Enter Helen (19 page)

“
‘Guppie' likes having her back scratched and frosted cokes and dislikes being called ‘Good Time.' . . . Her ambition is to become a successful businesswoman.”

—from a profile of senior Helen Gurley in her high school newspaper, May 1939

O
n a Sunday afternoon in April 1937, the Gurleys got the news that Mary had polio. At first the doctor thought it was influenza, but then they got the real diagnosis, and it was devastating. Mary's legs would be paralyzed, and she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She was nineteen.

Sometimes Helen wondered why polio picked Mary, a sweet-natured girl with cat-eye glasses and dark curls—the prettier of the two sisters, some people thought. Helen could have fallen victim to the disease just as easily.
“[We] were formed from the same gene pool, ate the same food, lived in the same apartment, slept in the same bedroom, breathed the same air, were accessible to the same floating germs out in the street,” Helen wrote in her 2000 memoir,
I'm Wild Again
. As a girl, she knew that she had been spared, and yet the fact that Mary was paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, and she was healthy and mobile, didn't make her own adolescence feel much easier. She was still dealing with the death of her father—she would always feel that loss—and getting used to their new life in California. In Little Rock,
she had envied her friends with more money, but soon she would know what being “poor” really felt like.

Shortly after getting the diagnosis, Cleo and Helen relocated to the East Side of Los Angeles, moving into a small bungalow across from the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, a clinic that specialized in treating children with crippling disorders including polio, knock-knees, bowlegs, and spinal curvatures.
Mary lived at the clinic, where she was treated by the founding doctor, Charles LeRoy Lowman, who was experimenting with new treatments for polio, like turning a fishpond on the hospital grounds into a therapy pool. Her doctors tried everything—pool treatments, massage therapy, two muscle transplants—but nothing worked. Hoping to cheer Mary up, Helen wrote one of her first fan letters, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the White House. “
Dear Mr. President, my sister Mary has polio just like you,” she began, before asking if he would send her a letter. When Roosevelt later wrote to Mary, wishing her a full recovery, Helen marveled at her own power. She was all of fifteen, but with a little pluck and a three-cent stamp, she had gotten the attention of the president of the United States.

In the meantime, Mary's medical bills were putting a serious dent in their finances, and they were all feeling the strain.
Starting classes at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, Helen acclimated to the idea that she was going to school with other poor kids now: blacks and whites under one roof. If she wanted to see rich people, she would just have to go to the movies.

A
NXIOUS THAT SOMETHING
would happen to her, Cleo insisted on walking Helen to school throughout her freshman year. For a teenage girl who was the new kid in class, being escorted to high school was embarrassing, but nothing close to the humiliation she
felt whenever she looked in the mirror. Helen recoiled at her own reflection—pimples studded her face like braille. For the next two years, Cleo spent much of her time taking care of Mary, who had returned from the hospital, but she also arranged for Helen to see a doctor about her acne. And so Helen's treatments began: Twice a week after school, she went to see a family doctor who didn't know much about dermatology but popped her pustules for no charge, leaving her face red and blotchy.

Perhaps if she had been born beautiful like her friend Elizabeth Jessup, Helen could have coasted through high school on her looks. Partly because of Cleo's criticisms of her, Helen recognized what she lacked, and knew she had to make up for it in other ways. She had to be smarter, wittier, and more memorable than other girls. She simply had to try harder.

Helen with her sister, Mary, who in 1937 was diagnosed with polio that left her paralyzed from the waist down. (
Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.
)

At home, Helen became a part-time caretaker to Mary. She learned how to negotiate her wheelchair over curbs as they went window-shopping or to the movies, and while she took pride in giving her sister a smooth ride, she was relieved when Mary eventually found other friends. Their next-door neighbor was also a polio victim and had gotten past the hardest times with the help of her husband. Together, the couple zipped Mary all over town.

At school, Helen was determined to become more social, performing in class skits and talent shows, joining school clubs, and even running for office. At home she chafed under Cleo's control. They loved and infuriated each other.
They were as “close as stitches,” as Helen later put it, and they both wielded the power to wound. As overprotective as Cleo was, she could chip away at Helen's confidence like no one else. And there were times when Helen hurt her mother so deeply that Cleo would crawl into bed, weeping with her face to the wall.

At school Helen became someone kinder, softer, and sweeter.
She was elected president of the Scholarship Society and of the World Friendship Society, hosting events like “Hello Day,” an after-school mixer that was held in the gym. As a senior, she worked on the school yearbook and joined the prom committee as chairman to help plan the St. Patrick's Day–themed dance—and to get a little closer to her crush, Hal Holker, the student body president and the most popular boy in the twelfth grade.

Spending all that time planning with the committee eventually paid off. The day of the senior prom,
Hal didn't have a date, so he asked Helen to go at the last minute; he figured she could take care of herself. Dancing together in the gym, decorated with shamrocks and streamers in green and white, they had such a good time that Hal asked her out again, the following week.

