Enter Helen (29 page)

“
You can't really talk about bosom techniques without
talking
about them.”

—Helen Gurley Brown, “Step Into My Parlour,” October 1969,
Cosmopolitan

A
fter Nora Ephron skewered
Women's Wear Daily
in
Cosmopolitan
,
Women's Wear Daily
skewered
Cosmopolitan
right back. How could anyone resist? Helen provided endless material, and along with Jackie O, she soon made regular cameos in the pages of
WWD
's gossip column, “Eye.” In October, the “21” crowd read all about
Helen's recent request for her own private john, which Hearst promptly turned down. The exploits of “Mother Brown” were always worth a good laugh.

And so was
Cosmopolitan
. “
Nobody took it seriously, let's face it,” says Gloria Steinem. “I mean, I would always fight for it on the grounds that it was at least allowing women to be sexual, even though it was to gain approval, and it wasn't exactly self-empowered. But, still, it was a big thing.”

Cosmopolitan
may have been a joke to the city's media elite, but for countless readers across the country, the magazine was a lifeline, especially when it came to questions about sex and relationships of all kinds. Who else were they going to turn to for answers about how to turn a guy on, or how to cope with an overbearing mother?

At forty-seven, Helen had plenty of advice to give, but she wasn't single, and she wasn't young. When
she
needed answers, she floated down the hall to talk to one of her single-girl assistants or editors: “
Robin, would a
Cosmo
girl think like this? . . . or dress like this? . . . or be attracted to this man?” She'd never understand certain attractions—the popularity of the band Cream, for instance—but she counted on her staff to keep her in touch with the times, and they came to expect her informal surveys. “Give me your definition of a bitch,” she once prompted. Another time:
“Have you ever dated a very wealthy man?”

The press ridiculed
Cosmo
for its endless articles on how to please a man, but Helen was just as interested, if not more, in finding out how men could please women. For the June issue, Gael Greene wrote a feature on how to cope with male impotence—after all, it affected women, too.
“Has a woman's magazine ever dealt with the subject of impotency before?” Helen asked her readers in her editor's letter that month. “I'm not sure . . . but we all know it isn't only the
girls
who are ‘frigid.' I think you can discuss almost
any
subject if you do it with honesty and in good taste.”

Naturally, for a feature on foreplay scheduled for July, she turned to the women on her staff. She wanted to know about their breasts—specifically, how they liked to have them caressed. For too long, men had been mishandling women's breasts, but no one ever talked about it. Well, it was time to fix that. The memo to her female staffers was supposed to be confidential, a private conversation among girls. That's why she addressed it the way she did:

They were free to send in their responses anonymously, and if they chose not to respond at all, she would just assume they thought it was none of her business. As for those who did choose to respond, she wanted to know: What pleases them when a man caresses their breasts? What do men do that they think is wrong? Why do they think that some girls don't get as much pleasure as they
should
get out of this kind of foreplay? Perhaps they're too self-conscious about their bosom size, et cetera. Finally, did they have any personal experiences to share? Maybe someone had a friend who didn't like having her bosom caressed, but then learned to enjoy it? “If we do this tastefully and with real insight,” she concluded her memo, “the article is going to help a lot of men make a lot of girls more happy.”

Helen left it to her senior editors to assign 99 percent of
Cosmo
's articles to their writers, but the issue of men mistreating women's breasts was too important, and she decided to assign the story herself to a writer in California. The woman took her best shot, musing on love and relationships, but her article lacked what Helen wanted most: specific techniques that men and women could
use
. “
This is your personal reminiscence of all your love affairs, and fascinating as it is, it doesn't have
anything
to do with boobs,” Helen told her. “I know,” the writer conceded, before asking if Helen could supply her with any material.

Shortly after that call, Helen sat down to write her memo.

