Enter Helen (14 page)

“
Spec said that he and Hefner would be glad to look at the prospectus,” Berney wrote to David Brown. “He said that they already have more projects than they can handle, but you never can tell.”

After reviewing the prospectus, Hefner turned the Browns down. He was too busy managing the
Playboy
empire and the failing
Show Business Illustrated
magazine. He wasn't interested in starting a new magazine—not this one, not now.

Despite the tepid reaction
Femme
was getting, Berney refused to be daunted, playing a never-ending game of who-do-you-know. Meanwhile, David personally brought the magazine prospectus around town to try to sell it. He pitched executives at Macfadden-Bartell, and he called on an old friend, George T. Delacorte, the extremely wealthy founder of the Dell Publishing Company. More rejection.

Then David went to lunch with his friend John O'Connell, also known as Jack. Back in the day, they had worked together at
Cosmopolitan
, and in 1950 O'Connell had gone on to be the editor-in-chief, a position he kept for nine years. While they were waiting for a table, O'Connell mentioned that Hearst didn't know what to do about
Cosmopolitan
, which was flailing. “
It looks as though they may fold it. But they're taking one more shot,” O'Connell said, adding that Hearst wanted to turn
Cosmopolitan
into a women's magazine, targeting single career women. David just listened, but after lunch, he called Berney with an urgent question: “Don't you know the president of Hearst Magazines, Richard Deems?”

Berney knew everyone. Yes, he knew Dick Deems. They had worked together at
Esquire
. David asked Berney to send their magazine dummy over to Deems, which he did, after negotiating a finder's fee.

A few hours later, Berney called David back. “
You're to telephone Deems,” he said. “He's very interested in
Femme
as a replacement for
Cosmopolitan
.”

The Browns met with Deems shortly after Berney's call, and he explained that
Hearst didn't want to replace
Cosmopolitan
. The company wanted to graft a new format onto it, and the outline for
Femme
was a good place to start. Following their talk, Helen began to think more about what her idea of a perfect issue of
Cosmopolitan
would look like, before submitting a second presentation to Deems. In a new proposal for
Cosmopolitan
, she critiqued the previous eight issues of the magazine under the current editor, Robert C. Atherton, and, with David's help, solidified her own ideas for how to improve it. She began with a close analysis of
Cosmopolitan
cover lines: “
How many copies does ‘Our Unadoptable Children' sell, whether you put that line in eighteen point type
or twenty-four point type?” she asked. “Compare that with ‘The ONE Diet You Can Live With.'”

At the request of Hearst, the Browns also included detailed mock-ups of several future issues, fleshing out ideas for new departments and features, as well as listing potential writers and what they would cost. Still, there was some concern that, in editing
Cosmopolitan
, Helen Gurley Brown would be a one-hit wonder. Despite her impressive track record with the “Sex and . . .” franchise, Hearst wasn't convinced that she could keep up the momentum needed to sustain a monthly magazine. And then there was the looming question of what
Cosmopolitan
's more conservative readers would make of her racy single-girl slant.

Looking for another opinion, Richard Deems asked Ruth Manton, a valued Hearst employee who worked in marketing at
Harper's Bazaar
, to get to know Helen a bit and report back on what she thought. Ruth set up a lunch, and it was a meeting she wouldn't soon forget. Shortly after they sat down, Helen explained her theory that any girl, no matter how plain, can get the man she wants—if she knows what
he
wants.

“
One of the first things Helen said to me was, ‘I'm completely flat-chested, and I wear falsies because that's what men are looking for,'” Manton says. “I nearly fell off my chair! I'm not a prude in any way, but in the Sixties, a woman didn't say this the first time you met her, not normally anyhow. I liked her immediately because she was so direct and honest. And she believed passionately in what she wanted to do.”

When Deems later asked Manton what she thought of their new candidate, she was blunt. “I said I liked her, I was intrigued by her: ‘She's got a whole new viewpoint for the magazine. I don't know whether women are ready for it. How will they respond to an exploration of their sexuality? I can't say.' That's how I left it,”
Manton says, “and the next thing I knew, Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of
Cosmopolitan
.”

