'Dust Bowl' Drought has hit too many western states including some middle states. And there does not seem to be any relief for them, which raises food prices, feed prices, lakes and rivers are drying out. Roads are buckling, sinkholes are forming. YIKES.............
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave Cosmopolitan Its Purr, Dies at 90
Santi Visalli/Getty Images
Helen Gurley Brown was Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: August 13, 2012
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 on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.
Related in Opinion
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Ms. Brown with her husband, David, at their home in 1970.
Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press
Ms. Brown in 1997.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
The Hearst Corporation, Cosmopolitan’s publisher, said in a news release that she died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital after a brief stay there. She lived in Manhattan.
As Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997, Ms. 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 due in no small part to her influence.
Before she arrived at Cosmopolitan, Ms. 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. (Ms. Brown was a former advertising copywriter.)
By turns celebrated and castigated, Ms. Brown was for decades a highly visible, though 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, she remained a wraithlike hundred pounds throughout her adult life. That weight, she often said, was five pounds above her ideal.
Ms. 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 Ms. 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.
Ms. Brown tossed the children and the Jell-O, though 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. Sex as an end in itself was perfectly fine, the magazine assured them. As a means to an end — the right husband, the right career, the right designer labels — it was better still.
In Ms. Brown’s hands, Cosmopolitan anticipated “Sex and the City” by three decades.
Gone was the housewife, apron in tow. In her place was That Cosmopolitan Girl, the idealized reader on whom Ms. Brown and her advertisers firmly trained their sights. Unencumbered by husband and children, the Cosmo Girl was self-made, sexual and supremely ambitious, a potent amalgam of Ragged Dick, Sammy Glick and Holly Golightly. She looked great, wore fabulous clothes and had an unabashedly good time when those clothes came off.
Forty-three when she took the magazine’s helm, Ms. Brown often described the Cosmo Girl as the young woman she had been — or dreamed of being — 20 years before.
A child of the Ozarks, Helen Marie Gurley was born on 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, the former Cleo Sisco, had been before her marriage.
“I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me — ordinary, hillbilly and poor — and I repudiated it from the time I was 7 years old,” Ms. Brown wrote in her book“Having It All” (1982).
When Helen was a baby, Ira Gurley was elected to the state legislature, and the family moved to Little Rock. In 1932, when she was 10, Ira was killed in an elevator accident, leaving her mother depressed and impoverished. In 1937, Mrs. Gurley moved with her daughters to Los Angeles. There, Helen’s older sister, Mary, contracted polio; she spent the rest of her life paralyzed from the waist down and in later years battled alcoholism.
Though Helen graduated as valedictorian of her high school class, she feared she could never transcend her family circumstances. At a time when a young woman’s main chance was to marry well, she felt ill equipped for the task. She did not consider herself pretty, she wrote years afterward, and had rampant, intractable acne. In “Having It All,” she coined the word “mouseburger” to describe young women like her. [mouseburger, n., pejorative,< mouse + -burger. A physically unprepossessing woman with little money and few prospects. Cf. milquetoast, said of men].
Helen Gurley persevered. She studied briefly at Texas State College for Women (it is nowTexas Women’s University), but with no money to continue, she returned 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 Ms. 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 went on to hold a string of secretarial jobs — 17 by her own count — and discovered the measure of security that sex could bring. At every office, or so it seemed, there were bosses eager to fondle and dandle. In exchange, there might be a fur or an apartment or the wherewithal to keep her family going a little longer.
Helen Gurley 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. “I look after him like a geisha girl,” she told The New York Times in 1970.
Mr. Brown, who produced “Jaws” and other well-known films, died in 2010; the couple had no children. Ms. Brown’s sister, Mary Gurley Alford, died before her.
This year Ms. Brown gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities, both of which Mr. Brown had attended, to create the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Brown found herself at loose ends and cast about for a project. Her husband, who had recently stumbled on a cache of letters she had written in her 20s to a married man who was smitten with her, persuaded her to write “Sex and the Single Girl.”
Though the book seems almost quaint today (“An affair can last from one night to forever”), it caused a sensation when it was published in 1962 by Bernard Geis Associates. It sold millions of copies, turned Ms. Brown into a household name and inspired a movie of the same title starring Natalie Wood, released in 1964.
In 1963, the Browns moved to New York. Two years later, the Hearst Corporation asked Ms. 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”).
Ms. 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.
