1920s–1930s
“Have you a rotten family, bad health, nowhere looks, serious money problems, a minority background, nobody to help you? Early-in-life problems can be the yeast that makes you rise into bread!”
—Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All, 1982
Helen often told the press that, in editing Cosmopolitan, she was essentially aiming the magazine at the girl she was twenty years before, “the girl with her nose pressed against the glass.” In 1965, she was forty-three, and in many ways a very different woman from the person she was at twenty-three, when she was still working her way through secretarial jobs. But to understand who she was then, you have to go back even further, back to her childhood in Arkansas.
You have to start in Carroll County, in the northwestern part of the state, near a town called Blue Eye (current population 30)—not to be confused with Blue Eye, Missouri (pop. 167). Head south from the Missouri border on AR 21, toward a town called Berryville, and take in the sights along the way. Go past Snake World, a roadside “attraction” featuring a collection of seventy-some snakes, including rattlesnakes and pythons, kept inside one man’s trailer, along with their prey. To the west is Eureka Springs, an artsy hippie town that’s also known for its sixty-seven-foot statue, Christ of the Ozarks—worth a visit, maybe another time. Instead head east on U.S. 62, passing the occasional Confederate flag and signs for livestock auctions, Home Style Cookin’, and Cowboy Church, which hosts “Come as You Are” services every Sunday, until you reach the center of a small town called Green Forest.
Welcome to the birthplace of Helen Gurley Brown. (Not a fact that the town chooses to advertise, by the way.) These days, Green Forest is better known for chicken—it’s home to a Tyson poultry processing plant and a large Hispanic population. Most people who would have known the Gurley family when they lived here in the early 1920s are no longer alive, and the few who remain don’t have much to say. At Mercy Thrift Shop, near a flower and gift store on Main Street, the white-haired woman behind the register looks as though she has been sitting in the same chair for decades. If anyone is still around who knows about Helen Gurley Brown’s connection to this place, she would be a likely candidate, but she is impassive. Either she doesn’t remember the Gurley name, or she doesn’t care to.
Strolling through the public square—past brick buildings blanched by the sun, boarded-up windows, and the occasional empty storefront—you have to squint and imagine a time when Main Street was in its prime, when people rode horses into town. This was the Green Forest where Helen Gurley Brown was born on February 18, 1922, when some of her more affluent relatives owned a good portion of Main Street, including the Mercantile, the dry-goods store in town.
Helen described her family as hillbilly and poor, but her parents were hardly uneducated (her father, Ira, had a law degree from Cumberland University in Tennessee), and they weren’t always poor. “That’s sort of a misconception a lot of people have—that everybody was desperately poor,” says Helen’s cousin Lou (now Honderich). “Helen’s grandparents indeed lived in the country, and they had outdoor plumbing; but that was rural Arkansas.” When Helen was still a baby, the Gurleys moved to Little Rock, where they were “solidly middle class,” Lou adds. “They had a really nice house in a nice neighborhood. Mom had been a teacher, Dad worked in the Capitol. I would think that was about as ordinary and as stable as it could be, but things did get very, very hard when her sister got sick and her father was gone.”
Main Street in Green Forest, Arkansas—where Helen was born on February 18, 1922—as it looks today. (Photo by author.)
Later, when she was in her seventies, Helen would tell a much more accurate and nuanced version of her family history in a memoir she wrote, “Memories of Mother and Early Life in Little Rock,” but it was never published. Apparently, the truth about where she really came from wasn’t nearly as interesting as the first rags-to-riches story she ever told. “I think it helped sell books,” Lou says. “I think her shtick kind of took over. There was not any other side—just the poor-little-girl side.”
FROM GREEN FOREST, take U.S. 412 to downtown Osage (a pinpoint on the map with a population of 418 in the whole township, at last count). You’ll know you’re in the right place when you see the sign for Osage Clayworks, a mammoth, multilevel old stone building with a wooden frame and large arched windows, standing to the south.
