Enter Helen (34 page)

Back in the States, the Catholic Church issued a critical statement in response to the centerfold. In the South and the Midwest, store clerks hid the issue behind the counter or refused to sell it altogether. Finally, Helen Gurley Brown had gone too far, people said. What was next, a private jet and a
Cosmo
key club for girls?

Meanwhile, high above the hullabaloo, in her office on West Fifty-Seventh Street, Helen watched it all play out, as
letters poured in. Writing from a laid-back engineering firm in San Francisco, a group of office girls thanked
Cosmopolitan
for giving them a centerfold to put on
their
section of the wall—why should the guys have all the fun? One male reader accused the magazine of exploiting men, while a married woman from Cupertino, California, lamented ever seeing such an example of poor taste and prayed it
would soon be erased from her memory. Donna Visione from Peru, Illinois, was so inspired she wrote a poem:

       
“
Helen saw a shrink all the time I knew her, every week. . . . I think there were two big things she didn't want anyone to know about: her insecurities, and her rage. She was profoundly angry.”

—Walter Meade

H
elen didn't make any New Year's resolutions to usher in 1973. She simply tried to fulfill the same old ones she had been making for years: “
Relax chin, stay at 105 pounds . . . torture!” she told her readers in her January editor's letter. She made no mention of taking over the world, but those plans were also in the works. In 1972 Helen launched the first international edition of
Cosmopolitan
in Britain. Featuring a busty blonde in a red-hot flamenco-style dress against a matching red-hot cover,
British
Cosmo
was an instant, red-hot success, selling out its 350,000 copies within hours of hitting stands. By early 1973,
Cosmopolitan
had a new director of international editions—Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner, who had been the second editor of
Eye
—and plans for a French version of
Cosmo
, to be followed by editions in Italy, Latin America, and Australia. “Like Coca-Cola, Helen Gurley Brown and her message of permissiveness will soon be a ubiquitous international presence,”
New York
reported that February. Over the next two decades, she would expand
Cosmo
into its own universe.

David's profile was about to blast off into space, too.
He and Richard Zanuck finally had started their own production outfit,
the Zanuck/Brown Company, joining MCA/Universal. In 1973, they were getting ready to release a new movie, and it was going to be big. Directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford,
The Sting
was scheduled to hit theaters that December, but being the producer's wife, Helen arranged for her senior editors to see an early screening of the film. Soon after she issued the invitation,
George Walsh declined. Helen was furious that he didn't have the nerve to tell her to her face. Instead, he asked his secretary to relay the message: He couldn't go because the movie started too late, at 9 p.m., and it just wasn't possible to have a babysitter stay with his kids for so long.

He gave his ticket to his secretary, and shortly afterward, Helen sat down at her typewriter and hammered out some thoughts about George Walsh. He should have come to the screening that night—did he really have a curfew? At the very least, he should have asked if there was
another
, earlier screening he could have attended. But he seemed to think that public relations wasn't a part of his job description; “
screw
that . . . public relations are where it's
at
with your boss,” she groused.

Helen titled the document “PROBLEMS,” but there was really one problem that was eating away at her—and he happened to be her second in command. Her issues with George Walsh took up fifteen pages. “
George Walsh has some kind of personality defect which causes him to be UNABLE to be pleasant,” she wrote. “He is patronizing . . . and somehow seems faintly sneering at all times.”

A few people on staff knew that Helen had been struggling with George since she first started working at
Cosmo
in 1965. But her readers would have had no idea. Time and time again, she featured him in her editor's column, where
Cosmo
Girls could read all about the man who “runs the office”—still somehow finding the
time to study French, renovate his family's Brooklyn brownstone, and help raise the children.

