Enter Helen (24 page)

V
ENE WAS A
valuable assistant, but she proved herself to be indispensable after Bill Guy had a heart attack in the office. One minute, everything was fine, and the next he was panting: “
Loosen my tie! Loosen my tie!”

Unsure of what to do next, Vene went screaming down the hall. Somebody called an ambulance, and suddenly her boss was being carted off on a stretcher. Over the next few days, Vene visited Bill at the hospital and kept him up to date about what was happening at the office. As the days of his recovery turned into weeks, she started doing his job in addition to her own. “
I was buying the fiction, negotiating with the agents,” she says. “Actually, when he was sick in the hospital, we got submissions that really interested me. Among them was Joyce Carol Oates.” Bill never liked her style—too downbeat and dark—but Vene loved it, and she pushed one of her short stories through to Helen's desk while Bill was laid up.

Bill eventually came back to the office and worked a couple of hours at a time, but his
Cosmo
days were almost over. When he resigned, Vene quit to fully devote herself to acting. Around the same time, Walter Meade turned in his notice to take a job as managing editor at the
Reader's Digest
Condensed Book Club.

In a matter of months, Helen had lost her fiction editor, her articles editor, and a resourceful assistant. She was sorry to see Vene go, but she was also proud of her. Vene was a true
Cosmopolitan
Girl, seizing the day and the spotlight. When she started landing lead roles in musical theater productions in New Hampshire, Helen was the first to congratulate her on a glowing review and put it up on the bulletin board. Not many people managed to do what they really loved to do
and
get paid for it—and
the office couldn't stop talking about her, Helen wrote to Vene, who held on to her letter for nearly fifty years.

“
Everyone has an identity. One of their own, and one for the show.”

—Jacqueline Susann,
Valley of the Dolls

I
n 1967, Helen made her TV debut with
Outrageous Opinions
, a half-hour talk show syndicated in eighteen cities. Every weekday at 2 p.m., New Yorkers could tune in to Channel 9 to watch Helen ask famous people about their sex lives.
Casino Royale
's blond bombshell Joanna Pettet gamely dished about her first real-life girl-on-girl encounter, but more than a few guests were unlikely interview subjects, to say the least. Woody Allen confessed his perverse attraction to mailmen (“Probably the uniform and the leather pouch get me,” he joked), while Norman Mailer fielded Helen's questions about his masculinity. “
You're the first lady analyst I've ever seen in pink,” he fired back.

Canceled after one season,
Outrageous Opinions
was
a failure, one of the few Helen ever had. She was faring better at the office, playing Masthead Musical Chairs. In addition to hiring a new art director, a Danish woman named Lene Bernbom, she found a new articles editor, Junius Adams (he later became the fiction and features editor), and she soon hired back Barbara Hustedt, who had graduated from college, to fill Vene's old post as assistant in the
fiction department. She let Harriet La Barre focus on editing the travel pages, now that Mallen De Santis was in charge of beauty.

A tall and striking woman with the understated elegance of a
Vogue
editor, Mallen came to
Cosmo
from
Brides
magazine, where she served as editor for one year, after editing beauty features for the teen magazine
Ingenue
. She was also a published author: Her 1963 book,
Bubble Baths & Hair Bows: A Little Girl's Guide to Grooming
, dispensed tips for the eager-to-please child on everything from how to brush her hair to how to wash her little white gloves. Under Mallen,
Cosmopolitan
's beauty section soon became a grown-up version of
Bubble Baths & Hair Bows
, only unlike the little girl featured in the book, the
Cosmo
Girl wanted to please a man, not her mother.

A graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, Mallen not only knew the latest Coty perfume or cure for stretch marks, but she was well-read in many other areas, and Helen consulted her on matters far beyond the beauty section.
“I did what Helen referred to as ‘material evaluation,'” Mallen says. In addition to planning her own section six months ahead, Mallen read
Cosmo
's major stories—the territory of the feature editors—and sent her notes back to Helen, who welcomed the extra set of eyes. (“
She really relied on Mallen being her guidepost,” says Eileen Stukane, a former features editor, sounding sympathetic toward Helen rather than begrudging of the beauty editor. “She thought Mallen was the staff intellectual. Mallen would sort of make pronouncements, and Helen would rely on her as being the smart one.”)