The roads are dustier here, the sky flatter and bluer, but the hills are gentle and sloping, and those are ancient cedars and black walnut trees in the distance. It’s beautiful, but it’s also remote and, for a certain kind of person, it would be impossibly lonely.
Not for Helen’s mother, Cleo. Born in 1893 in the tiny nearby village of Alpena, Cleo moved back to Arkansas from Los Angeles in the 1950s, eventually settling in Osage, where she lived for many years in a simple, one-story house that no longer exists. When it still stood, Helen visited her here—but rarely.
Helen did write to Cleo frequently, and Cleo used to pick up her letters at her mail slot at Stamps General Store—now converted into the Clayworks space, filled with stoneware mugs, vases, and pinch pots in various states of completion. When the potter Newton Lale bought the place, he made a deal with the family selling it that he would preserve the heritage of the general store, including old ledgers dating back to the early 1900s, when people bought everything from eggs to overalls here.
Newt has assumed the role of unofficial town historian ever since. He never met Cleo, but when he first came to town, he bought her house—it once stood across the street, where a pavilion is now—which was known as the Cat House, on account of the dozens of cats that Cleo used to have prowling around the property. Newt didn’t know her, but he knows her type: an Ozarks woman.
“Our mothers and our grandmothers grew up, and there was a no-nonsense attitude,” he says. “You didn’t have time to fool around. You were trying to survive, you were trying to feed your family.”
He never met Helen, but he knows her type, too: a small-town girl who wanted to see if she could make it in a bigger world. “My understanding was that she wasn’t real proud of Arkansas,” he says. “It was a poor place, she came from a poor condition, and she had to do what it took to get out of here.”
Cleo had wanted to get out once herself, but by the time Helen was born, four years after Mary, she was tethered to a long line of disappointments. Abandoning her college education because of family obligations was one. Marrying Ira Gurley was another. Even as a young woman, Cleo was plain to the point of homely—especially when compared with a sister who was beautiful and courted by several men—so her parents were thrilled when they found her a suitable match.
Smart and charismatic, Ira was a golden boy who hunted and fished with Cleo’s brothers and impressed her parents. Everyone loved Ira, except for Cleo, who was enamored of a poor, soft-spoken young man named Leigh Bryan. As for what Ira saw in Cleo, Helen didn’t really elaborate on it in her writings, but her cousin Lou speculates that perhaps he valued her education, which would be useful in raising children, even though he later insisted she give up her career. As the eldest of nine children, Cleo had been the rare girl who attended high school, going on to spend one semester at college at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, before becoming a teacher at a rural, one-room schoolhouse “I think Ira was smart, and I think he wanted a smart wife. She was solid, she had a nice family—her parents were wonderful. Maybe he saw the whole thing as being a good package,” Lou says. “I don’t know what else would make sense for a good-looking, going-places guy to marry a plain girl. I think it had to be rational, practical.”
Leigh was Cleo’s first love, and he would remain her only love, long after she married Ira. Ira was her husband, a “devout male chauvinist” who had voted against women’s suffrage, as Helen later recalled. Ira wanted Cleo to quit teaching, so she did, even though she loved it. And then she got pregnant. Giving birth to her first daughter, Mary Eloine, Cleo suffered painful tearing and almost died—she had needed a cesarean, a procedure that the simple country doctor attending her knew little about and couldn’t perform. Four years later, Helen Marie Gurley was born after another difficult labor.
Eventually, Ira took Cleo to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where some of the physical damage was repaired, but Cleo never forgot the pain of childbirth. She lived with those scars for the rest of her life.
“Having babies isn’t everything,” Cleo told Helen from the time she was a little girl. “Not that I don’t love you and Mary, but having babies isn’t all there is.”
