Enter Helen (9 page)

“
I was a country girl from Los Angeles and I [didn't] know about New York addresses.”

—Helen Gurley Brown, in 1993, recalling her first days living in Manhattan.

T
here were no big headlines heralding the Browns' arrival in New York in March 1963, partly because they got there at the tail end of a massive
newspaper strike that shut down seven of the city's major dailies. Led by a local printers' union in 1962, the strike was in retaliation against the automation of the newsroom. The computer was beginning to threaten the Linotype machine, along with thousands of jobs, and workers were demanding security and pay raises from newspaper owners. But the demonstration was much more than a battle over typesetting. It was a signal of changes to come as new technology infiltrated living rooms as well as newsrooms.

Over the course of 114 days, Linotypes, which depended on molten metal to set type, went silent and cold. No ink was spilled. Out of work, seventeen thousand newspaper employees took odd jobs driving taxis, shoveling coal, and busing tables to pay the rent. Jobless reporters, including Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, experimented with new, more literary forms of journalistic writing, while another group of editors and writers used their time
off to start the
New York Review of Books
. And across the city, New Yorkers remained in the dark about what was happening around the world and in their own neighborhoods. Without the benefit of printed ads and announcements, businesses suffered, and people missed everything from weddings to wakes.

By the time the strike ended on March 31—ultimately, workers won a slight pay raise, and both labor and management supported a plan to create a joint board to consider the future of newspapers—the industry had changed, and so had the city. People were still doing the Twist, but Chubby Checker no longer topped the charts, and a twenty-two-year-old folksinger named Bob Dylan would soon release his second album, featuring “Blowin' in the Wind,” a protest song that would come to define a generation. In the art world, six painters were preparing to mount a show at the Guggenheim Museum that would solidify a new form, pop art, and help make the name Andy Warhol as familiar as Campbell's Soup. Central Park still hadn't fully thawed, but in department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Bonwit Teller, buyers were watching Paris for spring fashions like Balenciaga's sporty capelets and brass-buttoned coats that flew in the face of coquetry. “
These were costumes for women with energy to burn,” the
New York Times
Western Edition declared, “and serious business to accomplish.”

Spring was just around the corner, but it couldn't come soon enough for Helen.
She barely left the apartment during her first few weeks in New York. To David she seemed almost catatonic with fear. She missed the sunniness of Southern California. Manhattan was dark and cold. On one of the first trips to New York that Helen and David had taken together, they were met at the airport by Bruce's mother and David's first wife, Liberty, who lived in the city. She had come to pick up Bruce, but she brought
a wool scarf and mittens for Helen, who hadn't experienced a real winter since living in Little Rock as a little girl.

Finishing her lunch at Schrafft's one day in March, Helen understood that she would never get used to the cold. Manhattan was a black-and-white film when she had gotten used to color.
Outside, it was gray, always gray. Gray skies, gray sidewalks, gray buildings, gray overcoats. Even the people were shades of the same bleakness—whitish, pinkish, brownish, but still gray. Once in a while, a woman in a red coat or a child in a yellow muffler would break the monotony, but the colorlessness always returned. And the crowds, they never left. All around her, people were lining up two deep at every chair. Businessmen schmoozed over steak lunches and oversize martinis, as secretaries nibbled on burger specials and touched up their lipstick.

Helen must have known Schrafft's would be packed when she walked in. It was as much of an institution as the three-martini lunch. Everyone from W. H. Auden to Mary McCarthy had written about the chain. In
The Best of Everything
, Schrafft's is the place where Rona Jaffe's heroine, Caroline, and her friends from the office order tomato surprise and strawberry soda. Helen knew that noon-to-two was the busiest time to be there—other than at twilight, when the Little Old Ladies started coming in for their blue-plate specials—but she was still surprised by the constant motion.
She wondered how New Yorkers felt when they went out west, to a place like Arizona, which was relatively quiet and still. The silence would be deafening—all that time and space to think, alone with yourself, and really, wouldn't that just be terrible? Warming her hands around a cup of tea, she listened to the gray thrum of voices and yearned for California.

