Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Soon, Sheraton was the kitchen temptress in Cosmo’s “The Seductive Cook.” A dozen excerpts were revised and ran as a series. Afterward, Sheraton found that Helen was hungry for more. “She asked me if I could do a hamburger diet, so I did. I suggested a piece about how to get over a broken love affair, called ‘Is He Really So Special?’ Then I did one on what kind of man makes the best lover, by profession.”

  Sheraton said that Helen was an agreeable if exacting editor. But she didn’t seem to be a serious eater. She did not get the sense that Helen liked food at all. “I think she was afraid of food. She’s the kind of woman who would order four asparagus and say ‘I’m so full I can’t have dinner.’”

  Success did usher in a ruthless and long-term pattern of self-abnegation for Helen. The sensible diet and exercise habits of her Los Angeles years, the Gladys Lindberg supplements and Pacific hikes, had hardened into a regime of almost maniacal daily imperatives. Helen did a tough hour and a half of floor exercises without fail, usually in the morning, but sometimes in her office at lunchtime. Her idea of a mad treat: diet Jell-O, every day, mixed with less water than recommended on the box to make it more gooey. Perhaps a few almonds. Helen was certainly a woman of appetites, but she was most comfortable with the sort of indulgence that burned calories rather than ingested them. Besides, David liked her skinny. He said so himself: “I agree that skinny women can’t look too thin. Skinny women look younger but skinny men look mummified.”

  At home, the couple fell into a fairly traditional arrangement of care and feeding. Helen did everything. In the morning, she gulped her murky potions and cooked David breakfast: eggs, mushrooms, toast. Every day, she made him get on the bathroom scale. To his relief, Helen could not monitor his business lunches. At home, they rarely dined together. Helen “cooked” for David, generally frozen entrees, simple chops, or chicken, supplemented by dishes left by the Browns’ housekeeper. Full-time domestic help was out of the question, Helen declared, and no way would she hire a cook. They ate your food and had too much time to sit around doing nothing. The Browns relied on a part-time housekeeper, Anna Freimanis, who served them for thirty-seven years, still sewing on buttons and putting up hems at ninety.

  None of her abstemious tendencies stopped Helen from producing a cookbook to fulfill her three-book contract with Berney Geis. This was a woman who made salads dressed with mineral oil, the cheap emollient that most cooks use to maintain wooden cutting boards. She wisely farmed the recipe development and testing out to a pro and merely seasoned the copy with her commentary. Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook was chiefly the work of Margot Reiman, author of two previous cookbooks and a frequent contributor to Cosmo. Besides some rudimentary HGB encouragements (“Most butchers are darlings”) there is little to feast on save some tangy chapter titles: “Food to Take to Bed,” “Come Fry with Me,” and “What a Friend We Have in Cheeses.” The book was fried by critics, but given Helen’s growing brand, it sold nearly 150,000 copies and had foreign sales in ten countries. Berney Geis negotiated a modest paperback sale.

  * * *

  As a new editor, Helen felt fortunate to make contact with all of the potential contributors at Liz Smith’s chicken fried salons. She wasted no time in using some of them, even the edgy New Journalism sorts whom she had sworn off when she fired Rex Reed. In a roundup article titled “Six Current (but perennial) Fascinators,” the subhead promised “a covey of fabulous (but dovelike) female writers flutter their wings over the men of their choice.” Edna O’Brien chose Richard Burton. Rona Jaffe celebrated Marcello Mastroianni. Here is Gloria Steinem on the actor Peter O’Toole: “Next to a Cary Grant or a Rock Hudson, O’Toole looks slightly tubercular. But … he makes the conventionally good looking seem like underwear ads in Sears Roebuck. And about as interesting.”

  Nora Ephron was game for nearly anything. She said that Helen provided her first crack at magazine journalism. She explained in a 2001 interview with the Los Angeles writer Margy Rochlin: “I remember very clearly when Sex and the Single Girl was published. That was in ’62 and I was working as a mail girl at Newsweek. I remember reading it [the excerpt] in the New York Post. It was about two years later that she took over Cosmopolitan. She gave me my first freelance assignment, ‘How they chose the chorus line at the Copacabana nightclub.’ I was grateful, I’ll tell you that. It was in a period where I was trying to get magazine assignments and all they ever wanted to know was ‘what magazine articles have you written?’ And Helen didn’t have any of that, she just called me cold and said, “I’ve been reading your stuff [in the New York Post, where Ephron was a reporter]. Would you like to do this?”

