1965
“She had flattery down to a high art, and I learned a lot from her about getting ahead. She would never openly fight with people like the rest of us, throwing our egos around. She gave me a positive philosophy for getting along—and it really worked for me.”
—Liz Smith
A few weeks into her appointment as editor, Helen walked as if she knew where she was going. Watching her float down the hallway in one of her eye-popping Puccis, shoulders back and chest out, one realized how poorly other women carried themselves in comparison, how clumsily and inelegantly. The hallway might as well have been a runway. Helen strutted like a model channeling a movie star, maybe Barbara Stanwyck. She didn’t swing her arms idly like the younger girls on staff, partly because she was always holding something, a manuscript or a layout. But it was also just how she was: deliberate. She walked with purpose, and as her staff got to know her, they learned to watch her walk for clues.
“You could tell where she was going when she was about halfway down the hall because she had different looks for different people,” says Walter Meade. “She was always very flirty with me.” On her way to Walter’s office, Helen often stopped and said hello to his assistant, Barbara Hustedt, a college student who would be heading back to school in the fall. “How’s your summer going?” Helen might ask Barbara, who went by Bobbie. “Are you enjoying New York?” She made it a point to be welcoming, but Bobbie sensed that she didn’t really care about her answers. It was as if an egg-timer were ticking in Helen’s mind, about to ding. “She always made me nervous. Not nervous in the way that I was tongue-tied, just, ‘Let this be over so I don’t overstay my welcome,’” says Barbara (now Hustedt Crook), who also kept her chitchat to a minimum in the restroom, where Helen frequently sang in the stalls. “She really had a great ladies’ room alto,” Barbara adds. “I guess she didn’t feel self-conscious. I mean, she had a perfect sense of pitch. If she was in the john, she was humming.”
On the outside, Helen seemed to be taking everything in stride, but that summer and fall, failure was still a very real possibility. She had inherited a legendary magazine with legendary problems, and the cards were stacked against her, just as they had been stacked against her predecessor—maybe even more so now.
Richard Berlin had been reluctant to hire Helen in the first place, wary that her racy ideas would turn off regular readers of Cosmopolitan. But recognizing her marketability, Richard Deems, president of Hearst’s magazine division, and Frank Dupuy Jr., Cosmopolitan’s publisher, convinced Berlin to give her a go on the conditions that there be little money spent to promote the new Cosmopolitan and that she produce the magazine adhering to its current editorial budget—one that hadn’t changed since World War II.
Deems monitored Cosmopolitan’s editorial content and reviewed its cover designs and blurbs, determining what was appropriate and what crossed the line. Dupuy advised Helen on business matters, including budgeting and advertising, and oversaw the physical production of the magazine: contracts with the printer, page counts, and pricing.
Early on, Helen decided to raise the cover price of the magazine from thirty-five to fifty cents, but she was just scratching the surface. For Cosmopolitan to sustain its success, she needed more support from Hearst: not just a bigger budget, but the force of a major ad campaign. She also needed to cut costs, drastically. That meant penny-pinching on expense accounts for work-related meals and travel—not exactly the way into her staff’s good graces. It also meant finding affordable writers and photographers.
From the start, she sacrificed some big literary stars and had to deal with the fallout. How could she pass over a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer? asked the old guard on staff. “Well, I don’t understand it,” Helen said, after reading the story herself. She started seeking out writers on her own, without dealing with the big literary agencies. She didn’t care to talk to agents anyway.
Back at the office, people hurled names of writers and photographers at her. Half the time she found herself asking, “Who’s that?” She needed answers before she could give them to her staff, but the phone never stopped ringing. Agents called wanting assignments for their writers; writers called wanting to know what was happening with their articles.
One day, George Walsh and Harriet La Barre came in complaining about a freelancer who’d turned in a poorly written profile of the actress Julie Christie. It was garbage, unprintable, they insisted, but Helen overruled them. They should fix it, not nix it—it was too valuable as a cover blurb. “Well,” they huffed, “if Herb Mayes were here, he wouldn’t be doing it that way.”
At least George and Harriet had the guts to challenge her directly. The night she went to a Writers Guild dinner, freelancers fawned over her, asking what they could write for her, but she found out that later they flayed her behind her back. “Those two-faced bitches—all they wanted to do was criticize me,” Helen told Lyn. “Betty Friedan led the pack.”
