Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Eyes rolled in group therapy once more as the gabby Miss Gurley unburdened herself about the difficulties of reeling in her intended. After all, she and David had been dating for six months, sleeping together though not living together. Helen insisted that she had “forsaken all others.” Sort of.

  She indulged in just a soupçon of what she called “latent revenge sex” with an heir to one of the world’s most fabled fortunes. For months, she had been doing a slow simmer at being the one forced to propose, and with no definitive results. Her disappointment and resentment boiled over after a silly little incident. During an evening at David’s home, she had watched, slack-jawed, as his housekeeper, Mrs. Neale—a portly know-it-all sketched with Dickensian savagery in Helen’s descriptions—cooed over fabric swatches that “we” might redecorate the house with. Helen was mildly amused to know that Mrs. Neale had been married three times and that one of her husbands had expired in bed on their wedding night. But this possessive and presumptuous majordomo was a constant irritation, especially with her slavering devotion to the black-and-white collie Duncan, whom she called “Baby” (she being “Mother”). With exaggerated politesse, Mrs. Neale also demonstrated a patent dislike for this pushy interloper with the unladylike sports car.

  Something snapped in Helen when Mother held up a salmon-colored swatch of brocade fabric she had in mind for some sofas and declared that Baby liked it best; he had told her so. As soon as Mrs. Neale, rigged out in her standard white uniform, bobby socks, and oxfords, tacked triumphantly back into her kitchen, Helen erupted: Shouldn’t she be helping fix the place? Wasn’t she going to be living there someday? He’d love her help, David countered. But no, he was not ready to marry. Helen tore home and dialed the Beldings to invite herself to another ranch getaway.

  The Beldings were used to her sudden romantic tempests and said yes, of course. So great was Helen’s agitation that she nearly totaled the Mercedes and herself on the drive south. Chastened and shaking, Helen pulled through the familiar gates of Pauma Vista. She settled in with some unusual reading that she had brought along, books on Arabian oilfields and petroleum dynasties. She was so angry with David that she had said yes to a date with a Getty scion. Jean Ronald Getty, known as Ron, was the uncontested black sheep of that roiling billionaire clan. Ages before she had begun seeing David, Helen had begged friends who knew him to introduce her to this potential Main Chance. Finally, he was to be in town and at liberty. Helen agreed to go on the blind date right after the weekend at the ranch.

  The petroleum prince was about her age and unattached. Getty was handsome enough but not at all charming; he seemed animated by an alarmingly entitled sort of lust. After lunch with the couple who introduced them, he fairly tore Helen’s clothes off on their first date. She resented “being peeled like a banana.” She was not even sure how he landed in her bed; she fled outside the apartment to rebutton herself between rounds of wrestling the boor. No. Just … No! This Getty was profoundly “full of shit,” Helen declared, and closed the door on him, with dispatch.

  There was another reconciliation with David; mini-breakups were getting to be a habit. Helen took the next bold step: proximity, at huge sacrifice. Her name had finally come up for an apartment in the sought-after Park La Brea apartment complex; Helen had been on the list for three years, but turned down the prized eighty-nine-dollar two-bedroom, furnished-and-with-a-patio apartment when it was offered. Instead, she moved to a white modern cube in Brentwood, just fifteen minutes from David’s home. She felt sure that if she stayed downtown, an hour’s drive from her intended, she would lose him.

  As it was, every now and again David “misplaced” her, seemingly forgetting that they were an item, or that they even had a date. One night she was driving home after group therapy, waiting at a light on Santa Monica Boulevard, when her worst nightmare whooshed by: it was David’s big white Chrysler 300, coming from Linden Drive. There was a blonde “smashed up against him” in the front seat and she was all over him.

  Helen did not take his calls for the next day and night. When she finally did pick up the phone, she used all her strength not to shriek and instead negotiated a limpid rapprochement. (David insisted the blonde was his business manager.) Helen told herself that he was really an okay guy, “just frisking around.” She was still determined to marry him and she had to be honest with herself. She was not deeply, romantically in love, either; she was hardly as obsessed as she had been with DJ. Yet she was taken with David, even told herself that she adored him. At thirty-seven, it was time. Helen held on.

