Enter Helen by Brooke Hauser Page B

article mirrored the image: Clearly Helen had found the right person in David, and he had found the right person in her. They were the picture of a new kind of couple, a husband and wife who were in business as well as in bed together, a team—that was the real message of the article, affixed with the headline“HUSBAND SAID ‘WRITE.’Helen’s Book Was a Shock to Her Mother.”
    As word of mouth spread, Helen Gurley Brown became thetopic du jour in offices and college dormitories, subways and living rooms, from the beaches of the Hamptons to the poolside lounges of Palm Springs.
    In Los Angeles, bookstores couldn’t hold on to their copies. For five weeks,Pickwick’s in Hollywood devoted a window display entirely to copies of Sex and the Single Girl , opened to the more provocative chapters like “How to Be Sexy,” and paired with a black bikini that the store owner had borrowed from a boutique across the street.
    In Greenwich Village, hipsters mocked Mrs. Brown and her ludicrous guide for single girls over thirty. “There are no girls that age down here—only boys,” a twenty-five-year-old Bronx-born reporter named Stephanie Gervis (later Harrington) wrote in the Village Voice , providing her own manhunting guide for readers. “Poets, writers, sculptors, and painters (unless they have galleries on Bleecker Street) are strictly for aesthetic nourishment and, of course, sex. Electricians are good for installing the hi fi set the stockbroker buys for you. . . . Radicals are good for nothing—they’re always off making speeches.” Folksingers could be found at the Café Wha? and the Bitter End, she added: “Be sure you arrive early, get a seat near the stage, and prostrate yourself at your idol’s feet. Gaze at him adoringly.”
    Helen made an easy target, but spoofs and digs only carried the message further. People were talking about the book, and buying it, and that was what mattered. The religious bans that Letty and Helen were hoping for never happened—to their surprise, Helen was actually invited to speak at a Junior Catholic Woman’s Club, whose single-girl members saw her book as their new bible. Meanwhile, newspapers published letters from incensed readers who shared the outrage Cleo had expressed to her daughter weeks before.
    In the San Francisco Chronicle , one indignant man called HelenGurley Brown’s messaging in Sex and the Single Girl “a libel against womanhood” that threatened the chastity of the nation’s girls. “The breaking down of moral values . . . which this book indirectly advocates is leading Western civilization into a decline,” he sputtered.
    In the Los Angeles Times , book critic Robert Kirsch seemed personally offended by Sex and the Single Girl . “Miss Brown provides the blueprint of a female so phony that the man who cannot see through the mask and affectation deserves his fate,” Kirsch spat. “Indeed, everything is a front. . . . She rushes breathlessly from punchy paragraph to compressed exposure, a creature of the advertising age, endorsing the phoniness and hard-soft-subliminal sell which substitutes for individuality, candor, sincerity. What she describes as sex is not sex at all but a kind of utility. Perhaps futility would be a better word.”
    Other critics agreed: Helen Gurley Brown was about as deep as a pillbox hat. But she also had her defenders. “At long last someone has written a book that says being single can be fun. Not only can be, but is fun—once unmarried ladies shake themselves free of the propaganda of wives’ magazines,” wrote Anne Steinert in the New York Journal-American . In the San Francisco Examiner , Mildred Schroeder predicted that the author’s “sometimes shocking but always stimulating philosophy” would make Sex and the Single Girl “the most controversial topic on the cocktail circuit since