Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  When the conversation turned from larger issues to the personal, Playboy’s Lewis zeroed in on Helen’s writing. He read her excerpts from some of the most vicious criticisms of Sex and the Single Girl. Asked whether phrases like “pippy-poo” and “teeny weeny” constitute good writing, Helen seemed unperturbed: “Those phrases seem to have annoyed people, especially the word ‘pippy-poo’—they just climb walls. I can’t blame it on my advertising background. I write letters that way. Let’s just say I’ve made a thing out of writing very girlishly … I don’t think these words offended anybody but men.” As the interrogation came to a close, Helen was tasked with explaining her success. After conceding that it was a fluke and somewhat “ridiculous,” she made a case for having simply told the truth as she saw it:

  “Why do we have to pretend that we love people that we hate and that marriage isn’t a horrible bore much of the time? The reason my book is successful is that there’s none of this crappiness about it … Anytime one can say of your book: ‘Yes, this is really how it is,’ you’re apt to have a hit on your hands, if it isn’t too grisly. You can have verisimilitude and be commercially successful.”

  In a subsequent issue, Playboy ran reader mail about Helen’s interview; she said it was the most scurrilous attack she had ever experienced. She was stunned and hurt; she complained that readers called her a slut, a prostitute, and a lesbian. So much for the “honor” of being one of the rare females interviewed.

  * * *

  Helen’s encounters with the mainstream press were hardly as friendly and gratifying as the radio shows and bookstore appearances that had drawn her an enthusiastic constituency following the publication of Sex and the Single Girl a year earlier. For Helen, it was a somewhat puzzling disconnect. She asked Letty Pogrebin for a sampling of the hate mail coming into Geis’s office, along with any bad press. Pogrebin obliged; the press clips included a lashing in Cosmopolitan, in an issue on “Women and Immorality.” A low-grade backlash against Helen’s girlie-girl mien had begun, and female interviewers, seemingly the only reporters assigned to such a “women’s story,” were to lead the charge.

  Generally they were graduates of Seven Sisters colleges, women who had worked hard to gain a foothold in a very male field. Some were already concussing their excellent brains on newsroom glass ceilings. Helen’s flirty public persona might have been irritating, but there was a palpable slighting of her professional bona fides. Few articles from that time even mention Helen’s stellar advertising career; Shana Alexander briefly referenced the secretarial jobs but omitted the admirable climb to copywriter, the awards, the “highest paid ad woman” distinction.

  While Helen may have been personally stung by some of the dismissive press, David had a more practical reaction: let’s move on. Just after Helen had finished her book tour for Sex and the Single Girl, he had begun working with her to expand her brand to other media. A year earlier, the FCC chairman Newton Minow had famously declared American television a “vast wasteland.” The weekly network lineup certainly was a vastly male preserve: The Jack Benny Program, The Red Skelton Hour, Ben Casey, Perry Mason, Rawhide, Route 66, Have Gun—Will Travel, and Bonanza.

  The Browns batted around ideas for TV projects that might be salable. Helen’s proposals for a half-dozen series ranged from sitcom to public service, from the prescient to the ludicrous. While some of the treatments are amateurish and clumsy, she was once again ahead of her time in proposing the types of shows that would one day, with the right talent, prove huge hits. The Browns’ brainstorming produced these trial balloons:

  The Single Girl Sandra: Sandra Sloan is a woman copywriter in the advertising business, a career woman in her late twenties “who isn’t panting to get married” yet wants a rich, full life surrounded by great women friends and platoons of men. In its rejection letter, ABC declared that the public was not at all interested in advertising and in any case, series based on female leads had been “uniformly unsuccessful” in the history of television. That simply wasn’t true. There were popular female stars, though safe types such as Molly Goldberg’s yiddische mama and madcap hausfraus in the Lucille Ball mode were preferred by network schedulers. Working-girl comedy had some traction in the late 1940s and early ’50s, with Gale Storm as a cruise director in Oh! Susanna and Eve Arden as a high school English teacher in Our Miss Brooks.

