David knew all too well what his wife would be facing, having watched and assisted at Cosmopolitan’s precipitous slide. By the mid-fifties, the once-proud book was moribund; its ad pages were down to seventy-nine per month, numbers so dismal they were last posted in the early Depression years. It had fared even worse under the recent stewardship of Richard Berlin, a tough, some said ruthless, manager who took the helm of the much devalued Hearst Corporation in 1943.
Herbert Mayes, David’s friend and mentor at Cosmopolitan, had been at Hearst since 1927 and watched Berlin’s swift ascension. In the 1930s, Mayes wrote, “the dynasty was in receivership due to Hearst’s extravagance.” Enter Berlin, who “swept the Hearst landscape of obstacles, becoming the single dominating figure in the hierarchy.” By narrowly avoiding a bankruptcy and getting the company back up on its shaky legs, Berlin became a trusted lieutenant of the octogenarian William Randolph Hearst. But Berlin disliked Cosmopolitan as much as the old man seemed to cherish this relic from his glory days. Hearst had been dead for more than a decade when the Browns made their proposal, yet it seemed that Berlin was still unable to drive a stake through the frail but beating heart of Cosmopolitan.
He certainly had tried. Earlier, Berlin had implemented a Draconian new regime for this hemorrhaging liability: he eliminated promotions, discounts for subscription renewals, and radio and newspaper ads, and retained just a tiny, dispirited staff. An average of 140,000 copies per month were going unsold on the newsstands. By then, the magazine had gone from literary/general interest to a “sort of” women’s magazine.
Even some of Cosmopolitan’s former marquee writers had sought to disassociate themselves. Lyn Tornabene, an editor then, remembers a rainy night, sometime in the mid- to late fifties, when she was working late in the Cosmopolitan offices, alone. The security guard walked in and said there was an anxious-seeming man who appeared very eager to see an editor there, any editor. Tornabene agreed to see the man and froze when he appeared before her desk, tall and stern-looking. It was J. D. Salinger. He said that he had heard that there was to be a special fiction issue of the magazine. He explained his visit: “I absolutely do not want any of my stories reprinted in this magazine. Can you make sure that doesn’t happen?”
After hearing her promise several times that she would relay his message to the editor in chief, Salinger thanked her and left. His history with the magazine had been turbulent since 1948, when some unnamed editorial lunkhead had disregarded Salinger’s own short story title “Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record” and ran it as “Blue Melody” without consulting him.
“I’m pretty sure they went ahead and tried to run both of Salinger’s stories,” said Tornabene. “It was that kind of place then. We were under a dozen of us on the staff of failing Cosmo. We started to assign and write freelance pieces under pseudonyms and pay each other. I was ‘Nina Borghese’ and my friend Harriet [LaBarre] was ‘EMD Watson,’ for ‘Elementary, My Dear.’ They found out at Hearst what we were doing. I got called down to Richard Deems’s office. He said we were very bad people and we had to go back to making thirty-eight dollars a week or whatever it was, so I quit. They didn’t even know I was there for twelve years at Hearst.” The staff felt even less cherished when Hearst moved the magazine out of its main offices to temporary space above a car dealership in the nearby General Motors Building in the summer of 1964.
So it transpired: Helen’s longed-for star vehicle was handed over, broken-down and unloved as it was, not unlike her giveaway old station wagon Appletrees. At eight hundred thousand, the magazine’s circulation was at its lowest in half a century; the ad page sales were comparable to the publication’s beginning numbers in the late 1800s.
Along with their agent, Lucy Kroll, David negotiated the new editor in chief’s contract. Helen was presented with a two-year deal that paid thirty-five thousand dollars for year one. It had a bonus structure that provided an additional five thousand dollars for incremental circulation jumps after she took the reins. Bernard Geis was required to sign a release stating that he would make no claims on Helen’s work or ideas for the magazine. As a sop, and perhaps in genuine gratitude for his help, Helen agreed to pay Geis 20 percent of each bonus she received for the duration of that first contract.
