Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Then Johnson saw Helen Gurley Brown at a cocktail party and made a beeline for her. “Unfortunately I wasn’t dressed like a Cosmo Girl because I had on a gingham yellow shirt and I wore this bow tie and I had on a silk suit with a skirt. I cozied right up to her. She was just so friendly. I said, ‘I really want to be on the cover of Cosmo.’

  “I don’t know, I just don’t know. Well, let me talk with you but I don’t know if you really fit, you know, the Cosmo Girl look.”

  Johnson went home downcast, kicking herself for the gingham and man-tailored getup. But the call came. She found out later that Sean Byrnes had lobbied hard for her. He insisted: Scavullo’s team could make Miss Beverly Johnson into a sizzle-lean Cosmo Girl. With her face finally camera-ready after three hours beneath Way Bandy’s brushes and a fixative dusting of baby powder, Johnson braced herself. “So now the hard test was the taping of the boobs—and I was like, my God there’s nothing there.” She stood naked to the waist as Bandy nudged and taped what real flesh he had to work with. “I had a handful. You know, like thirty-two double A.”

  Bandy stood back and surveyed the flatlands. “Okay, we’ll have to draw you some breasts.”

  He worked with the precision of a Dutch master, shading, blurring. “What he did with my face, he did for my chest. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s not going to work.’ And sure enough, it looks like I have breasts. And now, I have the dress on, looking like I have breasts. I am this woman.”

  Bandy was yelling: “Oh my God, you’re Sophia Loren!”

  They draped his trompe l’oeil frontage in Elsa Peretti diamonds by the yard. Johnson shivered in Scavullo’s lair. “Ice cold: that’s just the way he likes to shoot. All the assistants are scurrying around, trying not to look. So I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, they’re looking at me in a different way.’ I looked in the mirror and I was like, ‘Wow, who is that woman?’ That is the day that I became a woman.”

  They were waiting for her. Scavullo had descended to the studio. “I remember walking out and I just thought I looked like the sexiest woman in the world. I mean, I really felt that. I remember Sean standing behind Francesco with these huge lights on me, on … everything.”

  “I need quiet now!!! Beverly—lie down!” Down she went on the white painted floor. Scavullo preferred to shoot from above the models. Cass handed him a loaded camera, and they were off. Scavullo talked his talk—the low purr and sigh between flashes, Ohhhh, Beverly! Unbelievable. Her cover, February 1976, was Valentine red.

  “It changed my life. I started seeing myself as this real sexual being. As a model, looking like that, you really didn’t get a lot of action [from men]. In real life, you don’t look normal. On most magazine shoots, we’re objectified, flat and two-dimensional. There’s no curves. With Helen’s magazine, we were women. We were women who were proud to be women.”

  * * *

  As a very pretty baby girl, Brooke grew up before the lenses of the best. “Scavullo was Uncle Frankie to me,” said Shields, who was a Cosmo cover girl thirteen times, from 1981 to 1996. “I met him when I was eleven months old.” Shields debuted in Cosmo in February 1981, the same year as her infamous “What comes between me and my Calvins?” jeans ad. At fifteen, she was Cosmo’s youngest cover model. That day at Uncle Frankie’s, they gave her wispy bangs for the first time, beneath huge, wild hair; Sean Byrnes tucked her torso into a taut leatherette bandeau. It was odd, but okay. “I was never known for the body. I was known from the neck up. I was the face. It was funny, it felt older, because it was Cosmo and it was going to be a full-length shot. In most of my covers I’d be wearing jeans and topsiders beneath that white board. This was decked out, buffed up, and above the board.”

  As one of the most photographed women in the last half century, Shields has only positive memories of those shoots. “I was always comfortable with it. It wasn’t like you were doing Playboy.” Helen’s covers did not push her toward anything she hadn’t been dreaming of. Every time she went to work in Scavullo’s studio, she looked up at her ideal. All the men in the studio adored the model Gia Carangi. Her image covered the walls. “I’d stare at the picture of Gia, the one in the sand where she’s sort of nude. I thought she was the most beautiful. I’d go, ‘Ohhh, when I grow up.’”