CLEO’S FAMILY ALWAYS knew that Ira Gurley would become a somebody, and the year after Helen was born, he was already on his way, heading for a career in politics. In 1923 the Gurleys moved to Little Rock, where Ira won election to the state legislature.
The Gurleys were comfortable, but they weren’t wealthy. To bring in extra money, Cleo worked as a seamstress, setting up a small dressmaking service at home, where she fitted the occasional wealthy customer. One of Helen’s early memories was of seeing a striking, red-haired woman dressed in fur pull up to the house in a shiny Pierce-Arrow, driven by a chauffeur. Ira and Cleo never talked to their daughters about people being rich or poor, but growing up in the suburb of Pulaski Heights (now Hillcrest), Helen gradually became aware of the difference. “It was before the depression when money didn’t consume people so, anybody but me that is,” she later recalled.
Her obsession with money followed her through first grade, where she befriended wealthy little girls with names like Mary Louise and Mildred. Again, she wasn’t exactly sure how she knew they were well off—they all went to public school and played with the same Patsy Dolls and clipped the same pictures of movie stars out of magazines like Photoplay. She only knew that she gravitated toward those girls and would say or do anything to gain their favor. When one of the rich girls wanted to play make-believe, Helen always humbly accepted the role of the respectably dressed gentleman, while her friend pretended to wear pink satin dresses and diamond-buckled pumps. Why did she put up with those rotten little creeps and their unfair rules? Simple: They were rich, and she wanted to be friends with them.
Soon enough, with the onset of the Great Depression, some of Little Rock’s wealthiest families would lose their fortunes, but the Gurleys avoided the first major disaster. On the October morning in 1929 when the stock market crashed and banks closed around the country, Ira and Cleo brought the girls into the living room to say they had managed to salvage most of their savings. Not long after he was elected to the state legislature, Ira had secured a job with the Arkansas State Game and Fish Commission, which was headquartered in the State Capitol Building, and it paid well. They always had food on the table, even if it was just the usual mashed potatoes, canned peas, and overcooked meat.
At church, Helen always had fifteen cents to put in the collection envelope, and once, when she was falling behind, Ira gave her a five-dollar bill. After church, when they went to Franke’s Cafeteria to eat roast beef, she got seconds and thirds.
Helen adored her father. Most people did. Stocky and sure of himself, he was a man’s man who played cards but didn’t smoke or drink. (It was the Prohibition era.) When Ira Gurley was home, neighborhood kids found reasons to stop by. On hot summer evenings he would hold court on the front porch with the lights off. When he laughed, everyone laughed. When he told a story—he loved unspooling long, pointless tales, like the one he sometimes told about mosquitos moving grains of sand across the Sahara Desert—they joined in. When everyone left, Helen kissed Ira on the forehead or cheek. She was Daddy’s little girl.
Cleo was the homemaker, the caretaker. Ira was the fun-maker, the thrill-seeker. Every fall he took Helen and Mary to the state fair to enjoy the Ferris wheels and clouds of cotton candy. On Sunday afternoons he brought the girls to a local airport to watch single-engine airplanes take off and land. Thanks to a connection in the statehouse, one Sunday Ira was invited to ride in a plane himself. Helen beamed with pride at the sight of her daddy, wearing goggles and a helmet, ready for flight.
Ira had the power to call in favors, and if things went according to plan, soon he would have the ability to grant them. By 1932 he was preparing to run for secretary of state, a position that would launch the family into the upper strata of Little Rock society. The family had moved to a nicer house, and for a while it seemed as though the stars were aligned. Over the summer, however, everything changed.
Helen was ten years old and in the fifth grade when Ira was killed in an elevator accident in the State Capitol Building. One of the Gurleys’ neighbors, a man who also worked at the State Capitol Building, rushed home to tell Cleo the news. They weren’t sure how the accident happened, but most likely the elevator operator had shut the gate and begun going up before noticing that someone was trying to jump on. Ira’s body was crushed between the elevator floor and the door frame. He was forty years old. Cleo was thirty-eight, and that summer she mourned for the husband she never loved with a well of grief that ran as deep as love. As Helen came to see it later, Cleo felt responsible—she thought that, in withholding her love, she somehow caused Ira’s death.
