Remembering Helen Gurley Brown: Sex and the Hollywood Girl

I’ve always been fascinated by the career of Helen Gurley Brown. Come to think of it, I’ve always been fascinated by the name of Helen Gurley Brown. Not easy to take her seriously, when the “girly-girl” aspects of her personality seem to be spelled out in her moniker. But I digress. The fact is, she changed America’s view of female sexuality. Brown’s publication of Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 proclaimed that women, like men, could enjoy sex outside of marriage. Sex and the Single Girl, which tells working women how to meet, entice, and perhaps eventually marry the men of their dreams, was a bestseller that helped usher in the Sexual Revolution.

Brown’s book heartily endorses the sex act, but is surprisingly mum about possible biological consequences. This despite the fact that the Sixties had introduced a medical breakthrough that would transform women’s intimate lives. In June 1960, the birth-control pill first came onto the market. Though greeted enthusiastically by many, it was banned in some states until a 1965 Supreme Court decision permitted its use by all married women. The unmarried in numerous locales had to wait for a follow-up legal decision in 1972, but a Baby Boomer memoirist recalls that co-eds of his acquaintance “obtained prescriptions through dermatologists who were willing to support the conceit that it cleared up acne.” Gradually, oral contraceptives filtered through American society, leading to what John Updike called in Couples, his much-discussed 1968 novel about wife-swapping in suburbia, “the post-pill paradise.” Mrs. Robinson might not have approached Benjamin so boldly without this handy and nearly foolproof way of covering her tracks.

We might assume that movies from the early Sixties onward would reflect women’s uncertainties about their new options. But Hollywood instead stuck closely to its old formulas. When Sex and the Single Girl became a movie in 1964, it was less an exploration of female sexuality than Doris Day redux. A pretty but vacuous Natalie Wood portrayed Helen Gurley Brown, who in the screen version is a psychologist as well as a best-selling author. Her notoriety has led a scandal rag to accuse her of being a “twenty-three-year-old virgin.” Little does she know that a new patient (Tony Curtis) is both a cad and a snooping journalist determined to pin down an answer to a key question: “Does she or doesn’t she?”

Sex and the Single Girl steals shamelessly from 1961’s Lover Come Back. Like Doris Day, Wood dresses in gleaming white to emphasize her innocence. (She also combines crisp white with stark black, thus resembling a human Rorschach test. Only in the film’s last scene, as a woman in love, does she switch to feminine, flowing peach hues.) Like Rock Hudson, Curtis pretends to be sexually insecure and turns to Wood for help. As her infatuation with him grows, she may spout both psychological jargon and feminist rhetoric —- “When I do get married, it’s not going to be for love or sex or romance. I can get all of those things outside of marriage, just as easily as you can” —- but in fact the movie firmly endorses a double standard. By the end of the film he’s proposing, and she’s talking about giving up her career. At a time when American females were beginning to separate the idea of sex from matrimony, Sex and the Single Girl sticks to the old notion that the business of women is to get married. As the film’s catchy theme song tells us, the single girl who plays her cards right, sexually speaking, will find “that suddenly she’s not single anymore.”