  Shields developed almost a family relationship with Helen, who got along well with the notoriously difficult Teri Shields, Brooke’s mother and manager. “My mom was from Newark and poor and here was Helen, this self-made woman, outspoken when nobody was, and put together and fabulous.” She found Helen’s stream of affirmations nourishing. The little notes on pussycat stationery would flutter in after a shoot or a promotional event. “I started writing her notes, too, and sending her things. I just became sort of like an adopted niece or something. Anything she wanted me to appear at or show up at or speak at, I would just say yes.”

  As a mother of two, Shields has not been in studios that much of late, but when she does step into today’s lavish photographic events in industrial lofts, with mountains of achingly curated catering and a sprawling cast of hair and makeup teams, editors, clients, she appreciates the efficiencies of Helen’s operation and its family feel. “It was easy and great. That little makeup room, and that little bathroom with the picture of Barbra Streisand in boxing gloves over the toilet. It was very much like being at home. You’d go upstairs for lunch with Uncle Frankie and hang out afterwards.” Most often, though, she couldn’t stay and play. “I was in school. I had homework to do.”

  28

  High Tide

  Start the shark!

  —Steven Spielberg, on the set of Jaws, 1974

  ONE AFTERNOON IN MID-MAY 1973, as David’s father, Edward F. Brown, lay intubated and near death in a veterans’ hospital, kept alive very much against his wishes, David sat in the Carlyle hotel dining room with a fine Meursault, a filet of freshly caught salmon, and the remaining members of the Brown family, deciding when to end the patriarch’s life support. With any luck or divine mercy, the comatose roué was replaying his life’s bold adventures beneath crepey eyelids—perhaps the night his brother Al brought “fifty beautiful, copper-colored girls” from the chorus line at the Cotton Club to the Brown apartment while his wife was off in the Hamptons with the children.

  David’s stepmother, Nathalie, was at the table that day, as were his half brother, Edward, and half sister, Natasha. They agreed on a time. It was a cool discussion, even for the widow-to-be. Edward had always insisted on a WASP standard of veiled emotion, even though he cheated on Nathalie constantly. She never openly challenged Edward’s gross infidelities. “I didn’t want to spoil his pleasure in deceiving me,” she told her stepson. Edward, eighty-seven, died alone; per his instructions, there was no service and no one accompanied the plain pine box to a veterans’ cemetery on Long Island. David had never loved him, but he admired the old man’s sangfroid at facing the final curtain. As it happened, Edward Brown died as his son’s fortunes were about to turn in a spectacular way. Something huge was lurking, unseen as yet, but there was a tug on the line.

  Within days of his father’s burial, David would make his deal of a lifetime. It was for a literary property rooted in true events that occurred just before his own birth in late July 1916. During the last two weeks of Lillian Brown’s pregnancy, the city broiled in a fierce heat wave that drew millions to the New York and New Jersey shores, until a series of fatal shark attacks began. Headlines screamed the horrors: “Shark Kills Bather off Jersey Beach; Women Are Panic-Stricken as Mutilated Body of Hotel Employee Is Brought Ashore”; “Armed Posses Comb Coast to Snuff Out Man-Eating Sharks.”

  What became known as the “Jersey Shore Attacks” splashed and chomped into legend during the first two weeks of July; within sight of crowded beaches, four people were killed and one injured, by either bull or great white sharks. Panicked seaside towns sent out bravado flotillas of shark hunters to slay the voracious monsters. The attacks were largely forgotten for more than half a century, until Brown and
Zanuck cast their wide, efficient net for more movie properties.

  * * *

  In the wake of their banishment from Fox, the partners had been operating on both coasts at manic speed; sometimes they worked out of their cars or from hotel rooms, with two sets of secretaries to field calls. As industry veterans, they had the advantage of direct access to agents, publishers, attorneys, and ready conduits to studio cash, mostly at Universal. They were pinning high hopes for some operating capital on an upcoming Christmas 1973 release. The Sting was a caper film reuniting Robert Redford and Paul Newman, directed again by George Roy Hill. The partners were scouting new directorial talent as well. They had let themselves be persuaded by a young director named Steven Spielberg to let him cowrite and direct a prison break/car chase movie. It was based on a true-crime story of a young mother and her incarcerated husband trying to keep custody of their son, starring the ingénue Goldie Hawn. Filmed in Texas, The Sugarland Express would be Spielberg’s first big-screen film as a director. He had also directed Duel, a TV movie that starred Dennis Weaver as the motorist being chased down an empty road by a mysterious stalker in a tanker truck.

