Enter Helen (36 page)

“I was trying to explain, as we were all trying to explain, that this was not a reform; this was a revolution; this was long and deep and connected to the suffragists' and abolitionists' era; that that had been one big leap forward, and now we were trying to accomplish another one,” Steinem says, adding that feminists wanted to call attention to the fact that there weren't enough women in politics—or in medical schools, for that matter. “We were saying, ‘But it could be different. It could be different . . . that's the vision.'”

Helen was so grateful for Gloria's visit that she wrote to thank her for it the very same day: “
We
are
all sisters . . . that's the overpowering message we got . . . and there is much for all of us to do.”

“
Having It All
sounds so fucking cliche to me.”

—Helen Gurley Brown, in a 1982 memo to her book editors

I
n 1982, Gloria Steinem walked into
Cosmopolitan
's editorial offices to interview Helen Gurley Brown for a cable television special. It was a bracingly cold day in late winter, and the wind howled along Broadway.

Helen began with a tour, showing Gloria a black-and-white picture of herself as a baby (“I think I was a darling baby—I have not seen a better baby picture, ever!”) and another one of herself as a young woman of twenty-two. “I am wearing falsies. You know people
wore
falsies in those days.” She moved on to a more recent color photograph of herself in a flattering red dress and pearls, standing in front of a tree in a residential neighborhood, along with two gray-haired women: one in a wheelchair, the other in a housedress, attempting, and failing, to smile.

“This is my family, my mother Cleo Bryan, my sister Mary Alford. Mary got polio when she was nineteen and I was fourteen. My mother passed away last year, this was taken just a few months before that time,” Helen told Gloria, moving along to a picture of herself and David in black tie at a Hearst dinner dance. “This is the first cover of
Cosmopolitan
when I came aboard,” she
said, pointing out the July 1965 issue, featuring Renata Boeck.
“I got the sexiest picture I could find.”

Cut to Helen and Gloria sitting down across from each other. Gloria wears a short-sleeved purple blouse and large-framed glasses; she looks confident and relaxed with one arm resting on a pinkish-beige floral couch that matches the wallpaper behind it. Helen wears a tweed jacket with pink piping and a plaid scarf tied into a giant bow around her throat and sits on a cane chair, her back straight as a pin. As the camera closes in on her bronzed face and sprayed hair, she purses her lips, nods, smiles, and almost seems to flinch as she waits for the first question.

“Ever since I've known that we were scheduled to have this conversation, I've been asking people questions and asking what they would like me to ask you,” Gloria begins. “But I think the biggest mistake about you is that you are a glamorous person who—”

“Come on!” Helen protests, shimmying her shoulders and laughing for the camera. “I'm glamorous! I'm glamorous!”

“You are glamorous,” Gloria says smoothly. “But I think they feel that you arrived here without effort. They don't understand the work that went into it. And I think most especially they would be surprised to hear about your childhood.”

Not everyone knew, for instance, that she grew up “without much money.”

“Not much money!” Helen interrupts. “Not much money doesn't even describe it!”

Over the next few minutes, Helen recited the same story she had been telling for the past twenty years with slight variations. This time, her family wasn't “dirt-poor,” a description David sometimes used to describe her Arkansas roots; the Gurleys were “genteel poor.” Her father died when she was ten, leaving
her mother, “a pitiful little creature,” to take care of one daughter with polio and another with unsightly acne.

Gloria listened patiently, occasionally sharing pieces of her own story. In Toledo, Ohio, her family also had been genteel poor, living off the unpredictable income of her father, a traveling antiques dealer. She, too, had taken care of her mother, who suffered from debilitating depression but still made sure that both of her daughters went to college.

“I'm more pitiful!” Helen said, and laughed. “You were able to go to college. You got the money somehow to get there so I feel that I'm more pitiful than you. How did you get there?”

“Well, my mother wanted very much to have both her daughters go to college and she saved money and sold the family house. And I got scholarships and worked as a salesgirl,” Gloria answered. “I think that most women in the country probably have had the kinds of experiences you and I have had, and they don't identify with women who surmount them because they think they must be special.” A pause. “Actually, we're the same people.”

