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The woman who wanted it all
Sali Hughes
Pioneering magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown taught
generations of women that it was their right to have it all
-- a career, a family and great sex. Sali Hughes recalls the
life of a fascinating woman.
Helen Gurley Brown, creator of the Cosmopolitan magazine
brand as we know it, died in Manhattan on August 13, aged
90. To many, she is the founding mother of women's magazine
publishing and the woman who first put the concept of sex
and single girls into the mainstream. Decades before Sex and
the City and 50 Shades of Grey , and at a time when single
women couldn’t even obtain a mortgage, Cosmopolitan was
telling them to celebrate their unmarried status, demanding
better sex, better orgasms and better men.
But despite Gurley Brown's notoriety as the editor who
invented sex talk for women, former U.K. Cosmo editor Sam
Baker says it wrongly overshadows her passion for careers
and financial independence for women. "Right up until I
left, she would still be sending editors notes, saying: 'I
love what you’re doing, but more careers! Careers are so
important!'" Gurley Brown is credited with inventing the
term "having it all", a sentiment that endures to this day,
if only in making women feel failures for not achieving her
ultimate feminist goal. But what Gurley Brown arguably
intended was for us to want more, to not have to choose
between having a family and retaining our own identities, or
between caring for our families and providing for ourselves.
"Don’t use men to get what you want in life -- get it for
yourself," she often said. And she never suggested women use
anything but hard graft to make it. "Nearly every glamorous,
wealthy, successful career woman you might envy now started
out as some kind of schlepp."
Self-made
She was no exception. Gurley was born in Green Forest,
Arkansas, to schoolteacher parents. Her father, Ira, went
into politics soon after and moved his family to Little
Rock. When Helen was 10, in 1932, he was killed in a freak
elevator accident. Broke, at the tail-end of the Great
Depression, her mother, Cleo, took her two daughters to Los
Angeles, whereupon Helen's elder sister, Mary, contracted
polio and never walked again. The family was uninsured and
lost what little they had to Mary’s medical bills. Helen
said much later: "Why am I so driven? It seems logically to
have derived from things that happened to me after my father
died, but some of it must have been residual from very
early." She cut short her education to go out to work to
support her mother and sister (she remained obsessed with
the importance of money management throughout her career).
She became an advertising copywriter at a New York agency in
the time of Mad Men and, within five years, was one of
Manhattan’s most celebrated ad execs. She pitched a new
magazine to Hearst publications and instead was offered the
job of relaunching Cosmopolitan , where she remained for the
next 32 years as editor.
According to everyone who knew her, "Gurley was girly". In
stark contrast with the "dour feminist anger" she banned
from Cosmopolitan when she successfully overhauled the
ailing literary magazine in 1965, she revelled in her
femininity. Her existing Manhattan corner office on the top
floor of the Hearst building was pink, full of flowers and
heavily accented with animal print. She described herself as
neurotic, as plain (she saw herself as a champion of the
unexceptional-looking woman, and an example of what they
could achieve).
Forever young
She remained young at heart and obsessed with maintaining an
appearance to match. Gurley Brown was still exercising for
45 minutes beside her desk at 85 years old, and was from a
young age rarely without her custom-cut wigs and false
eyelashes -- though as former employee Nora Ephron observed:
"It never quite comes together properly. An earring keeps
falling off. A wig is askew. A perfect matched stocking has
run." A relentless self-critic, Gurley Brown was a big fan
of plastic surgery and claimed the only sick days of her
60-year career in order to undergo facelifts, a nose job,
injections and various other nips and tucks, none of which
she denied (she once even wrote a Cosmo feature on how to
have great sex while wearing a hairpiece). She was known to
weep at criticism or disagreements, and was regarded by some
as emotionally incontinent ("Whether it was group therapy or
what, there’s nothing left inside Helen. It all comes out,"
her husband told Ephron). She believed in love and being
sexually available to one’s partner. Through it all, her
girlish sense of fun never left her.
Gurley's marriage (at 37) to film producer David Brown
marked the beginning of her most important personal and
professional relationship, continued until his death in
2010. She called him 'Lambchop' and kept a photograph of him
on her pinboard, next to flatplans, ideas and tearsheets.
She used him as a sounding board for her work. "She and
David were a real team," says Baker, now editor-in-chief at
Red. "Even greater than the sum of their parts — and she was
always very proud of that, which I found very admirable."
As a colleague and friend, she was kind and supportive.
Baker says: "She was always sending notes, written on a
typewriter and amended by hand. She was one of the last
great letter writers." "Before she came along, women's
magazines were edited by men and ignored the single
readership altogether," says Court. Baker agrees: "In 1965,
when Helen took over, women’s magazines were about
homemaking. Helen made them about life, love, work, sex,
money, friends. Society has moved on and I truly think Helen
Gurley Brown gave it a push." While magazines have moved on
a great deal since the 60s, Gurley Brown's legacy is
indelibly marked on Cosmo 's glossy pages (she was still
writing for some international editions when she died).
"What Helen did was make feminism populist, accessible and
relevant to normal women's lives," says Court. "She showed
women what they could be at a time when everyone else told
them women were absolutely nothing until they married a
man."
© Guardian News & Media 2012
