Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  Before David died, he and Helen had a macabre little chat about where they should be buried. Southampton, Long Island, or in the Ozarks? “Take me to the Ozarks,” David told her. “I want to be wherever you are, and besides, I’ve always liked to go to new places.” To many people who knew the Browns in New York, the idea of Helen and David being buried in Arkansas seemed absurd, but Cleo’s side of the family, the Siscos, had a family cemetery in Osage, and Helen wanted to be buried there along with her mother and Mary, who died in 1997. “I think she just remembered it as being so pretty. She said over and over, ‘This is where I’m from, these are my roots, my grandparents are here,’” Lou says. “She always wanted to be buried here, and David was so in love, he wanted to be buried beside her.” After David died, Lou helped Helen design his gravestone. At a certain point, Helen told Lou, “Someday you’ll be doing this for me.”

  Helen entrusted her estate to Hearst executives, but she asked Lou to bring David’s ashes to Arkansas. After he died, Lou offered to take care of Helen as a daughter would, back in Arkansas, but Helen didn’t want to leave their home in the Beresford building on Central Park West—a palatial four-story penthouse apartment worth millions. She still showed up for work, long after she lost her ability to do it. Day after day, a driver picked her up and took her to the office, where she either slept or flipped through magazines for a few hours, before being driven home.

  When Lou came to visit her in New York, she tried to look at Helen the way Helen had looked at her as a young girl—without judgment. “She always wanted her makeup on, and although she let her aides do most of it, she put on her own lipstick! Not a single tremor in her hands,” Lou says. “We talked about the fact that neither of us drank coffee, and that’s why her hands were so steady.”

  Other people focused on Helen’s thinning hair. She had a bald spot in the back that she no longer bothered to cover with a wig, as she slipped further into dementia. The biggest shock of all was her weight. She had spent most of her adult life starving herself; she bragged to friends that she allowed herself to eat one cookie a year, on Christmas. Now she ate cookies all the time. She loved cookies: chocolate-chip cookies, sugar cookies. You name it, she ate it all.

  “A few years before she died, she was very heavy,” says former Cosmo photo director Laurence Mitchell. “When I called to say, ‘I want to come and see you,’ she would say, ‘Now I insist you bring me cookies.’ And she would really eat them! She wasn’t herself those last few years.”

  TOWARD THE END of her life, Helen looked for meaningful ways to allocate all that money she had been saving up for years, and she put much of it toward education. In addition to establishing an endowed fund at Smith College for students who return to school later in life, in 2012 Helen left $30 million to Stanford and Columbia—David’s alma maters—to create the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

  Shortly after visiting with the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, Helen died on August 13, 2012, following a brief stay at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia. She was ninety years old, “though parts of her were considerably younger,” read her obituary in the New York Times.

  In October, a who’s who of the city’s media elite—Hearst executives, magazine editors and writers, gossip columnists and the gossiped-about—attended her memorial at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, where waiters served pink champagne and warm chocolate-chip cookies to guests including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Brooke Shields. Helen never liked the idea of memorial services—she thought they were boring—but Hearst put on a great show, screening clips from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and bringing in Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara to sing a couple of Helen’s favorite show tunes on a stage bathed in pink light and decorated with hundreds of pink roses arranged into a perfect mound, like a scoop of ice cream.

  Amid the crowd were many people who knew Helen personally, and people who just felt like they did. People like Patricia Myles, a retired police officer from Virginia who first read Sex and the Single Girl when she was in college and credited Helen Gurley Brown for inspiring her to move to a big city, get her own apartment, and pursue her career. “In the back of my mind, Helen would say ‘Do it, do it!’ So I did,” Myles says. “She gave me the courage for so many things. She impacted my life something fierce.”

  One by one, friends and former colleagues took to the stage to say goodbye to the quintessential Cosmo Girl.

  Mayor Bloomberg credited Helen for changing the world, and changing it for women in particular.

  Barbara Walters told the crowd that Helen and David “never had children and never regretted it,” which may have been only partly true. “She believed she didn’t have to follow a traditional path, and Cosmopolitan was her child.”

  Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. remembered Helen’s odd habit of taking off one earring and resting it on the table at four-star restaurants—invariably the earring would disappear. “Can you see me on all fours under the table at La Caravelle?” he joked. Like several other speakers, he also noted Helen’s penny-pinching ways, telling the crowd that she “threw her nickels around like manhole covers.”

  It was a predictable theme, but others close to Helen felt that her fears about money weren’t funny at all. “It’s not a joke. It was kind of an obsession,” says Lou, who was also in the crowd that day.

  Lou couldn’t hear the speeches herself. She is mostly deaf now, a condition she has dealt with for years, but her family later told her that of all nine speakers, Liz Smith was the best. She was also kind, Lou adds: “She made me feel so great when she told me Helen talked about her ‘little cousin Norma Lou.’ She even said ‘Norma Lou,’ although I introduced myself as Lou, so I know it was true.”

  When it was her turn on the podium, Liz started with a question she had been trying to answer for nearly fifty years. “People have asked me since 1965, ‘What is, what was, Helen really like?’” Liz began. “Well, friends, I’ve been in entertainment for sixty-two years. I have known Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Madonna, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Walters. But what can one say about Helen being the person most people ask about?”

