Enter Helen (16 page)

Helen would get a similar message across to Bill Guy, a dark-haired, soft-spoken Virginian and former English instructor at the University of Richmond. Helen appreciated that
Cosmopolitan
had a rich history as a literary magazine—more recently, it had been publishing popular mysteries and thrillers—but now that it was a magazine for single girls,
she wanted the fiction to reflect this new demographic. That meant more stories about girls in the city—no rustic or rural settings—and the girls should be unmarried. For the July issue, Bill brought her a titillating thriller about a secretary who gets strangled, and another tale about a plain sister who
gets the upper hand over a pretty one. (Helen had a preference for stories with happy endings.)

With his connections to established writers and his passion for finding new talent, Bill was a powerful asset. So was
Cosmopolitan
's entertainment editor, Liz Smith, whose job included writing film reviews, assigning celebrity profiles, and finding freelancers to work for the magazine. Months before Helen walked into the offices at 1775 Broadway,
Liz had been writing about movies and movie stars for
Cosmopolitan
's previous editor. She had cut her teeth as an editor for
Modern Screen
when the magazine was at its peak and she had experience on her side, but in many ways she was still the same tomboy who had grown up riding horses and watching movies in Texas, where her father was in the cotton business. Having been raised in Fort Worth during the Depression, she was as starstruck as Helen. “She was just a little girl from Arkansas like I was just a little girl from Texas,” Liz says. “We had a lot in common: poor upbringing; nice people, but no money; living through the Depression. We had left home, shaken the dust off our feet, and we were living the high life. I mean, I was in Paris with the Burtons—it doesn't get any better than that for a writer.”

Before Helen's appointment, Liz had written the magazine's cover story about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor—a feat in itself, considering that the most famous couple in the world were trying to avoid the press. Liz eventually tracked them down in Europe, where they were filming
The Sandpiper
, and embedded herself in their entourage. She turned in a profile of Mr. and Mrs. Burton, whom she described as being
“like icebergs—only partly visible to mortals,” that melted off some of those layers, at once humanizing and flattering the famous lovers. “As always, she was breathtakingly implausible in the flesh,” Liz wrote of Taylor. “A
cloud of long black hair, the
ultra
violet eyes, the famous face, and she was quite petite—much slighter than screen size. She was wearing cream-colored flat shoes, tight khaki slacks, a purple top that covered her waistline. But she wasn't fat. I knew everybody would ask.”

Like many of her colleagues,
Liz Smith had come in to work expecting to be fired by her new boss. After getting a glimpse of Helen, who seemed so helpless in her new position, she even considered doing her a favor by simply resigning. Instead Helen invited Liz into her large office, which she was in the process of redecorating into a ladylike drawing room with pillows, candles, and scarves draped over lights to create a soft glow. She soon added personal touches wherever she could, bringing in potted houseplants; framed pictures of herself with David; assorted crystal vases and ceramic dishes to hold flowers, pens, and paper clips; a Japanese-style hand fan that she tacked up to the bulletin board along with pages from the magazine; and a large, plush tiger that sat on the floor.

“
Well, Lizzie, what shall we do with you?” Helen asked sweetly, making Liz think of the actress Billie Burke, who played Glinda the Good Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
.

Before Liz could respond, Helen told her exactly what she wanted to do with her. In her soft, breathy voice, she told Liz that she loved her writing and asked if she would consider staying on to help her turn
Cosmopolitan
into what it should be—“
a glorious unfettered, sexy and seductive paean for aspiring young women who wanted to unleash their ambitions, have sex with the same careless abandon as men, make silk purses out of sow's ears that we all mistake for romance, marry millionaires, etc.,” as Liz recalled in her memoir,
Natural Blonde
.

Liz leaped at the opportunity. Little did she know that Helen Gurley Brown, the first and only woman she would ever work for, would be the toughest, most demanding editor she ever had.

“
I'll never forget—she was so shy and deferential, like she wouldn't
dream
of succeeding,” Liz says now. “Of course, we were all taken in by that innocent act.”

“
In an ideal world, we might move onward and upward by using only our brains and talent but, since this is an imperfect world, a certain amount of listening, giggling, wriggling, smiling, winking, flirting and fainting is required.”

