Nora Ephron, Gore Vidal, Anna Piagi, Judith Crist, and now Helen Gurley Brown – what a summer this is shaping up to be! So many old-school characters just GONE. Helen Gurley Brown, the antediluvian editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years and the author of the groundbreaking 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl, who once shocked the world by saying “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere” – died today at the McKeen Pavilion at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia after a brief hospitalization. She was 90. From Wikipedia: “During the decade of the 1960s she was an outspoken advocate of women’s sexual freedom and sought to provide them with role-models and a guide in her magazine. She claimed that women could have it all, ‘love, sex, and money,’ a view that even preceding feminists such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not support and was met with fierce opposition. Due to her advocacy, glamorous fashion-focused women were sometimes called ‘Cosmo Girls.’ Her work played a part in what is often called the sexual revolution.” I think tonight we should all dress up in our fiercest Helen Gurley Brown drag and toast her life and legacy. Who’s with me?
