Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Watching her boss meld business with his political activities afforded Helen a window into national and global power-brokering that would have floored the young politico Ira Gurley. Belding’s idea of celebrity was a five-star general; Omar Bradley, U.S. Army field commander of operations in North Africa and Europe during World War II, was a friend and idol. Helen soon learned the significance of the huge freestanding American flag in the office. Belding was a civic and political dynamo fueled by such conservative Republican zeal that within a year of Helen’s arrival, he would, with the financier E. F. Hutton and Kenneth Wells, another adman, cofound the Freedoms Foundation, a nonprofit patriotic organization headquartered near the national park at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The foundation’s summary of basic freedoms, “The American Credo,” was hammered out with the help of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was by then president of Columbia University. Eisenhower would also become a Belding friend and ally. Ever the adman, Belding saw the organization as “an effective device of continuously selling the American system to its people.”

  The Freedoms Foundation was not without its critics, who suspected another, more right-wing agenda beneath the apple pie patriotism. Don Belding was hell on commies at home and abroad. He worked with RKO executives to make the eighteen-minute film Letter to a Rebel, a paean to American capitalism. The plot: a college kid questioning the American Way gets schooled in the virtues of honest capitalism by his newspaper editor dad. Thirty million people saw it in movie theaters as a short feature in its first year of release.

  As gatekeeper of Belding’s tenebrous inner sanctum, Helen also had an intimate view of the growing postwar camaraderie among business, the military, and politics. Tycoon types were whisked off on what were called “orientation trips,” often in the company of military brass. These civilian moguls from ad agencies, soft drink companies, and steel mills were given tours of impressive military installations. They were taken out on battleships, wined and dined in the officers’ mess. Belding often returned from such outings exhilarated and pumped with patriotic zeal. “They were kind of indoctrinated,” Helen observed.

  Belding was also the vice president for operations of the Citizens Food Committee; President Truman tapped the businessman Charles Luckman to lead the committee’s effort in food conservation at home and to ease severe postwar food shortages in Europe. Shortly after Helen went to work for Belding, she watched him cobroker a deal to speed U.S. grain to war-ravaged France before Soviet wheat could win hearts and baguettes. She was impressed and pleased to have a bird’s-eye view. Handling the confidential memos and telegrams about world affairs certainly beat typing up the tripe churned out by two-bit gag writers.

  In her unseen, Zelig-like presence, Helen was a rather privileged witness to deep national changes afoot, during and after the Eisenhower years. For one thing, advertising would gain a solid foothold in the electoral process. As he began his presidential campaign, Eisenhower worried his Republican advisors with his utter lack of telegenic charm. It was still a black-and-white world on TV, and Ike was popping up on the monitors a solid, dull gray; the only spark was his shiny bald pate, aflare in the harsh studio lights. His speeches bordered on soporific. Why not put a professional sales team on the case?

  As Helen first began learning the basics of commercial persuasion at FC&B, a reluctant Ike made the first political TV spots ever, designed by the adman Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency. Reeves, known as “the prince of hard sell,” had previously hawked soap, toothpaste, and deodorant. He saw little difference in selling a pol, though he did convince the candidate to loosen up a bit and powder his gleaming dome. As the filming ended, Eisenhower was heard to mutter, “To think that an old soldier should come to this.” A poem in The New Yorker lampooned this newfangled selling of the candidate: “Feeling sluggish, feeling sick, take a dose of Ike and Dick.” Ike’s rival Adlai Stevenson deplored “selling the presidency like cereal.”

  Wrestling, albeit briefly, with her Democratic upbringing, Helen switched parties to please her boss. “It was that or go underground,” she reasoned. She didn’t mind being Republican for a while. What did it hurt? “Other girls have embraced Zen Buddhism, the International Kite Flyers Society and World Federalists without any harm to their psyche or integrity.”

