Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown; 90/
NEW YORK—Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine who invited millions of women to join the sexual revolution, has died. She was 90.
Brown died on Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization, Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. said in a statement.
“Sex and the Single Girl,” her grab-bag book of advice, opinion and anecdote on why being single shouldn’t mean being sexless, made a celebrity of the 40-yearold advertising copywriter in 1962.
Three years later, she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan and it became her bully pulpit for the next 32 years.
She said at the outset that her aim 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.”
“It was a terrific magazine,” she said, looking back when she surrendered the editorship of the US 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.”
Along the way, she added to the language such terms as “Cosmo girl”—hip, sexy, vivacious and smart—and “mouseburger,” which she coined first in describing herself as a plain and ordinary woman who must work relentlessly to make herself desirable and successful.
She put big-haired, deepcleavaged beauties photographed by Francesco Scavullo on the magazine’s cover, behind teaser titles like “Nothing Fails Like Sex-cess—Facts About Our Real Lovemaking Needs.”