To loose Helen Gurley Brown upon the unsuspecting nation, Berney Geis kept to his winning strategy of promotional spending: big, loud, and front-loaded. He gave Pogrebin a thirty-thousand-dollar budget to start with—as much as two years’ worth of royalties for their author—to be spent between the pub date, in late May, and early July. Geis allotted up to fifty thousand dollars for a full campaign, depending on the book. In a time when print ads sold books briskly, many with the use of clip-out order coupons, Geis spent lavishly on space in major city newspapers, in Esquire, Redbook, and even the lefty alt-weekly in Manhattan The Village Voice. The initial half-page print ad began with a little teaser quote from the author:
“Theoretically, a ‘nice’ single woman has no sex life. What nonsense!”
Helen’s beloved “bible,” Glamour, would not take the ad; presumably her book was deemed inappropriate for any Girl with Taste. The New York Times Magazine did not find it fit to print. Nine magazines turned down Pogrebin’s pitch for excerpting on grounds of taste and probity. The Geis expert team shaped a basic two-column ad that would ballyhoo the book’s content and celebrity endorsements. Albert Ellis, author of Sex Without Guilt, conferred his professional gravitas in a box at the top of the ad: “… The discussion of the single girl and her premarital affairs is unusual for its honesty and realism—and remarkable for having been written by a woman.” (Helen would return the favor in 1964 by suing Ellis for title infringement when he published Sex and the Single Man.) The remaining endorsements made for a crazy salad of American womanhood: the actress Joan Crawford; the fitness advocate and Post Grape Nuts spokeswoman (and Geis author) Bonnie Prudden; and America’s most lovable tart of gold, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.
The selling of subsidiary rights began before the book was on press; as is usual for such campaigns, personal connections were deeply mined. Saul David, a friend of the Browns and a former editor at Bantam, bought the movie rights to the book for Warner Bros. for $200,000. They were such good friends that Helen had shown Saul the first chapter of her work-in-progress right before he went to work for Warner Bros., when he was still in publishing; he told her then that he could “unload it” for her, no problem.
A Life magazine story pointed out the most shocking aspect of the studio purchase: “$40,000 a word: That is what the title of Sex and the Single Girl gets its author Helen Brown.” It was true; Saul David was just buying the snappy title, since there was no plot, fictional or otherwise, to Helen’s rambling little guidebook. The studio head, Jack Warner, said to be apoplectic about the price, spluttered to one of his executives, “My God, we bought a bunch of recipes, and how to fix up the apartment!” Sniped Variety in its chewy argot, “Helen Gurley Brown’s ‘Sex’ tome didn’t have enuf yam to spin a film, confirms producer Bill Orr.”
A screenplay would have to be invented out of whole cloth, much as one had been knit for the movie version of the playwright Jean Kerr’s suburban mom memoir Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. In the Hollywood parlance of that time, it was advisable to buy such a “presold” title property that carried with it a “pretested” audience, presumably buyers of the original book. Even now, a catchy or evocative title—think Snakes on a Plane—can almost set its own price, plot be damned. In today’s dollars, the rights fee paid by Warner Bros. for Sex and the Single Girl computes to a bit over $1.5 million, or a tidy $375,000 per title word. David had wisely negotiated a deal that freed Helen from any screenwriting responsibilities. The fee, Life reported, was “the highest sum Hollywood ever paid for a nonfiction book—or more accurately a nonfiction non-book.” Even before Helen began her promotional duties, it looked as though Geis had knocked another one out of the park.
Despite all the good news, Helen had been wrestling with a deep anxiety that she did not confide to her publishers. She waited until April, when finished books were expected any day, to send the galleys to both her mother and her father-in-law, Edward Brown. Cleo’s first blast was devastating. In a fairly hysterical return letter, she warned her daughter that the little abomination would draw huge headlines—but then “so do murder and rape!” She begged Helen to withdraw it and railed against the influence of her married life in Hollywood, that sun-drenched Gomorrah “highly contaminated with carnal lust.” She sniped that Helen had better find herself a safe place—perhaps in the Browns’ “one hundred acres of virgin forest near San Francisco,” an investment Helen had boasted of in the book. Cleo also advised airing the manuscript often lest the vile thing spontaneously burst into flames.
