1963–1964
“No matter how accustomed to your own community you may become, never grow to feel safe in it. Feel threatened. You are threatened. You are never safe.”
—Max Wylie, Career Girl, Watch Your Step! 1964
On August 28, 1963, all eyes were on the nation’s capital, where a massive crowd of 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a Wednesday, and thousands of New Yorkers had decided to skip work to head south to Washington, D.C., instead. Those who stayed in the city congregated—in boardrooms, barbershops, bars, living rooms, dorm rooms, and newsrooms—to watch a live, black-and-white broadcast of the procession toward the Lincoln Memorial and to hear the melodious but mournful voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as he cried out his vision for equality. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he told the crowd in a speech invoking the Constitution and the Bible, the spirit of Lincoln and of America itself. As the sun dropped lower in the sky, King’s voice crescendoed, keeping a nation in thrall. But just as the final words of “I Have a Dream” echoed through Washington, a nightmare was unfolding in New York City.
That same day, two young women were brutally stabbed with kitchen knives in their third-floor apartment at 57 East Eighty-Eighth Street near Madison Avenue, an exclusive address in an affluent neighborhood. The victims were unlikely targets for violence in their doorman-protected building. Janice Wylie was a twenty-one-year-old copy girl at Newsweek who came from a prominent family. Emily Hoffert was a twenty-three-year-old Smith College graduate with a teaching assignment lined up on Long Island.
A third roommate, Patricia Tolles, later came home to a wrecked flat and called the local precinct before investigating any further herself. Then she called Janice’s parents. By the time the cops showed up, the Wylies were already waiting inside the apartment. Janice’s father, an author and advertising executive named Max Wylie, led the detectives to a shared bedroom, where blood spattered the walls. On the floor, the bodies of the two roommates lay under a blue blanket. One was nude and had been disemboweled; her ankles were bound together by strips of white cloth, curlers still in her hair. That was his daughter, Janice Wylie.
Less than twenty-four hours later, the news broke: “2 Career Girls Savagely Slain,” trumpeted the New York Daily News, coining a catchy moniker for the double homicide that would soon turn into a city wide obsession. Adding to the drama was a cast of already well-known characters, including Janice’s father, Max, and her uncle, the author Philip Wylie, whose venomous screed on career women Helen Gurley Brown had referenced in an early draft of Sex and the Office. “The Career Girls Murders lit up the city like a hit Broadway show,” T. J. English wrote in his 2011 book, The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge. “The case had innocent female victims, shocking brutality, and the makings of a classic whodunit. . . . The race of the victims, the savagery of the killings, and the social standing of the Wylie family all conspired to make the story a keeper,” what cops and crime reporters called “a good murder at a good address.”
In the days that followed, the March on Washington receded into the back pages, while tabloids found new ways to package the stories of the dead Career Girls. With both pity and morbid curiosity, New Yorkers read about Janice Wylie, who actually had planned on going to the March on Washington the day she was killed; her father, worried about her safety at such a mass demonstration, convinced her to stay home. The prettier of the two roommates, with blond hair, a Marilyn Monroe mole, and arched eyebrows, Janice quickly became an object of gossipy speculation, thanks to her good looks and once active dating life. Was she promiscuous? A swinger? A sleep-around girl who finally slept with the wrong guy? Or just a nice girl who liked to have a little fun?
The entire city was on edge about the slayings, but especially single women, who saw themselves in the victims, reported Gay Talese, who headed uptown to capture the mood among East Side residents shortly after the story first broke. “Throughout the day, girls were asking superintendents about double locks, or were going to hardware stores to buy door chains,” Talese wrote in the New York Times. “Residents at The Barbizon were telling Oscar, the doorman, how lucky they are. Many of those who live alone, such as the blonde social worker in an East Seventy-third Street walkup, were moving out and staying with friends.”
It wasn’t just the Upper East Side. From midtown Manhattan to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, girls began to change the locks on their doors and install peepholes. Some vacated their apartments altogether, seeking refuge back home with Mom and Dad. “All I remember is that a wave of fear ran through single women in New York. That’s all we talked about,” Jane Maas says now. Back then, she was a married thirty-one-year-old mother, who would go on to become a creative director at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. “I went home to a Marine Corps husband every night, and yet I was super aware of how worried all my single, apartment-living friends were: Are we safe going on dates? Or are we taking our lives into our hands? Are blind dates now not to be had? Maybe I should get a roommate. . . . Our mothers called us and said, ‘I think you should give up this wild notion about living in the city.’”
