Enter Helen (27 page)

“
That's the whole enchilada, darling. The will to please. That's the difference between good whores and bad whores—good wives and bad wives.”

—from “The Park Avenue Call Girl” by Liz Smith in
Cosmo
, July 1968

A
round the same time Gloria posed for her photo spread, Liz Smith was working on a story for
Cosmo
that turned out to be much more involved than she ever imagined. Helen wanted her to get an exclusive interview with a high-class prostitute for a profile, but Liz was having troubled finding girls who wanted to go on the record. Desperate, she even tried paying the going rate just to talk, but no one took her up on the offer. The only person she found who
was
willing to talk wasn't a call girl, but a faux socialite from the Hamptons named “Nicky.” As they chatted, it occurred to Liz that Nicky knew quite a bit about this particular line of work, even if she didn't actually do it herself. During one of their conversations, Liz floated an idea. They could role-play, just for fun. Nicky could pretend she was a call girl, and Liz would ask her questions about her life—
the
life. “
We'll tape it,” Liz said.

Nicky proved to be the perfect source. Over the course of the interview, she gave Liz the lowdown on everything from how much she charged to what kind of birth control she used (a
diaphragm). She also told her how she dealt with johns, got dates with millionaires, passed as a socialite in polite company, and handled her competition: not other call girls, but sweet “civilian girls” who were willing to hop into bed with any smooth guy in exchange for a night of dinner and dancing.
“Too much free stuff around competing with us,” Nicky whined. “How can you make an honest dollar these days?”

Back at her desk, Liz went for high drama, waxing poetic about Nicky's sun-streaked blond hair, as luxurious as anything coming out of Kenneth's hair salon. Nicky wasn't just any prostitute—she was a prostitute who lived on Park Avenue and made $40,000 in a year, not counting gifts. Sure, she
seemed
tough. She smoked Pall Mall golds, cursed the cops, and delivered brassy bad-girl lines, but it was all an act: An escort didn't spend all that time around the rich without learning a thing or two about how to operate in high society. “
The day before at lunch,” Liz wrote, “she had toyed with her Dover sole and then smoothly asked the waiter for a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé.”

When Liz turned in her story, Helen went crazy for it. She called it “The Park Avenue Call Girl” and published it in the July 1968 issue, alongside a sexy photograph of the model Heather Hewitt, just a few page-flips away from Steinem's photo spread. The article was a hit, and much later,
Liz got a call from the director Alan Pakula. Over lunch, he took out her piece and explained that he was making a new movie with Jane Fonda,
Klute
. Clearly, Liz was an expert on call girls. Would she be an adviser on the film?

Liz turned down the offer and admitted to him that the interview was a fake. Nicky may or may not have been an actual call girl. She just couldn't be sure. “It was the one thing I ever did for Helen that wasn't entirely kosher, and I don't think that she
cared,” Liz says now. “It was a great feat of imagination on my part—and desperation. I spent a lot of money trying to find a call girl. I offered everybody I knew! I remember I went to a guy who was running Le Club, an early discotheque, and I said, ‘I'll pay whatever the call girl wants,' but he was afraid, you know.” She laughs. “I was never a good investigative reporter.”

T
HE
P
ARK
A
VENUE
call girl story wasn't exactly Pulitzer-worthy, but to Helen it was
Cosmo
-worthy—whether it was made up or not. Hundreds of thousands of single girls across the country were buying
Cosmopolitan
, and it wasn't for its literary prestige or political coverage. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis and cities across America burned. In June, Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, and a nation mourned the loss of another beloved leader. In August, during protests against the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police used rifle butts, billy clubs, and tear gas to assault thousands of young antiwar demonstrators and innocent bystanders in a brutal and seemingly orchestrated attack that left
blood on the streets. No year came close to the violence of 1968, but to look at a copy of
Cosmopolitan
, one would assume that the most pressing issues in life were cleaning your closet and mastering a recipe for Korean-style chicken.

