Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  * * *

  In the Hearst executive suite, quiet discussions about her replacement had been under way for some time. The media speculation and internal Hearst scuttlebutt had been rising; there was rumor of a quiet Cosmo redesign being done at an outside firm. If nothing else, the magazine needed a face-lift. Helen’s office, quipped one staffer, “looked like the inside of I Dream of Jeannie’s bottle”; the magazine pages were fussy and dated as well. The search for a youth infusion had actually begun back in the late 1980s. The Hearst executive Gil Maurer had invited Bonnie Fuller, then the editor of a Canadian fashion magazine, Flare, to have breakfast in Montreal. He told her that he would like her to meet Helen Gurley Brown. “He arranged a trip to New York for me to meet her,” said Fuller. “I guess he thought there might be an opportunity for me to work for her. She just was so friendly, and warm, and wanting to know everything about me, and asked me a ton of questions. And she asked me at the end of our meeting if I would send her some story ideas.”

  Fuller sent her a hundred Cosmo-centric ideas; Helen shot back a laudatory note and suggested they stay in touch. “From then on, I was ‘the girl with the hundred ideas.’” In the interim, Fuller moved to New York with her family for another opportunity. “I had a job offer to take over this magazine called YM. It had been a tween magazine and they wanted it to be a full-on teen magazine, to take on Seventeen. So I ended up going there [in 1989]. From time to time I would send Helen an issue and a note, to keep in touch. Helen was very warm and gracious whenever I would see her. I never thought that Cosmo would ever be in my future. Never crossed my mind.”

  Fuller was next approached by the president of Hearst’s magazine division, Claeys Bahrenburg, about a new magazine the company was launching, the U.S. version of the French fashion book Marie Claire. Fuller soon became its editor in chief. Then Gil Maurer was at her door again, this time about the top job at Cosmo. “I was very complimented,” said Fuller, “but I was conflicted because I really liked Helen and I also loved what I did. I wanted to know about how they were going to transition. I respected Helen and this wasn’t something that I’d sought out. So, part of me was really uncomfortable about it. But Frank [Bennack] and Gil were people that I trusted. They really talked to me for a long time.”

  A takeover plan was soon in motion; it remained to force the issue with Helen. Frank Bennack, the Browns’ very good friend, broke the news. It was time to go, but he wasn’t telling her to leave the building. Fuller would be “deputy” editor until the full takeover; Helen would get two more years at full salary and, after that, a new job: editor in chief of the international editions. She would still have a place to go every day, and world travel; David could go along. It all seemed reasonable enough. The announcement was made on January 17, 1996; Helen’s final issue would be the following February, then Fuller would officially take the reins.

  Helen had held it together after Bennack left her office; later that day, she was scheduled for a TV show. HGB had never been a no-show. She wrote, “Probably the best interview I ever did was an hour with Charlie Rose on PBS just after the announcement … Somehow I was calm and quiet and said everything exactly the way I wanted it to be said.” Not that Helen was downplaying the devastation: “What did it feel like being told I wouldn’t be editor-in-chief of Cosmo anymore?… Gruesome! They had to tell me it was over … I would never have got around to telling them … I knew, at seventy-four, I was getting way too far out on the ledge (to put it mildly) to continue to be guru of an eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old reader.”

  Friends of the Browns noticed a serious disturbance in the field. Shortly after the announcement, David and Helen were dining with the New York Times theater critic Frank Rich and his wife, the Times writer Alex Witchel. “We went to Le Bernardin,” said Witchel. “Helen was really angry, and hurt, and she was not quite herself. She was always pretty much put together. But I remember that night, her hair was sort of dented in a funny way, she was generally askew in the way that she looked, and she was very upset. I said, ‘Look, write about it.”

  Helen told Witchel that she just might, but she never did. They might fire her altogether.

