Enter Helen (12 page)

Of course, nothing would be quite so memorable as the Chanel-inspired pink bouclé suit and matching pillbox hat that Jacqueline Kennedy wore the day her husband was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Hours later, when she boarded the plane back to Washington, she still wore the bloodstained suit for the world to see.

While the rest of the country grieved, Jacqueline Susann charged into the offices of Bernard Geis Associates, which had published her novel
Every Night, Josephine
, the week before Kennedy's assassination. When she saw the publicity team watching television in tearful silence, instead of preparing for a meeting about her poodle book, she blew up, giving them an early forecast of the ego storm to come.

“
Why the fuck does this have to happen to me?” she moaned. “This is gonna ruin my tour!”

Helen had her own books to promote—she was almost finished with
Sex and the Office
—but where Jackie saw an inconvenience, she saw a great opportunity.

Shortly after the president's death, Helen took it upon herself to rebrand the first lady in her newspaper column. “
As we have seen through our tears these last few weeks, the most beloved man is mortal,” she wrote from her perch over Park Avenue. “The most beloved wife can become a woman alone.”

“
It was the perfect time to think silver. Silver was the future, it was spacy.”

—Andy Warhol, reflecting on his Silver Factory in
POPism: The Warhol Sixties

I
n April 1964, more than half a year after the slayings of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert,
the NYPD finally arrested a suspect: a mild-mannered, black nineteen-year-old named George Whitmore Jr., who confessed to the murders of both Wylie and Hoffert. A grade-school dropout who had been described in the press as “possibly mentally retarded,” Whitmore soon recanted his confession, saying that he falsely admitted to a number of brutal crimes, including the double homicide, after being beaten and coerced by detectives. On the day Wylie and Hoffert were murdered, Whitmore said, he actually had been in Wildwood, New Jersey, watching the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech on television. Despite Whitmore's apparent innocence, he was indicted and sent to prison, only later becoming a tragic symbol of a corrupt and racist system. The real killer, a white heroin addict turned burglar named Richard Robles, was still out there and wouldn't be apprehended until January 1965, after confessing to friends. Convicted of the double homicide, eventually he was sentenced to twenty years to life.

Wrongly believing a madman to be off the streets, the city resumed its normal rhythms. Once again single girls started apartment-hunting in Yorkville and going on blind dates with oxford-shirt-wearing friends of friends, but their hearts belonged to John, Paul, Ringo, and George, who landed in America that February, and were taking over the charts by spring. Another British import, the James Bond film
From Russia with Love
, was playing in New York, and across the country, throngs of men poured into theaters to see soft-core comedies like
3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt
, starring blond bombshell Mamie Van Doren as a stripper named Saxie Symbol, and
Dr. Sex
, following the exploits of three sex researchers working on a follow-up to the Kinsey Report. “In Flaming COLOR and SKIN-A-RAMA,” the posters promised.

The movies mirrored the runways, where the look was all about mesh, flesh, and sexual freedom. As Andy Warhol was transforming an industrial loft on East Forty-Seventh Street into the Silver Factory, a soft-spoken Vienna-born fashion designer named Rudi Gernreich was tinkering with new ideas for old forms, like the see-through shirt and the No-Bra Bra, a sheer nylon garment that promised to free the breast from centuries of bondage. A no-sides bra, no-front bra, and no-back bra would soon follow, as would a tank suit paired with thigh-high plastic boots and a visored helmet to block out the sun.

Gernreich's topless bathing suit made the biggest splash of all. In many high-end department stores, it wasn't advertised or displayed; interested customers had to ask for it by name. Only then did salesclerks sneak into some back room to find the one-piece with its sleek bottom and bosom-baring straps. Also called a monokini, the suit made the bare breast the fashion statement of the year. By June,
the nation's first topless bar was born when a nineteen-year-old go-go dancer named Carol Doda wore the
monokini to perform at the Condor Club in San Francisco's bohemian North Beach neighborhood. The future of sex had been ushered in, and Helen Gurley Brown helped open the door.

