Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  Day after day, Cosmo’s young assistants came to the office with oily skin, split ends, and bad dye jobs. “What’ll I do? My hair’s a mess,” a receptionist named Sandy said one day, poking her head into the beauty department. After getting her brown hair professionally streaked with blond highlights, Sandy spent one too many nights home alone with a bleach bottle, and now her hair was three different shades of bad. Sandy’s before-and-after makeover story ran with the headline “The Great Hair Disaster . . . And How to Recover!”

  Everyone was a potential model, and once in a while, Mallen used someone truly beautiful, like Cosmo’s art director, Lene Bernbom, who insisted on hiding her thick blond hair under a hat with a chinstrap. (Mallen’s stylist gave her a fat ponytail with Dynel sausage curls by Tovar-Tresses.) Mostly, though, she went for plain girls, and the more lackluster the better. “The simple process was to make them look as awful as possible for the ‘before’ pictures and then make them absolutely glamorous for the ‘after’ pictures,” Mallen says. “The best makeovers were the very bland, mousy girls who you could take and really pile on the makeup and the hair—then they’d look wonderful.”

  Some girls needed a complete overhaul, like Lynn Foss, “a pretty little mouse of a girl who had all the potential of a sexpot,” according to Cosmo, “but whose fires were banked by her captain-of-the-girls’-hockey-team exterior.” After being further undone for her “before” shot, she was shipped off—along with a blue-sequined dress and a frightening black wig—to the photographer’s studio where she was redone by a superstar hair-and-makeup team on loan from Revlon.

  Other girls simply needed some fine-tuning and fixing. When Barbara Hustedt walked into a metal stanchion in the subway, chipping her tooth, Mallen saw an opportunity to bring her to a dentist who had just started using epoxy resin as a tooth filler. Someone else’s big Dumbo ears were the perfect excuse for a surgical procedure called otoplasty. Another assistant had terrible acne that was cleared up after several visits to Christine Valmy’s skin-care salon. After her redo story ran, Cosmo received more than a thousand letters about it.

  Why use real-life models? The idea was that Cosmo readers had a lot in common with Cosmo staffers and contributors—“same age, same dreams, same potential,” Helen explained in one of her columns. But they didn’t. Not really. Cosmo’s core readers were simple, working-class girls who considered the magazine to be their bible and Helen Gurley Brown to be their savior. Cosmo’s editors were sophisticated, college-educated women and men who already knew where to put the dessert fork on a dinner table.

  Mallen worked for Helen for almost twenty-five years. During that time, she dramatically expanded Cosmo’s beauty coverage to include cosmetics as well as plastic surgery, dentistry, nutrition, and fitness—all important fields for advertisers. She became an expert at channeling Helen’s voice through her ear, and she instinctively knew what Helen wanted for articles. Mallen pitched and guided many of them herself.

  Are there any stories she’s particularly proud of now? “No,” she says, after a pause, “I don’t think so.

  “All the senior editors knew it was kind of a lark, which did not mean that we didn’t do our jobs very well,” she adds. “My personal life and personal belief had very little to do with the job. It was frivolous, and a lot of my friends thought it was silly that I was working there, but it was a good job. I enjoyed it, I was well paid, and that was it.”

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  A VIPER IN THE NEST

  1969

  “You can’t really talk about bosom techniques without talking about them.”

  —Helen Gurley Brown, “Step Into My Parlour,” October 1969, Cosmopolitan

  After Nora Ephron skewered Women’s Wear Daily in Cosmopolitan, Women’s Wear Daily skewered Cosmopolitan right back. How could anyone resist? Helen provided endless material, and along with Jackie O, she soon made regular cameos in the pages of WWD’s gossip column, “Eye.” In October, the “21” crowd read all about Helen’s recent request for her own private john, which Hearst promptly turned down. The exploits of “Mother Brown” were always worth a good laugh.

