Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Hollywood handicappers still argue whether Jaws was really the first summer blockbuster based on the industry’s ever-shifting calculus of “first weekend” grosses and number of theater screens. Gottlieb said that the release was fewer than five hundred screens as opposed to a more typical two thousand now. But there was an undeniable new phenomenon: “When Jaws came out it was a great opening weekend. Then a great second week. Then a great summer. Then it developed legs and a pattern of return viewers, people who went back to see the film two, three, five times, paying each time. That was the breakthrough.”

  Worldwide grosses to date are at nearly half a billion dollars; Brown and Zanuck spent $7.5 million to make the movie. Jaws won three Oscars in 1975, for sound, editing, and score; it lost Best Picture to another blockbuster sequel, The Godfather: Part II. Three sequels (Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, and Jaws: The Revenge) were made without Spielberg and diminished in quality each time. Never mind—it kept the franchise humming through 1987. The two indie producers and their wives were financially set for life. Helen Gurley Brown, Depression baby, would never be fully convinced. Despite the cascade of seemingly boundless riches, she admitted, “I always have, always will run scared.”

  Once it was clear that Jaws would continue to mint money, Brown and Zanuck decided to reward Bill Gilmore, the head of production, a solid, unflappable veteran who had endured the torments of Captain Ahab to get the movie done. “So when the millions were pouring in,” said Gottlieb, “Zanuck and Brown, as a gesture of magnificent gratitude, gave Bill Gilmore a big-screen TV. Whereupon he quit. He knew what he had done, he knew what the picture was making.”

  Within the industry, the producers were known as world-class cheapskates; they maintained that the habit was key to their success. Lyn Tornabene took their parsimony a bit more personally as she watched the movie’s momentum build. “I’m getting these phone calls about the bidding on Jaws, then finally the movie is being made, Helen’s on Martha’s Vineyard, I’m hearing all about the filming. When they got home, a long while later, Helen and David wanted to take Frank and me out to thank me for finding Jaws. They wanted to take us to their favorite place in Bedford. They brought along a gift box, about eleven by fourteen inches, and after dinner it was time to open my present.”

  She had speculated throughout the meal. The box was quite light; maybe pearls? An Hermès scarf? She opened her gift. “It was the first Jaws T-shirt, the one with the shark’s head popping up. I took it home and shredded it.”

  Said Gottlieb, on hearing her story: “Of course, they got the shirt for free.”

  * * *

  David Brown wanted an aerie where he and Helen could settle into their astounding success. He also wanted it to be a home for life. In 1976, Alice Mason, a prominent New York residential real estate broker, helped David find his castle in the Beresford, a classic luxury apartment building designed by the architect Emery Roth. It is on Central Park West at Eighty-First Street, and Helen was not at all keen on leaving Park Avenue. “It was supposed to be tacky over there,” she said. With the success of the Jaws franchise and The Sting, which had collected seven Oscars, including Best Picture, with Cosmo’s numbers still climbing and Helen’s salary inching toward eighty thousand dollars, including bonuses, it was time to leave the posh building where Helen had to beg the landlord for a workable stove.

  Alice Mason was the sort of broker whom certain families retained to find them permanent and suitable residences, mostly along Manhattan’s Gold Coast. She did not trade with arrivistes and flippers: “I had my own firm from 1958 to 2008, that’s fifty years. Everyone I ever sold an apartment to never sold it. They died in it. They came to me, they found the best apartment they could afford.” The Browns wanted that sort of permanence, and something rather commanding appealed to David. Penthouse 22D is the four-floor, towered crown jewel of the Beresford overlooking Central Park and the American Museum of Natural History, with its copper-domed Hayden Planetarium. The apartment’s three separate terraces take in more panoramic views west to the Hudson River. There are several fireplaces, including one in the tower room. At the time, it was owned by the film director Mike Nichols. He was about to marry the TV newswoman Diane Sawyer, who was said to prefer the East Side. “It was a very dramatic apartment and I thought they’d really like it,” said Mason. “I knew Mike also. I called him and made the appointment to show it. They wanted to buy it right away. I think the price was something like three hundred fifty thousand. Or maybe it was a million. Helen wasn’t a free spender but David was and David wanted it. He made the decision.”

