Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  34

  The Long Goodbye

  please don’t die

  I won’t if you won’t

  we’re going to take little baby naps—his and hers

  little baby bear catnaps

  —scrap of poetry by HGB

  ON FEBRUARY 1, 2010, the morning of David Brown’s last day on earth, Helen went to work. It was a Monday; her darling driver, Michael, would be waiting to take her to midtown. What else was there to do? She was not making David’s breakfast anymore, or marching him to the bathroom scale. He could not walk; Helen herself could barely get around but she carried on the only way she knew how.

  She had gone off to work five days a week for seventy-one years. By then, “work” meant being gently bundled into the silver Mercedes for the familiar ten-minute ride, whisked into an elevator, and wheeled to a room on the thirty-seventh floor of the gleaming Hearst Tower that had been fitted out as a cozy but nonfunctional replica of the office where she had been her most vibrant and commanding self. The frilly faux office was a comforting sanctuary in an increasingly alien world. Her assistant, Susie, helped her into the office, settled her in, and closed the door. Mainly, Helen napped. Once in a while she would be wheeled down to the gleaming new cafeteria and helped into a chair. It’s a safe bet that she had tuna fish.

  Occasionally, she would lunch with old friends and colleagues there. The editors Sally Richardson and Elizabeth Beier, who had published Helen’s last two books at St. Martin’s Press, were saddened by her apparent loss of memory, but pleased to see that she still had a few canny coping strategies. She fished for memory aids to remember who she was lunching with: “Have you two got business cards? I’m afraid I’ve misplaced all of mine.” She looked quite different. By her lifelong standards, Helen Gurley Brown was plump; about thirty pounds over her steady 105, largely the result, Alex Birnbaum said, of the sweets Helen had long forbidden herself. David did tease her about it. The Browns’ caregivers took to hiding the cookies.

  Knowing that David was near the end, Birnbaum made regular visits to the Beresford. For the last six to nine months of David’s life, he spent his days in his home office/library, where a hospital bed had been set up. “I would go over every Sunday and spend time,” said Birnbaum. “By then he was on dialysis but his mind was absolutely clear. Helen’s was not at that point. Whether David recognized it or not I don’t know.”

  David Brown was ninety-three; his kidneys had all but failed. Home dialysis had been arranged. His production partner, Kit Golden, went to the Beresford on weekdays to talk of work when he was able, or just to visit and reminisce. She often brought her little daughter, Callie. By late January, it became apparent that the end was near. Golden witnessed what she felt to be a turning point. “I remember being there the day before he passed away, and he was doing this.” She made a pointing and tugging motion with her hand. “Like he was trying to get the IV out. And I remember coming home and saying to [her husband] Tom, ‘He’s ready.’”

  Helen had been sleeping on a sofa beside his hospital bed, but that night she fell asleep upstairs in the big canopy bed. Navigating the apartment’s many stairs had become problematic. At 3:45 a.m., David’s nurse called upstairs to Helen’s caregiver; she knew the end was near and Helen made her way down to say goodbye.

  When Alex Birnbaum telephoned The New York Times to announce the death, she did not tell the obituary writer, Bruce Weber, that David Brown had a son who predeceased him. “I wouldn’t have said anything about it because David wouldn’t have said anything. Also, I don’t think Helen would have liked it.” There was little point to raising questions about a subject so painful—not while Helen was alive. Weber said that even if she had given him the information, the paper had no firm policy on requiring the inclusion of predeceased offspring. Bruce Brown was buried a second time.

  Birnbaum was in deep grief herself; she had known and adored David since she was eight years old. They shared a birthday and celebrated nearly every one together. She would continue her weekly visits to Helen for as long as she lived. On the morning of David’s memorial service, Birnbaum went to the Cosmo offices at Hearst, where the new widow was receiving tender mercies from members of the editorial staff. “They were getting her all jacked up, the fashion department and everyone. They were so sweet in getting her together. Because by that time, she was not obese but she was about thirty pounds overweight.”

