Enter Helen (8 page)

“How about a bathing suit?” Helen offered next. If anyone was prepared to help a girl find the right fit of bathing suit, it was Helen, who had worked on the account for Catalina Swimwear.

But Lou told her that she already had a bathing suit.

“A cover-up,” Helen said as they continued past boutiques selling sundresses and swimwear. “A cover-up would be good.”

“Well, I actually made a cover-up out of a towel,” Lou said. “I made it with pockets, and I really like it.”

Helen looked at her cousin. She was wearing loafers.

“How about some shoes?” she asked.

Lou was doubtful, looking at the sophisticated heels on display in the windows. She wore loafers to school, low flats to church, and cowboy boots to the stable. What was she supposed to do with a pair of strappy high-heeled sandals back in Oklahoma?

“W
HERE ARE ALL
the bags?” David asked when they got home. “When girls go shopping, you come home with lots of bags.”

Lou showed David the copy of
The Good Earth
that Helen finally bought for her at the bookstore. “I like books better than clothes,” she said.

He smiled at her. “You're my kind of girl.”

It turned out that, even though she had just graduated from high school, Lou had read many of the same books that David had read, classics like
Les Misérables
, authors like Dickens. They talked about books a lot, and sometimes they talked about boys. Specifically, they talked about boys who were the same age as David's son, Bruce, who had been skipping school more and more—to do what? His father didn't really know.

“
What do boys at your age do?” David asked Lou once.

“Well,” Lou said, thinking of her boyfriend, her brother, and his friends. “They go to school, and on the weekends they might take their girlfriends to the movies, or they might work on their cars.”

“How does it work when they skip school?” he asked.

“I don't know any boys who skip school,” she said.

David said Bruce was so smart he could show up for tests and make an A without studying. But Lou could see that David was distressed about his son, and she felt sorry that he worried so much. Both David and Helen talked quite a bit about Bruce—his mother, Liberty LeGacy, was David's first wife—though Lou didn't meet him on that visit. She wasn't sure where he was, but he wasn't at their house.

Lou could tell that David liked her company, and she suspected that Helen enjoyed having a little “home person” around—someone to remind her of the Ozarks without actually having to
go
there. She knew that Helen appreciated her updates about the family, especially about her sister Mary, who was living in Shawnee, but it was hard for Lou to know what Helen liked about her, specifically. Helen just took an interest in her life. She always had. “You're going to college, right? You need to do that,” Helen told her one day. Yes, Lou said, she had enrolled at the University of Tulsa. She was thinking of studying French, maybe becoming a translator. Helen looked pleased and emphasized how important it would be to stay in school and receive a degree.

When Helen gave advice, Lou listened.
Her cousin had been her “glamorous go-to,” the person she consulted with about all of her worries, since she was fourteen. It's not that Lou didn't get along with her mother—she did—but sometimes they crossed ways. Helen always knew just what to say to make her feel better. Lou first got to know her when she would come to stay at their house in Tulsa while on business. When Helen was a copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding, working on the account for Catalina Inc., she used to visit department stores around the country. In Tulsa, Helen invited Lou to watch her sell swimsuits and help customers find their perfect fit. In her neat cardigan and high heels, Helen looked so sophisticated at work, Lou couldn't help but feel good when Helen sought her out back at the house. Helen used to ask Lou to wake her up in the mornings before school so that she could see her outfits. “Now turn around,” she would say, admiring whatever was her choice. “You ironed and starched that blouse. Must have taken you all morning!”

During one of those visits, Lou stood in shorts in front of the full-length mirror to show Helen her legs. “They're deformed,”
she said despondently. Her skinny legs didn't touch at the places they were supposed to—thighs, knees, calves. Only her knees touched. Helen laughed and laughed. Then she told Lou that if her legs touched at age fourteen, she would be fat by the time she was twenty.

