Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  Our honored guest will be the woiking goil’s friend—that paragon of what to do til the preacher arrives—that tipper-offer of how to pity the married wolf—that friend of the compleat bachelor:

  HELEN GURLEY BROWN

  Nuf Sed?

  This was an event not to be missed, the invitation noted. Mrs. Brown was already working on another book and wouldn’t be appearing in public again anytime soon.

  DECIDING ON A second book hadn’t been easy. In fact, Helen had been trying to figure out what her follow-up would be as early as January 1962, when she started sending pitches to Berney. Among the ideas Helen and Berney discussed, over time:

  •An autobiography focusing on life as a motion picture producer’s wife

  •The Executive Wife’s Handbook, an elite wife’s guide to negotiating the pressure and politics of being married to a successful husband

  •A guide to California living

  •A book about treating emotional problems through diet

  •A book for men called How to Love a Girl

  •A book for women titled How to Love a Man

  •A book about lesbians (which Helen chronically misspelled lesbions)

  •A book titled The Second (or Third, Fourth, Fifth) Time Around, about second (or third, fourth, fifth) marriages, and stepchildren

  •A book called Topic A, about what really goes on between men and women—and men and men and women and women

  •A book called Sex and the Office

  At one point, Helen also submitted an idea for a novel, The Girls of Beverly Hills, featuring a familiar-sounding character named Cloe, a mousy former secretary at a soap company who uses wigs, clothes, men, and pure moxie to become a sex symbol and national television star. In a lengthy outline for the book, Helen explained that there could be some recapping of Cloe’s affairs with other beaux, but a far more important character would be her husband, Kleinschmidt. A wealthy soap company tycoon, Kleinschmidt was “not too old nor too unattractive” and endlessly encouraging of her career. (Soap aside, Kleinschmidt seems to share quite a few traits with David.) Kleinschmidt and Cloe would do much of their plotting and scheming about her business (television) and his (soap) while lying in bed, not making love. “She is not the performer with her husband that she was with her previous lovers. Doesn’t have to be and he doesn’t mind,” Helen wrote. “Privately she is a quiet, non-sexy, comfortable woman who knows the crazy fame might come to an end someday but she won’t die.”

  Like Cloe, Helen knew that she wouldn’t die if her fame came to an end, but she didn’t want it to end. And yet, she was at a loss for what to do next. Her heart wasn’t in the novel. The diet book went nowhere because she couldn’t find a doctor to collaborate with her in the writing of it. “Lesbions” made a fascinating subject (“The doctors I’ve talked to tell me it is one of the most difficult human aberrations to treat—virtually impossible,” Helen told Berney), but she just couldn’t get into it. And How to Love a Girl, while in her comfort zone, wasn’t the big mail-order book that Berney was hoping for. She wasn’t very interested in reporting on other people’s lives, but she had used up the juiciest of her own stories in Sex and the Single Girl. “The book I could write best would be for a woman who marries a man somewhat older, wealthier and wiser than she,” Helen told Berney. Specifically, she envisioned an advice book about how to cope with an upper-class divorced man’s ex-wives and children. “The wicked step-mother is now the weary step-mother, trying to make friends, learn to discipline an older child she didn’t start out with,” Helen said, perhaps thinking of David’s son, Bruce.

  Originally, Berney had been wary about a book titled Sex and the Office. He had wanted to wait to see if Sex and the Single Girl would be a success before getting on the “Sex and . . .” bandwagon. But by June, he was ready to jump aboard. “We are beginning to get fervent letters addressed to you . . . from single girls who consider your book the answer to a maiden’s prayer,” he told Helen. “While not all of your fans are office girls most of them are. We should strike while the ardor is hot.”

