There was a certain low-level curiosity. She began a quiet and generally pleasurable experiment. Every now and again, she “borrowed” a little girl, the daughter of friends. The family came for dinner on Saturday nights, then left their daughter for a fun sleepover digging into Helen’s closets and trying on costume jewelry. On Sundays, Helen had her “child day,” taking her little surrogate to the movies, the zoo, or shopping. She did this every six months or so, until she no longer felt the desire to test the waters. Though she would stay close to the girl as she grew up, Helen concluded that she did not need or want children.
She could barely manage the most basic of pets, as Charlotte Kelly remembered it. “Helen’s L.A. lifestyle could not support the four-legged kind. Her solution? Three goldfish. Their names: Foote, Cone, and Belding.” Once finances permitted, Helen did accept a small, yowling ball of fur into her solitary life. A coworker gave her a male Siamese kitten. It was the first of a long line of Siamese Helen would take to heart and hearth. Indulging the same extravagance with which she named automobiles, Helen called her first kitten Semditch Paramder Mongkut—the full title of Anna’s Siamese potentate in one of her most beloved musicals, The King and I. Helen shortened it to Spam.
She fell hard for the feisty little cat. He seemed unusually vocal and restless, even for a Siamese. Helen hoped that neutering him would quiet things down. When it seemed to be the right time for the procedure, the vet had some interesting news: there was nothing to alter. Spam suffered from cryptorchidism; his testicles remained undescended firmly inside his body, yet he still had the hormonal urge to mate, poor frustrated darling. The condition is more prevalent in purebred animals and is now corrected with surgery then unavailable to the unfortunate Spam. As a result, the handsome but perpetually horny cat grew into “a living spitfire.” He howled a lot. Helen found there was little she could do to comfort her companion save to tell him over the racket, “Sex isn’t everything.”
* * *
Outside the FC&B office, Helen also enjoyed the camaraderie and laugh-filled gripe sessions of a ladies’ lunch bunch. “Helen and I had a mutual friend, Margaret Thalken,” said Yvonne Rich, who spent half a century working in Los Angeles law firms while raising her daughters. “The three of us all worked downtown. We would meet in a restaurant on Spring Street and have lunch. We always noticed what each other was wearing. I said, ‘Helen, that’s a beautiful red suit you have on.’ Helen was small and she said, ‘I got it in the children’s department at the Broadway’” (a Los Angeles department store).
Buying dresses and coordinates in the children’s and preteen departments was just one of Helen’s inventive economies; she was an early fan of Anne Klein Junior Sophisticates. Personal grooming was a snap to manage on the cheap; she washed her hair with the powdered sweater detergent Woolite and dry-shampooed with corn meal. When she wrote to the Woolite company to praise its silky-soft effects, she was rewarded with a case of the stuff, sent gratis.
Rich said that the friends talked about men over salads and tuna sandwiches, but never in intimate ways. Some girls went all the way and some girls didn’t; Helen had other friends with whom she could compare notes on foreplay techniques and postcoital etiquette. “We knew what she did but that was her business; we didn’t discuss that at lunch,” said Rich. “The rest of us were not doing the same thing and we just accepted that was Helen’s way. There was always someone paying the bills. She often said that the man in your life should be paying for accommodations, dinner, booze.”
Unmarried sex was never a taboo in Helen’s mind. “Even in 1947, I knew it was okay to sleep with men and not be married to them,” she said, having been reassured on that front by her first helpful therapist, Dr. Fink. She knew that she was far from the only one having taken the plunge and did not see herself as special or unusual in that way. She enjoyed sex and saw no reason that it should be forbidden to those with a naked ring finger. It was no big deal. “I’ve never been a revolutionary,” she said; “I was just reporting what was true for me, true for my girlfriends.” Women who indulged, including Charlotte Kelly, did compare notes. There was even a low-level competitiveness on bedding the same man. “We talked a lot,” Helen said. “Everybody knew who was having sex with who, and whether they enjoyed it, and I had two girlfriends who were pregnant with the same man.”
