Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Mary had become so obese that it was difficult for anyone to get her from the wheelchair into a car. She needed to get to the Methodist church for its fellowship and for AA meetings. Helen got Hearst to donate a van with a handicap lift to the church. It wasn’t enough. It was still difficult to get the manpower necessary to drive and use the van, as much as Mary might have benefited from it. Cleo, suffering from some age-related maladies, moved in with the couple and their ménage of animals and caregivers.

  Nature’s implacable cruelty had inflicted another bad joke on Mary; it was discovered that her backyard grew a self-sustaining crop of “lucky” four-leaf clovers. They just kept coming up. Mary’s housekeepers would find, press, and dry them and send them to Helen, who passed them along to acquaintances in need of luck or encouragement. She swore by their efficacy and tucked them into notes to those facing lumpectomies, biopsies, love and job troubles, public humiliations, and prosecution. Well, it just might help.

  For the New York branch of the family, the outset of the 1970s was exceeding expectations. David, working at Fox in tandem with Darryl F. Zanuck’s son Richard, had delivered a hit movie destined to become a classic so revered that it is number fifty on the American Film Institute’s list of the “100 Greatest Movies of All Time.” Zanuck had been the one to act quickly and invest four hundred thousand dollars in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, teaming Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and the director George Roy Hill. Helen glammed up for the red carpet at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; Butch Cassidy won four Oscars in early 1970; it lost Best Picture to Midnight Cowboy. Domestic box office for Cassidy in 1969 was just over $100 million.

  Helen was fighting trim; her measurements, faithfully taken bimonthly, “without straining tape measure any,” then typed onto Cosmopolitan memo paper, had held steady—no more than half an inch difference up or down over the last year: 33″ (bust), 24½″ (waist), 37″ (hips). Success hadn’t plumped up anything but her sales figures, which kept rising.

  David’s son and daughter-in-law were back in New York after studying at Washington University in St. Louis. So cheered was Helen to have Bruce married off that she had shown up at their 1965 wedding in a blindingly pink dress and matching turban. Bruce Brown was a regular contributor to Liberation, a pacifist magazine, and was said to be working on a book. He was also doing some freelance programming, mostly on drug-related topics, for WBAI, a progressive station in Manhattan at 99.5 FM that was listener-supported. Helen and David were fond of his wife, Kathy; she began work as a copy editor at Liberation, then became copy chief at Cosmo and would go on to a top editorial position at Mademoiselle. The couple was not as independent as Helen might have preferred. David recalled a conflict that left him uneasy.

  “I felt tensions building up to a dangerous level of anxiety … My son was in the hospital for a knee operation with the prospect of piling up medical costs. My wife, Helen, jealous perhaps or perhaps correctly, had said, ‘Why do you subsidize this boy of twenty-eight? What Indian sign has he got on you?’ It all came to me. Helen was the one who had the Indian sign on me. She could make me feel like a wrongdoer.”

  The tension eased when it became clear that only a short hospital stay was necessary.

  * * *

  Everything was lovely, really, until the chill day in early 1970 when Helen encountered Kate Millett and a stone-faced group of radical feminists in the Cosmo reception area. They meant business; Millett said that she was disgusted by the magazine’s “reactionary politics.” Helen doubtless saw her as a somewhat wild-eyed weirdo. But before year’s end, Millett’s doctoral thesis at Columbia University, Sexual Politics, would be bound in sturdy cloth, raised aloft at rallies, and embraced on the bestseller list. Her portrait, painted by Alice Neel, would be on the cover of Time magazine. It was that kind of year for the women’s movement; fast-moving, deeply factional, and boldly, fervently fractious.