Berlin and Deems had more stipulations: Helen would have to create her new version, from cover shoots to salaries and paper clips, on the old and barely adequate budget of about thirty thousand dollars an issue; she had to pledge that she would not publish sex-related articles that were smutty or graphic. She would report to two Hearst executives, Dick Deems and a money and marketing man, Frank Dupuy, Jr. They would prove the “good cops” to Berlin’s censorious and disapproving overlord. Berlin had vigorously opposed Helen’s appointment on the grounds that Hearst, which had become a highly cautious and conservative publisher by then, might alienate its public and advertisers with a nationally known loose woman at its helm.
It was understood within the company that Helen Gurley Brown would have to be closely monitored. There were no female editors topping the masthead at any Hearst publications. Women did not edit magazines for women anywhere in the mid-1960s, save for Beatrice Gould, who coedited Ladies’ Home Journal with her husband, Bruce; and Eileen Tighe at Woman’s Day. Herbert Mayes recalled the building-wide consternation when Helen’s appointment was announced. The murmurs ran along these lines: “Helen Gurley Brown, that ad agency copywriter—the Hearst morons think she can save Cosmopolitan? Well, we can say goodbye to good old Cosmo.”
For Berlin, it was actually a safe and canny bet; if Helen failed, she’d take the heat and he could finally close the troublesome book, with a very small investment in her salary and minimal start-up costs—some fripperies for her office décor, a new hire or two. If by some miracle the daffy little upstart turned it around, he would be the hero who gave her a chance to save the founder’s favorite.
Helen was due to take over the magazine on the ides of March 1965. The night before she was to present herself to her staff, she and David went to dinner with their friend the author Irving Wallace, known as a “blue-collar writer” who churned out sexy if clumsily written adventure yarns, most of which reaped fat movie sales. The men were walking up Park Avenue trying to comfort Helen, who was weeping copiously. They calmed her somewhat and daubed at her tears, but once the Browns got home, the night grew long and darker still. She was nearly catatonic with fear. She had no clue how she might begin. Once the long-dreaded day had dawned, Helen shivered herself into a soft blue wool jersey shift dress with a ruffle at the neck and hem; she was aiming for demure and none too threatening. David accompanied his quaking wife in a taxicab; they rode around and around until she felt she could go into the building. Helen asked David what she should do first.
“Ask the managing editor to lunch,” he told her. He or she should know all. At the very least, the ME could tell Helen which articles had been assigned and which were in-house; it would be a decent opening gambit that implied some knowledge of a magazine’s works. Helen could get busy inspecting the inventory she had inherited. This raised her spirits until she was told, upon reaching the office, that the managing editor already had a lunch date and would not even consider breaking it to accommodate her new boss, and, by the way, there were no article lists; they just kept things “in their heads.” Someone brought Helen a sandwich. By day’s end, she had made sure to meet and greet everyone; she shook their hands, looked them in the eye, and promised only this: she didn’t expect to fire any office staff.
Helen’s behavior after her first day at work has become part of the HGB creation myth, told and retold in slightly shifting versions. The truth: yes, David did indeed find her curled in a fetal position beneath his desk in the middle of the night. She had no idea how long she had been there when he coaxed her back to bed. He reminded his wife, as he had so many times before at K&E and as she struggled with her books: “This job is not the end of the world.”
Two days later, the ma
naging editor—she who had been too arch to lunch—quit. Helen immediately replaced her with the only man in the place. George Walsh wasn’t a perfect fit, as Helen later wrote, but he seemed the best at close hand: “He was a big political maven, staunch Catholic (I was still considered something of a scarlet woman), family man, not too beastly hard a worker—not just what I needed, but then I had David.” Walsh was eventually replaced as managing editor by Guy Flatley, who served Helen for many years as a fiercely loyal lieutenant and confidant.
