Wallflower at the Orgy (5 page)

She works over every piece that goes into the magazine, doing the kind of line-by-line editing most editors leave to their juniors—rewriting, inserting exclamation points and italics and capitalized words and
Cosmopolitan
style into everything. “I want every article to be baby simple,” she often says. Not surprisingly, most of the magazine sounds as if it were written by the same person. And, in a way, it is.
Cosmopolitan is
Helen Gurley Brown. Cute. Girlish. Exhortative. Almost but not quite tasteless. And in its own insidious, peculiar way, irresistible. Says
Cosmo
articles editor Roberta Ashley: “Helen manages to walk that line between vulgarity and taste, which isn’t easy. The magazine is like a very sexy girl—you don’t mind that her dress is cut down to her navel because her hair is clean. If her hair were dirty, you’d be revolted.”

And if, at times, Helen Gurley Brown and her magazine are offensive, it is only because almost every popular success is offensive. Mrs. Brown—like Hugh Hefner and Dorothy Schiff, to name two other irritating publishing successes—offends because she is proving, at sizable financial profit, the old Mencken dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. She is demonstrating, rather forcefully, that there are well over a
million American women who are willing to spend sixty cents to read
not
about politics,
not
about the female liberation movement,
not
about the war in Vietnam, but merely about how to get a man.

I have not been single for years, but I read
Cosmopolitan
every month. I see it lying on the newsstands and I’m suckered in. How to Increase the Size of Your Bust, the cover line says. Or Thirteen New Ways to Feminine Satisfaction. I buy it, greedily, hide it deep within my afternoon newspaper, and hop on the bus, looking forward to—at the very least—a bigger bra size and a completely new kind of orgasm. Yes, I should know better. After all, I used to write for
Cosmopolitan
and make this stuff up myself. But she gets me every time. I get home—or sometimes, if I simply can’t wait, I open it on the bus, being careful to remove my glove so that onlookers will see my wedding band and will know I’m not reading
Cosmopolitan
because I’m That
COSMOPOLITAN
Girl. And there it is. Buy a padded bra, the article on bust-lines tells me. Fake it, the article on orgasm says. And I should be furious. But I’m not. Not at all. How can you be angry at someone who’s got your number?

In a recent article in the
Antioch Review
linking
Cosmopolitan
and
Playboy
, Peter Michelson wrote,
“Cosmopolitan
, or more likely the Hearst hierarchy, recognized how
Playboy
was making the world safe for pornography, and it very neatly cut itself in on the sex-profit nexus.” That explanation, while interesting, gives the Hearst Corporation more credit than it is due. In 1964 about all the Hearst people realized was that
Cosmopolitan
was in bad shape. Circulation had dropped to under eight hundred thousand copies a month, below the
advertising guarantee. Advertising was down to twenty-one pages an issue. Early in 1965 Helen Gurley Brown came to see Richard Deems, president of the Hearst Magazine Division, with a dummy for a new magazine. He had vaguely heard of her, had no idea she was at all controversial, and had never read her 1962 best seller,
Sex and the Single Girl
. But he liked her, he liked her idea for a magazine aimed at single women, and most of all, he liked her long list of companies that might be willing to advertise in such a magazine. It is safe to say that if Deems had thought that Helen Gurley Brown was going to turn
Cosmopolitan
into something that would repeatedly be called the female counterpart to
Playboy
, he would not have employed her. “We happen to be a company with a conscience about what it publishes,” he said. “Our paperback division is the only book company that doesn’t have a married-sex book. We’re very studious about this kind of thing.”

There are, of course, many similarities between
Cosmopolitan
and
Playboy
. Both magazines contain nudity. Both are concerned with sexual freedom of a sort. Both are headed by people who are the products of repressed, WASP backgrounds. Both publish the worst work of good writers. Both exalt material possessions. Both are somewhat deprecating to the opposite sex:
Playboy
turns its women into sexual objects;
Cosmopolitan
makes its men mindless creatures who can be toppled into matrimony by perfect soufflés, perfect martinis, and other sorts of perfectible manipulative techniques.

Recently Helen Gurley Brown even commissioned a
Playboy-type
foldout picture—of actor James Coburn, nude, his vital parts somewhat obscured by a potted palm. “It was a very pretty picture,” said Mrs. Brown. “But … I don’t like to be in the position of turning James Coburn down … but
the particular picture I needed didn’t come out of this shooting. The pictures were very hippie and mystical, strange and ethereal and a little sad, and Jesus, that isn’t what I had in mind at all. I wanted a cute, funny, wonderful foxy picture, with that great mouth and marvelous teeth. I
am
going to do a foldout—I’ll take another whack at it—but I haven’t got the picture I want yet.”

There is one major difference between
Playboy
and
Cosmopolitan
. The
Playboy
man has no problems. The
Cosmopolitan
girl has thousands. She has menstrual cramps, pimples, budget squeeze, hateful roommates. She cannot meet a man. She cannot think of what to say when she meets one. She doesn’t know how to take off her clothes to get into bed with him. She doesn’t know how to find a psychiatrist. She even gets raped, though only by rapists with somewhat unlikely dialogue. (In “I Was Raped,”
Cosmopolitan
introduced the only rapist in history who lay down on his victim and murmured, “Let’s make love.”)

“It drives my management wild to be compared with
Playboy,”
said Mrs. Brown. “We are not like
Playboy
. We are all the things we’ve been talking about—onward, upward, be it, do it, get out of your morass, meet some new men, don’t accept, don’t be a slob, be everything you’re capable of. If you’re a little mouseburger, come with me. I was a mouseburger and I will help you. You’re so much more wonderful than you think.
Cosmopolitan
is shot full of this stuff although outsiders don’t realize it. It is, in its way, an inspiration magazine.”

