Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  There were still occasional hops to Los Angeles, for awards events and the like, and Helen enjoyed revisiting their old haunts. She was surprised, in June 2001, when the journalist Margy Rochlin got in touch and asked whether Helen would fancy taking a tour of the bachelorette pads she wrote about in Sex and the Single Girl. Helen was game; she confessed to Rochlin that the trip hadn’t been too terrific so far; Jackie Collins had snubbed her at a party. Imagine—after all those excerpts? In a Jeep piloted by an intern from her publication, LA Weekly, Rochlin picked Helen up at the hotel. HGB appeared in a short black dress, patterned stockings, and a cluster of pink rollers barely contained in a black-and-white polka-dot scarf that she had tied beneath her chin.

  Consider the astonishment of the Latino family finding the vision that was Helen at their door in South-Central L.A.—the former gopher palace. “Please let me in! I used to live here.” They finally opened the barred door to the strange, insistent old lady. The stuffy back room Helen had shared with Mary was so very tiny. Rochlin learned that Cleo and Leigh Bryan had slept right in the front room. Helen went out to the backyard. Rochlin wrote: “Standing in calf-high weeds on the hard-packed dirt, she surveys the nearby train tracks. It occurs to me that this might be the ground zero of man-trap feminism.” They did the full tour, though they were unable to locate the “keptive” apartment where Helen had waited for the crass anti-Semite. “He got what he came for, which was my little body,” she told Rochlin. “But I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get him.”

  When there was no answer to her knock at the Browns’ “married house” in Pacific Palisades, Helen, in high heels, startled her companions by bolting down the steep slope to peer in the windows. “It’s fun,” Helen said of her blast through the past, “but kind of weird.” HGB wilted visibly on the way back to her hotel. Rochlin asked if something was bothering her. “I’m distressed because I don’t have another idea for a book … Maybe I’ve run out of material.”

  * * *

  This seemed to be the case. Helen had written another iteration of her Book again, and quite recently. This time she called it I’m Wild Again. Jamie Brickhouse, then a publicist for St. Martin’s Press, fell madly for his author, but he just couldn’t get her on TV much. Even the belles of the Richmond Junior League disinvited her from their author luncheon after reading the “keptive” part in her book. Liz Smith obliged with a column item about HGB being blackballed in Richmond. But it was a tough sell all around, Brickhouse found. “She wasn’t the editor of Cosmo anymore, so the media wasn’t calling her. I’m Wild is really her batty musings, it’s read-out-loud-on-the-beach fun. If she had done some kind of tell-all, it might have sold. But she’d never do that.”

  Brickhouse was right about that disinclination to go deep. For decades, Helen had been writing the ultimate tell-all. But unlike the dashed-off autobiographical pages she shipped to the Smith archives, it was never intended for public view, nor did she let David know of it. The truest recounting of her improbable life had been kept in a spot that, during Helen’s working life, seemed inviolable to her: the Hearst Building. Somewhere, unless they have been secreted in a new place or destroyed, there are two sheaves of personal papers, enough to fill two oversized manila envelopes. Within them lies the real, no-filter HGB.

  Why did she set it all down? Compulsion? Self-analysis? Helen was addicted to talking to herself with a number-two pencil long before this oversharing Age of Memoir; she was the Samuel Pepys of the third grade, stuffing her scribblings into the compartments of her tiny rolltop desk. She kept her very adult papers under lock and key at various places in the building, moving them when events—such as ceding her office to Bonnie Fuller—made it prudent. Each time, Helen notified Charlotte Veal of the new location, with a crisp, rewritten letter. Only Helen’s trusted assistant knew the location of the papers and had the key to the cabinet or drawer. That person, no longer in Hearst’s employ and bound by a confidentiality agreement with the corporation—though not by Helen’s stipulation—had precise directions. Upon Helen’s death, only Charlotte Kelly Veal was to take possession of the papers, ASAP. This is how Helen put it to her friend: “The minute you hear I have konked out, please come to my office and present this letter and ask them to give you the envelopes.”