  Brown/Zanuck continued to ply their contacts for more low-investment, high-yield film properties. Said one industry veteran, “David would cultivate sources the way cops cultivate an informant.” Enter Lyn Tornabene, who had become Helen’s go-to writer for any Cosmo features related to David’s films. Tornabene had been dispatched to the set of The Sugarland Express to write a piece on Goldie Hawn. Through her presence on the film sets and her friendship with the Browns, she knew that David was always on the hunt. Tornabene had a good friend named Norman Darer, then president of the CBS Consumer Publishing Division, who saw a lot of available new properties. He was in charge of looking over literary submissions for possible paperback buys; since he was basically a numbers guy, he occasionally asked Tornabene to read a manuscript for story and marketability and share her opinion. He sent her a manuscript by Peter Benchley, a novel about a marauding great white shark that killed several humans near the beaches of an East Coast resort area. Benchley had received a $7,500 advance. “There was a question of paying three hundred thousand dollars for it,” Tornabene said, “and Norman needed to know whether it was worth it.”

  Darer passed; it seemed expensive for a fish tale. “I thought there was something in it for a movie,” said Tornabene, “and I gave it to Helen to show David.” After all, there hadn’t been a good, scary sea monster flick since Disney’s 1954 version of the Jules Verne classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with its giant squid, and, two years later, Moby Dick. Tornabene says that she was the one who put the new property straight into Helen’s hands. Other versions of the great discovery would persist; for years, Helen made vague comments about a secretary pulling it from a slush pile in the Cosmo office. Tornabene has no idea why she did so.

  But there it lay, in David’s hands. As a marquee terror title, Jaws was certainly evocative and efficient. Having read the manuscript, the partners set about trying to buy it, and quickly. There was a sudden chop in the water around Benchley’s novel. Bantam’s Oscar Dystel offered a $575,000 paperback deal. At the time, Benchley was down to about six hundred dollars in walking-around money. Book clubs began committing, and Jaws was suddenly a hot property. Carl Gottlieb, who would cowrite the film script with Benchley, described the frenzy for the film rights: “There were agents working on both coasts and so were Zanuck and Brown. Dick was handling the negotiations in L.A., while David did the talking to the New York people. At one point, both principals were seated in different chic restaurants … Dick at the Bistro in Beverly Hills and David at the Palm in New York. They were both negotiating with different agents.”

  They nailed it down in late May, for a base price of $150,000, with another $25,000 to Benchley to write the screenplay. (Gottlieb would earn $10,000 for his screenwriting services and another $5,000 for acting a small part.) It was to be made by Universal, which had Steven Spielberg under contract. Spielberg, then twenty-six, balked at first, asking, “Who wants to be known as a shark-and-truck director?”

  * * *

  Around Thanksgiving of that year, Mary Alford wrote to Helen after doing some stargazing out her bedroom door. She was eagerly anticipating Comet Kohoutek; she had read of its discovery in March of that year in Reader’s Digest. Mary was looking forward to the December nights, predicted by astronomers, when she might wheel herself out back and watch it streak, fiery and miraculous, across the southwest firmament. The sky was dark around suburban Shawnee; it would really be something to see. The whole idea of it—the bright, wild trajectory—intrigued her, Mary told her sister. “And its orbit will take it into the backyard of other solar systems. How about that?”

  Even the Peanuts comic strip had Snoopy and Woodstock awaiting the comet. When the moment came, Kohoutek proved to be only modestly visible, and like so many of Mary Alford’s promises—to stop drinking, to lose weight, to find another source of income beyond keeping the books for a small local company—the comet was declared a fizzle, unworthy of the hype that preceded it. As it streaked off toward another galaxy, Kohoutek faded into a clichéd pop/cult reference for any spectacular dud.

  Brown and Zanuck had better results; The Sting took off spectacularly on Christmas weekend. The fish picture was going forward; Spielberg had finally signed on to Jaws and David set to work protecting his investment in the property. Within the film industry, Carl Gottlieb said, it was rumored that David had also gamed the bestseller system to protect his investment. The book needed to get on the New York Times list and stay there to keep interest high while the film was being made. “David had an inside track to which bookstores were tracked by the Times bestseller list; they were known as the recording bookstores, a bit like TV’s Nielsen families. And they bought like a thousand copies in those stores.” Jaws made the list, but David probably needn’t have spent the money or the anxiety to maintain visibility for his investment. The hardcover edition would stay on the list for forty-four weeks. Helen did her part, making sure that an excerpt of Jaws appeared in Cosmo—with no mention that her husband owned the movie rights. Later, during production, there were five mentions of the movie in “Step into My Parlor.” By then, Helen was delighted to reveal that her husband was coproducer.