Lou's mother told her she was pretty, but her compliments seemed vague in comparison, reflecting a mother's love rather than the truth. Helen knew how to make you
believe
you were special. She found one feature that made you different and zeroed in on it. Looking past Lou's glasses, Helen told her that she had the prettiest hair in the family.

When they started writing letters to each other, Lou was still a kid who wore Peter Pan collars and loved nothing more than her parents, books, and horses. She and Helen were different in so many ways, but they both loved to write letters, and no one was better at it than Helen, who had a way of making any missive sound like a fan letter—and making you feel you were the most interesting and important person in the world. When Helen's letters arrived, Lou would pore over them. She always asked for details about Lou's life, rarely sharing any details of her own. “Helen's really busy,” her mother would say; “don't write her
right
back because she's so good to write to you.” But Lou couldn't help it; she just had so many questions. Sometimes she felt bad because she would lose her temper with her mother or she would tell a white lie about being at a friend's house when she was really going out. She was obsessed with making good grades. Helen was always so reassuring. “
You don't have to be perfect,” she'd say, or, “I think you need to quit worrying about being a good girl.” Lou instantly felt better; if Helen said it was okay, it probably was.

Now the woman who had written her all those letters was the author of a bestselling book. Lou had learned what she could from
family members. Other than Cleo and Mary, most of the family hadn't read it, because of the racy title alone;
the friends and relatives who had read it were shocked. It wasn't just the sex: It was the fact that Helen had written about her own mother and sister, about their being poor and needy. One just didn't air dirty laundry in public like that, they said to each other; one didn't expose the family. Cleo, in particular, took offense at how Helen had portrayed them all as backwoods hillbillies. (“
She sold her family down the river,” she later vented to relatives at Mary's house.)

Since she had arrived, Lou had been eyeing the boxes of books in the den. One day, before she left, she asked Helen for her own copy of
Sex and the Single Girl
.

“
Would your mother mind if you read it?” Helen asked her in return.

“No,” Lou said. “I'm allowed to read what I want to read.”

“Well, Cleo certainly wasn't happy about it,” Helen said, giving Lou a copy.

Back in her room, Lou stayed up all night reading. She was riveted. But she couldn't help but wonder if Helen really believed everything she had written about life as a single girl—how it's okay to sleep with guys before you get married, or have affairs with married men.

“Do you really believe that?” Lou asked Helen the next morning.

“Absolutely,” Helen said. “I believe the things I said. I just didn't talk about how lonely it can be.”

“
She's a phony. But she's a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk that she believes.”

—O. J. Berman (Martin Balsam) in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, 1961

B
y the end of the summer, Marilyn Monroe was dead, and Helen Gurley Brown was a household name. Lou was no longer the only young woman writing Helen letters and hoping for some advice or reassurance in return. She was one of hundreds, soon to be thousands. Across the country, Bettys and Pattys and Donnas and Brendas were sending Helen bushels of fan mail. Like Lou, they chose to confide in her, sharing their most troubling concerns and insecurities with the one woman they knew would understand. Sometimes they just wrote to say thank you. “
I've never been able to flirt before, and you made it so easy I'm flirting like mad!” a secretary from Milwaukee exclaimed. Five roommates sharing an apartment in Baltimore wired to say that they were going out to lease five separate apartments—they credited Helen for giving them the courage to strike out on their own.

Helen received no shortage of passionate testimonials, but she wasn't above faking the occasional fan letter. When
The American Weekly
asked her to contribute an article, Berney reminded
Helen that no one could convey her message—that even a plain girl could attract men by following the guidelines in
Sex and the Single Girl
—better than Helen herself. “
The best way to get this across would be by creating a few letters. If anyone has a talent for this it is you,” Berney told her. “You might create one letter from a girl saying that she had just about resigned herself to life as a plain Jane when she read the condensation of your book,” he suggested. “You have already received letters something like this, so it is just a question of making Nature follow Art a little more closely.”