  According to Charlotte Veal’s friend, attorney, and executor Robin LoGuidice, “The papers are a record of her affairs that she never wanted David to see. She was having affairs, but she liked to keep this front up, that she was flirtatious but never was unfaithful to him. The only person she could trust was Charlotte.” At Helen’s request, and as a friend, LoGuidice had done some research about securing the papers; a second attorney had suggested that they might be safer in some sort of trust. Helen would not hear of it.

  If it were anyone else, any woman who hadn’t encouraged extramarital affairs in her books and to her friends, who hadn’t bedded married men with zero guilt, who hadn’t slept with more men before marriage than a score of women of her generation might in two lifetimes, who hadn’t admitted that she really missed single and “mistress” sex, it might be a surprise. But it should not be. This was Helen Gurley Brown, who declared that “sex is power.” After her marriage, and for decades, she indulged in occasional flings that may have been as essential to her as the cosmetic rejuvenations.

  HGB’s flirty ways were well-known. Over the years, she did things that had people wondering. When the wealthy financier Pete Peterson, cofounder of the Blackstone Group, was newly divorced in 1979, he was baffled by a letter he received from Helen, ostensibly asking to meet him—privately—for financial advice. “It sounded like she wanted much more than that,” he said. “I had never seen anything like it.” He kept the crazy thing, and showed it to his subsequent wife, Joan Ganz Cooney, whom he married in 1980. Not long afterward, the couple began to see the Browns socially. Every now and then, Cooney thought of that outré letter. “It wasn’t ‘Dear Pete, I need a financial advisor.’ It was very provocative, and quite long. It was the first time I wondered if she ever had affairs. It was so provocative that it caused one to think—did she really write this?”

  To those who knew about her divertissements, Helen made it clear: they posed no threat to her marriage to the man she loved and depended upon. On plenty of occasions, she had burst into tears imagining a hundred ways that David might leave her. Yet she was not that careful. She confided in some friends and occasionally requested their complicity. Early on, Helen pressed Lyn Tornabene to act as a beard for her and a well-known actor. After his death, Helen put information intimating the relationship into her papers at Smith College, along with material about General Clifton. Simone Levitt, the wife of the Levittown builder Bill Levitt, recalled a talk with Helen aboard their yacht in Monaco: “They had their little affairs and they each knew it and accepted it. I don’t know with whom, but I know she let me believe that these affairs didn’t bother her because it gave her the freedom to do the same. I would say they were a happy couple, absolutely.”

  David Brown heard rumors about his wife. He wrote about one unsettling incident: He was dancing with a woman, a friend of theirs, who whispered that Helen and her husband had had an affair. She proposed a lunch, he wrote, “so we could discuss what to do about it. As politely as I could I extricated myself from both the dance and the lunch date. Years later I casually mentioned the incident to my wife but never asked whether what I had heard was true. Perhaps I didn’t want to know. There are secrets even a husband and wife should not share.”

  There may be a simple reason for David’s silent forbearance—with the flying plate of salmon, the airliner tantrums, and the whispers of infidelity—in his musings on Helen’s fierce attachment to him. He needed and loved her, very much. “I’m married—my third marriage—to Helen Gurley Brown, who seems in all respects save carnal desire to be the reincarnation of my mother. Stick a pin in me and she jumps. If someone appears to hurt me she cries out. If I’m overweight or overwrought, she hustles me to a d
octor or shrink. She is in all ways as totally attuned to me as my mother was. Is she my mother?… Has she been ordered into my life by the power of a mother’s will? How could I be so important in the cosmic order of things? I often wonder.”

  Among Charlotte Veal’s other close friends, it was an open secret; Helen borrowed her apartment from time to time and her requisites could be damned annoying. Helen being Helen, she would even dicker over the amount of small “honorarium” she placed on Veal’s mantel when she left. At one point she halved it; Helen’s excuse for cheaping out: “David doesn’t have a job right now.” The two women could get into some operatic tiffs, but LoGuidice said that Helen’s faith was well-placed. Helen put her thanks in her epic poem to “Carlotta.”

  When I wanted to borrow her flat she gave

  And my secrets will go with her to the grave!

