Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  He made liberal use of the decanter. Over dinner he was charming, rosy with bonhomie and bourbon. Facing his three varyingly depressive hosts, Sandburg, a man of Whitmanesque enthusiasms, wondered aloud: How is it, when one awakes to the sight of tender green leaves outside a window and the lilt of birdsong—well, how can one not be happy? The man must be a kook, albeit an adorable one, Helen figured. At evening’s end, Sandburg departed toting a good portion of their classical music records on loan to play in his hotel suite. Helen wondered if the lofty sounds might be inspiration for scripting the syntax of Jesus—in this case, the Swedish actor Max von Sydow. Displaying the insecurity and caprice typical of the industry, the studio used some of Sandburg’s work, but without screen credit. The film, which portrayed Jesus as the ultimate misunderstood outsider, was a colossal failure.

  * * *

  In the Brown home, another wave of intrusions had begun that could not be blamed on Nadine. There were armies in the night, bivouacked in Bruce’s quarters. Helen did not dare snoop in her stepson’s rooms, but there was always a trail of alien belongings scattered here and there, the detritus of more “friends,” many of whom slipped into the house in the wee hours. She found a hypodermic needle in a bathroom; Bruce claimed that it belonged to an unnamed acquaintance. Helen frequently came home from work to find her housekeeper up in arms. Lovell’s kitchen was under constant siege at lunchtime by a parade of unfamiliar young men who seemed unusually voracious, even for teens. Some were older and hairier than typical high school kids; David thought they were “beats,” a hairy counterculture tribe getting bemused coverage in the Los Angeles papers and Life magazine for their libertarian views and unabashed drug use.

  The cook tried to keep up with their crazy thirst—what were they doing in there? Lovell was ordering twelve quarts of milk every other day, an extravagance that made Helen wild. Mounds of sandwich makings disappeared in a trice; ziggurats of dirty dishes rose and teetered in the sink. To Helen, her husband appeared grief-stricken, baffled at the transformation of his bright, loving boy. The couple consulted a few child psychiatrists for advice. Certainly, Helen’s arrival was part of the issue, all the experts concurred. But Bruce was never around to take or return his mother’s calls, either. Tibby wrote him letters that Helen believed went unanswered. Helen and Duncan the dog did their best to console David. Then in June 1960, the collie developed sudden intestinal troubles and died. David sobbed for hours and mourned for days. On July 12, he called Helen at her office, in tears again. “We’ve lost Buddy.”

  His friend and boss Buddy Adler had died of lung cancer at fifty-one. David was an honorary pallbearer; the interment at the storied Forest Lawn cemetery was excruciating but for the grin-inducing engraving on Adler’s tombstone: “From Here to Eternity.” Genuinely mourning his friend, David was stunned and disgusted by the jockeying by other studio execs to get into the “right” limos in the funeral procession. Industry speculation on Adler’s replacement as head of production at Fox was rampant before the first spadeful of dirt hit the coffin lid. Some of the handicappers favored David Brown for the job; the trades called him a dark horse for the slot. Congratulatory phone calls had begun, albeit premature. The choice rested with the studio head, Spyros Skouras, a Greek shipping magnate who had made his second fortune in owning movie theater chains, and had produced classics for Fox, among them The Hustler, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, and Helen’s beloved The King and I. Skouras was immensely rich, and, during his tenure as president, things had been on the upswing for David’s career. The two had always talked frankly.

  On the day after Skouras’s decision, David returned home deflated and depressed; he had been passed over for a barely literate, older, and sickly Brit. At a meeting, David challenged Skouras about his choice; the Greek turned on him, red-faced and furious. Shortly afterward, David was relegated to the role of producer with four minor projects, and forced to endure the humiliation of a thousand slights, studio style. Overnight, his calls and memos were ignored. Helen watched in horror as he was stripped of all those glorious perks: The expense accounts! The parking spot! The car! He was only thankful he still had a job.

