Helen certainly found nothing to argue with in Cooke’s call for a new set of values that recognized sexual joy as fulfillment in itself, rather than a grunting genetic imperative: “We must acknowledge the pleasure value of sex,” Cooke went on. “We must make shared joy MORAL.”
This was hardly canon in the buttoned-up Eisenhower years, though other therapists and sex researchers had begun to question hidebound and conservative sexual mores on a more national stage. In 1958, as Helen was so immersed in Charlie Cooke’s private revolution, the Columbia-based psychoanalyst Albert Ellis published his classic and controversial manifesto, Sex Without Guilt. Helen became an early and keen reader of his work. Ellis also worked with Alfred Kinsey, whose 1948 study of white American males, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, churned up great controversy and sales.
Kinsey’s report was shocking at the time; it found that 37 percent of the male respondents had had homosexual experiences to the point of orgasm. Half of them had had sex outside their marriage and more than two-thirds had paid prostitutes for sex. Reactions were predictably polarized. The general public was intrigued: despite the report’s size and cost—it was 804 pages with a steep price of $6.50—it sold 200,000 copies. The guardians of taste were more tentative: though its reporters duly covered the furor around Kinsey’s research, The New York Times primly and resolutely refused to accept advertising for the hardcover edition.
And what were women really up to behind closed doors? International and American press had flocked to Kinsey’s headquarters at the University of Illinois in Bloomington in anticipation of “K Day,” the August 20 release of his 1953 study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (later known as “the Kinsey Report”). It trumpeted the truth that Helen already experienced: In a sample of just under six thousand white American women, half reported having had premarital sex. Twenty-five percent said that they had engaged in extramarital affairs.
Kinsey’s metrics and sample size were not unassailable, but the general truth was incontrovertible: single women were having sex and enjoying it. Kinsey’s unsettling news got his portrait—graced with a flower and a honeybee—on the cover of Time magazine. Scantily clad women on the September 1953 cover of then-staid Cosmopolitan magazine pointed toward its cover line about the study. Coverage was widespread, in Reader’s Digest, Life, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report—and Modern Bride.
Despite the attention, or perhaps because of it, the conservative backlash undid Kinsey. He was tarred as a Communist by conservative Republicans and his funding from the Rockefeller Foundation was cut off. The attacks left him a broken man whose contributions were not reevaluated until after his death, which came just three years after he published his report on women. Mid-fifties popular culture did show signs of resistance to old-guard repressives. Fundamentalist fogies may have been tossing Elvis records into bonfires, but the kids were buying them faster than they burned; runaway sales revealed that Grace Metalious’s sex-in-the-suburbs novel Peyton Place, so tame by current standards, was going home in millions of plain brown wrappers.
Upstairs in Charlie Cooke’s hang-up lab, solid citizens, male and female, were enduring highly unorthodox exercises to shake off their repression. Because of Cooke’s background as a marriage counselor, many of his referrals included singles and couples with sexual and intimacy issues. Even within the confidential circle of the group, Helen found it could be a rough go. She wept a good deal. Some sessions sent her climbing into Charlie Cooke’s lap for solace. Never, she insisted, was there sexual activity of any sort in his sessions, with him or between group members. Cooke was the daddy figure. Often he found himself mediating squabbles between other members and the outspoken Miss Gurley. Helen was a blabbermouth by nature, she admitted, and she did tend to go on about things. She also wanted to get her money’s worth. Occasionally, she was confronted by other group members with issues far more traumatic than her romantic disappointments. After a while, a few of them were losing patience with that Gurley girl, a stubbornly pragmatic multitasker who sometimes tended to personal grooming or light chores as others poured out their deepest anguish. Helen described the consequences of that frustration: “I would always bring along a little something to do while various members droned on about their problems! One night I did my nails and was getting ready to put up hems when a fellow member broke his hand pounding on the floor because he was irritated with me.”
Even then, she could be that vexing a woman, at times hardly conscious of her effect on others. Another evening, Helen’s rambling recitation about yet another string of romantic conquests set off a bomb in the room. Suddenly, one of the women piped up. She just had to go ahead and say it:
Helen Gurley was nothing but a slut!
