Enter Helen (21 page)

“
Desk accessories should be female . . . sharpened pencils in a blue Delft jar, a Can Can dancer's bronze boot for a paper-weight, a cigarette box that is glass and gilt.”

—Helen Gurley Brown,
Sex and the Office
, 1964

H
elen's real parlor appeared to be as welcoming as her theoretical one. Over the decades, she would redecorate it several times, though most people would remember the chintzy pink-and-green version featured on the cover of her 1982 book,
Having It All
. By then she had traded in her desk for a gilded console table, opting for floral wallpaper, a matching couch, a collection of antique dolls, and needlepoint pillows bearing messages like “I love champagne, caviar and cash.” Toward the end of her reign, it looked more like the cluttered living room of a sassy grandmother than the office of one of the most influential editors in the world.

Through all of the transformations, Helen's office would always feel homey. And yet, like so much about her, the soft surface was misleading. Like her column, her office was a kind of a stage, and she was a great entertainer, regaling readers and staffers alike with stories about visiting Mother and Mary or attending some glamorous premiere party with David. “
I always thought that when Helen decided to call her column ‘Step Into My Parlour,' that told
everything about how she operated,” Walter Meade says. “Although she was not a cold person, she was incapable of real empathy, and if you started talking about personal stuff to her, her eyes would glaze over in about two seconds.”

Just because she invited you into her parlor didn't mean she cared to step into yours, not for long anyway. In the Seventies,
Cosmopolitan
's longtime art director, Linda Cox, came to expect Helen's brisk monthly check-ins. “
About every four weeks, she would come into my office to ask how my son was. She didn't
really
want to know. She probably ticked it off in her monthly calendar: ‘Ask Linda about her son.' She was very programmed that way,” Cox says, adding that, as soon as she began to answer, Helen would start backing out of the office, loath to get caught in a conversation about nursery school. “She was just trying to keep me happy and be a good boss.” Despite her impatience for small talk, Helen was a great listener when she wanted to be. “Or,” adds Meade, “when she wanted something from you.”

From the start, David edited “Step Into My Parlour.” He also went over page proofs, read captions, and wrote cover lines. He and Helen were a great sales and marketing team. There was just one problem: Hearst wasn't quite ready for what they were selling and marketing.

Around the same time she was putting the finishing touches on her column, Helen got a call from the Hearst Corporation's president, Richard Emmett Berlin, concerning the July issue, which was about to go to press. Berlin didn't mince words:
He wanted her to cut a risqué cover line that David had written for the big estrogen feature.

Like the company itself, Berlin was conservative: a broad-shouldered Roman Catholic from Omaha, Nebraska, who had served in the navy during World War I, before joining Hearst
as an advertising trainee and working his way up to a business manager. He had a reputation for being tough and unsentimental, the pragmatist to William Randolph Hearst's idealist. During a period of financial floundering in the 1940s, Hearst himself had given Berlin the Herculean job of reorganizing the company. Berlin proved to be a fearsome leader, firing executives who weren't meeting profit goals, and selling and merging properties, always with an eye on the bottom line. He was largely credited with staving off bankruptcy and turning the company into a profitable entity once again. Hearst was the visionary, but Berlin was captain of the ship, the man credited with rescuing it and keeping it afloat.

Helen had every reason to want to impress Berlin, but when he told her to cut the cover line, “
The new pill that makes women more responsive to men,” she stood her ground. The estrogen piece epitomized
Cosmopolitan
's new direction and demographic. It had to be advertised boldly on the cover, not hidden deep inside the issue. It was important that her girls
know
about this pill, which could make the very act of sex more pleasurable, but it was just as important, if not more, that they buy the magazine, and she and David both knew that this was the line that would sell it.

Sitting in her new office, Helen argued with Berlin until he finally hung up on her, but not before telling her that he expected to see a different cover line that they could run instead.

After crying at her desk, she next called David. “
Why don't you try this on Mr. Berlin?” he asked. “Take off the last two words.” They didn't really need to say “to men.” What else would women be responsive to? Wallpaper?

Berlin approved the new blurb, and
Helen learned something about power that day. In the future, she would make her points more swiftly. It was better to hang up early than to be hung up on.

O
N
J
UNE
24, the July issue hit newsstands with the edited blurb, “
The new pill that promises to make women more responsive,” right under
Cosmopolitan
's title in calamine lotion pink. True to form, David wrote several eye-catching cover lines, but the main attraction was the cover girl herself. Overnight, the old
Cosmopolitan
had been carried out on a gurney, and the new
Cosmopolitan
had arrived flaunting blond hair, a flimsy gingham dress, and big breasts.

When Helen got the sales figures, she went to find Walter Meade, who was in Bill Guy's office.

