1965
“In an ideal world, we might move onward and upward by using only our brains and talent but, since this is an imperfect world, a certain amount of listening, giggling, wriggling, smiling, winking, flirting and fainting is required.”
—Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Office, 1964
In her first month, Helen made a few hiring decisions that would impact the magazine, and her personally, for years to come. One was promoting George Walsh to managing editor. Another was hiring Walter Meade.
A copy chief at the ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), Walter was already known around Cosmopolitan’s fiction department as a talented writer who had published short stories in the magazine, and Bill Guy thought he would be good at dealing with other writers and making assignments.
“We need an articles editor,” Bill told Walter around the same time that Helen started. “Why don’t you come and do it?”
Walter was interested in the job, but not in pretending he was qualified for it. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said.
“We have a new editor, Helen Brown, and she doesn’t know anything about it either,” Bill replied, “so why don’t I tell her about you, and we’ll go from there?”
Walter considered his options. He wasn’t long for the advertising world. Before he got the call from Bill, Walter had just been through a somewhat life-altering experience. He had been walking down Forty-Fifth Street with his boss, a workaholic who was also a husband and father in his mid-forties, when his boss said, “Oh my God, Walter,” grabbed his arm, and then dropped dead. Unsure of what to do, Walter chose the most practical route: He went into a nearby store, asked for a furniture blanket, and put it over his boss’s limp body before the cops came. When the shock of what had happened subsided, he realized that he had to get out of the advertising business.
That was the mind-set Walter was in when Bill called and said that Cosmopolitan was looking for a new articles editor. After Bill described the position in more detail, Walter thought, Yeah, I can do that.
And that’s how he found himself sitting across from Helen Gurley Brown in her office. Right away, he told Helen that he had never been an editor before. “I don’t know what I’m doing either,” she said, “and I don’t really know how I got this job.”
Then she told Walter the story of how David had essentially gotten it for her, encouraging her to apply in the first place. Listening to Helen recount the whole process, Walter thought she was the most direct person he’d ever met, and possibly the most flirtatious.
It certainly didn’t hurt that Walter, thirty-five years old to her forty-three, was good-looking: dark-haired, tall, and cool in a tan poplin suit. Helen soon began her process of sinking in. She did not sit behind her desk, but rather joined Walter on her sofa. As they talked about a starting salary, he couldn’t help but notice how she didn’t so much sit as curl like a kitten, despite the fact that she was wearing a short, slinky dress. “Her gestures were extremely feminine,” Meade says. “She talked very quickly and very smartly. She was never at a loss for words. And she called me ‘Pussycat.’”
Over the years, Helen would call countless people Pussycat, her favorite term of endearment. (Later, an illustrated pussycat became something of a mascot for Cosmo, similar to Playboy’s Bunny.) And yet, sitting in her office on that spring day, Walter Meade may as well have been the only man in her world. He had come in for what was essentially a job interview, but now that he was here it felt more like having a drink with an old girlfriend. Walter wasn’t sure how she did it. She was not a beautiful woman, not by a stretch, and yet he felt drawn to her—physically attracted to this petite, plain woman with her kittenish purr. And that was really something because Walter was gay.
In fact, Walter knew he would like Helen before he even met her. He had heard the rumors that she was just a silly dumb broad who couldn’t possibly edit a magazine if her life depended on it, and who would fall on her face; it was only a matter of time. He hadn’t read her books, but he knew she was adored by single girls and ridiculed by the press, and he admired her because the press was often wrong. Bill Guy, for one, thought she was a natural. Even with her lack of experience, he believed she had a strong vision and that she could turn Cosmopolitan into a success.
As Bill and Walter would soon learn, Helen was very feminine in her manner, and she wanted a similar feel for the magazine: sexy but respectable, with a certain patina of properness. But she was also Machiavellian, and to get to her ladylike ends she had no problem resorting to unladylike means.
Before the meeting in Helen’s office, Bill showed Walter a written response that Helen had given to a short story he had submitted to her—about a young couple who were deeply in love. “They went to a Tunnel of Love thing in an amusement park and the tunnel had its way with them—in an erotic way,” Meade says. “The Tunnel of Love itself became an erotic experience, and they had sort of a threesome with it.”