  Helen was annoyed—she had work to do—but she kept her cool. In her quiet voice she explained that Cosmo considered itself a feminist magazine; she had met with a feminist group, Women in Media, earlier and was agreeable to printing more feminist articles—but on her terms. Shortly after the protest, Helen was invited, and strongly encouraged, to participate in a consciousness-raising session, explained to her as a confidential circle in which women honestly examined their own “hang-ups.” The women had no idea what they had unleashed. Mrs. Brown, who had so long ago stood naked and confessed her insecurities to a dozen other people in Charlie Cooke’s hang-up laboratory, had little trouble getting into the groove. She wrote about it in her editor’s column: “Twelve of us—I almost said girls, but they say I must stop that and refer to us as women—sat about and related our hang-ups. Frankly, I was only to my eighth hang-up when I had to relinquish the floor to the next hang-upee.” At least she didn’t bring along a manuscript to edit while the others shared. She closed her column by recommending consciousness-raising sessions to her women readers. Who knew—it just might help.

  During that office invasion, Helen got off easy, merely backed up against a radiator for a mostly well-mannered discussion. There was little civility at the sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal that March. After a hundred demonstrators burst through the doors at 9:00 a.m., it became an eleven-hour siege. The publisher and editor in chief was forty-two-year-old John Mack Carter; the women who occupied his well-appointed office were from the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Redstockings, and the New York Radical Feminists. The writer Susan Brownmiller, one of the group’s leaders, told reporters that they targeted LHJ “because it is one of the most demeaning magazines toward women,” and because it reached so many of them—6.9 million. The protesters demanded Carter’s replacement by a woman, along with day care for the forty-seven women on his staff and an end to “exploitative” advertising. Carter, while shaken, held the line, telling a reporter that “though they may have a point, they can’t have my job.” The demonstration got a bit physical; a couple of women tried to push Carter off his desk, where he was seated. They helped themselves to a box of cigars and puffed away on them.

  The following month, Helen did run a surprisingly forthright article reprinted from The Village Voice. It was by an essayist and critic later called a “feminist oracle.” In 1970, Vivian Gornick was distressed by the deepening hostilities between men and women at her dinners with friends. The article was titled “The Women’s Liberation Movement!” The subhead was a bit pushy for Cosmo: “The next great movement in history may be yours. Are you speeding or impeding its arrival?” Gornick opened with the litany of complaints and misperceptions about the movement she had heard among her own friends:

  From a husband at a dinner party: “What is all that crap about … They’re mostly a bunch of dykes, anyway.”

  From a “college-educated housewife, fat and neurotic,” a shrug: “I’m sorry, I just don’t feel oppressed.”

  Gornick found herself feeling unaccountably depressed. Sizing up the historic intransigencies of the inequalities, she pulled no punches: “Because no one has ever had any intention of turning over any serious work to us, both we and the blacks lost the ball game before we even got up to play. In order to live you have to have nerve, and we were stripped of our nerve before we began. Black is ugly and female is inferior; these are the primary lessons of our existence.” It was raw and radical for a Hearst magazine. But Gornick’s grim polemics were wrapped in approachable personal anecdote and soul-searching. For a policy piece, it’s a good read with an upbeat conclusion about the important work of feminists: “They are gathering fire, and I do believe the next great moment in history will be theirs. God knows, for my unborn daughter, I hope so.”

  * * *

  In late summer, Helen decided to try a bit of activism herself; it would be the first organized event for social justice that she had ever participated in. On August 26, 1970, an estimated ten thousand women marched down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to a rally at Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Libra
ry at Forty-Second Street. Its organizers called it the Women’s Strike for Equality. The action was in support of abortion rights, day care for working women, and equality in education and employment. NOW urged passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had first been introduced into Congress in 1923 and finally seemed to be getting a bit of traction.

  Helen was passionate enough about women’s reproductive rights to slip on some sensible shoes and get out there. Her first abortion-related article, “I Didn’t Have the Baby, I Had an Abortion,” had run three years earlier. The pseudonymous first-person account was lengthy, graphic, sad, and rueful. It did not present abortion as casual or inconsequential, but as a deeply considered and painful choice; Helen ran both pro and con reader mail in a subsequent issue.

