Contents

Collection Overview

Biographical Note

Scope and Contents of the Collection

Organization of the Collection

Search Terms

Helen Gurley Brown Papers, 1938-2001

Finding Aid

Finding aid prepared by Amanda Izzo.

Encoding funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

2003

Biographical Note

Author and magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown was born in Green Forest, Arkansas on 18 February 1922 to Ira and Cleo (Sisco) Gurley, both schoolteachers. Though the family was poor, Cleo quit teaching to rear her two daughters. In Helen's early childhood, the Gurleys moved to Little Rock when Ira was elected to the state legislature. He was killed in an elevator accident when Helen was ten. Cleo struggled to support her children in depression-era Arkansas, first moving back with family in the Ozark region, and then taking Helen and her older sister Mary to Los Angeles in the late 1930s. In Los Angeles, Mary contracted polio, which strained the Gurley's already grim financial condition. Despite hardship, Helen excelled socially and academically. She was active in leadership positions in several high school clubs and graduated class valedictorian.

Helen Gurley spent a year at the Texas State College for Women and then returned to Los Angeles to put herself through Woodbury Business College. Cleo and Mary moved back to Arkansas but remained dependent on Helen's financial support, a situation which continued for the remainder of their lives. Helen graduated from Woodbury with a business degree in 1941 and took on a succession of secretarial jobs. The seventeenth job, at the advertising agency Foote, Cone, and Belding, was pivotal to Helen's future success.

Helen Gurley worked as executive secretary to Don Belding. During this time, she won a Glamour magazine contest for "Girls of Taste" that awarded her a vacation and a wardrobe. She had an active dating life, including a romance with prizefighter Jack Dempsey. Gurley's hard work captured the attention of her boss, and at the suggestion of his wife, Don Belding experimented, allowing Helen to write advertising copy. She succeeded at the task, and moved from secretarial work to copywriting. She wrote ads for several accounts, won prizes for her copy, and by the late 1950s had become the best-paid female copywriter on the West Coast.

In 1959, at the age of 37, Helen found a marriage partner in David Brown, a magazine and book editor who would become a film executive at the Twentieth Century Fox Studios, and later an independent producer. He was also an uncredited partner behind many of Helen's projects. After she found her advertising career stagnating at Foote, Cone, and Belding and then the Kenyon and Eckhardt Agency, it was David who encouraged her to write a book about her life as a single woman. The result, Sex and the Single Girl (1962), captured a zeitgeist of the early 1960s.

Bernard Geis Associates, a maverick publishing house, found great success with Brown's book, a guide to living single "in superlative style." It later published the wildly successful potboilers of Jacqueline Susann. Sex and the Single Girl, an advice manual that exhorted women to remain single and find fulfillment in an occupation and non-marital relationships with men, sparked national controversy and remained on the best-seller lists for months. Helen Gurley Brown made frequent personal, television, and radio appearances to promote the book. Rights to the title were sold to Warner Brothers at the highest price then ever paid for a non-fiction title. The film, Sex and the Single Girl (1964), starred Natalie Wood (as Helen Gurley Brown) and Tony Curtis.

Following the success of Sex and the Single Girl, David Brown and Bernard Geis Associates marketed Helen in a variety of enterprises. She wrote a syndicated newspaper advice column, recorded phonograph albums and radio spots, and wrote prodigiously. Her next book, Sex and the Office (1964), a racier advice manual and expose of a sex-filled world of secretaries, sold disappointingly in comparison to Sex and the Single Girl.

The Browns submitted proposals for a variety of works to keep up the momentum of Helen's popularity following Sex and the Single Girl: plays, television shows, other books, and magazines. Their proposal for a magazine for single women ("Femme") drew the interest of the Hearst magazine corporation. Though they did not want to start a new magazine for Brown, they made a trial agreement for her to try her format at their failing general interest magazine, Cosmopolitan. Brown officially became editor of Cosmopolitan in July 1965, and she brought dramatic changes to the first issue.

Brown converted the conservative Cosmopolitan to a female counterpart of Hugh Hefner's iconic Playboy magazine. She featured sexy cover models, controversial subject matter, and a hip sensibility that garnered a large audience quickly. While editing Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown authored The Single Girl's Cookbook (1969) and Sex and the New Single Girl (1971), continued to be a guest on many TV shows, and became one of Hearst's biggest success stories. Meanwhile, David Brown, along with partner Richard Zanuck, produced many successful films, including The Sting, Jaws, Cocoon, Deep Impact, and Chocolat.

