Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Enter Helen 201609

[inaudible conversations] hello, everybody. Thanks for your patience. We are excited to be celebrating the launch of enter helen by Brooke Hauser selects cabana applause lets get in applause for that. [applause] we have plenty of pics at the register and we appreciate it after the program you grab one because it helps us to do events like this one for you guys. A little bit more about the author and moderators. Brooke hauser has written for the New York Times, los angeles times, glamour and others and is the author of the new kids victory and the journeys of the high school immigrant teens which is the Library Association 2012 alex award. The first is the moderator whos edited for numerous publications including the New York Times, washington post, newsweek, new yorker online endeavors and is the editor of two books including the book of jezebel which we have and she works as a columnist for the New York Times book review. The last moderator, rachel syme is a writer for the new yorker, gq, Rolling Stone and npr. Her first Nonfiction Book is forthcoming from random house and shes also the founder of womens lives club. Please welcome our speaker. Thanks. [applause] i just want to thank everybody for being here. Of course the book came out a few weeks ago. We pushed us back because i had a baby, so this is one of my first public appearances and im kind of still in mom mode and i had some anxiety dream last night where i had to make all a few eggs and you didnt want to eat it. [laughter] congratulations on your baby. Im going to be moderating the discussion [inaudible] i want to start by asking about her and maybe give us context you came to the material. It was in 2012 and august i was looking for a book idea and am back to doing the same thing right now. Its kind of a scavenger anyway but its one of the best ones and in particular margarita foster of the New York Times and i think she just made a film at this time, but she sounded like such a fascinating character. Her life is so colorful that started in arkansas and new york and ended arkansas again. Anyway, it was a fascinating story and i thought why dont i know more about her. Right after college i started working at the premiere magazine and ive written a lot for the womens magazine and i thought if anyone should know it should be me. I didnt understand why i havent heard more about her. So thats kind of how i started looking into her story. Youve been a longtime read reader. No, not really, i do enjoy it now and the first was a few months old when i started going to the archives and digging through issues in the 60s and 70s and it was so much fun. Its a good time if you have extra time and in fact we have a couple of originals who were there in 1965 and she works at cosmo so im so glad shes here. She was the first person in 1955 cosmo because that was helens first year. I looked and started calling to track down people doing detective work and she said a lot of people are not around anymore. One lady was in denmark and changed her name so eventually i found out when she connected me to people and thats how i saved my inroads. To bring an end to the discussion but i have one more question about where you started the book. I know you said to me your editors were to bring in the cultural lands in the 70s and i want to hear about those decisions. Now my editor over there read the book and said that this is great but if you want everybody to read this, think about expanding the focus a little bit and i thought that was a good idea. Its a good idea and would help to show that youre a and i tried to accomplish that but it wasnt easy because it was my first attempt. She was very blunt. I covered vietnam and the assassinations and then i went back and they were different than what a lot of people think of. She was basically kicked out for living with her boyfriend on campus and they found a different kind of 60s to write about in line with her own stories, so that was helpful. You sounded jezebel, which at least in the beginning seemed to be focused on speaking truth to power. And talk about your experience and if you had an opinion about her work. If i had to describe it now, the womens media outlet i didnt think existed at the time and it was a direct provocation in the magazines as the existed then. I think a lot of them have gotten better. My understanding of Helen Gurley Brown, i heard of her but i didnt read cosmo because it was too old and because ther their k ocover lines about sex which mae me uncomfortable. It was aware she was a famous editor. The other i believe came right after helen left. It was maybe dumbed down a little bit more. Its funny though because wayne in 2007 we were trying to think about how, what we were going to put on the site is about jezeb jezebel, we had a state between third and Fourth Avenue and we decided to get a pile of old cause cosmo. Its the 60s, 70s and 80s and material that popped up on the site. You are right, they were really fun to go through. They had a sort of energy that again, as a younger team i found intimidating that i appreciated at 30 something. But a longtime editor force of nature, she was a very small woman and her love for her husband was allencompassing and enduring, and i think that came through some of the content on the site, and the magazine. There were no issues making that a primary concern of young women or women in a relationship. I think her first words unmarried women and sex she normalized data. I want to ask about her partner and i know that you had said and i looked this up, the daily mail had kind of a bombshell and a take away and you said did it matter how he would get a partnership with her legacy. Key is a very famous hollywood producer and she was the biggest production all times. He did jaws, but she was a real success tori. And actually, bob can speak to that. Her cousin, lou, is in the book and people who knew her very well. I think, you know, in some ways they have a very modern marriage they had a very modern marriage. In 62 when sex and the single girl came out, he credited one of his marriages to the fact that his exwife stopped working. She