Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Helen hadn’t wished to seem pushy and accepted the offer at twenty thousand dollars, despite the grisly tales she had heard about Max Factor’s volatile ad manager. She soon learned how the notorious Mr. Gross had earned his reputation when she arrived for a meeting at the Max Factor offices one day with a delegation from K&E. Spring lipstick and makeup shades were to be discussed. Instead of the usual opening pleasantries, Gross announced: “I’ve got a new gun.”

  Veterans of such announcements steeled themselves; Helen nearly fainted when Gross leveled a Smith & Wesson sidearm at the K&E account executive’s head and fired. The report was thunderous in a conference room. Gross shot blanks, or, with a specially rigged shotgun, he sometimes sent a trio of fuzzy snakes animated by coiled springs toward the creative team. Gross’s very expensive new copywriter, Gurley, learned how to shriek bloody murder whenever he reached into his arsenal; he seemed most pleased by visible demonstrations of terror. It took Helen a few more blasts to understand: the louder she screamed and carried on, the better Gross seemed to like her. Helen Gurley had become—as far as she knew—the highest-paid woman in West Coast advertising. If feigning terror meant job security at that salary level, she’d scream the place down, then get down to business: “Okay, let’s name a lipstick!”

  Helen applied her adjectival wizardry to every pot, potion, and tube of female enhancers the company brewed up. She preserved some of her old copy and lists of makeup and lipstick names. Let us imagine ourselves seated at Mr. Gross’s conference table and “get Gurley to read” her list of possibilities in a breathy aria of innuendo and alliteration: “Silkidacious … Kiss Kiss … Sylph … SSShhhhh!… Mam’Zelle … Arctic Rose … Bahama Skies … I Like Men!… If You Can’t Be Good, Just a Little Wicked … Love in the Morning … Madness a la Mode … Oh You Kid!… Pyro Pink … Rubies by Firelight … Timid Temptress … Virtue ’n’ Vice … With My Eyes Open … Who’s That Girl?… Red, Your Move…”

  And finally … “Yes, Darling.”

  In Helen’s new position, the beauty business revealed itself to be paranoid, pitiless, sexist, and very ugly indeed. As a client, Max Factor proved a nightmare of mistrust and indecision on all levels. The over-thinking was maddening. “One Sunday,” Helen wrote, “we had a three hour meeting to decide whether the headline should be ‘Eight Obstacles to Beauty’ or ‘The Eight Obstacles to Beauty.’” Worse, she found that her new agency was no less frustrating than the client. She worked until midnight and on holidays and Sundays. Management churned through scores of supervisory hires with varying styles and peccadilloes one needed to adjust to; Helen “went through” nine creative directors and four office managers during her four-year tenure at K&E.

  As a courted and prized hire, she was shocked and dispirited to find herself summarily tossed into a Positively Pink ghetto with two other women copywriters, Mary Louise Lau and Marilyn Hart, who were also brought aboard to work on the Max Factor account. The women liked each other a good deal, but the agency insisted they all work on the same assignments, with the expectation that the dear ladies would simply claw it out. They were given one another’s copy to work over, leaving them “locked in a death grip,” as Helen put it, with no autonomy or authorship.

  The office the women shared had once been part of a dental suite. The fixtures remained—sinks, basins, lavatories, and outlets for Bunsen burners; the practice had also made false teeth. It was painted livid green, dark and airless. “The whole effect was rather mossy,” Helen declared, “… and you can’t tell me it didn’t affect our cosmetics copy.” Despite the salary, Helen was miserable; her copy was regularly and completely eviscerated. Whatever persuasive professional voice she had developed to get herself to this place was stifled and devalued. For a time she was slightly encouraged by being assigned to write an “advertorial” Max Factor beauty column for Seventeen magazine; she then watched seven men rewrite it before they took it away entirely.

