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Summary
Summary
When Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl first appeared in 1962, it whistled into buttoned-down America like a bombshell: Brown declared that it was okay-- even imperative--for unmarried women to have and enjoy a sex life, and that equal rights for women should extend to the bedroom and the workplace. "How dare you?" thundered newspapers, radio hosts, and (mostly male) citizens. But more than two million women bought the book and hailed her as a heroine. Brown was also pilloried as a scarlet woman and a traitor to the women's movement when she took over the failing Hearst magazine Cosmopolitan and turned it into a fizzy pink guidebook for "do-me" feminism. As the first magazine geared to the rising wave of single working women, it sold wildly. Today, more than 68 million young women worldwide are still reading some form of Helen Gurley Brown's audacious yet comforting brand of self-help.
"HGB" wasn't the ideal poster girl for secondwave feminism, but she certainly started the conversation. Brown campaigned for women's reproductive freedom and advocated skill and "brazenry" both on the job and in the boudoir--along with serial plastic surgery. When she died in 2012, her front-page obituary in The New York Times noted that though she succumbed at ninety, "parts of her were considerably younger."
Her life story is astonishing, from her roots in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, to her single-girl decade as a Mad Men -era copywriter in Los Angeles, which informed her first bestseller, to her years at the helm of Cosmopolitan . Helen Gurley Brown told her own story many times, but coyly, with plenty of camouflage. Here, for the first time, is the unvarnished and decoded truth about "how she did it"--from her comet-like career to "bagging" her husband of half a century, the movie producer David Brown.
Full of firsthand accounts of HGB from many of her closest friends and rediscovered, little-known interviews with the woman herself, Gerri Hirshey's Not Pretty Enough is a vital biography that shines new light on the life of one of the most vibrant, vexing, and indelible women of the twentieth century.
Author Notes
GERRI HIRSHEY has worked as a features writer, columnist, reporter, and essayist for The Washington Post , The New York Times Magazine , Rolling Stone , Vanity Fair , GQ , Esquire , The Nation , and New York , among other publications. She is the author of several books, including Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music and We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock . Hirshey also collaborated with ex-Ronette Ronnie Spector on Spector's one-woman cabaret show "Beyond the Beehive." Hirshey lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewed by Mary Kay Blakely. Hirshey's compelling biography of Helen Gurley Brown chronicles a peculiarly American sexual history, beginning with the breadwinner-housewife marriages that birthed the baby boom generation. So it's more than a little amazing that when in 1964 Brown published Sex and the Single Girl-in which she acknowledged having 178 affairs before marrying David Brown at age 37-she didn't think encouraging unmarried women to enjoy sex was radical or revolutionary. She described the book as mainly practical, sharing what she and her girlfriends had been talking about for nearly two decades. If a woman had challenging work and great sex, children and husbands could come later. This 500-page biography, thoroughly researched and reported, covers Helen's childhood in rural Arkansas, sometimes inflating difficulties common to Depression-era families. Brown's mother, Cleo, made thoughtless comments that damaged her self-confidence. (Didn't all mothers of her generation do that?) A fatal elevator accident killed her father, leaving his 10-year-old daughter with "daddy issues" for life. Brown's older sister, Mary, contracted polio and lost the ability to walk. Those childhood difficulties may or may not have triggered the neuroses Brown battled throughout life. She sought psychiatric help for depression at age 22 and financial insecurity plagued her. Weight preoccupations caused other neurotic behavior. She exercised fanatically at home and at the office, where she once stripped down to her underwear to work out in the stairwell. While Hirshey offers copious evidence of Brown's eccentricities, she also documents truly admirable traits. A solid work ethic powered her through 17 low-wage clerical jobs before she was finally promoted to a copy writing position at the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding. As editor of Cosmopolitan, she worked 70-80 hours per week. An exacting perfectionist, she was admired by her staff as a fair and thoughtful boss with business acumen learned on the job: she managed a tight budget, repackaged book chapters into articles, expanded ads, and increased circulation. She lived leanly and sent a quarter of her monthly salary home to her difficult mother and paralyzed sister. Brown's compete makeover of Cosmopolitan overloaded the magazine with self-help articles about sex, beauty, fashion, girlfriends, jobs, money, and pleasing your man. She drove most of her writers bonkers at least once (myself included), rewriting copy that might make her "girls" mad, guilty, sad, wounded, or insulted. She made some tremendous blunders (refusing to examine AIDS and the need for safe sex) and ignored important issues (both abortion and birth control were illegal in some states), exempting herself from controversy because she was "a pragmatist, not an activist." But, as Hirshey concludes, she ruled with naïveté and sincerity that were impossible to fake. