In her Manhattan office former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown had a cushion embroidered with the maxim “Good Girls Go to Heaven/Bad Girls Go Everywhere.”

A motto she lived by, says New York Times obit writer Margalit Fox of the woman who “anticipated Sex in the City by three decades.”

How To Have It All

For young women in the 60s – a time when you were an old maid if not married by 23 – Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl offered advice on – as she once put it – “how to get everything out of life — the money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity — whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against.”

And Gurley Brown had her nose firmly pressed against that glass. Born poor, she was the “mouseburger” she described in her books – a plain woman of ordinary intelligence who worked relentlessly to achieve success. And succeed – by her lights – she did.

‘Dirty Secret’ Not Sex

For as Slate magazine noted, “The Cosmo’s girl’s dirty little secret isn’t sex. It’s work.”

Perhaps as proof of that, earlier this year she gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities, both of which her Hollywood producer husband David Brown had attended, to create the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Her marriage to Brown – his credits included Jaws and The Sting - lasted 51 years, till his death at age 93 in 2010, and despite the sex rhetoric, she was  reputedly totally faithful to  him.

Innovative and immoral, she was unfazed by criticism of her life style and values, as the tributes to her recount.

Memorable Helen Gurley Brown quotes

• “I’ve never worked anywhere without being sexually involved with somebody in the office,” she told New York magazine in 1982. Asked whether that included the boss, she said, “Why discriminate against him?”
• “You can’t be sexual at 60 if you’re fat,” she observed on her 60th birthday.
• “My own philosophy is if you’re not having sex, you’re finished. It separates the girls from the old people.”
• In The Late Show, an advice book for women over 50 subtitled ‘A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women Over 50,’ (which she wrote at 71) she suggests that as women age and the supply of available men dwindles, they should simply appropriate their friends’ husbands for jaunty recreational sex.
• “I never feel guilt about the wife, if she can’t keep him at home. I’m espousing ‘never let sex disappear no matter how old you are.’ There are many married women in sexless marriages or not in one at all. Certainly, if you have any sense you don’t fall in love with the man.”
• She 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.

Not For Everyone – But Inspiring Nevertheless?

Her values certainly weren’t for everyone, but her sheer determination to not settle for the hand life dealt her can’t help but inspire. Do you agree?

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About the author

Jenny W
First career as newspaper and magazine journalist with daily newspapers and magazines, then as an editor who successfully launched a new national Sunday newspaper and NZ House & Garden magazine. First woman editor of NZ Listener. Enjoying a second career as a business owner and entrepreneur, health products marketer, social media habitué, blogger and web marketer. Still learning and loving it.