Meanwhile, submissions kept coming in over the transom, and manuscripts and mail piled up on her desk. Many nights she stayed in her office until eleven o’clock, poring and picking over every single word, her copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style nearby. With surgical precision, she nipped here and tucked there, sanded down and reconstructed whole paragraphs, streamlining syntax and turning flaccid prose perky.
It was amazing how sloppy writers could be—how lazy! Using “this” and “that” to refer to a subject that the reader had long forgotten. She counted up repetitious words and bloodied manuscripts with her cuts and line edits, split one never-ending sentence into two sentences, sometimes three. She cast out clichés. Slash, slash, slash. Circle, circle. She added italics and (!!!) and(. . .) and CAPS.
There were still countless improvements to make, and new people she wanted to hire, but at least some of her editors and writers were working out. Privately, Liz Smith was stewing about her new boss’s mandate that she write only upbeat, accessible reviews, but she did as she was asked: So long, art-house films by the likes of Godard and Truffaut. The only New Wave her new readers cared about was the kind they could set under the dryer.
“One thing I decided,” Smith wrote in the August issue: “it is simply impossible for the average girl, who has to do her own nails, keep her clothes in order, fool with her hair, work eight hours a day, or keep a house and kids in line, to be au courant and a member of the cinema avant-garde.” Heaven knows she tried to understand the French filmmakers’ “nouvelle vague,” but, she concluded, “I guess I’m just too earthbound.”
For better or worse, she sounded just like Helen Gurley Brown.
EVERY WEEK BROUGHT countless drafts to edit, deadlines to meet, and calls to make—in her appointment diary, Helen penciled in Clairol, Shirley MacLaine, Eileen Ford. When she wasn’t on the phone, staffers constantly came by for her input. Harriet needed her to sign off on a fashion story about scanty lingerie. George, the managing editor, needed to go over the schedule. Tony, the art director, needed to show her pictures for October’s article about nose jobs. Helen assumed he would illustrate the piece with before-and-after photos, but Tony refused. He wanted something more tasteful. He showed her a black-and-white shot of a pretty blond girl in profile, her nose straight and smooth. People wanted to see only the “after,” he said.
Typically there might be around thirty articles running in an issue, but on any given day, they were working on one hundred different pieces in different stages, and three months of issues at once: closing the current issue, putting the next issue up on the layout board in the art department, and planning the month after that.
After getting a sense of all of the different material that was coming in or being generated in-house, George made up a schedule for an upcoming issue several months in advance, selecting a mix of different articles: say, an emotional feature, a health article, a how-to-get-ahead-in-your-career story, a first-person narrative, and a couple of celebrity profiles, along with whatever subjects Cosmopolitan’s regular columns and departments were covering that month. The editors overseeing beauty and fashion, for instance, worked on their schedules months ahead of time. Meanwhile, the fiction editor was thinking about which short stories and novels to buy, and the art director was reading all of the above and deciding how to illustrate each component.
Helen tried to keep up with the status of every single item by checking in regularly with her art director, managing editor, and production manager, but there were mistakes and oversights. Filling a single issue of a magazine with fresh material was hard enough. Managing three issues at once was almost impossible.
One day, George came bearing bad news: There was a hole in the August issue. “How can you have a hole when trunkloads of manuscripts arrive at a magazine every day?” Helen asked. But there they were . . . two blank pages staring back at her.
In a near panic, Helen called on her new friend, Jacqueline Susann. Helen had taken to Jackie at first sight, ever since they met on Park Avenue, and in the months since, her book Every Night, Josephine! had become a bestseller.
“Have you written anything recently?” Helen asked.
It turned out she had: Jackie had just finished “Zelda Was a Peach,” a whimsical short story about a rather naïve woman who learns about the birds and the bees, quite literally, through her indoor peach tree, named Zelda.
Helen slated “Zelda” for the summer fiction issue, along with a short story and poem from John Lennon’s new book, A Spaniard in the Works, and an excerpt from Edna O’Brien’s novel August Is a Wicked Month; a high-protein diet for girls with low willpower; a guide to “Swimnastics,” exercises anyone could do in the pool; and a fashion feature pegged to the new James Bond movie, Thunderball.
She was pleased with the photos of the Bond girls wearing various furs over various bikinis posing in front of various Bahamian scenes (a yacht, a palm tree, a white Bentley), but the real showstopper was the cover, featuring a hairy-chested Sean Connery nuzzling noses with his shirtless and slick-haired French costar, Claudine Auger. They were on the beach, but they might as well have been in bed.