NEW YORK — Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazines’ 64 international editions and one of the world’s most popular and influential editors, died Monday at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. She was 90.
Hearst Corporation CEO Frank A. Bennack, Jr. said Brown died Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization.
Gurley Brown was born in Green Forest, Ark., on Feb. 18, 1922, to Ira and Cleo Gurley, both school teachers. The family moved to Little Rock when Ira was elected to the state legislature. He died in an elevator accident when Helen was 10 years old.
After trying to support Helen and her older sister Mary in Depression-era Arkansas, Cleo Gurley moved them to Los Angeles in the late 1930s.
She spent a year at the Texas State College for Women and returned home to put herself through Woodbury Business College. In 1941, with her business degree, Gurley Brown took on a series of secretarial jobs.
It was her 17th job, at the advertising agency Foote, Cone, and Belding, that launched her future success. As executive secretary to Don Belding, Gurley Brown’s work ethic and witty notes impressed both her boss and his wife, who suggested she try her hand at writing advertising copy. By the late 1950s, she had become the highest-paid female copywriter on the West Coast and one of the few to be listed in ”Who’s Who of American Women.”
Brown first became famous with a best-selling 1962 book called “Sex and the Single Girl.” Three years later she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan.
It became her bully pulpit for the next 32 years, featuring big-haired beauties and racy cover headlines. Brown said her aim was to tell readers “how to get everything out of life.”
Brown was a controversial figure in the women’s movement, filling the magazine racy articles and centerfolds like a photo of Burt Reynolds in the buff that created a sensation in 1972.
Bennack, Jr. said Gurley Brown ”was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry.
”She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential ‘Cosmo girl.’ She will be greatly missed.”