Yesterday, the iconic magazine editor Helen Gurley
Brown died. She was 90. She'd had a good innings. In fact, if you read her
amazing biography, she'd pretty much had two innings. 40 at the start of the
sixties she'd already lived a whole life, meeting and marrying her partner for
the next fifty years film producer David Brown when she was 37. She then
proceeded to live another one.
She was 43 when she went to Hearst with a proposal for
a new radical sort of women's magazine and was made EIC of Cosmopolitan instead,
with a brief to remake the ailing literary magazine in her own image. Like it
or not, and I know many of you won't, seeing how everyone loves to hate on
women's magazines, a phenomenon was born.
Aside from her phenomenal influence on the global
magazine industry and women's lives (she coined the now controversial phrase
having it all, by which, I would argue, she really meant, having more, aiming
higher) I owe Helen a personal debt on two fronts.
Firstly, Cosmo changed my life. Or, more
accurately, an article I read in UK Cosmopolitan as a dungareed-and-doc'd
student in 1985 did. Back then Cosmo was THE magazine. I and my four
flatmates took it in turns to buy it for our flat, then fought over who got to read
it first, often resorting to reading bits out loud. But there was an article. I
read it. It made me see I was not alone, I was not going mad, that girls like
me could and did.
And secondly, nearly twenty years later, when I could
and had, and was Editor of British Cosmo, I met her. I will never forget
the first time I saw her. Waiting for me at the end of the corridor as the lift
doors opened, Helen Gurley Brown cut the most incredible figure. Daunting,
despite her diminutive size – as a comparatively chunky Brit Editor I was
constantly worried I might snap her – she was endlessly generous with her time
and her experience. (And her money – in January she donated $30million dollars
to Stanford and Columbia Universities to create the David and Helen Gurley
Brown Institute for Media Innovation.) Well into her eighties by then, she was
still sharp as a tack. I still have her letters, right down to the one she sent
me after I wrote to tell her I'd resigned to go to Red. True to style,
she was kind and generous to a fault: 'I can't say I'm happy,' she wrote. 'But
we all have to make tough decisions about our careers… we will stay
friends.' And we did. That takes some skill. To remain friends with those who
leave you.
But Gurley Brown's influence reached far further than
me.
Here are just some of the undeniably smart things she
said that remain as true today as they were then.
On looks: 'Beauty can't
amuse you, but brainwork—reading, writing, thinking—can.'
On hard graft: 'Nearly every
glamorous, wealthy, successful career woman you might envy now started out as
some kind of schlepp.'
On success: 'My success was
not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.'
On listening: 'Never fail to
know that if you are doing all the talking, you are boring somebody.'
On feminism: 'How could any
woman not be a feminist? The girl I’m editing for wants to be known for
herself. If that’s not a feminist message, I don’t know what is.'
On men: 'Don't use men to
get what you want in life – get it for yourself.'
On twitter last night, American writer Emily Nussbaum
referenced Mad Men when she said Helen Gurley Brown spoke to and
for the Joans of this world. It's true, she did. But her own story is pure
Peggy.
(This piece first appeared on my blog on www.redonline.co.uk/blogs, 14th
August 2012.)
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