Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Helen did not speak of her stepson’s death publicly or to any friends except perhaps Charlotte Kelly Veal, married by then to the Prudential insurance executive Speed Veal; the two couples were close. With the exception of Bruce Brown’s college roommate Marc Haefele, who had been in touch with Bruce’s former brother-in-law, no one interviewed about Bruce Brown, including some of his New York friends and associates at the radio station WBAI, knew the date or cause of his death; no one saw an obituary or heard of a memorial service. Even the record of Bruce Brown’s death was difficult to access in the Social Security death registry. Someone had entered his name as merely B. Brown. Birth, marriage, and divorce records were not retrievable for Bruce LeGacy Brown in any online database; a search done by a broadcast news organization with more powerful engines than commercial genealogy sites also turned up nothing.

  Besides a smart, scholarly book he published in 1973 on Marxism—reprinted in 2009—the only traces of Bruce Brown are the brief epitaphs in two of his father’s books: “The birth of my first and only son, Bruce, nine pounds of beautiful baby born in Lying In Hospital—inconceivable that he would succumb to drugs decades later. My love for him never dies.” (This was added to the 2003 paperback edition of David’s 1990 memoir.) And this: “Not having children pains me now but pleased me in my carefree earlier years. My son, whom I lost (to drugs). He is a love I never replaced.” David repeated one phrase that friends found somewhat puzzling: “My son was a victim of the war on drugs.” This might hint at a conviction; the term “war on drugs” implied a renewed enforcement and conviction policy dating back to the Nixon years.

  Michael Korda, who worked with both Helen and Jacqueline Susann, sees a parallel in the way the Browns and the Mansfields held their sadness close. “I did know that David had a son. I seem to remember hearing that he was a drug user. This [secrecy] is not an uncommon thing. Jackie Susann and Irving Mansfield, whom I knew much better than I knew Helen, had a son. In all the publicity and everything about her, you would never have known it. I guess I only know it because her publicist was a friend of mine.”

  In the aftermath of her son Carter’s suicide in the summer of 1988, Gloria Vanderbilt spoke of it publicly and wrote a book, A Mother’s Story, a decade later. But shared grief is not for everyone, Vanderbilt said. “There’s a side to David and to Helen that was absolutely closed off to the world, which I think was probably sensible. One of the reasons they stayed together for such a long time so successfully is that they managed to invent for themselves, somehow, a private life.”

  32

  The Politburo Must Fall

  Someone asked me this week if the Hearst Corporation was looking to ease Helen Gurley Brown out. This rumor surfaces over and over when someone reaches seventy. In America they immediately hire a guy to follow you around with a shovel in case you die and they need to pat you in the face.

  —Liz Smith, at a “roast” of HGB

  IT FINALLY HAPPENED: some pretty young woman offered Helen a seat on the M10 bus. She muttered something about getting off soon, thank you, dear, and scuttled toward the crowded front; Helen was not getting off yet, but she’d hide amid the trench coats until her stop rather than accept the seat and the truth: goddamn it, she was old. At seventy-one, she finally made herself say it out loud, sort of, in her book of advice aimed at women over fifty. Helen dedicated The Late Show to Dr. Janet A. Kelly, the therapist that Faith Stewart-Gordon had found for her when Helen just couldn’t shake her depression over aging. Dr. Kelly, who was a few years older than Helen, had let her weep for a few sessions, silently handing over Kleenex. Helen wrote: “Shrink listened, said I reminded her of Scarlett O’Hara, stomping her feet and shrieking, ‘But Ashley loves me, he will not marry Melanie!’” She snapped out of it and wrote a book about the wrinkles and the wrath as yet another form of therapy. It made the bestseller list for a short time; there were plenty of women who had faced down that “ma’am, would you like a seat” moment. And yes they did want to know about vaginal lubricants, sex after seventy, and fighting the “sads.”

  The rest of the nineties were to be very trying for Helen, professionally and personally, fraught with anxiety and more loss, but never without some bracing gobs of fun. Take Moscow. How Helen had needed it then, embracing, amazing, rejuvenating Moscow! Really, it was too astonishing. The May 1994 launch of a brand-new edition of Cosmo there was uproarious, divine, insanely successful! Helen was mobbed, photographed, loved to pieces. The networks were there to cover the American incursion: BBC, ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS. And once again, the media attention was all positive.

