“You’re Helen Gurley Brown!”
“Yes.”
“I’m Jacqueline Susann.” She introduced her husband, the producer Irving Mansfield. Within a minute or two, the women discovered their connections. Both were Geis authors; Susann’s paean to her French poodle, Every Night, Josephine!, was about to be published and become a surprise hit. Letty Pogrebin and Berney Geis, still flush with the success of Helen’s book tour, had worked up a similarly punishing itinerary for Susann.
As she was getting ready to tour for Josephine, Susann was already pecking at some attempted fiction that would become, with editorial shoveling and grammatical whippings that rivaled the labors in the Stygian stables, Valley of the Dolls. If Helen wrote in “snippets and smatterings,” Susann was given to mere sentence fragments and participles that did not so much dangle as screech and drown. No matter—Susann, too, “wrote what she knew,” which was Hollywood backstage and backstabbing. That she had failed as an actress and daily popped the pills or “dolls” to assuage her own deep pains and sadness lent the book that certain salable “verisimilitude” Helen had touted to Playboy. Like Helen, Jackie had been “that girl” to too many unappreciative men in Los Angeles.
The trio stood comparing notes as the lights changed and changed again and traffic roared by. It was the beginning of a close couples’ friendship between the producers and their infamous wives. Berney Geis was glad for the camaraderie of his authors; Helen was a perfect example to invoke. She was hands-down his hardest-working author, she loved money and would do nearly anything to maximize her profile and her sales. Jackie Susann was also very, very interested in money. Once she got out on the road and found herself booked at a radio station in some no-name town with wattage that barely reached the state highway, she’d bawl at Geis on the phone: “Did Helen Gurley Brown do that?”
Assured that she had indeed, Susann would soldier on. Once Helen was out on her Sex and the Office tour, they would sometimes do all-night radio shows together; their outrageous, dynamic tag team would become much beloved by night jocks like Long John Nebel. Together, the “sex lady” Helen and the unabashedly profane Jackie made riveting radio. Just a coupla great dames, dishing in the dark.
Helen was thrilled to have such a knockout gal pal. She told Susann’s biographer Barbara Seaman, “I loved the way she looked because it was always showbizzy. It was sequins, it was chiffon, it was high heels and ankle straps and lots of jewelry and the beautiful dark hair. I adored her.” Susann could pull off a leopard-skin pillbox hat, a sable coat, a diamond ring the size of a cocktail olive. Never mind that the spiteful literati-gnome Truman Capote would famously liken Susann to “a truck driver in drag.” Susann subscribed to the PR agent’s bromide that any publicity is good; her husband agreed.
Like David Brown, Irving Mansfield was canny and tireless in promoting his wife. Soon, the Mansfields would become regular visitors at the Browns’ apartment. Susann did not cook or even suffer to have a kitchen, preferring hotel life. The refrigerator in the Mansfields’ Central Park South suite in the Navarro Hotel contained only champagne, a jar of capers, and dog food.
* * *
By the spring of 1964, after almost a year’s work, Helen was nearly done writing Sex and the Office. This time, the editorial exchanges between Helen and Geis were bumpy, some bordering on cranky; there would be many more discrepancies between her draft manuscripts and the final product. As they hashed out their considerable differences, there was some soothing news: Sex and the Office was a financial success before it was fully written. True to his sub rights imperative, Geis had already sold paperback rights to Pocket Books for $125,000, based only on a scant twenty-page outline.
Sex and the Office was not the book Helen had envisioned, chiefly for its omissions. What emerged from her disputes with Geis was a flash-fried hash of a book, oddly disjointed and teeming with repurposed characters and tales from Sex and the Single Girl. There was some solid advice on strategizing, professional conduct, jousting with office bullies, and negotiating salary issues. Finally, if briefly, Helen addressed the needs of the working mother. But the end product was once again stripped of the issues that mattered so much to its author, birth control and abortion. She had complained to Playboy that the excisions of those subjects from her first book had to do with money: “He [Geis] thought it might hurt sales … and if I went so far as to tell a girl how not to have a baby we might be thrown out of the Author’s League or something. It was a commercial decision.” It was also a legal imperative; even Letty Pogrebin agreed. Contraception was still a crime in some states and abortion was still outlawed nationwide. Helen and her publisher might be seen as condoning criminal behavior.