They relished their liberties, but they were conscious of some potentially painful consequences. Some men did cling to the double standard, eager to leap into bed, but ultimately judging such a free-spirited woman unsuitable for marriage. Friends with serious troubles of the heart found a compassionate ear with Helen. Over dinner she would often find herself cheering up “the walking wounded.” They were all so vulnerable, these young women, she recalled. She was, too; how many times had she let herself be hurt in the past?
Along with her professional advances, the FC&B years also bracketed the period when Helen would become both a master of sex and a prisoner of love. Heartbreak, and its attendant depressions, cycled through those years. The feeling of being cheated on or rejected, the collapse of marriage dreams, those there-goes-my-future “sads” fostered a torment Helen knew too well. There were so many clear exit ramps for men and still so few rickety stepladders up and out for the women they left behind.
The only downside of unmarried sex that seriously concerned Helen was the repercussion that Cleo had so feared for her daughters. Helen always insisted that she had never been pregnant in her life, though there had been some “scares.” She saw girlfriends through abortions, frightening, excruciating affairs that generally involved a harrowing and expensive trip to a back room in Mexico. “Abortions in those days? Very serious matter,” Helen recalled. “I think they cost five hundred dollars.” For a working girl making anywhere from thirty-five to seventy-five dollars a week, the burden was staggering.
So astonishing was the ignorance and so great the terror that when one of Helen’s roommates became pregnant she denied the possibility for some time, ignoring the pleas of Helen and their third roommate to see a doctor when she got “sicker and sicker and fatter and fatter.” When she saw the doctor, she still would not admit to intercourse because she and her lover hadn’t “gone to bed” to do it. The lack of sex education was flabbergasting to Helen. “Then she starting doing things to try to unload this baby. Of course, nothing did any good. She was young and healthy.” The boyfriend came up with money for a Mexican abortion. They were married shortly afterward, then had two children.
There were very few happy endings like that, Helen observed. Some women would come to recover at Helen’s apartment after their abortions; a girlfriend should be pampered and monitored as she recovered and cheered up as best her hostess could manage. Helen observed that the risk, pain, and fright of the procedure itself nearly always gave way to a tremendous sadness afterward, despite the relief of having it over with. If you were caring for a young woman who was so “wounded,” as Helen put it, it was best to listen and not advise too much. Nearly always the man involved vaporized, though sometimes he paid for the procedure. But from what Helen had seen, he would never, ever be there to buoy the woman up in the aftermath of the abortion.
This was her mission, and she took it seriously. As the sad-eyed ladies reclined on her sofa, Helen refused to utter that unhelpful cliché “You’ll be better off without him.” She understood that they absolutely did not want to hear that—not right then as they bled and grieved but often still hoped the relationship would survive. She would tell them this: “You’ve got to go on with your life. This is so horrible, you don’t want any more of this, you can’t take any more of this…”
Through it all, her boss was an amused witness and sometimes father confessor for the many affairs. If Helen needed a few days in Mexico to recover from her latest romantic upheaval, Mr. B would generally give her the time off. Belding himself, wittingly or not, was the conduit for Miss Gurley’s sexual dalliance with members of an impressive military delegation bivouacked
at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“I’m going to give you to the boys tomorrow,” the boss told Helen after General Omar Bradley had arrived in Los Angeles with three military aides, two from the army and one navy man. The war hero was in town to deliver a speech on Armed Forces Day, May 19, 1951, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a venue that seated more than a hundred thousand. Belding had a hand in planning the general’s itinerary, giving a lavish party for Bradley and his entourage and offering any other services he might need. “It’ll be fun for you to go out there and pal around,” Mr. B told Helen. Her boss kindly made his car and driver and his secretary available to the general for the duration of his stay in Los Angeles. During that call to duty, there was a good deal of covert action that Helen never alluded to in her books.
