Getting Dressed: Irma Kurtz Brigid Keenan
The American agony aunt knows all our secrets – now she reveals hers
As the most famous agony aunt in the world – on Cosmopolitan magazine for 43 years – she has heard it all – including a confession of murder.
Irma Kurtz, 85, was born in Noo Jersey, as she still refers to it, despite years in London. But, back in the Fifties, on a school trip, Kurtz fell in love with Paris and determined to escape her destiny in America – ‘Lawyer husband, house in Connecticut, two cars’ – and live a bohemian life in the boulevards.
After Columbia University in New York, she worked at various jobs to earn the money to return. By chance, one job was with a PR firm doing publicity for Givenchy. There, a sympathetic Francophile boss promised that if she could get herself to Paris, she would arrange a job with the great man, teaching him English and doing a bit of PR.
‘I was a hippy in beads and blue jeans with wild hair down to my waist – Monsieur Givenchy used to look at me with an air of puzzled amusement,’ she says.
‘Once he gave me a dress, hoping, I think, that I would wear it at work, but I wasn’t really cut out for that scene and moved on to languageteaching – and writing.’
After a couple of years, she fell out of love with Paris. Not wanting to go home, she ended up in London instead. ‘It was the mid-sixties and I was broke – I’ve always been broke – and trying to get freelance work.’
She sent a piece to Dennis Hackett, editor of the brand-new magazine Nova. ‘It was about how men flirted in different capitals, and he bought not only it – he bought
ME, too. I wasn’t an agony aunt there. I did think pieces on love and emotions which is probably why, when I was interviewing Helen Gurley Brown, who was just setting up Cosmopolitan then, she asked me to become one, for her. ‘I had just become pregnant and thought that a stable job – for a couple of years – would be a better way of supporting my baby. I ended up staying for half a lifetime.’ Over the decades, Cosmo produced 64 local editions around the world. Kurtz flew to many of them – including Japan and Mexico – to help set up their problem pages. Her base was always London, from where she wrote both the British and the American agony-aunt pages. When she had death threats in America, as she sometimes did, it helped that she lived in Britain. Kurtz mourns the fact that, halfway through her career, emails replaced real letters. ‘You could tell a huge amount about people by their writing paper and how they wrote – I became a great graphologist. When everything went online, the job lost a lot of its intimacy and humanity.’ The other sea change during her time at Cosmo was women’s lib – as it was first known. ‘The world is a different place now. But the source of women’s problems continues to be men – though, sometimes now, it is other women, especially in the workplace. And it has always been lack of self-esteem – including in myself,’ she says, laughing. ‘I am always apologising.’ Her only other grumble is that
Kurtz in 1969, when she worked at magazine, writing ‘think pieces’ on love
her name is always linked to her Cosmo job – ‘Irma-kurtz-agony-aunt’ – when in fact the column took only some of her time.
She has written several travel books (her favourite is The Great American Bus Ride, about travelling round the US on Greyhound buses), a TV series ( Mediterranean Tales, for BBC4), self-help books and two novels – she is currently working on a third. Her autobiography, My Life in Agony, was published in 2015, the year she retired.
True to her early bohemian ideals, Kurtz never married. She lives between tiny one-rooms flats in London and in Wimereux – she still loves France, if not Paris. She walks everywhere – and she is still broke, having sold her house in London to help out when her son had triplets.
One economy is easy: she doesn’t buy clothes. ‘I always loved shopping for bargains in markets and in the Portobello Road and now I have enough.’
She uses inexpensive Nivea skincare: Soothing Night Cream, Refreshing Day Cream and Q10 Eye Cream. But she has two extravagances: Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair for her face and mānuka honey, to which she is ‘completely addicted’, for her taste buds.
Kurtz cut her long hair ‘on a whim’ years ago and has never regretted it.