Fleeing New York might seem like an overreaction now, but it didn’t seem like such a crazy idea then—especially because the killer was still on the loose. By late September 1963, the New York City Police Department hadn’t found a likely suspect after canvassing the city and questioning almost five hundred people. “The police [are] under intense pressure to solve the crime and remove from the streets a killer whose act has frightened thousands of lonely women,” the New York Times reported.
Inside of her apartment on Sixty-Fifth and Park, Helen Gurley Brown tracked the case along with the rest of the city. Never one to back away from a sensationalist story or a controversial subject, she also wrote about the Career Girl Murders in her column, “Woman Alone.” The headline was . . . not subtle: HOW DO YOU KEEP FROM GETTING MURDERED? it blared. Despite the fearmongering title, however, the article itself was quietly and calmly informative. Its advertised purpose was to give girls tips on how to stay safe in the city, and Helen dutifully interviewed the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for his advice on defense tactics. (For instance, what to do if a man is following you on the street: “Scream,” he advised.) She published other tips from a self-defense booklet that he gave her, but she had another agenda in writing about the Career Girl Murders, one that wasn’t advertised but was still obvious. As frightening as the city could be, she didn’t want one freakishly horrible story to scare off her readers; many were small-town girls who dreamed of pursuing their careers in the big city, just as she had. In writing her column, she was always talking to a version of herself, the little girl from Little Rock. If she could make it in a city like Los Angeles or New York, so could they—and they shouldn’t let anything stop them, not even a terrifying double homicide.
“Is there so much more crime in New York City that girls should stay away from here?” Helen asked the deputy commissioner.
Not at all. Of the twenty-five major American cities, she learned, New York ranked eighteenth in murders, seventeenth in rape, and tenth in aggravated assaults.
“Well, maybe girls alone should stay away from all big cities entirely?” she asked. Wrong again. In fact, crime was going up in suburban areas, she reported back. It was simply impossible to predict when and where a woman might end up in the grip of a psychopath, the deputy commissioner said, adding that “it will have nothing to do with where she lives.”
At least one person strongly disagreed with that assessment. A few months after his daughter’s murder, Max Wylie was researching a new book, Career Girl, Watch Your Step!—a 125-page safety manual aimed at unmarried women who were thinking of leaving home to go to big cities in search of a dream job or husband, or both. In a somber, fatherly tone, he advised would-be career girls to first live in a temporary residence with other women, such as the YWCA, and to avoid “the fringe element . . . the beatniks, the Bohemians, the far-out group with a distorted sense of values.”
“Don’t think of yourself as being safe,” Wylie cautioned. “Think of yourself as being in danger all the time. This will make you wary. There is no better protection than an awareness of the dangers that might engulf you.”
Wylie’s safety manual was written in response to the gruesome murder of his daughter, but in a broader sense it was also a reaction against the philosophies espoused by Helen Gurley Brown in Sex and the Single Girl and “Woman Alone.”
Helen had built a career on encouraging single, working girls to leave the nest, strike out on their own, find an apartment, get a job, meet new men, date around, sleep around if they wished—and, above all, embrace their independence.
Just beware, Wylie warned those same girls: Your independence could get you killed.
HAD HELEN BEEN single during that time, perhaps she would have wanted to stay locked inside her apartment forever, but as the leaves changed and the air turned crisp, the city’s fears began to dissipate along with the summer heat. It was impossible to step outside without discovering something or someone new. One cold sunny day, she was heading west across Park Avenue when a tall, striking woman heading east with her husband stopped her. “You’re Helen Gurley Brown,” she said. “I’m Jacqueline Susann.”
At first Helen didn’t recognize her—all lips and eyelashes, with a thick slab of black hair and a deep widow’s peak. Truman Capote hadn’t yet called her “a truck driver in drag” on national television, and Helen hadn’t seen the commercials that Jackie, once an aspiring actress, had done for Schiffli embroidery machines, along with her beloved French poodle, Josephine. (They wore matching mother-and-mutt outfits.) But as they started talking, Helen realized she knew exactly who she was. She had heard about Jackie from the team over at Bernard Geis Associates, who soon would be publishing her novel, Every Night, Josephine, a larky account of life with her now famous poodle. In time the two authors would become close friends. Jackie knew all about Helen’s Sex and the Single Girl tour and would use it as a model for future promotion of her own books. Helen studied Jackie herself—how she walked, talked, dressed, and demanded star treatment long before she was actually a star. “I loved the way she looked because it was always showbizzy,” Helen told the author Barbara Seaman in the latter’s biography of Susann, Lovely Me. “It was sequins, it was chiffon, it was high heels and ankle straps and lots of jewelry and the beautiful dark hair. I adored her. She was like a role model.”
