Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  There would be no mad abandon for HGB; she was thrilled for her friend, but there was always an issue to get out. I have work to do. It was a mantra she would invoke before cossetting herself away even in the most glamorous and exclusive playgrounds that success had admitted her to—at friends’ Hamptons estates, on exotic movie locations, even at Wyntoon, the “Bavarian Village” retreat in rural Northern California that William Randolph Hearst plundered and imperiled his publishing companies to build. Helen wrote to friends that she and David had slept in the bed of Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies; the tycoon had retreated to Wyntoon with Davies and their dachshunds shortly after Pearl Harbor. Each morning when Helen rolled out of that historic bower, she hit the floor for an hour and a half’s exercise, then went at the manuscripts she had packed with her hiking clothes. She would never let her work go. Back in New York, she put in seventy to eighty hours a week at the office; staffers who had been out to dinner and walked home past the office building looked for her office light, always the last one glowing.

  Helen believed in delivering a big bang for sixty cents per issue; in short order, her magazines were mammoth. The small, dense type ran nearly to the edges of the pages, so close to the cut that one could barely read the page numbers. The issues grew thicker, the ads plentiful. The dense bound volumes of late sixties, seventies, and eighties Cosmopolitans require effort to pry and keep open; piled high on a library cart, they seem to possess the atomic weight of lead. It was a magazine that a reader could spend a lot of time with. Hearst was sanguine about losing some of that valued “pass-on” readership beloved by advertisers, so long as more and more women bought their own copies and hung on to them. Cosmo readers were exceptionally loyal; between 92 and 96 percent of sales were single-copy purchases rather than subscription, more than double the industry average, month after month.

  Helen’s night terrors had subsided somewhat as the circulation grew. Life as a real editor in chief was dizzying, but it was becoming rather divine. Blasé New Yorkers began to recognize Helen in the street. Advertisers were jostling for placement up front and in the editorial well; young women were still writing for advice in the thousands.

  How exactly did she do that—and so quickly?

  Though Helen’s editorial message and mix had their multifaceted appeal, her numbers were also buoyed by a demographic tsunami that she could not take credit for. The baby boom, that massive postwar urge to breed that Helen had so disdained, had produced many more daughters of working age. The first wave was hitting the workforce in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, there were half again more working American women between the ages of twenty and thirty-four—15.1 million—than there had been at the end of the 1950s (9.6 million). This increase delivered a new and relatively solvent readership, with spenders even more attractive to advertisers than the daddy-dependent teens, college students, and housewives who bought Glamour, Mademoiselle, or Ladies’ Home Journal. Running the only magazine specifically geared to that independent, employed woman, Helen saw her circulation jumps keep a brisk pace with the surging female workforce.

  Work and sex, the twin linchpins of Sex and the Single Girl, were coalescing in a robust new constituency—the “singles scene,” part of what magazine trend stories were calling the sexual revolution. Far fewer young strivers were still living with their parents, or were financially dependent upon them. They were free to make decisions as to how and where they chose to live, and with whom. It was not their mothers’ stay-at-home-until-marriage sort of young adulthood. As Helen was assigning more articles on birth control and cohabitation, the term “sexual revolution” began popping up elsewhere in the media. Jacqueline Susann saw it; her Dolls heroine Anne Welles fled Papa’s house in “Lawrenceville” for a secretarial job in Manhattan:

  “She had escaped. Escaped from marriage to some solid Lawrenceville boy, from the solid, orderly life of Lawrenceville. The same orderly life her mother had lived. And her mother’s mother. In the same orderly kind of a house. A house that a good New England family had lived in generation after generation, its inhabitants smothered with orderly, unused emotion, emotions stifled beneath the creaky iron armor called ‘manners.’”