Whatever Helen had been expecting, it probably wasn't that statement. But sitting in her office on that blustery day, Helen and Gloria discovered they had a lot in common. They both had rough childhoods and grew up with unhappy mothers who felt trapped in their lives. They both knew women whose lives had been ruined by getting pregnant out of wedlock—a crime that used to be punishable by society, as Gloria reminded the audience. They both knew women whose spirits had been crushed by an unfair system, Gloria continued, but Helen refused to talk about women as victims.

“I understand your point, which is that women could go a lot further if we were not victimized by a system that pays us less,
penalizes us for having children that keep us away from our jobs,” Helen said. “Yes, we would do better. But then we also are acknowledging—or at least I am—that, regardless of the breaks, you can do pretty well anyway. You can rise above it.”

“Regardless of the bad breaks, a
few
people can do pretty well,” Gloria corrected her. “We're just trying to make a world in which
more
people can do pretty well.”

As the film rolled, Gloria Steinem's interview with Helen Gurley Brown sometimes seemed more like Helen Gurley Brown's interview with Gloria Steinem, with Helen interjecting, “Can we talk about you?” She wanted to know Gloria's thoughts on marriage—always a subject of interest to her
Cosmo
Girls—but she also opened the floor to talk about a subject close to Gloria's heart.

“Would you like to tell me where we are right now with the women's movement?” Helen asked.

“I think partly where we are is the ability for you and I to come here and talk to each other and talk to a lot of people in their living rooms, most of whom are probably women, who hear us saying things that were in their heads, too—in all of our heads—and we didn't think we were supposed to say,” Gloria answered. “Like, in your case, ‘I didn't want to have children.' Or in my case, ‘I didn't want to get married.' Or whatever. Or that we would like equal pay.”

Speaking of equality, why didn't Helen have a spot on the Hearst board when she made millions for the company? People talked about that, you know.

“It's such a tricky thing. It's a privately owned, family-owned company,” Helen began, but Gloria wasn't satisfied with her response.

“It's good for the country to see talent rewarded,” she said.

“I
am
rewarded!” Helen protested.

“It's bad for the country to see it not sufficiently rewarded.”

“Oh, Gloria!”

And so it went. After defending her position at the company—they let her do whatever she wanted!—Helen defended her magazine when Gloria asked if she would ever consider putting “more reality about the sadness of life” into
Cosmopolitan
.

“That's a very tough question. Because unlike you, I want my magazine to sell tremendously well, and I do tend to accent the positive,” she said. She could publish almost anything she wanted in
Cosmo
, she added—she could turn it into
U.S. News & World Report
—but she liked the shallow stuff. She cared about beauty and fashion.

“No, we both care about it,” Gloria conceded. “But I think you have secrets and a seriousness and a worth that
Cosmo
as a magazine doesn't adequately reflect. That your public image doesn't adequately reflect. That's why we're here.”

“To try to
change
all that,” Helen purred, deflecting the issue, but Gloria kept her on course. It was interesting how Helen acted on TV talk shows—giggling and flirting with the host—when, in reality, she was a much more serious person than she presented herself to be.

Helen delivering one of her trademark TV performances in an appearance with reporter and commentator Cleveland Amory. (
Copyright © Ann Zane Shanks.
)

“Gloria, you're trying so hard to make it seem as though I'm victimized or put upon. . . .”

“No . . .” Gloria said. “I'm just suggesting that we as women go on playing certain roles when we have the power to change, and I would like other people to know you as I know you.”

“Yes, I would like to be known as a serious person. I'm a very serious little person,” Helen said. “I'm no good at all at a party.”

Why did she have to call herself “little”? Gloria pressed. Why did she have to put herself down?

Helen simpered and sidestepped and sighed, but Gloria wouldn't let her off the hook. For once she wanted to see the real Helen Gurley Brown—and she wanted the rest of the world to see her, too. Why was it so hard for her to be truly honest about herself? Why couldn't she show the complexity of who she really was?

The thought dangled in the air for a moment, but Helen didn't bite—or rather, she bit for just long enough to slide right off the hook. And then, they moved on again. Helen's new book,
Having It All
, would be coming out soon. What would she like to do after that?

Well, Helen said, she expected to continue editing
Cosmopolitan
; she had a contract, though she didn't want to be a “doorjamb case.”

“That's when you get your foot in the door and you refuse to be removed no matter what's happening,” she said. “I don't want to be one of those.”

She planned to stay at
Cosmo
for as long as she could. After that, who knew?

