Enter Helen Read Online Free

legs. He razzed his underlings—“How many times a week do you have sex?” was a favorite question—and he kept them entertained. By the early Sixties, he had famously installed a fireman’s pole in his office leading to the floor below. A modern dancer in college, Letty slid down it every day.
    Letty had experienced Berney’s salaciousness firsthand, but she also saw he was more bark than bite, and she knew he saw greatpromise in her. A lover of fine food and wine, Berney had given Letty her first taste of artichoke one day at lunch, teaching her how to eat it. He also gave Letty her first taste of real power. She was barely out of college when she was hired to be an assistant to a woman named Hilda Lindley, the director of publicity and subsidiary rights, and when Hilda left the company soon afterward, Letty begged Berney for the chance to step up to her job. He said yes, andshe nearly passed out.
    At twenty-two, Letty was running four departments at the company. She handled everything from subsidiary rights to advertising, and she soon discovered that she had a flair for promotion. Shortly before her trip to Los Angeles, Berney handed Letty the manuscript for Sex and the Single Girl , which Helen had been writing in stages and sending to Berney for his input. He thought it was going to be a “smasherino.”
    â€œI’d like to publish this,” Berney told Letty. “What can you do for it?”
    Letty took the pages home to her apartment in Greenwich Village and got to work. “Have you got it? Can you get it? Are you sexy? Let’s see.What is a sexy woman?” Helen asked in one of Berney’s favorite chapters, “How to Be Sexy.” “Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex.”
    Reading Helen’s dishy accounts of her own romances and romps, Letty was incredulous.She had just gotten her own prescription from her doctor for the Pill, two years after the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid by G.D. Searle and Co. Delivered in a small brown medicine bottle, Enovid had already been on the market for a few years as a means of treating menstrual problems, but it was the first time the FDA had deemed a pill safe and effective for birth control purposes—on the condition that it was prescribed by a doctor. (In 1963, Ortho-Novumjoined the market with its Dialpak dispenser, featuring a built-in memory aid, discreetly designed to resemble a makeup compact.)
    Discreet as the packaging was, those tiny tablets changed everything. Single women no longer had to rely on their dates to provide a condom or, in the absence of one, wonder if the rhythm method really worked; their birth control was literally in their own hands. In Greenwich Village, where the Bitter End once displayed a sign that read “Folksingers Are Promiscuous; Don’t Spoil the Image,” sex between strangers became as common as a cold. People were definitely having it, but no one was talking about it casually, not out in the open, not like this: “The average man with an urge will charge like a Pampas bull, smear your lipstick, scatter your bobby pins, crush your rib cage and scare the living daylights out of you,” Helen wrote in Sex and the Single Girl , working into her argument about why every woman should experience a Don Juan at least once. “Don Juan would curl his lip at such tactics. He never makes passes without first establishing desire. He will devote several nights to the project if necessary, which it rarely is.”
    Like a knowing older sister, Helen dished out cheeky advice on where to find men (the office, the tennis court, a wealthy chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous) and how to attract their attention (“Carry a controversial book at all times—like Karl Marx’ Das Kapital or Lady Chatterley’s Lover ”). She gave tips on how to whip up crabmeat puffs, crash-diet on eggs and wine, mail-order a wig, and wear makeup. But there were