Enter Helen Read Online Free Page A

also more substantial chapters on how to start a career, save money, find an apartment for one, and have an affair, from beginning to end. “A lady’s love should pay for all trips, most restaurant tabs, and the liquor,” Helen advised. “That’s simply good affair etiquette.” As for how to answer the age-old question, “Should a man think you are a virgin?” Helen was equally frank. “I can’t imagine why, ifyou aren’t. Is he ? Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four-year-old virgin?”
    Helen’s funny, forthright voice spoke to Letty immediately. She knew plenty of girls who’d slept with married men; one girl she knew scheduled her affairs for her lunch hour. Having seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before, Letty was modeling her life in part after Holly Golightly, her prototype for how a single woman could live in New York City in style. She didn’t have a fish in a birdcage or a cat named Cat, but she did have, at various points, a duck, a rabbit, and a dog named Morpheus, God of Slumber. More important, she had her own apartment and her own mode of transportation. Miniskirted and zipping around town on her motor scooter, Letty was a vision of blond hair and bold independence. When Helen described the single woman as “the newest glamour girl of our time,” something clicked. Who could be more glamorous than Holly Golightly, in her diamond tiara and little black dress? The difference was that Helen Gurley Brown wasn’t at the whim of men who mistreated her. She had more than “mad money”; she made her own money. She was telling women they could give pleasure and get pleasure, without consequence. She was describing a lifestyle that Letty recognized as being real, if unspoken.
    Back at the office, Letty cornered her boss. “Berney, you won’t believe it. This is my life! This is true, this stuff is funny, it’s shocking,” Letty said. “We gotta do it!”
    Not long after that, she was on a plane heading west to give Helen some media training in the comfort of her own home. “I want to see what you think of her as, you know, a talking head,” Berney told her before she left.
    What was she like as a talking head? Well, she had a head, and it was talking: “Letty dear,” and “David dear.” She had an odd (oringenious) way of delivering her bold opinions in the same breath as little endearments and baby-talk phrases, like “pippy-poo” and “piffle-poofle.” And then there was Helen’s voice itself, soft and modulated, with little trace of her Arkansas roots. (“Listen to voices in movies. Most of them were willed into being by practice, practice, practice,” she had written in her book. “If you squeak or squawk, are thin or reedy . . . or are decidedly nasal, consider a voice revise.”)
    In person, Helen came on as sweet as her recipe for chocolate soufflé with foamy vanilla sauce. But Letty knew from her exchanges with Helen that underneath the froth was a steeliness—and that she used flattery to get what she wanted. She was particularly ingratiating with Berney, whose thoughts were always most welcome, especially for a “girl writer” like herself. In the long letters that she regularly typed to Berney on her pink onionskin paper, she turned on the charm, and he responded to it. But it would be different when she was on TV with millions of viewers, a tough host, and just a few minutes of airtime to answer whatever questions he lobbed at her. Some people simply would not like her—some would even hate her for writing a book that threatened the very core of their beliefs and values, and Helen would have to learn how to deal with that without bursting into tears.
    â€œNot everyone is going to be charmed by you,” Letty said. “There are some people who are going to think that you are morally vapid, or