Enter Helen (13 page)

“
What is it like to be the little princess, the woman who has fulfilled the whispered promise of her own books and of all the advertisements, the girl to whom things happen? It is hard work.”

—Joan Didion, “Bosses Make Lousy Lovers,”
Saturday Evening Post
, January 30, 1965

H
elen looked ten years younger on television, and she was the first to admit why.
On TV, she wore a wig, false eyelashes, powder, two kinds of rouge, lipstick, eyeliner, pencil, and shadow. The great thing about radio was that it was all about the voice, and Helen's voice was made for radio—or rather, she remade it for radio. Soft and silky, it glided across the airwaves like aural lube. Callers could rant about her ruining American morals, hosts could call her names, but they never got her to raise her voice. “
I'm kind of outspoken and
controverseeyal
,” she would coo in agreement.

When Joe Pyne, a former marine turned talk show host known for his confrontational interviewing style, called her a “
terrible woman” for giving girls explicit instructions on how to have a lunchtime affair with a married man, including advice on what kind of lingerie to wear, Helen didn't flinch.

“
Well, Joe, it's just that I think if a girl is going to be involved in a matinee relationship, she should do it in style, that's all.”

A rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at all the hard work (and makeup) that went into being the public Helen Gurley Brown. (
Copyright © Ann Zane Shanks.
)

“You know, I expect that you're soon going to have a book on murder! You're going to say, ‘Now, If you're going to murder someone—which I don't recommend, but if you do murder somebody—pick somebody who really deserves it!'” Pyne fumed.

“Oh, Joe Pyne,” Helen purred, “you really can't equate murder with girls having affairs. I think you have a kind of puritanical, funny, rigid attitude about things.”

As 1964 came to an end, so did Helen's twenty-eight-city promotional tour for
Sex and the Office
.
One day she climbed into a white, two-door Volkswagen Beetle with no air-conditioning that would be her chariot around Southern California. Her driver was Skip Ferderber, a twenty-three-year-old press agent who worked for an independent publicity company hired by Bernard Geis Associates to promote
Sex and the Office
in Los Angeles, and whose
mission was to bring Helen to as many TV and radio interviews as possible in seventy-two hours.

There was another passenger in the car, too. Sitting in the backseat of the White Angel, as Helen dubbed her ride, was a diminutive young novelist who was quietly scribbling notes about Helen Gurley Brown for a profile of her in an upcoming issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
. Finishing up the final stretch of a thirteen-week promotional tour of England and the United States, Helen was hanging on, but just barely. In Los Angeles, Joan Didion found “
a very tired woman indeed, a woman weary of flirting with disc jockeys, tired of parrying insults and charming interviewers and fighting for a five-minute spot here and a guest appearance there.”

Didion kept herself in the background; she was inscrutable even then. Still, she was clearly charmed by Helen's gumption and impressed by her work ethic—if somewhat disparaging of her actual work. At the time of the interview, Helen had sold nearly two and a half million copies of her two books, combined, and Didion attributed the sales partly to various daytime and late-night radio talk shows, like
Long John Nebel
, that featured Helen as a guest and reached “
a twilight world of the lonely, the subliterate, the culturally deprived.”

She also noted that a good number of the night owls who called in to shows to sound off on Helen Gurley Brown's depravity hadn't actually read her books, which were actually quite sweet and sincere. In fact, those listeners weren't responding to her books at all, but rather to the idea of them; just as they were responding to the idea of
her
, a woman whose studied, seductive voice had been transmitted via hundreds of radio and TV shows over the past year, and, with any luck, would soon be on hundreds more.

But then a funny thing happened. After being shuttled around to countless tapings in Los Angeles, Helen suddenly had a hard
time booking TV and radio interviews back home in New York. In November, Letty and a colleague wrote a memo to the Browns warning them that they were getting “
over exposure signals on HGB.” Bookers at some of the biggest shows like
The Tonight Show
simply felt that Helen had been on too many times. Their audiences just weren't interested in her at the moment, Letty reported: “No amount of idea suggesting, controversy proposals, or cajoling can change their minds it seems.”

Letty suggested putting Helen under wraps for a while, but Helen and David had another idea—they
always
had another idea. This was hardly the first time they had run into rejection. After
Sex and the Single Girl
first hit shelves, they churned out countless proposals for TV shows, some of which they pitched through the talent agent Lucy Kroll.

