Yes, I know:
She advocated for legal abortion and contraception.
She made the world safe for Sex and the City.
Worst of all, she insisted on wearing mini-skirts well after menopause.
Yet I can’t help but admire Helen Gurley Brown, the author of the early 1960s self-help phenomenon Sex & the Single Girl and longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine who died last week at age 90.
I’ve always had a soft spot for “outsider” female writers of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. It’s hard to imagine two women more different than Grace Metalious and Jacqueline Susann, yet I inhaled both their biographies.
Helen Gurley Brown was part of the same cohort of fiercely ambitious, sometimes uncouth “literary” females of the era.
But while those novelists created vivid fictional worlds in which to play out their fantasies of beauty, romance, fame, and revenge, Helen Gurley Brown’s accomplishment was far more audacious:
She too imagined, in pointillistic detail, her ideal realm — then set about remaking an entire society to match her personal vision.
The old joke goes, “It’s Sinatra’s world — we just live in it,” but it would be more accurate to say we’re living in Helen Gurley Brown’s.
Not everyone is happy about that.
However, there ARE three things to love about the brash publishing icon.
1. Her work ethic
Apocryphal show biz legends tell of studio execs fighting over the film rights to, say, Anna Karenina, then wondering “if the broad really has to die at the end.”
In reality, Hollywood has rarely missed the point so widely as it did with the 1964 film version of Sex and the Single Girl.
Not only is the movie’s “Helen Gurley Brown” a “Dr.,” she’s a 23-year-old virgin, played by the stunning Natalie Wood.
In actuality, Helen Gurley Brown’s life was movie-worthy, but along the lines of the Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck flicks she grew up watching. She was a plain girl from the Ozarks who made herself over, escaped to the big city, and ended up with the (pink) corner office — and a rich husband, too.
And forget that fictional degree — Gurley Brown wisely skipped college altogether.
Instead, she worked her way up from sexually harassed secretary (although she wouldn’t have used that term) to top copywriter.
And I do mean “worked”: unlike plenty of women then and now, she kept long hours at the office, even before she got her own magazine — and even after she became little more than a figurehead at Cosmo.
Here some women will chirp, “Hey, I work hard at the office, too!”
No, you actually spend most of your time planning bridal and baby showers and birthday parties for your colleagues — not to mention the annual walk-a-thon — and rearranging pictures of your dog on your desk.
That’s between trips to the coffee machine or the break room or the bathroom (again).
Please, ladies: I’ve worked with you. I’ve worked for you.
And I thank God my last office job ended years ago.
“But Helen Gurley Brown could work long hours,” you insist. “After all, she didn’t have children.”
Exactly. She chose not to. So did I.
Ironically, the very woman who kept insisting “you can have it all” realized she couldn’t early on, and chose accordingly.
2. Her marriage
Ironically, Helen Gurley Brown only wrote Sex and the Single Girl after she got married — at the then-advanced age of 37 — and only because her husband suggested the idea for the book.
For a woman who always put herself down as a “hillbilly” “mouseburger,” she certainly married well: to a well-to-do fellow who went on to produce Jaws and The Sting.
She flippantly counseled the occasional adulterous affair for others, but her 50-year-marriage was apparently never once placed in jeopardy.
As she told a reporter who asked her if she’d leave her husband if he cheated:
“I wouldn’t have left him, I would have killed him,” she says. “I could never have gone through what I went through with the Don Juan all over again. I couldn’t face it. I would have had to divorce him.”
And frankly, any woman who could live with a man with a mustache like that for a half-century deserves my respect.
3. Her hatred of hippies
Helen Gurley Brown’s “lipstick feminism” is the best thing about her.
When I was still part of the women’s movement — at the dawn of “third-wave feminism” — vicious arguments went on constantly about leg shaving and makeup wearing.
Not being one of the naturally lovely neo-hippie chicks who advocated a hirsute, barefaced existence, I couldn’t afford to be as “brave” as they thought they were.
(“She’s got a lot of nerve writing a book called The Beauty Myth,” my-then roommate tsked about the glamorous Naomi Wolf’s epochal debut.)
Second-wave au natural types always hated Helen Gurley Brown. They even staged a 1970 sit-in at the Cosmo offices.
Those back-to-goodness-and-nature hippies are certainly not natural. They may not wear makeup, but some of them bleach their hair and their fringy, furry, funky costumes certainly didn’t grow on their bodies (though they sometimes smell like it); the clothes are carefully, “unnaturally,”collected from thrift shop and Army surplus stores.
Magritte claimed the only way he could paint like a bohemian was because he lived like a bourgeois; indeed, he often created his bizarre surrealist canvases while wearing a suit and tie.
It’s a lesson lost on most would-be artists, who use up their meager talent cultivating sartorial affectations, literary feuds, and unoriginal “experiences” instead of actually working.
