http://www.latimes.com/...
Helen Gurley Brown, the self-described "mouseburger" who in the 1960s inspired women she said were like herself — average looks, brains and talent — to go out and get what they wanted out of life, including good sex whether they were married or not, has died. She was 90.
Brown, who went on to become the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, died Monday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia, according to an announcement fromHearst Corp.The cause was not given.
Brown remained at the helm of Cosmopolitan for 32 years, and would not have left in 1997 had she not been forced out. By then, Cosmo was selling 2.5 million copies a month — much of it at the newsstand — and collecting about $160 million a year in revenues. After leaving the editor's post, Brown oversaw the international editions of Cosmopolitan for many years.
Helen Gurley Brown was born Feb. 18, 1922, the daughter of schoolteachers in Green Forest, Ark. Following her father's death in a freak elevator accident when she was 10, Helen moved with her mother and her sister, Mary, to Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, Mary contracted polio, and it fell to Helen to do much of the caretaking.
But Brown always had ambition.
“I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me — ordinary, hillbilly and poor,” Brown wrote of her early life. She described herself as a teen this way: “Flat-chested, pale, acne-skinned, terrified.” She was determined not to stay a “mouseburger,” what she called women who are “not prepossessing, not pretty, don't have a particularly high IQ, a decent education, good family background or other noticeable assets.”
Brown attended what is now Texas Woman's University and Woodbury, a business college then located in Los Angeles. Next came a series of 17 secretarial jobs.