Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Didion heard it loud and clear above the schizo static of call-in America: Helen’s was the voice of the ad woman ascendant, child of the Radio Age, Boswell to beauty queens, conjurer of the thirty-second mascara spot. All those years, beginning on those grueling early media tours, Helen was not selling sex itself, but the very idea of it, the possibilities, the promise. In that fairly timorous time in America, the seduction was aimed between the ears, not at the crotch. And yes, oh my yes, Helen could still sling it, freer and more focused than ever now that the message and the royalties were her own. She was her own best client, and, as such, she was that much more effective because she believed in what she was selling. She truly did.

  Helen was also a nice woman who desperately wanted to be liked; to get her bit across, she’d damned well conduct herself like Charming’s Mother. The trouble with the increasingly skeptical reportage like Didion’s was that, unlike evanescent radio insults, the print stuff hung around. It left an acrid aftertaste. One’s friends saw it in New York and Los Angeles. How deeply did Helen feel Didion’s cuts? We shall see some dark indications further on. But at the time, she may have been too busy plotting her next move to stop and lick her wounds.

  As the promotional tour wound down and Sex and the Office was posting disappointing sales figures, a worried David wrote to Geis, “While Helen doesn’t show it or say it (and acts as though she has just written Gone With the Wind) I know her morale is low. Like the rest of us, she is depressed by the failure of SATO to become airborne … My course for the future is to get Helen back to work on something promising.”

  Helen was already on it. She seriously considered a return to the ad game, which had become a far livelier high-stakes casino, especially on Madison Avenue. Helen approached the best and brightest, a legendary ad woman and child of the Depression from rural Ohio whose ascent had been the talk of the business for nearly a decade as she rose through the giant agency McCann Erickson. Along her way, Mary Wells had already heard of the West Coast copywriter Helen Gurley, who had won some awards and gotten a bit of good buzz in the industry.

  Now in her mid-eighties, Mary Wells Lawrence (in 1967 she married the airline executive Harding Lawrence) is savoring the rewards of one of the most spectacular careers in advertising. Referring to her own revolutions, she says that she “let loose the bear” when she started her agency in 1965. By 1969, she was the highest-paid executive in all of advertising. Her firm, Wells Rich Greene, set the ad game on its blue serge derriere. Who else dared paint Braniff planes in swirling Pucci prints and dress stewardesses in swirly frocks commissioned from the maestro himself? That one signature campaign turned commercial airline travel into the wild painted zoo of kiwis, koalas, eagles, and kangaroos tethered to today’s airport gates.

  Lawrence’s revolution in advertising was supple and diverting—no more bashing the consumer with static and unimaginative close-ups of Product. “I began to theatricalize what I sold,” she explained. She ran her agency “as if it were a motion-picture company with a lot of productions happening at one time.” A few greatest hits were “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz,” for Alka-Seltzer; “I [heart] NY,” for the city’s tourist bureau; and “Flick your Bic.” Online “meme maker” apps still trade on the recurring iterations of Alka-Seltzer’s dyspeptic “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” koan, which has been famously recycled by the likes of the cartoon dunderhead Homer Simpson and Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

  Lawrence sold her company for $160 million in 1990. After some blissful years in the couple’s Italian villa, she was widowed in 2002. Now her feet barely touch the ground; she relishes the cruising life with a rotating cast of friends and grandchildren aboard her 156-foot yacht, Strangelove. When she left the twelve-person crew in its Mediterranean winter port for her customary March stopover in Manhattan, Lawrence found time to recall her strange little encounter with Helen Gurley Brown. She thinks it was probably in late 1964. She can’t quite recall, except that it was before she started her own company the following year. That would put it at the end of or just after Helen’s Sex and the Office book tour.

  But first, said Lawrence, a word about those Mad Men days. Never mind the horny hijinks you’ve seen on cable TV, or in Helen’s books. Yes, Lawrence herself did end up marrying a client. But she would have it known that there was very little sex in the office, at least in her shop. “I worked very hard. Advertising at the time was very hard because it was changing from doing something that was boring and easy to doing something very creative. We were having to sell it and resell it. It was an enormous challenge. That’s one of the things about Mad Men that amuses me—nobody at Wells Rich Greene was making love in the back room. We weren’t interested in other people. We were in love with ourselves.”