Of course, Helen also had David, the best tour guide New York City could offer. Through David she saw the New York that Sinatra later sang about, a city of new starts that could melt away little-town blues—and, best of all, her own husband was top of the list. He had taken her here shortly after they married in 1959. Seeing Rodgers and Hammerstein on Broadway, dining at Le Pavillon, waiting arm-in-arm for a taxi outside the “21” Club, drinking champagne at the Dorset hotel as the snow fell on Fifty-Fourth Street, so pretty it seemed staged, like something out of a Christmas scene in a Saks window display . . . New York was wonderful, but it was his. She needed to make it hers.
New York intimidated her with its piercing skyscrapers and medieval churches, its grand hotels and four-star restaurants, its army of doormen and maître d’s—but it also made her want to belong. Some nights in her apartment, she wondered about the scenes unfolding in the other buildings up and down Park Avenue. More than a few of her neighbors were famous, like Helena Rubinstein, the multimillionaire cosmetics manufacturer, now a widow who lived alone at 625 Park in a twenty-six-room triplex with a circular marble staircase, forty closets, and surrealistic murals by Salvador Dalí. And then there were all the lit windows of apartments whose tenants she would never know or know of. All the marriage proposals, domestic spats, makeup sex, extramarital affairs. The sheer number of lives being lived out in such close proximity amazed her, and she grew to marvel at her place in it all.
Los Angeles was for the young, but New York wasn’t interested in little girls. A girl couldn’t pull off a sharp knitted suit with a smart leather hat, or a black satin peignoir. A girl couldn’t hail a cab or a man’s attention in this city, but a woman could—and, in her early forties, Helen was determined to become a sophisticated New York woman. Slowly but surely, she started walking like she knew where she was going, and when she took cabs, a rare occurrence because she hated spending the fare, she gave directions to the drivers. In L.A. she had dressed like a baby doll, but in New York she smartened up in designer dresses and watched the windows at department stores like Saks, where the world’s most fashionable women shopped for floor-length evening coats, twill trenches, mohair jackets, and fur stoles.
Like every other woman who cared about style, Helen also watched the first lady, who had been a constant presence in Women’s Wear Daily ever since 1960, when the fashion trade trumpeted the news that Jacqueline (then a senator’s wife) and her mother-in-law spent a combined $30,000 per year on Parisian clothes and hats. “Jacqueline Kennedy orders mostly from sketches like a mail order catalogue—at Cardin, Grès, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Chanel and Bugnand. Each house has a well-shaped Jacqueline Kennedy dummy,” wrote WWD’s new editor, John Fairchild, who soon turned the formerly staid industry publication into a gossipy, must-read rag. As first lady, Jacqueline had cut down on her public shopping sprees, but she never failed to give WWD something to buzz about, donning endless varieties of A-line coats, pillbox hats, streamlined suits, and candy-colored silk dresses confected by her personal designer, Oleg Cassini.
Of course, nothing would be quite so memorable as the Chanel-inspired pink bouclé suit and matching pillbox hat that Jacqueline Kennedy wore the day her husband was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Hours later, when she boarded the plane back to Washington, she still wore the bloodstained suit for the world to see.
While the rest of the country grieved, Jacqueline Susann charged into the offices of Bernard Geis Associates, which had published her novel Every Night, Josephine, the week before Kennedy’s assassination. When she saw the publicity team watching television in tearful silence, instead of preparing for a meeting about her poodle book, she blew up, giving them an early forecast of the ego storm to come.
“Why the fuck does this have to happen to me?” she moaned. “This is gonna ruin my tour!”
Helen had her own books to promote—she was almost finished with Sex and the Office—but where Jackie saw an inconvenience, she saw a great opportunity.
Shortly after the president’s death, Helen took it upon herself to rebrand the first lady in her newspaper column. “As we have seen through our tears these last few weeks, the most beloved man is mortal,” she wrote from her perch over Park Avenue. “The most beloved wife can become a woman alone.”