Enter Helen (2 page)

“
Oh well he's got that je ne sais quoi While I, my dear, am from Arkansas”

—from an early poem by Helen Gurley

I
n the early Seventies, Helen Gurley Brown began working on a musical about her life, tracing her rise from a mousy girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, to the legendary editor of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. It was a story she had told countless times before, but this time her writing partner, a
Cosmo
contributor named Lyn Tornabene, was helping her to turn it into a spectacle worthy of Broadway.

They envisioned a play about “
a lady who knew—all out of the context of her time—the power of sex.” Set in Depression-era Arkansas, Los Angeles, and New York, it would unfold in several acts, with razzle-dazzle musical numbers like “Going All the Way” (one of the worst sins a girl could commit); “Sex Is Power” (followed by a series of “passion” ballets, featuring beds onstage and male dancers as Helen's favorite ex-lovers); and “Helen,” an ode to the patron saint of single girls, the editor of
Metropolitan
magazine (subbing for
Cosmopolitan
), and the ultimate authority on such subjects as how to boff in a wig or bag a rich man. Over the course of the play, many different characters would walk on and off the stage, though the most important stage direction of all was the simplest: “
Enter, Helen.”

But which one? There was the young Helen: scrawny, flat-chested, and acne-ridden with crooked teeth and limp, brown hair, a timid and pitiful creature. And then there was the grown Helen: a sophisticated, stylish, and sexy woman who had transformed herself from a “mouseberger” into the most famous editor in the world, a woman who, in one scene, tells her fawning secretary, “
Anybody can be me. You just have to work at it.”

In a flash of inspiration, the playwrights decided to create a duet for both Helens. Picture the scene: The grown Helen begins singing to herself as she primps in the mirror, putting on false eyelashes and a hair fall. Meanwhile, a soft light illuminates another spot on the stage. Pale and frail-looking in her cap and gown on graduation day, young Helen appears, lamenting her “blah” looks and wondering aloud, in her small, shaky voice, what will become of her future self.
They called this song “Look at Me,” aka “The Mouseberger Blues.”

Over the years, Lyn spent countless hours interviewing Helen, digging out the backstory that would become the basis of the play. Once, at Helen's Park Avenue apartment, “
she made supper,” Lyn says, “a salad with lemon juice and
mineral oil
—it's also a laxative! She had a little jar of Bacos, and then she made one scrambled egg that we shared. And Diet Jell-O.”

Other times, Lyn went into the city to pick Helen up and take her back to her house in Greenwich, Connecticut. After Helen did her morning floor exercises in Lyn's guest room upstairs—thump, thump, thump—they got to work. They talked about single girls and sex and men and affairs and consequences. Helen remembered girls she'd known who had come to her after getting pregnant; girls she had listened to and counseled through abortions and rejections, after the men went back to their wives. But mostly, she remembered the girl she had been.

During those sessions, they talked about Helen's childhood in Arkansas. Helen told Lyn about the tragic death of her father, Ira, and the fog of depression her mother, Cleo, never quite escaped, even after remarrying. (She later took the last name Bryan.) Other characters they chose not to develop, like Helen's older sister, Mary, who lived in Oklahoma. A victim of polio who spent most of her life in a wheelchair, Mary was quietly determined in her own way, but Helen and Lyn decided she would be better as a foil—a muted, gentle soul to bring out the sparkle of Helen's personality.

They titled the musical
Helen
and eventually shared the beginnings of a script with an agent, who shopped it around. But it never sold.
“It was too soon. The producing world is a man's world on Broadway. They weren't ready to worship Helen,” Lyn says. “It's so sad. She wanted it very badly.”

Helen filed the idea away, but she never forgot about it. Nearly two decades after they started writing
Helen
, she brought it up with Lyn once again. “Nothing's doing with the musical,” she said, “but I'm still trying.”

Enter Helen.

“All my life, ever since I was a little girl,

I've always had the same dream. To marry a zillionaire.”

—Loco Dempsey (Betty Grable) in
How to Marry a Millionaire
, 1953

H
elen Gurley loved the idea of David Brown long before she loved him. What wasn't to love? As head of the story department at 20th Century Fox, he was one of the most eligible bachelors in Hollywood, and according to a mutual friend, Ruth Schandorf, charming, intellectual, and “gentle as a baby lamb.” He had been something of a whiz kid after graduating from Stanford and the Columbia School of Journalism—editor-in-chief of
Liberty
magazine and then managing editor at
Cosmopolitan
. Twice divorced, he had a son with his first wife, a teenage boy who was almost old enough to go to college. Perhaps most intriguingly of all, David lived in an elegant house in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles, and he made an annual income of $75,000.
Not
including expense accounts.

