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Helen Gurley Brown, Madame “Sex and the Single Girl” Dies at 90
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 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,
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 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 was 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. She did not consider herself pretty, she wrote years afterward, and had rampant, intractable acne. 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 now Texas Woman’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.
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 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 perception that Ms. Brown had lost touch with her readers growing, Hearst announced that she would step down the next year as 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 Claire magazine.
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.”
R.I.P MADAME YOU’RE AN ICON TO MANY WOMEN!
Oprah to Interview Gymnastic Gabby Douglas
Oprah Winfrey revealed that she scored an exclusive interview with US Olympic gymnast Gabrielle Douglas for “Oprah’s Next Chapter.”
The television mogul tweeted the details in under 140 characters: “@Oprah sits down with Olympic Gold Medalist @gabrielledoug, on an all-new episode of #NextChapter - Sun 8/26 at 8:30/7:30c!”
Douglas will discuss her rise to Olympic gold and the intense and immediate media attention she found herself facing in London. Winfrey will visit the host family that provided a second home for Douglas during her training, and visit the gym in West Des Moines, Iowa where Douglas trained six days a week in preparation for London. Winfrey will also speak with Gabby’s mother Natalie, who cheered Gabby on from the stands every day and stood behind her as she pursued her Olympic dreams.
Halle Berry and Oliver Martinez…WEDDING OFF?
Halle Berry was supposed to marry fiance Olivier Martinez in a romantic summer wedding but instead of walking down the aisle a sullen looking Halle has been spotted without her engagement ring...
From The Daily Mail
In March Halle Berry confirmed reports that she was engaged to her longtime beau Olivier Martinez.
Despite vowing that she would never walked down the aisle again, it wasn't long before the former Bond girl was seen flaunting her stunning emerald sparkler.
But yesterday the star was pictured out and about in Los Angeles without her ring on her finger.
She tied a pink bandana around her head and hid her eyes behind a pair of large sunglasses.
Halle was seen walking towards a car as she held a large black leather bag. Noticeably ring-less, she failed to raise a smile as she journeyed forward.
Jennifer Hudson celebrates David's third birthday
She has always been known for her powerhouse vocals and more recently is recognized for dropping 80 pounds since becoming a spokesperson for Weight Watchers.
And Jennifer Hudson made the most of two qualities to be proud of as she performed a small gig.
The star attended Apollo In The Hamptons: A Night Of Legends at The Creeks in East Hampton, New York and stood out in a hot pink frock.
The 30-year-old looked stunning in the number which skimmed her slimmed-down thighs and was fitted around her curvy hips and waist.
She went without tights and made the most of her pins by donning black high heels.
The crooner worked herself into quite a sweat just by belting out hits during the show, which saw her joined by a live band.
Her dark wavy locks began to fizz up where it touched her wet skin while she looked slightly out of breath.
Hudson did however stick to flat footwear as she posed for images off-stage.
She added a quirky element to her outfit with some spiky metallic shoes which matched her jewellery.
Jennifer is clearly a big fan of the accessory and shared of a picture of her posing in the style of Michael Jackson as she prepared to board a private plane this week.
She and her WWE star fiancé David Otunga were also celebrating the third birthday of their son and the singer shared snaps of the group clowning around with face paint for his party.
The thrilled little boy was also snapped gaping in awe at a gigantic Disney cake.
Trey Songz Chats About ‘Chapter 5′, Beyonce, Drake/Aaliyah Duet, & More
As the August 21st release date of his fifth studio effort ‘Chapter V’ swiftly approaches, ‘Panty Droppa’ divo Trey Songz is beefing up promo efforts for the project – recently taking to Wild 94.9 this week to dish on dibs from the new cut.
In addition, the crooner also chimed in on the pressing Drake-producing-Aaliyah-album debate and once again, as many times before, reiterated his desire to gain his own duet with ‘Diva’ Beyonce.
As always, wherever there is Trigga, there are sure to be a slew of interesting comments. See it all unfold below:
Talking Points
1:05 -Chapter V
2:40 -Heart Attack and if he's been in one before.. (And he has! #SpoilerAlert lol)
3:20 -His Collabo with Beyonce
3:40 - His Musical Inspiration
4:00 - Chaka Khan & Nicki Minaj... AND ALL THAT A**!
4:30 - Which Celeb Makes Him Star Struck!
4:50 - Favorite Whitney Houston Song - Sings!
5:40 - His Thought On "Enough Said" (Drake and Aaliyah's Song)
8:00 - Jay-Z Impersonation (AMAZING!)
8:30 - Admits to cheating
8:45 - Strangest place he's ever had sex
9:20 - Has "someone" that he loves... Is it Lauren London??? You gotta watch to find out!!
