Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online

sort of huddled together. My sister was in a wheelchair andneeded constant care. My mother couldn’t go back to work or do anything for a number of years.” Tears continued to roll down her face. “I was terrified,” she said.
    The Gurleys moved to the East Side of Los Angeles near the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, and Helen enrolled at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School. Her memories of that period—aside from her sister’s illness—have mainly to do with having acne. “I was kind of a cute little girl, but who could see past these pus pustules?” Like that. She became a student leader, graduated as valedictorian, and was taken to the prom by the student-body president. “It was the coup of the year,” she recalled with some amusement. “He had a real case on me, because he got close enough to find out what I was like. I always have to get men close enough to me to be interested in me. I have to do what I call Sinking In before they pay attention. I’m never anybody that some man sees at a party and says, ‘Get me her.’ Never. But once they get near me and I turn on what I call Plain Girl Power—well, it worked with the student-body president.”
    Following high school and a year at Woodbury Business College, Helen went to work answering fan mail at radio station KHJ to pay for her second year at college. Her mother worked in the marking room at Sears Roebuck. Her sister did telephone work for the Hooper rating service. Then Mrs. Gurley and Mary moved back to Arkansas and Helen was left as a single girl in Los Angeles. Friends who knew her in the 1940s, when she held eighteen consecutive secretarial jobs, remember her as a shy, self-effacing, attractive girl who always did the sorts of clever things that seemed astonishing twenty years ago, like putting egg in spinach salad. She was, they recall, completely neurotic about money. She sent one week’s salary each month to her family and she was convincedno one would ever marry her because of her financial obligations.
    To make ends meet, she took the bus to work, drove her car only on weekends with gas she pumped at the serve-yourself station on Beverly Boulevard, brought her lunch to the office in a paper sack, read other people’s newspapers, made her own clothes, traveled by Greyhound bus. She tried every angle. Because she washed her hair in Woolite, she wrote the president of the company to tell him—and he sent her a free box of the stuff. She wrote an unsolicited memo to the proprietor of the beauty salon in her office lobby telling him how to hype up business—and he did her hair for nothing. She entered the
Glamour
magazine Ten Girls with Taste Contest three years in a row, and finally won. “I used to enter all the contests,” she said. “I bought so many bars of Lux soap to enter the ‘I like Lux soap because …’ contest. I couldn’t enter under my own name because I worked in an advertising agency, so I would send them to Mary and say, ‘Please, Mary, have a picture made of yourself in a wheelchair and send these off.’ Well, that didn’t work. That’s one that failed. But I did it. I tried.”
    She tried everything. Vitamin therapy. Group therapy. Psychoanalysis. Hair therapy. Skin therapy. Her persistent self-improvement dazzled her friends. “She decided the kind of person she wanted to be, the milieu in which she wanted to live, how she wanted to look,” said one longtime California associate. “In a very real sense, she invented herself.” There were a number of men in Helen Gurley’s life—two agents, a married advertising executive, and a Don Juan whom she spent nine years off and on with—but to hear her tell it, her job always came first. She became secretary to Don Belding, a partner in Foote, Cone & Belding, and afterfive years she was made a copy writer. “It was so heady,” she recalled in a near whisper. “I adored it. Instead of making a hundred dollars a week I’m making ten thousand dollars a