Where just months earlier Cosmo’s covers had featured photos of demure, high-collared girl-next-door types like Mary Tyler Moore, Ms. Brown’s first issue, July 1965, showed a voluptuous blond model whose deep cleavage was barely contained by her plunging neckline.
What Cosmopolitan’s previous cover lines had lacked in pith and punch (“Diabetes: Will Your Children Inherit It?”), Ms. Brown’s more than made up for. “World’s Greatest Lover — What it was like to be wooed by him!,” her inaugural cover proclaimed. Ms. Brown was not shy about disclosing the fact that in her 32 years with the magazine, her husband wrote all the cover lines.
Readers and advertisers flocked to the new Cosmo. When Ms. Brown took over, the magazine had a circulation of less than 800,000; at its height, in the 1980s, circulation approached three million.
Ms. Brown’s magazine did not find favor with everyone. In 1970, a group of feminists led by Kate Millett staged a sit-in at Ms. Brown’s office, protesting what they saw as her retrograde vision of womanhood. Even several nude male centerfolds (Burt Reynolds, April 1972; Arnold Schwarzenegger, August 1977) were for many of Cosmopolitan’s critics insufficient counterweights.
But in retrospect, Ms. Brown’s work seems strikingly apolitical, beholden mostly to the politics of personal advancement. (In “Having It All,” she compares herself, favorably, to Eva Peron.) The advice she offered Cosmopolitan’s readers on winning the right friends and influencing the right people was squarely in the tradition of Dale Carnegie, if less vertically inclined.
Ms. Brown was declared a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995. Like many landmarks, she had much restoration work done, which she spoke of candidly: a nose job, breast augmentation, face-lifts, eye lifts and injections of silicone and fat into her face to keep wrinkles at bay, among other procedures.
But while she could offset the physical tolls of aging, Ms. Brown could not always keep pace with changing times. She drew wide criticism for publishing an article in the January 1988 issue of Cosmopolitan that played down the risk of AIDS for heterosexual women. In the 1990s, when prominent men like Justice Clarence Thomas and Senator Robert Packwood were facing accusations of sexual harassment, Ms. Brown publicly disdained the charges, arguing that sexual attention from men is almost always flattering. Her remarks angered many feminists.
In 1996, with circulation declining and the public perception that Ms. Brown had lost touch with her readers growing, Hearst announced that she would step down the next year as Cosmopolitan’s editor in chief. Ms. Brown’s last issue was February 1997; she was succeeded by Bonnie Fuller, the founding editor of the American edition of Marie Clairemagazine.
Ms. Brown stayed on as the editor of Cosmopolitan’s international editions, continuing to work from an office appointed with pink silk walls, leopard-print carpet and a cushion embroidered with the maxim “Good Girls Go to Heaven/Bad Girls Go Everywhere.” ”
A biography of Ms. Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” by Jennifer Scanlon, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009.
Ms. Brown’s other books include “Sex and the Office” (1964), “Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook” (1969) and “Sex and the New Single Girl” (1970), all published by Bernard Geis. In 1993, William Morrow published “The Late Show,” ,” Ms. Brown’s advice book for women over 50, in which she suggests that as women age and the supply of available men dwindles, they should simply appropriate their friends’ husbands for jaunty recreational sex.
Perhaps none of these things — not the books, not the unabashed look of Cosmopolitan and its legion of imitators, not the giddy pleasure with which American women embraced sex without shame — would have happened quite as soon if Ms. Brown had heeded a single piece of advice. In 1962, just before “Sex and the Single Girl” was due to be published, she received a telegram from her mother. In an interview with CNN in 1998, Ms. Brown recalled its contents.
“dear helen,” it read. “if you move very quickly, i think we can stop publication of the book.”