L
INDA
C
OX HAD
just started working as an assistant art director when Helen's bosom memo landed in her hands, and she could
hardly believe what her new boss was asking of her—it wasn't any of her business! The whole memo really had to be seen to be believed, and on her way out of the office that evening, she quietly tucked it into her bag to share with some of her friends from her last job. They'd get a kick out of seeing how much her life had changed. Before a headhunter sent her to
Cosmopolitan
, Linda had worked as an assistant art director at
Holiday
, a slick magazine for the Jet Set, featuring the best writers and photographers out there. (One photographer, Slim Aarons, became especially well known for shooting the rich and famous in their haute habitats around the world.) Some former coworkers were throwing a dinner party at Trader Vic's in Midtown to say a belated goodbye to her and another former staffer, the writer Marilyn French, who had moved on to
Newsweek
. Linda couldn't wait to see their faces when they heard Helen's request, and as they started to drink, she broke out the memo.

“It was passed around, and we got a lot of laughs out of it, and that's kind of the end of the story,” Linda says now. Except it wasn't. As Linda was putting the memo back into her bag, a former coworker from
Holiday
's art department asked to borrow it. She wanted to show it to her boyfriend. One too many of Trader Vic's famous Scorpions made Linda say, “Sure.”

Over the next few days at
Cosmopolitan
, the girls turned in their responses about what they liked (“feathery touches”) and what they didn't (
“no feeling-the-melons pinching”). Helen was thrilled. All of the girls had written back, except for two, and she had gotten what she had asked for: real feedback from real girls. Bolstered by their insight,
she assigned two different writers to the story—the California writer had disowned it by this point—and they produced a fantastic piece, combining their material with hers.

The story was back on track when Helen heard that someone had leaked her memo to
Women's Wear Daily
. Around mid-March, an excerpt of the memo ran in its gossip column. “
BROWN STUDY: Eye is in receipt of a ‘memo' by Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown to her ‘girl staff members' announcing preparation of an article on ‘how men should treat women's breasts in lovemaking,'” the item began, mocking her serious inquiry into the matter.

All it took was an inch of space to reduce what could have been an act of public service into a public joke—and Helen wasn't laughing. “
She was
outraged
,” says Barbara Hustedt Crook, who had answered the bosom memo herself. “She stuck a note on the bulletin board—in her own quirky typing—that started, ‘THERE'S A VIPER IN THE NEST!!!!!' I can still hear the ice in her voice, discussing it.”

“
The person responsible would be immediately fired,” adds Linda Cox. “We were all shocked that someone would actually leak information to another publication and buzzed about who could possibly have done it. We thought it was a terrible thing to do and anyone who had any connection to
WWD
was suspicious. My friend who had just started at
Newsweek
called when she saw the
WWD
item. I said, ‘Isn't that awful? Helen is going to fire whoever leaked it.'”

Helen intended to flush out the culprit, and the staffers had their suspicions.

A few people said it was possibly the decorating editor, Karen Fisher. Other people speculated that Helen herself planted it for the press, but that would have been self-sabotage—
Cosmopolitan
already had printed a teaser for the story in the back of the June 1969 issue, “
WHAT MEN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WOMEN'S BOSOMS.”

Along with everybody else on staff, Linda wondered who it
could be. Just to be safe, she called her friend in the art department at
Holiday
and asked her to send the memo back. “
She said she would right away. When a few days passed and I still didn't have it, I began to get upset and called her again,” Linda says. “She finally admitted what had happened. A photographer, Slim Aarons, had seen it on her desk and picked it up and, as a joke, took it to his pals at
Women's Wear Daily
.”

Realizing the part she had played in the whole mess, Linda felt sick. “Helen was still livid, and I was too new and too scared to tell her what had happened. I didn't want to lose my job,” she says. “Then
Newsweek
ran the blurb with the additional information that the guilty party would be fired. Oh my God!”

Linda decided not to tell Helen what happened.
“I could never, ever face Helen,” she says. “Every time she called me into her office, I would almost throw up I was so scared. I never knew when the ax was going to drop.”

Not long after the leak, Helen told her version of the story to Nora Ephron in
Esquire
. “
This big brouhaha started because this little bitch, whoever she was, sent the memo to
Women's Wear
, and I would still fire her if I knew who she was,” she vented.

