Deems scrawled back, “How about Dick Nixon?”
Burt Reynolds became the anointed one. Helen met the actor in late January 1972 when she appeared on The Tonight Show and he was guest-hosting. Helen and Reynolds hit it off on the air and backstage; inspired by a certain yumminess of wit and physique, she made her indecent proposal during a commercial break. Reynolds figures that he may have had a few cocktails in the greenroom that night. “Helen didn’t have to talk me into it,” he confessed in his 2015 memoir, But Enough About Me. “I said yes before we came back on the air.”
Reynolds went to Helen’s office the following day to finalize the details. His friends and his agent advised against such frivolity; he was in a “serious” picture due out that summer, Deliverance. Reynolds went ahead anyhow. He stopped for two quarts of vodka on the way to Scavullo’s studio, ambled around in a robe for ages, then finally dropped his wrap and took his place atop that centerfold cliché, a bearskin rug.
As promised, the centerfold appeared in Cosmo’s April 1972 issue. Scavullo posed a grinning, hirsute Reynolds with one hand over his package and a rakish cigarillo dangling from his lips. The issue was a sellout: 1.55 million copies. The morning of the on-sale date, Reynolds awoke to a keening noise outside his home. When he left the house, his car was surrounded. Everywhere he went, he was mobbed by women waving the centerfold. His mailbox could not contain the wild torrents of lust and longing. Most of the mail was “positive and polite,” though there were also “some of the filthiest letters I’ve ever seen,” along with Polaroids of nude and willing women and one mash letter with a tuft of pubic hair encased in waxed paper. Perhaps his agent had been right.
* * *
In the Lampoon castle, there was jubilation over the Reynolds sellout as the staff pored over stacks of Cosmo back issues provided by the Hearst Corporation. Clearly they had picked a winner. When they had a cover mock-up readied, Rayman and Downey boarded a bus to New York and were ushered into Helen’s office for their audience. She was welcoming and cordial, wrapped in clingy black behind her rococo gilt desk. When Rayman showed her the cover, there was silence. And then:
“Ooooh.” Her brightly outlined mouth made a small circle. For a moment, Helen was quiet again, considering the vision before her.
The cover girl was a smirking skank, half-clad in the sort of ragged-hemmed, Clan of the Cave Bear schmatte that only Tina Turner can carry off with élan. One breast was nearly popping out. A leering jester, the Lampoon’s mascot, peered from behind her shoulder. Helen’s voice was calm and gentle as she explained to the long-haired parodists: “You can go with that if you want, but that’s not a Cosmopolitan girl. Nobody wants to sleep with a girl who looks like that. She’s so … bedraggled looking.”
Rayman and Downey exchanged panicky looks as Helen continued: “A Cosmopolitan girl always has a little smile, a twinkle in her eyes, something … there’s a little spark to her. That’s not a Cosmopolitan girl.”
The Harvard men had been schooled by a master marketer. By the summer of 1972, the real Cosmo cover girl was no joke. In the months following the centerfold issue, Helen’s circulation figures reached 1.6 million copies a month, double the numbers she had begun with. Ad pages had soared to 112 pages a month; the monthly ad revenue difference before and after HGB: $57,000 in 1965 and $434,000 in 1972.
That day in Helen’s office, Rayman and Downey couldn’t know the might of Cosmo’s rising numbers, but they recognized their error quickly enough. It wouldn’t do to make Helen’s curvaceous hood ornament unrecognizable and it surely wouldn’t sell their parody. She was right; they needed a subtler joke than just turning their model into a troll. They thanked Helen and left.
“We got on the bus,” Rayman said, “we went back to Cambridge, sat around with the staff, and came up with a very simple cover. It would be a shot of a beautiful model with just a hint of smile. We shot it with the same one-bounce flash off the photographer’s reflector to look just like a Scavullo cover.” They allowed themselves just one comic twist: the model’s eyes were crossed.
The Lampoon staff had rented the Victorian home of the innovative Harvard anthropologist Irven DeVore for the summer. It was comic Kismet; the vibes in the old, weird house were most hospitable to Lampoon apery. Since it was often used for “simian seminars,” the rooms were filled with specimens, baboon skins and skulls. “We would dress up in skins,” Marx said. “We never slept. It was a party.”
