Wallflower at the Orgy (6 page)

She tried everything. Vitamin therapy. Group therapy. Psychoanalysis. Hair therapy. Skin therapy. Her persistent self-improvement dazzled her friends. “She decided the kind of person she wanted to be, the milieu in which she wanted to live, how she wanted to look,” said one longtime California associate. “In a very real sense, she invented herself.” There were a number of men in Helen Gurley’s life—two agents, a married advertising executive, and a Don Juan whom she spent nine years off and on with—but to hear her tell it, her job always came first. She became secretary to Don Belding, a partner in Foote, Cone & Belding, and after
five years she was made a copy writer. “It was so heady,” she recalled in a near whisper. “I adored it. Instead of making a hundred dollars a week I’m making ten thousand dollars a year, and this is in 1955 and that was considerable money for a girl then, very heady. You know, everything adds up. It’s what I keep saying in my books and in
Cosmo
. If you do every little thing you can do in your own modest position, one thing leads to another. So
do
it and
be
it and
write
the letters and
make
the phone calls and get
on
with it. And this is what I was doing every hour of the day, every day of the year.

“But I’m still living in my frugal way. I’m still bringing my lunch to the office. And I was conservative enough to have saved a little money. I had managed to save eight thousand dollars.” One day Helen Gurley walked into a Beverly Hills used-car lot and paid five thousand dollars for a Mercedes-Benz. Cash. “The next weekend I went to the Beldings’ ranch in total shock because of this money I spent. It just was not like me. I was in pain, physical pain. Everyone told me all the reasons I should have that car—that I was a successful writer and a gifted girl—they pumped me up and held my hand. But every time they looked at me I was sitting over in the corner in a catatonic heap thinking of the money.

“A week or so later a friend of mine set up this famous date with David Brown, whom she’d been saving for me. I thought it was going to be a big thing. I felt it in my bones before I met him. She’d been talking about him for three years, and it felt right. It was an interesting, lovely evening. And he took me to my car after dinner. I could see him looking at this car, this nice car. And I said, ‘Yes, I just bought it and I paid all cash for it.’ And that was a nice thing, he liked the fact that I’d been able to save all that money, because he
had been married to very extravagant women, particularly his last wife.”

Helen Gurley and David Brown were married one year later, in September 1959, at the Beverly Hills City Hall. He is now vice-president and chief of story operations at 20th Century-Fox, and his wife continually says she could never have become what she has become without him. He gave her the idea of writing
Sex and the Single Girl
. He gave her the idea of aiming a magazine at single women. He was once an editor of
Cosmopolitan;
and in her early days there, he helped her run the magazine, rushing over in taxicabs for street-corner conferences about copy. He still writes all the cover blurbs for the magazine. Both Browns live work-oriented lives—long office hours, dinners out with business friends. They spend at least one night a week at Trader Vic’s with Darryl Zanuck; they travel to Palm Springs and the Riviera with Richard Zanuck. Several nights a week they eat at home, in their Park Avenue apartment, and spend the evening working.

At one point last year, Mrs. Brown was also emceeing a television show and overseeing the editing of Hearst’s
Eye
magazine. Both operations are now defunct, and she is left with just
Cosmopolitan
. Now selling 1,073,211 copies a month. Now pulling in 784 advertising pages a year—compared with 1964’s 259. There are still the little setbacks, of course: old friends who are jealous; reader complaints over increasing nudity in the magazine; the Hearst Corporation’s censorship. But though Helen Gurley Brown cries frequently, she cries much less now than she used to.

Why just the other day she managed to get through a major flap without crying once. It all had to do with the breast memorandum. Perhaps you remember it—one of her
staff members leaked it to
Women’s Wear Daily
, and every newspaper in the country picked it up. The memo began, “We are doing an article on how men should treat women’s breasts in lovemaking. It will either help us sell another 100,000 copies or stop publication of
Cosmopolitan
altogether.” Its purpose? “To help a lot of men make a lot of girls more happy.” It went on to say … But stop. Let her tell the story.

“It started with my idea of how boosoms should be handled,” she said. “Ninety-nine per cent of the articles here are assigned by the other editors, but this particular thing was a secret of mine that I felt only I understood. I called my own writer in California and told her about it. She tried it and turned it in and it was beautiful, but God, it didn’t have
anything
to do with how men should treat women’s boosoms. It had to do with
love
and it had to do with
companionship
and the wonderful relationship between men and women, but it just didn’t have
anything
to do technically with the subject. I wanted techniques. What does she like and how does she tell him and what does he do and how does he shape up. So I called my writer and said, ‘This is your personal reminiscence of all your love affairs, and fascinating as it is, it doesn’t have
anything
to do with boobs.’ And she said, ‘I know. Can you supply me with any material?’