  Birnbaum said that Helen seemed dazed, but cognizant of the awful ritual she faced. David’s service was held at Frank E. Campbell, the Funeral Chapel, the last stop for Manhattan’s mighty and wealthiest. Kit Golden sat beside the widow, who would turn eighty-eight in two weeks. Steven Spielberg, who had flown in for the service, sat on her other side. “Helen was very quiet,” Golden said.

  The first person to speak was Richard Zanuck, who choked up when he recalled his last, one-sided conversation with David the week before; someone had held the phone to David’s ear and the man Zanuck had spoken to every day for forty years whispered, “See you.”

  Zanuck recovered himself with a few David-isms:

  Work yourself to death; it’s the only way to live.

  For years I’ve been known as Helen Gurley Brown’s husband and I’ve loved it.

  Liz Smith does not think that Helen had quite processed the enormity of her loss. “I spoke with Helen at the funeral. I don’t think it much registered. I called her the next day to check on her and she said, ‘Oh, Lizzie, did you know that my husband has died?’”

  It was a traumatic break, and following David’s death, she began a precipitous decline. After a while, life went on in the “workplace,” with Helen shuttled between home tower and office tower, and various doctors’ appointments. Given Hearst’s well-managed cocoon, it is difficult to imagine how Scott Spears, interviewer with WMRN in Ohio, managed to get Helen on the line for a radio chat. Spears said that he just called the switchboard, got Helen’s assistant, and it happened quickly and directly, without Hearst brass or PR types being involved. It was done by phone from her office.

  Helen’s voice, always so distinct on the air, had slipped into a quavering near-whisper. The pauses were long and awkward. Spears wanted to know how she had “gotten over” her husband’s death. After a moment, Helen answered, “Well, I haven’t coped too well as a matter of fact, because we were so … together. And every day of my working life we would go home together. And sit in the den and watch television and he would think, and do whatever he did, and I would work. We were just so … close. I can’t stand it that he’s gone.”

  How had she dealt with it?

  “Well, I come to work every day.”

  * * *

  There is no question that Helen’s Hearst friends and minders saw to all of her needs with care and kindness. But there were some puzzling disconnects; Helen, the longtime cat lover, was presented with a puppy, which she refused to accept. Some visitors, old and close friends, were turned away in the lobby of the Beresford, per instructions given to caregivers. A list posted in the kitchen detailed who was admissible.

  It was not possible to determine when the two girlfriends, Helen and her Carlotta, last looked upon each other’s face and had a final giggle. Having suffered a bad fall and other health problems, Veal had not been able to attend David’s memorial service. She managed to get herself to the Beresford to visit Helen but was turned away. For many years, she had the key to the Browns’ penthouse; when they were away, she moved in and fed the cats. “She was told she could not come over without an appointment,” said Robin LoGuidice. “And Helen had invited her over. Charlotte was absolutely devastated.” The two friends kept trying; Helen had one willing caregiver who would dial Charlotte for her, but they began having difficulty communicating on the phone. Neither friend had planned for this awful contingency: Charlotte Veal was slipping into dementia as well and would be unable to carry out her custodial pledge for Helen’s papers.

  Helen didn’t go out much beyond the office, but sh
e did get up to Columbia University in early August 2012 to see Nicholas Lemann, then dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She was in a wheelchair. With them was Helen’s executor and then general counsel for Hearst, Eve Burton; she is also president of Helen’s Pussycat Foundation, which is distributing all of the Browns’ wealth—more than $170 million—to educational institutions and charities. Lemann was showing Helen the plans for the largest bequest thus far, $30 million for the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia. “Helen’s idea was that, since David had gone to Stanford as an undergraduate and then to Columbia Journalism School, she wanted to put together a gift that would bring together his two alma maters,” said Lemann. “We ended up with a partnership between us [Columbia] and Stanford Engineering School, particularly the computer science department. We created a dual degree program, between computer science and journalism at Columbia.”

