Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  “Pat Collins was going to have a baby under hypnosis,” said Reed, “and Helen wanted me to interview her in childbirth.” He pleaded something burning on the stove and rang off, saying he’d call Helen back. “That’s the last I spoke to her. What a thing to ask a man! My days there were over.”

  Rex Reed took himself off to Esquire and the New York newspapers; in 1973, “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” his profile of a melancholic Ava Gardner, would appear in Tom Wolfe’s anthology of the New Journalism along with nonfiction by Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, John Gregory Dunne, Hunter S. Thompson, and Terry Southern. And Joan Didion. Helen held firm to her criteria for writers as she assigned the first round of articles. “Fancy” writers were just too self-absorbed for her girls. “You must converse with your reader,” she explained. “Write the way you would talk. A person shouldn’t have a dictionary in their lap when reading a magazine! I could not let that go on.”

  This standard was firmly in place when Helen Gurley Brown’s first issue of the new Cosmopolitan hit the stands in July 1965. She set the tone in her chatty editor’s letter, which she called “Step into My Parlor.”

  “Hello, I’m Cosmopolitan’s new editor … The stories and articles in this issue were picked for one reason only. I thought they’d interest you, knowing that you’re a grown-up girl, interested in whatever can give you a richer, more exciting, fun-filled, friend-filled, man-loved kind of life!”

  Her inaugural main feature: “Oh, What a Lovely Pill!” In touting the benefits of birth control pills, the reporter did not mention that unmarried women were still unable to get prescriptions for them in many states due to chauvinistic old statutes and the stubborn cultural persistence of the no-sex-before-marriage canon. Until a month before Helen published the article, contraception was still a crime in Connecticut. Long outdated and intrusive Comstock Laws passed in 1873 and dubbed “bedroom patrol” statutes still forbade the use of contraceptive medications and devices, for anyone.

  On June 7, 1965, in the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut, the justices found for the plaintiff, Estelle Griswold, who brought the case on behalf of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut and its birth control clinic in New Haven. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion for the 7–2 majority; it declared the Connecticut law unconstitutional on right-to-privacy grounds. The decision specified that only citizens in marital relationships were finally granted the right to birth control.

  Unfortunately, full access to that “lovely pill” would not arrive for all women, most particularly those unmarried and sexually active Cosmo girls, until a second Supreme Court case, Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972, which granted the right to contraceptive freedom to unmarried people as well. Men had been walking on the moon for three years before single women were allowed prescriptions for the Pill nationwide.

  Helen’s new Cosmo did not address this pesky little problem, one that might well upset and even outrage her girls. Fact-checking would never be the magazine’s strong suit. The “Lovely Pill” article offered only the good news about that “honey of a hormone,” estrogen, contained in the pills. It was a miracle drug, said to confer fabulous side benefits beyond birth control. Better sexual responsiveness! Smoother skin! Thick, glossy hair! A later-onset menopause!

  It might be said that at forty-three, Cosmo’s new editor was showing her private concerns in her very first issue. Soon she would be a fervent devotee of the form of estrogen used for the drug Premarin, taking far more than her doctors’ recommended dosages as an early convert to what came to be called hormone replacement therapy. As Helen began her reign as HGB, the new Cosmo readers still had glossy hair and smooth skin. They relied on the “lovely pill” for its primary benefit. Much like Helen and her dear Carlotta in fifties Los Angeles, Cosmo girls simply didn’t want to get knocked up.

  22

  Weekdays in the Park with David

  “A man must feel he runs things, but as long as you control yourself, you control him.”

  —Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

  AS THE LEFTOVER ARTICLES WERE USED UP, Helen began to stamp her imprimatur on Cosmo editorial. Over the next three decades, she would order up, edit, and publish countless responses to that famous rhetorical question posed by Freud to his favored patient and muse, the brilliant and tormented heiress Marie Bonaparte:

  “Was will das Weib?”

  “What does Woman want?”

  After his own thirty years of study, Freud confessed himself baffled by the vast and mysterious “female continent.” Helen, who had been plumbing her own complex desires in and out of therapy for almost as long, felt it was her mandate to toss out as many appealing answers to the Big Question as she could: Her readers wanted good men, a great job, better posture! Cheaper car insurance! Help with problem perspiration! They wanted to better understand themselves; as she had planned in the Femme prospectus, she also hired a psychotherapist to write what would become one of the magazine’s evergreens, a monthly column, “The Analyst’s Couch.”