Geis also insisted that Helen move the section on strategies for women wanting to advance in their workplaces from the front to the back of the book; he contended that only a minority of Helen’s readers—about 10 percent—had such aspirations. It might be off-putting, even threatening, to display all that naked aspiration in a chapter called “The Keys to the Men’s Room” up front. Geis did approve Helen’s spicy “reportage” in a chapter titled “Three Little Bedtime Stories.” Helen claimed to have sat down with three women and taped their recollections of office-related sex. All three “interviewees” tell their tales in the singular, flimsily disguised voice of Helen Gurley Brown.
The kinky vignettes are gratuitous and rather Fifty Shades of Grey. The first is simply a boff-a-thon between a married TV producer and a single freelancer who sometimes works with him. (“Eight times for the weekend, if you want to know the box score.”) The second recycles another triste secretarial “keptive.” The third is a misbegotten whopper: Lyle, the “cuckoo-nut.” The employers of the narrator, Miss Lanebrawn, have hired an efficiency expert named Lyle. (While at FC&B, Helen did have an affair with a nerdy “motivational researcher” who wore turquoise socks and, she claimed, wanted to marry her.) He tricks her into an affair, claiming she has been promised to him sexually by her employers as payment. Soon he makes her ride in his car topless. Then the recitation purples like an ugly contusion: she gives him silk scarves; he binds her, facedown, with a pillow in her mouth, whacks her across the rump with a riding crop, then makes love to her. She finds the après-flogging sex thrilling. Afterward, Miss Lanebrawn admires her trophies: “I used to look at them, fascinated. They were exotic. Women like bruises, I think, maybe even non-cuckoo women … Maybe bruises make women feel feminine and helpless.”
Reader, she marries the creep.
Besides affording a flash of Helen’s fantasies in the slightly dark, rough trade scenarios that play out in the book and in her unpublished writings, there is nothing in these vignettes to help or inspire the average single woman in an office setting. Even as cautionary tales, they are just … cuckoo.
Some of the most credible aspects of Sex and the Office are presented as an afterthought. Geis decided to include an appendix about all nineteen of Helen’s jobs, presented as book “research.” Since the economics of including them in the 309-page book as part of the main text were unworkable, Geis scrunched them into tiny agate type, with his own introduction, and titled it “The Perils of Little Helen.” Despite the pseudonyms employed for bosses, companies, and lovers, “The Perils” is a reasonably accurate curriculum vitae for anyone trying to trace Helen’s workplace persecutions and ascensions. But when it was published, it was as a long, forgettable footnote in micro-type.
* * *
Sometime during that busy summer of 1964, Cleo arrived in New York for a visit. Thirty years after their trips to the Chicago World’s Fair, mother and daughter made plans to visit the New York World’s Fair, just the two of them.
This time, the exposition was rising up from a body of water somewhat less majestic than Lake Michigan—the sulfurous marshlands of Flushing Meadows. The attractions were built on a notorious dump site. A fierce tempest was brewing as mother and daughter bounced along in the backseat of a yellow cab through the unknown borough of Que
ens. They still couldn’t see that twelve-story U.S. Steel “Unisphere” globe pictured in all the papers. Where in heaven’s name were they? Helen, still new to the city and ever leery of being taken for a ride, was hectoring the driver. Cleo took his side. She told him, “Don’t pay any attention to her, she doesn’t know anything.” She went on to warn him that her daughter had a rather bad temper. Helen was struck by a sudden blaze of anger. Later she said it was just reflex, but yes, she did it—Helen reached over and hit her mother. It was a good solid swat.
Resentment had been simmering for two years, since Helen had read Cleo’s letter begging her not to publish Sex and the Single Girl. At forty-two, Helen had heard more than enough about her foibles from the broody termagant in the flat little hat. She remained unrepentant about having raised her hand to her. Later, when working on her Broadway musical project, Helen would tell Lyn Tornabene that she’d be just fine with actually staging the backseat smackdown to make a point: Cleo could be such a royal pain.
How dutifully, and sometimes desperately, Helen had tried to do right by Cleo and Mary. It was a bifurcation of affection and energy that only deepened as her own happiness and success grew. For forty years, she would keep to a faithful routine: almost daily letters to Mary and Cleo, two phone calls a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, and at least two trips a year to visit them. Since her marriage, Helen had never wavered in her financial and emotional support for her mother and sister, with her husband’s full approval.
