Enter Helen (7 page)

Just as the Browns had hoped,
Sex and the Single Girl
was a smash and Helen soon became a sensation. Reporters relished the chance to tell the tale of the poor little girl from Arkansas who made it big. Hers was a Horatio Alger story, and no one told it as vividly—or as frequently—as Helen herself.

Back at her typewriter, Helen fed in another sheet of onionskin. “Brief Resume of What's Happened With the Book So Far,” she typed at the top of the page, recapping her accomplishments through the month of June:
Sex and the Single Girl
would soon be on the
New York Times
bestseller list, having sold fifty thousand copies within a few weeks, and there was already a deal pending with Warner Bros., as well as talk of a Broadway show.

At the bottom of the page, she added a few more thoughts, her fingers tripping over the keys as she typed up her pitch for an article about the making of a bestseller—her own, of course. She imagined a picture story, illustrating her whirlwind tour through various autographing parties and TV appearances, all happening as she tried to hold on to her clients and her job at the ad agency. There would be a personal element as well. Thanks to her success with the book, David was benefiting in his career, too.

“
David Brown in for new scrutiny at 20th Fox because described by me so often publicly and in print as brainy, charming and
sexy
,” she pecked away.

Helen never got the allure of electric typewriters—the humming motor reminded her of a meter, measuring the minutes, as if to say, “
Now it's time to get down to work.” She didn't need a reminder. She was always working. She preferred her old-fashioned Royal 440 manual typewriter, a souvenir from her secretarial days. It was a different kind of reminder—a reminder of how far she had come.

“
Honey, nothing can live unless something dies.”

—Gay Langland (Clark Gable) in
The Misfits
, 1961, Marilyn Monroe's last completed film

I
n 1962, Helen Gurley Brown was David's most successful production to date, the one with the biggest payoff both personally and professionally, but he was having a much harder time producing movies. Toward the end of 1961, he had tried to make a comedy,
Something's Got to Give
, starring Dean Martin as a man who marries a blond bombshell after mistakenly thinking his first wife is dead.
The film was troubled from the start, but it was nowhere near as troubled as its leading lady, Marilyn Monroe.

Like the rest of the world, David was smitten with Monroe. He never forgot the first time he laid eyes on her in Los Angeles, all smiles and sunshine, gently bouncing down the steps of Fox's Administration Building, along with a
Hollywood Reporter
columnist who introduced her as the new girl on the lot. David thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and later, after watching her in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
, he discovered that she was funny, too.

When Norma Jeane Mortenson had her first screen test with Fox in 1946, she was just another ingenue in need of a new marquee name, but by the time David signed on to produce
Something's
Got to Give
, Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous women on the planet. Her “Golden Dreams” calendar photo, featuring her fully nude and stretched out on red velvet, had long decorated the walls of barbershops and college dorms across the country. She already had divorced Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, allegedly seduced President Kennedy, and pressed her hands into the wet cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. People knew about her troubles—the fractured childhood spent in orphanages and foster homes, the failed marriages, the miscarriages, the nervous breakdowns, the trips to psychiatric clinics—but
they didn't know her. David didn't really know her, either, though he felt he occasionally caught glimpses of the scared little girl who lived just under her skin. “
She used to come into my office and sit on my lap, sometimes tickling me,” he later wrote in his memoir,
Let Me Entertain You
. “We'd talk a bit. Joke a bit. Yes, I got paid for that job.”

Unfortunately, it didn't last, partly due to the meddling of Monroe's psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, who supported the appointment of another producer whom he knew socially, Henry Weinstein. David was pushed out, and Monroe, who was working for a small fraction of her worth because of an old contract with Fox, derailed the production after she failed too many times to show up to the set, claiming that she was ill. Fox dismissed her, filed a $500,000 lawsuit against her (it was later upped to $750,000), and ultimately halted the production. In the meantime,
David had committed to producing a historic drama about the Battle of Leyte Gulf, set to film in Hawaii and Hollywood.

