In 1936, Cleo took the girls on a road trip. As far as Mary and Helen knew, they were going to visit one of Ira’s brothers, Uncle John, in Los Angeles, and they would stop at the Texas Centennial Exposition, in Dallas, along the way. They did stop at the fair, just as Cleo had promised. As they enjoyed themselves, they had no clue that, back home in Little Rock, their house and all their furniture had been sold or that Cleo was moving the family to Los Angeles. When Cleo finally broke the news, Mary revolted, hopping onto the first bus she could get back to Little Rock, where she stayed with some girlfriends and tried to find a job. Cleo let Mary do what she wanted, but her independence didn’t last long. Not having much luck finding a job or a social life for herself in Little Rock, she soon joined her mother and younger sister in Los Angeles.
During summers at their grandmother’s house in Osage, Helen and Mary had spent plenty of hours dreaming about Hollywood. Sitting on the porch, they would watch the stars and read about them in Photoplay, Movie Mirror, and Silver Screen. Still, as much as Helen loved the idea of Hollywood, she didn’t actually want to live there, and she didn’t understand why they had to move so far away from everyone and everything they knew. (Cleo continued to keep her daughters in the dark about Leigh Bryan, who was living in Cleveland, but would join them in Los Angeles soon enough.)
Other than Uncle John and his family, they didn’t have anyone else to depend on in L.A., and Uncle John couldn’t offer much. A mechanic who was in and out of work, he wasn’t much better off than they were. At the very least, Cleo hoped that he would be able to provide some moral support, but that was before they got the phone call that changed their lives once again.
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GOOD TIME GURLEY
1930–1940s
“‘Guppie’ likes having her back scratched and frosted cokes and dislikes being called ‘Good Time.’ . . . Her ambition is to become a successful businesswoman.”
—from a profile of senior Helen Gurley in her high school newspaper, May 1939
On a Sunday afternoon in April 1937, the Gurleys got the news that Mary had polio. At first the doctor thought it was influenza, but then they got the real diagnosis, and it was devastating. Mary’s legs would be paralyzed, and she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She was nineteen.
Sometimes Helen wondered why polio picked Mary, a sweet-natured girl with cat-eye glasses and dark curls—the prettier of the two sisters, some people thought. Helen could have fallen victim to the disease just as easily. “[We] were formed from the same gene pool, ate the same food, lived in the same apartment, slept in the same bedroom, breathed the same air, were accessible to the same floating germs out in the street,” Helen wrote in her 2000 memoir, I’m Wild Again. As a girl, she knew that she had been spared, and yet the fact that Mary was paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, and she was healthy and mobile, didn’t make her own adolescence feel much easier. She was still dealing with the death of her father—she would always feel that loss—and getting used to their new life in California. In Little Rock, she had envied her friends with more money, but soon she would know what being “poor” really felt like.
Shortly after getting the diagnosis, Cleo and Helen relocated to the East Side of Los Angeles, moving into a small bungalow across from the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, a clinic that specialized in treating children with crippling disorders including polio, knock-knees, bowlegs, and spinal curvatures. Mary lived at the clinic, where she was treated by the founding doctor, Charles LeRoy Lowman, who was experimenting with new treatments for polio, like turning a fishpond on the hospital grounds into a therapy pool. Her doctors tried everything—pool treatments, massage therapy, two muscle transplants—but nothing worked. Hoping to cheer Mary up, Helen wrote one of her first fan letters, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the White House. “Dear Mr. President, my sister Mary has polio just like you,” she began, before asking if he would send her a letter. When Roosevelt later wrote to Mary, wishing her a full recovery, Helen marveled at her own power. She was all of fifteen, but with a little pluck and a three-cent stamp, she had gotten the attention of the president of the United States.
In the meantime, Mary’s medical bills were putting a serious dent in their finances, and they were all feeling the strain. Starting classes at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, Helen acclimated to the idea that she was going to school with other poor kids now: blacks and whites under one roof. If she wanted to see rich people, she would just have to go to the movies.
ANXIOUS THAT SOMETHING would happen to her, Cleo insisted on walking Helen to school throughout her freshman year. For a teenage girl who was the new kid in class, being escorted to high school was embarrassing, but nothing close to the humiliation she felt whenever she looked in the mirror. Helen recoiled at her own reflection—pimples studded her face like braille. For the next two years, Cleo spent much of her time taking care of Mary, who had returned from the hospital, but she also arranged for Helen to see a doctor about her acne. And so Helen’s treatments began: Twice a week after school, she went to see a family doctor who didn’t know much about dermatology but popped her pustules for no charge, leaving her face red and blotchy.
Perhaps if she had been born beautiful like her friend Elizabeth Jessup, Helen could have coasted through high school on her looks. Partly because of Cleo’s criticisms of her, Helen recognized what she lacked, and knew she had to make up for it in other ways. She had to be smarter, wittier, and more memorable than other girls. She simply had to try harder.
