1965
“The girl of the fifties would stay home waiting for Mr. Right.
But the girl of the sixties will date three or four rats at once.”
—Rona Jaffe, in an interview with the Associated Press, 1965
In the fall of 1965, ABC debuted a new game show that the Browns never pitched to the network. Hosted by Jim Lange in a jacket and tie, The Dating Game invited viewers to play the voyeur as a series of career-girl types hidden behind a stage partition asked questions of three eligible bachelors who tried to score a date and a laugh from the studio audience. Sample question: “How would you go about telling your date that she had a dress that was maybe too short or too tight?” Answer: “They can’t make a dress that’s too short or too tight.”
On national TV, a single girl had to play by the rules and pick just one boy for an all-expenses-paid night on the town, but across the country girls were dating Bachelors One, Two, and Three. Why choose? Marriage was no longer the only option, and going steady had gone out of style. Rona Jaffe, newly appointed as a contributing editor at Cosmopolitan, put it best with the title of her latest book: Mr. Right Is Dead. Like her first book, The Best of Everything, her “sextet” of stories about bachelorette life arrived at just the right moment, aimed at just the right market: young, single, working women.
In New York they colonized the streets of the Upper East Side, filling up brownstones and slick apartment buildings from Sixty-Fifth Street all the way up to the Eighties, from Park Avenue to the East River, a swath of real estate that Cosmopolitan later dubbed “The Girl Ghetto.” Around 8:30 a.m. on weekdays, they stalked the sidewalks in pencil skirts and strappy heels, wearing head scarves, headbands, and hair bows the size of chinchillas. At night they gathered at singles bars like T.G.I. Friday’s and Malachy’s. From the time it opened in 1958, Malachy’s welcomed men and women, a revolutionary and brilliant business plan considering that, located on Third Avenue between Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth Streets, it was around the corner from the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Pan Am stewardesses, Madison Avenue secretaries, and sweater-clad coeds piled in for burgers, beer, and bachelors.
And in Southern California, a girl could do worse than rent a furnished apartment at one of the area’s brand-new coed singles housing complexes—also known as “passion pads”—a place like Torrance’s South Bay Club, with its tennis matches, sauna sessions, late-night dance parties, and endless opportunities to score with the opposite sex. It didn’t hurt that a typical party attracted three guys for every girl.
ACROSS THE COUNTRY, entrepreneurs were targeting bachelors and bachelorettes, and the writer Thomas Meehan was investigating the singles market for a two-part series in Cosmopolitan called “New Industry Built Around Boy Meets Girl.” Considering the population’s abundance of unmarried women and shortage of eligible men, it was no wonder so many girls were going on coed vacations like Puerto Rico Fiesta House Party, sponsored by the Singles Travel Center (part of Liberty Travel Service), and signing up with programs like Bachelor Party Tours Inc., which offered a twenty-one-day European adventure complete with gondola rides, Swiss yodeling, dinner at the Eiffel Tower, and the possibility of a marriage proposal.
Not that finding a spouse was the industry’s only raison d’être. “Many single women take cruises or head alone to resort hotels so that even if they fail to corral a husband they can at least find a man interested in having a no-strings-attached affair,” Meehan reported in his first dispatch for the September issue. “In short, it’s the sex drive of America’s forty-two million unmarried adults that has helped to create the booming Singles Industry.”
In addition to Meehan’s first dispatch, Cosmopolitan’s September issue included a book excerpt called “How Yoga Can Change Your Life,” complete with suggested stretches and poses; an illustrated feature teaching novices how to play the guitar; and an optimistic article by Lyn Tornabene about the entertainment industry called “Do Be an Actress” (“Don’t listen to the pessimists. You can do it!”), featuring the inspirational personal stories of six young stars. “What’s new this month, pussycat?” Helen wrote in September’s “Step Into My Parlour,” and the answer was everything. The September issue was essentially a 140-page self-improvement manual filled with articles that not only spoke directly to the reader, but also told her that she could do anything and be anyone . . . with a little help from Cosmopolitan, of course.
Helen was a believer in “experts,” and she rounded up advice from the best she could find. She asked Huntington Hartford to write a primer on how to start an art collection, and she tapped William Pahlmann, an interior designer known for his eclectic tastes, to help a career girl spiff up her apartment, using secondhand furniture, bargain finds, and buckets of paint.
Many a career girl also had a cat or dog waiting for her at home and needed some good advice about housebreaking—like the kind dispensed in “Pets and the Working Girl.” Mia Farrow wasn’t the only one taking her pet to work. (Her fluffy white cat, Mr. Malcolm, was a regular on the set of Peyton Place.) The writer reported that many bosses were allowing their employees to bring pets into the office.
After hearing about the pet piece, Bill Guy brought in his Yorkshire and Maltese terriers, Ginger and George. George barked a lot, but otherwise they didn’t create too much of a disturbance—and now Helen had a cute story to tell in “Step Into My Parlour.” “If you hate being away from your darlings all day,” she wrote, “you might show the article to your boss.”
Helen asked her own staffers to dream up alcoholic health drinks, promising a prize to whoever came up with the best one. They gave her forty-seven recipes, and after experimenting at home with her electric blender, she chose nine to publish alongside photos of boozy beverages garnished with strawberry and cinnamon sticks.
“Husband-Coming-Home Clothes,” the big fashion spread that Harriet had edited, also got the color treatment. The idea was that, even if a woman worked, she could still get home before her husband, mix up an iced martini, and change into a sexy outfit: say, frilly white knickers, a “rumple-proof” sari, or a slinky catsuit in leopard print. (“Of course I’m purring, pet,” read the caption for the catsuit. “You’re home early. Do I detect you’re purring too because I’m wearing such a pretty nylon and Lycra stretch tricot ‘Scat Suit’? By Vanity Fair, $30.”)
Inspired by the colorful op art of Richard Anuszkiewicz, the photographer Melvin Sokolsky wanted to experiment with patterns, layering mod fashions with mad prints and fur rugs for a trippy effect. The merchandising editor had brought in sixty-seven garments, from which they selected ten hot looks for the models for the shoot. One blond, the other brunette, they lounged and rolled around on the floor, clinging lustily to a couple of male models in suits—the husbands coming home. “I never paid much attention to them, to be honest—they’re foils,” Sokolsky says of the men. “The girls needed a male stimulus.”
Their blatant sexuality pushed the bounds of propriety, and yet, leopard print aside, these wives really weren’t so different from the housewife featured in traditional women’s magazines who managed to cook dinner, clean the house, and pretty herself up before her man walked through the door, with one major exception: They were as eager to be pleased as they were to please.
Mr. Right wasn’t dead, after all—he was just repurposed.