Not Pretty Enough Page 5

  In October 1929, when the gathering Depression hit full-force, it did not flatten the Sisco and Gurley clans. Up north, in Osage and Green Forest, people were too poor, isolated, and self-reliant to feel much difference. Much of the state’s population was still reeling from the devastating Mississippi Flood of 1927, one of the worst in American history. Arkansas, second in loss of life, saw thirty-six of its seventy-five counties underwater, some by as much as thirty feet. There was still great residual misery from this natural disaster when the market crash of October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, caused Cleo and Ira to sit their girls down that same day and reassure them: Ira had managed to get all of their money out of the venerable, family-owned Worthen Bank.

  Even as the Depression deepened, some small indulgences were still possible. A door-to-door salesman badgered and shamed Ira and Cleo into a pricey set of the World Book Encyclopedia for those bright little minds. On Christmas Day 1930, Helen was in raptures over a handsome child-sized desk, a rolltop, with lots of cubbyholes for her important papers. Reminiscing about it to an editor at House Beautiful—Helen contributed to a story on people’s most memorable gifts—she claimed some Hollywood provenance for her Christmas surprise: “The desk was absolutely perfect—a miniature of the one that was immortalized in The Front Page and I kept all my papers in there.” She was a furious scribbler, notebook filler, and list maker, even then.

  When the budget allowed, there were other excursions downtown. Sometimes it was to Gus Blass Department Store, the biggest and most established retail anchor of the shopping district. The Gurleys could not afford the upscale merchandise. But at the candy counter there, featuring locally made Schneider confections, Helen satisfied a sweet tooth that she would struggle to suppress for most of her adult life. “Calorie” was a little-known word in those days, when she stood on tiptoe to greedily consider the counter’s delights. Fifty years later, Helen wrote her thanks for and remembrances of a favorite treat to Mr. Schneider in rather Proustian raptures. The confection she still dreamed of was “chocolate on the outside, a fine-grade honey comb crunch on the inside … the word praline keeps coming to mind…”

  The whole family trooped to the new Arkansas Theatre when it opened downtown. They saw Sam Goldwyn’s screen version of Flo Ziegfeld’s comic revue Whoopee, starring Eddie Cantor; Helen learned the title song and loved to belt it out.

  Helen coveted a new doll that every girl wanted. With great joy and evident pride, she became the owner of a Patsy doll. Patsy was designed by Herr Bernard Lipfert, a German immigrant who became an intuitive and hugely successful totem-maker for American girlhood. So appealing were his creations that Lipfert was dubbed “an industry monopoly” by a Fortune magazine article on the big business of American dolls. Of all of them, Patsy remained Lipfert’s favorite. She became an improbable hit nationwide.

  Patsy did not cry “Mama,” and she certainly did not have the standard porcelain beauty of most dolls of that era. She was thirteen and a half inches tall and remarkable in her very plainness. Patsy was marketed as the doll “that looks like a real girl,” “a loveable imp,” and “The Personality Doll.” This was a playmate that Helen could surely take to heart. Like Helen, Patsy had reddish-brown hair and brown eyes; she was sturdy enough to stand upright on her own two feet just fine, thank you. But, unlike Helen’s busy yap, Patsy’s rosebud mouth was sculpted shut.

  Patsy was sold by one of the oldest American doll manufacturers, the Effanbee Company. She debuted in 1928 at the pretty steep price of $2.95. Yet Patsy sold well right through the Depression. Given her popularity, Patsy was a status symbol of sorts, a rosy-cheeked leveler between the poorer denizens of Pulaski Heights and the girls whose families belonged to the Little Rock Country Club. Patsy’s arrival in the Gurley home also engendered an upbeat, pleasurable bond between Cleo and Helen. The family budget did not support the Effanbee-made wardrobe, at 89 cents per dress, much less the deluxe “Patsy Trousseau Suit Case.” At a whopping $12.75, that was all too dear for Ira’s $1,800-a-year clerk’s salary at the Fish and Game Commission, roughly $35 a week before taxes. He earned the same as the department stenographers, which was far less than the rigorous positions of fish culturist ($3,000) and game breeder ($2,400).