  In April 1974, as David was busy scouting possible locations and conferring with his director, Helen flew to Los Angeles to join Jackie Susann, Garson Kanin, and The Exorcist’s director, William Friedkin, on a panel sponsored by the Amazing Blue Ribbon 400, an arts-related charity begun in 1968 by Dorothy Chandler, a leader in Los Angeles cultural circles. The subject was to be “public taste,” keyed to a landmark June 1973 Supreme Court decision, Miller v. California, that many people in the media and arts found alarming. The decision returned standards for determining obscenity to local authorities, effectively decentralizing screen censorship. Obscenity prosecutions would once again become the purview of local authorities. Jackie Susann was horrified: there went the Bible Belt as a market. She hated to think of going back to the bad old days: “Think of how many girls in the Ozarks went wrong without any books or movies at all. With only Uncle Clem to misguide them.”

  Susann was desperately, fatally ill, but she willed herself to fly west for the panel; she had promised and she felt strongly about the issue. When Helen saw her friend, she was stunned by her weight loss; Susann was down below a hundred pounds and it was a gauntness that not even Helen could envy. She observed that Susann “seemed very frail, but even at that point I thought it was the old respiratory problem. She was so fragile, but she got through the morning. She was practically carried off.”

  Having fought breast cancer for more than a decade, Jacqueline Susann died in New York on September 24. Her third and final novel, Once Is Not Enough, was still selling; she was the first author to have three novels in a row make the bestseller list. The Mansfields’ lawsuit over Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was still in court; Irving Mansfield recei
ved the $2 million in damages after his wife’s death. The suit was “just business” and had never caused a rift between the couples. Still, the Browns were stunned that their friends had kept so many of their agonies secret, even from them. David wrote, “As close as we were to the Mansfields, we had no idea Jackie was dying of cancer or that they had a retarded child in an institution. Behind the glitz, theirs was a sad life.” The Browns last saw the Mansfields walking hand in hand down Park Avenue after a screening they attended together.

  * * *

  Once Jaws production began on Martha’s Vineyard, Helen had to fly there if she wanted to see her husband. Given the production’s ongoing crises, either Brown or Zanuck had to be on the set at all times. Disasters occurred with such scary frequency that Carl Gottlieb’s book The Jaws Log, which documents the singular hell of making the movie, has sold nearly 2 million copies since its publication in 1975. To begin with, wrote Gottlieb: “Dick and David had innocently assumed that they could get a shark trainer somewhere, could get a great white shark to perform a few simple stunts on cue in long shots with a dummy in the water.” Disabused of this notion—these were fifteen-foot, two-ton engines of single-minded predation, not Flipper—they embarked on the tortuous path to building three versions of a two-thousand-pound mechanical shark. One sank on its maiden voyage, prompting the crew to nickname the robotic killer “Flaws” and “the Great White Turd.” The actor Roy Scheider was trapped in the cabin of a rapidly sinking production boat, the Orca II, and fought his way out just in time as cameras, tripods, scripts, and lights sank into the deep. Richard Dreyfuss fell into more sulks than Liz Taylor on a bad hair day.

  Later, Peter Benchley would insist that the novel was not based on the shark attacks that occurred in New Jersey at the time of David Brown’s birth. Yet in the movie, a shark expert played by Dreyfuss warns the mayor of a newly terrorized town in New England that “it happened before! The Jersey beach!… 1916! Five people chewed up on the surf!” Whatever its source of inspiration, the yarn was riveting on the big screen; Gottlieb saw its matchless fright factor even during postproduction. “There were moments when lab technicians would jump in surprise. They never get involved in story. But they were going, ‘Whoa, look at that!’” The sound cutters, the Foley artists, even Gottlieb, who had been on set, jumped or shrieked at the first moment the shark leaped out of the water toward a kill. Sneak previews drew rising choruses of screams; ratings cards given to screening audiences were spectacular. Oscar Dystel and David Brown reveled in a career peak of mutually profitable synergy: the movie posters used the same titillating image as the bestselling paperback cover. An oblivious woman swims on the surface with the monster below, open-mouthed, nose and teeth pointed toward her belly.