Like Helen herself, the magazine was in a constant state of improvement, and soon she developed a system.
Cosmo
came out once a month, and each issue used up a few dozen ideas, which meant that they needed a fresh crop of articles to assign to writers every week.
Editors were responsible for generating story ideas, which they shared once a week during a meeting in Helen's office.
Every four weeks, they reviewed the
last
issue of
Cosmo
to determine what they could have done differently. Looking over a feature on swimsuits slated for May, Helen wished that all of the models had been shot underwater, instead of one on a rock and another in a hammock—but the photographer wanted to vary the scenes, and he had gotten his way. She'd had more success with a writer whom she made revise an article about polygamy—too historical the first time around—but she found plenty of other examples to pick apart.

“
Every time an editor sees a new issue of her magazine (unlike the mother who believes her child is perfect), she's apt to decide, ‘Oh dear, we really could have been a little more amusing here,' or ‘How did we get so boring
there
?'” Helen confided in her readers in her May editor's letter. “She always thinks it could be
better
.”

Helen leading a staff meeting in the mid-1960s. She often stood in front of her desk, instead of sitting behind it. (
Copyright © Ann Zane Shanks.
)

I
N
J
ANUARY
1967, Helen typed up her first memo to the staff on the subject of writing and editing. It was thirty-five pages. “
Everybody—and especially me—needs editing!” she began. Recently, she had seen too many mistakes in okayed manuscripts that editors had passed on to her desk for approval. Rather than sigh and stew in her irritation, she decided to teach her staff to do things her way. She started by laying out twenty-four editing rules to live by. “RULE 1.
WRITING SHOULD BE CLEAR:
Nobody should read a sentence in
Cosmopolitan
and say
whaaaaaaat?
” It was imperative that
Cosmo
's articles be accessible to the average girl.

A select few writers could muse on whatever they pleased. To amp up
Cosmo
's music coverage, Helen hired Nat Hentoff, a music critic known for writing eloquently and eruditely about jazz in publications like the
Wall Street Journal
. Working from home, he had complete control over his column, “
Cosmo
Listens to Records,” and he liked the idea of reaching an audience he might not have found otherwise: young women. On a single page, Hentoff wrote about chamber music, bluegrass, flamenco, and Donovan, the latest singer-songwriter to join the scene, with his album
Sunshine Superman
. But even Hentoff, whom Helen admired and personally edited, still had to follow the golden rule.

“
She was always interested in clarity. If I used a multisyllabic word, she might say, ‘Maybe you could make that shorter,'” Hentoff says now, adding that he once received a similar piece of wisdom about composition from Dizzy Gillespie. “He said it took him most of his life to learn what notes
not
to play.”

For Helen, the point was to reach as many people as possible—to enlighten, not to frighten away. Editors of food and decorating features shouldn't assume that
Cosmo
readers owned a
soufflé pan or knew what it meant to cut something on the bias. “
All instructions for making
anything
should be understandable to a ten-year-old girl,” she reminded them. Articles should be inspiring and entertaining, but above all they had to be in service to the reader, and, as always, Helen used herself as a model.

“
She edited the magazine for three Helens,” Walter Meade says. “For instance, she kept all the how-to stuff, the decorating in particular, really dumb. She would read ‘How to Make Your Window Shades out of Wallpaper' very closely, and she would not print something she herself could not do.

“Then there were the super-sexy covers, which was what Helen the party girl
wanted
to be,” he continues. “She was ashamed of her small breasts and insisted that her cover girls have ample ‘bosoms,' as she always called them. The sexy articles and advice columns were written for that girl.

“The interior well of the book had serious pieces, usually written by very good writers—and that fed her need to be intelligent and wise.”

Helen was acutely aware of her lack of a formal college education, and through
Cosmo
, she educated herself and her girls. She gravitated toward erudite people, chief among them David, who sometimes used his own intellectual prowess to school her. (“
I just didn't get David in his boutonnière,” says Lyn Tornabene. “I thought he was the most pretentious man.”) Helen didn't necessarily share her husband's taste for great literature, but thanks to David, she knew enough about the classics to drop the occasional literary reference—and to appreciate one that was well placed in an article. Some writers needed to be studied a little, which was fine as long as the story was worth the time put into reading it. Whether she was writing about marriage or the Maharishi,
Cosmo
contributor Gail Sheehy could do no wrong.