Highlights From the Archives
Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave Cosmopolitan Its Purr, Dies at 90
By MARGALIT FOX
Ms. Brown, who wrote the best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl,” was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women.August 14, 2012BUSINESSOBITUARY (OBIT)
ARTICLES ABOUT HELEN GURLEY BROWN
Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan's Longtime Editor, Dies at 90
By MARGALIT FOX
Ms. Brown ran the magazine for more than three decades, giving it the sexually frank tone it was known for.August 13, 2012
How Cosmo Conquered the World
By EDITH ZIMMERMAN
Yes, there is a Cosmo for pretty much every country you can think of. Selling American friskiness has never been, like, so awesome.August 03, 2012, Friday
Helen Gurley Brown Gives $30 Million for Media Innovation at Columbia and Stanford
By BRIAN STELTER
The former editor of Cosmopolitan is financing an institute on media innovation on both campuses, at Columbia's journalism school and Stanford's school of engineering. Her total gift to the journalism school was its largest ever.January 30, 2012
Bad Girls, Good Sense: A Helen Gurley Brown Quiz
By PAT RYAN
“Sex and the Single Girl” set out some surprisingly homespun guidelines and strict rules for personal finance. Test your knowledge with our quiz.May 24, 2009, Sunday
Miniskirt Lib
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
A biography calls Helen Gurley Brown a trailblazing feminist.April 26, 2009, Sunday
Helen Gurley Brown: The Original Carrie Bradshaw
By DWIGHT GARNER
Jennifer Scanlon’s biography of Helen Gurley Brown charts her rise from growing up in poverty to editing Cosmopolitan, and argues that she deserves more credit as a pioneering feminist.April 22, 2009, Wednesday
T
The Seasoned Woman
To the Editor: I keep wondering if your reviewer Toni Bentley and I read the same book, Gail Sheehy's ''Sex and the Seasoned Woman'' (Feb. 5). Bentley says Sheehy's ''prose is sloppy and frequently awkward.'' Hardly. Gail doesn't know how to write that way. Bentley also seriously objects to the premise of the book -- that women over 50 can and should continue to be sexual creatures, to have sex with a partner, if available, alone if necessary. Why is Toni Bentley so upset with this premise?...March 05, 2006, Sunday
Injecting Silicone, and Risk
By NATASHA SINGER
Liquid silicone has been regaining popularity, as doctors use it off-label to fill wrinkles, furrows and acne scars or add volume to lips and cheeks.January 26, 2006, Thursday
Are Three Towers Now Two? No. One's Just Hiding.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Although the Beresford is sometimes considered the cynosure of Central Park West co-ops, its stumpy spires mark it not as an apotheosis but as the antecedent of its remarkable colleagues.November 20, 2005, Sunday
Quasimodo Would Feel at Home
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
LEW FRANKFORT'S apartment at the Beresford just got a little bigger. Last year, Mr. Frankfort, the chairman and chief executive of Coach, the leather goods company, bought a four-story apartment that extends into one of the three towers in the Emery Roth-designed landmark at Central Park West and 81st Street. The seller was Bob Weinstein, a co-founder and former co-chairman of Miramax Films. Mr. Frankfort embarked on a complete renovation of the apartment and also entered into talks with t...November 20, 2005, Sunday
Casual Relationships, Yes. Casual Sex, Not Really.
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Mating rituals today owe as much to Doris Day as they do to Samantha Jones.April 03, 2005, Sunday
The Big City; Kept Women: Nearly Extinct For a Reason
By JOHN TIERNEY
IT was billed as Girls' Nite for Helen Gurley Brown and a select group of customers at Henri Bendel, which seemed the ideal opportunity for a sociological inquiry: Whither the kept woman? Several dozen elegant ladies, world-class shoppers of all ages, gathered in the Fifth Avenue store Thursday evening to sip wine, watch a makeup demonstration and listen to Mrs. Brown discuss her new memoir, ''I'm Wild Again'' (St. Martin's Press). She started with the section titled ''The Year of Being Kep...April 08, 2000, Saturday
First 'Cosmopolitan Girl' Reveals a Secret
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Helen Gurley Brown, the 76-year-old former editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, has come clean in her new memoir, ''I'm Wild Again: Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts'' (St. Martin's Press). In a chapter titled ''The Year of Being Kept (But Not Very Well),'' she reveals for the first time that she had a financial arrangement when she was 24 with an older, married man who, in exchange for rent and a nominal secretarial job, had a sexual relationship with her. According to he...January 31, 2000, Monday
The Dance Of the Images
By PHOEBE HOBAN
THE disco song ''Bad Girls'' boomed throughout the marble-floored duplex penthouse, which was a study in shocking pink: candelabras wreathed in magenta feather boas sat on pink-velvet-draped tables. On the balcony over Fifth Avenue, a row of brightly lighted mannequins looked like high-fashion gargoyles. A small army of caterers dressed like Las Vegas showgirls wore red dynel wigs. But the glitzy decorations paled in comparison to the guest list for the party given on Monday night by the son...October 12, 1997, Sunday
Is Helen Gurley Brown the Captain or the Ship Itself?
