Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  He assigned Ailes to produce her book segment, briefing Douglas and settling their guest into a rudimentary greenroom. Fraser sat down to compose some provocative suggestions for the audience Q and A session. Helen had agreed to take questions from the audience, but she had no idea that Fraser would rile them up ahead of time. Her instincts were correct; it was a setup of sorts.

  “I would make sure that the [audience] questions were not just ‘How do you do your hair?’ No. It was ‘Would you have sex with someone in your office, maybe a married person?’ They were incendiary questions, let’s put it that way.”

  Fraser then stirred the pot further; his questions were read to the audience as cues for writing their own. “I did all the audience warm-up. I would ask, ‘Is this book based on real examples of people cheating in the office? Why are you advocating sex in the office? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to do a book like this, why did you write that book?’”

  Duly roused by Fraser’s intro, the audience members scribbled questions before the show; Fraser went over them and selected eight. The chosen interrogators could hold their written questions at their sides but were instructed not to read them. Fraser wanted fresh, impassioned delivery; it made for better TV.

  Recalling that day, Helen said that she had felt uneasy from the start. The studio audience gave off a restive sort of buzz. She would come to believe that the audience had been purposely packed with angry housewives come to confront the Scarlet Woman. She remembered it with a shudder: “There were dozens of them and one of me. It was rough.” Once the Q and A segment began, they flew at her like furies, shouting over her answers, flinging accusations. Fraser said that the studio’s phones trilled instantly, and madly. “We had like fourteen lines in the office. When I had Malcolm X on, the phones went nuts. When I had Helen Gurley Brown on, same thing, people yelling ‘Take her off the air, she’s a sex queen!’ People didn’t swear then like they do now, they were more thoughtful, like ‘I’m surprised Mike Douglas would condone this kind of woman.’”

  In the studio, the unexpected and collective anger may have blown back Helen’s hair, but it did not ruffle her composure. Fraser and Ailes stood watching, amazed at the woman’s moxie. “You could never put her in a corner, she would always fight her way out. And she wasn’t afraid to be very clear about the message in what she wrote, which is ‘This is the way life is. Your guy is going to cheat on you and sex rules the world. And it rules the world if you’re single or married.’”

  There it was again, Helen’s impolitic, hot-button truth: single women were having and enjoying sex, with whomever they chose. Get used to it.

  Most of the Douglas audience had never read the book, Helen was sure. What could they have been so riled up about? “God, were they angry,” she said. “They were furious.” This had never happened anywhere else. The insults were varied and colorful but the general tenor was outrage: How dare you?

  When the cameras’ red lights blinked off, Helen bolted to the waiting car and away from the flying squad of heartland harpies. They did not threaten her physically, but all those faces contorted with anger, the sheer noise of them was unbearable. She cried. When she called David to tell him how frightened she had been, how she might want to stop putting herself out there like that, he was sympathetic but firm. Helen simply had to stay out there and do the shows. She would always have to do the shows. He explained: “We are pimp and prostitute, without any question.”

  He meant it in the nicest way; she understood and accepted his characterization. David and Berney Geis had sent her out there for whatever form of love or lashings the public might bestow; she knew the risks. Helen had walked into it with a sincere heart and a straightforward mission: sell it. The Brown family enterprise was up and running, though it had yet to hum with peak precision and profit margin. The collaborative process was direct and efficient: David dreamed up an idea; Helen wrote it, labored over its refinement, and performed it superbly. Then they took it to the bank.

  Of course it was up to the front woman to take the heat. The women in Cleveland weren’t the majority, they were just loud and upset and possibly reacting to some unfortunate misunderstanding. After all, there had been plenty of admiring, grateful women along the way as well, those who told Helen their own stories at book signings, grasped her hands and thanked her many times over. At KYW, Woody Fraser was delighted with the outcome and would have her back on the show several times. “In Cleveland she was fabulous. We got along great. I didn’t realize till this day that I scared the shit out of her.”