  He was certainly in a position to make an all-cash offer, pronto. Soon, Forbes magazine would report that, having earned more than $60 million pretax—the equivalent of close to a quarter billion today—the Brown/Zanuck partnership was “one of the most successful independent production companies in the entertainment business.” David invested his film earnings across bonds, oil and gas, cattle, and real estate in such a smart and stable configuration that the magazine assessed his net worth at $40 million, about $170 million in 2015 dollars. He was pleased to take his well-earned place at the Beresford; over the decades, other famous tenants have included Isaac Stern, Rock Hudson, the gambling czar Meyer Lansky, Diana Ross, Tony Randall, Laura Nyro, Beverly Sills, Calvin Klein, Meryl Streep, Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinsky, and Jerry Seinfeld.

  The architectural critic Paul Goldberger, who has lived in the Beresford for the last nineteen years, recalled asking the Browns for a tour of their apartment not long after they had moved in. They were happy to have him see the place for an article he was researching on two of his favorite prewar residential architects, Emery Roth and Rosario Candela. He climbed the spiral stairs to the tower room, with its huge windows and wood-burning fireplace. “It’s the grandest room,” said Goldberger. “Nothing else had that height. Its location is so eccentric as to crown this little mini chateau that is the apartment. It’s almost like a conservatory in a grand house. Roth’s great gift was in making ample spaces, big, beautiful, generously laid out family apartments. Those three tower apartments were situations in which his normal practical instinct was set aside to do something greater. The building has setbacks as it gets higher toward the towers and you end up with space that is not laid out as naturally and gracefully as anything below. The choice was to allow a couple of apartments in which you assume that the unusual and spectacular nature will be enough to make up for the absence of an easy, flowing layout.”

  The property was glamorous but not at all suited to a family; it has only two bedrooms, besides a couple of cramped staff rooms on the bottom level, where David would install his ham radio. The Browns were healthy and their only domestic ménage was the two cats. So at the time, rooms set between four sets of stairs without an internal elevator did not pose a problem. Given her admitted décor impairment, Helen turned to the Ladies’ Home Journal decorator Nathan Mandelbaum to redo the place. The real estate photos of the Browns’ apartment up for sale in 2015 showed it to be unchanged since his ministrations in 1976, with a mood-ring-trapped-in-seventies-amber ambiance. One can easily envision Angie Dickinson as Police Woman’s Pepper Anderson lounging before the living room fire on the faux leopard carpet.

  Mandelbaum gave them a red lacquered dining room with a striped, wraparound banquette, a living room with overstuffed sofas in many patterns, and scads of chinoiserie—screens, equestrian statues, armoires. The tower room, which Helen called the belfry, was packed with what she called “airport sculpture, the kind of thing tourists pick up last minute at the airport, but I like it.” Later she would add oversized plush stuffed animals. The master bedroom, with its huge, curtained canopy, was a riot of pink print with accents of crimson; the carpet was bubblegum-pink shag. Taking in the breadth of it, with its countless patterns and enough sets of fancy china to set up a high-end skeet range, David declared the apartment “bizarre,” yet homey. Helen found it “romantic.”

  The Browns were well settled into their fina
l home when Helen sat down to bang out her November “Step into My Parlor.” Exciting news: she and David had gone to their first state dinner at the White House! The German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, and his wife were the guests of honor. Dinner was in massive white tents set up on the lawn; Helen was seated between the American ambassador to Germany and the former Redskins player Sonny Jurgensen—“both charming!” There was an after-dinner tour: “Blue Room, Green Room, Red Room. My dear, those rooms are goose-pimply!… Nancy Kissinger looked smashing in navy chiffon with scads of green eyeshadow.”

