Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  At least one person strongly disagreed with that assessment. A few months after his daughter’s murder, Max Wylie was researching a new book, Career Girl, Watch Your Step!—a 125-page safety manual aimed at unmarried women who were thinking of leaving home to go to big cities in search of a dream job or husband, or both. In a somber, fatherly tone, he advised would-be career girls to first live in a temporary residence with other women, such as the YWCA, and to avoid “the fringe element . . . the beatniks, the Bohemians, the far-out group with a distorted sense of values.”

  “Don’t think of yourself as being safe,” Wylie cautioned. “Think of yourself as being in danger all the time. This will make you wary. There is no better protection than an awareness of the dangers that might engulf you.”

  Wylie’s safety manual was written in response to the gruesome murder of his daughter, but in a broader sense it was also a reaction against the philosophies espoused by Helen Gurley Brown in Sex and the Single Girl and “Woman Alone.”

  Helen had built a career on encouraging single, working girls to leave the nest, strike out on their own, find an apartment, get a job, meet new men, date around, sleep around if they wished—and, above all, embrace their independence.

  Just beware, Wylie warned those same girls: Your independence could get you killed.

  HAD HELEN BEEN single during that time, perhaps she would have wanted to stay locked inside her apartment forever, but as the leaves changed and the air turned crisp, the city’s fears began to dissipate along with the summer heat. It was impossible to step outside without discovering something or someone new. One cold sunny day, she was heading west across Park Avenue when a tall, striking woman heading east with her husband stopped her. “You’re Helen Gurley Brown,” she said. “I’m Jacqueline Susann.”

  At first Helen didn’t recognize her—all lips and eyelashes, with a thick slab of black hair and a deep widow’s peak. Truman Capote hadn’t yet called her “a truck driver in drag” on national television, and Helen hadn’t seen the commercials that Jackie, once an aspiring actress, had done for Schiffli embroidery machines, along with her beloved French poodle, Josephine. (They wore matching mother-and-mutt outfits.) But as they started talking, Helen realized she knew exactly who she was. She had heard about Jackie from the team over at Bernard Geis Associates, who soon would be publishing her novel, Every Night, Josephine, a larky account of life with her now famous poodle. In time the two authors would become close friends. Jackie knew all about Helen’s Sex and the Single Girl tour and would use it as a model for future promotion of her own books. Helen studied Jackie herself—how she walked, talked, dressed, and demanded star treatment long before she was actually a star. “I loved the way she looked because it was always showbizzy,” Helen told the author Barbara Seaman in the latter’s biography of Susann, Lovely Me. “It was sequins, it was chiffon, it was high heels and ankle straps and lots of jewelry and the beautiful dark hair. I adored her. She was like a role model.”

  Of course, Helen also had David, the best tour guide New York City could offer. Through David she saw the New York that Sinatra later sang about, a city of new starts that could melt away little-town blues—and, best of all, her own husband was top of the list. He had taken her here shortly after they married in 1959. Seeing Rodgers and Hammerstein on Broadway, dining at Le Pavillon, waiting arm-in-arm for a taxi outside the “21” Club, drinking champagne at the Dorset hotel as the snow fell on Fifty-Fourth Street, so pretty it seemed staged, like something out of a Christmas scene in a Saks window display . . . New York was wonderful, but it was his. She needed to make it hers.

  New York intimidated her with its piercing skyscrapers and medieval churches, its grand hotels and four-star restaurants, its army of doormen and maître d’s—but it also made her want to belong. Some nights in her apartment, she wondered about the scenes unfolding in the other buildings up and down Park Avenue. More than a few of her neighbors were famous, like Helena Rubinstein, the multimillionaire cosmetics manufacturer, now a widow who lived alone at 625 Park in a twenty-six-room triplex with a circular marble staircase, forty closets, and surrealistic murals by Salvador Dalí. And then there were all the lit windows of apartments whose tenants she would never know or know of. All the marriage proposals, domestic spats, makeup sex, extramarital affairs. The sheer number of lives being lived out in such close proximity amazed her, and she grew to marvel at her place in it all.