Meade never forgot the memo that Helen sent back with the manuscript. “The note was all in lowercase, and it said, ‘bill, dear, i do think we have to draw the line somewhere—and being fucked by a machine is it.’”
EVEN AS SHE brought on new people, Helen lived with the constant threat of losing her staff to other jobs. But at least one former staffer wished she had never left in the first place when she heard that Helen Gurley Brown was Cosmopolitan’s new editor.
Before Liz Smith took over her position, Lyn Tornabene had been the magazine’s entertainment editor under Robert C. Atherton, and she witnessed its decline firsthand.
At a low point in circulation and staff morale, a few of the editors got so desperate that they started assigning each other freelance articles just to subsidize their meager salaries. They tried to be sneaky about it, writing under assumed names—Harriet La Barre wrote under “EMD Watson” for “Elementary, my dear”—but management eventually found out about it. Dick Deems called Lyn into his office, slapped her on the wrist, and told her that she’d just have to stick with her salary of thirty-eight dollars a week. Lyn quit, moved to Connecticut with her husband and daughter, and started freelancing. But when she heard that the author of Sex and the Single Girl had replaced her old boss, she felt compelled to write to her. “If I had known you were coming,” Lyn told her, “I’d have stayed.”
Shortly after getting that note, Helen invited Lyn into the office to chat about freelance assignments. She needed strong, reliable writers, and Lyn had experience and insight on her side, having worked at the magazine for years. When Liz Smith took over the entertainment section and asked her predecessor for some advice about how to run it, Lyn answered with her characteristic candor. “Why should I do that? Why help you succeed? I don’t want you to do a good job. I want to be remembered as the best.”
A cute brunette with a brassy sense of humor, Lyn would become Helen’s go-to person for funny social commentary, like an essay she wrote under a pseudonym called “What It’s Like to Be a Jewish Girl,” as well as her friend and confidante. But that day in Helen’s office, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
“It was a very strange meeting,” Lyn says now. “One of the things she believed was that talking to someone across a big mahogany desk was intimidating, so she curled up on the couch in the corner—she weighed, you know, two pounds—and then gestured, ‘Darling you sit here,’ on the other end of the sofa. So I sat. The very first thing she said to me was, ‘You know these aren’t my cheekbones.’ Dr. [Norman] Orentreich, he was silicon-ing everybody. Then she said, ‘This isn’t my hair. It’s a Kenneth fall.’ She went over all the parts of her body that were not original.
“Also by the end of that meeting,” Tornabene adds, “I knew that she had slept with one hundred and seventy-eight men.”
OVER THE YEARS, Lyn would hear a lot more about Helen’s conquests during their hours of interviews and conversations. At a certain point, she stopped counting the number of times Helen used the word mistress when talking about all the men she had slept with to get ahead, but she witnessed her seduction skills firsthand when Helen and David, headed to a restaurant in Bedford, New York, made a last-minute visit to her house in Greenwich, Connecticut, one November night in the mid-Sixties.
“She called on Thanksgiving, whispering, ‘Darling, David and I are on our way to Bedford, and we’re going to go right past your place. Can we stop in and say hello?’” Tornabene says. “I said, ‘Look honey, there are twenty insane people here. Both families. You’re very welcome, but I have no idea what’s doing.’
“So here comes the stretch limo up the driveway, and I have no recollection whatsoever where David was because I was fixated on Helen. She had discovered my father-in-law, who was a very handsome man, a Sicilian: a tall, tweedy sort of guy. He was actually a baron and couldn’t ever earn a living. Anyway, Dad is sitting at the far end of the sofa, alone. Helen spots him, sits on the arm of the sofa, and then realizes she’s looking down on him, so she slides to the floor so she can look up at him.
“Like [Anna and] the King of Siam, she would never sit higher than a man she was talking to. Of course, in the kitchen is my wonderful Sicilian mother-in-law, who is calling for my husband, ‘Get the putana off your father! Get the putana outta here, outta here!’
“I don’t think Helen needed to see how far she could get. She knew how far she could get. It was just her. That’s how she functioned,” Lyn says. “She was scared to death all the time, and she managed to dispel any possible fears with her various techniques that she’d worked out over the years.”