  The runaway popularity of Cosmo and Dolls was concomitant with the loosening of hidebound, male-dominated sexual etiquette. Women were beginning to listen more closely to their own desires, and act upon them. There was even new science about women’s sexual lives in the laboratory discoveries of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, researchers who probed the uncharted physiology of human mating. The New York Times reviewer, a physician and Planned Parenthood administrator, admitted his own prudery in writing (favorably) about their book, Human Sexual Response: “… somehow I find the thought disconcerting that at bejeweled dinner parties across this nation … gentlemen on miladies’ right will ask, ‘Did you know that old Sigmund Freud was wrong? Masters found that clitoral and vaginal orgasm are essentially the same?’ The reply will be, ‘I found that interesting, but even more fascinating the fact that the size of the male phallus bears no demonstrable relationship to the degree of sexual satisfaction.’”

  The doctor noted the shift from the old Freudian vaginal orgasm–only paradigm: clitoral exploration got twenty-two pages, vaginal forty-two. He warned that no one should buy the book for their porn collection; the prose was ponderously academic and chilly; sexual partners and masturbators were wired like lab rats. But the findings were heralded by the “new woman,” who, like Helen two decades before, found the conventions of married life in suburbia—sexual and otherwise—little more than Colonial-style coffins. Like Anne fleeing Lawrenceville, they packed their bags and shopped for vibrators, discreetly wrapped.

  Their migrations were unprecedented and liberating. In Re-Making Love, an insightful post-analysis of the sexual revolution subtitled The Feminization of Sex, the authors contended, “The birth control pill … contributed to women’s sexual revolution but by no means caused it. The causes of the sexual revolution were more sociological than technological: Without a concentration of young, single women in the cities, there would have been no sexual revolution.”

  During the 1960s, there was an 80 percent rise in single households. Most of the change was happening in urban areas, where young men and women flocked for employment opportunities. Cosmo was reaching them back in Lawrenceville, and in the cities. In 1969, two-thirds of Cosmo’s readership lived in the cities or suburbs; by 1983, the figure would jump to seven out of eight. The book/TV series/movie colossus Sex and the City was still three decades away from Helen’s debut Cosmo. But the stage was being set in countless sixties fern bars.

  * * *

  It all made for a fruitful and seemingly limitless synergy of message and demographic, and Helen was running far ahead of the pack. Yet at Hearst, she was still on a short leash. As she watched her numbers come in, Helen asked for a bonus structure keyed to circulation increases and without a cap. Richard Berlin, the cost-slasher in chief, refused to entertain the idea. Despite the incredible and growing circulation numbers, the huge increase in ad pages and revenue, Helen’s “bonus” was limited to a thin dime per copy sold over the previous year’s circulation. Millions more were pouring into Hearst coffers by the early seventies and her salary hovered around sixty thousand dollars.

  As often as she dared, Helen asked for a decent editor in chief’s travel budget and was repeatedly rebuffed. Instead, she traded shameless editorial mentions, often in her “Step into My Parlor” column, for free flights and accommodations to spread the Cosmo gospel. Of TWA’s New York–to–London night flight, she gushed, “It is simply a floating pleasure palace! If they’re not filet-mignoning you, they’re white and red wining you, and there’s the movie and the stereo. (David accused me of waking him up out of a sound sleep so I wouldn’t even miss even the hot-towel course.)”

  Hearst also sought more control over Helen’s public image. She was proud of her frequent television appearances and growing visibility, yet her ex
tracurricular efforts were frowned upon in the executive suite. In a letter stiff with censure and condescension, Dick Deems suggested that since she would be receiving vast sums of money in her next contract—richly deserved, of course—perhaps she should take care in accepting outside assignments that might “decelerate your progress on the magazine.” To hell with daytime TV gabfests, then; the Hearst men wanted more growth and revenue, faster.

  Helen would also receive a demoralizing note from Richard Berlin. Though he had congratulated Helen on her stunning sell-through numbers, Berlin expressed regrets that the woman who saved Cosmo and shored up the entire company’s sagging bottom line would not be welcome at Hearst’s fiftieth-anniversary party in the summer of 1969. He explained that “it’s strictly a stag affair.” By way of consolation, Berlin made a lordly offer to reserve a conference room in order to instruct her in the august history of the privately held company. The message was clear: though Helen’s triumph had indeed made Berlin a hero, though her new office was certainly an improvement on the fusty dentist’s suite at her last ad agency, the glass ceiling at Hearst had the primal fixity of a polar ice cap.