On paper, she cast herself as a shy, self-effacing office wife and George as the man of the house. She created the picture of a lovably odd couple, but in reality, he was more like the odd man out. She wasn't sure where he belonged—maybe
Time
or
Newsweek
—but not at
Cosmo
. He just didn't get the
Cosmo
Girl; “
one doesn't want to get personal but probably he is UNABLE to approve or like our kind of lady,” Helen wrote, before getting extremely personal and speculative about his private life—“he really
is
a closet chauvinist. . . .”

In all the time they had worked together,
Helen couldn't remember him once complimenting her, or even saying “well done.” The more she wagged her tail and tiptoed around him, the worse it was between them. Why did she bother courting his approval? If anything, he should be courting hers.

Instead, he played the resigned man. He rarely stayed at the office later than 5:30 p.m., and he cleared the work off his desk every evening. At editorial meetings, he often stared out the window, and he rarely brought in his own original ideas to pitch. He was totally competent when it came to overseeing the magazine's schedule and production, Helen had to admit, but was it too much to ask for a managing editor who cared? Someone who understood her and gave her moral support? Someone more like—David?

“Keep George,” David told her. “He is intellectual, high-dome. You are more plebian—you know, girlish material. He is a good foil for you.”

Helen took David's advice, but she wasn't happy about it. She knew George sometimes went out on job interviews—maybe one day, he would leave of his own accord. Very soon, his contract would be coming up, and she wasn't sure that she could live with him for another two years.

“
Cosmopolitan
is talking to women one by one.

We're talking about making all women's lives work.”

—
Ms.
editor Suzanne Levine, in the
New York Times
, August 11, 1974

O
n April 18, 1974, New Yorkers awoke to read the latest installment of news about Watergate on the front page of the
New York Times
—but it was a full-page ad for
Cosmopolitan
in the back pages that really begged for attention. “
I think a certain girl who just married a very famous diplomat is a Cosmopolitan girl in every
way
!” read the text next to a photo of a well-coiffed, cleavage-baring model. The ad didn't name the diplomat or the lucky girl who landed him, though anyone with a subscription would have gotten the reference to America's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who had tied the knot with his leggy, longtime friend, Nancy Maginnes, just ten days earlier. What made her a
Cosmopolitan
Girl? She was as smart as he was, the girl in the ad proclaimed.

Seeing the ad in the paper, the writer Stephanie Harrington couldn't help but wonder what the staffers over at
Ms
. would make of it. They wouldn't care about
how
Mrs. Kissinger landed her man, she surmised, but they might ask the obvious question: “
Why, if she's so smart, isn't
she
Secretary of State?”

As it happened, Harrington was working on an article for the
New York Times
comparing the two magazines,
Ms.
and
Cosmo
, when the ad came out. Around the same time, she arrived at the General Motors Building to meet Helen Gurley Brown.

Harrington had written about her before. As a young writer for the
Village Voice
, she spoofed
Sex and the Single Girl
by writing her own guide to manhunting in Greenwich Village. (She'd also written for Helen—during a period in 1969, Harrington was
Cosmo
's monthly book columnist, a job that later went to Gloria Vanderbilt.) Helen still made an easy target, but she was also the powerful leader of the most insecure army in the world—the legions of mouseburgers who clung to her every word. To see firsthand how she ruled, Harrington went to an editorial meeting.
After making her way up to the fourth floor, she took her place in Helen's small office, along with about a dozen women and two men, who dragged their chairs into a circle, with Helen at the center.

As usual, there were a few announcements, followed by a flourish of blue sheets, as editors read aloud their pitches.

“Have we done anxiety lately?” someone asked.

“That is like asking if you've eaten in the last week,” Helen quipped.

“We have depression in the works,” someone else mentioned; “this should be separate.”

“This one is totally ridiculous—‘Are Lesbians Ecological?'”

As the meeting unfolded, Harrington grew increasingly aware of the great disparity between the senior editors, who seemed to be normal, sensible people, and the article ideas they suggested—ideas like “Face-Lift for the Still Young—During Crucial Man-Holding Years” and “Orgasm Is Yours If You Follow These Simple Instructions.” Other than conjuring up these ideas, the editors
seemed to have little to do with them. For the most part, they were just repackaging the same old formulas that
Cosmo
had been selling for nearly ten years.