  Helen tried again with That Tully Girl, another sitcom centered on an office temp who spread havoc in every new job. A third workplace sitcom, about life in a company called PyroDynamics, which installed tech equipment, revolved around a bumbling president named Dinwiddie Crump who hadn’t the foggiest idea how to run a company (think Ricky Gervais, then Steve Carell, in The Office).

  Striking out with office themes, she tried the domestic arts: Cook’s on the Fire laid out the scenario for a TV cooking game show, innovative but far tamer than the two dozen culinary competitions flambéing the egos of aspiring chefs on cable channels today. Normal Like Me was Helen’s title for a series based on some hellzapoppin’ group therapy. She drew on her experience with Charlie Cooke and his feisty dozen, right down to the punching bag in his therapy room. A decade later, hitching the same premise to a proven and brilliantly deadpan comic star proved a solid hit with The Bob Newhart Show, which was centered on the group practice of a Chicago therapist.

  Helen intended to star in another program herself, as the “immoderator” in Frankly Female, which would pit her against a male cohost in debating women’s issues and complaints. The suggested subjects ranged from the vapidity of women’s magazines to abortion rights. In her sketch of the proposed show, Helen briefly mentioned that very hot topic with an example ripped from the news: In 1962, Sherry Finkbine, an Arizona actress who hosted a local version of the kiddie show Romper Room, made headlines for seeking an abortion after ingesting some pills that she did not know contained Thalidomide, known to cause severe birth defects. She was pregnant with her fifth child and her doctor recommended a “therapeutic abortion.” Having been assured anonymity, Finkbine spoke to a newspaper in order to alert other women to the dangers of the drug. When her identity was revealed, she received death threats, lost her job, and endured public shaming as well as legal threats before flying to Sweden to have the procedure. The surgeon informed her that the fetus had one arm and no legs and could not have survived.

  The Finkbine case was pivotal in the growing call for abortion rights; after covering the story, The New York Times published an editorial calling for reform of the archaic abortion standards. It might have made for absorbing and controversial television, but it’s hard to envision any program director green-lighting a show by a woman given to pushing such flammable envelopes.

  Nothing sold. With much the same wisdom that single-girl Helen had declared herself “America’s guest” rather than inept hostess, she abandoned the notion of becoming a network show runner and settled back into guest spots as the infamous and provocative Helen Gurley Brown. After all, she had another book to sell.

  PART THREE

  New York

  Give me such shows—give me the streets of Manhattan!

  —Walt Whitman, “Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun”

  19

  She’ll Take Manhattan

  New York, I soon recognized, loves women, whereas Los Angeles loves girls.

  —HGB, I’m Wild Again

  IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1963, the Browns closed the door on 515 Radcliffe Avenue. With some difficulty, they wrangled their two Siamese cats, Samantha and Gregory, and set off to spend the rest of their lives as New Yorkers. Toting the yowling cats in a carrier, David and Helen tucked themselves into a first-class compartment on a swift eastbound train, the City of Los Angeles. Their pared-down possessions would follow in a van, and not too quickly, they hoped. They still did not have a place to live. In Chicago, the menagerie changed trains for the Broadway Limited. It was a pleasant, cushy journey, as David described it, save for the nervous Samantha’s penchant for peeing on him in
the upper berth.

  Upon arriving in Manhattan, they checked into the Dorset Hotel, left the maids to deal with the disoriented felines, and went in search of an apartment. It didn’t take them long to decide; home was to be on the “Gold Coast,” 505 Park Avenue at East Sixty-Fifth Street, in an apartment costing a shocking $550 a month. At first, David noticed that his wife seemed disoriented. “Helen became—may I say?—catatonic and was afraid to leave the apartment in a scary new city far from her bright, sunny, friendly Southern California. There were bad patches, and Gregory and Samantha, in their catlike way, responded to them all. Sometimes nervous, sometimes hissing, they were aware.”