Spoken with venom, it had the effect of a gut-punch. Though Helen “went to pieces” under the assault—weeping, she sheltered in Charlie Cooke’s lap—she was also somewhat bewildered. What was a slut? Displaying a cultural myopia worthy of Cleo, she truly did not know. Maybe it was something out of a trashy southern novel, she thought at first. She looked up the word as soon as she got home and could not find a definition listed. She knew that it must be something horrible, so she asked friends. They explained: a slut was a woman with “round heels,” as the old expression for prostitute conveyed, someone easily pushed over backward into bed. Helen was stunned.
Slut-shaming is an ancient yet ever-vital blood sport; now haters may sling tweets and mortifying Instagrams instead of real stones, but the brutish motivation is no more civilized for its high-tech delivery system. More than a century and a half after the embroidered badge of shame flamed on Hester Prynne’s chest in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the practice has been so entrenched and enhanced, its barbs now so expertly aimed and massively deployed via social media, that the effects of online slut-shaming became the subject of a TED talk delivered in early 2015 by Monica Lewinsky, the ex-lover of the former president Bill Clinton. She received a standing ovation.
In the late fifties, even for the sexually liberated Helen Gurley, slut-shaming had a traumatic effect in that first startling moment. “Slut!”—the English word itself is shaped to be spat more than spoken, rather like puta, the Spanish word for whore. From Helen’s stung recollection on first hearing the term hurled at her, it is apparent that she honestly viewed herself not as a “sleep-around girl,” but as someone who just had “a lot of trouble with men.”
Here is how she described herself in those days: Not the memorable sort of girl who wowed anyone at a party. Not at all good at social chitchat. Not the kind of girl men took home to Mother. She said it herself: Helen Gurley was somebody one took to bed—if she agreed to it. Sure, she knew what she was doing, but she did not feel that she was a bad person for it. Most assuredly, she would not describe herself as … that word.
There were no equivalent derogatory expressions for males. Men were and are players, ladies’ men, womanizers. “Prick”—a word Helen came to use freely and with relish—would not enter wide usage for decades. By contrast, Don Juan, the name of a legendary cad first created by Tirso de Molina in the seventeenth century, has rarely been perceived as a coarse term. Helen’s choice of Don Juan to describe her tormentor almost civilized him. That bad-boy male archetype has intrigued intellectual lights from Camus (the essay on “Don Juanism” in The Myth of Sisyphus) to Mozart (the opera Don Giovanni) to that deft chronicler of refined sexual warfare, Jane Austen. Upon seeing a pantomime titled Don Juan, or the Libertine Destroyed in 1813, Austen confessed in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, “I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty and Lust.”
Thus the centuries-old divide: The bad boy could fascinate even as he spiraled to his comeuppance. The bad girl more often invited shaming and disgust. The disapproval and anger Helen heard that night in therapy would come roaring back at her again and again after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl; it would menace her fiercely at some
live appearances. She would learn to withstand it, even surf the swells of such public opprobrium on prime time if the kerfuffle sold books. Through it all, Helen would remain as unapologetic as she was in Charlie Cooke’s house of pain.
Overall, she voiced only one complaint about her therapist’s perspective on sexual activity. “He almost took the fun out of it,” she said. “Because you couldn’t fantasize anymore, sex was not naughty, you didn’t need to have fantasies with your beaux, you didn’t need to use naughty words, because sex was as clean as the driven snow. I don’t think people should be separated from their fantasies. But he was a wonderful influence.”
There was another aspect of her therapy that Helen seemed to have found more problematic to work through. Before Cooke wrote about men’s and women’s physical insecurities and the manifestations of bodily shame in Sex Can Be an Art!, he was exploring the subject with his group patients in a most excruciating exercise. Those who dared would strip naked, one at a time, and talk about their bodies in terms of perceived assets, deficiencies, and insecurities. Others were invited to comment. No one was forced or pressured to participate. Helen made herself do it. Having undressed completely, she faced a dozen pairs of eyes trained on all the areas that shamed her, took a breath, and dove into a recitation of her most personal complaints. She found it mortifying.
