Enter Helen

1968

“We just wanted one cover with somebody with small breasts. It was sort of chic at the time because we all went braless, but Helen wanted her bosoms. And man, we never got one sock thrown to us.”

—Barbara Hustedt Crook

By 1968, everyone knew the ideal image of That Cosmopolitan Girl. On covers, she wore very little clothing—an orange boa and nothing else, or green crocheted pajamas with peekaboo holes—but whatever she wore was bright. Her style was sexy. Given a blouse, she might lose the top button. Given a tunic-and-trousers combo, she might lose the trousers. Her smile was sultry, not innocent. Her stance was confident, and her gaze was direct. As a rule, her breasts were big, and her hair was long and tousled, though occasionally she wore it in a doorstopper beehive or a heap of sausage curls or a quirkily askew updo studded with tiny pink bows. Styles shifted, but Helen remained adamant about one rule. As she later told her art department: “Girls must ALWAYS look man-loving.”

For the cover Helen used only professional models, but inside the book she wanted to picture more “civilian girls,” at least one a month, especially for beauty stories and lifestyle features on subjects like food and decorating. In general, civilian girls were great for trend stories and career roundups, but no matter the subject, they had to look like the Cosmo Girl, attractive and ambitious. After Valley of the Dolls came out, Helen ran such a story about girls in publishing. Rex Reed wrote the piece (after firing him as a film critic, Helen hired him on a freelance basis to write other features), which spotlighted Helen’s former book publicist at Bernard Geis Associates, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who posed in a photo alongside her bestselling author Jacqueline Susann. “For a jazzy company, which BGA is acknowledged by competitors to be, Letty is perfect,” Reed wrote. “She projects the right image, gives the feeling of now.”

In 1968, Helen reached out to another young woman who projected the right image and gave the feeling of now: Gloria Steinem. A few years before in Newsday, Harvey Aronson anointed her the World’s Most Beautiful Byline. “That’s it, that’s her, that’s who. That’s Gloria Steinem, the sweet belle of success, the queen of the slicks, and the sweetheart of the slickers,” he wrote breathlessly. “That’s Gloria Steinem, a career girl who has conquered New York in print and in person.” For the July issue, Helen asked Gloria to conquer the subject of her hair for a larger feature all about brunettes. Cosmo would illustrate the package with photos of famous brunettes throughout history, including Gloria herself.

Despite her initial misgivings about writing for Cosmo, Gloria took the assignment for one simple reason—she needed the cash. She and her roommate had just moved from a cramped midtown studio into a more expensive apartment in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of the Upper East Side. It was a beautiful space, occupying the parlor floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone on a leafy street off Park Avenue, but the rent was high, and Gloria was tired of worrying about money. “I used to get up in the morning and think, Oh, God, we spent ten dollars. Where are we going to get ten dollars?” Steinem says.

Cosmo paid well, so she took the job, sat down at her Olivetti, and pounded out the deepest thoughts she could muster about her hair. She liked it long and loose, and the previous summer, she had bleached two sections of it blond to frame her face.

“I always wear a center part,” read the final article, which bore Helen’s signature italics; “it’s my trademark.”

GLORIA WASN’T THE FIRST of her friends to appear in Cosmopolitan. A few months before, the magazine had profiled her roommate, Barbara Nessim, in an article about working girls with irregular hours. (Barbara, an artist, was featured alongside a professional bassoon player and an owner of a pop-art necktie business.) But unlike other “civilian girls” whose pictures ran in Cosmo, Gloria was a semi-celebrity—she had been a recognizable name ever since she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show. It wasn’t the first time she would be posing as a model, either.

In the early Sixties, working as a contributing editor for Glamour, Gloria frequently posed as the girl model, or model girl. In 1964, when Glamour sent her to London to interview an emerging star named Vidal Sassoon in his Bond Street salon, she wasn’t just the reporter, but the girl in the hairdresser’s chair—she was photographed with a sleek new bob. When Glamour decided to do a story on how to throw a swinging holiday party, a writer and photographer followed Gloria home to the cramped midtown studio she and Barbara shared at the time and captured their effortless cool. “Gloria and Barbara didn’t try to make their apartment into something it isn’t,” Glamour reported. They simply strung up some twinkly white lights, served their guests hot dogs and champagne, put on the Beatles, and frugged their hearts out. “Dear Gloria Steinem,” wrote one reader from Atlanta, “How do I get to be Gloria Steinem?”

While working for Glamour, Gloria wrote witty articles offering readers advice on how to put up with a difficult man, how to pick up a man on the beach, and how to identify their own personality type and then change it. (When asked about her type, she quipped that she aspired to be “Audrey Hepburn in the CIA . . . with bosoms.”) She also landed assignments for Vogue and the New York Times, but the truth was that the career she had cobbled together for herself bore little resemblance to the kind of important writing she once envisioned doing after graduating from Smith magna cum laude. By day she might be writing about textured stockings or tropical vacations, but after hours she was volunteering for political campaigns, attending antiwar demonstrations, and fund-raising for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, a group of migrant farmers led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

It wasn’t until she started writing for New York, a magazine that she helped found with editor Clay Felker, that her life and her lifework truly began to merge in her column, “The City Politic.” By the summer of 1968, she would be covering the upcoming elections as well as fund-raising and campaigning for presidential candidate Senator George McGovern, whom she would soon join at the Democratic National Convention. But all of that was still a few months away when Cosmo came calling.