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Journalist Hirshey (We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock, 2001, etc.) presents a deeply researched biography of daring author and hugely influential magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown (1922-2012). Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and her decadeslong editorship of a seemingly moribund Cosmopolitan magazine starting in 1965 seem easy to dismiss in an era of pervasive feminism beginning around 1970. However, Hirshey convincingly shows how Brown demonstrated some feminist tendencies and was certainly no shallow airhead (a term that fits with some of the informal prose peppered throughout the book). Before the author narrates Brown's unlikely ascension to influence and fame in New York City, she relates remarkable, telling details about her subject's childhood and young adulthood in rural Arkansas and then Los Angeles. After Brown's father died when Helen was 10 years old, her mother, Cleo, became unmoored geographically and unhinged emotionally. As a result, Helen and her older sister had to survive an unstable and sometimes poverty-stricken stretch. "Much of what Helen understood about her people was colored by her mother's melancholy worldview," writes Hirshey. In Helen's case, the agony was magnified by an inherent shyness and a terrible extended period of acne, which she believed rendered her physically unattractive. Although she outgrew the acne, she never felt that she was "pretty enough." Nonetheless, through sheer will, Brown succeeded in the advertising world, charted an ambitious social life that included open pursuit of premarital sex, and married late and well. Hirshey vividly relates how her husband, David Brown, parlayed his experience in both publishing and cinema into helping Helen conceive her bestselling books and turn around Cosmopolitan. Unlike numerous other biographers, Hirshey never falls into the trap of reductionism. Although Brown sometimes presents contradictions that cannot be easily resolved, the author portrays the complexities with skill. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The powerhouse behind Cosmopolitan magazine's controversial success, the unsinkable Helen Gurley Brown, was forever haunted by a toxic sense of inadequacy rooted in her hardscrabble Arkansas childhood. The antidote was work and men, the richer the better. At the outset of this precise, explicit, true-life picaresque, seasoned journalist Hirshey, who diligently dug through vast archives and conducted dozens of interviews, exclaims, How she has astonished me. Readers will share her wonderment. Smart, tenacious, and canny Brown supported her widowed mother and sister after they moved to California, weathering secretarial jobs in atrociously sexist offices until she broke into advertising as one of few women copywriters in the 1950s, outspokenly proud of being a single career woman who loved sex and wielding sexual power. In 1965, the happily and profitably married renegade brought her gospel of libidinous self-improvement to a floundering Hearst publication; gussied it up with busty Cosmo girls ; filled it with cheerfully candid advice about style, careers, good sex, and birth control (all at a time when contraception and abortion were illegal); and, in the process, forever changed women's lives. Hirshey is entrancing and enlightening throughout this detailed chronicle of Brown's brimming life of struggle, transformation, fame, failings, and influence, an astutely contextualized biography spiked with cameos by Jacqueline Susann, Kate Millet, Joan Didion, Gloria Vanderbilt, and many more. A pointillistic portrait essential to understanding the seemingly endless fight for women's equality.