Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  “The west is for the babies . . . the sun goddesses . . . the now’s,” Helen wrote in another batch of notes about the city. “New York is far kinder to the old. . . . It’s good to see because I’m not a baby either.”

  ( 11 )

  THE MEANING OF LUNCH

  1963

  “One of the lovely things that can happen to a girl in an office is lunch. Lunchtime is fraught with possibilities!”

  —Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Office, 1964

  New York was teeming with beautiful babies—they just didn’t hang out anywhere near Helen Gurley Brown on Park Avenue. On weekends, bearded guys in berets and leggy girls with hair as straight as rain headed to MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village to check out new music at the Figaro or the Kettle and any number of coffeehouses offering a stage to anyone with a harmonica. On weekdays, Midtown blossomed with girls fresh out of college, wearing belted raincoats and sensible flats, and heading to their jobs at ad agencies, publishing houses, and magazine offices. “You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls,” Rona Jaffe had written in The Best of Everything.

  Five years later, Helen had her eye trained on the real-life versions of those girls, and specifically on their lunchtime rituals. She was working on a series of chapters about lunch for Sex and the Office, and she had started observing the eating habits of office girls as closely as a mother hawk watches her chicks. When she saw a group of secretaries in the smudged window of a drab diner or lined up for a pale hot dog at a midtown catering truck, it occurred to her that girls who should be watching their wallets and their waistlines were buying lunch instead of bringing it from home. Since when had packing a lunch become a mark of shame? It’s not as if they had to wear the brown bag—they just had to fill it with healthy food, as she had been doing for years. She would suggest two Brown Paper Bag Plans in Sex and the Office, including her own recipe for Mother Brown’s Rich Dessert Tuna Salad with sweet pickles and raisins, which she used to eat every day of the week. When she was feeling really wicked, she allowed herself two Triscuits and four potato chips.

  It was time to change the image of the Brown Bag Lunch, starting with the name. “American Beauty Lunches” would do. “Home-food can be delicious glamour girl fodder instead of junk,” Helen wrote at her typewriter, addressing all those catering-truck-and-diner devotees. If they just packed their lunches, they could save enough money to spend Christmas in Jamaica and look better in a bikini.

  Helen saw the importance of giving practical, everyday advice, and yet she knew that Sex and the Office was somehow missing the mark. She had managed to squeeze a lot of useful, and questionable, information into the book, such as how to give a firm handshake and how to cheat discreetly on an expense account. She had done her research, interviewing secretaries, businesswomen, and the occasional “tycooness” about their experiences in the working world.

  Despite all the footwork that went into Sex and the Office, or perhaps because of it, the book felt forced. From the very start, Helen had warned Berney that she had no interest in getting into the technicalities of office work—how to type up neat carbons, for instance. “My idea is that a kind of secretarial handbook is beneath me,” she said. She wanted Sex and the Office to be better than Sex and the Single Girl, but it just didn’t have the same urgency. She had found that nothing was quite as motivating as the need to prove herself. “I’m best when I’m angry about something—and outrageous,” she told Berney. The notion that a good girl shouldn’t have a sex life—now that was something to rail against.

  Lest Sex and the Office be as sexless as a stapler, she had to spice it up with titillating true stories, and the more taboo the better. Helen convinced Berney to let her write about the darker sides of the office, and he welcomed a chapter on call girls, who didn’t work in offices per se but whose work largely depended on their existence. Having a call girl delivered to an office was about as common as ordering a new coffee machine: “The girl is sent as a bribe, payment for a favor expected or received,” Helen explained to her readers. But not to worry: “The call girl, though enormously attractive to certain men, is not really competition for you. She’s an entirely different thing.”

  Berney agreed to the chapter called “Some Girls Get Paid for It,” but he and Helen had it out over several other case studies, which he felt were simply too hot to handle without getting burned. A story about a woman who gets raped on a date eventually got cut, but Berney allowed a reference to “office wolves” with predatory streaks. (“If your instinct goes ‘sniff, sniff—peculiar, peculiar,’ trust your instinct,” Helen advised.) He okayed a story about an office girl who takes up with a man with a taste for S&M (who convinces her to ride in a convertible with her breasts exposed, and later whips her buttocks with a riding crop), but dropped an odd story about a secretary with a daddy complex who beds her much older, overweight boss. “I like that feeling of being squashed,” the narrator confesses. “It makes me feel small and helpless.”

  During those long days alone with her typewriter in her New York apartment, Helen described sexual encounters in dripping detail, but no tale was quite as erotic as a story she wrote about two women who meet at work and end up in bed. Were they women she had known or simply imagined? Had she been in a similar situation herself or ever fantasized about it? It’s hard to know, but she was very convincing in describing the slow-burning attraction between a young showroom model—the narrator of the tale—and a glamorous older designer named Claudia, who work at the same firm.

  The story begins one day at the office when, after a fitting that lasts into the wee hours of the morning, Claudia suggests to the young model that they get a drink. The bars would be closed, so her apartment is the only option. Once they are at her pad, Claudia gives her a scotch and water, and they listen to records and talk about the new spring line she is designing. After Claudia gets up to mix another drink, she walks over to the model and kisses her on the mouth—and it’s a kiss that is not so lustful as it is “full of sincerity and friendship,” the model-narrator says.