When Helen first heard that David was single again, she felt her hopes flit around in her rib cage. At forty-two, he was what she had begun to think of as “
collector's-item age,” more worldly than her bachelor friends in their meager twenties, with less mileage than widowers in their thick-in-the-middle sixties.
David Brown was clearly marriage material, but the first time Helen asked Ruth to fix them up, she advised against it. “
It's too soon,” Ruth said. “You should wait until he's ready for a sensible girl like you.” David's second wife, Wayne Clark, had left him for another man, and in the aftermath he had been finding some comfort in the arms of starlets.

No one who knew Helen Gurley well would have described her as patient, but she
was
sensible and self-aware. She hadn't stayed single for thirty-six years without getting to know herself, and she'd never forgotten the lesson she had learned as a starry-eyed twenty-four-year-old legal secretary working for Paul Ziffren, back when he was still a young tax attorney at the Los Angeles law firm Loeb & Loeb.
Helen was a lousy legal secretary, partly because she found the work so boring, but working for Mr. Ziffren had its perks. Namely, it kept her in meat and men. Meat, as Mr. Ziffren once gave her ten pounds of bacon as a gift (a client, Vons market, had given it to him) at the peak of rationing in the Forties, and she and her mother and sister had eaten it for eight days straight. And men, as the firm represented several wealthy entrepreneurs looking to buy or sell exclusive properties, and her job put her in close contact with all kinds of Possibles. When she wasn't typing up depositions, Helen fantasized about what it would be like to be the wife of Texan investor Joe Drown, who had just purchased the Hotel Bel-Air. Marrying into money wouldn't solve all of her problems—Mary would still be in a wheelchair, and Mother would still be depressed—but at least they wouldn't be poor.

One day, after Howard Hawks's wife, Slim, swanned into the office in Russian sable looking every inch the Best-Dressed Woman in the World, Helen approached her boss. Wouldn't it be something if
she
could marry rich and solve her family's problems?
Maybe Mr. Ziffren could send one of the firm's wealthy clients her way.

Mr. Ziffren studied her, a scrawny, needy little thing with a slight Arkie twang. “
Helen, the kind of man you are thinking of, seriously rich, can marry anybody he wants to—a movie star, famous fashion model, heiress, somebody from a great family, her father a financial or political star,” he explained. “He isn't necessarily going to want to marry
you
, whatever your inclinations!”

It was a cold but well-reasoned argument, and after Mr. Ziffren's little lecture, Helen put millionaires out of her sight—at least as potential husbands.

Instead, she took up with a wealthy builder—she later discreetly referred to him as “M.”—who hired her to work at a movie studio that he had built in the heart of Hollywood. During her job interview, Helen gave an abbreviated version of her qualifications and her life story. After her father died in an elevator accident back in Arkansas, Mary had gotten polio and Mother had done everything she could to support them, but it wasn't enough. Even after moving back to Arkansas, they depended on
her
for money, Helen explained to this balding man with a limp who listened quietly before asking if she had a boyfriend.

He interviewed her on a Monday, and by the end of the week, they'd had sex on his office couch, all expensive buttery leather. In addition to a brand-new office, he set her up in a furnished apartment and began teaching her how to be a mistress. For starters, he said, she must buy some lingerie for herself and have cigars and alcohol on hand at all times. He soon sent over a fully stocked bar: more than three dozen bottles of liquor and liqueurs, from Chartreuse to crème de menthe.

It was a simple arrangement, and one in which they both had something to offer. He provided her with cash, a new wardrobe
and wristwatch, a used car, and a stock portfolio; and she provided sex as well as constant entertainment with her funny-sad stories about Mother and Mary and all of their hillbilly relatives. She was Scheherazade of the Ozarks: charming, witty, somewhat well-read, and good in bed.

As long as she was with M., she didn't have to worry about money. He paid for Helen's first-ever airplane trip and sent her, alone, to explore places like Palm Springs and Catalina Island; but she soon grew lonely and unhappy. She had no office friends, no life outside of the affair. For a while she shared an apartment with a Jewish girl, her roommate Barbara, but M. was an anti-Semite and didn't want her associating with Jews. One day Helen was so bored in her little apartment that she polished off three bags of potato chips and a giant batch of clam dip all by herself before going downtown to watch three movies, one after another. She ultimately discovered that she wasn't very good at being a kept girl—eventually she started sleeping when she was with him instead of sleeping
with
him—but she milked M. for all she could.

It was M. who gave Helen the money to visit Cleo and Mary, and who found them an apartment in Los Angeles when they briefly moved back to California. Whatever the request—the plane fare to see her mother or some cash for new clothes—all Helen had to do was ask, providing a little something in return. “
I was like a prostitute,” she later told her friend Lyn. “I would sleep with him and get the $200.” Despite her own waning interest in M., she was devastated when the affair ended; her security was gone.

