Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Lovey was the last good thing that happened; December brought the Browns’ year crashing to a dismal end. Their misfortune played out in excruciating, public, and bicoastal slo-mo. David Brown and Richard Zanuck were summarily, viciously fired from Fox by Zanuck’s father, Darryl. David called their stage-managed dismissal the Ritual of Severance. On the afternoon of December 29, the two men made their way through a gauntlet of tipped-off reporters in the New York lobby of the old Art Deco Fox Building in the neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. “No time was wasted,” David wrote. “We were asked to resign forthwith from the board and from our positions as president and executive vice-president. Like criminals, we were allowed one phone call—to our lawyer. He said get it over with—resign.”

  A final ceremony of humiliation, studio-style, awaited the Fox pariahs at Fox headquarters in Los Angeles. As their stunned secretaries looked on, Brown and Zanuck were stripped of their credit cards; they watched as their names were removed from their parking spots; security guards they had known for years were instructed never to admit them again without appointments. It was not lost to the trade papers that Papa Zanuck, a man with the appetites and charisma of Caligula, was putting his own son’s manhood in a very public vise.

  And why? It seemed Butch Cassidy himself couldn’t have rescued the partners from their most recent capers gone bad. The disgraced pair had been responsible for an expensive series of lurid disasters: Portnoy’s Complaint (the rights were bought but the film was never made at Fox), the bizarre and X-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and the disastrous adaptation of Gore Vidal’s transgender novel Myra Breckinridge. Fox still had a cash-flow problem; the studio had never fully recovered from the Cleopatra debacle. Worse, the modest profit on Dolls was offset when the Mansfields sued Fox for making an unlawful sequel and tarnishing Jacqueline Susann’s literary reputation.

  The industry humiliation was bad enough. But David’s private reaction was a deep depression. “Failure is always at your heels,” he wrote of the plunge. “There is no way to avoid it. It’s terrifying. It unsettles you. It disorients you. It puts you into deep depression. It’s a form of death. Whenever I have a failure, I go into mourning.”

  Suddenly, the Browns’ life together went dark, though to those encountering the couple in the Manhattan caravan of dinners, galas, and screenings, David Brown seemed just fine. But at home, the gloom was unbearable. Helen described the onset: “My darling’s depressions, usually short-lived, thank God, are cataclysmic. They roll through the apartment like bolts of soggy gray flannel, enveloping everything in sight including the furniture, certainly including me … Finally when his pain has caused me such pain I can’t stand it any longer (smoothing his brow, supper on a tray, rubbing his feet get you nowhere), I tell him I’m ready to jump.”

  He countered: Couldn’t he even tell her bad news? “What am I supposed to do … pretend to be happy, wear a vacant smile so that you won’t be inconvenienced?”

  * * *

  As the Browns reeled into 1971, David and Richard Zanuck began drawing up plans to become independent production partners. Helen was preparing for some modest promotional duties. She had reissued her eight-year-old seminal work and retitled it Sex and the New Single Girl. Published by Geis, it was another HGB rehash, replete with anachronisms and barely updated save for her newest beauty regimes. The book came and went like a cat in the night.

  Another American author, quite beloved by then, made it known that she was most unhappy about her glancing appearance in Helen’s magazine. In July 1971, Cosmo felt obliged to run her letter of complaint; the writer felt herself misrepresented in an article about the publishing business written by Stephen Birmingham. It referred to her first and only novel as “a dog-eared manuscript turned down by virtually every publishing house in New York.” The complainant countered, “The fact is that I received a contract from Tay Hohoff, senior editor at Lippincott on the basis of a first draft of an unfinished manuscript that had been submitted to only one publisher. As for Miss Hohoff’s guiding the writing ‘paragraph by painful paragraph,’ she did give me invaluable encouragement and support. But the truth is that I wrote the novel by myself. By hand. In Monroeville, Alabama.”

  It was signed by Harper Lee. Her cavils about Cosmo’s misinformation regarding To Kill a Mockingbird hit on a serious deficiency. Despite its humming commercial enterprise, Helen’s six-year-old remake of the magazine still hadn’t anything resembling a dedicated fact-checking department and Helen saw no need to have one. It was a liability and a journalistic failing that would cost her dearly later on.

