Her romantic flings effervesced, cooled, and sometimes collided. Some of the most rewarding affairs conferred experiential rather than material gain and drew Helen far from her comfort zone. In most cases, it was a good thing. But she must have been insane, she reasoned later, to have sat steadying the controls of a rickety little plane on the ground while its private pilot, Freddy, a smitten Swiss import at FC&B, tried to restart it by twirling the propeller. They flew often on weekends. Whenever they found themselves aloft and lost, Freddy bounced the little plane down on remote airstrips. Helen hopped out and ran to get directions; if Freddy turned the engine off it might not restart. As they flew slowly and ever so low, she watched the desert scud by below—they practically skimmed the cactus tops—as they putt-putted toward Vegas for a weekend.
Freddy was on his way to becoming very rich, but he was not marriage material. He had a wife back in Zurich. Helen didn’t care; she was having too much fun. The fearless and handsome young Swiss opened her eyes to places she thought she knew by then, including Los Angeles and New York. He availed himself of the cities’ offerings in huge gulps and insisted she partake. On a trip to Manhattan, he took Helen to the Statue of Liberty and to the classic Broadway plays South Pacific and A Streetcar Named Desire. Dear Freddy even escorted her to the three Bs of the city’s fashion-forward: Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, and Bonwit Teller. Out west, he propelled her toward natural wonders, among them the Grand Canyon and the staggeringly lush wildflower bloom in the desert at Palm Springs. Looking back, Helen admired his capacity for wonder. Freddy certainly showed his committed career woman what it might be like to fully embrace one’s joie de vivre.
“I never really got it,” she confessed. “I was too busy working. Always have been.”
And yet …
Other men also gifted her with indelible moments of joy, not all of them horizontal. On her own in the Eternal City, Helen had stood in piazzas awhirl with beautiful young Romans on motorbikes; she longed to experience the Vespa transports of la dolce vita. She told a young man in a glove shop that she would just adore a ride on his machine. He set Helen and her shopping bags on the back of his scooter and they rode all day through the fabled Seven Hills, the marketplaces. With her arms wound tightly around this “darling Italian boy,” she found herself at the Colosseum at twilight as a light drizzle glazed that cruel architectural wonder. She declared that day, in all its gorgeous, reckless whimsy, one of the best of her life—and she did not sleep with the man.
When it came to male conquests, Helen was feeling what she called “the power.” By her early thirties, she felt that she had reached the peak of her sexual prowess. She reminisced in Having It All: “I remember splendid years of slipping out of the Beverly Hills Hotel at dawn to pick up Appletrees, my fourteen-year-old Buick station wagon (parked on a side street because she really wasn’t up to being seen at the Beverly Hills Hotel porte-cochere), feeling as alive as an eel from having been at it all night with a New York friend I had a long liaison with, and another time leaving a lover at the Plaza Athénée in Paris to taxi across town in rumpled red chiffon to my eight-dollar-a-night room at the Normandie, loved senseless…”
Clifton, Freddy … Affairs sometimes “overlapped,” she noted in a whopping understatement. Sometimes she and Charlotte had a tag team going; Clifton also had a fling with the vivacious Miss Kelly. As it happened, there was an artistic rendering of Helen’s surging sexual wattage that survived those days. She had a brief affair with an art director at FC&B, a sweet, talented man who seemed quite ardent. He was distressed, at first, to arrive at her apartment one day and find two other men already visiting. Then he got over it and began working on a comic tribute to Miss Gurley’s puissance as the siren of Bonnie Brae Street. The artwork, Lyn Tornabene recalled, was framed and hung in the bathroom of the Browns’ Park Avenue apartment. It was a rendering of Helen’s apartment building, with men hanging from the rafters, men falling out windows. The stairway was clogged with men; the street outside was beset by a traffic jam of suitors. Two women stood outside the building, taking in the mayhem. The caption had one saying to the other, “I think her name is Helen Gurley.”
* * *
As is often the plotline of bodice-ripping romance novels, a blackguard had her heart all along. He tossed, dribbled, and drop-kicked it mercilessly over eight tumultuous years. Helen wrote about him in a number of her memoirs and in several guises; he appears in Sex and the Single Girl as two different offenders. She may have monetized some of the heartache in print, but none of the published works capture the raw pain, the wrenching scenes, and the deep psychological torments that emerge in her conversations with Lyn Tornabene.
