Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  Eventually, Ira took Cleo to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where some of the physical damage was repaired, but Cleo never forgot the pain of childbirth. She lived with those scars for the rest of her life.

  “Having babies isn’t everything,” Cleo told Helen from the time she was a little girl. “Not that I don’t love you and Mary, but having babies isn’t all there is.”

  CLEO’S FAMILY ALWAYS knew that Ira Gurley would become a somebody, and the year after Helen was born, he was already on his way, heading for a career in politics. In 1923 the Gurleys moved to Little Rock, where Ira won election to the state legislature.

  The Gurleys were comfortable, but they weren’t wealthy. To bring in extra money, Cleo worked as a seamstress, setting up a small dressmaking service at home, where she fitted the occasional wealthy customer. One of Helen’s early memories was of seeing a striking, red-haired woman dressed in fur pull up to the house in a shiny Pierce-Arrow, driven by a chauffeur. Ira and Cleo never talked to their daughters about people being rich or poor, but growing up in the suburb of Pulaski Heights (now Hillcrest), Helen gradually became aware of the difference. “It was before the depression when money didn’t consume people so, anybody but me that is,” she later recalled.

  Her obsession with money followed her through first grade, where she befriended wealthy little girls with names like Mary Louise and Mildred. Again, she wasn’t exactly sure how she knew they were well off—they all went to public school and played with the same Patsy Dolls and clipped the same pictures of movie stars out of magazines like Photoplay. She only knew that she gravitated toward those girls and would say or do anything to gain their favor. When one of the rich girls wanted to play make-believe, Helen always humbly accepted the role of the respectably dressed gentleman, while her friend pretended to wear pink satin dresses and diamond-buckled pumps. Why did she put up with those rotten little creeps and their unfair rules? Simple: They were rich, and she wanted to be friends with them.

  Soon enough, with the onset of the Great Depression, some of Little Rock’s wealthiest families would lose their fortunes, but the Gurleys avoided the first major disaster. On the October morning in 1929 when the stock market crashed and banks closed around the country, Ira and Cleo brought the girls into the living room to say they had managed to salvage most of their savings. Not long after he was elected to the state legislature, Ira had secured a job with the Arkansas State Game and Fish Commission, which was headquartered in the State Capitol Building, and it paid well. They always had food on the table, even if it was just the usual mashed potatoes, canned peas, and overcooked meat.

  At church, Helen always had fifteen cents to put in the collection envelope, and once, when she was falling behind, Ira gave her a five-dollar bill. After church, when they went to Franke’s Cafeteria to eat roast beef, she got seconds and thirds.

  Helen adored her father. Most people did. Stocky and sure of himself, he was a man’s man who played cards but didn’t smoke or drink. (It was the Prohibition era.) When Ira Gurley was home, neighborhood kids found reasons to stop by. On hot summer evenings he would hold court on the front porch with the lights off. When he laughed, everyone laughed. When he told a story—he loved unspooling long, pointless tales, like the one he sometimes told about mosquitos moving grains of sand across the Sahara Desert—they joined in. When everyone left, Helen kissed Ira on the forehead or cheek. She was Daddy’s little girl.

  Cleo was the homemaker, the caretaker. Ira was the fun-maker, the thrill-seeker. Every fall he took Helen and Mary to the state fair to enjoy the Ferris wheels and clouds of cotton candy. On Sunday afternoons he brought the girls to a local airport to watch single-engine airplanes take off and land. Thanks to a connection in the statehouse, one Sunday Ira was invited to ride in a plane himself. Helen beamed with pride at the sight of her daddy, wearing goggles and a helmet, ready for flight.

  Ira had the power to call in favors, and if things went according to plan, soon he would have the ability to grant them. By 1932 he was preparing to run for secretary of state, a position that would launch the family into the upper strata of Little Rock society. The family had moved to a nicer house, and for a while it seemed as though the stars were aligned. Over the summer, however, everything changed.