  Liz went on to share some funny, crowd-pleasing anecdotes about Brown’s lettuce-leaf diet and much larger appetite for sex, well into her older age. And yet she never answered the question, What was Helen really like? At least not publicly. “She may have thought she had it all, but I always thought she kind of led a spiritually empty life,” Smith says now. “I always considered her my intellectual inferior, if you can believe it, and she was one of the smartest, shrewdest people I’d ever known.”

  For all her confessions, Helen remained unknowable, even to those who knew her best. For all the work she did on her physical self in the name of self-improvement, toward the end of her life Helen wondered if maybe she hadn’t transformed herself so much at all. “I’m afraid we continue in life to be who we were,” she wrote in I’m Wild Again. “I started as insecure as a jelly doughnut—isn’t that how we all start?”

  AFTER FASHION WEEK in New York, Helen was cremated wearing her favorite perfume, a Pucci dress, and a purse containing a twenty-dollar bill. Many months later, in May 2013, she ended up right back where she began. In Arkansas with Mother and Mary. Only this time she was with David, too.

  After a lifetime of tunneling up, she chose a resting spot of quiet anonymity in her family’s cemetery, its iron gate decorated with an S for Sisco. It is as pretty a corner of the world as one could imagine, with wide-angle views of grazing cattle, distant mountains, and hay-strewn fields hemmed in by oaks, cedars, and black walnut trees. Near the cemetery is a small pond. It rarely freezes over, but in winter the grass turns gold, glinting in the sun. The relative who oversees the cemetery, and who dug Helen’s grave by hand, lives across the street.

  The day of Helen’s burial, it snowed in Arkansas—the first time in nearly seventy-five years. The weather was so bad, they had to set up a tent, and due to the icy roads, some
of the guests couldn’t make it, but those who did joined the small graveside service to say goodbye to a woman they had known, and hadn’t known at all, for many years. As promised, Lou designed Helen’s gravestone (in pinkish desert rose), choosing a fancy Cosmoesque pussycat for the front and inscribing the full names of David, Ira, Cleo, and Mary on the back. It stands beside David’s granite gravestone, featuring an Oscar, a nod to his storied and wildly successful producing career. (After Jaws, David went on to produce films such as Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, and A Few Good Men.) When Lou asked Helen for the names of David’s closest relatives to put on the back of his stone, Helen said she had trouble remembering them.

  Some relatives traveled to the cemetery from other towns around Arkansas. Also among the small group were a few Hearst executives from New York: Frank Bennack and his wife; Eve Burton; and the senior vice president and editorial director of Hearst Magazines International, Kim St. Clair Bodden. In death, Helen’s two lives finally merged together as everyone waited for the priest to start.

  Before Helen died, she and Lou talked about the possibility of her having a “somewhat religious service,” and that is what they had. Lou asked an Episcopal priest from her church to lead it, and after pouring her ashes from an urn, the Rev. Roger Joslin invited individuals to come forward and shovel the earth.

  “As far as I know, Helen Gurley Brown didn’t read a lot of what we call Holy Scripture. But if she had, I suspect that the ‘Song of Solomon,’ the Song of Songs, would have been her favorite book,” he began, reading aloud a few lines.

  Granted, as a little girl in Little Rock, Helen wouldn’t have heard a sermon on the Song of Solomon, with its racy imagery, he said. “God is not even mentioned, and the language is every bit as erotic as anything you would find on the pages of Cosmopolitan . . . But it can also be understood in a more literal way—as poetry, graphically depicting erotic love between a man and a woman.”

  Your lips are like a crimson thread,

  And your mouth is lovely. . . .

  Your two breasts are like two fawns,

  Twins of a gazelle that feed among the lilies.

  As the sun peeked out, the priest described a woman they all recognized—she was a different kind of preacher who once declared that “skinny is sacred,” but also had more meaningful truths to deliver about love, sexuality, and self-realization.

  “Helen’s fierce honesty, her willingness to explore and depict the sensual nature of modern love, has moved us all toward a deeper and more expansive conception of what is truly sacred,” he continued.

  Everyone knew that Helen hated it when people went on for too long, so he decided to end early.

  “I’ll let the Song of Solomon give voice to former lovers, to her departed husband, David, to friends and family and to all that loved her,” the priest said.

  You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride,

  You have ravished my heart

  With a glance of your eyes.

  It was a beautiful sermon that captured something important and essential about Helen Gurley Brown, but again, perhaps not the whole picture.

  Just out of frame was David Brown’s gravestone, which bears no mention of his mother, father, or son. There is only the inscription that Helen wrote for it—one cover line he didn’t approve, his final credit:

  MARRIED TO HELEN GURLEY BROWN

  When Helen died in 2012, about two and a half years after David, she was laid to rest beside him in rural Arkansas, where her mother and sister are also buried. (Photos courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich and the author.)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Not long after Helen Gurley Brown died in August 2012, I read her book Sex and the Single Girl for the first time. Like millions of women before me, I loved her funny, frank voice from the very first page, but I couldn’t help but note the irony of my own introduction to her groundbreaking book, fifty years after its publication.

