Q&A: Naked Burt Reynolds and man-hunting in Vietnam: Helen Gurley Brown biographer Brooke Hauser on how the Cosmo girl came to be

In 1962, when a 40-year-old Los Angeles ad copywriter published an advice manual on love and work, no one could have imagined that the book would help fuel the Sexual Revolution and change the course of publishing.

Helen Gurley Brown’s “Sex and the Single Girl” landed like a liberated lightning rod on bookshelves around the United States, encouraging women to pursue their professional aspirations, and enjoy a healthy sex life in the process — at least until Mr. Right came along.

“What is a sexy woman?” asked Brown in what became one of the 20th century’s most renowned self-help books. “Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex.”

In midcentury U.S. of A., where women’s paths consisted principally of chaste courtship and wifely duty, Brown shifted the conversation. Her endgame may have been traditional (find a man), but the Arkansas-born, Los Angeles-based ad woman — one of the top women in advertising at the time — helped give single ladies permission to play. (The arrival of the birth control pill in the early ‘60s helped the cause along.)

“Sex and the Single Girl” was a runaway bestseller — and it generated as much praise as it did enmity. (Times critic Robert Kirsch derided it as “phony.”) It also turned Helen Gurley Brown into a household name. By 1965, she had landed in the editor-in-chief’s chair at Cosmopolitan magazine in New York where she transformed a moribund women’s title into the blazing bible (with cleavage) of the new career girl.

Brown was a contradictory amalgam of impulses. She was a flirty waif of a woman who also happened to be an ambitious workaholic. She described herself as a “mouseburger” (a plain Jane) though she could be wildly charismatic. And she was talking the single girl talk at a point in her life when she was already comfortably married — to Hollywood producer David Brown, who persuaded her to write “Sex and the Single Girl” to begin with.

In the ‘70s, when the feminist movement was launching a protracted battle for women’s social and economic equality, Brown was still championing super-sexy ways to land a man. That didn’t stop her from featuring an excerpt of Kate Millett’s feminist tome “Sexual Politics” in Cosmopolitan, or from regularly attempting to get Gloria Steinem to write for the magazine. During that same period, she also printed a centerfold of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug.

Through the 1980s and ‘90s, Brown became a bit of a caricature: overly coiffed, overly made-up, overly concerned with sexual freedom at a time that the AIDS epidemic was raging. Yet her influence is without question.

Journalist Brooke Hauser spent four years combing through the editor’s papers (Brown died in 2012 at 90) and interviewing dozens of people who knew and worked for her (including Steinem). The resulting biography, “Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman,” published last month by HarperCollins, encapsulates the colorful life of a woman who rocked minis well into her eighties.

In this lightly edited conversation, Hauser talks about how Brown changed the ways women saw themselves and how Los Angeles shaped her world view. She also recounts the most ridiculous article ever to run in man-crazy Cosmopolitan.

What were women’s magazines like in the early 1960s, before Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmopolitan?

I had a lot of fun looking at old women’s magazine from the ‘50s and early ‘60s — publications like Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. These magazines were edited by men and they were teaching housewives how to whip up the perfect pot roast and to have a martini waiting for their husband when he came home. There was a real concentration on housework.

They would talk about women with their married names — like, “Here’s what Mrs. John Richards does before her husband comes home.” The pictures on the covers were usually celebrity wives or models wearing prim and feminine outfits: cloche hats, Peter Pan collars, not showing any skin.

How did Brown shake that up? And in what way can we see her influence on women’s magazines today?

I think if you look at most women’s magazines and even men’s magazines, you see her influence. When she took over in 1965, there were a lot of comparisons between Cosmo and Playboy. Initially, Helen’s bosses tried to back away from those comparisons, but sex sells and it still sells.

Helen was the first editor of a major women’s magazine to understand that it wasn’t just men who wanted to see sexy pictures of women. Women wanted to see them, too — but maybe for different reasons. In the ‘60s, the women looking at the Cosmopolitan cover girl with the big breasts and the big hair, they were looking at it as an aspirational model.

Brown moved to Los Angeles at 14 after her father’s death and lived here into her forties. How did that shape her?

I think it shaped her in a big way. Helen had this myth of herself as this poor, hillbilly girl from Arkansas who made it big. But as a child, she was not poor, she was middle-class. In fact, her father was a lawyer and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her mother moved Helen and her older sister, Mary, to Los Angeles after his death. Yet Helen always described herself as this mouseburger from Arkansas.

I asked her cousin in Arkansas, why did she feel so unattractive and unspecial? She thinks that it had to do with [Helen’s] move to Los Angeles at such a young age, when she was very impressionable — this land of golden skin and glamorous style. She romanticized and obsessed over the stars. She was always interested in fame and famous people. She sought it out.