The villain is nearly always referred to as Don Juan; only once did Helen tell Tornabene his full name. In other writings she called him “Bill,” “W.G.,” or “Willie.” He was in the advertising business, the creative director at a smaller agency. Given the many coy discrepancies and disguises over the years, he will appear herein as DJ.
He was “a real sex man,” Helen declared. He was also a Wow. She likened him to a Greek god, lordly at six feet plus, with a sensual Dionysian countenance beneath black, curly hair. He was two years older than Helen; she was twenty-nine when they met. She said that he was very, very good in bed. At first she was so besotted that she didn’t see the signs that he was a serial heartbreaker. But the man was sick. Sick, sick, sick.
By Helen’s description, DJ could have been a two-button, single-vent, white-shirted prototype for the advertising executive Don Draper, the dark, driven swordsman in the TV series Mad Men. Both wreaked serial, unrepentant, idiosyncratic hell on women. It took a while, but Helen came to realize that it pleasured DJ greatly to have her know that there were other women, many, in his life, to constantly “stick the shiv in,” as she put it.
“He was very romantic, the most romantic man you could possibly ever hope for in your whole life. I wanted to marry him, he would come back to me after a hiatus with the flowers, a Brooks Brothers shirt, the pen that says, ‘I have grey hair, brown eyes and a black heart.’ It was this wonderful sterling silver pen that he would have made. It was so cute. And rotten to the core. He would come back and he would say, ‘Okay, we’re going to be together, if everything goes well, we’ll get married.’ Idiot! I fell for it about three different times. He’d come back, we’d be in trouble, we’d break up again.”
She began to see how carefully he planned his tortures. A cuter, much younger lover showed up banging on his apartment door while Helen was in his bed; gee, he’d thought that girl was still in Europe. He left letters from his other women where she could find them. Helen, a scant AA cup, did not need to know, from snooping into one steamy missive, that he had named a New York girlfriend’s generous breasts “Liebchen” and “Schatzi.” He bought gifts for his harem in multiples—Brooks Brothers oxford cloth shirts, pens from the popular silversmith Allan Adler—monogrammed for each. One Christmas, Helen saw stacks of these gifts in his apartment, marked for different women. DJ did not deny his philandering but calmly explained the gifts to other women as necessary expiations. Of course she was the One.
Psychopath. Sadist. Egotist. Pretentious ass. She knew him to be all of those things. And yet there she was, hopeful and compliant. If he went out, she prowled his apartment with the intensity of a hungry badger, sniffing and pawing for signs of betrayal. Helen judged herself “a purebred masochist,” tormenting herself by snooping in DJ’s fat, loose-leaf address book for entries penned with different-color inks—new girls were generally in blue or green. Fittingly, Helen’s entries were jotted down in mournful purple.
To everyone else, and often to Helen, DJ was charming and funny. He was an openhanded spender: champagne by the case, mad weekends in Mexico and Hawaii. His exes stayed in his life, to the consternation of those still “in play.” He acted the gallant, seeing women through their divorces, even squiring one of Helen’s friends to a Mexican abortion. He gave the women financial advice, as
ked about their mothers … their pets! Many of his conquests had been very wealthy, a fact he often mentioned to Helen, making her feel like “a nothingburger.” DJ extolled his ex-wife, her beauty, her Cordon Bleu cooking, her perfect ease as a hostess. Most cruelly, he belittled the thing that gave Helen the most self-esteem, her so-called career. Beginning way back with her Sunkist orange debut, he was patronizing, sometimes mocking about her ad copy, as though she were a little girl playing at a big man’s game. They were the lowest of blows, and, coming from a successful pro, the jabs went deep.
Charlotte Kelly took Helen’s sobbing phone calls, tended her on “healing” weekends at the Beldings’ ranch, and tried to be supportive when she kept going back to her demon lover. “It was painful to watch and share,” Kelly wrote. “I finally spoke. ‘Helen, if you do not put some distance between yourself and this man, you’re going to flip out.’ She agreed and retreated to Mexico for 10 days. The problem was, she took him with her.”
