Enter Helen (28 page)

“
As they glide back and forth across your television set, you can't help but wonder for a moment if Mary Quant, John Lennon, Vidal Sassoon and Dr. Timothy Leary ever did happen.”

—from “There She Is . . . Miss America,”
Eye
, April 1968

H
aving so winsomely put Miller on notice about her unhappiness—and those other job offers—
Helen eventually used
Cosmo
's newsstand success as a bartering chip for a bonus, while negotiating for a pay raise and a new-and-improved contract. She had no problem playing the damsel in distress, if it helped her get what she wanted from a man, but a new movement was brewing, and its members didn't pretend to need rescuing. They needed a revolution.

In 1968, a civil rights activist named Carol Hanisch came up with the idea of protesting the Miss America Pageant to call attention to the women's liberation movement. Robin Morgan, a poet and member of New York Radical Women who was well versed in guerrilla theater tactics, joined her in crafting a plan and a press release titled “NO MORE MISS AMERICA!”

All were invited to join in a daylong demonstration on the boardwalk, in front of Atlantic City, New Jersey's Convention Hall, where the pageant was being held that September.
“The Annual Miss America Pageant will again crown ‘your ideal,'”
Morgan wrote. “But this year, reality will liberate the contest auction-block in the guise of ‘genyooine' de-plasticized, breathing women. . . . We will protest the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us.”

Interested participants were encouraged to bring any bras, girdles, and other “woman-garbage” they had around the house to throw into a giant Freedom Trash Can.
“Lots of other surprises are being planned (come and add your own!)” the release read, “but we do not plan heavy disruptive tactics and so do not expect a bad police scene. It should be a groovy day on the Boardwalk in the sun with our sisters.”

The organizers discouraged men from joining the demonstration, but invited sympathetic husbands and boyfriends to volunteer as drivers. Other women coming from New York City took a bus. By 1 p.m., more than one hundred women had gathered on the boardwalk. Some sang the lyrics of a new protest song written by the folksinger Bev Grant:
“Ain't she sweet, making profits off her meat. Beauty sells she's told so she's out pluggin' it.” A few of the demonstrators were already famous or would be soon, such as the civil rights lawyer Florynce “Flo” Kennedy and the artist-scholar Kate Millett, but mostly they were unknown members of a still largely unknown cause.

They were white, black, Hispanic, old, young, wealthy, poor, fat, thin, aproned and oven-mitted, blue-jeaned and braless, freckled and wrinkled, long-haired, gray-haired, and Afro-haired. They were housewives, grandmothers, college students, artists, actors, lawyers, scholars, and career activists, and they had heard about the protest in a number of ways, through women's consciousness-raising circles, antiwar organizations, and groups advocating birth control and abortion rights. Many were from New Jersey or New
York City, and some came from as far away as Gainesville, Florida, and Bancroft, Iowa, but they had all come to Atlantic City for the same reason: to expose the Miss America Pageant for the sham it really was.

“Atlantic City is a town with class!” they shouted as they marched down the boardwalk. “They raise your morals and they judge your ass!” As passersby gawked, they waved homemade banners, protesting everything from the pageant to the war.
MISS AMERICA IS A BIG FALSIE. GIRLS CROWNED—BOYS KILLED.
WELCOME TO THE MISS AMERICA CATTLE AUCTION
.

Somewhere, a live sheep bleated—and was crowned and festooned with blue and yellow ribbons in a mock ceremony.
Elsewhere, a woman wearing a top hat and her husband's suit conducted a mock auction, selling another woman wearing a miniskirt who had chained herself to an eight-foot wooden Miss America puppet in a red-white-and-blue bathing suit. “
Step right up, gentlemen, get your late-model woman right here! . . . She sings in the kitchen, hums at the typewriter, purrs in bed!” she yelled at the crowd. “The perfect model, she doesn't talk back . . . you can use her to push your product, push your politics, or push your war.”

It was theater of the absurd, but nothing compared with the absurdity of the pageant that they were protesting—a beauty contest that, since its inception in 1921, had never selected a black finalist. (
Later that night, the first Miss Black America would be crowned just a few blocks away in a separate pageant.) Inside Convention Hall, fifty life-size Barbie dolls in various shades of white paraded around in swimsuits and zombie smiles, waiting to be judged on their special talents and ding-dong answers to questions like “
How can people live together more peaceably?”

Meanwhile, outside on the boardwalk, demonstrators were throwing items of their oppression into the Freedom Trash Can.

“No more girdles, no more pain! No more trying to hold the fat in vain!” someone shouted, dropping a girdle into the can.

“Down with these shoes!” another woman cried, tossing in a high-heeled shoe.

