1968
‘“We had all these young assistants who were basically secretaries, except they couldn’t type or take shorthand . . . they were fertile ground for makeovers.”
—former Cosmopolitan beauty editor Mallen De Santis
Many mornings, Helen and David took a cab together to work. He dropped her off at her office, and then continued on to his own, a few blocks away. When they didn’t head in together, Helen took the bus. She loathed the idea of wasting money on a private chauffeur or a taxi for herself, but that wasn’t the only reason why she rode the bus. She wanted to be with her girls: to see what they wore, where they went, what they read. She boarded hoping to see women with their noses buried deep inside Cosmopolitan, but her market research met with mixed results.
Millions of women read Cosmo, but many preferred not to admit it—including Nora Ephron, who took care to remove her glove if she was reading Cosmo on the bus so that her fellow passengers would see her wedding ring. “I have not been single for years, but I read Cosmopolitan every month,” she confessed in her 1970 Esquire profile of Helen Gurley Brown. “I see it lying on the newsstands and I’m suckered in. ‘How to Make a Small Bosom Amount to Something,’ the cover line says, or ‘Thirteen New Ways to Feminine Satisfaction.’ I buy it, greedily, hide it deep within my afternoon newspaper, and hop on the bus, looking forward to—at the very least—a bigger bra size and a completely new kind of orgasm. Yes, I should know better. After all, I used to write for Cosmopolitan and make this stuff up myself.”
In fact, when Nora was still a cub reporter at the New York Post, Helen was the first editor to ever offer her a magazine assignment: an article skewering New York’s famously catty fashion rag. When “Women’s Wear Daily Unclothed” appeared in Cosmopolitan’s January 1968 issue, it prompted threats of a lawsuit from Fairchild—a sure sign that Ephron had arrived. (Years later, she wrote to thank Helen for giving her the assignment, which she said was “one of the first things I ever did in which I found my voice as a writer.”) The same year, Mallen De Santis asked her to undergo a makeover for the magazine.
Nora wrote about her redo in the May 1968 issue in a sequence of short, funny diary entries that accompanied her before-after transformation. In her article, “Makeover: The Short, Unglamorous Saga of a New, Glamorous Me . . . ,” she gave a blow-by-blow account of the experience, from deciding on a new “nighttime look” with Mallen to arriving at Lupe’s hair salon the following day to be styled by the famous high-society Spanish hairdresser. Flourishing a pair of solid-gold scissors, Lupe told Nora his vision for her hair: “de ringlets in de front and de shaggy in de back.”
Nora allowed “de ringlets in de front,” but ultimately nixed “de shaggy in de back” because it would take two years to grow back her hair if he chopped it all off. Three hours later, with her hair washed, cut, and set with rollers, she joined Mallen and the photographer in a limo headed to his studio, where the makeup artist would take over. After examining her closely, he decided she was “not pretty-pretty” and pointed out everything that was wrong with her face. (“Told me my face too narrow, eyebrows too arched, chin too long,” she later recounted.) He then went about correcting it through the magic of makeup and contour.
At the end of the day, Nora left the photographer’s studio with glued-on lashes and bright red lips, as well as a seemingly wider face, softer brows, and shorter chin. She wrote the last entry of her makeover journal the next morning: “Ringlets have lost curls. False eyelashes sitting in medicine cabinet. Old me back in the mirror—the last person I expected to see.”
IN 1968, NORA Ephron already had a recognizable byline, but many of the makeovers that ran in Cosmo were of complete unknowns. For her makeover models, Mallen De Santis didn’t go through an agency. She simply walked down the hall.
Day after day, Cosmo’s young assistants came to the office with oily skin, split ends, and bad dye jobs. “What’ll I do? My hair’s a mess,” a receptionist named Sandy said one day, poking her head into the beauty department. After getting her brown hair professionally streaked with blond highlights, Sandy spent one too many nights home alone with a bleach bottle, and now her hair was three different shades of bad. Sandy’s before-and-after makeover story ran with the headline “The Great Hair Disaster . . . And How to Recover!”
Everyone was a potential model, and once in a while, Mallen used someone truly beautiful, like Cosmo’s art director, Lene Bernbom, who insisted on hiding her thick blond hair under a hat with a chinstrap. (Mallen’s stylist gave her a fat ponytail with Dynel sausage curls by Tovar-Tresses.) Mostly, though, she went for plain girls, and the more lackluster the better. “The simple process was to make them look as awful as possible for the ‘before’ pictures and then make them absolutely glamorous for the ‘after’ pictures,” Mallen says. “The best makeovers were the very bland, mousy girls who you could take and really pile on the makeup and the hair—then they’d look wonderful.”
Some girls needed a complete overhaul, like Lynn Foss, “a pretty little mouse of a girl who had all the potential of a sexpot,” according to Cosmo, “but whose fires were banked by her captain-of-the-girls’-hockey-team exterior.” After being further undone for her “before” shot, she was shipped off—along with a blue-sequined dress and a frightening black wig—to the photographer’s studio where she was redone by a superstar hair-and-makeup team on loan from Revlon.
Other girls simply needed some fine-tuning and fixing. When Barbara Hustedt walked into a metal stanchion in the subway, chipping her tooth, Mallen saw an opportunity to bring her to a dentist who had just started using epoxy resin as a tooth filler. Someone else’s big Dumbo ears were the perfect excuse for a surgical procedure called otoplasty. Another assistant had terrible acne that was cleared up after several visits to Christine Valmy’s skin-care salon. After her redo story ran, Cosmo received more than a thousand letters about it.
Why use real-life models? The idea was that Cosmo readers had a lot in common with Cosmo staffers and contributors—“same age, same dreams, same potential,” Helen explained in one of her columns. But they didn’t. Not really. Cosmo’s core readers were simple, working-class girls who considered the magazine to be their bible and Helen Gurley Brown to be their savior. Cosmo’s editors were sophisticated, college-educated women and men who already knew where to put the dessert fork on a dinner table.
Mallen worked for Helen for almost twenty-five years. During that time, she dramatically expanded Cosmo’s beauty coverage to include cosmetics as well as plastic surgery, dentistry, nutrition, and fitness—all important fields for advertisers. She became an expert at channeling Helen’s voice through her ear, and she instinctively knew what Helen wanted for articles. Mallen pitched and guided many of them herself.
Are there any stories she’s particularly proud of now? “No,” she says, after a pause, “I don’t think so.
“All the senior editors knew it was kind of a lark, which did not mean that we didn’t do our jobs very well,” she adds. “My personal life and personal belief had very little to do with the job. It was frivolous, and a lot of my friends thought it was silly that I was working there, but it was a good job. I enjoyed it, I was well paid, and that was it.”