Though Helen’s published accounts of his psychological abuse were leavened with self-deprecating humor, she confessed some serious anger issues. Her scenes with DJ became operatic and more frequent. When a blond model walked by their table at the Santa Ynez Inn and greeted DJ, Helen poured a pitcher of water over his head in a spasm of jealousy. Objects began to fly and shatter; she threw a pitcher of icy gimlets, she hurled shoes, papers, books, but never an ashtray—she didn’t want to hurt him! Finding a letter in his glove compartment, she screamed at him, “You’re seeing your wife again!” She took his car, parked it at the edge of the ocean, and refused to tell him where it was for three days. She sobbed, shrieked, and pleaded, sometimes for hours, to the point where only chugging a quart of milk could ease the hiccuping frenzy. DJ reveled in it; the more intense her agitation, the greater turn-on it was for him. His voice became calmer and sexier as he tried to soothe her.
Silly girl …
She came to realize that her unseemly meltdowns were DJ’s “Academy Awards.” Duly rewarded, he performed the role of cad with increasing élan. As Helen saw it, she was a prisoner of sex. “Whatever the emotional problems, I feel still that sex is such a dynamic incredible happening that your brains go bye-bye if you’re mad about this person. You can’t be sensible, you can’t say, ‘Well, I’ll just sleep with him but I’ll go have somebody else who’s nice. I’ll marry somebody else and I’ll keep this person as a playmate.’ You can’t do that. If you’re sexually zonked, that’s it. That’s it.”
Zonked she remained. She left DJ many times over those eight years, sometimes for six months at a time. She found pleasure, if not solace, in other men’s arms. She had plenty of other beaux, “from Holly Golightly’s super rats to soft, marshmallowy fellows that mothers would approve of.” The dalliance with the military men was during one such hiatus from DJ. So, too, was one of her more lighthearted and most public affairs. It was encouraged by none other than Don Belding, who thought it good for business. Helen called it an office romance. The prizefighter Jack Dempsey, a likable palooka, was endorsing Bulldog Beer, the product of an FC&B client, Acme Brewing Company.
The sportswriter Damon Runyon dubbed Dempsey the “Manassa Mauler” for the small Mormon town in Colorado he hailed from, as well as for the ferocity he displayed in the ring. Dempsey had an eighth-grade education and had been a cowboy and a miner before he made a phenomenal living with his fists. In 1926, Dempsey’s championship match with the challenger Gene Tunney took up two-thirds of The New York Times’ front page, as well as most of pages two through seven in the main section. The bout, which Dempsey lost by unanimous decision, paid him an unheard of $850,000—worth about $11.3 million today. Helen was four at the time of that heavyweight title match; meeting him long after those glory days, she declared him a “super stud,” still strong and rather voluble in the clinch. When close to the Moment, he was given to shouting, “Straighten me out, darling!” Said Helen, “Presumably, I did.”
Such a couple, bearlike Dempsey, sixty-two, and tiny Helen, thirty-one, prompted some good-natured ribbing. Perhaps they needed an interpreter to speak to each other, wags suggested. The fact was, Helen later noted, both she and Dempsey shared a tunnel-your-way-up background, and they got along just fine. Helen and her prizefighter were together for nearly a year. Dempsey squired her to Chasen’s, that clubby Beverly Boulevard canteen where the clientele—Sinatra! Bogie! Hitchcock!—was as hot as its famous chili. At the Mocambo club, Helen was elated to show off her best moves on the sizzling-est dance floor in town. She adored being at the center of it all—showbiz, at last! Flashbulbs haloed the Champ when he was out on the town; on Dempsey’s mighty arm, Helen was popping up in the gossip columns, though most often as “unidentified brunette.”
In time, the affair petered out. Helen complained of the meager leavings: a silk lounging outfit worth a couple of hundred dollars, bought in Las Vegas. Dempsey still had a healthy income from his eponymous restaurant in Manhattan as well as the Bulldog endorsement, but alas, it was not reflected in his gift giving. He had two ex-wives and three daughters to support. It had never occurred to her to ask Dempsey for money, she said. He was thoughtful in his way, always sending flowers. She was offended, though hardly heartbroken, when Dempsey suddenly decamped for New York to deal with a labor dispute at his restaurant and got himself engaged, briefly, to a rich widow. The Champ sent Helen a cheesecake.
