NEW YORK – Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and an author who encouraged women not to save it for the wedding night, died Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization, Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. said in a statement. She was 90.
“Sex and the Single Girl,” her million-selling grab-bag book of advice, opinion and anecdote on why being single shouldn’t mean being sexless, made a celebrity of the 40-year-old advertising copywriter in 1962 and made her a foil for feminists who believed that women’s rights meant more than sleeping around.
Three years later, she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan, and it became her playtime pulpit for the next 32 years.
She said at the outset that her aim was to tell a reader “how to get everything out of life – the money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity – whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against.”
“It was a terrific magazine,” she said, looking back when she surrendered the editorship of the U.S. edition in 1997. “I would want my legacy to be, ‘She created something that helped people.’ My reader, I always felt, was someone who needed to come into her own.”
“Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” the 2009 biography of Brown by Jennifer Scanlon, a women’s studies professor, argued that her message of empowerment made Brown a feminist even if the movement didn’t recognize her as such.
She also championed cosmetic surgery, speaking easily of her own nose job, facelifts and silicone injections.
Helen Gurley was a child of the Ozarks, born Feb. 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Ark. Growing up during the Depression, she earned pocket money by giving other kids dance lessons.
Her father died when she was 10 and her mother, a teacher, moved the family to Los Angeles, where young Helen, acne-ridden and otherwise physically unendowed, graduated as valedictorian of John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1939.
All the immediate future held was secretarial work. With typing and shorthand learned at a business college, she went through 18 jobs in seven years at places like the William Morris Agency, the Daily News in Los Angeles, and, in 1948, the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency. There, when finally given a shot at writing ad copy, she began winning prizes and was hired away by Kenyon & Eckhardt, which made her the highest-paid advertising woman on the West Coast.
Marriage came when she was 37 to twice-divorced David Brown, a former Cosmopolitan managing editor-turned-movie producer, whose credits would include “The Sting” and “Jaws.”
Her husband encouraged Brown to write a book, which she put together on weekends, and suggested the title “Sex and the Single Girl.” A working title of “Sex for the Single Girl” had been rejected as a little too permissive, even for Gurley Brown.
They moved to New York after the book became one of the top sellers of 1962. Moviemakers bought it for a then-very-hefty $200,000, not for the nonexistent plot, but for its provocative title. Natalie Wood played the character named Helen Gurley Brown.