Enter Helen (22 page)

“
The girl of the fifties would stay home waiting for Mr. Right.

But the girl of the sixties will date three or four rats at once.”

—Rona Jaffe, in an interview with the Associated Press, 1965

I
n the fall of 1965, ABC debuted a new game show that the Browns never pitched to the network. Hosted by Jim Lange in a jacket and tie,
The Dating Game
invited viewers to play the voyeur as a series of career-girl types hidden behind a stage partition asked questions of three eligible bachelors who tried to score a date and a laugh from the studio audience. Sample question: “
How would you go about telling your date that she had a dress that was maybe too short or too tight?” Answer: “They can't make a dress that's too short or too tight.”

On national TV, a single girl had to play by the rules and pick just one boy for an all-expenses-paid night on the town, but across the country girls were dating Bachelors One, Two,
and
Three. Why choose? Marriage was no longer the only option, and going steady had gone out of style. Rona Jaffe, newly appointed as a contributing editor at
Cosmopolitan
, put it best with the title of her latest book:
Mr. Right Is Dead
. Like her first book,
The Best of Everything
, her “sextet” of stories about bachelorette life arrived at just the right moment, aimed at just the right market: young, single, working women.

In New York they colonized the streets of the Upper East Side, filling up brownstones and slick apartment buildings from Sixty-Fifth Street all the way up to the Eighties, from Park Avenue to the East River, a swath of real estate that
Cosmopolitan
later dubbed “
The Girl Ghetto.” Around 8:30 a.m. on weekdays, they stalked the sidewalks in pencil skirts and strappy heels, wearing head scarves, headbands, and hair bows the size of chinchillas.
At night they gathered at singles bars like T.G.I. Friday's and Malachy's. From the time it opened in 1958, Malachy's welcomed men and women, a revolutionary and brilliant business plan considering that, located on Third Avenue between Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth Streets, it was around the corner from the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Pan Am stewardesses, Madison Avenue secretaries, and sweater-clad coeds piled in for burgers, beer, and bachelors.

And in Southern California, a girl could do worse than rent a furnished apartment at one of the area's brand-new coed singles housing complexes—also known as “
passion pads”—a place like Torrance's South Bay Club, with its tennis matches, sauna sessions, late-night dance parties, and endless opportunities to score with the opposite sex. It didn't hurt that a typical party attracted three guys for every girl.

A
CROSS THE COUNTRY
, entrepreneurs were targeting bachelors and bachelorettes, and the writer Thomas Meehan was investigating the singles market for a two-part series in
Cosmopolitan
called “New Industry Built Around Boy Meets Girl.” Considering the population's abundance of unmarried women and shortage of eligible men, it was no wonder so many girls were going on coed vacations like Puerto Rico Fiesta House Party, sponsored by the Singles Travel Center (part of Liberty Travel Service), and signing
up with programs like Bachelor Party Tours Inc., which offered a twenty-one-day European adventure complete with gondola rides, Swiss yodeling, dinner at the Eiffel Tower, and the possibility of a marriage proposal.

Not that finding a spouse was the industry's only raison d'être. “
Many single women take cruises or head alone to resort hotels so that even if they fail to corral a husband they can at least find a man interested in having a no-strings-attached affair,” Meehan reported in his first dispatch for the September issue. “In short, it's the sex drive of America's forty-two million unmarried adults that has helped to create the booming Singles Industry.”

In addition to Meehan's first dispatch,
Cosmopolitan
's September issue included a book excerpt called “How Yoga Can Change Your Life,” complete with suggested stretches and poses; an illustrated feature teaching novices how to play the guitar; and an optimistic article by Lyn Tornabene about the entertainment industry called “Do Be an Actress” (“
Don't listen to the pessimists. You can do it!”), featuring the inspirational personal stories of six young stars. “
What's new this month, pussycat?” Helen wrote in September's “Step Into My Parlour,” and the answer was
everything
. The September issue was essentially a 140-page self-improvement manual filled with articles that not only spoke directly to the reader, but also told her that she could do anything and be anyone . . . with a little help from
Cosmopolitan
, of course.

Helen was a believer in “experts,” and she rounded up advice from the best she could find. She asked Huntington Hartford to write a primer on how to start an art collection, and she tapped William Pahlmann, an interior designer known for his eclectic tastes, to help a career girl spiff up her apartment, using secondhand furniture, bargain finds, and buckets of paint.

Many a career girl also had a cat or dog waiting for her at home and needed some good advice about housebreaking—like the kind dispensed in “Pets and the Working Girl.” Mia Farrow wasn't the only one taking her pet to work. (Her fluffy white cat, Mr. Malcolm, was a regular on the set of
Peyton Place
.) The writer reported that many bosses were allowing their employees to bring pets into the office.

After hearing about the pet piece, Bill Guy brought in his Yorkshire and Maltese terriers, Ginger and George. George barked a lot, but otherwise they didn't create too much of a disturbance—and now Helen had a cute story to tell in “Step Into My Parlour.” “
If you hate being away from
your
darlings all day,” she wrote, “you might show the article to your boss.”