  Helen and David arrived at the launch party in a blaze of media heat lightning. She stood out in her flaming red suit. Many of the business-type guests wore black formal attire; some were accessorized with bling and bodyguards. And what a party. Helen had insisted upon dancing. Pity the scarlet-faced young Russian dragooned into partnering Mrs. Brown as she executed a wild form of elder boogaloo. Helen wrote to Liz Smith, “1,400 people turned out for our press conference—of course they haven’t much to do in Moscow at night! They really seem ready for this magazine … Moscow is like a boomtown. I really never got so excited about a launch before…”

  Since the Soviet Union flag had been lowered on Christmas Day 1991, things had been rather dreary. For the previous two decades, the only periodicals for Soviet women were drab if earnest stalwarts such as Krestyanka and Rabonitsa, which translated, respectively, as “Peasant Woman” and “Factory Worker Lady.” But in May 1994, the pink joys of a new international edition of Cosmo bloomed in street and train station kiosks. Cindy Crawford was on the cover.

  The audacious bit of media détente, with a business plan that would set the template for Cosmo’s global domination, had been the brainchild of George Green, the first president and CEO of the newly created Hearst Magazines International (HMI). In 1993, Green had gone to Moscow on a reconnaissance trip. Hearst had been trying, through its news division, to copublish a newspaper there with the once mighty Soviet paper Izvestia. It was disastrous. Corruption and virtually unchecked organized crime had tanked the project. Green noticed that at any meeting with Russian investors, everyone was seriously if discreetly armed.

  Disheartened, Green went for a long walk around Moscow. He recalled, “I went into food stores, I went into beauty stores, I went into department stores. I wasn’t sure what I’m looking for … Then I noticed that every single cosmetics brand in the world was there, but there was no way for any one of those cosmetic brands to distinguish itself … nowhere for them to advertise; there was no promotion. There were pamphlets put out by the Women’s Workers’ Party, but no magazines. And I said to myself, ‘I’ve got a business.’”

  With Helen’s supervision on editorial and a pair of Russian coeditors, Green got Cosmo up and running in Moscow within the year. Despite some serious challenges, the first issue carried forty pages of ads and sold sixty thousand copies. Most of the articles were written by Russian women; the general tenor was upbeat, post-babushka, and, by Russian standards, cheerily disruptive. One article asked, “Are Husbands Necessary?” The text took issue with a rigid cultural given: any unmarried woman over thirty was an old maid. Nyet! Now these women were fun-loving, independent singles. In fact, the Russian Cosmo girl was in her twenties or thirties and urban (mainly in St. Petersburg and Moscow), had a job in one of the newer post-Communist businesses or with a foreign company, and made a comparatively high salary of two hundred dollars a month.

  David, a devoted reader of The Economist, had turned up another astonishment about Cosmo’s new market that deeply interested Helen. An Economist article reported an odd situation in women’s reproductive health. Due to the lack of available alternatives, abortion had been the commonest method of birth control; in 1989, 10 percent of Russian women of child-bearing age had had an abortion. By the time Cosmo arrived, that figure was halved with the increased availability of contraception methods, generally for those living close to Moscow. But bett
er and more available contraception was still an issue that Helen might champion, albeit carefully.

  The Russian circulation was minuscule by Helen’s stateside standards, but it augured great things; Hearst made back its initial investment on the first issue. Russian Cosmopolitan would eventually become the bestselling women’s magazine in Europe, publishing more than a million copies of each issue. Green was jubilant: “This was as good an investment as I will have ever made, or expect to make, for Hearst.” He was wrong only in underestimating the functionality of his business model, which relied on local partnerships in future foreign editions; the returns would prove staggering.

  The international ad/editorial partnerships had been strengthened by none other than the former Cosmo editor Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner. By then Wagner was an executive at Estée Lauder. Impressed with her ability to expand the Cosmo brand beyond U.S. borders, Leonard Lauder hired her to help do the same for his products. “He was looking for somebody who could take a basically U.S. concept and make it global without destroying the DNA of the original concept. And I had already done that for Cosmo.” Of course, Wagner placed plenty of Lauder ads in all those new Cosmos. Helen’s baby colossus was still “all loving hands at home.”