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PROVOCATION DOES NOT age well. Those who succeed make it difficult to appreciate how radical they were. When Helen Gurley Brown published "Sex and the Single Girl" in 1962, her frankness about the fact that unmarried women had sex - and liked it - shocked reviewers and sold millions of copies. When she took over Cosmopolitan in 1965, staff members grumbled. But over the 32 years she served as editor in chief, her message became mainstream. "There is a catch to achieving single bliss," Brown told her "Single Girl" readers. "You have to work like a son of a bitch." Cosmo reiterated that any girl could diet, exercise, groom, shop, flirt and sleep her way into having it all - another phrase that Brown helped make ubiquitous. The trick was indefatigability. Today, when career advisers exhort us to "do what you love, and love what you do" and pop songs tell us to "work it," to be sexy at work and to work at being sexy not only isn't shocking; it's expected. This may be why, four years after her death at the age of 90, Helen Gurley Brown is experiencing something of a revival. Matthew Weiner, the creator of "Mad Men," frequently cited "Sex and the Single Girl" as a source of inspiration and urged writers for the show to read it. In the introduction to her 2014 memoir "Not That Kind of Girl," Lena Dunham identified Brown as a key influence. The half-hour pilot that Dunham is currently developing for HBO revolves around a writer for women's magazines during the early years of second-wave feminism. A play based on Brown's life is also in the works. Now, two new biographies of Helen Gurley Brown have arrived within months of each other: "Enter Helen," by Brooke Hauser, a contributing writer at .Allure; and "Not Pretty Enough," by the longtime culture journalist Gerri Hirshey. (The feature film rights for "Enter Helen" were optioned before the book was even finished.) Both books draw heavily on the personal papers that Brown bequeathed to Smith College, as well as published works by Brown and her husband, the film producer David Brown. Both authors interviewed colleagues, friends and the few relatives who survived Helen. And both highlight the exhausting feedback loop between her anxieties and her ambition. Hauser and Hirshey are not the first. In her 2009 biography "Bad Girls Go Everywhere," the gender and women's studies professor Jennifer Scanlon presented a rigorous assessment of the relationship between working-class "Gurley girl feminism" and the more privileged precincts of the women's movement. "Enter Helen" and "Not Pretty Enough" offer engaging takes on Brown's life for a popular audience. "Enter Helen" focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, the decades when Hauser's heroine took off. Hauser lifted the title from a repeated stage direction in a musical that Brown tried to write about her own life, and the book has the nimble-footed and slightly manic quality of a revue. Most chapters run only a few pages. All are signposted with dates and epigraphs. We enter in medias res, shortly before Helen married David, and follow her rise for 165 pages before flashing back to her childhood in Arkansas. "Genteel poor" was a phrase Helen used to describe it. She felt a keen need to compensate for her "mouseburger" origins for the rest of her life. "Her insecurity was cellular," Hauser writes. It was also her great selling point. The improbability of her success proved that her can-do methods worked. Throughout, Hauser weaves in passages connecting Brown to her contemporaries and the cultural landscape of the 1960s. These side glances not only help situate her life in the context of its times. They remind us of how many of her stances were truly progressive - her vocal support of access to contraception and legal abortion, for instance. They also offer amusing glimpses into friendships and catty contretemps. We learn that Hugh Hefner was an early ally and that Gloria Steinern was often dismissive. Joan Didion was agnostic. A 1965 profile by Didion, published in The Saturday Evening Post, observed that Brown seemed mostly "very tired." GERRI HIRSHEY'S "NOT PRETTY ENOUGH" presents a narrower, but deeper, perspective. As Hirshey states in her introduction, her book is concerned more with the character and psychology of its protagonist than with her cultural surroundings. Where Hauser's method is montage, Hirshey suggests her own approach is "pointillist." "Not Pretty Enough" begins with contemporary reminiscences before it dissolves, like a classic Hollywood flashback, to 1893, when Brown's mother, Cleo Sisco, was born in the Ozarks. Brown's father died in a freak elevator accident in June 1932, when Helen was only 10 and her sister, Mary, was 14. Their childhood was impoverished and itinerant. Cleo moved her daughters across state lines several times before settling in Los Angeles and remarrying. Mary was afflicted by polio, while Helen suffered from disfiguring acne. Hirshey makes a strong case that the "intimate rituals of utter frustration and despair" that Brown shared with her hapless mother, along with her idealization of her dead father, shaped her forever. Indeed, they may have shaped the entire Cosmopolitan empire: "Cleo's basic self-improvement message was a dour version of the one Helen would banner with big-sisterly cheer in her own best sellers and in her magazine: Honey, do the best with what you have." Hirshey's psychological insights into Brown's