  23

  Recipe for Success

  It is better to get hollandaise all over your negligee sleeves than to wear something appropriate to cook in when you are entertaining a man.

  —HGB, Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook

  HELEN DID NOT LET UP, not for a second, though she ran on a strict 1,200 to 1,500 calories per twelve- or fourteen-hour workday. Her optimal regime “when I’m being good” looked like this:

  Breakfast: one-quarter of an envelope of Carnation Instant Breakfast mixed with Gladys Lindberg’s yeast-liver powder, stirred into 6 ounces of hot skim milk.

  Lunch: exactly 4 ounces of cottage cheese, half an apple or pear, and a 3-ounce daub of tuna salad made in large weekly batches by the Browns’ housekeeper.

  Snack, 5:00 p.m.: same as lunch.

  Dinner: 4 to 8 ounces of “some kind of meat,” with vegetable.

  She passed most evenings in bed surrounded with manuscripts and the two cats. If Helen had a productive evening, she rewarded herself with an 11:00 p.m. dollop of tuna. She also worked weekends, to David’s glum disapproval. Despite the new mayor John Lindsay’s insistence that New York was a “fun city,” Helen wasn’t succumbing to its blandishments. They still went to Liz Smith’s parties and to weekends in the Hamptons, where Smith shared a house with the food, style, and entertaining guru and host extraordinaire Lee Bailey. David Brown owned a home and a sizable tract of property in the Hamptons, but they rented it out; Helen, still wary of the “patio life,” could not see herself as a weekend hostess. In town, the Browns often saw Herbert and Grace Mayes and their daughters, Vicki and Alex; David and Herb Mayes had lunch together every Saturday. Helen was working, of course.

  She rarely strayed from the reams of “emo” copy to immerse herself in national and world news. Thus the Cosmo girl was a fairly oblivious creature as events of the late sixties deepened national fault lines; the article mix remained fairly insular and upbeat, despite the onset of assassinations, civil rights protests, and the agonies of Vietnam. In 1966, Helen did run a brief article about that conflict (“Vietnam: What’s It All About?”), a sort of crib sheet for the girl who wished to sound informed. She preferred personal “news” stories; a year and a half before Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in June 1968, she assigned a perky profile, “The Incredible Go Go Go Superlife of Ethel Kennedy.”

  As cities, including New York, began to burn in the wake of Martin Luther King’s April 1968 assassination, Helen kept to small, personal, and very occasional articles on race relations. Readers of color scarcely registered. The same could be said of most women’s magazines of the time. Cosmo wasn’t a magazine that championed diversity beyond its occasional African American cover models and a few generally clumsy pieces involving race. Despite its earnestness, one unfortunate first-person article in Cosmo, “What It Means to Be a Negro Girl,” got carpet-bombed by white and African American reader mail alike (“I personally do not know one Negro woman who fits the vapid creature presented by your article”). There was a similar but more nuanced reaction to a thoughtful piece by the director Sidney Lumet’s wife, Gail, on their interracial marriage. Race and sex was still such a freighted issue that another article, “The Black Man Turns Me On,” drew both rage and huzzahs in the reader mail column.

  * * *

  Let the great world spin; Helen kept her head down, and the copy flowing. Weekdays, she generally ate spartan lunches at her desk at the office. When necessary, she took writers to lunch, but never anything too too extravagant: Longchamps, Gallagher’s steak house, Toots Shor’s, Patsy’s, La Grenouille. Entries in her thick red office diaries often break down expensed meals to the penny. Lunch with the fashion designer John Weitz was an investment of $10.59; nibbles with an editor from Women’s Wear Daily in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons was madness—$19.74!!! Peter Rogers, an advertising executive best known for the iconic “What Becomes a Legend Most?” Blackglama fur and Vidal Sassoon hair product campaigns, says he adored HGB and their lunches à deux. “I had lunch with Helen about once at month at an Italian place near her office. One of us would pay every other time. The best thing was that she would get out her change purse and start taking out nickels and dimes. It was hysterical. All her friends were extravagant people. That change purse killed me. And yes, she did eat her salad with her fingers.”