  George Green had stumbled upon the hunger for American imports that seized many post-Communist republics. But with Cosmo, there was a deeper motivator than the global carbo-creep of McDonald’s and KFC. The women’s imperatives—“I beg you not to settle”—that Helen had begun tapping into in 1962 were awakening in former Communist bloc and underdeveloped nations worldwide, among the rich Saudi women wearing La Perla lingerie beneath their chadors, the Bollywood fangirls in Mumbai dreaming past arranged marriages to true love. This could be a wave as powerful as the booming, newly independent female workforce had been for the earlier Cosmo. Much of the appeal was commercial as well. A new class of wealthy consumers was emerging along the Pacific Rim, in central Asia, the newly democratic Soviet republics, the postcolonial African nations. Readers were hungry for the name-brand consumer goods advertised in Western-style magazines. Once again, Cosmo was in the catbird seat—and in the kiosks off Red Square.

  * * *

  Back in the office, Helen got on with business as usual. She had a growing sense that her tenure was nearing its end. But she did make time to deal with the escalating problems of a dear friend in need. Charlotte Veal’s husband, Speed, had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and it was progressing swiftly. He could no longer walk or feed himself and was in and out of a veterans’ hospital. The Browns had helped with paying some dental bills, and David had wanted to contribute to more caregivers at their apartment to give Charlotte a break. She wouldn’t allow it. The Veals’ friend Robin LoGuidice said that Charlotte had been arranging regular schedules of visitors and lunch dates to ease her husband’s isolation. “Helen came on a regular basis and sat by his side. She wasn’t an outwardly affectionate person, but she was so loyal. Speed would joke, ‘Yeah, Helen came by. She brought a lettuce leaf.’”

  There was nothing Helen could do when a second big blow rocked her friend’s life. In her late fifties, as Speed was nearly incapacitated, Veal was fired by Hearst after nine years. “She was running all of Hearst magazines’ PR,” said LoGuidice. “She was traveling for the job. When she came back they had cleaned out her office.” Another, younger woman had Veal’s desk and title when she returned from her trip. Veal was told to leave immediately; no settlement was offered. “They [Hearst] weren’t going to do anything for Carlotta. She had to get a lawyer. She got a severance and a pension—not what she deserved, but she got it.”

  Charlotte Veal was well-known in the industry. The Ms. magazine editors Gloria Steinem and Pat Carbine hired Charlotte almost at once to work on special projects there. Speed Veal was worsening and would not last much longer. Charlotte would need a full-time job to support them both. Over nearly nine years, Speed’s illness and care had taken its toll on her in worry lines and weight gain. It took ten months, but Charlotte managed to lose forty pounds. “The body was in shape,” she said, “but I had the wrinkles of a shar-pei puppy.” Who’d hire her?

  Helen got her a face-lift, gratis. She swapped it, even-up, for an article on the surgeon’s practice in Cosmo. She guaranteed, in a letter to Dr. Helen Colen, that “your article, ‘Change Your Face, Change Your Life,’ will run in the October 1994 issue of Cosmopolitan … As you know, I am fervently pushing for the surgery date for my friend…” The results were glorious. What’s a girlfriend for?

  Not long afterward, Helen reconsidered her long avoidance of breast augmentation surgery. She had given up stuffing her bras, as she explained in The Late Show. “I quit that and just went with small and cute and fuck you, these are my tits, and I got used to going braless and weightless and it hasn’t been bad.” At seventy-three, two years after she wrote those words, she got herself a pair. David was not happy about it. He said he had always loved her small breasts. A few years earlier, he had lost it completely when he arrived home to find her swollen beyond recognition and in agony after a facial procedure and burst out, “Jesus, the things you do to yourself—the self-inflicted pain!” Helen kept a sexy can of her preferred emollient, Crisco, on her nightstand to rub into her surgical scars. She also swore that Proctor & Gamble’s canned vegetable fat was miraculous at keeping away age spots on her hands.

