Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Mrs. Brown had begun to intrigue a wide spectrum of New Yorkers. The composer Irving Berlin was crazy about her, as was Walter Cronkite. Even the New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote her admiring notes. And soon, Helen had a new blue-blood friend whom she met at Liz Smith’s soirees. She had taken an immediate liking to the straight-talking heiress, artist, and socialite, Gloria Vanderbilt DiCicco Stokowski Lumet Cooper, still best known by her family name throughout those four marriages. She already had a connection to Cosmopolitan. “I had written for the magazine when Bob Atherton was running Cosmopolitan,” said Vanderbilt. “I had written a couple of short stories. When Helen came in, I started doing book reviews. I felt total confidence in her take and her point of view. She was very focused on how she wanted the magazine to be. I never had any problems with her at all as far as editing went.”

  Vanderbilt became Cosmo’s regular book reviewer, and would also contribute her design and fashion flair to Cosmo’s generally outdated and uninspired decorating features. Both Vanderbilt and the respected music writer Nat Hentoff enjoyed considerable leeway in reviewing books and records. A typical Vanderbilt mix: a literate biography of Marie Antoinette, a memoir by the lefty columnist Jack Newfield about his years with the late Bobby Kennedy, and a posthumous collection of poems and essays of the folksinger/writer Richard Fariña, who was married to Joan Baez’s sister; Fariña died in a motorcycle crash two days after his first book, a novel, was published. For her new editor in chief, Vanderbilt included a thumping great reference book on Broadway musicals.

  Helen and Gloria, the Arkie and the heiress, were both in Los Angeles in the late thirties and early forties, but, said Vanderbilt, “we never spoke of those years. It wouldn’t do, you know.” They were contemporaries; Helen was the elder by two years. But discussing their L.A. experiences would not be gentille; the gulf was too wide and the comparisons too stark. Helen had to accept Vanderbilt’s silence on those years. There was plenty more to discuss; they discovered that they both enjoyed men, very, very much. Vanderbilt had married her final husband, the author Wyatt Cooper (father of the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper), just before she and Helen met; she had also been linked romantically with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Roald Dahl, and Howard Hughes. Both women were plain, direct talkers with no inhibitions about discussing men, romance, sex, and, when they got around to it, which juicy novels to review next in the magazine. Like Helen, Vanderbilt adored dancing. Peter Rogers took both women for a whirl with David Brown one uproarious night at the Waldorf; even David, a reluctant dancer, hit the floor a bit. “We danced all night there,” said Rogers, who became one of Helen’s most adored partners. “Helen could do anything, she was a wonderful dancer. She loved to boogie. If I do say so, we both were pretty good.” Nights out with Helen and Gloria were mad fun, he said, because of the women’s great élan and their friendship. “Gloria was crazy about Helen,” he said. “They were together quite a bit, to the end. Helen’s friends stayed with her and she stayed with them.”

  As her own star rose, Helen had the pleasure of watching some close women friends go on to madly successful careers. Vanderbilt was already a wealthy and successful woman when they met, but she would become a national brand when she jumped in on the designer jeans craze early, along with Calvin Klein. Jackie Susann’s was an astonishing trip, and she and Helen were together all the way. Another breakout success came to Judith Krantz, the former fashion assistant at Good Housekeeping who would become fabulously wealthy as a novelist of the rich, bitchy, and infamous.

  Judy Tarcher had first been a good friend of David Brown since their early days at Hearst and they had stayed in touch, partly through their mutual friendship with Herb and Grace Mayes and their daughter Alex. She met her husband, Steve Krantz, in 1953 at a Fourth of July party given by her high school friend Barbara Walters. Steve Krantz was a TV and film producer; he would become known for his bawdy animation feature Fritz the Cat and for TV miniseries of his wife’s bestselling novels Scruples, Princess Daisy, and I’ll Take Manhattan. Like the Browns, they were a family franchise; Krantz’s novels were copyrighted under the name “Steve Krantz Productions.”

