Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  At the height of their careers, their solo lunches were hard to manage, especially given Walters’s schedule. “We would have lunch together twice a year and talk very intimately to each other, Helen in that teeny-weeny voice. She was very private but she was a very loving and generous friend. We discussed our siblings, our work.”

  She knew that over the years, there were endless crises with Helen’s family, the frantic calls, the worries. Walters could relate. “I had a sister who was what we would call today developmentally challenged. And she had a sister who had a physical impairment. It’s difficult when you’re well and strong and you have a relative that isn’t. Dealing with that was always a big part of Helen’s life.” Some things were walled off, even between friends. Walters didn’t know about Helen’s breast cancer until years later. Helen never mentioned Bruce Brown, even when he was alive. “I remember being surprised to learn that David had a child. She never discussed it. Nor did she want children—that we did discuss.”

  Over the decades, Walters was aware of the public dialogue on Helen, the potshots and feminist condemnations. She does not think it just to overlook her friend’s role as disrupter of the sexual status quo, to have been brave enough to start the conversation. “What she did was make women feel that it wasn’t a crime to be single and have sex. She also didn’t think it was a crime to be with somebody else’s husband, and that there were times when a married man was the kind of relationship you should have. She made women feel they could be sexual. This was an amazing contribution. It’s what made the magazine so popular. She said enjoy your body, enjoy your sex life, enjoy the man in your life, enjoy somebody else’s man. She was criticized by Gloria Steinem and the women’s movement for being too feminine. I remember Gloria Steinem saying a woman needs a husband the way a fish needs a bicycle. To Helen it was wonderful to have a man. To women in the movement, it wasn’t necessary to have a man, so Helen became not just silly, but detrimental.”

  Helen was very insistent that all her friends have men in their lives. She could be a bit much on that issue. “There were times that she wanted to fix me up with this one and that one, people that I thought were totally unsuitable. I’d say, ‘Helen, he would not be interested in me.’” Helen also astonished Walters with her economies, some of which were … well, not flattering.

  “It was funny that she was so cheap, even with her clothes. She would wear the same little outfits year after year, always very short. Many inches above the knees and we would joke with her about why she was so cheap. It was pathological, it was obsessive. We talked about this great need to hold on to money, this fear of losing it. But she was wonderfully generous about David. David loved women, and she loved the fact that he loved women. I don’t mean that he cheated on her, but he loved being with women and Helen encouraged that. She used to encourage me to have lunch with David and I enjoyed that, he was a lovely man. I always thought that was generous and wise and showed the kind of relationship that they had.”

  Over the years, Helen sent Walters a blizzard of huzzahs, thank-yous, and “gee your hair looked great on GMA” notes. “It was remarkable. It was almost too much. She must have done these every day to I don’t know how many people.” Walters is one of the few people interviewed who did not keep at least some of her HGB missives. She does have one memento. “When she died, to my amazement, she left me a tea set. She must have had a will and gave something to every woman she knew.”

  Unlike her friend, Walters is not a saver, a hoarder of tokens and proofs. For one thing, she has lived on camera for more than half a century. For another, she’s just not the kind to box things up so others can poke at them someday. “I have no archive. It takes a different kind of interest in yourself, I guess. I kept no notes, no letters, no diaries. And fortunately nobody’s writing a book about me, so I don’t have to worry about it.”

  SIMONE LEVITT, ON RESILIENCY AND OH, THE SEX

  Simone Levitt knew some very hard times growing up in wartime Paris; Helen could not hear enough about exactly how she survived. Simone was a beautiful child in a hideous time; when the war came, her mother played poker and baccarat to keep them alive. Simone sold cigarette butts she found on the street. She was half Jewish, half Greek. “I was in jail. I was with the orphans. I almost went to Auschwitz. I was a survivor. At eleven, I was raped by a French policeman.”