Though David initially planned to be Helen's publisher, he abandoned his bid in December, when Darryl and Richard Zanuck asked him to return to 20th Century Fox and fill a newly created position as head of story operations. (After the
Cleopatra
debacle, the studio was back on its feet thanks to the success of 1965's
The Sound of Music
.) David accepted the job, and while his name never again appeared on the
Cosmopolitan
masthead, he played an instrumental part in its production, and in the continued advancement of Helen's career.

One wintry night in Deems's apartment in the Waldorf Towers, it was David who negotiated a deal for Helen to edit
Cosmopolitan
.

“
I think Helen was cowering in a corner somewhere,” David later recalled, rendering the scene with a raconteur's sense of irony. “She had never edited a magazine. I don't think I had ever seen her read one.”

While it's possible Helen would have felt like hiding out, it's doubtful that she actually cowered in the corner during the negotiations. Even more dubious is David's implication that she didn't read magazines before she was hired to edit one. But like Helen's rags-to-riches rise, the tale of how she went from a meek wallflower to one of the most powerful editors in the world isn't her story alone. It's also David's—and what good is a story editor who doesn't set the stage for a dramatic journey?

“
Helen Gurley got browner, browner, and browner—where else but on the beach at Waikiki?”

—“Helen Gurley Wins a Holiday in Hawaii,”
Glamour
, May 1953

G
rowing up, Helen inhaled magazines. She and her sister Mary pored over pictures of Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, and Jean Harlow in
Photoplay
and
Silver Screen
, though as she got older, Helen didn't read for leisure so much as she did for escape, literally. In June 1949, she was still working as an executive secretary at Foote, Cone & Belding when she was one of thirteen women featured in
Glamour
after attending a job seminar hosted by the magazine. The next year, she was spotlighted again in an article about ambitious secretaries.
Glamour
was her bible, and in the years after World War II, a woman like Helen Gurley was the magazine's target reader, to judge by its new tagline: “For the girl with a job.”

Though she would have been attracted to any number of lifestyle articles, Helen took particular interest in
Glamour
's annual competition, “Ten Girls with Taste,” which recognized
ten women with modest incomes who still managed to show impeccable taste, whether hosting or dressing or decorating. After a friend of hers won the contest and its prizes—a trip to Europe and a new wardrobe—
Helen entered for the first time in 1951, filling out a
questionnaire that asked about everything from what she typically wore to work to how she would entertain guests for an evening to what she considered her life's philosophy.
Glamour
chose her as one of twelve finalists and flew her to New York, but she never made it past the next round. In 1953, at the age of thirty-one, she entered again. This time she was one of thirty-nine thousand hopefuls—including receptionists, switchboard operators, and “home economists”—who answered a similar questionnaire.

Helen gave it her all. Her typical work outfit hadn't changed much since the first time she filled out the form, so she made up a new-and-improved one. She wasn't much of a cook, so in response to a question about how she would entertain friends for dinner, she lifted ideas from the food section of
Ladies' Home Journal
. As for her philosophy of life, it borrowed heavily from Edward R. Murrow's radio show
This I Believe
, which broadcast the voices of famous public figures and everyday Americans, sharing their heartfelt, personal philosophies for the common good.

In her final application, Helen Gurley painted herself as a hardworking but fun-loving California girl who enjoyed having friends over for Sunday brunch or for an evening of casual conversation and listening to records. While loyal to her boss, she also slipped in a little mention of the fact that she hoped to someday have a career in copywriting. But she really must have won the judges over with her generous heart, or at least the suggestion of it, cornily declaring that good taste “
starts with that most basic commodity—one's own self—and extends outward to speech, clothes and possessions. It reaches its supreme station . . . in kindness to another human being.”

Helen submitted her application, and to her delight,
Glamour
chose her as one of seventeen semifinalists. After surviving the next round of cuts, she was named one of the ten winners and
invited to collect her prizes: a new vacation wardrobe to go with a two-week vacation to Hawaii, where she would sightsee, sunbathe, and sip pineapple punch on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, all while being photographed for a feature slated for the magazine's May issue.