Helen knew that many of her own editors wouldn't have read
Cosmo
if they didn't actually work there, but the magazine wasn't meant for them—
it was meant for simple, small-town girls who might have gotten through a year or two of college at most. These were the girls her editors needed to consider when they brought story ideas to the weekly editorial meetings in Helen's office. For the September 1968 issue, the food and decorating editor was working on that story about clutter-free closets and had found some good tips to share, like how to create the illusion of order by
covering everything—walls, shelves, shoeboxes, hatboxes—with red patent-leather plastic, the shinier the better. Meanwhile, Harriet La Barre was following up on a couple of leads for her column, “The Travel Bug.” She had heard about a new kind of cruise for single girls who wanted to shed some pounds while they sailed the high seas. American Export–Isbrandtsen Lines was offering the 7-Day Caribbean Cruise, which cost only ninety-eight dollars and included lots of fun-in-the-sun activities, but zero meals—ideal for the budget-and-calorie-conscious
Cosmopolitan
Girl, she explained: “
On
this
cruise, you can even board ship with twenty-one cans of Metrecal and a jar of instant coffee; diet your way back through the Caribbean . . . arrive back home sleek, sun-bronzed—and seven pounds lighter!”

Sitting on the love seat in Helen's office, Mallen De Santis contributed some of the tawdriest ideas, all the more surprising coming from someone so elegant. How many ideas did she bring over the years? “
Oh, hundreds! Hundreds!” Mallen says now, and laughs. “‘I had an affair with my mother's stepfather.' I mean, you get to the point where you're really scraping the bottom.”
George Walsh brought the fewest, and Helen brought the best and worst. Over the decades, she contributed thousands. Yes, there were tons of stories about sex, but many of Helen's ideas came directly from her own life, like “FAMILY FISTICUFFS,” about the day she hit Cleo in the cab going to the World's Fair in Queens. “
One day I found myself taking a swipe at my
mother
. . . my dear, sweet, little grey-haired
MOTHER
, for God's sake!” Helen wrote in a memo titled “NOTES ON GIRLS WHO GET HIT OR VISA VERSA.” And then there was that time with David. They had been having one of their usual squabbles over tipping—he had given a cabdriver a ten-dollar
bill for a six-dollar ride—and Helen blew up. She screamed until he shook her and gave her a light cuff on the cheek. What exactly was it that drove men and women to hit each other?

In later years, editors typed up their story ideas on blue sheets, which were filed in huge loose-leaf binders labeled “
major emo” or “major non-emo,” depending on their emotional content. Writers who came to the office to meet with an editor could leaf through the blue sheets in the “major emo” binder, reading endless ideas about jealousy, envy, guilt, bottled-up rage, and existential longing. Stories like “THOSE
OTHER
PEOPLE . . . the ones who
belong
,” a dreamlike meditation on loneliness that Helen considered assigning to one of
Cosmo
's regular writers or else someone who was “more intellectual,” as she wrote at the top of the memo. Wasn't it strange how a person could eat at the poshest restaurants, attend the hottest fashion shows, admire spectacular views from one's own apartment, and still feel like all of those wonders belonged to
other people
? “even when you
belong
at them . . . or can afford them . . . or have every reason to be there,” she wrote, “you feel like one of the people looking
in
. . .”

Or maybe a better take on a similar idea would be “THE YOU NOBODY KNOWS,” a probing piece about people's secret sides. Some girls led double lives. She knew the type: a woman who acted one way around the rich and powerful and another, completely different way around people without money; or a girl who fooled everyone at the office into thinking she was sweet and innocent when, on her own time, she swore a blue streak and slept around. She was a special sort: sneaky, complex, and able to keep up appearances. “
now, the reason all this is occurring to me is that
i
am one of the kinky ones,” Helen confessed. People in different areas of her life had completely different impressions
of her, probably because she encouraged them to see her as they
wanted
her to be—not as she really was. “i just somehow fail to mention to them that they're getting a fake picture,” she wrote.

