Helen Gurley Brown/Good Girls Go To Heaven/Bad Girls Go Everywhere

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/books/22garn.html?_r=1

Helen Gurley Brown: The Original Carrie Bradshaw

Published: April 21, 2009
Helen Gurley Brown, the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” (1962) and for three decades the editor of Cosmopolitan, was born in Green Forest, Ark., a tiny town in the Ozark Mountains. Her father died when she was 10; her sister had polio; her family was “hillbilly,” she wrote, and poor. Once she got out, she looked back only by force of will. She liked to quote a line from Carson McCullers: “I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.”


Courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown
Helen Gurley Brown in the art department at Cosmopolitan, shortly after she took over as editor of the magazine in 1965.

BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE

The Life of Helen Gurley Brown

By Jennifer Scanlon

Illustrated. 270 pages. Oxford University Press. $27.95.

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Courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown
Helen Gurley Brown with her husband, David Brown.

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Courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown
Ms. Brown and the publisher John Mack Carter, left, at a 1990 party celebrating her 25th anniversary as Cosmopolitan editor.


Roxanne Ashley
Jennifer Scanlon
Ms. Brown’s background lighted a kind of fire beneath her; it allowed her to speak effortlessly, later in her life, to the fears and aspirations of America’s often ignored working-class women. She would write, defining her scrappy brand of Horatio Alger feminism: “If you have some daily anguish from some cause that’s not really your fault — a rotten family, bad health, nowhere looks, serious money problems, nobody to help you, minority background (I don’t have that — a WASP — but I had other things), rejoice! These things are your fuel!”

In her entertaining new biography of Ms. Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” Jennifer Scanlon, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College, charts her subject’s rocketlike rise out of the Ozarks. She also argues, convincingly, for Ms. Brown as a feisty, pivotal and too easily dismissed pioneer of the American women’s movement, one who dismayed more serious feminists with her breezy tone, her refusal to see men as the enemy and her belief that sex is not only great fun but also a “powerful weapon” for single women.

Ms. Brown belongs alongside figures like Betty Friedan in histories of second-wave feminism (even if Friedan would have squirmed at the idea), Ms. Scanlon writes, and was a precursor of the third-wave, “Sex and the City” feminism. Born in 1922, Helen Gurley Brown escaped Arkansas when her mother moved the family, briefly, to Los Angeles. Never a great beauty, Ms. Brown developed a presence, Ms. Scanlon writes. “She eventually came to realize that success and power produced their own beauty.” She was popular and valedictorian of her high school senior class.

When her family returned to the Ozarks, Ms. Brown stayed put. She skipped college and worked as a secretary in 17 different offices during the mid-1940s. The professional playing field was desperately unequal: men were paid far more than women, and there were few opportunities to advance professionally. Living by her wits, Ms. Brown learned to game the system.

She slept with some of her bosses, and dated both Jack Dempsey and Ron Getty, son of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. (“A lady’s love should pay for all trips, most restaurant tabs and all liquor,” she later advised.)

She instinctively knew, however, as she would later counsel other women: “You can’t sleep your way to the top or even to the middle, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to do it yourself, so you might as well get started.” Within a few years she landed a job at an advertising agency and became the most highly paid female copywriter on the West Coast. In 1959, when she was 37, she married David Brown, an older, twice-married film producer. It was his idea that she write “Sex and the Single Girl,” but it was her bright, no-nonsense voice that brought the book to life.

The early 1960s was not a cheerful time for single women in America; they were viewed with pity if not outright suspicion. As Ms. Brown put it, the prevailing attitude was: “If you were female and not married by age 30, you might as well go to the Grand Canyon and throw yourself in.” Ms. Brown knew, the author writes, that single women “wanted to feel good about rather than ashamed of the life choices they made or contemplated.” The single girl, she proclaimed, “is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.”

In “Sex and the Single Girl,” Ms. Brown was direct about sex. “You inherited your proclivity for it,” she wrote. “It isn’t some random piece of mischief you dreamed up because you’re a bad, wicked girl.”

The book was also a groundbreaking financial primer. “Being smart about money is sexy,” Ms. Brown said. A child of the Great Depression, she was a proud penny pincher, brown-bagging her lunch nearly every day of her professional life.

Ms. Scanlon notes, interestingly, that some of Ms. Brown’s most provocative writing — on topics like contraception, abortion (which was still illegal), and lesbianism — was cut from “Sex and the Single Girl” by male editors. Nevertheless, the book went on to be a best seller and a cultural phenomenon. Ms. Brown became, the author writes, the 10th-most-frequent guest on “The Tonight Show.”

Some of the best chapters in “Bad Girls Go Everywhere” contrast Ms. Brown’s career with that of Friedan, whose book “The Feminine Mystique” came out a year later. Ms. Scanlon is sympathetic to both women, but fiercely loyal to her subject. Unlike Ms. Brown, she writes, Friedan, who attended Smith College, was simply “not one of the women she purported to speak for.”

The book’s second half chronicles Ms. Brown’s 32-year tenure as the editor of Cosmopolitan, where her fundamental message was little changed.

Ms. Scanlon writes well about Ms. Brown’s sparring with feminists like Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett, who once led a group that invaded Cosmo’s offices. Ms. Brown never could get with the whole hippie thing.

“Those back-to-goodness-and-nature hippies are certainly not natural,” Ms. Brown explained. “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.” Ms. Brown was justly criticized, Ms. Scanlon notes, for not allowing certain subjects into her magazine. These included the existence of children, and topics like AIDS.

As Ms. Brown aged, she grew no less provocative. In her 1993 book, “The Late Show,” aimed at older women, she wrote: “Welcoming a penis just seems more womanly to me than baking chocolate chip cookies or doling out money for a grandchild’s college tuition.” She was gently forced out of the editorship of Cosmopolitan in 1997.

“Bad Girls Go Everywhere” is the first biography of Ms. Brown; I suspect there might be more. Ms. Scanlon covers this territory gracefully and concisely, but the bite in this cocktail is provided by Ms. Brown, who is by far the livelier writer.

You finish this book with little doubt that, as Ms. Scanlon writes, had Helen Gurley Brown “sought to trademark the Cosmo Girl, she would have had to present herself as evidence.”