Magazine editor successful advocate of “good life”

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32568, 30 March 1971, Page 7

Magazine editor successful advocate of “good life”

If you have that feeling- of being hemmed in by four walls and stuck to an unrelenting routine of housework, looking after the children, and tending to your husband’s every need, there is probably only one person to blame.

That person, according to Helen Gurley Brown, one of the world’s most celebrated liberators of enslaved womanhood, is probably at this moment sitting with his feet up and watching television: your husband.

“I believe women have as much basic talent as men, only in most cases it goes unrecognised and gets bogged down in the home," says Mrs Brown. “A husband, if he is any kind of a man, would assess what his wife wants and can do, and help her to do it"

Not that Helen Gurley Brown herself would ever

I need to be told by her husband, American film producer, David Brown. Nor does she speak without experience. She has risen from 'shorthand-typist to her present standing as author, magazine editor and highpowered executive all rolled into one. Though she admits to being in her late 40s she succeeds in looking a very i feminine 30. Even so, her work schedule would make any average male executive shudder in horror. j “Not many people would I want to work as hard as I Ido,” she has said. “I had to I work the minute I got out jof high school, and all I could do was shorthandtyping. I was a secretary for 15 years, but always getting better until, at 33, I was a whizz-bang executive secretary. Then I got a chance to write advertising copy.”

She applied herself to that job with her customary drive and, for seven years, she was

the highest paid woman in advertising in California. But the last agency she was with stopped offering her assignments after buying her from their competitors for a vast sum. It was then that she decided to write the phenomenally successful “Sex and the Single Girl,” which was to sell millions of copies. Mrs Brown has never thought it “all that good a book,” but rather a book on an idea whose time had come—about single girls having a good life. “Mostly the message was, ‘Don’t worry and feel guilty if you are having an affair because so is everyone else,’ a sisterly book by a girl who was doing it herself,” she once said.

Her philosophy all along has been one of self-better-ment—built on the fact of her own hard times in her early years. As a fatherless 11-year-old, she gave dancing lessons to other children at 25 cents an hour to help to make ends meet “I was a terribly average girl who inherited enough of a brain to do a few things.” she has said. UNDERSTATEMENT That, judging by what she has done with her life, must rank as one of the biggest understatements of all time. Without any doubt, her greatest achievement has been to revive the ailing fortunes of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. When she took on the editorship six years ago, it was unable to meet its advertising guarantee of an 800,000 circulation. Now, it sells more than a million, and the accounts are very much in the black. She has done it by catering to the young provincial

American girl and interpreting her life as a constant struggle to meet and fascinate the opposite sex. “My editorial thinking,” says Mrs Brown, "is ruthlessly personal. I’m able to get away with it because the magazine is successful. We are geared for the 18 to 34 girl market, and we don’t run anything that isn’t slanted to that slice of the market.” With articles headed: “How Sensuous Should a Working Girl Be?” “I Live With a Bachelor,” and “How Long Can a Man Stay Physically In Love?”, it is obvious why that particular “girl market” buys the magazine. Indeed, Helen Gurley Brown has succeeded in putting the word “sex” into the magazines, and making it respectable. Where once that provocative three-letter word was carefully avoided by the cosy, chintz-laden women’s magazines, it has now become common currency in their editorials. Most of all, though, she

seems proudest of the fact that her 40s have been her best years—a message she is always pounding home to her readers. “Suddenly when I was 40, I fell into a glamorous life, and I had earned it,” she has said. Needless to say, the magazine business and writing books (she has recently completed a successor to her best-seller called, “Sex And the New Single Girl,”) spells a long working day for Mrs Brown. “What my husband and I badly need is a wife,” she say?. “You know, someone to warm our slippers for us when we get home and listen to what a terrible day we’ve had in the office.”— Features International.