had put at one of the magazines in new york city and she stopped working and he credited the demise of their marriage to the fact she had given up her career and wasnt happy staying at home. So he said Something Like if you want to love a woman or you want to see a woman happy, let her work, or Something Like that. So he fully supported her career. She was already very successful by the time they met, but its true, sex and the single girl was his idea about shes the one that owned it and made it occurs, but he edited it. When she started thinking about cosmo in 65, basically it was a magazine version of sex and the single girl and still is in a lot of ways. She had been a longtime managing editor at cosmopolitan, said he was the one who helped her get there. And my question to you is i dont know if that matters. I mean, Everybody Knows Helen Gurley Brown believed in using men to get what you want. And she said she used her own husband and he used her too. For a long time he was known as mr. Helen gurley brown because sex and the single girl was a big success before he made it big in hollywood. This is a question for you both. When the sex and the single girl came out and they hit a cultural moment and it seemed like we were learning in another cultural moment of talking about single women there were a lot of books that emerged in the last year and there were all these sort of explorations of what it means to be a single girl in the modern day. Im wondering why you think we are in another moment of the phenomenon of the single girl. Its a great question that i dont know the answer to. Why are we in a moment of im not sure. We are in a moment in terms of book publishing. I think that, you know, you might argue that there were moments in television and movies and have been for some time, although most television and movies that feature the single woman she usually in separate the man. Even sex in the city after all these years. I think i assume it is just demographics and in a certain part who buy their books to talk about what its like to be single and when i think of cosmo in us steves and 70s it came to me there were a lot of stories in the old issues of cosmo that celebrated being single as a not as explicitly as the plan point on the timeline e you became married where i do think in the past ten years they would celebrate female singlehood. There was no space for the relationship and then you had a man you had to worry that you were going to lose him. Do you think thats fair . Spreadsheet courage toyman to be adventurous and maybe thats the difference between then and now i think some of the books that have come out recently they celebrate singled to what it is on my way to walking down the aisle so that said not every woman wanted to get married so when she gave these tips, i think she understood some women wanted to stay single for life and she encouraged them. So much of what people tell her have to do with single dating that when i read the sex and single girl for the first time in 2012, it was hardly shocking. Now that theyve been on the air in sex and the city its not that shocking anymore. Its really valuable advice and most of it i would say has to do with getting ahead in your career and budgeting money. And so, that is really what i took from it is how possible the advice was and how clear it was to me that she was staying there is a step by step guide on how to become an individual. That was it and i still read it that way. I read it on the back of my jogging stroller. I was already in my 30s but it still had a lot of relevance and good advice. So i think its fair to say that at the time absolutely cosmo encouraged women to find their meet and get married. But she gave good advice along the way. Obviously she was writing that magazine during the movement and use that its somewhat of a moot point people want to ask and its something people need to now ask. Can you now respond to that question . The first person who asked the reason i had such a hard time answering it is because she didnt call herself a feminist until she was much older and when she was younger and was kind of learning about the Womens Movement, she was right in the column, its kind of related to the burger but still selfexplanatory. Four years later actually, 1968, 1969 she wrote and published an excerpt on sexual politics that is interesting. She didnt remember it being in cosmo because it was so unlikely. But i still wouldnt call Helen Gurley Brown a feminist because she doesnt call herself that. But i would say that she believed in what feminism is a need for rights and she was certainly an outcast in the movement. She didnt have that many friends in the movement. They were quite critical of her. I wanted to ask you as someone that has spent so much time in the womens magazine, what can they do fit the vehicle to teach women about feminism a if they y had beehavent been the greatest carriers of the message. Do you mean the women involved or the magazine . I think they can. My interest in the magazines when i was in my teens was in part because i was reading the magazines that i felt maybe when im feminist but in some cases were. Lets talk about the commercial issue here on the title or glamour in the mid80s. It felt very progressive and then regress. Thats when i worked at glamour. I absolutely felt that way. But again its not that the magazines didnt talk about relationships are thing were tht were important in womens lives but they didnt seem to put the same weight on it. It wasnt like i discovered the feminism through, but my mother talking about it all the time. The magazines felt like they were in alignment with what i cared about and i think its harder now because a lot of women are learning about gender politics in the magazines that have this struggle trying to be relevant when they come out once a month and things seems a passerby. They have the hard task of trying to remain in the conversation when theres a vibrant conversation happening every single second of every single day back in their politics and i think thats where young women are now becoming politicized. With that said, its Something Like cosmo today or glamour or other womens