Cosmo editor put down state, but here she’ll rest

Longtime Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown’s headstone stands in Sisco Cemetery in Osage. Although she died Aug. 13, no one seems to know when her remains will be brought back to Arkansas for burial. Her husband is buried nearby.
Longtime Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown’s headstone stands in Sisco Cemetery in Osage. Although she died Aug. 13, no one seems to know when her remains will be brought back to Arkansas for burial. Her husband is buried nearby.

— The late Helen Gurley Brown, unabashed in her disdain for her home state, valued family above all and perhaps saw Arkansas as a formative place in her life, for good or bad.

The trailblazing editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for more than three decades is expected to be laid to rest in the small, rural cemetery in Carroll County where her mother and older sister are buried - the Sisco Cemetery off Arkansas 103 in Osage. The small patch surrounded by a knee-high stone wall holds just 20 or so graves and sits less than 100 yards from where Brown’s mother, Cleo Sisco Bryan, oncelived.

Brown died at age 90 on Aug. 13 after a short hospital stay. She lived in a four-floor Manhattan penthouse that she shared with her husband of 51 years, Hollywood producer David Brown, who died in 2010. The couple had no children together, though David had a son, Bruce, from a previous marriage. His son preceded him in death.

Helen Gurley Brown’s pinkish granite headstone has been placed next to that of David. Her marker is emblazoned with her trademark pussycat; his has an Oscar statue on it. It’s been said that she called everyone “Pussycat,” pronouncing it “pushycat.” In 1991, David Brown - along with his longtime associate Richard Zanuck - was awarded the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

Helen Gurley Brown, who was born in Green Forest, said on many occasions that she was hellbent on escaping her Ozarks upbringing.

“I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me - ordinary, hillbilly and poor - and I repudiated it from the time I was 7,” she wrote in her 1982 book Having it All.

Despite her public disavowel of Arkansas, Jennifer R. Scanlon, who wrote the 2009 biography of Brown - Bad Girls Go Everywhere - was not surprised that Brown chose to be buried near her birthplace.

“I really believe her link to family overshadowed whatever negative memory she had of Arkansas. I think she realized it played a formative role in her life,” said Scanlon, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of the Humanities in Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

“She did look down on her family when she was young, but she remained close to her sister, in particular,” as well as her mother, both of whom lived in Arkansas until they died, Scanlon said.

“I guess she felt that as much as anywhere else, it [the state] was a link to her family,” she said.

Brown returned to Arkansas regularly to visit her mother and sister, Mary Gurley Alford, before they died in 1980 and 1997, respectively. Scanlon said Brown gave her sister “considerable assistance” in the last years of her sister’s life.

Alford contracted polio when she was in her early 20s, spent the rest of her life paralyzed from the waist down and battled alcoholism in her later years.

Brown’s father, Ira Gurley, was a schoolteacher-turnedlegislator who died in an elevator accident in 1932, when Brown was 10. He is buried at a cemetery in Green Forest.

Before becoming the Cosmopolitan editor in 1965, she penned the best-seller Sex and the Single Girl, branding herself as the role model for the character Carrie Bradshaw decades before Sex and the City became a hit for HBO. According to The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Sex and the Single Girl for what was then the highest price ever paid for a nonfiction title. The 1964 film starred Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda.

Some of Brown’s other books were Sex and the Office (1964), Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook (1969), Sex and the New Single Girl (1970) and The Late Show (1993).

MAKING WAY FOR HELEN

An invitation-only memorial was held Oct. 18 at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York. It’s unknown when Brown’s remains will make their way back to Arkansas - not even the Green Forest funeral home owner, Jim Smith, knows for sure - but locals are convinced that it will happen.

“Her roots are here,” said Carolyn Clayton, whose late husband, Wayne Bell, was a first cousin of Brown’s. Bell is buried in the Sisco Cemetery with a spot for Clayton next to his grave. Bell’s mother and Brown’s mother were sisters. Clayton’s son, Jerrit Bell, maintains the Sisco Cemetery.

Clayton recalls meeting Brown on one of Brown’s visits to see her mother.

“She seemed really downto-earth to me,” Clayton said. “I think she was trying to be like us ... and I’ll just leave it at that.”

As for Brown’s burial in Sisco Cemetery, Clayton said, “I heard she wanted it quiet.”

So far, it’s been stealth.

Newt Lale, owner of Osage Clayworks nearby, said he recalls Brown’s headstone popping up seemingly overnight in the cemetery, sometime in late October or early November.

“I was a little amazed when the guy from the funeral home came by and asked who was in charge of the cemetery,” recalled Lale.

When Lale asked who was to be buried there, the undertaker said, “Helen’s coming back here.”

Lale’s pottery place is ina turn-of-the-century building that was once operated as a general store by the late Frank Stamps. Lale, a friend of Stamps, said Stamps mowed the property of Brown’s mother across the highwaywhen he mowed his own.

“Frank would always take a picture of the house and send it to Helen,” said Lale, “and she would mail him a check” for proof that the area was well-maintained.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/29/2012

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