“Everybody says, ‘I want to go to Cyprus' or ‘I want to write my book' or ‘I want to look at the sunset' or ‘I want to spend more time with my children,'” she told Gloria. “None of those things exist for me. . . . It's hard for me to think ahead and say, ‘What is going to fill up my life?'”

What about a new book or a new magazine? Gloria asked.

“No,” Helen said, she had squeezed every last drop of wisdom she could think of into
Having It All
. And she didn't want to deal with the next subject, the obvious one: age. It was so cliché. So . . . predictable. She had been cheering up young single girls and plain girls and poor girls with their noses pressed against the glass forever. She wasn't interested in cheering up old girls about the same issues. She wanted to do something different. Something more meaningful for society, maybe. Something global.

“Women over sixty are the single poorest group in the whole country,” Gloria said. Wouldn't it be worth her while to help them?

“Maybe that's the next phase,” Helen said unconvincingly, as they wrapped up.

It was time to go. She had places to be and people to see. Somewhere in Manhattan on that cold, glittery night,
twenty people from Estée Lauder were waiting at a restaurant to meet Helen Gurley Brown—and hear all about That
Cosmopolitan
Girl.

“
Home. I'll go home, and I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”

—Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh),
Gone with the Wind

I
n 1993, That
Cosmopolitan
Girl went into forced retirement at the suggestion of a new ad agency hired to work on the magazine's image. Going forward,
Cosmo
would eschew the word
girl
and be known as “the largest selling young women's magazine in the world.” For two decades, feminists had been protesting
Cosmo
's insistence on calling women “girls,” and Martin H. Landey, chairman and chief executive of New York's Cox Landey & Partners, thought they had a point.
“I don't think the advertising should talk like that anymore,'” Landey told the
New York Times
. “The world changes.”

The world changes, and Helen Gurley Brown helped change it, selling sex without guilt in the Sixties, sex as liberation in the Seventies, and sex with power in the Eighties, along with power hair. British hairstylist Harry King created the iconic
Cosmo
style—big hair fanned out and sprayed on the sides—on the model Kelly Emberg for the December 1980 cover, starting an instant trend. “
It became known as the Cobra Look,” he says. “I could not believe I was getting away with this hair. . . . I was making a goof, and it became mainstream.”

In 2015, the Browns' brainchild turned fifty under a new editor,
editor, the British-born Joanna Coles, who, since her appointment in 2012, has been honoring Helen's sex-loving brand of feminism while using the magazine and its website to educate readers (see: “Your
Cosmo
Guide to Contraception: How Not to Get Pregnant”) and to endorse political candidates.
In the United States,
Cosmopolitan
is the bestselling magazine for young women, reaching approximately 18 million readers a month, and it is one of the biggest magazines in the world, with more than sixty international editions distributed in more than one hundred countries, from Finland to Mongolia.

Helen oversaw many of
Cosmo
's international incarnations herself, especially during her final years at the magazine. She didn't want to be a doorjamb case, but sure enough she became one. Though her initial engagement with Hearst was for a couple of years, she remained
Cosmo
's editor-in-chief for more than three decades, and her later years were some of her most controversial ones, though not for the reasons she intended.

In 1988, Helen made national headlines thanks to a hugely controversial article she ran in
Cosmo
's January issue, “Reassuring News About AIDS: A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be at Risk.” According to Dr. Robert E. Gould—a psychiatrist with no proven medical or research expertise regarding HIV—straight women could rest easy about the virus, which was most commonly associated with young gay men. “There is almost no danger of contracting AIDS through ordinary sexual intercourse,” Gould wrote. Playing down the importance of using a condom during vaginal intercourse, he argued that in many cases
“a healthy vagina” (without lesions, for instance) was sufficient protection against the virus.

As soon as the issue hit stands, medical authorities denounced Gould's article for spreading false information, a charge that was
later supported by then–surgeon general C. Everett Koop. But Gould wasn't the only one to blame. In mid-January, three hundred activists organized by the New York chapter of the AIDS group ACT UP picketed outside of the Hearst Magazine Building, bearing signs that read “The
Cosmo
girl CAN get AIDS,” “CONDOMS
NOT
COSMO,” and “HELEN GURLEY BROWN—DOES
HAVING IT ALL
INCLUDE AIDS?” Distributing flyers that tore apart Gould's claims, they called for a boycott of the magazine, asking the public to
“Say No to
Cosmo
.”

