London - When Helen Gurley Brown published her book Sex And The Single Girl in 1962, it sold two million copies in the first three weeks and shotstraight to the top of the bestseller lists.
A frank and often funny account of what it felt like to be a career girl at the dawning of the sexual revolution, it became a manual for the Mad Men generation of females: educated, ambitious, sexually adventurous - and keen to shake off the shackles of marriage and domestic drudgery in favour of cocktails at seven and bed with the boss.
The central premise of the book was that women should own their sexuality and use it to their advantage rather than sit patiently waiting like good little wallflowers for a man to pick them.
Sex was power, and if you were going to give it away you should expect more in return than a washing machine and an upright Hoover.
Used well, it could take a woman to new heights, not just of pleasure but also material success.
Gurley Brown took the whole idea of sex in the workplace and turned it upside down. She did away with the pretence that women were shy little victims of bottom-pinching bosses, and asserted the notion that such encounters could just as easily be a two-way street.
In 1965, after her book had taken the world by storm, she took over as editor in chief of a rather dry literary magazine called Cosmopolitan and transferred her revolutionary vision to its pages. By the time she’d finished with it 32 years later, it had become synonymous with a modern, sexually assured, style-conscious, uber-ambitious and, some might say, rather slutty brand of feminism.
A slight, rather plain woman from an impoverished Arkansas family, Gurley Brown rose, by dint of her own guile and ambition, to become one of the defining figures not only of her generation of women, but also of many subsequent ones.
It is impossible to underestimate the impact that this woman, who never fully retired and died at the age of 90 in 2012, had on society.
She was the one who coined the phrase “have it all”, writing: “Explain to your husband that you will be a better companion, a more adoring wife and loving mother if you are allowed to take a job... don’t you see that by working you could have it all?”
She was the one who, through Cosmo, encouraged us all to take the Pill, be open and free with our bodies and generally divorce sex from all those boring old-fashioned notions of love and morality in favour of a more hedonistic existence dedicated to pleasure and self-gratification.
She practically invented the likes of Samantha in Sex And The City, women who viewed men as men used to see women, as objects of lust to be devoured and spat out. She also championed the idea that women should demand orgasms and that women should be unashamed of their sexual urges.
Her cover lines were legendary. “Should you make a pass at him?” Or: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man? You can! You can!”
Married men made excellent “pets”, she concluded in one quote - especially if you had more than one, although in Sex And The Office, published in 1964, she did not explicitly recommend sleeping with the boss - “I think it’s better to keep this darling as a friend, someone who may from time to time advise you about other men.”
Depending on your point of view, she was either a hero and a pioneer, or a merchant of filth. The truth, as ever, lay somewhere in-between: some kind of sexual take-back for women was certainly long-overdue; but living your life like an alley cat, as many discovered, was not necessarily the road to happiness.
But perhaps what’s most fascinating about Gurley Brown - and something that few of us who to a greater or lesser extent espoused her vision of female emancipation realised, is how little any of this was actually her idea.
In a new book about Gurley Brown’s life by a young American writer called Brooke Hauser called Enter Helen, the extent to which the Gurley Brown of legend was, in fact, a commercial creation is revealed for the first time.
Not only that, it turns out that her inventor was a MAN. And not just any man, either: her HUSBAND.
Yes, you read that right. Helen Gurley Brown, the woman who perhaps more than any other in the 20th century influenced women to shed their inhibitions and approach life as though it were one long pool party, was a fake.
A very clever, very effective fake - and one who doubtless believed in everything she said and did. But a fake nonetheless.
And one that, ultimately, may turn out to have done more harm than good to women and society.
If Hauser’s account of Gurley Brown’s life is accurate, the real author of the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies was not a kick-ass feminist trailblazer on a mission to liberate her sisters from centuries of sexual enslavement - but a rather portly, middle-aged gentleman with an eye for a good story and a talent for spin.
David Brown was 42 when he met his future wife, the 36-year-old Helen in 1958. He already had two failed marriages under his ever-expanding belt. He was also head of a department at 20th Century Fox, extremely well-connected, had an elegant house in a swanky part of Los Angeles - and earned the considerable sum of $75 000 a year.
That’s not to say Helen was a slouch. As the author of the new book points out, on the night a mutual friend introduced them - at Helen’s request - he was impressed by her credentials: a job as an account executive at a top Hollywood advertising agency, her own flat, a stock portfolio - and her own car, a Mercedes-Benz, which she had bought the week before in cash, for $5 000.
As Hauser says: “He [David] was seriously impressed. Most of the women he knew wouldn’t pay for a taxi, let alone their own Mercedes.”
They married soon after, at Beverly Hills City Hall, on September 25, 1959. She was 37, he 43.
For them, it was the beginning of a very successful partnership and a long, loving marriage that lasted well into their 80s.
For the rest of the world, however, it was an equally momentous occasion. Because although their union never produced any children, it gave birth to an ideology that perhaps more than any in recent decades has altered the way young women live their lives.
By introducing the concept of “having-it-all”, Gurley Brown swept aside centuries of tried-and-tested family dynamics and encouraged women to pursue a holy grail of sexual, material and maternal gratification that, as countless women have discovered to their own detriment, is about as plausible as a virgin birth.
As well as being encouraged to achieve the impossible, we were also persuaded to swap one set of shackles - motherhood, housework, the drudgery of domesticity - for another, albeit more glamorous, kind of tyranny.
Under the banner of sexual liberation, Helen and her clever husband simply introduced young women to another form of enslavement.
