Enter Helen (15 page)

Helen would tell the story of this night countless times over the years. Like her story about how she wept in front of the Waldorf (“I don't want to be a magazine editor!”), it became a part
of her repertoire of charming, comical little scenes in the madcap movie of her life. She cast herself as the smart but sometimes silly working girl who was always getting in over her head, and David as the charming gentleman who was always bailing her out.

Frequently, she
was
in over her head—and David did bail her out—but as with some of her other stories, the details of this tale changed slightly with each telling, and people who knew Helen well cast doubt on such scenes. She wouldn't have crawled under her desk or gotten down on the floor (unless she was doing exercises).

“That wasn't her,” says Walter Meade (he now goes by Walker Meade), who worked with Helen for many years, first as an articles editor and later as a managing editor, her second in command. “She may have
felt
like she was threatened, and that's how she rendered it, but she would never have done that.”

It's more likely that she would have had a Joan Crawford moment, standing by a window and
wanting
to curl into a little ball at the thought of what lay ahead. Of course, that's not nearly as fun to imagine. As Meade puts it:
“When it seems to you as though she's being a storyteller, she is.”

“
I hope to have a magazine that reflects life as it is lived, and that does indeed include sex. But nothing will be dragged in. It'll just come along naturally.”

—Helen Gurley Brown in
Newsweek
, March 29, 1965

A
former secretary herself, Helen couldn't believe the incompetence of a couple of the assistants who worked for her. Her own secretary didn't take dictation, at least not up to snuff. Occasionally Helen got so swamped she borrowed another editor's assistant to do it, paying her extra. Sometimes after she finished dictating, Helen passed by the girl's desk and saw all of her letters stamped and neatly stacked on a ledge, as if waiting for an invisible wind to carry them to their destinations.
Apparently mailroom runs were beneath her.

It wasn't just that secretary. Half of
Cosmopolitan
's staff seemed to be against her. Some people had been there for decades, and they resented the sudden change of guard, as Helen's assistant Robin explained to her one day.

“
Mrs. Brown,” Robin said, “it just seems to me that it would have been more fair if they'd brought you in as a managing editor so everybody could get used to the idea—and
then
you took over.”

Helen looked at the pretty girl standing before her and bit her tongue. Robin was only trying to help, to tell her in the
nicest
possible way that people thought she didn't belong here, and they wanted her out.

At some point every day, Helen picked up the phone and called David, anxious to talk, and she was particularly desperate on the day her executive editor, Betty Hannah Hoffman, quit. It was only Helen's first week as editor-in-chief, and suddenly she was left without a second in command. She needed to find a replacement, fast. She had told the staff that she would get back to them on important decisions, so they expected answers.

David always came to the rescue. Early on, he gave her advice about everything from budgeting to personnel issues, and he committed to reading all of
Cosmopolitan
's fiction. Even though she had a fiction editor, William Carrington Guy—better known as Bill—David was ultimately the one who decided which short stories to snatch up and which novels to excerpt. He also reviewed articles. A few times when she was really desperate, David met Helen at work in the middle of the day so that they could hail a cab together and just drive around Central Park. As they drove past still-bare cherry and dogwood trees and the first of the ice-cream vendors with their yellow-canopied carts, he told her what material to buy, what not to buy, what to edit, and what to throw out.

After work the conversation continued at their apartment. In those chilly evenings of early spring, Helen brought home as many articles and stories as she could possibly stuff into her briefcase, as well as the production schedule. She read manuscripts at the office, and in bed, and by the end of her first week she had a clearer sense of the material she could salvage and what she still needed to assign. Maybe it was because she was a writer herself, but she got a real rush out of assigning stories to other writers and promising big money—$1,000 to $1,500 for a major piece.

For the July issue, she asked Doris Lilly, the society columnist and author of
How to Marry a Millionaire
, to update her strategy on winning a rich man in an article offering concrete tips. Ever aware of the marketing angle, she also slated a fashion feature all about the clothing brand Jax, essentially creating a giant advertisement disguised as a trend story.

Helen wanted the pictures to be sexy, and she got what she wanted from the artist and photographer J. Frederick Smith, whose illustrations of pert-breasted pinup girls she had clipped from the pages of
Esquire
as a younger woman. For his first
Cosmopolitan
assignment under Helen, he photographed models who personified her idea of the Jax girl: slender and small-waisted with “
a bosom she doesn't make much of a fuss about but everybody else does,” as the display copy read.