Like the rest of the staff, Walter and Bill had been living on tenterhooks. Helen's takeover had been so sudden, longtime readers were bound to be confused. Some of the editors had worried that the new
Cosmopolitan
would scare away loyal readers or, worse, that people would just pass it by.

Helen, for one, never underestimated the power of a sexy woman, but the figures blew her away.
The July issue sold approximately 954,000 newsstand copies, almost 260,000 more copies than June. The new
Cosmopolitan
was an instant success.

Walter heard her before he saw her two-stepping down the hall to Bill's office.

“
Guess how much?” she asked, breathless with excitement.

Walter and Bill exchanged a look. They didn't know that the sales figures had come in, until Helen showed them the proof.

“I think she said, ‘We're on the Yellow Brick Road,'” Meade says. “She was the way you get when you've been validated. She wasn't silly about it, she was just sort of: ‘I told you so.'”

O
NE SUMMER DAY
in Winter Park, Florida, a
Cosmopolitan
reader picked up the July issue and stared in shock at the busty blonde on the cover. Flipping through the pages, she only became more incensed when she saw an excerpt from
Aly
, Leonard Slater's
biography of the late Prince Aly Khan, who had been Pakistan's United Nations representative and who also happened to have been a notorious womanizer and the third husband of Rita Hayworth. When she had read enough about Aly's art of lovemaking, the mother of four sat down and wrote a furious letter to
Cosmopolitan
's new editor, declaring that she planned to throw the July issue into the garbage, where it belonged. “
I will not have it in my home where my children might possibly read it,” she huffed, before signing off, “A former
COSMOPOLITAN
reader.”

Helen Gurley Brown published her letter along with many others, from readers who alternately praised the magazine and denounced it. There was the woman from Philadelphia who blasted the decision to put such a
“whorish” model on the cover, and the anonymous reader who accused the magazine of reducing a woman to “nothing but a stupid, idiotic
cow
of a sexpot.”

Hate mail poured in. Readers canceled subscriptions, newsstand vendors refused to sell the new
Cosmopolitan
, and
advertising giants like AT&T and Coca-Cola backed away or bailed, pulling pages. But for every reader who dropped a subscription, there were countless new ones who felt as though, finally, someone was talking directly to them. “
The July issue of
COSMO
is alive and right up to the minute in its point of view about life as we modern women really know it to be,” wrote a reader from New York, notably shortening the magazine's name.

“
I feel that you have given career girls a ‘laughing look' at themselves—and let's face it, everybody needs a good chuckle once in a while,” wrote a woman from Winnipeg, Manitoba. “I am looking forward to the next issues and will recommend them to my friends.”

As
Cosmopolitan
gained the attention of readers across the country, in New York, editorial teams at major national magazines
took note of the new girl in town, trying to figure out just how a sex book author with no previous editing experience had managed to turn a failing magazine into an overnight success.

One of those magazines was
Look
, a photo-driven general-interest magazine founded by an Iowan entrepreneur named Gardner “Mike” Cowles Jr. in 1937, one year after Henry Luce started
Life
. A seasoned veteran of the magazine industry, Cowles was no stranger to failure, having launched several magazines with life spans as short as their titles, such as
Flair
, a magazine for the moneyed elite, conceived of and edited by his third wife, Fleur Fenton Cowles. He ultimately struck gold with
Look
, a tabloid-style picture magazine that, under the influence of Fleur's sophisticated sensibility, evolved into a hugely influential biweekly with a focus on entertainment and politics, including early in-depth reporting on the civil rights movement. In the mid-Sixties,
Look
boasted a circulation of 8.5 million, thanks in no small part to Samuel O. “Shap” Shapiro, the magazine's vice president and circulation director.

Shapiro was a powerhouse in the world of circulation, a man who was brimming with ideas on how to sell magazines, but
even he had never seen anything quite like the newsstand sales figures for
Cosmopolitan
's July issue, which he addressed at a weekly management meeting with Cowles and a handful of
Look
's top editors and department heads.

A young editor named Patricia Carbine (Pat, for short) was in the magazine's conference room when conversation turned to
Cosmopolitan
, Hearst, and Helen Gurley Brown. Like the others in the room, Carbine was familiar with
Sex and the Single Girl
, which she had skimmed enough to know that she wasn't a fan.

“
I thought she was talking about somebody I didn't know and didn't want to be,” says Carbine, who was then the highest-ranking female editor at a national general-interest magazine. “I
remember an emphasis of hers was that if one knew how to manipulate men in the business setting, then your life would work out more happily because you would be more desirable and attractive, and that would be
wonderful
for your career. My existence in my working world bore virtually no resemblance to what she was talking about, and I was working in a world of men.”