The event at the Los Angeles Coliseum was to be, Helen understood, “a pretty goddamned big speech,” and the military aides huddled with Bradley at his bungalow to hone the text. Miss Gurley mostly sat poolside with the brass, sipping cold drinks and chatting. Bradley had been much in the news as a top advisor to the Truman administration on whether, in the wake of Hiroshima, the United States should pursue development of “the Super,” or hydrogen bomb. As the head of Truman’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Bradley had told the president that “it would be intolerable” to let the Russians perfect that nuclear trump card first. Truman respected Bradley tremendously; going ahead with the “H bomb,” if only as a deterrent, was one of the commander in chief’s first momentous decisions in office. The green light had come in January 1950, securing Bradley’s status as a Cold War hero.
“It was pretty heady stuff,” Helen said of kibitzing with these much-decorated guardians of freedom. But there was some serious business to attend to for Mr. B’s secretary. With only an hour and a half before Bradley was set to stand and deliver, Helen sat down to type his just-completed speech on a strange bit of equipment that had been delivered to the bungalow. She had never used an electric typewriter. Panicked, she could not make that strange, perplexing beast do her bidding. It hummed; it threw its own carriage back with shocking force and stuttered at the merest touch … kkkkkkkkk. There were so many strikeovers, the speech looked as if it had been redacted by a government censor. Helen slumped over the machine, defeated. In a soothing chorus, the general’s men murmured: “Don’t worry your pretty head about it.”
A hotel typist competent on the newfangled machine got the job done in a trice. For the light chores during the remainder of their visit, Helen borrowed a manual typewriter for some correspondence work. In the evenings, when Bradley retired for the night in the bungalow, his two army aides slipped out surreptitiously on alternate evenings to entertain Miss Gurley. She swore that neither knew about the other’s dalliance. Army people were very heterosexual, she declared—at least the ones she knew. Both men were married and able to effect military-quality secrecy around their trysts. Somehow, Bradley’s naval officer aide seemed immune to Miss Gurley’s charms.
Helen’s relationships with these military men opened yet another portal. She learned that even if men didn’t buy you “prezzies,” they certainly could take you places and open your eyes to things you might not dream of. An alliance with a powerful man could afford one world travel, a keener perspective, sophistication, and the considerable excitements of being present at the edges of … well, history.
Of those two aides to Bradley, the one Helen came to care deeply for was Chester “Ted” Clifton, Jr. Just the month before he arrived in Los Angeles, Clifton, along with Paul Nitze, director of policy for Truman’s State Department, had drafted the letter relieving General Douglas MacArthur of his command, at Truman’s request. Omar Bradley signed it. Clifton was soon promoted to major general and went on to serve with the army’s European command in Paris. He later became senior military aide and communications officer for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; Clifton was in the Dallas motorcade the day JFK was assassinated. The general remained as military aide to Johnson until 1965.
Clifton had been such glorious fun, and the perks were grand on the gold-braided arm of government expense accounts. For years, once Helen began traveling for business, Clifton would meet her anywhere: New York, Rome, Washington, Paris, Kansas City—even Little Rock if Helen happened to be making a visit home to Cleo and Mary. She had far less of a relationship with Willis Matthews, the second Bradley aide (“I didn’t like him much”), but she agreed to meet him in Little Rock on another occasion and teased him unto madness at first; he chased her clear around the hotel. Having thoroughly enjoyed their fox hunt, she surrendered, explaining that it felt fabulous for a man to “have the hots,” to be so out of his mind for you that even the H bomb could not distract him mid-mission. In recalling those military lovers, Helen said that she learned very early to be very good in bed. She had also learned to talk dirty. Herman Citron, the MCA agent, had coached her. She wondered whether other girls did that. They ought to try it, really.
Here was the silly little secret, a hard-won fact that finally conferred a certain confidence and satisfaction upon the girl who always considered herself “not pretty enough.” Certainly, men love beautiful women. But when the lights went out, Miss Universe might just as well be the poor, sooty little match girl if she couldn’t make him shout hallelujah. Helen’s proof? Many of her men, like the generals, kept on coming back. She was discreet with all of her married lovers but never was she apologetic about the joys of those liaisons. Even as a long-married woman she would declare, somewhat wistfully, “I don’t think there’s anything like mistress or unmarried sex.”
