by Nora Ephron
Why am I telling you this? It was a long time ago, right? Things have changed, haven’t they? Yes, they have. But I mention it because I want to remind you of the undertow, of the specific gravity. American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away. Things are different for you than they were for us. Just the fact that you chose to come to a single-sex college makes you smarter than we were—we came because it’s what you did in those days—and the college you are graduating from is a very different place. All sorts of things caused Wellesley to change, but it did change, and today it’s a place that understands its obligations to women in today’s world. The women’s movement has made a huge difference, too, particularly for young women like you. There are women doctors and women lawyers. There are anchorwomen, although most of them are blond. But at the same time, the pay differential between men and women has barely changed. In my business, the movie business, there are many more women directors, but it’s just as hard to make a movie about women as it ever was, and look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun. It’s 1996, and you are graduating from Wellesley in the Year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.
What I’m saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you—there’s still a glass ceiling. Don’t let the number of women in the workforce trick you—there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.
Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is “Don’t take it personally,” but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words “get back, get back to where you once belonged.” When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O. J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you—whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don’t have the alibi my class had—this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: unlike us, you can’t say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won’t have as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won’t be able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa!
So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women—who have it all—give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can’t have it all. Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn’t know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won’t make the list in ten years—not that you still won’t be some of those things, but they won’t be the five most important things about you. Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It’s slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. “When you see a fork in the road,” he said, “take it.” Yes, it’s supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don’t laugh, this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It’s another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words “Nobody said it was so hard.” But it’s also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.
—May 1996
The Profiler: Some Women
Helen Gurley Brown: “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come with Me. I Was a Mouseburger and I Will Help You.”
I don’t know anyone who has had professional contact with Helen Gurley Brown who is not fascinated by her. You probably don’t believe that, but it’s true. In the three years I wrote for Cosmopolitan, she managed to drive me absolutely crazy with her passion for italics, exclamation points, upbeat endings, and baby simpleness. She once insisted on translating all the common French phrases I had used in an article—and translated almost every one of them wrong. But still, there is something about her….
THEY ARE STILL screaming at her after all these years. They are still saying that Helen Gurley Brown is some kind of scarlet woman, for God’s sake, leading the young women of America into reckless affairs, possibly with married men. And every time they say it she sits there, little puckers beginning in her chin, and waits for the moment when the talk show will be over and she can run offstage and burst into tears. You might think that by now they would stop screaming—after all, this small, thin, dreadfully sincere woman is not to blame for the moral turpitude in America; you might think that by now Helen Gurley Brown would stop crying—after all, her attackers simply do not, cannot understand. But no. Just the other night, it happened again. On The Merv Griffin Show or The Joey Bishop Show. One or the other. She was just sitting there, talking in her underslung voice about how a single girl must go to lunch with married men, that a single girl with no other men in her life must somehow make the men who are there serve a purpose. She finished her little spiel and the screaming began. A singer on the panel started it. “Is this the kind of thing we want the young women of our country to listen to?” he said. “I wouldn’t want any daughter of mine to go and date a married man.” Then he turned to the audience and said, “Everyone out there who agrees with me, raise your hand or clap.” And it began. Thunderous applause. Hundreds of hands flapping on the monitors. And as soon as the show was over, Helen Gurley Brown began to cry.