Despite her personal ambivalence about reading
Cosmopolitan
, Carbine was intrigued by the idea of a magazine for single women, and so were her male colleagues. When Cowles asked Shapiro if he had any insight to offer on Helen Gurley Brown's impressive debut, Shapiro wondered aloud if the success of her first issue wasn't simply a fluke—she had ridden in on the coattails of
Sex and the Single Girl
, but she couldn't exploit that formula forever.

“
What she had managed to do was turn her book into a magazine—into her first issue of the magazine,” Carbine says. “She had done it, and she had done it very successfully, but what else did she have to say?”

How did she do it? Cowles had asked.

Shapiro's question was more to the point: Could she do it again?

“
She had flattery down to a high art, and I learned a lot from her about getting ahead. She would never openly fight with people like the rest of us, throwing our egos around. She gave me a positive philosophy for getting along—and it really worked for me.”

—Liz Smith

A
few weeks into her appointment as editor, Helen walked as if she knew where she was going. Watching her float down the hallway in one of her eye-popping Puccis, shoulders back and chest out, one realized how poorly other women carried themselves in comparison, how clumsily and inelegantly. The hallway might as well have been a runway. Helen strutted like a model channeling a movie star, maybe Barbara Stanwyck. She didn't swing her arms idly like the younger girls on staff, partly because she was always holding something, a manuscript or a layout. But it was also just how she was: deliberate. She walked with purpose, and as her staff got to know her, they learned to watch her walk for clues.

“You could tell where she was going when she was about halfway down the hall because she had different looks for different people,” says Walter Meade. “She was always very flirty with me.” On her way to Walter's office, Helen often stopped and said hello to his assistant, Barbara Hustedt, a college student who would be
heading back to school in the fall. “
How's your summer going?” Helen might ask Barbara, who went by Bobbie. “Are you enjoying New York?” She made it a point to be welcoming, but Bobbie sensed that she didn't really care about her answers. It was as if an egg-timer were ticking in Helen's mind, about to ding. “
She always made me nervous. Not nervous in the way that I was tongue-tied, just, ‘Let this be over so I don't overstay my welcome,'” says Barbara (now Hustedt Crook), who also kept her chitchat to a minimum in the restroom, where Helen frequently sang in the stalls. “She really had a great ladies' room alto,” Barbara adds. “I guess she didn't feel self-conscious. I mean, she had a perfect sense of pitch. If she was in the john, she was humming.”

On the outside, Helen seemed to be taking everything in stride, but that summer and fall, failure was still a very real possibility. She had inherited a legendary magazine with legendary problems, and the cards were stacked against her, just as they had been stacked against her predecessor—maybe even more so now.

Richard Berlin had been reluctant to hire Helen in the first place, wary that her racy ideas would turn off regular readers of
Cosmopolitan
. But recognizing her marketability, Richard Deems, president of Hearst's magazine division, and Frank Dupuy Jr.,
Cosmopolitan
's publisher, convinced Berlin to give her a go on the conditions that there be little money spent to promote the new
Cosmopolitan
and that she produce the magazine adhering to its current editorial budget—one that hadn't changed since World War II.

Deems monitored
Cosmopolitan
's editorial content and reviewed its cover designs and blurbs, determining what was appropriate and what crossed the line. Dupuy advised Helen on business matters, including budgeting and advertising, and oversaw the physical production of the magazine: contracts with the printer, page counts, and pricing.

Early on, Helen decided to raise the cover price of the magazine from thirty-five to fifty cents, but she was just scratching the surface. For
Cosmopolitan
to sustain its success, she needed more support from Hearst: not just a bigger budget, but the force of a major ad campaign.
She also needed to cut costs, drastically. That meant penny-pinching on expense accounts for work-related meals and travel—not exactly the way into her staff's good graces. It also meant finding affordable writers and photographers.

From the start, she sacrificed some big literary stars and had to deal with the fallout. How could she pass over a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer? asked the old guard on staff. “
Well, I don't understand it,” Helen said, after reading the story herself. She started seeking out writers on her own, without dealing with the big literary agencies. She didn't care to talk to agents anyway.

Back at the office, people hurled names of writers and photographers at her. Half the time she found herself asking, “Who's that?” She needed answers before she could give them to her staff, but the phone never stopped ringing. Agents called wanting assignments for their writers; writers called wanting to know what was happening with their articles.

One day, George Walsh and Harriet La Barre came in complaining about a freelancer who'd turned in a poorly written profile of the actress Julie Christie. It was garbage, unprintable, they insisted, but Helen overruled them. They should fix it, not nix it—it was too valuable as a cover blurb. “
Well,” they huffed, “if Herb Mayes were here, he wouldn't be doing it that way.”

At least George and Harriet had the guts to challenge her directly. The night she went to a Writers Guild dinner, freelancers fawned over her, asking what they could write for her, but she found out that later they flayed her behind her back. “Those
two-faced bitches—all they wanted to do was criticize me,” Helen told Lyn. “Betty Friedan led the pack.”