Everybody was thinking about the future in 1964, especially organizers of the World's Fair, which was bringing innovations from every sphere of art and industry under one giant Unisphere in Queens. The World's Fair beckoned progress, but for Helen it also dragged up a painful past:
As a girl, she had been to the World's Fair in Chicago, twice; her mother had taken her in the years after her father died, and it was a bittersweet chapter in both of their lives.

Thirty years later, when Cleo came to visit Helen in New York, it seemed only fitting that they go to the Queens fairgrounds, now that one of the biggest events of the decade was happening in her backyard. But that didn't mean it would be easy. A million trips around the giant tire Ferris wheel in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park couldn't throw Helen off the way Cleo did. With her gray schoolmarm bun, wrinkle-etched face, and tiny four-eleven frame, she couldn't have looked smaller or more vulnerable standing amid all the behemoth buildings of Manhattan, and yet she made Helen feel like the vulnerable one, the visitor in town.
The tension between them had been building up for years, and it rose to the surface now.

Helen had wanted to show Cleo a good time at the World's Fair, but the mood spoiled seconds after they stepped into a cab heading for Queens. As soon as Helen started giving directions to the driver, Cleo began undercutting her, belittling her as usual.

“
Don't pay any attention to her,” Cleo told the driver, ignoring Helen's protests. “She has a nasty disposition.”

Helen snapped.
She hit Cleo right there in the taxi. Not very hard; she just cuffed her. But still. She couldn't believe she had struck her mother, a little old lady who never even spanked her as
a child. She considered herself a gentle person, but Cleo brought out something wild in her, something wounded.

W
HEN
C
LEO TOOK
Helen to the World's Fair in 1934, the theme was “A Century of Progress.” Three decades later, in Queens, the motto “Peace Through Understanding” might have seemed like a taunt to Helen and Cleo, the difference between them simply too wide to be bridged. Did they make it to the fair? Did they turn back after their fight? It's unclear: Helen's account of that day stops with her hitting her mother in the cab. The frame freezes.

In a sense, the frame froze for millions of visitors, but especially for baby boomers, who would remember the World's Fair as a more optimistic time, when moms wearing pastel capris, dads smoking cigars, and suntanned kids carrying Brownie cameras gawked over modern miracles like the electric toothbrush and got their first glimpse of a computer system at the space-age IBM Pavilion. With Watergate still in the far distance, it was a small world—just as the Disney ride said—and everyone was welcomed to a piece of it. “
Practically everybody in the world is coming to the fair!” trumpeted an early promotional film,
To the Fair!
“The Wilson family is driving in from out West. . . . They're coming from the four corners of the earth, and from Five Corners, Idaho. They come down from New Athens, Maine, and from Athens, Greece. And from Tokyo, and Kokomo, and Rome. Down from Frisco, and down from Troy . . . from Aurora, Illinois.”

For a ticket price of two dollars, fairgoers could visit pavilions representing more than thirty foreign countries, traveling from Hong Kong to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Or they could go to more far-flung places, thanks to a “time tunnel” designed to bring people into the prehistoric past, complete with dinosaurs, all while sitting in the comfort of a 1964-model Ford. General Motors
offered trips to the moon in Futurama, a lunar landscape complete with “lunar crawlers” for getting to the space market. In the shadow of the giant Unisphere—the fairgrounds' 140-foot high, 900,000-pound, stainless steel centerpiece—titans of industry unveiled the future . . . Picture-phones! Belgian waffles! Moving sidewalks! Underwater apartment-pods for humans who wanted to live on the seafloor! And heralding it all was a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who cut the ribbon at the U.S. Pavilion.

It was a season of possibility and a summer of resistance. On July 2, 1964, almost eight months after President Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act.
In states throughout the South, blacks tested their new rights, eating steak and mashed potatoes in restaurants side by side with white families, and slowly stepping into swimming pools where
WHITES ONLY
signs still hung. In Kansas City, Missouri,
what should have been a simple haircut became a national event when Gene Young, a thirteen-year-old black boy and delegate of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), walked into the Muehlebach Hotel barbershop for a trim. When he was denied service, several other black delegates staged a sit-in, forcing the shop to close its doors. The next day, Young was photographed, with knitted brows and a somber expression, while getting his head shaved by a white barber.

