10 things I learned from Helen Gurley Brown
As typhoon Helen swept into the country on Aug. 14, I woke up to the gloomy news that Cosmopolitan founder Helen Gurley Brown had died in New York at the age of 90.
How ironic, a colleague pointed out, about the typhoon’s coincidental name and timing. As one force of nature arrived to wreak havoc on our shores, another relentless and irrepressible one left the world she had so bravely shook up and changed.
The author of the groundbreaking 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years since she revamped (emphasis on “vamp”) it in 1965, and later editor-in-chief for its 59 or so international editions, had become so iconic in the publishing world that she was declared a Living Landmark of New York City. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement, “Today New York City lost a pioneer who reshaped not only the entire media industry, but the nation’s culture. She was a role model for the millions of women whose private thoughts, wonders and dreams she addressed so brilliantly in print.”
Through Cosmopolitan, she revolutionized the global magazine industry and the lives of women for generations to come, inspiring readers of the No. 1-selling young women’s magazine around the world to live big, be the best they could be in every aspect of their lives, and to chase after their dreams. Credited with having invented the term “Having it all,” she let women know that they were entitled not just to having a family but also a great career and a great sex life, too — yes, even if they were single.
Almost half a century before Carrie Bradshaw, there was Helen Gurley Brown, courting controversy by bringing frank discussions about sex and sexuality to the forefront and empowering women to engineer whatever kind of life they desired, unencumbered by societal constraints, expectations or mores. Castigated by pioneers of the feminist movement in the early ’70s, (Sex and the Single Girl predated Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique by a year) Helen always insisted she was a feminist. She’s been referred to as a “lipstick feminist,” a “working girl’s feminist” and even a precursor of “third wave Sex and the City feminism,” according to Women’s Studies professor Jennifer Scanlon, who wrote Helen’s biography Bad Girls Go Everywhere, and definitely an undeniable driving force in women’s empowerment through the decades.
“I’m so, so sad,” I wrote on my Facebook wall. I couldn’t believe that a living legend like herself could ever die. I posted, “RIP, HGB. We will love and remember you forever, Helen Gurley Brown — embodiment of both chutzpah and joie de vivre, wonderful human being, generous mentor, and sincere and caring friend to many. Knowing you was an honor and a privilege, and I will be forever be inspired by the fun and fearless life you led and advocated millions of women to live. Thank you.”
As soon as I got to the office, I snatched the letter still hanging in my cube since 2005, manually typewritten and full of her trademark sweetness and charm: “Myrza Dear… I haven’t quite got it through my head that you won’t be editing the magazine these days, but you created such an outstanding Cosmo that others will perhaps be able to come along and follow your inspiration. Please stay in my life because it wouldn’t be the same without you. I’ll look forward knowing where you are and how you are.”
At the time, I was leaving Cosmo to edit Marie Claire, and this was the last of the 96 personally typewritten (she never got around to using a computer) monthly letters (all of which I kept) she had sent me in the course of my eight-year editorship. As editor-in-chief for Cosmo’s international editions, she wrote each editor (at the time there were already about 45 editions, now about 59) what she thought about every single issue, with equal parts heaping praise and constructive criticism.
I first met Helen, then 75, in the cold winter of January 1997 at her Hearst office in New York. Petite and waif-like but every inch a vamp with big earrings, even bigger hair and wearing a décolletage-baring mini-dress more typically seen on Cosmo cover girls a third her age and replete with fishnet stockings and high heels, she was perched delicately on a floral chintz couch nestled on a leopard-print carpet in a surreal pink room that was more boudoir than high-powered corner office. I sat between her and a teddy bear wearing pearls, a throw pillow cross-stitched with her famous quip, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere” strewn nearby.
I was unprepared to meet an icon, and did so not under the best of circumstances, and I was not dressed for the part: I was bundled up in a thick black turtleneck, my nose Rudolph-red — having never experienced winter, I had come down with a bad cold and fever and embarrassingly, a nosebleed, but I had to get past my ailments and over my disbelief that I was having a one-on-one with the legendary Cosmo guru “HGB” herself. We had important work to do.
In a few months, we were about to launch Cosmo in the Philippines at a time, when, shockingly, since it was a mere three years before the turn of the 20th century, people here still spoke in hushed tones about then-taboo topics like sex, contraception, reproductive health, and even selfishly going after what one wanted in life. The Filipina was still a meek manang who hadn’t come out of her shell, and was too shy to speak up about her dreams, concerns, wants and desires. She was afraid to be herself, or worse, different. She didn’t dare live life on her own terms — yet.