WATCH & LISTEN:
Thanks @MoniqueDee_/Wild 94.9 – Trey on Beyonce (3:20), Trey on Aaliyah/Drake (5:45)
LeBron James Unveils His New LeBron X’s
Lebron James rocked his latest signature sneaker, the LeBron X. The x’s are going to be real big for LeBron, and Nike this year. Check out the official pic’s, and the words below courtesy.
Bobbi Kristina kisses and professes love for 'brother-turned-partner' Nick Gordon...and shows off diamond sparkler!
Bobbi Kristina Brown not only kissed and professed her love for brother-turned-partner Nick Gordon over Twitter she also showed off a mysterious diamond sparkler on her left ring finger.
The 19-year-old had gotten matching 'WH' wrist tattoos with Gordon this week in honor of what would have been her mother's 49th birthday, but the loved-up pair were eager to show their love to all 95,000 of the singer-turned-actor's followers.
'1 of the main reasons why i even smile today.:) iloveyoubooboo, forever&always. "it's just US now"...@Nickdgordon {<3}' Bobbi tweeted along with the kissing picture.
According to TMZ, Bobbi and Nick grew up together after Whitney took him in at the age of 12 when his father went to prison and his mother was unable to take care of him.
Nick was the singing superstar's unofficially adopted son, and she treated him like family up until her death at the age of 48 due to an accidental drowning complicated by heart disease and cocaine use.
The 22-year-old first fueled rumours about their relationship status in a tweet written last March, exclaiming: 'Yea we got a little closer and what!!!'
The controversial couple have reportedly been sharing her $1.2million Atlanta home together ever since.
'No matter what...This connection between us will #STAYSTRONG 4EVER! We will love & miss u 4ever lady:)' Kristina wrote, adding, '& still through those trials & tribulations the devil kept on trying to break them & soon realized...He couldn't.'
She recently did a guest stint on Tyler Perry's sitcom For Better Or Worse.
And the mourning starlet is currently filming her blooming love for Gordon on her upcoming reality show, The Houston Family Chronicles, which is set to premiere on Lifetime next month.
In loving memory: The 19-year-old had gotten matching 'WH' wrist tattoos with Gordon this week in honor of what would have been her mother's 49th birthday
Bobbi was seen clutching Nick's thigh while they watched the Billboard Music Awards together back in May, and the teenager was seen wearing the same diamond sparkler that night.
The duo batted away rumours of an engagement shortly after and last month, according to Hollywood Life, they both decided it wasn't the right time to wed.
'Bobbi and Nick really love each other,' said the source.
Celebrity Kids spotted at African Pride Dream Kids Fashion Show
Show Me the Way Foundation enlisted the help of celebrity children to walk the runway. The foundation teamed up with African Pride Dream Kids Hair Care for the 2012 Runway Red: Safari Wonderland celebrity kids fashion show. The Zoo Atlanta event featured the children of celebrities Phaedra Parks,Lil Duval, Pastor Troy, Akon, T.I.and Tiny, Evander Holyfield, Sean “Diddy” Combs and more.
T.I. and Tiny’s son Major was spotted at the African Pride Fashion Show. Let me tell you that Major is a heartthrob and King is a charmer.
King was clearly a show stopper! The runway was his.
T.I.’s daughter is on the left and Cynthia Bailey’s daughter is on the right
T.I.’s son graced the red carpet looking like a grown man!
Love and Hip Hop Atlanta’s Erica and Lil Scrappy daughter was giving Tyra Banks the run for her money. She worked the step and repeat like it was nobody’s business.
Phaedra (attorney, businesswoman, and cast member of Real Housewives of Atlanta) and Apollo’s little cutie patooty was all smiles and full of joy!
Comedian Lil Duval’s daughter was bouncing her hair for the dolls! She is so adorable and silly like her dad. She told me after I took her picture, “Let me see.” Too funny. Lil Duval better get ready! She is picture with Delaney Deshields’ daughter and friend.
More Pics!
Fun Times for the kiddies!
When Beyonce is around Everything SHUTS DOWN!
On a recent night out in New York Beyonce shut down the taping of a reality show after she turned up at bar were they were filming...
From Page Six
Beyonce isn’t about to get caught on reality TV. The singer demanded cameras shooting the upcoming Oxygen docu-series “Girlfriend Confidential: NY” be turned off when she arrived at Midtown lounge XVI, where the show was being filmed Thursday night.
“Beyoncé came to meet Jay-Z around midnight, but sat outside while she was told about the show,” says an eyewitness who added, “She demanded production be shut down while she entered the club.” They cooperated by turning off their cameras and not filming Beyoncé while inside.
OH WELLS…. Speaking of Beyonce…She decides to SHARE some of her World with us
The ‘Single Ladies’ songstress has released fresh set of snaps on the platform, chronicling her personal adventures with family and friends.
Peep pics of B with daughter Blue, sister Solange, and more above and below…
Still fiercely private (and doing much of her talking on stage), it’s great to see Ms. Knowles-Carter loosening up and adapting to the online age; one which stresses the importance of fans being able to feel connected to their idols.