  Gamely, Helen went on with her tour. In her papers at Smith there is a note to Roger Ailes, thanking him for “putting me on the map in Cleveland.” Ailes sent Helen Christmas cards for some years; she wrote him gushing notes from time to time during his ascent to political and media power broker for the conservative right. A decade after that first Douglas show, Fraser would book Helen as a regular member of his on-air “family” on the program he created for ABC, Good Morning America. Helen seemed to bear both men only goodwill for the Shaming in Cleveland. They all shared a like-mindedness on the subject of compelling TV: keep ’em watching, no matter what.

  Said Fraser, “Fabulous woman.”

  * * *

  Just how good was she out there? How potent a pitchwoman?

  As you settle in beneath a pair of headphones in the archives at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan to summon the aural HGB of so very many radio outings, it is helpful to close your eyes and listen to that voice speaking in the dark. Often, in big cities and at lesser stations of questionable wattage, Helen did late or all-night radio shows—whatever it took. Her voice is well suited to the dark, whispery in tone, pleasant and young-sounding, with a musky minor note of boudoir. No matter the insult hurled her way by a ratings-driven host, her reply is devoid of anger or hurt; she is a nice, reasonable woman who never raises her voice and offers a polite parry for every megawatt affront.

  Listen in as she braves the Los Angeles lair of Joe Pyne, a crusty primogenitor of the Limbaugh/Beck/O’Reilly yawp-radio cabal. Pyne was a tough, crabbed, chain-smoking right-winger who zinged his guests and callers with a quiverful of signature insults: “Go gargle with razor blades!”

  In Helen Brown, he booked a pigeon and got a smiling lynx. At her first cue, Helen leaned in to the mike: “This is Helen Gurley Brown, and I think the office is the sexiest place on earth!”

  “This is Joe Pyne, and I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  Oh yes he does. Hear him thunder after his guest burbles about the glories of lunchtime trysts with a married boss: “You’ve got a chapter here, ‘The Matinee,’ where you actually instruct a young girl how to have an affair during the lunch hour with a married man in the office. You even give her recipes. How dare you, Helen Gurley Brown? You terrible woman. You have instructed this girl almost as someone conducting a symphony. She starts out making sure all the preparations are right so the action begins as soon as he walks in the door.”

  Pyne reads a recipe title for a hot lunch: “Fishy Fodder for a Lover.”

  Consider them, both grinning across the studio desk in their glass recording booth, a pair of savvy cage wrestlers who both know exactly what they must do in between swap meet announcements and thirty-second spots for psoriasis cures. Keep them. Make them stay, hanging curious in the dark. Pyne presses:

  “I never met anyone before who not only is in favor of sin but writes a book on instructions for it!”

  Imagine, too, David Brown, lifelong radio buff, wreathed in pipe smoke and listening in from his Park Avenue perch with a smile of deep satisfaction as his agile darling bats it back, sweetly: “Joe, sometimes I think there was no Santy Claus in your life.”

  Pyne tries another tack; with all this talk of husband poaching, would she rather go back to her predatory single days?

  “No, I’m delighted to be married. I’ve been married five years. I married a dreamboat and I’m very happy with him. However, I don’t wish I’
d met him any earlier. I met him when I was thirty-six, married him when I was thirty-seven, and I did enjoy all those single years. I must say I kind of identify more with single girls than I do with wives, that’s true.”

  “Thank you, Helen Gurley Brown, you terrible woman. This is Joe Pyne.”

  * * *

  One reporter, as slim and bird-boned as her quarry, had been peering at Helen day and night through the studio glass as the hiss and yowl of crackpot America was piped out beyond the sound booth. On assignment for The Saturday Evening Post, thirty-one-year-old Joan Didion was spending a few days hitting California bookstores and radio stations with Mrs. Brown on that Sex and the Office tour, a punishing marathon of more than three hundred radio and TV shows—mostly radio, given Pogrebin’s difficulty in booking TV spots. Helen made stops at friendly forums such as Girl Talk and Long John Nebel’s surreal midnight-to-5:00-a.m. radio shows, as well as the irascible Pyne’s smoky lair.