Fine as it was to hang out on the beach, her victory afforded her much more than travel. In the weeks after her win, the name Helen Gurley appeared in newspapers around the country. The magazine made her a mini-celebrity, the “Ideal Career Girl,” as one women's editor christened her in the
Hollywood Citizen-News
.
It also made her true ambitions known. Had she not confessed her desire to become a copywriter on the magazine's contest form, she might have remained a secretary. Don Belding assigned Helen to her first account, Sunkist, after being hounded by Mary Campbell, the soon-to-be-legendary head of Condé Nast's personnel office, who wanted to know why Belding hadn't given her a chance to write copy of her own.

Glamour
was Helen's passport into a more sophisticated world. Long before David brought Helen to Manhattan, her favorite magazine did, putting her up at the ritzy Waldorf-Astoria when she won. While in town, she also visited
Glamour
's headquarters in Midtown—
it was her first time in a magazine office.

The second time was in March 1965, when she entered
Cosmopolitan
's offices at 1775 Broadway as the magazine's new editor-in-chief.

“
She has no intention of turning the rather bland magazine into something racy.”

—
Time
on new
Cosmopolitan
editor Helen Gurley Brown, March 26, 1965

I
n the beginning of 1965, Helen got a new appointment book, a stiff red vinyl diary with gold writing that looked more like a motel Bible. She cracked it open to Tuesday, March 16. “
FIRST DAY AT HEARST,” she wrote in blue pencil, under the small print on the upper right-hand corner of the page: “290 days follow.” And so the countdown began.

David's old mentor Herb Mayes was the first to call and officially congratulate Helen. The contract had been signed (
David negotiated for a total annual compensation package of $35,000 for the first year of her contract, the equivalent of approximately $264,000 in 2015), and the public relations department at Hearst had written up a press release, calling Helen Gurley Brown “
a spokeswoman for single women and girls with jobs.” “
A lot of people will think we hired her because she wrote
Sex and the Single Girl
,” Deems would soon tell
Newsweek
, scrambling the message, “but actually we hired her in spite of those books.”

It was too late to back out even if she had wanted to—and she had thought about it. Over the weekend, after having dinner at Christ Cella in Midtown with David and the author Irving Wallace, Helen put on a bit of a show, shedding tears over her new position while simultaneously using the moment to flatter their friend. “
I don't want to be a magazine editor!” she cried, as they walked past the Waldorf-Astoria. “I just want to be a bestselling author like Irving!” For what must have been the twelfth time that night, David reminded her that the job was temporary, and she could decide how she felt about it later. All she had to do was show up and try her best, like she always did.

Despite David's confidence in her ability to succeed, Helen sensed that Hearst was waiting for her to fail.
Just in case, her contract included a stipulation that if her editorship didn't work out, she could use up the rest of her term writing articles for other Hearst magazines. It wasn't so much a matter of
if
but
when
, they seemed to be saying, and she wrestled with her own insecurities. Being handed a magazine to edit without the benefit of any previous editorial experience was daunting, to say the least—she felt like someone had told her to suddenly
become an astronaut or a brain surgeon. She didn't have the slightest notion of what to
do
when she got to the office. “
Ask the managing editor to have lunch with you,” David suggested. The managing editor would be able to tell her what articles had been assigned so far, and she could start by taking a look and seeing if she liked any of them.

David's reassurance gave her some relief, but
she still went to bed feeling like she would be starting a prison term in the morning. At least she could get out after a year.

I
N 1965, WHAT
is known today as the Hearst Tower wasn't yet a tower, but rather an imposing six-story sand-colored building that
took up a full block along the west side of Eighth Avenue between Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Streets. In 1926, William Randolph Hearst, the founder of the Hearst Corporation, commissioned the virtuoso architect Joseph Urban to design the structure, soon to be known as the International Magazine Building, to house the twelve publications he owned at the time. Though it was intended to be a skyscraper, the Great Depression intervened, and the builders never saw their vision fully realized.

Born in Vienna, Urban had built his reputation in the theater as a stage designer, working on countless plays, musicals, operas, and other productions throughout Europe, before coming to America in 1911. A few years later, in New York, he met Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. and began designing sets for the legendary producer's Follies. When Ziegfeld later introduced Urban to Hearst, the designer and the publishing giant found a shared love of spectacle—which explains why the Hearst headquarters turned out the way it did. Urban pulled out all the stops, drawing from Art Deco, Secessionist, and Baroque influences. Built from cast limestone, the building features an arching main entrance flanked by tall fluted columns and statues representing the arts. On one side: Music and Art. On the other: Comedy and Tragedy. (Today, the cast-stone structure of the original International Magazine Building serves as the base for the new Hearst Tower, a geometric, glass-paneled forty-six-story skyscraper, which was completed in 2006.)

