in a corner. Sizing up the workplace she would occupy for nearly a decade, Helen decided that it looked like the Field Museum, the Chicago natural history collection she and Cleo had visited on their trip to the World’s Fair.

  Don Belding was an odd bird in the trade. He hadn’t put in the standard migratory years of most admen, and had spent his entire career on the West Coast. He had a hardscrabble beginning as a miner’s son in the small backwater of Grants Pass, Oregon. After the Great War, he had learned his metier from the ground up, steered toward advertising by a veterans’ job training program. He began with an unpaid internship, then a mailroom job at the San Francisco branch of Lord & Thomas, the ad agency that was eventually absorbed in the founding of his own partnership firm, Foote, Cone & Belding (FC&B), in 1942.

  FC&B did a good deal of wartime work, mostly public service announcements regarding conservation; the agency presided over the creation and introduction of that forest safety icon, Smokey Bear. But the advertising industry had begun retooling itself toward more consumer accounts after the war years when Miss Gurley fortuitously if grudgingly walked into it. The late forties and early fifties saw a comprehensive sea change as the new medium of television began to supplement, and sometimes surpass, the standard print and radio campaigns. For FC&B and Helen it would prove a golden decade, with lucrative auto, tobacco, and cosmetics contracts and a base of staid but reliable accounts: Sunkist citrus fruits, Johnson Wax, Kotex, Dial soap, Purex. The Hollywood arm of the agency built a roster of top-drawer celebrities, among them Bob Hope and Jack Benny, who were eager to host new TV programs sponsored by FC&B clients.

  Once that paralyzing fright overtook her, Helen could claim little recollection of her interview with Belding save that it was halting, uncomfortable, and lasted less than ten minutes. He did make a point of telling her that he was often out of town, “probably to cheer me up,” she figured. On Monday morning, she got the call that the job was hers, at $75 a week. Her rent was $72.50 a month, so it would work nicely, allowing a substantial stipend—at least a week’s salary per month—for her mother and sister.

  She could not know it, but broke, itinerant, and unfocused Helen was about to find solid ground on several levels. Surprising even herself, Helen had checked her reflexive flirtatiousness at Belding’s imposing door. She explained the change in behavior this way: “After I met him he was the father in my life and he was a very strong man. It never occurred to me to sleep with him, ’cause he was Daddy.” There is no question that apart from the long-lost Ira Gurley and her future husband, no man would be as important to the long march toward Becoming HGB. Belding opened the path to serious skills, a genuine career, and the sort of professional satisfactions Helen would later wish on Cosmo readers, even more than toe-curling orgasms. In an undated letter to Belding wishing him a happy birthday, Helen told him: “There isn’t any question that you’ve influenced my life for the good more than any person I’ve ever known.”

  Belding and his second wife, Alice, did all but adopt his eager if unfinished new secretary. Helen gratefully noted that they “took her off the streets” on formerly desolate holidays and assured her a place at their table every Christmas and Thanksgiving. The Beldings were the openhanded, sophisticated, and well-situated family that Helen had long dreamed of. Writing to Alice Belding, Helen declared that her time at FC&B was the happiest in her single working life. “It was like finding a haven,” she told her, “after so many years of bumping around.”

  The work threw her at first. Belding’s affianced secretary had stayed on to give Helen two weeks of very detailed instructions. “She was a whirlwind, tweedy, fantastic with figures, lovey-dovey with stock quotations … a really dreadful girl,” Helen complained of the efficient Miss Cunningham. Once she left, bedlam ensued as Helen struggled on multiple phone lines to connect clients, wife, ex-wife, and respective sets of children at the boss’s command.

  “Get Sargie on the phone!”

  She quickly learned that this meant phoning Belding’s houseman to put Mr. B’s beloved German shepherd, Sarge, on the line for some s
weet nothings from Daddy.

  “Didja get some gophers today, Sargie?”

  Worst of all for a girl’s beauty sleep, Belding was “a nut about punctuality.” Commuting by car in Los Angeles was murderous even then, and Appletrees was anything but reliable; the Buick’s doors were held shut with ropes and its composite roof worn so thin as to appear translucent. Daily, Helen boarded a fat red Pacific Palisades bus while the moon was still up, popping out hair curlers and daubing on makeup as it jounced through still-sleepy downtown. It was challenging, but all rather scrumptious.

  “I was living just an adorable career-girl life,” she said, “and I was not kept at all.”

  She was happy to pay the price for such gleeful independence. Helen rarely knew what to expect on any given day; she became an inventive scrambler as the eccentricities of some FC&B clients caused her to make some odd requests around town. She pleaded with the Santa Fe railroad purser for special Super Chief accommodations. She needed to book an extra connectable sleeper berth just for the feet of one Philip Liebmann, president of Liebmann Breweries, the producer of Rheingold beer. The railroad was unsympathetic, the client resolute.

  “I am a tall man, Miss Gurley,” Liebmann said. “Do you honestly want me to sleep with my knees under my chin all the way to Chicago?” The same gentleman objected to the number of diners—thirteen—at a business meal Helen had arranged at the Brown Derby. The deeply superstitious Mr. Liebmann refused to sit down until a restaurant cashier, coaxed by Miss Gurley, agreed to be the fourteenth in the party.

  Professional paranoia was common in such a competitive business, but no FC&B client was as furtive as Howard Hughes. When Belding was unavailable to personally receive Hughes’s communiqués, Helen escorted messengers from Hughes’s various businesses (RKO Pictures, Hughes Aircraft) into the boss’s office. Once the door was shut, seals were produced and warmed globs of wax were pressed to secure tamper-proof envelopes, to be opened by Belding only. To Helen’s great disappointment, she never witnessed Hughes’s late-night visits to the office, when, office scuttlebutt had it, he obsessed over the visibility of Jane Russell’s impressive cleavage in print ads for the RKO film The Outlaw. Hughes’s favorite new actress was pictured reclining on a hay bale, scantily clad and alternately posed sucking on a bit of straw or dangling a big revolver toward her crotch. Up and down, by millimeters, FC&B art directors moved the top of Russell’s blouse at Hughes’s direction, trying to outflank the decency patrols.