childhood, as well as the book's treatment of Brown's long partnership with her husband, deepen and complicate the plucky image that Brown projected in public. Given how fixated she was on the connections between sex appeal and success, it's unsurprising she struggled as she got older. After her death, Brown was treated with the special cruelty that our culture reserves for women who do not know when to desist from trying to be desirable. Even her obituary in The Times included a snide remark: "She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger." Hauser speeds over Brown's twilight, when she turned into a grim caricature of herself, the emaciated octogenarian in fishnets doling out oral sex tips and say- ing reprehensibly ignorant things about H.I.V and sexual harassment. "For all her confessions," Hauser concludes, "Helen remained unknowable, even to those who knew her best." Hirshey lingers over the denouement, taking several chapters to chronicle Helen's later years as the editor of Cosmopolitan's international editions, her declining health, her late-in-life weight gain and her stunned grief after the death of David. When people asked how she was dealing with it, she offered a pantomime of nonchalance that sounds like a kind of despair: "Well, I come to work every day." "WRITE THE WAY you speak," Brown admonished, and for better or worse, both Hauser and Hirshey use prose strongly inflected - you might even say infected - with Brown's own idioms and idiosyncrasies. "Was he riding on his wife's coattails?" Hauser writes of David Brown. "Absolutely! And why not? She had ridden on his." The new Cosmo that he and Helen cooked up would consist of "frank discussions about sex, money, careers, apartments, fashion and beauty - oh, and men, men, men." The prose of "Not Pretty Enough" is less cartoonish, but Hirshey's attempts to ventriloquize sometimes verge on pastiche. She describes one early lover as "a Wow" and a title Brown wrote as "a lapel-grabber." From time to time, Hirshey adopts the kind of heavy-handed innuendo Cosmo favored. Helen's speaking voice was "well suited to the dark, whispery in tone, pleasant and young-sounding, with a musky minor note of boudoir." These biographies convey the sense of desperation that attended someone whose success depended so fundamentally on self-doubt. "Enter Helen" shows Brown trying to become everything anyone else wanted. She insisted that she loved sex even when she did not orgasm: "It was the most marvelous feeling because, my goodness, he was looking at me, at me." "Relax chin, stay at 105 pounds . . . torture!" was her New Year's resolution for years. "Not Pretty Enough" announces this central problem in the title. Yet neither book quite answers the deepest questions it poses. Why does Helen Gurley Brown matter now? Why does her story feel so timely? Hauser, despite her vivid treatment of Steinem and Betty Friedan, simply neglects to discuss contemporary feminism. Hirshey, from the outset, dismisses questions about Brown's legacy the way she imagines Brown herself would: "Aw, pippy poo." "I do find much of the revisionist analysis and H.G.B. meta-dissection to be tedious, solipsistic and drearily beside the point," Hirshey sighs. IT'S A STANDARD KIND of complaint for popular writers to lob at academics. But refusing to situate Brown in the current context seems like a missed opportunity. The past few years have seen a powerful revival of feminism in the United States, along with its commercial acceptance - or, depending on your perspective, its appropriation. In "Bad Girls Go Everywhere," Scanlon presented Brown as a complicated feminist figure: Cosmopolitan may have been crass, but it also disseminated feminist messages to a working-class audience whom the canonical front of the women's movement didn't reach. These two biographies matter precisely because Brown's life and career anticipated the tensions that countless women are talking about now. She offered a blueprint for success in a sexist world, telling readers how to game a system that was set up to exploit them. Was this the right approach? Whatever your answer, this is the same debate we are still having about the most powerful women in America, from Hillary Clinton to Beyoncé. Paradoxically, the most prominent heir to Brown's up-by-the-bootstraps feminism may be Sheryl Sandberg. In a 1982 interview with Gloria Steinem, Brown conceded that women faced obstacles specific to their gender, but, she insisted : "You can do pretty well anyway. You can rise above it." Sandberg hardly shares Brown's mouseburger origins, but in "Lean In" she delivers a message Brown would have recognized. "We can reignite the revolution by internalizing the revolution," Sandberg promises. A girl can hope, and as Brown knew, hope sells eternal. MOIRA WEIGEL'S first book, "Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating," was published in May. 'Her insecurity was cellular,' Hauser writes of Brown. It was also her great selling point.
