Not Pretty Enough

May 23, 2016
Reviewed by Mary Kay Blakely
Hirshey’s compelling biography of Helen Gurley Brown chronicles a peculiarly American sexual history, beginning with the breadwinner-housewife marriages that birthed the baby boom generation. So it’s more than a little amazing that when in 1964 Brown published Sex and the Single Girl—in which she acknowledged having 178 affairs before marrying David Brown at age 37—she didn’t think encouraging unmarried women to enjoy sex was radical or revolutionary. She described the book as mainly practical, sharing what she and her girlfriends had been talking about for nearly two decades. If a woman had challenging work and great sex, children and husbands could come later.
This 500-page biography, thoroughly researched and reported, covers Helen’s childhood in rural Arkansas, sometimes inflating difficulties common to Depression-era families. Brown’s mother, Cleo, made thoughtless comments that damaged her self-confidence. (Didn’t all mothers of her generation do that?) A fatal elevator accident killed her father, leaving his 10-year-old daughter with “daddy issues” for life. Brown’s older sister, Mary, contracted polio and lost the ability to walk.
Those childhood difficulties may or may not have triggered the neuroses Brown battled throughout life. She sought psychiatric help for depression at age 22 and financial insecurity plagued her.
Weight preoccupations caused other neurotic behavior. She exercised fanatically at home and at the office, where she once stripped down to her underwear to work out in the stairwell.
While Hirshey offers copious evidence of Brown’s eccentricities, she also documents truly admirable traits. A solid work ethic powered her through 17 low-wage clerical jobs before she was finally promoted to a copy writing position at the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding. As editor of Cosmopolitan, she worked 70–80 hours per week. An exacting perfectionist, she was admired by her staff as a fair and thoughtful boss with business acumen learned on the job: she managed a tight budget, repackaged book chapters into articles, expanded ads, and increased circulation. She lived leanly and sent a quarter of her monthly salary home to her difficult mother and paralyzed sister.
Brown’s compete makeover of Cosmopolitan overloaded the magazine with self-help articles about sex, beauty, fashion, girlfriends, jobs, money, and pleasing your man. She drove most of her writers bonkers at least once (myself included), rewriting copy that might make her “girls” mad, guilty, sad, wounded, or insulted. She made some tremendous blunders (refusing to examine AIDS and the need for safe sex) and ignored important issues (both abortion and birth control were illegal in some states), exempting herself from controversy because she was “a pragmatist, not an activist.” But, as Hirshey concludes, she ruled with naïveté and sincerity that were impossible to fake. (July)
Mary Kay Blakely is a professor of magazine journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism and coeditor of Words Matter: Writing to Make a Difference (Univ. of Missouri, Apr.).

May 1, 2016
Journalist Hirshey (We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock, 2001, etc.) presents a deeply researched biography of daring author and hugely influential magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown (1922-2012). Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and her decadeslong editorship of a seemingly moribund Cosmopolitan magazine starting in 1965 seem easy to dismiss in an era of pervasive feminism beginning around 1970. However, Hirshey convincingly shows how Brown demonstrated some feminist tendencies and was certainly no shallow airhead (a term that fits with some of the informal prose peppered throughout the book). Before the author narrates Brown's unlikely ascension to influence and fame in New York City, she relates remarkable, telling details about her subject's childhood and young adulthood in rural Arkansas and then Los Angeles. After Brown's father died when Helen was 10 years old, her mother, Cleo, became unmoored geographically and unhinged emotionally. As a result, Helen and her older sister had to survive an unstable and sometimes poverty-stricken stretch. "Much of what Helen understood about her people was colored by her mother's melancholy worldview," writes Hirshey. In Helen's case, the agony was magnified by an inherent shyness and a terrible extended period of acne, which she believed rendered her physically unattractive. Although she outgrew the acne, she never felt that she was "pretty enough." Nonetheless, through sheer will, Brown succeeded in the advertising world, charted an ambitious social life that included open pursuit of premarital sex, and married late and well. Hirshey vividly relates how her husband, David Brown, parlayed his experience in both publishing and cinema into helping Helen conceive her bestselling books and turn around Cosmopolitan. Unlike numerous other biographers, Hirshey never falls into the trap of reductionism. Although Brown sometimes presents contradictions that cannot be easily resolved, the author portrays the complexities with skill.

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June 1, 2016

Hirshey (We Gotta Get Out of This Place) offers a well-researched, in-depth look at Helen Gurley Brown (1922-2012), editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1997. Beginning with Brown's roots in rural Arkansas and later move to Los Angeles, this biography follows its subject through the events that shaped the opinions she went on to broadcast to the world from atop her media perch. With numerous firsthand accounts from acquaintances and close friends, including Gloria Vanderbilt and Barbara Walters, Hirshey takes readers on a rags-to-riches journey of Brown's life, recounting her often unstable childhood and time working for advertising agencies early in her career. Later chapters explore her partnership with film producer husband David Brown, her best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl, and her revitalization of Cosmopolitan after taking the editorial reins. This account sheds light on a complex woman whose controversial personality helped form both second-wave feminism and the magazine industry. VERDICT The story of Brown's rise to the top will appeal to readers of biography and those with an interest in the feminist movement.--Mattie Cook, River Grove PL, IL

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
The powerhouse behind Cosmopolitan magazine's controversial success, the unsinkable Helen Gurley Brown, was forever haunted by a toxic sense of inadequacy rooted in her hardscrabble Arkansas childhood. The antidote was work and men, the richer the better. At the outset of this precise, explicit, true-life picaresque, seasoned journalist Hirshey, who diligently dug through vast archives and conducted dozens of interviews, exclaims, How she has astonished me. Readers will share her wonderment. Smart, tenacious, and canny Brown supported her widowed mother and sister after they moved to California, weathering secretarial jobs in atrociously sexist offices until she broke into advertising as one of few women copywriters in the 1950s, outspokenly proud of being a single career woman who loved sex and wielding sexual power. In 1965, the happily and profitably married renegade brought her gospel of libidinous self-improvement to a floundering Hearst publication; gussied it up with busty Cosmo girls; filled it with cheerfully candid advice about style, careers, good sex, and birth control (all at a time when contraception and abortion were illegal); and, in the process, forever changed women's lives. Hirshey is entrancing and enlightening throughout this detailed chronicle of Brown's brimming life of struggle, transformation, fame, failings, and influence, an astutely contextualized biography spiked with cameos by Jacqueline Susann, Kate Millet, Joan Didion, Gloria Vanderbilt, and many more. A pointillistic portrait essential to understanding the seemingly endless fight for women's equality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)