Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  A couple of nights later, they screened the movie in Long Beach, California, and got a similar reaction. It dawned on David that they had a blockbuster on their hands—and, in part, he had Cosmo to thank. A couple of years earlier, Peter Benchley’s manuscript had landed on the desk of the books editor, who passed it along to Helen with a short note, suggesting that it might make a good movie. Soon after that, David and Richard bought the rights.

  Helen visited David in the Vineyard while they were filming, and she tagged along for some of the promotion of Jaws, but she had to hold down the fort back at the office. She got considerable help from Walter Meade, whom she rehired, this time to replace George Walsh as her managing editor. George’s exit, though delayed, was inevitable. “She knew that he had to go. He knew that he had to go,” says Meade, who regarded Walsh as very professional, but also saw that he was conflicted about working for Helen. “It was circumstance that ended their relationship. It was oil and water.” (Walsh went on to become editor-in-chief of the general books division of Macmillan Publishing Company.)

  Walter came back just in time to celebrate a landmark event: Cosmo’s tenth anniversary under Helen. Since he first walked into her office a decade earlier, a lot had changed, including Helen herself. When she showed up at Cosmo for her first-ever job as a boss, “it seemed to me there were no guidelines for being or trying to get to be a woman executive,” she wrote in her February 1975 editor’s letter. “If you were one, you’d simply ‘fallen in’ (like I did) or were one of those rare creatures who somehow instinctively knew how to go after the same glittery work-prizes men did.”

  Around the same time, Helen met Letty Cottin Pogrebin for lunch. It had been years since they had seen each other, and Letty had changed, too. When they first met, she was all of twenty-two, a baby book-publicist and swinging single girl who wanted a life as adventurous as Holly Golightly’s. A decade later, Letty was an editor at Ms., a columnist at Ladies’ Home Journal, a prominent author, speaker, and activist, and the mother of three children with her labor-lawyer husband—to some, she was a model of the modern woman. Helen relished the chance to ask Letty all about her experience as a feminist, and over the next two and a half hours, they talked about what was happening in the women’s movement, what still needed to happen, what women wanted, what men wanted, and what women and men wanted from each other. They didn’t talk much about husbands, kids, houses, or jobs that day, but they met for other lunches, and Letty had the opportunity to ask Helen a question on one subject she never quite addressed in Sex and the Single Girl and rarely included in Cosmo.

  “We used to go to lunch for old times’ sake. I guess we were both drinking, though we tried not to, and I was glad because it sort of oiled her gears,” Letty says. “She was asking me about my children, and I said, ‘Helen, did you ever miss having children?’ She said, ‘Well, between you and me, I stopped using birth control. I wanted a child, and I didn’t want David to know, so I left it in the hands of fate, and I never got pregnant.’ I just think she was so completely invested in this framed photograph of the elegant, hip, pioneering sexologists and single-single-single.”

  Her public image failed to capture the complexity that was always just out of frame. “If she hadn’t created her own trademark, I think she would have been happy to be a feminist,” Letty says. “It was too late for her to be a feminist, or at least an out-feminist. She had created this tribe of so-called liberated women through sex—which was precisely the opposite of what we at Ms. would say—but I think she related on a deep level. She just couldn’t go back.”

  SO SHE WENT forward—Helen eventually did identify as a “devout feminist”—and she aligned herself with other women who were moving in the same direction. At the end of 1975, a group of editors including Pat Carbine from Ms. and Ruth Whitney from Glamour met to discuss the role that women’s magazines could play in getting the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution ratified. Helen promised to try to reel in the help of John Mack Carter, the former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal who recently had become the editor of another Hearst title, Good Housekeeping.