Meanwhile, submissions kept coming in over the transom, and manuscripts and mail piled up on her desk. Many nights she stayed in her office until eleven o'clock, poring and picking over every single word, her copy of Strunk and White's
Elements of Style
nearby. With surgical precision, she nipped here and tucked there, sanded down and reconstructed whole paragraphs, streamlining syntax and turning flaccid prose perky.

It was amazing how sloppy writers could be—how lazy! Using “this” and “that” to refer to a subject that the reader had long forgotten. She counted up repetitious words and bloodied manuscripts with her cuts and line edits, split one never-ending sentence into two sentences, sometimes three. She cast out clichés. Slash, slash, slash. Circle, circle. She added
italics
and (!!!) and(. . .) and CAPS.

There were still countless improvements to make, and new people she wanted to hire, but at least some of her editors and writers were working out. Privately, Liz Smith was stewing about her new boss's mandate that she write only upbeat, accessible reviews, but she did as she was asked: So long, art-house films by the likes of Godard and Truffaut. The only New Wave her new readers cared about was the kind they could set under the dryer.

“
One thing I decided,” Smith wrote in the August issue: “it is simply impossible for the average girl, who has to do her own nails, keep her clothes in order, fool with her hair, work eight hours a day, or keep a house and kids in line, to be
au courant
and a member of the cinema avant-garde.” Heaven knows she
tried
to understand the French filmmakers' “
nouvelle vague
,
”
but, she concluded, “I guess I'm just too earthbound.”

For better or worse, she sounded just like Helen Gurley Brown.

E
VERY WEEK BROUGHT
countless drafts to edit, deadlines to meet, and calls to make—in her appointment diary,
Helen penciled in Clairol, Shirley MacLaine, Eileen Ford. When she wasn't on the phone, staffers constantly came by for her input. Harriet needed her to sign off on a fashion story about scanty lingerie. George, the managing editor, needed to go over the schedule. Tony, the art director, needed to show her pictures for October's article about nose jobs. Helen assumed he would illustrate the piece with before-and-after photos, but Tony refused. He wanted something more tasteful. He showed her a black-and-white shot of a pretty blond girl in profile, her nose straight and smooth.
People wanted to see only the “after,” he said.

Typically there might be around thirty articles running in an issue, but on any given day, they were working on one hundred different pieces in different stages, and three months of issues at once: closing the current issue, putting the next issue up on the layout board in the art department, and planning the month after that.

After getting a sense of all of the different material that was coming in or being generated in-house,
George made up a schedule for an upcoming issue several months in advance, selecting a mix of different articles: say, an emotional feature, a health article, a how-to-get-ahead-in-your-career story, a first-person narrative, and a couple of celebrity profiles, along with whatever subjects
Cosmopolitan
's regular columns and departments were covering that month. The editors overseeing beauty and fashion, for instance, worked on their schedules months ahead of time. Meanwhile, the fiction editor was thinking about which short stories and novels to buy, and the art director was reading all of the above and deciding how to illustrate each component.

Helen tried to keep up with the status of every single item by checking in regularly with her art director, managing editor, and production manager, but there were mistakes and oversights. Filling a single issue of a magazine with fresh material was hard enough. Managing three issues at once was almost impossible.

One day, George came bearing bad news: There was a hole in the August issue. “
How can you have a hole when trunkloads of manuscripts arrive at a magazine every day?” Helen asked. But there they were . . . two blank pages staring back at her.

In a near panic, Helen called on her new friend, Jacqueline Susann. Helen had taken to Jackie at first sight, ever since they met on Park Avenue, and in the months since, her book
Every Night, Josephine!
had become a bestseller.

“
Have you written anything recently?” Helen asked.

It turned out she had: Jackie had just finished “Zelda Was a Peach,” a whimsical short story about a rather naïve woman who learns about the birds and the bees, quite literally, through her indoor peach tree, named Zelda.

Helen slated “Zelda” for the summer fiction issue, along with a short story and poem from John Lennon's new book,
A Spaniard in the Works
, and an excerpt from Edna O'Brien's novel
August Is a Wicked Month
; a high-protein diet for girls with low willpower; a guide to “Swimnastics,” exercises anyone could do in the pool; and a fashion feature pegged to the new James Bond movie,
Thunderball
.

She was pleased with the photos of the Bond girls wearing various furs over various bikinis posing in front of various Bahamian scenes (a yacht, a palm tree, a white Bentley), but the real showstopper was the cover, featuring a hairy-chested Sean Connery nuzzling noses with his shirtless and slick-haired French costar, Claudine Auger. They were on the beach, but they might as well have been in bed.