In , Helen went into further detail on her tormentor in a startlingly frank interview about her sexual history. I wanted to marry him. It was so cute. And rotten to the core. I fell for it about three different times. She began to see how cunningly he planned his tortures. He left letters from other women where she could find them.
One Christmas, Helen saw stacks of these gifts in his apartment, marked for different women. Most cruelly, he belittled the thing that gave Helen the most self esteem, her so-called career. Coming from a successful pro, the jabs struck hard. Understandably, Helen developed some anger issues. When a blonde model walked by their table at the Santa Ynez Inn and greeted DJ, Helen poured a pitcher of water over his head in a spasm of jealousy.
Objects began to fly and shatter; she threw a pitcher of icy gimlets, shoes, papers, books. She sobbed, shrieked, and pleaded, sometimes for hours, to the point where only chugging a quart of milk could ease the hiccuping frenzy.
DJ reveled in the drama; the more intense her agitation, the greater turn-on it was for him. His voice became calmer and sexier as he tried to soothe her. Silly girl Helen saw herself as a prisoner of sex. She left DJ many times over those eight years, sometimes for as long as six months.
Helen kibitzed poolside and typed the occasional memo; when Bradley retired for the evening, her covert maneuvers with Clifton began. They saw each other off and on for years, on two continents. On another break from DJ, Helen had one of her more light-hearted and most public affairs, encouraged by her boss Don Belding, who thought it good for business. Helen was offended, though hardly heartbroken, when Dempsey suddenly decamped for New York to deal with a labor dispute at his eponymous restaurant and got himself engaged, briefly, to a rich widow.
The Champ sent Helen a cheesecake. DJ still pursued her relentlessly. To break her addiction to him, Helen turned to a new therapist who had developed the wildest, most demanding form of psychotherapy she had ever known.
Helen cried a lot and endured excruciating group exercises, but finally, she walked away from DJ for good. By the time she turned 35, she had come to understand this: Sex and romance were too damned unpredictable. The workplace, despite its ups and downs, was a far safer bet. It never went away and left you. It was not capricious. It did not go out with another girl. If you did good by it, it would be good by you. Her therapist had convinced Helen that she was ready for a good man, that she deserved love and security.
You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often emotionally cheaper and a lot more fun by the dozen. Gurley Brown's first job was with radio station KHJ where she answered fan mail for six dollars per week. From she worked as an executive secretary at Music Corp. Her ability to produce bright, arresting prose won her two Francis Holmes Advertising Copywriters awards during her tenure at the firm The couple had no children.
Gurley Brown once remarked that one secret of their marital success was that her husband never interrupted her on Saturdays and Sundays when she was working upstairs in her office. Gurley Brown's first book, Sex and the Single Girl revolutionized single women's attitudes towards their own lifestyle.
The book became a national best-seller. At a time when Reader's Digest and The Ladies Home Journal still insisted that a "nice" girl had only two choices, "she can marry him or she can say no," Gurley Brown openly proclaimed that sex was an important part of a single woman's lifestyle. According to Gurley Brown, "The single girl is the new glamour girl.
In , Gurley Brown was hired as editor-in-chief of Hearst Corp. In , she took a secretarial job with the Los Angeles advertising firm of Foote, Cone and Belding, where she worked for advertising executive Don Belding and advanced to writing copy. The following year, at age thirty-seven, she married movie producer David Brown, who went on to produce such films as The Sting , Jaws , Cocoon , and Driving Miss Daisy Along with assuring her readers that sex could be natural, respectable, and healthy, she underscored the importance of what came to be known as self-esteem.
Brown and her husband drafted plans for a magazine aimed at eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old single women. She resigned as editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan in , remaining at the helm of its international editions. In Arkansas, the Browns were planning to look at gravesites. Her husband David Brown died of kidney failure at their home in New York City on February 1, , at age ninety-three. Brown died on August 13, , in New York following a brief hospitalization. For additional information: Berebitsky, Julie.
Falkof, Lucile. Fox, Margalit. Hauser, Brooke. New York: HarperCollins, Helen Gurley Brown Papers, — Sophia Smith Collection. Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
Hirshey, Gerri. New York: Sarah Crichton Books,
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