  So Cleo set to work on faithful reproductions of Patsy’s clothes, but she could not resist embellishing them. Her delicately embroidered, pleated, and painstakingly hemmed facsimiles far outshone the mass-produced “originals.” She also managed to scare up some sort of small suitcase for Patsy’s growing wardrobe. Helen could be seen trekking with it through the neighborhood, headed for a long and satisfying afternoon of play with friends and their Patsys.

  In September 1931, Helen packed Patsy’s things for the big move to the Gurleys’ final home in Little Rock, 415 North Monroe Street. The family had only to shuttle their belongings through the small Spruce Street backyard, across the alleyway, and into the yard opposite. After years of renting, Ira and Cleo had become homeowners. They bought from neighbors who seem to have been in financial distress; a warranty deed in the Pulaski Circuit/County Clerk’s archives shows that Ira and Cleo paid J. S. Bailey and his wife, Leelah, a token ten dollars to take over their $3,250 mortgage from the Worthen Bank. The new house was also a small clapboard cottage, but with a larger front porch bordered by solid brick pillars. To the family’s surprise and delight, the formerly balky radio played loud and clear at the new address.

  In the summer of 1932, Ira had begun to contemplate another run for an office within the capitol, the Arkansas secretary of state; candidates were elected by legislators. By then, Ira was a familiar figure in the capitol’s halls and chambers; he was likable, competent, and, to his mind, quite electable. Evidence of his twelve-year career still hangs in the third-floor corridor of the Arkansas State Capitol building, in two official portraits surrounded by those of his legislative and administrative fellows. In the 1919 photo taken for his only elective term, in the Forty-Second General Assembly, he wears a jaunty, oversized bow tie and an expansive, mighty-glad-to-be-here grin.

  On June 17, 1932, a Friday, Ira stood around the corner from where those portraits now hang, on the third floor, waiting for the elevator. The capitol elevators were equipped with open, cage-style cars then, and Ira could see who was within as the car ascended. Theories differed on exactly what happened next—whether Ira had just been careless, or he had been showing off, jumping into the car as it had begun to move. Some said there was a pretty young woman already inside.

  Citing eyewitness accounts, the North Arkansas Star described the accident:

  Mr. Gurley was awaiting the elevator on the third floor of the building when the operator, Albert Sanders, opened the door. Miss Emma Hill, employed in the state comptroller’s office, said that as she left the car, Mr. Gurley stepped aside to permit her to alight. Almost at the same instant, Sanders started the car, pulling the door shut simultaneously. Mr. Gurley stepped onto the floor of the car as it started up.

  He was caught between the elevator and the door opening, his head and feet inside the car, his back and hips outside.

  Sanders lowered the car to the basement where the ambulance crew took charge of the victim a few minutes after the accident. The operator then was permitted to go home. He was on the verge of nervous collapse.

  Ira died on the way to the hospital. His neck was broken, and his chest was crushed. Ben Sain, another capitol employee, who lived across the street from the Gurleys, went straight home to break the news to Cleo. Fifty-year-old Albert Sanders was not the regular elevator attendant, but a relief operator. During the investigation of the accident, Sanders told Secretary of State Ed F. McDonald that he did not see Ira until it was too late. It was not clear why the operator took the car with its half-protruding passenger three floors down before he was extricated and laid—“squashed,” as Helen would later tell Bill Clinton—on the cool marble floor.

  Mary was fourteen. Helen was ten. Her memories of that day and the weekend to follow suggest
a child processing the loss and its attendant ritual under severe shock; the unresolved grief—what Helen called her “daddy issues”—would propel her toward therapy a decade later. She recalled crowds of visitors to the Gurley home that Friday night, the phone ringing nonstop. More than grief, she experienced a sort of pride at first. Ira must have been a great man, because now he was famous, with so many people making a huge sort of fuss. The following morning, Helen was whisked off to a friend’s home with her Patsy. When she returned that evening, her father looked like a fine, important man indeed. Ira was laid out in his best dark suit, in a coffin lined with gray velvet. Their home even smelled special: the plain parlor was transformed by banks of floral arrangements. Ira’s photo and an account of the accident had made the front page of the Arkansas Democrat the afternoon he died; the story was in the Arkansas Gazette the following morning. Helen hadn’t cried at all until she leaned in to kiss her father. Always a severe judge of her own behavior, she later concluded that those tears were not born of genuine grief, but produced to fit the drama of the moment. Mary put her arms around her little sister and drew her away from the coffin.