Having insisted on the right to monitor household finances soon after the wedding, Helen made sure that she had a hand in all domestic money decisions, though David would remain the point man on all of her business negotiations. A draft of a will made in 1964 indicated that David Brown left all of his property to his wife, except for a $15,000 bequest to Bruce, who would inherit any remains of the estate following his stepmother’s death. Should Bruce predecease Helen, the remaining estate was to be divided between David’s alma maters, Stanford and Columbia Universities, upon Helen’s death. At the time the draft was made, the Browns’ net worth was stated to be about $250,000, part of it a $150,000 life insurance policy. A notation indicated that Mrs. Brown also wished to provide for her mother and sister, Mrs. Bryan and Mrs. Alford.
Mary Gurley had married. To Helen’s amazement and initial relief, her sad, lonely sister became the wife of one George Alford, whom she met while having consultations on her legs at a veteran’s rehabilitation facility in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Veterans of World War II and Korea were having successes with new treatments there, but given the total paralysis of Mary’s legs, it was found that she hadn’t the strength to ever relearn to walk with crutches and braces. It meant the end of hope, but she had fallen in love. At last, Mary might have someone to love, support, and care for her, finally giving her a certain independence. When the couple met, Alford was seeking relief at the rehab facility for debilitating pain. An elevator accident had maimed Mary’s new husband. This one occurred in a grain elevator. Alford’s shoulder was crushed and nerves were badly damaged. His pain was unremitting. The couple settled in Shawnee, Oklahoma, not far from the capital, Oklahoma City, and its hospitals.
It soon became clear that man and wife carried deeper troubles to their marriage. The sheer difficulty of Mary’s life had worn her down; she was an alcoholic and she chain-smoked, which was very bad for her polio-damaged lungs. To her sister’s evident horror, Mary had also become obese. Soon, there were escalating troubles with Mary’s husband. Complicating his own alcohol dependency, George Alford’s ceaseless pain had left him addicted to prescription drugs.
So began a fresh round of family agonies and ministrations. There was little Cleo could do in Osage; it would fall to Helen to try to sort it all out. She dreaded the “phone calls from hell,” and struggled with the tangle of anger and grim empathy that besets an addict’s loved ones. Of the ordeal with Mary’s husband, Helen wrote, “For as long as he lived, I was involved with his pain … I schlepped him many places trying to find doctors or treatments that would help. George belonged to my sister, was usually good and helpful with her, so he went with the territory for me.” Helen and David paid for his treatment and transportation at facilities from Salt Lake City to Manhattan’s NYU Hospital.
After a few lapses, Mary did get sober with the help of AA; and she grew close to friends at the Methodist church where the meetings were held, did AA support work, and got involved with stray cat rescue. Helen didn’t mind attending AA meetings with Mary when she visited. But even as a cat lover, she was sorely taxed when she bedded down on the Alfords’ living room couch; six to eight cats prowled and climbed over her at any given time; candles and room deodorants did little to dispel l’eau du chat and the added pungency of two rescue mutts. Eventually, Helen would switch to the relative comforts of the Shawnee Holiday Inn.
The trips to Oklahoma were not all pain and drudgery. Helen remembered some of them as “deep-dish soul visits” with her sister, sitting by Mary’s bed as they recalled their childhood, listening to music (mostly Mary’s country favorites), watching the Westminster Dog Show on TV, and chowing down on the tamale pie and baked apples served by Mary’s housekeeper. The ties that bind soothed both women in those moments, at least temporarily.
At summer’s end, with the nettlesome Cleo back in Osage and the Alfords reasonably stabilized, Helen arrayed her wardrobe and packed up for her Sex and the Office tour. Taxing as it was, the road trip might be a welcome escape. She gladly stepped back into Helen Time, alone, focused, and unflappable. Or so she thought.
20
“How Dare You, Helen Gurley Brown?”
I just want to say that this Sex for the Secretary creature—whatever her name is—certainly isn’t contributing to the morals in this country. It’s pathetic. Statistics show.
—caller on a radio show during HGB’s Sex and the Office publicity tour
“WE ARE GETTING OVEREXPOSURE SIGNALS ON HGB.”