  The rest of the column carried the best news of all from the editor’s perspective: “Cosmo is burgeoning … October carried the most advertising pages in our history (203), and, as we go to press, the August issue sold 319,000 copies more than August a year ago for a total of 2,515,000. Each month we sell almost all the copies we print—pretty big stuff in the magazine business.” Thanking her readers for their support, she also gave a shout-out to the girls and boys of the so-so Cosmo volleyball team, who won thirteen games and lost ten.

  The turn of the year brought another Oscar race; David Brown had no horse in it, but he and Zanuck had armfuls of statues from The Sting and Jaws and, with their triumphs, the sort of social standing that elevated David and his smart, saucy editor wife into what gossip columnists liked to call “le tout New York.” The term took in a very rarefied sliver of that populous island, those tout enough to be invited to the literary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar’s exclusive Oscar-watching party at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. A New York Times reporter was eavesdropping on the crowd during cocktails: “Nora Ephron was talking about Esquire, Shana Alexander was talking about Patricia Hearst. Halston was talking about Elizabeth Taylor … next to Halston, Mrs. Helen Gurley Brown was talking to Mrs. Walter Cronkite.” There were so many more: Diana Vreeland, Jimmy Breslin, Françoise de la Renta, David Brinkley, Eric Sevareid, Elia Kazan, Yul Brynner. When Swifty got up to pay tribute to the dozen former Oscar winners in attendance, Helen watched her beaming husband accept his tribute. Swifty also announced that it was his seventieth birthday; following the rousing applause, waiters burst through the doors with cutlets of veal cooked in cherries and rolled in hazelnuts. Thank heaven, there was pureed broccoli; Helen Gurley Brown could enjoy the bacchanal. Irwin Shaw dozed through the Oscar telecast. When Paddy Chayefsky won his Oscar for writing the screenplay for Network, the exhausted hostess, Mary Lazar, leaped up and did a little dance, doubtless grateful that it was over for another year, and the limos of le tout were beginning to converge outside to bear them away.

  If it hadn’t been a chilly March night, the Browns could have strolled home from the party along Central Park West. For Helen, their new address conferred the greatest perk of all: the M10 city bus stopped right out front of the Beresford; its final stop, generally a ten-minute ride, was Fifty-Seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, practically at the doorstep of the Hearst Building. Heaven! Every weekday, the doorman saw Helen out onto the avenue clutching her sacks of work, some cottage cheese, and the precious container of tuna salad. Dropping her fare into the change box was a reassuring sound: only fifty cents!

  29

  Victory Lap

  My only previous exposure to Helen was on Johnny Carson. I thought she was a complete ditz. I didn’t think she was running the magazine … there must be someone else and she was the poster girl. When I went to work there, I had an enormous amount of respect for her. She was fair, she was clear, she was focused.

  —Bobbe Stultz, associate art director at Cosmo

  MARY ALFORD WATCHED FROM her front door in terror and amazement as her sister executed a Cruella de Vil fishtail into the driveway, piloting a huge Cadillac owned by the proprietress of the local Holiday Inn. How’d she do that? Sheer desperation. Renting a car at the Oklahoma City airport wasn’t an option, since Helen no longer had a valid license, a fact she must have kept from the kind innkeeper. Helen played the wheelchair card, the faithful, frequent, and famous customer card, the whole royal flush to get her preferred room and to have the pool kept open late for her so that she could dog-paddle away the stress.

  The Caddie was an added blessing; there were no cabs in Shawnee at the time, and Helen needed wheels. Things were falling apart in the little house on Pesotum Street. By the late seventies, Cleo was failing; she suffered from atherosclerosis and had a couple of mild strokes. Any housekeeper they could get to stay on the job had her hands full with the needs of both women; George Alford, having become too debilitated, had been moved to a nursing home. With great effort, Mary brought him home for visits a few times a year.

  When Cleo turned eighty-five in October 1978, Helen sent her a long, loving letter. It acknowledged her mother’s trials: “I want to weep for your being burdened with child care as a little bitty girl yourself, then, having no place else to put your talent, pouring it into your own children.” She recalled the sacrifices a self-centered little girl would not have thought twice about: “With your first paycheck from Sears Roebuck you bought me a little wolf jacket that was my greatest JOY!” The letter meandered, sweetly, through the years and stuck a perfect landing: “Cleo, you were a good mother. The best. If I’m something special in the world of working women now, it’s because you put me there and David took up where you left off … Everything good you wanted for me I got.”