Helen cried bitterly. It wasn’t fair. Instead of being proud that her daughter would be a published author, Cleo had expressed only bafflement and despair. Cleo simply couldn’t understand: Helen had it all, a good husband, a respectable career—why spoil it all like this? She also took some things very personally; did Helen have to mention that her mother was a terrible cook? (“Mother’s steaks resembled the hide of an armadillo.”) Helen was stunned and angry at first. Then she realized what seemed to distress her mother most, though Cleo did not speak to it directly. Somehow, and it seemed incredible given their years living together so closely in that city of carnal lust, Cleo appeared to have convinced herself that Helen had been an intact single girl—a virgin!
It was delusional, of course, some sort of protective denial. But Helen had to acknowledge that the publicity surrounding her as sexual buccaneer would be excruciating for Cleo, especially at home in Osage. There had been no loud and notorious female in Carroll County since 1909, when the temperance leader Carry Nation bought a cabin and sheep farm in Alpena Pass for a quiet end to her hatchet-wielding days smashing barrels of demon rum. Cleo, who was back in that area teaching school, might want to sink into oblivion herself once the church ladies and her fellow faculty members got wind of her daughter’s cavalier tips on poaching husbands during lunch hour. How could Helen toss it off so casually as this: “It seems to me the solution is not to rule out married men but to keep them as pets.”
Helen was less forgiving of her father-in-law’s reaction. The man who had so coldly abandoned his baby boy David, that pompous, incorrigible skirt chaser, pronounced her book utterly distasteful and suggested that if his daughter-in-law must publish, she should do it under a pseudonym to spare the proud family name. Edward Brown, milk industry flack and self-styled Park Avenue grandee, admonished his son: How could he allow his wife to write something like that? Henceforth, Helen had a private pet name for her father-in-law: Pretentious Bastard!
In Berney Geis’s hive, activity had ratcheted up for the launch. The letters Pogrebin sent Helen outlining their “gets” and hopes for bookings routinely ran four or five pages, single spaced. At the end of April, Pogrebin informed her author that they had just struck gold. The American Weekly, a tabloid-ish Hearst magazine supplement tucked into Sunday newspapers, had taken the unprecedented step of devoting an entire issue to an excerpt of Sex and the Single Girl. In the mid-fifties, circulation had hit 10 million, but incursions of television and Hearst’s refusal to place it in newspapers not its own would soon scuttle the randy old rag. Helen caught its last hurrah.
Pogrebin had reason to exult. In 1962, securing that fat national insert was the equivalent of having Oprah Winfrey holler up the book on the Times Square Jumbotron—with a live national uplink. The four-color insert, billed as a “full condensation” of Helen’s book, would reach an estimated 3.5 million homes. Better still, newspaper subscribers tended to keep those magazine inserts in the home for about a week, widening the window of exposure and “pass-on” readership. Pogrebin explained the value of such a coup to Helen with a recent example: When The American Weekly ran a small article on a book about the utterly unsexy Trachtenberg system of “speed” mathematics, it became a bestseller overnight. “At a time like this,” she told Helen, “all I can say is Mazel Tov.”
A bit of fishing on eBay reeled in a brittle but intact example of this priceless promotional grail; it is stamped with the logo of the Seattle Post-Intelli
gencer, one of nine big-city papers it ran in. By today’s shrunken newspaper standards, it is extravagantly large, ten by thirteen inches, with the full fifteen pages of editorial devoted to the book. The front cover is a stunner of early-sixties kitsch—bright blue, with a cartooned single gal surrounded by male arms bearing gifts: perfume, candy, champagne, an engagement ring. A yellow banner across the front reads “The Wonders of Being Single.” Open the magazine and there it is again as the inside headline: “Women Alone? Oh, Come Now!”
Well hell yes! After years of magazine gloom and doom on her prospects for happiness, what interested single woman wouldn’t pluck that bright blue and promising object from the stack of Sunday funnies and classifieds, nudge the tabby aside, and settle in with it on her sleek midcentury davenport? What secretarial pool wouldn’t have a copy or two in the break room, coffee-stained and tattered by multiple readers? The clip-out coupon to buy a copy of the book was on the last page so that its use would not bite into the editorial.
