Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  The magazine’s many iterations are keenly mapped in James Landers’s history The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Cosmopolitan’s drift toward the literary during the Jazz Age, Landers wrote, “established it as the premier popular fiction magazine in the nation.” The magazine published Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Booth Tarkington, Damon Runyon, P. G. Wodehouse, Adela Rogers St. Johns, and W. Somerset Maugham.

  Cosmopolitan had made a good deal of money for its owner. But by the time David Brown arrived, Hearst’s flagship publication was listing badly. Though they were still publishing literary fiction and nonfiction, the market for it was much reduced. Television had begun to compete with magazines for the nation’s leisure hours and for advertising dollars. David’s mentor at the magazine was the man who hired him. The urbane and fastidious Herbert Mayes was a trusted and energetic editor who oversaw Cosmopolitan in addition to being editor in chief of Good Housekeeping. It was Mayes who schooled David in the sly art of writing cover lines. “Mayes’s blurbs had a twist on them,” Brown recalled. “They resembled a curve ball at a baseball game: They twisted outward, sometimes inward but they always contained a surprise. He readily dispensed superlatives like ‘Best Christmas Ever’ or ‘a story that will change your life.’” Using Mayes’s rules, David Brown wrote cover lines for the 1949–51 editions, a skill he would become known for during Helen’s tenure at the magazine.

  When David was at Cosmopolitan, a sophisticated, Paris-returned young Wellesley grad named Judy Tarcher, later the bestselling novelist Judith Krantz, was the shoe editor at Good Housekeeping and wrote fashion copy as well. She often gave parties attended by work and fashion friends and her high school friend Barbara Walters. At Hearst, Judy was friendly with a Good Housekeeping coworker named Wayne Clark. “Wayne was gorgeous,” Krantz recalled. “She was a natural beauty and she was just voluptuous, tall, beautiful brown hair. She was a copyeditor.”

  Employee fraternization was forbidden under Mr. Hearst’s directives. Judy Tarcher was shocked, then, to find that Wayne had been keeping a secret. “I gave a big party at my parents’ house one night. I invited Wayne and she showed up with David, who was in many respects my boss, and I managed to keep my cool and say hello to him—not say, ‘Oh my God, what are you two doing together?’”

  David was newly divorced from Tibby. The court had granted her custody of Bruce, and her famous lawyer, Louis Nizer, wrested a fairly ruinous alimony from David, who promptly married Wayne. She, too, was recently divorced. Possibly Hearst executives were too preoccupied to enforce the company fraternization policy; Cosmopolitan was still sinking fast. As personnel changes were made and David was passed over for the job of editor in chief, he had the good sense to leave New York and its fickle magazine world.

  David’s name came up when the 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck instructed his New York vice president to find the best editor in town to come west and acquire literary properties to be made into movies. Wanting to put the vast prairies between himself and Tibby, David, along with his new wife and his nine-year-old son, Bruce, walked a red carpet to board the 20th Century Limited for Chicago, where they caught the Super Chief to Los Angeles. Despite the custody decree, Bruce’s upbringing was fairly bicoastal. Sometimes it was just better for him to be with his father. But overall, the cross-country disruptions must have been bewildering to the boy. It was said that Bruce took a shine to his pretty new stepmother.

  Embracing Los Angeles was problematic at first, since David Brown did not drive. Wayne ferried him from their home in the Hollywood Hills to Santa Monica Boulevard, where he caught a streetcar to the studio, then a company tram to his office. Since this was an unseemly entrance for an executive, he made a note to learn to drive. As soon as he had his license, he picked up Robert Evans, handsome roué, film producer, and dear friend, who gasped a few minutes into the ride, “You drive the way I fuck!” (Both men survived for another half century of friendship.)

  The newly mobile David moved his family to a bigger and more expensive rent-toward-purchase house on Radcliffe Avenue in Pacific Palisades that had a commanding view of the ocean. He thought that Wayne wanted it. He worried that such a lively, cultured woman might be unhappy as a hausfrau. While living in the West Village, Wayne had socialized with the likes of Mary McCarthy, James Agee, and the painter Jackson Pollock. David encouraged her to continue working; she took a job he had arranged for her at a friend’s press agency. “It worked out well for Wayne but not for our marriage,” David concluded. He lost his second wife to Robert Healy, the head of Interpublic, Inc., arguably the world’s largest ad agency then; the dominant McCann Erickson was merely one of its subsidiaries. The wealthy and powerful Healy walked into the PR office one day and fell hard for the captivating Mrs. Brown.

