1967
“The trouble with most teen magazines is that they’re too parental. They always seem to be talking down and teaching. Eye won’t be that way because we’re all nearly the same age.”
—Susan Szekely, “Nobody over Thirty,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 11, 1967
They came by thumb and by Greyhound bus, braless and barefoot, with feathers and flowers in their hair. Some came because they were disillusioned with the war or with the fight for civil rights or with their parents, and they wanted to be with other people who understood their ideals. Others came because it sounded like fun. They came for free food and free love and free drugs and free music. They came to be free. In 1967, spring break turned into the Summer of Love as tens of thousands of high school kids and college students from all over the country flocked to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, home to Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and a new breed of young hipsters who called themselves hippies.
That May, Hunter S. Thompson explained their kind to readers of the New York Times—“The word ‘hip’ translates roughly as ‘wise’ or ‘tuned in.’ A hippy is somebody who ‘knows’ what’s really happening, and who adjusts or grooves with it,” he wrote—but by then, images of flower children saturated the media, beckoning more than 75,000 young people to join a revolution that started long before they got there.
They’d read about the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where Timothy Leary told a crowd of thousands to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” poet Allen Ginsberg led a Hindu chant, and the Grateful Dead expanded minds and the future of music in a cloud of incense and marijuana smoke. They had heard about the Diggers, a group of anarchists and guerrilla theater performers who spread their anticapitalist message by salvaging other people’s trash to provide the masses with everything from free stew to Free Stores, where nothing was for sale and everything was for the taking.
By July, the Haight was overrun with gawking tourists and television crews wanting to catch a glimpse of “Hippieland” and the thousands of runaways, many of them barely into their teens, who slept in the park and loitered in the streets, hungry and half-conscious. By October, the same month that Hair premiered off-Broadway, the hippie was dead—symbolically, at least. As a final protest, the Diggers led a mock funeral through the streets to mourn “Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media.” They rejected the commercialization of their culture, but more important, as one of their members, Mary Kasper, later explained, “We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, don’t come out. Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live.”
The revolution spread with every joint passed, every postage stamp laced with LSD, every thumb lifted, and every subscription to a new rock magazine that promised to document and celebrate both the music and the movement it spawned. In his editor’s letter for the debut issue of Rolling Stone, which featured John Lennon on the cover, the young publisher Jann Wenner captured the cynical idealism of a generation: “We hope that we have something here for the artists and the industry, and every person who ‘believes in the magic that can set you free,’” he wrote, wary of “sounding like bullshit” should he explain its mission much further.
As promised, Rolling Stone spread the magic around the country—along with the message of a movement and a generation that advertisers wanted to reach. In some ways, selling anything to hippies was counterintuitive, but that didn’t stop the biggest corporations in the world from trying to cash in on their culture. “If you want to swing college, come to the type-in,” Smith-Corona quipped in an ad for its new electric portable typewriters. “Pick a flower. Power. Do a daisy. Crazy. Plant your stems in panty hose,” read an ad for Hanes nylons in daisy-printed, fluorescent colors. Canada Dry winked at Timothy Leary with its slogan for Wink, “Join the cola dropouts,” while Diet Rite Cola invited everyone to “Join the Youth Quake,” not just kids.
At Hearst, Helen Gurley Brown was busy creating a new glossy aimed at the bearded-and-braided set, when she wasn’t working on Cosmo. A kind of Life for college kids, Eye would target young men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty, part of the booming youth market that Richard Deems estimated to be about 26 million strong. He appointed Helen as Eye’s supervising editor, until they got the magazine off the ground.
One of their first hires was a thirty-year-old art director named Judith (or Judy) Parker, who had overseen the design of New York magazine when it still appeared in the World Journal Tribune. Tall and thin with translucent white skin and her long, black hair parted and plaited in twin braids, she was beloved by artists and musicians in New York’s counterculture scene. Soon after hiring Judy, Helen found Eye’s editor in Susan Szekely, a twenty-seven-year-old Bryn Mawr graduate who would soon change all of her stationery to reflect her married name, Susan Edmiston. When Hearst plucked her from the New York Post, Susan had been writing her own nationally syndicated column, called “Teen Talk.” (Around one hundred pounds with dirty-blond bangs, she could have passed as a teenager herself.) Like her supervisor, Susan had no prior editing experience when she took the helm, but she had established herself as a national authority on all things teen, from the mods to the Monkees, and Helen desperately needed a guide.
