As Helen continued her triumphant march, David Brown was preoccupied with a metastatic studio disaster that had been spreading insidiously since 1958, when he and Helen first met. Movie attendance had been down during that period; Fox films had been tanking badly. The studio head, Spyros Skouras, had sent David, still his trusted scout at that point, a memo: “Dave, we need a big picture … Find me a big subject.” David dove into a history of all the studio’s productions and found that the Queen of the Nile hadn’t barged across the silver screen since the silent-era star Theda Bara had played her in 1917.
Skouras green-lighted the new Cleopatra movie, and by late 1962, it was bringing down the studio. The reiteration of Cleopatra starred Elizabeth Taylor in the title role and Richard Burton as her Roman lover Marc Antony. It would end up costing $44 million (about $344 million today). Such spending was an astonishment back then; the epic Ben Hur, chariot races and all, had cost only $12 million and delivered eleven Oscars. Cleopatra went through two directors and two casts, and was shot in four countries over two and a half years of wretched excess. Speaking of the pricey sets built overseas, David Brown observed, “Only the Romans left more ruins in Europe.”
The production churned up enough boldface scandal to all but melt the frantic tabloid presses. Lust! Betrayal! Brutality! And that was just off-set. The incendiary affair of Burton and Taylor, both married to others at the time, was a drama so public, operatic, and volatile that its lurching progress, featuring drunken fights, a Seconal overdose, and vengeful spouses, got about as much ink as the astronaut John Glenn’s little stunt of orbiting the earth in February 1962. A Vatican newsletter felt obliged to pillory Taylor for her “erotic vagrancy.”
Such a divine, louche way of putting it; Helen would have killed for a papal condemnation. At home, she listened with a movie fan’s absorption and a wife’s concern to the latest studio confidentials. David was astounded by the epic overspending and tabloid spectacle that had taken over his little notion for a picture. Even Richard Burton professed himself amazed by the public obsession with his on-set dalliance, the paparazzi dangling from cliffs over the Mediterranean, the thundering papacy. He confessed to a friend, “It’s like fucking Khrushchev! I’ve had affairs before—how did I know the woman was so fucking famous!”
Cleopatra would not reach the box office until 1963; to float the bloated thing into theaters required a drastic jettison of baggage at Fox in the fall of 1962. Skouras was out as studio head and Darryl F. Zanuck was in. To save the company, Zanuck sold Fox’s most precious asset, the 260-acre studio lot south of Beverly Hills, for $43 million, a giveaway so desperate it’s been described as “a transaction that would come to resemble Peter Minuit’s $24 deal for Manhattan.” The property became the site of the massive development Century City. Though he had nothing to do with Cleopatra beyond suggesting it, David owned his part in the debacle: “When I gaze upon that gargantuan complex of hotels, office buildings, and shopping centers known as Century City … I think of how I may somehow have been responsible for starting it all.”
Zanuck closed down all productions except Cleopatra; he fired nearly everyone, and began to rebuild. David Brown was told to pack up and leave in November. It was the greatest calamity to date for the Browns. Helen took it personally. She was deeply affronted on behalf of her husband, a loyal company man. Why, she spluttered, her darling had never even filled his boaty gas-guzzler from the pump on the back lot! Not once! She carried on for a while in operatic gusts of indignation and hand-wringing, then settled into their new reality: David was unemployed!
It was no small consolation that David could occupy himself with counting Helen’s royalties and seeking a better payout structure. Given the size and pace of funds rolling in, sticking to Geis’s boilerplate fifteen-thousand-dollar yearly cap on royalty disbursement meant Helen’s earnings would take fifteen years or more to pay out. There was already a quarter-million dollars in the publisher’s coffers when David asked to revisit the arrangement. Helen had to pay considerable tax on the first installment of the movie rights deal; where would they find such funds? After a good deal of back and forth, it was agreed; more payments could be loosed as advances against yet more books. David pointed out that in speaking for his wife, he hoped that Geis understood: Helen still wished to be in contact with him personally on “creative” matters.
Helen had been working up a few ideas for her next Geis nonfiction book. She was thinking lesbians. Geis did have a certain knee-jerk male enthusiasm for the subject. He acknowledged three questions that so many men really want answered about women loving women: How did they get that way? Why? And what really goes on between them?
