1965
“God damn it, Helen, you aren’t a mouseburger anymore and maybe . . . never were. Distorted image!”
—letter from Lyn Tornabene to Helen Gurley Brown
Helen worked on her issues, but she never worked them out. Her insecurity was cellular, so much a part of her that it was practically its own organ. Helen Marie Gurley was a straight-A student, but she saw herself as average. Her friends thought she was cute, but she thought she was nothing special. Growing up, she was firmly middle class, but she felt poor—even before she actually was poor. She wasn’t from “hillbilly stock,” as she claimed, but she believed that she was. Her self-portrait mattered. Because of it, she understood at some deep level that in order for Cosmopolitan to work, she not only had to change society’s image of the single, working girl—but also had to change that girl’s image of herself.
She started by writing that girl a letter. One day in the spring of 1965, Helen sat down at her Royal manual typewriter and started composing her first column as the editor of Cosmopolitan. She had written hundreds if not thousands of letters before this moment, using this same typewriter, but this letter was different—this one meant everything. It was where she would announce herself and what she stood for: her beliefs, convictions, and ideas for the magazine going forward. The challenge was to package it in a way that felt fun and breezy, not too serious, not forced. Many readers already knew her from her books and her “Woman Alone” column, so she introduced herself as an old friend before explaining how she personally selected the articles in the July issue: “I thought they’d interest you . . . knowing that you’re a grown-up girl, interested in whatever can give you a richer, more exciting, fun-filled, friend-filled, man-loved kind of life!”
The column bore all the signature stylings she would become known for: italics, exclamation points, fawning assessments of Cosmopolitan’s featured writers. Once the letter was finished, Helen gave it to David to read, and he left his marks as usual. Of course, the real judge wouldn’t be David or her Hearst bosses, but the reader, the person Helen simply referred to as you.
EVEN THOUGH HUGH Hefner had turned down the Browns’ early proposal for Femme, Helen continued to look at Playboy as a prime example of how to mold a magazine with a specific reader in mind. Hearst avoided the comparisons, but not Helen. “A guy reading Playboy can say, ‘Hey, that’s me.’ I want my girl to be able to say the same thing,” she once said. She admitted that she admired Playboy “to the point of ridiculousness” and thought Hefner was “a bona-fide genius.” With Playboy, Hefner hadn’t just created a magazine. He had created a lifestyle and a philosophy—literally, “The Playboy Philosophy,” a monthly feature that broke down his vision not just for the magazine, but for the future of the modern American male.
Who was he? In the inaugural December 1953 issue, featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover, Hefner began by describing the Playboy man in terms of who he wasn’t. He wasn’t necessarily the family breadwinner or the Father of the Year type featured in popular family magazines, nor was he the rugged outdoorsman portrayed in traditional men’s magazines. He didn’t care much for camping or fly-fishing or do-it-yourself projects. In fact, the Playboy man preferred to stay indoors, where he could satisfy his appetite for “the good life” more easily. “We like our apartment,” Hefner wrote. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex. . . .”
The single girl Helen wrote about could also mix a good cocktail and talk about sex without blushing. And while Hefner wasn’t ready to invest in a new magazine for women, he liked the idea of there being “a female version of Playboy,” and he took a keen interest in Helen’s vision for a sexually liberated Cosmopolitan.
“It was the beginning of the sexual revolution. Playboy played a major part in igniting that, and I felt that there was more than a little room for the same thing for women,” Hefner says today. “I thought that, if she hired the right people—and we helped her hire the right people—she should do very well. There was a waiting audience for what she had in mind; it really made sense.
“What I did personally was align her with and introduce her to my own editors so that she had contact with the agents and the writers that we were using,” Hefner continues. “We gave her a frame of reference in terms of the marketplace and what we paid for various kinds of pieces.”