Helen and David had left Pacific Palisades shortly after his job offer came in. The decision had been a mutual one, and yet Helen
wasn't quite ready to say goodbye. Leaving California at the height of her career was like breaking up with a steady boyfriend to enter into an arranged marriage with a man she hardly knew.
The day they were supposed to leave 515 Radcliffe Avenue, Helen couldn't find their cat Samantha. They would be boarding a train headed east in less than two hours, followed by a huge moving van packed with their furniture, and Helen started to panic. Roaming the hillsides one last time, she hissed and whistled for Samantha, who turned up just in time to be packed alongside the other cat, Gregory, in a carrying cage. The Browns switched trains in Chicago, taking the Broadway Limited the rest of the way to New York.
Once in the city, they stayed at the Dorset hotel, near the Museum of Modern Art, and started searching for an apartment. They found it in a twenty-one-story, white-brick apartment building at 605 Park Avenue, at the southeast corner of Sixty-Fifth Street, for $550 a month.

In Pacific Palisades Samantha and Gregory had been outdoor cats, stalking the hills for mice, snakes, and lizards. In New York they became indoor cats, fed by the doorman when Helen and David went of town. They no longer hunted, but sat on the windowsills, watching the snow fall over Park Avenue. Occasionally Helen and David took the cats out on leashes to get some fresh air, but they seemed unhappy. After a lifetime of being on the prowl, they were suddenly housebound.

And Helen? The day David brought her to their five-room rental,
she stood in the doorway of No. 17C and cried. She had gotten used to the twelve-room house in Pacific Palisades. Now, in this small flat that didn't even fit their stuff, she had to deal with neighbors. Some nights, the people who lived upstairs would have parties, and Helen would knock on their door, barefoot in her bathrobe, seeming older than she was. The noise bothered her at
night, but the quiet got to her during the day, when David went to the office. She didn't feel at home in the apartment with its white walls, neutral living room, and fussily arranged paintings. A decorator friend had lent her understated touch to the place, and the result was blanched of color and character. Helen tried to brighten her desk with lemon leaves and an ashtray that read “I'm sexy” in six different languages around the rim, but having spent twenty-plus years working in offices,
she missed the feeling of having somewhere to
be
.

She had hoped that the coldness and the darkness would make her work harder on her column, which she planned to debut in a few weeks with the introductory headline: “
CALLING ALL WIDOWS, DIVORCEES, BACHELOR GIRLS.” But it wasn't turning out that way. In fact, “Woman Alone” was starting to seem like a fitting title for reasons she hadn't anticipated. Other than David and the cats, she had no family in the city and few friends. She was used to dressing for the office and spraying her hair with Satin Set, not roaming around her apartment with a bad case of bedhead.

When Helen dared to venture out, she found the city to be intimidating and exhausting.
Her efforts to win over doormen, rental agents, and restaurant hostesses left her depleted. She could ooze compliments at a person until the air between them was sticky, but her attempts to charm rarely made a difference with New Yorkers. They didn't seem to like her any better for all her flattery, and more important, she noted after a few unsuccessful exchanges, they didn't seem to like themselves any better. What was the point? Knowing what made other people tick was one of Helen's talents, and in New York it seemed impossible.

Still, Helen noted that New York had at least a few redeeming factors. For one, men looked at her here. She could feel eyes on her when she was walking down the street or having lunch by herself. In the absence of the California sunshine, she basked in their gazes and realized that their attention to her was due to another thing that she appreciated: In Manhattan, there were no streetcars teeming with starlets, big-breasted and tawny-skinned.
“In many ways it's like Pittsburgh because there are some simply hideous people loping about on the streets,” Helen observed in some of her early notes about the city. It was nothing like California, where pretty girls were “as plentiful as the palm situation,” she added.