  Dr. William Appleton, a Boston psychotherapist, wrote that column for nine years. Yes, his editor Bobbie Ashley sent him real reader letters; he collected some of the funnier ones over the years. But Helen was not looking for sensational or sexy topics; Appleton said: “I think Helen’s idea was to keep the lonely girl company. It was about women understanding their own psyches, about being fearful and getting through the night. It was mostly about hurt feelings, more interpersonal stuff than the techniques of sexual acrobatics.”

  Helen’s expanding fan base responded almost instantly; the letters poured in. As she steadied her course over the first year, Hearst executives were astonished by her numbers. In her first three years, circulation went from 782,000 to 1.05 million and kept rising. Ad pages more than doubled. Cosmo was finally, emphatically, out of the red. Handwritten hosannas from Dick Deems arrived scrawled on the weekly memorandums of newsstand sales estimates: “In the merry month of May—just wonderful!” “The word is FANTASTIC!” “This must be the best June report in the entire industry!”

  The whole industry took note: for seven years straight, Mrs. Brown’s Cosmopolitan would enjoy an unprecedented “sell-through” rate. More than 90 percent of the issues that went out to vendors for single-copy sales flew off the racks. The sales appeal lay in Helen’s editorial mix, the monthly recipe of service, celebrity, fiction, and emotional/psychological pieces, later known as “emo” articles. She delivered a variety pack of interests far more diverse than those in conventional women’s magazines. “There’s always the basics,” she said. “Office politics, men and women in love and wrong relationships, ambition, personal fulfillment, health.” But she went far beyond those categories.

  Hers was a “Questions in the Night” form of editing; she took note of the crazy things that troubled her in the wee hours, the sorts of queries that we now compulsively type into search engines at 2:00 a.m., unwilling or unable to ask anyone else. It took in everything from bad boyfriends to going Dutch treat (never!), stubborn armpit stains, masturbation, and the gorgeous (rich) bitch who covets your boyfriend. Some article titles offered the same guilty pleasures that now churn massive traffic to list-heavy websites. Seeing the title “What’s the Oldest Thing in Your Refrigerator? Celebrities Confess Their Leftovers,” who wouldn’t be tempted to peek inside?

  Given her efforts to please most of her readers all of the time, some of the juxtapositions in Cosmo’s table of contents could be breathtaking. The January 1966 list featured the psychotherapist Albert Ellis on “New Kooky (but Workable) Cures for Frigidity,” just above “Religious Retreats for World Weary Girls” and “Six Tricks to Fake Discotheque Dancing.” Love, Pray, Boogaloo.

  Helen’s nonfiction and service articles covered the waterfront and then some:

  “Have You Heard About the New Catholicism?”

  “Women and Snakes”

  “Give Your Husband an Alcohol Rub”

  “How to Read a Painting�
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  “The Poor Girls’ Guide to America’s Rich Young Men”

  “Foiling Flashers”

  “How to Talk Jazz”

  “How to Give Your Cat a Pill”

  “A Day in the Life of a Nuclear Power Plant”

  Over the first several months, Helen leaned heavily on her live-in magazine maven. David Brown had promised that at least in the beginning, he would read and choose all fiction to be run, which short stories and novels to buy, and which to condense. He also wrote Cosmo’s cover lines for more than thirty years. A brief sampling:

  “The Bugaboo of Male Impotence”

  “I Was a Nude Model (and this is what happened)”

  “Things I’ll Never Do with a Man Again”

  “The Astonishingly Frank Diary of an Unfaithful Wife”

  “How to Make a Small Bosom Amount to Something”

  “Why I Wear False Eyelashes to Bed”

  “65 Depressed Celebrities Tell How They Fight the Gloom”

  “What the Pill Is Doing to Husbands”

  “Living Together Is a Rotten Idea”

  When she felt herself to be the shakiest of rookies, Helen would call David at some point, nearly every day—she had a dedicated phone line installed in her office—and ask him to pick her up in a taxi. Their “nooners” were all business. Said David, “We’d ride around Central Park in a taxi while I went over page proofs, cover blurbs, captions, article ideas, and read manuscripts hurriedly.” It was undoubtedly the only time in her long Manhattan life that the fiercely frugal Helen Gurley Brown took taxicabs with abandon. Fear allowed for such an extravagance—and she didn’t dare expense the fares.