Among their ideas that never made it to screen: a food-themed quiz show (sample challenge: taste five types of milk, from skim to evaporated, and identify each); a game show in which ordinary people would present their ideas for new inventions in front of an audience (nearly forty-five years later, ABC's
Shark Tank
would be based on a similar premise); and a cheeky talk show,
Frankly Female
, which Helen would host. Though aimed primarily at women, the show would also feature a male cohost to attract some men. In one proposed segment titled “EXPLAIN PLEASE!” the idea was that Helen would ask an expert a ridiculously basic question about a subject that the Browns deemed long had eluded women—such as the names of the seven continents—only they were too ashamed to admit it. A man from the Internal Revenue Service could break down a tax form to Helen on the air, for instance. Other experts could explain how to count using Roman numerals, or why World War I started in the first place. In answering, the expert would speak
very simply as if to a child, using props if necessary. Easy enough for “how to change a tire,” though
“How it started with the Jews and the Arabs and who's right?” could prove more challenging.

The Browns never did convince a network to green-light
Frankly Female
.
Nor did they have success with a comedy-drama series,
Sandra (The Single Girl)
, about the adventures of a somewhat plain, but charming, single girl who works as a copywriter in an advertising agency. ABC rejected the idea for what were then obvious reasons. No one wanted to watch a TV show set in the world of Mad Men—especially not one that focused on a woman. “
It is a series built around a female lead, and the unfortunate history of television indicates that this has been uniformly unsuccessful,” wrote the network's bearer of bad news. (In 1966, Marlo Thomas would star as a struggling actress trying to make it in New York City in ABC's
That Girl
, one of the first sitcoms to focus on a single, working woman who didn't live with her parents. The Browns had been a bit
too
ahead of the curve.)

Sooner or later, something had to stick, but it sure as hell wasn't going to be
The Unwind Up
, a show that promised to feature a psychotherapist named Charles Edward Cooke, coauthor of the 1956 guide
Hypnotism Handbook
with sci-fi writer A. E. Van Vogt. Cooke would actually hypnotize viewers into a near-sleep state—with the help of soothing music and somnolent readings of telephone directories, Teamsters union bylaws, and
The Communist Manifesto
. Keeping the viewer in a hypnotic state, Helen pointed out, would be ideal for sponsors wanting to soft-sell their products. Not so ideal for the viewer, perhaps. “
The only possible harm that could come to anyone from this kind of hypnosis,” Helen noted, “is that they might have left something on the stove before they fell asleep, failed to put out a cigarette, or left a child unattended.”

Although most of their ideas never panned out, the Browns didn't stay discouraged for long. If anything, they saw rejection as a kind of creative fuel—a reason to keep trying. David had lost his job enough times to know the importance of having something “
in the mail,” whether it was a book proposal or a new concept for a column. Whatever it was, he always had some idea floating around—something that might lead to the Next Big Thing. All it took was one great idea landing in the right hands at the right time.

As it happened, by the fall of 1964, there
was
something in the mail that was beginning to spark some interest.

“
Here's a proposal for you from Helen Gurley Brown. While it
is
a marriage proposal, I'm afraid it's your magazine she suggests living with happily ever after, not the boss.”

—1964 letter from Bernard Geis to Richard Deems, the president of Hearst Magazines

I
n December 1964, Helen's epic tour finally slowed to a halt with a few last stops, including one in Miami, where she visited Tropical Park Race Track, appeared on Larry King's TV show
Miami Undercover
, and signed autographs at Burdine's department store. There were worse ways to spend a few days in winter than staying at the Doral Beach Hotel, a brand-new tower in Miami Beach with ocean views on Collins Avenue's famous Millionaire's Row, but Helen didn't stick around. She was eager to get back home for a few reasons, not the least of which was that, on Christmas Day, the movie adaptation of
Sex and the Single Girl,
cowritten by Joseph Heller, whose novel
Catch-22
had come out three years before, would be hitting theaters.

Sex and the Single Girl
's journey to screen had been fraught with its own catches and conundrums, starting with how to adapt a plotless how-to guide into a feasible film. Along the way, the original producer, Saul David, dropped out, but with director Richard Quine at the helm, the production attracted an all-star cast, including Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, and Mel
Ferrer. The film's star was Natalie Wood, who played a character named Dr. Helen Gurley Brown, a doe-eyed twenty-three-year-old research psychologist and author of the titular bestseller advocating sexual freedom for unmarried women. Other than those surface details,
Sex and the Single Girl
the movie had almost nothing to do with
Sex and the Single Girl
the book. But that didn't stop single girls from lining up to see the film at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway and the Trans-Lux 52d Street, or the occasional critic from enjoying the Technicolor romp with its suggestive one-liners and jazzy score. “
It's not the worst picture ever made, girls and boys,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the
New York Times
the next day.

Sex and the Single Girl
didn't exactly get glowing reviews—“
It was ridiculous, a horrible movie,” says Rex Reed, who claims that “even Natalie, who became one of my best friends, wouldn't talk about that film”—but it did get Helen's name out there once again, quite literally, along with the title of her bestselling book, which was featured as a recurring prop in the movie.