In September, Hearst announced its plans for Eye to the press, and soon afterward, Susan was featured in a big write-up by Eugenia Sheppard in Women’s Wear Daily, along with a taste of her plans to reach the Now Generation, with the help of “a dozen girls and men all under 30,” as Sheppard reported, making no mention of their much older supervising editor. Around the same time, the young staff moved into their new offices, located in an old art gallery just south of Washington Square Park on LaGuardia Place.
Over the next few weeks, Susan threw herself into the epic adventure of editing a magazine for teens, rounding up material for the March issue, Eye’s debut. Pete Hamill made a provocative case for drafting women into war, Warren Beatty pondered the pros and cons of the Pill, Lisa Wilson (daughter of Sloan Wilson, who wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) wrote about why she dropped out of college in the States to study abroad in Europe, and Eye’s advice columnist answered questions from young readers, hungry for independence.
Unlike Cosmo, which sounded like a single person with a singular voice, Eye sounded like the generation that created it—and this was a generation that had absolutely nothing to do with Helen Gurley Brown. Then again, she never claimed to be an expert on this crowd. Other than offering some line edits, Helen gave Susan free rein to assign and edit the features she wanted.
Her real issue was with the look of the magazine. Helen wanted it to be slicker and sexier—like Rolling Stone meets young Cosmo. From the start, she butted heads with the art director, who wanted the design and photography in the magazine to be as experimental as the culture it would be covering. For the first issue, Judy planned a pullout psychedelic poster—perfect for tacking on a dorm room wall—and color-saturated photos capturing the trippy, battery-powered electric dresses of designer Diana Dew. (Among other moody settings, she sent the photographer to shoot models “in the quiet setting of Woodstock, an artists’ colony in New York State.” The music festival named for the town was still almost two years away.)
Judy also worked on a profile of the model Cathee Dahmen, who was known for her kooky, curly black hair—the result of a permanent that made her look like a cross between Harpo Marx and Betty Boop. On the day of her shoot for Eye, Dahmen wore a men’s dress shirt with a tie—and at one point, no makeup. Judy loved how she looked naturally and wanted to run the “before” picture of her bigger than the “after,” but Helen wouldn’t hear of it. “Helen and Richard Deems would come down in the limousine and would look at the layouts,” Susan Edmiston says, “and they would insist that she use the photo with the makeup as the full-page photo.”
Susan stayed out of it. She had her work cut out for her conceiving, assigning, and editing so many articles, but sometimes she heard Helen and Judy arguing in the art department. “I was not really directly involved with the conflict, and, in fact, Judy maybe didn’t feel that I supported her enough,” she says now. “I believe that Deems and Helen wanted me to oppose Judith, and Judy wanted me to stand with her against them. I was not directly involved in the conflict. I just kept my head down and did my work.”
UNLIKE Cosmo, Eye didn’t have a prototypical girl. The only constant in the models’ looks from month to month was a shot of irreverence. Headlines were flip: “Should a Proper Young Woman of Impeccable Upbringing Wear an Ankle Bracelet?” read an April feature on hippie anklets. In fashion stories, beautiful people modeled irony and an anything-goes mentality as much as the clothes. Girls wore ties and military fatigues, their hair loose and free. Guys wore necklaces and pink-lensed glasses. Occasionally the magazine ran a beauty feature like “Follow the Dots,” a guide to painting on faux beauty marks and freckles, but for the most part the emphasis was on being made-down instead of being made-up. Trying too hard, an overabundance of hairspray, and skintight dresses were on the way out. Authenticity and earthiness were in. “You could call it cosmetics of the soul—the art of being as beautiful inside as outside,” the rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote of the latest beauty trend.
Eye’s fashion editor, Donna Lawson (now Donna Lawson Wolff), wanted her section to reflect the counterculture, not the Cosmo culture—Janis Joplin was her idea of a style icon—but Helen wasn’t having it.
“I had a meeting with her once—I think Judith was there—and she told me how wrong she felt the beauty and the fashion was,” Donna says now. “She tried to explain, and I held fast to my point of view, because I was young and pretty obstinate, but I really felt it should express the kids at the time, and she disagreed: They looked poor, they looked unkempt.