There were many other films on Fox's list of upcoming movies, including an ambitious adaptation of James Joyce's
Ulysses
, as well as a project about World War II general George S. Patton that David had been working on for years. But the movie that everyone was talking about that summer was
Cleopatra
, which Fox's
president, Spyros Skouras, prematurely had declared would be “
the greatest grossing film of all times” as well as the greatest movie in the history of the motion picture.

It certainly was shaping up to be one of the most expensive.
Costs for
Cleopatra
, originally budgeted at around $2 million, skyrocketed thanks to a bungled production that began in London and later moved to Rome, where sets and costumes had to be recreated a second time. It was while in Rome that the film's two stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (cast as the Egyptian queen and her Roman lover Mark Antony)—married to other people—carried out an increasingly public and tumultuous affair that made Helen Gurley Brown's office romances seem junior league in comparison. Even before the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper broke the news of their tryst in her column in the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, everybody knew about the couple, including Taylor's husband, the singer Eddie Fisher; and Burton's wife, the young actress Sybil Williams. Paparazzi stalked them, and publications around the world wrote about them. In Italy, the newspaper
Il Tempo
described Taylor as an “
intemperate vamp who destroys families and devours husbands.” Even the pope chimed in, denouncing her as immoral.

No one could have predicted the colossal mess that
Cleopatra
would become—not even David Brown, who had pitched the idea for a remake in the first place. Five years earlier, in 1957, Skouras had asked David to come up with “
a big picture” on “a big subject.” It was while digging through some studio records that David learned
Cleopatra
was actually a Fox property. In 1917, Fox Film Corporation had made a film about the Egyptian queen starring the silent-screen star Theda Bara. Working for Paramount, the director Cecil B. DeMille later remade
Cleopatra
with Claudette Colbert in 1934.

More than twenty years later, this was the film David watched in a small screening room with Skouras and Fox's head of production, Buddy Adler. DeMille's version was in black-and-white, but if 20th Century Fox made their
Cleopatra
in full color with the right stars, it could be the Hollywood epic they needed.

Instead, in the otherwise capable hands of producer Walter Wanger, it became an epic disaster. After a year of production, two key original casting choices dropped out—Rex Harrison eventually replaced Peter Finch as Julius Caesar, and Richard Burton stepped in for Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony—and the original director, Rouben Mamoulian, was replaced by Joseph Mankiewicz. Elizabeth Taylor caught “the Asian flu,” fell into a coma, and underwent a tracheotomy, further delaying the film. Scripts were written, rewritten, and discarded. Elaborate and expensive sets were built, destroyed, and rebuilt. (“
Only the Romans left more ruins in Europe,” David later quipped.) Meanwhile, forced to keep the cast and crew on salary through multiple shooting delays, Fox was hemorrhaging millions and having to answer to furious stockholders. The future of the company looked bleak.

Fortunately, David was having more success managing his wife's career than his own. After months of pitching an adaptation of
Sex and the Single Girl
around Hollywood, he finally got some good news.

E
ARLY ONE EVENING
during the summer of 1962, the Browns sat in their sunroom with Helen's seventeen-year-old cousin from her mother's side, Norma Lou Pittman, and celebrated a deal that had been in the works for some time.
Sex and the Single Girl
was becoming a movie—and for the rights to the book,
Warner Bros. was offering $200,000, the largest sum ever paid for a nonfiction work in Hollywood history. Even more incredible was the fact that the
studio was willing to hand over that much cash for a book with no plot and no substantial character other than Helen Gurley Brown. Word around town was that Warner's bought the book for its title alone. “Sex and . . .” was clearly a formula that worked, but that wouldn't help the screenwriter. How was anyone supposed to write a scene around making an omelet with leftovers from the fridge, or wearing Band-Aids instead of a bra? The question of how to adapt a seemingly unadaptable book would be left to the film's producer, a friend of the Browns named Saul David. During the negotiations with Warner's, David Brown insisted that Helen be relieved of any responsibility to turn her book into a usable screenplay so that she could focus on other projects, such as writing her next book and developing a syndicated newspaper column aimed at the single girl.

