Helen Lawrenson

She made friends with great ease, many among the rich and famous, notably author Clare Boothe Luce and statesman Bernard Baruch.Her mother once confided to her she never wanted children, and had made several attempts to get rid of Helen as a foetus: hot mustard baths, enemas, riding horseback, and more.She interviewed, among others, Lindbergh, Admiral Byrd, Red Grange, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clarence Darrow, Al Jolson (whom she idolized)."The life I managed to lead was an entertainingly dissipated caper", she once stated, adding that this included heavy drinking in speakeasies during Prohibition.Lawrenson was a senior editor and film critic at Vanity Fair from 1932 to 1935 and also wrote for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Look, Esquire and Town & Country.There, her first article, "Latins Are Lousy Lovers" (1936), initially published anonymously, in which she ridiculed machismo as "quantity rather than quality",[7] caused a sensation and was considered probably the "most notorious piece" in an Esquire collection from 1973.Their life was fraught with danger: "On one of our first dates he took me to a waterfront saloon that was the hangout of the shipowners' agents who had been offered money to kill or maim him.I suppose the only reason we emerged unscathed was because Joe Kay, a seaman friend who accompanied us, although admittedly frightened, had the wit to tell the bartender that I was a member of District Attorney Dewey's staff, and the word was passed around."[12] Lawrenson, 74, died on April 6, 1982, apparently following a heart-attack, after failing to show up for lunch with longtime agent Roz Cole and representatives of the Simon & Schuster publishing house.