  Los Angeles was for the young, but New York wasn’t interested in little girls. A girl couldn’t pull off a sharp knitted suit with a smart leather hat, or a black satin peignoir. A girl couldn’t hail a cab or a man’s attention in this city, but a woman could—and, in her early forties, Helen was determined to become a sophisticated New York woman. Slowly but surely, she started walking like she knew where she was going, and when she took cabs, a rare occurrence because she hated spending the fare, she gave directions to the drivers. In L.A. she had dressed like a baby doll, but in New York she smartened up in designer dresses and watched the windows at department stores like Saks, where the world’s most fashionable women shopped for floor-length evening coats, twill trenches, mohair jackets, and fur stoles.

  Like every other woman who cared about style, Helen also watched the first lady, who had been a constant presence in Women’s Wear Daily ever since 1960, when the fashion trade trumpeted the news that Jacqueline (then a senator’s wife) and her mother-in-law spent a combined $30,000 per year on Parisian clothes and hats. “Jacqueline Kennedy orders mostly from sketches like a mail order catalogue—at Cardin, Grès, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Chanel and Bugnand. Each house has a well-shaped Jacqueline Kennedy dummy,” wrote WWD’s new editor, John Fairchild, who soon turned the formerly staid industry publication into a gossipy, must-read rag. As first lady, Jacqueline had cut down on her public shopping sprees, but she never failed to give WWD something to buzz about, donning endless varieties of A-line coats, pillbox hats, streamlined suits, and candy-colored silk dresses confected by her personal designer, Oleg Cassini.

  Of course, nothing would be quite so memorable as the Chanel-inspired pink bouclé suit and matching pillbox hat that Jacqueline Kennedy wore the day her husband was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Hours later, when she boarded the plane back to Washington, she still wore the bloodstained suit for the world to see.

  While the rest of the country grieved, Jacqueline Susann charged into the offices of Bernard Geis Associates, which had published her novel Every Night, Josephine, the week before Kennedy’s assassination. When she saw the publicity team watching television in tearful silence, instead of preparing for a meeting about her poodle book, she blew up, giving them an early forecast of the ego storm to come.

  “Why the fuck does this have to happen to me?” she moaned. “This is gonna ruin my tour!”

  Helen had her own books to promote—she was almost finished with Sex and the Office—but where Jackie saw an inconvenience, she saw a great opportunity.

  Shortly after the president’s death, Helen took it upon herself to rebrand the first lady in her newspaper column. “As we have seen through our tears these last few weeks, the most beloved man is mortal,” she wrote from her perch over Park Avenue. “The most beloved wife can become a woman alone.”

  ( 14 )

  PEACE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING

  1964

  “It was the perfect time to think silver. Silver was the future, it was spacy.”

  —Andy Warhol, reflecting on his Silver Factory in POPism: The Warhol Sixties

  In April 1964, more than half a year after the slayings of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, the NYPD finally arrested a suspect: a mild-mannered, black nineteen-year-old named George Whitmore Jr., who confessed to the murders of both Wylie and Hoffert. A grade-school dropout who had been described in the press as “possibly mentally retarded,” Whitmore soon recanted his confession, saying that he falsely admitted to a number of brutal crimes, including the double homicide, after being beaten a
nd coerced by detectives. On the day Wylie and Hoffert were murdered, Whitmore said, he actually had been in Wildwood, New Jersey, watching the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech on television. Despite Whitmore’s apparent innocence, he was indicted and sent to prison, only later becoming a tragic symbol of a corrupt and racist system. The real killer, a white heroin addict turned burglar named Richard Robles, was still out there and wouldn’t be apprehended until January 1965, after confessing to friends. Convicted of the double homicide, eventually he was sentenced to twenty years to life.

