Enter Helen (31 page)

The whistles blew, and Friedan yelled, “
Take the streets!” As the march began, the women overflowed the barricades, spreading across the entire avenue. They pushed past policemen blocking their path, past the honking cars and cursing drivers—
“Bitches!” “Baby killers!” “Cunts!”

Fanning across the avenue, they marched down to Fifty-Seventh Street, past Tiffany's and Harry Winston jewelers, past Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral, past the diamond
dealers and hot dog vendors, past open windows filled with waving flags and smiling faces.

As they walked, some women took off their heels and marched in their stockings. Men joined, too, carrying signs of their own: “Men for Women's Rights.” Some gay men marched for their own rights, but didn't carry signs. And then there were other women's groups like Men Our Masters, or MOM, its members wearing heavy makeup, carrying pink signs, and spouting their love of the opposite sex. What was so wrong with a man lighting a cigarette for a girl? one of the MOMs asked the marchers. “
Why can't you light your own fucking cigarettes?” someone replied.

They marched until they made it to the New York Public Library, where a few women scaled the famous marble lions.

Despite the strike committee's call for women to boycott
Cosmopolitan
, Helen Gurley Brown showed up to march along with
a ragtag group of women's magazine editors, including Shana Alexander, the first female editor of
McCall's
, and Pat Carbine, who soon would replace Alexander at the helm of
McCall's
after seventeen years at
Look
, where she had risen to the post of executive editor.

“
It was exhilarating,” Carbine says. “I can't speak for Helen, but I left the office in high heels to walk down Fifth Avenue, which I would not have chosen to do if
Ms.
had already started. I would have had the sense to take those damn shoes off and put on something more comfortable.”

In its coverage of the march the next day, the
New York Times
noted that among the demonstrations was a linguistic one. “‘Ms.' is used by women who object to the distinction between ‘Miss' and ‘Mrs.' to denote marital status,” the article read.

“
Failure is always at your heels. There is no way to avoid it.”

—David Brown,
Let Me Entertain You

H
elen was the first to admit that she wasn't exactly the poster child for women's lib, but a few days after the march,
New York
featured her and David in its cover story, “Living with Liberation.” Along with famous couples like Bella and Martin Abzug, Barbara Walters and Lee Guber, and Joan Rivers and Edgar Rosenberg, the Browns talked about the changes that the movement had, and hadn't, brought into their day-to-day lives. As usual, David came off as the doting husband, while Helen painted herself as a dutiful wife who cleaned, cooked, and handed over her paycheck every week. “We definitely have a double standard at home,” she admitted. Still, they had managed to create a marriage in which they were both free.
“We are totally possessed by each other but we are not each other's possession,” as David put it.

Each was also the other's priority, in part because of their decision not to have kids.
“I think Helen is taking on a decision that is probably one of mine,” David said, explaining that, at his age, it was hard to imagine raising another child, as much as he loved his son Bruce. “I think Helen would have cheerfully had children. She is extremely maternal, but I insist on being the only child.”

David gave Helen the attention and stability she needed, and
in her he found a lifelong mate and mentee who seemed
cosmically connected to his every physical and emotional need. They were a match made in Hollywood, perfect foils for each other, “
the Working Girl and the Producer,” as Faith Stewart-Gordon, the owner of the Russian Tea Room, would put it in her own memoir. But toward the end of 1970, a seismic shift in their plans threw them off center, leaving them both reeling from the aftershock.

A few days after Christmas,
20th Century Fox fired David for the second time. Trouble had been brewing for a while. As president and executive vice president of the studio, Richard Zanuck (the son of Fox chairman Darryl F. Zanuck) and David had put a lot of time and money into
three controversial movies that eventually took them down at Fox:
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
,
Myra Breckinridge
, and
Portnoy's Complaint
. The screenplay based on Philip Roth's novel made
Cosmo
seem schoolgirlish in comparison, and Zanuck Sr. had had enough. One day in the Fox boardroom, he read off a list of all the offending words in the script:
motherfucker
,
cocksucker
,
blow job
. What the hell were they thinking?

After hiring an independent committee to look into ways of restructuring the company, the board of directors at 20th Century Fox asked Richard and David for their resignations, citing the loss of profits as the reason, though David surmised that Darryl Zanuck really wanted them out because he believed they were a potential threat to his power. (“
We were—because of our concern over his diminishing ability to run the company,” he wrote in
Let Me Entertain You
.
Zanuck's habit of creating cinematic showcases for his mistresses cost the company millions and eventually attracted the scrutiny of Fox stockholders, before he resigned in May 1971.) David later likened the firing to an execution. Fox's New York office was located at 444 West Fifty-Sixth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Hell's Kitchen, a short walk away
from the Hearst headquarters at Fifty-Seventh Street and Broadway, but just far enough to edge into a seedier side of Midtown. “
It was a dangerous area with a high crime rate,” he wrote. “I never experienced any danger on the street compared with the treachery, betrayal, and character assassination that took place within that walnut-paneled boardroom. The rapidity with which one can be reduced to corporate nothingness is amazing and frightening.”

It was an ugly story—father pitted against son—and a personal one, soon to become very public, as
the Zanucks would be in and out of court over the next two years, battling each other. Before Richard and David even exited the boardroom on the day of their firing, photographers arrived and lay in wait to capture their defeat.

After getting the bad news, Helen and Richard's second wife, Linda Harrison, met their defeated and disoriented husbands in Los Angeles and spent the holiday weekend in Palm Springs. At the last minute, they decided to ring in the New Year at Don the Beachcomber, a popular Polynesian-style bar and restaurant where Frank Sinatra was known to hang out and drink a rum cocktail called the Navy Grog. It was the place to be, but when they got to the restaurant, they didn't get their usual star treatment.