In 1983, Helen wrote the best-seller Having at All, an advice manual and memoir in the style of Sex and the Single Girl. In the 1980s, she also had television stints as a regular on Good Morning America, a short-lived syndicated show A View from Cosmo, and was a guest on talk shows. She continued to edit the highly successful Cosmopolitan, which had by the 1980s grown to 300 pages, of which a hundred were highly lucrative advertisements. She oversaw expansion of the Cosmopolitan franchise into numerous international editions. In 1993 she wrote The Late Show, an advice manual and memoir about growing older. She published a writing guide, The Writer's Rules, in 1999, and in 2000 wrote her so-far definitive memoir, I'm Wild Again.

Brown's career has been marked by controversy. Sex and the Single Girl, a celebration of independent womanhood published a year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, sparked much dispute about women's place in pre-women's movement popular culture. In a literary world that had only recently seen the lessening of stringent restrictions on the portrayal of sex, Brown's emphasis on sex drew much opposition from conservative critics. However, by the late 1960s, she and her vision of adamantly man-crazy womanhood drew opposition from non-conservatives as well. The incipient women's movement targeted Brown's limited vision of liberation. Feminists criticized the sex-object "Cosmo Girl" and envisioned a mass media that reflected a greater range of possibilities for women than the pink collar, man-obsessed vision of Cosmopolitan. Brown's idiosyncratic notions of liberation and sexual freedom have raised controversy in recent years as well. In the 1990s, her dismissal of sexual harassment as a significant workplace problem and her indifference to the risk of AIDS for heterosexual women drew great wrath again from feminists. Brown nonetheless identifies herself and her magazine as unfailingly feminist. She has worked on behalf of the National Abortion Rights Action League in support of abortion rights and supported other feminist organizations and causes.

While Brown has frequently been the target of criticism, in recent years she has also accumulated accolades. Her work at Cosmopolitan has been recognized through her election to the Publishing Hall of Fame and a Henry Johnson Fisher Award. She has been declared a New York City landmark, being a familiar presence on New York City busses heading from her Central Park West apartment to the Cosmopolitan office. Her admirers and friends have included gossip columnist Liz Smith, television journalist Barbara Walters, mogul Malcolm Forbes, and New York Mayor Ed Koch.

In 1997 Brown gave up her editorship of Cosmopolitan to become editor-in-chief of international editions of the magazine. Far from a retiree, she remains a workaholic in her new job, enjoys travel with David, who continues to produce hit films, and still voices "outrageous" opinions that make her a frequent presence in newspapers and magazines.

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Scope and Contents of the Collection

The Helen Gurley Brown Papers consist of 22.5 linear feet of material and date from 1938 to 2001. The bulk of the papers were produced in the 1960s and provide a comprehensive picture of Brown's exceptionally intertwined personal and professional lives. Types of material include personal and professional correspondence, published and unpublished writings, personal records and memorabilia, printed materials, photographs, biographical materials, an audiotaped interview, videotapes, phonograph albums, scrapbooks, and posters.

Some material pertaining primarily to David Brown can be found in SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS and SERIES IV. WRITINGS. Since he collaborated with Helen on many of her projects, his work is interspersed throughout her papers. Helen Gurley Brown has been a pivotal figure in the magazine world in the second half of the twentieth century, and her papers give an insider's look into the Hearst organization, one of the most powerful media organizations of this century, and the publishing industry in general. The papers also address topics well beyond the world of magazines. Her work as an advertising copywriter at a time when women were not expected to work outside of the home certainly deserves consideration, and her call for "liberation" of the single woman was among the first. Brown's rags to riches career was unusual at a time when most women still did not work outside the home. Her experience of moving from pink-collar clerical worker to wealthy doyenne of the mass media was unique. She helped shape the popular culture of the 1960s and beyond. Sex and the Single Girl ushered in a spate of "Sex and the..." imitators but also launched a cultural dialogue on the question of the unmarried, sexually active, employed woman. The look of Cosmopolitan, which was conveyed on the signature covers photographed by Francesco Scavullo and the racy cover blurbs, defined young women's magazines for much of the second half of the twentieth century. As her career progressed, Brown associated with rich and influential people, who are well-represented in her collection. Additionally, the strong responses, both positive and negative, elicited by Brown's work give a sense of changing and conflicting public opinion on questions of sex, gender, and the media. To date, there is no scholarly biography of Helen Gurley Brown.

