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A FUN SCAM
1962
“An extra woman is a problem. . . . Extra women mean extra expense, extra dinner-partners, extra bridge opponents, and, all too often, extra sympathy.”
—Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman, by Marjorie Hillis, 1936
Back at the office in New York, Letty wrote to Helen to thank her for the visit, and for talking her up to Berney. “Your very kind, very superlative comments about me impelled Berney to ask if I had put you up to it,” she joked. “I think that I have finally convinced him that no payola was involved and no pressure put upon you to rave about me to ‘The Boss.’” After buttering up the Browns with some compliments of her own, Letty got down to business, mapping out the beginnings of a promotional and publicity plan. She knew that the success of Sex and the Single Girl depended largely on their ability to package the message with the messenger. But what was the message they wanted to get across?
It was the spring of 1962. The United States was intensifying its presence in Vietnam, while back home civil rights activists faced off against segregationists in the South. Politically, change was in the air, but socially, the early Sixties still felt more like the Fifties: John F. Kennedy was president, and the newspapers were saturated with photos of his perfect all-American family, including little Caroline riding her pony, Macaroni, on the White House grounds.
Against this backdrop of charmed domesticity, magazines written not for the single woman, but rather for the young suburban housewife who had everything, and nothing, to do. Acknowledging that “time is the housewife’s great bugaboo” in its April 1962 issue, Good Housekeeping gave her time-saving tips on how to iron her husband’s clothes, fix sandwiches for the children, shine the silver, wax the windows, dust the furniture (if she polished it at the same time, it could be fun, “like a game”), sponge-mop the floors, cook a Hungarian roast, whip up a Cherry Cinnamon Float, and still manage to put her face on and do her hair before he walked through the door. “When the clock says Charlie’s due home, and I see something must be done, I twirl up a straggly wisp where necessary and plant a bow over it,” as one housewife shared.
American society simply wasn’t built for a woman on her own. In most parts of the country, a woman needed a husband to sign a lease, open a business, or apply for a credit card in her name. Looking through the help-wanted ads in a major metropolitan newspaper, such as the New York Times, she was limited to the “Female” section with its listings for sleep-in maids and housemothers, typists, secretaries, stenographers, clerks, switchboard operators, administrative assistants, and other Gal Fridays. (Listings for accountants, attorneys, and engineers were filed separately under “Help Wanted—Male.”) Especially if she was applying to be a receptionist (“RECEPT ‘NO SKILLS’ Exciting ground flr opp for atr gal in glamorous midtown Mad Ave. office”), it helped if she had a pleasant phone voice and a pretty face and didn’t wear glasses. If she got as far as the interview, her prospective employer might ask if she’d ever been pregnant or planned to be. Depending on her answer, she might not be hired, and if she got pregnant on the job, she could be fired. If she lived in a state where the Pill was a real option (many states restricted access to contraception), she might get a prescription if she felt brave enough to ask for it, but she still lived in fear of becoming pregnant and needing to have an illegal abortion. Her own family didn’t know what to make of her. If she hadn’t married by twenty-four, people became concerned. By thirty, she was considered a lost cause.
Everyone knew her, and yet sometimes she felt no one really understood her. But Helen Gurley Brown did. She understood her because she had been an “extra woman,” until she married David Brown in 1959 at the age of thirty-seven.
The audience for Sex and the Single Girl was obvious. In 1960, there were an estimated 21 million “women without men” living in America—they outnumbered unattached men by nearly 4 million—but what would they make of the little biographical detail that the author of Sex and the Single Girl was now married and living in the lap of luxury? “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life,” Helen had written. “During your best years, you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.”
Helen’s own status as a wife was a fact that couldn’t be ignored but shouldn’t be overtly advertised, either. And yet Letty saw that David as a husband was an undeniable part of the package; she sensed that his support could be a key to the book’s success, and not just because of his Hollywood connections.