After Hearst executives got wind of the bosom memo, they demanded to see a copy of the article as soon as it was finished, and now they weren't letting her run it—too graphic. “
The actual use of anatomical words bugs them,” Helen told Nora. “Well, you cannot talk about love and relationships when you're talking about how to handle a breast. . . . You've got to say a few things about what to do.” Helen didn't blame her bosses, at least not publicly. They were just scared of getting too much flak. They were worried about alienating more readers, about stirring up more trouble with conservative supermarkets in the South. She would try running the article again, once the uproar died down.

“
We've decided to wait for a bit to publish this one,” she explained to her readers after the bosom story failed to appear in the July issue, as advertised. “Now, nobody around here is a puritan (are you kidding?!), but sometimes an article is a bit ahead of its time.”

B
Y NOW
H
ELEN
had learned how to work around her bosses instead of working against them. She appeased and pleased, flattered and flirted, and while she frequently got what she wanted for
Cosmo
eventually, her power had its limits in a corporate culture dominated by men.

In June 1969, Hearst threw a party to celebrate company president Richard Berlin's fiftieth anniversary at the corporation. In addition to the Hearst editors and executives who attended the bash, friends like President Nixon, the Duke of Windsor, and J. Edgar Hoover submitted tape recordings to be played for the audience.

Helen wasn't there because she wasn't invited. And she wasn't invited because she was a woman. Even Berlin's own wife, Honey, wasn't welcome. Berlin later wrote a note to Helen, apologizing for the fact that no female executives were allowed to attend the event—
the boys, he explained, wanted it to be “a stag affair.”

“
One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.”

—Carol Hanisch, in her 1970 essay, “The Personal Is Political”

O
n March 21, 1969, nearly three hundred people filled the basement of Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church to witness an unforgettable event. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, the church was known for its radical politics, and for sheltering deserters throughout the Vietnam War. On this particular evening, it gave refuge to another maligned group—women who had gotten abortions, many illegally, making them criminals in the eyes of the law. The event was organized by Redstockings, a radical women's group cofounded by Shulamith Firestone and the writer Ellen Willis. The previous month, Red-stocking members had infiltrated a New York State legislative hearing on abortion law reform, hoping to be heard as “
the real experts on abortion,” but the committee rebuked them, depending instead on the testimonies of its own members: fourteen men and one nun. (Ultimately, three women were allowed to address the committee that day, but the protestors were not satisfied with the token coda granted to them.)

Shut out, Redstockings decided to host their own hearing
instead. “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is” was billed as a one-act play that would be followed by personal testimonies. For the first time in public, women would tell the truth about their unplanned pregnancies and illegal abortions—about the borders crossed, the surgeries botched, the fears of being found out and judged.

That March evening in the church basement, the crowd listened to twelve women share their stories over the course of three hours. One woman told how, after a desperate search, she found a hospital that would give her a therapeutic abortion, but only if she agreed to be sterilized at the age of twenty. Another woman had to pretend she was mentally unstable before being granted an abortion—and confessed that going through with it was the sanest thing she'd ever done. At one point a Redstocking commented, “
I bet every woman here has had an abortion.”

Many women in the audience had endured abortions themselves, but chose not to step up to the microphone, not yet. “
I was one of those who kept quiet,” Susan Brownmiller later wrote in her memoir,
In Our Time
. “I chose an easier path and played
Village Voice
reporter.” Another journalist was there, too. Sitting on a windowsill, wearing aviator glasses and a miniskirt, Gloria Steinem was covering the speakout for her “City Politic” column in
New York
.

Gloria had gotten an abortion in London after graduating from Smith. Like Brownmiller, she wasn't ready to talk about it, but as she listened to the testimonies, she realized that her story fit into a much larger one that hadn't been voiced, until now.
After the event, she typed up her article, “After Black Power, Women's Liberation,” a witty, well-reported survey of feminist groups and actions around the city, including the abortion speakout hosted by Redstockings. Aiming for objectivity, Gloria left her own emotions, and her own abortion, out of the article—but despite her
impersonal tone, this story was very personal. Years later she would look back on that evening in the church basement as a crucial moment in her feminist awakening.

“
Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem later wrote in her book
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
. “If one in three or four adult women shared this experience, why were each of us made to feel criminal and alone? How much power could we ever have if we had no power over the fate of our own bodies?”

