Book of the week: Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown by Jennifer Scanlon

Scanlon’s biography of Helen Gurley Brown is a “sympathetic and thorough” portrait of the controversial editor of Cosmopolitan.

(Oxford, 270 pages, $27.95)

Future Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown was 19 when she landed the first of more than a dozen secretarial jobs that she would hold in 1940s Los Angeles. “You can’t sleep your way to the top or even to the middle,” the Arkansas native said years later, though she claimed to have been “sexually involved” with a boss or colleague at every office she worked in while single. Happily unmarried until she wed movie producer David Brown at 37, the by-then accomplished ad exec decided that other women needed to understand that they could live, without apology, a single life as active as hers had been. In 1962, her Sex and the Single Girl sold 2 million copies in its first three weeks.

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