Over the course of her career as a book publicist, Letty would pull off a lot of stunts. To promote Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s hugely popular novel about pill-popping starlets, she created fake prescriptions as teasers. At a party for another client, Harpo Marx, she took over a room at the Algonquin, giving guests hard-boiled eggs, Harpo wigs, and harps to pluck on. Then there was her treatment for The Exhibitionist, a popular novel about an aging voyeur, published under the pen name Henry Sutton. Letty bought a Times Square billboard to advertise the book, an unheard-of move at the time, and hired a live model to dance in a bikini on the sign’s scaffolding; she also gave the press body paint, along with instructions to decorate the girl as they pleased. (As anticipated, the model attracted lots of attention, especially when she removed her top in front of hundreds of gawkers; this led to Berney’s arrest—and priceless publicity.)
Helen, thirty-seven, and David, forty-three, at Beverly Hills City Hall on their wedding day, September 25, 1959. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)
The more outlandish the idea, the better; Berney loved a good gimmick. But selling a mousy, married woman as the swinging patron saint of single girls when her own husband was standing by her side, complicit in the whole presentation? That was truly a master scheme.
“She worked very hard to create this package, which I always felt she knew perfectly well was a put-on, a kind of a fun scam,” Letty says. “We were selling the single girl experience through the voice of a married woman. It was all very subliminal: ‘What you see is where you would end up if you wanted, but I’m not selling marriage. I’m selling singlehood.’ If she had been single with no trophy husband, I’m not sure that she would have carried the authority that she did. The implicit message is: ‘Do what I do, and you get a David.’”
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SINGLE WOMEN OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
1962
Should Men Be Allowed
To Read This Woman’s Book?
“Is there any way possible to keep men from reading it? There’s too much in it they shouldn’t know!”—GYPSY ROSE LEE
“It should be put on every man’s bed table—when he’s free, that is.”—JOAN CRAWFORD
—A press release for Sex and the Single Girl from Letty Cottin, April 16, 1962
Several months had passed since Letty first read Helen’s manuscript as it came to Berney’s office, chapter by chapter. During that time, Joan Crawford had read it, too. She was Hollywood royalty, but she was also a friend of David and was happy to help Helen out by giving her a blurb. Letty used her endorsement, along with a quote from burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee, to run in daily teaser ads in newspapers across the country.
“It’s the old ‘Everybody is talking about Sex and the Single Girl’ approach,” Letty told Helen, and they had to fulfill the hype. In three weeks they would have finished books, and Letty wanted to be ready to roll with their publicity campaign by the time the first shipment of books arrived at the office.
Berney was a firm believer in the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and Sex and the Single Girl was a perfect book for offbeat promotion. One of their more creative ideas was to get the book banned. To that end, Letty had sent an advance galley to the head librarian at the Little Rock public library, asking for a statement, but secretly hoping for a burst of fury.
&
nbsp; “We’re not getting too far in our attempt to get your book banned in Little Rock,” Letty wrote in a letter to Helen after getting no response from the library. “A little bit of censorship in the right places won’t hurt. Any suggestions?”
“Maybe a Catholic ban!” Helen wrote back. “Letty dear, I don’t know how to get a public denunciation—a nice, strong, snarly, vocal one—from some religious leader, but it is a possibility. It’s such an exploitable subject.”
Letty promised to submit the book for review or advance comment to an editor at the Catholic Digest. If she had her number right, the woman would explode in a fit of moral indignation and call Helen Mary Magdalene, pre-salvation, she said.
The agency left no promotional stone unturned, but Helen was the one who would have to do the real digging, especially once the book was released. Her professional and personal contacts would be key, Letty added. Would she be willing to call up a few of her old boyfriends and enlist them in a wild promotional scheme?
No, Helen wrote back, her semi-famous exes were out, but not necessarily to protect their privacy. Her real concern was that, if she started name-dropping, she would seem like a show-off—and that would clash with her image as the humble and selfless savior of single women everywhere.
What about her contacts in the advertising world? Letty prodded. “I know you worked like a dog on the Max Factor account and I’m wondering how close you were with the big shots there. In other words, would it be conceivable that Max Factor would endorse your chapters on makeup while taking credit for the identification of you with their account. Perhaps co-op advertising lurks somewhere in the crystal ball.”