  Then she started to push again. The ring, please.

  One dreadful night he pushed back. They had been to the theater. Afterward, David seemed uncharacteristically distracted and ruffled. He threw up his hands. What was he going to do? He just couldn’t, absolutely could not marry again. Helen told him—calmly this time—that she understood, but that it was over. He was not to call her again. She went home and cried. And cried. The following morning at 8:00 a.m., she laced up her sneakers and lit out for her fortress of solitude, Will Rogers State Park. Up, up, and around she marched, past the beloved humorist’s old polo fields, so teary and bereft as to be almost oblivious to the wildflowers along the winding paths, the soothing canopy of eucalyptus trees, the dusty wake of equestrian trail riders, the glories of the vista at Inspiration Point. By the time Helen trudged back to the parking lot she was fairly wrung out. There stood David beside his big Chrysler. He knew exactly where to find his distraught health nut.

  “Come on home,” he said, “we’ll work it out.”

  During that summer of 1959, their marriage plans were on and off at least five times by Helen’s reckoning. Cleo, out for a visit, dared ask the question aloud: “Helen do you think maybe David really doesn’t want to get married?”

  He finally agreed to set a date: September 25, 1959. Even if he hadn’t forbidden her to tell anyone, Helen would have stayed mum. She was dying to trumpet the news, but dared not. “I didn’t want to get the train that far and have it derail with some extravaganza. What if he got cold feet and didn’t show up? No, we did it David’s way, just a judge and his secretary as witness.”

  As a stealth bride, she had indulged herself in one splurge. Denied the customary trappings—invitations in crisp calligraphy, bridesmaids, reception, and even a stupid old wedding shower—Helen ordered her wedding dress from Jack Hanson, the former Los Angeles Angels shortstop turned women’s clothes designer who declared himself a “beauty freak” and tooled the Hollywood hills in a 1934 Rolls-Royce. Hanson could afford it. Sold under the Jax label, his well-cut slacks sheathed the hips of Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Hanson had become such a habit to certain slinky, shiny ones, the deeply devoted “Jax Pack,” that Miss Nancy Sinatra, Jr., was heard to declare, “The most important men in America are my father, Hugh Hefner and Jack Hanson.”

  Helen had long been a Jax fanatic. She went to work countless times in a sturdy but stylish plaid Jax dress and invested the breathtaking sum of eighty dollars in a slinky black frock that she wore to death. (How fabulous when she found that David adored slinky black!) For the wedding, Hanson came up with a surprisingly demure affair with a high neck and long sleeves, accessorized by a chic, barely there hat and a small bouquet of orchids. This nuptial rig spoke quietly but firmly: “Dearly beloved, I mean business.”

  It was a small group that assembled at Beverly Hills City Hall on the afternoon of September 25, 1959: the happy couple; Ruth Schandorf; David’s secretary, Pamela Hedley, as witness; and, stuffed into a suit far too small for him, the glum and reticent Bruce Brown. David had quietly left work early that day, telling his boss, Buddy Adler, “I’m taking off for a couple of hours, see you Monday.”

  Charlotte Kelly joined the wedding party for a short celebration afterward. David had reserved the Swan Suite at the Hotel Bel-Air for the weekend. On their wedding night, they were taken to dinner by Ernest Lehman and his wife, Jackie; the couple h
ad been “at or near” all of David’s weddings. They convened at Perino’s, a cherished grotto-to-the-stars on Wilshire, where Bette Davis kept a booth and Sinatra spilled martinis into the Steinway. The foursome went on to the Largo strip club on Sunset to catch the spectacular and athletic Candy Barr. Helen judged her “a damn fine stripper.”

  After their weekend at the Bel-Air, the bride completed her transition to the ocean-side aerie as Helen Gurley Brown. She loaded the Mercedes herself with some essentials. The things she carried: a pair of six-pound dumbbells; an exercise slant board; a prodigious supply of soy lecithin, powdered calcium, and yeast-liver concentrate for those Serenity Cocktails; an electric contraption said to stave off wrinkles; “and enough high-powered vitamins to generate life in a statue.”

