Bad girls go everywhere
THE LIFE OF HELEN GURLEY BROWN
1. growing up gurley, and a girl
Before it became famous as the birthplace of Helen Gurley Brown, Green Forest, Arkansas, a tiny town in the Ozarks, was known principally for two things: its individualistic traditions and its bawdy folklore. It seems a fitting place, then, for Helen Marie Gurley to have entered the world on February 18, 1922. Years later, as a young adult struggling to survive financially on a secretary's salary and then, even later, as a successful writer and editor enjoying financial security, Brown largely denied any connection to the place of her birth. Green Forest lacked the cachet claimed by many of her equally successful contemporaries who hailed from cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. And her own Horatio Alger-like approach to success left little room or incentive for her to delve too deeply into the significance of her life as an Arkansan.
Nevertheless, reflective or not, in her appreciation for individual accomplishment and in her celebration of sexuality, Helen Gurley carried forward some of the traditions she hardly realized she had inherited. In her conscious mind she remained haunted by certain aspects of her young life: nagging poverty, the stark contrast she felt between the everyday life of her family and community and the widely publicized lives of the Hollywood stars with whom she was enamored, and the ways in which her family, in particular her mother, seemed perpetually to hang back from, rather than embrace, life. From an early age she envisioned herself on the run, and that metaphor would shape her decision making and her sense of her self, her family, and her past for her entire life.
In some ways and perhaps largely unwittingly, Helen's mother, Cleo, would plant the idea in Helen's mind that family and community held one back rather than provided a framework for success in life. Cleo Fred Sisco Gurley had been born in the tiny community of Alpena, Arkansas, the oldest of nine children and an intellectually promising child from the start. Saddled with family responsibilities from a young age, Cleo was delighted when her parents managed to let her move to Green Forest to live with an aunt and attend high school. One of her high school teachers convinced the family that Cleo was simply too bright not to attend college so, for what amounted to "one glorious semester," she enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. But her family called her back home to help out with her younger siblings for a time, and her promised return to college never materialized.
A young woman could obtain respectable employment as a teacher in rural Arkansas without a college degree, so to support the family Cleo settled in to riding three miles by horse each day to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Reuhel. After four years of teaching, she met fellow teacher Ira Marvin Gurley, who attended the Cumberland Law School in Tennessee while teaching in Gardner, Arkansas. Cleo married Ira Gurley rather than her high school beau, Leigh Bryan, because Gurley was more in keeping with her family's expectations: he hunted, fished, exhibited a certain charm, and offered greater promise as a provider than did the bookish but, in her mind, more compatible Bryan. It was a decision she would long regret.
By the time of Helen's birth, Cleo had, at her husband's insistence but much to her chagrin, left her job to raise Helen and Helen's older sister, Mary. Cleo subsequently, and even visibly, bore the burden of having relinquished rather than taken on significant life decisions, largely through a process of resignation. She resigned herself to leaving college to meet her family's needs, resigned herself to marrying Ira Gurley when she preferred another suitor, and resigned herself to giving up a meaningful career when her husband requested that she do so.
Helen discovered her mother's discontents in piecemeal fashion, as the family was unaccustomed to talking about such things. They knew or spoke little about their ancestors, whose life stories might have shed some light on female aspirations among the Ciscos. Prior to Cleo's death in 1980, Helen participated in an effort to recover some basic facts about the family, but overall they appeared satisfied with a mere sketch of who and what came before them. Believed to be of Spanish lineage, and descending from a colonial-era immigrant named DeSesco who settled first in the Carolinas, the Ciscos would migrate to Arkansas by way of Kentucky and Tennessee. On the Gurley side, Helen descended from a seemingly quite wealthy great-great-grandfather, whose will, probated on December 2, 1865, four days before the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, bequeathed an abundance of land in addition to thirteen slaves to his wife and ten children. Little more is known of Helen's paternal roots or f-amily, even those who lived closer to Helen's own time, as she grew up in closer contact with her mother's family than her father's. She spent her infancy near her mother's family, but in 1923 Ira Gurley completed law school and won election to the Arkansas state legislature. The family moved to Little Rock, the state capital, roughly 120 miles, and in some ways worlds away, from Green Forest.