  Wrongly believing a madman to be off the streets, the city resumed its normal rhythms. Once again single girls started apartment-hunting in Yorkville and going on blind dates with oxford-shirt-wearing friends of friends, but their hearts belonged to John, Paul, Ringo, and George, who landed in America that February, and were taking over the charts by spring. Another British import, the James Bond film From Russia with Love, was playing in New York, and across the country, throngs of men poured into theaters to see soft-core comedies like 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt, starring blond bombshell Mamie Van Doren as a stripper named Saxie Symbol, and Dr. Sex, following the exploits of three sex researchers working on a follow-up to the Kinsey Report. “In Flaming COLOR and SKIN-A-RAMA,” the posters promised.

  The movies mirrored the runways, where the look was all about mesh, flesh, and sexual freedom. As Andy Warhol was transforming an industrial loft on East Forty-Seventh Street into the Silver Factory, a soft-spoken Vienna-born fashion designer named Rudi Gernreich was tinkering with new ideas for old forms, like the see-through shirt and the No-Bra Bra, a sheer nylon garment that promised to free the breast from centuries of bondage. A no-sides bra, no-front bra, and no-back bra would soon follow, as would a tank suit paired with thigh-high plastic boots and a visored helmet to block out the sun.

  Gernreich’s topless bathing suit made the biggest splash of all. In many high-end department stores, it wasn’t advertised or displayed; interested customers had to ask for it by name. Only then did salesclerks sneak into some back room to find the one-piece with its sleek bottom and bosom-baring straps. Also called a monokini, the suit made the bare breast the fashion statement of the year. By June, the nation’s first topless bar was born when a nineteen-year-old go-go dancer named Carol Doda wore the monokini to perform at the Condor Club in San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach neighborhood. The future of sex had been ushered in, and Helen Gurley Brown helped open the door.

  Everybody was thinking about the future in 1964, especially organizers of the World’s Fair, which was bringing innovations from every sphere of art and industry under one giant Unisphere in Queens. The World’s Fair beckoned progress, but for Helen it also dragged up a painful past: As a girl, she had been to the World’s Fair in Chicago, twice; her mother had taken her in the years after her father died, and it was a bittersweet chapter in both of their lives.

  Thirty years later, when Cleo came to visit Helen in New York, it seemed only fitting that they go to the Queens fairgrounds, now that one of the biggest events of the decade was happening in her backyard. But that didn’t mean it would be easy. A million trips around the giant tire Ferris wheel in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park couldn’t throw Helen off the way Cleo did. With her gray schoolmarm bun, wrinkle-etched face, and tiny four-eleven frame, she couldn’t have looked smaller or more vulnerable standing amid all the behemoth buildings of Manhattan, and yet she made Helen feel like the vulnerable one, the visitor in town. The tension between them had been building up for years, and it rose to the surface now.

  Helen had wanted to show Cleo a good time at the World’s Fair, but the mood spoiled seconds after they stepped into a cab heading for Queens. As soon as Helen started giving directions to the driver, Cleo began undercutting her, belittling her as usual.

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” Cleo told the driver, ignoring Helen’s protests. “She has a nasty disposition.”

  Helen snapped. She hit Cleo right there in the taxi. Not very hard; she just cuffed her. But still. She couldn’t believe she had struck her mother, a little old lady who never even spanked her as a child. She considered herself a gentle person, but Cleo brought out something wild in her, something wounded.

  WHEN CLEO TOOK Helen to the World’s Fair in 1934, the theme was “A Century of Progress.” Three decades later, in Queens, the motto “Peace Through Understanding” might have seemed like a taunt to Helen and Cleo, the difference between them simply too wide to be bridged. Did they make it to the fair? Did they turn back after their fight? It’s unclear: Helen’s account of that day stops with her hitting her mother in the cab. The frame freezes.

