Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  By the early eighties, Helen’s name and image recognition—what media analysts were calling a Q-score—was strong enough for her new agent, Swifty Lazar, to have negotiated a tidy deal with Simon & Schuster’s imprint Linden Press. Joni Evans estimated that the whole package could bring up to $2 million in hard- and softcover sales.

  Evans had blue-penciled her way through the career chapter “How to Mouseburger Your Way to the Top,” as well as those on diet and exercise. Her eyes widened as she paged through to a section Helen called “How to Go Down on a Man.”

  Waiter, more coffee please?

  Helen began with the basics: “Flick your tongue around this nice penis head and move it on down the penis, putting more and more of it down your throat…” She was also reassuring: “Only a very large penis will gag you and you can always stop and come up for air.” Evans was agog, yet appreciative of her author’s craft. “She could do how-tos better than anyone. She took all these subjects seriously and gave them great respect. She was earnest in her approach to … blow jobs.”

  At this point, Helen felt that her girls could handle such plain talk. The language in the magazine had become more frank, without reader pushback. The word “orgasm” first appeared in a cover line in 1970, and “lesbian” the year after. By the mid-seventies, there were more references to “penis” rather than “male genitalia.” The catchall of “oral sex” was specified as “fellatio” and “cunnilingus.” Helen’s loyalists were talking back in a very intimate way. In January 1980, Cosmo had invited readers to complete and send in a questionnaire about their sex lives. Its seventy-nine questions covered premarital and extramarital relationships, types of sex acts, orgasm frequency; 106,000 women—Texas housewives, New Jersey schoolteachers, high school girls, ranging in age from fourteen to seventy—sat down and answered. In 1981, as Evans was working on Helen’s manuscript, the survey was published as a book, The Cosmo Report. It showed that some things had indeed changed. Only 5 percent of women reported having their first sexual experience with their husbands; it had been 50 percent in the early fifties when Alfred Kinsey was asking. More than 20 percent of respondents had sex before they were fifteen, and 90 percent had by the time they were twenty-five. Helen’s survey had made her case: even if women didn’t have it all just yet, they were having It a good deal sooner and more often.

  Camped at the edge of the sun-dappled pool deck, Joni Evans kept working; as she considered the quandary on “ball-sucking” (which one first? both at once?), she wondered what the sit-down edits with Helen would be like. She was coediting the book with the company’s editor in chief, Michael Korda, who had also shepherded Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough and lived to tell about it. The edit sessions with Helen—one held in the Browns’ frigid, unheated tower room—moved along reasonably until they reached a bizarre impasse.

  They stalled out over a pubic hair. “It was her idea for a gift for your man on Valentine’s Day,” said Evans. “Take a single pubic hair of your own and encase it in some sort of Lucite frame, which could be worn around the neck, or as a bracelet. It was just appalling.” Korda recoiled as well; the two sparred over which of them would tell Helen it had to go. “We were all chicken, even Swifty,” said Evans. “I went to Liz [Smith]. I knew they were close friends.” Smith agreed on the ickiness factor and caucused with Helen. “Whatever she did,” said Evans, “she got it out. We were so grateful.” Korda had almost as strong a reaction to Helen’s signature appellation: “I hated the word ‘mouseburger,’ but I couldn’t get her to drop that. I still think it’s a stupid word.”

  Korda believes the book’s success was dependent upon Helen’s being Helen: “It was a combination of her being outrageous and her being transparently sincere. That worked. She went a long way with it, frankly. But that’s the key to it. Her recommendations were outrageous but they were offered in a voice of total sincerity and a certain degree of naivete and charm. Naivete particularly. That’s a difficult combination and I think it’s very much a part of her character. It’s not something you can fake.”

  When Having It All was published, Dick Deems was appalled by Helen’s candor—the impropriety of the woman! Having seen the splashy New York magazine feature by Jesse Kornbluth timed to the book’s release, a stormy Deems appeared in Helen’s office and delivered a withering dressing-down: The word “penis” was in the article! Helen had let herself be photographed in skimpy PJ tops, exercising—in bed! (She looked terrific at sixty.) Helen sat there and took it, mortified and furious. Revenues were at an all-time high; advertisers were jostling for space. “Penis” was in Cosmo that very month—and in nearly every other women’s magazine. How dare he? She shot Deems a long note the next day, answering his charges point by point, insisting she hadn’t been any sexier than usual in the interview. She reminded the pompous ass: “I know what I am doing.”

