Enter Helen (18 page)

Helen was ten years old and in the fifth grade when Ira was killed in an elevator accident in the State Capitol Building. One of the Gurleys' neighbors, a man who also worked at the State Capitol Building, rushed home to tell Cleo the news. They weren't sure how the accident happened, but most likely the elevator operator had shut the gate and begun going up before noticing that someone was trying to jump on. Ira's body was crushed between the elevator floor and the door frame. He was forty years old. Cleo was thirty-eight, and that summer she mourned for the husband she never loved with a well of grief that ran as deep as love. As Helen came to see it later, Cleo felt responsible—she thought that, in withholding her love, she somehow caused Ira's death.

Helen (
left
) and Mary as young children. (
Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.
)

Ira died on June 18, a Friday. That night, people flooded the Gurleys' house. They brought heartfelt condolences, food, and flowers, and in the following days, newspapers ran front-page stories celebrating the life of Ira Marvin Gurley. Helen almost forgot to mourn her father—she was too distracted by the attention and drama. Overnight, her family had become important, famous even, and she realized that her father must have been a great man. Seeing him fixed up in a suit and laid out in his gray-velvet-lined coffin, Helen thought he looked handsome.

The next day, they drove Ira's body to Green Forest for the funeral. It was at the graveside, along with relatives from both Cleo's and Ira's sides, that Helen truly understood that her daddy was gone.

The sun began to set, casting a soft pink glow on the fields in the distance. It was time to go home, but Helen wasn't ready. On the walk back to the car, she kept breaking away from Cleo and Mary and a couple of aunts to run back to Ira's grave and talk to her father one last time. “One last time” happened a few times: They walked, she ran, they let her. Eventually, they got the grieving little girl into the car.

H
ELEN AND
M
ARY
spent the next week in Osage with Cleo's parents. Surrounded by woods and fields cleared for cattle,
the one-story white farmhouse was simple but comfortable, with wide wooden floors and a main room with a big, round cast-iron wood-stove that had warmed Helen through many winter days. In the summer their grandmother set up fans to stir the breeze.

The Gurleys had spent summers here before, but this one was unlike any other.
For Helen and Mary, it was a time of escape. When they returned to Little Rock, Cleo let the girls do what they pleased—anything to get through their loneliness and loss. They went to the movies several times a week, taking in double bills and single, serial features like
Tarzan of the Apes
and
Mandrake the Magician
.

In the darkness of the theater, Helen watched Fred Astaire dance with Ginger Rogers and worshipped sophisticated movie stars like Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert. Matinee showings came with a free candy bar, which Helen loved almost as much as the movies themselves.

That summer, Cleo let the girls eat more sweets than usual. At home, Mary and Helen whipped up batches of fudge and divinity, a lumpy white confection bursting with pecans. Measuring, mixing, and pouring the mixtures out to cool kept their minds occupied and their hands busy.

Cleo tried to keep her own hands busy, too. She sewed as she always had, but with new intensity, concentrating her efforts on her two daughters. Hers were no mere cookie-cutter creations: Knowing how much Helen loved Hollywood glamour, Cleo made her an evening dress that was a near replica of Colbert's wedding gown in
It Happened One Night
. She also made her a brown wool coat with a beaver-fur collar and a pink taffeta dress with a blue
velvet sash. Working feverishly, she sewed baby-doll dresses for Helen—and for her baby dolls. She made ruffles and ribbons, flowers and frills. She sewed to fill the time, and to mend her mind, but her husband's sudden death had left a gaping hole in their lives that couldn't be stitched back together.

He was here, and then he was gone, and no one really knew what happened that day in the Capitol Building. Looking for some answers later that summer, Cleo drove her gray Chevy to the south part of town, where the elevator operator lived. Helen waited in the car while Cleo talked to the man, perhaps hoping for a confession, or at least an explanation. She never got one, though she heard some theories. A pretty woman had been inside the elevator when Ira jumped—perhaps he had been trying to get her attention.

Later, Cleo found out that the legislature had set aside funding for a new, safe elevator, and a cheaper, outdated one had been purchased instead to the benefit of corrupt state officials. The state of Arkansas eventually paid a settlement, claiming at least some responsibility for the accident, but even with money that she would get from the settlement, Cleo had little security for the long term: no job, no prospects, and no plan for how she would raise two children on her own.

“
Helen may have come to the false conclusion about her looks after moving to California. She really wasn't like the starlets she saw there. Maybe that was it? A small, pretty fish in a big pond of spectacular mermaids.”

