Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but also thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died Monday in New York. She was 90.
The Hearst Corp., Cosmopolitan’s publisher, said in a news release that she died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital after a brief stay there. As Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997, Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women. The look of women’s magazines on the newsstand today — a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines — is in no small part the result of her influence.
Before she arrived at Cosmopolitan, Brown had already shaken the collective consciousness with her best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl.” Published in 1962, the year before Betty Friedan ignited the modern women’s movement with “The Feminine Mystique,” it taught unmarried women how to look their best, have delicious affairs and ultimately bag a man for keeps, all in breathless, aphoristic prose. (Brown was a former advertising copywriter.)
By turns celebrated and castigated, Brown was for decades a highly visible, although barely visible, public presence. A tiny, fragile-looking woman who favored big jewelry, fishnet stockings and minidresses till she was well into her 80s, she was a regular guest at society soirees and appeared often on television. At 5 feet 4 inches, she remained a wraithlike 100 pounds throughout her adult life. That weight, she often said, was 5 pounds above her ideal.
Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death. What is safe to say is that she was a Janus-headed figure in women’s history, simultaneously progressive and retrogressive in her approach to women’s social roles.
Few magazines have been identified so closely with a single editor as Cosmopolitan was with Brown. Before she took over, Cosmopolitan, like its competitors, was every inch a postwar product. Its target reader was a married suburbanite, preoccupied with maintaining the perfect figure, raising the perfect child and making the perfect Jell-O salad.
Brown tossed the kids and the Jell-O, although she kept the diet advice with a vengeance. Yes, readers would need to land Mr. Right someday — the magazine left little doubt that he was still every woman’s grail. But in an era in which an unmarried woman was called an old maid at 23, the new Cosmopolitan gave readers license not to settle for settling down with just anyone and to enjoy the search with blissful abandon for however long it took.
A child of the Ozarks, Helen Marie Gurley was born Feb. 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Ark., the younger of two daughters of a family of modest means. Her father, Ira, was a schoolteacher, as her mother had been before her marriage.
Helen Gurley studied briefly at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University), but with no money to continue, she moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in secretarial school, from which she graduated in 1941.
Around this time, she had a short, inadvertent career as an escort. At 19, as Brown recounted in her memoir “I’m Wild Again” (2000), she answered a newspaper advertisement seeking young women for “social evenings.” She needed to support her mother and sister: What could be simpler, she reasoned, than earning $5 for going on a date? On her first outing, she and her gentleman caller parked and kissed a bit before the full extent of her responsibilities dawned on her. She fled with her $5 and her virtue.
She eventually became an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles, first with Foote, Cone & Belding and later with Kenyon & Eckhardt. In 1959, she married David Brown, a former managing editor of Cosmopolitan who had become a Hollywood producer.
David Brown, who produced “Jaws” and other well-known films, died in 2010; the couple had no children. Helen Gurley Brown’s sister, Mary Gurley Alford, died before her.
In 1963, the Browns moved to New York. Two years later, the Hearst Corp. asked Brown to take over Cosmopolitan, one of its less prepossessing magazines. Becalmed in the doldrums, Cosmopolitan favored articles on home and hearth, along with uplifting discussions of current affairs (“The Lyndon Johnson Only His Family Knows”).
Brown had never held an editing job, but her influence on Cosmopolitan was swift and certain: She did not so much revamp the magazine as vamp it.