  * * *

  It was common practice then to run wholly made-up articles. “I Was a Sleep Around Girl” was authored by William Manville, then married to the writer Nancy Friday, another Cosmo contributor and the author of My Mother/My Self, the book that enabled many therapists to consider buying second homes. Manville, a novelist, had told Liz Smith he needed to make some quick money. “I told him to think of sensational things, sexy stories,” Smith recalled. “True or not, Helen will never know. And she’ll love them. I think one was about nuns climbing over a convent wall.” Smith had to fess up about fabricating her article on the Park Avenue call girl “Nicky.” It was so realistic and well-read that the director Alan Pakula offered to hire Smith to advise Jane Fonda for her role as a prostitute in Klute. She had to tell the director, “I lost my moral compass when I did that, so I am no expert on call girls.” They had a roaring laugh over it at lunch.

  Judy Krantz called Helen with an idea she swore she could research in accurate and vivid detail. Krantz declared that damn it, she had had enough of reading about the rolling cascades of orgasms that women were supposed to be having. Bestsellers such as Dr. David Rubin’s Any Woman Can and The Sensuous Woman, by “J,” featured women with climax capability in the two and even three digits! Oh please—another thing to make normal women feel inadequate? Despite the headlines, the percentage of “multi-orgasmic” women was actually minuscule, Krantz contended. Who are these women? And who’s counting? It was time someone reassured Cosmo readers that there was nothing sub-par about one big fabulous O at a time. Krantz proposed the article and its memorable title: “The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm.” Helen loved it.

  Krantz made cogent cases for doubting some of the reports on multi-orgasmic women; few of the bestselling sexologists gave actual percentages for such fortunate creatures. And though she praised Masters and Johnson’s The Human Sexual Response as “the first important breakthrough in understanding women’s sexuality,” Krantz wanted to see numbers, please, and in real bedrooms. “Some women … (again, we are not told how many) ‘may enjoy’ multiple orgasms—but consider, please, that these took place in a laboratory where women were masturbating … not when making love with an actual partner.”

  She had her own laboratory, and it was one very active petri dish. Steve and Judy Krantz had moved to Los Angeles, he for the production work and she in a new role as Helen’s West Coast correspondent. Once Helen okayed the article, Krantz began working the denizens of luxury spas and industry parties to get her story. Much of her later success as a novelist rested with her big eyes and ears; she was and is a peerless and very amusing observer of the idiosyncratic mores and louche lifestyles of the bitchin’ famous. Krantz didn’t doubt that certain L.A. women would dish on orgasm experiences as readily as they swapped personal trainers and colonic practitioners. “I introduced myself as West Coast editor of Cosmo, wanting to do an interview on orgasm. Any party that I went to, I brought it up. I was able to get a lot of people. And I came up with eight percent of the women I interviewed had had multiple orgasms.”

  She didn’t claim scientific accuracy; she was just fulfilling the Cosmo mandate: help normal women be okay with a single satiating O. Still, the A-list anthropologist in her was amazed at some of the “oral histories.”

  “One of them needed two hours of foreplay before she could have her first orgasm. She’d been married five tim
es. The husband who told me about her divorced her soon after. Very tired husband. She said that once she had one orgasm, she just would have more and more. She said her head and her toes would touch the mattress and the rest of her was up in the air having an orgasm. If she hadn’t had an orgasm with her husband the night before, she would go to work and pick out the man she would have lunch with, then afterwards they would go to bed. She couldn’t take two days in a row without orgasming. Very strange girl. Oh, I kept a straight face, I didn’t laugh. I would just be amazed. And the more you’re amazed the more they tell you.”

  Krantz’s article was well received, cheered by the mono-orgasmic majority; it became rather legendary. At least a decade later, having been introduced at a party to the then-editor of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, she was tickled by Brown’s reaction. “She said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Judy Krantz? You’re the one who totally changed the way we could write in magazines.’ I said, ‘I am?’ She said, ‘Yes! Ever since “The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm,” we can write much more frankly in magazines. Did you know how important that was?’”

  Krantz confessed that she hadn’t a clue. “I just thought it was a wonderful title.”