Helen Gurley Brown grasped that paradox. As one (male) writer noted wisely in a 2000 book review:
But on closer inspection, I’m Wild Again is a strangely inapt title and a poor description of Brown’s life. She’s not wild again (and she may never have been very wild in the first place). This is the autobiography of a puritan. Wild chronicles how Brown exercises obsessively; doesn’t drink, smoke, or eat; has remained utterly faithful to her husband of 35 years; and lives for her job. The Cosmo girl’s dirty little secret isn’t sex. It’s work.
If only her millions of acolytes had ignored much of what Helen Gurley Brown said, and instead imitated what she did, the modern world would be a much happier, healthier place.
Not all her advice, mind you.
Like, “Never refuse to make love, even if you don’t feel like it.”
For instance, I’ve adapted her wise counsel on what to say when your new beau asks you how many other men you’ve slept with — although on account of the very sexual revolution she helped usher in, I’ve had to adjust it for what one might call “inflation.”
Here goes:
- Silently add up the number in your head.
- Divide it by 2.
- Now, just say “Five.”
You’re welcome!
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be in my non-pink, non-corner office, working another 12-hour-day…
***
More from Kathy Shaidle:
Lenin worked long hours and probably would have hated hippies too. Hitler loved animals, was kind to his secretaries and to children, and was probably a good soldier in World War I.
A “surprisingly conservative role model”? Helen Gurley Brown was a major contributor to the wrecking of our culture. And when it comes to her personal character, you might be interested to read how she behaved on airplanes….
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/17/helen-dear
Interesting about the number of sex-partners reported. The old CDC definition of “promiscuous” was 5 or more sex-partners (in your life).
Dear Egil,
Godwin’s Law means you’ve just killed this thread after only one comment. congrats!
Thank you!
Or maybe those sensitive PJMedia posters were shocked into speechlessness by seeing “conservative” and “Helen Gurley Brown” within the same sentence, no matter how much in jest.
Godwin’s Law does not make any statement about whether any particular reference or comparison to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that the likelihood of such a reference or comparison arising increases as the discussion progresses, irrespective of whether it’s appropriate or not.
So, he didn’t kill the thread, he just reached “1″ faster than most. I myself was thinking of Al Capone and Hugo Chavez while I was reading your piece. Sorry, living the life of a puritan while running Cosmopolitan magazine is akin to a vegan running McDonalds.
K. Shaidle, m’lud. Godwin’s law be damned! You’re bulletproof. I’ve just spent an entire two-hour lunch in Madrid trying — probably succeeding — in convincing a skeptical bunch of smart Spanish ad men that it is indeed possible to make a good, even great, Bloody Mary out of gazpacho, especially if the vodka is called Putinitoff.
I know well the office world of which you speak, though I saw cat-not-dog photos, and you are surely correct in all directions. HGB didn’t have to wear those post-menopausal mini-skirts, though. The barf factor is always with us.
“She was a plain girl from the Ozarks who made herself over, escaped to the big city, and ended up with the (pink) corner office — and a rich husband, too.”
Yeah, what used to be called a ‘whore’. I have nothing against her, but she was on the make; don’t glamorize her.
I have to agree with Egil and Rik.
Why the constant barrage to make someone a conservative when they are not is beyond thinking.
It’s okay to find some admirable qualities in someone who isn’t a conservative. We aren’t liberals here so we don’t mind.
The downfall of this country is partly due to the media deciding that someone like Helen Brown is some sort of conservative, all the while, in charge of a magazine that is not even close to conservative. The media got used very well by the Soviets. I don’t think it would be far fetched to pin “Soviet Agent” on some of these media types.
This is flat-out ridiculous. Brown was one of those who brought down misery on literally millions of impressionable young women by separating sex from love. And for that she deserves a special place in hell.
“She flippantly counseled the occasional adulterous affair for others, but her 50-year-marriage was apparently never once placed in jeopardy.”
Hypocrisy is not a conservative value.
There was nothing conservative about her, unless you ignore the fact she stood for everything conservatives are against. She was instrumental in bringing about the moral decay that is crippling this great nation.
I can’t wait to see PJMedia’s upcoming articles lauding the following individuals….
Woody Allen. Worked hard at professional writing and musicianship from the time he was a teenager. Often works long hours writing, directing and acting in his movies.
Bill Clinton. Claimed to be a New Democrat, and emphatically stated that “the era of big government is over.” He also shook the hands of Newt Gingrich, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush!
Saul Alinsky. Said, “I love this g*d-d**n country, and we’re going to take it back.” Also agreed once with Barry Goldwater!
Margaret Sanger. According to that oft-quoted source Wikipedia, she “spent much of her youth assisting with household chores and caring for her younger siblings.” She also “was opposed to excessive sexual indulgence,” and she “noted that her opposition to abortion was based on the taking of life.”
Jesse Jackson. Quotes Scriptures in public and even uses that lost art of rhyming poetry!
Alfred Kinsey. Actually married a woman!
What great conservative role models! I’m sure, though, that whoever writes about the above persons for PJMedia will leaven their articles with enough snarkiness and irony to make themselves unassailable as writers, and to show how dense the rest of us Flyover-Country yokels really are!