  The following day, the body was driven north to Green Forest; Cleo, Helen, and Mary followed in a car crammed with flowers. Helen was still bewitched by the pageantry of it all, by the crowds of people converging on the Sisco and Gurley homes and at Glenwood Cemetery, on the northern edge of Green Forest. After the interment, as people began to walk away from the grave site, Helen gave way, racked with deep sobs. She finally realized: they were really leaving him there, all alone. Her mother and two aunts herded her gently to the car. Once, twice, three times, she broke away and ran, sobbing, back to the grave. When Helen bolted a fourth time, she was swept up firmly and put into the car. They drove straight to Osage, where her grandparents Alfred and Jennie would keep her and Mary for a week, leaving Cleo to her grief.

  Cleo’s extravagant mourning mystified her daughters. She seemed so inconsolable that Helen later wondered if it wasn’t guilt rather than true grief. She hadn’t really loved Ira, had she? She had made that clear, even to his daughters. Surely, abject fear had much to do with Cleo’s agitated state. She was a widow at thirty-eight in a downward-spiraling economy. Terrified for her future with two children, Cleo would soon take the wheel of the family’s small gray 1930 Chevy and venture around Little Rock and beyond on some baffling, inchoate quests.

  The first came just weeks after Ira’s death. It is hard to imagine why Cleo took her ten-year-old daughter along to interview the elevator operator involved in her father’s fatal accident. An autopsy and investigation had already cleared Albert Sanders of error or wrongdoing; the death was ruled accidental. Cleo did leave Helen sitting in the car when she went into Sanders’s home to speak with him. But on her mother’s return, the bewildered little girl got a detailed report.

  The man had no new information for the widow; he had suffered no confessional breakdowns about its being his fault. Pressed about Ira’s behavior—Cleo needed a reason for her plight—Mr. Sanders was noncommittal. He couldn’t say what caused Ira to jump into the ascending car. But, yes, there was an attractive young woman inside at the time. Afterward, Cleo would often refer to Ira’s death—“witheringly,” as Helen put it—as her father’s “decision.” This had to be confusing and troubling. Why would Daddy decide to leave them, and in such a horrible way?

  Mary simply refused to go on Cleo’s grim errands, to the elevator operator’s home and then to a long, droning night session at the capitol that would determine the family’s compensation for Ira’s death on the job. It was again Helen who sat with a visibly agitated Cleo in the visitors’ balcony, not far from where Ira had taken his fatal hop. No records of a session specifically devoted to the Gurley death compensation could be found in the state archives. Helen remembered the amount as about fifty thousand dollars, but according to Dr. David Ware, historian of the state capitol, that sum would have been exorbitant, and hardly plausible, given the Depression and the fact that it would probably have represented far more than Ira would have earned in his entire career there, had he lived.

  Once the modest insurance and settlement money arrived, Cleo could be seen out and about more often, piloting the girls to dance lessons, choir rehearsal, or just on an aimless Sunday drive. At last, Cleo could venture forth on her own whim, all over town. She told Helen that the car took the place of Daisy, her stalwart little horse, and that she always felt a need to have ready transportation. Helen theorized that the Chevy conferred a sense of independence that Cleo had been missing as Ira’s wife.

  It was also becoming clear that Cleo was possessed by an unpredictable flight instinct that would land the trio in some very odd places. Though she did not tell her daughters, Cleo was formulating some plans—long-range, often harebrained schemes that required a certain mobility. She would bide her time to execute them until the right moment. Meanwhile, there were two girls at home who very much needed their mother.

  3

  Fear Itself

  So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

  —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking of the Depression

  HOW CLEO SPOILED HER FATHERLESS GIRLS. They could scarcely believe the freedom and the treats. In the first months after Ira’s death, Cleo’s spartan kitchen became a sweet sanctuary; most days, Mary and Helen mixed up a batch of fudge and consumed the whole panful as soon as it cooled. Though each batch took two full cups of sugar and half a cup of milk, Cleo did not limit or scold them. That first strange summer, it also rained dimes. Cleo dispensed enough to send the girls to the movies for daylong double bills that also included serials—Tarzan, Mandrake the Magician. They went four and five times a week, as often as the bills changed, and no matter what was playing.