It was while going through Smith's images from the Jax shoot with the fashion editor Harriet La Barre that Helen spotted The Girl: a honey-blond bursting out of her red-and-white gingham cotton dress (legend has it that the photographer turned the dress backward to show off her cleavage), her substantial breasts looking like the main dish on a picnic table. Staring straight at the camera with bedroom eyes and pale lips parted just enough to reveal her top teeth, she looks like she was caught by surprise.

“
What's this one?” Helen asked when she saw her.

“Oh, that's just one of the rejects,” Harriet said.

“That's
it
,” Helen said.

“That's what?”

“That's the cover,” Helen said.

“You're kidding,” Harriet said. “My God, the bust is all hanging out.”

Helen smiled to herself. “What better thing could a bust do?”

H
ER NAME WAS
Renata. Renata Boeck, when she was in the tabloids, but she had decided to not use her last name as a model since no one could pronounce it anyway. She was among the first German models to make it big in America, part of what
Life
magazine dubbed “The Fraulein Fad.” She was one of the first models to become known by her given name alone, years before Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort became, simply, Veruschka. And she was the first
Cosmo
cover girl under Helen Gurley Brown.

The truth is, Renata never really cared about modeling. Growing up in Hamburg, she considered it to be low-class. Instead, right after high school, she became a stewardess for a charter airline, a calling that eventually led her to America, where she intended to start a job with another airline, Flying Tigers, in San Francisco. The plan was to take a ship from Hamburg to New York, where she would stay for the week at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, before flying to San Francisco, but she never made it that far. In March 1961, her ship docked in Manhattan. Renata disembarked, and a cluster of photographers from various daily newspapers around the city spotted her right away. “
They were looking for someone famous. There was nobody famous, so they all zoomed in on me,” Boeck says. “A few hours later, in three papers, I was on the front cover. It was really weird. I couldn't believe it. I still don't!”

Modeling agencies courted her, and movie moguls called her. Famous men on both coasts made a point of meeting her. She began seeing the producer Robert Evans, and after they broke up, she started going out with singer Eddie Fisher, who was in the midst of a divorce from Elizabeth Taylor. She was also spotted around town with Warren Beatty, who once brought her to a dinner with the Kennedys. Everyone noticed Renata, including “Jack,” who excused himself from the table and said goodbye.
“Ten minutes
later, I got a call,” Boeck says. “I went to the phone, and that's when he said, ‘Hello, this is Jack Kennedy.' He wanted me to leave the party and meet him. I said, ‘I'm here with Warren, I couldn't possibly!' He was married. I said that to him, too. I wouldn't see a married man, no matter what he was the president of.”

In 1964 Renata became one of photographer Slim Aarons's “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places,” when he shot her wearing a monocle and reading the paper in bed at the Regency Hotel, a photograph he titled
Monocled Miss
.

By 1965, Renata was a Girl of the Moment in a decade full of them—Twiggy with her little boy's body and pixie haircut, Jean Shrimpton with her cute snub nose and blue eyes as big as Tiffany's boxes—but she stood out among the rest. She was a solid C-cup, so busty that Eileen Ford used to tell her to strap her breasts down. Fashion editors wanted flat-chested girls, but Helen wasn't a fashion editor, and she didn't really care about clothes. She cared about what was underneath them.

“
She wanted cleavage, and she told me that I was the sexiest of all,” Boeck says. “I was the only one with breasts in those days. That's why Helen Gurley Brown chose me.”

W
ITH HER COVER
girl chosen, Helen could zero in on putting together the rest of the issue. She eventually dumped dozens of articles that just wouldn't fit the new format, but she decided to snatch a piece about estrogen therapy that had been commissioned for an earlier issue and slate it for July.

In the piece, the writer, Lin Root, focused on the work of a New York City gynecologist, Robert A. Wilson, who was about to release what would become a bestselling book,
Feminine Forever
, in which he pushed hormone therapy as a natural cure-all for menopausal women. (“
It is the case of the untreated woman—the
prematurely aging castrate—that is unnatural,” he claimed.) The estrogen pill, Premarin, had been around since 1942, but Wilson popularized the idea that hormone therapy could be a continuous, lifelong treatment for women of all ages, “
from puberty to the grave.” If taken regularly, he promised, estrogen would make the average woman feel younger, look more beautiful, and take greater pleasure in the act of sex—no matter what her age.