  Helen worked hard and never took the standard coffee breaks, but there was a great perk—relaxation and hospitality in the boss’s country lodgings. Belding, soon a respectful “Mr. B” to Helen, was also somewhat of a gentleman farmer. Pauma Vista, his hilly, seventy-acre ranch beneath Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, cultivated avocados, oranges, lemons, and grapefruits, which Helen frequently brought home from weekends there. The pretty place also succored Helen during the relentless romantic tempests of the next decade. She grew comfortable in the Beldings’ welcoming town and country homes and found herself at ease amid their often powerful guests.

  The effects of this immersion were apparent and pleasing, especially to Helen. Those vexing gaucheries shrank in number and severity and her life skills broadened. She would learn how to take accurate dictation in a moving limo, pacify millionaire clients’ bizarre (nonsexual) peccadilloés, and plan a funeral for six hundred attendees. Dispatched to meet Belding in Santa Barbara as he came ashore after the yacht races, she would be swept off in the limo by his driver, along with the boss’s correspondence. Being so essential and cosseted tickled her: “I found it very romantic slipping along in the night under a fur lap robe like Marie Walewska being spirited out of Poland by Napoleon.”

  Helen dressed and spoke better; by sheer perseverance and some elocution lessons, the Arkansas accent had finally been hog-tied and slaughtered. Alice Belding’s domestic arrangements conferred some basics missing from Cleo’s slapdash ménage. Before long, Helen could distinguish a fish fork from a salad fork, a Beaujolais from a Chablis. She also knew a stock from a bond, and managed her own finances better with Mr. B’s advice. Under the couple’s protection and tutelage, Helen would finally feel safe. “They really cared about me,” she said.

  * * *

  Helen relied heavily on another kind of ad hoc family, one that she had always found loyal, supportive, and loving. “Girlfriends are very important,” she said—and wrote—many times. In 1949, Helen hired a new secretary for her department and welcomed her to the cubicle adjoining her own outside Don Belding’s office. Charlotte Kelly was nineteen, Helen twenty-seven. They would remain the closest of confidantes for the rest of their lives. Charlotte, fun-loving and emotionally operatic, became “Carlotta” to Helen. Kelly was a pretty dark-haired woman with a “why the hell not?” worldview, an utter incapability of managing money, and a perfectly dreadful backstory.

  Both women had been raised by single mothers who struggled with family tragedies and Depression-era privations, but Kelly’s family history was even darker than Helen’s. Growing up, she had been told that her maternal grandparents, James and Rena Ferrara, had died in a mining accident in Tonopah, Nevada, a raw, tumultuous silver town crowded with many Italian immigrants like themselves. After their deaths, Charlotte’s mother, Anne Marie, their only child, was raised by relatives in Seattle. Working as a soda jerk there, Anne met and married Charles Kelly, the hard-drinking son of an oil baron; they moved to Los Angeles, where he soon abandoned Anne and their little girl, Charlotte.

  Mother and daughter were very close; Anne Ferrara Kelly was a very beautiful woman who struggled to support herself and her daughter while also coping with breast cancer. Helen spent a good deal of time in their home; she admired Anne Kelly’s cheer and humor in the face of adversity, something that Cleo had never managed.

  The true story of the Ferraras’ deaths was Wild West gothic. Anne Kelly waited until her daughter was older and her cancer recurrent and advanced to tell Charlotte the truth. There were newspaper accounts—“Murder & Suicide at Dawn”—in The Tonopah Daily Bonanza. On the morning of January 17, 1916, a drunken miner named Aldo Vambonie shot James and Rena Ferrara, point
-blank, in their bed. James died instantly. Rena, with a bullet in her brain, survived for three days. The murderer, a jealous lover, shot himself soon after. The paper called it “the act of a drink-crazed man for the love of a woman.” Snuggled in the bed beside her bleeding mother was little Anne Marie, Charlotte’s mother. The child was catatonic for a year.