Helen with her sister, Mary, who in 1937 was diagnosed with polio that left her paralyzed from the waist down. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)
At home, Helen became a part-time caretaker to Mary. She learned how to negotiate her wheelchair over curbs as they went window-shopping or to the movies, and while she took pride in giving her sister a smooth ride, she was relieved when Mary eventually found other friends. Their next-door neighbor was also a polio victim and had gotten past the hardest times with the help of her husband. Together, the couple zipped Mary all over town.
At school, Helen was determined to become more social, performing in class skits and talent shows, joining school clubs, and even running for office. At home she chafed under Cleo’s control. They loved and infuriated each other. They were as “close as stitches,” as Helen later put it, and they both wielded the power to wound. As overprotective as Cleo was, she could chip away at Helen’s confidence like no one else. And there were times when Helen hurt her mother so deeply that Cleo would crawl into bed, weeping with her face to the wall.
At school Helen became someone kinder, softer, and sweeter. She was elected president of the Scholarship Society and of the World Friendship Society, hosting events like “Hello Day,” an after-school mixer that was held in the gym. As a senior, she worked on the school yearbook and joined the prom committee as chairman to help plan the St. Patrick’s Day–themed dance—and to get a little closer to her crush, Hal Holker, the student body president and the most popular boy in the twelfth grade.
Spending all that time planning with the committee eventually paid off. The day of the senior prom, Hal didn’t have a date, so he asked Helen to go at the last minute; he figured she could take care of herself. Dancing together in the gym, decorated with shamrocks and streamers in green and white, they had such a good time that Hal asked her out again, the following week.
“Good Luck” was the theme of prom that year, but luck had little to do with Helen’s high school success. It wasn’t luck that secured her a spot in the Ephebian Society, a coed club made up of students who demonstrated outstanding scholarship, leadership, character, and citizenship. It wasn’t luck that made her popular (her classmates voted her the third most popular girl) or the second most likely to succeed or the fifth best dancer. She didn’t place for “prettiest girl,” though she corralled third-place honors for “biggest apple polisher” in the graduating class of 375 seniors. Pluck, no
t luck, got her into the final round of tryouts to be the commencement speaker at graduation, and into the school paper, The Optimist.
Student reporters made it a point to interview Helen Gurley (alternately nicknamed Guppie and Good Time) about everything from extracurricular activities to her thoughts on whether girls should be able to wear pants to school. “It lowers the respect of other fellows and girls for the one who comes to school in slacks,” she told her interviewer. “It is just as out of place as a playsuit at a formal affair.”
In the spring of 1939, she even commanded her own mini-profile in the school paper, thanks in part to her membership in the Ephebian Society. “I’ve dreamed of being an Ephebian for so long that I just can’t believe it’s true,” she gushed, ever the apple polisher. “It’s just about the grandest thing that ever happened to me.”
On graduation day, Helen delivered her commencement address. At least among her friends, she had made a name for herself. No one doubted that Helen Gurley was college material, and she soon lined up big plans to go to Texas State College for Women in Denton.
Shortly after Helen’s high school graduation, the Gurleys moved again. This time Cleo went to Warm Springs, Georgia, where Mary could receive care at a polio treatment center established by Franklin Roosevelt.
Helen sitting for a portrait as a young woman. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)
Meanwhile, Helen began life as a freshman all over again in Texas, but like her mother, she stayed in college for only one semester. Cleo and Mary returned to Los Angeles and needed her back home.
EVEN AS SHE made other friends in L.A., Helen never stopped idolizing her old friend Elizabeth Jessup. They confided in each other through letters, signing off with their nicknames for each other: Helen was “Kitten” and Elizabeth was “Buzzie,” “Sassafras,” or “Sassy” for short. Helen loved getting updates about her friend’s life in Little Rock. Throughout their high school years, Helen had rooted for Elizabeth when she nabbed the lead in a class play or got elected as student body president at Little Rock Central High School.
Over time, Elizabeth also had become a sort of barometer. Simply by living out her own life in Little Rock, Elizabeth allowed Helen to gauge just how much she herself had changed since leaving. As much as Helen was evolving, her living situation was not. After Mary’s treatment in Georgia, she and Cleo came back to Los Angeles, and they all moved into a little stucco house in South-Central. From her backyard Helen could see railroad tracks and hear the freight trains that passed by. Some nights she would be necking in the car with a boy, and a train would suddenly come crashing past. As bad as the noise was, at least it was outside. Inside the house, sharing a room with Mary and her wheelchair, Helen became attuned to the clawing sounds of the gophers that would tunnel their way up under the floorboards. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Once, in desperation, she and Mary ran a long hose down one of the gopher holes to flush the rodents out. They got one—a wet, drowning ball of brown fur that they didn’t try to revive.
Maybe it was cruel to kill the gopher, Helen thought later; he was only trying to survive, to hoard some food while he had the chance. Born blind and helpless, he was hardwired to tunnel up into a better place. The gopher was just doing what gophers do—any creature trying to make it would do the same.
Helen had managed to tunnel her way up at high school, but it was over now. She would have to start tunneling again. She had been the shining example of a well-rounded student, the epitome of “college material,” and had she not been poor and applying to schools at the end of the Depression, perhaps she would have found herself reading Shakespeare at Smith or some other elite college. Instead, she was heading to secretarial school at Woodbury Business College in downtown Los Angeles. At the very least, learning shorthand and typing would guarantee her a job when she got out.