  Helen had consulted with one other man besides Belding about taking the new job. She had just started dating the movie executive David Brown in June 1958 when she asked for his opinion of the K&E offer; she believed him to be the shrewdest of businessmen. He had told her to take the money and skedaddle over there. Unhappy as she had become at K&E, she wouldn’t think of tossing that advice in her new lover’s face. More than a year before they were formally introduced, Helen Gurley had decided to seek the ultimate cure for her long-unsettled life and marry this man a friend had told her about. It was time. Finally there was a candidate who—at last—met all of her requisites for a lively and secure retreat from the singles arena.

  As she told a friend, “David came to me presold.”

  12

  The Marriage Plot

  Helen wants to marry and the three traits she’s seeking in a man are intelligence (he must be smarter than I), affection (to the point of nausea) and stability (he must be grown up).

  —Miss Helen Gurley’s thoughts in a Los Angeles Mirror article, 1959

  HELEN WAS WILLING TO PLAY THE LONG GAME. It was a plan, impressive in its dogged forbearance, that began this way: In mid-1957, Helen was taking some exercise with her friend and hiking companion Ruth Schandorf, who told her of a newly divorced male friend of hers. David Brown was then a well-regarded story editor at 20th Century Fox studios. It was an important job title in those days, second to “head of production” in a studio’s creative department. Schandorf thought that, given time to let off steam with a few starlets and a candy box of other assorted nymphets, David just might be a “possible” for Helen. He was no matinee idol, but Schandorf assured Helen: “You’ll never be bored.”

  Helen had seen David Brown once at a party, still with his wife, and thought him “dishy.” Might she get an introduction? Soon?

  Schandorf agreed to watch closely and signal when the moment was right, warning that it might take a year or so. She had known David since his arrival in Los Angeles and had lunched often with his most recent wife, whose abrupt departure had left the man in tatters and in therapy. Schandorf laid out the full dossier for Helen: Dear David had no trouble getting women, but he was a two-time loser in matrimony. Married for seventeen of his forty-two years (eleven to the first wife, six to the second), he clearly wasn’t averse to the institution. Yet both wives had walked out on him, the first a lively dancer with a roving eye, the second a stunner with screen test looks and a Vassar degree. This left the mogul-in-the-making “alimony poor” in a pretty but neglected Spanish-style manse in Pacific Palisades. He was making eighty thousand dollars a year securing literary properties for the studio. “I thought he was John Paul Getty,” Helen recalled. But she wasn’t after the money at that point, she said. “I wanted security.”

  Schandorf promised that when she felt David might be ready for an adult relationship, she would arrange something casual, but intime. Perhaps a small dinner party. Helen was game; meanwhile, she enjoyed herself with a sweet younger man from William Morris, among others.

  It would hardly be Kismet, then, the coming together of David and Helen Gurley Brown. Helen Gurley was obliged to perform her own version of the Labors of Hercules to “sink in” to the psyche and libido of her mustachioed, pipe-smoking catch.

  She admitted to being in a bit of a hurry by then; at thirty-six, her hair was already turning “salt and pepper,” though the rest of her was in fine working order. But she was done with being “the girl.” She had been the girl for long enough, and for too many.

  Describing his dating mind-set at the time, the die-hard New Yorker David Brown made the odds of a bicoastal matchup seem slim indeed: “California’s a wasteland with regard to intelligent females,” he declared. “Helen was different. She was just old enough to be wise and just my type, but I was on a kick of dating only geisha and peasant types. I had only just shed a working wife, and for awhile I wanted girls who had absolutely no rights.” Watching them navigate their courtship year—he drifting languidly, she paddling madly—is to appreciate the sheer unli
kelihood of it all.

  * * *

  Ruth Schandorf’s dossier on David mainly concerned his romantic history. Helen, universally described as a nonpareil listener, would have no difficulty coaxing the details of David’s Runyonesque beginnings from him. As his three late-life memoirs would reveal, he had as few qualms about sharing his intimate history as Helen did.

