1965
“Desk accessories should be female . . . sharpened pencils in a blue Delft jar, a Can Can dancer’s bronze boot for a paper-weight, a cigarette box that is glass and gilt.”
—Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Office, 1964
Helen’s real parlor appeared to be as welcoming as her theoretical one. Over the decades, she would redecorate it several times, though most people would remember the chintzy pink-and-green version featured on the cover of her 1982 book, Having It All. By then she had traded in her desk for a gilded console table, opting for floral wallpaper, a matching couch, a collection of antique dolls, and needlepoint pillows bearing messages like “I love champagne, caviar and cash.” Toward the end of her reign, it looked more like the cluttered living room of a sassy grandmother than the office of one of the most influential editors in the world.
Through all of the transformations, Helen’s office would always feel homey. And yet, like so much about her, the soft surface was misleading. Like her column, her office was a kind of a stage, and she was a great entertainer, regaling readers and staffers alike with stories about visiting Mother and Mary or attending some glamorous premiere party with David. “I always thought that when Helen decided to call her column ‘Step Into My Parlour,’ that told everything about how she operated,” Walter Meade says. “Although she was not a cold person, she was incapable of real empathy, and if you started talking about personal stuff to her, her eyes would glaze over in about two seconds.”
Just because she invited you into her parlor didn’t mean she cared to step into yours, not for long anyway. In the Seventies, Cosmopolitan’s longtime art director, Linda Cox, came to expect Helen’s brisk monthly check-ins. “About every four weeks, she would come into my office to ask how my son was. She didn’t really want to know. She probably ticked it off in her monthly calendar: ‘Ask Linda about her son.’ She was very programmed that way,” Cox says, adding that, as soon as she began to answer, Helen would start backing out of the office, loath to get caught in a conversation about nursery school. “She was just trying to keep me happy and be a good boss.” Despite her impatience for small talk, Helen was a great listener when she wanted to be. “Or,” adds Meade, “when she wanted something from you.”
From the start, David edited “Step Into My Parlour.” He also went over page proofs, read captions, and wrote cover lines. He and Helen were a great sales and marketing team. There was just one problem: Hearst wasn’t quite ready for what they were selling and marketing.
Around the same time she was putting the finishing touches on her column, Helen got a call from the Hearst Corporation’s president, Richard Emmett Berlin, concerning the July issue, which was about to go to press. Berlin didn’t mince words: He wanted her to cut a risqué cover line that David had written for the big estrogen feature.
Like the company itself, Berlin was conservative: a broad-shouldered Roman Catholic from Omaha, Nebraska, who had served in the navy during World War I, before joining Hearst as an advertising trainee and working his way up to a business manager. He had a reputation for being tough and unsentimental, the pragmatist to William Randolph Hearst’s idealist. During a period of financial floundering in the 1940s, Hearst himself had given Berlin the Herculean job of reorganizing the company. Berlin proved to be a fearsome leader, firing executives who weren’t meeting profit goals, and selling and merging properties, always with an eye on the bottom line. He was largely credited with staving off bankruptcy and turning the company into a profitable entity once again. Hearst was the visionary, but Berlin was captain of the ship, the man credited with rescuing it and keeping it afloat.
Helen had every reason to want to impress Berlin, but when he told her to cut the cover line, “The new pill that makes women more responsive to men,” she stood her ground. The estrogen piece epitomized Cosmopolitan’s new direction and demographic. It had to be advertised boldly on the cover, not hidden deep inside the issue. It was important that her girls know about this pill, which could make the very act of sex more pleasurable, but it was just as important, if not more, that they buy the magazine, and she and David both knew that this was the line that would sell it.
Sitting in her new office, Helen argued with Berlin until he finally hung up on her, but not before telling her that he expected to see a different cover line that they could run instead.
After crying at her desk, she next called David. “Why don’t you try this on Mr. Berlin?” he asked. “Take off the last two words.” They didn’t really need to say “to men.” What else would women be responsive to? Wallpaper?
Berlin approved the new blurb, and Helen learned something about power that day. In the future, she would make her points more swiftly. It was better to hang up early than to be hung up on.
ON JUNE 24, the July issue hit newsstands with the edited blurb, “The new pill that promises to make women more responsive,” right under Cosmopolitan’s title in calamine lotion pink. True to form, David wrote several eye-catching cover lines, but the main attraction was the cover girl herself. Overnight, the old Cosmopolitan had been carried out on a gurney, and the new Cosmopolitan had arrived flaunting blond hair, a flimsy gingham dress, and big breasts.
When Helen got the sales figures, she went to find Walter Meade, who was in Bill Guy’s office.
Like the rest of the staff, Walter and Bill had been living on tenterhooks. Helen’s takeover had been so sudden, longtime readers were bound to be confused. Some of the editors had worried that the new Cosmopolitan would scare away loyal readers or, worse, that people would just pass it by.
