Helen Gurley Brown dies; editor of Cosmo and author of ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ was 90

“You can’t sleep your way to the top or even to the middle, and there is no such thing as a free lunch,” she wrote in “Sex and the Single Girl.” “You have to do it yourself, so you might as well get started.”

Helen Marie Gurley was born in Green Forest, Ark., deep in the Ozark mountains, on Feb. 18, 1922.

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Helen Gurley Brown, the iconic editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine and author of "Sex and the Single Girl," died at the age of 90 on Monday. Current Cosmo editor-in-chief Kate White says Brown “really listened to women,” and helped foster feminism in America.

She often described her background as “hillbilly,” and she said her Depression-era childhood left her “mildly terrified” about the prospect of bankruptcy and failure. This fear deepened after the death of her father, a schoolteacher and state legislator, in an elevator accident in Little Rock when she was 10.

She later described her mother, Cleo, also a schoolteacher, as prone to depression. Cleo Gurley struggled to keep the family together, taking in sewing and caring for an older daughter, Mary, who had contracted polio. Cleo settled the family in Los Angeles, near the hospital where Mary received treatment.

Helen completed high school in Los Angeles and was class valedictorian, an accomplishment she attributed as overcompensation for a bad acne problem and less-than-voluptuous figure. She attended Texas State College for Women before financial reversals led her back to Los Angeles.

She took shorthand classes and held more than a dozen secretarial jobs to support her family. She said she took it personally when she was not chased around the office like the other young women. Lack of harassment, in her view, was not to be envied.

She would later write in her bestseller: “If you’re not a sex object, you’re in trouble.”

In 1948, she joined Foote Cone & Belding, an advertising agency where she became executive secretary to board chairman Don Belding.

Her boss recognized her facility with words, especially in vivacious letters to him when he was out of town, and promoted her to copywriter. Several years later, working as a copywriter and account executive at Kenyon & Eckhardt, she became one of the nation’s highest-paid advertising writers.

Meanwhile, she dated several of her bosses and a number of well-known men, including champion boxer Jack Dempsey and Ron Getty, the son of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. In 1959, when she was 37, she married David Brown, an executive with 20th Century Fox movie studios who later produced films including “Jaws,” “The Sting” and “The Verdict.”

Brown, to whom she was married until his death in 2010, was one of her biggest fans and supporters, and he urged her to write “Sex and the Single Girl” after professing delight in reading many of her early letters to boyfriends.

Mrs. Brown often used her own long and faithful marriage as an example when doling out tips for happy relationships. Among them: “Communicate maniacally” and “always say yes to sex.”

The book brought her national prominence, and that fame was heightened in 1964 with a movie version of “Sex and the Single Girl” in which Natalie Wood played a fictitious version of Mrs. Brown.

She launched a syndicated newspaper advice column, called Woman Alone, and wrote several more books, including “Sex and the Office” (1964) and “Helen Gurley Brown’s Outrageous Opinions” (1966). The latter also became the name of her short-lived TV talk show.