The timing couldn't have been better. In the weeks leading up to the film's release, Berney had been circulating a proposal for a new magazine concocted by the Browns. A self-help magazine aimed at single, working women, it was called
Femme
.

T
HE CONCEPT FOR
Femme
wasn't exactly the result of a flash of inspiration—it was simply another idea in a chain of dozens that Helen and David had discussed. By the summer of 1964, she had been getting fan mail for two years thanks to her books. She still tried to answer letters individually when she could—a staggering number of girls wrote to her about being in love with married men, a subject she considered to be one of her specialties—but it was impossible to keep up with the demand. One day, after a new bag of mail arrived, David brought up the idea.

“You know, Helen, you really ought to have a magazine for these girls,” he said. “Most of the magazines are only talking about married girls. It's motherhood and home and God. You ought to have a book for good-citizen swingers like you were.”

It was as simple as that. Not long after that conversation, Helen and David sat down at the kitchen table and started brainstorming. (
At a certain point, Charlotte Kelly, a close friend of Helen's from her advertising days, also pitched in.) Between them, they had two pads of paper, two pencils, and a gazillion ideas for new features and departments. Helen focused on the beauty pages, jotting down all the concepts she had tried and failed to sell to Max Factor, while David came up with eye-catching headlines and wrote a preamble about
Femme
's enormous advertising potential. Once they had gotten everything down on paper, Helen typed up the keepers.

Among their ideas for monthly departmental features: a dating column in which Helen would dole out advice, a health column in which a medical professional would answer women's pressing questions about everything from diaphragms to male impotence, a financial column in which a female economist such as Sylvia Porter would advise readers on budgeting and investing, and a photo spread titled “However Do You Do
That
?” in which a model would simulate performing “masculine” household repairs that often eluded the woman on her own. (How to fix a leaky faucet, for example.)

Among their suggested headlines for major articles:
U.S. PRESIDENTS WHO LIKED GIRLS
(a look back at the last ten presidents and their taste in women), S
EXUAL PROWESS IN MEN
(asking the age-old question, “Is size important?”),
ABORTION
! (in which the following line was written and crossed out:
“Femme is for it in many instances”
),
I'M NOT MARRIED TO THE BABY'S FATHER
. . .
AND NEVER WAS
(written anonymously),
THE NOSE JOB
(a step-by-step account),
BABY-BRAIN ASTROLOGY
(men love girls who can tell them about their signs!), “
IF YOU COMMIT SUICIDE I'LL KILL YOU
!” (or, “How to help a suicidal person”),
I LOVE GIRLS LIKE YOU LOVE MEN
(“Article by a
lesbion
Lesbian”),
THE WORLD OF FALSIES
(with before-and-after pics), and perhaps the best-worst fashion spread ever imagined in the history of magazines,
THE POODLE AND THE SINGLE GIRL
, featuring “various costumes girls wear with poodles (and various poodles).”

Over time, Helen and David would go through several versions of the proposal, tweaking ideas for features and smaller, departmental articles. But from the very start, they imagined a magazine that looked as sexy as it read, with hot, color-saturated images that could compete with photo-heavy books like
Look
and
Life
. To get that vision across, they put together a crude editorial dummy, with “FEMME” written in black marker on a scrap of paper taped to the cover.

The girl on the cover was not famous; she was just a girl. Like
Femme
, which was only a temporary title, she was a placeholder. “
The bathing-suit girl,” Helen called her—a nobody who looked like a somebody because she was beautiful, and clearly comfortable in her body.

But before you picture her, picture what came before her—close-up shots of serenely smiling faces belonging to housewives and celebrity spouses who regularly graced the covers of women's magazines like
Good Housekeeping
wearing turtlenecks and tidy flips.

Now see the supple bathing-suit girl in her teeny, flowery bikini, her blond hair on the verge of looking unkempt. Her face is in profile, nuzzled against her bare shoulder smelling, you imagine, of summer and the slightest hint of sweat. Gaze at her for a few seconds and you begin to notice her sooty eyelashes, manicured
nails, the way a small smile is just beginning to spread on her lips. You wonder why she is smiling, and whether she's at the beach or perhaps basking in the sun on some swimming rock, her boyfriend just out of frame. But those thoughts come later, because at first glance, here's what you see: chest, flesh, and navel. Soft skin in soft focus.

Look just to the right of her armpit, at another scrap of paper taped onto the page: “For the woman on her own,” reads the subtitle in black type. Closer to her breast, you'll find the teasers for this sample issue: “U.S. Presidents Who Liked Girls” and
“Where the Men Are.” (Compare those lines with the far more somber ones that ran on the covers of
Cosmopolitan
around the same time: “Do Religious Schools Teach Prejudice?” and “Diabetes: Will Your Children Inherit It?”)