magazines affecting the outlook and the ideas who isnt in the middle of the media but still its possible they were having more of an effect. The reason i found them so frustrating is because they felt like the only outlet or the only sort that women had in terms of learning how to be themselves were what it meant to be an adult. Which is why its so great that jezebel exists. I often write celebrities profiled to have the star of the moment. Do you consider your self a feminist. I think that it had existed in Helen Gurley Brown it would have been a heyday because she made stuff up and fabricated. I think that she may have offered one hardboiled egg di diet. People wrote to track down a big fat cow or Something Like that. I tried to look her up and she said yes i sent that letter but i didnt write that line. Barbara can speak to that, too. Its tough because they had to put the issue on once a month and you want to keep recreating it and there were stories that were created in magazines that went backwards. She thought of a cool cover line and then asked for the story to be written around it. Some of the stories i had to execute myself. I was a good cover line and we had to think of the story in 1200 words that would accompany the story. I do know that a lot of stuff was astonished. If they found it perfect or smooth or petty, they work were tweaked to create some humor. [inaudible] [laughter] if the questions they pose in the column and the New York Times [inaudible] they had you go back and check those. When it comes to the biographical subject to do you feel an obligation to write your subject or to approach . I found that everything she said or wrote i had to wonder about and take it with a grain of salt and was completely fascinated by her. When she was acting naughty i guess you could say, i will say its fun to write about. She was a very fun person to write about and didnt always like her because if you read the book you will see there are times when she kind of caught her family in a light that wasnt flattering. She created this portrait has a bunch of hillbillies from arkansas. Whethen i went and met with her cousin and looked through the albums and spent three days talking and we ate biscuits and jam that were incredible. Helens father was planning on running for Political Office when she was killed in an elevator accident. Very well educated for a woman of her time and went to college for a year and she grew up middleclass and was dirt poor and all that stuff. Its absolutely important to fact check. I think theres another obligation to like your subject. Speak to i loved her, but i also had problems. She was very rich at the end of her life and there were things she could have done. Those are questions that dampened my enthusiasm but her complexity, shes very famous and thats puzzled me cause she was wealthy and lived through the depression and a lot of analysts through her life she was a very flawed person but again that makes it interesting to write about. Had i gotten to know her in real life i read every scrap of paper she wrote on that had been saved. So it is a very weird way to get to know somebody. Despite a. Of she couldnt have been [inaudible] what do you appreciate about h her . I wasnt alive at that time and a lot of women who have achieved a certain amount of power have had to go through the dot got got she talks about Hillary Clinton and how its meaningful that the person thatt might be the first female president was married to a powerful man and thats why she became powerful being attached to a powerful man does open certain doors in a way that it might not so i admire her tenacity and i dont know that i agree with some of her opinions on how to achieve the power but i dont know how fair this is because that is the case in the civil air era but if you look at a more recent issue of cosmo from the 80s or 90s, they didnt give the sense that american women were diverse and in terms of ethnic diversity, they were not as diverse as they are now but its something that occurred to me looking at these issues of cosmo. Its american womanhood which would say thats probably middleclass highly educated caucasian, and that was one of my frustrations that i worked for and was part of the reason why i started the site because i felt i would walk down the street in new york in terms of ages and ethnic backgrounds and economic situations and it wouldnt be reflected in the media and it felt like we were living in the 20th century when we were hopefully in the 21st, so thats something that frustrated me. It addressed economic or racial issues in the magazine at the time there was a lot of stuff going on in the american political system. For sure. If you had one of the more fascinating avenues comparing cosmo from the late 60s to the title that no one really remembers anymore but it was kind of like cosmo meets Rolling Stones and it was a class between the editor and helen. To go from cosmo in the 60s, unless it was talking about how goodlooking kennedy was, the headlines from that era was the undiscovered joy of having a chinese lover. [laughter] i dont know. Her target reader was illustrated in the magazine that came out later. Her target reader was a smalltown workingclass girls on the boondocks basically and as some other peoplhas some othe about women and men who were educated new york sophisticates were kind of filtering their knowledge from the stewardess of cincinnati and this was a girl who didnt know what to do with her dessert fork she said she was talking to herself but i dont know if i would buy that because she was obviously somewhat sophisticated to achieve this level of success but she created this and its still not true. A lot of the womens magazine editors create order make things important. I dont know that ive ever held one before. Maybe im wrong, but i doubt that its that important to know how to tie a tie. Part of it is because of a privilege certain things and if you dont then you are somehow less than. There was one right before i got there and they chose to cover up the magazine with brown paper but the cover line was, i know we are on cspan but its what he thinks of your orgasm face. For a lot of women its pro