Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online Page A

year, and this is in 1955 and that was considerable money for a girl then, very heady. You know, everything adds up. It’s what I keep saying in my books and in
Cosmo
. If you do every little thing you can do in your own modest position, one thing leads to another. So
do
it and
be
it and
write
the letters and
make
the phone calls and get
on
with it. And this is what I was doing every hour of the day, every day of the year.
    “But I’m still living in my frugal way. I’m still bringing my lunch to the office. And I was conservative enough to have saved a little money. I had managed to save eight thousand dollars.” One day Helen Gurley walked into a Beverly Hills used-car lot and paid five thousand dollars for a Mercedes-Benz. Cash. “The next weekend I went to the Beldings’ ranch in total shock because of this money I spent. It just was not like me. I was in pain, physical pain. Everyone told me all the reasons I should have that car—that I was a successful writer and a gifted girl—they pumped me up and held my hand. But every time they looked at me I was sitting over in the corner in a catatonic heap thinking of the money.
    “A week or so later a friend of mine set up this famous date with David Brown, whom she’d been saving for me. I thought it was going to be a big thing. I felt it in my bones before I met him. She’d been talking about him for three years, and it felt right. It was an interesting, lovely evening. And he took me to my car after dinner. I could see him looking at this car, this nice car. And I said, ‘Yes, I just bought it and I paid all cash for it.’ And that was a nice thing, he liked the fact that I’d been able to save all that money, because hehad been married to very extravagant women, particularly his last wife.”
    Helen Gurley and David Brown were married one year later, in September 1959, at the Beverly Hills City Hall. He is now vice-president and chief of story operations at 20th Century-Fox, and his wife continually says she could never have become what she has become without him. He gave her the idea of writing
Sex and the Single Girl
. He gave her the idea of aiming a magazine at single women. He was once an editor of
Cosmopolitan;
and in her early days there, he helped her run the magazine, rushing over in taxicabs for street-corner conferences about copy. He still writes all the cover blurbs for the magazine. Both Browns live work-oriented lives—long office hours, dinners out with business friends. They spend at least one night a week at Trader Vic’s with Darryl Zanuck; they travel to Palm Springs and the Riviera with Richard Zanuck. Several nights a week they eat at home, in their Park Avenue apartment, and spend the evening working.
    At one point last year, Mrs. Brown was also emceeing a television show and overseeing the editing of Hearst’s
Eye
magazine. Both operations are now defunct, and she is left with just
Cosmopolitan
. Now selling 1,073,211 copies a month. Now pulling in 784 advertising pages a year—compared with 1964’s 259. There are still the little setbacks, of course: old friends who are jealous; reader complaints over increasing nudity in the magazine; the Hearst Corporation’s censorship. But though Helen Gurley Brown cries frequently, she cries much less now than she used to.
    Why just the other day she managed to get through a major flap without crying once. It all had to do with the breast memorandum. Perhaps you remember it—one of herstaff members leaked it to
Women’s Wear Daily
, and every newspaper in the country picked it up. The memo began, “We are doing an article on how men should treat women’s breasts in lovemaking. It will either help us sell another 100,000 copies or stop publication of
Cosmopolitan
altogether.” Its purpose? “To help a lot of men make a lot of girls more happy.” It went on to say … But stop. Let her tell the story.
    “It started with my idea of how boosoms should be handled,” she said.