11
The Cures
I believe psychiatry helps most dramatically in taking the joy out of punishing yourself.
—HGB, Helen Gurley Brown’s Outrageous Opinions
THE MEETING SPACE OF THE GROUP psychotherapy practice was a large room atop a rambling old house in the Griffith Park section of Los Angeles. Upon entering, Helen noted the unusual décor. The room was fitted out with the expected hodgepodge of chairs and an array of most peculiar therapeutic aids: a punching bag, pillows and ropes, bean bags, boxing gloves, and an adult-sized portable potty. Even compared with happenings in the edgier quarters of late-fifties Los Angeles, where bongos sounded above the surf from the Venice Beach beats and Elvis blew minds in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, this scene was way, way out.
But Helen was desperate. She could not pull free of DJ, who pursued her relentlessly and reeled her back in with a smug possessiveness. When the pain became too excruciating, when she feared seriously for her health and sanity, she would turn to another man to help break her addiction. He practiced the wildest, most demanding psychotherapy she had ever known. The Los Angeles therapist Charles Cooke was known as Charlie to his patients. A decade before the bloom of Esalen, est, and other California-based, crawl-on-the-carpet paths to full selfhood, Cooke developed a most unconventional and sometimes excruciating group therapy practice.
Helen’s gynecologist had recommended that she see Cooke. Besides participating in his group, Helen also had private sessions with Cooke twice weekly, some involving hypnosis. At its most intense, her therapy totaled four hours per week. She was frantic to free herself from DJ as well as from the less tangible demons that had beset her for so long.
She suspected that she still had some daddy issues. She was also prone to spasms of the depression that hobbled her mother. Despite her very busy social life, she was too often met by a curdling despair when she returned to her empty apartment from a date or a night with the girls. She found that, like her abusive lover, the darkness came upon her with a perverse beckoning: “Depression is waiting for you with your robe and slippers and a highball in its hand. ‘Hello, Dear, I made myself at home,’ Depression says. ‘Sure, I’m still here. Did you think I had anyplace better to go?’”
She could lightly mock the problem, but its persistence frightened her deeply. There was also the constant, undermining murmur of that “not pretty enough” cant. This she recognized as a key neurosis, her most stubborn “N.” “It’s such a dull, ordinary, run-of-the-mill neurosis I hate to mention it and only do so because it’s mine…,” she confessed. “I think I am not pretty. I mean I
know I am not pretty. On big N days I think I am not even passable. On those days or nights I really suffer.”
Thus Helen arrived at Charlie Cooke’s practice with a substantial to-do list. Assessing her experience there years later, she said that much of the work involving her family and upbringing had been done in the private sessions: “I sort of expiated the pain of losing my father. I was hypnotized a lot, and got out the pain and the grief.”
Helen, by then a practiced spiller, had little difficulty in adjusting to speaking in a group setting, though her manners would prove somewhat lacking. Cooke kept the group that Helen joined to a mixed dozen of men and women; the cast changed slightly during her time there. The walls and furnishings bore witness to their exertions; over the months, Helen watched the space get trashed to splinters as group members wrestled with their issues and, sometimes, with one another. The cardinal rule: no one should get hurt. Cooke’s methods were shocking at the time; they included nudity, hypnosis, and intense role-playing. But by Helen’s reckoning, his results were liberating and life-affirming for her. “He [Cooke] said, ‘You must not go back to that man who’s pursuing you,’—who’d been after me and hurt me so often. But he was the best of all the therapists when it came to sex. He said sex isn’t dirty. Sex is fabulous, and you enjoy it, and enjoy your enjoying it. It’s the most wonderful thing two people can do.”
On this last point, Cooke was publicly emphatic. Drawing on his therapeutic experience, he authored two books on his practice and fields of interest, The Hypnotism Handbook and Sex Can Be an Art! In his introduction to Sex Can Be an Art!, Cooke called for a reassessment of the very purpose of sex; he believed that as contraception technology continued to improve, society’s outdated mores constrained modern lovers. For the first time in our culture, Cooke contended, the two functions of sex could be separated; ecstasy need not be chained to procreation. “The sex urge is as strong in each one of us as it was in our parents or great-great-great grandparents,” he wrote. “The Urge is to copulate, not to make babies!”
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