  Following the Copa story, which was “not fun,” Ephron went on to write a wallflower’s lament in “Men, Men, Everywhere But” and a scrumptious dressing down of the bossy fashion bible titled “Women’s Wear Daily Unclothed.” In that piece, Ephron gave Helen her best early work; it was a gleeful dissection that also dared to take on “the Ladies,” the women with classic-eight apartments on Park Avenue who spent fifteen to seventy thousand dollars yearly to maintain their 10021 zip code chic. It was a tribe that Helen was just getting to know: “Mrs. Charles Revson of lipsticks … Charlotte Ford Niarcos of automobiles … Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas … Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper.” And why did the Ladies desperately need their fresh copy of WWD served with the jewel-like fraises des bois and black coffee set down by the maid? Besides the surety of knowing whom and what to put on one’s back, Ephron wrote, “There is one more reason that The Ladies read Women’s Wear Daily; it serves as their Surrogate Bitch. Delightful, delicious, delectable, and delirious the newspaper is, but it is also as bitchy as can be.”

  Within the year, WWD would have its tasty revenge, thanks to a nameless viper in Cosmo’s booo-som. “Some little bitch,” Helen lamented, leaked her memo to women staffers wanting to know “what pleases you in terms of having your breasts caressed.” Her questions on the subject were classic HGB; it was Helen’s wish that a strong article cataloging those desires could “help a lot of men make a lot of girls more happy.” She intended to use the response to instruct men in precisely how to cherish booo-soms. The leaked memo induced delirium in the WWD editors, who published and burlesqued it. How the Ladies tittered over their consommé at La Côte Basque. Dick Deems and Richard Berlin were mortified and spiked the piece. Helen declared she’d fire the traitorous bitch if she knew who she was. And of her bosses: “The use of anatomical words bugs them … But I plan to lie low for a while and come back with my boosom article later. I read it tenderly, like a little love letter, every so often.”

  Ephron also had the guts to submit herself to a Cosmo beauty makeover, “before” pictures and all, surrendering herself to Lupe, a single-named hairdresser with solid gold scissors, a trim Pierre Cardin suit, and a peppery Latin imperiousness. The next aesthetician asked dourly, “Is this your regular makeup? You’re certainly not pretty-pretty.” Ephron was pleased enough with the WWD and makeover articles to include them in her first anthology, Wallflower at the Orgy.

  During the same period, Helen bought a piece by Tom Wolfe, collected in his book The Pump House Gang. Wolfe embedded himself in the privileged circle of London’s hip young things in “Life of a Teenage London Society Girl.” Helen, whose basic instruction to all writers was “write the way you speak,” ran several thousand words that made for as hyper-oxygenated and kandy-kolored a prose pile as Wolfe ever hove onto a page. It is fairly hallucinogenic with Brit teen talk, and Wolfe displayed an italic habit as heavy as Helen’s. One of his shorter, tamer sentences might have been written by a certain single girl, alone in Europe for the first time, circa 1952: “Italian men! They are so quaint. In Rome, wicked Rome, they have this quaint old notion about seduction and if they sleep with a young, tender, blond, English society girl, their little chicken chests puff out and they have accomplished a seduction.”

  The stylish writers were creeping in after all. Helen remained resolute: no
Joan Didion, no way. Not that Didion was concerned, or even interested. But Gail Sheehy, she of the multi-book Passages juggernaut, turned into an early favorite for Helen, reporting on everything from putting one’s husband through school (“She Works While He Studies”) to “What Your Sleep Habits Reveal.” Sheehy also did some single-girl travelogues for the magazine. Ski bunny trips and Caribbean windjammer cruise dispatches had lush adjectival passages that hinted at the erotic possibilities: “My partner suddenly pulls me over a stone wall and we drop into the sand … it is very quiet now as he draws me close, water lapping at our necks as though in a jar. All senses are sustained, joined to the great natural forces of water, air and wind…” The idyll ends with a chaste “late day tour of the island straddling a stick shift.”