  This brought her to the very talented Mrs. Brown, who turned out to have some very definite ideas of her own worth as a copywriter. At the time they met, Lawrence was a major player at Jack Tinker & Partners, an odd duck spinoff agency, more of a think tank of imperceptible wizardry. They were working in rather unusual headquarters, a duplex suite at the Dorset Hotel. Applicants churned through all the time looking for copywriting work. Throughout her career, Wells interviewed hundreds and hundreds of hopefuls, she says. But she remembered Helen Gurley Brown quite clearly.

  “I was looking for a really terrific top-flight writer. I’d heard that she was very good. I was running Tinker by then. She [Helen] called and made an appointment. When she came in, she was charming and bright and we talked for quite a long time. I did offer her a job. She accepted. She was talking about her ability to be a great copywriter for me, about the kind of writing that she imagined she’d be doing, what she would love to do. And in the middle of that she suddenly just stopped dead and said to me, ‘Nope.’”

  Lawrence stared at her, puzzled. Helen seemed to be shaking her head slightly, working out some inner debate.

  “She looked at me very strangely and said, ‘You know, I take that back. I’m not going to work for you. I won’t work for you. You are younger than me. I realize in talking to you that my big mistake is that I should be running something myself. I should be doing what you’re doing.’

  “She said that she realized that I was already running my life, I was already the boss, I was already a star. She kept using the word ‘star.’ She said, ‘I realize talking to you that I have to be the star. I have to run something of my own, I can’t work for you, I can’t work for anybody. I have to get my own thing.’”

  Hitching her wagon to a supernova like Mary Wells in the mid-1960s could well have been a spectacular ride, if Helen could cut it. It was an uncharacteristic flare of ego and ambition that let her walk away from a slot that other copywriters of the day would have sold a kidney for. Wells started her own agency shortly after her encounter with Helen, in 1965. By the end of its first year, Wells Rich Greene had more than a hundred employees and $39 million in billings.

  Lawrence said that she never did any business with Cosmopolitan once Helen had found her place in the firmament; she had made a conscious decision not to go after women’s accounts. Like Helen, she had worked for Max Factor and found it madly stultifying. “I did not want to build a boutique agency or a fashion or a cosmetic agency. I didn’t want a small, feminine agency. I wanted an agency that competed with McCann Erickson and with all the big boys. I wanted major accounts, I wanted cars and airlines. I wanted Proctor and Gamble.”

  She never read Helen’s magazine but had periodic, cordial encounters with her, sometimes in the offices of the dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon Dr. Norman Orentreich. Helen was always charming. “Those early days of her rise, she was very much a star,” Lawrence said. “People were entranced by her, people were amused by her. They were entertained by her. They liked what she was doing.”

  Of that flashy, ad-friendly star vehicle Helen finally rode to glory, Lawrence said, “I think she was brilliant in terms of branding. I think everybody thinks she was brilliant. It took guts to blatantly tal
k about women and sex the way she did. In those days it was very unusual. I think she had innate courage.”

  From time to time, Helen did think of the advertising titan whose offer she refused. She, too, thought about the strength it took to be a woman at the top of that brutal game, wondering aloud to a friend: Did Mary Wells ever feel like a vulnerable girl? Could she still be hurt? Did she ever cry?

  21

  In Which Cosmopolitan Gets a Makeover

  In those days, Cosmopolitan was a failing horror. I had an editor in chief who kept asking if Moby Dick was the man or the whale.

  —Lyn Tornabene, former editor at the magazine

  IN THE WINTER OF 1964, Helen sat in the small dining area of the Browns’ apartment and cobbled together the beginnings of her life’s greatest triumph. On the table: a pot of glue, scissors, and a stack of old women’s magazines. It is likely that the cats were the only witnesses to the moment of creation. Painstakingly, and none too skillfully, Helen drew a shaky logo that read Femme, the proposed name of the new magazine she and David wanted to launch for that vastly underserved market, single women. It just might become that longed-for star vehicle for the restless Mrs. Brown.