“She was from another generation, and she just didn’t get it,” Donna adds. “It was beyond her comprehension what we were trying to do.”
TWO YEARS INTO her reign, Helen knew exactly what the ideal Cosmo Girl looked like—unfortunately, her art department did not. Many afternoons at Cosmopolitan, she held a new layout in her hands, crumpled it up, and hurled it into the trash can. If she didn’t like a photo, she didn’t ever want to see it again, and her photo editors learned not to try to show her the rest of the take. If she didn’t like the look of the girl or the style of the dress, it was out.
Nothing angered her more than a failed attempt that she actually had to run, like the August 1967 cover featuring Raquel Welch, who emerged as the sex symbol of the decade after starring in the 1966 adventure film One Million Years B.C. Playing a curvaceous cavewoman named Loana, Welch uttered only a few lines, but no one cared what she was saying. Audiences cared about what she was wearing: a teeny-weeny doeskin bikini that clung to all the right places.
With her new role as “Lust” in the campy British comedy Bedazzled, Welch was an obvious choice for a Cosmo cover girl, but the images from her session with William Connors left Helen cold: He’d given her head shots when what she really wanted to see was Raquel’s great body. Wild-haired and wearing nothing more than a patterned orange Fieldcrest towel, Raquel oozed sex appeal from the waist up, but the whole reason for dressing her in a short towel was to show her off from the waist down. “Raquel Welch was to have been shot in full figure,” Helen wrote in a memo to her art department after the issue went to press. “This was an opportunity to do something different on the cover.”
Unfortunately, against the yellow background, the orange towel looked washed out. Plus, they already did bright yellow for April’s cover, and they had another yellow one planned for the fall. “From lack of communication and because so many people were involved, I didn’t get what I asked for,” Helen fumed. She didn’t care that some of their regular photographers complained about matching the models’ outfits to the no-seam background paper used on set. She wanted hot models in hot “costumes” posing against hot colors—red-on-red, orange-on-orange, pink-on-pink—a different one every month so that readers would know instantly that a brand-new issue of Cosmopolitan was out.
On weekends, David tried to lead Helen away from her typewriter, but it was no use—she never stopped working. She went to bed thinking about the magazine and woke up with new ideas about how to make it better, more visually stimulating.
She wanted more color, more optimism, more energy. She wanted more smiling girls who looked, as she wrote in another memo, “SOFTLY SEXY,” as opposed to Playboy girls who looked “‘chippily’ sexy” or Glamour girls who sometimes looked like tomboys. She wanted more originality in the styling of models—bare arms were sexy, but so were furs and feather boas—and in the magazine overall. Instead of hiring professional models for lifestyle stories, why not use more real-life girls? Instead of letting the article dictate the artwork, why not try it the other way around? A stunning nude photo, a sexy picture of two people kissing, a bold psychedelic design—anything could be a potential launching pad for a story idea.
In general, she wanted “more boy-and-girl-together-pictures” showing couples kissing, hugging, and holding hands—and she wanted the chemistry to feel real. Why use a homosexual male model when they could hire a heterosexual one? The point was for the models to look like they enjoyed sex—and like they were about two seconds away from having it. “We are the one magazine for women which can show so much love,” she reminded her staff. And while men were an important part of the package, she also wanted to picture beautiful women with a sexual identity and desire that were all their own.
Perhaps she explained what she wanted best to the photographer David McCabe, who walked into Cosmo’s offices right around this time to hear about his first assignment for the magazine—a lingerie shoot—straight from Helen herself.
The fact that she, and not the art director, would be the one briefing him about the assignment was the first surprise. In his years working for magazines like Vogue and Mademoiselle, Mc-Cabe almost never met the editors-in-chief—“they were always off somewhere in an office being treated like gods,” he says—but Helen was hands-on. And she was very clear about what she wanted for the shoot.
“David,” she said silkily, after they had sat down, “I want you to make these girls look, you know, really . . . wet.”
McCabe stared at the prim woman before him, unsure if he had heard her correctly.
“You mean, you want me to shoot them in the shower?” he asked.
“No, silly boy,” she purred. “I want you to make them look excited.”