Not Pretty Enough Read online

  Having paged through the failed treatment, I turned to the accompanying material, a small box of cassette tapes with yellowing labels. Helen made the recordings over several months in 1970–71 in a series of conversations with her friend and longtime Cosmo writer Lyn Tornabene, who, by mutual agreement, recorded and kept her own set of tapes. This was their plan: Tornabene would interview Helen in long and detailed sessions to get the basics and “turning points” of her life story. They would brainstorm on production numbers and song titles; then Tornabene would write the treatment, to be shown to agents and prospective theater angels. She was never compensated for this speculative work. The payoff, they both hoped, would be boffo at the Broadway box office.

  The aged and brittle listening copies of the tapes at Smith were largely inaudible. I ordered digital transfers of the originals. Transcribing them, I realized what revelatory documents they are. Helen is speaking with an honesty and self-awareness completely unlike her coquettish media mien; this is not the coy HGB who held forth on foreplay and sexy underwear on The Tonight Show. Her soliloquy has humor, pain, mortification, anger, and regrets. It speaks to the damnable loneliness of her journey. This is the real deal, the unedited truth about events and relationships only hinted at or veiled in all those memoirs and advice books. It is the Rosetta stone of HGB in terms of translating her habitual printed-word euphemisms—“a man I was dating,” and “a woman I know”—into flesh and blood, with names. It’s all delivered in Helen’s own soft, expressive, and sometimes gleefully profane voice.

  Listening to Helen’s recitation is alternately laugh-inducing, touching, and infuriating, especially in its detailed anecdotes of the brutish sexism in the offices she worked in as a secretary. Pared down and delivered by a strong actress or HGB herself, with just a spotlight and a mike, it could have made a riveting, lambent one-woman show.

  Ideally, a biographer would present some of this extraordinary material verbatim. What better and more accurate delivery system than in Helen’s own unfettered, purring syntax? She had placed the tapes, and all of her writings, correspondence, photos, and mementos, in the Smith archives, with no restrictions. Helen granted permission to quote material for an earlier biography by Jennifer Scanlon, published while she was alive. But, despite Helen’s clear intentions in making her papers available—and her plan to set those taped recollections on a Broadway stage—they have been effectively held captive since her death. Smith College has physical possession of the material, and serious researchers may have access to it. But permission for quoting from the Helen Gurley Brown Papers verbatim and at length is now tightly controlled by Helen’s coexecutor, Eve Burton, an executive of the Hearst Corporation, which publishes Cosmopolitan.

  Officers of the privately held corporation who worked closest and longest with Helen did not respond to my repeated requests for interviews about her. That’s their prerogative, of course. But other colleagues of Helen’s still at Hearst were forbidden to participate in interviews for this book. Helen, who believed vehemently in free speech, would have flipped at the gag order. No reason was given; no communication of mine or from my publisher, e-mailed and hand-delivered, was ever acknowledged. Every Hearst employee who was forced to withdraw his or her help because of this blanket prohibition expressed bafflement and regret. Their reactions were all along these lines: We adored Helen. What are they afraid of?

  Helen was particularly pleased that her papers are housed in the Sophia Smith Collection’s excellent journalism section—along with those of Gloria Steinem. David Brown began his career as a journalist and an editor. A draft of the Browns’ early will, dated 1964, indicates their intent to donate much of their estate to his alma maters, Stanford and Columbia Universities. And so it came to pass: $30 million built an impressive, cutting-edge journalism institute now shared by those two universities.

  How incongruous, then, that working journalists may not directly cite the freely donated papers of a woman who willed these grand journalism bequests. Many questions have been raised about the current restrictions put into effect by Eve Burton, also Hearst’s general counsel and vice president. “I am the keeper of the brand,” Ms. Burton said in a 2015 New York Times article investigating the questionable fate of Helen’s legacy.