  The two secretaries bore their pasts and made their own lives, relying heavily upon each other for support, secret sharing, and as much fun as they could manage. But on the job, Helen was known for her unwavering sobriety. Speaking of those times in a speech many years later, Kelly said, “Helen was tiny … frugal … driven … vulnerable to her own insecurity … She was also smart, talented, quietly tough, and a genius at creating opportunity.” Helen didn’t party with the rest of the FC&B staff at the Los Angeles Advertising Club, all-too-conveniently housed in the same building as FC&B. “I mean, it was our branch office,” Kelly said. “Many of us drank and made fools of ourselves there, but never Helen … She was always upstairs writing copy, entering contests, or planning to visit her invalid sister via Greyhound bus.”

  Kelly’s fiscal imprudence left her perpetually broke; relief always came from the toe of an old boot in the back reaches of Helen’s closet; she squirreled away nickels, dimes, and dollar bills. Helen was saving for something; her friend had no idea what.

  Despite her loftier position as executive assistant to the chairman, Helen maintained generally good relations with the other secretaries. But a small breach in the office sisterhood did lead to yet another stinging and public embarrassment for her. Just as her dateless humiliation at the sorority function had galvanized Helen toward her “sinking in” mode of snaring a man, this small event, negligible to everyone else, helped Helen score a coup that would propel her out of the secretarial rank and file forever.

  Once again, it involved a slight. Helen had long made clear her dislike of engagement, wedding, and baby showers and their requisite gift buying. The giggly rituals seemed needlessly expensive and tedious and, to Helen, somewhat exclusionary. She already understood that she was not the kind of woman whom men were rushing to the altar. Yet in postwar America, women her age were marrying in a fever; many of them seemed to expect some celebration of the fact.

  Having somehow offended the hostess of an upcoming shower, Helen found herself the only woman at FC&B not invited. On the night it was to be held, she stewed as everyone else covered their typewriters and carried their prettily wrapped gifts out into the bright evening. It was humiliating, galling. “I felt like the blackballed freshman of the year,” she groused.

  What to do for the long night alone to keep her mind off this exclusion? In her desk, there was a clipped-out questionnaire for entering Glamour magazine’s “Ten Girls with Taste” contest. In those days, in small display type below its logo, Glamour tagged itself, “For the girl with a job.” Helen loved the magazine, from its unusual attention to the very existence of single working women, to the cute accessories—hats, gloves, bags—that could convey a professional edge without sizable investment. How dreamy it might be, then, to be declared a Girl with Taste by her favorite publication. Yvonne Rich, then a legal secretary, had been a winner the previous year and wound up with a trip to Europe and a new wardrobe. At the time, “envy had practically unhinged me,” Helen admitted, a fact Rich laughingly confirmed.

  Helen would win that contest, too. She’d show them all. While her coworkers were enjoying cocktails and cooing over silk teddies, she stayed at the office for three hours, hammering out her entry. It was a yearly contest for Glamour. There were eight pages of questions geared to finding ten young women “of average income” who demonstrated good taste in every area of living.

  Doubtless Helen did not write about the free TWA travel poster over her stove depicting a smoking-hot matador that she found “really goose-bumpy.” Certainly, for the hospitality questions, she did not disclose her recipe for Chloroform Cocktails: coffee, gin or vodka, rich vanilla ice cream, and nutmeg—sometimes served with “canned sausages, piping hot.” Despite the Beldings’ tutelage, in some areas, she admitted, “I had the taste of an aardvark.”

  To her astonishment, she was chosen a semifinalist for the 1951 crop of tastemakers; she was one of seventeen women flown to New York for the final round of judging. The trip was exciting but she didn’t make the cut; she was sure that having one of the Los Angeles–based judges tell her that a man Helen had been dating was a two-timing skunk had thrown her off her game a bit. But the worst part was going home and telling Yvonne that she was a loser. How it stung! Helen skipped entering the contest in 1952 but vowed to try again—and again—if she had to.