It's possible that Helen took Berney's advice, but she was busy enough trying to keep up with the demand for interviews. By the end of June, she had been on thirty radio and TV shows, including the
Today
show and
The Mike Wallace Show
. In the coming months, she'd be on dozens more. No station was too small, no amount of airtime too short—she did it all.

She brought the same frenzied work ethic to her promotional appearances.
She said yes to all kinds of meet-and-greets, autograph sessions, press club dinners, and cocktail parties at posh hotels, but she never lost her focus on single working girls. She spoke to single mothers at Parents Without Partners, secretaries on Secretary's Day, and more secretaries and “
female-type supervisors” on Female Day, a jokey luncheon organized for a group called Supervising Helpers in Television, otherwise known as S.H.I.T. “
Once a year the dimly illuminated S.H.I.T. Society opens its creaky doors to the pretty side of the magic shadows business and invites GIRLS to gather together with us for lunch,” the invitation read. “So, go in, swat yer secretary in the customary manner and place, and tell her she is going to lunch with you next Friday.”

This was an event not to be missed, the invitation noted. Mrs. Brown was already working on another book and wouldn't be appearing in public again anytime soon.

D
ECIDING ON A
second book hadn't been easy. In fact, Helen had been trying to figure out what her follow-up would be as early as January 1962, when she started sending pitches to Berney.
Among the ideas Helen and Berney discussed, over time:

At one point, Helen also submitted an idea for a novel,
The Girls of Beverly Hills
, featuring a familiar-sounding character named Cloe, a mousy former secretary at a soap company who uses wigs, clothes, men, and pure moxie to become a sex symbol and national television star. In a lengthy outline for the book, Helen explained that there could be some recapping of Cloe's affairs with other beaux, but a far more important character would be her husband, Kleinschmidt. A wealthy soap company tycoon, Kleinschmidt was “
not too old nor too unattractive” and endlessly encouraging of her career. (Soap aside, Kleinschmidt seems to share quite a few traits with David.) Kleinschmidt and Cloe would do much of their plotting and scheming about her business (television) and his (soap) while lying in bed,
not
making love. “
She is not the performer with her husband that she was with her previous lovers. Doesn't
have
to be and he doesn't mind,” Helen wrote. “Privately she is a quiet, non-sexy, comfortable woman who knows the crazy fame might come to an end someday but she won't die.”

Like Cloe, Helen knew that she wouldn't die if her fame came to an end, but she didn't want it to end. And yet, she was at a loss for what to do next. Her heart wasn't in the novel. The diet book went nowhere because she couldn't find a doctor to collaborate with her in the writing of it. “Lesbions” made a fascinating subject (“
The doctors I've talked to tell me it is one of the most difficult human aberrations to treat—virtually impossible,” Helen told Berney), but she just couldn't get into it. And
How to Love a Girl
, while in her comfort zone, wasn't the big mail-order
book that Berney was hoping for. She wasn't very interested in reporting on other people's lives, but she had used up the juiciest of her own stories in
Sex and the Single Girl
. “
The book I could write best would be for a woman who marries a man somewhat older, wealthier and wiser than she,” Helen told Berney. Specifically, she envisioned an advice book about how to cope with an upper-class divorced man's ex-wives and children. “The wicked step-mother is now the
weary
step-mother, trying to make friends, learn to discipline an older child she didn't start out with,” Helen said, perhaps thinking of David's son, Bruce.

Originally, Berney had been wary about a book titled
Sex and the Office
. He had wanted to wait to see if
Sex and the Single Girl
would be a success before getting on the “Sex and . . .” bandwagon. But by June, he was ready to jump aboard. “
We are beginning to get fervent letters addressed to you . . . from single girls who consider your book the answer to a maiden's prayer,” he told Helen. “While not all of your fans are office girls most of them are. We should strike while the ardor is hot.”