  She had written a very different letter to Mary. Helen had to acknowledge the torments Cleo was still inflicting on her sister once she had moved back in with her. In a letter that was partly an act of contrition, Helen chastised herself at first for expecting too much of her sister, given what she had had to bear; she realized that she had sometimes gone over the line with her holier-than-thou temperance lectures and torrents of books and articles on new diets to try. If it had taken food and alcohol to ease the aches, she understood that as well.

  But … by God, Cleo. The amateur shrink in Helen was convinced; whatever stubbornness and resentments Mary had shown over the years had to be due in large part to so many years of “bearing up” under their mother. Hadn’t Helen, able-bodied and on the cusp of great success, hauled off and belted Cleo herself? She wouldn’t minimize her mother’s burdens, her terrible grief and endless disappointments. Maybe she and Mary had been hard on their mother, but she had been plenty tough on them. It came down to this, she told Mary: Few things were worse to live with than Cleo’s hostility toward people. Toward life itself. Never mind that it was all well founded from an early age. Hers was a curdled little soul, and her misery seeped into her girls like a slow and invisible toxin. They would just have to endure it and love her anyhow.

  On October 27, 1980, four days after her eighty-seventh birthday, Cleo Bryan closed her eyes in the last of her crowded, substandard, and sorrow-filled homes and died, of atherosclerosis. Helen sobbed for nearly the entire flight west. Once she got to Shawnee, she and Mary hung on to each other across the arms of the wheelchair, just as they had during those bleak early days in Los Angeles, and cried. Now they were two. In her messy, terribly complicated grief, Helen did not care how much anything cost as she arranged for a coffin and transport to send her mother back to Osage, to rest with her people. There was a service in Shawnee at Mary’s church. How did Helen get Mary to Osage? They must have used the church van; perhaps the Nelson Funeral Service in Berryville, the same family firm that buried Ira Gurley, had rounded up some strong and compassionate drivers.

  At 2:00 p.m. on Halloween, there was a graveside service in the Sisco family cemetery. It was right below the house where Helen and Mary had spent all those childhood summers with their grandparents Alfred and Jennie Sisco, where Cleo had cared for those waves of squalling babies and escaped down the road on Daisy’s broad back. Five of Cleo’s nine siblings survived her. Aunt Gladys, whose luminous beauty had cast such long shadows of discontent around Cleo and her daughters, was already in a nursing home.

  Helen knew it wasn’t over when the first clods of earth thudded against the coffin.
It didn’t take a squadron of therapists for her to realize: she would wrestle with Cleo’s disappointments for the rest of her life. But once she got back to New York, her grief, as with most of her family worries, remained private.

  * * *

  Joni Evans, an editor and executive at Simon & Schuster, had settled into one of her favorite editing spots, poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She had authors to see in Los Angeles and she always brought books-in-progress to work on. She was peering closely at a manuscript by Helen Gurley Brown, another memoir/how to/advice book with the tentative title Having It All, due for publication in 1982. Helen wasn’t crazy about the title, but it was to be a valedictory of sorts; the subtitle was a pithy synopsis of her triumphs: “Love-Success-Sex-Money Even if You’re Starting with Nothing…”

  Helen didn’t know it yet, but she had begun her long and final victory lap. The Cosmo juggernaut was growing ever stronger, with more foreign editions and a surprising uptick in paid subscriptions at the rate of 25 percent a year during the eighties. Cosmo readers were committed. Newsstand sales were still flourishing at 2.62 million copies a month. The magazine’s core constituency delivered another surprise: pass-along rates had soared to seven readers per issue. Women were sharing all that advice and current fiction at the bargain price of two bucks an issue; advertisers could be assured of more eyes per copy on their campaigns for spring lip colors and feminine hygiene sprays.