  Hers is an astonishing story; Levitt had just returned to her one-bedroom rental on Fifth Avenue after giving a lecture about her life to passengers on the Queen Mary 2. Let us pick up in 1964, when she married one of the richest men in America. Bill Levitt built the postwar development Levittown in Long Island and sold seventeen thousand houses there. Simone’s wedding present was the matchless 227-foot yacht La Belle Simone. The Levitts met the Browns at a Manhattan party, then invited them to cruise in the Mediterranean; they always moored longest in Monaco. Simone has been widowed since 1986; Bill had lost the fortune and died at eighty-four, unable to pay for his final hospital care. Simone Levitt and the Browns remained friends until their deaths. She says that in all that she has experienced, there was not a creature like Helen.

  “I remember the first morning [on their first cruise together], she was typing away, working on the ship all morning. And when she finished typing she would come up and light up the whole ship. She was a fascinating human being. No one was ever bored talking to her … She amazed me with the short skirt and the sex. Oh, the sex, the sex, the sex. She told me the whole story about the way she and David fell in love and them doing it. On the ship she would say the same thing—‘Lovely dinner but you’ll have to excuse us but David and I are in a loving mood.’ She was not actually sexy-looking. It was like making love to an ironing board. She really played it to the hilt, about this sex with him. She must have known what he liked, no doubt about it. It kept the marriage together. I think she knew that’s how she was going to keep him.”

  Levitt watched Helen cater to her man, defer to him often, and stay ever vigilant to David’s moods. “He had a dark side. No doubt about it. On the boat, sometimes he would sit watching the sea and stare. He wanted quiet time, absolutely. But she respected that and didn’t make him feel like ‘C’mon, David, join the crowd.’

  “Interestingly enough—even though she was sex oriented—she really was a woman’s friend. She never made me feel like I wasn’t important because I wasn’t a man that was going to make a pass at her. She talked to me like I was the only person in the room. She was fully interested in me—at least it appeared to me. She asked me so many questions, always. But I believed she really took every human being really seriously. She was not a superficial person at all and she really felt that everyone had something great to offer.”

  ALICE MASON, ON SOCIAL GRACES

  After thirty years of giving her exclusive and storied dinners in her Upper East Side apartment, Alice Mason lives alone, quite contentedly, she says, with her tiny dog. As real estate broker to the mighty, she has been in—and sold and resold—every posh urban castle in the right parts of town. While working on a huge memoir that she has decided not to publish, she sat down and did the math: “Mostly in the seventies and eighties I had a dinner nine times a year—that’s sixty people nine times a year, five hundred settings a year, and I did it for like thirty years.” It was a rule that she separated married couples at different tables and in different rooms. “It wasn’t about friendship. Ever. It was about who was important in New York. It was introducing everybody to everybody. When you came, everybody was famous. I put Malcolm Forbes at my table, Norman Mailer, and always, Barbara Walters. I never had Helen or David at my table. Ever. I never gave David and Helen especially great tables.”

  Helen was generally sent to the gulag of boring spouses, even though Mason says that she did not fall into that category. “Helen was very tolerant of sitting with anybody. Once she sat down at dinner, she was quite comfortable. She never minded. Most people do mind. I would mind.” The Browns, polite and unassuming, were the vital inte
rstitial tissue—congenial by nature, and pleased as heck to be there.

  “The Browns were regulars at the dinners, for about twenty years, right until when I stopped giving them.” Unlike many who acknowledged the trophy invitations over the years with crisp, pro forma notes, the Browns always returned the honor in kind, and then some. “I knew David and Helen many years, intimately. Helen called me for lunch once a month. She was always easy to talk to because she had no pretensions. And what had she done? She wrote a book about sex, it was a big success. But Helen worked very hard, right to the end. That’s what she loved. They [Hearst] should have been nice, because she made that magazine, she saved the company. Her whole life was work.

  “I don’t think they entertained anyone as much as me because they came to so many dinners that I gave. They both always made an effort. They always had a car. But they were never overly impressed with themselves. They took me with my daughter. We mainly went to dinner but they took me to the theater. Helen always ordered but she didn’t eat very much. She always exercised so much and she even carried that mat with her. She exercised twice a day. I thought it was very sad in the end because there she was … well, fat. Of all the things she hated.

