Perhaps the clincher was the high note of compassion chiming above the food and fashion burble in her winning entry. Glamour cited this passage: “Helen believes that good taste ‘starts with that most basic commodity—one’s own self—and extends outward to speech, clothes and possessions. It reaches its supreme station … in kindness to another human being.’”
Helen Gurley could sling it.
That August, Mr. Cyril Magnin pinned a corsage on Helen at the San Francisco airport before she was whisked off to his department store to be fitted for her vacation togs. Then it was off to Hawaii. Helen took in blazing Waikiki sunsets on the veranda of the rosy pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel. She posed for bathing beauty photo ops with Diamond Head in the background and island-hopped to Maui. There was also some activity unplanned by the good women at Glamour. General Bradley’s third aide, the navy man who had somehow resisted Miss Gurley’s charms, was then stationed in Hawaii. They managed a little reunion.
After a week’s R&R, Helen sailed back to Los Angeles, tanned and triumphant, aboard the Lurline, the venerable and luxurious Pacific liner that had ferried Amelia Earhart and her small plane across the ocean toward their fateful flight. Helen savored every minute, but as ever, she did not, would not forget the snub that set it all in motion. “It was all quite princessy,” she allowed, “but it started with loneliness, a Remington with a new ribbon and lots of hours to kill.”
Shortly after she returned from Hawaii, Helen learned that Mary Campbell, the personnel director at Glamour’s parent company, Condé Nast, had phoned Don Belding and strongly suggested he give Miss Gurley a try at copywriting; her contest entry was impressive with its essay on the values of women’s professional organizations. Like Miss Campbell, women achievers recognized something in Helen Gurley, a steely aspirational drive belied by the soft voice and habitual “little me” dissembling.
Don Belding was finally convinced. When notice of the promotion to copywriter went to the company personnel office, Helen was called in and questioned closely. Did she want to leave a nice, secure secretarial post for something she might just fail at? As if Helen, on her umpteenth secretarial job, could not find another. Yes, she told the man, she really, really wanted to try. Helen got her own office with her name on the door. Her first big account was to be Catalina swimsuits. Helen installed Charlotte Kelly as Belding’s new secretary. Unencumbered by any “daddy” feelings about her new boss, Kelly embarked on an affair with him. Her only reservation, she confided to Helen, was that the much older Mr. B might be called to Glory during their exertions.
Once Helen moved out of the twin cubicle and into her own office, she got herself to another therapist, immediately. “I was utterly terrified,” she wrote. “Though I could afford just one half-hour session a week, a patient, adorable psychiatrist used to prop me up and spoon-feed me my ego ration every Saturday morning until I’d begun to score a few points in my new job.”
At thirty-one, Helen had come to know her own frailties. During her twenties and thirties and on into the years of her greatest successes, she suffered from colitis and sudden outbreaks of hives after physical activity, ailments long thought to be aggravated by stress. She found that Pyribenzamine, a first-generation antihistamine prescribed for the hives, also made her drowsy enough to help with the frequent insomnia that resulted from nighttime anxieties. She would use it for forty years, until it was no longer manufactured. More than two decades after the onset of these maladies, Helen self-diagnosed her digestive torments: “I did get the colitis, which I have to this day, from worrying about money.”
She also recognized her cyclical lapses into almost paralyzing bouts of hypochondria. After all, she had seen the ravages of polio and cancer at very close hand. “Every year I go through this psychosomatic fit which seems to involve X-Rays,” she complained in her early thirties. She confessed to having convinced herself that she had “tuberculosis, acute appendicitis or a big fat tumor.” In sultry weather, once thought to be an incubator, she imagined “a touch of polio.” Despite the costs, ranging from ten to fifty-five dollars a visit, she took herself off to specialists and always received a clean bill of health. She called it her expensive relief. Even Don Belding had learned to recognize the onsets of her maladies, real and imagined, and kindly bundled her straight to a doctor with his driver, William.