Now
that
was information worth sharing with
Cosmopolitan
readers—and Helen intended to. She rewrote the article, describing the “femininity index” that Wilson had devised with a colleague to measure a woman's level of estrogen, and explaining exactly what this “
honey of a hormone” could do: In addition to ending period pain and the worst effects of menopause, it could act as a contraceptive or increase a woman's chances of getting pregnant, all depending on how and when it was used. Perhaps best of all, the women who used it found that they had gotten their youthful glows, figures, and sex drives back. “
My skin is fresher, my hair has more shine; the pill makes me feel and look more attractive!” one excited pill-popper shared.

To this day, a misunderstanding about this article persists, and Helen is applauded for publishing a protofeminist piece about “the Pill,” one of the first to run in a mainstream women's magazine. But read past the cutesy headline “Oh What a Lovely Pill!” and you'll find that the story itself doesn't promote sexual freedom so much as it is sells the scary and sexist idea that hormone therapy is a magic bullet for any woman wanting to feel “forever feminine”—not old and dried up like the “castrate” Wilson later described in his book.

As it turned out, many of the millions of women who took “the youth pill” after reading about it would be forever damaged;
years later, studies showed that some hormone replacement drugs
increased the risk of cancer and strokes. It's possible that Helen later regretted the role she played in spreading the gospel of hormone therapy, that she would have scrapped the story altogether if she had known about the long-term effects sooner. “
I mainlined Premarin for years because I wanted to stay sexy and juicy and young,” she told
New York
magazine in 2002, fifteen years after being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of sixty-five. “If not for all those hormones, maybe this wouldn't have happened to me.”

F
ALSEHOODS AND PSEUDOSCIENCE
aside, “Oh What a Lovely Pill!” encapsulated Helen's vision for the new
Cosmopolitan
as a magazine that talked about sex openly and frankly.
Above all, she wanted
Cosmopolitan
to feel personal, a magazine edited for a specific woman by a specific woman—much like a frank and sophisticated older sister. For the magazine to succeed, it was crucial to communicate this vision to her staff, and in the weeks and months ahead she would have more success with some of her editors than others.
In a rush to fill the position of managing editor, she offered the job to the fashion editor, Harriet La Barre, who turned it down. The fiction editor, Bill Guy, rejected it next. Who was left? Just
Cosmopolitan
's books editor, George Walsh, whom Atherton had planned to let go. A Catholic family man with the lean physique of a basketball player and the serious mind of an academic, Walsh brought considerable gravitas to the magazine, but he was hardly an ideal fit for the new
Cosmopolitan
, and over time, Helen would come to resent how he made her feel intellectually inferior.

In addition to Walsh,
several other editors had worked at the magazine for years, and she knew they knew more than she did, at least when it came to the technicalities of putting out a magazine. There were the two Tonys:
Cosmopolitan
's production manager,
Anthony Guzzardo, had been at the magazine for more than three decades, while
Cosmopolitan
's Sicilian art director, Anthony C. La Sala, was approaching two, having started as a paste-up assistant. La Sala would be Helen's guide through the portfolios of fashion photographers, designers, and cartoonists. He would communicate her preferences back to contributors: more color, humor, bosoms, and depictions of men and women together. No pictures of kids. (“
For information on children,” Helen told
Writer's Digest
the following year, “read Doctor Spock.”)

Harriet La Barre, soon to be listed as fashion
and
features editor on the masthead, would help show Helen around the editorial side of the operation. A stylish, slender woman who was as hardworking as she was tightly wound (
Helen used to call her “a white-knuckle girl”), Harriet had been at
Cosmopolitan
for more than a dozen years, covering a range of subjects including beauty and travel. Going forward, Helen would make sure that Harriet geared travel articles toward the single girl on a budget, but not
too
small a budget. “
Don't come at me with the inexpensive, off-season vacation story,” Harriet would tell potential freelancers. “Sure there are a lot of them, but who's there? We like to talk about places where women can meet men.”