  He was born into a rapidly changing New York City; its first skyscraper, the sixty-story Woolworth Building, was only three years old when Lillian Brown delivered her first child in that city on July 28, 1916. That month, as young French, British, and German soldiers began dying in droves in the protracted Battle of the Somme, America drifted closer to the Great War. Yet there was still optimism at home, with a booming economy, more and higher steel beams thrusting into the Manhattan skyline, and, nationwide, a rather Yankee Doodle outlook toward the quotidian pleasures of American life. But early on, there was little to suggest good fortune for this child of a doomed marriage and a coldly abandoning father. It was viewed as a mixed and thus questionable union then: Lillian Brown was Jewish; her husband, Edward F. Brown, was raised in Southampton, a dyed-in-the-seersucker WASP, according to his son. He was a man of various mundane trades and master of none, save philandering. At that, his son owned freely, Edward Brown was indefatigable and wildly creative.

  Early into his marriage, he began an affair with a renowned violinist named Nathalie Boshko. Much later in his life, David would learn from Boshko that she first knew of his existence on an evening she followed her lover home on the streetcar; she had become suspicious because Edward Brown would never reveal to her where he lived. She alit from the streetcar, keeping well behind him, and found herself in then-prosperous Sheepshead Bay. Crouched behind hedges outside the small house Brown had entered, the musician watched in horror as he kissed Lillian and dandled baby David. It was not far to the ocean; Boshko considered drowning herself in the Atlantic. Instead she rode back home and composed her ultimatum: divorce the woman in Sheepshead Bay and marry me—immediately—or we’re through. So it went; Edward Brown disappeared from his son’s life for the next seventeen years. He managed his new wife’s concert tours; they had a son and a daughter. He did not tell the children about his first wife and son, even after his second family returned to New York and he took a job doing public relations for the milk industry. He made no effort to see or contact his firstborn.

  David was raised by his mother, who had gotten remarried, to a wealthy man much her senior, Isadore Freundlich. For a time, life was, in Cole Porter terms, swell-egant. The couple sailed to Europe every summer; the little boy in short pants waved from a Hudson River pier beneath a bright shower of confetti. David was six in 1922 when the family moved to Woodmere, Long Island, seeking the well-pruned gentility of “the country life.” Five years later, an awestruck David watched Charles Lindbergh sail over the trees and into history from the dirt runway of nearby Roosevelt Field. In the area, those living close to the airfield learned not to paint their homes white as the burgeoning aviation age sent billowing dust clouds from its unpaved runways. David was a boy of lively curiosity and enthusiasms; he read science fiction and tinkered with a crystal radio set. On May 19, 1928, he stood in the middle of Pine Street peering through smoked lenses at a total eclipse of the sun that dropped a surreal, Magritte-like darkness over the well-kept homes.

  David became fast pals with another Woodmere boy, Ernest Lehman, who was destined to become a successful screenwriter (West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The King and I, North by Northwest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). The boys spent hours tuning in to distant voices on ham radios, an enthusiasm David maintained throughout adulthood. Suburban life was cushy and carefree until the 1929 crash decimated the net worth of David’s stepfather. With their home on Pine Street about to be sold for delinquent taxes, the family hastily downsized to an apartment back in Manhattan. Though she had never received alimony or child support, Lillian Freundlich was resolute that her only child should attend college, despite the family’s reduced circumstances. A meeting was arranged with David’s long-absent father, who agreed to send him through Stanford University.

  The summer before he left for California, David’s father thoughtfully arranged a job for him in the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. The experience left him with a lifelong terror of doctors and all things medical. At seventeen, David helped saw open human skulls for brain extraction. He injected lab mice with the pneumonia virus, sliced and diced them, and tried to make the best of it. “There was no air conditioning in 1933,” he wrote. “The general sultriness and presence of death around us made us feel very horny. I remember a nurse named Jo who was refreshingly uninhibited … My little lab was across the way from a ward for insane women. Hideous-looking former prostitutes beckoned me with obscene gestures.”