Helen at home on Park Avenue in 1965, with her cats, Samantha and Gregory. (
Copyright © I. C. Rapoport.
)

In New York, as in Paris, it was enough to be stylish and slender. And while it didn't hurt to be young, a woman of a certain age wasn't overlooked, partly because, in half of the city's restaurants, the lighting was so dim that she couldn't be fully seen in the first place. It was no wonder society ladies adored Longchamps, with its slick décor and dark corners—their wrinkles simply disappeared. And all that history . . . Hollywood was one giant facelift, but New York embraced its past.

“
The west is for the babies . . . the sun goddesses . . . the
now's
,” Helen wrote in another batch of notes about the city. “New York is far kinder to the old. . . . It's good to see because I'm not a baby either.”

“One of the lovely things that can happen to a girl in an office is lunch.
Lunchtime is fraught with possibilities!”

—Helen Gurley Brown,
Sex and the Office
, 1964

N
ew York was teeming with beautiful babies—they just didn't hang out anywhere near Helen Gurley Brown on Park Avenue. On weekends, bearded guys in berets and leggy girls with hair as straight as rain headed to MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village to check out new music at the Figaro or the Kettle and any number of coffeehouses offering a stage to anyone with a harmonica. On weekdays, Midtown blossomed with girls fresh out of college, wearing belted raincoats and sensible flats, and heading to their jobs at ad agencies, publishing houses, and magazine offices. “
You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls,” Rona Jaffe had written in
The Best of Everything
.

Five years later, Helen had her eye trained on the real-life versions of those girls, and specifically on their lunchtime rituals. She was working on a series of chapters about lunch for
Sex and the Office
, and she had started observing the eating habits of office girls as closely as a mother hawk watches her chicks. When she saw a group
of secretaries in the smudged window of a drab diner or lined up for a pale hot dog at a midtown catering truck, it occurred to her that girls who should be watching their wallets and their waistlines were buying lunch instead of bringing it from home. Since when had packing a lunch become a mark of shame? It's not as if they had to
wear
the brown bag—they just had to fill it with healthy food, as she had been doing for years.
She would suggest two Brown Paper Bag Plans in
Sex and the Office
, including her own recipe for Mother Brown's Rich Dessert Tuna Salad with sweet pickles and raisins, which she used to eat every day of the week. When she was feeling really wicked, she allowed herself two Triscuits and four potato chips.

It was time to change the image of the Brown Bag Lunch, starting with the name. “
American Beauty Lunches” would do. “Home-food can be delicious glamour girl fodder instead of junk,” Helen wrote at her typewriter, addressing all those catering-truck-and-diner devotees. If they just packed their lunches, they could save enough money to spend Christmas in Jamaica
and
look better in a bikini.

Helen saw the importance of giving practical, everyday advice, and yet she knew that
Sex and the Office
was somehow missing the mark. She had managed to squeeze a lot of useful, and questionable, information into the book, such as how to give a firm handshake and how to cheat discreetly on an expense account. She had done her research, interviewing secretaries, businesswomen, and the occasional “tycooness” about their experiences in the working world.

Despite all the footwork that went into
Sex and the Office
, or perhaps because of it, the book felt forced. From the very start, Helen had warned Berney that she had no interest in getting into the technicalities of office work—how to type up neat carbons, for instance. “
My idea is that a kind of secretarial handbook is
beneath
me,” she said. She wanted
Sex and the Office
to be better than
Sex
and the Single Girl
, but it just didn't have the same urgency. She had found that nothing was quite as motivating as the need to prove herself. “
I'm best when I'm angry about something—and outrageous,” she told Berney. The notion that a good girl shouldn't have a sex life—now
that
was something to rail against.