3.David Brown
Through her late twenties and early thirties, and assisted by her single and married friends, Helen Gurley dated widely, keeping a sharp eye on the pool of eligible bachelors in Los Angeles. By thirty-five, she determined she was ready not just for another affair but, she hoped, for a long-term commitment. But while age may have compromised her embrace of single life, by no means had it compromised her desire or determination to marry someone of substance. She considered only men of means, successful men, and stayed clear of "ordinary men [she] might have to help support" along with her family. One morning, as she walked for exercise with her friend Ruth Shandorf, Gurley listened intently as her companion described David Brown, a film studio executive and former New Yorker. Shandorf explained that Brown's second marriage had recently ended and that he was "on the market," and Gurley felt an immediate compatibility, not simply for an affair but for marriage: "It wasn't love at first sight for me. It was love b-efore first sight. I had fallen in love with his credentials: forty-two, brainy (people said he was brilliant), glamorous movie executive, good looking, terrific personality." Believing she understood marriage better than most people engaged in the practice, and keenly aware of her own priorities, Gurley was undeterred by Brown's two failed marriages. She asked Ruth for an introduction. Helen Gurley had time to sit with a description of David for some time before she encountered the real thing. Following their initial conversation, Shandorf warned Gurley that she ought to postpone the proposed blind date for a while as David was in a "starlet phase," dating widely and not ready for a sensible (that is, marriage-bound) woman like Helen.
Helen continued to go out with other men but kept thinking about meeting David. A year later, Shandorf let her know that the time seemed right. After one evening's introduction at a dinner party at Shandorf 's house, and the promise of a date to follow, Helen considered David close enough to the ideal for her liking: "Having him [be] a turn-off would have screwed everything up," she wrote years later.
But meeting David Brown and marrying him proved two different things. Having just ended a marriage and with a teenage son in his custody, David himself was in no hurry to fit into anyone's, never mind Helen Gurley's, marriage plan. The maturity she was drawn to, and that would enable their relationship to begin on a level far more sophisticated than those relationships Gurley had already walked or crawled away from, also ensured that David would think hard about marriage before he would act, regardless of Helen Gurley's seductive charm or talents of persuasion. In addition, he quickly and apprehensively sized up her agenda. By the time he came along, he later joked, Helen was determined to marry, and he fit the bill as well as anyone might have. "It's just that she was looking for a husband. There's no bones about that," he recalled in a tone that reveals his customary wit but also, perhaps, more than a tinge of truth. "So she decided to pick on me."
Born into an affluent New York family on July 29, 1916, David Brown could not have come from a background more different than Helen Gurley's, although each had grown up without a father at home. David's father, Edward Fischer Brown, a financially successful public relations executive for the milk industry, left the family to marry his mistress when David was a toddler. His mother, Lillian, remarried, this time to a wealthy man thirty years her senior, Isador Freundlich, who moved the family from the then-affluent community of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to Woodmere, Long Island. They lived there until 1933, when they relocated to New York City amid tremendous financial losses suffered during the Great Depression. Brown's memories of this early wave of New York suburbanization remained positive decades later: "The Island, as we called it then, was young and dewy and we were Robinson Crusoes venturing to every brook and forest."
His mother and stepfather, part of the country club set on the South Shore of Long Island, traveled by ship to Europe every summer, and Brown had fairly free reign to indulge in his passions for inventiveness (he would watch Charles Lindbergh take off for Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis, and build shortwave radio receivers and transmitters with friends) and indulgence (he would smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol with friends). "Our parents were awash in the hedonism of the period," he recalled. "They were at the country club breaking the 18th Amendment and one or more of the Ten Commandments, no doubt." He remembered one of his parents' returns from Europe, in the middle of Prohibition, when they disembarked with crates filled with fine wines and spirits disguised as grandfather clocks. Incidentally, during his Long Island years, David caddied at Woodmere Country Club for William Fox, the motion picture executive for whose company Brown would, forty years later, become an officer and director.
David Brown's early youth was a mixture of economic privilege and emotional deprivation, as his father had literally abandoned the family, avoiding contact with his first family and keeping David's existence a secret from his second, which included his wife, the well-known violinist Nathalie Bosko, and their children, Edward and Natasha. Brown would not see his father again until he turned seventeen and needed money for college. David graduated from high school just as the family lost its Long Island home because of delinquent taxes. "As General Motors went, so did we -- down, down, down," Brown would write, recalling how the Depression struck the wealthy as well as the poor. His mother, who had never sought alimony or child support from David's father, now decided, as he later recalled, to "put the arm on the old boy" to send their son to college. Had his father declined, he knew, his mother would have scrubbed floors to allow him to go: "She was that kind of woman."
11. aging, resisting, redefining
When Helen Gurley Brown first stepped into the editor's office at Cosmopolitan in 1965, she was forty-three years old. It was not unusual to encounter an editor a generation older than a magazine's audience, particularly when the target audience was that coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four age group. Experience and business acumen often compensated for the difference, and in Brown's case the degree of identification she accomplished with her particular audience more or less buried criticisms of her age -- at least for a time. Inevitably, though, the topic of her age and the growing disparity between her age and that of her readers would become more and more of a story in itself.