Selling the rights to
Sex and the Single Girl
was a huge professional coup for David, who was
also busy trying to sell the stage rights to develop a musical based on the book, similar to
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
. For Helen, the victory was personal. How many times had she been snubbed by celebrities and patronized by studio executives and their wives, who were nice to her simply because she was David's girl? And now, Warner's wanted to pay her to use her name and likeness in a movie based on a book she had written. Out came the champagne. Pop! Helen offered a flute to Norma Lou, whom she had started calling “Lou” at the girl's request. “
You're old enough, do you want a little sip?”

Lou was nervous, but didn't say it. She took a sip for Helen. It was her first taste of alcohol.

No one back home would have believed it, but Helen actually took time off work to spend with Lou, who would be staying with the Browns for six days before visiting a girlfriend who lived in
the area. She had come a long way, flying from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she still lived with her parents. The trip to California was her graduation present from Helen, who grew up playing with Lou's mother, Rosemary, who was her second cousin and four years older. When Helen described her Arkansas relatives as hillbillies who peed in the woods, she wasn't thinking of Rosemary, with her lush dark hair and dreamy hooded eyes. Helen called her the Beautiful Princess.

Lou also thought her mother was a natural beauty, but Helen was more glamorous. No one in the family understood why Helen considered herself unattractive, but Lou thought maybe it had something to do with living in California, the land of the gorgeous—all those girls with their blond hair and tans. Lou had blond hair and a bit of a tan herself from riding horses back home, but she also wore glasses. Her mother had bought her the frames, a pretty pale blue with tiny gemstones on the sides.

Norma Lou, photographed in 1962, the year she came to visit Helen and David in California. (
Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.
)

Lou was wearing her glasses and a new travel suit when Helen picked her up at the shuttle stop downtown. She had made sure to pack her Brownie box camera in preparation for her trip, but nothing could have prepared her for the culture shock. From the moment she stepped into Helen's Mercedes-Benz, she felt a long way from home, a feeling that further sank in as they drove to Pacific Palisades. Along the way, they stopped at an outdoor market so Helen could buy some big lemon leaves and flowers for the house, which to Lou's eyes seemed more like a European villa. Helen told her that an entire Asian family took care of the terraced garden.

And then there was Lou's room, next to the library downstairs. It was spectacular, with arched ceilings and huge windows forming a semicircle of glass. Lou looked out at her view and felt suddenly overwhelmed. She'd never seen the ocean before.

She didn't want to be a bad houseguest, but a couple of days into her trip, Lou began to tear up unexpectedly. She had a hard time hiding her puffy eyes from Helen, as much as she tried. She missed her parents and her home—the farthest she'd ever traveled alone before was to her grandmother's house and Girl Scouts camp, forty-five minutes away.

“
Do you think you might possibly be homesick?” Helen asked her that weekend. “David and I have been talking, and we think you need to get out of the house.”

Helen knew that Lou loved horses, so she and David took her to the Will Rogers Polo Club to see a polo match, and afterward they went out to eat. Helen also knew that Lou went to church on Sundays, so she brought her to a service at a beautiful Methodist church, even though David was Jewish and she never went. “I won't pretend that we go to church,” Helen told Lou. “I know that
you
go to church, and it might be fun to go someplace different.”

Now that she'd finalized the film rights to
Sex and the Single
Girl
, Helen wanted to celebrate, so she sought Lou out again one morning over breakfast.

“
We're going to go shopping!” Helen said.

“What are you going to get?” Lou asked.

“Oh,” Helen said, “let's shop for you.”

Helen had seen Lou's clothes. Other than her travel suit, Lou had sewn almost every piece of clothing she'd packed in her suitcase. After breakfast, they drove to the village shopping district to look around. As Helen parked her Mercedes, she suggested that they find Lou a new dress.

“Well, I've got two dresses,” Lou said, admiring the lacquered cars lining the streets. She had packed both of her homemade shirtwaists for the trip and had chosen the light blue one for their outing.

“You know, a girl can always have more than two dresses,” Helen said, walking toward the stucco buildings.

They went into one shop, a small, minimalist boutique. Glancing around the store, Lou felt uneasy. There were no racks of clothes—just a dress here and there on a form. She wondered where they kept the rest. They left after about a minute, and Helen politely thanked the saleslady.