“Good Luck” was the theme of prom that year, but
luck had little to do with Helen's high school success. It wasn't luck that secured her a spot in the Ephebian Society, a coed club made up of students who demonstrated outstanding scholarship, leadership, character, and citizenship. It wasn't luck that made her popular (her classmates voted her the
third
most popular girl) or the second most likely to succeed or the fifth best dancer. She didn't place for “prettiest girl,” though she corralled third-place honors for “biggest apple polisher” in the graduating class of 375 seniors. Pluck, not luck, got her into the final round of tryouts to be the commencement speaker at graduation, and into the school paper,
The Optimist
.

Student reporters made it a point to interview Helen Gurley (alternately nicknamed Guppie and Good Time) about everything from extracurricular activities to her thoughts on whether girls should be able to wear pants to school. “
It lowers the respect of other fellows and girls for the one who comes to school in slacks,” she told her interviewer. “It is just as out of place as a playsuit at a formal affair.”

In the spring of 1939, she even commanded her own mini-profile in the school paper, thanks in part to her membership in the Ephebian Society. “
I've dreamed of being an Ephebian for so long that I just can't believe it's true,” she gushed, ever the apple polisher. “It's just about the grandest thing that ever happened to me.”

On graduation day, Helen delivered her commencement address. At least among her friends, she had made a name for herself. No one doubted that Helen Gurley was college material, and
she soon lined up big plans to go to Texas State College for Women in Denton.

Shortly after Helen's high school graduation, the Gurleys moved again. This time Cleo went to Warm Springs, Georgia, where Mary could receive care at a polio treatment center established by Franklin Roosevelt.

Helen sitting for a portrait as a young woman. (
Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.
)

Meanwhile, Helen began life as a freshman all over again in Texas, but like her mother, she stayed in college for only one semester. Cleo and Mary returned to Los Angeles and needed her back home.

E
VEN AS SHE
made other friends in L.A., Helen never stopped idolizing her old friend Elizabeth Jessup. They confided in each other through letters, signing off with their nicknames for each other: Helen was “Kitten” and Elizabeth was “Buzzie,” “Sassafras,” or “Sassy” for short. Helen loved getting updates about her friend's life in Little Rock. Throughout their high school years, Helen had rooted for Elizabeth when she nabbed the lead
in a class play or got elected as student body president at Little Rock Central High School.

Over time, Elizabeth also had become a sort of barometer. Simply by living out her own life in Little Rock, Elizabeth allowed Helen to gauge just how much she herself had changed since leaving. As much as Helen was evolving, her living situation was not. After Mary's treatment in Georgia, she and Cleo came back to Los Angeles, and they all moved into a little stucco house in South-Central. From her backyard Helen could see railroad tracks and hear the freight trains that passed by. Some nights she would be necking in the car with a boy, and a train would suddenly come crashing past. As bad as the noise was, at least it was outside. Inside the house, sharing a room with Mary and her wheelchair,
Helen became attuned to the clawing sounds of the gophers that would tunnel their way up under the floorboards.
Scratch, scratch, scratch
. Once, in desperation, she and Mary ran a long hose down one of the gopher holes to flush the rodents out. They got one—a wet, drowning ball of brown fur that they didn't try to revive.

Maybe it was cruel to kill the gopher, Helen thought later; he was only trying to survive, to hoard some food while he had the chance. Born blind and helpless, he was hardwired to tunnel up into a better place. The gopher was just doing what gophers do—any creature trying to make it would do the same.

Helen had managed to tunnel her way up at high school, but it was over now. She would have to start tunneling again. She had been the shining example of a well-rounded student, the epitome of “college material,” and had she not been poor and applying to schools at the end of the Depression, perhaps she would have found herself reading Shakespeare at Smith or some other elite college. Instead, she was heading to secretarial school at Woodbury Business College
in downtown Los Angeles. At the very least, learning shorthand and typing would guarantee her a job when she got out.

In the meantime, she was stuck living with her mother and her new stepfather. In 1939, almost seven years after Ira's death, Cleo married her high school beau, Leigh Bryan, who moved from Cleveland, where he had been working as a Good Humor ice-cream salesman, to live in Los Angeles with his new wife and two grown stepdaughters. Helen, who was seventeen when Cleo remarried, knew Leigh cared for her mother, but
she found him to be embarrassing, especially when a date came to the house to pick her up. Outside the house, Leigh's ice-cream cart sat idly by the front door, and on many evenings when he was home, the living room reeked of whatever he was cooking for dinner with Cleo. (Sadly, Leigh soon became ill and would die of stomach cancer five years into their marriage.)

Still, they were managing to get by. Cleo had gotten a job pricing merchandise at Sears, Roebuck, and despite the pain and discomfort she experienced daily, Mary never complained. But just shy of eighteen, Helen was getting fidgety. She knew that she was changing, and growing, and soon she wouldn't fit into the little life that her mother and sister had created for themselves.

In the back room she shared with Mary, Helen wrote long letters to Elizabeth about the changes she had already witnessed in herself. Lately, she had begun to think a lot about God. To obsess over God, really. She still said her prayers at night, but she wasn't sure she believed in a higher power.
Sometimes it felt like believing in Santa Claus—when she prayed, she basically listed everything she wanted to accomplish, hoping to see some improvement the next day. Granted, she was no great student of the Bible, but wasn't it more rational, more reasonable, more productive, to believe in oneself?