Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  * * *

  As David Brown settled into his new role as producer and Helen juggled her double shift between the book and her job, there were more crises to grapple with at home. Toward the middle of what should have been his senior year of high school, Bruce Brown was asked not to return to Rexford after the Christmas break. He was said to be disruptive, combative, and disrespectful to faculty and fellow students. Against David’s will, Bruce was determined to take night courses and get a day job. It turned out he did neither, and kept to the company of his hairy, freeloading posse. David considered cutting off his allowance and throwing him out of the house, but couldn’t bear to take such an extreme step. Just how Bruce obtained his high school diploma or its equivalency remains a mystery, but by the late spring of 1961, the news was joyfully received on Radcliffe Avenue: Bruce was college bound. He was headed three thousand miles away, to New York University in downtown Manhattan, in the heart of David’s beloved Greenwich Village. The achievement seemed no less remarkable than the astronaut Alan B. Shepard’s first suborbital space flight that May. The three Browns got by under the same roof as best they could until the fall, when Bruce enrolled as a freshman at NYU. A welcome serenity bathed Lovell’s kitchen and the Brown marriage; it was Tibby LeGacy Brown’s turn to oversee her son in the big city as best she could.

  * * *

  David took Helen’s proposal—two chapters and a detailed outline—and set to selling it, working his publishing connections on both coasts. Both he and Helen talked it up at a party in Los Angeles with his friend Oscar Dystel, then president of the paperback publisher Bantam Books, who seemed interested. Dystel, a graduate of both Harvard Business School and the promotional department of Esquire magazine, is credited with saving and revitalizing Bantam when the entire paperback industry had all but imploded.

  To the Browns, approaching a paperback publisher was simply a matter of “take my book, please.” Said Helen, “David and I both felt that whoever published my manuscript would make us very grateful, so it really didn’t occur to us to go to a hardcover publisher first.” Dystel was visiting the West Coast when the couple approached him about Helen’s book-to-be; he enlisted his colleague Marc Jaffe to help pitch the proposal at Bantam in New York. After a couple of months they gave the Browns the bad news. These single women of Helen’s were not miserable enough; they couldn’t sell happy talk about a woman alone. Who’d believe it? If Helen wanted to recast it on a less triumphant note, they would take another look. Perhaps she could tone it down, so that her single girls struggled and suffered more. Dystel and Jaffe simply didn’t know what to do with all of these “racy” girls having fun in bed.

  Such a rewrite was as joyless as tap-dancing in galoshes, but Helen had a go at it and submitted a new, subdued draft and outline. A short while later, Dystel met the Browns for dinner at the Hotel Bel-Air. He lowered the boom during the entree. They just couldn’t use it, period. Helen fought back tears. She summoned everything she had to act like a proper wife and do nothing untoward at a business dinner. She told herself over and over—don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. At home, she sobbed all night. The following morning, a perturbed and sleep-deprived David called Dystel. Wasn’t there something they could do with it? She’d worked so hard … Dystel had one idea. “There’s this crazy guy in New York … he does really crazy things.”

  Bernard “Berney” Geis was a canny, puckish publishing type, the son of a Chicago cigar maker. He had worked in the industry for twenty-five years, rising as high as editor in chief of Grosset & Dunlap, before he took his more radical, often unseemly notions of how to publish and started his own company in 1959. The cramped East Fifty-Sixth Street headquarters of Bernard Geis Associates featured a firehouse pole between its two floors. Women employees in skirts were urged to deliver manuscripts and mail by sliding down the pole. Groucho Marx was a Geis investor, author, office pet, and provocateur. One day, Groucho gave cigars to all the women in the office and induced them to light up; the outré spectacle of all those maidens sucking on fat stogies had long been a fantasy of his.

  Geis maintained a small list and roster of writers that made a big noise in middle America, including the TV host Art Linkletter, Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby), and the former president Harry S. Truman. Groucho’s first mock-memoir, Groucho and Me, was a solid bestseller. Linkletter’s first book for Geis, a tie-in to his Kids Say the Darndest Things program, took off like a Roman candle after he held it up on TV. From that moment on, Geis’s shining path was the Tao of the Tie-In.