What was Helen thinking when she approved the article? It's impossible to say, but the same year, it
was reported that only 4 percent of AIDS patients contracted the virus through heterosexual intercourse. Still, telling straight women that they didn't have to worry about contracting AIDS wasn't just shortsighted; it was delusional and potentially catastrophic. Helen's vision for single women to enjoy sex without consequence blinded her to very real, very deadly consequences that didn't exist when she was young—and believing she was right, she refused to apologize.

About a week after the protest, Helen went on the air, defending the article to Ted Koppel of ABC's
Nightline
.
“We have come so far in relieving women of fear and fright and guilt,” she said, “and now along comes this thing to scare the daylights out of everybody forever. And since there isn't too much proof that AIDS is spread through heterosexual intercourse, I think our side should be presented, too.”

“When your readership, ten million mostly young women, read an article like that, and draw the conclusion that, therefore, maybe they don't need to urge their partners to use condoms,” Koppel pressed, “do you feel entirely comfortable with that?”

“I feel quite comfortable with this,” Helen replied, sending chills down the spines of her closest allies.

“
People would always say to me ‘How can you work for her?' and ‘She's a terrible person.' And I would say, ‘No, she isn't,'” Liz Smith says. “She was wrong about a lot of things. She never believed that straight women could get AIDS, and we all went to the ground wrestling with her that AIDS was a international disease, and it wasn't just a disease of gay men. She never saw that, and it caused the women's movement to move away from her, but she didn't mean any harm.”

Feminists further distanced themselves from Helen in the Nineties, when she
downplayed sexual harassment in a decade full of high-profile charges against powerful men, such as Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and Senator Bob Packwood. When asked if any of her female
Cosmo
staffers had been sexually harassed at work, Helen quipped, “
I certainly hope so.”

And in October 1991, she wrote an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
that was as disturbing as it was infuriating. “I
know
about sexual harassment,” Helen began, before suggesting that people lighten up about a little horseplay at work. To make her point, she described a game her office mates used to play at Los Angeles's KHJ radio station when she worked there in 1940. Here's how Scuttle worked: A guy (usually an announcer or engineer) would chase a girl (a secretary or an assistant) around the office until he caught her and tore off her panties.
“While all this was going on, the girl herself usually shrieked, screamed, flailed, blushed . . . but to my knowledge no scuttler was ever reported to the front office.
Au contraire
, the girls wore their prettiest panties to work,” Helen wrote, confessing that she used to hope to be scuttled herself, but she was too plain to attract the attention.

O
NCE
, H
ELEN
G
URLEY
Brown led the way for the single girl, but by the mid-Nineties she was old enough to be That
Cosmopolitan
Girl's grandmother—and her ideas seemed to get battier every year. In 1996, at the age of seventy-four, she finally agreed to step down so that she could be
replaced by a much younger editor, Bonnie Fuller, coming from another Hearst title,
Marie Claire
. “
I think it was difficult for her,” says Laurence Mitchell, who worked as Helen's photo director for fifteen years, starting in 1981. “Her biggest fear in life was that, if she were to retire, no one would ever ask her to lunch—but the point is, she never went to lunch anyway!”

Shortly after the announcement was made, some critics rushed to knock Helen down even further. The
Wall Street Journal
ran an unflattering front-page story by media reporter Patrick Reilly, suggesting that Brown had overstayed her welcome and that the company couldn't wait to replace her. It was the most hurtful article she had read about herself in the thirty-four years she had been in the public eye, and for once, Helen put aside her diplomacy and furiously typed up one of the few angry letters that she actually
sent
—on her signature cotton-candy pink letterhead:

“If it gives you any satisfaction.

Exit Helen.

O
NLY SHE DIDN'T
leave that easily.
In addition to giving her a car and a new office, Hearst gave Helen Gurley Brown a new title: editor-in-chief of
Cosmopolitan
's international editions. If she was hurt by the forced retirement, she didn't really complain, at least not publicly. Privately, she confided in a few friends, admitting
that the ugly publicity that surrounded her exit—and the exit itself—was hard on her.