One by one, they stepped up to the can.
A woman sick of doing the dishes slammed in a bottle of gooey pink detergent. Another tossed in a pair of falsies. Gradually, the can filled up with bras, false eyelashes, hair curlers, corsets, tweezers, wigs, dishcloths, and pots and pans.

“Why don't you throw yourselves in there!” shouted a man standing on the sidelines, one of several hundred bystanders.
“Go home and wash your bras!” shouted another, in a growing chorus of insults.

They were called communists, lesbians, witches, and whores. But they didn't stop. One mother chucked her seventeen-year-old son's copy of
Playboy
. “
Women use your minds, not your bodies!” she yelled.

Someone else threw in a copy of
Cosmo
. The October issue wasn't out yet—if it had been, it might have ended up on the top of the heap. “Why I Wear My False Eyelashes to Bed” and “How Not to Get Dumped on
His
Way Up” were just a couple of the stories advertised on the cover that month.

T
HE DEMONSTRATORS ATTRACTED
tons of press, but the cameras never caught their crowning glory inside the Convention Hall. Just as the former Miss America, Debra Barnes, was giving her goodbye speech, Hanisch and another protestor hung a banner over the balcony, announcing their arrival in all caps: women's liberation. As security broke up the scene on the balcony, two other women on the convention floor set off two stink bombs by the stage.

The millions of viewers at home didn't see the chaos; they saw just the tearful face of Judith Anne Ford, aka Miss Illinois, when she was crowned as Miss America for 1969. (An eighteen-year-old gymnast, she won over the judges with her skills on the trampoline and her perfectly sculpted platinum-blond hair.) But the message of women's liberation got through in countless articles about the protest that ran in newspapers around the country in the following days.

Some articles reported scenes of bra-burning on the boardwalk, but while a few women tossed their bras into the Freedom Trash Can that afternoon,
nobody ever set fire to one. Still, women's lib soon became associated with “bra-burning,” and Helen Gurley Brown, always a friend to advertisers, saw an opportunity to come to the rescue of bra manufacturers everywhere.

After the protest, she assigned an article about the bra industry that included a history of bras and a guide to buying the hottest styles. Want to talk about liberation? Then talk about Rudi Gernreich's No-Bra Bra! Want to talk about change? Check out Pucci's new line of mad, eye-popping prints for Formfit Rogers!

“
The WLM can put down bras all they like,”
Cosmo
told readers; “most American women are still putting them on.”

‘“
We had all these young assistants who were basically secretaries, except they couldn't type or take shorthand . . . they were fertile ground for makeovers.”

—former
Cosmopolitan
beauty editor Mallen De Santis

M
any mornings, Helen and David took a cab together to work. He dropped her off at her office, and then continued on to his own, a few blocks away. When they didn't head in together, Helen took the bus. She loathed the idea of wasting money on a private chauffeur or a taxi for herself, but that wasn't the only reason why she rode the bus.
She wanted to be with her girls: to see what they wore, where they went, what they read. She boarded hoping to see women with their noses buried deep inside
Cosmopolitan
, but her market research met with mixed results.

Millions of women read
Cosmo
, but many preferred not to admit it—including Nora Ephron, who took care to remove her glove if she was reading
Cosmo
on the bus so that her fellow passengers would see her wedding ring.
“I have not been single for years, but I read
Cosmopolitan
every month,” she confessed in her 1970
Esquire
profile of Helen Gurley Brown. “I see it lying on the newsstands and I'm suckered in. ‘How to Make a Small Bosom Amount to Something,' the cover line says, or ‘Thirteen New Ways to
Feminine Satisfaction.' I buy it, greedily, hide it deep within my afternoon newspaper, and hop on the bus, looking forward to—at the very least—a bigger bra size and a completely new kind of orgasm. Yes, I should know better. After all, I used to write for
Cosmopolitan
and make this stuff up myself.”

In fact, when Nora was still a cub reporter at the
New York Post
, Helen was the first editor to ever offer her a magazine assignment: an article skewering New York's famously catty fashion rag. When “
Women's Wear Daily
Unclothed” appeared in
Cosmopolitan
's January 1968 issue, it prompted threats of a lawsuit from Fairchild—a sure sign that Ephron had arrived. (Years later, she wrote to thank Helen for giving her the assignment, which she said was “
one of the first things I ever did in which I found my voice as a writer.”) The same year, Mallen De Santis asked her to undergo a makeover for the magazine.