  An eternity seems to pass before Claudia carefully unbuttons the model’s blouse, fondling her breasts and eventually removing her skirt. She is calm and confident. When Claudia touches her, she already knows how the touch will feel because she has experienced the same sensation. There is no question about what is wrong or right with another woman. It just feels natural, the model explains. There is no anxiety, not even when they are both naked on the bed and Claudia flips the girl on her back, kissing her mouth, her breasts, her stomach, “and then her mouth was THERE . . . really inside me with her tongue.” When they entwine their legs like two pairs of scissors, the model orgasms for the second time. Usually, she’s worn out after climaxing, but sex with another woman is softer, gentler, she confides: “you lack the final thrust . . . perhaps the final violence . . . there is a vague feeling of incompletion and you can go on.”

  It wasn’t easy to shock Berney, but Helen sure caught him off guard. Though they had talked about her writing a chapter called “Boys Will Be Girls . . . and Vice Versa,” about male and female homosexuality in the workplace, Berney assumed such accounts would be reported from a distance. “I thought it was going to be about how to handle temperamental homosexuals in the office,” he wrote in a letter to Helen, after reading a draft of that chapter, which he later cut. Helen’s detailed play-by-plays of actual sex acts between women was pushing the proverbial envelope too far. “I got a lot more than I bargained for,” he admitted.

  Helen reminded Berney that she had been dead set against a chapter called “The Matinee,” which Letty suggested after hearing about a friend who sometimes used her lunch hour for sex. (Letty’s friend eventually wrote a mini-essay on the subject, which Helen introduced as a special report in one of the book’s three chapters on lunch.) Lesbi
anism was just part of office culture. It was the idea of a matinee that was truly “icky,” Helen said, sounding suddenly Victorian in her prissiness, but she had gone ahead with it anyway.

  Berney stood his ground. “No objection was made by me to the rape scene, the gal driving barechested in an open car, or the man beating the girl lightly with a whip. I just happen to feel that a literal description of a homosexual act between two girls would ruin your reputation if we were to publish it,” he insisted. “There’s no way of proving this except by publishing it. Then I could say I told you so—but it’s much better to tell you so now.”

  SPRING FINALLY CAME, and along with the dogwoods and magnolias, a new club blossomed in New York. It had its roots in Chicago, but it soon found an outpost in a white, seven-story building at 5 East Fifty-Ninth Street near Madison Avenue. Tens of thousands of men bought keys to the club before it even opened, and when it finally did, it was packed. On an average day, 2,700 people entered the Playboy Club to eat, drink, and gawk at the scantily clad waitresses in Bunny ears and tails. Despite problems securing a cabaret license, the club was a total hit, grossing up to $90,000 a week, and to commemorate its success, Playboy’s April 1963 cover featured a Bunny in uniform serving cocktails. Inside the same issue was Helen Gurley Brown’s Playboy interview.

  Berney and Letty had groomed Helen to speak about Sex and the Single Girl in a respectable, acceptable manner—as the wifely Mrs. Brown—but in the pages of Playboy, she dropped the Sunday-morning-paper act and assumed the role of sex expert, sounding off on everything from extramarital affairs to abortion. When her interviewer asked what kind of response she had been getting from fans, she was blunt. “I get a lot of mail about how to keep from having a baby,” she answered. “This mail I get is from girls who are quite sincerely interested in knowing. For some reason they feel they can’t talk it over with their doctor. My inclination is to tell people exactly what I think they should do: They should get fitted for a diaphragm.”

  She didn’t get her first diaphragm until the age of thirty-three, Helen added, but she had taken other precautions. Back when she was single, she knew plenty of girls who hadn’t been as careful. One of her roommates tried to make herself miscarry before finally getting an abortion. The procedure itself wasn’t as complicated as people thought. “There is some chance of becoming barren, but if the operation isn’t performed by an idiot, it’s quite simple,” Helen said, grossly underestimating both the danger of illegal abortion and the difficulty of finding a reputable doctor.

  The real problem was financial accessibility, she added. In most states, abortion was considered legal only if the mother’s life was at risk, and illegal abortions were expensive, running up to one thousand dollars in cash. Most working girls couldn’t afford one, and they either had to find a way to scrape up the money or travel to Mexico or Europe to terminate their pregnancies.

  “It’s outrageous that girls can’t be aborted here,” Helen continued. “Never mind that this little child doesn’t have a father. And never mind that its mother is a flibbertigibbet who has no business having a baby. Abortion is just surrounded with all this hush-hush and horror, like insanity used to be.”

  Helen had tried to broach some of these subjects in Sex and the Single Girl, she told her interviewer, but her publisher, Bernard Geis, made her cut the parts about how to avoid getting pregnant. They butted heads about other cuts, too. In the chapter on affairs, Berney had tried changing “nymphomaniac” to “pushover” to describe a woman who feels secure only when she’s in bed with a man. “I just hit the roof. I hate that word,” Helen said.