  Gael Greene did not trifle with innuendo. She was an unapologetic sexual adventuress—she had once scored with Elvis! Here was a writer heaven-sent for the new Cosmo. Greene, another former Mademoiselle guest editor, had been a regular Cosmo contributor before Helen’s arrival, and one of the writers Helen had very much wanted to keep. She had done her own ribald “little book,” an unsuccessful knockoff called Sex and the College Girl. Reporting mostly from the erogenous zone for Cosmo (“How Sexually Generous Should You Be?”), Greene was also developing the lusty gourmand persona that ripened, like triple-crème brie, into the “Insatiable Critic” in the dining-out pages of New York magazine. Her memoir of that time, Insatiable, is a steaming lagniappe of sex, foie gras, and cinema studs. Greene settled into an agreeable, natural collaboration with her new editor. In short order, she became Cosmo’s resident sexologist. She was married, if just for a short while longer, to the New York Times culture editor Don Forst. But Greene braved a bit of participatory journalism for Cosmo; she slept with Clint Eastwood when dispatched to interview him on the sweaty desert set of Two Mules for Sister Sara. He was one tough hombre with a tender touch, and Greene was not shy in re-creating the cataclysmic attractions in her memoir: “I remember the sweet smell of soap and the sun smells of his skin, the feel of his beard, how lean he was, how tall, the long muscles wrapping his bones…” When they met in a hotel for a second assignation, she reported, “my knees buckled from the impact of his Clint Eastwoodness.”

  Greene’s rationale at the time: what happens on the road does not get packed and taken home. She explained in Insatiable, “It never occurred to me that what we had might have gone on beyond the Beverly Wilshire. It was wonderful sex in an era of wonderful possibilities. I still believed I was having sex on the run to be a better wife to my husband.”

  Myrna Blyth was a married young mother, a fiction writer, and a nonfiction reporter when she began writing for Helen in the late sixties. Now senior vice president and editorial director of AARP Media, and formerly the longtime editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, she is also the author of Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness—and Liberalism—to the Women of America, a conservative excoriation of the “female media elite.”

  Blyth’s short story called “The Wife-Eater,” a mordant marriage dissection, appeared in the early HGB Cosmo, along with her nonfiction articles. Blyth respected Helen’s editing skills, but found her a cold fish. “I liked Helen, she was admirable. But she didn’t have a normal human conversation. She was interested in fodder.” She says she sensed Helen’s tone deafness to the lives of real women during a phone call when her toddler son was laughing in the background. Helen assumed he was fussing and crying; she simply had no idea what a happy child might sound like.

  Given the fact that two-thirds of Cosmo readers at the time were married and likely to have foaled, Blyth found it an unforgivable blind spot. As time went by, reader demographics did skew more toward singles, to five out of every nine by the early eighties. But there were plenty of divorced and married women who Blyth felt were underserved by Helen’s determined myopia. “She was always trying to find ways that you might get respect—for being skillfully sexy, or very interesting, or beautiful. She didn’t understand that women also get respect simply because they’re mothers. I would say she had a total lack of understanding of the real lives of millions of women. Yes, younger women are more focused on sexuality and looks. Fine. But because of the circumstances of her own life, she didn’t understand that you usually mature out of that. Or she had no interest in it.”

  Regardless of Helen’s alleged blind spots, Blyth respected her engaging and inclusive olio. Some of the banner names of Helen’s early issues, besides Ephron and Wolfe: Françoise Sagan, Nadine Gordimer, Jane Howard, Iris Murdoch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ross Macdonald, George Plimpton, Kenneth Tynan, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin. In her February 1966 special issue on men (“3 dozen articles!”), Helen dispatched the renowned Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci on an assignment that she would have killed for herself, a rare interview with the legendary Spanish matador El Cordobés. Helen’s sigh is almost audible as she writes, “Oriana spent several weeks at El Cordobés ranch to get the story.”

  “When you look at the Cosmo that Helen edited,” said Blyth, “it looks like The Atlantic compared to the Cosmo of today.”