  But not quite. Helen could be a pill and Veal grumbled to a few of her friends about being marooned when Helen used the apartment. Yet, true to her pledge, said LoGuidice, “Charlotte never told me names.” It was a sisterly pinkie-swear that went back to 1949. “They had hard, hard lives,” said LoGuidice. “And they came up by hook or by crook. Charlotte would tell me that when they were young, they would have competitions about who would sleep with whom. They were wild and reckless.”

  What Veal knew above all was that Helen needed and adored her husband; the flings posed no danger, in Helen’s mind, to a union destined to last until death. In this sort of thinking, she seemed to subscribe to another, almost Continental double standard—the discreet affair that never threatened a solid and sophisticated marriage, and might even enhance it. Helen clarified her philosophy on affairs in her final book: “Why are we (not me) so horrified that people cheat? I guess I don’t know. Carrying on as though somebody sleeping with somebody, not your legal mate, is just this side of bombing churches … seems a little extreme to me … Doesn’t anybody get it … adultery is about sex. Sex is about it feels good … very good.”

  For years, until well into the 2000s, Helen also maintained a correspondence with her tormentor Don Juan. Their communication was mainly one-sided and often not personal at all; he forwarded random, multiple-mailing bloviations to many friends and acquaintances. Helen often sent DJ’s letters to Veal with comments of the “can you believe him?” sort. Besides one long, very personal letter to DJ about their romantic history that Helen included in her 2004 volume of correspondence, Dear Pussycat, she also included a few of his letters—one crassly speaks to their romantic past—in her archives at Smith. He is still living, in his late nineties, and will not be named here. It is clear from the correspondence that Helen never fell back into his arms, and had not seen him for decades. A photograph tucked into one of his letters shows a silver-haired popinjay in a three-piece white suit. She had David, she said to Charlotte. Whatever had she seen in that one?

  * * *

  Two years after Helen’s experiment with the mirror and pillow, Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues, arrived at Helen’s office for one of a half-dozen interviews they did for The Good Body, Ensler’s book in progress on women’s body images. She found Helen on the floor, doing sit-ups. Ensler looked closely at Helen’s face. There was something different, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Ensler had been traveling, and before she left, Helen had promised her: no more procedures on her face. The two women, so different in age, lifestyle, and feminist politics, enjoyed talking to each other. Their conversations ranged way beyond Ensler’s requisites for her book project. They talked a good deal about Cleo Gurley, and her indelibly wounding remarks about Helen’s plainness. Ensler peered more closely at Helen’s face.

  “Helen? Your promise?”

  “I just couldn’t do it.”

  Helen began talking, between sit-ups. She was exercising every time Ensler showed up; HGB was still loath to give up the battle with her cursed “tummy pooch.” What she said to Ensler between ab compressions amounts to an extraordinary burst of self-awareness.

  Eve dear. Come in pussycat … Don’t mind me, I’m multi-tasking … Eighty years old, one hundred sit-ups twice a day; I’m down to ninety pounds. Another ten years I’ll be down to nothing. But even then I won’t feel beautiful. I accept this terrible condition. It’s driven me to be disciplined and successful.

  Through Cosmo I’ve been able to help women everywhere. Well, almost everywhere.

  Through Cosmo, I’ve been able to help everyone but me. Ironic. Come closer, Eve. I don’t bite. Let’s have a treat!

  (Opening edamame.) Edamame, my new favorite treat. It’s food that isn’t food. Energy. That’s the closest I ever come to cooking. I never did get the nurture gene.

  My mother never saw me. She saw acne. She took me to the doctor twice a week for five years. He opened, postuled [sic] and squeezed my face. He left it battered. He would keep an X-ray machine on my face, five minutes at a time. He burned the bottom layer off my face. After the appointments, we would drive around, my mother and I. She would cry, I would cry. “How can I be a happy person, Helen?” she would say. “Your sister is in a wheelchair with polio. Your father is dead. And you, Helen, have acne…”

  (Doing sit-ups again.) Don’t get things fixed, Eve. Don’t do it. (Stops sit-ups.) If you do, another thing always breaks down. I had my eyes done at forty. I thought that would do. But no. Tried it again when I was fifty-six. First full face-lift at sixty-three. Second at sixty-seven. Third at seventy-three. I’m desperate for another, but there’s no skin left on my face. Yesterday they took some fat out of my backside and they shot it into my cheeks.