As Letty Pogrebin began lining up the publicity campaign for Sex and the Office, there were glimmerings of resistance. She alerted the Browns. She had heard it from The Les Crane Show, The Tonight Show, and others: Helen had just been on the air too much and was not of interest to their audiences at the moment. Even Pogrebin’s PR wizardry had been neutralized. Admitting defeat, she told Helen and David that “no amount of suggesting, controversy proposals or cajoling can change their minds it seems.” It was time for Helen to take some lumps, a fate not unusual for the sophomore outings of first-time authors with “surprise” bestsellers.
Pogrebin was able to book Helen on a fairly new talk show in Cleveland. It seemed tame enough; its host had done a stint on Hi, Ladies, a Chicago daytime klatch given to such segments as “Cleaning with Ammonia.” Helen understood from her first book tour that the Midwest could be a touchy and censorious marketplace for a disruptive female, however charming. She had come to recognize the acrid tang of sanctimony emitted by both sexes; the first whiff would put her on her guard.
On September 21, 1964, she sensed a vague tension almost as soon as she took her chair onstage in the bare-bones thirty-eight-by-one-hundred-foot studio of The Mike Douglas Show at station KYW. The audience of about seventy people, mostly women, sat wedged in a set of bleachers. In hindsight, Helen thought it must have been a setup, a live ambush. There was something fishy, despite the welcoming smile of her host.
Douglas was a bland and affable sort, a former band singer/piano player who was somehow drawing big ratings for the show’s delighted parent company, Westinghouse. On the production staff was the future Fox News mastermind and CEO Roger Ailes, who would famously meet Richard Nixon in the program’s greenroom in 1968 and become his media guru for the presidential campaign. Ailes had begun on the Douglas show as a sixty-eight-dollar-a-week prop boy but had advanced to producer by the time Helen arrived on her book tour. He had been schooled in entertainment value by his boss, another very young producer and show runner from Chicago, Forrest “Woody” Fraser,
who was just twenty-three when he conceived and sold the Douglas show to Westinghouse.
Ailes’s biographer Gabriel Sherman wrote about the early schooling of the Fox power broker: “From Fraser he [Ailes] learned that great TV had more to do with drama—conflict, surprise, spontaneity—than with expensive sets … Fraser said, ‘The most important ingredient for a daily show was to keep it fresh, and one way was to keep people off balance, not knowing what would happen, sitting on the edge of their seats.’” Fraser and Ailes would throw in mystery guests and surprise gags. “The occasional ambushes notwithstanding,” Sherman concluded, “it was a safe place.”
For the most part, that was true. But Woody Fraser had the brashness of youth and the desire to put his new show on the map. He was willing to tweak the daytime talk show formula and unafraid to make the big “asks” at KYW. So far he had been suitably rewarded: he got John Lennon and Yoko Ono to act as cohosts for a week, gave Malcolm X one of his first TV forums, and coaxed a nervous young Barbra Streisand through one of her early TV appearances. The eclectic mix and the show’s ratings, impressive for a small midwestern production, helped the Douglas show become the first syndicated daytime program in television.
Now eighty and “working harder now than I did then,” Fraser called from his car, stuck in the rush hour honk of a Los Angeles traffic jam; he was on his way home from Universal Studios, one of a few places he still has programming. He also runs a few shows on Fox TV in New York. “Talk to me,” he began, “so I won’t be bored to death out here.”
He would like to get one thing straight from the jump: Helen brought the whole thing on herself. Fraser said that he got a phone call from this Helen Gurley Brown woman pitching Sex and the Office. Hard. “We had never done a book before. She said that it was a breakthrough book, she was very candid about this, saying books would sell.” Fraser was undecided but Helen was persistent. “She called me back two or three weeks later. She talked me into it. I thought she was going to be this hot New York chick. She was extremely smart and knew how to sell. She was a woman with vision, you know what I mean?” He questioned his instincts when she finally arrived. “She walked into the studio and I thought, ‘Holy shit, we’ve got nothing here.’ She was very plain, no makeup, didn’t have much of a shape. The minute she opened her mouth, I said, okay, this is a sharp, sharp woman. All I wanted to do at twenty-three was do the best show I could. And right away, she was money in the bank.”
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