  No one appears in the HGB diary lunch slots more frequently than Liz Smith, by then a good friend and consigliere, and “Char” Kelly. They often convened, one-on-one, in Helen’s favorite booth in the bar area of the Russian Tea Room at 150 West Fifty-Seventh Street. The restaurant was presided over by Faith Stewart-Gordon. She inherited the Tea Room from her husband, Sidney Kaye, who had owned it since 1955. Stewart-Gordon ran the restaurant after Kaye’s death in 1967.

  The “Tea Room,” or RTR, had long been a favorite midtown refuge for show business types as well as Hearst employees, who used it as a convenient canteen just up Fifth-Seventh Street from the offices; Judith Krantz still rhapsodizes over the ninety-cent entrees, glasses of strong tea, and mammoth sandwiches from her Good Housekeeping days. When Helen and David Brown came for business lunches, Stewart-Gordon noticed a pattern. “They’d be there on the same day. David was always with his movie people; Helen was with her friends or colleagues. If it was a one-on-one, whether with Liz Smith or Geraldine Stutz [president of Henri Bendel], Helen liked to sit in the last bar booth. She really came to talk to the person she was with. She certainly didn’t come to display herself. David would be sitting on the other side of the room in a booth with [the agent] Sam Cohn.” She recalled that Helen often came in with her boss, Dick Deems. “He treated her like a combination of a daughter and a girlfriend. He would always make sure that she knew that he was the boss. He was very condescending.”

  To stay at her “ideal” 105 pounds, Helen did not actually eat, said Stewart-Gordon. “At the Tea Room, she’d have some sort of little salad, nothing memorable; she never would eat blinis and caviar or chicken Kiev. That would have been anathema. She did like food, she did care, she just showed this tremendous willpower. She had this thing in her head that she was fat, I guess.” Sometimes, said Lyn Tornabene, Helen feasted with her eyes. “At the Tea Room she’d order Perrier with a straw and sit and stare, leaning on an elbow, at what I was eating. I like food. I like blinis. She would say, ‘Is that as good as it looks?’ I’d ask, ‘Helen, darling, you want a bite?’ Always it was, ‘Oh no, that’s all right.’”

  Helen knew that she needed food features on her editorial menu; it brought advertisers, and some Cosmo girls actually enjoyed eating. One day, when she was sorting through the piles of books and galleys the previous tenant of her office had left behind, she came upon a small, literate, and witty confection published in 1963, the year after Sex and the Single Girl. The Seducer’s Cookbook was written by Mimi Sheraton, who
would go on to become a respected food writer and New York Times restaurant critic. Its come-on: “Helping men to get the answer that they want (yes), to give women a reason for saying it, and to keep America from becoming, sexually, a have-not nation.” Seduction by food was an ancient art, Sheraton insisted, larding her thesis with testimonials from Plato, Shakespeare, Casanova, Balzac, and the Marquis de Sade, who insisted that “a good dinner is cause for a physical voluptuousness.”

  Sheraton’s seductive menu plans were egalitarian and unisex, posing “20 situations into which men may lure women, and vice versa.” The recipes are fairly classic—caviar omelets, baked oysters casino, squab en cocotte—but the book’s sexual content is decidedly outré for 1963. Women and men, married and unmarried, leap from table to bed and back again with Moll Flanders gusto. Helen called Sheraton; a sexy food writer was exactly what she needed. She was extravagant in her praise, raving over Sheraton’s genius in “discovering” the food/sex connection and suggesting a series of excerpts from chapters such as “What to Do with Leftovers (how to end an affair)” and “After Bed, What? (a light snack for an encore).” But Helen needed some alterations for her girls. “This book was mostly written for men seducing women,” Sheraton said. “And Helen said, ‘I want to turn it around and make it women seducing men,’ because the magazine was primarily for women. She felt I should have done the book from the other angle. She said that men didn’t buy books.”