In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  THE EVA PERÓN FOUNDATION grew organically from Eva’s charitable office hours. By the spring of 1948, hundreds of people would arrive every day at dawn to stand in line to see Evita. The supplicants would weep with gratitude. If they could write, they wrote thank-you notes.*4 Some would reappear at her office with goods from their factories: sugar, pasta, bread, shoes. These would be repackaged by Evita’s growing staff, and redistributed.

  Official photographers were now on hand for Eva’s office hours. She arrived in her finery and the klieg lights whoomped on as though she were attending a Hollywood premiere. She got into the kissing and hugging in a way that made her seem Christlike. She was especially eager to dote upon those who were suffering from leprosy and various forms of venereal disease. Once, she kissed a man with a face ravaged from late-stage syphilis; when a maid stepped forward to wipe her face with a bit of alcohol, Evita took the jar and hurled it against the wall. The Catholics longed to have her beatified.

  Even the oligarchy (sidelined politically, but still very rich), who otherwise considered Eva vulgar and cheap, got into the swing of donating goods and services to the foundation. They also had no choice, of course. Once Eva ordered a pharmaceutical company to cough up some much needed vaccines for the poor. When the anti-Perónist CEO refused, the factory’s electricity was shut off; after a week or so—with refrigerated medicines going bad in the Argentine heat—there was a pop inspection. The company was shut down and the CEO forced to flee to Uruguay.

  By 1949, pretty much the entire Argentine economy circulated through Evita’s foundation. She was 30 years old. But just when the whole deal began to seem like an outgrowth of her megalomania, she would do something smart and constructive—for example, opening new nursing schools and public hospitals.

  Good medical care was available only to people who could pay for it, and Eva’s foundation built 12 excellent public hospitals for the poor. Each facility was large and clean, with marble floors, sweeping staircases, and the latest medical equipment imported from Europe and the United States. She could have used her money more wisely—built twice as many hospitals with fewer bells and whistles—but she wanted to make a statement: Everyone deserves good health care. Naturally, she didn’t want a single soul to forget who their benefactors were. Paintings of Jesus and Juan Perón hung on the walls, and her initials, EP, were carved into every bed frame.

  IRONICALLY, you know who had really lousy health care? Eva Perón.

  In 1950, during a ceremony celebrating the taxi drivers’ union, she fainted. The press reported she’d undergone an emergency appendectomy. The doctor who performed the surgery diagnosed some other lady parts trouble, but Eva refused to hear of it and sent him away. No one could make her listen. She continued her workaholic ways, sleeping two or three hours a night, eating little. She lost weight and continued to suffer abdominal pains. More doctors were called, but none of them could bring themselves to give her anything close to bad news. Eventually, she underwent a hysterectomy*5 (although she was told it was just a “necessary surgery”). No one ever told her she had cancer.

  Accounts differ as to whether Eva died of uterine or cervical cancer. Same goes for Perón’s first wife, Aurelia. The discrepancy isn’t clear. In any case, the current thinking is that both women died of cervical cancer, caused by an aggressive strain of HPV carried by Juan.

  Perón, it seems, was a common whore.

  BY 1951, IT WAS CLEAR that Evita—now 32—was failing. She continued appearing in public, and continued giving increasingly crazy and paranoid speeches. Argentines tend not to have the fear of death that we Anglos do. Or, rather, the fear of watching someone die.

  On August 22, Evita stood before her countrymen and -women and gave a rambling speech on her usual topic, the greatness of her husband. She exhorted people to embrace fanaticism, to crush their enemies, to be soldiers for Perón. Another presidential election had been scheduled for June 4 of the coming year—10 months away. Evita’s followers had been pressing for a Perón-Perón ticket. La Señora, Our Lady of Hope, would be vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency!*6 The crowd roared that she should accept the nomination anyway, but she dithered and vague-talked. She weighed less than 90 pounds and, as someone recalled, was “as green as spinach.” Her hundreds of thousands of supporters saw with their own eyes that she was not long for this world. A few days later, she declined the nomination.