Cooke may not have freed Helen of all her physical insecurities, but after about a year of his treatment, she walked away from DJ for good. She was greatly relieved and continued group sessions and phone consultations with Cooke awhile to stave off any relapse. She was also in need of another sort of rehabilitation. Helen’s physical health had suffered, too, during her long, humiliating tango with DJ. The increased stressors of climbing the ladder in advertising took a toll as well. Just as foreshadowed in the bloody artwork on Don Belding’s wall, the ad game had proved to be a brutal business.
Burnouts were common in the trade and Helen was putting in punishing hours. There were seven other copywriters on staff, all male. Night after night she watched them leave at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. for their patio suppers in Pasadena and Altadena. Some of them shot her resentful glares as she continued to tap away. One of those copywriters complained to their boss that it simply wasn’t fair. He and the other men had to go home to their families! Gurley was taking advantage of them because she wasn’t married and didn’t have to go home. In fact, Gurley had to work later and work harder to keep her place among them. She was, after all, just a girl copywriter—pale, thin, and very, very tired.
For nearly a year, friends had urged her to see a certain Los Angeles nutritionist, a former housewife turned health guru whom Helen described as holding court “sort of like Gandhi” with hopeful petitioners lined up outside her storefront for consultations. Gladys Lindberg had taught herself about good nutrition in an effort to restore her own family to the rosy-cheeked robustness she knew as a child in South Dakota. She and her husband, Walter, opened their first health food store in Los Angeles in 1949. Gladys Lindberg’s clientele built rapidly, from the rank and file to the famous: the actresses Doris Day, Merle Oberon, and Gloria Swanson, and the entire Occidental College track team. After store hours, a limo would deliver “the Queen of Gospel,” Mahalia Jackson, a woman who surely needed her strength. By then, Jackson was regularly sounding her sanctified clarion at civil rights events at the behest of Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Helen had called Mrs. Lindberg, who refused to treat her over the phone. Annoyed, she resisted visiting the shop until she felt “lower than a worm.” Helen hit this nadir after two hard, humbling weeks in Long Beach as the unhappy Boswell to vacuous and very young beauty contestants preparing for a telecast. It was Miss Universe time. Again. The Catalina-sponsored contest had become a tiara’d colossus with serious network legs. During pageant season, Helen found herself hovering on the perimeter of photo shoots and makeup sessions, collecting personal information about the contestants to feed a slavering press corps, “pressing for news of dating at Keokuk High or water-skiing in Helsinki.” It was humiliating and exhausting.
She bore up as long as she had to, but once sets were struck and the runway dismantled, a shaky and exhausted Helen headed north in “Catharine Howard,” the well-used ’49 Chevy she had bought after putting the failing Appletrees out to pasture. She pulled up outside the Lindberg shop on Crenshaw Boulevard in southwest Los Angeles. There was no missing its garish neon sign; one had to get people’s attention to talk about health food in those days.
Helen took her place in line, and when she finally reached the presence of the wise woman, she launched into a typical overshare about her torments in Long Beach: “I explained to a cast of about thirty that I was suffering from an acute case of jealousy as well as symptoms of disappearance.” The busy and sensible Mrs. Lindberg bade the young woman quit talking and stick out her tongue. When told that it was purplish, with a deep groove down the center, Helen began to cry copiously, though she had no idea what malady her livid tongue foretold. Lindberg’s diagnosis was hardly surprising: fatigue, compounded by vitamin deficiencies and years of lousy food.
It was the beginning of a long and restorative relationship. Helen walked out that day with sacks of whole grains, soy pancake mix, and a full supply of “Varsity Packs”—the vitamins and minerals that Lindberg fed to the athletes who sought her help. Also included: the makings for Lindberg’s Serenity Cocktail, a blended elixir that became a daily staple. It consisted of fresh pineapple, soybean oil, raw milk, brewer’s yeast, and iron-rich dried liver powder. Helen whirred up a pint of Serenity in a blender each morning and carried it to work in a thermos, downing half in midmorning and the other half to ward off a midafternoon slump.