But before we got down to business, Helen asked me point-blank, “What makes you think you’d make a good Cosmo editor?” “Er, I know I can help the Filipina,” I managed to mutter, through my unglamorous sniffling and coughing, “because I know her. And I know exactly how to help her.”
Turns out I didn’t, really. In the next few hours, days and years, I would come to learn that it was Helen who did, with her wonderful invention of a life manual called Cosmo that would empower the Filipina and give her a voice and venue where she could come into her own and become the woman she was meant to be.
With each of the magazine’s international editors she endearingly called “Pussycat,” Helen established a personal relationship we all cherished and treasured. She had a very nurturing and motherly way of mentoring — she was tough and exacting and always had the highest standards for good writing and visual quality, but was also warm, kind and generous about imparting her knowledge and experience. She treated you like a dear friend she sincerely cared about, and always made you feel good about yourself. Who knows how she found the time to do so for each one of us, but simply she did, and touched many, many lives along the way.
To celebrate her life and legacy, here are 10 “Helenisms” I count as my favorites:
1. The past is no excuse — use it as your fuel. “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!” she wrote.
Born “ordinary, hillbilly and poor” in Arkansas, the course of her life took a turn for the worst when her schoolteacher father was killed in an elevator accident when she was 10, leaving his family penniless. Soon after, her sister Mary was afflicted with polio. Helen, who was her high school’s valedictorian, had to be the family breadwinner immediately, so she went to business college while working as a secretary. She held 17 secretarial jobs until she realized her ambition of becoming a top copywriter at an ad agency (she became the highest paid one in the male-dominated industry on the West Coast) before she wrote her groundbreaking book. (It’s said that she was the inspiration for Mad Men’s lead female characters Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway.)
2. Determine what it is you can do better than others, then pursue it until you succeed. Success magazine says, “Gurley Brown credited her childhood fondness for letter-writing for her ability to write good letters as a secretary, which in turn opened to a career in advertising. That happened after the wife of a boss, ad mogul Don Belding, read a letter and said: “Don, your secretary writes nicely. Why don’t you let her try writing advertising copy?” He dismissed that at first, but relented after Gurley Brown won Glamour magazine’s Ten Girls with Taste contest. Its entry form incidentally asked: What do you want to be when you grow up? Gurley Brown wrote “copywriter.”
3. Work harder than everyone else. She said, “I hope I have convinced you … the only thing that separates successful people from the ones who aren’t is the willingness to work very, very hard.” Her work ethic was legendary. Besides editing Cosmo fulltime, often staying in the office until 11p.m., she spent her Saturdays forcing herself to churn out pages for whatever book (she wrote a total of 11) she was writing at the moment. “My husband and I both think that when you retire, you die,” she said. And they never did retire, working every single day until they could no longer do so.
4. Believe in and harness the power of the makeover: Helen believed any mouseburger could transform herself into a (just to localize it) Champ. “Mouseburger” was what she called herself and other women who had not been born into beauty, wealth or connections, but were hardworking and determined enough to become the best they could be. “Nearly every glamorous, wealthy, successful career woman you might envy now started out as some kind of schlep,” she believed. She was in constant makeover flux — making herself over in many different ways until the end. Some of her efforts at aesthetic enhancement, though, were admittedly a little on the extreme side, as The New York Times quipped in its obituary for her: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.”
5. Enjoy — no, revel — in your singlehood. It took a while, but Helen made singlehood a glamorous and legitimate lifestyle choice way before Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte lived it up on the small and big screens to become our life pegs. This was tough to do in the ’60s, when she said, “If you were female and not married by age 30, you might as well go to the Grand Canyon and throw yourself in. And if you were having sex with a man you were not married to? Well, your reputation was just shot.”
In Sex and the Single Girl, which was not just a manual for dating but also for career and finance, Helen said of the single girl, “She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.” She also very controversially said, “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband.”
6. If you marry, marry the right man, but don’t make him your golden ticket. “Marry a decent, good, kind person who will cherish you,” she said, at age 37, at the height of her advertising career. She did marry twice-married Hollywood producer David Brown, and they had a happy, long-lasting marriage. But she was quick to stress the importance of still achieving on your own and keeping your own identity: “If you marry, don’t just sponge off a man or be the gold-medal-winning mother. Don’t use men to get what you want in life — get it for yourself.’ She always liked to say, “Men are wonderful and children are wonderful and you may need both to fulfill your life, but you should not, you must not, live through those people.”