  Neither party brought up the most shameful aspect of Kornbluth’s article: it reported that Gloria Steinem had recently asked Helen in an interview about Hearst’s failure to elect her to its board, despite her monumental contributions. Didn’t that indicate that even very successful women were still denied ultimate power? Helen’s answer, if there was one, was not quoted. Gloria was always pushing, though Helen knew she meant well. She and Steinem were doing a cable TV show when Kornbluth, researching his article, tagged along. He caught a tough/tender moment as Steinem braced Helen about her reflexive self-deprecation. It amounted to a mini therapy session. Steinem began: “On TV, you giggle and flirt with the host and tell stories about bedroom manners. You’re a much more serious and complicated person than that.”

  “Oh, Gloria, you’re trying so hard to make it seem as if I’m victimized.”

  “I’m just suggesting that we as women go on playing certain kinds of roles even when we have the power to change. And I would like other people to know you as I know you.”

  “Yes, I would like to be known as a serious person…”

  “Just say it straight out, ‘I am a serious person…’”

  “I’m scared! I’m scared!”

  “Just say what’s inside your head and your heart.”

  “I care, I care.”

  “Well, that’s it. ‘I’m a serious person and I care’ is a start.”

  The two women were not close, but Steinem was never as dismissive or combative as Friedan had been. Steinem had a tough upbringing with a difficult mother herself and was more keenly attuned than most to Helen’s insecurities. In 1974, Steinem had called Helen just to reassure her that the women’s movement meant her and her readers no harm; in her thank-you note, Helen was clearly touched. Steinem wrote for Cosmo and sat for a fairly intimate portrait, “The Glorious Triumph of Gloria Steinem,” by writer Joan Barthel. Over the years, Helen peppered Steinem with congratulatory notes on TV appearances, on her late-life marriage. But Helen complained to Charlotte Veal that Steinem kept her distance: “Carlotta, she’s never been friendly to me though I admire her wildly. She is smart … the smartest!”

  * * *

  Cosmo day-to-day was a sisterly, civilized, and nearly all-female workplace, according to interviews with a dozen former staffers. There were perks beyond the free cosmetics samples on the ladies’ room shelf and the bizarre recycled freebies—press kits, workout headbands, cheesy promotional watches—that Helen distributed at Christmas from what was known, sub rosa, as “the regifting closet.” Perhaps fancying herself as the Madame Récamier of Fifty-Seventh Street, Helen began holding Friday afternoon “salons” in her office. Quel éclat! when staffers walked in and found the boss sitting in the lap of New York’s governor, George Pataki. Woody Allen stopped by, as did Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Henry Kissinger, Steven Spielberg, Elizabeth Dole, and Walter Cronkite. “She would invite somebody she knew that she found fascinating,” said the former associate art director Bobbe Stultz. “We also had Mike Wallace, Liv Ullmann, Vernon Jordan. It wasn’t just entertainment people who would talk about frivolous things. She would invite a
certain level of staff—I just squeezed in. We would ask this person questions, and she would. It was fantastic.”

  Other employee benefits fell into the “be careful what you wish for” category. “A lot of the people on the staff got their apartments made over, and you really couldn’t find a lot of people who wanted that,” said Stultz. “A friend of mine, Judi Drogin, did. She had a small apartment in the Thirties. It was a wreck.” Judi, now Drogin-Feldman, who was one of Helen’s personal assistants, said that she gasped when she walked into her new digs just as on those TV home makeover shows. “It was pink,” she said. “And I mean screaming, bubblegum pink, everywhere. But they did a great job with the built-ins and I was grateful.” After the photo shoot, she repainted. It took many coats to diffuse that Cosmo glow. Drogin-Feldman, now a real estate agent, was one of the two assistants Helen had at all times. She also dropped to the floor in Helen’s office and did ab crunches with her at lunchtime. “She asked me in the job interview whether I exercised. It wasn’t a requisite, but I stayed in good shape working for Helen.”