  She kept her word and wrote to Carter. They needed four more states to make the ERA the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, and rounding up enough votes to make that happen wouldn’t be easy, considering local defeats of the bill in New York and New Jersey. They needed to rally all the support they could get. “This may not be a subject you feel passionately about, John,” Helen wrote, perhaps anticipating a lukewarm reaction, but she urged, “the group feels passionately that you should join!” She quickly outlined the plan. Each magazine would publish something about the ERA in an upcoming issue. Whether the magazines chose to run a major feature about it or just a sidebar was up to them. They didn’t have to endorse the bill. They only had to disseminate the information about it to their readers. Might John consider running such an article in Good Housekeeping, a magazine that reached millions of readers?

  In her own whispery way, Helen made a bold request, and it worked. Carter joined the cause, along with the editors of more than thirty other women’s magazines, whose combined circulation reached nearly 60 million. Each magazine devoted a part of its July 1976 issue to the ERA.

  For Cosmo, that meant running a two-page feature called “ERA & YOU,” explaining why ratifying the amendment was both so important and so controversial. “Puzzled and confused about the Equal Rights Amendment?” Cosmo asked. Staunch opponents saw the bill as threatening to families and the very moral fiber of American life, but many women didn’t support ERA because they weren’t sure what having equal rights really meant. They were afraid of being saddled with responsibilities they didn’t want in the name of equality: being drafted if there were another war, for instance, losing Social Security benefits if they were widowed, or no longer being entitled to child support if they were divorced. After all, if men and women were equal . . .

  Cosmo’s writer, Linda Wolfe, addressed those fears head-on. Maybe women would be expected to join the army someday. Maybe they would lose some child support. Maybe they would have more obligations. But equality was worth it. “We cannot hope to grab all the goodies and give nothing in return,” Wolfe wrote. “Men and women will have equal rights or they will have unequal ones, as they have today.”

  RATIFICATION OF THE ERA proved to be a long and continuing battle. (Congress passed the amendment in 1972, but to become a part of the Constitution, it needed to be approved by a three-fourths majority of thirty-eight states. A decade after it was proposed, the ERA missed the mark by three states.) Still, Helen persisted in using Cosmo’s pages to educate her readers on issues that directly affected their lives. She was a fierce and lifelong supporter of birth control and a woman’s right to choose. Most of all, she was a fierce and lifelong supporter of women.

  “She seemed to understand long before anybody else that women supporting each other—older women supporting younger women—was a form of feminism,” says Erica Jong, who developed a friendship with Helen after the publication of her groundbreaking 1973 novel, Fear of Flying. “I believe that it is the very essence of feminism: helping each other, which, when I was young, was very rare. Helen seemed to know that nurturing younger women was part of what could make her important.” At the same time, Jong adds, “We did not think of her as a great feminist leader. We thought of her as a very successful advertising woman who appealed to a more down-market group, a pop culture person who found a way to make money out of women and their needs. Now I do think she was a feminist, in that she promoted women.”

  As she got older, Helen went out of her way to nurture young female executives, publishers, editors, and writers—and she took great interest in Ms. It wasn’t “Ms. versus Cosmo,” except for when the two staffs played each other in a game of softball. The two magazines shared freelance writers, contributing editors, even article ideas. When Cosmo rejected an article making the case for embracing au naturel body hair, Ms. took it and ran it in a summer issue.
When David Brown came across a Ms. cover line that he particularly liked—“Is it different with a younger man?”—he called up Pat Carbine and asked her if he could buy it for Cosmo. She didn’t sell it, but Carbine says now, “I regarded the call as the consummate compliment.”

  Over the years, Helen and Gloria became allies, if not exactly lunch buddies. Helen wrote Gloria long fan letters on Cosmopolitan stationery, confessing her eternal admiration and devotion. Did Gloria know how wonderful she was? How inspiring? Was it okay to tell her she looked smashing the other night? She courted Gloria relentlessly: to let Cosmo profile her, to write for Cosmo, to speak at Cosmo’s International Conference. Gloria never stopped being critical of Helen. She challenged Helen openly and publicly, but she also came to see the value in joining forces with her.