Good points on hypocrisy. HGB’s for saying women could “have it all”, but not having children herself, hippies for unnaturally feigning naturalness, bohemians for their dependence on the bourgeois.
It has grown to absurd heights in our time with the professional hypocrites in office and their propaganda machine propping up them, the UN, the EPA, the DOJ, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc, etc…
Along with books by Judith Krantz and Anton LaVey, Helen Gurley Brown’s “Sex and The Single Girl” was one of my favorite books to read when I was a teenager. The advice on thrift, flirting, diet and exercise were certainly fun and interesting, much more so than other YA advice books, even if I took very little of it seriously.
However, I could never get into Cosmopolitan, which brings to mind a food magazine that always has a roasted turkey on the cover, with ten articles on how to recycle Thanksgiving leftovers every month. There were other women’s magazines that were enthusiastic about the sexual revolution and had more intelligent articles and better photography– I think of Nova and Viva, but they did not last.
The party must have been fun in the early days, but the end result we now have are cougars and mostly obese girls in skimpy outfits.
There is nothing Conservative about a woman who chooses to work in preference to having children. That is pretty much the definition of a Lefty feminist.
I am guessing you probably grew up reading Cosmo? Maybe you should have run this past a dude before publishing it?
A crazy thought just popped into my head: Is Conservatism the male view of the world, and Liberalism the female view? Patriarchal vs. matriarchal? Liberals are from Venus, and Conservatives are from Mars? Hmm. I might be onto something, here.
No, I don’t think so. Conservatism is the ideological orientation one takes after studying history, economics, and human behavior, and psychology. It’s realistic and humble, because it recognizes the limits of mind/will. There are liberal men (lots of them) and conservative women (many famous ones in fact).
If you’re looking for a divide, it’s closer to rational (conservative) vs. emotional (liberal). But conservatives are not stubbornly rational nor unrealistic. For example, Christians believe in life after death, but the vast majority still cry and understand when someone cries when they lose a loved one. Our humanity is our nature, and conservatives – if nothing else – acknowledge the limits on consciously (i.e., through government) directing behavior and custom.
Interesting contrast in USA Today obituary of two women, Helen Gurley Brown and Nellie Gray, dedicated to their movements. Found it here online: http://www.priestsforlife.org/columns/4279-column-helen-gurley-brown-vs-nellie-gray
The hippies may have been more annoying, but I think people like Brown actually did more long-term damage. The hippies would have been just another freakish subculture if there had not also been “respectable” people preaching an equally destructive message.
I think many of you grant WAY too much power to Helen Gurley Brown. She ran a magazine. Having survived the ’70′s in my twenties, which makes me 60 right now, I remember reading Cosmo but putting it pretty much in the same category as Glamour or Mademoiselle. None of that shit governed my life. It was another People or Entertainment Weekly past tense. People.
Actual,normal people did not operate on a daily basis because of some pseudo-annointed sociological avatar.
Is it really necessary for conservatives to incessantly show soft spots for liberals? I get so tired of reading articles that begin with “Yes, I know,” go on to list a number of reprehensible examples, only to later praise their subject.
Have you looked around and seen the cesspool that is modern pop culture? I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but consider just one thing for now: HBO makes hit shows that combine extreme, graphic violence with gratuitous nudity and sex. I can’t think that recurring violent sexual fantasies is even close to healthy for a society. I’ve seen minimal amounts of these programs, and though I could watch them, I’m so turned off by this potent and toxic combination of blood lust and plain old lust they make me ill. (Think True Blood, Game of Thrones)
Conservative self-loathing is really get old.
Are there no conservative women to laud?
Ms. Brown played a very important role in propping up the racist, sexist corporate greed machine. She was a voice of false dissent. Ms. Brown distracted the country, and many feminists, by maintaining the issues between men and women were about sexuality and not equality. Regardless of whether single women were enjoying sex or being celebant; the real issue–that women earn 59 cents to every man’s dollar was swept under the rug.
Ms. Brown thought female independene for patriarchy was about letting women sleep with whoever they want, while the true issue of women working where they want was swept aside. It is irrelevant whether we live in a soceity that would please Larry Flynt or one that would please Jerry Fallwell. Both men were patriarchal corpocrats who only wanted to keep women impoverished and enslaved.
All so-called culture war issues are sham controversies manufactured by powerful corporate interests to distract the people from their greed. Like Star Wars Chancellor Palpatine, the corparchy controls both sides of the culture war, and no matter who wins, the 99% lose!
Reagan’s comment about the hippies was priceless!
He and Nancy were being driven around Haight-Ashbury in the governor’s limousine during an anti-war protest. Many of the hippies bore placards saying “make love, not war”. Upon seeing this, Ron remarked to Nancy that most of them looked like they couldn’t do either.
Calling Helen Gurley Brown a pioneer is like calling Madonna a pioneer. A new way of exploiting sex and having an effect on culture? Wow, how revolutionary. I wonder if rediscovering something that never goes out of fashion is really novel or if it shows the lack of imagination of the would-be followers.