. . they were fertile ground for makeovers.” —former Cosmopolitan beauty editor Mallen De Santis Many mornings, Helen and David took a cab together to work. He dropped her off at her office, and then continued on to his own, a few blocks away. When they didn’t head in together, Helen took the bus. She loathed the idea of wasting money on a private chauffeur or a taxi for herself, but that wasn’t the only reason why she rode the bus. She wanted to be with her girls: to see what they wore, where they went, what they read. She boarded hoping to see women with their noses buried deep inside Cosmopolitan, but her market research met with mixed results. Millions of women read Cosmo, but many preferred not to admit it—including Nora Ephron, who took care to remove her glove if she was reading Cosmo on the bus so that her fellow passengers would see her wedding ring. “I have not been single for years, but I read Cosmopolitan every month,” she confessed in her 1970 Esquire profile of Helen Gurley Brown.