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Search Terms

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Organization of the Collection

This collection is organized into six series:

• I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS
• II. CORRESPONDENCE
• III. SPEECHES AND APPEARANCES
• IV. WRITINGS
• V. COSMOPOLITAN
• VI. OVERSIZE MATERIALS

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SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS (1938-2000) 2.5 linear feet

This series includes material that documents Helen Gurley Brown's personal life and professional accomplishments. There are clippings, appointment books, travel itineraries, awards, and photographs. There is also a file of material from and about David Brown. The many Clippings give a comprehensive picture of the heavy press coverage Brown has received throughout her career. They stretch from her schoolgirl days in Little Rock to the present. The Education material primarily covers Brown's involvement later in life with her alma mater Woodbury College. This series contains miscellaneous Financial and legal material, including a 1946 income tax return; Awards; and a Videotape profile of Brown aired on CNN. The Memorabilia is especially engaging, containing writings and ephemera from her years in Little Rock and those pre-dating Sex and the Single Girl. The Papers contain a large selection of Photographs, some shot by celebrity photographers, and many with celebrity friends.

SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE (1939, 1950-2001) 4 linear feet

Brown has always been a prodigious correspondent. Her correspondence is organized into several subseries. The Individuals subseries is arranged alphabetically by name and includes friends, frequent correspondents, and correspondence more personal than businesslike. Accordingly correspondence can be found here that is related to her work at Cosmopolitan, her writings, speeches and appearances, or other topics located elsewhere in her papers. Correspondence with celebrities is filed in Individuals.

The next subseries is Thank you and congratulatory notes, mostly from her staff at Cosmopolitan magazine, but also from her household staff and employers at Hearst. This correspondence is mainly of a quotidian nature, but illustrates how Brown, by many accounts a demanding person, earned the respect of her staff and employers.

Public response and fan mail includes letters from readers of Brown's writings and viewers of her appearances. Some letters are simple requests for autographs, while others provide detailed and moving accounts of how Brown's plan for success helped these generally working-class women find degrees of fulfillment. The extent to which these women embraced Cosmopolitan's message is in sharp contrast to the criticism leveled at the magazine by many conservatives and feminists.

Correspondence by Subject includes letters generated by Brown's philanthropic work, critiques of magazines other than Cosmopolitan and other Hearst properties, letters from libraries and museums interested in Brown's work, love letters from the 1950s, and correspondence with friends from Little Rock. The bulk of the Subject correspondence involves Editor's perquisites/gifts. These letters reveal Brown's personal interest in clothes and cosmetics. Noted for her thrift, she often used her clout as an editor of a women's magazine to obtain these items wholesale. Manufacturers and designers, eager to have their products highlighted in Cosmopolitan, and others because they were friends, obliged. These letters give no indication that the products were intended for the pages of Cosmopolitan; such correspondence can be found in SERIES V. COSMOPOLITAN. As best as can be determined, the letters here pertain to gifts and perquisites that were for Brown's personal use.

General correspondence contains letters of a quotidian nature, regarding home repairs and so forth.

This series contains most of Brown's correspondence, but there is additional correspondence in other series. For example, correspondence generated by the planning and execution of speeches and appearances, with publishers and media figures interested in Helen's writings, and tied explicitly to her work at Cosmopolitan can be found in the relevant series. Correspondence connected to specific projects has been kept with the project whenever possible. An exception to this rule is celebrity correspondence, which has been filed in SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE-Individuals even though it may relate to a specific project. Determining whether or not correspondence should be categorized as professional or personal was one of the biggest challenges of this collection, since Brown's work and personal life were enmeshed. Many of the people with whom she maintained friendships were figures in the media. In general, the correspondence included in SERIES V. COSMOPOLITANis explicitly related to the production of the magazine. Nonetheless, many of the correspondents in SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE are at least tangentially related to Cosmopolitan.

SERIES III. SPEECHES AND APPEARANCES (1962-2001), 1.75 linear feet

Material in this series pertains to Brown's presentations in person, or on television or radio. There are correspondence; speech texts; and notes from her personal appearances, including the text of a debate in which she participated at Oxford University. Her television and radio work generated scripts; schedules; and correspondence, including public response mail from an appearance on the news program Dateline. Pilot shows starring Brown, one in the 1960s called Outrageous Opinions and another in the 1980s called What Should I Do?, generated material as well. Television proposals that never came to fruition are filed in SERIES IV. WRITINGS. In the early 1960s, Brown recorded a radio show that was syndicated in Canada. This series contains the complete scripts of these recordings.

SERIES IV. WRITINGS (1940, 1956-2000), 9 linear feet

Besides editing Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown occupied herself primarily as a writer. Before she wrote the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl, she wrote ad copy, of which a small amount can be found here, and unpublished vignettes and poems. The emphasis on themes of sexuality and independent womanhood is greater in these early unpublished writings than her later published works.