But most writers could do wrong and did. In an article about drinking, for example, a writer might insult an advertiser whose ads ran in
Cosmo
's pages—they lost several pages of liquor ads that way. (
“RULE 22.
DON'T ATTACK THE ADVERTISER!
”) In celebrity profiles, too many writers gushed over their subjects—a sure sign of amateurism—instead of really getting to know the person by talking to their friends, family, colleagues, and lovers. In self-help articles proffering advice, they made girlish promises they couldn't keep—“
25 men will follow you down the street,” for instance—when the point was to give practical tips and set realistic goals that regular girls could accomplish. Worst of all, many freelancers were just lazy, turning in flabby sentences. “
Show no mercy toward sloppiness,” Helen exhorted, citing some examples of mistakes made in the past. “Edit ruthlessly.”

Helen edited ruthlessly, just as she had been edited by David. She liked her sentences as she liked her figure—tight and taut. She commanded the editors to cut sentences in half, to watch out for repeating words, to use complete sentences with subjects and predicates, and to banish clichés. Why not aspire to be a little more like the ad copywriter who had to grab people on their way to work by saying something in a new and surprising way?

Speaking of which, some words were just out:
groovy
,
fun
as an adjective,
gizmo
, and
gals
. Dirty words were another no-no. Calling someone a bastard? Fine. Calling someone a good lay? Not fine.
Cosmopolitan
was a sexy magazine, but its articles had to be tasteful for it to survive. A man could go to bed with a woman, but he could not put his hand up her skirt. They could “make love,” but they couldn't have “sexual intercourse,” and the writer mustn't use anatomical parts.

Some of these rules might as well have been written on a blackboard in a high school English class. Helen was a stickler about
grammar and syntax, and she honored other rules to keep the peace with Hearst management and outside advertisers. When it came to actual editorial content, she took a slightly different tack. On her watch,
Cosmo
published more than a few phony diets and faked letters to the editor.

“
It wasn't that we didn't get letters—just that they weren't necessarily as punchy as we might have liked,” says Barbara Hustedt Crook, who edited the letters section for years and wrote many of them herself. “I can't remember Helen specifically writing any letters, but have no doubt she did—especially at the beginning, when I wouldn't have been around.”

“
We made up things all the time!” adds Mallen De Santis, who dreamed up nonsense regimens like the Grapefruit and Hard-Boiled Egg Diet. “In our articles, a lot of the quotes were made up, fictional people. You know, we never really thought much about that. We didn't have to observe time-wasting rules.”

H
ELEN NOT ONLY
allowed writers to make up material; she encouraged them, particularly when it came to
Cosmo
's case histories. “
It's pretty tough, as you know, to make ‘fake case histories' sound
real
,” she told her staff in the same January 1967 memo. While some writers used
only
authentic sources in their articles, she conceded that not everyone had the time or the research skills to “ferret out the ‘realies.'” But this was nothing that a little creative reporting couldn't solve. To make her point, she relayed a recent conversation she'd had with George Walsh about a feature on widows. Helen had wanted George to call up the writer, Jane Howard, to ask how long one of the widows had waited to go back to work after the death of her husband. But it would be difficult to get the answer she wanted—the widow in question was
a composite of five different girls. “
Very good!” Helen wrote. “I hadn't realized she was a ‘fake.' The challenge is always to
try
to supply enough details to make the men and women sound real.”

Likewise, writers should feel free to change the subject's background—fewer case histories should be set in New York City. Say they were writing about a secretary from Manhattan. Why not make her be from Reno or Raleigh? “
Only 8 per cent of our readers live in New York City,” Helen reminded her editors. They needed to focus on reaching the other 92 percent.

Who were the 92 percent? They were the girls living in small towns and suburbs across the country, riding buses to work, and blowing their hard-earned money on lunch when they should have been saving up for their first apartments. They were the girls who called
Cosmo
's offices, looking for some answers and tying up the receptionists with their urgent questions, because they didn't know who
else
to ask about what dress they should wear for a date on Friday night or whether it was okay to call a guy who hadn't phoned for three days. They were the girls who depended on
Cosmo
for advice on how to survive a job interview or an affair.