  Helen was ten years old and in the fifth grade when Ira was killed in an elevator accident in the State Capitol Building. One of the Gurleys’ neighbors, a man who also worked at the State Capitol Building, rushed home to tell Cleo the news. They weren’t sure how the accident happened, but most likely the elevator operator had shut the gate and begun going up before noticing that someone was trying to jump on. Ira’s body was crushed between the elevator floor and the door frame. He was forty years old. Cleo was thirty-eight, and that summer she mourned for the husband she never loved with a well of grief that ran as deep as love. As Helen came to see it later, Cleo felt responsible—she thought that, in withholding her love, she somehow caused Ira’s death.

  Helen (left) and Mary as young children. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)

  Ira died on June 18, a Friday. That night, people flooded the Gurleys’ house. They brought heartfelt condolences, food, and flowers, and in the following days, newspapers ran front-page stories celebrating the life of Ira Marvin Gurley. Helen almost forgot to mourn her father—she was too distracted by the attention and drama. Overnight, her family had become important, famous even, and she realized that her father must have been a great man. Seeing him fixed up in a suit and laid out in his gray-velvet-lined coffin, Helen thought he looked handsome.

  The next day, they drove Ira’s body to Green Forest for the funeral. It was at the graveside, along with relatives from both Cleo’s and Ira’s sides, that Helen truly understood that her daddy was gone.

  The sun began to set, casting a soft pink glow on the fields in the distance. It was time to go home, but Helen wasn’t ready. On the walk back to the car, she kept breaking away from Cleo and Mary and a couple of aunts to run back to Ira’s grave and talk to her father one last time. “One last time” happened a few times: They walked, she ran, they let her. Eventually, they got the grieving little girl into the car.

  HELEN AND MARY spent the next week in Osage with Cleo’s parents. Surrounded by woods and fields cleared for cattle, the one-story white farmhouse was simple but comfortable, with wide wooden floors and a main room with a big, round cast-iron wood-stove that had warmed Helen through many winter days. In the summer their grandmother set up fans to stir the breeze.

  The Gurleys had spent summers here before, but this one was unlike any other. For Helen and Mary, it was a time of escape. When they returned to Little Rock, Cleo let the girls do what they pleased—anything to get through their loneliness and loss. They went to the movies several times a week, taking in double bills and single, serial features like Tarzan of the Apes and Mandrake the Magician.

  In the darkness of the theater, Helen watched Fred Astaire dance with Ginger Rogers and worshipped sophisticated movie stars like Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert. Matinee showings came with a free candy bar, which Helen loved almost as much as the movies themselves.

  That summer, Cleo let the girls eat more sweets than usual. At home, Mary and Helen whipped up batches of fudge and divinity, a lumpy white confection bursting with pecans. Measuring, mixing, and pouring the mixtures out to cool kept their minds occupied and their hands busy.

  Cleo tried to keep her own hands busy, too. She sewed as she always had, but with new intensity, concentrating her efforts on her two daughters. Hers were no mere cookie-cutter creations: Knowing how much Helen loved Hollywood glamour, Cleo made her an evening dress that was a near replica of Colbert’s wedding gown in It Happened One Night. She also made her a brown wool coat with a beaver-fur collar and a pink taffeta dress with a blue velvet sash. Working feverishly, she sewed baby-doll dresses for Helen—and for her baby dolls. She made ruffles and ribbons, flowers and frills. She sewed to fill the time, and t
o mend her mind, but her husband’s sudden death had left a gaping hole in their lives that couldn’t be stitched back together.

  He was here, and then he was gone, and no one really knew what happened that day in the Capitol Building. Looking for some answers later that summer, Cleo drove her gray Chevy to the south part of town, where the elevator operator lived. Helen waited in the car while Cleo talked to the man, perhaps hoping for a confession, or at least an explanation. She never got one, though she heard some theories. A pretty woman had been inside the elevator when Ira jumped—perhaps he had been trying to get her attention.

  Later, Cleo found out that the legislature had set aside funding for a new, safe elevator, and a cheaper, outdated one had been purchased instead to the benefit of corrupt state officials. The state of Arkansas eventually paid a settlement, claiming at least some responsibility for the accident, but even with money that she would get from the settlement, Cleo had little security for the long term: no job, no prospects, and no plan for how she would raise two children on her own.