Helen asked her own staffers to dream up alcoholic health drinks, promising a prize to whoever came up with the best one. They gave her forty-seven recipes, and after experimenting at home with her electric blender, she chose nine to publish alongside photos of boozy beverages garnished with strawberry and cinnamon sticks.

“Husband-Coming-Home Clothes,” the big fashion spread that Harriet had edited, also got the color treatment. The idea was that, even if a woman worked, she could still get home before her husband, mix up an iced martini, and change into a sexy outfit: say, frilly white knickers, a “rumple-proof” sari, or a slinky catsuit in leopard print. (
“Of course I'm purring, pet,” read the caption for the catsuit. “You're home early. Do I detect you're purring
too
because I'm wearing such a pretty nylon and Lycra stretch tricot ‘Scat Suit'? By Vanity Fair, $30.”)

Inspired by the colorful op art of Richard Anuszkiewicz, the photographer Melvin Sokolsky wanted to experiment with patterns, layering mod fashions with mad prints and fur rugs for a
trippy effect.
The merchandising editor had brought in sixty-seven garments, from which they selected ten hot looks for the models for the shoot. One blond, the other brunette, they lounged and rolled around on the floor, clinging lustily to a couple of male models in suits—the husbands coming home. “
I never paid much attention to them, to be honest—they're foils,” Sokolsky says of the men. “The girls needed a male stimulus.”

Their blatant sexuality pushed the bounds of propriety, and yet, leopard print aside, these wives really weren't so different from the housewife featured in traditional women's magazines who managed to cook dinner, clean the house, and pretty herself up before her man walked through the door, with one major exception: They were as eager to
be
pleased as they were to please.

Mr. Right wasn't dead, after all—he was just repurposed.

“
A color photograph of a pretty brunette with a deep V, bosomy neckline has helped sell lots of Cosmopolitan magazines this month.”

—Eugenia Sheppard,
New York Herald Tribune
, September 9, 1965

I
n late August, the September issue flew off the stands, thanks partly to Melvin Sokolsky's cover shot of a young model named Paula Pritchett—the sultry brunette featured in the “Husband-Coming-Home Clothes” fashion spread. The same month,
Vogue
hit the stands with a head shot of a fresh-faced ingenue in sparkly earrings and a pale blue boa, and
Mademoiselle
ran a close-up of a model in a turtleneck and coat. Pretty as they were, anyone with a pulse would have been drawn to Pritchett with her bed-tumbled hair and deep cleavage.
The stretchy, red-jersey wraparound dress she filled out so effortlessly actually belonged to Sokolsky's wife, who had worn it as a maternity outfit, but it was incidental, merely a delivery system for Pritchett's curves.

“
Basically, that red dress is selling the most beautiful set of breasts you've ever seen,” says Sokolsky, who first began shooting for high-end fashion magazines like
Harper's Bazaar
when models posed like upper-class women “with their noses turned up,” and sex was still a taboo subject. “Then the Sixties came around, Helen came around, . . . and gestures changed. Put a pair of beautiful tits
on the front of the magazine to knock people's heads off? That could never have
been
before.”

Sokolsky shot other covers for
Cosmopolitan
, but one photographer soon became Helen's favorite, at least when it came to shooting the magazine's covers. Small and slight with thinning black hair, a deep tan, and a nervous energy, Francesco Scavullo wasn't the picture of glamour, but he produced thousands of glamorous pictures that defined an era and a brand. Helen invented the idea of That
Cosmopolitan
Girl to describe her target reader. Scavullo created the fantasy of her, with the help of bright lights, hairspray, makeup, push-up bras, and lots and lots of tape.

Scavullo shot many beautiful girls for many magazines, but no relationship was quite like the one he had with
Cosmopolitan
—it lasted for more than three decades.
Working in a spotless, white-walled studio that took up the first floor of a four-story carriage house on East Sixty-Third Street, he approached
Cosmopolitan
's cover shoots with the eye of a film director, controlling each element to capture the image he had in mind. He managed every decision made about hair, makeup, and clothes, and had many outfits custom made by fashion designer friends like Halston, but it always came down to the look of the girl—and he often handpicked her, too.

Scavullo's first cover for Helen was of a blond, Finnish model named Kecia Nyman. She had been featured in an earlier issue of
Cosmopolitan
in an article called “The Bittersweet Lives of Fashion Models,” talking about the pressure she felt as a model to always appear beautiful no matter how tired or sick she felt. “
I don't know what other models ate, I just know that I starved a lot,” Nyman says now.

When she showed up at Scavullo's studio in New York, Kecia had just come from another booking overseas and felt exhausted
and weak. Not long into her session with Scavullo, her stomach began to hurt. Her cramps were so horrible that at one point Scavullo stopped shooting and ordered her a hamburger from a nearby restaurant, which she barely touched. She finished the job, but rushed out of the studio and into a taxi back to her apartment, where she started vomiting blood. Somehow she managed to get herself to the emergency room at a nearby Catholic hospital. Suffering from a bleeding ulcer, she stayed in the hospital for two weeks.

