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I'm Wild Again
Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts
By Helen Gurley Brown St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Helen Gurley Brown
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-27352-1
CHAPTER 1
Snippets from My Life
Jobs and Men
I won't try to do an hour-by-hour, year-by-year account of my seventeen secretarial jobs or the two copywriting ones, the latter of which led to my writing Sex and the Single Girl because I thought I was going to be fired and David came up with the book idea. I'll also spare you a boyfriend recall although there were some of those since I started dating at seventeen and didn't marry until thirty-seven. I'll just mention a few boy/girl encounters, not necessarily the sweetest ones and, in writing about David in a minute, tell you how I got started as editor of Cosmopolitan. Along the boyfriend trail—let's call them male encounters—were these highlights (or low-lights).
Paid for Pleasure
At age nineteen I had one little fling in the escort business. In a magazine article—I think some fairly decent magazine—I read about girls who went out with men and got paid as "dates," not one word about anything beyond dinner, dancing, and just being a delightful companion ... a regular date it would seem. With the article still in mind, I saw an ad in the Los Angeles Times for "attractive girls wanted for social evenings" placed by the Dolores Gunn Escort Service and decided this was definitely something to look into. Working at KHJ radio station as a secretary in the manager's office, $18.00 a week, I went over to see Dolores in her seedy mansion somewhere in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles between Vermont and Western Avenues. I didn't actually see Dolores ... she was behind a screen. Do you think the screen might have tipped me to something like she didn't want to be identifiable in a police lineup? Might have, but didn't. Dolores saw me and I passed ... how bad could you look at nineteen? My fee for the evening would be $5.00—nearly a third of my weekly salary—not bad.
Date picked me up in front of the apartment I shared with Merle and Rosa for a few months while Mary's and Mother's and my little house on West Fifty-ninth Street was getting ready to be moved into. Date was nothing-looking, possibly fifty; we drove around Los Angeles in his Plymouth sedan for a while, finally parked on a quiet street in Santa Monica, kissed some. Where was dinner? Where was dancing? Did I always suspect there wouldn't be any? Probably. I didn't mind the kissing that much, as I remember, though I could be blanking; he didn't get obstreperous or try anything awful.
Presently he asked, "Shall we double the fee—you get ten dollars, Dolores gets her ten dollars, and we go on to the next step?"
Again I wasn't that shocked. "No," I said. "I was just supposed to go on a date." Maybe the gods, realizing they were dealing with a low-grade criminal-class amateur, were too bored to unleash their full furies and get me raped, killed, or beaten up. If that had happened, Dolores would have lost her license or whatever escort services carry, of course. Perhaps she actually tried to screen clients as well as escorts and accommodate only noncrazy ones. The evening, as I recall, lasted about two hours ... however long it takes to drive from downtown L.A. to the Pacific Ocean, stop for a little chat in Santa Monica, drive back again.
On the way home, he said, "Kid, don't mess around. If a man can get it free, he won't have much use for you ... if you're getting all the milk you want, why buy the cow?" The cow/free milk proposition was popular in those days. Letting me out at my front door, Date gave me $5.00 and, I assume, took care of Dolores. Why wasn't I revolted? I was a little but not utterly. I think even then I was a practicing realist. I knew my date wasn't going to be Tyrone Power. Even at age nineteen and a virgin I realized men "needed things" and there wasn't anything horribly wrong about their needing them even if you couldn't or wouldn't supply. Also from a pretty early age I tried to do whatever you needed to do to survive. At that moment I needed more money. The escort business wasn't going to provide, but I was never a big rebel or complainer. I'd got myself into this silly assignation, was probably lucky to be alive!
Dolores called once more after that; she probably hadn't got a rave review and suggested on my next date I try to be a little more cooperative. We didn't do business after that. God bless that date. From him I learned I wasn't going to make any real money or solve any problems as an escort. I'd have to be good at something else.
Mary and Cleo
One Sunday afternoon in April 1937, playing out in the backyard of their Fifty-ninth Street home in Los Angeles with my cousins Bob and Virginia Gurley, we got the news that Mary had polio. Doctor had thought at first it was simple la grippe, but now a more accurate—and devastating—diagnosis was in. Life would change irrevocably for Mary, Mother, and me. Her legs paralyzed, Mary would spend the next sixty years in a wheelchair, me the same sixty trying to make up a bit with financial support and love for what had happened to her, her life challenge a little more major than mine. We had the same parents, I reasoned (Daddy had died five years before in an elevator accident in the Arkansas State Capitol Building, had run for the elevator, jumped on just as the doors were closing—you could do that then—life got snuffed out), were formed from the same gene pool, ate the same food, lived in the same apartment, slept in the same bedroom, breathed the same air, were accessible to the same floating germs out in the street. Polio picked Mary, not me ... I owed her. I never wished it had been me, martyrdom not my thing, but I would never abandon her.