Since then, Helen had gotten to know her share of the opposite sex. She continued to see men from the office, married men, and, occasionally, famous men like prizefighter Jack Dempsey. She discovered that what she lacked in natural beauty she could make up
for in perseverance and a little skill she would later call “sinking in.” No man ever tripped over himself when he saw Helen Gurley walking down the street, but over time, she found that if she could just get close enough to her target and turn on her own quiet charm, she could make an impression.

By her mid-thirties, Helen had had her heart broken several times, and with the help of her girlfriends and a few psychiatrists, she had glued it back together like a torn Valentine. Now David was the one who was recovering, and he would have to get starlets out of his system once and for all.

So, taking their mutual friend's recommendation, Helen waited. And then, one day nearly two years after his divorce from Wife No. 2 was finalized, David Brown liked the sound of Helen Gurley, too.
According to Ruth's thumbnail sketch, she was a successful (but not aggressive) career girl who had:

At thirty-six, she had no history to hold her back, and everything she needed to be self-sufficient. Newly hired as a copywriter and account executive at the Hollywood ad agency Kenyon & Eckhardt, she lived in a cute little flat and was the owner of a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL and a small but sturdy portfolio of stocks.

One night in June 1958, Ruth hosted a small dinner party at her house for David and Helen. Slim and neat in a short blue shift, Helen felt chic but nervous. As they ate, she let David do most of the talking—after all, he was so good at talking, and she was rather shy. But when he walked her out to her little gray Benz, she
mentioned that she had bought it the week before, paying $5,000 in cash.
He was seriously impressed. Most of the women he knew wouldn't pay for a taxi, let alone their own Mercedes.

They began seeing each other somewhat regularly after that. Driving his beat-up Jaguar, David would pick Helen up at her little flat on Bonnie Brae Street downtown, a bit of a haul from his place in Pacific Palisades. Even though he wasn't wealthy himself (as it turned out, he didn't own the house overlooking the Pacific but rather rented it for three hundred dollars a month), David whisked Helen into a world of film premieres, dinner galas, and glamorous pool parties.

As accomplished as he was professionally, David had a painful past of his own. Born into a well-off family,
he, too, had been abandoned by his father, Edward—but unlike Ira Gurley, who had died tragically, David's father had left by choice. An executive for the milk industry, he was a philanderer who abandoned his wife, Lillian, and their infant son in Brooklyn to marry his mistress. Raised by his mother and stepfather in Woodmere, Long Island, David met his father for the first time in seventeen years when an uncle arranged a visit. Edward later paid his way through Stanford and occasionally wined and dined him in Manhattan, along with whichever women joined them that night. But Edward's second family didn't know about David's existence until 1951, when he and his then-wife, Wayne, decided to make a spontaneous visit to his father's summer home in Southampton. In the moments before they arrived, Edward quickly brought his wife and grown children up to speed, divulging that he had a son in his thirties from a previous marriage, as well as a daughter-in-law and a grandson.
“We were a secret. My father never listed me as his son in his
Who's Who in America
sketch until I was listed in
Who's Who in America
and included him in mine,” David later
recalled in his 1990 memoir,
Let Me Entertain You
. “He was the worst kind of snob.”

David shared bits and pieces of his history with Helen early on, and sometimes, back at her typewriter, she wrote about his issues, which were starting to seem mixed up with her own. “He's only 42 but he feels he hasn't made an important contribution to the world,” she mused after one of their dates in some notes to herself. (This particular document was a nearly six-page character study.) David was a bit of a dreamer, and not just when it came to the movies. Often when they were together, he would start telling Helen about his Ideal Girl, and that girl did not resemble her at all. “I feel more like a something with other people—smarter, cleverer, funnier and prettier,” Helen wrote, “but feeling like that with other people just about equals feeling like nothing with David because he is so much smarter than
they
are.”

After they had gone out a few times, David invited Helen over for dinner, giving her the perfect opportunity to investigate.
His house was more run-down than she had expected, clearly in need of a woman's touch after his ex-wife's departure. Plaster was cracking throughout the house, the carpets were threadbare, and much of the furniture that David had been left with was old and mismatched; but again, Helen saw potential. Like David, the place had character. There was a large room lined with books—more than two thousand, Helen guessed. It was the first time she'd ever seen a real library in someone's home—clearly it wasn't just for show.

A few months into their courtship, when Helen's name came up for a charming garden apartment at the coveted Park La Brea complex, she turned it down, even though she had been on the waiting list for three years. Located in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles, within walking distance of the Farmers Market and
Wilshire Boulevard, the Park La Brea apartment was a fantastic deal with its two bedrooms, patio, and furnished kitchen for only eighty-nine dollars a month.

But in Brentwood, she found another apartment that had its advantages, too: It was newer, more modern, and best of all, only fifteen minutes away from David. Helen had learned from experience that if she wanted to have any chance of sinking into the man, she had to stay close.