  And so was Cosmopolitan. “Nobody took it seriously, let’s face it,” says Gloria Steinem. “I mean, I would always fight for it on the grounds that it was at least allowing women to be sexual, even though it was to gain approval, and it wasn’t exactly self-empowered. But, still, it was a big thing.”

  Cosmopolitan may have been a joke to the city’s media elite, but for countless readers across the country, the magazine was a lifeline, especially when it came to questions about sex and relationships of all kinds. Who else were they going to turn to for answers about how to turn a guy on, or how to cope with an overbearing mother?

  At forty-seven, Helen had plenty of advice to give, but she wasn’t single, and she wasn’t young. When she needed answers, she floated down the hall to talk to one of her single-girl assistants or editors: “Robin, would a Cosmo girl think like this? . . . or dress like this? . . . or be attracted to this man?” She’d never understand certain attractions—the popularity of the band Cream, for instance—but she counted on her staff to keep her in touch with the times, and they came to expect her informal surveys. “Give me your definition of a bitch,” she once prompted. Another time: “Have you ever dated a very wealthy man?”

  The press ridiculed Cosmo for its endless articles on how to please a man, but Helen was just as interested, if not more, in finding out how men could please women. For the June issue, Gael Greene wrote a feature on how to cope with male impotence—after all, it affected women, too. “Has a woman’s magazine ever dealt with the subject of impotency before?” Helen asked her readers in her editor’s letter that month. “I’m not sure . . . but we all know it isn’t only the girls who are ‘frigid.’ I think you can discuss almost any subject if you do it with honesty and in good taste.”

  Naturally, for a feature on foreplay scheduled for July, she turned to the women on her staff. She wanted to know about their breasts—specifically, how they liked to have them caressed. For too long, men had been mishandling women’s breasts, but no one ever talked about it. Well, it was time to fix that. The memo to her female staffers was supposed to be confidential, a private conversation among girls. That’s why she addressed it the way she did:

  TO Girl Staff Members

  FROM Helen Brown

  SUBJECT

  We are doing an article on how men should treat women’s breasts in love-making. It will either help us sell another hundred thousand copies or stop publication of Cosmopolitan ALTOGETHER!

  They were free to send in their responses anonymously, and if they chose not to respond at all, she would just assume they thought it was none of her business. As for those who did choose to respond, she wanted to know: What pleases them when a man caresses their breasts? What do men do that they think is wrong? Why do they think that some girls don’t get as much pleasure as they should get out of this kind of foreplay? Perhaps they’re too self-conscious about their bosom size, et cetera. Finally, did they have any personal experiences to share? Maybe someone had a friend who didn’t like having her bosom caressed, but then learned to enjoy it? “If we do this tastefully and with real insight,” she concluded her memo, “the article is going to help a lot of men make a lot of girls more happy.”

  Helen left it to her senior editors to assign 99 percent of Cosmo’s articles to their writers, but the issue of men mistreating women’s breasts was too important, and she decided to assign the story herself to a writer in California. The woman took her best shot, musing on love and relationships, but her article lacked what Helen wanted most: specific techniques that men and women could use. “This is your personal reminiscence of all your love affairs, and fascinating as it is, it doesn’t have anything to do with boobs,” Helen told her. “I know,” the writer conceded, before asking if Helen could supply her with any material.

  Shortly after that call, Helen sat down to write her memo.

&nb
sp; LINDA COX HAD just started working as an assistant art director when Helen’s bosom memo landed in her hands, and she could hardly believe what her new boss was asking of her—it wasn’t any of her business! The whole memo really had to be seen to be believed, and on her way out of the office that evening, she quietly tucked it into her bag to share with some of her friends from her last job. They’d get a kick out of seeing how much her life had changed. Before a headhunter sent her to Cosmopolitan, Linda had worked as an assistant art director at Holiday, a slick magazine for the Jet Set, featuring the best writers and photographers out there. (One photographer, Slim Aarons, became especially well known for shooting the rich and famous in their haute habitats around the world.) Some former coworkers were throwing a dinner party at Trader Vic’s in Midtown to say a belated goodbye to her and another former staffer, the writer Marilyn French, who had moved on to Newsweek. Linda couldn’t wait to see their faces when they heard Helen’s request, and as they started to drink, she broke out the memo.