Meanwhile, sixteen blocks away, the editors of
Ms.
were packaging a very different set of messages. Early on,
Harrington went to an editorial meeting at
Ms
., located at Forty-First Street and Lexington in a cramped duplex of offices that was about as organized as its staff—which is to say, not very. Sitting in the larger of the two communal offices along with twenty women and one mailman (everyone was invited to meetings), she listened as conversation veered from family-minded urban planning to the Italian left's struggle against sexism to the question of whether equality had killed off romance.

“What is romance?” someone joked. “Is it a magazine?”

“Women's obsession with romance is a displacement of their longings for success,” Gloria Steinem cut in, sitting at a desk near the door.

When she sat down to write her article, “Ms. Versus Cosmo: Two Faces of the Same Eve,” Harrington didn't overtly identify with one magazine or the other—she criticized and commended both—but she was writing about women who did.

Both magazines had broken the mold of the traditional women's glossy and both were revolutionary, advocating for equal rights in the bedroom and the boardroom. Both attracted fiercely loyal readers who turned to them for a monthly injection of career advice and courage to strike out on their own. But why did it have to be
Ms.
versus
Cosmo
? Why couldn't a woman feel solidarity with both? To illustrate her point, Harrington imagined a young Madame Bovary penning a letter to her favorite magazine:

The letter was signed “Emma Bovary, Yonville Parish,” but which editor was she writing to—and at which magazine? Was Emma Bovary a
Cosmo
Girl or a
Ms.
woman? It was a clever construction, mirroring a very real divide. On the one hand, there was
Cosmopolitan
, the working girl's self-help guide with its aging not-so-single-girl editor, Helen Gurley Brown (now fifty-two and still wearing miniskirts); its endless advice on how to be sexy and how to catch a man, explained in baby-simple prose; its cover girls with bursting cleavage; its staff of men and women, all versed in
Cosmo
-speak (which is to say Helen-speak, a language all its own); its readership of nearly two million; and its ever-expanding reach around the globe, with twelve foreign editions and counting. (
Helen regularly critiqued foreign editions, which often repurposed material from American
Cosmo
, to make sure that international editors stayed true to the original's optimistic, sex-positive message and now famous
Cosmo
style.)

On the other hand, there was
Ms.
, the feminist free-for-all
with its glamorous, unofficial spokeswoman, Gloria Steinem (now forty and wearing flared jeans); its sometimes heavy-handed advice on how to start a consciousness-raising group or a revolution; its edited-by-committee prose “as riveting as the telephone directory—the gray, not the yellow pages,” as Harrington quipped;
its “coverpersons” like George McGovern and Bella Abzug; its majority female staff and resistance to editorial hierarchy; and its readership of 400,000, including many highly educated women. “
More than twice as many
Ms.
readers as
Cosmopolitan
readers attended college, and more than a third of
Ms.
readers hold advanced degrees,” Harrington reported. “And only 5.5 per cent of
Ms.
readers also read
Cosmopolitan
.”

Two very different magazines, and readerships—and two very different revolutions. But what if some of those differences could be bridged? What if the so-called two faces of Eve could come together as a united front?

Occasionally, they did—on issues like reproductive freedom. After the Supreme Court's 1973
Roe v. Wade
decision to legalize abortion came under attack, Helen attended yet another press conference, organized by the National Abortion Rights Action League, along with Gloria. Helen later described the day in her July editor's letter: “
Before the press conference we went to the ladies' room where I glued on my false lashes and anchored my fall while Gloria ran a comb through her hair and put on some Chap Stick!”