  “I had a million letters from Helen Brown, every time they came to dinner. They never took it for granted. David would write wonderful letters. David was a better writer than she was. Helen was a very cozy writer. Yes, sometimes she called me pussycat.”

  LIZ SMITH, ON BEING SPOKESWOMAN

  Swear to God, says Liz Smith, if one more person in this, the ninth decade of her life, asks what Helen Gurley Brown was really like, they’ll get baptized with this nice tart margarita. For nearly half a century, Smith has been the quotable media Font of HGB, cannot count the Brown-related items she tucked into thirty-three continuous years of columns in the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and Newsday. Lizzie, aka Honey to Helen, dear Lizzie, official HGB roaster and toaster, arranger of birthday parties, joke Cosmo covers, endless prezzies. And yes, damn it, eulogizer. Helen’s archives hold plenty of Lizzie speeches but perhaps the best HGB encomium is the tersest: “She’s our adorable fanatic.”

  Helen was always most satisfying one-on-one, and it was to her that Smith confessed her sorrow and rage when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp fired her as columnist and spoiled her fine long run. She and Helen had their ups and downs and always forgave—at least Smith did. Though it would have been nice if the fancy foundation doling out the Browns’ fortune had found a bequest for her Literacy Partners charity. “She left me some fruit plates. I think like all people who live a long time, she had a lot of china she didn’t know what to do with. Because she didn’t really entertain. All the time they lived on Central Park West, I went there once. To a party they had for Woody Allen.

  “I used to say to Helen: What are you gonna do with all this fucking money? If David dies, take a yacht and go around and take all your girlfriends and we’ll have a great time. Even if he doesn’t die you should do that. She would just laugh.”

  LOIS CAHALL, ON BEING “LOIS ANN”

  Lois Cahall was living on Cape Cod, the divorced mother of two girls, when, sometime in the disco eighties, she was in New York and first saw HGB at Studio 54, a vision in leopard pumps and micro-miniskirt. She went home and later reread Having It All; like so many other women, she wrote Helen a thank-you note. HGB invited her to visit the next time she was in Manhattan; so began a close friendship of more than two decades. Helen insisted on calling her Lois Ann; only her late mother had called her that.

  “We called each other every week. ‘Is this a good time?’ was always my opening line—something advised from her book. When we didn’t speak, we wrote to each other, long old-fashioned letters, me from my computer in Cape Cod, her from her old typewriter on her pink pussycat stationery in Manhattan. Thousands of letters, ranging from her invalid sister, the loss of my mother, gossip, her hurt at being ‘ousted at Cosmo’ after creating its empire. Helen taught me to ‘just get on with it, Lois Ann.’”

  For the decade that Cahall lived in New York as the partner and fiancée of the screenwriter Stephen Schiff, the Browns came to weekly dinners at their apartment. On Sunday nights, she saw them off with David toting a Tupperware container of leftovers. He was very fond of Cahall’s stuffed peppers and her wiseacre daughter Maxine, who wrote a paper on women in politics titled “From Helen to Hillary.”

  “Maxine curled up on the sofa in Helen’s office as she dispensed wisdom on everything from bosoms to boardrooms. History was repeating itself. When I sent her a copy of the paper with the A my daughter received, Helen declared it ‘quite sparkly! She can write!’”

  On one of her final visits to Helen after David’s death, Cahall was speaking generally of m-e-n and her own recent love troubles, as they had so often and deeply over a quarter century. During the afternoon, Helen had been in and out of the present. Cahall asked her, “Helen, you’ve spent your lifetime telling us how to please men but you never told us what to do when it goes wrong. You taught me ‘I love you, I miss you, but I gotta go.’ But what happens after the woman goes? Where do we go?”

  HGB shrugged. “Maybe it’s time for another magazine.”