  Doubtless he was relieved to inhale the sea air as he boarded a steamship west in August. The incoming freshman Brown sailed off to college via the Panama Canal, chosen by Edward as the cheapest way to ship his boy to school. The bargain-rate voyage took three languorous weeks. David studied psychology and took a few gut courses. There were only three students in his “Business of Theater” course. Another, “Psychic Phenomena,” was given at the bequest of the university founder Leland Stanford’s wife, who was a devotee of spiritualism. Course work included coed séances with “a certain amount of manmade levitation under the table.” After graduation in 1936, David headed straight for New York and journalism school at Columbia University. He had his master’s degree a year later and set out to make his way as a writer.

  By the spring of 1937, while “Bashful Babe” Gurley was still coping with acne and a southern accent in her Los Angeles high school, twenty-one-year-old David Brown was shacked up with “a commie girl” in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Over breakfast, they argued about the Spanish Civil War. He thought it the best of times.

  Young David liked to stay out late and sleep in, so he got a job that let him prowl Broadway as a second-string drama critic and night editor for the fashion trade paper Women’s Wear Daily. The Depression was still spreading miseries, but he described it as “a palmy time” for him, bunking in a serviceable flat with three other young men and Anna, the card-carrying Communist. In his first memoir, Let Me Entertain You, he outlined the simple and liberating math of his carefree youth: a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, eleven dollars in rent. As to the rest: “The remaining fourteen dollars easily saw me through an active social and sexual life. Who cared if banks failed in Yonkers?” Sounding much like a certain single girl, he added, “It was exciting to be in New York and get out of strange beds before going to work.”

  In the beginning, David Brown had nearly as many writing gigs as Helen Gurley had secretarial jobs. For a time, as writing partners, he and Ernest Lehman even wrote horoscopes; their chief literary client was the Peerless Weighing and Vending Company of Long Island City. In 1941, while writing a Broadway section for Pic, a pictorial magazine positioned as a blue-collar version of Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, David married a lithe, twenty-year-old ballerina named Liberty “Tibby” LeGacy. He waxed rhapsodic in recalling her charms: “achingly beautiful, fragile as a lily with long blonde hair and lean, exquisitely shaped legs that never ended. Her breasts were small and perfect and her green eyes could render a man helpless.”

  They had a son, Bruce LeGacy Brown, a robust nine-pounder born at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, on October 4, 1942. That year, David left Pic to become nonfiction editor of Liberty, a popular general-interest weekly given to pulpy covers and meaty prose. Life was still palmy in the Brown household despite the nation’s entry into World War II. David assumed that acting as an air raid warden in a designated shelter near Park Avenue was sufficient military service, but in 1943 he was drafted. He was aiming for a post as an intelligence officer until he made an unfortunate blunder while marching his squadron around at Officer Candidate School; he dismissed them in front of the wrong barracks. �
�Does not know where his men are quartered,” was the damning citation that washed him out of OCS.

  By the summer of 1945, he was released from tedious stateside service in the army after the liberal Washington columnist Drew Pearson wrote about the thousands of men still idling at American bases “picking up cigarette butts” at taxpayers’ expense. As stipulated in the GI Bill of Rights, Liberty had to give its returning soldier a job; since the nonfiction slot had been filled, David became fiction editor and, eventually, editor in chief at twenty-nine. His pride in being elevated at such a young age was quickly punctured when he learned that Liberty’s newest owner had bought it as a needed tax loss. It was destined for the chopping block. And his marriage to the green-eyed Tibby “was on the critical list.” In 1949, David was hired as managing editor of Cosmopolitan magazine with the personal approval of the owner, William Randolph Hearst.

  The outsized newspaper and magazine tycoon had bought the tame general-interest magazine for a song in 1905 and turned it into a sensationalist cudgel to further his own agendas. Cosmopolitan was first published in 1886 with the expansive motto “The World Is My Country and All Mankind Are My Countrymen.” Within a year of Hearst’s taking ownership in 1905, a splenetic President Theodore Roosevelt lambasted one of Hearst’s lieutenants at the New York Journal in the wake of Cosmopolitan’s scandalous multipart congressional exposé, “The Treason of the Senate,” which aimed particularly at the Roosevelt crony Senator Chauncey Depew. It was classic and gleeful muckraking; the alleged calumny sold like crazy.