Helen found a lot to admire about Gloria, but the feeling wasn't always mutual. “
She was the most unconfident, ingratiating person, constantly referring to herself as a mouseburger,” Steinem says. “If anything, we felt sorry for her because she was working so hard, and she so clearly lacked faith in herself, so nobody blamed
her. At least I certainly didn't blame her for
Cosmopolitan
. We just referred to it as the Unliberated Woman's Survival Kit.”

“
Helen really created a little money-printing press for Hearst. A
big
one. Strike the word ‘little,'” adds Pat Carbine. “And here comes something down the highway that is calling into question one of the basic premises of the magazine, which is that if you just follow this formula that we'll give you every month, you can catch a man, and that's what it's all about. Issue by issue, dissecting that premise—which one could say
Ms.
is all about—Helen
had
to pay attention.”

H
ELEN TRIED TO
educate herself about feminism. She frequently asked Gloria for updates on the women's movement, and over time they developed a friendly rapport. In April 1974, Helen wrote to Gloria to thank her for calling the office to “
reassure us that you and the other leaders of the Women's Liberation movement were
not
against us.” She was glad to have an ally in the movement, and yet, as many questions as Gloria answered, as many times as she signed her letters to Helen “in sisterhood,” somehow the message never got through. Helen understood the movement and didn't.
“She would say ‘Now, your movement says this, your movement says that . . . ,'” Pat Carbine recalls. “Gloria would stop her in her tracks and say, ‘Helen it's
our
movement.'”

As much as Gloria wanted to support Helen in theory, some chasms were too wide to be bridged. In the mid-Seventies, Helen once again attracted the ire of feminists when
a former
Esquire
secretary, Julie Roy, revealed that she had been abused by Dr. Renatus Hartogs, a prominent New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who wrote
Cosmo
's monthly column “Analyst's Couch.” Over the years, Dr. Hartogs had answered readers' questions about everything from losing their virginity to dealing with frigidity. It later
came out that he had been using his actual analyst's couch to have sex with patients, under the guise of sexual therapy.

Once again, protestors showed up in the lobby of the General Motors Building, but Helen was not there. She was in her office four floors above—on the phone with Gloria.

“
Gloria, you have to do something, you have to do something! There are demonstrations in the lobby!” Helen said frantically.

As usual, Gloria was calm. “Well, who's demonstrating?”

“Your people are demonstrating!” Helen sputtered.

“What do you mean, ‘my people'?” Gloria asked, confused.

“Women!” Helen cried.

Retelling the story forty years later, Steinem lets the irony settle in, before going on. “She was most alarmed. I said, ‘But Helen, what are they demonstrating about?' Well, it turned out that the sex advice column in
Cosmopolitan
was being written by a psychiatrist who was on trial for sexually abusing his patients. And Helen didn't fire him. He continued to write the sex column. I said, ‘Well, Helen, no wonder they're demonstrating. Why don't you fire him?' And Helen said, ‘Oh, he's such a nice man.'

“
I do not remember feeling angry at her,” Steinem says. “I just felt sad.”

Barbara Hustedt Crook saw it a little differently. There were times when she felt embarrassed to work at
Cosmo
. Walking through the protestors who occasionally gathered in the lobby, “
it felt like breaking the picket line,” she says. “I was sort of with them in spirit.” She had worked for the editor who oversaw “Analyst's Couch,” and her personal opinion of Hartogs was that he was kind of a jerk. “
I wasn't surprised by the accusations,” she says. “What did surprise me was Helen's initial refusal to fire him on the grounds, as she explained in a staff meeting, with real passion and eloquence, that he was innocent until proven
guilty. On the one hand, it seemed ludicrous and icky to keep him on, while on the other, I quite admired her for it, because her position seemed principled rather than personal, and fairly courageous.”

Hartogs later was found guilty by a state supreme court jury. In March 1975 he was convicted of malpractice and ordered to pay $350,000 to his victim, one of several women who eventually came forward. His final column for
Cosmo
appeared four months later.