Helen (left) and Mary as young children. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)
Ira died on June 18, a Friday. That night, people flooded the Gurleys’ house. They brought heartfelt condolences, food, and flowers, and in the following days, newspapers ran front-page stories celebrating the life of Ira Marvin Gurley. Helen almost forgot to mourn her father—she was too distracted by the attention and drama. Overnight, her family had become important, famous even, and she realized that her father must have been a great man. Seeing him fixed up in a suit and laid out in his gray-velvet-lined coffin, Helen thought he looked handsome.
The next day, they drove Ira’s body to Green Forest for the funeral. It was at the graveside, along with relatives from both Cleo’s and Ira’s sides, that Helen truly understood that her daddy was gone.
The sun began to set, casting a soft pink glow on the fields in the distance. It was time to go home, but Helen wasn’t ready. On the walk back to the car, she kept breaking away from Cleo and Mary and a couple of aunts to run back to Ira’s grave and talk to her father one last time. “One last time” happened a few times: They walked, she ran, they let her. Eventually, they got the grieving little girl into the car.
HELEN AND MARY spent the next week in Osage with Cleo’s parents. Surrounded by woods and fields cleared for cattle, the one-story white farmhouse was simple but comfortable, with wide wooden floors and a main room with a big, round cast-iron wood-stove that had warmed Helen through many winter days. In the summer their grandmother set up fans to stir the breeze.
The Gurleys had spent summers here before, but this one was unlike any other. For Helen and Mary, it was a time of escape. When they returned to Little Rock, Cleo let the girls do what they pleased—anything to get through their loneliness and loss. They went to the movies several times a week, taking in double bills and single, serial features like Tarzan of the Apes and Mandrake the Magician.
In the darkness of the theater, Helen watched Fred Astaire dance with Ginger Rogers and worshipped sophisticated movie stars like Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert. Matinee showings came with a free candy bar, which Helen loved almost as much as the movies themselves.
That summer, Cleo let the girls eat more sweets than usual. At home, Mary and Helen whipped up batches of fudge and divinity, a lumpy white confection bursting with pecans. Measuring, mixing, and pouring the mixtures out to cool kept their minds occupied and their hands busy.
Cleo tried to keep her own hands busy, too. She sewed as she always had, but with new intensity, concentrating her efforts on her two daughters. Hers were no mere cookie-cutter creations: Knowing how much Helen loved Hollywood glamour, Cleo made her an evening dress that was a near replica of Colbert’s wedding gown in It Happened One Night. She also made her a brown wool coat with a beaver-fur collar and a pink taffeta dress with a blue velvet sash. Working feverishly, she sewed baby-doll dresses for Helen—and for her baby dolls. She made ruffles and ribbons, flowers and frills. She sewed to fill the time, and to mend her mind, but her husband’s sudden death had left a gaping hole in their lives that couldn’t be stitched back together.
He was here, and then he was gone, and no one really knew what happened that day in the Capitol Building. Looking for some answers later that summer, Cleo drove her gray Chevy to the south part of town, where the elevator operator lived. Helen waited in the car while Cleo talked to the man, perhaps hoping for a confession, or at least an explanation. She never got one, though she heard some theories. A pretty woman had been inside the elevator when Ira jumped—perhaps he had been trying to get her attention.
Later, Cleo found out that the legislature had set aside funding for a new, safe elevator, and a cheaper, outdated one had been purchased instead to the benefit of corrupt state officials. The state of Arkansas eventually paid a settlement, claiming at least some responsibility for the accident, but even with money that she would get from the settlement, Cleo had little security for the long term: no job, no prospects, and no plan for how she would raise two children on her own.