  The upstart Geis business model was pinioned, sliced, and diced in the writer Dick Schaap’s article “How to Succeed in Publishing Without Really Publishing,” in The New York Times Book Review. Schaap outlined the operating system: Geis published a list of just ten or twelve books a year, with huge print orders, massive promotional efforts, and distribution by other publishers to further cut the overhead. Most of Geis’s books were distributed through a contract he had negotiated with Random House. This gave his staff the opportunity to talk their product up at the giant publisher’s sales conferences. The Times’ disdain for this literary Barnum was displayed in the cartoon accompanying Schaap’s piece: A clownishly costumed author is shot skyward by a circus cannon with nearly naked dancing girls prancing atop its barrel emblazoned “Bernard Geis Associates.” A brass band heralds the send-off.

  Geis’s track record, albeit short, was nonpareil. In its eleven-year existence, Bernard Geis Associates landed a quarter of its books, seventeen of them, on the New York Times bestseller lists. Geis cared less—far less—for a hardcover original than for its subsidiary rights (movie deals, paperback, magazine excerpts) and related merchandising. The actual hardcover book was almost incidental, since Geis had his eye on the lucrative back end. His brash publishing apostasy—sub rights über alles—had its risks, but when it all lined up, the payoff was huge. Concluded Schaap: “He is a home-run swinger in a league of bunters.”

  A week and a half after David shipped the proposal, the Browns had an offer from Geis to publish the book, which David had titled Sex for the Single Girl. Helen didn’t like it but acquiesced. “It sounded just like another Kinsey Report to me,” she said. But Geis wanted it! A check for a six-thousand-dollar advance was enclosed with his letter. The deal was structured with modest sales in mind; Helen’s earnings would be capped at fifteen thousand dollars a year. The payouts would continue regularly over the years at that set fee until all royalties had been paid. Stringing out earnings is great for tax reporting, Geis told all his authors. It also let him hang on to royalty payments longer to keep necessary cash on hand. Though the Browns eventually hired a literary agent, Lucy Kroll, David negotiated all deals. Through him, Helen made her wishes known, down to the last sub-clause, and executed the documents.

  Once the contract was signed, Helen stowed the intrusive phone in the refrigerator and went back to writing in a state she described as “euphoric.” Finishing the manuscript took a year; despite David’s entreaties to hang up the damnable ad game, she insisted on keeping the job at K&E. David edited every chapter, sometimes heavily. She pushed back a bit, explaining that “when he crossed out or rewrote whole passages, I realized it wasn’t working and I’d start over because David’s and my styles are totally different. He’s formal and stately. I’m less proper and much more casual and conversational. He’s a better writer, but I’m a more popular writer.”

  They went back and forth a good deal over the chapter on having affairs, the original nut of the project. Helen redid it three times. She asked and then answered those questions rarely posed in polite company: “Why Does She Do It? Who With?” “Should a Man Think You Are a Virgin?” “Can You Sleep with Two Men at Once?”

  Lesbians got a cursory but courteous acknowledgment: “I’m sure your problems are many. I don’t know about your pleasures. At any rate, it’s your business and I think it’s a shame you have to be so surreptitious about your choice of a way of life.” Male homosexuals, whom
she counted as some of her closest friends, got fond if stereotyped consideration. First she had a few tips on identifying guys who wouldn’t be shopping for that solitaire diamond ring: “If he has a male roommate and he’s over forty, there’s little doubt about his sex. He’s a girl.”

  Kept as dear pets, confidants, and style consultants, she valued them highly: “They make wonderful friends—loyal, sympathetic and entertaining. They will sit by your bed when you have a strep throat … will give you sound advice about men … and give the best parties of anyone I know. They are frequently devastatingly attractive—and a girl can’t surround herself with too many attractive men.”