As the true chaos of the place was slowly revealed, Helen despaired. Any story that the staff could remember assigning, Helen did not like; little of the ephemeral “inventory” was appropriate for her vision of the magazine, so she canceled nearly everything. There were heaps of unused manuscripts all over the office. She tottered home with a sack full and began to read, finding most of them unusable. Helen went back into the office with a sheaf of culls as well as article ideas from their prospectus. To set about assigning them, she began to see the few Cosmopolitan writers who seemed simpatico to what she had in mind. One of the first was Lyn Tornabene, who was freelancing by then. She had written some celebrity profiles that Helen liked very much; she was also the dauntless, feet-on-the-ground sort of journalist Helen could appreciate. One could ship her to Cape Canaveral for a first-rate dispatch on the real lives of astronauts’ wives or send her to lunch with Marlon Brando; she never disappointed.
“I go in for our meeting,” said Tornabene, “and I’m ushered into the office which now looks like a Hallmark greeting card. One of Helen’s things was that it’s intimidating to most people to be talked to across a desk. So she curls up on the sofa, which was beautifully upholstered, in one corner, and gestures for me to sit next to her. The first thing she said to me after the greeting was ‘These aren’t my cheekbones.’” Tornabene laughed. “I loved it. She said [Dr. Norman] Orentreich did them. Then she said, ‘This isn’t my hair, this is a Kenneth fall.’ That was my how-do-you-do. I think I was quite quiet. After all, what was there to say?”
Helen did have one more bit of unsolicited personal information to share: before her marriage, she had made love with 178 men. Agog, Tornabene could not begin to calculate how that was feasible. Though the number has stuck with her all these years, she never has worked out the math or determined the seriousness of Helen’s astounding boast. Once she recovered her equilibrium, the rest of the meeting went well. Tornabene agreed to continue doing celebrity profiles for Cosmopolitan; they settled on the queenly sum of about one thousand dollars per feature.
* * *
Like many incoming bosses, Helen found that she had to do some housekeeping and sweep away any regular Cosmo writers unable or unwilling to execute her vision. She also needed to gauge the compatibility of those staying on. In her autobiography Natural Blonde, the columnist Liz Smith, then Cosmo’s entertainment editor, recalled the trembling soul that was ushered to her desk and introduced: “She had a self-deprecating Arkansas charm and a kind of sweet, dithering Billie Burke manner. She seemed so helpless I thought I’d save her the trouble of firing me and resign. But soon she asked me into her corner office, transformed with scarves over pink lights, pillows, candles, kitty cat knickknacks and needlepoint.”
Helen sought and got reassurance that Smith would continue as entertainment editor, a job she inherited when Lyn Tornabene had quit. Smith would keep writing her features, mainly profiles of movie stars, but she did not want to continue doing movie reviews. Instead she put forward her protégé Rex Reed. Helen was perplexed. “Why would you recommend a person to take one of your jobs?”
“I thought he was a far better writer and critic than I was,” said Smith, “and I told Helen that.”
On a long, wintry afternoon in his apartment at Manhattan’s storied residential fortress the Dakota, surrounded by framed photos of himself with half of Hollywood, Reed rewound back to his days as a fresh and naive arrival from the Lone Star State. After lean freelance times writing press releases for turkeys like The Three Stooges and Snow White (“my God, it was a skating picture”) and scrounging by on sixty dollars a week as a press agent’s assistant, the twenty-five-year-old Reed lobbed a Hail Mary pass toward the editors of Cosmopolitan. He wrote a review of Lilith, starring Jean Seberg, Peter Fonda, and Warren Beatty, and sent it in to Liz Smith, who took it to the editor in chief who preceded Helen, Robert Atherton. The Lilith review ran in the magazine; they hired Reed immediately as their movie reviewer; he also wrote features.
“Cosmo was my first paid job in New York City,” Reed said. “Liz and I became very good friends. I used to go to her apartment and she would make her Texas chicken fried steak dinners. Nobody in New York had eaten anything like this. Everybody came to Liz’s, she was in there beating the steaks into submission with a Coke bottle, making chicken fried gravy, and of course that’s what I grew up on. She lived at Thirty-Eight East Thirty-Eighth Street in a wonderful house with a spiral staircase and a sunken living room, a great apartment. But nothing worked. In the middle of her parties, she would blow fuses and everybody sat in the dark.”