  Congratulatory wires to the happy couple had greeted their return to 515 Radcliffe Avenue. One of them was from the housekeeper and the collie. It read primly, “Much happiness for the future.” It was signed “Baby Duncan and Mother.”

  14

  Whiskey Sours with Carl Sandburg

  Unlike Madame Bovary you don’t chase the glittering life, you lay a trap for it.

  —HGB, Sex and the Single Girl

  HELEN SURVEYED HER NEW DOMAIN, having quickly swept it clean of the hot blond accountant and the disapproving Mrs. Neale. The ocean sunsets were a thrill, if one gazed at their splendor above the neglected landscaping. The house, a rambling stucco affair built in 1928, was in disrepair but it had good bones. Furniture and rugs were worn and tatty. There were a couple of rooms that no one entered. A small study referred to as “Wayne’s writing room” had been sealed off. Helen likened it to the grieving Maxim de Winter’s preservation of his lost Rebecca’s ghostly rooms at Manderley. The library was David’s pride; he told Helen that it held more than two thousand books. But David had ceded his capacious hexagonal den with its fireplace, ocean view, and separate bath and entrance to Bruce.

  One afternoon when Helen was home alone, putting things to rights, a strange young woman turned up at the front door looking for David. She was vacuum-packed into a pair of black toreador pants and a purple T-shirt and her hair was a greasy, unkempt catfight of blond and black. She looked to be in her late twenties and seemed rather “off” to Helen, who did not let the stranger inside when she asked to come in.

  Was she the new Mrs. Brown?

  As Helen answered, the woman peered past her at the white couches that had come from her apartment.

  Redecorating? The way she asked implied a familiarity with the home. Uneasily but politely, Helen showed her the gate. That evening, on hearing of the visit, David seemed upset. The interloper must have been Nadine, his longtime stalker. Helen was dumbfounded; though the bedevilment had been going on for nearly two years, David had never mentioned it, possibly to avoid scaring her. He had given the aspiring actress—weren’t they all?—a ride home from a party once. He felt that there was something odd about her right away; she had so unnerved him that he drove her straight to her run-down little boardinghouse, no hanky-panky, no thanks.

  Nadine began turning up at the house; David would send her away in a cab. He swore that there was never any relationship, that he had been to the Beverly Hills police chief and his own lawyer to try to deal with Nadine’s escalated harassment, which often took the form of twenty to forty calls a day to his office and answering service. The police thought her a persistent but mild sort of stalker, assuring Mr. Brown that they’d seen scarier huntresses. For Helen, it was an uncomfortably close look into what she called Hollywoodlandia, the dark and fevered twilight zone populated by bitter hearts. There were more frightening incidents. Helen came home from work to find her white couches and coffee table splattered and still dripping with rivers of black ink. Lovell Addison, the Browns’ new cook/housekeeper, was gibbering with fright at the mess and intrusion; she had seen no one, heard nothing. Bruce was questioned and genuinely seemed surprised at the break-in.

  Nadine. How the hell had she gotten in?

  So began a domestic life that found Helen feeling alternately triumphant and storm tossed. David seemed inured to the Nadine disruptions, but the changes in Bruce had reduced his father to a hand-wringing insomniac who stared at the ceiling many nights. He often sat quietly with the collie, puzzled and despondent over what he saw as a new recalcitrance in his son. He didn’t know what to do, having grown up without fathering himself. Bruce was no longer wearing the brown regimental uniform of the military academy that Helen had first seen him in, since the headmaster of the Harvard School for Boys had requested he not return after the term’s end. David had subsequently enrolled him in the Rexford School.

  Despite the difficulties at home, the Browns settled into a satisfying social life with David’s studio friends, the Lehmans, and some of Helen’s girlfriends, especially Charlotte Kelly. She was a frequent visitor to the Brown aerie, sharing conquests and confidences from her very active single life. Helen still adored the dish. Yvonne Rich, then on her second marriage, visited the Browns at home and had them to dinner. “Eating was an interesting subject with Helen,” Rich said. “When she would come to dinner at my house in Alameda, you always had to sit her in a certain place where she could see herself in a mirror. Helen also liked to eat with her fingers. If she had a salad she’d pick up each little piece of lettuce and put it in her mouth.”

