Lessons in sex

Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is revealed in this intimate biography in 50 shades of pink. ‘Let it be understood at the outset,’ writes Gerri Hirshey, an American freelance journalist for many upmarket periodicals:

Sex has imbued the soft core, hard times and glory days of this story — sex surrendered, sex wielded, lavished and revelled in, sex merely endured and sometimes coolly transactional, sex reimagined, promised and packaged on glossy magazine covers for global dissemination…

Hirshey tells all about Helen’s life, every nook and cranny, from her childhood poverty in hillbilly Arkansas, steeply ascendant to the pizzazz of A-list Manhattan. She is a connoisseur of pizzazz, and her style is suitably ornate.

Helen’s father Ira was a brutal misogynist, nicknamed ‘Caveman Gurley’. Her mother, Cleo, experienced agonising obstetrical difficulties giving birth to Helen and her older sister Mary, was later crippled by polio, and was depressed and pessimistic ever after. When Helen was only ten, Ira died while attempting to get into a lift already moving. Helen inherited financial anxiety and remained parsimonious even when she made lots of money. ‘By the time Mary and Helen were school age,’ Hirshey relates, ‘Cleo had begun her steady warnings that pretty girls got the best in life, and her daughters had better learn to use their brains and wits.’ Helen was made to believe she was not at all pretty, and in adolescence was further handicapped by chronic acne, hence the book’s title. As a young woman she lived according to the creed she would proclaim always: to have and to hold men, the single girl must exert inner charm above the neck and below the waist.