  It is delicious to picture these two tiny and angular women taking each other’s measure in greenrooms and hotel coffee shops along the tour. These were Californians of diametrically opposed trajectories and miens, the commercial and the intellectual, the “Arkie” arriviste and the native daughter. Didion went to school with Arkie and Okie migrants resettled in the Sacramento Valley. She did not care for them much. She was of undiluted, barrel-aged West Coast stock; some of her maternal ancestors wagon-trained across the plains in the company of the doomed Donner party before they had the luck or good sense to drop off at the Humboldt Sink in Nevada and veer north to Oregon.

  Didion was younger than her interview subject by twelve years. The cultural distinction between them was as wide as the Mojave. And over their careers, the women would amass their very different cadres of fan girls. Yet they shared some striking similarities. Both of them were painfully thin, prone to depression, and known to be epic public criers. They sobbed anywhere from the strain of it all, Didion in subways and Laundromats, Helen in TV studios, restaurants, in the middle of Park Avenue. From an early age, Cleo Gurley had burdened her girl with the anxiety of not being “pretty enough,” and Eduene Didion informed Joan that she was destined for the often crippling fragility of the women in her family. Both writers had childhoods that, owing to Cleo’s misfortunes and Frank Didion’s military service, found both families struggling to get by in too many cheap, temporary homes.

  There was one crucial nexus shared by Joan Didion and Helen Gurley Brown: both were restless women of strong ambition who changed their fortunes dramatically with winning entries in contests run by Condé Nast monthlies. Didion had been a Mademoiselle guest editor, or “GE,” flown to New York City to work on the magazine’s “College Issue.” That collegiate summer idyll was made famous by the poet Sylvia Plath’s nightmarish rendition of the experience in her novel, The Bell Jar. At the end of her GE service, Plath threw her clothes off the roof of the Barbizon Hotel and went home in a borrowed peasant blouse. She made her first suicide attempt while the special 1953 guest editor issue of Mademoiselle was still on the stands.

  Successful survivors include the writers Joyce Carol Oates, Meg Wolitzer, Mona Simpson, Francine du Plessix Gray, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, and Ann Beattie, the fashion designer Betsey Johnson, and the actress Ali MacGraw. Being a GE conferred a public and prestigious conduit; smart, gifted women surfaced and shone. Wolitzer, who was in the final “class” of GEs in 1979, put it this way: “To me, Mademoiselle was to Vogue what Skipper was to Barbie: her younger, crisply put-together sister who read Mary McCarthy and attended a Seven Sisters college instead of lolling around the Dream House all day.”

  Didion had won her Mademoiselle spot by submitting a draft of a short story; as a rising college senior she flew to New York in May 1955 for her summer turn as GE. Precocious talent that she was, Didion was then welcomed into a second Condé Nast sisterhood. The “Prix de Paris” contest at Vogue was for college seniors; it was the same contest that the Vassar/Sorbonne undergrad Jacqueline Bouvier had won earlier. First prize was a job, post-graduation, in either the magazine’s New York or Paris office. Didion’s winning essay for the “Prix de Paris” contest secured her a job at Vogue in New York, where she began as—yes—a promotional copywriter, churning out thirty-line spurts of enthusiastic prose, “the kind that was sent to stores as advertising support.”

  One of her first encounters at Vogue was with the personnel director, Mary Campbell, the same compassionate soul who had phoned out to the West Coast and urged Don Belding to promote Miss Gurley. Campbell had begun her career as personal secretary to Condé Nast himself; by 1955, she had shepherded and encouraged hundreds of bright young women. Encountering pale, lost-looking Didion in the corridors, Campbell would ask her, “Have you called your mother?” If the answer was “not lately,” she was marched into Campbell’s office to dial Eduene.