7. Don’t fake it, make it happen. Whether she was talking about orgasms or your goals, Helen believed you just needed to do what’s necessary to get what you want done. This motto of hers predated Nike’s “Just do it!” She used to say, “Get up and do it if it needs to be done, even if you hate it!” In a book called American Comeback, she advised, “My advice to someone chasing after their dream is to do the tough stuff first every day — the challenging, unpleasant things, whether it is making a telephone call to complain about something that you aren’t looking forward to or finishing a work project that is disagreeable but necessary — then you do the pleasant things later. If that applies to nearly every day of your life (including weekends) you’re apt to reach your goals.”
She was extremely disciplined, whether she was writing one of her 11 books or keeping fit — she was so maniacal about it, she is said to have never missed a day of exercise, thinking nothing of doing leg lifts in the aisles of airplanes in flight while passengers were asleep. When she came to Manila for the launch of Cosmo Philippines, hotel guests were surprised at the sight of her swimming laps every single morning at the pool of The Peninsula Hotel.
Also, she insisted, “My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense,” — advice that Hearst vice president and editorial director Kim St. Clair Bodden has taken to heart. “I learned from Helen that everything is about good sense,” she says. “You have to go with your gut — if it makes good sense, go with it!”
8. Be nice, be helpful, and treat everyone the same. A Fortune piece on CNN.com quotes former Hearst president Cathie Black as saying, “Helen said about people, ‘You never know who they are. You never know what they will become … She never thought any amount of praise was too much.” Lavish praise, she indeed liked to give, as I personally experienced in her monthly letters. “Heaping kudos, recognition and respect on people — employees at every level — was Brown’s leadership approach,” said the Fortune story.
She is said to never have forgotten a name, and remembered the most touching details about you. I remember the time when my father had prostate cancer and went to New York in 1997 — Helen so nicely arranged for him to meet prostate cancer survivor and bestselling author Michael Korda, a dear friend of hers who co-edited her 1982 book Having It All. During that time, she didn’t have to, but she very accommodatingly met my parents in her Hearst office just to see how they were doing. I was surprised during succeeding encounters with her at international editors’ conferences when she would ask me how my father was. She was very sweet and thoughtful that way.
“That was the thing about Helen,” wrote her former Cosmo staffer John Searles in The Daily Beast. “In this age we now live in, where everyone obsessively posts and tweets the most self-obsessed details of their lives, she rarely focused on herself in personal interactions. Instead, she liked to compliment people — most often about their good posture — and was more interested in asking others about their lives. After listening, she could be counted on to offer thoughtful advice on how they could — what else? — make the most of what they had.”
9. A healthy sense of fear and insecurity are good for you. Learning she felt this way after everything she had achieved was very comforting for me to hear and has certainly assuaged my fears: “I care. I care a lot. I think of Cosmopolitan all day, and I run scared. So it’s a combination of fright, caring and anxiety.” And hooray for those little bouts of self-doubt: “Feeling insecure is good for you. It forces you to do something better, drives you to use all your talents.”
10. You’re only as old as you think you are. Helen certainly broke the barriers of age-appropriate dressing, refusing to be boxed into her age bracket and wearing whatever she darn pleased — corsets, animal prints, leather minis and stilettos be damned. Whoever said a senior citizen’s cleavage and knees had to be kept under wraps? The sight of her sexy septuagenarian and outlandish octogenarian ensembles may have shocked the sensibilities of some, but Helen could certainly work any look she wanted, and never stopped making an effort to look her best to the very end. Helen Gurley Brown lived by her own rules, whether in the fashion arena or outside of it, and by example encouraged us all to challenge and even break convention if it stopped working in our favor.
My favorite and unforgettable Helen anecdote took place in the Atlantis Paradise Island Resort in the Bahamas, during the Cosmo Editors’ Conference in 2000. During our free time between work sessions, we were given the freedom to roam around the resort and enjoy its many facilities and activities as we pleased. Everyone was awed and definitely intimidated by the piece de resistance of all its features — the 60-foot-tall Leap of Faith slide, which one climbed all the way up an iconic ancient Mayan temple before plunging in an almost-vertical drop with tremendous speed through a clear acrylic tunnel submerged in a shark-filled lagoon. Of course, none of us mostly 30-something editors dared try it, but guess which 78-year-old red-maillot-clad fun, fearless fox got up there without batting a single waterproof mascara-ed eyelash?