—Lou Honderich

B
efore Ira died, there were a million things that Cleo did and did well. In the winter she made hot cocoa and toasted cheese sandwiches, warming the house. She dutifully tended to her home, her husband, and her children. She spent hundreds of hours taking Helen to dance classes and friends' houses, helping with homework and Sunday school assignments, and made all of her clothes. Even after Ira died, Cleo found ways to give her daughters little luxuries, but laughter was one luxury she could not afford. A serious woman by nature, Cleo turned more inward every day. Sometimes her melancholy shrouded the house like a veil.

Helen grew up during some of the worst years of the Great Depression in Arkansas, and yet, for a girl of ten whose father had just been ripped out of her life, perhaps her mother's great depression was the harder one to bear. After the attention brought on by Ira's death faded, the Gurleys had few visitors. Once in a while, a relative came by, but for the most part Cleo distrusted people outside her small circle. She lived in a constant state of anxiety,
much of it centered squarely on her daughters. Scared that they, too, could be snatched away at any moment, she dressed Helen in long underwear through April and seemed to hold her own breath every time her daughters waded into the water at one of the local swimming holes. Coming up for air, Helen would spot Cleo, hand on her brow to shield her eyes from the sun, frantically searching the water. “
The days were somewhat pleasant, despite our being daddyless,” Helen would write many years later, “except for the deep sadness that had enveloped Cleo and made passes at Mary and me . . . ‘poor little fatherless children.'”

Helen found a happier home nearby in the house of her new friend, Elizabeth Jessup. Not only was Elizabeth prettier and more popular than Helen; she was charming and so was everything around her. She had the best dollhouse in town; no flimsy baby doll furniture, but sturdy pieces that really functioned.

And then there was the house she lived in: It was always filled with laughter, friends, and music. Elizabeth's mother, Mrs. Jessup, was the junior choir conductor at a local Methodist church, where she played the organ. At home she played the piano and invited Elizabeth's friends from choir practice to come over and sing along. Helen had been baptized in a Presbyterian church, but Elizabeth's church was far more fun, and she soon became a regular at choir practice as well as at Mrs. Jessup's sing-alongs. Everyone got to choose a solo, and Helen's song was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

Even when Mrs. Jessup wasn't around, Helen and Elizabeth sang their hearts out to songs like “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” “You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” and “Blue Moon.” But Helen liked it when Mrs. Jessup was there. She had a warm, welcoming way about her, and she treated all the kids who came to her house like they were her own. Helen was at Elizabeth's house listening to the radio the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was elected in November 1932. When Roosevelt visited Little Rock the next year, Mrs. Jessup played the organ for the welcoming assembly, and lucky Elizabeth got to sit on the bench.

Elizabeth had everything that Helen wished she had—a cheerful home, good looks, a certain star quality—and yet somehow Helen didn't envy her. She just felt fortunate to know her. Elizabeth had other friends, too, of course, but she and Helen were best friends. They walked to grammar school together, rode their bikes together, climbed trees together, and starred in a school operetta together. (Elizabeth played the lead, Helen her maid.) At Mrs. Jessup's weekly choir rehearsals, they also discovered boys together. Writing about her Little Rock childhood years later, Helen wouldn't remember the church hymns she sang so much as the sexual undercurrent she felt, being tightly packed into the choir loft with the other sweaty prepubescent girls and boys.

Surrounded by velvet-lined pews and stained glass, Helen nurtured a giddy crush on a boy named Dick Anderson, who, as it turned out, had a crush on Elizabeth, who wasn't particularly interested. Helen didn't mind being overlooked by Dick, as long as she had Elizabeth to talk to about it. Giggling hysterically, they sang the lyrics to Pinky Lee's hit, “The Object of My Affection,” which became their code theme song for Dick. Ever the loyal friend, Elizabeth devoted herself to helping Helen plot ways to get the object of her affection alone in the room with her. Not that Helen would have known what to do with Dick back then, had she gotten the chance. These were innocent times, when the naughtiest thing Helen did was pass notes with Elizabeth in class. Day after day, they would write in a small brown spiral notebook, confessing their crushes and assessing each boy for each other's amusement. Knowing that the entries were for their eyes only,
they could fantasize about being touched and kissed when, in real life, they had experienced nothing of the sort.

In junior high, Helen and Elizabeth continued to confide in each other, though there were certain subjects that they didn't broach. Elizabeth had always been the pretty one, and as a teenager she only became prettier, with her curly dark blond hair and curvy figure. With both pride and horror, Helen watched as her friend evolved from a flat-chested girl, like herself, into the fortunate owner of a substantial bosom. The transformation seemed to have happened overnight. One day after swimming together at a public pool, Helen saw Elizabeth scooping her breasts into her bra as she got dressed. Helen wasn't jealous—she was simply incredulous that in the span of just a few years, she and her best friend had become so different.