One in which being thin, sexy and beautiful became practically every girl’s duty; where how you looked in your hotpants became more important than the books you’d read; where having sex with a man was an obligation, not a choice.
As a young woman growing up in the Eighties, I remember this argument well. It was deployed to countless girls at countless discos by countless young men who saw the so-called sexual emancipation of women as an excellent leg-up in the pursuit of getting a leg-over.
Whereas their parent’s generation had, on the surface at least, been forced to respect the rules - you had sex, you got married. Now that Gurley Brown and her armies of glossy Cosmo girls with cover lines such as “What to do if you don’t feel like doing it”, and “Cosmo girls confess their most erotic experiences”, now men not only expected sex, but also expected it to be no strings attached.
All Gurley Brown’s revolution really achieved was to make it easier for men to have sex - while removing the one safety net a woman who fell pregnant actually had: marriage.
Over time, inevitably, hard-working professional women found they had left it too late to have children. In 2012, around one in five 45-year-old women at the end of the childbearing years (born in 1967) in England and Wales had never had children, compared with their mother’s generation (born in 1940) where one in nine never had children.
Both the book and the magazine legitimised promiscuity and glamourised extramarital affairs. They pitched two stereotypes of womanhood - wife and mother vs career girl and sexpot - against each other, leaving men to enjoy the spoils.
Gurley Brown’s vision also blurred the boundaries of female identity. What it means to be a woman, which had always been a fairly clearly defined role, suddenly became open to interpretation. Her constant rally cry - that women really could “have it all” - established an impossible standard by which all women suddenly felt enormous pressure to abide.
Wanting a nice husband and a couple of kids suddenly felt like a terrible cop out. Not wanting to work late and down shots with the lads after work before winding up in a strip club at 4am somehow felt lame.
The legacy of Gurley Brown is not a brave new world full of sexually fulfilled women CEOs with loving well-adjusted partners and happy children.
It’s women who are stretched to breaking point, pulled this way and that by their so-called freedoms. It’s young girls who perform sex acts on groups of young men in clubs because they’ve been taught, mistakenly, that experimentation and lack of inhibition is what sexual fulfilment is all about. Even more so, it’s the women who desperately want to have a child yet doesn’t because she’s too busy playing the field, and leaves it too late.
Indeed, it’s notable that Helen never had children (her editors were given strict injunctions that there should be “no glums, no dour feminist anger and no motherhood” in Cosmo) - so she devalued all who did. Women who lived life to her agenda also missed out - often to their bitter regret.
It’s basically every male fantasy, in which the wife is not only a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom - but a CEO in the boardroom to boot.
When you think of it like this, it’s no surprise that the whole thing turns out to have been dreamt up by a bloke. And Helen, the serial singleton with a string of failed affairs to her name, played right into his agenda. Because truth is, had it not been for her partnership with David, Helen might never have written Sex And The Single Girl.
And if it hadn’t been for his negotiation skills and contacts, she would never have landed the editorship of Cosmopolitan.
The story told in the new book goes that Helen was away visiting her family when David stumbled across some letters she had written to a former (married) boyfriend. They were “original, witty and warm”, he told her. She should write a book; question was, what about.
David’s day job in Hollywood was developing stories and scripts, and an idea had crossed his desk that had potential. It was a guide on how to have an affair.
At David’s encouragement, Helen began to play around with a few ideas. After many false starts, an idea began to crystallise: a manual for America’s new generation of single career girls based on her own experiences.
As Hauser says, “It was David who had come up with the idea for Sex and the Single Girl in the first place.David was the first reader and her connection to the powerful people who mattered.
“It was David’s trail of friends from the publishing world that eventually led to Bernard Geis [Gurley Brown’s publisher] after a series of others had turned the book down, dashing her confidence.
“David was Helen’s live-in editor and he was merciless. Sometimes he crossed out whole passages. He made her re-write the big chapter The Affair three times over before he accepted it.”
As for the job at Cosmo, that too would never have come about without the help of her husband. After the success of the book, Helen and David had worked up a pitch for a magazine called Femme, aimed at the same sort of girls who read Sex And The Single Girl. Nothing much was coming of their attempts to sell it with Helen as the editor, until one day David heard through his contacts that Hearst, owners of Cosmopolitan, were thinking of folding the magazine.
He immediately found a way of getting the plans for Femme on the desk of Hearst president Dick Deems - and that was all it took.
“He played an instrumental part in its [Cosmopolitan] production, and in the continued advancement of Helen’s career,” writes Hauser.
He even negotiated her salary: “One wintry night in Deems’ apartment in the Waldorf Towers, it was David who negotiated a deal for Helen to edit Cosmopolitan.
“‘I think Helen was cowering in a corner somewhere,’ David later recalled. ‘She had never edited a magazine. I don’t think I had ever seen her read one.’”
Whether she actually was curled up in a corner is a moot point.
Hauser points out in the book, that David had a talent for the theatrical. Nevertheless, the extent to which he guided and supported his wife in her career are notable.
“David always came to the rescue. Early on, he gave her advice about everything, from budgeting to personnel issues. A few times when she was really desperate, David met Helen at work in the middle of the day so they could hail a cab together and just drive around Central Park.
“He told her what material to buy, what not to buy, what to edit and what to throw out.” He even wrote her cover lines.
In fact, what this book shows is that for all the sex and scandal Gurley Brown generated on the outside, her own marriage was at its heart a very old-fashioned one: a partnership of equals, based on mutual respect and encouragement.
A partnership that they both ultimately benefited greatly from. A partnership that, thanks to the part they played in changing the role of women in society, is a privilege denied to many.
Daily Mail