  Helen grieved with him. Fuck Hollywood! Look what it did to her darling. David was plunged into the first depression she had seen, having lost his plummy perch as literary arbiter. The dog was dead, the stepson likely using drugs and disliking her intensely. Her own career was drifting badly, with little to engage her. She was finding it harder and harder to shift through her new commute of fifty-nine signal lights and descend to her days at Kenyon & Eckhardt. The work that had once distinguished her was still being spindled and mutilated. One humdrum day, Helen was summoned to the West Coast manager’s office from her moldy perch in the old dental lab. She nearly doubled over from the shock when he made an abrupt pronouncement: her salary was to be cut by a third, effective immediately. As soon as she was able to speak, her reaction was rather girlie; she couldn’t help it: Didn’t they like her anymore?

  Oh, they liked her just fine. But they had decided—never mind those months of mad wooing and Max Factor’s imperative to “get Gurley” at all costs—that Mrs. Brown just made too much money. It didn’t sit well with management. If she didn’t want to work for less pay, and that was understandable, they’d allow her to leave.

  Allow her? Was that what this was about—they wanted her out?

  Oh heavens no. They were happy with her and her work was just fine. She just made too darn much money. The West Coast office had to cut expenses. And, “We know your husband can support you and all that.” Blurting that she would think it over, she hustled out of the man’s office, drove home, and laid her burden down. David was as stunned as she was, and furious. They didn’t need the money. He told her that she shouldn’t even show up there the following day or ever again. But Helen needed to work; she simply had to. It was the way she defined herself and her place in the world. There weren’t any comparable slots for women anywhere else in town; she was at the top of the heap and out on a ledge. Helen went back, took the cut, and worked as hard as she ever did. She could never dog it. What if they fired her?

  To help herself bear the mad injustice of it all, she stole. She started in the mailroom, filching three- and four-cent stamps and, occasionally, some airmail stamps. It proved a lukewarm teaspoonful of revenge, and she quit the mailroom capers after filching about four bucks’ worth of postage. Helen then upped her larceny to swiping steno notebooks, three hundred file folders, a quart of typewriter cleaner, and reams of onionskin paper and carbons. She would find a use for that flimsy pink stock soon, banging away on a used typewriter she’d bought from FC&B. David had been after her to write something besides ad copy. The man passed book ideas around to other women like chocolates. Maybe he had one for her.

  15

  For All the Single Ladies …

  In those days, the only people who made love were these: in the colleges, stringy-haired, lonely daughters of left-wing urban parents; in the high schools, pretty girls who got pregnant and got married; in the adult world, women who, in typing, teaching, theater, publishing, art, were stymied in their jobs.

  —Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

  I guess it was a pippy-poo little book and yet it had great sincerity to it.

  —HGB on Sex and the Single Girl

  FIVE MONTHS INTO THE MARRIAGE, while Helen was in Arkansas for a visit with Cleo, David was searching for something in a storage room at home and came upon a sheaf of Helen’s old letters and carbons; when she typed personal letters, she often kept a copy. Some of the letters in the packet were on Foote, Cone & Belding stationery. They were between Helen and a certain Chicagoan, Bill Peters, who worked at J. Walter Thompson, a large public relations firm. They were both in the business of deft and gentle coercion. It was apparent they had met on an airplane in May 1949 and struck up a hot little correspondence. David settled in with the packet of letters and read on.

  The single secretary jouncing a
long on the early-morning bus to FC&B came to life for him, as did her cultural leanings at twenty-seven; it seemed that Helen was a keen S. J. Perelman fan but she was not especially enjoying Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. She swooned over her LP recording of South Pacific, played it until it was worn to “a handful of dust.” Since Peters—eager boy!—also wrote to Helen during her visits to Osage, her return letters from there helped David picture his wife as she might have been that very moment. Helen’s home place was the dark side of the moon to him. He had asked her—what the heck did she do in Arkansas? Now he knew: she slipped back in time, custom, and memory, floated in cool, lazy creeks as she pondered her home state’s “unprogressiveness,” ate fried chicken, and hand-pumped Cleo’s wheezy Hammond organ long enough to play the score of Kiss Me, Kate and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Poorly.