  In the meantime, she continued to pay close attention to her favorite magazine’s style directives. Photos of Helen at the time—cute, fairly chic, with a sleek cap of hair—bear witness to the way she put herself together in those days, favoring dresses accessorized with inexpensive but au courant little purses and hats. Lack of funds had kept her out of beauty parlors for ten years. At a time when many women around her were going blond, she kept her own hair color because it was a pretty brown. She studied Glamour for tips on working-girl chic, and declared it her style “bible.”

  Beyond wanting to win the Glamour contest—the prizes included a new wardrobe and a fabulous vacation—Helen’s ambitions were modest. Her job had grown so absorbing that for the first few years, she never thought beyond being Mr. B’s secretary. The closest she had come to “creative” input was conducting the maddening search for identical little girl twins to star in the “which twin has the Tonette?” home permanent ads. She knew from his itinerary that Belding was always on the hunt for good copywriters, but it was his habit to cast his net far beyond the home office; never would it extend to female secretaries, anywhere.

  Some seeds of change were planted during a headhunting mission that took Belding to the burled and smoke-filled advertising warrens of Madison Avenue in Manhattan. He told the story himself in a written narrative included in his archived papers. His wife, Alice, accompanied him on that trip and when he came back to the hotel complaining of the weak candidates, he found her reading a stack of Helen’s “while you were away” memos and telegrams. When her boss was on the road, Helen often spent the better part of her day writing and rewriting her “Dear Mr. B” missives, condensing incoming correspondence and messages and adding her own pithy commentary. Her dispatches were crackling with energy and intelligence; they flew after Belding wherever he went, often via Western Union, dropping reminders and sharp-eyed observations. Helen considered this a survival skill: “I was always able to write,” she said. “The men I worked for depended on me to say exactly what they wanted to say. Memos, business letters, all sorts of correspondence. That’s what kept me employed.”

  Alice Belding handed him one of Helen’s letters that night in New York. “Read this,” she said. “Don’t you think she’s creative? Why don’t you give her a chance? You never give the women a chance in the better jobs. I think she’s a better writer than some of the copywriters you’ve got.”

  Back home in California, Belding pondered, but did nothing. His wife continued to nudge. “Alice, get off the case, she’s a secretary,” he pleaded, until finally, he ordered the account supervisor to give Helen an assignment for a “safe” client, in a distant radio market, one that could withstand a novice attempt or two. Helen was excited, but she wasn’t sure how to begin. One morning, while Yvonne Rich was in the kitchen with her baby girl, Deborah, in the high chair, she got a call from Helen. She was phoning from work, rather agitated, and got straight to the point: “What can I say about an orange?”

  Helen had been assigned to help on the Sunkist account. She was desperate for a new angle on this commonplace and dimply orb. What a funny coincidence, Rich told her. “Deborah’s sitting here in the high chair and she’s chewing on an orange.”

  “The peel as well?”

  “Yes, there’s a lot of good in the orange peel.”
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  “Oh, thank you for that!” Helen rang off quickly and plunged into research on the chemical makeup of peel and pith. Riboflavin!—aka vitamin B2. She wrote it up with nutritional hosannas for the Sunkist campaign. The radio ad ran in the hinterlands of Albany and Schenectady, New York. Belding allowed Helen to work on the Sunkist account every holiday season—a prime time for citrus sales—over the next few years. But he was still too hidebound to consider a female full-time copywriter. At least the Sunkist account kept her in the game.

  Hungry little Deborah got no credit for the save. In fact, Rich recalled that Helen—who had been her maid of honor—rarely even asked after the child.

  “She had no use for babies at all,” Rich recalled. “No interest.”

  The baby boom had begun on a postwar tsunami of optimism: the GI Bill was setting returning vets up with college tuition and loans for that dream cottage for two—or three. Helen’s vocal antipathy toward procreation seemed almost unnatural to some of her friends. She expressed no longings of her own as her Los Angeles and Little Rock girlfriends began gestating and knitting booties. Helen was touched when Elizabeth Bilheimer named her newborn daughter after her and asked that she be the baby’s godmother. Yet even pushing thirty, then considered the outer limits for a first pregnancy, Helen felt no great urge.