The Second Act for a Former Hollywood ‘Glamour Girl’: Tulsa Philanthropist

Steve Sisney/The Oklahoman

Nine buildings owned by nonprofit or public institutions in Tulsa, Okla., bear the name of Peggy V. Helmerich, including a library, a women’s-health center, a 733-seat theater, and a collegiate learning center. It’s a testament to the philanthropic largess that she and her late husband, the oil-industry magnate Walter Helmerich III, have bestowed on this city of just under 400,000 residents.

Mrs. Helmerich has a particular love of literary causes. She refers to two projects as her “babies": the Tulsa Library Trust, a charity she helped launch that has raised millions to support the city’s library system, and the 30-year-old Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, an annual program that has brought writers such as Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, and Ian McEwan to town.

“We just decided there was no reason in the world that Tulsa couldn’t be a little treasure — a little gem of culture and education right in the middle of the United States,” Mrs. Helmerich says.

Before her name went up on Oklahoma buildings, it was up in lights in Hollywood, where she was a budding starlet with the screen name Peggy Dow. As a contract player for Universal Studios, she made nine films from 1949 to 1951. She appeared alongside Jimmy Stewart (and a giant imaginary rabbit) in the classic comedy Harvey.

“We had so much fun on that film,” she recalls. “I never saw that rabbit, but I felt him a few times — we all knew he was near.”

A Girl-Next-Door Type

Her life has been a singularly American journey, from a girlhood in rural Mississippi through gilded-age Hollywood to an adopted hometown she initially feared was only “tumbleweeds and dust,” and where she has long served as one of its greatest boosters.

She was born Peggy Josephine Varnadow in 1928 in Columbia, Miss., where her father ran a small chain of grocery stores. As a girl, she amazed friends and family with her knack for reciting poetry. That talent, she says, led her to study drama at Northwestern University. (Her classmates included the comedians Paul Lynde and Charlotte Rae.)

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Hollywood quickly took to her mix of thespian chops and blonde, girl-next-door good looks (which helped land her on the cover of Life magazine). It was a more innocent Tinseltown than today; she lived at the Hollywood Studio Club, a women’s dormitory run by the YWCA, and monitored by the wife of Cecil B. DeMille.

“They would send a letter home if your behavior was a little out of line,” Mrs. Helmerich recalls of her residency there. “And you had to be in at 12 o’clock.”

Even with a curfew hanging over her head, she managed to hit the swanky nightclub circuit, flashbulbs winking as she arrived on the arms of Tony Curtis or Rock Hudson.

She met the man who steered her away from stardom on a blind date to attend the premiere of the film “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” (starring her dorm mate, Marilyn Monroe).

But Walter Helmerich wasn’t her escort: He had come with another woman, who ended up taking a fancy to Peggy’s blind date. An awkward moment was smoothed over when Mr. Helmerich asked Peggy to dance. They were married less than a year later.

And so Mrs. Helmerich took on a new role: Tulsa housewife, and over time the mother of five sons.

“I can’t say I didn’t miss the glamorous life at times, especially if I saw a friend in a movie,” she says. “But it was a tough business, and you can only be a glamour girl for so long.”

Meanwhile, the oil-drilling firm Helmerich and Payne, co-founded by her father-in-law, was having considerable financial success. (Walter Helmerich became its president in 1960.)

Charity fundraisers increasingly courted her husband. Though the exact details are lost, she recalls that one large nonprofit flew him to its headquarters in Washington and asked for $1 million.

Upon his return, he told her he had different plans. “He said to me, ‘You know, I’m going to give that million dollars here in Tulsa. We need it a lot more than Washington does.’ And that’s pretty much been the pattern ever since.”

The Helmerich Foundation, responsible for the bulk of the family’s giving, was founded in 1965. With an endowment of $150 million, it has given away more than $100 million to date.

Grass-Roots Fundraising

The path to Mrs. Helmerich’s most direct philanthropic involvement — helping to start the Library Trust — began at the behest of the mayor of Tulsa, who then happened to be the Helmeriches’ next-door neighbor.

Despite Mrs. Helmerich’s lack of experience in such work, he asked her to join the board of the public library.

“He said he wanted somebody from the neighborhood with grass-roots knowledge of what kids might need from the library,” she says.

After consulting with her husband, her first action as a board member was to inquire if the library system had any contingency funds. “When a city has financial trouble, the first things getting cut are the parks and the libraries,” she says.

It turned out that the system did have a rainy-day fund. It held all of $300.

Realizing the situation was “ridiculous,” Mrs. Helmerich organized fundraising events. One of those activities involved inviting corporate leaders to have breakfast at the library.

“The mayor thought we should bring in a professional fundraising group, but we decided to do it on our own,” she says. “It really began to grow as we got more and more people in the community familiar with the library and all that it did.”

The Tulsa Library Trust was established in 1972 and now has an endowment of more than $44 million.

A Literary Tradition

Mrs. Helmerich’s namesake literary award grew out of her work for the trust. While the group was organizing a birthday party for the library system, someone got wind that the writer James Michener was doing research at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, about 100 miles away, so he was invited to speak at the party.

“We offered him a nice gratuity and he came,” Mrs. Helmerich says. “People just came out of the woodwork to hear him and we thought, gosh, what a wonderful idea. We should keep this going and get the best authors we could to put Tulsa on their visiting schedule.”

The annual award gives recipients $40,000 and requires them to make two appearances in town. The first is at a gala fundraising dinner. “And then, the next day, they appear for free for anybody in the community who wants to come hear them,” Mrs. Helmerich says.

While still busy organizing and appearing at fundraising events, she’s no longer involved in the day-to-day running of any philanthropic operations. Her five sons now serve on the board of the Helmerich Foundation, and one serves on the library trust’s board as well.

But Mrs. Helmerich is not above pulling rank to make sure her pet causes get support.

“It’s like I have a mantra,” she says. “I just say, ‘Well, boys, Mama wants to do this.’ "