  Helen was displaying her new frontage rather boldly on October 3, 1995, her former staffer John Searles recalled. Now a successful novelist, he said it was his first day on the job as an assistant in the book department, and his first close proximity to the boss, whom he came to adore in nine years on her staff. Everyone had trooped into Helen’s office to hear the announcement of a verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial. She had the only TV in the place, a small, cheap model. Helen barely looked up; she was sitting behind her desk, working. “She had this miniskirt on, this plunging top to show off her new breasts,” said Searles, “bangle bracelets up her arms, her hair all teased, lipstick, makeup. Everyone’s staring at the TV and Helen was just working away and not even listening.” There were gasps and shrieks when the verdict was announced. Helen looked up briefly, saw the stunned faces around the room, and bent her head back to work, no comment, barely a flicker of acknowledgment.

  Increasingly, there were signs that Helen was preoccupied and stressed; might they really take it all away from her soon? The anger and anxiety management techniques that she had long employed—chiefly bending flatware during tedious event dinners—had helped calm her for many years. Bored to the boiling point, Helen would hold a spoon beneath the ballroom’s starched napery and let her skinny fingers bend the damned thing—fully in half, David reported. Beneath the table, she would hand it to him as a signal: I’ve had it, we’re out of here! Over the years, Helen’s leavings had puzzled a legion of hotel busboys.

  One Friday night after a long workday, the Browns were taking Alex Birnbaum to dinner at the Tea Room. “We had barely sat down and Helen said, ‘I want that special salmon.’ It was salmon coulibiac, so I said, ‘Are you sure? It has hollandaise sauce.’ She gave me an odd look. The waiter came, put the dishes down, and Helen said, ‘That’s not what I ordered.’” Birnbaum had no warning and no time to duck. Helen upturned her dish and flung it. The slithery, heavily sauced fish hit Birnbaum full frontal, from neck to sternum.

  “Bring me grilled,” Helen ordered the flabbergasted waiter, who made haste back to the kitchen. The ladies’ room attendants took Birnbaum off to be sponged down with soda water. Beneath their ministrations she wondered: What to do? What to say? When she got back to the table, not a word was said by either Brown. “It really stunned me.”

  More often those days, a sudden anger overtook Helen, and she threw a few public tantrums. She wrote about some of them, for expiation, exorcism, or comic relief. Most involved airplanes. She created a stir on a long flight when she attempted to use the first-class aisle as an exercise mat. “I can’t eat this shit!” she d
eclared, upending a full, untouched tray of airline food when the flight attendants ran out of what she had ordered. Her most shocking episode of air rage: “I recently screamed at a baby on an airplane—a baby!—who had been screaming at me or something from Oklahoma City to LaGuardia … two hours and forty minutes of straight screaming and my nerves had had it. You never saw such shocked parents—or fellow passengers.” By way of explanation Helen wrote, “I find that airports and airplanes are big scream launchers.” Who would argue? But a baby?

  On that flight, Helen had been on her way back from another distressing trip to Shawnee. George Alford had died a few years earlier. But for her housekeeper/caregiver and rescue cats, Mary was alone and in woeful condition. After more than sixty years in a wheelchair, she had breathing difficulties stemming from the damage the polio had done to her lungs and years of smoking. She was nearly blind, suffering from macular degeneration; it was still a desperate juggling act with caregivers. Helen had left Oklahoma with an unpleasant foreboding and her nerves on edge.

  Stress, family or otherwise, could not explain Helen’s arrest at the San Antonio airport on November 17, 1995. It was a pleasure trip; the Browns were attending the marriage of the Hearst executive Frank Bennack’s daughter. There was a police report of the incident, listed as a “Disturbance” on Airport Boulevard. Helen had gone off to find a cab while David collected the luggage. After a bit, the police located him by walkie-talkie. It crackled, “We have a demented woman here.” It seemed that Helen had leaped out of the cab, without paying, when it was clear the driver had to circle back to fetch David. Oblivious to airport traffic loops, she had become convinced he was cheating her. Two police cars pulled up, lights flashing, to stop the skinny little woman stomping dangerously in the Arrivals lanes. “That’s my wife,” owned Mr. Brown, who found her fulminating: they could put her in jail the rest of her life but she would not pay. Things were smoothed over, another cab found. Helen fed it to Liz Smith, police report and all, and urged her to have fun with it in her column.