  There I was, a new mom, pushing my baby jogging stroller along a wooded bike path, reading Helen’s snappy writing with great pleasure—my hot-pink paperback copy was splayed against the stroller’s hood. I wasn’t young, single, or dreaming of the big city—so I was hardly her target reader—but her advice has stuck with me nevertheless. If you haven’t read Sex and the Single Girl in a while (or if you’ve never read it, period), pick up a copy sometime. Sex is a surprisingly small part of it. At its heart, Sex and the Single Girl is really a guide to becoming an individual.

  In the five decades since it was written, a lot has changed. I never experienced a world in which a woman couldn’t lease an apartment on her own. I’ve never been discriminated against while applying for a job. I first want to thank my parents, Terry and Michelle Hauser, for raising me to believe that I could do anything I wanted, as long as I worked hard for it. We didn’t really talk about “feminism” in my house while I was growing up, but looking back, I now realize that we lived by its principles.

  I also want to thank my husband and best friend, Addison MacDonald, for the endless love, support, and patience—and the occasional wine run. As a working mom (to our son Marlow, whose sweetness and sense of humor are a daily tonic), I am grateful to have such a wonderful partner in life, and such awesome in-laws, Greg MacDonald and Wendy Soliday, whom I now look to as examples for how to raise a caring, kind son.

  Flannery O’Connor said a good man is hard to find (Helen would agree), but I’ve been fortunate. This book wouldn’t have happened without my longtime literary agent, Larry Weissman, who one day several years ago took me out for drinks and asked if I’d ever thought about writing a book. Over time, Larry has become a mentor and a friend, a someone so valuable to me that I don’t even know what to call him anymore—but “agent” doesn’t begin to cover it all. His wife, Sascha Alper, defies classification as well. A skilled chef and baker, she is also a talented writer and editor who read my manuscript early on, and gave me priceless advice and edits.

  My smart and seasoned editor, Claire Wachtel, helped me see the big picture. Shortly after I turned in my first draft, we met in a lunch booth at HarperCollins, and talked for hours about how Helen Gurley Brown tapped into the cultural zeitgeist of the 1960s. Hours turned into days when I returned to her office the next morning to share a carton of blueberries and talk some more. After our conversation, I expanded the focus of the book to include more about the era that Helen lived in—and helped define—and those passages were some of the most fun to research and report. I’m also thankful to the indefatigable associate editor Hannah Wood, my savvy and heroic guide through the production process, and researcher Rebekah Call, as well as HarperCollins deputy general counsel, Beth Silfin, for her cool, calm judgments.

  Since I first read Sex and the Single Girl on the back of a baby stroller, dozens of people have come forward to help me bring this book to life. I am grateful to Katherine Heintzelman, a close friend and an early reader; Julia Holmes, a copy editor and novelist who helped me fact-check the book; my film agent, Josie Freedman, who thought it would make a good movie; Barbara Hustedt Crook, Eileen Stukane, and Sheila Weller, all of whom made important introductions to sources; Sharon Harkey and Amber Rounds, who transcribed interviews; and of course the dozens and dozens of people who participated in those interviews, many of them writers and editors themselves whom I greatly admire.

  I must give special thanks to Lou Honderich, one of Helen’s last remaining relatives and a talented author in her own right. (Look up her young-adult novel, Ricki.) Thanks largely to Lou, Enter Helen doesn’t tell the same old “rags to riches” story that Helen told time and time again; she helped me see all the complexities of her beloved cousin as well as all the nuances of her family’s history.

  Lou also gave me wonderful photos of Helen and David Brown to use in the book. Thanks, as well, to legendary TV producer Robert Shanks, who shared his photos of Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s taken by his wife, Ann Zane Shanks, and to the photographer I. C. Rapoport, who also captured Helen on film duri
ng her early years at Cosmopolitan. Finally, thanks to Eve Rockett, the widow of Canadian photographer Paul Rockett, who took the cover photo of Helen, as well as to GNP Crescendo Records, at gnpcrescendo.com, who provided the high-resolution image.

  Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge Smith College, and the special collections staff in particular. What an education I have gotten here—and for free! My heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth Myers, Maida Goodwin, Karen Kukil, Joyce Follet, Amy Hague, Kelly Anderson, Kathleen Banks Nutter, Nanci Young, Kate Sumner, Margaret Jessup, and Nichole Calero. The women’s archives that are housed here are world-renowned, and the women who work here are world-class.

  NOTES

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

  Dating from 1938 to 2001, the Helen Gurley Brown Papers are housed at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and will hereafter be referred to as HGB Papers, SSC. The SSC also houses the Gloria Steinem Papers and the Ms. Magazine Records, as well as back issues of Cosmopolitan, Ms., Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal.

  A note on the notes that follow: The author re-created scenes based on the recollections of interview sources as well as material found in articles and other documents, including the writings of Helen Gurley Brown. Whenever Helen’s inner thoughts are expressed, they are based on dialogue or descriptions from her own notes, letters, journals, columns, memoirs, etc., as cited.