  * * *

  Cindy Spengler has vivid memories of the day Helen’s confidence in her as advertising director of Cosmopolitan was put to its greatest test. Spengler had flown out to San Francisco with a presentation—a Hail Mary pass, really—designed to make a big save. She was nervous as she carried her materials into a conference room filled with ad agency executives, mostly male. At stake was nearly $20 million in billings for a lavish set of magazine spreads to roll out General Motors’ new car, the Saturn. “We were originally on the media plan for Saturn,” Spengler said, “and the client took us off because the magazine was too racy. A lot of pages were going to our competitors.” Spengler’s West Coast reps told her that the client particularly disliked Cosmo’s rather intimate “Irma Kurtz’s Agony Column.”

  Spengler had scoured other women’s magazines for sexy material in advice columns and relationship pieces. “I started out with showing headlines and cover blurbs and asked them to guess what magazine they were from because they all sounded like Cosmo, but they were from Redbook, LHJ, Glamour, Mademoiselle.”

  Spengler pushed on. “I read aloud a letter wanting to know how to give fellatio. I’m glad I was young, because now I think it would be gross if I read that thing today.”

  She asked her listeners: “Which magazine do you think this is from?” Cosmo, of course, came the chorus. Then she held up the magazine that she had read it from. “I think it was Glamour. We got the business back. The revenues for Cosmo were huge.”

  Helen was an empathetic and activist mentor to this young ad woman who started out in the field and performed so spectacularly that Helen brought her home to New York. They traveled together to see West Coast advertisers. Helen was her boss, but she was also … Helen: “This was a woman who climbed stairs in hotels for exercise and got locked in the stairwell once. She took her clothes off down to her underwear while I was there and started doing her exercises. Helen didn’t ever have to put on airs; she was who she was. She was confident in who she was and she never apologized for it either, being feminine.”

  She could also be tough. When a very upset Spengler found out that one of her male subordinates on the West Coast was making more money than she was, Helen sat down and banged out a sample letter to brace Hearst management with. Spengler wrote her own, with some of Helen’s advice, and quickly got the adjustment made. The boss also advised her in love, and when things reached a dicey point with a boyfriend reluctant to wed, Helen counseled a tough stance (“Move out!”); unbeknownst to Cindy, the ad executive Peter Spengler sought counsel with Helen as well. HGB danced up a storm at their wedding.

  As effective as Spengler and her team were, there was no greater sales force-of-nature than HGB, who had no qualms about cozying up to advertisers. Spengler went with her to the regular luncheons with representatives from agencies and their clients in a private room at ‘21’. “It was a long table and Helen sat right in the middle and had the most important people on either side. She always started out with a bit about her own story—‘We’re mountain people.’ Beforehand, she knew of any sensitivity that was a concern of the people in the room. She remembered names and people very well.”

  Sometimes it got warm in the upstairs dining room. Spengler nearly choked on her salmon as she saw Helen slide off her ladylike Chanel jacket. She was wearing only a camisole beneath. “It was a pretty one,” said Spengler. “But she seemed not to realize that it was actually underwear and not a business top.” No one seemed to mind.

  Helen valued, admired, and pressed her sales team; perhaps they reminded her of her own mad ad days. During a sales retreat in Bermuda, Seth Hoyt, a former ad guy about to become publisher of Cosmopolitan, tossed a silk-clad Mrs. Brown into the pool. She laughed and executed a leisurely paddle to the ladder.

  30

  Thin Ice

  It’s bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.

  —Elizabeth Taylor

  HELEN HAD CERTAINLY HEARD THE NEWS: by the mid-1980s, a growing scourge had invaded Francesco Scavullo’s busy hive and devastated his studio family. In August 1986, the makeup artist Way Bandy’s New York Times obituary stated, at his insistence, that AIDS was the cause of his death. Too many people still refused to name the beast aloud. Bandy’s memorial was held on November 13 of that year; envelopes were passed for contributions to AIDS research. Five days later, Scavullo’s darling and Cosmo cover girl Gia Carangi was gone as well; shared needles from her heroin addiction led to her contracting HIV and an excruciating death from AIDS complications. Scavullo told friends, “We were hysterical crying in the studio when we heard.”