  Given all the professional and personal overlap, the Browns and the Krantzes became friends, sometimes traveling in Europe together and sojourning at the Krantz apartment in Paris. Judith Krantz, now a robust eighty-eight, spoke of their long association from her home in California, where she had just finished her daily session on Pilates equipment custom-upholstered with pink leather. She said that she lost no time in expressing her interest in Helen’s Cosmo reinvention. “I proposed myself to Helen,” she said. She was fed up with the gingham’d confines of Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal, and she had a crazy little article idea. “I had heard a word—funky. And I thought funky was a great word and that Cosmo should have a little piece on it—just a short one. I wrote a note to Helen suggesting this. And Helen wrote back and said, ‘I don’t think funky is going to last.’”

  At Helen’s suggestion, they had lunch. “And then I started working for her for the next nine years.” Krantz recalled the early days of the loose-leaf binder. “They gave me assignments from the book. The minute I found one I liked, I grabbed it. It was wonderful, because I had always worked for men who wanted me to bring in a dozen assignment ideas a month, and that was hard.” It helped that she knew Helen’s articles editor. “Bobby Ashley was a very good friend,” said Krantz. “But Helen personally edited my work. She would call up and say, ‘Look on page four. The third paragraph down. And the fourth line down from the top. There’s a word there that I think you should substitute another word for. That’s not a good word.’ And we’d talk about what was a good substitute. She was the most definitive and best informed editor I’ve ever had.”

  Krantz says she welcomed such micromanagement of her copy, at least at first. In her experience, male editors of women’s magazines simply did not engage with women writers. “I’d always worked for male editors, and they’d say things like, ‘Well, run it through the typewriter again,’ which doesn’t help at all. Helen knew exactly what she wanted, either in or out, and she would tell me. We would go through the whole piece that way, and when it was finished, it was exactly the way it was printed. There was never another editor like that. Never. No word went into Cosmopolitan that Helen didn’t approve of.”

  Krantz had the feeling that Cosmo had almost become Helen. “The magazine was her holy grail. It was her sense of what was right.”

  * * *

  Hearst executives felt that Helen needed another seasoned pro at her side and began a search. They hired Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner, a well-credentialed journalist then at The Saturday Evening Post. From the beginning of her tenure at Cosmo, Wagner noticed a substantial and growing gap between the real magazine and the public perception of it. “People make a mistake when they think of Cosmo as a sex magazine. Cosmo was not a sex magazine. Cosmo was the big sister telling the baby sister how not to screw up. In her own life, Helen had no role models.”

  Wagner, now retired from an executive position at Estée Lauder, wore a few hats at Cosmo. In addition to assigning and editing for the regular magazine, she helped Helen recycle and monetize the immense body of editorial content into a series of hardcover and paperback anthologies, among them Cosmopolitan’s Hangup Handbook, Cosmopolitan’s Love Book, Cosmopolitan’s Living Together (Married or Not) Handbook, and a collection of short stories, The Wings of Love. One of Wagner’s hires for that enterprise was a talented writer named Veronica Geng, who went on to a career as a humor writer for The New Yorker before her early death from brain cancer. Geng wrote sharp, droll essays for Cosmo and assisted Wagner in packaging the themed book anthologies. “She was brilliant,” said Wagner. “I just loved her.”

  Wagner would also help create the magazine’s first international editions, often traveling the world with her husband, Paul, and the Browns to help launch them. All along the way, though she liked Helen, Wagner was often frustra
ted by her boss’s limited and sometimes myopic worldview. She found it very difficult to divert Helen from her obsession with money and financial security, both for herself and for her readers. “Everything was colored by her lifelong worry about money. No matter how much money she made, she never got over that. Clearly she made a great deal more money than I did as an editor. If she liked a dress I was wearing she’d say: ‘That’s a great dress, what did it cost?’ I would tell her and she’d say: ‘Oh, I couldn’t afford that.’ And of course she could have.”

  It follows, Wagner said, that “there was no wasted space in Cosmopolitan.” Wagner watched Helen incentivize her staff to fill every inch. One could pack thrifty and transformative tips into three lines at the end of an editorial column. (“Flies or bees bothering you? Spray them with hairspray and they will take a quick dive.”) There were regular, required meetings to come up with ideas for fillers. The editor with the most ideas per meeting got a bottle of champagne. Wagner found Helen to be a good and fair boss. “I never looked at it as ‘she-who-must-be-obeyed,’ I never did. I recognized and honored her for paying meticulous attention to what her vision was. And that it was genuine. She really cared about that baby sister, she really wanted to help. That was not my baby sister but I understood it and I respected her. Her commitment to her audience was genuine and one thousand percent. In every way.”