Lest
Sex and the Office
be as sexless as a stapler, she had to spice it up with titillating true stories, and the more taboo the better. Helen convinced Berney to let her write about the darker sides of the office, and he welcomed a chapter on call girls, who didn't work in offices per se but whose work largely depended on their existence. Having a call girl delivered to an office was about as common as ordering a new coffee machine: “
The girl is sent as a bribe, payment for a favor expected or received,” Helen explained to her readers. But not to worry: “The call girl, though enormously attractive to certain men, is not really competition for you. She's an entirely different thing.”

Berney agreed to the chapter called “Some Girls Get Paid for It,” but he and Helen had it out over several other case studies, which he felt were simply too hot to handle without getting burned. A story about a woman who gets raped on a date eventually got cut, but Berney allowed a reference to
“office wolves” with predatory streaks. (“If your instinct goes ‘sniff, sniff—peculiar, peculiar,' trust your instinct,” Helen advised.) He okayed a story about an office girl who takes up with a man with a taste for S&M (who convinces her to ride in a convertible with her breasts exposed, and later whips her buttocks with a riding crop), but dropped an odd story about a secretary with a daddy complex who beds her much older, overweight boss. “I like that feeling of being squashed,” the narrator confesses. “
It makes me feel small and helpless.”

During those long days alone with her typewriter in her New York apartment, Helen described sexual encounters in dripping
detail, but no tale was quite as erotic as a story she wrote about two women who meet at work and end up in bed. Were they women she had known or simply imagined? Had she been in a similar situation herself or ever fantasized about it? It's hard to know, but she was very convincing in describing the slow-burning attraction between a young showroom model—the narrator of the tale—and a glamorous older designer named Claudia, who work at the same firm.

The story begins one day at the office when, after a fitting that lasts into the wee hours of the morning, Claudia suggests to the young model that they get a drink. The bars would be closed, so her apartment is the only option. Once they are at her pad, Claudia gives her a scotch and water, and they listen to records and talk about the new spring line she is designing. After Claudia gets up to mix another drink, she walks over to the model and kisses her on the mouth—and it's a kiss that is not so lustful as it is “
full of sincerity and friendship,” the model-narrator says.

An eternity seems to pass before Claudia carefully unbuttons the model's blouse, fondling her breasts and eventually removing her skirt. She is calm and confident. When Claudia touches her, she already knows how the touch will feel because she has experienced the same sensation. There is no question about what is wrong or right with another woman. It just feels natural, the model explains. There is no anxiety, not even when they are both naked on the bed and Claudia flips the girl on her back, kissing her mouth, her breasts, her stomach, “
and then her mouth was THERE . . . really inside me with her tongue.” When they entwine their legs like two pairs of scissors, the model orgasms for the second time. Usually, she's worn out after climaxing, but sex with another woman is softer, gentler, she confides: “you lack the final thrust . . . perhaps the final violence . . . there is a vague feeling of incompletion and you can go on.”

It wasn't easy to shock Berney, but Helen sure caught him off
guard. Though they had talked about her writing a chapter called “
Boys Will Be Girls . . . and Vice Versa,” about male and female homosexuality in the workplace, Berney assumed such accounts would be reported from a distance. “
I thought it was going to be about how to handle temperamental homosexuals in the office,” he wrote in a letter to Helen, after reading a draft of that chapter, which he later cut. Helen's detailed play-by-plays of actual sex acts between women was pushing the proverbial envelope too far. “I got a lot more than I bargained for,” he admitted.

Helen reminded Berney that
she
had been dead set against a chapter called “The Matinee,” which Letty suggested after hearing about a friend who sometimes used her lunch hour for sex. (Letty's friend eventually wrote a mini-essay on the subject, which Helen introduced as a special report in one of the book's three chapters on lunch.) Lesbianism was just part of office culture.
It was the idea of a matinee that was truly “icky,” Helen said, sounding suddenly Victorian in her prissiness, but she had gone ahead with it anyway.