  Helen’s mock-up cover for Femme featured a large close-up photo of a woman in a bikini that looks like it was clipped from an ad for diet aids; her execution might land a solid “C” in a middle school art class. The subhead, pasted on in typewriter script, reads “For the woman on her own.” There were two cover blurbs, also typed and pasted on: “U.S. Presidents Who Liked Girls” and “Where the Men Are.”

  Yet again, this cut-and-paste project had begun as David’s idea. One day at home, as they marveled at the mail that was still coming in, he told Helen, “You really ought to have a magazine for these girls.” Helen had struggled mightily to answer the torrent of letters. So many of them touched her. How could she not send a few lines of encouragement and thanks? David went on: These single women writing to Helen were “loving, warm, sexy and terrific,” just as she was. But most of the women’s magazines were talking to married women about God, motherhood, and home. What a bore, and what an opportunity gone begging. David’s solution was so very logical: “You ought to have a book for good citizen swingers like you were.”

  Helen knew exactly what he meant by the term and would use it herself. “Good citizen swingers” were really very decent, well-meaning single women who simply wanted all the other aspects of a good life available to married women and men: a good, independent work life, equal and decent wages, supportive friends, male and female, and as much good sex and romance as might befit their needs.

  The Browns had discussed the idea sitting in their apartment with Charlotte Kelly. It made sense for Helen and David to ask for their bachelorette friend’s help on the magazine idea. She worked at Ladies’ Home Journal, exactly the sort of staid, marriage-centric women’s book that Helen disdained, and had plenty of ideas on what not to do. As a younger single woman with a romantic past in the same spirit, if not with a comparable number of conquests, as Helen, Kelly was also the perfect sounding board and potential reader. David Brown summed up their discussion that night: “We decided it would have to appeal to single girls, somewhat alienated young married women who were tired of PTA meetings and women’s service magazines, and others addicted to Helen’s frank, feminist views.”

  David had left his publishing job and returned to 20th Century Fox as a vice president, still hunting screen properties and working chiefly from New York. He didn’t have a lot of extra time, but he was eager to settle his wife into something that would keep her challenged and further the family enterprise. He understood that Helen unemployed would be Helen unhinged. A magazine seemed just the thing, given his own editorial expertise. The Browns and Kelly, each with a pad, began listing article ideas with a descriptive sentence for each. Helen scribbled pages of them just by recycling the beauty ideas that had been rejected by Max Factor. Many subjects of interest in her own life landed in her article list: “The World of Falsies,” “How to Have More Fun at the Racetrack,” “How to Seduce a Man,” “Cat People.”

  Serious topics got monthly columns; women’s health issues—everything from frigidity to “colonic difficulties” and thinning hair—would be addressed in “Doctor, Can I?” Written by a qualified psychoanalyst, “The Analyst’s Corner” would “probe the psyche of the woman on her own.” David wrote up a preamble pitch about Femme as an ad vehicle. They added what Helen called a few more “philosophic thoughts”:

  Femme is for women who like men. “Women have stronger sexual desires as they grow older.”

  Femme is for women who like themselves. “They want to progress financially, physically, emotionally.”

  Femme is optimistic, affirmative, upbeat.

  Femme is bold. “Because women really are bold … Femme cannot pretend that women are not the equals of men—mentally, physically and emotionally. Femme sees no reason to dwell on this subject, however—the equality of women—but only to acknowledge it by the selection of editorial material.”

  Helen’s magazine would not rock the boat; it aimed to just steer its own quietly feminist course, laden with plenty of tips for career advancement, makeup, lingerie, and well-equipped man-hunting. She typed it all up; Berney Geis had it photocopied at his office. “It was all loving hands at home,” Helen said of the final product.

  * * *

  As they pondered how and to whom they might try to sell their next venture, the Browns enjoyed a very merry holiday season. The risqué ads for the film version of Sex and the Single Girl had been everywhere for weeks, picturing Natalie Wood as “Helen”—sexuality researcher and bestselling author—crisscrossed at groin level atop her romantic costar, the tabloid reporter Tony Curtis. The copy: “Is it true what they say about Sex and the Single Girl? Yes!”