Team Helen did not rest after that triumph. No connection was too small to exploit. When Pogrebin wrote to the Jax boutique in Los Angeles that the book contained a couple of shout-outs to Helen’s adored designer, Sex and the Single Girl popped up in its windows to intrigue all the willowy dream girls wafting in from the canyons for their fanny-cupping Jax slacks. She contacted the Concord resort and Grossinger’s in New York’s Catskill Mountains; those hotels often ran weekends geared to Jewish singles. Pogrebin had a yiddische fixer in those hills. “I sent Helen up there with a man named Joel who used to be the go-to guy to get into that scene,” she said. “Grossinger’s had hundreds of people over one weekend.” Geis pushed Helen to ask a huge favor of the actress Joan Crawford, who seemed to have a liking for his author: get her to do some radio spots. Helen visited Crawford, who readily agreed. Ever the movie freak, Helen filched a few squares of the star’s monogrammed toilet paper on the way out.
There was some thought that a little stone-throwing at this scarlet woman author might bump up sales. Helen and Pogrebin put their heads together on ways to awaken a bit of righteous outrage; getting banned in a few places could be boffo. Helen thought hard about who might condemn the thing in a way that guaranteed a few inches of newspaper coverage. The Vatican? The DAR? The Girl Scouts? As it happened, the very Catholic nation of Spain was beginning its yearlong (and ultimately successful) process to have the book banned; Ireland would follow. Germany would move energetically, if futilely, to ban Helen’s first and second books on grounds of being “youth endangering.” Alas, churning up such official opprobrium proved a fruitless angle on this side of the Atlantic.
On May 23, pub day, a telegram was delivered to Helen’s Manhattan hotel, predicting a long and lusty life for Mrs. Brown’s literary baby, with kisses from all the gang at Geis. Helen hit the road. She was an instant crowd-pleaser at the podium and at the book signing table. She was poised and prepared. She was also frankly, wryly Helen. Pogrebin saw right away that women responded well to her. “She was fantastic. You couldn’t wish for more because she had that wonderful combination of being ladylike plus a concerted sexiness. A studied sexiness. It didn’t come naturally to her. She was wearing short skirts and I thought to myself, ‘This is the last woman who should be wearing short skirts,’ because she had such skinny legs.”
Perfection was not what women wanted to see. Helen delivered the common touch despite her best efforts toward flawlessness. Her slipups were small and humanizing: a nylon stocking cobwebbed behind one bony knee; an earring dangled askew; her lipstick needed blotting. She was anything but cool and prepackaged. As the long lines began to form at book signings, Helen looked up and put the Eye Lock on each paying customer, answered every question, dispensed advice in a concerned murmur.
He still won’t marry you? Try this …
“I think women sensed this was not somebody to be jealous of, the way you might if Angelina Jolie is giving you advice,” said Pogrebin. “I think that’s what made her so successful. She understood that, sadly, in our culture, most women are raised feeling not pretty enough. She tuned into that at a very deep level.”
The insert in The American Weekly ran on June 2, right in the sweet spot; the author was on the road and on radio and television and the books were in the stores, though rarely for long. Sex and the Single Girl began moving immediately. In New York City, hundreds of thousands of young women making their way to work saw a snappy banner for the book running above the logo of the New York Post for a few days’ worth of excerpts. The city had more than 1,500 newsstands back then, conveniently anchored to subway stops, drugstores, bars, and cafeterias for maximum traffic. Pogrebin, who had negotiated the excerpts, could scarcely believe the placement. “It said ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ on every newsstand in New York. There were pictures of it. And after the Post took it, I was able to sell syndication rights. I do remember that it took a lot of heavy lifting to get the Times to run the ad.”
In just three weeks after Sex and the Single Girl went on sale, more than forty-five thousand copies were sold. Geis was going back to press for the third time. Helen’s road-warrior tenacity would lead to sales of more than two million copies in the United States and twenty-eight foreign editions of Sex and the Single Girl in fourteen languages. By July, The New York Times had relented and was accepting ads for the book, which was number eight on its own nonfiction bestseller list. Helen hit number nine in Publishers Weekly, number three in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sales numbers jumped wherever she went.