Helen rejected that idea, too, since the company had recently fired her firm, Kenyon & Eckhardt. Not that Max Factor would have agreed anyway. When it came to other accounts, she added, “I just don’t think there would be anything in it for them.”
But Helen later reconsidered. If they sent along a book with a soft sell, pointing out the Max Factor connection, perhaps the company would think of something. After all, if Helen looked good, Max Factor would look good, too. She hadn’t just been writing their copy; she was wearing their products. She was frequently buying what she was selling, and selling what she was buying. Max Factor’s Hypnotique was in her top three for inexpensive perfumes, and she had been using Pan-Cake for twenty-two years to hide her acne scars. Naturally, she gave a nod to Hypnotique in her chapter on how to be sexy (“Douse the perfume on cotton, put another piece of cotton in front of it and tuck it inside your bra”) and included beauty tips from the company’s makeup director in her chapter on cosmetics.
It seemed only reasonable to let Max Factor know that she was touting their products in Sex and the Single Girl. On her pink paper, Helen drafted a note to the staff at Max Factor, explaining that someone who worked on their account had just written a book—and she personally wanted them to have a copy. By the way, they might consider turning to pages 80 and 216, where she wholeheartedly endorsed Hypnotique and Pan-Cake. Helen hammered out the rest of the message—part sales pitch and part bluff, suggesting that her success could be theirs, too—with directions for Letty to send it to Mr. Chester Firestein, the future heir to the throne of the Max Factor makeup empire.
Helen hadn’t spent the better part of a decade working with advertisers for nothing: It was always about what’s-in-it-for-them. The same was true of the consumer. They had to go after people who had something to gain, and no one had more to gain than the single working girls who could see themselves in Helen’s image. On this point, Helen and Letty agreed.
“You are that rara avis, an agency copywriter turned author who draws her literary material from her personnel agency experience,” Letty wrote to her. “If all the single girls now working in advertising agencies bought a copy of your book we’d be in the best seller strata without moving a finger. If even one-tenth of this group bought a copy we’d be well on our way!”
As an insider herself, Helen would know the best way to distribute the message of Sex and the Single Girl to the major ad agencies where single women were working as secretaries, clerks, and various Gal Fridays.
Of course, ad agencies were only a small slice of the promotional pie. They needed to find ways to make the book available to single girls where they gathered naturally, whether in a steno pool or a department store. “There are just too few single girls browsing through book stores,” Helen pointed out.
They knew their audience: America’s millions of single women, and working girls in particular. Now they just had to reach them.
IN MID-APRIL, HUNDREDS of book reviewers, newspaper and magazine editors, syndicated columnists, trade journalists, radio hosts, TV reporters, newscasters, and newsmakers around the country opened their mail to find an advance copy of Sex and the Single Girl, and an impassioned call to action.
DON’T KNOCK IT, GIRLS, SAYS AUTHOR—BEING SINGLE IS SEXY
Single women of the world, unite! Here is your manifesto!
A daring new book that sheds no tears whatsoever for the unmarried female, “Sex and the Single Girl” (Bernard Geis Associates, May 23, $4.95) tells her instead how to be fascinatingly single. The author, Helen Gurley Brown (a single girl herself for 37 years) makes hash of the idea that all women must be married to achieve any degree of fulfillment. She points out that this is an arbitrary and ridiculously illogical notion—in view of the fact that there are four million too few single men in our country to go around.
In thirteen uninhibited and outspoken chapters, the single girl is told how to have a spectacular fling not by sublimating and substituting, but by living The Rich Full Life.