  In a sense, the frame froze for millions of visitors, but especially for baby boomers, who would remember the World’s Fair as a more optimistic time, when moms wearing pastel capris, dads smoking cigars, and suntanned kids carrying Brownie cameras gawked over modern miracles like the electric toothbrush and got their first glimpse of a computer system at the space-age IBM Pavilion. With Watergate still in the far distance, it was a small world—just as the Disney ride said—and everyone was welcomed to a piece of it. “Practically everybody in the world is coming to the fair!” trumpeted an early promotional film, To the Fair! “The Wilson family is driving in from out West. . . . They’re coming from the four corners of the earth, and from Five Corners, Idaho. They come down from New Athens, Maine, and from Athens, Greece. And from Tokyo, and Kokomo, and Rome. Down from Frisco, and down from Troy . . . from Aurora, Illinois.”

  For a ticket price of two dollars, fairgoers could visit pavilions representing more than thirty foreign countries, traveling from Hong Kong to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Or they could go to more far-flung places, thanks to a “time tunnel” designed to bring people into the prehistoric past, complete with dinosaurs, all while sitting in the comfort of a 1964-model Ford. General Motors offered trips to the moon in Futurama, a lunar landscape complete with “lunar crawlers” for getting to the space market. In the shadow of the giant Unisphere—the fairgrounds’ 140-foot high, 900,000-pound, stainless steel centerpiece—titans of industry unveiled the future . . . Picture-phones! Belgian waffles! Moving sidewalks! Underwater apartment-pods for humans who wanted to live on the seafloor! And heralding it all was a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who cut the ribbon at the U.S. Pavilion.

  It was a season of possibility and a summer of resistance. On July 2, 1964, almost eight months after President Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. In states throughout the South, blacks tested their new rights, eating steak and mashed potatoes in restaurants side by side with white families, and slowly stepping into swimming pools where WHITES ONLY signs still hung. In Kansas City, Missouri, what should have been a simple haircut became a national event when Gene Young, a thirteen-year-old black boy and delegate of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), walked into the Muehlebach Hotel barbershop for a trim. When he was denied service, several other black delegates staged a sit-in, forcing the shop to close its doors. The next day, Young was photographed, with knitted brows and a somber expression, while getting his head shaved by a white barber.

  Frequently, the testing met strong, sometimes violent resistance from white segregationists. In places like Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, business owners chased blacks off their property, wielding pistols and ax handles. And in Charlottesville, Virginia, a restaurant owner named Buddy Glover closed the doors of Buddy’s Restaurant minutes after the bill’s passage, opting to lose business rather than serve black patrons.

  The signing of the Civil Rights Act was a landmark moment, but the fight was far from over, and it was a fight that was starting to gain many supporters among women. A key part of the legislation, Title VII, prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex.

  Shortly after the bill was signed in July, the Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group National A
ssociation of Manufacturers launched a series of seminars across the country to educate business owners and managers about what to expect when the Civil Rights Act went into effect. “When these slick woman’s magazines start telling their readers about ‘your new rights,’ why, the emancipation proclamation will be a pygmy by comparison,” NAM’s vice president of industrial relations said at a seminar in Baltimore. “This could be a headache to employers long after the last of the race complications have been solved.” Very soon, he told his audience, everyone in the room would be living in a very different world, one where “Help Wanted—Female” ads would no longer exist. The new law forbade them. “That secretary that you advertised for to sit in your lap,” he warned, “may wind up being a man.”

  And the boss might wind up being a woman. At least, that was the message that Helen had wanted to get across in Sex and the Office, which Letty—now married to a lawyer named Bert Pogrebin—would be broadcasting. Around the same time that NAM was schooling businessmen in Baltimore, Letty launched another huge publicity and promotional campaign. This time she sent briefcases filled with copies of Sex and the Office to secretarial schools around the city, with her pitch to administrators: “Despite the thoroughness of your course program, there are other procedures that no school can begin to teach. . . . SEX AND THE OFFICE gives instructions on how to dress ‘Up to Here and Down to There,’ how to survive ‘Jungle Warfare’ (office politics) and how to move onward and upward, where ‘the money, the men, and the spoils are even greater.’” It was as much an invitation as it was a challenge: Was a school like the Washington Business Institute on Seventh Avenue training its female students to become secretaries or was it preparing them to be businesswomen, possibly executives themselves someday?