  Evita was bedridden when it came time for her to cast her vote for Perón. A ballot box was brought to her bedside, and when the election officials emerged from the residence, women who’d been praying outside rushed to kiss the box that held her vote.

  He won, handily. She insisted on participating in the inaugural parade, and a special wire and plaster contraption was made to hold her up in the convertible in which she and Juan stood and waved. Even though she had no idea what was wrong with her, and didn’t want to know, she knew false hope when she heard it. In the end, a sort of truth prevailed, and she sent away the devoted minions who offered her flattery.

  After she died, on July 26, 1952, not a single flower could be found in the entire city of Buenos Aires. They were all piled in great towering stacks outside the ministry where Evita had dispensed her favors.

  AFTER SHE WAS GONE, the spell Eva had cast was broken. The economy hit the skids. There had been a pair of bad harvests. The European countries that had been decimated by World War II were starting to regain their footing. Perón lost his focus. He tried to continue the daily giving on behalf of the foundation but couldn’t summon any interest. On special occasions, he took to broadcasting her speeches instead of giving his own. Formerly so dashing and matinee idol–like, he got fat. He started riding a scooter around town in a Windbreaker. Once he was seen for who he truly was—a corrupt old autocrat like the rest of them—it was only a matter of time (three years, to be exact) before he found himself in exile.

  MY PERSONAL THEORY ABOUT the rise of the cult of Evita is that macho Argentina was simply starved for the feminine. Evita brought glamour, generosity, beauty, and a spirit of vive la différence to public life. In many ways Juan Perón was her Trojan horse. By standing up day after day and proclaiming her devotion to her husband, she could get away with saying and doing pretty much anything she wanted. And in a country where women were viewed as chattel, her mere insistence on being seen, heard, and respected made her extraordinarily difficult. People couldn’t look away—nor could they resist her exotic, female charm.

  *1There were many complex political reasons, aside from the Evita business. People were getting sick of the pro-fascist military in general. Argentina, long proud of its neutrality, was pressured—largely by the United States—into supporting the Allies. Every time they won a battle or beat back the Axis, the oligarchy and politically savvy upper-middle-class citizens celebrated it as a symbolic victory against their own Nazi-positive regime.

  *2Except, you know, all the common whore stuff.

  *3This was also a smart business move, because pictures of Evita sold papers; on the nights she wore a new dress to some gala, the housewives of Buenos Aires would buy out the run.

  *4Which is more than you can say for the average American high school student upon receiving a birthday card from grandma containing a twenty.

  *5So completely was she kept in the dark about her situation that her surgery was performed by an oncologic surgeon flown in from Memorial Sloan Kettering. She never met him. He was spirited in and out, while she was still under anesthesia.

  *6Perón’s third wife, Isabel, would be elected vice president. After his death, she served as president from July 1, 1974, to March 24, 1976. She was the first female president in the world. This should feel like good news, but she presided over a particularly horrific era of Argentine history.

  CHAPTER 12

  HELEN GURLEY BROWN

  Relentless

  HELEN GURLEY WAS A 36-year-old
copywriter at L.A. advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding when she traded in her rickety Chevy for a car that would change her life. Frugal by design and necessity, she’d intended to spring for a slightly newer, yet still used, Thunderbird. Instead, she glimpsed a gray Mercedes 190 SL—a truly elegant ride. On a whim, she plopped down $5,000 in cash ($42,505.63 in 2017 dollars) and drove the car off the lot. She was equal parts horrified to have spent so much money and gratified because she felt she deserved it—a radical notion for a woman in 1958.

  A few months later, when Helen met her future spouse, twice-divorced film producer David Brown, the sight of her sliding into that gray Mercedes would confirm his belief that she was different from the silly starlets, models, and gold diggers he’d been dating. He found Helen’s ability to save, then spend on a fine car, to be intoxicating.

