Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown dead at 90
Posted August 13, 2012 4:32 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine has died, her publisher Hearst Corp. said.
Brown died Monday morning at McKeen Pavilion at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia in New York after a brief hospitalization, Hearst said. She was 90.
“It would be hard to overstate the importance to Hearst of her success with Cosmopolitan, or the value of the friendship many of us enjoyed with her,” CEO Frank Bennack Jr. said in the release. “Helen was one of the world’s most recognized magazine editors and book authors, and a true pioneer for women in journalism—and beyond.”
Brown’s book of advice, Sex and the Single Girl, made her a celebrity in 1962.
Three years later, she was hired by Hearst to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan magazine and it became her pulpit for more than three decades.
Her goal from the outset was to tell a reader “how to get everything out of life — the money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity — whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against,” she said.
“It was a terrific magazine,” she said, looking back when she surrendered the editorship of the U.S. edition in 1997. “I would want my legacy to be, ‘She created something that helped people.’ My reader, I always felt, was someone who needed to come into her own.”
A fall memorial for Brown will be announced at a later date.
With files from The Associated Press
