‘Not Pretty Enough’ charts rise of Helen Gurley Brown

Author writes compassionate, complex biography.

Helen Gurley Brown had an epiphany as a young woman, and it would inform a great many things she said and did in adult life: Sex is a great democratizer.

“Here was the silly little secret,” Gerri Hirshey writes in “Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown.” “Certainly, men love beautiful women. But when the lights went out, Miss Universe might just as well be the poor, sooty little match girl if she couldn’t make him shout hallelujah.”

So Helen Gurley Brown became an expert in the sack.

Once you understand how liberating her youthful insight was — sex can be weaponized! — you understand the man-pleasing evangelism of Cosmopolitan magazine, over which Brown presided for 32 years. She was simply encouraging millions of ordinary-looking “mouseburger” women like herself to go to war with the army they had, not the army they wish they had.

Helen Gurley Brown is a fabulous story of American self-invention. Her life spanned almost an entire century. (She died at 90 in August 2012.) She was born in the Ozarks and had a difficult childhood: Her father died when she was 10; her sister contracted polio a few years later; her mother, already destabilized by the Great Depression and probably by congenital depression, too, did not cope well.

Yet somehow Brown willed herself into a glittering media czarina in Pucci. Along the way she dated glamorously, punched a hole in the glass ceiling of the West Coast advertising business, and wrote “Sex and the Single Girl,” which, in 1962, dared to celebrate the adventurous lives of single women and decriminalize coitus without matrimony. How did she do it? This is the question that preoccupies Hirshey, a veteran magazine writer and author of several books. She is a studious and generous biographer, embracing the philosophy of the Crunch gym chain — “No judgments” — when approaching her subject. The debate about whether Brown was good for feminism does not interest her. “She was a realist,” the author writes, “not a revolutionary.” This attitude frees Hirshey to do a compassionate, psychologically complex biography, arguing the world from her subject’s point of view.

We see her big-game man-hunting in the context of her poor background and of her family’s continuing financial problems. “Marrying for love was not an option,” Hirshey writes. “There were too many mouths to feed and doctors to pay.” (At 37, Brown managed to find love and security in Hollywood producer David Brown.)

Most poignantly, we see her anorexia, exercise mania and macabre plastic surgeries — heck, her entire professional drive — in the context of her mother’s unforgiving gaze: Cleo Gurley made it clear that she never thought her daughter was beautiful.

Hirshey’s meticulous re-creation of Brown’s single-girl years in Los Angeles, where she went through 19 secretarial jobs and juggled boyfriends like plates, are alone worth the price of admission to this circus.

But in one of her final secretarial jobs, Brown finally got her big break: Her boss’ wife noticed that Brown’s “While You Were Away” memos were written with unusual élan, and suggested that maybe she ought to write for a living.

So it came to pass. Her boss made her a copywriter. Brown always had a flair for small economies.

Thus began one of her greatest and most enduring love affairs — with the office itself. “Business I could rely on,” she told a friend. “It never went away and left you.”