Brown's collection boasts impressive documentation of her published writing efforts. It contains drafts; manuscripts; newspaper clippings; and published copies of Sex and the Single Girl, Sex and the Office, Outrageous Opinions, Having It All, The Late Show, and I'm Wild Again. Researchers interested in her first two books should consult correspondence (filed in this series) with her publisher Bernard Geis Associates, which includes letters from Bernard Geis and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and the Lucy Kroll Agency. This correspondence gives an excellent sense of the circumstances that surrounded Brown's sudden rise to fame and the successful efforts of Helen and David Brown to capitalize upon that fame. The correspondence also elucidates the changing world of the media and publishing in the 1960s as well as relatively new strategies of marketing controversial and sexually explicit material. Clippings record the public response to such efforts.

There are published and draft versions of Brown's magazine and newspaper articles in this series. Material related to a syndicated advice column for single women that ran between the time Sex and the Single Girl was published and the point at which Brown took over Cosmopolitan is of special interest. The series also contains the scripts and LP albums Brown recorded, one an album of advice, the other a recording of a speech. Short pieces that Brown wrote for other people's books and articles and her declines of such requests are found here.

The unpublished material reveals the breadth of Brown's ideas. Several proposals for unrealized television programs, plays, and articles concern themes that Brown repeated in her published work, but take a more radical approach to them. Fragments of an incomplete autobiography; an autobiographical theatrical piece, which includes an audiotaped interview; and fictional short stories and poems are included among the unpublished works.

The series also contains letters to the editor, notes, and some writings by David Brown

SERIES V. COSMOPOLITAN (1965-2000) 4.5 linear feet

Helen Gurley Brown's 'child' for the past thirty-five years has been Cosmopolitan magazine. She changed a failing general interest magazine into a phenomenon - not only a best-selling magazine, but a cultural icon.

This series comprehensively traces Brown's Cosmopolitan career from its beginnings to her current job evaluating Cosmopolitan's international editions. Of special note is the proposal circulated by David and Helen Brown for a new magazine, 'Femme,' that would become Cosmopolitan's new format.

Throughout her tenure, a primary component of Brown's job was the courting of advertisers. Texts of the speeches and presentations she gave to advertisers and international editorial staff, as well as acceptance speeches for awards given to Cosmopolitan can be found in the subseries Advertising and publicity. This subseries includes advertisements for the magazine, including many written by Brown; promotional materials from the Hearst Corporation; and a large amount of newspaper clippings documenting coverage of Cosmopolitan in the press.

Correspondence (the years 1988-89 are especially well documented) illuminates the day-to-day operations of Brown's editorial work, as letters flow between Brown and writers, Cosmopolitan staffers, advertisers, and Hearst executives regarding specific issues of the magazine as well as ongoing concerns. Frequent correspondents among the staff and Hearst executives are filed by individual. Researchers interested in the advertising content of the magazine may wish to consult the letters of Stan Perkins and Seth Hoyt.

The Editorial subseries provides an in-depth look at the magazine production process. Rules for writing and art format, which Brown enforced strictly, are compiled from the 1970s to the 90s. There are files of article ideas and editing memos, and a sample folder that represents the transformation of an article from its submitted state to the published version. Some notes on Brown's ideas for the magazine have been included, as is information on production and circulation. This subseries also contains the results of reader and staff surveys. Within the Editorial material is a section on special features. Material regarding the famous Burt Reynolds centerfold and other special issues of the magazine, such as anniversary issues and the last issue edited by Helen Gurley Brown, are filed here. Another special feature was the failed television pilot A View from Cosmo starring Brown. A "Best of" set of articles has Brown's favorite article among pieces from such regular Cosmopolitan writers as Erica Jong, Judith Krantz, and Gail Sheehy; a collection of some of Brown's long-running editorial, "Step into My Parlor;" and drafts and a copy of the only article Brown wrote for the magazine.

A small subseries concerns Cosmopolitan Events and includes material from a lunch given by Brown for other women's magazine editors to raise awareness for the National Abortion Rights Action League and a party thrown by the Hearst organization to celebrate Brown's twenty-fifth anniversary as Editor.

A set of Cosmopolitan magazines from 1953-79 is housed in the Sophia Smith Collection's Periodicals Collection.

SERIES VI. OVERSIZE MATERIALS (1965-96) .75 linear feet

These items have been culled from other series for preservation purposes. The series features large photographs and artwork of Brown; an honorary degree; birthday cards and tributes; writings; publicity from her books and Cosmopolitan; material from Cosmopolitan; and scrapbooks from Sex and the Office, a television show proposal, a Cosmopolitan speech, and her Cosmopolitan twenty-fifth anniversary party.

SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS (1938-2000)

SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE (1939, 1950-2001)

SERIES III. SPEECHES AND APPEARANCES (1962-2001),

SERIES IV. WRITINGS (1940, 1956-2000),

SERIES V. COSMOPOLITAN (1965-2000)

SERIES VI. OVERSIZE MATERIALS (1965-96)