Through it all, talking things out was her remedy of first choice. She understood that the root cause for most of these afflictions was her susceptibility to paralyzing anxiety. Having been raised during the Depression in a family home suffused with fear, she lived with this undermining surety: Something can always happen to ruin everything. Fear would trail her like a slinking pariah dog, just lying in wait to tear into her success, her solvency, her hopes for a truly loving man. For the ensuing half century, psychotherapy was the flaming torch that kept the beast at bay.
* * *
She also realized that there was much to congratulate herself for. Though she would also work on the rather dowdy Stauffer System weight loss campaigns—and win awards for her copy—the Catalina account had it all: glamour, celebrity, travel, and prestige. It got Helen out of the office a good deal, to the client’s offices and on photo shoots. Humphrey Bogart allowed Helen’s creative team to photograph their clothes on his yacht, the Santana—owing, Helen was sure, to the machinations of Mrs. Bogart, Lauren Bacall, who cast a keen eye toward the freebies for the entire family. Bogie was genial and obliging, donning a Catalina sport shirt for the ad.
Helen was game. She clambered on slippery rocks with Dixie cups of bourbon to warm model mermaids as they flopped their tails and shivered in the dawn mists of Malibu. She hauled supplies, spare swimsuits, and props along the mile trail in from the Pacific Coast Highway. The conditions were far more hospitable when shooting at the sumptuous Neptune Pool in William Randolph Hearst’s boundless pleasure dome, San Simeon; there was even a surprise meeting with Hearst himself as he and his family arrived to stay in the lordly “bungalow” on the estate.
Helen was apprehensive when Catalina suggested she get some retail immersion. That meant barnstorming fifty department stores nationwide with the company’s Trade Relations Service team as Catalina rolled out its newest line. The swimsuit selling period was a tight two months; close vigilance over the hits and poor performers was essential. Helen knew it would be a brutal grind, hitting a store or two a day for a month, talking to buyers, sales clerks, and customers from nine to nine. Having soldiered through it, she wrote up the value of her sojourn in the retail trenches for a trade magazine, Western Advertising, in an article titled “Four Weeks Behind the Counter.” She sold suits herself in thirty stores. Some days, it was murder: “The Alamo looked pretty good after I’d squeezed a size 16 into several size twelves (she insisted).”
Less exhausting but deeply annoying was Helen’s stewardship of the long-stemmed Hillevi Rombin, a Swedish beauty crowned Miss Universe for 1955. The Miss Universe franchise had begun three years earlier as a local “bathing beauty” contest sponsored by Catalina in Long Beach. After winning her title, Rombin was sent on a department store tour to model the company’s suits. Chaperoning a natural beauty like Miss Rombin through the backwaters of Milwaukee and Duluth was hardly an ego-boosting exercise for Helen. “When there were men in the same room I felt like I’d become part of the furniture,” she crabbed. When unencumbered by Norse goddesses or tweedy product managers, Helen would often meet lovers in far-flung cities. Let their expense accounts foot the bill for the Chateaubriand if she could bank her FC&B meal per diem; out of habit, she also hoarded hotel soaps, stole towels, and deftly padded expenses wherever she could.
It was sometime during this period in the early to mid-1950s that Helen took a deep breath and ventured where no twentieth-century Gurley had ever gone. She quietly borrowed five hundred dollars from Alice Belding and took herself to Europe, alone and clueless, for the first time. She was tentative and frightened when she set foot in London, but she managed not to c
ommit too many tourist faux pas on the Continent. There was an impractically high heel caught in some cobblestones, a mortifying pratfall, no harm done. Why, it was plain, perfectly reasonable frugality that made her fall out of a bidet and onto the WC floor like a wet flounder in her cheap lodgings at London’s Green Park Hotel (“$4 a night with crepe paper curtains”). Helen discovered that the strange porcelain fixture had the same hot water one had to pay a maid a shilling (then fifty cents) to fill a whole bathtub with down the hall. Those tubs were “large enough to wash a Nash Rambler,” and it cost a tidy sum to fill one. Why not try to fold herself into that warm, frothing source for free? Even after the unfortunate flop, Helen washed her hair in the bidet; she couldn’t get her head under the sink tap. But oh, such nice linen sheets everywhere … no extra charge.