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  GOING WEST

  1930s

  “Helen may have come to the false conclusion about her looks after moving to California. She really wasn’t like the starlets she saw there. Maybe that was it? A small, pretty fish in a big pond of spectacular mermaids.”

  —Lou Honderich

  Before Ira died, there were a million things that Cleo did and did well. In the winter she made hot cocoa and toasted cheese sandwiches, warming the house. She dutifully tended to her home, her husband, and her children. She spent hundreds of hours taking Helen to dance classes and friends’ houses, helping with homework and Sunday school assignments, and made all of her clothes. Even after Ira died, Cleo found ways to give her daughters little luxuries, but laughter was one luxury she could not afford. A serious woman by nature, Cleo turned more inward every day. Sometimes her melancholy shrouded the house like a veil.

  Helen grew up during some of the worst years of the Great Depression in Arkansas, and yet, for a girl of ten whose father had just been ripped out of her life, perhaps her mother’s great depression was the harder one to bear. After the attention brought on by Ira’s death faded, the Gurleys had few visitors. Once in a while, a relative came by, but for the most part Cleo distrusted people outside her small circle. She lived in a constant state of anxiety, much of it centered squarely on her daughters. Scared that they, too, could be snatched away at any moment, she dressed Helen in long underwear through April and seemed to hold her own breath every time her daughters waded into the water at one of the local swimming holes. Coming up for air, Helen would spot Cleo, hand on her brow to shield her eyes from the sun, frantically searching the water. “The days were somewhat pleasant, despite our being daddyless,” Helen would write many years later, “except for the deep sadness that had enveloped Cleo and made passes at Mary and me . . . ‘poor little fatherless children.’”

  Helen found a happier home nearby in the house of her new friend, Elizabeth Jessup. Not only was Elizabeth prettier and more popular than Helen; she was charming and so was everything around her. She had the best dollhouse in town; no flimsy baby doll furniture, but sturdy pieces that really functioned.

  And then there was the house she lived in: It was always filled with laughter, friends, and music. Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs. Jessup, was the junior choir conductor at a local Methodist church, where she played the organ. At home she played the piano and invited Elizabeth’s friends from choir practice to come over and sing along. Helen had been baptized in a Presbyterian church, but Elizabeth’s church was far more fun, and she soon became a regular at choir practice as well as at Mrs. Jessup’s sing-alongs. Everyone got to choose a solo, and Helen’s song was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

  Even when Mrs. Jessup wasn’t around, Helen and Elizabeth sang their hearts out to songs like “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” and “Blue Moon.” But Helen liked it when Mrs. Jessup was there. She had a warm, welcoming way about her, and she treated all the kids who came to her house like they were her own. Helen was at Elizabeth’s house listening to the radio the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in November 1932. When Roosevelt visited Little Rock the next year, Mrs. Jessup played the organ for the welcoming assembly, and lucky Elizabeth got to sit on the bench.

  Elizabeth had everything that Helen wished she had—a cheerful home, good looks, a certain star quality—and yet somehow Helen didn’t envy her. She just felt fortunate to know her. Elizabeth had other friends, too, of course, but she and Helen were best friends. They walked to grammar school together, rode their bikes together, climbed trees together, and starred in a school operetta together. (Elizabeth played the lead, Helen her maid.) At Mrs. Jessup’s weekly choir rehearsals, they also discovered boys together. Writing about her Little Rock childhood years later, Helen wouldn’t remember the church hymns she sang so much as the sexual undercurrent she felt, being tightly packed into the choir loft with the other sweaty prepubescent girls and boys.

  Surrounded by velvet-lined pews and stained glass, Helen nurtured a giddy crush on a boy named Dick Anderson, who, as it turned out, had a crush on Elizabeth, who wasn’t particularly interested. Helen didn’t mind being overlooked by Dick, as long as she had Elizabeth to talk to about it. Giggling hysterically, they sang the lyrics to Pinky Lee’s hit, “The Object of My Affection,” which became their code theme song for Dick. Ever the loyal friend, Elizabeth devoted herself to helping Helen plot ways to get the object of her affection alone in the room with her. Not that Helen would have known what to do with Dick back then, had she gotten the chance. These were innocent times, when the naughtiest thing Helen did was pass notes with Elizabeth in class. Day after day, they would write in a small brown spiral notebook, confessing their crushes and assessing each boy for each other’s amusement. Knowing that the entries were for their eyes only, they could fantasize about being touched and kissed when, in real life, they had experienced nothing of the sort.

