Enter Helen (25 page)

They were mostly white, but not all. Some were black women who might have been pleasantly surprised to see an article called “The Negro Girl Goes Job Hunting,” about the bigotry dark-skinned women regularly encountered while looking for employment. “
Hey, beautiful dark girl,” wrote Ruth Ross, then an assistant editor at
Newsweek
, “go on out there and get your job!” (Despite this rallying cry, Helen's own staff at
Cosmopolitan
was overwhelmingly white in the late Sixties, a black woman named Mary being the exception. She was known as “the mailroom girl,” though she appeared on the masthead as an editorial assistant and took on many other responsibilities, growing close with Helen in later years.)

Other women recognized themselves in
Cosmo
's first-person essays like “I Didn't Have the Baby, I Had the Abortion,” described as
“a true story, told by a young woman for whom you cannot help but have sympathy.” “
I'm still shaking! That girl is me—two years ago,” a reader from Boston wrote in. “Everything she said, her innermost thoughts—they were mine.” Helen rarely gravitated toward political articles, but certain issues directly affected the lives of her 92 percent, and none more so than the war. Every month, the draft claimed thousands more of America's men—many of them young, white, and middle class.

Helen regularly ran articles about where to find eligible bachelors, and in 1967, Vietnam was an obvious, if ludicrous, place to look. Shortly after more than one hundred thousand antiwar protestors gathered in Central Park to demand a stop to the bombing that April, Helen published a shockingly tone-deaf article selling the glamorous side of Saigon, where a girl could soak up the sun and lap up the attention of so many single young men. What was a little artillery fire in the background compared with the bachelorette's battleground back home?

“COULD
YOU
WORK IN VIETNAM?”
Cosmo
asked readers in the July 1967 issue. Reporting from Saigon, the writer, Iris George, interviewed several career girls. One was an American Red Cross recreation aide whose responsibilities included going on coffee runs and entertaining the troops with games of charades and tic-tac-toe.

“The boys think we're pretty special,” she confided. “You have to watch it. The constant attention can go to your head.”

“A stateside girl in Vietnam feels like Miss America,” added a program director for the USO. “It's not that we're all beautiful, but there are so many of our men here and so few women.”

It wasn't the first time Helen promoted the benefits of looking
for men off the beaten path. In
Sex and the Single Girl
, she had recommended taking up sailing, going to AA, or joining a political club (Democratic, Republican, or both) to get a little closer to the opposite sex. She could be shameless, but she really topped herself when she sold the pluses of manhunting in a war zone.

“
The trouble with most teen magazines is that they're too parental. They always seem to be talking down and teaching.
Eye
won't be that way because we're all nearly the same age.”

—Susan Szekely, “Nobody over Thirty,”
Women's Wear Daily
, December 11, 1967

T
hey came by thumb and by Greyhound bus, braless and barefoot, with feathers and flowers in their hair. Some came because they were disillusioned with the war or with the fight for civil rights or with their parents, and they wanted to be with other people who understood their ideals. Others came because it sounded like fun. They came for free food and free love and free drugs and free music. They came to be free. In 1967, spring break turned into the Summer of Love as tens of thousands of high school kids and college students from all over the country flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, home to Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and a new breed of young hipsters who called themselves hippies.

That May, Hunter S. Thompson explained their kind to readers of the
New York Times
—“
The word ‘hip' translates roughly as ‘wise' or ‘tuned in.' A hippy is somebody who ‘knows' what's really happening, and who adjusts or grooves with it,” he wrote—but by then, images of flower children saturated the media,
beckoning more than 75,000 young people to join a revolution that started long before they got there.

They'd read about the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where Timothy Leary told a crowd of thousands to “
turn on, tune in, drop out,” poet Allen Ginsberg led a Hindu chant, and the Grateful Dead expanded minds and the future of music in a cloud of incense and marijuana smoke. They had heard about the Diggers, a group of anarchists and guerrilla theater performers who spread their anticapitalist message by salvaging other people's trash to provide the masses with everything from free stew to Free Stores, where nothing was for sale and everything was for the taking.

By July, the Haight was overrun with gawking tourists and television crews wanting to catch a glimpse of “Hippieland” and the thousands of runaways, many of them barely into their teens, who slept in the park and loitered in the streets, hungry and half-conscious. By October, the same month that
Hair
premiered off-Broadway, the hippie was dead—symbolically, at least. As a final protest, the Diggers led a mock funeral through the streets to mourn “Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media.” They rejected the commercialization of their culture, but more important, as one of their members, Mary Kasper, later explained, “
We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, don't come out. Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live.”