  Helen seemed pleased with the architectural plans he showed her, Lemann said, though she was adamant that some existing bars come off windows on the building to house the new institute. But she was not a brick-and-mortar donor at heart; subsequent bequests have gone to “Magic Grants”—Lemann said that Helen insisted on the term—for tuition to students in need, plus $15 million to the New York Public Library to fund a literacy program in the Bronx and Manhattan and $7.5 million to a program for the Browns’ neighbor across the street, the American Museum of Natural History; teenage girls interested in the sciences learn computer coding there. The girls in the tuition-free classes are Brown Scholars.

  On August 8, a few days after her visit to Columbia, Helen went to her office for the last time. Alex Birnbaum got the call from a Hearst employee; Helen had died at New York–Presbyterian/Columbia hospital on August 13. This time it was a corporate representative phoning The New York Times to announce the death; no cause was given. The obituary writer, Margalit Fox, could not resist a parting shot right in the opening paragraph: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.”

  The Hearst send-off for Helen in October was a pink and leopard extravaganza held at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. It was fizzy, showbizzy, bedecked with long-stemmed former Cosmo models, a song from Matthew Broderick, a tribute from the then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, film clips of some iconic “Little Girl from Little Rock” moments in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Helen would have loved it. Her friends were there, and some of them spoke from the big stage. Their quieter elegies follow … a girls’ “den night,” as Helen would say.

  35

  The Women: Can We Talk?

  A best girlfriend is like Mentholatum … inexpensive, nobody is trying to get it (her) away from you, soothing on nearly all occasions.

  —HGB, I’m Wild Again

  Helen’s whole life is this monument to artifice, yet her friendship is very real.

  —Liz Smith

  NO MATTER THEIR VINTAGE OR HERS, Helen always called them girlfriends. Some of them were just that; she was in third grade when she first met one special playmate in Little Rock who stayed in her life for the next seventy years. Many friends from Helen’s New York period are women of accomplishment and of privilege; there are also some stalwart “unknowns” among her most adored. Helen’s girl group was an ever-shifting configuration, not of loyalties but of availability, circumstances, datebooks, and PDAs—this was boldface, A-list Manhattan, pussycat, where Park Avenue falls dark as the innermost courtyards of a souk during the summer months, where in the autumn, shiny obsidian Navigators and Mercedes migrate in knowing herds to the right places on the right nights. More privately, Helen’s women friends met in pairs and trios over a cozy lunch; they picked at Dover sole and Cobb salads at Le Cirque and Michael’s and spooned the livid magenta borscht at the Russian Tea Room. Of course, Helen didn’t eat. Talk was the essential nutrient.

  Singly, the women recalled their relationships with Helen, and doing so, they laughed a good deal. A few got teary. They were unanimous on this: once she faded from them, life was a little less fun.

  GLORIA VANDERBILT, ON LOVE, SEX, ANOREXIA, AND LOSS

  “We always went to Michael’s. That’s where she always wanted to go. She’d order nothing.” A laugh. “She just had no idea how thin she was. I think when you’re anorexic you never think you’re thin enough. You look in the mirror and what you see is not that person. I thought she was just painfully thin.”

  Almost always, it was just the two of them.

  “I liked David, I respected him, and I was thrilled to see this wonderful couple because it’s very rare to see that. But he didn’t interest me. Helen was my friend. My focus was all on her and we always had so much to talk about that there wasn’t room for anything else. She talked about men she’d been involved with. She was almost like Pamela Harriman, a great kind of courtesan who really knew how to make men feel great. I trusted her and she trusted me. We mostly talked about men and sex.” Big laugh. “We never got into graphic discussions, nothing like in her books where she describes how to do a blow job and all that. Why go there when you know all about it anyway?” Understand: their talk was about the thrall, not the mechanics. There was another husky laugh from the woman who published an erotic novel called Obsession at age eighty-five.