  As for Peters: he sketched himself as a restless husband and father of two, trapped, at twenty-eight, in a corporate job unworthy of his intellect. He was reading Dreiser and The Saturday Review of Literature (he was a would-be novelist) yet building the little postwar dream house in a Chicago suburb. The foundation concrete was poured, the sewer hookup done, and through it all, he claimed to dream of that free bird, Miss Gurley. The billets-doux comprise a midcentury minuet of coquetry and longing. There is no overt sexual talk from Helen. Yet soon Peters is mad for her, confessing the aphrodisiac effect of her tart, witty dispatches. She excites him. The ardor fizzled on a brief West Coast meeting. In her letters, Helen had hinted gently, then sternly (“you’re married”) that it wasn’t meant to be. Read between their lines and it’s evident that the chemistry is all wrong; Helen’s ardent correspondent is just too darn pleased with his sewer hookup in Squaresville, a “patio” type after all.

  David refolded the letters and returned them to their place. He was indifferent to the unfulfilled romance; he never cared to hear about his wife’s past dalliances, but he was struck by her art of persuasion. Helen had utterly bewitched an intelligent stranger with words. Though Mr. and Mrs. Brown had clashed in a couple of rousing arguments on advertising—David was loudly contemptuous of its venal deceptions—he realized for the first time that Helen could actually write. It wasn’t art, but she could engage. The voice was welcoming, conversational, mercilessly self-deprecating, and often funny as hell. When she returned from her trip to Osage, he told her, “You have a delightful writing style. I’d like to think of something for you to write.”

  No one had complimented Helen’s prose in a long time. The almost total dismissal of her copywriting stung. She complained that her assignments were growing scarcer. Her workdays at K&E had become so stultifying that she was taking afternoon naps on a small strip of red carpet she rolled out on the floor. She asked David: Did he have a little book idea for her that she could peck at on those tedious afternoons?

  If only he’d known she was really interested in trying to write a book. He had a corker, one that would have suited her perfectly. It was a guidebook of sorts for single women, something along the lines of “how to have a successful affair.” He had listed the key elements in a snare-the-guy campaign: the right clothes, food, and sex tips, of course. There was a slight problem, though; he had just given the idea and outline to someone else.

  “My God, that’s my book, that’s my book!” She insisted that David get the idea back. He did, quickly. Helen rolled a page of that purloined K&E onionskin into her typewriter carriage and set right to it. Almost immediately, she hit a wall. Except for the constant churn of letters to family and friends, her prose had chiefly been composed in terse copy blocks and thirty-second TV spots. For days, then weeks, she sat there stumped, rattling off what she called “dibs and dabs” and trashing every attempt.

  David was gentle but unsparing in his critique. First the tone was too self-conscious, then too pretentious. After each attempt he urged her, “Sit down and try again.” She did. Again and again. It was not pleasurable. Whatever was she doing? But what else was there? Her salary had been slashed, her copy mangled, and her professional self-esteem was on life support. She didn’t imagine any sane woman would stick with the vexing little project. “They would have said, ‘To hell with it! To hell with it! To hell with it!’”

  Such was the bumpy start of a collaboration that would eventually seem as natural as breathing. Helen had begun showing David her ad copy for Max Factor while they were still dating. But the Browns’ working relationship as pop/cult co-conspirators was never as male-dominant or one-sided as the standard Svengali and protégé model. Helen was no pliant ingénue. Instead, the two would click with the unerring force of a pair of magnets drawn to each other’s opposite poles: literary versus instinctive, promoter versus executor, canny versus candid. The New Yorker and the Californian were right and left of coast, brain, and loyalties.

  Sometimes they would disagree, loudly. Helen came to realize that she and her husband had different views of what her book should be. His notion was sassy and cutie-pie; Helen found it “a bit on the gamey side.” It came down to this: David wanted to titillate and amuse. Helen wanted to help. She surely could have used the counsel of a wise veteran while navigating the bachelorette shoals. She reset her course: “I got into something more personal and poignant.” Her focus sharpened when she looked at a sheaf of notes she had been jotting down, some of them written while she was under the hair dryer; she abhorred “dead” time—why waste even a moment? She realized that she had been drawn to a subject no one was talking about in a meaningful way: women without men. She was still fuming over the recent media and cocktail party debates set off by an article of that title in the July 5, 1960, issue of Look magazine.