Nonetheless, the little girl who had withstood so many ugly jolts in a household of breathtaking insecurities had seen enough to make a crucial distinction between her two great loves: men and work. Sex and romance were too damned unpredictable. A girl couldn’t depend on anything. She could be sweet and adorable and sexy, yet still something would happen to ruin it all.
The workplace, despite its ups and downs, was a far safer bet.
“Business I could rely on. It never went away and left you. It was not capricious. It did not go out with another girl. If you did good, it would do good by you.”
10
How Ever Did She Do It?
She is a feeling being. She is completely aware of her own longings—to be needed, to be reassured that she is attractive and desirable, to belong intimately somewhere to someone. She is all Woman. And probably her greatest—and most uncomfortable—womanly virtue is her lack of pretense about it.
—from a job evaluation of the copywriter Helen Gurley, done for Foote, Cone & Belding
ON A FROSTY EVENING IN JANUARY 1953, the hotel guest Miss Helen Gurley, wearing only a silky petticoat beneath her heavy topcoat, left the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan and walked as far as Penn Station, a bit over fifteen blocks away. Her heels clicked a rapid staccato; it was too cold for a languid sashay. Years earlier, she had seen Betty Grable do something just as impetuous in a movie. Helen thought it would be fun. She was stunned to find that New York in January is not the back lot of 20th Century Fox in July. As numbness and good sense set in, she scurried back to the hotel for some beauty sleep “in order to look ravishing the next day” for long hours before a panel of Glamour magazine judges. She had entered the contest for the second time, and again, she was flown to New York as a finalist.
Three months later, the discernment and sophistication of the executive secretary Helen Marie Gurley was trumpeted in newspapers from Los Angeles to New York, Little Rock to Honolulu. On her second try, Helen was chosen to be one of “Ten Girls with Taste.” There had been nearly thirty-nine thousand entries, the largest field ever, according to the story in the Arkansas Gazette. The paper also reported that Miss Gurley, daughter of Mrs. W. L. Bryan of Osage, “wins a two week trip to San Francisco and Hawaii as guest of Glamour and a complete vacation wardrobe to be selected especially for her trip and presented by the Joseph Magnin store in San Francisco.”
How eve
r did she do it? How, among nearly forty thousand aspirants from sea to sea, plenty of them from top-drawer colleges and proper, gingham-curtained Colonial homes and golfing, bridge-playing parents, did Helen Marie Gurley pull it off?
Hers was a very savvy and determined campaign. Helen might indeed have wowed the judges in person. Some of them may have met her when she was a finalist on her first try. The photograph submitted with Helen’s application was no amateur snap. She scored a coup in having her portrait made by the celebrity photographer John Engstead in a pose worthy of his usual subjects: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe. Engstead was a talented conjurer of womanly glam; he shot for Vogue, Life, and Mademoiselle, and he knew how to sell a Look. He posed the contestant Gurley seated, in semi-profile, with one elegantly gloved hand raised toward her flowered hat and the other caressing Spam, nestled regally on her lap. She declared it “the photograph that helped me win.”
Helen’s account of filling out the Glamour contest questionnaire shows an early talent for scanning, parsing, and reconfiguring popular culture signifiers in a way that beamed straight to a target audience—in this case, the tastemaker doyennes of women’s magazines. As she answered the questions, the girl who had long struggled to “pass” as not poor and not too terribly gauche took very close notice of the turn of a collar, as well as the style and syntax favored by aspirational magazine copy.
What is a typical outfit you wear to work? (She made one up from studying fashion pages.) How would you entertain four people for dinner? (Since she had never done so, she conjured a sumptuous spread by poring over the food sections of Ladies’ Home Journal.) What is your philosophy of life? (She cobbled herself an ethos from having listened to many five-minute This I Believe radio broadcasts; Edward R. Murrow hosted that hugely popular motivational series in the early fifties.)
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