  “I just remember once, we were talking about—you know the Spanish word encantado? It means sort of charmed, as when someone is sexually involved with a person and you’ve really got a bond that’s extremely intense and important. Nothing’s going to come between you. She was the most wonderful friend to talk about that sort of passion. Also she was so supportive and a hundred percent trustworthy. Absolutely. I never ever felt that if I confided something that she was going to go around gossiping about it at all. Ever. The only confidence she shared was how much she loved David Brown. She didn’t have to say it, one just knew it. They were the most wonderful team and they loved each other so much and they were both so supportive of each other. It was just divine.”

  Vanderbilt had noticed, though in a way she couldn’t exactly define, that the Browns were not like a lot of other New York people. They were simpler, more direct. She was especially glad of that during the long, unthinkable ordeal following her older son Carter’s suicide. Despite the heat of that July day, he had asked for the doors to stay open on his mother’s penthouse balcony; suddenly he dashed out, dangled his feet over the railing, and, heedless of her pleading, went over into the air. In the aftermath, as she and her surviving son, Anderson Cooper, struggled for some ballast, most Manhattanites observed the prim protocols of death: calling hours, condolences by appointment. Not the Browns. Helen had insisted. They just had to go over. She was worried; she just had to see Gloria.

  “It was after the funeral. Of course there were people coming all the time to see me. But a couple of weeks after, all that had kind of stopped. Nora, my housekeeper, came in to me and said, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Brown are here.’ It was wonderful to see them. It was surprising and sort of very small town. I’ve never, in New York, experienced somebody just coming. It was quite amazing. It meant a lot that they were there.”

  During their lunchtime confidences, Vanderbilt looked keenly at her friend, watched her push food around, saw the lifts, the “scrapings,” as she described them, faint scarifications of her relentless surgical enhancements. “I think everybody is a person of contradictions, really. I think she loved beauty and she wanted to be as beautiful as she possibly could be. One way of doing that is through plastic surgery and she chose to go that way. I think that she did not have a clear image of herself, of how far she went, losing weight, having a lot of plastic work done. I don’t think she looked in the mirror and saw it.”

  If the other women noticed the alarming tautness, the thinning, over time, of hair and skin, they never said a word. Nor would they suggest a more age-appropriate hemline, a lipstick a few tones down from the five-alarm reds. What would be the point? There was no stopping her. “I think she saw it [surgery] from the point of view that every time, she was getting cl
oser to achieving beauty. Also, I think many people feel that having plastic surgery is a kind of rebirth. I think she felt that every time she had it, it was reinventing herself. It was excelsior, it was higher, it was better.

  “I do think this ‘not pretty enough’ thing is the key, isn’t it? I mean, we all get the image of ourselves growing up, if you have a mother and a father, that’s who you get it from. That sticks, that’s kind of like a stamp. If it had been said to her, ‘You’re pretty and you’ve also got brains, look out world,’ everything might have been different.”

  Few women of Vanderbilt’s acquaintance seem to understand the transformative power of sex as Helen did, how it could burn past the so-called “hot” years, and still smolder toward the grave: “I remember in one of her books, she was planning what she was going to wear in her coffin. It was a Pucci dress.”

  A long pause.

  “I loved Helen dearly. And I really miss her.”

  BARBARA WALTERS, ON MAKING A CLEAN EXIT

  Speaking on the eve of her own “retirement” from regular broadcasting at eighty-six in July 2015, Walters was, by her admission, a bit out of sorts. Now what? Helen was miserable after they took her magazine away; she always worried that people would quit calling. When Walters turned up for Helen’s last birthday at the Beresford, her ninetieth, it was a thin crowd, mainly a few women from Hearst and Helen’s much younger personal friend, Lois Cahall. In photographs from the party, there is a vast difference between the well-coifed, still-working Walters and Helen, who sat in an armchair, chubby, dolled up in a black dress and bolero jacket and, of course, fishnet stockings, badly torn in one knee. Blowing out the candles, she looked like a contented grandma—like Cleo, without the Sisco nose. “She talked very honestly about what it was like to get older,” Walters said. “I think about her saying there was nothing good about aging except for taking a hot bath. So when I get into the hot bath I think, ‘Helen, you’re right.’”