Frequently, the testing met strong, sometimes violent resistance from white segregationists. In places like Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, business owners chased blacks off their property, wielding pistols and ax handles. And in Charlottesville, Virginia, a restaurant owner named Buddy Glover closed the doors of Buddy's Restaurant minutes after the bill's passage, opting to lose business rather than serve black patrons.

The signing of the Civil Rights Act was a landmark moment,
but the fight was far from over, and it was a fight that was starting to gain many supporters among women. A key part of the legislation, Title VII, prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex.

Shortly after the bill was signed in July, the Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group National Association of Manufacturers launched a series of seminars across the country to educate business owners and managers about what to expect when the Civil Rights Act went into effect. “
When these slick woman's magazines start telling their readers about ‘your new rights,' why, the emancipation proclamation will be a pygmy by comparison,” NAM's vice president of industrial relations said at a seminar in Baltimore. “This could be a headache to employers long after the last of the race complications have been solved.” Very soon, he told his audience, everyone in the room would be living in a very different world, one where “Help Wanted—Female” ads would no longer exist. The new law forbade them. “That secretary that you advertised for to sit in your lap,” he warned, “may wind up being a man.”

And the boss might wind up being a woman. At least, that was the message that Helen had wanted to get across in
Sex and the Office
, which Letty—now married to a lawyer named Bert Pogrebin—would be broadcasting. Around the same time that NAM was schooling businessmen in Baltimore, Letty launched another huge publicity and promotional campaign. This time she sent briefcases filled with copies of
Sex and the Office
to secretarial schools around the city, with her pitch to administrators: “
Despite the thoroughness of your course program, there are other procedures that no school can begin to teach. . . .
SEX AND THE OFFICE
gives instructions on how to dress ‘Up to Here and Down to There,' how to survive ‘Jungle Warfare' (office politics) and how to move onward and upward, where ‘the money, the men, and the
spoils are even greater.'” It was as much an invitation as it was a challenge: Was a school like the Washington Business Institute on Seventh Avenue training its female students to become secretaries or was it preparing them to be businesswomen, possibly executives themselves someday?

Read this book, and this briefcase could be yours
, the package seemed to say. And yet the briefcase spoke louder than the book itself. Berney had made his cuts.

Sex and the Office
was successful, but it didn't have the impact of Helen's first book, which spawned other imitations—among them,
Saucepans and the Single Girl
,
Sex and the Single Man
, and
Sex and the Single Cat
. “
A publisher asked me to write a ‘me-too' book—about sex and the college girl,” says Gloria Steinem, who was more interested in critiquing Helen Gurley Brown's new book. Writing for the
New York Herald Tribune
, Steinem put
Sex and the Office
into a political context, comparing the recent spate of books about the problems facing women to books about the problems facing blacks.

“Both have suffered allegations of smaller brain and other natural inferiorities,” Steinem began. “Both have gone (or are going) through periods of imitating the former master—in the case of women, being more masculine than men; in the case of Negroes, of being more middle-class-white than the whites.” The common wisdom was that women, like blacks, were supposed to have some kind of deeply ingrained expertise on the problems of their kind, Steinem argued, but “knowledge by nature” could take a person only so far. Who had appointed Helen Gurley Brown as the spokesperson for the American woman?

Certainly not Steinem. She dismissed Helen Gurley Brown's writing style as “an ingenious combination of woman's-magazine-bad and advertising-agency-bad,” before likening Helen to another famous mogul whom she respected even less.

“
Sex and the Office
doesn't quite fit into George Orwell's category of ‘good-bad-books,'” Steinem wrote, “but, like Hugh Hefner's ‘
Playboy
Philosophy,' it is worth studying as an unusual example of a standard American mashed potato mind at work—unusual, because it is not the sort of mind that frequently produces books. Future governmental commissions on American Goals may read it and weep.”