As it happens, Helen Gurley Brown cries quite a lot. She cried for three hours at Trader Vic’s the night Jerry Lewis attacked her on The Tonight Show. She cried one day in the beauty parlor just after returning from a trip to see her mother. She cried the day a Hearst executive refused to let her run a cover of Cosmopolitan magazine because there was too mu
ch boosom showing. (That’s the way she pronounces it. Boosom.) She cried the day Richard E. Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation, put his foot down over a cover line that said, “The Pill That Makes Women More Responsive to Men.” She cries all the time because people don’t understand her. Jerry Lewis does not understand her, her mother does not understand her, and from time to time, the Hearst Corporation does not understand her. They don’t understand what she is trying to do. They don’t understand that she knows something they don’t know. She knows about the secretaries, the nurses, the telephone-company clerks who live out there somewhere, miles from psychiatrists, plastic surgeons, and birth-control clinics. Only 8 percent of Cosmopolitan’s readers are in New York City—the rest are stuck in the wilds, coping with their first pair of false eyelashes and their first fling with vaginal foam and their first sit-down dinners and their first orgasms. These are the girls who read Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook and learn—yes, learn—that before guests arrive for dinner it is smart to put out the garbage. These are the girls who buy Cosmopolitan and swallow whole such tidbits of advice as: “Rub your thighs together when you walk. The squish-squish sound of nylon … has a frenzying effect.” These are the girls who have to be told How to Tell If He’s a Married Man. You don’t believe there are girls who cannot tell if a man is married? Listen, then, to this letter to Helen Gurley Brown from a young lady in Savannah, Georgia:
My problem is a common one. I am an expectant unwed mother…. The father of my child turned his back on me after he found out. Besides, he was married. However, I was not aware of this until after our affair had begun, and too weak to break it off until I realized he had never been serious about me. By this time it was too late.
Helen Gurley Brown knows about these girls. She understands them. And don’t you see? She is only trying to help.
We are sitting in her yellow-and-orange office across the street from Hearst headquarters at Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue in New York. On the floor is a large stuffed tiger. On the bulletin board is a picture of her husband, David. She calls him Lambchop. On the wall is a long magazine rack containing, along with a number of popular periodicals, the last twelve months of Cosmopolitan magazine. Read all about it. Why I Wear My False Eyelashes to Bed. I Was a Nude Model. I Was Raped. I Had a Hysterectomy. On her desk—along with some dental floss she uses before all editorial meetings—is a tearsheet of the next in a series of advertisements she writes for Cosmopolitan; this one, of a luscious girl, her hand poised deftly over her cleavage, has the following to say:
What does a girl do if she’s wearing a hairpiece and she and her date are getting quite romantic? Well, we all know that a hairpiece can’t live through very much in the way of stress and strain so I just take out the pins and take mine off. So far no boy I’ve known has ever fainted dead away because everything that basically counts is me … adding extra hair is just an accessory. When I think of all the subterfuge and pretending girls once had to go through I’m thankful I live now when you can be truthful … and there’s a wonderful magazine to help me be the honest female-female I really am. I love that magazine. I guess you could say I’m That COSMOPOLITAN Girl.
Helen Gurley Brown is now in her fifth year as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. She took it over when she was forty-three and it was in trouble, turned it around, breathed new life and new image into it, became the only editor in America to resurrect a dying magazine. She is now forty-eight and tiny, with tiny wrists, tiny face, tiny voice. “I once heard her lose her temper,” a former Cosmo editor recalls, “and it sounded like a little sparrow—she was chirping as loud as she could but you still couldn’t hear her.” She wears Rudi Gernreich dresses, David Webb jewelry, a Piaget watch, expensive hairpieces, custom-cut false eyelashes—but it never quite seems to come together properly. An earring keeps falling off. A wig is askew. A perfect matched stocking has a run. All of which not-quite-right effect is intensified because Helen Gurley Brown relentlessly talks about her flat chest, her nose job, her split ends, her adolescent acne, her forty-minute regimen of isometrics and exercises to stay in shape. She does not bring up these faults to convince you she is unattractive but rather to show you what can be done, what any girl can do if she really tries. “Self-help,” she says. “I wish there were better words, but that is my whole credo. You cannot sit around like a cupcake asking other people to come and eat you up and discover your great sweetness and charm. You’ve got to make yourself more cupcakable all the time so that you’re a better cupcake to be gobbled up.” That’s the way she talks when she gets carried away—exhortation, but in the style of girlish advertising copy. She talks about “hot-fudge-sundae-kind-of-pleasure” and “good-old-fashioned-popcorn-eating-being-transported-to-another-world-going-to-the-movies.” Ten years as an advertising copywriter pays off for this girl. Yes sir. She can package anything. Titles for articles fall out of her mouth involuntarily. A staff member will suggest an article idea, and if she likes it, she has the title in an instant. The Oh-So-Private World of the Nurse, she will squeal. Or The Bittersweet World of the Hillbilly Girl. Or The Harried, Happy World of a Girl Buyer. One day someone suggested an article about how most girls worry about having orgasms. “Yes!” cried Mrs. Brown. “We’ll call it ‘It Never Really Happens to Me.’ ”
I am in Helen Gurley Brown’s office because I am interviewing her, a euphemism for what in fact involves sitting on her couch and listening while she volunteers answers to a number of questions I would never ask. What she is like in bed, for example. Very good. Whether she enjoys sex. Very much. Always has. Why she did not marry until she was thirty-seven. Very neurotic. Wasn’t ready. It all seems to pour out of her, her past, her secrets, her fears, her innermost hopes and dreams. Says her husband, David, “Whether it was group therapy or what, there’s nothing left inside Helen. It all comes out.”