In a long and thoughtfully laid out letter, Geis outlined all of the tedious journalistic things Helen would have to do to make it fly. Securing medical and scientific acceptance of the same-sex “phenomenon” would require the endorsement of medical professionals; she would have to interview many doctors. And frankly, Geis pointed out, a book full of medical citations and factual limitations was not the sort of book Helen wanted to write, was it? Nor did he want to publish such a thing. Helen should be free to express her own singular voice.
Deftly, Geis had steered his author to a more salable alternative with a sequel-like title: “Sex and the Office.” She set to work right away, after taking time for a short stint in a Los Angeles recording studio. Gene Norman, a Los Angeles producer who began by recording jazz greats such as Lionel Hampton, Art Tatum, and Dizzy Gillespie, thought it would be a great idea to have Helen speak some of her womanly wisdom on vinyl. Norman’s label, Crescendo, also recorded spoken-word discs with the comedian Mort Sahl and the plummy-toned Orson Welles. The Browns were intrigued. But to their consternation, they found that the Warner Bros. movie deal included recording rights to the book material. Helen cobbled up a slightly different assortment of her tangy aperçus and called it Lessons in Love.
The packaging took a page from the Geis playbook with an “adults only” warning stamped beside a shot of Helen’s Sex and the Single Girl jacket photo and another caution: “Not to be played on the air.” Side A is “How to Love a Girl,” directed toward men. Women get their tips on Side B, “How to Love a Man.” A choice cut: “How to Talk to a Man In Bed.” After a strange ramble about a half-dressed girl wielding a potted plant to avoid getting raped, Helen got down to the sweet talk in the event that you should actually want to be in bed with a man: “As for naughty words and four-letter words, most men love you to say them and if you don’t know any, they’ll tell you some you can use.”
Overall, the LP is a trifling, disjointed ramble, campy enough to draw delighted shrieks from bridesmaids at any of today’s retro-themed, margarita-fueled bachelorette parties. It sold ten thousand copies and earned only enough royalties for a couple of Jax ensembles. Though they toyed with notions for more albums, Helen and David wisely let her recording aspirations slip quietly away.
Despite David’s baffled disapproval, Helen was still hauling herself to the office. By November 1962, the stalwart trio of women copywriters at K&E had been mistreated unto diaspora. The first to leave, the most creative in Helen’s opinion, was fired outright. She went straight to another agency with responsibilities for $3 million in accounts. The second grew so frustrated she moved to a large agency in another city and was made copy chief. Helen, sure of her immediate future as an author, newspaper columnist, and record-setting seller of screen rights, having outlasted several irksome regimes at K&E, packed up her storyboards, her cosmetic samples, and her nap-friendly rug and closed the door on her nineteenth job.
18
Meet the Press
It’s hard to stop me, because mine is such a good example of somebody quite ordinary wanting to write, trying to write, having no particular talent and then “getting there.”
—HGB, The Writer’s Rules
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1963, David Brown wrote to his college boy in New York with some good news: it wasn’t to be made public yet, bu
t he had a new job. He was headed back to publishing, as a vice president in editorial for New American Library, a literary paperback house. Bruce could expect Helen and David to be living in New York by April. And what a happy reunion it would be. The rest of the letter congratulated Bruce on the lovely young woman he had recently introduced to his visiting father as the love of his life. David told Bruce, by then an avid reader of philosophy and political science, that love is “the greatest moving force in our civilization.” Love or the lack of it, he amended.
David also wrote to his son’s new girlfriend, Kathy Ames, with a warm welcome that suggested a father’s immense relief; his long-troubled son had found someone to love and care for him. Just a thought: maybe Kathy could even get Bruce to cut his hair. David added a P.S. to his future daughter-in-law: “I hope you like my Helen…”
Bruce had been living in an apartment at 177 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village with a classmate, a prelaw major named Marc Haefele. After a career in book publishing and newspapers, Haefele is now based in the Los Angeles area as a print journalist and radio commentator on NPR stations. Recalling the roommates’ friendship and its abrupt dissolution, Haefele said that he spoke to Helen only on the one occasion she phoned the apartment looking for Bruce. “There was no love lost between those two,” he said.