  Unflinching, Helen marched straight into the danger zone: the Married Man. Mrs. Brown waved a silky red negligee in the faces of American wives when she suggested to her single readers that other women’s husbands may simply need good sexual love instead of stultifying domesticity: “Babies, rump roasts, wall-to-wall monogrammed towels, that’s all that really matters! Not to him! He’s had all that. And his needs may be as tearing and searing as your needs, just different.”

  Helen was having no part in the nationwide stampede toward la vie domestique that engendered the baby boom. Fortune magazine, citing the economic good times that encouraged all that seismic coupling, characterized the era as “optimistic philoprogenitive.” Helen didn’t give a damn about the leading economic indicators, asking bluntly, “What’s your hurry?” As to choosing a mate, she counseled taking the time to find out who you are first: “I could never bring myself to get married just to get married … how much saner and sweeter to marry when you have both gelled.”

  It was easier for Helen to prescribe time and patience, since she was uninterested in children. The serious gap in her counsel, one that would run throughout all of her subsequent books and her magazine, lies in her disregard and, in many instances, her outright disdain for the messy and complicating requisites of breeders. At the time her book was published, she was certainly bucking the boomer-producing tide.

  The “ticking biological clock”—another menacing media trope—had yet to be invoked, but there was still a strong cultural imperative in place. Women in Helen’s age group at the time had begun childbearing at an average age of twenty-one; more than 70 percent of first births were to women under twenty-five. Thirty-seven percent of women in Helen’s generation had four or more children. The number skewed sharply downward in women born in 1960; they were most likely (35 percent) to have just two children.

  “I guess if you’ve gotta foal, you’ve gotta foal,” Helen typed, with bemused resignation. But even future broodmares would agree that the first mandate for all single readers was to find and lasso the right stud. In her discussion of marriage choices, Helen pleaded for the insistence on suitability and self-worth that had so sadly eluded Cleo: “I beg you not to settle.”

  When the manuscript was sent to New York, Geis’s skeleton staff set to work getting it in shape for production. Letters between Helen and Geis show that he kept a close watch on his first-time author, urging speed and a bit more confidence. He was sure she could turn out a “smasherino,” and gently suggested the adoption of a certain professionalism: Would she kindly proofread what she sent?

  A comparison of Helen’s original manuscript with the published book shows remarkably few differences. Apart from these few blue-pencil tussles, the prose was amazingly intact, especially for a first-time author. The most important change was a tiny adjustment in the title. Random House, which was none too thrilled about distributing this smutty bombshell under its contract with Geis, would not allow the use of Sex for the Single Girl because sex was still understood to be out of bounds for unmarried women; it would be unseemly for a reputable firm to suggest it was for such a thing. Geis stepped in and changed “for” to “and.” The title was cleared for liftoff on the Spring 1962 list.

  As radio, TV, and in-store bookings were being set up, Berney Geis brainstormed with his most formidable consigliere, a petite blond Brandeis graduate named Letty Cottin. (Soon afterward, Letty Cottin Pogrebin.) Here was a tireless and inventive publicist who could dream up stunts and write pitch letters to melt the flintiest assignment editor. Wrote Schaap, “Letty Pogrebin is an impish, energetic young lady who is utterly devoted to submerging her own literary tastes and hustling any book that bears the Geis imprint. She even reads all of the books, which is a measure of her great loyalty.”

  In promoting Geis books, Pogrebin cleared fences like a border collie acing agility trials. Faced with balky reviewers, media-shy authors, and bookstore bannings, she could pivot her campaigns on a dime. In any city an author visited, she engineered a tiered set of bookings, from radio and TV to bookstore appearances. Little dissuaded or delayed her; she threaded through Manhattan traffic congestion on a motor scooter. No one, save Geis himself, would be more influential in terms of launching Mrs. Brown’s 267-page subversion.