There is very little that has happened to Helen Gurley Brown that she has not managed to extricate a rule from. Or
learn a lesson from. Or make a maxim of. Or see, in hindsight, that it was all part of a plan. If it weren’t for her unhappy childhood, she says, she wouldn’t be enjoying herself so much now. If it weren’t for her years of difficulty, she would never have had such a drive to improve her lot. She has led a hard life, a perfect life out of which to build inspirational books and an inspirational magazine.

She was born in Green Forest, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, the second daughter of Cleo and Ira Gurley. Both her parents were schoolteachers, but her father turned to politics and was elected to the state legislature. In 1925 he moved his family to Little Rock. He was killed in a freak elevator accident in the State Capitol Building seven years later. His daughter Helen was ten and his daughter Mary was fourteen.

“That really changed our lives considerably,” Helen Gurley Brown remembered one day recently. “That sort of finished things, finished a phase of my life which I never will get back. The security.… They say a great deal of your life is formed by the time you’re about seven, so these drives and rages and ambitions and yearnings and needings and cravings of mine must have been formed before that time, some of them. I never have gotten to the bottom of all that. Why am I so driven? It seems logically to have derived from things that happened to me after my father died, but some of it must be residual from very early. I don’t know.

“But anyway, here we are in Little Rock, little fatherless children. I don’t think my mother and father were particularly happy together, but my father’s death was a horrendous thing in her life. She and my father had been very poor. She gets disgusted with me because I keep carrying on about
how poor I was. I always ate. I always looked O.K. I really never was eating pork and beans out of a can and putting cardboard in the soles of my shoes. But it’s what you get in your head, it’s how it seemed to you that motivates you. Whereas my parents were really poor, and just about the time things were beginning to go rather well, she and my father resolved whatever differences they had, poosh, he’s taken away, snapped off.

“We stayed in Little Rock for about three years after my father’s death,” she continued. “But he left a limited amount of insurance and our house was mortgaged to the hilt. So because Mother felt we couldn’t keep up the nice little standard of living in Little Rock on this particular stipend she had been left, she decided we’d all go move to Los Angeles. It was very brave and gutsy of her. But my sister didn’t want to go to California. I didn’t either. And my mother didn’t level with us, because you didn’t in those days. She said, ‘Oh, I think it would be nice to go to California, we have relatives there.’ So we move to California and Mary gets polio.” She paused. “She was nineteen. There was no March of Dimes and there was nobody to help. Shlurp, in one big thing, in one year, it took all the money we had. I really got good and scared out of my wits about that time.” Another pause. “I just didn’t know what was going to become of us. It was still the end of the Depression, jobs were very hard to get and my sister—she’s never walked again. I don’t know, we were sort of a pitiful little tribe.” Her voice cracked and she began to cry. “My word,” she said. “I never talk about this any more.” She daubed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Well, this is the way I was for years. It was the three of us sort of huddled together. My sister was in a wheelchair and
needed constant care. My mother couldn’t go back to work or do anything for a number of years.” Tears continued to roll down her face. “I was terrified,” she said.

The Gurleys moved to the East Side of Los Angeles near the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, and Helen enrolled at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School. Her memories of that period—aside from her sister’s illness—have mainly to do with having acne. “I was kind of a cute little girl, but who could see past these pus pustules?” Like that. She became a student leader, graduated as valedictorian, and was taken to the prom by the student-body president. “It was the coup of the year,” she recalled with some amusement. “He had a real case on me, because he got close enough to find out what I was like. I always have to get men close enough to me to be interested in me. I have to do what I call Sinking In before they pay attention. I’m never anybody that some man sees at a party and says, ‘Get me her.’ Never. But once they get near me and I turn on what I call Plain Girl Power—well, it worked with the student-body president.”

Following high school and a year at Woodbury Business College, Helen went to work answering fan mail at radio station KHJ to pay for her second year at college. Her mother worked in the marking room at Sears Roebuck. Her sister did telephone work for the Hooper rating service. Then Mrs. Gurley and Mary moved back to Arkansas and Helen was left as a single girl in Los Angeles. Friends who knew her in the 1940s, when she held eighteen consecutive secretarial jobs, remember her as a shy, self-effacing, attractive girl who always did the sorts of clever things that seemed astonishing twenty years ago, like putting egg in spinach salad. She was, they recall, completely neurotic about money. She sent one week’s salary each month to her family and she was convinced
no one would ever marry her because of her financial obligations.

To make ends meet, she took the bus to work, drove her car only on weekends with gas she pumped at the serve-yourself station on Beverly Boulevard, brought her lunch to the office in a paper sack, read other people’s newspapers, made her own clothes, traveled by Greyhound bus. She tried every angle. Because she washed her hair in Woolite, she wrote the president of the company to tell him—and he sent her a free box of the stuff. She wrote an unsolicited memo to the proprietor of the beauty salon in her office lobby telling him how to hype up business—and he did her hair for nothing. She entered the
Glamour
magazine Ten Girls with Taste Contest three years in a row, and finally won. “I used to enter all the contests,” she said. “I bought so many bars of Lux soap to enter the ‘I like Lux soap because …’ contest. I couldn’t enter under my own name because I worked in an advertising agency, so I would send them to Mary and say, ‘Please, Mary, have a picture made of yourself in a wheelchair and send these off.’ Well, that didn’t work. That’s one that failed. But I did it. I tried.”