  The Browns also conferred at their dining room table. She would read a snippet from an article, he’d blurt out a cover line, and they would tweak it to perfection. Running gobs of fiction that readers could settle in with was a part of Helen’s master plan to deliver value; up through the 1980s, her issues would average thirty-four to forty-two pages of fiction and poetry (much of the latter erotic).

  Guided in large part by David’s input, Helen’s fiction choices ranged from mysteries and thrillers to bodice-rippers and well-crafted, somewhat feminist short stories. David Brown had an eye for the literate as well as the potential blockbuster; the affable, high/low cultural dynamic that characterized the Browns’ marriage was clearly visible in Cosmo’s contents page, month after month. In Helen’s second issue, August 1965, she ran a story, “August Is a Wicked Month,” by the fiery young Irish “It Girl” of letters, Edna O’Brien, who would go on to write nonfiction for Helen as well. In the same issue, Helen used a little nonfiction bagatelle that Jacqueline Susann had pulled out of a drawer somewhere called “Zelda Was a Peach.”

  Helen wanted to get in on the ground floor with Susann. She had some insider’s tips about her friend and fellow Geis author. The Browns and the Mansfields kept close company, and all four of them had a penchant for mutual, remunerative log-rolling. They all knew that Geis was planning a typically socko launch for Susann’s first novel, Valley of the Dolls, which had finally coalesced as the tale of three Hollywood agony sisters and their struggles with men, the movie biz, depression, and “dolls,” slang for prescription barbiturates. Letty Pogrebin had an unusually strong feeling when she got her hands on a newly minted copy of Dolls. “I just knew that it was going to sell and sell and sell,” she said.

  While Susann’s aggrieved and exhausted editor, Don Preston, was still wrestling her ungovernable prose to the mat, Geis had used smoke, mirrors, and flat-out lies to gin up a paperback deal with none other than David Brown’s friend at Bantam, Oscar Dystel. This (and bigger lies about Susann’s literary chops) gave Geis leverage when talking it up with the movie guys. In that “all loving hands at home” spirit that Helen had invoked, the movie rights to Valley of the Dolls were snapped up early by David Brown. Fox optioned the book for $80,000, with a series of escalator clauses that would bring the Mansfields up to $200,000 in up-front fees—the equivalent of about $1.4 million today.

  Letty Pogrebin began her mightiest campaign; thanks to the paperback sale, her Dolls publicity budget was the fattest yet, at $50,000 for this first-time novelist. She began to tease book reviewers and editors with a few campy gimmicks. One mailing held notices that looked like a doctor’s prescription pad, with the scrawled message, “Take 3 yellow ‘dolls’ before bedtime for a broken love affair; take 2 red dolls and a shot of scotch for a shattered career; take Valley of the Dolls in heavy doses for the truth about the glamour set on the pill kick.”

  To get through the 250 promotional appearances in 11 cities—in just 10 days—Susann did pop amphetamines, so as not to “droop on TV.” And she did not. Like Helen, this former TV pitchwoman was an indefatigable doyenne of hype and this was her Moment. Within the year, the hardcover would hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list and stay there for 22 weeks. When the Fox movie came out in 1967 it was enthusiastically panned, very well attended, and destined for many half-lives as a trashy cult classic. Helen completed the two-family cross-promotion with a feature story in Cosmo; after all, this was a movie her girls flocked to. The article was about the lead actresses Sharon Tate, Patty Duke, and Barbara Parkins and was titled “The Girls Who Play Jennifer, Neely and Anne.” She got Rex Reed to write it.

  In the year of Dolls’s release, David Brown’s studio grossed more than $44 million in domestic ticket sales in return for its $200,000 option and $5 million filming budget. The Mansfields had solidified the foundation for a burgeoning empire; by the 1970s, Dolls would be registered by the Guinness Book of World Records as the bestselling novel of all time, surpassing Peyton Place with 17 million copies sold to date. And Susann kept writing.