  They married in 1959—and that’s when Helen Gurley Brown, at the ripe old age of 37, began her singular career as writer, magazine editor, and lifelong advocate for single girls. David Brown had a background in publishing, and with his encouragement Helen wrote the groundbreaking best seller Sex and the Single Girl. Her message that women could (and should!) enjoy the same things in life as men—sexual freedom, love, and money—is unremarkable now.*1 But in 1962 it was revolutionary. Three years later, at the age of 42—with not a single day of magazine experience—Helen became the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, a job she would hold for the next 32 years.

  Since her first issue in July 1965, Cosmo has been almost exactly the same, publishing dizzily upbeat articles on sex, love, work, men, and money for independent working women. For many years it was one of the most profitable magazines in America, and even after Helen was forced to retire in 1997, her successors were clever enough to retain her seemingly magical formula.

  I have always admired Helen’s ambition, tenacity, vision, and stubborn adherence to a philosophy of women’s liberation that began to sound a little daft as the decades rolled by. She was the first (and pretty much only) voice advocating for the so-called single working girl in the postwar dark ages of the late 1950s and early ’60s—a time when every female over the age of 21 who wasn’t married or engaged to be married, and who couldn’t afford to enroll in college to pursue a so-called MRS degree, was looked upon as pitiful.

  But Helen Gurley embraced her pink-collar, working-girl life, logging an impressive 17 secretarial and two copyediting jobs. She supported herself, made a home for herself, and had a lot of steamy affairs (highlights included brief canoodles with crooner Rudy Vallée, prizefighter Jack Dempsey, the CEO of Revlon, a French painter, and a Swiss skier). A high school–educated, self-made woman who’d been born without beauty—then as now the coin of the realm—she nevertheless built a full life. By all rights she should have been happy to settle for any man who would have her. Instead, she messed around and settled down only when she was ready—and in so doing, inspired women of modest means to embrace their freedom and love their lives just as they were.

  But just when I begin to feel all you go girl! about Helen, reveling in her self-made womanhood, I recall my first experience reading Cosmopolitan. I was babysitting three boys in the neighborhood sometime in the early 1970s. I was in junior high, wearing (as I did that entire summer) a pair of brown cord cutoffs that had faded to a soft tobacco color and an oversize baby blue T-shirt from Oak St. Surf Shop in Laguna Beach.

  I came upon the issue in a pile of magazines atop the toilet tank in the master bath. There was a cleavage-y lady on the cover with quotes marching down the page on either side of her. The only memorable offering was something about the “unexpected” joys of taking a Chinese lover. I could barely coax Billy Mohr into holding my hand after band practice, much less benefit from a story about “taking” a lover of any ethnicity. Inside, I eagerly turned to the fashion horoscope. As a Pisces, I was advised to wear diaphanous caftans in shades of aqua, and strappy, jeweled sandals to make the men in my life go mad with desire.

  I burst out laughing. Pretty much the same response when I flip through an issue of Cosmo today.

  HELEN GURLEY was born in tiny Green Forest, Arkansas, in 1922. As an adult she would claim to come from poor hillbilly stock, but her father, Ira, was an attorney who served in the Arkansas state legislature. He was one of those dashing extroverts who made life seem more exciting the moment he walked into the room. Not so her mother, Cleo Gurley, who was quiet and “nice” and came from a good family. She was average in all ways, and therefore grateful to have landed a suitable husband. In truth, she felt more passion for her job—Cleo considered teaching her calling—which Ira insisted she quit, as all good wives did in those days. Cleo went on to have a difficult experience giving birth to both Helen and her older sister, Mary. When Helen was an adult, she remembered her mother saying that even though she loved her daughters, having babies wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  The family had moved to Little Rock by the time the Great Depression hit in 1929. Ira managed to hold on to most of the family savings, as well as his good job at the State Game and Fish Commission. They were safely moored in the middle class until Helen was 10, when her father was killed in a freak elevator accident. Rumors swirled that he had been so intent on catching a ride up with a pretty woman that he didn’t see the closing doors and was caught between the shaft wall and the moving car.