  Judy Tarcher spoke to a stunned and devastated David just after the wrecking ball hit. “He got home one day and there was no Wayne,” said Krantz. “He couldn’t imagine why she left, she didn’t warn him. She took all her clothes and was gone. He said, ‘She had everything she wanted. She had a house on the Pacific Palisades.’ And I thought, no, that’s not what she wanted! I don’t think he ever got over Wayne—my opinion. I think when he married Helen he was still in love with Wayne.”

  Wayne Brown quickly married Robert Healy. She had decamped with most of her belongings, save for the painting an artist friend had given her, a work so baffling and loathsome to David that he had just nailed the canvas straight to the wall in a room he rarely entered. Wayne did come back briefly to carefully pry the spattered abomination off the wall, roll it up, and take it away. It was a Jackson Pollock that, according to David, was later hung with a bit more care in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

  David was still paying alimony to Tibby and trying to make good on debts that Wayne had incurred with her impeccable taste. She graciously offered to return his mother’s diamond ring—perhaps for his next wife?—and gave him the pawn ticket with which to retrieve it. David had hired a housekeeper to shore up the domestic arrangements and to help shepherd Bruce, who also spent some time back east with his mother. David loved the boy deeply but he could see that at sixteen, Bruce was becoming sullen, secretive, and the bane of private school headmasters. A large collie named Duncan served as comic relief.

  13

  Let the Games Begin

  “I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”

  —Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

  FINALLY, IT WAS TIME. Ruth Schandorf had judged David Brown receptive to a setup and told him, “I have someone perfect for you. She’s a little neurotic and she’s no Jayne Mansfield, but…”

  In June 1958, Helen had invested in a light blue “shift” dress for Schandorf’s dinner party; she felt chic in this new, waistless style that skimmed her slim frame. On arrival, she was relieved to find the dress most appropriate for the elegant little gathering. She was careful that none of the old gaucheries would mar her first impression and barely spoke as David held forth at table. After brandies, he walked her to her Mercedes, parked at the curb. She let it slip, canny girl: Yes, the Benz sure was a beauty. She had paid for the car herself just three weeks before. In cash.

  Knowing David’s history with profligate wives, this was the first cupid’s arrow Helen let fly. She had a hunch that for this man, her independence and solvency might be a potent aphrodisiac. Schandorf’s comprehensive briefing had made Helen confident in her opening gambit. “I’ve never doubted I eventually persuaded him to marry me,” she maintained, “because he had never known a girl who paid all cash for a pair of stockings, let alone a sports car.”

  Game on.

  He did not call for a week and a half. Then he invited her to dinner. They went to Jack’s, a popular joint at the beach. Helen dressed to thrill; she purrrred across the table and deployed the soon-legendary HGB Eye Lock, a fixed gaze so mesmerizing, so laser-like in its “there’s nobody in this r
oom but you” intensity, that any male felt trembly yet grateful to be in its crosshairs. After dinner, Helen summoned the Power; she could not keep her hands off the man, was “all over him like a tent.” She did not go to bed with him but allowed that “I went pretty far.” He liked it. She could tell.

  Another ten days passed. Helen had fretted herself into a tense knot of uncertainty when David finally invited her to dinner at his home. He still lived in what Helen called a crumbling mansion in Pacific Palisades, sixty-six stoplights away from her apartment, just murder with a stick shift. Post-Wayne, the Brown ménage included a bossy British housekeeper, the aforementioned sloppy and spoiled dog, and the increasingly troubled Bruce, who had watched his father chase skirts like a man possessed over the last year and a half. Bruce harbored few positive thoughts about acquiring a second stepmother.