  In junior high, Helen and Elizabeth continued to confide in each other, though there were certain subjects that they didn’t broach. Elizabeth had always been the pretty one, and as a teenager she only became prettier, with her curly dark blond hair and curvy figure. With both pride and horror, Helen watched as her friend evolved from a flat-chested girl, like herself, into the fortunate owner of a substantial bosom. The transformation seemed to have happened overnight. One day after swimming together at a public pool, Helen saw Elizabeth scooping her breasts into her bra as she got dressed. Helen wasn’t jealous—she was simply incredulous that in the span of just a few years, she and her best friend had become so different.

  The fact that Helen didn’t like her own body very much didn’t stop her from appreciating Elizabeth’s. On the contrary, she thought Elizabeth had been blessed with “the most beautiful breasts anybody ever aspired to,” as she would put it in her memoir. She came to associate “loving Elizabeth” with “loving boys in the yeasty, sensuous, long simmering summers of Little Rock.”

  Over one of those summers, Helen and Elizabeth fell for the same boy, Freed Matthews, a dark-haired teenager from a poor family who wouldn’t survive Little Rock’s imminent polio epidemic. But while he was alive, he was so very alive, managing to convince both girls that he wanted them equally. Nothing happened—unless one counts what happened between the dolls in Elizabeth’s dollhouse.

  Helen knew that they were too old to be playing with dolls, and yet they were too young and inexperienced to be playing this game any other way. Lying on the floor of Elizabeth’s bedroom, they took turns being the girl doll and putting her in various positions with the boy doll—Freed Matthews. They weren’t sexual positions; the dolls were just talking, very closely.

  It was a fleeting and very friendly threesome. “If Elizabeth and I were going through a homosexual phase, we didn’t know it,” Helen later wrote, “but we were surely as much in love with each other as we were wi
th Freed Matthews.”

  AROUND THE TIME of Helen’s sexual awakening, her mother was having an awakening of her own. In 1933, Cleo took Helen to the Chicago World’s Fair, while Mary stayed behind with relatives. Helen, eleven years old, was enthralled. Going to Chicago was the most thrilling adventure, and she soaked in the sights: the skyscrapers and double-decker buses, Marshall Field and the Shedd Aquarium. Riding up and down the escalators as many times as Cleo would allow, Helen was oblivious to the real reason for their trip: Cleo was trying to track down her first love, Leigh Bryan.

  Cleo found Leigh the following year, in 1934, not in Chicago, but in Cleveland. Once again she told Helen that they were going to Chicago for the World’s Fair, but as they approached the city, Cleo suggested that they continue on to Cleveland instead. Helen, unsuspecting, went along with the change in plan that, very likely, had been Cleo’s mission from the beginning. Later that night, staying at the Cleveland Hotel, Helen woke up to find herself alone in the room. Terrified, she eventually found a note Cleo had left saying she would be back in an hour. When Cleo returned, she confessed that she had been out with an old acquaintance. She never said who he was, but quietly Cleo and Leigh continued to keep in touch.

  By the summer of 1935, Cleo was becoming restless in Little Rock and agitating for a new start somewhere else. “It’s been three years since we lost your daddy,” she used to say. “We didn’t lose him,” Mary would retort. “He’s not out in the parking lot.” Despite a small sum of insurance money and the settlement Cleo had gotten from the state of Arkansas, there wasn’t enough to pay off the mortgage and maintain the lifestyle that she and the girls had grown accustomed to. Very soon the money was going to run out, and when it did, they might as well be far away from friends and neighbors who could bear witness. So Cleo started making plans to head west, joining the hundreds of thousands of people before her who had led the exodus to California. John Steinbeck wrote about the pilgrimage of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, and Woody Guthrie sang about the “garden of Eden” in his song “Do Re Mi.” Of course, not all of these Eden-bound migrants had lived in the Dust Bowl or worked in the fields. Even among the have-nots, some had more than others. There were Gurleys as well as Joads.