1953
“Helen Gurley got browner, browner, and browner—where else but on the beach at Waikiki?”
—“Helen Gurley Wins a Holiday in Hawaii,” Glamour, May 1953
Growing up, Helen inhaled magazines. She and her sister Mary pored over pictures of Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, and Jean Harlow in Photoplay and Silver Screen, though as she got older, Helen didn’t read for leisure so much as she did for escape, literally. In June 1949, she was still working as an executive secretary at Foote, Cone & Belding when she was one of thirteen women featured in Glamour after attending a job seminar hosted by the magazine. The next year, she was spotlighted again in an article about ambitious secretaries. Glamour was her bible, and in the years after World War II, a woman like Helen Gurley was the magazine’s target reader, to judge by its new tagline: “For the girl with a job.”
Though she would have been attracted to any number of lifestyle articles, Helen took particular interest in Glamour’s annual competition, “Ten Girls with Taste,” which recognized ten women with modest incomes who still managed to show impeccable taste, whether hosting or dressing or decorating. After a friend of hers won the contest and its prizes—a trip to Europe and a new wardrobe—Helen entered for the first time in 1951, filling out a questionnaire that asked about everything from what she typically wore to work to how she would entertain guests for an evening to what she considered her life’s philosophy. Glamour chose her as one of twelve finalists and flew her to New York, but she never made it past the next round. In 1953, at the age of thirty-one, she entered again. This time she was one of thirty-nine thousand hopefuls—including receptionists, switchboard operators, and “home economists”—who answered a similar questionnaire.
Helen gave it her all. Her typical work outfit hadn’t changed much since the first time she filled out the form, so she made up a new-and-improved one. She wasn’t much of a cook, so in response to a question about how she would entertain friends for dinner, she lifted ideas from the food section of Ladies’ Home Journal. As for her philosophy of life, it borrowed heavily from Edward R. Murrow’s radio show This I Believe, which broadcast the voices of famous public figures and everyday Americans, sharing their heartfelt, personal philosophies for the common good.
In her final application, Helen Gurley painted herself as a hardworking but fun-loving California girl who enjoyed having friends over for Sunday brunch or for an evening of casual conversation and listening to records. While loyal to her boss, she also slipped in a little mention of the fact that she hoped to someday have a career in copywriting. But she really must have won the judges over with her generous heart, or at least the suggestion of it, cornily declaring that good taste “starts with that most basic commodity—one’s own self—and extends outward to speech, clothes and possessions. It reaches its supreme station . . . in kindness to another human being.”
Helen submitted her application, and to her delight, Glamour chose her as one of seventeen semifinalists. After surviving the next round of cuts, she was named one of the ten winners and invited to collect her prizes: a new vacation wardrobe to go with a two-week vacation to Hawaii, where she would sightsee, sunbathe, and sip pineapple punch on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, all while being photographed for a feature slated for the magazine’s May issue.
Fine as it was to hang out on the beach, her victory afforded her much more than travel. In the weeks after her win, the name Helen Gurley appeared in newspapers around the country. The magazine made her a mini-celebrity, the “Ideal Career Girl,” as one women’s editor christened her in the Hollywood Citizen-News. It also made her true ambitions known. Had she not confessed her desire to become a copywriter on the magazine’s contest form, she might have remained a secretary. Don Belding assigned Helen to her first account, Sunkist, after being hounded by Mary Campbell, the soon-to-be-legendary head of Condé Nast’s personnel office, who wanted to know why Belding hadn’t given her a chance to write copy of her own.
Glamour was Helen’s passport into a more sophisticated world. Long before David brought Helen to Manhattan, her favorite magazine did, putting her up at the ritzy Waldorf-Astoria when she won. While in town, she also visited Glamour’s headquarters in Midtown—it was her first time in a magazine office.
The second time was in March 1965, when she entered Cosmopolitan’s offices at 1775 Broadway as the magazine’s new editor-in-chief.