Read Online Enter Helen by Brooke Hauser - Free Book Online

Kinsey” and recommended it to every woman “over the age of consent,” while the Houston Chronicle claimed it was as “racy and sassy” as its title suggested, but also full of “hard common sense.” “Oh, you’ll blush at a few of the paragraphs and ask yourself,‘Do I dare go on?’” wrote one reviewer in West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette , before urging her readers to get past their embarrassment. “You’ll bless her for her open frankness. . . . Honestly, you’ll probably want to go out and try her ‘secret formulas for success.’”
    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.
    â€œDavid 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.

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    S OMETHING’S G OT TO G IVE
    1962
    â€œHoney, nothing can live unless something dies.”
    â€”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