  She must have approved of the 5:00 p.m. timing of the march step-off, set so that working women could attend. By the time it began, one of the demonstration’s key organizers had navigated a very long and trying day. Early that morning, Betty Friedan had been twenty minutes late for her first radio interview. Her excuse was amusing enough to the predominantly male editors of The New York Times that they featured the item above the fold in its front-page coverage of the march, set off in a highlighted box. Its derisive headline: “Leading Feminist Puts Hairdo Before Strike.” Friedan had an emergency appointment at Vidal Sassoon’s salon to get her shoulder-length gray hair curled and styled. The Times reported her explanation: “‘I don’t want people to think that Women’s Lib girls don’t care about how they look,’” she said as she paid the cashier ten dollars. “‘We should try to be as pretty as we can. It’s good for our self-image and it’s good for politics.’”

  Helen would have agreed with that statement; beauty on the barricades never hurt. But it had become clear that Helen and Friedan were miles apart on many other things. Friedan had lambasted Cosmo as “quite obscene and horrible,” adding, “It embraces the idea that women are nothing but a sex object.” Never mind that in Helen’s first year as editor, she had run a huge Friedan report, “Working Women 1965,” and that later, in 1978, when Helen called her asking, “Is the women’s movement over?” Friedan would oblige with a lengthy Cosmo article exploring the question. Perhaps she considered her articles placed in the frilly enemy camp as Trojan horses of sorts.

  Despite the two women’s freighted interactions, the rhetoric on the day of the march was nothing Helen could argue with. At the rally, Friedan, who drew the loudest cheers of any speaker, declared, “This is not a bedroom war, this is a political movement. Man is not the enemy, man is a fellow-victim.” Well, that was good to hear. The potential for scaring men away was long one of Helen’s chief if misguided reservations about the women’s movement.

  It was by no means a homogenous march; radicals and moderates, downtown lesbians and straight suburban moms, lactating hippie wives, the Socialist Workers Party’s Emma Goldman brigade, and a spirited contingent of original suffragettes were all herded into one designated lane of Fifth Avenue in rush hour traffic. Horns blared; women chanted. Helen strode along with Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Bella Abzug, past cheering women and girls and the inevitable hecklers calling the marchers “bra-less traitors.” One male counter-demonstrator wore a bra as he taunted marchers as they passed by St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Marchers carried signs that read “Repent, Male Chauvinists, Your World Is At an End,” and “Liberté, Egalité, Sororité.”

  The march was tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920. Politicians were realizing that this was a movement to be reckoned with; the brain trust of the newly founded NOW had done some vigorous lobbying. Though it was merely a ceremonial gesture, Mayor John V. Lindsay, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and President Richard Nixon had issued proclamations endorsing the significance of “Women’s Strike for Equality Day.” Rallies were held in Boston, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles, and other major cities that day. The New York rally went on until dark. One of the speakers was New York City’s commissioner of consumer affairs, Bess Myerson. She had begun her public life as Miss America of 1945.

  * * *

  When she left the office to join the march, Helen’s desk had a pile of upbeat editorial matters awaiting her attentions. Production was in high gear for the October issue, featuring the deep, laced-trimmed frontage of Raquel Welch on its cover; it was no coincidence that Welch was the marquee star in a Brown/Zanuck project at Fox, Myra Breckinridge, in release as the issue went to press. Some of the upcoming cover lines might have gotten Helen drummed out of the line of the march that day: “The Slightly Kept Girl,” and “Why (Sob) Didn’t He Call and How (Aha!) to Make Him.” Most surprising was a bold cover line in the bottom right corner: “‘Play It As It Lays,’ from the Smashing New Novel by Joan Didion.”

  How could that be? Five years after her vivisection by Didion, Helen had bought the first excerpt from her second novel, published that same August. Generally, Helen waited to buy the far cheaper second serial. Just what might have brought her around—and at a higher price? It could have been Didion’s growing reputation as a hot young writer and cool, brainy antidote to the California surfer girl trope. The now-iconic “Stingray” publicity photos showed Didion in a clingy long dress, wispy, smoking, and leaning against her beloved Corvette. “I’ve never read such rave reviews for a novel,” Helen gushed in her editor’s column. “The New York Times recently compared her to Nathanael West.” Helen also credited serious lobbying for the excerpt by her book editor, Junius Adams.