The tour continues as you goose the bathing-suit girl's thigh at the lower right-hand corner of the page and turn it to find the letterhead of Bernard Geis Associates, trumpeting the arrival of a proposal for a new magazine. Now that the gorgeous girl on the cover has gotten you this far, Helen and David will take over, telling you all about their discovery of a new audience and a new market, as a result of the phenomenon that is
Sex and the Single Girl
. They will tell you that, in an era of specialized magazines, there is one unique group that has been ignored: smart, financially sound women. They will tell you that Helen Gurley Brown, champion of single girls everywhere, recognizes the unmarried woman “as a first class citizen,” as opposed to a societal outcast, and has commanded a loyal audience practically overnight. After sharing some figures to illustrate the astronomical success of
Sex and the Single Girl
, the Browns will then guide you through a few more relevant statistics, pulled from recent census records, and show you just how America's unmarried women, divorcees, widows, and other
women on their own add up to a grand total of 27,381,000 potential readers—more, if you count married women who have an
“independent attitude.”

But the statistics don't tell the whole story. They don't capture the essence of the reader—her wants, her needs, her insecurities, her goals and dreams. Again, before you imagine who this woman is, remember who she is not. She is not a housewife interested in reading about how to make the perfect jelly roll for the holidays or how to banish mildew from the basement, in traditional women's magazines like
Ladies' Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
. She is not the urban sophisticate targeted by upmarket fashion magazines like
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
or even the collegiate girl next door reflected in the pages of
Mademoiselle
and
Glamour
. She is too old for
Seventeen
.

Now imagine a single, working-class woman; let's say she's twenty-nine. It's possible that she never got a chance to go to college and never will. She might be looking for a husband, but then again she might enjoy being on her own.
Femme
is for the woman who likes men—and, more important, who likes herself. She may
seem
shy and ladylike, but she is actually quite frank, and if you scratch the surface, you might find that she is as ambitious, cutthroat, and egocentric as any man. She is tired of reading women's magazines edited by men who assume that she is a sweet, sheltered, easily shocked little cream puff unable to talk about real subjects, like sex. She is weary of being force-fed the message that women love serving everyone else. And she's not the only one. Don't forget the Betty Friedan disciples: married women who had good educations and inquisitive minds that were no longer sated by articles about cookie swaps and easy ways to save time in the kitchen.

“
This woman's magazine will
never
deal with the problems of school lunches, PTA, laundromats and making over the attic,” the
Browns wrote. It
would
start frank discussions about sex, money, careers, apartments, fashion, and beauty—oh, and men, men, men. “It will view the woman on her own as potentially, if not actually, the most desirable, affluent and interesting segment of our female population,” they added.

Now, just for a moment, pretend you are a magazine publisher in desperate need of a circulation boost and advertising revenue. What if the Browns could promise that this new audience of career-minded women on their own would also have money of their own?
What if the Browns told you that they would do everything in their editorial power to ensure that those women spent their hard-earned cash on advertisers' products? That this new readership would also be a distinct, largely untapped market for companies looking to hawk makeup, swimsuits, shoes, bras, jewelry, home appliances and décor, soda, liquor, cigarettes, cars, airlines, travel resorts, TVs, candy, banks, brokerage firms, drugs, stationery, and slenderizing products?

Not sold yet? What if they told you that the editor of this prospective magazine, Helen Gurley Brown, was such a valuable commodity herself that it would cost a fortune to create and promote such a spokeswoman, starting from scratch? And what if they told you that, in hiring her, you'd also be getting former
Cosmopolitan
managing editor David Brown's editorial insight and expertise as a bonus?

Would it matter that his wife had never worked at a magazine before, let alone edited one?

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
, the Browns pitched Helen as
Femme
's editor-in-chief. That variable never changed. But this one did: In an early draft of the proposal, David pitched himself as the magazine's publisher, highlighting his early editorships at both
Liberty
and
Cosmopolitan
as well as his role in originating the
Sex and the Single Girl
franchise and managing his wife's career. Once again, he was restless at work, and in the short biography of himself that David included in their packet, he announced he would be leaving his post at New American Library in order to focus on
Femme
.

By the time Bernard Geis was circulating the prospectus to various publishers in the winter of 1964, David had renamed himself as an editorial consultant. Geis was also listed as a consultant, someone who could bring a considerable amount of promotion and publicity to the magazine. But first, he had to get the proposal to the right people, which proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated.
Esquire
had seemed like a natural ally—Berney once worked at the magazine as an assistant editor—but he was having a hard time convincing anyone there to even look at the outline. By November he was still waiting to hear from
Look
, although he finally heard back from
Playboy
, where he knew the editorial director, A. C. Spectorsky, or “Spec.”