  Some of Helen’s letters and internal memos at Smith refer to efforts of earlier Hearst executives to rein her in on occasion, but the horse had long ago left the barn, and the digital age has loosed some corkers. Helen still prattles online in a daffy instructional recording from the 1960s on how to catch a man “if you’re not pretty enough.” There is YouTube footage of her pantomiming for an off-camera interviewer how to self-administer a protein-rich semen facial. Her 2000 essay for Newsweek, “Don’t Give Up on Sex After 60,” began, “I had sex last night. I’m 78 and my husband, movie producer David Brown, is 83.”

  One simply can’t out-Helen Helen. So why muzzle that extraordinary voice?

  * * *

  This was always meant to be a heavily reported biography; I had never intended to rely solely on Helen’s archives, of course. But I was not about to give up on those tapes. I needed firsthand testimony from a live participant in those conversations to comment on the experience and verify facts. As it happened, I had already interviewed Lyn Tornabene a few times at the outset of my research, long before I knew of the tapes. Lyn, now in her mid-eighties, had proved to be an invaluable source with excellent recall and a wicked sense of humor.

  “There’s just so much,” she told me. “You’d better come on out.”

  Toting a three-hundred-page transcript of the tapes, I went to visit Lyn at her mountainside home in the Sonoran desert. I left her alone with the two fat notebooks for a day or so.

  Lyn thought she had embarked on another glamorous adventure—Broadway!—when she and Helen sat down at the Tornabene home in Greenwich, Connecticut, and at the Browns’ apartment in New York, with their twin recorders whirring and Helen’s Siamese cat, Samantha, yowling in the background. Forty years later, with Lyn’s magisterial corgi, Britannia, clicking across the Spanish tiles in her den, we sat down to go through it all. On the wall above us: a framed photo of Helen in jeans and cowboy boots astride a swaybacked horse that looks hugely pregnant, probably taken at one of the Hearst family ranches. It was not easy for Lyn; she still misses her old boss and friend. She adored those Cosmo glory days, when an assignment would land her on a movie set with the ingénue Goldie Hawn, or downing blinis at the Russian Tea Room with a swoon-worthy troika: Richard Burton, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte. She answered my questions gamely, confirming and elucidating the substance of her conversations with Helen, with the recall and the sharp discernment that made her one of Helen’s first “must-have” writers at the magazine.

  Many more people stepped up to help. Upon learning of the difficulties with Hearst, other writers and archives generously shared HGB interview material. Though I turned up many obituaries in searching for Helen and David Brown’s contemporaries, I did find scores of people to interview, from writers to editors, hairdressers, supermodels, film producers, restaurateurs, funeral home directors, attorneys, screenwriters, secretaries, photographers, financiers.

  And, oh, the women. This is very much a book about women’s friendships. Talking with Helen’s friends was a constant and unexpected joy. They loved her dearly, even though she often drove them bonkers. Their voices help animate the narrative here; it is a chorus of tremendous range, from Helen’s business school sorority sister Yvonne Rich to well-known women such as Gloria Vanderbilt, Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, Judith Krantz, and more. If there is a godmother to this book, it’s the writer Liz Smith, one of Helen’s closest friends, who offered up nearly a half century of their correspondence. The box weighed eighteen pounds.

  The sheer volume of HGB’s editorial output is daunting, amounting to three decades of articles in issues that often ran from three to four hundred pages each. It was clear that I could expect no help from Hearst in verifying Helen’s
financial success, sales figures, and readership data. So I was madly grateful to discover a thorough and absorbing work by James Landers, professor of journalism and media studies at Colorado State University. For his 2010 history, The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine, Landers read and closely analyzed a century’s worth of issues.

  His book answers some intriguing questions: When did Helen first dare put the word “orgasm” on her cover and, as she put it, “welcome the penis” in her copy? Exactly how sexy was Cosmo, and how soon? There are some surprising answers. Landers studied Helen’s article mix by subject and “periodicity”—that is, seen in the context of the times in which the articles appeared. Using a model he first applied to a study of news reportage on the Vietnam War, he pored over 216 back issues of Helen’s Cosmo, from her first, in July 1965, through July 1986, inputting terms such as “birth control,” “penis,” “vagina,” “abortion,” and “orgasm” into his model. Thanks to his efforts, it’s possible to separate Cosmo’s actual sexiness from the public perception of it.