  The young women who won early contests at Glamour were flown to New York for final judging at Condé Nast headquarters, but not for on-site editorial internships. Most were already working women, like Helen. Who could get the time off? An article and photo in the magazine, a week’s vacation in Hawaii or Europe, some free fashions from advertisers, and a bit of cash would do nicely. Glamour did add a “Top Ten College Girls” contest, changed to “College Women” as the women’s movement gained strength; its 1972 winners included Kate White, who would be the third editor in chief of Cosmo and, later, a bestselling novelist. While Mademoiselle and Vogue guest editorships were golden portals for “serious” writers, the two Glamour magazine winners who went on to create global empires—Helen Gurley and Martha Kostyra (Stewart), winner in 1961’s “Top Ten College Girls”—were cited for their taste and style. Their shared aesthetic: aspirational practicality. Art or commerce, poems or essays, a glossy magazine or enamelware casseroles sold at Macy’s—all their achievements spoke to the ambitions, aesthetics, and exigencies of these young women’s lives. Despite the many justifiable criticisms of women’s magazines of those times, a talented minority of the Condé Nast chosen had achieved transits beyond their dreams.

  By the time Helen had begun working on Sex and the Single Girl, Didion had earned a spot on the Vogue masthead as features editor and was soon publishing essays and short stories in the magazine as well. She also believed in hedging her bets, taking a University of California correspondence course in shopping-center theory in case this writing thing didn’t pan out. When Didion took the magazine assignment to shadow the famous Mrs. Brown toward the end of a punishing twenty-eight-city tour, Helen had sold more than two million copies of her two books combined. And so it was that in late 1964, their populist and cerebral proclivities had landed them in the same studios and green-rooms, headed toward a certain stark inevitability: pinioned by Didion’s unblinking raptor gaze, Helen Gurley Brown was deftly plucked and shredded.

  The article, “Bosses Make Lousy Lovers,” was a sharper, more skillful takedown than Shana Alexander’s snarky Life piece. As such, it’s an early example of Didion’s edgy, crystalline takes on banal and middlebrow America, this one refracted through the bent vibes and voodoo incantations of talk radio. Didion first skewered Helen’s late-night radio audience, which took in “the twilight world of the lonely, the subliterate … the culturally deprived people whose last contact with the printed and bound word was ‘Calories Don’t Count.’” She drove the shiv further: “Her market seems to be composed of people who ordinarily set eyes upon a book only when Johnny Carson holds one up.”

  At a Los Angeles station, Didion sat listening to Helen from midnight to 5:00 a.m. and wrote up the conversational segues on air as near hallucinatory, with radio callers’ secondary dialogue winding around and beneath the main “sexy office” topic:

  Say, does anyone know if rattlesnakes can swim?

  On air, Helen yattered through the aural labyrinth, dauntless. Facing Didion as an interviewer, she was enthusiastic and unguarded. She burbled brand-name affirmations of her success with the pure glee of a parvenu: she
was being accorded the best hotels, the finest champagne, real caviar, star treatment. She addressed her critics: “They can’t put me off by hinting I write to make money,” she says. “I love money. And I’m promotable. Some people aren’t … I’ve never turned down a show, never lost my temper. I do them all, and I’m always Charming’s Mother.”

  As the caravan moved on, interviewers and makeup men kept telling Mrs. Brown that she looked tired. Her days and nights were nonstop; the damnable Santa Ana winds were blowing, too, with their own sly subliminals that whispered of madness and migraines. Didion noted Helen’s responses to her hosts’ concern: “‘I should rest,’” she would say doubtfully. “‘I should get something done to my face.’”

  When she hopped off Helen’s road show, Didion paged through Helen’s two-book oeuvre and concluded, “To read, after listening to the Night Owls and their soulmates, what the author alternately calls her ‘silly little girlish books,’ her ‘little pippypoo books,’ and her ‘very sincere little books,’ is a curious experience. It is then that you realize that the voices in the night respond not to the books but to some idea of the books, not to Mrs. Brown’s written word but to the calculating provocative voice she has transmitted on more than 300 radio and television shows this past year.”