  While Warner executives fretted over ominous rumblings from the ratings overlords at the Production Code Administration (PCA), the studio’s unit publicists had been feeding salty tidbits to the trades. A press release to The Hollywood Reporter crowed, “A new slanguage has developed on the set of a new WB picture. That overworked expression ‘sensational’ has evolved into ‘sexsational.’” Security guards on Stage 6, where the movie was filming, answered the phone “Stage Sex.”

  Helen’s positively dreamiest prezzie came on Christmas Day 1964, when the film opened. There were huge lines of ticket buyers, overwhelmingly women, outside two theaters premiering the film, the Rivoli and the Trans-Lux 52nd Street. Helen’s fan base was out in force. The New York Times reviewer A. H. Weiler described pandemonium outside and within the theaters. The high-pitched sound of female anticipation clearly took him aback. Weiler didn’t love the movie and he didn’t hate it; he seemed surprised, along with much of Hollywood, that Warner Bros. had indeed cobbled a movie from that five-word title and inflated it with star power: besides Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, they cast Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Mel Ferrer, and the always-droll character actor Edward Everett Horton. The novelist Joseph Heller, newly famous for Catch-22, was one of the screenwriters. Except for the sharper-than-usual rom-com writing and the savvy performances of Fonda and Bacall, the movie was a pretty standard confection along the lines of Doris Day vehicles like Pillow Talk and Send Me No Flowers, madcap finale and all. In terms of plot and character, the film version worked a reverse twist on the book; despite having written a sexy bestseller, Natalie Wood’s Helen was a virgin, and a prissy one at that. The movie was an utter cop-out. As The Atlantic would later put it, “The alley-cat cultural force that was Sex and the Single Girl got de-clawed.”

  None of it mattered. Sex and the Single Girl was a solid hit, if not of the magnitude of other 1964 releases: Mary Poppins, Goldfinger, Elvis’s Viva Las Vegas, and the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. Asked about the reversal of her heroine’s sexual behavior from adventurer to prudish good girl, Helen insisted she had no problem with the discrepancy, adding, “I thought the movie was absolutely adorable!” />
  * * *

  The movie was still opening in more theaters nationwide in January 1965 when David Brown began pitching the Femme idea. Helen’s homemade cover rendering went with him, affixed to the more professional twenty-page presentation. “It was a dear little prospectus,” Helen judged. Making the rounds alone, David presented his case for targeting a hitherto untapped readership. In meetings at Dell Magazines and at Fawcett Publications, he read aloud the Browns’ optimistic numbers: more than 13 million unmarried American women, plus 1.7 million divorcées, 1.4 million women legally separated, 2.6 million with “absent” husbands, and 8.3 million widows, totaling more than 27 million potential readers. A long list of possible advertisers followed, taking in everything from cosmetics to cars, diet foods, and beverages, airlines, resorts, candy … and brokerage houses. Cover stock and the suggested sixty editorial pages (plus ads) would be on paper equivalent in weight to that of Playboy. Suggested cover price: sixty cents.

  The proposal contained bios for both Browns. David was listed as “originator” of the concepts behind Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the Office, and as “overseer” of their production and writing. His stated intent was to create and sell “exploitable properties” based on those titles. Femme would be geared to make its initial profits on circulation, but the Browns expected it to become a highly profitable advertising vehicle. The Femme proposal was the first boldly articulated statement of the Browns’ wider ambitions for the “woman alone” market; the family enterprise was refining its message and intent on expanding its reach.

  Everyone turned it down flat, save for David’s former colleagues at Hearst. In January 1965, Berney Geis first took the proposal to his friend and former Esquire colleague Richard “Dick” Deems, then president of the Hearst Corporation. Deems was frank in his distaste for the Browns’ title. He told Geis that the company was in no financial position to start a new magazine, but would consider “superimposing” their new format on Hearst’s limping bunny Cosmopolitan. Still unsure, Deems sent the proposal back to Helen, with a request to suggest writers for all those articles and approximate pay scales. Between them, the Browns knew enough writers; David’s magazine experience allowed them to come up with reasonable fees that wouldn’t seem extravagant to the financially challenged Hearst. Helen and David both went to brace Deems in his posh lair in the Waldorf Towers, though David reported that during the negotiations, “Helen was cowering in a corner somewhere. She had never edited a magazine. I don’t think I had ever seen her read one.”