His friendship with Bruce Brown began with all the promise of a heady, parent-free collegiate life in early-sixties Greenwich Village, then a banquet of soulful and seditious arts. Both young men had college draft deferments; the Vietnam War had yet to make its campus incursions through draft “lotteries.” David Brown forwarded Bruce’s draft card to New York with the reassurance that his son’s young life would not be disrupted.
Haefele has pleasurable memories of their movable Village feast: Bob Dylan was playing at Gerde’s and the proscenium-busting plays of Bertolt Brecht were wrinkling foreheads in a half-dozen Off-Broadway productions. There was pizza at Emilio’s and drinking at the White Horse Tavern with classmates and neighbors. “One night we went to the 5 Spot Café to see Thelonious Monk,” Haefele said. “But instead a young pianist and vocalist named Aretha Franklin showed up. We’d sit up late, listening to Orson Welles reading Whitman on WBAI.” For young men studying history, literature, philosophy, and politics, life downtown was grubbily idyllic, at least at first. They were close, companionable roommates. They talked books and music and conducted genial arguments enlivened by weed and bargain booze.
“We both used a fair amount of marijuana, he more than I,” said Haefele. “Occasionally I’d encounter him at home in a stoned condition, but I assumed it was marijuana use. I never saw any syringes. But one night he stole and downed an entire prescription of mine for Demerol, maybe eight or ten pills—enough to have killed the normal person. It was then I realized he was into harder stuff.”
Adding to his suspicions, there was a perplexing remark by his roommate’s mother, Liberty LeGacy, as Tibby was back to calling herself. She appeared at the apartment about once a month, trim and chic in jeans and a bandana shirt tied around the midriff, to help tidy the shambles only college boys could perpetrate. One day she asked Haefele how he was doing with his diabetes.
“I told her I wasn’t a diabetic,” he said. “I think that maybe Bruce told her that I was, in order to explain a neglected syringe she might have come across in our place.”
David Brown had occasionally come to visit on Waverly Place when he was in town; he was an urbane, tweedy presence, stepping around the drifts of reading lists and pizza boxes and gamely sipping their rotgut Scotch. They discussed writers and films; he regaled the roommates with tales of his encounters with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock. To Haefele, he seemed proud and deeply fond of his scholar son. Bruce finally seemed to be thriving in classes and in the churning bohemian bazaar that his father had wallowed in so happily back in the thirties with his “commie girl.”
There was no doubt that Bruce Brown was a brilliant student. “Some of his teachers thought he was a genius,” Haefele said. “He had a quick grasp of dense modern philosophy. He whizzed through Sartre and Husserl, was fascinated by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and quickly absorbed phenomenological ontology and existentialism. He wrangled toe to toe with some formidable professors like Sidney Hook and William Barrett.”
Hook was a pragmatic social democrat known for his vigorous condemnation of Marxism and Stalin as well as his opposition to Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-hunting, which he damned as “a heavy liability to American democracy.” Barrett, a pioneering American interpreter of existentialism, was also a literary critic and associate editor of the Partisan Review. His friends included Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and, closest to him, the poet Delmore Schwartz. Bruce Brown seemed able to hold his own with, and even challenge, these exceptional teachers. At home, he would recap the dizzying play-by-play of his ontological derring-do in charged NYU seminar rooms. “In our first year, we enjoyed sharing each other’s learning,” said Haefele, “but he drew way ahead of me. And he became quite arrogant.”
Their friendship curdled at about the time Bruce had loudly and wholeheartedly embraced dialectical materialism, the fundament of Marxism. He grew erratic and hostile and sometimes growled that he would kill Haefele, though he was never physically menacing. Finally, Bruce just disappeared one day, having removed his belongings while his roommate was out. A few days later in that stinging-cold February, the landlord came by and conducted Haefele to the street for nonpayment of rent. He learned that the money he had been giving Bruce monthly was never paid to the landlord, nor had Bruce seen fit to pay rent at all for some time. Haefele surmised he had lost his rent money and his lodgings to Bruce’s growing drug habit. He still cannot be sure. There might be a less nefarious explanation: “Suppose he stole that rent money simply because he was a total asshole?”