Mary was immediately put in the Orthopedic Hospital, which specialized in polio, Mother and I moved to a little bungalow on South Hope Street across from the hospital. During the many months Mary was in the Orthopedic she had pool treatments, massage therapy, was seen by the best polio doctors in the world, Doctors Brockway and Lohman. Muscle transplants—paralyzed muscles replaced with healthy ones—were performed twice but nothing could reverse the damage, she would remain paralyzed from the waist down all her life. For the next two years I attended John H. Francis Polytechnic High School a few blocks from the hospital where, would you believe, white students mingled with black ... shocking! One year out of Little Rock, where a black man looking directly in the eyes of a white woman on the street could land in jail, where occasional lynchings still took place on Saturday night, I could have had a problem but prejudice of any kind had never been on the menu in my house and the dusky ones and I, after they got used to how funny I sounded, got along fine. Black boys were fabulous dancers, and the Amazonian black girls, towering over me on the basketball court, actually forgave my getting a ball—finally—into the hoop, but the hoop belonged to the other team. John H. Francis got the best out of me and vice versa.
Mother's time and anxiousness (she knew how to do anxious better than anyone I've ever known) were pretty much channeled into care of her older daughter, now home from the hospital, but I wasn't neglected. Acne was the major problem of her younger child. At that time the medical profession didn't know any more about acne than they did about polio, and mine was virulent. Every Tuesday and Friday after school I saw Dr. Todd, who opened postules and sent me out to face the world with a face that looked as though it had been smeared with strawberry jam. So, what does a sixteen-year-old with an invalid sister, depressed Mommy, terminal acne, and the financial pinchies do to cheer herself up—drugs? drink? temper fits? total withdrawal? Drugs and drink weren't available for teens in those days and wouldn't have appealed anyway; the other two options didn't either. And so a lifelong habit got started: do the best you can with whatever you've got even if most of what you've got isn't remarkable and some of it you wouldn't give a tarantula. My grades were good. Mother and Daddy were smart so I guess I inherited those genes. Acne was the challenge. Shy like my mother—some of my classmates called me "the Bashful Babe"—I willed myself to become more outgoing, even extroverted, divert attention from the skin that was either forming postules or scabbing up from excision. I wrote little skits for myself and performed them before the whole student body in numerous variety shows (show biz!), tried out for the class play but wasn't an actress so that route of expression denied me. Several times I ran for school office and was actually elected: president of the Scholarship Society, president of the Amacitians (girls' club), president of the World Friendship Society. I didn't know Belgrade from marmalade, Outer Mongolia from Mentholatum, but if the club needed leading I was happy to try. At graduation I was one of five honor students—an Ephebian, for God's sake!—photographed for the school paper, made a big fuss over and, of course, I was class valedictorian. Particularly popular with teachers, I was voted biggest apple-polisher in the senior class but also second most popular girl ... I guess you could be both.
On the dating scene I wasn't a belle but also wasn't a blip. As I wrote in Sex and the Single Girl, I felt and feel a girl needs men in her life. My theory from high school on was that until you can collect a prince, you create a court from who's there, no matter how disparate the courtiers. My two steadiest beaux, Joey and Lester, I would now say were homosexual but, at the time the "condition" didn't exist and surely wasn't talked about. We danced, picnicked, baked at the beach, drove tons of miles around Bel Air and West Los Angeles on Saturday nights in Joey's father's big old Chrysler, occasionally picked a flowering branch from the grounds of a Bel Air mansion ... wicked!
The day of the senior prom at Poly High, president of the student body, Hal Holker, didn't have a date, had been just too busy to get on the case and called me that afternoon. It wasn't, he explained later, because he considered me a wallflower and probably not booked but, on the chance I wasn't, thought I'd be perfect. "Gurley could take care of herself ... good dancer ... lots of friends ... wouldn't have to worry about her while doing stuff you have to do as a prom chairman." Dateless, I accepted the offer and we had such a good time he took me out graduation night a week later. Then, if you'll pardon a little bragging (you can check with him if you like), the Number One Man on Campus fell in love with me—acne had subsided a bit by them. Some of the best smooching of my life was during those sweet summer months. Still years away from surrendering virginity, I wouldn't take anything for the sexy hours when you struggled your brains out with boy or man, passionate, steamy struggling ... foreplay that didn't actually lead to play. A Little Rock brought-up-girl didn't go All the Way ever. Since I could be brought to orgasm by kissing why ask for anything more, and whoever he was put up with it. What the poor creature did when he got home was his affair.