  At home, with the help of her “bride’s cookbook,” she turned out some extravaganzas for David and Bruce: lamb glazed with lime marinade, Chantilly potatoes, avocado stuffed with orange ice. David wolfed it all down with gusto, earning the lifelong nickname “Basker” from his beloved. It was a reference to the Sherlock Holmes tale The Hound of the Baskervilles. Helen labored long but ate very little, weighing and measuring herself constantly. She hit the floor each morning with her version of the Royal Canadian Mountie calisthenics and a few saucy stretches from the fitness pioneer Bonnie Prudden’s “Sexercise” regime. Helen had a dread of David’s “firing” her as a wife. The man was surrounded by starlets and Jax Pack sylphs. At dinner parties, Helen was beginning to develop the anorectic’s seething resentment of a fine meal laid out for her enjoyment. “A plague on hostesses and their self-centered little souls,” she crabbed in a diatribe that was only partly facetious. “They never understand we don’t eat their exquisite food not because we have no taste or taste buds or are trying to make them miserable (they’ve cooked, they’ve slaved) but because we are trying—desperately—not to gain weight.”

  She was relieved to have her debut evening as Hollywood hostess take place not at home, and with absolutely no food involved. Best yet, it was glamorous; David was holding a private screening of a new film at the studio and suggested she invite some of her work colleagues as well. It was the first mix of their work worlds; Helen asked K&E’s West Coast creative director and his wife, and several friends from her days at Foote, Cone & Belding. After the movie there was a gathering at the home of a wealthy Max Factor executive to toast the newlyweds.

  Over the reassuring pop of Dom Pérignon corks, Helen looked around the room and told herself: You’re a wife! Not a guttersnipe with her nose against the window—no more! A wife!

  The couple rode home happy with each other and with the way the evening went. As they walked through the front door into the two-story entryway, shards of glass glistened all over the floor. Two large stained glass windows were broken. Smashed eggs slid down the walls and squelched underfoot. Goddamn it, what now?

  Bruce was found in his room studying, insisting he’d been there all night. Nope, heard nothing.

  Helen was indeed a wife, for better and for worse.

  * * *

  It was a busy time for David. By the beginning of 1960, some of his story acquisitions were panning out well and in production. He had put Ernest Lehman to work adapting John O’Hara’s novel From the Terrace, and the studio had cast the golden newlyweds Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the leading roles. With tympanic pomp, Fox had announced production o
f its biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told, to be directed by George Stevens. David flew to Chicago with Stevens to call on the nation’s beloved poet, historian, and three-time Pulitzer winner Carl Sandburg, in hopes of cajoling him into writing some of Christ’s dialogue for the film.

  Putting words into the mouth of the Son of God was a dicey business, far too sensitive to trust to some West Hollywood wiseacre. Stevens felt that only Sandburg could write dialogue “as majestic as that contained in the King James version of the New Testament.” The two movie men had to rent a Chicago theater so that Sandburg could watch some of Stevens’s films, among them Giant, Shane, and I Remember Mama. Sandburg agreed to help. Stevens, who would spend five agonizing years on the film, wept on hearing the good news; he and David repaired to a few Chicago bars and got happily drunk.

  When the time came to run the Lord’s lines, the studio flew the octogenarian poet west and put him up at the Hotel Bel-Air. David invited him to a home-cooked dinner. Bruce was excited and promised to be home for supper. Helen panicked at the thought of a literary lion at her table. She had heard that Sandburg was fond of whiskey sours. She called a bartender at the Brown Derby, who shared a fail-safe formula of sugar, crushed ice, half a lemon, and bourbon—exactly one ounce of the brown stuff.

  Helen had become a near-teetotaler by then; she felt she should be in control at all times—and besides, the empty calories! She brewed a batch of sours with exactly an ounce of spirits per serving and found it delicious. David fetched Sandburg from his hotel and settled him in to enjoy the Pacific sunset. Helen was relieved when the “cutie pie” poet gallantly commended her on the mixology. Of course it would be ever so nice if he might keep the bourbon by his side to freshen up the delicious basic mix from time to time.