Out on the icy street with his possessions, Haefele called Tibby LeGacy, who took him in, helped him find another place, and reimbursed him what she could. She was kind, apologetic, and concerned. Here the trail of Bruce Brown ends for a while. He did finish at NYU and go on to Washington University in St. Louis for graduate school, studying history. Kathy went with him and got an undergraduate degree there. But except for the rare and incidental mention, Helen stopped writing about her stepson or speaking of him to anyone. Few of the Browns’ friends in New York, old and new, would ever know that David Brown had a son.
* * *
The third Mrs. Brown scored another media coup on March 3, 1963, when a Life magazine article trumpeting her multimedia triumphs hit the stands. Though the Browns’ maid was mentioned, there was no reference at all to the third member of the family. The writer, Shana Alexander, was patently underwhelmed by the sensational Mrs. Brown. Alexander, the first woman staff writer and columnist at Life, was just three years younger than Helen. She was a native New Yorker and Vassar graduate; she would go on to a career in broadcast news as the liberal voice in “Point/Counterpoint” on CBS’s 60 Minutes, a combative segment gleefully satirized on Saturday Night Live with Jane Curtin as Alexander.
One wouldn’t expect the embedded textual hostility, given the lavish opening photo arranged by Life and its headline, “Singular Girl’s Success.” Helen, seated in a flowered shift and white stilettos, looks up at the camera from the midst of a circle of smiling men in suits who help manage her “$500,000 enterprise” (the equivalent of $3.8 million today). She is posed as a comely, broadly smiling conglomerate. Labels identify each man’s specific fealties to the lady: Contracts, Publishing, Record, Syndication, Husband, Movie, Book Sales, Publicity. They hold up their products. Smiling down at his wife, David Brown is displaying what looks to be their marriage certificate.
It’s immediately apparent that the reporter has little patience for this literary lightweight and her wee book with the gargantuan payday. Alexander described the bestseller this way: “There are only bits and pieces of Helen’s personal story, fragmented like walnuts and thinly spread through a gummy chocolate fudg
e of grooming hints, advice to the lovelorn, jokes, snippets of psychological insight, decorating suggestions, exercise regimens, stock market tips and recipes. There is even some bold talk about sex but no orgies.”
Asked about the personal thrills of her multiplatform success, Helen committed the sin of hubris rarely framed attractively in print: “‘It’s me, me, me! That’s what’s so heady about it,’ she crows.”
Within days of the Life story, Helen was back on the newsstands in a media platform generally accorded to the likes of Albert Schweitzer, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the historian Arnold Toynbee, all of whom sat, with dignity and seriousness, for the lengthy interrogations required. Helen Gurley Brown was the first woman asked to do “The Playboy Interview”; it appeared in the April 1963 issue. She was preceded in February by Frank Sinatra, and by the British philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell in March. The issue after Helen’s brought Alex Haley’s incendiary sessions with Malcolm X. This was what Helen would call “heady stuff.” Of eighty Playboy Interviews throughout the sixties, only four others were with women: the novelist Ayn Rand, Princess Grace Kelly, the atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and the sex researcher Virginia Johnson (jointly with William Masters).
Though they appeared to be on the same team in terms of sexual liberation, Playboy’s interviewer, Richard Warren Lewis, did not lob softballs; he went straight to topics that Helen’s own publisher had declared verboten: abortion and birth control. Helen did not mince words about her frustrations with Geis’s prohibitions. She had plenty to say on women’s reproductive rights and clearly relished the forum. Of American abortion laws, she said, “The whole thing needs to be overhauled. It’s a shame that girls have to go to Mexico or Europe to be operated on. It’s outrageous that girls can’t be aborted here.” She also harked back to the needless fear and horror she had seen her friends endure, along with the threat of infection from back-room procedures: “If a girl would be able to go to a hospital now, there would be practically no danger to her … The only problem with an abortion is finding someone who can perform it. And also, it’s hideously expensive, like dope. I understand the going rate in Los Angeles right now is $500, and it has to be cash, right then. Well, kids don’t have that kind of money. Career girls don’t either.”
Not Pretty Enough Page 26