  “I can imagine the same woman reading both our magazines,” Gloria wrote to Helen in September 1978, “and in any case, I would like very much to be able to say some of the things to your readers that I wish had been said to me much earlier.”

  Thanks to Helen, Gloria could get her message across to more people through the pages of Cosmo. And when she needed more funding for Ms., Helen introduced her to a Hearst executive, who discussed with her the possibility of applying to the Hearst Foundation. “That you made the first call was especially important in underlining the fact that we each serve a different purpose with our publications; that Ms. has a complementary function as a kind of early warning system on emerging issues that is helpful to other women’s magazines, and vice versa,” Gloria wrote.

  It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. One of the most famous feminists of her generation, Gloria gave Helen the sense of belonging to a cause that didn’t always want her. In return, Helen supported Gloria wholeheartedly—with money, time, constant encouragement, and the occasional care package, like a shipment of bran muffins. She sent checks to the Ms. Foundation for Women, and she gave advice, often unsolicited.

  The overall look of Ms. could be much better, Helen told Gloria again and again. The layouts tended to be messy and hard to read, the headlines uninviting. “She came to an editorial meeting once and tried to jazz up our cover lines,” Steinem says. “It was very generous of her to do that.”

  In August 1978, Gloria Steinem visited the Cosmo offices at Helen’s request. “She called me up and said, ‘My staff needs to understand the women’s movement. Will you come over and explain it?’” Steinem says. “I thought it was brave because, one, she was admitting she knew nothing about the women’s movement; and, two, she was understanding that her staff should understand.”

  Helen regularly invited celebrities to sit in on editorial meetings. In addition to Barbara Walters, a personal friend, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Henry Kissinger, and Woody Allen were just a few of the guests who graced Cosmo staffers with their presence, though no one knew why. Some staffers guessed the visits were an ego trip for Helen, who wanted to show off her connections to her employees and vice versa. “We were supposed to ask questions, and it was excruciatingly awful,” Mallen De Santis says. “I mean, these were major people who couldn’t have had less interest in talking to a bunch of civilians. You had to really exert yourself, so they didn’t feel like they were casting their pearls before swine. You had to be nice swine.”

  Most of the visitors went on about some element of their own personal success, but Gloria came to Cosmo to talk about a movement that affected them all, men and women alike.

  “I was trying to explain, as we were all trying to explain, that this was not a reform; this was a revolution; this was long and deep and connected to the suffragists’ and abolitionists’ era; that that had been one big leap forward, and now we were trying to accomplish another one,” Steinem says, adding that feminists wanted to call attention to the fact that there weren’t enough women in politics—or in medical schools, for that matter. “We were saying, ‘But it could be different. It could be different . . . that’s the vision.’”

  Helen was so grateful for Gloria’s visit that she wrote to thank her for it the very same day: “We are all sisters . . . that’s the overpowering message we got . . . and there is much for all of us to do.”

  ( 51 )

  HAVING IT ALL

  1982

  “Having It All sounds so fucking cliche to me.”

  —Helen Gurley Brown, in a 1982 memo to her book editors

  In 1982, Gloria Steinem walked into Cosmopolitan’s editorial offices to interview Helen Gurley Brown for a cable television special. It was a bracingly cold day in late winter, and the wind howled along Broadway.

  Helen began with a tour, showing Gloria a black-and-white picture of herself as a baby (“I think I was a darling baby—I have not seen a better baby picture, ever!”) and another one of herself as a young woman of twenty-two. “I am wearing falsies. You know people wore falsies in those days.” She moved on to a more recent color photograph of herself in a flattering red dress and pearls, standing in front of a tree in a residential neighborhood, along with two gray-haired women: one in a wheelchair, the other in a housedress, attempting, and failing, to smile.