Kecia appeared on more than two thousand magazine covers over the course of her career, but she always appreciated Scavullo's kindness in an industry that could be very cruel. “
We all loved Scavullo. He was understanding, he was generous,” she says. “He always equipped the studio with food because he knew that models were on the run and starving.”

In the image that ran on the October 1965 cover, Kecia wore a cotton-candy-pink hat by Halston, pearl earrings, thick mascara, and pale peach lipstick. Set against an off-white background, the conservative, close-up beauty shot looked more like a cosmetic ad than the type of sexy covers that Scavullo would become known for—but then, the look of the
Cosmopolitan
cover girl was still a work in progress, too.

N
OT LONG AFTER
she started at
Cosmopolitan
, Helen began hosting weekly advertising luncheons at the “21” Club. A former speakeasy at 21 West Fifty-Second Street, “21” boasted a history as colorful as the lawn jockeys on the iron gates that guarded the entrance.
It was a place of legend and extraordinary leverage. “21” was where Humphrey Bogart proposed to Lauren Bacall at table 30, otherwise known as “Bogie's Corner,” and where Cary Grant came for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because he could,
although the restaurant also served antelope and black bear when they were in season.

It was easy to spend a fortune at “21,” but for some it was just as easy to make one. Salvador Dalí, known to show up with a pet ocelot on a leash, rarely left without getting a new commission from a fellow diner. Sitting under the toy trucks and planes hanging from the ceiling in the front room, the rich sometimes grew richer over their power lunches—a term that didn't yet exist. Everybody else got seated in Siberia, the restaurant's least desirable room, if they got seated at all.

When Helen first started going to “21,” she was “
just another 102-pound nobody in a Pucci dress,” as the writer Gael Greene later put it in
New York
, but before long, she began dropping three hundred dollars or more a week there on business lunches, and soon she had her own table. She was joined by her publisher, Frank Dupuy Jr., and over time they developed a routine. Every Thursday they would head over to “21,” where they reserved a private dining room to seduce advertisers and agency representatives with cocktails, wine, brandy, and cigars.

The group changed from week to week, but generally there were about twenty people present, including the president and vice president of the company (say, Revlon) and their advertising agency executives. Select
Cosmopolitan
editors and the occasional assistant were also invited on a rotating basis.
Playing the hostess, Helen used her charms to her advantage, flattering and flirting with her mostly male prey. She made sure that the head of the company was seated beside her, and while they ate, she homed in on her target.

“
She would go through the dummy of the upcoming issue, page by page, giving a little précis of what this story's about, just a few lines for each,” says former
Cosmopolitan
beauty editor Mallen De
Santis, who went along as backup during lunches with cosmetics companies. “All these ad people were just dumbfounded, gazing at this magazine, which of course was not out yet. I mean, that was a brilliant stroke.”

From the start, Helen understood that the market was just one part of it; companies worried about
Cosmopolitan
's new message. Not to worry, she assured advertisers in a statement she prepared in 1965. During her career in advertising, she had seen too much change come too soon whenever new management came in.
Change didn't necessarily mean improvement, but she
was
a bestselling author, and after all the book tours and lectures and letters and face-to-face meetings with single women around the country, well, she knew a thing or two about what her girls wanted, and she felt that she could funnel all that knowledge into the pages of
Cosmopolitan
. As for any concerns about risqué content, just because she wrote a couple of books with
sex
in the title didn't mean that
Cosmopolitan
was going to become “prurient.” Heavens, no! Her books, by the way, were filled with practical, positive advice for the average girl.

As cigar smoke filled the room, Helen described the typical
Cosmopolitan
reader,
a woman between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. She knew what her girl liked to eat, drink, smoke, wear, and drive; where she liked to vacation; and how much she was willing to pay for her hotel. Market research showed as much, but Helen also knew what was going on inside her girl's head: She might seem like a delicate flower, but she was stronger, bolder, and more ambitious than people realized. In a voice soft but sure, Helen drew a portrait so complete, it was as if she knew this girl personally, and by the time she was done, the executive knew her, too: Helen could have been describing his wife, girlfriend, daughter, or secretary.

For advertisers, part of the beauty of the
Cosmopolitan
reader was that she was always trying to improve herself by dyeing her hair or losing weight, increasing her bust size or contouring her makeup to make her nose look smaller.
The
Cosmopolitan
cover girl was a different species altogether, and nowhere was the disconnect between the real girl and the fantasy girl more obvious (or ingenious) than in the newspaper ads that Helen soon began writing for
Cosmopolitan
. Frequently, the ad pictured the face of a glamorous model (shot by Scavullo), but the voice of a less sophisticated woman who confessed her goals and dreams (everything from mastering a headstand to conquering dating as a divorcée) in an inner monologue that ended with her loyalty to the one magazine that truly understood her.

Over the years, Helen perfected her pitch to an art. She might have been trying to get a cosmetics company to advertise their latest lipstick in
Cosmopolitan
, but by the time the executives went home to tell their wives about meeting Helen Gurley Brown, they were ready to buy much more than a quarter page of ad space. They were ready to buy into the very idea of the girl she described—not just any girl, but That
Cosmopolitan
Girl.