  * * *

  Without warning, in 1968, Hearst expressed its confidence in Helen by handing her another magazine to supervise, a new publication with a planned readership utterly alien to her: hippies! The growing “youth culture” was opening up a tantalizing new market. To her horror, Helen was suddenly tasked with becoming Groovy Big Sis, developing a new magazine for a younger readership she knew absolutely nothing about. Hearst decided that it should cash in on flower power and other lucrative by-products of the late-sixties “Youthquake” by launching its own unisex counterculture magazine, titled Eye. “It was to be patterned after a French magazine which was about the teenage kids and was making a fortune,” said Wagner, who believes the project was doomed by two very serious errors in judgment. “One: Hearst Corporation is to the right of Attila the Hun, and these kids they hired for the magazine were all the way on the left. Two, they made Helen the consulting editor.”

  HGB would never refuse a summons from the executive suite, but she had a perfect dread of this assignment. At forty-five, she was on the wrong side of the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” divide and it made her deeply uneasy. What did she know of teenage boys and girls and lava lamps and Bob Dylan? What did she care? Helen would be paid an additional twelve thousand dollars a year to oversee Eye; she was so dubious about its future that she inserted a clause that stipulated she be paid each year in full, even if Hearst’s new magazine flopped aborning. In the search for an editor in chief for this misbegotten and mistrusted product, Helen remembered a young writer named Susan Edmiston, who had done a madly popular teen column that ran in the New York Post, alternating weekdays with Helen’s “Woman Alone” column. After Helen’s syndication deal ended for lack of readership, Edmiston’s column was still drawing heavy ad placement for the growing bazaar of teen-related products falling into the new marketing category of “hip consumerism.”

  “She called me up and asked me if I was interested,” said Edmiston. “I sat down and wrote down a hundred ideas for such a magazine. Then she asked me to get a dummy done.” Edmiston called her friend Nora Ephron, who suggested someone to help her produce a viable, young-looking magazine dummy. “The first thing they did was to hire Judith Parker,” said Edmiston. “Judy was a brilliant and very strong art director, so she and Helen were butting heads right from the beginning. We had a piece on a young model. There were beautiful, typical model photos and then there was a shot of the way she looked in the morning with no makeup. So Judy of course wanted to use the no makeup, unglamorous photo as a full page and use the model photos as little ones on the bottom of the page. I recently looked back at that issue to see who had won.” Edmiston laughed. “Helen.”

  Before long, it was full-out war between Parker and Helen, who tried to enlist Edmiston on her side. She refused to join the fray. “I’m not a combative person. I was working very hard and had a lot of wonderful contacts from my years on the Post, through my friendship with Nora, so I had access to these writers. It’s impressive who was writing.” Contributing editors included Ephron and Lillian Roxon, the godmother of rock writers who could command the rare access for “101 Hours with John Lennon and Paul McCartney” during their magical mystery tour of Manhattan. Tom Wolfe, Nik Cohn, even Bruce Springsteen’s manager-to-be Jon Landau wrote for Eye. There were articles on Esalen, Dylan, John Lennon, Jean-Luc Godard. But there were echoes of HGB in some of the story assignments: “Five Self-Made Rich Kids Tell How They Did It.” “Mother Jealous of Your Freer Sex Life?”

  The counterculture staff parried with stories like “Miss America Is a Bummer” and “Sorcerer of Rock: Jim Morrison Raps.” Helen’s input centered on subjects she knew best: fashion, makeup, dating. She disliked the visuals intensely. “A lot of the photography was by Judy’s boyfriend [the British rock-shooter Michael Soldan],” said Edmiston. “It was very psychedelic-influenced and this was great for the magazine, except that they [Hearst] didn’t understand it or the market.”