  As it happened, the Gurley girls’ movie bingeing came at a time when screen standards had become unusually lax. The motion picture business experienced a worrisome attendance slump during the Depression; New York City movie houses reported their worst attendance on record in the first quarter of 1932, and the empty rows were spreading nationwide. In an effort to stem the exodus, producers rolled in an era of “S and S”—sex and sin. Its flashy hood ornament: Jean Harlow, a screen siren morphed from an average ingénue into a captivating vixen by Max Factor, the Russian immigrant who transformed Hollywood makeup.

  Tasked by the studio to make Harlow stand out from the crop of contract players, Factor bleached her blond hair into a lighter shade he famously coined as “platinum.” For contrast, he heavied up the eye makeup and the dark, thickly painted lips. Factor adored his creation and the woman who inhabited it; as vamp ascendant, Harlow played trashy floozies with cheerful élan until she died of kidney failure at twenty-six. The lure of her artfully painted look was replicated by the likes of Bette “Jezebel” Davis, Ida Lupino, and Paulette Goddard.

  In an effort to curb the industry’s wanton drift, the Motion Picture Code had been established in 1930 by Will Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. But it would not be systematically enforced, with its “Purity Seal”—often to prudish and religious excess—until four years later. Thus, with Cleo’s blanket permission, Helen and Mary were privy to some hot stuff: sexier starlets, untrammeled screen whoopee, gory lions-and-Christians epics, and the bodice-ripping beguilements of swashbuckling rogues. They became, in Helen’s words, “total little movie freaks.”

  Perhaps their mother thought they would miss Ira less, sitting day after day in the dark, cocooned in make-believe; possibly, she needed the time to herself. But when the girls were at home, she was completely attentive to their needs. Cleo listened closely to her daughters’ recitations of their days outside the home and helped with homework and church projects. Striving to be the good daughter and model student, Helen rarely got into trouble. The one ti
me she was disciplined in school, it was all about boys. When they were in the fifth grade, both Helen and Elizabeth Jessup concocted a secret rating system of the dreamboats in their class and recorded their sentiments in a small notebook. Helen had left it in her coat pocket in the cloakroom, but a classmate ratted them out to the teacher. A mortified Helen was made to fetch the offending object and await her fate before the entire class. She took the fall alone, red-faced. She was instructed to confess to her mother that very day and then destroy the notebook. Like the incident with the pretty girl and the swings, it was a searing humiliation that Helen would churn up and recount many times in her adult life. She kept to Miss Baker’s required penance when she got home that afternoon. Upon hearing the sobbed mea culpa, Cleo merely held her girl and promised it would soon be forgotten.

  In her long hours alone at home, Cleo sewed constantly, almost obsessively. Before everything went so dark, six-year-old Helen had accompanied her mother on the train to Denver when Cleo took summer courses at Teachers College in Greeley, Colorado. She may have convinced Ira to let her upgrade her certification and teach again. But she hadn’t the teaching credentials for a big-city school and as the Depression tightened its vise, there were no jobs, anyway.

  Cleo dressed her daughters with a fierce and somewhat manic energy. She may have felt a sense of pride as Helen and Mary left for school in custom-tailored dresses and skirts. But there was no praise at home, and rarely even a thank-you from fussy little Helen, who still craved store-bought fashions. The ungrateful child confessed years later, “I was such a little prick.” She was willful, even then. As a grown woman, subject to rare but intense flashes of anger, she would send small objects airborne—ashtrays, radios, full plates of food—sometimes in the most public arenas. As a child, vexing poor Cleo, Helen recalled, she went way over the line just once. The eruption was over, of all things, a clothing fad she referred to as a “scandal suit,” which was a combination of blouse and shorts with an overskirt; no nice girls wore just shorts. Helen’s friend Betty Tabb had a smashing version in a lively print—couldn’t she have one, too? When Cleo picked Helen up after school shortly thereafter, a surprise awaited her in the backseat. It was fabric for her own scandal suit, a few yards of white cotton piqué.