Meanwhile, the letters kept pouring in. At one point, the volume was so great that
the post office in Pacific Palisades refused to deliver the mail to the Browns' house; they had to pick it up themselves. Helen had tried to answer each letter personally, but there were just too many, and she couldn't keep up with the demand while traveling on a promotional tour that kept extending with trips to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Boston. “
Hold onto your lovely wig—this is just the beginning of the schedule,” Berney wrote to Helen in a memo listing some of her October engagements on the East Coast, shortly before she kicked off the tour in Chicago with a well-oiled press conference at the Gaslight Club. The next two weeks were a blur of flights, taxis, hotels, handshakes, hair-and-makeup chairs,
ten-second radio spots, late-night radio spots, early-morning TV calls, hurried departures to make the next booking, cancellations, near misses and just-made-its, interview lunches, outfit changes, press dinners, bookstore signings, fawning fans, fake smiles, cocktail parties, and quick exits—most of which she navigated by herself or with David.

In California, she'd had a publicist to shuttle her around to appointments, but lately Berney had been leaving her to deal with such logistics. And whatever happened to the flowers and champagne he used to send? “
I am something of a little
star
now!” Helen reminded Berney, running on a low reserve of patience. “I make a lot of money for us.” Speaking of money, she kept a running tab of her out-of-pocket expenses, noting every tip she gave to taxi drivers, baggage porters, doormen, bellmen, and elevator men; and she needed that money back, especially when she was already losing hundreds of dollars for every week of work she took off to do one of those trips.

By the fall, promoting
Sex and the Single Girl
had become something of a third job, the first being her work at Kenyon & Eckhardt and the second writing
Sex and the Office
. If she didn't get a break soon, she would simply break down.

I
N
N
OVEMBER 1962
, Helen finally quit her job at Kenyon & Eckhardt, and by December she had a firm offer from the Los Angeles Times Syndicate to write a newspaper column aimed at bachelorettes, divorcees, and widows.
Eventually “Woman Alone” would reach more than one hundred newspapers around the country. It was a good solution: In addition to providing additional income for not much work, the column would give Helen a central place where she could answer her mounting fan mail.

It was auspicious for another reason. The column, like the book, was work Helen could do anywhere. That became an important consideration when 20th Century Fox crumbled down to its very foundation.
To pay for
Cleopatra
, which ultimately cost around $44 million—the equivalent of more than $340 million today—the studio had to sell off most of its valuable 262-acre lot. (It eventually became Century City.) Before long, Fox president Spyros Skouras was out, and a new president was elected: Darryl F. Zanuck, the shrewd producer and kingpin who had cofounded the company in 1933 and now didn't waste any time rebuilding the studio. First, he finished its demolition: In short order, Zanuck canceled numerous productions, closed up studio buildings, and fired once-valued executives and other employees. Once again, David Brown was out of a job.

If David minded being known as “Mr. Helen Gurley Brown” after that, he certainly didn't show it. Was he riding on his wife's coattails? Absolutely! And why not? She had ridden on his. They were a team: a royal
We
.

“
The ‘We' explains why he oozes security, despite the demeaning fact that—as he candidly admits—‘I never hear my own name being utilized in my own introductions,'” Cindy Adams wrote in
Pageant
magazine's December 1963 issue, after meeting the Browns at a Manhattan cocktail party. “It's because this is not HER book. It's THEIR book. He saw every scrap of paper. He edited every line. The idea was his. The title was his. It was his decision to tell all and not hold back. It was his decision to mention himself by name and not cheat the readers. He says quite plainly that there'd be no best seller, no forthcoming movie, and no syndicated column (in 70 newspapers) for his wife if it were not for him.”

Shortly after that piece appeared,
David was offered a
position as an executive vice president at New American Library, a medium-size publishing house known for its paperbacks and popular fiction, including Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. David accepted. After
Cleopatra
, taking a break from the movie business seemed like a good idea, and he, especially, welcomed a new start.

The Browns were moving to New York.