  Carangi was one of the first American women known to die of AIDS. Hers was a lonely, degrading end; having resorted to turning tricks for drugs, she was found raped, in withdrawal, and suffering from exposure on a rain-soaked street. Such ugliness was not spoken of. There were no obituaries of the famous model at the time, save a small mention in her hometown; no contingent from the traumatized fashion world turned up at her funeral in Pennsylvania. Paralyzed by grief and depression, Scavullo sent a mass card. Angelina Jolie would portray Gia in a 1998 HBO movie; a pathetic scene shows the model, bloated from methadone treatment, wedged into a Fabrice gown and woozily trying to pose for her final Cosmopolitan cover; the actor playing Scavullo positions her carefully to conceal an ugly needle abscess on her hand.

  The deaths saddened Helen, of course, but she didn’t want to hear a damned thing more about this AIDS business. It wasn’t a problem for her readers, she was sure. She was also adamant: she felt that all this business about sex killing people could set women’s hard-won sexual freedom back years, and she refused to be a part of it. She had hectored Ronald Reagan about abortion rights, written to the Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor about protecting Roe v. Wade—she was still worried sick about some crazies overturning it. And here they were, all these AIDS crusaders, scaring the bejesus out of women about having sex again. It wasn’t right.

  Her thinking was woefully uninformed, and as a result, Cosmo lagged way behind in its coverage of the growing epidemic. Its earliest mention was two sentences in a 1983 health column as “another frightening new disease.” A reader’s “fear of AIDS” was treated with reassurance in “Irma Kurtz’s Agony Column.” A 1985 cover line asked, “Is There Gay Life After AIDS? The Devastating Changes in Male Homosexual Relationships.”

  In the pages of Cosmo it was still a “them” issue—homosexuals and druggies. On a personal level, Helen’s refusal to engage or even become well-informed on the issue frustrated some of her close friends. Liz Smith was involved early in the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR). Hadn’t Helen, who had just personally done a Liz Taylor interview, seen the star everywhere as a concerned AIDS activist and poster girl? What did it take to convince her? Smith recalled blurting at Helen one day, “Don’t be one of those women—the ones who have fired their hairdre
ssers and tried to ignore this thing.”

  Helen was not one of that panicky and heedlessly cruel tribe who suddenly shied away from even air kisses at the salon and the fashion showrooms, but she had little interest in the growing body of information on AIDS caseloads and transmission paths; she cared only about the inhibiting sexual realities the coverage seemed to be causing. It was a stubbornness that caused Judy Krantz to refuse Helen a blurb for a book of hers: “In the book it specifically said, if you’re sitting next to an attractive man on the airplane, and he asks you to go to a hotel with him go and do it. I said, ‘Helen, you don’t seem to realize the danger of AIDS. How can I possibly give a blurb to a book that says go with a strange man whom you know nothing about and fuck him? I’m sorry but I just can’t.’”

  Alex Mayes Birnbaum recalled a trip to their country house in upstate New York with the Browns in the summer of 1986, during which her husband, the travel writer Stephen Birnbaum, had offered to help Helen bone up for a debate on modern sexuality she was to participate in at the University of Oxford that October. His wife noticed that as they worked together, a major disagreement was Helen’s belief that “heterosexuals can’t get AIDS, women can’t get AIDS. The stupidity was staggering. We knew by then, the world knew, that women and heterosexuals could get it. She just wouldn’t have it. David would be very silent during these discussions.”

  Helen wouldn’t let it rest. In January 1988, she published a story suggested by her senior articles editor, Myra Appleton, who was friendly with the doctor who authored it. It ran during some of the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic with this upbeat title: “Reassuring News About AIDS: A doctor tells you why you may not be at risk.” It was bunk at the outset. Cosmopolitan’s longtime laxity in fully vetting its medical articles came home to roost in a catastrophic way. In Dr. Robert E. Gould, Appleton chose a ringer to legitimize the specious headline. He was a clinical professor of psychiatry, not a researcher or practitioner with clinical AIDS expertise. Yet he made the controversial and erroneous case that if women’s male lovers were not in the known risk group—engaging in homosexual or bisexual sex or sharing needles for IV drug use—there was very little chance that women would contract HIV through normal vaginal intercourse. The doctor’s contentions also bore a nasty whiff of racism; he asserted that while it was known that some African women had contracted the disease from vaginal sex with men, it was because “many men in Africa take their women in a brutal way, so that some heterosexual activity regarded as normal by them would be closer to rape by our standards.”