Nora wrote about her redo in the May 1968 issue in a sequence of short, funny diary entries that accompanied her before-after transformation. In her article, “Makeover: The Short, Unglamorous Saga of a New, Glamorous Me . . . ,” she gave a blow-by-blow account of the experience, from deciding on a new “nighttime look” with Mallen to arriving at Lupe's hair salon the following day to be styled by the famous high-society Spanish hairdresser. Flourishing a pair of solid-gold scissors, Lupe told Nora his vision for her hair:
“de ringlets in de front and de shaggy in de back.”

Nora allowed “de ringlets in de front,” but ultimately nixed “de shaggy in de back” because it would take two years to grow back her hair if he chopped it all off. Three hours later, with her hair washed, cut, and set with rollers, she joined Mallen and the photographer in a limo headed to his studio, where the makeup artist would take over. After examining her closely, he decided she was “not pretty-pretty” and pointed out everything that was
wrong with her face. (
“Told me my face too narrow, eyebrows too arched, chin too long,” she later recounted.) He then went about correcting it through the magic of makeup and contour.

At the end of the day, Nora left the photographer's studio with glued-on lashes and bright red lips, as well as a seemingly wider face, softer brows, and shorter chin. She wrote the last entry of her makeover journal the next morning: “
Ringlets have lost curls. False eyelashes sitting in medicine cabinet. Old me back in the mirror—the last person I expected to see.”

I
N 1968,
N
ORA
Ephron already had a recognizable byline, but many of the makeovers that ran in
Cosmo
were of complete unknowns. For her makeover models, Mallen De Santis didn't go through an agency. She simply walked down the hall.

Day after day,
Cosmo
's young assistants came to the office with oily skin, split ends, and bad dye jobs. “
What'll I do? My hair's a mess,” a receptionist named Sandy said one day, poking her head into the beauty department. After getting her brown hair professionally streaked with blond highlights, Sandy spent one too many nights home alone with a bleach bottle, and now her hair was three different shades of bad. Sandy's before-and-after makeover story ran with the headline “The Great Hair Disaster . . . And How to Recover!”

Everyone was a potential model, and once in a while, Mallen used someone truly beautiful, like
Cosmo
's art director, Lene Bernbom, who insisted on hiding her thick blond hair under a hat with a chinstrap. (Mallen's stylist gave her a fat ponytail with Dynel sausage curls by Tovar-Tresses.) Mostly, though, she went for plain girls, and the more lackluster the better. “
The simple process was to make them look as awful as possible for the ‘before' pictures and then make them absolutely glamorous for the ‘after'
pictures,” Mallen says. “The best makeovers were the very bland, mousy girls who you could take and really pile on the makeup and the hair—then they'd look wonderful.”

Some girls needed a complete overhaul, like Lynn Foss, “
a pretty little mouse of a girl who had all the potential of a sexpot,” according to
Cosmo
, “but whose fires were banked by her captain-of-the-girls'-hockey-team exterior.” After being further undone for her “before” shot, she was shipped off—along with a blue-sequined dress and a frightening black wig—to the photographer's studio where she was redone by a superstar hair-and-makeup team on loan from Revlon.

Other girls simply needed some fine-tuning and fixing. When Barbara Hustedt walked into a metal stanchion in the subway, chipping her tooth, Mallen saw an opportunity to bring her to a dentist who had just started using epoxy resin as a tooth filler. Someone else's big Dumbo ears were the perfect excuse for a surgical procedure called otoplasty. Another assistant had terrible acne that was cleared up after several visits to Christine Valmy's skin-care salon. After her redo story ran,
Cosmo
received more than a thousand letters about it.

Why use real-life models? The idea was that
Cosmo
readers had a lot in common with
Cosmo
staffers and contributors—“same age, same dreams, same potential,” Helen explained in one of her columns. But they didn't. Not really.
Cosmo
's core readers were simple, working-class girls who considered the magazine to be their bible and Helen Gurley Brown to be their savior.
Cosmo
's editors were sophisticated, college-educated women and men who already knew where to put the dessert fork on a dinner table.

Mallen worked for Helen for almost twenty-five years. During that time, she dramatically expanded
Cosmo
's beauty coverage to include cosmetics as well as plastic surgery, dentistry, nutrition,
and fitness—all important fields for advertisers. She became an expert at channeling Helen's voice through her ear, and she instinctively knew what Helen wanted for articles. Mallen pitched and guided many of them herself.

Are there any stories she's particularly proud of now? “No,” she says, after a pause, “I don't think so.

“
All the senior editors knew it was kind of a lark, which did not mean that we didn't do our jobs very well,” she adds. “My personal life and personal belief had very little to do with the job. It was frivolous, and a lot of my friends thought it was silly that I was working there, but it was a good job. I enjoyed it, I was well paid, and that was it.”