After high school—my prom king was off to Alaska to look for gold—I attended Woodbury Business College to learn how to type and take shorthand, tuition paid by working after school at radio station KHJ for an announcer whose early-morning radio show, Rose and Shine, observed birthdays and anniversaries of letter writers. My job was to extrapolate requests from letters so my boss could announce, "If little Willie will go out to the garage and look behind the tool chest, he'll find just what he's been looking for" or "Minnie and Sam Spiegelgrass are celebrating a twenty-third wedding anniversary ... congratulations, Minnie and Sam." Occasionally I had a twelve-year old boy or girl celebrating their seventeenth year of togetherness ... mixed extrapolation; rough morning at school before coming to the station must have made me not squeaky careful. Some afternoons when I got to KHJ, somebody there in the morning would report Mr. Wilson having gone mangoes, shrieking to be heard all the way to Cahuenga Avenue that his idiot secretary had screwed up again, distressed parents having called to say Becky Sue couldn't find her birthday doll in the attic because he'd announced it hidden in the basement next to the bicycle rack. For my chores I was paid $6.00 a week, lavishly raised to $7.00 in a few months.
From KHJ I moved on to posh Music Corporation of America in Beverly Hills, continued my thirteen-year odyssey through fifteen more secretarial jobs, sometimes getting fired, sometimes firing myself to try to advance in the world. Finally I was given a chance to write advertising copy but, hey, this is Mary's and Mother's story so let's get back to them.
During my high school years when we lived in the little house near the Orthopedic Hospital, Mary and I were close companions, went shopping, to the movies, sometimes just strolled around. I was proud of getting her wheelchair up and down curbs without bumping. Our next-door neighbor, also a wheelchair-bound polio victim, and her construction worker husband, had somehow got beyond the depression and sads that go with invalidism and were an enormous support to my overwhelmed mother, particularly because they were cheerful. Sue and A. frisked Mary all over town, sometimes took her to the ranch of a family member in Simi Valley where she actually picked oranges.
After my graduation from high school, Cleo, Mary, and I moved to the little house by the railroad tracks on West Fifty-ninth Street where freight trains roared by just beyond the backyard and gophers tunneled up under Mary's and my bedroom, actually pushing floor boards up, the little bastards! We once put a hose down a gopher hole, let it run several hours—talk about big spenders on our budget—actually flushed up a gopher! Poor drowned little thing, we didn't try to revive him. Maybe there's a secret cruel streak in all of us but this gopher was eating our carnations and trying to sleep in our bedroom. Mother got a job in the marking room at Sears Roebuck pinning little tickets on merchandise; her marking-room friends were really the only ones she had in Los Angeles. Shy to the point of verbal paralysis, with not one smidge of outer confidence or inner self-esteem, she poured herself into Mary and me and, oh yes, a husband—I should have mentioned him earlier.
After Mary became ill, while I was in high school, Cleo married the sweetheart of her girlhood and he lived with us. She hadn't married gentle, bookish, poetic, much-like-her Leigh in the first place because her family preferred Ira Gurley, dynamic law school graduate, full of charm, hunted and fished with her brothers, sure to Amount to Something and be a family asset. They put the pressure on and she married Ira. From what I glean—I was only ten when Daddy died—he loved my mother but didn't understand her, made her give up her teaching job—which had meant everything to her and they needed the money. In those days, if your wife worked, the neighbors thought you were a lousy provider, Zeus forbid!
So now there was Leigh in our lives, a nice-enough person, good cook (men didn't cook in those days and I hated the food smells that wafted to the living room when a date picked me up), but I found him embarrassing and ineffectual. The only job he ever held was Good Humor salesman; his cart with its icy treasures sat outside our front door every night. Stepfather for five years, Leigh died slowly, agonizingly of stomach cancer. Those visits to him in the Los Angeles county hospital with Cleo were as pain filled as anything you would ever want to know. She loved him, she deserved a little happiness. One would have hoped her childhood was friskier but, as oldest child, she was often nursemaid for the younger eight, heaped with responsibility early, screw having fun. So here she was, widowed again, older daughter an invalid, younger still smeared with strawberry-jam acne, occasionally worried that she was neglecting her younger (not true) for the older.
Cleo also worried about my love affairs that never led to marriage; I worried about a couple of those myself (more in a minute). Mary got a job with C. E. Hooper, the ratings system of the day, telephoning to see what radio program people were listening to. For forty cents an hour she sludged her way through hundreds of numbers copied from the telephone book, put up with hang-ups, nocomprendes, and couldn't-remembers, conscientiously recording data. Sometimes I helped her call for a little while. Socially we branched out to the opera, theater, race track. My beaux were nice to her—one brought her Danny Kaye records—though we could have taken her on outings a little more often. While my sister didn't ever cry or complain ever, God knows what demons occupied her. In 1946, when I was twenty-four years old, my mother took Mary from Los Angeles back to live with her folks in Osage, Arkansas. She thought she and Mary would have a better life there among loved ones, or so she said. She really did it because she saw me being a semi-nurse-companion to my sister, too deeply involved in Mary's life (and problems) perhaps to have a life of my own. Cleo's separating me from them was a courageous, unselfish act ... she could easily have sacrificed me to be a handy, unpaid bound-by-blood helper forever.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I'm Wild Again by Helen Gurley Brown. Copyright © 2000 Helen Gurley Brown. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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