Enter Helen (17 page)

“
What was so marvelous about Helen is that she was entirely self-created. She invented herself, and then spread the message. What I love about those early years is that she never published anything she didn't believe in. She was like Billy Graham. This was her religion.”

—Lyn Tornabene

T
he week the July issue was scheduled to hit stands, an affable reporter named Dick Schaap sat across from Helen and asked what she made of the fact that some people still resented her sudden ascent to editor of
Cosmopolitan
, considering her lack of experience.

“
You don't just fall into a job like this,” Helen said silkily, explaining how she worked her tail off at the ad agency during the week, while writing
Sex and the Single Girl
on weekends. “It was a best seller. It may not be literature, but it certainly didn't
bore
anybody to death. I got into scoring position so I could get into the magazine. I possibly will fall on my face and the minute I do they will have a new editor.”

Schaap scribbled down her response. A reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune
, he was more accustomed to profiling athletes—five years before, he interviewed a young Cassius Clay before Clay became the heavyweight champion of the world. Helen Gurley Brown wasn't typical as an interview subject, and not just because Schaap frequently covered sports. She was different even among her kind.

In between glances at the July cover girl, a juicy-looking blonde in a low-cut Jax dress, the sportswriter studied the new editor. She wore a light blue suit by Marquise and white mesh stockings. A demure black bow was affixed to her hair. As Schaap asked about her plans for the new
Cosmopolitan
, Helen lounged on her sofa, occasionally stretching her arms like a cat rousing from a nap. “
She did not look like most editors I have seen,” Schaap later observed. “She did not act like most editors I have seen.”

That Helen Gurley Brown was not like any other editor—any other boss, really—seemed to be the consensus among the staffers and freelancers who found themselves in her office, but they still didn't know
what
to make of her. “
I always thought I was smarter than she was,” says Liz Smith, “but I found out later she was smarter than I was.”

Helen during her first year as editor, 1965. (
Copyright © I. C. Rapoport.
)

Despite
Cosmopolitan
's abysmal circulation figures in recent months, editors still took pride in the magazine's rich history as a forum for intellectual thought—“
the magazine for people who can read,” as David Brown once nicknamed it. Suddenly Helen seemed to be editing the magazine for people who were reading-
impaired
. She wanted articles to be “baby simple” with no unnecessary big words. “
We don't want very many cosmic pieces—about space, war on poverty, civil rights, etc., etc., but will leave those to more serious general magazines,” Helen told
The Writer
. She wanted fun pieces, nothing too heavy. Most important, she wanted her girls to feel happier after reading an issue of
Cosmopolitan
. Articles needed to be optimistic and upbeat. That meant no bad reviews of books, records, and movies, but especially movies. (She was married to a movie producer, after all.)

Helen's rules drove Liz Smith crazy. Whatever chance she once had to become a respected movie critic, Helen sabotaged: What use was a critic who couldn't write an unkind word? “
You are censoring me!” Liz yelled. Helen dealt with Liz the way she had learned to deal with men: She listened to her, fussed over her, petted her ego, and eventually cajoled her into doing things her way. As for a certain young movie critic whom Liz had been mentoring, he clashed with Helen even more.

A few months earlier, Liz found in her mail an unsolicited review of
Lilith
, starring Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, and Peter Fonda.
The writer of the review was a dark-haired, long-lashed, and dimpled twentysomething named Rex Reed. Having come to New York after college at Louisiana State University, Rex was working as a press agent at a public relations office when he really wanted to spend his time watching movies. He hadn't expected much to come of his submission to the entertainment editor at
Cosmopolitan
, but Liz was impressed. As it happened, he had been
born in Fort Worth, her hometown, and she liked the idea of having another southerner around.

A few days later, Liz called Rex to say that
Cosmopolitan
's editor-in-chief, Robert Atherton, wanted to meet with him. Not only did Atherton want to publish his review of
Lilith
for a nice sum of fifty dollars—his first byline in a national magazine—he wanted Rex to be
Cosmopolitan
's new movie critic. Rex was ecstatic.

And then Atherton was out, and Helen Gurley Brown was in. Even if Helen hadn't been familiarizing herself with old issues of
Cosmopolitan
all along, she certainly would have read Reed's negative review of
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
, starring Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau, in the June issue. “
Car lovers will drool over
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
. Movie buffs, however, may appraise it as a motorless vehicle for some 24-karat stars who find themselves hijacked in chromium-plated material,” he had written.

