After they had gone out a few times, David invited Helen over for dinner, giving her the perfect opportunity to investigate. His house was more run-down than she had expected, clearly in need of a woman’s touch after his ex-wife’s departure. Plaster was cracking throughout the house, the carpets were threadbare, and much of the furniture that David had been left with was old and mismatched; but again, Helen saw potential. Like David, the place had character. There was a large room lined with books—more than two thousand, Helen guessed. It was the first time she’d ever seen a real library in someone’s home—clearly it wasn’t just for show.
A few months into their courtship, when Helen’s name came up for a charming garden apartment at the coveted Park La Brea complex, she turned it down, even though she had been on the waiting list for three years. Located in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles, within walking distance of the Farmers Market and Wilshire Boulevard, the Park La Brea apartment was a fantastic deal with its two bedrooms, patio, and furnished kitchen for only eighty-nine dollars a month.
But in Brentwood, she found another apartment that had its advantages, too: It was newer, more modern, and best of all, only fifteen minutes away from David. Helen had learned from experience that if she wanted to have any chance of sinking into the man, she had to stay close.
( 2 )
GROUND RULES
1958–1959
“Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?
You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?
—Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953
Sol Spiegel, Sam Siegel. Helen tried in vain to remember the difference. Or was it Sam Spiegel, Sol Siegel? Their last names were the same except for one letter, but the p was key. One of these two had produced The Bridge on the River Kwai for Columbia, while the other was the former head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but for the life of her Helen couldn’t recall which was which. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a problem remembering names. On one of her early visits to David’s house, she met his son, Bruce, an awkward sixteen-year-old with glasses and a poor complexion, and their seven-year-old black-and-white collie, Duncan. At least to Helen’s ears, both names sounded Scottish and vaguely aristocratic, and she hesitated to say either one out loud as they waited for his housekeeper, Mrs. Neale, to bring out the roast beef.
Eventually, she figured out a little mnemonic device: D was for Duncan and Dog, B was for Bruce and Boy. She never again got them confused, but she couldn’t do the same for David’s friends in Hollywood. There was no simple trick she could rely on to help her remember the names of all the important people she was supposed to know—and there was always so much she didn’t know. For instance, what does one wear to a film premiere or the Academy Awards or a welcome-home-to-Hollywood party for Ingrid Bergman in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel? Helen spent at least half her salary buying black-tie dresses that she was beginning to see as dubious investments—if she and David ever broke up, she’d never have an occasion to wear them again. Not that she was getting much of a return on her investment in the present. She had felt sleek in a black dress slit down to her navel when she was introduced to the movie columnist Louella Parsons, but she might as well have been wearing a cloak of invisibility. Miss Parsons looked right through her and moved on to someone else, who mattered.
As nerve-racking as it could be to dress for one of David’s events, what to wear was easier to figure out than what to talk about with his friends. What does one say to Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter extraordinaire who had written Sweet Smell of Success and North by Northwest and who happened to be one of David’s closest friends? If you were Helen Gurley, you might rest your elbows on the marble table on his lanai, put on your most interested face, and say sweetly, “Tell me, Ernest, how do you write a screenplay?” If you were David Brown, you might choke on your gin and tonic and try to change the subject.
“You simply don’t ask a screenwriter how he writes a screenplay,” David informed Helen on the car ride home. “What would you think of somebody who asked you how you wrote copy?”
Nobody ever asked, but if someone had, Helen might have told that person how she wrote from life, drawing from her own experiences and observations and feelings. When she was a copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding, she was the only woman present at meetings, and she used her instincts to her advantage. She knew what women wanted—things that the men in the room didn’t know. She knew about tuna fish, which her girlfriends ate straight out of the can because they had just learned about the benefits of protein. She wasn’t a mother, but she knew that the best way to sell Purex bleach was to speak to the woman at home, not as someone’s mother or wife, but as an individual with her own agenda. “She’s supposed to have a clean house for her husband and the children and everything, but I just have a feeling that she has some feelings of her own, which don’t have to do with any of them,” Helen might suggest at a meeting, before sharing the copy she had written from the mother’s point of view.
“Nobody ever asks me,” Helen told David now. “And I’d be delighted. Besides, I’m sure Mr. Lehman didn’t mind talking about himself—he’s human, isn’t he?”
Helen prided herself on her ability to talk to anyone, but her charm didn’t always work on the denizens of Hollywood. As much as she enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, it only left her feeling more self-conscious when the night was over.
“Look, you are not a Radcliffe undergraduate. You are a successful, mature businesswoman. Besides that, you’re my girl, and when you’re with me, you are not privileged to ask naïve schoolgirl questions about the movie industry,” David said, not unkindly.
He was never unkind about the fact that she hadn’t finished college beyond secretarial school, but it was clear to both of them that he possessed the superior intellect. “You must simply act,” he told her, “as though you know more than you do.”
( 3 )
SEX AND THE NOT-SO-SINGLE GIRL
1961–1962
“It’s useful being top banana in the shock department.”
—Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961
Almost as soon as she walked into the rambling Spanish-style house at 515 Radcliffe Avenue in Pacific Palisades, Letty Cottin saw everything that Helen Gurley Brown was not.
She was not beautiful, or even pretty. Helen had admitted as much on the first page of Sex and the Single Girl, which Letty would be promoting as her book publicist, but this was their first meeting on Helen’s home turf. Letty quickly assessed the tiny, wren-like woman standing before her. Just over five feet four in heels, Helen couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred pounds. Everything about her seemed fragile; even her dull, Sanka-brown hair, which she worked into a sad bouffant or stiff flip when she didn’t wear a wig. Except for her high forehead, there was nothing exceptional about her. Makeup could hide her wrinkles and acne scars to a point, but it didn’t conceal the overall impression that she was, at the bottom of it all, painfully plain.
Sizing her up from under her own mane of long blond hair, Letty couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. This was the woman she was supposed to sell to the public as the savior of single girls everywhere?
She was not sexy—and she wasn’t single. As usual, David was standing nearby. With his sparse gray hair, sweet smile, and gentlemanly aspect, he didn’t exactly seem like “the type who’d ravage females on leopard-skin rugs,” as future gossip columnist Cindy Adams would soon write in an article about the Browns in Pageant magazine, but it was David who had come up with the idea for Sex and the Single Girl in the first place.
Letty took in the Technicolor sunset, panoramic views of the Pacific, and terraced gardens that cascaded down from the back of the house. Single girls didn’t have haciendas—or housekeepers, for that matter. It was up to Mrs. Neale, the gray-haired British maid wh
o had taken care of David after his second divorce, to get dinner ready, padding around in her crisp white uniform and oxfords.
As she sat across from her new assignment, it dawned on Letty that the job of promoting Helen Gurley Brown would be trickier than she had anticipated. She had approximately three months to get Helen ready for the spring release of Sex and the Single Girl and the onslaught of TV, radio, and press promotion that they hoped would accompany it, and they had a lot of work to do. At forty, Helen was a well-respected account executive and copywriter at one of the biggest advertising agencies in Los Angeles, Kenyon & Eckhardt, where she went after leaving Foote, Cone & Belding. She could sell the fantasy behind any eye shadow, lipstick, or cake of makeup, but selling herself as a sexy, confident woman was another matter, and Letty was here to train her to act the part.
Letty’s boss was Bernard Geis, better known as Berney around the New York offices of his publishing company, Bernard Geis Associates, on East Fifty-Sixth Street. A natural showman with hooded eyes, a broad smile, and dark, deeply waved hair, Berney prided himself on turning books into sensations and authors into celebrities, if they weren’t already. He got an early glimpse of the power of a good plug in 1957, while working as an editor at Prentice-Hall. When one of his authors, House Party TV host Art Linkletter, made an on-air mention of his new book— Kids Say the Darndest Things!—sales spiked, and a bestseller was born.
Realizing the potential of flashy promotion to sell books, Berney founded his own firm the following year, securing financial backing from several limited partners, including some of his top authors: Linkletter, “Dear Abby” columnist Abigail Van Buren, and Groucho Marx, to name a few. (Bernard Geis Associates’ first list of five titles featured Linkletter’s The Secret World of Kids, Van Buren’s Dear Teen-Ager, and Marx’s memoir, Groucho and Me.) Berney published books but left their distribution to other companies, and his particular genius was in advertising, promotion, and publicity. As Letty would later recall: “Berney Geis was an original. An innovator. Until he came along, publishing as a profession spoke in whispers and wore tweed. After Berney, it whooped and hollered. Dressed in neon. It made waves.”
In the gentleman’s world of publishing, Berney was considered to be a schemer and a spotlight-seeker. Around the office, he was a lovable scamp. He called women “dames” and wasn’t above hiring a secretary because she had great legs. He razzed his underlings—“How many times a week do you have sex?” was a favorite question—and he kept them entertained. By the early Sixties, he had famously installed a fireman’s pole in his office leading to the floor below. A modern dancer in college, Letty slid down it every day.
Letty had experienced Berney’s salaciousness firsthand, but she also saw he was more bark than bite, and she knew he saw great promise in her. A lover of fine food and wine, Berney had given Letty her first taste of artichoke one day at lunch, teaching her how to eat it. He also gave Letty her first taste of real power. She was barely out of college when she was hired to be an assistant to a woman named Hilda Lindley, the director of publicity and subsidiary rights, and when Hilda left the company soon afterward, Letty begged Berney for the chance to step up to her job. He said yes, and she nearly passed out.
At twenty-two, Letty was running four departments at the company. She handled everything from subsidiary rights to advertising, and she soon discovered that she had a flair for promotion. Shortly before her trip to Los Angeles, Berney handed Letty the manuscript for Sex and the Single Girl, which Helen had been writing in stages and sending to Berney for his input. He thought it was going to be a “smasherino.”
“I’d like to publish this,” Berney told Letty. “What can you do for it?”