  26

  Cosmo Goes to Harvard

  My favorite magazine says one should buy lots of cosmetics, learn how to make small talk, and cultivate a sophisticated aloofness with sexual overtones. I love that magazine … I enjoy fellatio and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I guess you’d have to say I’m that Cosmopolitan girl.

  —from The Harvard Lampoon’s Cosmopolitan parody issue, 1972

  THE TONIGHT SHOW FLICKERED ONSCREEN in the delft-tiled castle that is headquarters to The Harvard Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine that has been published at the university since 1876. The Lampoon members Eric Rayman, Jim Downey, and Sandy Frazier were idly watching TV in the top-floor Ibis Room and brainstorming about which magazine they might parody next. That night in March 1972, the assembled Lampoon staffers were having difficulty choosing a victim.

  Playboy? No, too soon after the Lampoon’s 1966 send-up; it was a winner. The staff crowed: “It sold faster than Nixon’s ambassadorial appointments.” Hef himself sent a telegram professing his delight.

  Life? Nope, the magazine had done that a few times, starting back in 1911. Its most recent Life parody, featuring the earth as a broken egg on its cover, lost money. Rayman, the Lampoon president and a Harvard junior, figured that it was because it didn’t have sex on the cover. A successful 1968 Time parody with a naked woman at a newsstand and the cover line “Does Sex Sell Magazines?” had done just fine.

  Rayman’s crew needed a hit that would sell very well on newsstands nationally. In 1972 the Lampoon’s meager endowment was again in need of a serious cash infusion. Rayman had taken the helm at a challenging moment in the magazine’s history, just as the university was navigating the post-sixties churn of sexual politics. Gender skirmishes were erupting on campuses nationwide as “coeds” chafed at the very term. A Boston-based collective of feminist writers had just published Our Bodies, Ourselves, a frank, empowering guide to the female body by and for women; some men were studying it as a user’s manual. At Harvard, Brahmin paternalism was giving little quarter. A hotly debated “non-merger merger” agreement in 1971 gave Harvard control of day-to-day operations at its sister school, Radcliffe; this included moving some female undergraduates into Harvard houses for the first time. Could women be full-fledged Harvard students? Could they be funny enough for the Lampoon?

  “Women started trying out for the Lampoon my freshman year and sophomore year,” said Rayman. “The Lampoon opened its candidacy to women but didn’t elect any; it was very controversial, you can imagine, fights, blackballs, everything.” Then, in the fall of 1971, the freshman Patricia Marx became the first woman elected, followed by the senior Elizabeth Stern and two more women the following May. Marx said she had no feminist imperative in applying.

  “When I got to Harvard, I thought, well, I’d sign up for this. I had no idea that there was a problem—that they didn’t take women. I knew that I was the first girl because there were newspaper stories about it, but it didn’t seem like a political thing to do.” Marx did notice some changes on campus, notably on her diploma. “I applied to Radcliffe and got a Harvard degree.” She was hearing ramped-up rhetoric from some of her women friends. “The student ratio was three to one [male to female] then. I remember a friend of mine saying, ‘We’ve got to fight to change the ratio, because all those boys look at us.’ And I said, ‘But that’s why I came here.’ I thought it was great that there were more boys than girls.”

  On the staff in 1972 were some future perpetrators of an edgier new humor, a comic sensibility that would claw past all boundaries of taste and mix old-school pratfalls with a penchant for being fiendishly, gleefully politically incorrect. Jim Downey wound up as head writer for Saturday Night Live in its glory days of Coneheads, “Weekend Update,” John Belushi’s Samurai deli man, and Eddie Murphy’s ghetto take on “Mr. Rogers.” Patty Marx would become an SNL writer, a novelist, a New Yorker contributor, and the 2015 winner of a Guggenheim Foundation grant to perpetrate more spare, elegant absurdities. Ian “Sandy” Frazier has long been a nonfiction writer and humorist at The New Yorker.

  Rayman, now a well-respected Manhattan publishing attorney, could throw a comic punch line with the best of them; he was also the Guy in Charge, able to negotiate with printers and distributors on the business side and keep the merry pranksters on task. Sometimes. Despite its talents, the group was making little progress choosing its victim that night until inspiration beamed down obligingly from the TV set. The Tonight Show guest Helen Gurley Brown, smug as a tabby with a mouthful of canary feathers, announced that Cosmopolitan’s April 1972 issue would have an exciting new feature: a nude male centerfold. Why shouldn’t women have equal ogling rights? Cosmo would be the first magazine ever to make it happen.