Library Journal Review
Hirshey (We Gotta Get Out of This Place) offers a well-researched, in-depth look at Helen Gurley Brown (1922-2012), editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1997. Beginning with Brown's roots in rural Arkansas and later move to Los Angeles, this biography follows its subject through the events that shaped the opinions she went on to broadcast to the world from atop her media perch. With numerous firsthand accounts from acquaintances and close friends, including Gloria Vanderbilt and Barbara Walters, Hirshey takes readers on a rags-to-riches journey of Brown's life, recounting her often unstable childhood and time working for advertising agencies early in her career. Later chapters explore her partnership with film producer husband David Brown, her best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl, and her revitalization of Cosmopolitan after taking the editorial reins. This account sheds light on a complex woman whose controversial personality helped form both second-wave feminism and the magazine industry. VERDICT The story of Brown's rise to the top will appeal to readers of biography and those with an interest in the feminist movement.-Mattie Cook, River Grove PL, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Preface: The Trouble with Helen | p. xi |
Prologue: That Woman | p. 3 |
Part 1 Arkansas | |
1 Cleo's Lament | p. 9 |
2 Daddy's Girl | p. 21 |
3 Fear Itself | p. 34 |
4 Roads to Nowhere | p. 44 |
Part 2 Los Angeles | |
5 What Fresh Hell | p. 57 |
6 Sinking In | p. 71 |
7 Not Pretty Enough | p. 85 |
8 The Keptive | p. 94 |
9 Dear Mr. B... | p. 107 |
10 How Ever Did She Do It? | p. 127 |
11 The Cures | p. 145 |
12 The Marriage Plot | p. 159 |
13 Let the Games Begin | p. 169 |
14 Whiskey Sours with Carl Sandburg | p. 180 |
15 For All The Single Ladies... | p. 188 |
16 We Have Liftoff! | p. 199 |
17 Roadshow | p. 211 |
18 Meet the Press | p. 225 |
Part 3 Mew York | |
19 She'll take Manhattan | p. 237 |
20 "How Dare You, Helen Gurley Brown?" | p. 249 |
21 In Which Cosmopolitan Gets a Makeover | p. 264 |
22 Weekdays in the Park with David | p. 280 |
23 Recipe for Success | p. 292 |
24 Big Sister and the Youthquake | p. 303 |
25 A March Forward, A Few Steps Back | p. 314 |
26 Cosmo Goes to Harvard | p. 328 |
27 Isn't She Lovely? | p. 338 |
28 High Tide | p. 345 |
29 Victory Lap | p. 357 |
30 Thin Ice | p. 367 |
31 A Sort of Crisis | p. 377 |
32 The Politburo Must Fall | p. 381 |
33 "What The Hell, We're Off to Korea!" | p. 396 |
34 The Long Goodbye | p. 406 |
35 The Women: Can We Talk? | p. 412 |
Epilogue: "Take Me to the Ozarks" | p. 425 |
Notes | p. 429 |
Acknowledgments | p. 477 |
Index | p. 483 |