When Helen called Rex in for a meeting, he found the new editor-in-chief sitting on top of her desk wearing a skirt so short it showed off the tops of her thighs, netted in Bonnie Doon stockings. He wasn't sure how old she was, but too old to be dressing like
that
—and those fake eyelashes and that false hair! Was she wearing a wig? It was only noon! He was interrupting her lunch, in fact—he noticed a little container of yogurt next to a perfectly sculpted salmon-colored rose.

“My dear,” Helen said after they exchanged hellos, “
you write pippy-poo copy. I'm afraid I can't use you because you're upsetting my girls.”

What?
Rex had no idea what “pippy-poo” meant. And which girls was she talking about, exactly? He didn't know about the legions of young women from the middle of the country who wrote to Helen looking for advice on what to wear on a first date or on a
first job interview. He didn't worry himself over their menstrual cramps and acne scars, their broken hearts and battered egos—but Helen did, and she felt that Rex's opinions were too critical for the new, upbeat, optimistic
Cosmopolitan
.

“My girls have never heard of Mike Nichols,” she explained. “They don't want opinion. They just want to know a good movie to go to on a Saturday night at the drive-in.”

“How do you know such a girl exists?” Rex asked.

“
Because, my dear,” Helen cooed, “I
was
that girl.”

“
Have
you
a rotten family, bad health, nowhere looks, serious money problems, a minority background, nobody to help you? Early-in-life problems can be the yeast that makes you rise into
bread
!”

—Helen Gurley Brown,
Having It All
, 1982

H
elen often told the press that, in editing
Cosmopolitan
, she was essentially aiming the magazine at the girl she was twenty years before, “
the girl with her nose pressed against the glass.” In 1965, she was forty-three, and in many ways a very different woman from the person she was at twenty-three, when she was still working her way through secretarial jobs. But to understand who she was then, you have to go back even further, back to her childhood in Arkansas.

You have to start in Carroll County, in the northwestern part of the state, near a town called Blue Eye (current population 30)—not to be confused with Blue Eye, Missouri (pop. 167). Head south from the Missouri border on AR 21, toward a town called Berryville, and take in the sights along the way. Go past Snake World, a roadside “attraction” featuring a collection of seventy-some snakes, including rattlesnakes and pythons, kept inside one man's trailer, along with their prey. To the west is Eureka Springs, an artsy hippie town that's also known for its sixty-seven-foot statue, Christ of the Ozarks—worth a visit,
maybe another time. Instead head east on U.S. 62, passing the occasional Confederate flag and signs for livestock auctions, Home Style Cookin', and Cowboy Church, which hosts “Come as You Are” services every Sunday, until you reach the center of a small town called Green Forest.

Welcome to the birthplace of Helen Gurley Brown. (Not a fact that the town chooses to advertise, by the way.) These days, Green Forest is better known for chicken—it's home to a Tyson poultry processing plant and a large Hispanic population. Most people who would have known the Gurley family when they lived here in the early 1920s are no longer alive, and the few who remain don't have much to say. At Mercy Thrift Shop, near a flower and gift store on Main Street, the white-haired woman behind the register looks as though she has been sitting in the same chair for decades. If anyone is still around who knows about Helen Gurley Brown's connection to this place, she would be a likely candidate, but she is impassive. Either she doesn't remember the Gurley name, or she doesn't care to.

Strolling through the public square—past brick buildings blanched by the sun, boarded-up windows, and the occasional empty storefront—you have to squint and imagine a time when Main Street was in its prime, when people rode horses into town. This was the Green Forest where Helen Gurley Brown was born on February 18, 1922, when some of her more affluent relatives owned a good portion of Main Street, including the Mercantile, the dry-goods store in town.

