D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A moved her upstairs and sent her out to open Cosmopolitan magazines across the world, David went with her, always taking the backseat. He was Mr. Helen Gurley Brown, and delighted to be so. It amused him because, of course, he was attending with his teammate. He was the story of her life. They met in Los Angeles in the late 1950s through Don Belding, the California partner of the major advertising firm of Foote, Cone & Belding, which is now part of Interpublic Group. Helen had started out as the secretary to Don Belding, who ran the West Coast office. She later became a copywriter after nagging for “a chance.” (Nagging is the
wrong word because Helen wasn’t a nagger, but it’s the right idea.) She was given that chance and she succeeded. That was about 60 or 65 years ago and, to give you an idea of what Helen was like, when she was given that promotion to copywriter, she brought in a young woman named Charlotte Kelly to replace her. Helen had originally hired Charlotte on Belding’s behalf to work as a file clerk. The two women became good friends from the start. The last time I had Thanksgiving with David and Helen, in 2010, the other guest was Charlotte Veal, formerly Charlotte Kelly, a longtime New Yorker and close lifelong friend of Helen.
When Helen made friends, she kept them. Neither David nor Helen had a flamboyance of ego, which often afflicts people in what are perceived as “important” positions for “important” people—positions that are held in professional lives. They certainly could get V.I.P. treatment wherever they went, and I’m sure they didn’t mind it for the convenience of moving more quickly through a crowd. But they conducted themselves as one of us. When they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a dinner together at Per Se, the haute cuisine restaurant in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, upon leaving the res-
taurant, Helen wanted to take a bus back to their apartment on Central Park West because she thought the meal was too expensive. David reneged on that one, persuading her that he wasn’t going to finish celebrating the day by taking a bus home. He was thinking of the convenience he had earned and she was thinking of what was financially practical. Helen very often took the bus, even long after Hearst had provided their star editor with a car and driver. The first time I ever saw her in New York, sometime in the late 1960s when she was already the famous and famously successful editor of Cosmopolitan, she was getting on the uptown
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