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Sitting amid the pink silk walls and leopard-print carpet of her office, listening to this nearly 75-year-old woman talk about love and sex as if she were still 23, the question arises: Can there possibly be life for Cosmopolitan magazine after Helen Gurley Brown? Indeed, these days, Ms. Brown seems to be wondering what life can possibly offer her after Cosmopolitan. ''There isn't any question that I feel some grief for the loss of the product,'' Ms. Brown said. ''Because I loved having a m...January 13, 1997, Monday
Helen Gurley Brown Navigator
A list of resources from around the Web about Helen Gurley Brown as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.
Brown Institute for Media Innovation
OTHER COVERAGE
How Cosmo Changed the World
Cosmopolitan
Helenism
The New Yorker, May 11, 2009
The Woman Who Made it Good to be Bad
Salon, Apr. 12, 2009
Helen Gurley Brown
Vanity Fair, Aug. 2007
VIDEOS
Helen Gurley Brown … A Woman for All Seasons
PBS, Dec. 02, 1989
The Modern Woman
PBS, Mar. 11, 1981
Helen Gurley Brown, Groundbreaking Cosmopolitan Editor, Has Died at 90
Helen Gurley Brown, the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine and the woman most often credited with building it into an international empire, has died at age 90, according to the magazine's publisher, Hearst Corporation. Brown passed away this morning at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Colombia after a brief hospitalization, but no cause of death has been released yet. “Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation, in a statement. “She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential ‘Cosmo girl.’ She will be greatly missed.”
News of her death follows a lengthy article about the global growth of Cosmo in The New York Times Magazine, which called her the "patron saint" of Cosmopolitan magazine's editorial mission. As recently as January, she donated $30 million to Columbia's J-School and Stanford's engineering school to establish a joint "institute for media innovation." Here's the press release from Hearst:
HELEN GURLEY BROWN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS, COSMOPOLITAN & AUTHOR OF SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL, DEAD AT 90
Gurley Brown Redefined Womanhood for Many Women and Built Cosmopolitan Into Global Media JuggernautNEW YORK, August 13, 2012 – Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazines’ 64 international editions and one of the world’s most popular and influential editors, died today at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. She was 90.Widely heralded as a legend, Gurley Brown’s impact on popular culture and society reached around the globe, first with her 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, and then for the more than three decades she put her personal stamp on Cosmopolitan in a way rarely replicated by editors. Under her reign, Cosmopolitan became the bible of “single girls” worldwide and remains the magazine of “fun, fearless, females” to this day.“Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation. “She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential ‘Cosmo girl.’ She will be greatly missed.”“Helen was an inspiration, a true success story. Her energy, enthusiasm and true passion for women’s issues unleashed a platform for women worldwide,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines. “She brought the subject that every woman wanted to know about but nobody talked about, to life, literally, in Cosmo’s pages.”Her and her husband David Brown’s philanthropy also left an indelible mark on journalism: In January, Gurley Brown gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities. The gift created the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, housed at both Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Engineering at Stanford. The center represents the “increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts,” both schools announced. The journalism school said its $18 million share was the largest donation in its 100-year history.Gurley Brown’s husband, David, who died in 2010, attended both universities and was a movie producer whose films included Jaws, The Sting and The Verdict.She also gave the papers, notes, and correspondence that document her career—and publishing in the late 20th century—to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.The woman who redefined womanhood for many coming of age at that time, was born in Green Forest, Ark., on February 18, 1922, to Ira and Cleo Gurley, both school teachers. The family moved to Little Rock when Ira was elected to the state legislature. He died in an elevator accident when Helen was 10 years old. After trying to support Helen and her older sister Mary in Depression-era Arkansas, Cleo Gurley moved them to Los Angeles in the late 1930s. There, Gurley Brown excelled socially and academically, graduating from high school as class valedictorian.She spent a year at the Texas State College for Women and returned home to put herself through Woodbury Business College. Her mother and sister, who had contracted polio, depended on her financial support for the rest of their lives. In 1941, with her business degree, Gurley Brown took on a series of secretarial jobs.She was later to urge her readers to plan their financial lives wisely, writing “Being smart about money is sexy.” A careful spender her whole life, she was said to bring her lunch to work almost every day for the more than 30 years she spent at Hearst.It was her 17th job, at the advertising agency Foote, Cone, and Belding, that launched her future success. As executive secretary to Don Belding, Gurley Brown’s work ethic and witty notes impressed both her boss and his wife, who suggested she try her hand at writing advertising copy. She proved her talent, winning prizes for her copy. By the late 1950s, she had become the highest-paid female copywriter on the West Coast and one of the few to be listed in Who’s Who of American Women. (She is also