Early on, Helen commissioned writers whose work had appeared in Playboy to pen pieces for her, and Cosmopolitan soon adopted a similarly frank tone. Both magazines advocated for sexual freedom and expression, featuring photos of beautiful girls in seductive poses. But while the two editors had many convictions in common, their target readers were, at the core, far more different than they were alike. The Playboy man was handsome, successful, and sophisticated; he not only knew how to make an hors d’oeuvre, he knew how to spell it. He was at ease with himself and seemingly free of insecurities.
The Cosmopolitan Girl, on the other hand, was full of hang-ups. She might want to date the Playboy man, but he didn’t necessarily want to date her—too much baggage. While he was busy adding to his wine collection, she was worrying about paying her rent, financing her car, dealing with her overbearing mother, asking her boss for a raise or promotion, and trying to manage the feelings of helplessness and rage that she occasionally felt when she thought about all of the above.
Had they met in the real world, these two might have had a fling, but eventually they would have gone their separate ways, realizing that they were incompatible. (If anything, the Cosmopolitan Girl had more in common with the working-class Playmate. “Playmates,” Hefner says, “were often Cosmo Girls with their clothes off.”)
And yet, the Playboy man and the Cosmopolitan Girl shared one essential trait. Both characters seemed like much more than figments of their creators’ imaginations—they seemed real. “I think magazines are the most personal form of mass communication, and the best magazines have a personality that is almost human,” Hefner says. “Both Playboy and Cosmo defined their readership in a very clear way, and that was part of the reason for their success.”
Before Helen Gurley Brown took over, Cosmopolitan had no editor’s letter, only a roundup of what was in the issue. Just as Hefner had done in Playboy, Helen wrote directly to the reader she imagined. Hers was one specific girl—essentially the girl she had been.
At seventeen she was the scared high school graduate, soon to be a secretarial student, who had confessed that she would rather die than be poor all her life.
By the age of thirty-five she was the loveless career girl at Foote, Cone & Belding, the odd specimen who conveyed an ambition so intense it fascinated an observer from an outside consulting company, Runner Associates, studying her for a job evaluation that read more like pages from a psychoanalyst’s notebook:
“She seems constantly aware of her lack of fulfillment. . . . She is as intrigued by it as if it were an aching tooth that she keeps worrying with her tongue,” the report pronounced. “She doesn’t want to have to work out her long-range problems. She wants both to be cared for, and to feel exquisitely needed. She wants proof of romance, and glamour, and ease.”
Eight years later, when a forty-three-year-old Helen began typing up her first editor’s letter for Cosmopolitan, she was addressing the girl who wanted it all. Other people might have seen that girl as someone’s bored secretary, unmarried daughter, insecure friend, or dissatisfied wife, but Helen spoke to the person she was on the inside. She saw her for who she truly was—a woman with desires as strong as a man’s.
Helen’s first-ever editor’s letter was a page long, squeezed in next to an ad for a powdered deodorant promising to end “a woman’s 3 worst odor problems” (odorous sanitary napkins and perspiration under bras and girdles). The mostly black-and-white layout could have been more inviting, but the name of the column welcomed readers right in: “Step Into My Parlour.”
Her first picture showed her multitasking with the phone at her ear and a manuscript in her hand. Over time, Helen’s vision for her column would continue to take shape—she tried never to be photographed in the same dress or pose, and she liked to be shown in far-flung locations with fabulous people—but from the start, she made it clear that everything in the issue was in service of her imaginary girl, who had very real problems to deal with and dreams to pursue.
She personally selected articles about how to avoid a disastrous divorce, how to find a good psychiatrist on a budget, and how to travel in style when single. Equally important were the countless advertisements curated for this specific young woman, who, in fact, was horrified by the sweat that collected under her bra and girdle—and also needed a cure for her period cramps (Midol), a tampon with a slimmer applicator (Kotams by Kotex), and a quick fix for getting rid of her calluses and corns (Pretty Feet).
At the same time, Helen acknowledged this girl’s need for some kind of proof that more was out there—romance, glamour, and ease: “You also want to be inspired, entertained and sometimes whisked away into somebody else’s world,” she wrote.
The girl reading could start by stepping into Helen’s parlor, if only for a moment.