The apartment had a cozy fireplace and a real decorator’s touch; the fashion designer Chuck Howard, then doing sketches for Bill Blass and working with the very young Donna Karan, had conferred his sharp eye and chic/casual touches. Smith’s ad hoc dinners fed a shifting mix of Texas expats and writerly locals, most with an edgy and liberal outlook. Theirs was a spirited, Holly Golightly sort of crowd; the Texan Tommy Thompson, the Life staff writer who first discovered Lee Harvey Oswald’s home and wife after the JFK assassination, was a regular. Both Gloria Steinem and Gloria Vanderbilt dropped in, as did the director Robert Benton, the writers Gael Greene, Mary Ann Madden, Nora Ephron, and Ephron’s then-husband, Dan Greenburg. The majority of Smith’s guests had more ambition than money; they shared a penchant for bourbon, high-spirited arguments, and a free meal.
Helen and David Brown, often invited after her debut at Cosmo, seemed “a bit like hicks” to Smith in these roiling gatherings; somewhat agog, the Browns took in the loud, progressive pastiche. They seemed to love the celebrity drop-ins and arguments and general carryings-on, but as Smith remembers it, Helen hung back, “more ladylike” than the rest, and watched with great interest. They weren’t her people, but they were somebodies or about to be somebodies that it behooved her to keep track of.
Soon after Smith told Rex Reed of the change at Cosmo, he was asked to come in and meet with Mrs. Brown. Helen’s red datebook for March 25, 1965, had Reed penciled in at 10:30. Lauren Bacall was due at 11:30, so she would have to be efficient.
Reed claims that he still cannot fathom the precise meaning of pippy-poo, could not parse its implications even as it fatally damned his copy that day, breathily delivered from beneath fluttery false eyelashes and a wig. After a while he realized that the little woman sitting atop her desk, legs crossed, was giving him the gate.
“I’ve read your reviews and they’re very disturbing,” Helen told him, “because you have opinions. And I don’t want to upset my girls.”
Helen had been fine with Liz Smith’s movie reviews, which were rarely as caustic or critical as those of Reed in full cry. He wondered what sort of magazine the new boss had in mind. “Who are your girls?” he asked.
“They’re girls who have never heard of [director] Mike Nichols. That’s much too esoteric for my girls. They’ve never seen a movie with writing [subtitles] on the bottom of the screen, they don’t go to movies in black and white and they only want to know about a movie they can go to on a Saturday night date at the drive in. They write to me about their menstrual problems.”
What? Reed was confused indeed. “How do you know such a girl exists?”
“Because, dear, I was that girl.”
Helen was quick to assure him that his firing was nothing personal. “Don’t feel bad, there are a lot of other writers I’m having to discontinue or not hire. I can’t use their work, they’re too upsetting.”
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sp; Reed recalled her reeling off the names of some other untouchables, many from the stable of writers favored by the editor Clay Felker, who made journalistic waves with his 1964 supplement to the New York Herald Tribune; the insert soon became New York magazine, which in turn would incubate and debut Ms. magazine in its pages. Felker was an early champion of the “New Journalism”; his go-to writers included Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, and Elizabeth Crow. They were probably not for the new Cosmo. And Helen made it clear to Reed: there would be absolutely “no Joan Didion.”
Reed thought of his idol then, the writer who had so inspired him to have a bit of sport with conventional journalistic formats. He asked Helen, “Not even Gay Talese?”
“No, I won’t be able to use her, either.”
Helen was not editing for dumb bunnies and rubes; later, the reader research would bear her out: they were well educated and employed, with decent incomes. But no matter what, she was not buying the same sort of literary navel-gazing that had nearly killed Cosmo. Helen gave Reed one last chance. She called him at home with a socko, must-have idea. It involved a showbiz hypnotist with clouds of platinum hair named Pat Collins, known as “the Hip Hypnotist.” Collins, a skilled practitioner, performed at her night spot, Pat Collins’ Celebrity Club on the Sunset Strip; she was frequently on TV mesmerizing the likes of Lloyd Bridges and Lucille Ball. Her latest proposed stunt was something Helen wanted covered by a reporter; she felt strongly that it must be written by a male witness to the big event.
Not Pretty Enough Page 31