  Pogrebin would go on to become one of the feminist founders of Ms. magazine; a decade after directing the campaign for Sex and the Single Girl, Pogrebin, by then married with twin daughters and a son, would also write her own guide, How to Make It in a Man’s World. Her frustrations with sexism in the “gentlemanly” business of publishing had landed her on Geis’s team. She had been secretary to the editor in chief of a large publishing house. “But when I applied for a raise I was told that no woman in the company was making more than eighty dollars a week and never would. That was the personnel director’s line. She was a woman.” She quit. Berney Geis saw something in the ambitious and energetic young woman who applied for a job; he offered her a hundred dollars a week. Within a year, Letty Pogrebin would be vice president of Geis Associates.

  Months before the publication date of Sex and the Single Girl, Geis flew Pogrebin out to California to coach their new author—to toughen her, really—for the noisy and personal assaults that he dearly hoped would come, broadcast by as many kilowatts as possible. If things went well on her publicity tour, Helen was in for a multi-city round of slut-shaming sure to bolster sales. Shrillness would sink her; so would tears. Helen was a copious crier; she’d have to dam the waterworks for the duration. She would have to absorb some coruscating offensives, and kill softly, with charm.

  In her sessions with Helen, Pogrebin channeled the gamut of interrogators: the ornery macho radio jock; the sweet-as-sorghum lady chat show host who would pretend to be an ally, then take out the hatpin. Pogrebin started pitching hardballs at her author, with the occasional tricky slider. “You know, ‘Mrs. Brown, I am concerned that you are corrupting the minds of young women and young girls…’” Helen held up with aplomb. “She got kind of polished at it,” said Pogrebin. “And she always had that sort of whispery half smile. She could pull that off.”

  Finally, Pogrebin was satisfied that her author had absorbed her cautions and coaching; the diminutive Mrs. Brown seemed possessed of a samurai resolve beneath the soft voice and liquid brown eyes. As their sessions drew to an end, Pogrebin was surprised when Helen turned the tables and began coaching her publicist on another subject entirely. “It was about nutrition and skin. She said I’d have to eat this kind of green or wheat germ and I have to do this and that with my skin. I remember her telling me about her skin person. It was almost like a quid pro quo, a ‘thank you for coming over and training me and now here are my tips.’”

  Helen only wanted to help.

  17

  Roadshow

  I understand that if I do not feel that this book can show me how to enjoy single life while being in a better position to win a man, I may return it in 7 days for return of purchase price.

  —publisher’s guarantee for Sex and the Single Girl

  AS PUBLICATION DREW NEAR, Helen had been fretting about the lure of her look. How might she best present herself in the all-important book jacket and publicity photo? Hot? Chic? Author-ish?

  The conservative book design deliberately belied its racy contents; it was bound in light gray cloth and wrapped d
emurely in a type-only blue cover. The black-and-white headshot needed for the back cover would precede and follow Helen everywhere on tour, from bookstore windows to press releases. Everyone at Geis Associates was weighing in; they tried at least four portraitists. Helen had some test shots done by none other than John Engstead, the Hollywood celebrity shooter who had made the portrait for her Glamour contest entry a decade earlier; maybe he could work his mojo again. The women in Geis’s office loved his va-va-voom shots but the boss was on the fence. Geis complained to Helen that the Engstead proofs he saw “made you look like a $500 call girl.” Another shooter’s prints suggested to Geis “a Marseilles waterfront Apache dancer.”

  Yes, he agreed with Helen that her hair should be “more yummier.” But he was resolutely anti-glitz in some shots he had seen: “Let’s avoid the evening gown and the Shah of Iran’s jewelry.” He was looking for something in between siren and sensible; he needed to book his author in New York and Kenosha. He urged her to keep trying with Engstead and others, and damn the cost. Geis suggested one Peter Samergian, whose shot did grace the final version of the cover.

  Helen is wearing a prim solid-color dress with contrasting edging. Her hair is in a neat sixties “flip” with bangs, and there is a pencil angled discreetly at her elbow for the auteur accent. Smiling ever so faintly, she looks strikingly like The Honeymooners’ wisewoman Alice Kramden (as played by Audrey Meadows), the prime-time embodiment of plain girl power able to quell three hundred blustering pounds of Ralph with a single raised eyebrow.