  It was her birthday a month after the “firing,” as Helen referred to it privately. She felt lousy. She told Liz Smith that she was still reeling from an article The Wall Street Journal ran, declaring that she had been axed and outlining the long-simmering plans by Hearst to get rid of her. It mentioned the AIDS and sexual harassment disasters and bristled with nasty blind quotes, some allegedly from within Hearst. Helen was mortified. The girlfriends bore her up with a birthday lunch at Mortimer’s, the A-list East Side clubhouse. Greeting Helen in the restaurant’s front window was a giant mock-up of a Cosmo cover, screaming “Götterdämmeruung at Hearst!” and “Sex for Septuagenarians” and “It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It.” There was a fudge brownie cake; Helen ate some, to hell with it all.

  David Brown may have suffered most in the aftermath. At home, Helen persisted in reliving the Moment, ad infinitum. Finally, David told her, gently, “Helen, if you’ll cut a tape, I’ll promise to listen to it every night right after Larry King.”

  * * *

  The dual transitioning was cordial but hardly smooth; Helen was still in her own office planning a boffo final issue. Fuller was still editing Marie Claire for a few more months and dashing down to a basement room Hearst provided in its old, castle-like building on Fifty-Seventh Street to build out her new Cosmo. Cathie Black, who had just taken over as head of all Hearst magazines, consulted with Helen. “I would see her as regularly as I would any of the other editors; the difference was that I would spend an equal amount of time with what Bonnie was developing along with her longtime creative director, Donald Robinson.”

  Fuller had brought a team of about half a dozen to the cramped bunker, where she and Robinson focused on a redesign. Atoosa Rubenstein, who had started in 1993 as a Cosmo fashion assistant just out of college, says Fuller’s lab became known as “the pod.” What sort of new Cosmo Girl were they hatching down there? As one of the youngest on staff, Rubenstein hoped they would bring the poor girl up to date. “The eighties were so feminine and coquettish and that was so perfect for Cosmo. Helen was maximal. But in the nineties, sexy was a subtler thing. Calvin Klein was very big, and it was almost androgynous. You still had to be sexy, but define the new sexy. The height of ‘cool’ at that moment was not sexy at all. It was very androgynous.”

  Veteran staffers were wary of the pod people. “It was a really awkward time,” Rubenstein recalled. “It wasn’t as much, ‘poor Helen.’ Everyone was looking for a new job. In the same way that Helen’s covers were not very au courant, a lot of her staffers were also not very modern. There was a lot of fear from those people because they knew the jig was up.” Rubenstein, who always had a good relationship with Helen, would land on her feet as editor in chief of the short-lived tween version, Cosmo Girl. When she got the job, Helen gifted her with a crumpled tissue; inside was a beautiful diamond “eternity” ring, one of Helen’s own.

  Finally, it was time for the big reveal. Cathie Black was all for it. “We all believed that the magazine needed a refresh for a more modern woman who was used to a different look. Bonnie put together a dummy, which was presented to Frank Bennack. Frank was a little surprised at the look of it. But Bonnie was really amazing, she just kind of stood up and said, ‘We are talking 1996 to ’97, and this is what it should look like.’ And from day one it was very successful.”

  It was gratifying that ASME, the American Society of Magazine Editors, elected Helen to its editors’ hall of fame that year, and so thoughtful of Hearst to present her with a newer model Mercedes. But nothing made it better, or even okay. Faith Stewart-Gordon had asked her advice about selling the Russian Tea Room at about the same time and Helen had jumped all over her: “Don’t sell, Faith. When you lose your base in New York, nobody will remember you for five minutes.”

  Things got worse. Speed Veal died in May 1996. Hel
en was one of his eulogizers. Charlotte was devastated and still trying to find a full-time job. Helen soldiered on, preparing her Cosmo funeral barge, heavy with ads; the last issue was an extravaganza of high points and tributes in February 1997. She allowed herself a bit of bragging in her final editor’s letter: out of 11,343 magazines published, according to the Magazine Publishers Association, Cosmopolitan was number six at the newsstand. “We have 29 international editions, Argentina and India the latest. Russia, launched two years ago, is a wow!” David, that darling man, had helped with 380 sets of cover blurbs. Helen made it clear that she was not retiring, but headed to a new global post. “I’ll give it a shot!”