It is possible to travel along with that game American girl in Paris—and in Madrid, Venice, Florence, Rome, Nice, Monte Carlo, Positano, and a few more breathtaking perches along the Amalfi Coast. Pages from a stenographer’s notebook, doubtless pinched from the supply closet at FC&B, chart Helen’s bold and often harrowing solo adventure; she also wrote of the trip in some of her books. Her commentary veers between Lucille Ball and Colette. In between the scrawled calculations for currency exchange and ferry departures, the journey spools out. Here, in her own breathless style, an interpretive re-creation of Helen Marie Gurley’s very first Continental tour:
Paris. Stunning. But so lonely.
A little sad.
Exactement, tristesse! It would all be better with a lover. Still, she is undone by the beauty, knocked out by the art, maddened anew by Gallic plumbing.
But here he is! Helen has arranged the briefest rendezvous with General Ted Clifton in Paris; he is on NATO business, or something like that. He has swept her from the low-rent Normandie hotel to the sumptuous Plaza Athénée. Cinderella creeps back to her thrifty garret at dawn. Dinner at the Tour D’Argent. Bliss … but then a whole day to kill alone; he is a busy man. They take in a high-class strip show; such tight, heavenly bodies on these French girls …
The military caravan moves on.
Alone again. And in the streets, the eyes have it. Men’s eyes are on her everywhere. She can hardly write fast enough; there are scrawled exclamations that conjure the raw male hunger of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer—that moment when Elizabeth Taylor emerges from the sea all but naked in a wet white swimsuit: The men! The men! So many hungry eyes. A horde of locusts, Helen thinks.
Why is it a nice girl can actually like the wrong kind of attention? Why?
She feels their bold stares, marvels at the brazen stalking from glove store to kiosk to café. Then, a train south to Monte Carlo, where she is sweetly touched by Lady Luck in a casino, winning a quick five hundred dollars. She can pay Alice Belding back, pronto.
Florence! What a knockout. The Duomo. The men.
She gives herself a hard talking-to:
You are after what, Helen Marie?
Romance? Fortune? Both?
Here are more men, murmuring to her in blunt, task-specific English. Goddamn them all for their rote, class-conscious pick-up lines:
’Scusi. Are you a college woman from Smith or Wellesley? Do you study here?
Goddamn them! They can tell she is not like those other girls on their Continental tour, of course they can. They know bloody well she isn’t studying Renaissance painting at Barnard.
When she dares, she looks hard at them, too. She knows what they are after, but for heaven’s sake—at home, no one would even look. But every man in Florence seems … interested. She does not miss the bland and dismissive American male faces. Basta!
These men as lovers?
They ply a well-honed art of seduction, as though a woman is a piece of clay to be patted and smoothed. Is she in some sort of swoon? Let’s be fair; it is a heady thing for a woman, not a ravishing beauty, to be so relentlessly pursued.
Still, a girl feels conned. Used, yes. Of course. How they lie, bold and guiltless as six-year-olds caught stealing candy. Sure he’s “never done this before with anyone.” He only wants to do it to you, cara mia. Oh please.
Please do.
When it’s over? No sentiment, no promises. You will be missed no more than the sweet pastry consumed three days ago.
There she sits in her budget rooms with their worn chenille spreads and million-dollar views, a small thin face in the window, taking her own measure with the keener sextant of the solitary voyager. Perhaps she has never felt freer. On October 13, there will be a morning flight to New York. She is thinking of her return and the all too familiar vistas.
American men do not have mouths like succulent grapes.
They are clumsier.
She still does not understand bidets.
Arrivederci!
* * *
Alice Belding got her five hundred dollars back; work reassumed its place as the main adventure for forty-nine weeks a year. The performance evaluation of Helen that FC&B commissioned from a Colorado research firm limned a dogged perfectionism, obsessive attention to detail, and the willingness to undertake grunt work among her virtues. It is clear that she spoke her mind to the interviewer(s), who noted: “She is just as charming and responsive as we thought. She loves everything about her job situation. However, she feels she could handle more assignments and would like to earn more money, for the family drain on her finances is quite severe. Moreover, it is very important for her to feel she is accomplishing something—going somewhere—that her life is not at a dead end.”