  JOAN RIVERS, ON SEX, PLASTIC SURGERY, AND BEING AMERICA’S “LAST” GUEST

  A few months before her death during a surgical procedure in September 2014, Joan Rivers called from the road to talk about her friend Helen; she was at “some hotel in Virginia or God knows where,” working, of course, at eighty-one. Rivers was at the Browns’ home only once, at a rare dinner party (“someone else must have canceled”), but she and Helen had plenty of TV and beauty adventures together. Once, Rivers recalled, she drove all over Atlantic City—don’t even ask why they were there, who the hell remembers—to find Helen an emergency wig. She could only find “a hooker wig,” but Helen was glad to have it. “She burned her hair on a radiator.”

  What?

  “Don’t ask.”

  They didn’t really lunch and they didn’t hang out at each other’s glamorous Manhattan homes. Home was sanctuary to both women, but since they were always working, their relationship solidified in Johnny Carson’s Burbank studio. They were wicked co-conspirators when Johnny was away and Rivers took over as guest host. She had made her comic chops scurrying around that stage like a goldfish bumping against the bowl, bubbling out unlovely one-liners: My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on. I wish I had a twin so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.

  Badum-bum.

  Could it be that as well-known cosmetic surgery junkies, theirs was a sisterhood of sutures? Can we talk about it? Did they? “The plastic surgery? Oh sure, we talked about it. A lot. That was during my heyday with it—you know what I’m saying? And it was considered so private and it was considered so … well, it was a dirty little secret. You know, the joke was always you can talk about your sex life but you won’t say you had your face done. Helen was such an advocate of it and that was wonderful. We would discuss who the good doctors were in those days. You went to [Dr. Michael] Gurdin first. And then when Gurdin began to fade you went to [Dr. Jeffrey] Hoefflin. She was very frank about it and very open about it.

  “I think her whole life was the office. I remember very early on, Marty Erlichman, who was then my manager—he’s still Barbra Streisand’s manager—called me with a story. Helen wanted to do something with Barbra [for Cosmo]. Marty was a young man then at that point. Helen said, ‘We’ll meet up in my office.’ And she was having her hair colored while Marty went in to talk to her. He was in shock. He said, ‘Can you believe it? I went into her office and there they were, dyeing her hair and she was talking to me. Oh my God. She had the paste all over her hair.’”

  Rivers had a very different reaction: “I thought, ‘How smart is that?’” She laughed. “She’s not letting time go by. How smart. She’s still running the magazine.”

  Rivers wrote for Cosmo from time to time, and Helen also ran pieces about
this fearless female comic. Rivers appreciated the exposure; likewise, she was a great Helen booster on The Tonight Show when she guest hosted. They were good together. That was before Johnny got wind that Rivers was getting her own late-night show and banned the uppity, traitorous c-word forevermore. Both women understood their places in that late-night man cave, and did their best. The key to Helen’s ubiquity there, Rivers said, was her humility. She could roll with anything and kept her expectations low. During commercial breaks, Rivers would find her in the greenroom, watching the monitor and the clock, assessing her odds of actually getting on if the marquee guests ran long. When the production team did each night’s lineup for guest spots, Helen was always at the bottom of the batting order.

  “She was a great, not a major. The first guest was usually the movie star or the big comic. And the main guest was the one that you pulled across midnight so nobody changed the channel. That would be when they had Bob Hope or Gwyneth Paltrow, you know what I’m saying? The last guest was always the writer, the author, the magazine person, and that’s who Helen was. And she was always very good. But Helen was never the first guest. She was the last guest.”

  And she was damned glad to be there. Every time she was on The Tonight Show, Helen sent a gushy, grateful note to the makeup man Bob Oysterman, who always did right by her. He sent her out to take her place on the sofa, still warm from a twinkly starlet in a tube dress, and made Helen feel she had a right to be there. Rivers said that Bob was a sweetheart. He understood.

  “Helen was never pretty. She made herself into the most glamorous woman, a New York glamour girl. Of course she was insecure or she wouldn’t be not eating at the age of seventy, and she wouldn’t be wearing a minidress. You know … to the very end she wanted to be a sex symbol.”