  Seven months later in that annus horribilis, Helen found herself aboard a jet for Oklahoma City, making her final trip to Shawnee. Mary Gurley Alford had died on September 17, 1997, two months shy of turning eighty. After a service at her church, Mary was buried beside Cleo in Osage. In July 1998, Helen was diagnosed with breast cancer. Thirteen days later, she had a lumpectomy, followed by six weeks of radiation and follow-up treatment with the drug Tamoxifen. She wrote to her surgeon, Dr. Patrick Borgen at Sloan Kettering: “I will never be able to tell you how grateful I am that you saved my bosom.” He removed a small area; the implants were intact. Privately, Helen wondered about the cause of her disease; publicly, she absolved herself: “I also don’t dwell on the possibility of having given myself cancer with the heavy dosage of Premarin for 33 years. Occasionally a doctor suggested taking less but nobody slugged me.”

  At the time, Helen told no one of her cancer, save David, her assistant Susie Schreibman, and three close girlfriends. Her reasoning: “At the office I wanted to be continued to be perceived as a healthy rat, despite my age; management, who pays me (well), must always be encouraged to feel they are getting a bargain, don’t want them concerned with my vital signs.”

  The magazine industry was stunned when Bonnie Fuller exited Cosmo after just a year and a half to become the editor of Glamour. When she recovered from her own shock, Helen wished her well; she had never harbored any enmity toward her replacement, and her parting gift was a suggestion that Fuller have occasional lunches with David, who enjoyed giving career advice to young, smart women.

  Fuller’s successor, Kate White, had a deep résumé: editor at Mademoiselle, editor in chief of Child, McCall’s, Working Woman, and Redbook. She would run Cosmo for fourteen years. While Helen would occasionally shoot her a cautionary note (“Are you a crazy girl or something?”), she had approved of White from the day she met her in the late eighties, when White came to interview her as a journalist. Helen told her, “I could so see you as editor of Cosmo one day.” When White was working at Mademoiselle, Helen called her in for a bit of brainstorming. Even then, White said, Helen knew that she needed a younger eye. “She said, ‘Look, I’ve got to stay fresh, and the magazine has to go through a refreshing.’ I did put some ideas together for her, and she asked me to do a critique.” Helen skimmed through it when they met, then said again, “‘Kate, you could be the editor of this magazine one day. I’m not going anyplace anytime soon. But you could start to shape things up a bit’ … So I’d had those couple of kind of prophetically weird moments with her.”

  When White did take over, she was surprised to feel some anti-Cosmo attitudes that persisted in some younger women. The quartet of career women on Sex and the City had far out-brazened the Cosmo girl. Yet White was getting signals that some still found her magazine to be sexually incorrect: “I remember trying to get Lena Dunham to write a piece before her show even started. We got a curt no. Well, if that show [HBO’s Girls] isn’t about pleasing men … What’s wrong with pleasing a guy?”

  White felt that Cosmo was a bold disrupter in letting men know exactly what women wanted and exactly how to administer it. “When I took over it, you were the agent provocateur. You were expecting to have a man address your needs. In fact, at that point we had three million male readers and the number one reason they said they read the magazine was to find out how to please the women in their lives. I love pleasing my husband. I want my husband to feel really pleased by me. What’s so bad about that?”

  * * *

  Helen’s stash of four-leaf clovers hadn’t done her much good personally, but she was still dispensing them, with a dollop of compassion. Over the years, she kept a soft spot for those who had suffered public castigation, as she had. The sales of Erica Jong’s ribald novel Fear of Flying were robust—it has sold 27 million since 1973. But the slut-shaming backlash, some from women critics, was brutal. Helen’s personal and extravagant embrace in the pages of Cosmo over the ensuing years made for a soothing antidote. “She understood,” said Jong. “I was very, very young. She was older and nurturing. I was very wounded. I was a 4.0 [literature] student at Barnard. And then I published Fear of Flying and people decided I was the Happy Hooker of the literary world.” HGB offered some lessons in perspective for Jong: “I thought I was going to triumph by quoting James Joyce—she knew it was all a matter of tits. Not all of life is about intelligence and good taste. Now I realize you have to be fierce to change people’s minds. So I’m less a snob now and more a realist. Above all, Helen Gurley Brown was that.”