While the children were having their fun, doing an interview with the first Talking Barbie and mocking the cheesy improve-your-bustline ads, Helen had more misgivings about that first cover girl they showed her. In August she wrote to Rayman: “She looks gloomy … I don’t think anybody is going to be attracted to that bosom!” She also complained of an undue emphasis on sex in the cover lines they had shown her: “The two I object to most are 10 WAYS TO DECORATE YOUR UTERINE WALL and TURN YOUR PERIOD INTO A DASH. I’m enclosing our September issue of COSMO so you can see how few of our own cover lines are sexy.”
Helen was correct about that; her issues from that year never had more than one or two sex-related cover lines, and at that stage they were quite tame—none of your icky “Untamed Va-jay-jays: Guess What Sexy Style Is Back” and the online doozy “Men Are Having Their Nutsacks Ironed Because YOLO” dreamed up by some of Helen’s more recent successors. Even in her first years at the helm, the public perception of Cosmo’s sex mania didn’t fit the facts. In the years from 1965 to 1972, sex was the subject of just 78 of 1,503 nonfiction articles, a shockingly modest 5.2 percent.
The misperception was largely a result of Helen’s ceaseless media fan dance, vamping on TV. And the centerfold stunt didn’t help. For those who didn’t actually read her magazine, the gambit landed Cosmo squarely in the “naughty book” category with Playboy. Helen had no one to blame—or congratulate—but herself.
That same August, Helen decided to reward Burt Reynolds’s good sportsmanship with a full profile in the magazine. In July, Reynolds got his first serious critical raves for his role in the southern gothic odyssey Deliverance. He was a star! Helen had a teensy bit to do with that, she said. Reynolds was filming White Lightning, an ex-con/car crash/moonshiner genre smashup. He was on location in Little Rock, of all places. Helen dispatched Gael Greene.
Before she left for Arkansas, Greene decided that she would absolutely not fall into the sack with her subject, as she had with Clint Eastwood. She intended to give Reynolds, then thirty-six, a stern bit of career advice. “I thought he was foolish to do the centerfold. He complained all the time that people didn’t take him seriously. Then he distributed photos of himself wearing a football jersey and obviously naked below. So I had that opinion of him when I went out to interview him.”
She flew to meet Reynolds on the movie set and found him in the hotel bar. “He was dark, heavy-browed, his sulky lips involved with a vodka and tonic…”
Uh-oh.
“We tried to talk in the bar and there were too many interruptions,” Greene said. “We decided we would go to his room and order dinner. Jumpsuits were hot then and I had this really sexy satin fringy jumpsuit. I decided to wear it because I had vowed to myself that I would not have sex with Burt Reynolds. I did not want to be one of just a thousand women that year. I wore the jumpsuit because I knew there was no way you could gracefully get out of it.”
Once they were in his room, lust trumped grace; fringe parted obligingly.
He never spoke to Greene again.
“He hated the article,” she said. “He didn’t like when I said that he should stop sending out naked pictures of himself. He didn’t like being criticized.” Greene spilled her writer’s remorse to her therapist, who was not at all sympathetic.
“Gael, why did you do that? It was so stupid. You didn’t have to.”
“Well, I’m a journalist.”
“You consider Cosmopolitan to be journalism?”
“She was right,” Greene concluded, “I really regretted it.�
�
* * *
Back in Cambridge, after some spirited debate on the right poster boy—there was support for Ralph Nader, Dick Cavett, and Wilt Chamberlain—the staff realized there was only one choice: the nation’s globe-trotting secretary of state and most eligible bachelor, Henry Kissinger. They would pose him on a fuzzy faux-panda rug. (Kissinger, also a former Harvard professor, had recently been in China conducting talks with Premier Zhou En-Lai.) They created a composite photo that set Dr. K’s head atop the slightly zaftig body of a fifty-year-old Boston cab driver. “It sold over a million copies, the biggest Lampoon sale ever,” said Rayman. “We even went back to press and the Lampoon made a ton of money. It got national attention. Henry Kissinger was in Vietnam when it came out and there were news stories about Kissinger autographing copies of it for the GIs.”