A
FEW DAYS
after the speakout, the
Village Voice
published Brownmiller's article, “Everywoman's Abortions: ‘The Oppressor Is Man.'” The piece included definitions of new terms for the unenlightened reader. One of those terms was
oppressor
—another word for man. Brownmiller also gave a quick primer on consciousness-raising circles, the leaderless, free-form support groups that encouraged members to tell the truth about their lives—their inner lives, especially—in the company of other women. By the early Seventies, “c.r. groups” and “rap groups” were popping up around the city, in borrowed office spaces downtown, apartments on the Upper West Side, and Brooklyn brownstones. In groups both large and small (but preferably small to create intimacy), women talked about their childhoods, marriages, and sex lives—airing their deepest secrets and insecurities.

It was at her weekly consciousness-raising meeting that Judy Gingold, a Marshall scholar working as a researcher at
Newsweek
, had an epiphany that eventually sparked a revolt. Her group of eight included an assistant at NBC, who voiced her feeling that she could get ahead in her career if only she were better at it. “Everyone was saying the same thing—‘if I were better, I would get ahead.' All of us in that room felt inadequate,” Gingold later
recalled in Lynn Povich's book
The Good Girls Revolt
. “And that's when I thought, wait a minute, that's not right. It's not because we're undeserving or not talented enough that we aren't getting ahead, it's how the world is run. It made me see that the problem wasn't our fault—it was systemic.”

At
Newsweek
, Gingold was one of many highly educated women assigned to low-prestige and low-paying jobs.
They compiled newspaper clippings, fact-checked articles, sorted mail, fetched coffee, and answered to “sweetheart” and “dolly.” Many had ambitions far beyond the research department, but they kept them in check. After all, the writing and editing jobs they coveted weren't available to them—they were given to men.
In the fall of 1969, a lawyer friend told Gingold that what
Newsweek
was doing was illegal—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited segregating jobs by gender. Over the next few months, Gingold discreetly spread the message to her female coworkers around the office, recruiting allies as they passed her desk or reapplied their lipstick in the ladies' room. Soon they had a lawyer—a pregnant civil rights activist named Eleanor Holmes Norton, then assistant legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union—and a solid case. In 1970 there were more than fifty men writing for
Newsweek
, but there was only one woman.

On March 16 of that year, forty-six female employees held a news conference to announce that they were suing
Newsweek
for sexual discrimination, after filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It would take two years and another lawsuit before the case was settled in their favor.

T
HE SAME DAY
that the lawsuit was announced, the new issue of
Newsweek
hit stands. The eye-catching red-yellow-and-blue cover featured an illustration of a naked woman bursting through the
female gender symbol R and the headline “Women In Revolt.” The former “dollies” who brought the suit against
Newsweek
cleverly timed their press conference to coincide with the release of the magazine's first major article about the burgeoning women's movement—but they were hardly the only women in revolt. Two days after their press conference, Susan Brownmiller (a former
Newsweek
researcher)
led another group of women who were ready to confront their oppressors. On March 18, around two hundred women invaded the Hearst offices of
Ladies' Home Journal
, cornering the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, at his desk.

The
Journal
's slogan was “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman,” and yet month after month, the articles and advertisements that typically ran in the magazine underestimated both the power and the intelligence of women readers. Seven years had passed since Betty Friedan had published
The Feminine Mystique
, and magazines like
Ladies' Home Journal
still presumed that women had nothing better to do with their time than clean the house, pretty themselves up, and have dinner and a fresh martini waiting when their husbands got home.

It was time to put an end to celebrity profiles like “Joanne Woodward: The Care and Feeding of Paul Newman” and fashion features like “Dressing for the Men in Your Life.” It was time to stop assigning disingenuous self-help articles that were really thinly veiled ads for whatever was the new-and-improved freezer or pantyhose or hair dye of the month. Most important, it was time to hire a staff of women, including nonwhite women, and let
them
determine what kind of stories were important. The protestors were fed up with the image of silly, childish wives depicted in the
Journal
's recurring column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” when what women
really
needed to know was how to get a divorce. Or an abortion. Or how to have an orgasm.