  Helen also defended the writer Joyce Maynard when she was pilloried for publishing a book about her May-December romance with J. D. Salinger. When Woody Allen created a furor by marrying his partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn, Helen gave the happy couple a dinner party. She wrote to both Patricia Hearst, whom she had known since childhood, and the Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell when they were in prison. She even sent a lucky clover to the PR woman Lizzie Grubman after she ran her SUV into a crowd in the Hamptons.

  In the electronic media, Helen would pop up in familiar and downright weird settings; she was a special favorite of the host Alexander Heffner on the long-running PBS show The Open Mind. Utterly surreal was her 1996 partnership with the comic Dave Chappelle on a BBC oddment called Where’s Elvis This Week?, a quasi quiz show hosted by a young, dark-haired, leather-jacketed Jon Stewart. Helen and Chappelle were “debating” a British comic and the very perplexed-looking cultural critic Christopher Hitchens, whose facial expressions were priceless as he tried to take in the singular Mrs. Brown.

  The Browns had circled the globe a few times; they had ballooned in Europe with Malcolm Forbes, had cruised through Polynesia, and were mad for Japan. They took an Amazon tour where all the guests were issued machetes. But they still had a bucket list. They wanted to go to Angkor Wat and Bali; Helen had been saving air miles. She also engaged in some more intimate exploration. At seventy-six, a time when an arthritic shoulder and creaky hips were beginning to get in the way of a limber tango swoon, she decided to hit the floor and have a close look at the body part that had caused her such tumult and pleasure in life, that mighty but unseen Motivator, her vagina. She had just read Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, the feminist book and theater piece that was being performed in more foreign countries than Helen’s magazine was being sold in. The New York Times called the stage version a “consciousness-raising global blockbuster.”

  “This is the craziest book I ever read!” Helen said. Yet it intrigued her. It should have been a bestseller, she thought. Why didn’t more women know about it? She told Charlotte Veal, “Spurred on by this book, I decided to look at the area they’re talking about.” Helen explained that she had instructions, gleaned from the book: “You lie down with a mirror and a pillow under your fanny.” The rest took dexterity, one hand to hold the mirror, the other to part the draperies. “It’s impossible to see anything,” Helen grumped to her friend. “You can’t get the area opened up with one hand. I’m not recommending this procedure to you—just reporting.”

  Her conclusion: “The vagina is a closed circuit.”

  33

  “What the Hell, We’re Off to Korea!”

  Find out what you can still do, and enjoy it.

  —HGB’s advice for those over eighty


  THE WOMAN COULD STILL TANGO—IN HEELS. Unknown to anyone but David and Charlotte Veal, who flatly refused to join her, Helen left her penthouse on Thursday nights and got herself to a church on the Upper East Side that ran a ballroom program called “Danse Elegante.” So it wasn’t the Mocambo. So some of the men had as much rhythm as a Maytag washer that’s slipped its belt. But once a gentleman held out his hand and the evening began, the music was ageless and so were they. In cold weather, Helen swept into the drafty church hall in her favorite full-length lynx coat; she loved to startle friends when she put her hand in a pocket and the coat suddenly growled, rwoooowrrr. Kit Golden’s husband, Tom Mangan, had given Helen a souvenir key chain honoring Penn State’s Nittany Lions; it roared on command. Helen adored it. Just as she had named her cars, she christened her furs. The lynx was Jezebel. One day she called Mangan in distress: “Jezebel has lost her voice.” He showed up with new batteries.

  David and Helen had made it to Angkor Wat in 2000; he was eighty-four. They were still flying around launching Cosmo editions—the number reached forty-three during Helen’s international stint. As Helen put it to a friend, “What the hell, we’re off to Korea!” Into the new millennium, the Browns boarded jets and cruise ships, bouncing between left and right coasts, for work and for pleasure. They loved getting paid to talk about their careers on “author cruises” and set sail from Southampton on the QEII with the mystery writers P. D. James and Dick Francis. At home, they sat on their terrace at the Beresford and never tired of the glorious sunsets over the Hudson River; the sound track was Berlin and Gershwin classics, playing on one of David’s many radios. They both took more pills than they wanted to and kept their freezer full of Lean Cuisine.