Helen described her family as hillbilly and poor, but her parents were hardly uneducated (her father, Ira, had a law degree from Cumberland University in Tennessee), and they weren't always poor. “
That's sort of a misconception a lot of people have—that everybody was desperately poor,” says Helen's cousin Lou (now
Honderich). “Helen's grandparents indeed lived in the country, and they had outdoor plumbing; but that was rural Arkansas.” When Helen was still a baby, the Gurleys moved to Little Rock, where they were “solidly middle class,” Lou adds. “They had a really nice house in a nice neighborhood. Mom had been a teacher, Dad worked in the Capitol. I would think that was about as ordinary and as stable as it could be, but things did get very, very hard when her sister got sick and her father was gone.”

Main Street in Green Forest, Arkansas—where Helen was born on February 18, 1922—as it looks today. (
Photo by author.
)

Later, when she was in her seventies, Helen would tell a much more accurate and nuanced version of her family history in a memoir she wrote, “Memories of Mother and Early Life in Little Rock,” but it was never published. Apparently, the truth about where she really came from wasn't nearly as interesting as the first rags-to-riches story she ever told. “I think it helped sell books,”
Lou says. “I think her shtick kind of took over. There was not any other side—just the poor-little-girl side.”

F
ROM
G
REEN
F
OREST
, take U.S. 412 to downtown Osage (a pinpoint on the map with a population of 418 in the whole township, at last count). You'll know you're in the right place when you see the sign for Osage Clayworks, a mammoth, multilevel old stone building with a wooden frame and large arched windows, standing to the south.

The roads are dustier here, the sky flatter and bluer, but the hills are gentle and sloping, and those are ancient cedars and black walnut trees in the distance. It's beautiful, but it's also remote and, for a certain kind of person, it would be impossibly lonely.

Not for Helen's mother, Cleo.
Born in 1893 in the tiny nearby village of Alpena, Cleo moved back to Arkansas from Los Angeles in the 1950s, eventually settling in Osage, where she lived for many years in a simple, one-story house that no longer exists. When it still stood, Helen visited her here—but rarely.

Helen did write to Cleo frequently, and Cleo used to pick up her letters at her mail slot at Stamps General Store—now converted into the Clayworks space, filled with stoneware mugs, vases, and pinch pots in various states of completion. When the potter Newton Lale bought the place, he made a deal with the family selling it that he would preserve the heritage of the general store, including old ledgers dating back to the early 1900s, when people bought everything from eggs to overalls here.

Newt has assumed the role of unofficial town historian ever since. He never met Cleo, but when he first came to town, he bought her house—it once stood across the street, where a pavilion is now—which was known as the Cat House, on account of the dozens of cats that Cleo used to have prowling around
the property. Newt didn't know her, but he knows her type: an Ozarks woman.

“
Our mothers and our grandmothers grew up, and there was a no-nonsense attitude,” he says. “You didn't have time to fool around. You were trying to survive, you were trying to feed your family.”

He never met Helen, but he knows her type, too: a small-town girl who wanted to see if she could make it in a bigger world. “My understanding was that she wasn't real proud of Arkansas,” he says. “It was a poor place, she came from a poor condition, and she had to do what it took to get out of here.”

Cleo had wanted to get out once herself, but by the time Helen was born, four years after Mary, she was tethered to a long line of disappointments. Abandoning her college education because of family obligations was one. Marrying Ira Gurley was another. Even as a young woman, Cleo was plain to the point of homely—especially when compared with a sister who was beautiful and courted by several men—so her parents were thrilled when they found her a suitable match.

Smart and charismatic, Ira was a golden boy who hunted and fished with Cleo's brothers and impressed her parents. Everyone loved Ira, except for Cleo, who was enamored of a poor, soft-spoken young man named Leigh Bryan. As for what Ira saw in Cleo, Helen didn't really elaborate on it in her writings, but her cousin Lou speculates that perhaps he valued her education, which would be useful in raising children, even though he later insisted she give up her career. As the eldest of nine children, Cleo had been the rare girl who attended high school, going on to spend one semester at college at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, before becoming a teacher at a rural, one-room schoolhouse “
I think Ira was smart, and I think he wanted a smart wife. She was solid, she had a nice family—her parents were wonderful. Maybe he saw the
whole thing as being a good package,” Lou says. “I don't know what else would make sense for a good-looking, going-places guy to marry a plain girl. I think it had to be rational, practical.”