At least one person saw her for who she really was: an actress. “
She grew up in an age when movie stars were Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck . . . women who used guile and seduction to get what they wanted in films,” Walter Meade says. “She never struck me as having the personal characteristics of any of the great women stars of her day. It was their techniques she emulated: the crying, the fabricating, the willfulness and egocentricity.”

Like Anne Baxter's Eve in
All About Eve
, Helen was willing to do whatever it took to get her way, but she had a vulnerability that reminded Walter of another famous heroine: Scarlett O'Hara. “
I think Scarlett is closer to Helen than almost any other image. Except she was beautiful and Helen was not,” Meade says. “The point is that, to HGB, life itself was an invention. People made themselves into images that spoke to them so there was nothing amiss in molding a magazine the same way.”

“
To be a woman is to be an actress.

Being feminine is a kind of theater.”

—Susan Sontag

I
n the spring of 1968, a twenty-year-old Barnard sophomore named Linda LeClair made national news for doing something totally mundane—living with her boyfriend. Thousands of college kids had similar arrangements, but Linda also did something they did not: She publicly admitted it. A couple of years after moving into an apartment on the West Side with her boyfriend, a Columbia junior named Peter Behr, Linda was interviewed by a
New York Times
reporter working on a story about the increasingly visible phenomenon of coeds shacking up on campuses around the country.

In her article “An Arrangement: Living Together for Convenience,” which ran that March, Judy Klemesrud wrote in depth about three couples, including Linda and Peter, who explained that they were living together because marriage was “
too serious a step.” They shared a bank account, divided household chores, and didn't bother buying a bed—instead, they had six mattresses on the floor, crash pads for their friends and for themselves. Their parents knew that they were living together, and disapproved, but they may not have been aware of the fact that, shortly after moving in, Linda became pregnant and traveled to Puerto Rico for an
abortion. Linda also admitted that, in order to sidestep Barnard's strict housing regulations, she lied on her housing form, claiming that she had taken a job as a live-in caretaker off-campus.

Klemesrud changed Linda's name to “Susan” in the article, but she provided more than enough personal information for college officials to identify Linda and track her down. The college president called for LeClair to be expelled, but angry students protested on her behalf, attracting the attention of the national media. No one was more vocal than Linda and Peter themselves;
they handed out leaflets calling their case “a Victorian drama” and distributed surveys asking other Barnard students whether they too had broken housing rules. Three hundred girls answered yes. Many Barnard women resented the double standard—why did they have a curfew, while Columbia men could come and go as they pleased?

Under pressure, Barnard granted Linda a hearing open to both students and faculty, and in April, before the Judicial Council of Barnard College and her peers, she copped to lying on her housing form and living out of wedlock with a Columbia student. But she also read a statement of her own, accusing the college of discriminating against students on the basis of sex, among other factors, and challenging the idea that a school should be able to govern a student's private life. She was old enough to marry without her parents' consent—she should be able to live wherever and with whomever she wanted.

A Barnard philosophy professor took Linda's side, along with two religious counselors, a rabbi and a minister. After deliberating, the council proposed a revision of the housing rules. They also issued a statement against her expulsion, letting her go with a slap on the wrist: She would be banned from using the campus snack bar and cafeteria.

Over the next few weeks, the story of “the LeClair Affair” continued to attract a media maelstrom. Letters poured into the president's office at Barnard. Strangers accused Linda of being a whore and a blight on society, but thousands of students revered her as a hero, someone who finally was exposing the truth about double standards on college campuses—and in society at large.

“A sexual anthropologist of some future century, analyzing the pill, the drive-in, the works of Harold Robbins, the Tween-Bra and all the other artifacts of the American Sexual Revolution, may consider the case of Linda LeClair and her boyfriend, Peter Behr, as a moment in which the morality of an era changed,” wrote
William A. McWhirter in
Life
. McWhirter marveled at how a girl as “unalluring” as Linda LeClair, with her lank hair and ruddy complexion, could ignite such a firestorm.