recognized in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in The World, and the World Book of Facts.)In 1959, at the age of 37, Gurley Brown married Brown, 43, then a film executive at 20th Century Fox Studios, and later an independent producer. During their marriage, Brown was a partner behind many of Gurley Brown’s projects, even writing Cosmo cover lines. It was he who persuaded her to write a book about her life as a single woman. The result, Sex and the Single Girl (1962), took the nation—and then globe—by storm.On the bestseller lists for more than a year, Sex and the Single Girl has been published in 28 countries and translated into 16 languages. The book encouraged young women to enjoy being single, find fulfillment in work and non-marital relationships with men, and take pleasure in sex. When Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique ushered in the modern women’s movement a year later, the two works and their authors helped lead the growing national dialogue about the place of women in society and popular culture. Quick on the stiletto heels of her first success, Gurley Brown wrote the 1964 bestseller, Sex and the Office.Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Sex and the Single Girl for what was then the highest price ever paid for a non-fiction title. The 1964 film starred Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda.The Browns then worked together to keep Helen in the public eye. She wrote a syndicated newspaper advice column and made record albums and radio spots. The pair pitched plays, television shows, more books, and new magazines for single women. One, a magazine called Femme, attracted the interest of Hearst Magazines. But instead of a new title, they agreed to let her try to revive Cosmopolitan magazine.In July 1965, Gurley Brown, the woman who famously said, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere,” officially became editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and launched it into publishing history. She was Cosmo’s tireless editor-in-chief, growing the magazine in the 1980s to 300 pages, a third of which were highly lucrative advertisements. Since then, its sales and advertising have risen spectacularly. Today Cosmopolitan is the top-selling young women’s magazines in the world, with 64 international editions and is published in 35 languages and distributed in more than 100 countries. In 1997, Gurley Brown left the flagship magazine to be editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan’s growing international editions.Gurley Brown’s vision—and spectacular success—was to remodel the then-conservative Cosmopolitan. She once said she accomplished this because, “My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.”She featured sexy cover models, provocative content, and a fresh point of view that appealed to young women. She was a highly visible magazine editor and personality, authoring The Single Girl’s Cookbook (1969) and Sex and the New Single Girl (1971), an updated version of her first book, and making TV show guest appearances. At one point, she was said to be so popular that she was the 10th-most-frequent guest on “The Tonight Show.” In the 1980s, she had a weekly spot on Good Morning America and briefly hosted her own show, A View From Cosmo, on Lifetime.She and Brown, who were married for 51 years, were anchors in the New York publishing and Hollywood film communities, as he and partner Richard Zanuck produced some of the era’s most memorable movies, among them, Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy. When asked by an interviewer in 2006 to what she attributed her long, happy marriage, Gurley Brown answered, “I married the right man. He is kind, compassionate and generous, not just to me, but to a lot of other people. You need to marry a decent, caring person.”Named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the U.S. five times by The World Almanac, Gurley Brown continued to write books, some 11 in all. They include The Outrageous Opinions of Helen Gurley Brown (1967); the 1982 bestseller, Having It All; The Late Show: A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women over 50 (1993); and a writing guide, The Writer’s Rules: The Power of Positive Prose—How to Create It and Get It Published (1988). Her definitive memoir, I'm Wild Again: Snippets From My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts, was published in 2000. A biography of Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, by Jennifer Scanlon, was published in 2009.Just recently, Advertising Age named her among 100 women who have made an impact on advertising during the past century.For her exemplary contributions to magazine journalism, Gurley Brown was awarded a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications in 1985. In 1986, the Hearst Corporation established a chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in her name, the Helen Gurley Brown Research Professorship.She was inducted into the Publisher’s Hall of Fame in 1988, taking her place with such publishing originals as Henry Luce, DeWitt Wallace, Harold Ross, and Norman Cousins.The Magazine Publishers of America honored Helen Gurley Brown with the 1995 Henry Johnson Fisher Award, the magazine publishing industry’s highest honor. Gurley Brown was the first woman recipient. She received the 1996 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame Award.When asked in 2006 about the social firestorm called Sex and the Single Girl that ignited her long, iconic editorial career, Gurley Brown explained, “Before I wrote my book, the thought was that sex was for men and women only caved in to please men. But I wrote what I knew to be true—that sex is pleasurable for both women and men.”Donations may be made to The Pussycat Foundation, c/o Karen Sanborn, Hearst Corp., 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, to fund media innovation at Columbia and Stanford Universities. A fall memorial will be announced at a later date.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)