When Helen reported for her first day of work,
Cosmopolitan
wasn't located in the main Hearst headquarters. It was about a block away in the General Motors Building, at the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Broadway. Walking into the lobby, she wasn't completely sure how she had gotten this far, but here she was, preparing to meet her staff. It was a fair, blue-skied day, and she had
chosen a look to match, wearing a simple light blue jersey dress with a ruffle around the neck.

Helen had little idea of what to expect, and her staff knew even less. A few days earlier,
a rumor pinballed around the offices of
Cosmopolitan
. By Monday, Atherton would be out, replaced by a new editor-in-chief, a semi-celebrity. For the rest of the day, the halls buzzed with anticipation and uncertainty about the fate of the office. “Who do you think it is?” secretaries asked each other. “Well, who's around?” “Who's been making headlines?”

Vene Spencer, a petite brunette with big brown eyes, dimples, and bangs, was the unofficial leader of the pack, having worked at
Cosmopolitan
for longer than most of the other secretaries. As the assistant to the fiction editor, she even had her own office, but it was impossible to ignore the chatter of Les Girls, which is what she called
Cosmopolitan
's secretaries, herself included. (An aspiring actress, Vene chose the name in honor of the Gene Kelly movie
Les Girls
.) Each of the major editors had a well-coiffed office girl to fetch coffee, type up line edits, or sort through the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts. They had names like Robin and Diane and wore belted dresses and brooches, nylons and pumps, just as Helen had worn in her day as a secretary, but it never occurred to them that their new boss would be a former secretary herself—or a woman, for that matter. Standing outside Vene's office, they might as well have been trying to guess the Mystery Guest on
What's My Line?
Was Mr. X a controversial figure? Someone who had written for
Cosmopolitan
in the past? George Plimpton, maybe? Tom Wolfe?

Hearst didn't officially announce Helen Gurley Brown's appointment to the press until she showed up for work. Many of
Cosmopolitan
's staffers learned the news along with the Associated Press, which also reported that Robert Atherton would be named
international editor of Hearst Magazines. Les Girls, for one, couldn't believe it. “It came as a complete shock,” Vene says. “We, the younger women, thought, ‘Oh, boy! This is going to be fun!' We knew her now by reputation: ‘Sex and . . .' We'd all read it. But she was the furthest thing in our minds because no one had ever talked about changing the direction of the magazine.”

Within hours, Helen's red vinyl diary filled up with lunches and interviews with reporters from
Time
and
Newsweek
, but her top priority was to meet the staff, and
she started by inviting her new employees into her office. Over the weekend, Atherton had moved out and Helen Gurley Brown had moved in, or at least some of her stuff had. (It was only right to set up a lunch with Atherton for the following Tuesday at the Lotus Club.) Fresh flowers filled the spacious corner office, with its brown-and-orange color scheme, neat bookshelves, and bulletin board. Window blinds and heavy drapes obstructed an otherwise clear view of Huntington Hartford's newly erected Gallery of Modern Art, a ten-story, white-marble monstrosity with Venetian-style pillars. In the center of the room was a large and rather manly desk, and Helen made a point of standing in front of it, not behind it, as she welcomed the staff into her office one by one.

Earlier that morning, Vene had been filled with apprehension about meeting her new boss. She had dressed extra nicely, but she couldn't quite quell the flurries of nervous energy as she stood in a sort of reception line to meet Helen. To Vene's surprise, Helen knew all about her.

“You're Vene—Vene Spencer,” she cooed, extending a delicate hand. “You live in Brooklyn Heights. Your husband's an actor.” Vene beamed. She was bowled over. How did Helen Gurley Brown know so much about her life? This woman is a marvel, she thought, as she walked away.
She did her homework.