Leigh was Cleo's first love, and he would remain her only love, long after she married Ira. Ira was her husband, a “
devout male chauvinist” who had voted against women's suffrage, as Helen later recalled. Ira wanted Cleo to quit teaching, so she did, even though she loved it. And then she got pregnant. Giving birth to her first daughter, Mary Eloine, Cleo suffered painful tearing and almost died—she had needed a cesarean, a procedure that the simple country doctor attending her knew little about and couldn't perform. Four years later, Helen Marie Gurley was born after another difficult labor.

Eventually, Ira took Cleo to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where some of the physical damage was repaired, but Cleo never forgot the pain of childbirth. She lived with those scars for the rest of her life.

“
Having babies isn't everything,” Cleo told Helen from the time she was a little girl. “Not that I don't love you and Mary, but having babies isn't all there is.”

C
LEO'S FAMILY ALWAYS
knew that Ira Gurley would become a
somebody
, and the year after Helen was born, he was already on his way, heading for a career in politics. In 1923 the Gurleys moved to Little Rock, where Ira won election to the state legislature.

The Gurleys were comfortable, but they weren't wealthy. To bring in extra money, Cleo worked as a seamstress, setting up a small dressmaking service at home, where she fitted the occasional wealthy customer. One of Helen's early memories was of seeing a striking, red-haired woman dressed in fur pull up to the house in a shiny Pierce-Arrow, driven by a chauffeur. Ira and Cleo
never talked to their daughters about people being rich or poor, but growing up in the suburb of Pulaski Heights (now Hillcrest), Helen gradually became aware of the difference. “
It was before the depression when money didn't
consume
people so, anybody but
me
that is,” she later recalled.

Her obsession with money followed her through first grade, where she befriended wealthy little girls with names like Mary Louise and Mildred. Again, she wasn't exactly sure how she
knew
they were well off—they all went to public school and played with the same Patsy Dolls and clipped the same pictures of movie stars out of magazines like
Photoplay
. She only knew that she gravitated toward those girls and would say or do anything to gain their favor. When one of the rich girls wanted to play make-believe, Helen always humbly accepted the role of the respectably dressed gentleman, while her friend pretended to wear pink satin dresses and diamond-buckled pumps. Why did she put up with those rotten little creeps and their unfair rules? Simple: They were rich, and she wanted to be friends with them.

Soon enough, with the onset of the Great Depression, some of Little Rock's wealthiest families would lose their fortunes, but the Gurleys avoided the first major disaster. On the October morning in 1929 when the stock market crashed and banks closed around the country, Ira and Cleo brought the girls into the living room to say they had managed to salvage most of their savings. Not long after he was elected to the state legislature, Ira had secured a job with the Arkansas State Game and Fish Commission, which was headquartered in the State Capitol Building, and it paid well. They always had food on the table, even if it was just the usual mashed potatoes, canned peas, and overcooked meat.

At church, Helen always had fifteen cents to put in the
collection envelope, and once, when she was falling behind, Ira gave her a five-dollar bill. After church, when they went to Franke's Cafeteria to eat roast beef, she got seconds
and
thirds.

Helen adored her father. Most people did. Stocky and sure of himself, he was a man's man who played cards but didn't smoke or drink. (It was the Prohibition era.) When Ira Gurley was home, neighborhood kids found reasons to stop by. On hot summer evenings he would hold court on the front porch with the lights off. When he laughed, everyone laughed. When he told a story—he loved unspooling long, pointless tales, like the one he sometimes told about mosquitos moving grains of sand across the Sahara Desert—they joined in. When everyone left, Helen kissed Ira on the forehead or cheek. She was Daddy's little girl.

Cleo was the homemaker, the caretaker. Ira was the fun-maker, the thrill-seeker. Every fall he took Helen and Mary to the state fair to enjoy the Ferris wheels and clouds of cotton candy. On Sunday afternoons he brought the girls to a local airport to watch single-engine airplanes take off and land. Thanks to a connection in the statehouse, one Sunday Ira was invited to ride in a plane himself. Helen beamed with pride at the sight of her daddy, wearing goggles and a helmet, ready for flight.

Ira had the power to call in favors, and if things went according to plan, soon he would have the ability to grant them.
By 1932 he was preparing to run for secretary of state, a position that would launch the family into the upper strata of Little Rock society. The family had moved to a nicer house, and for a while it seemed as though the stars were aligned. Over the summer, however, everything changed.