  From the dinner party onward, the blueprint for Becoming HGB was unfurled with steely resolve. Helen had completed Phase One by demonstrating her solvency and self-sufficiency and making clear her intention to keep on with her career, no matter what. Yet she sensed a vexing inertia on David’s part. For the longest time, he would not even give her his home phone number and Helen was forced to contact him through “Mr. Brady,” the maddeningly discreet and inscrutable gatekeeper at David’s answering service. Helen turned it up a notch or three; the sex was frequently and fabulously administered. This Helen believed: hooking a man on your personal brand of sex, then threatening to withdraw it, you can finally get what you want—provided you’ve laid the groundwork well and properly. She exulted in her sexual prowess and boasted about it into her eighties. Never, in all of her books, articles, and correspondence—or to friends—did she describe David Brown as a captivating lover; she always cast herself as the aggressor/temptress. She observed that some people can really cook, and some just make scrambled eggs.

  A few years before she began her relationship with David, Helen considered a change in birth control methods. After a decade and a half, she was weary of condoms and longed to try a diaphragm, which she understood to be far less disruptive, since the spring-loaded latex devices could be inserted some time before intercourse and left in for hours afterward. Diaphragms also freed a man from any bother at all. Plenty of women were using them by then. Yet Helen found that making the switch was still problematic for a single woman. The first doctor she went to asked an odd question: “Are you engaged to be married?”

  “No.”

  His tone was peremptory. “Well, we’re not doling out diaphragms to single women.”

  Helen left his office humiliated and outraged. Eventually, she found a gynecologist with a more liberal outlook who was willing to fit her for the device. She preferred being responsible for her own reproductive safety; it was the smart woman’s solution, and given the man’s comparative freedom with a diaphragm, it seemed ever so gracious. From then on, serious Possibles such as David Brown would be spared the fumbling and the responsibility; the magic could just … happen.

  Despite Helen’s determined and steamy crusade, the courtship lurched along. David was still dating others. Among them was the newest publishing It Girl, Rona Jaffe. In 1958, Jaffe was in the news for her sexually frank and bestselling novel The Best of Everything, about the lives of five women in the secretarial pool of a New York paperback publisher. The Radcliffe graduate had spent four years as a file clerk at Fawcett Books, where she gathered much of her material. The film version of The Best of Everything came out just after the book, in 1959. It was a synergy of production and promotion that David Brown found most attractive. He had watched the whole process very closely. The Best was the pet project of the producer Jerry Wald, his coworker at Fox. Like David, Wald was always scouting literary properties. He had been visiting the publisher Simon & Schuster in New York when he told an editor there, “I’m looking for a modern-day Kitty Foyle. A book about working girls in New York.”

  Kitty Foyle, a novel by Christopher Morley, had brought Ginger Rogers an Oscar for Best Actress in the 1940 RKO film version. She played the title role of Kitty, a Philadelphia department store saleswoman. Wald was looking for someone who might write him a better, updated working-girl property that might be as profitable. Kitty had been a huge hit; it even inspired a line of Kitty Foyle dresses. Wald found his property in a chance encounter. The editor he met with in New York knew Rona Jaffe; she was a close college friend of his assistant. The editor knew that she had been toiling in the paperback mill and had plenty of stories. He told Wald, “Rona’s going to write a hell of a novel someday.” The subject was broached with her, briefly. Jaffe had thought it all preposterous but out of curiosity, she got Kitty Foyle out of the library. “I thought it was dumb,” she wrote later. “I said to myself: He [Morley] doesn’t know anything about women. I know about women. And I work in an office.”

  She let the matter drop until she was in Hollywood on vacation with the same college friend and Wald invited them to lunch. “I wanted to say something interesting to him,” Jaffe recalled, “so I casually remarked, ‘I’m going to write that working-girl book.’ He replied that he was going to produce it.” The novel-to-be was placed at Simon & Schuster in the care of the editor Robert Gottlieb. Jaffe supplemented her own observations by interviewing fifty working women. She heard things that were not often mentioned in polite and mixed company: “Back then, people didn’t talk about … going out with married men. They didn’t talk about abortion. They didn’t talk about sexual harassment, which had no name in those days. But after interviewing these women, I realized that all these issues were part of their lives, too.”