It all comes out—in interviews, on television, in editorial conferences, in memoranda, in the pages of her magazine. Helen Gurley Brown spends twelve hours a day worrying, poring over, agonizing about her magazine; if her insomnia is acting up, she may spend most of the night. She writes endless memos, in lower-case letters, to her writers, full of suggestions for articles she is particularly concerned about. “would like to go into a little detail about what goes through a girl’s head as she is unable to have an orgasm,” went one recent memo. “maybe a soliloquy. this subject has been treated so clinically … as though she couldn’t do pushups….” She writes memos to her editors praising them, nudging them, telling them how to fix stories that need fixing. “She has a very clear picture of what will and will not fit her magazine,” said Hearst editor-at-large Jeannette Wagner. “If she sends you back an article with a note that says, ‘I want a lead that says thus-and-such,’ you go back and do exactly what she says.”
She works over every piece that goes into the magazine, doing the kind of line-by-line editing most editors leave to their juniors—rewriting, inserting exclamation points and italics and capitalized words and Cosmopolitan style into everything. “I want every article to be baby simple,” she often says. Not surprisingly, most of the magazine sounds as if it were written by the same person. And, in a way, it is. Cosmopolitan is Helen Gurley Brown. Cute. Girlish. Exhortative. Almost but not quite tasteless. And in its own insidious, peculiar way, irresistible. Says Cosmo articles editor Roberta Ashley: “Helen manages to walk that line between vulgarity and taste, which isn’t easy. The magazine is like a very sexy girl—you don’t mind that her dress is cut down to her navel because her hair is clean. If her hair were dirty, you’d be revolted.”
And if, at times, Helen Gurley Brown and her magazine are offensive, it is only because almost every popular success is offensive. Mrs. Brown—like Hugh Hefner and Dorothy Schiff, to name two other irritating publishing successes—offends because she is proving, at sizable financial profit, the old Mencken dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. She is demonst
rating, rather forcefully, that there are well over a million American women who are willing to spend sixty cents to read not about politics, not about the female liberation movement, not about the war in Vietnam, but merely about how to get a man.
I have not been single for years, but I read Cosmopolitan every month. I see it lying on the newsstands and I’m suckered in. How to Increase the Size of Your Bust, the cover line says. Or Thirteen New Ways to Feminine Satisfaction. I buy it, greedily, hide it deep within my afternoon newspaper, and hop on the bus, looking forward to—at the very least—a bigger bra size and a completely new kind of orgasm. Yes, I should know better. After all, I used to write for Cosmopolitan and make this stuff up myself. But she gets me every time. I get home—or sometimes, if I simply can’t wait, I open it on the bus, being careful to remove my glove so that onlookers will see my wedding band and will know I’m not reading Cosmopolitan because I’m That COSMOPOLITAN Girl. And there it is. Buy a padded bra, the article on bustlines tells me. Fake it, the article on orgasm says. And I should be furious. But I’m not. Not at all. How can you be angry at someone who’s got your number?