Call it frankness, oversharing, or the product of so much therapeutic introspection; Helen would retain the habit of “going deep,” in workplace and public discussions, sometimes with startling non sequiturs that pulled the conversation toward highly personal matters. So it was with this interview. It is also apparent that she volunteered her thoughts on office fraternization. Helen was never able or willing to separate sexual longing from the workplace, declaring years later that with the exception of her years at Cosmo, “I have never worked anywhere—and I’ve worked a lot of anywheres—without being sexually involved with somebody in the office.”
As a copywriter, the evaluator concluded, Helen understood exactly how to reach her chiefly female audience for swimsuits and weight loss programs: “With a subjective, feminine, intuitive sensitivity; most certainly not with rational, objective, or even very communicable logic.”
Translation: Well done, little lady—however you pull it off.
Helen was hot professionally, winning awards for her campaigns, including three “Lulu” statuettes, awarded for the best copywriting by advertising women on the West Coast. Some of her most valuable endorsements were from clients who responded to the way Helen presented her copy. Often in pitch meetings, clients requested, “Get Gurley to read it!”
Feeling somewhat established in her new career, Helen decided that it was time to transform her poky little dwelling. She had a bit of mad money put aside from the Glamour contest, and she had exercised another of her wily fiscal ploys to add to the nest egg. In her earlier dating days, she would pay off a cabbie and hop out once the taxi drove out of sight of the date who gave her carfare. Helen would then catch a bus home and pocket the difference. This time, she had pulled off that old switcheroo on a grander scale by exchanging her first-class ticket for one in coach when flying to New York for the Glamour judging.
Having the enchanting career-girl apartment, a stage setting for seduction and socializing, would be a longed-for and affirming accomplishment. She simply had no idea how to pull it off. So how exactly might one so untutored furnish what her magazine would later call a “Man Trap”? She was able to tap the talents of two useful men in her “stable,” in this case a gay couple she called Mark and Schuyler. She was entranced by how they had transformed their odd, twenty-by-fifty-foot apartment—$62.50 a month—in a “rabbit hutchy” old building in Beverly Hills into what she described as “a corner of Versailles.”
/> The gentlemen pruned and purged; they banished a hideous faded davenport to the care of a more desperate friend. So, too, went the red and chartreuse flowered chairs. Those irredeemably tacky gewgaws? Gone, sweetie, to the land of things that should not even be given away. The fate of the sizzling toreador poster is unknown. A color scheme emerged: moss green, hot pink, and white; that saucy palette would be reproduced endlessly in Cosmo’s home décor features. “Over the year, a few dollars and a few deeds at a time, the boys stole, cajoled, borrowed, coaxed, begged, painted and polished my apartment into something pretty terrific,” she concluded. To her astonishment, she found herself house-proud in mad, midcentury Los Angeles. “People talked about that apartment,” she crowed. “It brought me great pleasure.”
Once the lair was completed and the stage set, the action chez Gurley was nonstop. There were Sunday brunches. The Chloroform Cocktails flowed freely; on occasion, Helen called them London Fogs, which sounded a tad more upscale. Bold imbibing was encouraged (“Piffle to the guest who drinks Puritanical highballs even at brunch”). Canned sausages were served, along with canned cling peaches heated and goosed with orange peel, cinnamon, and a maraschino cherry. Having few culinary referents, Helen looked to Irma S. Rombauer’s classic, The Joy of Cooking. Sometimes she surrendered to the heavily sauced and syruped postwar fare served up by the test kitchens of women’s magazines, which were then cozying up with burgeoning American food conglomerates. Entrees and desserts were built with white bread, American cheese, instant pudding mix, and canned cream of mushroom soup. Along with this chemical banquet there was Sunday revelry as well; sometimes Helen gave dancing lessons. She deemed her early to mid-thirties “my really popular era.”
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