—Helen Gurley Brown,
Sex and the Office
, 1964

I
n her first month, Helen made a few hiring decisions that would impact the magazine, and her personally, for years to come. One was promoting George Walsh to managing editor.
Another was hiring Walter Meade.

A copy chief at the ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), Walter was already known around
Cosmopolitan
's fiction department as a talented writer who had published short stories in the magazine, and Bill Guy thought he would be good at dealing with other writers and making assignments.

“We need an articles editor,” Bill told Walter around the same time that Helen started. “Why don't you come and do it?”

Walter was interested in the job, but not in pretending he was qualified for it. “I don't know anything about it,” he said.

“We have a new editor, Helen Brown, and she doesn't know anything about it either,” Bill replied, “so why don't I tell her about you, and we'll go from there?”

Walter considered his options. He wasn't long for the advertising world. Before he got the call from Bill, Walter had just been
through a somewhat life-altering experience. He had been walking down Forty-Fifth Street with his boss, a workaholic who was also a husband and father in his mid-forties, when his boss said, “Oh my God, Walter,” grabbed his arm, and then dropped dead. Unsure of what to do, Walter chose the most practical route: He went into a nearby store, asked for a furniture blanket, and put it over his boss's limp body before the cops came. When the shock of what had happened subsided, he realized that he had to get out of the advertising business.

That was the mind-set Walter was in when Bill called and said that
Cosmopolitan
was looking for a new articles editor. After Bill described the position in more detail, Walter thought, Yeah, I can do that.

And that's how he found himself sitting across from Helen Gurley Brown in her office. Right away, he told Helen that he had never been an editor before. “
I don't know what I'm doing either,” she said, “and I don't really know how I got this job.”

Then she told Walter the story of how David had essentially gotten it for her, encouraging her to apply in the first place. Listening to Helen recount the whole process, Walter thought she was the most direct person he'd ever met, and possibly the most flirtatious.

It certainly didn't hurt that Walter, thirty-five years old to her forty-three, was good-looking: dark-haired, tall, and cool in a tan poplin suit. Helen soon began her process of sinking in. She did not sit behind her desk, but rather joined Walter on her sofa. As they talked about a starting salary, he couldn't help but notice how she didn't so much sit as curl like a kitten, despite the fact that she was wearing a short, slinky dress. “Her gestures were extremely feminine,” Meade says. “She talked very quickly and very smartly. She was never at a loss for words. And she called me ‘Pussycat.'”

Over the years, Helen would call countless people Pussycat, her favorite term of endearment. (Later, an illustrated pussycat became something of a mascot for
Cosmo
, similar to
Playboy
's Bunny.) And yet, sitting in her office on that spring day, Walter Meade may as well have been the only man in her world. He had come in for what was essentially a job interview, but now that he was here it felt more like having a drink with an old girlfriend. Walter wasn't sure how she did it. She was not a beautiful woman, not by a stretch, and yet he felt drawn to her—physically attracted to this petite, plain woman with her kittenish purr. And that was really something because Walter was gay.

In fact, Walter knew he would like Helen before he even met her. He had heard the rumors that she was just a silly dumb broad who couldn't possibly edit a magazine if her life depended on it, and who would fall on her face; it was only a matter of time. He hadn't read her books, but he knew she was adored by single girls and ridiculed by the press, and he admired her because the press was often wrong. Bill Guy, for one, thought she was a natural. Even with her lack of experience, he believed she had a strong vision and that she could turn
Cosmopolitan
into a success.

As Bill and Walter would soon learn, Helen was very feminine in her manner, and she wanted a similar feel for the magazine: sexy but respectable, with a certain patina of properness. But she was also Machiavellian, and to get to her ladylike ends she had no problem resorting to unladylike means.

Before the meeting in Helen's office, Bill showed Walter a written response that Helen had given to a short story he had submitted to her—about a young couple who were deeply in love. “They went to a Tunnel of Love thing in an amusement park and the tunnel had its way with them—in an erotic way,” Meade says.
“The Tunnel of Love itself became an erotic experience, and they had sort of a threesome with it.”