When she originally agreed to do the Cosmo shoot, Gloria thought it would be with the former Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown, who had retired the previous year to start an acting career. (One of her first assignments for New York would be to profile Brown, who later claimed that they had an affair, in his memoir, Out of Bounds.)

“I knew him,” Gloria says now. “Also, nobody told me that I had to wear anything except my own clothes.”

Gloria found a scenario completely different from the one she had agreed to when she arrived at the studio of a young British photographer named Gordon Munro, who worked out of a building at 100th Street and Fifth Avenue. Instead of the football player, Cosmo wanted her to pose with the TV actor Vince Edwards, who showed up sporting dark sideburns and a shamrock-green turtleneck, which he would wear for the photo. Though Gloria was under the impression she, too, would be wearing her own clothes, the magazine had another plan for her, and it involved “some truly ridiculous costume with, like, snakes around your breasts or something like that,” she says.

Gloria refused to wear the first outfit, but she grudgingly put on the second: a low-cut purple romper with bloomer-style shorts, black stockings, and a bejeweled serpent arm cuff. “I remember her saying, ‘You mean I really got to do this?’” says Munro, who ultimately had to satisfy Cosmo’s beauty editor, and Helen herself. “I had to say, ‘Yeah, you do,’ even though it was the editors who were standing over me with the ax. Once she sort of realized that she was going to do it, she did it, and she was great.”

Looking back now, Gloria realizes she could have refused the whole setup. She could have walked out, but she stayed. Why? “I’m trying to think of an analogy where the whole thing is wrong and you try to fight for details, when actually you should just forget the whole thing?” she offers. “But it was very difficult. The whole thing was set up, and, you know . . . It was a case in which I was a mouseburger, I think. I just went along with it.”

If it had been even a year later, she probably would have done things differently. For that matter, the photographer might have done things differently, too. “I didn’t really know who Gloria Steinem was at the time, to be honest,” says Munro; he was more familiar with Edwards, who played a doctor on TV’s Ben Casey. His biggest concern was figuring out how to create an interesting composition using a white set, two models, and a cluster of green grapes—Cosmo’s nod to Cleopatra. “They had this idea that Gloria was supposed to be this brunette bombshell, and she was enticing this famous man,” Munro says. “She was supposed to be feeding the grapes to him, but [Edwards] didn’t like that idea, so luckily it didn’t happen.”

Munro appeased Edwards, but this picture wasn’t about him. It was all about her. Helen wanted a story about a brunette bombshell whose power to entice men rivaled any blonde’s. Egypt had Cleopatra. Hollywood had Elizabeth Taylor. New York had Gloria Steinem.

Munro tried to pose her so that she would be comfortable, but the setup wasn’t working. “She needed to be able to sit comfortably, which meant she needed a chair to sit in. So, Vince Edwards, I turned him into that chair,” Munro says. He told Edwards to bend one knee and to put his arm over it, and Gloria nestled in. Leaning back into her actor-chair, she gazed into the camera. “Chin down,” Munro instructed her. “A little bit more. Now look up at me.” POP!

When Gloria first walked into the studio in her coat and large sunglasses, Munro thought she was attractive, though he wasn’t crazy about long hair. But under the lights, he began to appreciate her beauty: how her blond highlights perfectly framed her face and the feminine way her wrist bent to hold those stupid grapes by Edwards’s ear. He felt a familiar stirring, which he experienced when he connected deeply with a subject he was photographing.

“I tend to fall in love for a moment. I definitely was able to form a relationship with her,” Munro says nearly fifty years later. “How two-way a street it was, I don’t know, but I started to see all the parts of her, the attributes, the shape of her face . . . it began to appeal to me more and more until the picture happened. And then she left.”

A FEW MONTHS later, the July issue hit stands, featuring the beauty story, “Brunettes: A Touch of Evil Is Required . . .”

Seeing herself in that horrid purple romper dress cuddled up with Edwards, Gloria was aghast. Then she read the display copy, which introduced her as a “onetime Playboy bunny.” “It was a nightmare,” Gloria says now. “I remember not going out of the house when those photographs were in. The whole time it was on the newsstands, I thought, Oh, my God, somebody I know is going to see this.”

Munro felt so bad about the whole shoot that he offered to take a simple, black-and-white portrait of Gloria shortly before she left his studio that day. “I wanted to make amends for being the guilty party—taking this picture that made her feel so awkward. I thought she was such a beautiful woman, and after I learned about her, I realized how incongruous it was—what my picture was all about,” he says.

That picture mortified Gloria. It baffled Munro. But to Helen, it must have made perfect sense. Gloria was everything she admired in a woman: beautiful, brainy, and beloved by men. What better role model for That Cosmopolitan Girl?