Berney stood his ground. “
No objection was made by me to the rape scene, the gal driving barechested in an open car, or the man beating the girl lightly with a whip. I just happen to feel that a literal description of a homosexual act between two girls would ruin your reputation if we were to publish it,” he insisted. “There's no way of proving this except by publishing it. Then I could say I told you so—but it's much better to tell you so now.”

S
PRING FINALLY CAME
, and along with the dogwoods and magnolias, a new club blossomed in New York. It had its roots in Chicago, but it soon found an outpost in a white, seven-story building at 5 East Fifty-Ninth Street near Madison Avenue. Tens of thousands of men bought keys to the club before it even opened, and
when it finally did, it was packed.
On an average day, 2,700 people entered the Playboy Club to eat, drink, and gawk at the scantily clad waitresses in Bunny ears and tails. Despite problems securing a cabaret license, the club was a total hit, grossing up to $90,000 a week, and to commemorate its success,
Playboy
's April 1963 cover featured a Bunny in uniform serving cocktails. Inside the same issue was Helen Gurley Brown's
Playboy
interview.

Berney and Letty had groomed Helen to speak about
Sex and the Single Girl
in a respectable, acceptable manner—as the wifely Mrs. Brown—but in the pages of
Playboy
, she dropped the Sunday-morning-paper act and assumed the role of sex expert, sounding off on everything from extramarital affairs to abortion. When her interviewer asked what kind of response she had been getting from fans, she was blunt. “
I get a lot of mail about how to keep from having a baby,” she answered. “This mail I get is from girls who are quite sincerely interested in knowing. For some reason they feel they can't talk it over with their doctor. My inclination is to tell people exactly what I think they should do: They should get fitted for a diaphragm.”

She didn't get her first diaphragm until the age of thirty-three, Helen added, but she had taken other precautions. Back when she was single, she knew plenty of girls who hadn't been as careful. One of her roommates tried to make herself miscarry before finally getting an abortion. The procedure itself wasn't as complicated as people thought. “
There is some chance of becoming barren, but if the operation isn't performed by an idiot, it's quite simple,” Helen said, grossly underestimating both the danger of illegal abortion and the difficulty of finding a reputable doctor.

The real problem was financial accessibility, she added. In most states, abortion was considered legal only if the mother's life was at risk, and illegal abortions were expensive, running up to one
thousand dollars in cash. Most working girls couldn't afford one, and they either had to find a way to scrape up the money or travel to Mexico or Europe to terminate their pregnancies.

“
It's outrageous that girls can't be aborted here,” Helen continued. “Never mind that this little child doesn't have a father. And never mind that its mother is a flibbertigibbet who has no business having a baby. Abortion is just surrounded with all this hush-hush and horror, like insanity used to be.”

Helen had tried to broach some of these subjects in
Sex and the Single Girl
, she told her interviewer, but her publisher, Bernard Geis, made her cut the parts about how to avoid getting pregnant. They butted heads about other cuts, too. In the chapter on affairs, Berney had tried changing “nymphomaniac” to “pushover” to describe a woman who feels secure only when she's in bed with a man. “I just hit the roof. I hate that word,” Helen said.

“Pushover” made the woman sound like a weakling, a prude who didn't like sex. “
Au contraire
. She's asking for it. She needs it. She needs the reassurance. When a man is making love to you, the United Nations building could fall down and if he's really a man, he won't stop for a minute. . . . It does give you a feeling of power,” Helen said. “I understand a nymphomaniac in that respect. Any girl who goes to bed with a man has a reason. I don't think one of them is that she doesn't know how to say no.”

In fact, Helen wasn't describing a nymphomaniac—who, by definition, craves sex and struggles to control her desires—so much as a woman who craves control and gets it through sex. Either way, she saw sex as a powerful weapon, and a necessary one for any single girl who was fighting her way to a man when so few were available.

“
I don't know of anything more ruthless, more deadly or more dedicated,” Helen told
Playboy
, “than any normal, healthy American girl in search of a husband.”