  In the Ibis Room, an epiphany: “And we’ll be the second!”

  So it was decreed in the comedy castle. In doing her coquettish promo from the Tonight Show couch, Helen had pitched the Harvard team a fat home run; they could have sport with its cover and the male centerfold. The new Cosmopolitan was a coltish seven years old, but its cover girls had already been stamped with the saucy imprimatur of its Image Maker in chief and her trusted co-conspirator the photographer Francesco Scavullo. Thus far, theirs was a successful cover formula: models wore mysterious Giaconda a-go-go smiles above booo-soms artfully cupped and cantilevered in the latest peekaboo Qiana frock. It was time to lob a few eggs into that décolleté.

  Helen seemed pleased at the news when Rayman phoned her. Harvard was calling! In fact, the Lampoon was a bit late to the Cosmo media roast. The newsmagazines had weighed in; Time accused Helen of creating a simpering idiot in the Cosmo girl, a creature in need of italics and underlined instructions just to paint her nails. Tongue firmly in cheek, Newsweek had branded Helen “the working girl’s Simone de Beauvoir.” In 1968, a New Yorker cartoon showed a tawdry urban street with SEX writ large over doorways, in windows, on trucks and water towers. The caption has a matronly passerby remarking to her male companion, “I suppose we have Helen Gurley Brown to thank for this.” Even the conservative moral arbiter William F. Buckley felt compelled to burlesque HGB’s wanton ethos and girlie syntax with a 1970 cover story in the National Review; his essay was titled “You Are the More Cupcakeable for Being a Cosmopolitan Girl.”

  Buckley held his patrician nose and did a deep read of Helen’s “Step into My Parlor” editor’s columns, “which are pure HGB,” he noted. He read articles as well. One of the most luscious pieces caught his fancy. He limned Cosmo’s helpful how-tos this way: “Are you, sir, a breast fetishist? I mean, madam, is your lover a breast fetishist? Don’t despair. Don’t go away. Hear what Jill did. Cosmo reveals that on her wedding night ‘she came to bed with a dollop of Hershey’s milk-chocolate syrup tipping each breast. Honest! Stan is still a fetishist. But his fetish i
s his wife. And they keep a can of Hershey’s by the bed. Does that hurt anyone?’”

  Buckley had taken the cover line for his essay from one of Helen’s own high-fructose sentences: “You’ve got to make yourself more cupcakeable all the time so that you’re a better cupcake to be gobbled up.”

  Could it be that prose of this caliber was almost … unburlesqueable? Posing seductively in the crosshairs of culture and gender wars, Cosmo and its italic-dependent editor had become easy and rather delectable targets.

  Patty Marx was not a Cosmo reader. “Before I went up to Cambridge for the summer to work on the parody, I was in Philadelphia at my parents’ and I had to get copies of the magazine so I could study them. I remember being so embarrassed to go into the drugstore to get Cosmo. My mother did it for me. It was like buying rubbers or something. I just thought it was a dirty magazine.”

  Helen didn’t seem intimidated by the brainy college kids and their pranks. As a rule, the Lampoon never sought permission from its magazine targets, but tried for a certain cordiality. Rayman’s call was a courtesy. Helen’s sole stipulation, she told him, was that she be shown the cover beforehand. This was strictly a business requisite. It would not do to have Cosmo and its doppelgänger on the newsstands together with covers too similar in color and image. Mrs. Brown could take a joke, but she was not prepared to lose a single newsstand sale to an impostor.

  * * *

  At the time, much of Helen’s attention was focused on her greatest gamble yet, that male centerfold. She had first floated the idea in 1968 and Hearst executives reluctantly funded a naked photo shoot of the actor James Coburn. In a priceless memo to Dick Deems slugged “Cosmopolitan Nude Man,” Helen reported on the resulting photos with evident horror; the otherwise scrumptious Mr. Coburn seemed to have slid into some mystical Eastern phase. The two shots approved by Mr. and Mrs. Coburn exuded a whiff of visual patchouli, with “almost a hippie look.” Helen suggested they eat their losses and wait for Mr. Right.