  Helen was impressed and intrigued by Landers’s labors, enough to grant him one of her final substantive interviews. Landers told me that the Hearst Corporation did not welcome or address many of his questions, particularly about Helen’s impressive revenues and sales figures. Helen, proud of her track record for the company, quietly took care of business: a plain manila envelope with no return address arrived at his home, containing a sheaf of the requested material. Landers’s research and his generosity in speaking about his HGB experience were invaluable in giving her wild editorial run some essential context.

  Toward the end of my research, I was also given access to the private papers of the late Charlotte Kelly Veal, Helen’s boon companion, confidante, and Single Girl co-adventuress, beginning in 1949, when they were secretaries in adjoining cubicles at a Los Angeles ad agency. The Helen–Charlotte papers constitute a pink blizzard of letters, thank-you notes, poems, speeches, and billets-doux between girlfriends who shared everything—including old lovers. Helen wrote a poem about her best friend, about their wilder days and containing a few startling lines about Charlotte’s sudden firing as head of PR for all Hearst magazines, at age fifty-five. A segment of that sweet-and-spicy verse appeared in the program for Charlotte Veal’s November 2013 memorial service, which I attended. Some of the verse had to be censored, deemed a bit de trop in a consecrated church. They were both great dames, and incorrigible to the end.

  * * *

  Biography is often a pointillist exercise; one must search out and map contacts until a cogent portrait begins to show itself. Helen touched so very many lives, on such an immense canvas, that I had to indulge in the occasional broad stroke. The willful and puzzling erasure of a family member’s existence occasioned some detective work through birth, death, and prison records. I slipped on a red herring or two. There were also ghostly shadow images to contend with. Helen presented versions of herself and often wrote for the public in a private code of pseudonyms and shifting points of view—for her pleasure as well as her protection. Despite the flamboyant public image, she was a deeply private woman who knew the comfort and safety conferred by genteel dissembling and camouflage.

  On my longest research trip to Smith College, a compassionate archivist noticed a certain decline in energy on my part by about day six. She placed before me an oversized storage box from the Brown collection.

  “Thought you might like to see this.”

  I opened it to find HGB’s faux-leopard hat and boa, and was instantly revived. I picked up the pillbox-style hat. I could visualize her in the whole kit, fishnet stockings sagging, tight little skirt six inches above those skinny knees. It brought to mind the Bob Dylan classic “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Darned if it doesn’t speak to the biographer’s nosy impulse:

  Yes I see you got your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat

  Well, you must tell me, baby,

  How your head feels under somethin’ like that.

  Prologue: That Woman

  THE HOUSE THAT RANDY HIGH’S parents rented to an elderly schoolteacher named Cleo Sisco Bryan in 1966 was not a handsome or comfortable structure, even when it was new. He would just as soon not direct a visitor to the site. About half a century ago, some wrongheaded speculator—a stranger to this part of northwestern Arkansas—tried to build and sell a bunch of flat-roofed houses in the town of Green Forest. It was lunacy to try to defy the pitiless rains and snows of the Ozark Mountains, where spring runoff can arrive with a biblical roar. No one was surprised when some of those flat roofs looked as bowed as swaybacked plow horses. The High family lived in one as a starter house; Randy High says his parents were very glad to finally build a new home and rent out the old hulk.

  Tearing around outside on his Big Wheel trike as a young boy, High often saw the tiny woman who drove up monthly in an ancient black car to pay her rent. Cleo had returned to her home place—she was born in nearby Alpena—after decades away in Little Rock and Los Angeles. She had been widowed and had two grown daughters from her first marriage, to Ira Gurley, a schoolteacher from Green Forest.

  Randy High is a native son of Carroll County, and he knows the whole sad and rather ghastly story of Ira and Cleo Gurley, as well as the spectacular trajectory of their infamous younger daughter, Helen Gurley Brown. He is also paid to know folks’ business. As genial curator of the Carroll County Historical Museum, High welcomes visitors and assists with land-grant, cemetery, and genealogy searches in the 1880 former courthouse building that fronts the town square in the county seat of Berryville. As a funeral assistant and “pre-need” counselor for the Nelson Funeral Service—the same family firm that buried poor Ira Gurley after the tragedy—High is familiar with generations of local families and their troubles.