  “This is my family, my mother Cleo Bryan, my sister Mary Alford. Mary got polio when she was nineteen and I was fourteen. My mother passed away last year, this was taken just a few months before that time,” Helen told Gloria, moving along to a picture of herself and David in black tie at a Hearst dinner dance. “This is the first cover of Cosmopolitan when I came aboard,” she said, pointing out the July 1965 issue, featuring Renata Boeck. “I got the sexiest picture I could find.”

  Cut to Helen and Gloria sitting down across from each other. Gloria wears a short-sleeved purple blouse and large-framed glasses; she looks confident and relaxed with one arm resting on a pinkish-beige floral couch that matches the wallpaper behind it. Helen wears a tweed jacket with pink piping and a plaid scarf tied into a giant bow around her throat and sits on a cane chair, her back straight as a pin. As the camera closes in on her bronzed face and sprayed hair, she purses her lips, nods, smiles, and almost seems to flinch as she waits for the first question.

  “Ever since I’ve known that we were scheduled to have this conversation, I’ve been asking people questions and asking what they would like me to ask you,” Gloria begins. “But I think the biggest mistake about you is that you are a glamorous person who—”

  “Come on!” Helen protests, shimmying her shoulders and laughing for the camera. “I’m glamorous! I’m glamorous!”

  “You are glamorous,” Gloria says smoothly. “But I think they feel that you arrived here without effort. They don’t understand the work that went into it. And I think most especially they would be surprised to hear about your childhood.”

  Not everyone knew, for instance, that she grew up “without much money.”

  “Not much money!” Helen interrupts. “Not much money doesn’t even describe it!”

  Over the next few minutes, Helen recited the same story she had been telling for the past twenty years with slight variations. This time, her family wasn’t “dirt-poor,” a description David sometimes used to describe her Arkansas roots; the Gurleys were “genteel poor.” Her father died when she was ten, leaving her mother, “a pitiful little creature,” to take care of one daughter with polio and another with unsightly acne.

  Gloria listened patiently, occasionally sharing pieces of her own story. In Toledo, Ohio, her family also had been genteel poor, living off the unpredictable income of her father, a traveling antiques dealer. She, too, had taken care of her mother, who suffered from debilitating depression but still made sure that both of her daughters went to college.

  “I’m more pitiful!” Helen said, and laughed. “You were able to go to college. You got the money somehow to get there so I feel that I’m more pitiful than you. How did you get there?”

  “Well, my mother wanted very much to have both her daughters go to college and she saved money and sold the family house. And I got scholarships and worked as a salesgirl
,” Gloria answered. “I think that most women in the country probably have had the kinds of experiences you and I have had, and they don’t identify with women who surmount them because they think they must be special.” A pause. “Actually, we’re the same people.”

  Whatever Helen had been expecting, it probably wasn’t that statement. But sitting in her office on that blustery day, Helen and Gloria discovered they had a lot in common. They both had rough childhoods and grew up with unhappy mothers who felt trapped in their lives. They both knew women whose lives had been ruined by getting pregnant out of wedlock—a crime that used to be punishable by society, as Gloria reminded the audience. They both knew women whose spirits had been crushed by an unfair system, Gloria continued, but Helen refused to talk about women as victims.

  “I understand your point, which is that women could go a lot further if we were not victimized by a system that pays us less, penalizes us for having children that keep us away from our jobs,” Helen said. “Yes, we would do better. But then we also are acknowledging—or at least I am—that, regardless of the breaks, you can do pretty well anyway. You can rise above it.”

  “Regardless of the bad breaks, a few people can do pretty well,” Gloria corrected her. “We’re just trying to make a world in which more people can do pretty well.”

  As the film rolled, Gloria Steinem’s interview with Helen Gurley Brown sometimes seemed more like Helen Gurley Brown’s interview with Gloria Steinem, with Helen interjecting, “Can we talk about you?” She wanted to know Gloria’s thoughts on marriage—always a subject of interest to her Cosmo Girls—but she also opened the floor to talk about a subject close to Gloria’s heart.