Also, it was in Los Angeles where she got into advertising, part of her journey from small-town girl to big-city sophisticate. She came of age professionally in the world of advertising — working as a copywriter at Foote Cone & Belding.

Where she became a very important copywriter.

She was in some ways the female Don Draper. When people talk about “Mad Men,” they sometimes compare Helen Gurley Brown to Peggy or to Joan — the young woman who starts off as a secretary then works her way up the ladder. But in my mind Helen had more in common with Don Draper.

By the time she was ready to write “Sex and the Single Girl,” she wasn’t working her way up the ladder. She was already at the top. And she was so inscrutable, just like he was. You can see both of them as products of their own invention. It was no coincidence that Helen was in advertising and then went on to create her brand, this artifice that was herself.

In what ways did Brown change how women see themselves? And how did she reinforce the idea that the end goal was getting a man?

She sent mixed messages. She wanted to empower single women, but she called them “girls” and the end goal was to get married. I think she did really encourage women to go out there, strike out on their own, turn their jobs into their careers and sleep around if they wish — and not get married just yet. The “just yet” is important, because a lot of her advice was about how to catch a man.

If you read “Sex and the Single Girl,” it has all of these crazy ideas — like, join a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, or become a member of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, because then you could meet more men. She’d say things like, “Read books like ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ because it will start conversations.” They are ludicrous, funny ideas and it’s hard to tell when she is being serious or not.

Right now there is so much swirling around the topic of single women. There is Rebecca Traister’s book “All the Single Ladies.” And there are all of these statistics about how single women might change how people vote this election. In some ways, it was Helen who started this conversation about single women.

You’ve combed through a lot of back issues of Cosmopolitan as part of your research. What’s the most cockamamie advice you found?

There was an article that she wrote at the height of Vietnam. It was this travel article where she was singing the praises of volunteering to go to Vietnam so you could meet a man. And there’s a quote in it, one woman saying something like, “It’s not that we’re all so pretty, it’s just that there’s so few women here.” For me that topped it. Everyone was talking about Vietnam as this serious crisis and Helen saw it as, “There’s a lot of young men over there — eligible, too.”

Betty Friedan, the author of “The Feminine Mystique,” once stated that Cosmopolitan had “utter contempt for women.” How did Brown navigate the women’s movement?

I think she got lost. When [Gloria Steinem] and Letty Cottin Pogrebin were starting Ms. Magazine [in the early 1970s], they used to refer to Cosmopolitan as the un-liberated woman’s survival kit. And when they began to pitch Ms. to advertisers, they would say, “If you think of Cosmopolitan as the poison, think of Ms. as the antidote.” By the ‘70s, women had moved on to other things, and Helen was till stuck on sex.

Gloria Steinem was an early critic of the magazine. So was Betty Friedan. But what’s interesting is that Helen deeply admired Gloria Steinem. She was constantly trying to get Gloria to write an article or to be in the magazine. When Gloria wrote her famous I-was-a-Playboy-Bunny piece [officially titled “A Bunny’s Tale”], Helen got her to pose in Cosmopolitan.

It’s essentially a picture of Steinem wearing a purple romper showing a lot of skin and she’s sprawled out alongside this TV actor. I interviewed Steinem about it and she was very funny about it. She said that if it had happened later in her career, she would have said something about being uncomfortable with the situation. She told me she behaved like a mouseburger. And the story identified her as a former Playboy bunny rather than explaining that she was a journalist undercover.

Helen, in her mind, saw Gloria as the perfect Cosmo girl.

Brown had a habit of ameliorating, exaggerating and fabricating. How close do you think you got to the real Helen in your book?

There was one man I interviewed who was so wonderful to talk to — her managing editor. And he said something to me early on. He said he always thought of Helen Gurley Brown as a cubist painting because she had so many faces and so many angles and you never knew which one you were getting.

My job was to encircle her through all of these interviews with more than 100 people who all knew a different side of her. Without sounding too English major-y about it, she illustrated something bigger about the human condition. Her story is about trying to find and forge your identity. I loved the idea that I couldn’t pin her down.

Besides the vision of the single, professional woman, what other ideas did Brown leave us with?

I think the idea of “having it all.” It was the title of her memoir. And it’s burrowed its way into so many conversations that women are still having today. It irritates so many women — and it irritated Helen. She originally didn’t want to name her memoir “Having It All.” But in her view, women didn’t have to stay home and be housewives. They could also work and they they would go home and have interesting stuff to talk about with their husbands. And that’s what “having it all” meant. I first saw the phrase used in her 1964 book, “Sex and the Office.” But it created a sensation when she published her memoir in 1982 — and it hasn’t gone away.

“Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman”

Brooke Hauser

HarperCollins: 480 pp., $28.99

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Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.