The press appointed Linda as an unlikely poster girl for the sexual revolution (her boyfriend, Peter, later became a poster boy for resisting the draft), while others saw her as a radical and a champion of women's rights. To others still, her story symbolized the divide between old and young, the Establishment and those challenging it—a power dynamic that was playing out in the pages of
Eye
, with articles like “Are Your Parents Making You Drop Out?” and “Who's Who in Student Power,” a guide to ten students leading the revolt on campuses around the country.

What connection did Helen have to these articles or to the counterculture movement in general? “
None
,” says Susan Edmiston,
Eye
's former editor-in-chief. “I just can't remember any way in which her values were oriented toward young people.”

When Berkeley student activist Jack Weinberg said never to trust anyone over thirty, he might as well have been talking about Helen Gurley Brown, but it wasn't only her age that set her apart.
It was everything about her, from the clothes she wore to the four-year college degree she never earned. She was the antithesis of the young idealists who made up
Eye
's editorial staff.

In June, Susan received a newsletter titled “Notes from the First Year” from a friend who was a member of the women's liberation group New York Radical Women. Growing out of a young but powerful radical feminist movement, the explosive manifesto soon gained notoriety, along with its founding editor,
Shulamith Firestone, a twenty-three-year-old rabble-rouser with long black hair, Yoko Ono–style specs, and a fierceness that could border on madness. (She was later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.) One of six children raised by Orthodox Jewish parents, Firestone would become best known for her landmark 1970 book,
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
, in which she argued that the patriarchal family structure was at the root of women's oppression. (She also called pregnancy “barbaric” and shared a sister's grievance that giving birth was like
“shitting a pumpkin.”) But in 1968, Firestone was still just warming up. In addition to her primer on the women's rights movement and Anne Koedt's essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” the newsletter featured a page devoted to causes and people they supported and rejected. Linda LeClair was filed under “WE SUPPORT.” Helen Gurley Brown was filed under
“AUNT TOM OF THE MONTH.”

Susan didn't especially like Helen, but she got along with her.
Eye
's art director, Judy Parker, did not. She boldly opposed Helen's ideas and didn't hesitate to take a stand against her.
Eye
had a small staff, and it was no secret that Helen and Judy were a bad match, or that the magazine was struggling. In May,
Women's Wear Daily
caught wind of a rumor that
Eye
was “
on the blink.” Around the same time, Judy was fired, less than a year after she was hired. The way it happened was especially brutal.

Shortly after the firing, Susan got a call that Hearst was changing the locks on the doors, presumably so that Judy and her boyfriend,
Eye
's chief photographer, Michael Soldan, couldn't get into the office and steal valuable artwork—a concern that struck Susan as insulting and unfounded. It was a Friday, and they left. That was the last time anyone heard from them. Tragedy struck over the weekend, when Judy, Michael, and another photographer went sailing on Long Island Sound in the middle of a storm, and drowned. Susan got the news from a friend of a friend who called her before information about the accident went public, but it spread soon enough. “
I remember hearing that they were on acid, and that the waters were rough,” says then–fashion editor Donna Lawson Wolff. “We were all really heartsick about it.”

It's possible that drugs played a role in the accident. “
Perhaps they were handicapped in handling the boat, or high on the storm experience, and that affected their ability to function,” Susan says now. But at least a couple of
Eye
's young staffers also questioned Helen's involvement, as they grappled with the sudden loss of their friends. If she hadn't been so stifling, if Judy hadn't been fired so coldly, if the locks hadn't been changed . . . maybe Judy and Michael wouldn't have gotten on that boat that day.

In retrospect, it seems unfair to suggest that Helen was somehow responsible for the sad turn of events—people get fired all the time and survive—but all these years later, the theory that she wasn't exactly blameless is still hard to shake.