  Meanwhile, the letters kept pouring in. At one point, the volume was so great that the post office in Pacific Palisades refused to deliver the mail to the Browns’ house; they had to pick it up themselves. Helen had tried to answer each letter personally, but there were just too many, and she couldn’t keep up with the demand while traveling on a promotional tour that kept extending with trips to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Boston. “Hold onto your lovely wig—this is just the beginning of the schedule,” Berney wrote to Helen in a memo listing some of her October engagements on the East Coast, shortly before she kicked off the tour in Chicago with a well-oiled press conference at the Gaslight Club. The next two weeks were a blur of flights, taxis, hotels, handshakes, hair-and-makeup chairs, ten-second radio spots, late-night radio spots, early-morning TV calls, hurried departures to make the next booking, cancellations, near misses and just-made-its, interview lunches, outfit changes, press dinners, bookstore signings, fawning fans, fake smiles, cocktail parties, and quick exits—most of which she navigated by herself or with David.

  In California, she’d had a publicist to shuttle her around to appointments, but lately Berney had been leaving her to deal with such logistics. And whatever happened to the flowers and champagne he used to send? “I am something of a little star now!” Helen reminded Berney, running on a low reserve of patience. “I make a lot of money for us.” Speaking of money, she kept a running tab of her out-of-pocket expenses, noting every tip she gave to taxi drivers, baggage porters, doormen, bellmen, and elevator men; and she needed that money back, especially when she was already losing hundreds of dollars for every week of work she took off to do one of those trips.

  By the fall, promoting Sex and the Single Girl had become something of a third job, the first being her work at Kenyon & Eckhardt and the second writing Sex and the Office. If she didn’t get a break soon, she would simply break down.

  IN NOVEMBER 1962, Helen finally quit her job at Kenyon & Eckhardt, and by December she had a firm offer from the Los Angeles Times Syndicate to write a newspaper column aimed at bachelorettes, divorcees, and widows. Eventually “Woman Alone” would reach more than one hundred newspapers around the country. It was a good solution: In addition to providing additional income for not much work, the column would give Helen a central place where she could answer her mounting fan mail.

  It was auspicious for another reason. The column, like the book, was work Helen could do anywhere. That became an important consideration when 20th Century Fox crumbled down to its very foundation. To pay for Cleopatra, which ultimately cost around $44 million—the equivalent of more than $340 million today—the studio had to sell off most of its valuable 262-acre lot. (It eventually became Century City.) Before long, Fox president Spyros Skouras was out, and a new president was elected: Darryl F. Zanuck, the shrewd producer and kingpin who had cofounded the company in 1933 and now didn’t waste any time rebuilding the studio. First, he finished its demolition: In short order, Zanuck canceled numerous productions, closed up studio buildings, and fired once-valued executives and other employees. Once again, David Brown was out of a job.

  If David minded being known as “Mr. Helen Gurley Brown” after that, he certainly didn’t show it. Was he riding on his wife’s coattails? Absolutely! And why not? She had ridden on his. They were a team: a royal We.

  “The ‘We’ explains why he oozes security, despite the demeaning fact that—as he candidly admits—‘I never hear my own name being utilized in my own introductions,’” Cindy Adams wrote in Pageant magazine’s December 1963 issue, after meeting the Browns at a Manhattan cocktail party. “It’s because this is not HER book. It’s THEIR book. He saw every scrap of paper. He edited every line. The idea was his. The title was his. It was his decision to tell all and not hold back. It was his decision to mention himself by name and not cheat the readers. He says quite plainly that there
’d be no best seller, no forthcoming movie, and no syndicated column (in 70 newspapers) for his wife if it were not for him.”

  Shortly after that piece appeared, David was offered a position as an executive vice president at New American Library, a medium-size publishing house known for its paperbacks and popular fiction, including Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. David accepted. After Cleopatra, taking a break from the movie business seemed like a good idea, and he, especially, welcomed a new start.

  The Browns were moving to New York.

  ( 10 )

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  1963

  “I was a country girl from Los Angeles and I [didn’t] know about New York addresses.”

  —Helen Gurley Brown, in 1993, recalling her first days living in Manhattan.