  “Pushover” made the woman sound like a weakling, a prude who didn’t like sex. “Au contraire. She’s asking for it. She needs it. She needs the reassurance. When a man is making love to you, the United Nations building could fall down and if he’s really a man, he won’t stop for a minute. . . . It does give you a feeling of power,” Helen said. “I understand a nymphomaniac in that respect. Any girl who goes to bed with a man has a reason. I don’t think one of them is that she doesn’t know how to say no.”

  In fact, Helen wasn’t describing a nymphomaniac—who, by definition, craves sex and struggles to control her desires—so much as a woman who craves control and gets it through sex. Either way, she saw sex as a powerful weapon, and a necessary one for any single girl who was fighting her way to a man when so few were available.

  “I don’t know of anything more ruthless, more deadly or more dedicated,” Helen told Playboy, “than any normal, healthy American girl in search of a husband.”

  ( 12 )

  A STRANGE STIRRING

  1963–1964

  “The truth is that I’ve always been a bad-tempered bitch.”

  —Betty Friedan, Life So Far

  A few months before Playboy’s April issue hit the stands, a young journalist from Ohio applied for one job that Helen Gurley Brown never could have landed, no matter how hard she tried: Playboy Bunny. Even with her wigs, false eyelashes, Pan-Cake, and padded bra, Helen simply didn’t look the part. But Gloria Steinem did. Twenty-eight with dark brown hair, kohl eyes, and the killer legs of a Copa Girl, Steinem walked into Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club one brisk day in January 1963, carrying her leotard in a hatbox and a newspaper ad hyping the perks of being a Playboy Bunny: celebrity encounters, travel, and “top money.”

  Pretending to be a former waitress named Marie Catherine Ochs (a family name), Steinem told the woman who interviewed her that she had come to audition to work at the club. Indeed, she had, but her real mission was to go undercover as a Playboy Bunny and write about the seamy reality of the job for Show, a stylish monthly magazine covering the arts.

  Steinem ended up training and working as a Bunny for about three weeks. Like the other women on her shift, she donned her cleavage-baring costume with its collar, cuffs, and tail, perfecting her Bunny dip. Unlike the other Bunnies, she also took notes about the job’s not-so-glamorous demands: grueling working conditions, a demerits system that left many girls broke, and the disturbing requirement that all Bunnies get a gynecological exam by a Playboy doctor.

  The first installment of her witty, groundbreaking two-part series, “A Bunny’s Tale,” ran in Show that May, followed by the second installment in June. And while the exposé was an instant sensation, it also created lasting problems for Steinem. Hours upon hours of wearing high heels and carrying heavy trays permanently enlarged her feet by half a size. Long after she turned in her costume, Playboy continued running her employee photograph out of spite. (In 1984, Playboy ran a different photo of Steinem, at age fifty, in which her breast was accidentally exposed.) In some circles, she became known as just another Playboy Bunny rather than as a serious journalist who had gone undercover for an assignment. It would be years before she felt proud of the article, realizing that, as she put it, “all women are Bunnies.”

  While Gloria’s star was rising in New York, another journalist was igniting a new movement among women. Barely over five feet with salt-and-pepper hair, heavy-lidded brown eyes, and a nose that got her teased as a kid, Betty Friedan might as well have strapped a ton of dynamite under her housecoat: Her book The Feminine Mystique exploded onto the scene in February 1963, blasting a hole in the image of the happy housewife. Millions of women had fallen victim to an empty notion of femininity propagated by companies selling everything from washing machines to face creams, she argued. Marrying and having kids younger, they felt trapped in their homes, in their sex lives, and in their own bodies; and they grappled with an existential dread that she called The Problem That Has No Name.

  “It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States,” she wrote. “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid
to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

  It was a question that Betty Friedan, a mother of three, had asked herself. Originally from Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein (her maiden name) graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942 and won a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, to study psychology. Instead of pursuing her Ph.D. in California, she moved to New York City, where she started writing for leftist publications and eventually met her husband, Carl Friedan, a summer-theater producer who later went into advertising. They married in 1947 and soon began building their family in Parkway Village, Queens. To friends they appeared to be a happy couple, but Carl was cheating on her. When Betty became pregnant with their second child—a condition that cost Friedan her job at a union newspaper—he began calling home from the office to say that he would be staying late. “I later learned he was having an affair with a former girlfriend,” Betty Friedan wrote in her memoir, Life So Far. “I knew who she was. I sensed they’d been seeing each other and I felt desolate, deserted, betrayed, all those things.”

  Carl was also abusive. In 1956 they moved to Rockland County, New York, for Carl’s job (he eventually established his own advertising and public relations firm), settling into a beautiful but isolated old stone barn that they rented. In this rural setting with two kids and a third on the way, Betty became dependent on Carl for adult companionship, and he depended on her to help out with expenses by taking on freelance writing assignments. “I must have gotten sharper with Carl about his deals, when we were so behind on our bills, or his not getting home for dinner,” she wrote in her memoir. “I seem to remember a sense of unspeakable horror; fear; I felt numb, until, one night, he hit me. And he cried afterward, that first time.” (Carl later refuted her charges of physical abuse.)