Meade never forgot the memo that Helen sent back with the manuscript. “The note was all in lowercase, and it said, ‘bill, dear, i do think we have to draw the line somewhere—and being fucked by a machine is it.'”

E
VEN AS SHE
brought on new people, Helen lived with the constant threat of losing her staff to other jobs. But at least one former staffer wished she had never left in the first place when she heard that Helen Gurley Brown was
Cosmopolitan
's new editor.

Before Liz Smith took over her position, Lyn Tornabene had been the magazine's entertainment editor under Robert C. Atherton, and she witnessed its decline firsthand.

At a low point in circulation and staff morale, a few of the editors got so desperate that they started assigning each other freelance articles just to subsidize their meager salaries. They tried to be sneaky about it, writing under assumed names—Harriet La Barre wrote under “EMD Watson” for “Elementary, my dear”—but management eventually found out about it. Dick Deems called Lyn into his office, slapped her on the wrist, and told her that she'd just have to stick with her salary of thirty-eight dollars a week. Lyn quit, moved to Connecticut with her husband and daughter, and started freelancing. But when she heard that the author of
Sex and the Single Girl
had replaced her old boss, she felt compelled to write to her. “If I had known you were coming,” Lyn told her, “I'd have stayed.”

Shortly after getting that note, Helen invited Lyn into the office to chat about freelance assignments. She needed strong, reliable writers, and Lyn had experience and insight on her side, having worked at the magazine for years. When Liz Smith took over the
entertainment section and asked her predecessor for some advice about how to run it, Lyn answered with her characteristic candor. “
Why should I do that? Why help you succeed? I don't want you to do a good job. I want to be remembered as the best.”

A cute brunette with a brassy sense of humor, Lyn would become Helen's go-to person for funny social commentary, like an essay she wrote under a pseudonym called “What It's Like to Be a Jewish Girl,” as well as her friend and confidante. But that day in Helen's office, she wasn't sure what to expect.

“
It was a very strange meeting,” Lyn says now. “One of the things she believed was that talking to someone across a big mahogany desk was intimidating, so she curled up on the couch in the corner—she weighed, you know, two pounds—and then gestured, ‘Darling you sit here,' on the other end of the sofa. So I sat. The very first thing she said to me was, ‘You know these aren't my cheekbones.' Dr. [Norman] Orentreich, he was silicon-ing everybody. Then she said, ‘This isn't my hair. It's a Kenneth fall.' She went over all the parts of her body that were not original.

“Also by the end of that meeting,” Tornabene adds, “I knew that she had slept with one hundred and seventy-eight men.”

O
VER THE YEARS
, Lyn would hear a lot more about Helen's conquests during their hours of interviews and conversations. At a certain point, she stopped counting the number of times Helen used the word
mistress
when talking about all the men she had slept with to get ahead, but she witnessed her seduction skills firsthand when Helen and David, headed to a restaurant in Bedford, New York, made a last-minute visit to her house in Greenwich, Connecticut, one November night in the mid-Sixties.

“
She called on Thanksgiving, whispering, ‘Darling, David and I are on our way to Bedford, and we're going to go right past your
place. Can we stop in and say hello?'” Tornabene says. “I said, ‘Look honey, there are twenty insane people here. Both families. You're very welcome, but I have no idea what's doing.'

“So here comes the stretch limo up the driveway, and I have no recollection whatsoever where David was because I was fixated on Helen. She had discovered my father-in-law, who was a very handsome man, a Sicilian: a tall, tweedy sort of guy. He was actually a baron and couldn't ever earn a living. Anyway, Dad is sitting at the far end of the sofa, alone. Helen spots him, sits on the arm of the sofa, and then realizes she's looking down on him, so she slides to the floor so she can look up at him.

“Like [Anna and] the King of Siam, she would never sit higher than a man she was talking to. Of course, in the kitchen is my wonderful Sicilian mother-in-law, who is calling for my husband, ‘Get the
putana
off your father! Get the
putana
outta here, outta here!'

“
I don't think Helen needed to see how far she could get. She
knew
how far she could get. It was just her. That's how she functioned,” Lyn says. “She was scared to death all the time, and she managed to dispel any possible fears with her various techniques that she'd worked out over the years.”