In Geis’s office and in the Brown home, the letters were piled hip deep. Pogrebin told Helen, “Your fan mail is fascinating.” It included agony letters, thank-yous, testimonials, pleas for advice. They heard from secretaries and file clerks, saleswomen, divorcées, stranded and struggling single moms. Women alone were reaching out to their new “champion,” as the promo lit billed her. David and Helen sat and read the letters together. They were nearly all about men. Many of them are preserved in Helen’s archives. Paging through the handwritten histories, the stories of transformation and triumphs achieved by using Mrs. Brown’s advice, it is clear that though Helen’s prime audience was fellow rank-and-file “mouseburgers,” her famous term for plain Jane female strivers, her messaging reached beyond city limits and the stratifications of class. The “silly little book” was calling all girls. Joan Ganz Cooney, who would go on to found Children’s Television Workshop and co-create Sesame Street, said that she read the book when it was published, at the outset of her own career in Manhattan: “The thing I remember from it, which I practiced, was when you’re single, don’t hesitate to have lunch with married men, because you should be engaging with men. And I did. She was right about it. Sometimes they wanted to go farther than that lunch and one could control that. It was an easy ‘no.’ Her idea was to have fun and have men in your life and I took it quite seriously and it made a difference. I made some great friends of men.”
* * *
It almost didn’t matter that some of the reviews of Sex and the Single Girl were mocking and unkind, especially since the author charmingly dissembled at most appearances about her “little” offering. She never claimed it was Anna Karenina. The vicious slam in her hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, did sting. The critic Robert L. Kirsch found it “as tasteless a book as I have read.” He accused her of hating and manipulating men. Then he opened up with both barrels on Mrs. Brown’s bona fides: “She rushes breathlessly from punchy paragraph to compressed exposure, a creature of the advertising age, endorsing the phoniness and the hard/soft subliminal sell, which substitutes for individuality, candor, sincerity. What she describes as sex is not sex at all but a kind of utility. Perhaps futility would be a better word.”
Mr. Kirsch may have thought he did his best to dismiss the tawdry spectacle. Doubtless he went mangoes, as Helen might say, at the reaction of his own newspaper to this sly, calculating creature of the ad age. In December 1962, the Los Angeles Times Mirror syndicate contracted with
Helen for as many of those punchy paragraphs as she could fit into a thrice-weekly syndicated column to be called “Woman Alone,” which would be carried by up to seventy-five papers nationwide. She reasoned that it was also a sensible way to handle her huge volume of mail, targeting columns to subjects most inquired about. (Number one was men, of course.) She was already signed up for more books for Geis, and the movie rights payments were coming in. The newspaper column would be an awful lot of work, she confided to Pogrebin, but that bully pulpit was just too delicious to turn down. Helen’s five-year contract with the Times Mirror Company in January 1963 stipulated that she would get half of the syndication’s gross revenue, with a guaranteed minimum of $165 a week; should it bomb, either party could terminate the agreement.
* * *
Cleo had calmed down, somewhat. A month after her initial blast of disapproval, she sent Helen what at first seemed to be a conciliatory letter, allowing that she was sure the book would be an inspiration to career girls. She said that she was proud of her daughter and her talent for writing. But despite her attempts to make peace for one paragraph, the old anger boiled up mid-page. Cleo admitted that she was still smarting from being portrayed as a nitwit in the book, a “doddering old bore who sprang from share-cropper stock.” She had a suggestion: Why not write the next book about certain women, too young and unformed to know better, who married the wrong men? Women who stayed for the children. She named other unhappy wives in Little Rock who had suffered her own cruel fate. The squall fills the page and ends, cramped at the bottom, “Mother.” Having gotten that out of her system, Cleo found it in herself to praise Helen in the weeks to come. She actually said it: Helen looked beautiful on The Tonight Show, and so at ease. She sure hoped that they paid her well. Henceforth, the letters were again signed with love.
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