“Look at the table they're giving us,” Richard said. “It's the worst table.”

“It's chaos here,” David said, eyeing the crowd. “The owner of the restaurant is carrying dishes.
He
can't even get the busboy's attention.”

But Richard persisted. The reason they were being ignored wasn't that the restaurant was busy or that they had made last-minute reservations. It was that they were no longer studio heads.

“This is Hollywood,” he said bitterly, “and phone calls were made.”

David didn't think much of the slight that evening—it
was
New Year's Eve, and the place was packed—but many years later, he realized that Zanuck was right.

D
AVID HAD BEEN
fired before, and knew he would survive, but the swiftness and completeness of this particular severance left Helen reeling. One day, she had been married to a company man, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood. The next day, the name “David Brown” was erased off his personal parking space in the Fox lot. Helen generally kept it together at work, but after David was fired,
she cried her eyes out in George Walsh's office, a place where she went countless times a day to discuss budget issues and production schedules, but rarely went for comfort.

The inescapable truth was that she lived in a near-constant state of anxiety. She worried about falling behind at work, and about David being out of work. She worried about David cheating on her, although, considering her track record, David had more of a reason to worry about her cheating on him. (“
She and Jackie Susann had a husband-watch agreement,” says Walter Meade. “Jackie kept tabs on David when he was in California, and Helen did the same for her husband when he was in New York. She was wise in the ways of men, so I think she was always suspicious. She once told me if she caught him cheating, she would shoot him.”) As usual, Helen worried about Cleo, alone in Osage, and about Mary, who was in Shawnee, Oklahoma, where she had joined a local AA chapter. Helen was thankful to her cousin Lou, who gave her regular updates about the family, but she hated visiting.

She dreaded the flight to Oklahoma City and the drive to Shawnee, where Mary lived in a small, two-bedroom house with her soon-to-be husband, George Alford, whom she had met at a
physical rehabilitation center. (A car accident left him with a severe arm injury.) Helen sent small allowances, but she could have done more to help her sister fix the place up. She could have made it wheelchair-accessible inside, at least in the kitchen and bathroom. She could have bought her a new house altogether—she had the money, but she hated spending it. Besides, she never stayed at Mary's. She slept at the Holiday Inn.

Helen with her mother and sister at her sister's house in Shawnee, Oklahoma. (
Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.
)

Back in New York, Helen wrote about her visits home. She told her readers about accompanying Mary to her AA meetings, and about her mother's life in Osage. She came off as the dutiful daughter and a good sport to boot, but occasionally her colleagues saw a different side. “
To go home, for her, took a ton and a half of Valium. She loathed her childhood, she loathed her upbringing, she loathed being poor,” Meade says. “I rarely talked to her about her family. I never initiated the conversation. I only know anything about it because of what she said. . . . She would complain bitterly about what it cost her emotionally to do it. Home was everything that she was trying to get away from. She wanted a life of accomplishment, recognition, glamour, and fulfillment.”

And she had gotten it. So why did she feel the need to constantly prove herself? Why was she so maniacal about working, filling up every free moment with a task? Why wasn't she happy? It was an unanswerable question, like asking, “Why aren't you a natural blonde?”

“Didn't you work in order not to have to work someday?” David asked her once.

“I thought so,” Helen said, “but it isn't true. We're on the bread line of success. If somebody gets rid of you or me, we are pitiful people.”

Sometimes
she felt like a character out of a Kafka story, she told Lyn Tornabene on one of their tapes—this one, Helen recorded alone. If Lyn was surprised that Helen read Kafka, she never said so, but it's likely that David would have been the one to make the literary connection, says Meade: “
I can hear him telling her she was just like one of Kafka's characters, and she would have said, ‘Who the hell is that?'”

Whether David introduced her to it or not, Kafka's story “The Burrow” resonated with Helen. She felt for the mole-like creature, an ugly, vulnerable little thing that lived under a pile of mud and
leaves and spent its life digging and hoarding and burrowing and just-surviving, without ever managing to get anywhere safe. The creature raced around inside its maze, hiding food and strengthening the walls, all the while sensing the approach of some larger, unknown creature—a looming threat.
“That's
me
!” Helen recalled thinking. “I'm forever shoring up and trying to protect the trenches. I'm never safe. I'll never be safe.”

She had spent her whole life trying to protect her little place in the world—staying later at the office, working harder for her bosses, giving all that she could give—but it never seemed to be enough. All these years later, she was still at it, killing herself to please her Hearst bosses, their wives, and their children.

One simply had to shore up and be ready. The walls could crumble at any moment.

And so she raced. She staved off whatever it was that was coming for her, that faceless, looming thing, with
countless treatments and surgeries—nipping, tucking, injecting, peeling, and forever fixing the vulnerable structure that was herself.

She built her shelter not out of mud and leaves—but out of ink and paper. She wrote thousands of letters to celebrities, fashion designers, politicians, and public figures whose support would help strengthen those walls.

She made endless lists documenting what she ate and with whom and how much it cost, always what it cost, what she wore and what her measurements were as of that very moment. She drafted countless memos to her staff, outlining how
Cosmo
could be better, and penned more missives to herself.

She wrote to remind herself which secretary she needed to fire and which editor she wanted to hire, but she also wrote to document her very existence—and to work out her
Cosmo
/cosmic problems on the page.