Letty took the pages home to her apartment in Greenwich Village and got to work. “Have you got it? Can you get it? Are you sexy? Let’s see. What is a sexy woman?” Helen asked in one of Berney’s favorite chapters, “How to Be Sexy.” “Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex.”
Reading Helen’s dishy accounts of her own romances and romps, Letty was incredulous. She had just gotten her own prescription from her doctor for the Pill, two years after the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid by G.D. Searle and Co. Delivered in a small brown medicine bottle, Enovid had already been on the market for a few years as a means of treating menstrual problems, but it was the first time the FDA had deemed a pill safe and effective for birth control purposes—on the condition that it was prescribed by a doctor. (In 1963, Ortho-Novum joined the market with its Dialpak dispenser, featuring a built-in memory aid, discreetly designed to resemble a makeup compact.)
Discreet as the packaging was, those tiny tablets changed everything. Single women no longer had to rely on their dates to provide a condom or, in the absence of one, wonder if the rhythm method really worked; their birth control was literally in their own hands. In Greenwich Village, where the Bitter End once displayed a sign that read “Folksingers Are Promiscuous; Don’t Spoil the Image,” sex between strangers became as common as a cold. People were definitely having it, but no one was talking about it casually, not out in the open, not like this: “The average man with an urge will charge like a Pampas bull, smear your lipstick, scatter your bobby pins, crush your rib cage and scare the living daylights out of you,” Helen wrote in Sex and the Single Girl, working into her argument about why every woman should experience a Don Juan at least once. “Don Juan would curl his lip at such tactics. He never makes passes without first establishing desire. He will devote several nights to the project if necessary, which it rarely is.”
Like a knowing older sister, Helen dished out cheeky advice on where to find men (the office, the tennis court, a wealthy chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous) and how to attract their attention (“Carry a controversial book at all times—like Karl Marx’ Das Kapital or Lady Chatterley’s Lover”). She gave tips on how to whip up crabmeat puffs, crash-diet on eggs and wine, mail-order a wig, and wear makeup. But there were also more substantial chapters on how to start a career, save money, find an apartment for one, and have an affair, from beginning to end. “A lady’s love should pay for all trips, most restaurant tabs, and the liquor,” Helen advised. “That’s simply good affair etiquette.” As for how to answer the age-old question, “Should a man think you are a virgin?” Helen was equally frank. “I can’t imagine why, if you aren’t. Is he? Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four-year-old virgin?”
Helen’s funny, forthright voice spoke to Letty immediately. She knew plenty of girls who’d slept with married men; one girl she knew scheduled her affairs for her lunch hour. Having seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before, Letty was modeling her life in part after Holly Golightly, her prototype for how a single woman could live in New York City in style. She didn’t have a fish in a birdcage or a cat named Cat, but she did have, at various points, a duck, a rabbit, and a dog named Morpheus, God of Slumber. More important, she had her own apartment and her own mode of transportation. Miniskirted and zipping around town on her motor scooter, Letty was a vision of blond hair and bold independence. When Helen described the single woman as “the newest glamour girl of our time,” something clicked. Who could be more glamorous than Holly Golightly, in her diamond tiara and little black dress? The difference was that Helen Gurley Brown wasn’t at the whim of men who mistreated her. She had more than “mad money”; she made her own money. She was telling women they could give pleasure and get pleasure, without consequence. She was describing a lifestyle that Letty recognized as being real, if unspoken.
Back at the office, Letty cornered her boss. “Berney, you won’t believe it. This is my life! This is true, this stuff is funny, it’s shocking,” Letty said. “We gotta do it!”
Not long after that, she was on a plane heading west to give Helen some media training in the comfort of her own home. “I want to see what you think of her as, you know, a talking head,” Berney told her before she left.
What was she like as a talking head? Well, she ha
d a head, and it was talking: “Letty dear,” and “David dear.” She had an odd (or ingenious) way of delivering her bold opinions in the same breath as little endearments and baby-talk phrases, like “pippy-poo” and “piffle-poofle.” And then there was Helen’s voice itself, soft and modulated, with little trace of her Arkansas roots. (“Listen to voices in movies. Most of them were willed into being by practice, practice, practice,” she had written in her book. “If you squeak or squawk, are thin or reedy . . . or are decidedly nasal, consider a voice revise.”)
In person, Helen came on as sweet as her recipe for chocolate soufflé with foamy vanilla sauce. But Letty knew from her exchanges with Helen that underneath the froth was a steeliness—and that she used flattery to get what she wanted. She was particularly ingratiating with Berney, whose thoughts were always most welcome, especially for a “girl writer” like herself. In the long letters that she regularly typed to Berney on her pink onionskin paper, she turned on the charm, and he responded to it. But it would be different when she was on TV with millions of viewers, a tough host, and just a few minutes of airtime to answer whatever questions he lobbed at her. Some people simply would not like her—some would even hate her for writing a book that threatened the very core of their beliefs and values, and Helen would have to learn how to deal with that without bursting into tears.
Enter Helen Page 2