  So that was it. Fat injections. Ensler thought of the needles and the pain.

  I think even you would approve, Eve. I am recycling. My shrink says I’m doing this for my mother, Cleo’s gone almost twenty years. Can you imagine I’m doing this for her? I never had a daughter but, if I did, I would tell her she’s beautiful and lovely every minute … Eve, I would have to practice this. One thing I never had to practice was sex. I took to it like a duck to water. It’s been a good week. My husband and I had sex two days in a row. Not bad for eighty. He’s feisty, always has been. The crazy thing is he’s always thought I was beautiful, but of course that doesn’t count, I mean he loves me.

  In November 2004, when Ensler performed a version of that monologue as HGB onstage at the Booth Theatre in New York, Helen and David Brown were in the audience. They went backstage after the curtain. Helen made a beeline for Ensler.

  “You got me!” she said.

  She was smiling broadly; David said he loved it. By God, he still loved her, through all the craziness and countless cans of Crisco rubbed into so very many surgical scars. Ensler said, “Afterwards she wrote me a note that said I had honored her and told the truth.” Maybe it would help somebody.

  Ensler has had more than a decade to think about her conversations with Helen. She never expected to become so very fond of her. All along, Ensler got the feeling that a lot of Helen’s image issues came down to … Cleo. “That woman!” said Ensler. “The stories just got me so angry, and so sad for Helen. She talked about her father, too, what a misogynist he was. But really, I think a lot of the scarring was as much from her mother withholding that approval as from the acne itself.”

  * * *

  The dreaded things, the “old people” catastrophes, began deviling David, and at first Helen tried to make light of it. The first mishap, in 2005, was kind of funny. They were at home, unpacking from a trip to Paris. “He was trying not to drop a bottle of scotch somebody gave us,” Helen wrote to Liz Smith, “a quart not a fifth and god forbid I would leave it in the hotel room … Well, instead of dropping the scotch he fell over and broke his hip!” There was nothing amusing about the second broken hip, the following year. His kidneys were not in great shape.

  They muddled along, and every May, as she had for over a decade, Helen phoned a “young” man, now sixty-plus, David Patrick Columbia: “Pussycat, can we count on you for Thanksgiving?” M
onths ahead of time, it was reassuring to hear his “Yes, of course.” At last, David and Helen had a family for the holiday. To make a fourth, it had always been Alice Mason or Charlotte Veal. Mr. Brown still commanded one of the best tables in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons, and treated his guests to a whole turkey, full trimmings. The restaurant’s co-owner Julian Niccolini said the staff always liked to see them coming. “They were very nice, normal people. Sweet. David would tip up to a hundred percent on a check.” With Helen, it was the notes. “My God, the notes, it was too much. I still have some of them. Hundreds over the years!” They fluttered in after every business lunch, and yes, after every turkey.

  Columbia says he never understood why they chose him, a Manhattan columnist who founded, edits, and writes the online A-list chronicle New York Social Diary. Though The New York Times has called him “Boswell to the Bluebloods,” Columbia’s pedigree was as modest as Helen’s. He grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, the son of a factory worker. He recalls first meeting the Browns at a lunch with Alice Mason. Columbia began having lunches with David; the holiday meals became a standing date. For their last few Thanksgivings, Columbia walked or helped wheel Helen and David through the Pool Room. Often, he would walk Charlotte Veal home afterward and hear her tales of the wild old days with Helen.

  Having survived gales of Category 5 air kisses, having observed and documented the ways of le tout Manhattan, Columbia found the Browns to be the real deal. They saw and enjoyed their own set of “nobodies,” just as they relished the private life they maintained for themselves. “They were the most couple couple I’ve ever known, because they were always together,” said Columbia. “They were a single act. Helen and David were not intellectuals at all. They had the common touch. They never lost that ordinariness. That’s what made them so attractive to people. Helen was ordinary. That was her strength, her money in the bank—she never lost that.”