Now everyone was in on the joke and it was all in good fun—wasn’t it? Helen had pulled it off again, landing just off-center of national affairs, in the nightly news and the print media buzz, and all but swatting off eager advertisers. The tremendous profits helped the Lampoon bolster its anemic endowment. A much-relieved Rayman realized that their original cover would have been disastrous. Four decades later, he remains convinced: Helen Gurley Brown had staved off potential disaster for the smarty-pants college magazine, just as she had rescued Cosmo for Hearst. Her rules were simple and unassailable: build a brand, baby it, and never, ever mess with its most recognized signifiers.
In the Hearst Building, executives were thrilled with the sellout and circulation bump following the centerfold gambit, but Helen realized that she had to carefully manage her sizzling new feature. There would be a few more: the athlete/actor Jim Brown and dimply John Davidson would follow in 1973; Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977; and finally, in 1982, the Baywatch beach Adonis David Hasselhoff, with a pair of obliging shar-pei puppies snuggling on his crotch.
All these years later, Burt Reynolds remains rather testy about his pioneering role as male sex object. He is convinced that it cost Deliverance the Best Picture Oscar, which went to The Godfather instead. He was deeply distressed when he tried to act in serious theater afterward: “I did The Rainmaker in Chicago and the audiences were rowdy: instead of applause there were hoots and catcalls.” In his earlier memoir, My Life, Reynolds had been more direct about his discomfiture, with a plaint that might well have been composed in the Ibis Room:
“They cared more about my pubes than they did about the play.”
27
Isn’t She Lovely?
“Beauty” is a word that’s gotten a bum deal. People think beautiful is boring, but that’s not true. To be beautiful is to be godlike.
—the photographer Francesco Scavullo
AS THE LAMPOON STAFF FOUND, Helen’s cover girls were not so easy to burlesque. Helen had worked doggedly to create those over-the-top embodiments of her “sex is power” maxim, beauties with the bold, direct gaze that drilled the passerby and challenged, “take me”—to the register, please. Today, some women trade vintage Cosmo covers online like baseball cards.
Helen’s models ranged from unknowns to supermodels: Gia Carangi, Christie Brinkley, Paulina Porizkova, Kim Alexis, Patti Hansen, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Kathy Ireland, Beverly Johnson, Rene Russo, Janice Dickinson, Margaux Hemingway, Brooke Shields. But it didn’t matter who she was; once a model entered Francesco Scavullo’s chilly studio in the basement of his town house on East Sixty-Third Street, her transformation into Helen’s ideal became a process like no other. It usually required up to four hours in makeup and hair work for a half-hour shoot. Editorial work was still dismally low-paying in the mid-seventies—perhaps $150 for a cover. But nailing a Cosmo cover became the hot booking that could plump a model’s portfolio overnight.
At Helen’s insistence, cover shoots were minimalist, intimate, and budget-friendly. There was no sign of Mrs. Brown, no hovering fashion editor or art director, just Scavullo and his team: Sean Byrnes, the photographer’s assistant and life partner; the makeup genius Way Bandy; the studio manager, Bob Cass; and one of a select roster of hairdressers that included Suga and Harry King. Cass, now sublimely happy as a charter boat captain in the Caribbean, has plenty of wild, storm-tossed recollections from his years as Scavullo’s right hand and enabler. Weathering the photographer’s emotional problems, treated over the years with lithium, shock therapy, and hospitalizations, could be exhausting. There were many nervous collapses.
But never with Helen. Unlike some imperious editors Cass had seen joust with the maestro, this was no drama queen. As Helen set to sculpting and tinting her big beautiful doll, she consulted closely with Scavullo, whom she paid $1,500 for each cover shot.
Cass said the Cosmo sessions almost always went smoothly; rarely was there a reshoot. The reason was simple: “Helen Gurley Brown let him do what he wanted.” That extended to what her models were wearing. Cover outfits were chosen by Sean Byrnes, who had no fashion background. Helen had made it clear in a 1967 staff memo on cover requisites that Cosmopolitan was not, and never would be, a fashion book. Since she didn’t get the fashion ads, she could totally ignore the designer sun kings whose ad pages kept the editors of fashion magazines hyperventilating on seasonal trend alert.