“
The company has been insanely good to me until these last 15 minutes,” she wrote to Walter Meade in February 1996, “and they didn't mean me to get hurt, though I was.” Since she couldn't imagine not working, she would commit herself to improving
Cosmo
's international editions, and see whatever else came her way.

She did what she promised. She still traveled, appearing at
Cosmo
launch parties around the world. She still came to work and made endless notes on
Cosmo
's foreign-language editions, but after a while, “they didn't really want to hear her comments,” says one longtime colleague. “They accepted it, but it wasn't something that they necessarily took into consideration.” What did she really know about single women in Russia or in the Middle East?

When she wasn't writing notes for the international editions of
Cosmo
, Helen worked on preserving her legacy. In 1972 she began sending her papers to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the alma mater of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. Helen had been saving letters, photos, and other memorabilia ever since she could remember. For a long time, she stored everything in her building's basement, but gradually she began moving the contents of her life to the college's women's history archives. Being at Smith meant a great deal to her. It pained her to think of her lifework ending up in a paper shredder somewhere after she died. “I don't have children, and it sort of hurts me to think that I just have to throw it away,” Helen wrote. At Smith, she added,
“I feel I have a home.”

When Helen left
Cosmo
in 1997, one of her first thoughts was to visit Smith, in Northampton, Massachusetts. As early as 1975, she proposed talking to Smithies in their natural
habitat—perhaps in their own dormitories. Surely she would benefit as much as the students would. It was so important to keep
Cosmo
young and vital, and she wanted to hear what they had to say.

One of Helen's biggest insecurities was that she never had a formal college experience. “She was
ashamed of being sort of from the sticks and not having an education. She was always covering that,” says Erica Jong. “She admired people who had graduated from college and graduate school and were more intellectual than she was.” Shortly before she died, Helen visited Smith.
The college made her an honorary member of the Class of 1962, the year that
Sex and the Single Girl
was first published, and she finally earned membership in an exclusive club she never could have dreamed of entering when she was college-age.

Once, Helen had dismissed the idea of writing a book about getting older, but in 1993 she published
The Late Show
, an advice book for women over fifty, followed by yet another rehashing of her life story in 2000's
I'm Wild Again
, a reflective book that includes a letter to the daughter she never had, as well as more tender portraits of her mother and sister.

Still, people seemed to prefer the sensational Helen Gurley Brown, who was still doling out blow-job tips into her late seventies, not the serious person whom Gloria Steinem had tried, and failed, to unearth. “
I don't know that she counted her own reality as serious and important enough to share it,” Steinem says. “I don't know. I hope so, with somebody, I hope so.”

As always, Helen had David, and David had Helen, whom he needed more than ever after his son Bruce Brown died after years of struggling with drugs. Bruce had been troubled ever since Helen could remember, and those troubles never went away.

Articles described the Browns as “childless,” but that's not
accurate. People forgot that David was a father, Helen a stepmother. They just remembered that the Browns never wanted children, though they didn't necessarily know why. “
Because she had to raise herself,” says Lyn Tornabene, recalling one of the last conversations with Helen she ever had. “There was no room for any other baby. She needed the attention and wanted it. That was it.”

O
N
F
EBRUARY
1, 2010, David died at home in Manhattan at the age of ninety-three.
By then the Browns had amassed a fortune—in 2015, the Browns' estate was worth around $105 million, minus $73 million worth of donations—and Helen asked Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. to oversee her affairs. Along with Hearst general counsel and senior vice president Eve Burton, he soon became a co-trustee and co-executor of her will.

In David's absence, the walls of Helen's burrow finally began to cave in. Her mind dulled, her memory dimmed, and she relied on someone else to remind her of her story. Toward the end of her life, she started talking to her cousin Lou on the phone every Sunday night, and frequently those conversations turned toward her childhood in Arkansas. “
Helen talked to me about Cleo in her old age. During those times, she was not so dismissive; rather, she showed an understanding. Perhaps it was always there, but it was more ‘catchy' to do the whole hillbilly bit,” Lou says. “It warmed my heart when she would confide in me over the years, the last ones in particular. I think she needed a person to talk to who had nothing to gain by being nice to her and could talk to her about her family. She told me in her last year, one night, ‘I feel happy when we are talking. I don't feel happy very often.' I know that was true because she missed David so much.
Fortunately, toward the end she thought he was on a long trip. At least, I think that was fortunate.”