“
We demand that the
Ladies' Home Journal
hire a woman editor-in-chief who is in touch with women's real problems and needs,” Brownmiller began.

One by one, she and another organizer read off the rest of their demands in front of a crowd that included reporters as well as members of Redstockings, New York Radical Feminists (a successor of New York Radical Women), and the National Organization for Women (NOW).

“
The Women's Liberation Movement represents the feelings of a large and growing mass of women throughout the country,” she continued. “Therefore we demand that as an act of faith toward women in this country, the
Ladies' Home Journal
turn over to the Women's Liberation Movement the editorial content of one issue of the magazine, to be named the
Women's Liberated Journal
.”

In the days leading up to the event, Brownmiller and the rest of her sit-in steering committee alerted members of the press about their plans and even cased the
Journal
's offices. Even if he had caught wind of the plan, Carter, a soft-spoken southern man in his early forties, couldn't have anticipated that he would be spending the next eleven hours in a room with dozens of angry women who had been planning his exit with military precision.

But as they talked, he listened, and his office began to feel more like a giant living room. Clusters of women snacked sitting on the floor and picked through Carter's box of cigars. They also grabbed their fifteen minutes of fame, hanging a “Women's Liberated Journal” banner outside a window and airing their grievances to reporters they had invited from outlets like CBS, NBC, and the
Washington Post
.

Gradually, individual demonstrators spoke up. They talked about their own lives and their mothers' unfulfilled ambitions. At one point, Carter, dressed in a suit, got up to sit on his desk, where he could see the women's faces more clearly.

Everything was going according to plan until Shulamith Firestone and another radical, Ti-Grace Atkinson, barreled toward Carter, shouting that they were going to push him out of the window. “
We can do it—he's small,” Firestone said, seconds before leaping at his desk. Reacting swiftly, a Redstocking trained in judo intercepted her before she could hurt him. “
He was a quiet little man—and he just sat there,” says Jacqui Ceballos, a NOW member and mother of four who watched the scene in awe. “They were moving towards him, and Susan and the others pushed them back. They didn't go there to throw him out of the window—they went there to change the magazine and get their articles printed.”

Despite their best attempts, they didn't get Carter to resign. But by 6 p.m., the editors of the
Journal
agreed to look into hiring more women. (Three years later, the
Journal
's managing editor, Lenore Hershey, became its editor-in-chief.)
They also agreed to give members of the women's liberation movement eight pages of the August issue and $10,000 to fill it as they pleased. As promised, the summer issue included a special insert—unedited—written by thirty of the protestors, who covered subjects including divorce, childbirth, and consciousness-raising.

Plans were already in the works for a new column, “The Working Woman,” by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who left Bernard Geis Associates after nearly a decade to write her own book,
How to Make It in a Man's World
. (Doubleday published it in 1970, the same year as Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics
. As it happened, Pogrebin and Millett shared an editor, Betty Prashker.)

A mother of three, Letty eventually used her national platform to challenge the idea that a working woman should
have
to adapt herself to a man's world—on the contrary, the world should adapt itself to working women who needed affordable child care, among other considerations—but when she first signed on to write for
the
Journal
, she says, she was still just “a baby feminist” with a lot of growing to do.

“My editor at Doubleday warned me that I was going to be attacked by women's libbers and I asked, ‘Who are they?' I was oblivious,” Letty says. “She gave me Kate Millett's manuscript. . . . I was just learning. I was just opening my eyes.” By the time her byline started appearing in the
Journal
, “I was an absolute rabid feminist,” she says. “I insisted on being free to say anything I wanted in my column. I wrote it for ten years.”

The demonstrators had wanted to target a women's magazine with a man at the helm, and Carter had been an obvious choice, but they threw out other names early on. At one point, someone suggested Helen Gurley Brown.

“
I think we passed over it very quickly because we could not say she was the enemy,” Brownmiller says. “
Cosmopolitan
was so much one woman's brainchild. She had a successful formula. The circulation statistics were her biggest buttress. Why should she change it?”