Her most important dictate was this: “About one cover in three should have bosom showing. Decolletage dresses are not in fashion so I know it’s a challenge.”
Booo-soms über alles, on schedule, and on demand. And hair? The bigger the better. It might be said that the Cosmo Girl’s evolution toward extreme hair was compensatory; Helen’s own hair drove her crazy. It was thin, dry, and receding; she “mainlined Minoxidil,” the second-market heart drug that was found to grow hair. For two decades, Helen also relied heavily on the wizardry of Nick Piazza, who went straight to beauty school when he returned from his tour in Vietnam as a marine and landed in the renowned salon of Kenneth (Battelle), known as the world’s first single-named celebrity hairdresser. Piazza worked with Jacqueline Onassis, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Eunice Shriver. Helen was hooked on his deft cuts and superb custom falls and wigs. She had several at any given time. Piazza recalled that Helen had even submitted herself to a tattooist’s needle: “Because she had a receding hairline, she had little dots tattooed in to sort of simulate some fullness in the hairline.” It helped for a while. “Yeah, but they turned orange,” Piazza said. Helen rolled with it. Unlike so many women he has helped, she fully understood her beauty shortcomings and was realistic about how much could be done. “Helen wasn’t upset with any of that. That was just life.”
But how she enjoyed her cover excesses. Her models had dream hair, glossy, copious, tousled, just-out-of-bed hair. No one would do it bigger and fuller than the British hairdresser Harry King. He did eighty-five Cosmo covers with Scavullo.
“I started that chopped, natural, fucked-up look,” King said. “They all wanted it.” This is how he made the glorious mess: “I spritzed it with this stuff and then I got my brush, picked up huge chunks, teased it at the root and brushed it through the ends. The whole process took me fifteen minutes, max. Once we got on the set, I would create shapes with my hands.” Sometimes the tousle got more sauvage with help from studio fans. “And when the photographer would change a roll of film, I would go in and completely give a new hairstyle, in minutes. The photographers loved that because I didn’t take hours. Helen Gurley Brown loved the hair.”
Though she would never have all the enviable assets herself, HGB had built her avatar; Bob Cass says that her creation came to life courtesy of a bank of lights Scavullo called his light cannon. “Most photographers would bounce light into an umbrella, which really just had a very commercial look. His light was funneled into and through an umbrella to diffuse the light.” This gave the Cosmo Girl the arresting gaze that Helen so adored.
And for the models? Beverly Johnson would like to explain how her first Cosmopolitan cover made her a woman. No lie. Listen.
* * *
“I really want to do Cos
mo.”
The model agency duenna Eileen Ford looked at little Beverly Johnson, waving a copy of that vulgar thing at her. Ford dispatched her girls to Vogue and Bazaar and to the runways. Cosmo? It was a creature of the magazine industry’s clawing underclass. Out of the question, dear. It was déclassé, unladylike. Don’t ask again.
Johnson, a skinny, brainy African American girl from Buffalo, New York, politely but resolutely got up in Mrs. Ford’s business. “Why not?”
Nearly forty years after this impertinence, Johnson sat in a Manhattan hotel suite, serene and stunning at sixty-three, in town for some work during Fashion Week, pleased to talk about how her first Cosmo cover transformed her—in the business, and in her own head.
“I saw a Naomi Sims Cosmo cover—she was the top black model at the time and I was on her heels. It was so beautiful and so classy and I was saying, ‘Look, everybody’s doing it and I want to do it!’” Johnson had some standing at Ford, even at her young age; Vogue had already put her on its cover, in a chaste cornflower-blue crewneck, the sort of treatment that Mrs. Ford approved of for her upstate ingénue. Johnson tumbled into the business like Alice down the rabbit hole. Her mother had brought her A student to the Glamour offices to take a typing test. She did poorly but soon landed on the magazine’s cover.
“I knew nothing about the business, I just kind of fell in. I was this little five-foot-nine, one hundred and three pounds, flat-chested high-fashion model and I got this Vogue cover and I did the Halston show.” Never mind the couture treatment; little Beverly longed to grow up and get real. “I wanted to see every aspect of the fashion world and Cosmo was a part of that. And, so, I began to beg. ‘I really want to do Cosmo, I really really want to do Cosmo.’”
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