In the meantime, she was stuck living with her mother and her new stepfather. In 1939, almost seven years after Ira’s death, Cleo married her high school beau, Leigh Bryan, who moved from Cleveland, where he had been working as a Good Humor ice-cream salesman, to live in Los Angeles with his new wife and two grown stepdaughters. Helen, who was seventeen when Cleo remarried, knew Leigh cared for her mother, but she found him to be embarrassing, especially when a date came to the house to pick her up. Outside the house, Leigh’s ice-cream cart sat idly by the front door, and on many evenings when he was home, the living room reeked of whatever he was cooking for dinner with Cleo. (Sadly, Leigh soon became ill and would die of stomach cancer five years into their marriage.)
Still, they were managing to get by. Cleo had gotten a job pricing merchandise at Sears, Roebuck, and despite the pain and discomfort she experienced daily, Mary never complained. But just shy of eighteen, Helen was getting fidgety. She knew that she was changing, and growing, and soon she wouldn’t fit into the little life that her mother and sister had created for themselves.
In the back room she shared with Mary, Helen wrote long letters to Elizabeth about the changes she had already witnessed in herself. Lately, she had begun to think a lot about God. To obsess over God, really. She still said her prayers at night, but she wasn’t sure she believed in a higher power. Sometimes it felt like believing in Santa Claus—when she prayed, she basically listed everything she wanted to accomplish, hoping to see some improvement the next day. Granted, she was no great student of the Bible, but wasn’t it more rational, more reasonable, more productive, to believe in oneself?
Helen and Mary outside of their house near the railroad tracks in South-Central Los Angeles, circa 1945. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)
Helen knew Elizabeth had different views and aspirations. Within a couple of years, Buzzie would be headed down the aisle. She wanted a husband, a house, and children—she wanted what women were supposed to want.
Helen wanted something other than the life of duty and sacrifice that had been prescribed for her. She couldn’t just settle for the boy who bagged groceries, not with Cleo and Mary depending on her for help. She needed to marry up, up, and away—out of her sad little life and into something bigger and grander. She could relate to Scarlett O’Hara; they shared a selfish streak, a yearning to be free at whatever cost.
“If I’d been beautiful I might be a gold digger,” Helen confided in Elizabeth, “but I’d rather die than be poor all my life. I have a hideous, disgusting, but sincere ambition to have a great deal of money someday.”
IN 1946, WHEN Helen was twenty-four, Cleo, widowed again, took Mary back to Osage. Cleo said they’d have a better life there, living with her parents and surrounded by family, but Helen suspected that, characteristically, her mother had another motive. “She really did it because she saw me being a semi-nurse-companion to my sister, too deeply involved in Mary’s life (and problems) perhaps to have a life of my own,” Helen later wrote in I’m Wild Again.
Finally, she was free to live life on her own terms.
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TURNING POINTS
1950s
“The world that shaped Helen had two drivers: Poverty and movies.”
—Walter Meade
In the early 1970s, while working on her musical with Lyn Tornabene, Helen created a tape on the theme of turning points in her life. Generally, Lyn interviewed Helen, but in this instance, Helen recorded herself, talking about moments that had formed her. Many of those moments had to do with her family and upbringing—Mary getting polio, for instance—but others were far more fleeting.
Here is Helen Gurley, thirty years old, at a photo shoot for Rheingold Beer in Beverly Hills, in the early Fifties. She has come with her beau, the head of the Rheingold account and a top executive at Foote, Cone & Belding’s New York office. He is in town for the shoot, and to see her, but they stand at a professional distance so no one will suspect that they are having an affair. At this particular session, the famous Hollywood photographer Paul Hesse is getting ready to shoot the beautiful winner of this year’s “Miss Rheingold” co
ntest. The setting is a party scene, and a couple of guys and one girl have been hired as extras in the background. The two male models walk in, but the female model still hasn’t shown, and time is money, so Helen’s lover suggests the obvious: They should just use Helen as the girl. All she has to do is blend into the background—pretend to mix a martini or put on a record. Easy fix. But it’s a no-go. Hesse won’t use her. He would rather wait for the model. So they wait, and she still doesn’t show, and he still won’t use Helen. “That nearly killed me,” Helen confided in Lyn nearly twenty years later. “I wasn’t even presentable enough to fill in as a background girl.”
Helen wanted a lot out of life, but what she wanted most of all—to be beautiful—was unattainable. She never cared about being the next Marie Curie; she wanted to be Lana Turner, the blond goddess who conquered Hollywood and three husbands. Of course, she was about as far away from being a blond goddess as one could be, but she did have something else going for her. “I learned very early to be good in bed,” Helen told Lyn. “Nobody ever told me. I just knew.”
She never slept with a man on the first date (she was from the South, after all), and the pursuit was a big part of the fun. In the Forties and Fifties, there was no end to the tactics a man would try to get her into bed, and when he finally succeeded, Helen didn’t have to pretend to like it. She didn’t lose her virginity until she was twenty, but she had known the feelings of lust and desire ever since she was a girl.
Enter Helen Page 17