  There were no big headlines heralding the Browns’ arrival in New York in March 1963, partly because they got there at the tail end of a massive newspaper strike that shut down seven of the city’s major dailies. Led by a local printers’ union in 1962, the strike was in retaliation against the automation of the newsroom. The computer was beginning to threaten the Linotype machine, along with thousands of jobs, and workers were demanding security and pay raises from newspaper owners. But the demonstration was much more than a battle over typesetting. It was a signal of changes to come as new technology infiltrated living rooms as well as newsrooms.

  Over the course of 114 days, Linotypes, which depended on molten metal to set type, went silent and cold. No ink was spilled. Out of work, seventeen thousand newspaper employees took odd jobs driving taxis, shoveling coal, and busing tables to pay the rent. Jobless reporters, including Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, experimented with new, more literary forms of journalistic writing, while another group of editors and writers used their time off to start the New York Review of Books. And across the city, New Yorkers remained in the dark about what was happening around the world and in their own neighborhoods. Without the benefit of printed ads and announcements, businesses suffered, and people missed everything from weddings to wakes.

  By the time the strike ended on March 31—ultimately, workers won a slight pay raise, and both labor and management supported a plan to create a joint board to consider the future of newspapers—the industry had changed, and so had the city. People were still doing the Twist, but Chubby Checker no longer topped the charts, and a twenty-two-year-old folksinger named Bob Dylan would soon release his second album, featuring “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a protest song that would come to define a generation. In the art world, six painters were preparing to mount a show at the Guggenheim Museum that would solidify a new form, pop art, and help make the name Andy Warhol as familiar as Campbell’s Soup. Central Park still hadn’t fully thawed, but in department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Bonwit Teller, buyers were watching Paris for spring fashions like Balenciaga’s sporty capelets and brass-buttoned coats that flew in the face of coquetry. “These were costumes for women with energy to burn,” the New York Times Western Edition declared, “and serious business to accomplish.”

  Spring was just around the corner, but it couldn’t come soon enough for Helen. She barely left the apartment during her first few weeks in New York. To David she seemed almost catatonic with fear. She missed the sunniness of Southern California. Manhattan was dark and cold. On one of the first trips to New York that Helen and David had taken together, they were met at the airport by Bruce’s mother and David’s first wife, Liberty, who lived in the city. She had come to pick up Bruce, but she brought a wool scarf and mittens for Helen, who hadn’t experienced a real winter since living in Little Rock as a little girl.

  Finishing her lunch at Schrafft’s one day in March, Helen understood that she would never get used to the cold. Manhattan was a black-and-white film when she had gotten used to color. Outside, it was gray, always gray. Gray skies, gray sidewalks, gray buildings, gray overcoats. Even the people were shades of the same bleakness—whitish, pinkish, brownish, but still gray. Once in a while, a woman in a red coat or a child in a yellow muffler would break the monotony, but the colorlessness always returned. And the crowds, they never left. All around her, people were lining up two deep at every chair. Businessmen schmoozed over steak lunches and oversize martinis, as secretaries nibbled on burger specials and touched up their lipstick.

  Helen must have known Schrafft’s would be packed when she walked in. It was as much of an institution as the three-martini lunch. Everyone from W. H. Auden to Mary McCarthy had written about the chain. In The Best of Everything, Schrafft’s is the place where Rona Jaffe’s heroine, Caroline, and her friends from the office order tomato surprise and strawberry soda. Helen knew that noon-to-two was the busiest time to be there—other than at twilight, when the Little Old Ladies started coming in for their blue-plate specials—but she was still surprised by the constant motion. She wondered how New Yorkers felt when they went out west, to a place like Arizona, which was relatively quiet and still. The silence would be deafening—all that time and space to think, alone with yourself, and really, wouldn’t that just be terrible? Warming her hands around a cup of tea, she listened to the gray thrum of voices and yearned for California.