The revolution spread with every joint passed, every postage stamp laced with LSD, every thumb lifted, and every subscription to a new rock magazine that promised to document and celebrate both the music and the movement it spawned. In his editor's letter for the debut issue of
Rolling Stone
, which featured John Lennon on the cover, the young publisher Jann Wenner captured the cynical idealism of a generation: “We hope that we have something here
for the artists and the industry, and every person who ‘believes in the magic that can set you free,'” he wrote, wary of “sounding like bullshit” should he explain its mission much further.

As promised,
Rolling Stone
spread the magic around the country—along with the message of a movement and a generation that advertisers wanted to reach. In some ways, selling anything to hippies was counterintuitive, but that didn't stop the biggest corporations in the world from trying to cash in on their culture. “
If you want to swing college, come to the type-in,” Smith-Corona quipped in an ad for its new electric portable typewriters. “
Pick a flower. Power. Do a daisy. Crazy. Plant your stems in panty hose,” read an ad for Hanes nylons in daisy-printed, fluorescent colors. Canada Dry winked at Timothy Leary with its slogan for Wink, “
Join the cola dropouts,” while Diet Rite Cola invited everyone to “
Join the Youth Quake,” not just kids.

At Hearst, Helen Gurley Brown was busy creating a new glossy aimed at the bearded-and-braided set, when she wasn't working on
Cosmo
.
A kind of
Life
for college kids,
Eye
would target young men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty, part of the booming youth market that Richard Deems estimated to be about 26 million strong. He appointed Helen as
Eye
's supervising editor, until they got the magazine off the ground.

One of their first hires was a thirty-year-old art director named Judith (or Judy) Parker, who had overseen the design of
New York
magazine when it still appeared in the
World Journal Tribune
. Tall and thin with translucent white skin and her long, black hair parted and plaited in twin braids, she was beloved by artists and musicians in New York's counterculture scene. Soon after hiring Judy, Helen found
Eye
's editor in Susan Szekely, a twenty-seven-year-old Bryn Mawr graduate who would soon change all of her stationery to reflect her married name, Susan Edmiston. When
Hearst plucked her from the
New York Post
, Susan had been writing her own nationally syndicated column, called “Teen Talk.” (Around one hundred pounds with dirty-blond bangs, she could have passed as a teenager herself.) Like her supervisor, Susan had no prior editing experience when she took the helm, but she had established herself as a national authority on all things teen, from the mods to the Monkees, and Helen desperately needed a guide.

In September, Hearst announced its plans for
Eye
to the press, and soon afterward, Susan was featured in a big write-up by Eugenia Sheppard in
Women's Wear Daily
, along with a taste of her plans to reach the Now Generation, with the help of “
a dozen girls and men all under 30,” as Sheppard reported, making no mention of their much older supervising editor. Around the same time, the young staff moved into their new offices, located in an old art gallery just south of Washington Square Park on LaGuardia Place.

Over the next few weeks, Susan threw herself into the epic adventure of editing a magazine for teens, rounding up material for the March issue,
Eye
's debut. Pete Hamill made a provocative case for drafting women into war, Warren Beatty pondered the pros and cons of the Pill, Lisa Wilson (daughter of Sloan Wilson, who wrote
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
) wrote about why she dropped out of college in the States to study abroad in Europe, and
Eye
's advice columnist answered questions from young readers, hungry for independence.

Unlike
Cosmo
, which sounded like a single person with a singular voice,
Eye
sounded like the generation that created it—and this was a generation that had absolutely nothing to do with Helen Gurley Brown. Then again, she never claimed to be an expert on this crowd. Other than offering some line edits, Helen gave Susan free rein to assign and edit the features she wanted.

Her real issue was with the look of the magazine. Helen wanted
it to be slicker and sexier—
like
Rolling Stone
meets young
Cosmo
. From the start, she butted heads with the art director, who wanted the design and photography in the magazine to be as experimental as the culture it would be covering. For the first issue, Judy planned a pullout psychedelic poster—perfect for tacking on a dorm room wall—and color-saturated photos capturing the trippy, battery-powered electric dresses of designer Diana Dew. (Among other moody settings, she sent the photographer to shoot models “
in the quiet setting of Woodstock, an artists' colony in New York State.” The music festival named for the town was still almost two years away.)

Judy also worked on a profile of the model Cathee Dahmen, who was known for her kooky, curly black hair—the result of a permanent that made her look like a cross between Harpo Marx and Betty Boop. On the day of her shoot for
Eye
, Dahmen wore a men's dress shirt with a tie—and at one point, no makeup. Judy loved how she looked naturally and wanted to run the “before” picture of her bigger than the “after,” but Helen wouldn't hear of it. “
Helen and Richard Deems would come down in the limousine and would look at the layouts,” Susan Edmiston says, “and they would
insist
that she use the photo with the makeup as the full-page photo.”