  Ira had been a well-loved man about town. The newspapers ran front-page stories reporting his shocking death and honoring his achievements. Helen was confused by the commingling of grief and giddiness she experienced during her family’s 15 minutes in the spotlight. She felt, for a moment, celebrated—just like the movie stars she read about in Silver Screen.

  The Gurleys’ fortune would change, but not overnight. There had been a bit of savings, and Cleo had received some compensation for her loss from the state of Arkansas. Never an enthusiastic mother, her solution for raising her now fatherless daughters involved allowing them unlimited sweets, movie magazines, and tickets to the weekly double feature. Even as a young teenager, Helen was captivated by money, fame, glitz, and glamour. Cleo was an excellent seamstress, and after hearing her daughter rave about the clothes in It Happened One Night, she whipped up a copy of Claudette Colbert’s swanky satin wedding dress.

  In 1937, when Helen was 15 and Mary was 19, Cleo moved the family to Los Angeles. The month after they settled in, Mary came down with what was thought to be the common flu. She attributed her stiff neck, arms, and legs to the cheap mattress on the twin bed in the room she shared with Helen. At the time, polio was one of the most feared infectious diseases in the nation, causing permanent paralysis and sometimes death—and Mary had contracted polio.*2 Although Helen and her sister shared a small bedroom and a toothbrush glass in the bathroom, the disease passed Helen by. For the rest of her life, Mary would be in a wheelchair, and Helen would feel equal parts relief and guilt that she had not been stricken as well.

  HELEN WOULD GO ON to coin the term “mouseburger” to describe the kind of woman she believed herself to be: dull, plain, and lacking in native feminine charm. I suppose it was her spunky spin on “mousy”—a perfectly good word that unlike “mouseburger” does not conjure up a meat patty made of mice, served on a sesame seed bun.

  Aside from being a little plain and thin as a stick insect, Helen was not mousy, but a dynamo. In high school she was an “apple polisher”: ambitious, driven, determinedly cheerful, a proto-Tracy Flick. She was the kind of overachieving girl who had nicknames (Guppy and Good Time). She was the class valedictorian, and if anyone was custom-built for a successful college experience, it was her. But the tuition was simply too expensive. After a semester at Texas State College for Women, she returned home to L.A., where she enrolled in the much less expensive Woodbury Business College. She was 18, and paid for her own tuition with her first job, at KHJ radio station.

  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, few things were more poignant than a woman forced to work for a
living. A few years earlier, during World War II, it was a different story. The government—desperate for humans with two arms, two legs, a working heart, and a brain—had impressed upon women that it was their patriotic duty to work. Rosie the Riveter, with her saucy red polka-dot bandanna and arched eyebrow, was created to inspire women to join the armed forces and step into the industrial jobs vacated by men who’d enlisted.

  Suddenly, women were needed. They were busy, they were contributing, and they dug it. Then the war ended, and those who were married were released from duty first—presumably so they could race home to wash the curtains, vacuum the carpet, and make a quick pot roast in preparation for their returning husbands. Single women working stateside were fired to open up jobs for returning soldiers; if they were lucky, they would step away from their workstation and straight into the arms of a future fiancé, who would put a ring on it, quick.

  After the war, if you were over the age of 22 and you weren’t married or engaged to be married, you were considered an old maid. You were probably living at home and working in one of the lady-approved jobs—teacher, nurse, secretary—while looking forward to a life of caring for aged parents and being a beloved auntie. Maybe you were still a virgin, saving your virtue for the husband who would give your life meaning, but who’d failed to materialize as yet.

  Helen Gurley said fuck that.

  Literally, she probably said that, for she was known for her salty language.

  SOMETIMES A WOMAN IS considered difficult simply by pointing out the obvious; sometimes it’s for drawing attention to something people suspect but wish to ignore. Helen’s practical nature, rooted in her ability to both recognize a good opportunity and trust her gut, allowed her to see the potential in situations others might have remained blind to, and act on them.