“That’s when I sat down and wrote my memo to the girls in the office. Just give me your thoughts about boosoms, I said. Has anybody ever been a real idiot in making love to you? How could men improve their techniques? What would you like done that’s not being done? I just got a wonderful response. All the girls responded except two. I’d like to know who the two were because I don’t think they’d be happy at
Cosmopolitan
, but I had no way of knowing because
a lot of girls didn’t sign their memos. I’ve sent many memos before—give me your definition of a bitch, have you ever dated a very wealthy man—and this was just another one of those memos. Then I saw it in
Women’s Wear Daily
and I really did hit the roof. A lot of people said, Ho, ho, ho, how lucky can you be? You probably mailed it yourself in an unmarked envelope. But that’s not true, because I tread a very careful path with Hearst management and I don’t want to get them exercised about anything. If I just very quietly develop these articles and show them the finished product, it’s much better. But this big brouhaha started because this little bitch, whoever she was, sent the memo to
Women’s Wear
, and I would still fire her if I knew who she was. Because then the turmoil started. My management said to me, We want to see a copy of the boosom article the minute it’s finished. I didn’t want this attention to be called to what I was doing. Furthermore, we have trouble with supermarkets in the South and I didn’t want them stirred up ahead of time.

“Well, the girls wrote their wonderful memos, I put two other writers on the story—because the girl in California suddenly got very haughty and said she didn’t want to deal with the material. She just went absolutely crackers about the whole thing. So these two writers took it on and between them they turned in wonderful stuff, their own ideas plus all my material. I got this fantastic article. But my management won’t let me run it. The actual use of anatomical words bugs them. Well, you cannot talk about love and relationships when you’re talking about how to handle a breast. You must be anatomical. You’ve got to say a few things about what to do. I’m not mad at them—they do it because they’re afraid we’ll have too much flack. But I plan to lie low
for a while and come back with my boosom article later. I read it tenderly, like a little love letter, every so often. I’ll try it again after a while.”

One day a couple of years ago, a
Cosmopolitan
editor named Harriet LaBarre called me and asked if I wanted to write an article on how to start a conversation. They would pay six hundred dollars for one thousand words. Yes, I would. Fine, she said, she would send me a memo Helen had written on the subject. The memo arrived, a breezy little thing filled with suggestions like “Remember what the great Cleveland Amory says—shyness is really selfishness” and “Be sure to debunk the idea that it is dangerous to approach strangers.” I read it and realized with some embarrassment that I had already written the article the memo wanted, in slightly different form—for
Cosmopolitan
, no less. I called Harriet LaBarre and told her.

“Omigod,” she said. “And I even edited it.”

We talked it over and decided that I might as well take the assignment anyway.

“After all,” said Mrs. LaBarre, “if it doesn’t bother us to
run
the same article twice, it shouldn’t bother you to
write
it twice.”

“I have just one question, though,” I said. “What is this about the great Cleveland Amory and his theory that shyness is just selfishness?”

“Did she say that?” said Mrs. LaBarre. “She must be kidding—I don’t even think she likes Cleveland Amory.”

A few weeks later I turned the article in, and Harriet LaBarre called. “We’re going to run it,” she said, “but there are two things we want to change.”

“All right,” I said.

“First of all, I was wrong about Cleveland Amory,” she said. “I’m afraid we do have to say that shyness is really selfishness.”

“But shyness
isn’t
really selfishness,” I said.

“Well, I know, but that’s the way we have to put it.”

“What’s the second thing?” I said.

“Well, it’s just one little change Helen made, but I wanted to read it to you. You have a sentence that reads, ‘It is absurd to think that any girl who asks a nice-looking man how to get to Rockefeller Center will be bundled up in a burlap bag and sold into a Middle Eastern harem.’ ”

“Yes,” I said, realizing it wasn’t much of a sentence.

“Well, Helen changed it to read, ‘The notion that any girl who asks a nice-looking man how to get to Rockefeller Center is immediately bundled up in a burlap bag and sold into a Middle Eastern harem is as antique and outmoded a myth as the notion that you can’t take a bath while you’re menstruating.’ ”

“What?”

“Is that all right?” she said.

“Is that all
right?
Of course it’s not all right. How did that particular image get into my article?”

“I don’t really know,” said Harriet LaBarre. “We’re thinking of doing a piece on menstruation and maybe it was on her mind.”

I hung up, convinced I had seen straight to the soul of Helen Gurley Brown. Straight to the foolishness, the tastelessness her critics so often accused her of. But I was wrong. She really isn’t that way at all. She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a girl who hasn’t taken a bath during her period since puberty. She’s just worried that somewhere out
there is a girl whose breasts aren’t being treated properly. She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a mouseburger who doesn’t realize she has the capability of becoming anything, anything at all, anything she wants to, of becoming Helen Gurley Brown, for God’s sake. And don’t you see?
She is only trying to help
.

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face gaunt, his hair the color of bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean planes, Howard Roark laughed. It was probably a soundless laugh; most of Ayn Rand’s heroes laugh soundlessly, particularly while making love. It was probably a laugh with head thrown back; most of Ayn Rand’s heroes do things with their heads thrown back, particularly while dealing with the rest of mankind. It was probably a laugh that had a strange kind of simplicity; most of Ayn Rand’s heroes act with a strange kind of simplicity, particularly when what they are doing is of a complex nature.

Whatever else it was, Howard Roark’s laugh began a book that has become one of the most astonishing phenomena in publishing history.
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand was published on May 8, 1943, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, at the then-staggering price of three dollars. Its author, a Russian émigrée with a Dutch-boy haircut, had written the 728-page book over a period of seven years, six months of which were spent hanging around an architect’s office learning the lingo of the profession Howard Roark was to exemplify so romantically. The book was turned down by twelve publishers; the editor-in-chief of Bobbs finally bought it over the objections of his publisher.