  24

  Big Sister and the Youthquake

  Wanted: Keeno, diggo, coolo, chico … Bark it to me, baby, swing out, snap those fingers, gravy. Freak into my arms with loving broom-feathers and we will definitely be in “the horn.” Be my Valentine, Marko S., Alexandria, Va.

  —classified ad in Hearst’s Eye magazine, 1968

  IT WOULD BE INACCURATE to say that Helen kept her vow of no staff dismissals; some people left rather than deal with the pressures exerted by an untried editor with a hardwired doomsday mentality and a pair of Hearst minders breathing down her neck. To feed and fatten the loose-leaf notebook containing article ideas, an object that would become a talisman of Helen’s editorial control, editors were expected to churn up scores of ideas, weekly. “You had to come up with ideas or you were out … A couple of people had nervous collapses from the stress,” said the editor Harriet LaBarre.

  Though she was happy to have the writing assignments, Lyn Tornabene dreaded the low, whispery calls that came after she had turned her stories in. There was always the preamble of breezy flattery, followed by a cold front. On the phone, Helen’s voice sounded “like Jackie at the White House,” said Tornabene, but the hushed tones often belied a stern mission. “I was really having trouble with Helen at first. I’d send in any article and a call would come. ‘Lyn, darling. Oh, you shouldn’t work so hard for me, I don’t deserve to have you working for me, no, you’re too good. But I hate your lede. You have to do the first thousand words over because they’re terrible.’”

  Writers dealt with it in their own ways. When Liz Smith’s movie reviews were worked over with a pickax and a pot of treacle, her form of therapy was to write an excoriating letter to Helen that she never sent, begging to resign as movie critic rather than suffer the editorial mauling. A short excerpt: “My name cannot go on the reviews this month as they have been rewritten. They are trite, banal and devoid of any punch. We did not always put out a magazine that was so homogenized and simplistic … and every interesting word like ‘ersatz’ or ‘pellucid’ expunged.” Finding even her critic’s opinions completely reversed by an unknown hand, Smith asked, “Who is it that has the guts to just keep doing this to me month after month?” It was professionally embarrassing; Smith did quit writing reviews and stuck with features.

  It was apparent from the outset of her tenure: Helen was a complicated woman to deal with. Often, the aggrieved or merely indifferent parties, male and female, were disarmed by a certain snake charmer’s je ne sais quoi. For months, at the beginning of Tornabene’s association with the new Cosmo, her husband, Frank, also a journalist, had listened with empathy to his wife’s complaints about Helen’s editing. He had been prepared to loathe the petite gorgon on sight when they finally met at an office Christmas party. Tornabene says the application of the HGB whammy that night was a wonder
to behold: the Eye Lock, the light caress, the resulting deer-in-the-headlights stupor. “Later, we’re waiting for the elevator and my husband says, ‘Don’t you ever say anything mean about that adorable woman.’”

  Helen continued her conquest of the Tornabene males. It was Thanksgiving, circa 1967. As happened so often, the Browns had no holiday plans with friends or relatives. Still counting herself as America’s guest, Helen called Tornabene at home in Greenwich, where she was hosting “both families, a lot of strays, and four dogs.” The Browns had just dined alone in a restaurant in nearby Bedford, New York. Might they drop by?

  “They come in a huge limo,” said Tornabene. “Helen spots my father-in-law, who is a very handsome, elegant man—an exiled northern Italian, very tall. She goes over and sits on the arm of the sofa, then realizes she’s looking down on Dad. She wouldn’t sit higher than a man, ever. Like Anna and the King of Siam. She slithered to the floor. And they bonded. A sponge would have done fine to pick him up off the sofa. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, is my mother-in-law, Marie, a very round, Calabrese Italian lady and she is calling for my husband, Frank. She’s yelling, ‘PUTANA! PUTANA! Get her away from your father!’ Poor Dad, he never recovered.”

  Tornabene admits to having been in a sort of thrall herself; wherever she went, despite all of the famous men and women she interviewed, she had the same experience as Liz Smith with other people’s curiosity. Never mind the movie stars; America really wanted to know: What was Helen Gurley Brown really like? “I adored her,” said Tornabene. “She was like no other thing on earth, Helen Gurley Brown. I never could predict her, I never anticipated an answer to a question.”