  “It was passed around, and we got a lot of laughs out of it, and that’s kind of the end of the story,” Linda says now. Except it wasn’t. As Linda was putting the memo back into her bag, a former coworker from Holiday’s art department asked to borrow it. She wanted to show it to her boyfriend. One too many of Trader Vic’s famous Scorpions made Linda say, “Sure.”

  Over the next few days at Cosmopolitan, the girls turned in their responses about what they liked (“feathery touches”) and what they didn’t (“no feeling-the-melons pinching”). Helen was thrilled. All of the girls had written back, except for two, and she had gotten what she had asked for: real feedback from real girls. Bolstered by their insight, she assigned two different writers to the story—the California writer had disowned it by this point—and they produced a fantastic piece, combining their material with hers.

  The story was back on track when Helen heard that someone had leaked her memo to Women’s Wear Daily. Around mid-March, an excerpt of the memo ran in its gossip column. “BROWN STUDY: Eye is in receipt of a ‘memo’ by Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown to her ‘girl staff members’ announcing preparation of an article on ‘how men should treat women’s breasts in lovemaking,’” the item began, mocking her serious inquiry into the matter.

  All it took was an inch of space to reduce what could have been an act of public service into a public joke—and Helen wasn’t laughing. “She was outraged,” says Barbara Hustedt Crook, who had answered the bosom memo herself. “She stuck a note on the bulletin board—in her own quirky typing—that started, ‘THERE’S A VIPER IN THE NEST!!!!!’ I can still hear the ice in her voice, discussing it.”

  “The person responsible would be immediately fired,” adds Linda Cox. “We were all shocked that someone would actually leak information to another publication and buzzed about who could possibly have done it. We thought it was a terrible thing to do and anyone who had any connection to WWD was suspicious. My friend who had just started at Newsweek called when she saw the WWD item. I said, ‘Isn’t that awful? Helen is going to fire whoever leaked it.’”

  Helen intended to flush out the culprit, and the staffers had their suspicions.

  A few people said it was possibly the decorating editor, Karen Fisher. Other people speculated that Helen herself planted it for the press, but that would have been self-sabotage—Cosmopolitan already had printed a teaser for the story in the back of the June 1969 issue, “WHAT MEN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WOMEN’S BOSOMS.”

  Along with everybody else on staff, Linda wondered who it could be. Just to be safe, she called her friend in the art department at Holiday and asked her to send the memo back. “She said she would right away. When a few days passed and I still didn’t have it, I began to get upset and called her again,” Linda says. “She finally admitted what had happened. A photographer, Slim Aarons, had seen it on her desk and picked it up and, as a joke, took it to his pals at Women’s Wear Daily.”

  Realizing the part she had played in the whole mess, Linda felt sick. “Helen was still livid, and I was too new and too scared to tell her what had happened. I didn’t want to lose my job,” she says. “Then Newsweek ran the blurb with the additional information that the guilty party would be fired. Oh my God!”

  Linda decided not to tell Helen what happened. “I could never, ever face Helen,” she says. “Every time she called me into her office, I would almost throw up I was so scared. I never knew when the ax was going to drop.”

  Not long after the leak, Helen told her version of the story to Nora Ephron in Esquire. “This big brouhaha started because this little bitch, whoever she was, sent the memo to Women’s Wear, and I would still fire her if I knew who she was,” she vented.

  After Hearst executives got wind of the bosom memo, they demanded to see a copy of the article as soon as it was finished, and now they weren’t letting her run it—too graphic. “The actual use of anatomical words bugs them,” Helen told Nora. “Well, you cannot talk about love and relationships when you’re talking about how to handle a breast. . . . You’ve got to say a few things about what to do.” Helen didn’t blame her bosses, at least not publicly. They were just scared of getting too much flak. They were worried about alienating more readers, about stirring up more trouble with conservative supermarkets in the South. She would try running the article again, once the uproar died down.