  To Helen’s advantage, Cosmo was assured of a direct line to All Things Jackie; she had items for her editor’s column, book excerpts, and an enviable “girlfriend” presence in the magazine. The bestselling fascinator wrote and contributed to articles such as “The Camille Complex,” about getting over a cold. (“Take two aspirins and a glass of milk with a jigger of Scotch.”)

  Helen and Jackie made a fabulous pair of media molls, one petite and whispery, the other tall, loud, throaty, and gleefully foul-mouthed. Both adored the designs of Emilio Pucci, the Florentine purveyor of clingy, wildly patterned frocks, the sort that announced, “Here she is!” Jackie ordered Pucci drapes for the Mansfields’ hotel suite; her closet was crammed with thirty Puccis dresses. Helen indulged in about half as many and wore them for forty years. By the late 1960s, the output of Helen Gurley Brown and Jacqueline Susann flared across American pop culture on newsstands, bestseller lists, radio waves, and TV talk shows. It was a bright, binary constellation: two brazen dames, two canny producer/husbands, two bestsellers, two hit movies, and a vast marketing universe as yet unexplored.

  * * *

  Helen did suffer one brief and public stumble, a largely forgotten foray into daytime television: In December 1967, she sat in a Manhattan television studio in a hot pink dress, waiting for her eyelash glue to set and fielding questions from a New York Times reporter about her latest venture in expanding the national dialogue—well, at least in eighteen King Features Syndicate cities—on intimate subjects, mostly s-e-x. For a very short time, she was the interviewer/host on a half-hour show named after her anthology of syndicated columns, Outrageous Opinions. It was a one-on-one interview format. She would be coaxing famous people to talk about sex. Helen reasoned that she could be a compassionate but provocative interviewer thanks to her own years of analysis: “It teaches you to be casual and informal. I mean, it makes it seem all right to air your dirty linen in public, and to talk about bouts with drinking or cancer—or your little mongoloid brother. You used to keep him locked in the attic.”

  Despite such a gauzy and bizarre summary of her modus operandi, Helen did lure some big names to her hot seat: Otto Preminger, Cleveland Amory, Barbara Walters, David Susskind, Woody Allen, the comic Jackie Mason, the actress Joanna Pet
tet. Helen was confident that she could get them to loosen up and dish. Pettet did reveal a glancing lesbian encounter; Woody confessed a compulsion to kiss mailmen (“Probably the uniform and the leather pouch get me”). The show had its moments, thanks to Mrs. Brown’s breathy directness as an interviewer.

  She marched into the studio to cross-examine Norman Mailer, who seemed confused at first. He was told they’d be discussing “ideas.” In her soft little voice Helen braced the literary lion: “Norman, why are you so violent?”

  “I’m not violent.”

  “Does it have something to do with proving your manhood?”

  “You’re the first lady analyst I’ve ever seen in pink.”

  They thrashed their way through a prickly thicket; yes, Mailer surmised, every man worries at some point whether he’s homosexual. And it was just nobody’s business why he had stabbed his second wife, Adele, at that party.

  As a host, Helen was still Charming’s Mother. She didn’t see the upside of being a tough interviewer: “Nobody likes you when you’re a bitch, nobody wants to go to bed with you or take you to Bermuda.” Alas, charm was not enough for the daytime audience of housewives, never a robust constituency for HGB. There was a history of mutual enmity; materializing between the detergent and diaper rash commercials to prod guests on their sexual peccadilloes, Helen Gurley Brown was still that woman. When the show was quickly canceled, Helen had to accept what she had suspected all along: she really was most effective as America’s guest.

  * * *

  The Browns and the Mansfields grew closer. Yet no one but Susann’s husband and doctors knew of her very private sufferings that included an autistic son, Guy Mansfield, living in an institution, and Susann’s recurrent breast cancer, serious pill dependencies, heavy cigarette habit, and deep smoker’s cough. Nonetheless, she was determined to celebrate her ascent to “N.Y. Times Bestseller!!” with her dream team. Don Preston, Susann’s editor at Geis, recalled the evening when he and his wife were invited to the lavish celebration that the Mansfields threw for themselves and the Browns at ‘21’: “Jackie stage managed that dinner, and they must have worked on it a week … I think [the wine] was a Chateau Lafitte. Caviar and vodka was standing in front of us when we sat down, and I drank Helen’s vodka because she didn’t want it. She tried to send it back, but I wouldn’t let her.”