Frank Ocean Cancels Summer Shows
R&B star Frank Ocean has cancelled all of his upcoming summer shows (12), including a concert with Coldplay.
The singer was due to play a number of huge gigs over the next few weeks, including an appearance at Britain's V Festival this weekend (18-19Aug12), Pukkelpop in Belgium and Bestival on the U.K.'s Isle of Wight.
He also scrapped his support slot with Coldplay on the band's upcoming European tour, which is due to kick off in Copenhagen, Denmark at the end of the month (28Aug12).
Ocean apologized to fans in a short statement, saying, "Let me start by saying I feel like an a**hole right now, but a tough decision had to be made in regard to my schedule over the next few months.
"The casualties of that decision include my appearances at upcoming festivals in Europe and my opening slot on the European leg of the Coldplay world tour. Sorry as f**k, I'll be back if you (sic) have me."
Ocean has not given a reason for the cancellations, but the news comes just a day after he scrapped an appearance at Sweden's Way out West festival on Saturday (11Aug12).
The star also cut short a show at Norway's Oya Festival on Thursday (09Aug12) - he left the stage after four songs citing vocal problems. A statement posted on the festival's official website, reads, "Unfortunately, Frank Ocean had to cancel his afternoon concert after just 15 minutes due to acute problems with his voice. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused."
Flavor Flav Lands $1 Million Tax Bill
Rapper Flavor Flav has found himself in trouble with tax authorities after allegedly wracking up debts of nearly $1 million
Documents filed by officials at America's Department of the Treasury suggest the Public Enemy star owes payments dating back to 2004 and 2005, according to Tmz.com.
Website editors report he is obliged to hand over a grand total of $906,250
Flavor Flav - real name William Drayton, Jr. - previously had a tax lien filed against him in 2009 by officials in California. The bill was for over $183,000
Ginuwine’s Daughter Calls Him A Deadbeat Dad, Blasts Him On Twitter
Yikes. There’s an interesting story floating around alleging that singer Elgin Baylor Lumpkin, stage name ‘Ginuwine’ (don’t front like you don’t remember that appealing baby hair) is a dead beat father, to his teenage daughter, Tiffany. Just a backstory on Ginuwine’s family, reportedly, he has a total of 8 children. He’s married to former rapper Sole and they have two daughters together. His teenage daughter Tiffany, is from a previous relationship. This week, Tiffany took to twitter to put her famous father on full blast:
Super special s/o to my mommy and father she the greatest she took care of us when n*ggas was actin clueless and I will be forecast greatful ppl don’t get moms like mine but I got her and will never let her go or THROW HER UNDER THE BUS DON’T FORGET THAT @ginuwine2012 my mother is the muthaph*ckin best yet!
She continued, tweeting one of her followers:
If that’s not enough, Lip Stick Alley has some alleged text message conversations that Tiffany released between her and her father.
This is pure speculation and there’s been no response from Ginuwine’s camp. Hopefully, it’s not true–but stay tuned.
Katy Perry and John Mayer?
The singers were spotting leaving a home in Los Feliz, according to RadarOnline.
And Katy clearly felt comfortable around the broody crooner, taking her red platform shoes off and carrying them in her hand as her feet began to ache.
Photos of the pair show the Firework hitmaker dressed in a sweet red floral frock, belted at the waist and paired with cream headband over her raven locks.
Having traded her sky-high heels for ballet flats, Katy walked to the car with the Wonderland singer.
But he couldn't hide his smirk as the pair jumped into his car and he hopped behind the wheel with Katy by his side.
The pair have been spotted enjoying each other’s company on several occasions in recent weeks; and earlier this month Katy was seen emerging from John’s car the day after a dinner date with him.
Katy's divorce from Russell Brand - who bears more than a passing resemblance to John Mayer - was made official last month, officially ending their 14-month marriage.
Since splitting from Russell in December 2011, the star has been linked to male model Baptiste Giabiconi and Florence And The Machine guitarist Rob Ackroyd, while the comedian has moved on with actress Isabella Brewster.
Meanwhile, John is no stranger to being in the limelight thanks to his string of celebrity relationships.
As well as enjoying long-term relationships with Minka Kelly, Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston, John has also dated Jennifer Love Hewitt and Taylor Swift.
AND FINALLY FROM “THE CRAZY PEOPLE SHOPPING AT WALMART” FILES
‘Time For A Bud’
Wowzer!!!! I think the vicious cycle of irony just hit me in the face like a ton of bricks! How do you not see this lady? You’ve got Budweiser yoga pants on yet it’s all that Budweiser that’s causing you not to do yoga so you don’t look good in your Budweiser yoga pants. My brain hurts now. Time for a beer.
HAVE A GREAT DAY EVERYBODY!!!
EFREM
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