  Helen and David had left Pacific Palisades shortly after his job offer came in. The decision had been a mutual one, and yet Helen wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye. Leaving California at the height of her career was like breaking up with a steady boyfriend to enter into an arranged marriage with a man she hardly knew. The day they were supposed to leave 515 Radcliffe Avenue, Helen couldn’t find their cat Samantha. They would be boarding a train headed east in less than two hours, followed by a huge moving van packed with their furniture, and Helen started to panic. Roaming the hillsides one last time, she hissed and whistled for Samantha, who turned up just in time to be packed alongside the other cat, Gregory, in a carrying cage. The Browns switched trains in Chicago, taking the Broadway Limited the rest of the way to New York. Once in the city, they stayed at the Dorset hotel, near the Museum of Modern Art, and started searching for an apartment. They found it in a twenty-one-story, white-brick apartment building at 605 Park Avenue, at the southeast corner of Sixty-Fifth Street, for $550 a month.

  In Pacific Palisades Samantha and Gregory had been outdoor cats, stalking the hills for mice, snakes, and lizards. In New York they became indoor cats, fed by the doorman when Helen and David went of town. They no longer hunted, but sat on the windowsills, watching the snow fall over Park Avenue. Occasionally Helen and David took the cats out on leashes to get some fresh air, but they seemed unhappy. After a lifetime of being on the prowl, they were suddenly housebound.

  And Helen? The day David brought her to their five-room rental, she stood in the doorway of No. 17C and cried. She had gotten used to the twelve-room house in Pacific Palisades. Now, in this small flat that didn’t even fit their stuff, she had to deal with neighbors. Some nights, the people who lived upstairs would have parties, and Helen would knock on their door, barefoot in her bathrobe, seeming older than she was. The noise bothered her at night, but the quiet got to her during the day, when David went to the office. She didn’t feel at home in the apartment with its white walls, neutral living room, and fussily arranged paintings. A decorator friend had lent her understated touch to the place, and the result was blanched of color and character. Helen tried to brighten her desk with lemon leaves and an ashtray that read “I’m sexy” in six different languages around the rim, but having spent twenty-plus years working in offices, she missed the feeling of having somewhere to be.

  She had hoped that the coldness and the darkness would make her work harder on her column, which she planned to debut in a few weeks with the introductory headline: “CALLING ALL WIDOWS, DIVORCEES, BACHELOR GIRLS.” But it wasn’t turning out that way. In fact, “Woman Alone” was starting to seem like a fitting title for reasons she hadn’t anticipated. Other than David and the cats, she had no family in the city and few friends. She was used to dressing for the office and spraying her ha
ir with Satin Set, not roaming around her apartment with a bad case of bedhead.

  When Helen dared to venture out, she found the city to be intimidating and exhausting. Her efforts to win over doormen, rental agents, and restaurant hostesses left her depleted. She could ooze compliments at a person until the air between them was sticky, but her attempts to charm rarely made a difference with New Yorkers. They didn’t seem to like her any better for all her flattery, and more important, she noted after a few unsuccessful exchanges, they didn’t seem to like themselves any better. What was the point? Knowing what made other people tick was one of Helen’s talents, and in New York it seemed impossible.

  Still, Helen noted that New York had at least a few redeeming factors. For one, men looked at her here. She could feel eyes on her when she was walking down the street or having lunch by herself. In the absence of the California sunshine, she basked in their gazes and realized that their attention to her was due to another thing that she appreciated: In Manhattan, there were no streetcars teeming with starlets, big-breasted and tawny-skinned. “In many ways it’s like Pittsburgh because there are some simply hideous people loping about on the streets,” Helen observed in some of her early notes about the city. It was nothing like California, where pretty girls were “as plentiful as the palm situation,” she added.

  Helen at home on Park Avenue in 1965, with her cats, Samantha and Gregory. (Copyright © I. C. Rapoport.)

  In New York, as in Paris, it was enough to be stylish and slender. And while it didn’t hurt to be young, a woman of a certain age wasn’t overlooked, partly because, in half of the city’s restaurants, the lighting was so dim that she couldn’t be fully seen in the first place. It was no wonder society ladies adored Longchamps, with its slick décor and dark corners—their wrinkles simply disappeared. And all that history . . . Hollywood was one giant facelift, but New York embraced its past.