Helen had indeed been researching, including learning and memorizing a few personal details about every employee she met that morning. But some things she just couldn't have anticipated. Just as David suggested, Helen asked her managing editor, Betty Hannah Hoffman (who was actually listed as “Executive Editor” on the masthead), out to lunch. She had hoped to glean important information about the production schedule and future editorial material, but
Betty promptly turned her down. She already had lunch plans, she said.

Instead of dining at the Russian Tea Room, one of her favorite spots to see and be seen, Helen ate a sandwich that someone had brought her. She knew that people didn't take her seriously—talk was already getting back to her. Along with a failing magazine, she had inherited a relatively small staff, including the previous editor's assistant, Robin Wagner, and gossip spread quickly. She knew that her underlings had more magazine experience than she did, not to mention bachelor's and graduate degrees from elite colleges and universities.

In the opinion of more than a few people on staff, Helen Gurley Brown was an impostor and a hack, just an ad woman who had written a sex book—and overnight she had become the editor-in-chief of
Cosmopolitan
. “
The magazine is bubbling with enthusiasm over its new editor, even though she has no editing experience,”
Time
reported in late March, quoting
Cosmopolitan
's publisher, Frank Dupuy Jr., who churned out the hype: “She is the most exciting woman in the world!”

What was Hearst thinking?
Almost instantly there was mutiny in the ranks. Much of the staff began job-hunting, using their expense accounts to treat well-connected friends to lunch, hoping for a phone call on their behalf in return. A few editors considered quitting—a better option than being fired or, worse, having to
report to some pseudo-celebrity who didn't know the first thing about how to run a magazine. Someone started a rumor that Helen Gurley Brown was going to take over
Cosmopolitan
and clean house, picking off longtime employees one by one, but she had no such plans. At this stage it was more important to find allies.

She started by announcing that she didn't intend to fire a soul (at least not yet).
When she asked to see what was scheduled for future issues, she was surprised to learn that there wasn't a formal schedule—nothing in writing unless you counted Betty's chicken scratch. April was on stands, and May was almost finished, so there was no use in complaining about “Dental Reciprocity,” a mind-numbingly dull feature about the national shortage of dentists. Helen looked over the stories for June. Wary of alienating her single, working-girl readers, she might have done without a beauty story on bridal makeup and a political article about female protestors titled “Women Dissenters: The New Breed,” but it was too late to make any major cuts, and it was more pressing that she not anger her staff by trashing their hard work. What else did they have planned? Not much, she was told. Nothing that was ready, anyway.

Helen was still getting a feel for the layout of the offices and the different departments, but there was no shortage of article manuscripts. They were everywhere: stacked on top of desks, pouring through the slush pile. In the coming days she would go through them, hoping to find something she could salvage. To her disappointment, many of the submissions were months old and outdated. She could have assigned a junior editor the chore of reading through the manuscripts, but she couldn't rely on someone else to enforce her editorial vision for
Cosmopolitan
. So she began the Sisyphean task of reading each and every manuscript herself.

The bulk of the material was boring and bland: stuffy,
self-conscious writers writing to impress instead of to communicate. It wouldn't suit her girls. Disappointment dawned, then fear. If these articles were unusable, how was she supposed to fill the July issue, her first?

By the time she left the office, she was exhausted. If Betty had said yes to lunch, Helen might have been able to ask her about how to fill holes in future issues, stick to the budget for articles and art, find freelance writers, turn ideas into assignments, or how to delegate at least some of the above to her staff, but Betty made no accommodation, no attempt to reschedule her lunch date and help Helen out.

At least she had David. “
You don't need literary people,” he told her that night over dinner at the Russian Tea Room. She needed writers who could deliver the types of pieces she wanted, and she had a few contacts already, he added. “Just get those articles assigned. Don't pay attention to what people are saying. The only people who matter are the ones who are going to read your magazine.”

After dinner, he offered more reassurance, and they went to bed. As
Helen later recalled in David's memoir,
Let Me Entertain You
: “
I went to sleep but it didn't take. About four in the morning, David came and found me under my desk in the den. There was just room enough to get into a fetal position and I don't know exactly how long I had been there. Maybe hours. He brought me back to bed and for the first time, among many times in subsequent years (about three a year) told me this job wasn't the end of the world; that, of course, I could
do
it but if I didn't
want
to, I didn't
have
to—I could leave.”