  It helped tremendously that Charlotte Kelly was already a New Yorker, albeit of recent vintage. She gave the Browns a welcome cocktail party; it was also somewhat of a thank-you for helping her build a new and lively career. Back in Los Angeles, David Brown had helped her get her job as executive secretary to the producer David O. Selznick, who was trying to mount a theatrical production of Gone With the Wind that he hoped to open on Broadway. Selznick was moving all his operations to Manhattan for six months, and Kelly went along, having little idea what she had signed on for.

  The secretarial work was copious and exacting; Kelly’s new boss was a perfectionist known as “David O. Semicolon.” His personal life was as tumultuous as his prose was orderly. Kelly regaled the Browns with the ongoing adventures of life in the great man’s ménage, which included Selznick’s wife, the actress Jennifer Jones, their six-year-old daughter, her full-time nanny, and Kelly as secretary and general factotum, in a capacious suite at the St. Regis hotel. Said Kelly, “We settled in like a ship of fools.”

  She took dictation at warp speed, ran to FAO Schwarz for lavish toys, and acted as liaison between the hotel and Selznick’s studio, which sent a weekly expense check for ten thousand dollars. Helen loved getting her friend’s dishy dispatches on life with “DOS,” especially because the hotel suite was teeming with exotic visitors: Lauren Bacall, the Duke of Windsor, Leonard Bernstein, Salvador Dalí, and Truman Capote, along with the Selznicks’ grown children from previous marriages and a Japanese pyrotechnics team claiming to have invented a technique to safely create a raging fire onstage. Selznick was determined to re-create the realistic burning of Atlanta as the ultimate theatrical experience, without singeing eyebrows in the orchestra seats.

  Soon into the Manhattan stay, Selznick contracted a case of infectious hepatitis and the suite was turned into a hospital ward with a quarantine section. His recovery was slow and the Broadway production fizzled. The Selznicks retreated to Hollywood. Kelly stayed in New York. Selznick had some parting advice. Having watched Kelly flail through frequent romantic and financial crises and knowing her charged family history, he advised her to go into therapy: “You are the most self-destructive young woman I have ever known and if that remains unexplored and unresolved, your assets will not serve you—for they will never reach fruition. And that would be a shame.”

  For years, Helen and Charlotte had discussed how their missing fathers may have affected their relationships with men, their strained upbringings, the mutual worry that as grateful if shaky escapees, they might just lose it all, anytime. Finally, with Helen’s urging as well, Kelly did begin therapy. She settled in as an editorial assistant at Ladies’ Home Journal and soon rose to a public relations position there. She had found a $140 a month apartment in a stately Stanford White building in the East Eighties. Helen and David were just a short walk away on Park Avenue, and they were a stabilizing anchor. The two women were thrilled to be together again.

  * * *

  The Browns’ New York work lives had gotten under way as soon as they arrived. David began his new job at New American Library and Helen’s first “Woman Alone” column appeared in about fifty newspapers nationwide. Given her work on the second book and the newspaper endeavor, there were weeks when Helen did not leave the apartment but once or twice. She had spread herself very thin and some of the “Woman Alone” columns read as though they were quickly dashed off, retreads such as “27 Ways to Spend Saturday Night,” “Delectable After Forty,” and a zippy paean to Gladys Lindberg’s “High Powered Meat Loaf.” She also tackled subjects ranging from good nutrition on a low budget to dating advice for single mothers, the benefits of therapy (“To Shrink or Not to Shrink”), dealing with chronic blues (“Flight from Depression City”), and a series of columns, “Women Alone—Second ’Round,” devoted to widows and divorcées.