  Few are still subsistence farming, as they were when Cleo Gurley bore her daughters, Mary and Helen, here. Now Tyson, Butterball, and Walmart are the big employers in the area; vast modern poultry barns squat along the winding country roads amid signs that say “Let’s Have Church!” and “When 1% of the church shows up Abortion in Arkansas shuts down.”

  Cleo Bryan didn’t chitchat when she handed over the rent money. High remembers her always looking the same: “Plain dark dress that reached to the top of her shoes. Dark stockings. She always had those shoes old ladies wore—laced to the ankle, with round toes and a two-inch heel. Her white hair was pulled back in a little bun, very severe. She always wore this flat, kind of squashed dark hat. She never smiled. Never.”

  Cleo had taken a teaching job nearby and lived alone in the rented house. She had returned to Carroll County in the early 1950s and lived quietly until, midway through 1962, a certain unwelcome notoriety flapped in and roosted on her narrow shoulders. The scandalous news electrified even this remote corner of Arkansas, which is approached through towns and hamlets with evocative place names: Toad Suck. Possum Trot. Pickles Gap. Gobbler. Lake of No Return.

  The details of Cleo’s mortification spread quickly: “Did you know? She’s the mother of that woman.”

  And: “Her daughter wrote that book.”

  Cleo’s was a rugged cross to bear, especially for a respectable schoolteacher in a small town. That book was titled Sex and the Single Girl, and its author, that woman, was Cleo’s younger daughter, Helen Gurley Brown.

  On July 6, 1971, that woman had the nerve to return to her home place as some sort of big-deal celebrity. The local press had been alerted, likely by Helen herself, and Cleo had made herself ready. She forswore her drab everyday dress when she went to Boone County Regional Airport, near Harrison, to meet her famous daughter’s flight. A photo accompanying the front-page article in the Harrison Daily Times shows Cleo wearing a light-colored blouse with a jaunty bow and her flat little hat. The glamorous Mrs. Brown had just flown in from Hollywood for a visit. A reporter for the Daily Times, J. E. Dunlap, Jr., filed a dispatch bristling with barely contained righteousness. He noted: “Mrs. Brown now lives in New York where sh
e is busy with her work as editor of the Cosmopolitan magazine … Mrs. Brown started putting sex into the Cosmopolitan and its circulation has risen from 750,000 copies monthly when she first became editor to 1,446,000 and the price has been increased four times. It is now 75 cents an issue.”

  Interviewing this wildly successful native daughter—Helen was born just up the road, in Green Forest—J.E. got right to it: “What do you think of today’s sexual revolution?”

  Cleo bore up as Helen answered: “I think it’s splendid … It’s a happy, comfortable, pleasant, pleasurable thing—sex—and I don’t see any reason for making it something wicked and guilty and feel uneasy about.”

  After the airport event, mother and daughter drove north to Osage, to the house Cleo was raised in. There would still be many aunts and uncles and cousins to receive her, good people whom Helen had called hillbillies in press interviews—an unthinking, hurtful slur that she would eventually repent of. They would be waiting with some of the family’s historically dreadful corn bread, a substance so viscous that, as a child, Helen had used globs of it as bookmarks. There would likely be some creditable fried chicken and ever so many questions. Helen always sent Cleo all her press clippings, rural delivery.

  Their mother-daughter relationship was close and fraught and at the very heart of the insecurities that drove Helen Gurley Brown up and away from her past but sometimes left her trembling in the dark. When she answered questions in Vanity Fair’s “Proust Questionnaire” at age eighty-five, Helen said that her greatest regret in life was “that I never sat down with my mother and asked her to talk to me about her life … I should have persuaded her to talk as I do my girlfriends. She had nobody else to do that with.”

  This might have proved problematic, given that Helen had declared elsewhere that Cleo “had about as much insight as a waffle.” Cleo’s childhood hardships would inform her own motherhood deeply. Helen opened a remembrance of her mother with a pointed question: Just how neurotic could a mother be “and not louse up her children’s lives?”