Susan stayed out of it. She had her work cut out for her conceiving, assigning, and editing so many articles, but sometimes she heard Helen and Judy arguing in the art department. “I was not really directly involved with the conflict, and, in fact, Judy maybe didn't feel that I supported her enough,” she says now. “I believe that Deems and Helen wanted me to oppose Judith, and Judy wanted me to stand with her against them.
I was not directly involved in the conflict. I just kept my head down and did my work.”

U
NLIKE
Cosmo
,
Eye
didn't have a prototypical girl. The only constant in the models' looks from month to month was a shot of irreverence. Headlines were flip: “Should a Proper Young Woman of Impeccable Upbringing Wear an Ankle Bracelet?” read an April feature on hippie anklets. In fashion stories, beautiful people modeled irony and an anything-goes mentality as much as the clothes. Girls wore ties and military fatigues, their hair loose and free. Guys wore necklaces and pink-lensed glasses. Occasionally the magazine ran a beauty feature like “Follow the Dots,” a guide to painting on faux beauty marks and freckles, but for the most part the emphasis was on being made-down instead of being made-up. Trying too hard, an overabundance of hairspray, and skintight dresses were on the way out. Authenticity and earthiness were in. “
You could call it cosmetics of the soul—the art of being as beautiful inside as outside,” the rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote of the latest beauty trend.

Eye
's fashion editor, Donna Lawson (now Donna Lawson Wolff), wanted her section to reflect the counterculture, not the
Cosmo
culture—Janis Joplin was her idea of a style icon—but Helen wasn't having it.

“
I had a meeting with her once—I think Judith was there—and she told me how wrong she felt the beauty and the fashion was,” Donna says now. “She tried to explain, and I held fast to my point of view, because I was young and pretty obstinate, but I really felt it should express the kids at the time, and she disagreed: They looked poor, they looked unkempt.

“She was from another generation, and she just didn't get it,” Donna adds. “It was beyond her comprehension what we were trying to do.”

T
WO YEARS INTO
her reign, Helen knew exactly what the ideal
Cosmo
Girl looked like—unfortunately, her art department did not. Many afternoons at
Cosmopolitan
, she held a new layout in her hands, crumpled it up, and hurled it into the trash can. If she didn't like a photo, she didn't ever want to see it again, and her photo editors learned not to try to show her the rest of the take. If she didn't like the look of the girl or the style of the dress, it was out.

Nothing angered her more than a failed attempt that she actually had to run, like the August 1967 cover featuring Raquel Welch, who emerged as the sex symbol of the decade after starring in the 1966 adventure film
One Million Years B.C.
Playing a curvaceous cavewoman named Loana, Welch uttered only a few lines, but no one cared what she was saying. Audiences cared about what she was wearing: a teeny-weeny doeskin bikini that clung to all the right places.

With her new role as “Lust” in the campy British comedy
Bedazzled
, Welch was an obvious choice for a
Cosmo
cover girl, but the images from her session with William Connors left Helen cold: He'd given her head shots when what she really wanted to see was Raquel's great body. Wild-haired and wearing nothing more than a patterned orange Fieldcrest towel, Raquel oozed sex appeal from the waist up, but the whole reason for dressing her in a short towel was to show her off from the waist down. “
Raquel Welch was to have been shot in full figure,” Helen wrote in a memo to her art department after the issue went to press. “This was an opportunity to do something
different
on the cover.”

Unfortunately, against the yellow background, the orange towel looked washed out. Plus, they already did bright yellow for April's cover, and they had another yellow one planned for the fall.
“From lack of communication and because so many people
were involved, I didn't get what I asked for,” Helen fumed. She didn't care that some of their regular photographers complained about matching the models' outfits to the no-seam background paper used on set. She wanted hot models in hot “costumes” posing against hot colors—red-on-red, orange-on-orange, pink-on-pink—a different one every month so that readers would know instantly that a brand-new issue of
Cosmopolitan
was out.

On weekends, David tried to lead Helen away from her typewriter, but it was no use—she never stopped working. She went to bed thinking about the magazine and woke up with new ideas about how to make it better, more visually stimulating.

She wanted more color, more optimism, more energy. She wanted more smiling girls who looked, as she wrote in another memo, “
SOFTLY SEXY
,” as opposed to
Playboy
girls who looked
“‘chippily' sexy” or
Glamour
girls who sometimes looked like tomboys. She wanted more originality in the styling of models—bare arms were sexy, but so were furs and feather boas—and in the magazine overall. Instead of hiring professional models for lifestyle stories, why not use more real-life girls? Instead of letting the article dictate the artwork, why not try it the other way around? A stunning nude photo, a sexy picture of two people kissing, a bold psychedelic design—anything could be a potential launching pad for a story idea.