  Eye’s youthful fashion looked like so much nasty burlap to Helen. She told Edmiston, “Don’t make the models look poor.” On the rare occasion that Helen and her editorial team visited the loft space that housed Eye, she found it distasteful and disorienting. “They would come down in a limousine,” said Edmiston. “The office was on LaGuardia Place, in a former art gallery. Some people described it as a seedy part of town. It wasn’t, it was just the Village.” The writer Sheila Weller, then a staffer in Eye’s fashion department, described the vibe in The New York Times: “It was a magical place, all the more so as few people remember it … The art department girls were cocky and beatific, as if cutting and pasting bits of swirling psychedelic typeface was a completely uninteresting part of their personal cosmic order.” There had never been good chemistry, said Jeanette Wagner. “Helen didn’t like those kids. She thought they were screwing up their lives, and they weren’t working hard enough, they had money, their parents had money.” The clash between Helen and Judy Parker reached a hopeless impasse in the late spring of 1968. Edmiston received a phone call on a Friday morning. “I was told they were firing Judy and the rest of the art department, and they were coming to change the locks. They were afraid Judy would steal artwork or God knows what.” Parker and her staff had left before the Hearst operatives arrived. “I just felt these people were thugs,” said Edmiston, “because of what they did with the firing and the lock changing.”

  Judy Parker and Michael Soldan decamped to Long Island and boarded their small sailboat on the Long Island Sound with another photographer. “A big storm came up and that was it, they couldn’t deal with it,” said Edmiston. All three were presumed drowned; their bodies were not recovered. According to a footnoted roundup of sixties tragedies in Sheila Weller’s book Girls Like Us, Parker and Soldan “took acid after their boss, Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan, scolded them for their hallucinogenic colors; then got in their boat in Long Island Sound in a storm and drowned.” Edmiston is not sure about the scenario. “Acid? I think everybody was saying that, but how would they know?” Still, it may have been the case. “The notion that they might take drugs after this firing is reasonable.” A new art director was hired; Edmiston heard that people were being interviewed for her editor in chief job, and she quit. She went on to work as articles editor of Redbook, and cofounded Savvy magazine. She is now a writer, living in Northern California.

  Jeannette Wagner was sent downtown to try to get Eye on a better track, but hip and Hearst were a hopelessly poor fit. The monthly folded after fifteen issues, in May 1969. Soon afterward, Wagner got a phone call from the Hearst executive suite. “They said, ‘Okay, we now want to st
art this international edition [of Cosmo], so I became the editor in chief of the international edition. And then we did a book club.” Repackaging content was something Helen could wholly embrace. The Cosmo engine was humming with more foreign editions, plus paperback and hardcover anthologies of past articles. “We also did a merchandising division,” said Wagner. “We did the Cosmo Girl’s crochet-it-yourself bikini.” She laughed. “We sold thousands of them.”

  25

  A March Forward, a Few Steps Back

  The feminists attacked me … Kate Millett came into the office and I was backed up against the radiator but it wasn’t very hot.

  —HGB

  MARY ALFORD’S HOME COMPANION, Teresa Rowton, wrote to Helen about a funny little thing she’d noticed. She had heard a strange noise coming from Mary’s bedroom and peeked in. Mary was running over sheets of bubble wrap with her wheelchair. She seemed to be enjoying herself; Rowton stood just watching for a while. There was always plenty of the plastic wrap around, since Helen sent frequent packages full of free cosmetic samples, magazines, and other giveaways that came to the office. Decades before the wrap’s manufacturer, Sealed Air, began marketing its “Bubble Wrap 100866453 Anti-Stress Box” as a modern calmative sold on Amazon, Mary had discovered the satisfying if small release in popping the honeycombed sheets of packing.

  Life just wasn’t getting any better in the crowded little home in Shawnee; George was in ever-escalating agony, floating in a distant haze of alcohol and pills. Desperate, Helen tried to find him an acupuncturist. The ancient medical art was still illegal in the United States, but David’s buddy the producer Robert Evans had connections. A grateful Helen said that Evans “got his friend, Los Angeles lawyer Sidney Korshak, to fix me up.” They flew Alford to California for treatment; it didn’t help. Helen tried neurosurgeons and, later on, contacted the televangelist Oral Roberts, whom she had met on The Merv Griffin Show. Helen generally distrusted religion, but she was looking for a miracle. Roberts prayed with the Alfords. He also proffered an excerpt of his wife’s book, His Darling Wife, Evelyn, to Helen. When his pious spouse gasped, “Cosmopolitan?” Roberts cited the magazine’s huge readership. “Besides,” he added, “I like Helen Gurley Brown.” Roberts was pleased to accept a ten-thousand-dollar donation from Hearst for his eponymous university.