Letty spent the rest of the month canvassing the most influential readers in the country with promotional material for Sex and the Single Girl. She made sure that every major motion picture studio in Hollywood received a copy of the book. Often it came with her personal pitch, comparing Helen’s book to Rona Jaffe’s bestselling debut novel, The Best of Everything, published in 1958 by Simon & Schuster, where Letty had worked as a secretary the same year. One of David Brown’s colleagues, a Fox producer named Jerry Wald, commissioned the book from Jaffe, a former associate editor at Fawcett Publications. He wanted to make a movie exploiting young women’s appetites for sexually provocative stories (the previous year, he produced Peyton Place, starring Lana Turner), and, at twenty-five, Jaffe had the material to mine. Drawing from her own life, as well as her friends’ experiences, she soon came back with a novel set in the steno pool at a fictional New York publishing company; it was a shockingly candid tale of three working girls trying to navigate the hazards of single life, from sexual advances in the office to an unwanted pregnancy. Two weeks later, the book was a bestseller. One year later, in 1959, it was a movie starring Hope Lange, Diane Baker, Suzy Parker, and Joan Crawford.
With any luck, Sex and the Single Girl would strike a similar chord with readers—and eventually moviegoers. “What The Best of Everything did to glamorize gals in publishing,” Letty wrote in a letter to Jerry Wald himself, “this book does for single women the world over.” Meanwhile, David quietly slipped the galleys to famous friends like Terry Melcher and his mother, Doris Day.
Bernard Geis Associates targeted bachelorettes themselves in a vigorous grassroots campaign. Responding to Helen’s concern about the lack of single women browsing in bookstores, Letty sent personal missives to every conceivable place where they might congregate, from the YWCA to chapters of Parents Without Partners. In letters to resorts like Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Letty directed hotel gift store managers to read Chapter Three, “Where to Find Them.” Surely their clientele of working girls who saved all year long to vacation at YOUR HOTEL NAME HERE would consider their visit more successful if it resulted in a male liaison.
Around New York City, directors of the top secretarial schools received the book with specific instructions to read Chapter Five, “Nine to Five,” with their students in mind. After all, Helen Brown herself traveled throu
gh seventeen different secretarial jobs before becoming one of the highest-paid female copywriters on the West Coast. “Naturally, not all of your girls will become the wife of a Hollywood producer or copywriter for one of the largest advertising agencies in the United States, or included in ‘Who’s Who of American Women,’ but one can never tell!” Letty wrote. “That, I suppose, is the exciting part of the secretary’s position: she has a close look at the important inside operations of a business. She can learn, advance and take initiatives.”
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, photographed shortly after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl, in her office at Bernard Geis Associates. (Collection of Letty Cottin Pogrebin.)
Letty carefully tailored her letters to whomever she was addressing, but her main message always got through: “The book may shatter conventional shibboleths, it may offend self-styled moralists, it may delight liberal professional women, and infuriate many wives,” she wrote, “but this is one book about which everyone will have an opinion.”
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THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
1962
“As tasteless a book as I have read this year.”
—Robert Kirsch reviewing Sex and the Single Girl in the Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1962
On the morning of May 23, 1962, Bernard Geis Associates sent Helen Gurley Brown a Western Union telegram, featuring an illustrated bouquet of roses and this message:
HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS ON THE BIRTH OF YOUR LITERARY BABY
WE PREDICT A LONG AND LUSTY LIFE
ESPECIALLY THE LATTER
Staying at the Hotel Madison on East Fifty-Eighth Street in New York, Helen was only a short walk away from Berney’s office, but the telegram was a nice welcome to New York—or, as he called it, Godless Gotham. Today was the day that Sex and the Single Girl would be hitting shelves in bookstores across the country. Helen’s book tour had begun with a stop in Chicago, where she went tête-à-tête with the beloved gossip columnist Irv “Kup” Kupcinet on his weekly television show, At Random. She was in New York for a luncheon with Joan Crawford at the Gaslight Club and various TV and radio interviews, including a spot on the Tonight Show. To celebrate the book’s release, Berney and his wife wanted to throw a small dinner party for Helen and David. (Among the suggested guests in addition to Letty: David’s old mentor Herb Mayes; the showbiz biographer Maurice Zolotow; the president of Bantam Books, Oscar Dystel; and their respective wives.) Unfortunately, David had had to cancel his trip east at the last minute—trouble was brewing at Fox over a multimillion-dollar adaptation of Cleopatra—but Letty had promised to meet Helen after another dinner for a late-night drink.
Enter Helen Page 4