  “Women Without Men,” by Eleanor Harris, did get people buzzing. But Helen found the chatter wrongheaded and maddening. She was especially appalled by the picture Harris painted of a parched and barren single life; she seemed to believe there was little a woman could do to escape the default miseries of not having a husband. Harris’s tone, alternately pitying and scolding, was downright traitorous to her sex. The more Helen read of it, the angrier she got.

  By the time Harris’s article appeared, hundreds of thousands of the 21.3 million single women in America had moved to cities in hopes of finding better lives for themselves. Harris contended that though they left home in search of husbands, they found “only work,” a dismissal that raised Helen’s professional hackles. And a lack of male attentions was hardly Helen’s experience in Los Angeles, or that of the New York working girls interviewed by Rona Jaffe. Harris was still passing judgment on Girls Who Did: “Many unattached women of ‘nice’ background are as much drawn to sexual relations with men as married women or perhaps more so; relentlessly, they go about most of their lives trying to find sexual fulfillment.” But since most of these randy huntresses of “nice” pedigree didn’t do it without a ring—at least in Harris’s view—this proved problematic. Harris reported that a third of the unmarried women in America were somehow “getting along” without steady male companionship.

  Helen fumed. Getting along? Whose side was this journalist on? With feminism in woeful postwar eclipse, with many wartime working women having ceded their jobs to returning military men, Harris’s ideal for women—a secure, married life as wife, mother, and helpmate—was maddeningly retro. It amounted to de facto surrender.

  It got worse. In concluding her dispatch from the dispiriting, camphor- and cabbage-scented boardinghouses and bedsits of spinsterdom, Harris appended a couple of paragraphs devoted to an eccentric coven of single women actually enjoying a “man-free life.” She concluded with an admonishment to their desperate sisters: “It would do no harm if our frantic hordes of unwed women would think over those [man-free women’s] statements. Perhaps several million of them would stop their headlong hunt and finally settle down for a well-earned rest.”

  Harris stopped just short of suggesting kitten adoption and a hot water bottle between the sheets.

  Helen’s typed volleys came quick
ly, and con brio: “There is a tidal wave of misinformation these days about how many more marriageable women there are than men (that part is true enough) and how tough is the plight of the single woman—spinster, widow, divorcee.”

  Then she delivered a backhanded swat to the annoying machinations of mothers, pushy aunts, and smug marrieds: “I think a single woman’s biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!” Helen knew that it was hardly an either/or situation. Why didn’t people understand that being single didn’t have to be “man-free”? That an unmarried woman could want something better than merely “getting by”?

  Helen did think of herself as a nice girl, always; she believed just as strongly that unmarried sex was “a wonderful, delicious, exquisite thing.” Considering Harris’s caricature of “frantic hordes,” knowing so well the disappointments and dreams of that misunderstood population, Helen said, “I just felt something in my gut.”

  She’d go ahead and do it—make a reasoned case for the contrarian view. She refused to see singledom as merely a sentence to be served. The unmarried needn’t be default ascetics. Instead, she wrote, “The single years are very precious years because that’s when you have the time and personal freedom for adventure.” She plumped up her point with a quote from Tennessee Williams’s play Camino Real: “Make voyages. Attempt them. That’s all there is.”

  How much better when those daring transits involve men, good sex, great female friends, fulfilling jobs, travel. What a dull time it would have been for Helen without her frisky pair of generals, the luminous transits over the Mojave Desert with her dauntless pilot, Freddy, her divine spin through the glories of Rome with her Vespa boy, the sizzling afternoons with a clutch of girlfriends held rapt by the blood, dust, and drama of Mexican bullfights. If anything, she berated herself for being too boring with those frugal weekend projects, making curtains—even pajamas. Gawd, who makes pajamas? Looking back, she said, “It’s one of the regrets of my life that I didn’t screw all that and learn French.”