  It was, after all, a Hollywood-based story, which would appeal to Helen’s readers. Besides the movie industry bitchiness and a broken marriage, there is stark treatment of back room abortion, albeit in an upscale home. Didion would write repeatedly and unstintingly of abortion in three of her five novels. Over her lifetime, Helen’s most enthusiastic and committed activism would always be for abortion rights. But in the end, it was probably the good manager who listened to her book editor and snapped up the first serial of a novel that went on to win the National Book Award. For Cosmo, Helen could put some personal feelings aside.

  * * *

  At about that time, Helen agreed to sit for another memorable magazine profile. Her interviewer was a writer whom she knew and liked. Nora Ephron’s Esquire article was titled “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come with Me. I Was a Mouseburger and I Will Help You,” and it stands as the smartest comic/simpatico distillation of HGB’s maddening complexities to date. It was a good match. The two women shared a penchant for light, self-deprecatory writing about their own feminine insecurities. Ephron’s essays did not spare her own bodily anxieties, from “A Few Words About Breasts” in 1972 to her 2006 anthology I Feel Bad About My Neck, which also included a meditation on that freighted female appendage, “I Hate My Purse.”

  Ephron was a seasoned journalist by then, but she was not prepared for HGB’s insistent candor. Helen gave Ephron the name and phone number of a married ad executive she had an affair with during her single years. Ephron interviewed the man, who was still married and was perplexed that Helen would identify him. She judged it too awkward to use in the article.

  “I can’t believe you gave me his name,” Ephron told Helen later.

  “Oh. Well. Yes.”

  Unbidden, Helen also announced to a startled Ephron that she was very good in bed and she liked sex, very much. Ephron served it all up with both glee and deadpan reserve; she had the canny and humane instinct to merely quote Helen at length, and meticulously. By her Helenisms, ye shall know her.

  It was not a puff piece, by any means. To illustrate the more aggravating of HGB tics, Ephron tapped into her own editorial outrages at Cosmo, citing a cruel and unusual rewrite. In an innocuous article on how to start a conversation with a stranger, Helen’s blue pencil had violated a fine, defenseless Ephron sentence by inserting a bizarre non sequitur about not being afraid to take a bath while menstruating. Her editor Harriet LaBarre
had the onerous task of reading the change to Ephron over the phone. Helen was insistent and the writer was apoplectic—at least at first. Ephron wrote: “I hung up, convinced that I had seen straight into the soul of Helen Gurley Brown. Straight to the foolishness, the tastelessness her critics often so accuse her of. But I was wrong. She isn’t that way at all. She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a girl who hasn’t taken a bath during her period since puberty … And don’t you see? She is only trying to help.”

  * * *

  It continued to be an eventful year in Cosmo editorial; in the November 1970 issue, the word “penis” appeared in the magazine for the first time. In her editor’s column, Helen cautioned readers that the article containing that startling reference, an excerpt of Kate Millett’s scholarly Sexual Politics, “isn’t easy reading but it’s well worth it.” Helen chose a section on Freud, “who managed to denigrate women pretty badly and who felt women never recovered from their early shock (and jealousy) over not having a penis!”

  The column jumped to another wacky HGB non sequitur; she was positively purring over a new addition to the Cosmo family. The magazine’s new mascot and logo was a cartooned kitty cat named Lovey. Helen hoped that the puss would become as recognizable as The New Yorker’s monocled Eustace Tilly or the Playboy bunny. Lovey was that issue’s cover girl; her image was printed on a T-shirt that allowed zero cleavage on the model wearing it. Lovey was bright pink, sporting a perky red bow; she would pounce into Cosmo merchandising on T-shirts and tote bags.