Helen, for one, never underestimated the power of a sexy woman, but the figures blew her away. The July issue sold approximately 954,000 newsstand copies, almost 260,000 more copies than June. The new Cosmopolitan was an instant success.
Walter heard her before he saw her two-stepping down the hall to Bill’s office.
“Guess how much?” she asked, breathless with excitement.
Walter and Bill exchanged a look. They didn’t know that the sales figures had come in, until Helen showed them the proof.
“I think she said, ‘We’re on the Yellow Brick Road,’” Meade says. “She was the way you get when you’ve been validated. She wasn’t silly about it, she was just sort of: ‘I told you so.’”
ONE SUMMER DAY in Winter Park, Florida, a Cosmopolitan reader picked up the July issue and stared in shock at the busty blonde on the cover. Flipping through the pages, she only became more incensed when she saw an excerpt from Aly, Leonard Slater’s biography of the late Prince Aly Khan, who had been Pakistan’s United Nations representative and who also happened to have been a notorious womanizer and the third husband of Rita Hayworth. When she had read enough about Aly’s art of lovemaking, the mother of four sat down and wrote a furious letter to Cosmopolitan’s new editor, declaring that she planned to throw the July issue into the garbage, where it belonged. “I will not have it in my home where my children might possibly read it,” she huffed, before signing off, “A former COSMOPOLITAN reader.”
Helen Gurley Brown published her letter along with many others, from readers who alternately praised the magazine and denounced it. There was the woman from Philadelphia who blasted the decision to put such a “whorish” model on the cover, and the anonymous reader who accused the magazine of reducing a woman to “nothing but a stupid, idiotic cow of a sexpot.”
Hate mail poured in. Readers canceled subscriptions, newsstand vendors refused to sell the new Cosmopolitan, and advertising giants like AT&T and Coca-Cola backed away or bailed, pulling pages. But for every reader who dropped a subscription, there were countless new ones who felt as though, finally, someone was talking directly to them. “The July issue of COSMO is alive and right up to the minute in its point of view about life as we modern women really know it to be,” wrote a reader from New York, notably shortening the magazine’s name.
“I feel that you have given career girls a ‘laughing look’ at themselves—and let’s face it, everybody needs a good chuckle once in a while,” wrote a woman from Winnipeg, Manitoba. “I am looking forward to the next issues and will recommend them to my friends.”
As Cosmopolitan gained the attention of readers across the country, in New York, editorial teams at major national magazines took note of the new girl in town, trying to figure out just how a sex book author with no previous editing experience had managed to turn a failing magazine into an overnight success.
One of those magazines was Look, a photo-driven general-interest magazine founded by an Iowan entrepreneur named Gardner “Mike” Cowles Jr. in 1937, one year after Henry Luce started Life. A seasoned veteran of the magazine industry, Cowles was no stranger to failure, having launched several magazines with life spans as short as their titles, such as Flair, a magazine for the moneyed elite, conceived of and edited by his third wife, Fleur Fenton Cowles. He ultimately struck gold with Look, a tabloid-style picture magazine that, under the influence of Fleur’s sophisticated sensibility, evolved into a hugely influential biweekly with a focus on entertainment and politics, including early in-depth reporting on the civil rights movement. In the mid-Sixties, Look boasted a circulation of 8.5 million, thanks in no small part to Samuel O. “Shap” Shapiro, the magazine’s vice president and circulation director.
Shapiro was a powerhouse in the world of circulation, a man who was brimming with ideas on how to sell magazines, but even he had never seen anything quite like the newsstand sales figures for Cosmopolitan’s July issue, which he addressed at a weekly management meeting with Cowles and a handful of Look’s top editors and department heads.
A young editor named Patricia Carbine (Pat, for short) was in the magazine’s conference room when conversation turned to Cosmopolitan, Hearst, and Helen Gurley Brown. Like the others in the room, Carbine was familiar with Sex and the Single Girl, which she had skimmed enough to know that she wasn’t a fan.
“I thought she was talking about somebody I didn’t know and didn’t want to be,” says Carbine, who was then the highest-ranking female editor at a national general-interest magazine. “I remember an emphasis of hers was that if one knew how to manipulate men in the business setting, then your life would work out more happily because you would be more desirable and attractive, and that would be wonderful for your career. My existence in my working world bore virtually no resemblance to what she was talking about, and I was working in a world of men.”
Despite her personal ambivalence about reading Cosmopolitan, Carbine was intrigued by the idea of a magazine for single women, and so were her male colleagues. When Cowles asked Shapiro if he had any insight to offer on Helen Gurley Brown’s impressive debut, Shapiro wondered aloud if the success of her first issue wasn’t simply a fluke—she had ridden in on the coattails of Sex and the Single Girl, but she couldn’t exploit that formula forever.
“What she had managed to do was turn her book into a magazine—into her first issue of the magazine,” Carbine says. “She had done it, and she had done it very successfully, but what else did she have to say?”
How did she do it? Cowles had asked.
Shapiro’s question was more to the point: Could she do it again?