  “We’ve decided to wait for a bit to publish this one,” she explained to her readers after the bosom story failed to appear in the July issue, as advertised. “Now, nobody around here is a puritan (are you kidding?!), but sometimes an article is a bit ahead of its time.”

  BY NOW HELEN had learned how to work around her bosses instead of working against them. She appeased and pleased, flattered and flirted, and while she frequently got what she wanted for Cosmo eventually, her power had its limits in a corporate culture dominated by men.

  In June 1969, Hearst threw a party to celebrate company president Richard Berlin’s fiftieth anniversary at the corporation. In addition to the Hearst editors and executives who attended the bash, friends like President Nixon, the Duke of Windsor, and J. Edgar Hoover submitted tape recordings to be played for the audience.

  Helen wasn’t there because she wasn’t invited. And she wasn’t invited because she was a woman. Even Berlin’s own wife, Honey, wasn’t welcome. Berlin later wrote a note to Helen, apologizing for the fact that no female executives were allowed to attend the event—the boys, he explained, wanted it to be “a stag affair.”

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  WOMEN IN REVOLT

  1969–1970

  “One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.”

  —Carol Hanisch, in her 1970 essay, “The Personal Is Political”

  On March 21, 1969, nearly three hundred people filled the basement of Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church to witness an unforgettable event. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, the church was known for its radical politics, and for sheltering deserters throughout the Vietnam War. On this particular evening, it gave refuge to another maligned group—women who had gotten abortions, many illegally, making them criminals in the eyes of the law. The event was organized by Redstockings, a radical women’s group cofounded by Shulamith Firestone and the writer Ellen Willis. The previous month, Red-stocking members had infiltrated a New York State legislative hearing on abortion law reform, hoping to be heard as “the real experts on abortion,” but the committee rebuked them, depending instead on the testimonies of its own members: fourteen men and one nun. (Ultimately, three women were allowed to address the committee that day, but the protestors were not satisfied with the token coda granted to them.)

  Shut out, Redstockings decided to host their own hearing instead. “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is” was billed as a one-act play that would be followed by personal testimonies. For the first time in
public, women would tell the truth about their unplanned pregnancies and illegal abortions—about the borders crossed, the surgeries botched, the fears of being found out and judged.

  That March evening in the church basement, the crowd listened to twelve women share their stories over the course of three hours. One woman told how, after a desperate search, she found a hospital that would give her a therapeutic abortion, but only if she agreed to be sterilized at the age of twenty. Another woman had to pretend she was mentally unstable before being granted an abortion—and confessed that going through with it was the sanest thing she’d ever done. At one point a Redstocking commented, “I bet every woman here has had an abortion.”

  Many women in the audience had endured abortions themselves, but chose not to step up to the microphone, not yet. “I was one of those who kept quiet,” Susan Brownmiller later wrote in her memoir, In Our Time. “I chose an easier path and played Village Voice reporter.” Another journalist was there, too. Sitting on a windowsill, wearing aviator glasses and a miniskirt, Gloria Steinem was covering the speakout for her “City Politic” column in New York.

  Gloria had gotten an abortion in London after graduating from Smith. Like Brownmiller, she wasn’t ready to talk about it, but as she listened to the testimonies, she realized that her story fit into a much larger one that hadn’t been voiced, until now. After the event, she typed up her article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” a witty, well-reported survey of feminist groups and actions around the city, including the abortion speakout hosted by Redstockings. Aiming for objectivity, Gloria left her own emotions, and her own abortion, out of the article—but despite her impersonal tone, this story was very personal. Years later she would look back on that evening in the church basement as a crucial moment in her feminist awakening.

  “Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem later wrote in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. “If one in three or four adult women shared this experience, why were each of us made to feel criminal and alone? How much power could we ever have if we had no power over the fate of our own bodies?”