  One column read as a book review of sorts. An original typescript slated for June 28, 1963, is titled “Envy Anyone?” It is a rousing hurrah for a fascinating and heartening book that Helen had come across, The Feminine Mystique. (Helen misspelled the author Betty Friedan’s name throughout as “Frieden.”) That landmark feminist platform had been published eight months after Sex and the Single Girl, in February 1963. It landed smack in the heartland, excerpted in both McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal, which conferred a combined readership of 36 million, most of them housewives. The Feminine Mystique hit the New York Times bestseller list in early May and stayed there for six weeks. Helen’s column about it never ran in newspapers; presumably it was spiked because the book had been out so long before Helen discovered it. Her unedited typescript explains why she found the book “wonderful.”

  “With an impressive body of research, Mrs. Frieden presents a spine-chilling account of the nameless frustration felt by many women who are supposed to be the most fortunate in the world—spoiled American wives.”

  Mrs. Friedan had minced no words, declaring that American women were trapped in the “comfortable concentration camp” of suburbia. Helen cheered the skewering of some apple pandowdy shibboleths: “Mrs. Frieden also blames the mystique [on] women’s magazines who fill reader’s heads with recipes for Quiche Lorraine, but never a thought about the common market.” It is doubtful that Helen herself spent much time pondering international trade agreements, save for their effect on perfume duties at foreign airports. The larger point taken: it was time to get homemakers’ heads out of the oven.

  The Brown and Friedan readerships were complementary segments of American womanhood, taking in mostly working class singles and securely if not happily married middle class wives. Helen clearly felt a resonance in Friedan’s scholarly wake-up call. With its opening evocation of the “strange stirring” among married American women, of the silent question so often asked (“Is this all?”), the audacious unveiling of “the problem that has no name,” Friedan’s book seemed to validate all of Helen’s diatribes on the stultifying life of the American wife.

  Friedan could speak as one of them, though she had more advantages than many. She was married to Carl Friedan, an advertising executive; they had three children and lived in an eleven-room house in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York. Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein a year before Helen in 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan was a formidable researcher, thinker, and writer. As an undergraduate at Smith College, she campaigned for unionizing the college housekeepers. As a graduate student at Berkeley she studied psychology with Erik Erikson. She had an early career as a labor journalist. As a married woman with three young children, she also had household help three to four days a week; it afforded her that precious commodity lost to so many homemakers: time to think. To research her book, she was able to conduct all those interviews with her former Smith classmates, to sink herself into Freud and Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey and Bruno Bettelheim, whose research and scholarship helped support Friedan’s subversive conclusions.

  The two noisy outliers took vastly different paths after their bestsellers. Helen would carve her niche well outside the complacent circle of the “Seven Sisters” women’s magazines. Friedan got divorced and made a new, activist life on the barricades. Three years after writing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan became the inaugural president of the National Organization for Women, and along with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus.


  Helen wrote cute, but took the enormous step of starting the conversation on women’s sexual needs and rights. Friedan wrote canon; The Feminine Mystique has enjoyed lasting sales—more than 3 million since its initial publication, with a new edition for its fiftieth anniversary in 2013. It will command gender studies attention in perpetuity. The book has also been assailed periodically by contemporary critics challenging everything from its primary sourcing to its exclusion of working class and nonwhite women. Such are the cycles of reverence and revisionism accorded a true revolutionary.

  It would serve little purpose to venture into that well-trampled thicket here, or to parse the vast and obvious differences between Friedan’s and Brown’s high-impact books. Of more interest will be the women’s interactions once Helen acquires the subversive propagandist tool they both derided in their first books: a women’s magazine of her own.

  * * *

  Not long after the Browns had settled in on Park Avenue, Helen began a close friendship with another female iconoclast, a fabulous creature unlike anyone she had ever met. It happened by accident. Helen was headed home, hurrying against the spring chill, when a red light stranded her on the manicured, tulip-trimmed traffic island that bisects Park Avenue. She nearly bumped into a statuesque, impeccably made-up woman and her shorter, balding husband. Having just moved to the city, Helen did not recognize the face of the attractive but dreadfully untalented actress who had settled for being the pitchwoman for Schiffli Lace embroidery supplies in ubiquitous metropolitan-area TV ads. From beneath a tower of raven hair, the stranger stared closely at the smaller woman.