The fact that Helen didn't like her own body very much didn't stop her from appreciating Elizabeth's. On the contrary, she thought Elizabeth had been blessed with
“the most beautiful breasts anybody ever aspired to,” as she would put it in her memoir. She came to associate “loving Elizabeth” with “loving
boys
in the yeasty, sensuous, long simmering summers of Little Rock.”

Over one of those summers, Helen and Elizabeth fell for the same boy, Freed Matthews, a dark-haired teenager from a poor family who wouldn't survive Little Rock's imminent polio epidemic. But while he was alive, he was so
very
alive, managing to convince both girls that he wanted them equally. Nothing happened—unless one counts what happened between the dolls in Elizabeth's dollhouse.

Helen knew that they were too old to be playing with dolls, and yet they were too young and inexperienced to be playing this game any other way. Lying on the floor of Elizabeth's bedroom, they took turns being the girl doll and putting her in various
positions with the boy doll—Freed Matthews. They weren't
sexual
positions; the dolls were just talking, very closely.

It was a fleeting and very friendly threesome. “
If Elizabeth and I were going through a homosexual phase, we didn't know it,” Helen later wrote, “but we were surely as much in love with each other as we were with Freed Matthews.”

A
ROUND THE TIME
of Helen's sexual awakening, her mother was having an awakening of her own. In 1933, Cleo took Helen to the Chicago World's Fair, while Mary stayed behind with relatives. Helen, eleven years old, was enthralled. Going to Chicago was the most thrilling adventure, and she soaked in the sights: the skyscrapers and double-decker buses, Marshall Field and the Shedd Aquarium. Riding up and down the escalators as many times as Cleo would allow, Helen was oblivious to the real reason for their trip: Cleo was trying to track down her first love, Leigh Bryan.

Cleo found Leigh the following year, in 1934, not in Chicago, but in Cleveland. Once again she told Helen that they were going to Chicago for the World's Fair, but as they approached the city, Cleo suggested that they continue on to Cleveland instead. Helen, unsuspecting, went along with the change in plan that, very likely, had been Cleo's mission from the beginning. Later that night, staying at the Cleveland Hotel, Helen woke up to find herself alone in the room. Terrified, she eventually found a note Cleo had left saying she would be back in an hour.
When Cleo returned, she confessed that she had been out with an old acquaintance. She never said who he was, but quietly Cleo and Leigh continued to keep in touch.

By the summer of 1935, Cleo was becoming restless in Little Rock and agitating for a new start somewhere else.
“It's been three years since we lost your daddy,” she used to say. “We didn't
lose
him,” Mary would retort. “He's not out in the parking lot.” Despite a small sum of insurance money and the settlement Cleo had gotten from the state of Arkansas, there wasn't enough to pay off the mortgage and maintain the lifestyle that she and the girls had grown accustomed to. Very soon the money was going to run out, and when it did, they might as well be far away from friends and neighbors who could bear witness. So Cleo started making plans to head west, joining the hundreds of thousands of people before her who had led the exodus to California. John Steinbeck wrote about the pilgrimage of the Joad family in
The Grapes of Wrath
, and Woody Guthrie sang about the “garden of Eden” in his song “Do Re Mi.” Of course, not all of these Eden-bound migrants had lived in the Dust Bowl or worked in the fields. Even among the have-nots, some had more than others. There were Gurleys as well as Joads.

In 1936, Cleo took the girls on a road trip. As far as Mary and Helen knew, they were going to visit one of Ira's brothers, Uncle John, in Los Angeles, and they would stop at the Texas Centennial Exposition, in Dallas, along the way. They did stop at the fair, just as Cleo had promised. As they enjoyed themselves, they had no clue that, back home in Little Rock, their house and all their furniture had been sold or that Cleo was moving the family to Los Angeles. When Cleo finally broke the news, Mary revolted, hopping onto the first bus she could get back to Little Rock, where she stayed with some girlfriends and tried to find a job. Cleo let Mary do what she wanted, but her independence didn't last long. Not having much luck finding a job or a social life for herself in Little Rock, she soon joined her mother and younger sister in Los Angeles.

During summers at their grandmother's house in Osage, Helen and Mary had spent plenty of hours dreaming about Hollywood. Sitting on the porch, they would watch the stars and read about them in
Photoplay
,
Movie Mirror
, and
Silver Screen
. Still, as much
as
Helen loved the idea of Hollywood, she didn't actually want to live there, and she didn't understand why they had to move so far away from everyone and everything they knew. (Cleo continued to keep her daughters in the dark about Leigh Bryan, who was living in Cleveland, but would join them in Los Angeles soon enough.)

Other than Uncle John and his family, they didn't have anyone else to depend on in L.A., and Uncle John couldn't offer much. A mechanic who was in and out of work, he wasn't much better off than they were. At the very least, Cleo hoped that he would be able to provide some moral support, but that was before they got the phone call that changed their lives once again.