  Gottlieb told his twenty-five-year-old author to “look back in horror and write.” He spoke to Jaffe regularly as she spooled out her story; meanwhile, a few doors down from David Brown at Fox, the producer Wald was cranking up a huge publicity campaign for the book that Jaffe hadn’t yet written. “It was a surreal and nerve-wracking time,” she said.

  Jaffe delivered in five months. She took the purposely ironic title from a New York Times help-wanted ad that began: YOU DESERVE THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. While the book was in production, signs were encouraging; the lathered team of typists assigned to produce the final version of the 775-page manuscript as quickly as possible were captivated by what they were reading; some of them called Jaffe to find out what was in the chapters other women were typing. When the book came out and long lines formed at in-store signings, the young author got requests to inscribe copies to “all the girls on the forty-ninth floor.”

  Jaffe’s ensemble cast of working women looking for love was built on a reliable template that had previously supported Clare Booth Luce’s play and film The Women (1936), Edna Ferber’s theatrical boardinghouse in Stage Door (1937), and beyond. Just before her death in 2005, Jaffe called her first novel “Sex and the City without the vibrators.”

  Wald brought Jaffe to Hollywood to consult several times during the film’s production, and it was then that she met David Brown. His regard for her outlasted their brief period of dating. He had long admired a certain flock of literary rara avis—iconoclastic and uppity women writers. As an editor at Cosmopolitan, he was in thrall to the legendary Adela Rogers St. Johns, whose exploits as “the World’s Greatest Girl Reporter” were as vivid as her prose. She had covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial for Hearst and made “special friends” with both Clark Gable and that busy gentleman Jack Dempsey. Long before Barbara Walters was eliciting on-camera waterworks in celebrity interviews, St. Johns was known as a popular “sob sister” for her revealing Hollywood profiles. In his work with her at Cosmopolitan, David observed her to be “quite a swinger before she got religion.”

  Thus when Rona Jaffe emerged as another sort of sly, brainy observer of What Women Want, David Brown, bachelor literary scout, remained deeply interested on both professional and personal fronts. Given his admitted prejudice against California girls, it didn’t hurt that Jaffe was also a die-hard, Brooklyn-born New Yorker.

  David infuriated
Helen by suggesting that she take a nap one afternoon so that he could watch Jaffe on TV undisturbed. Helen was getting a bit testy about the competition, real and imagined. She complained that her inamorato also had a highly irritating tic; over and over, as certain female virtues occurred to him, he limned a vision of his ideal wife, the one who would finally be right for him—someday. Helen did not recognize this woman in herself: She was a career girl who made at least a hundred thousand dollars but would give it up if asked to. Could she cook! Escoffier quality. She would be very good with people and a fabulous hostess. Beautiful? Of course, along the classic lines of … hmmm … the actress Gene Tierney. Not that he wanted to actually marry again, of course not. But should she appear …

  Every description of this clearly unattainable dream wife made Helen want to scream: What about me? I’m right here!

  Helen had come to terms with the realization that she never really was “wife material.” She didn’t believe for a second that she could perform that role in the traditional manner. In no way could she see herself as one of the inanely content creatures polishing breakfronts and smiling from those ad posters in Don Belding’s office. She had always been “mistress material,” she conceded, but perhaps she might come up with her best version of a wife. She knew she was doomed to failure as a hostess and sparkler on the Hollywood party circuit. Dating David, she had found herself intimidated by such women.

  But David wasn’t looking for a Bel-Air hostess type. He was not a red carpet kind of guy. He preferred cozy evenings with his old friend Irving Berlin and Berlin’s wife, Ellin, to big industry functions. Overall, Helen understood that she was at her best advantage when she and David were alone together. She coddled him—went full-out geisha—and she cooked madly in her well-appointed Man Trap. Whether it was ten-minute broiled lamb chops or a labor-intensive chicken dish laboriously basted in honey and butter, David wolfed it all contentedly. His favorite Scotch and brandy were laid in, his cigars and pipe graciously permitted. In his home, Helen tried to make friends with Bruce, who was upsetting his father deeply with school discipline issues. Helen coaxed him to the dinner table and tried to engage him in conversation. He seemed uninterested in knowing her, but he did like her car.