Like many of Lindberg’s followers, Helen enjoyed much-improved health, fairly quickly. Given more energy, she began to exercise. In short order, she was a devotee of yoga and trail walks; she hiked amid coyotes and skirted gopher holes along the winding trails of Will Rogers State Park. Half a century before the primacy of kale, kombucha, and the proliferation of “yoga rooms” in major airports, Helen Gurley’s wellness quest placed her firmly in the category of kook. She did not care; in fact, she proselytized, touting the transformative potency of powdered liver with the whispery zeal of a street-corner pusher. Friends acknowledged the restoration of her health and forgave the whole grain and organ meat sermons. Oh, that’s just Helen.
She was thirty-six, and though she was pleased to find herself more robust and finally free of her demon lover, Helen continued to wrestle with another bothersome “N,” her long-standing money neurosis. That anxiety had finally eased up a bit, given Helen’s cheap rent, the modest two dollars in gas she fed the Chevy weekly, and the comfort of some real savings. Thanks to scrimping in the secretarial days and her ten-thousand-dollar copywriter salary, Helen’s bankbook from the Security First National Bank showed a reassuring eight-thousand-dollar balance. The old boot in her closet was stuffed with bills and change as well.
Thinking that she might feel safe in replacing her ten-year-old car, she went looking at used Thunderbirds. A T-bird would be darling. She took along a man she was dating who worked at the William Morris Agency. They walked together through the used car lot, admiring ragtops, the signature “porthole” windows, and spoked chrome wheels. Suddenly, displaying the reckless auto lust that had propelled Cleo toward her pricey Pontiac, Helen went plumb crazy. She fell hard for a handsome, “cloud grey” 190SL Mercedes sports car, technically “used,” with just two thousand miles on it. The car smelled like success and handled as sweetly as a responsive lover. As if in a trance, Helen handed over the keys to the Chevy and five thousand dollars in cash and christened her new steed “Bismarck.”
Charlotte Kelly had visited the Beldings at their ranch with Helen the weekend before she would actually take possession of the car. The Mercedes, Charlotte finally realized, was the thing Helen had been saving for for so long, stuffing cash into that old boot. “Upon congratulating Helen
on the purchase of the car, she burst into tears and cried the whole way, three hours sopping wet.” The splurge had made Helen utterly sick and unable to sleep. Was she a crazy girl? She cried all the way to and from Tijuana when she and Bismarck ferried Charlotte and their friend Angela to the bullfights. It had been a mistake, some horrible lapse in judgment. She would just have to learn to live with it—and take it easy on the curves. She wasn’t used to the kind of power the smooth German “performance” engine delivered.
Just as she settled into her relationship with Bismarck, an intense professional courtship surprised and unnerved her. In the tenth summer of her tenure at FC&B, a rival agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt (K&E), began pursuing the talented Miss Gurley. After fierce competition, the company had just won the sought-after $4 million Max Factor cosmetics account over many rivals, including FC&B. The cosmetics client had seen Helen perform during the agency “bake off.” Max Factor made it clear; Gurley would seal the deal, so K&E was aggressive about getting her on their team. “They needed to staff up girl writers in a hurry,” Helen explained; “I was a logical acquisition.” She turned K&E down a couple of times; they kept coming back with more money.
In an undated recollection—it appears to have been part of a speech—Don Belding recounted the circumstances of Helen’s departure. He noted that she had been doing very well for FC&B, particularly with the Catalina and Stauffer accounts. “We were paying her $10,000 I believe, and they made her an offer of $20,000 and Helen was all upset. She came and talked to me and I said, ‘We can’t pay you that, but if they’re so anxious to get you, why don’t you say you’ll come for $25,000…’”
Belding had leveled with Helen; he and his partners were in no position to match the offer. The agency was reeling over a catastrophic campaign for Ford Motor Company’s epic $350 million bomb, the 1957 Edsel. Helen realized that she could not say no. But leaving home was terrifying, as Charlotte Kelly described it. “She couldn’t say yes without me coming down to her office and literally holding her hand while she called to accept the position.” As Helen packed up the office with her name on the door and prepared to leave, Mr. B wished her well—they would remain close friends until his death in 1969.
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