The woman who made sex fun: Helen Gurley Brown liberated the single girl with an advice guide that sold 2 million copies in just 3 weeks

A cartoon in the New Yorker in 1968 showed a city street with the word ‘sex’ scrawled over doorways, in windows, on trucks and water towers, and a matronly pedestrian saying to her male companion: ‘I suppose we have Helen Gurley Brown to thank for this.’

The Gurley Brown who emerges as a kitten with iron paws in this engrossing biography would have been purring at the august magazine’s acknowledgment, however tongue-in-cheek, of how she had put her indelible mark on the cultural landscape.

Helen Gurley Brown was a fascinating woman and good biography subject

But it was her film producer husband, David Brown, who was responsible for unleashing her provocative inner genie from the bottle. Talk about teamwork; this couple were as in step as Fred and Ginger.

HGB is famous for three things: writing a pioneering and unprecedentedly frank self-help guide, Sex And The Single Girl; transforming what was an ailing women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, into a hugely successful global phenomenon that she presided over as editor for an astonishing 32 years (she was 74 when tactfully eased out of the title, whose readership was 18 to 34-year-old women); and introducing a nude male centre-fold in 1972, the hirsute actor Burt Reynolds sprawled naked on a bear skin, cigarillo dangling from his wolfish grin, hands covering his vital parts.

Hers was not a promising start but, boy, did she turn it around.

In later life, she would mock her hillbilly Ozark origins for the amusement of her lovers and bosses (who were sometimes interchangeable, and usually married).

In truth, her sad mother, Cleo, the first-born of ten children, was a schoolteacher-turned-seamstress, and her father, Ira, a not very successful local Democrat politician before his untimely death — he was crushed in an elevator accident when Helen was ten and her sister was 14.

She attributes her Daddy issues to this loss, which resulted in life-long therapy from the age of 20.

Her mother is credited with contributing to HGB’s hang-ups about her looks, always putting them down. (Her teens were blighted by terrible acne, the boils painfully lanced and x-rayed by a doctor twice a week.)

Plastic surgery was to become Gurley Brown’s own version of self-harming. She gave an interview on the perils of flesh-cutting to Eve (Vagina Monologues) Ensler, while continuing her ab crunches well into her 70s on the floor of her office in Hearst Tower.

Her appetite for food was trained to be delicate (it needed to be for her to stick to her ideal weight of 7st 5lb). At restaurants, her lunch companions would observe how she picked at her salad, eating the leaves with her hands.

Her hunger for sex, in contrast, was legendary. At 20, she lost her virginity and never looked back.Very much a product of her time (the Depression), the young Gurley Brown was determined to make the best of herself and to seize every opportunity that came her way

For almost two decades, marrying at the late age (all the more so then) of 37, Gurley Brown slept her way through Los Angeles. She once told a journalist that before her marriage she had bedded 178 men.

What a fascinating subject for a biography she is.

Very much a product of her time (the Depression), the young Gurley Brown was determined to make the best of herself and to seize every opportunity that came her way.

She was qualm-free about being on the make, filching from petty cash, seeking out small economies (she was petite enough to wear children’s clothes with her fishnet stockings — an HGB trademark — and washed her hair in detergent) and targeting suitors who would give her money, presents and, hopefully, more.

But as soon as she was earning, and for the rest of her life, Gurley Brown supported her mother and her sister Mary, who had contracted polio as a young woman and was confined to a wheelchair.

Her kindness and loyalty extended to looking after her girlfriends (friendships always meant a lot to her) who would go to her apartment to recover after their abortions

Her kindness and loyalty extended to looking after her girlfriends (friendships always meant a lot to her) who would go to her apartment to recover after their abortions.

It was seeing their suffering that made Gurley Brown acutely aware of the need for safe and affordable abortions.

There is a Zelig-like quality to this biography — Gurley Brown works as a secretary in the film industry and then in an advertising agency, where her boss (the one she doesn’t sleep with) and his wife kindly take her under their wing, helping her to iron out her ‘gaucheries’.

It is the boss’s wife who urges her husband to give his secretary a break as a copywriter. He puts Gurley Brown in charge of the Catalina swimsuits account, which involves shoots on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s yacht, and in the Neptune Pool of William Randolph Hearst’s Californian castle in San Simeon.

As twice-divorced David Brown (producer on hit films including Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Jaws, Chocolat and Angela’s Ashes) enters the frame, Gurley Brown has been offered a job with a rival ad agency, doubling her salary and making her the highest paid woman in the ad business.

For her new account, Max Factor, she invents lipstick names: Timid Temptress, With My Eyes Open and Love In The Morning.

She hooks her man after a six-month campaign, worthy of General Eisenhower (a client of her old agency), to lead him to the altar.

In something of a neat circle, David had been hired in the late Forties as managing editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.

It was there that he learnt ‘the sly art’ of cover lines — a role he would resume, with his wife at the helm, 16 years on when they lived in New York — gifting Gurley Brown with, for example, How To Make A Small Bosom [such as his wife had, which he adored] Amount To Something.

D avid was also to choose the fiction for her. As one contributor to the biography says: ‘When you look at the Cosmo that Helen edited it looks like The Atlantic compared to the Cosmo of today.’

Those who wrote for her included Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer and Tom Wolfe.

The book’s author, Gerri Hirshey, is a journalist in America. Starting out as pioneer of sorts herself in the boys-only rock journalism world of Rolling Stone, she once had the privilege of having a piece for Cosmo spiked (on how to buy a cat) by HGB herself with her loopy scrawl: ‘Not sexy enough’ — and she actually interviewed her.

How important was HGB? Well, Hirshey certainly makes a strong case that she liberated young women to feel good about themselves and have sexual appetites.

She refused to see the singleton status as something to endure, saying her book, which sold more than two million copies in just three weeks, was ‘not a study on how to get married, but how to stay single — in superlative style’.

She was hopelessly out of line on the Aids crisis, never wanting to acknowledge that heterosexuals and women, in particular, could succumb to the virus — angering not only Aids campaigners but also friends, including Liz Smith and Judith Krantz. Her stepson, Bruce, a heroin addict, died of an Aids-related illness.

In her mid-70s, she was still dancing in heels at tango classes in a church hall. At 80, she was down to 6st 4lb and doing 100 sit-ups a day. She and David boasted about having sex two days in a row.

When she died, the New York Times obituary had a brilliant line: ‘She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.’

My favourite story in the book is at the end, when her pal — the late, great Joan Rivers — tells the author about the time she saw her frugal friend attempting to get on a bus as she juggled overstuffed work bags.

Rivers rolled down the window of her limousine and hollered: ‘Helen, calm down and get a cab! Your husband made Jaws!’

Daily Mail