O
NCE THE SHOCK
of Judy's and Michael's deaths subsided, the reality settled in, and it was disturbing. Susan already felt disillusioned when she heard that Hearst was interviewing other people for
her
job. When her lawyer advised her to start looking for work elsewhere, she took his counsel and quit.

Along with Richard Deems, Helen personally interviewed thirty-five people, searching for
Eye
's next art director and editor-in-chief. Meanwhile, at
Cosmo
, she had just managed to hire a replacement for her former features editor Harriet La Barre. She found a star in Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner, who became
Cosmo
's new articles editor, but with Susan's sudden exit, Helen felt she had no choice but to send Jeanette downtown to edit
Eye
.

She had solved one crisis, but there were countless others, and by August, Helen was close to hysterical.
Sitting at her desk one night at seven thirty, she felt sorry for herself for still being at work when everyone else was at home or on vacation.

Usually Helen consulted David about her problems, but he was in California until tomorrow. She needed someone to talk to
tonight
, but she couldn't go to Dick Deems. He was the one who had asked her to get involved with
Eye
in the first place. She didn't want to let him down, but the fact was, she couldn't stand it anymore. Now that Judy and Susan were gone,
Helen estimated that
Eye
was taking up nearly a third of her time—time that she desperately needed to spend on
Cosmo
.

At one point Helen tried seeing her publisher, Frank Dupuy, but he was away. So she fed a piece of typing paper into her typewriter and began writing a letter to the vice president of Hearst Magazines, John R. Miller.

“Dear John, I'm in trouble,” she began. But where to begin, really? She was so overwhelmed, she wasn't even sure what she needed from him—or so she said. “I seem to be snap-crackle-popping under the strain and it's
not
a case of $5.00 more for this one or add one more secretary or get the fiction editor a raise . . . it seems to be the TOTAL EDITORIAL PICTURE.”

Her staff at
Cosmo
was falling apart at the seams. Two secretaries had left just a week before. Another girl had turned in her
notice even after getting a raise. They'd also lost an assistant art director and a paste-up girl, and they were about to lose someone else in the copy department who was leaving to have a baby.

Every other day, it seemed, another staffer left
Cosmo
and someone new and green came in. Helen had been searching for months for a decorating editor who could write
and
spiff up a room on a shoestring budget, but she was most upset about losing Wagner to
Eye
, even though she was the one who recommended her for the position in the first place.

Just the other day, she had finally hired a promising text editor for
Cosmo
. Well, it turned out
he
was an alcoholic! Joanne Hearst was another disaster. Helen hired the young heiress to help out in the fashion department, and all the other girls resented her, probably with good reason. Most days, Helen couldn't even find her, and she wasn't paying her $175 a week to disappear. And speaking of vanishing acts, her managing editor was MIA. “
Where is George Walsh, my strong right arm?” she asked Miller, before supplying the answer: He'd left at lunch to head to Cape Cod.

George's weekly jaunts to Cape Cod were hardly her biggest concern, but, she confessed, she was beginning to think about replacing him with someone who cared more about the job—and about her sanity. There was always some looming catastrophe keeping her at her desk until 10 p.m. She worked in the office when other people were at home sleeping. She worked at home when
she
should have been sleeping.

She simply couldn't handle it all.

“
John, I have told you before I am someone who has to be SAVED from herself,” Helen wrote, making sure to mention a couple of job offers she'd had recently. Norman Cousins had asked her to edit
McCall's
, and Mary Campbell from
Glamour
had also approached her. She was bringing it up simply to emphasize her point that
good editors were hard to find—and she desperately needed some backup. Something was wrong, and if it didn't get righted soon, she wouldn't last another six months.

As it turned out, it was
Eye
that wouldn't last.
Hearst suspended publication after the May 1969 issue. Once again, Helen would be able to focus her attention on
Cosmo
.