EVERY story about Helen Gurley Brown eventually makes a pun on her name. So let's get them over with; she is a girlie who made good, a Gurley who can't help it, a golden Gurley. The last is probably the most appropriate because 30 years as editor of America's Cosmopolitan magazine has made her a wealthy woman and also because, like television's Golden Girls, she is no longer young. She is 75, but she rages against the dying of the light - not vocally (she is singularly soft-spoken) but physically. Her pinched face bears the tell-tale trail of the surgeon's knife; her skeletal frame is the living denial of the Duchess of Windsor's edict that one can never be too thin. One can and HGB, as she likes to sign her editorial pronouncements, appallingly is.
In the Barbara Cartland suite at The Oriental in Bangkok, where she has come to help launch Cosmopolitan in Thailand, she is perched on the sofa like a spindly pink wraith. The Oriental's room allocation holds a certain irony; a preference for looking pretty in pink is possibly all that Barbara Cartland, champion of the virginal heroine, and Gurley Brown, author of Sex And The Single Girl, have in common. Back in 1965, when she revamped an insipid, faintly intellectual Hearst title which had been limping along since 1886, Gurley Brown changed the face of women's magazines forever with her emphasis on sex and foreplay.
The magazine's coverlines have always been famously lurid so it's perhaps worth noting that every one of them has been written by a man - HGB's husband, David Brown, Hollywood producer of The Sting and Jaws, and a dead ringer for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He hovers solicitously about his wife who gives off an air of extreme fragility, much at odds with the feisty, go-get-'em image of Cosmo womanhood.
In fact, Gurley Brown's position is no longer as strong as it was. Last year, Hearst decided to create a new position for her which moved her out of the hands-on arena of the magazine and into the world of international Cosmopolitans of which, by the end of this year, there will be 34. Southeast Asia is keeping her busy - following Thailand, there was a launch in the Philippines on April 25, in Poland on April 15 and there will be one in Indonesia in August. If the thought of an Islamic country filling its news-stands with stories about orgasm, infidelity and How To Get Your Man seems incongruous, Gurley Brown is unabashed. That is 'The Formula', she says and as Cosmopolitan is a genuine world-wide publishing phenomenon, it clearly works.
She anticipates obvious criticisms before they are voiced; The Formula, indeed, extends to her interview technique which is friendly (many game attempts at the journalist's name, no matter how difficult), doe-eyed in the Nancy Reagan mode and, if you've read the press cuttings, entirely word perfect. She tells how hardship - a widowed mother and a sister in a wheelchair - forced her to 'hit the deck running' at 18 when her face was still encrusted with acne. She has spent her life writing about how beauty passed her by, which must be why she has gone to such pains, literally, to distance herself from what Nature intended. She refers to herself as a 'mouseburger', a plain woman who made a success of the little parings life handed her from the feast. 'I don't know what my IQ is but I'd say it isn't very high,' she states. 'But I do have common sense.' WHEN SHE wrote Sex And The Single Girl in 1962, she received hundreds of letters from women who were relieved Gurley Brown was absolving them from sexual guilt. 'They figured they all had a new best friend,' she remarks. Cosmopolitan was intended to fill that role every month and when it proved to be a massive success she, in her turn, figured that she had millions of best friends whose experiences she could relate to. But how well can she know, say, the Thai women queuing for a river-boat, 10 floors beneath her suite? 'This is my fifth trip to Bangkok,' she says. 'and I've not settled down long enough for an intimate relationship. But I have common sense and I have enough contacts in Taiwan, Tokyo, Seoul, Venezuela, Istanbul, Spain, France, Brazil and some other places I've forgotten to know that women have the same emotions all over the world. So the format never changes. It's a magazine for women who love men, who love children and motherhood and who have a choice of doing work. Now, that doesn't sound so heinous or reprehensible, does it?' No, but what about the concept of globalisation? 'People have very flatteringly said that Cosmo is like Coca-Cola or McDonald's and I say 'Glory Hallelujah!' There is nothing bad about Coca-Cola - unless you drink too much of it - and McDonald's make delicious hamburgers. We are exporting what people want, just as China exports beautiful chinoiserie into our country. I mean, are you going to live in a tree? We're not trying to change Asian culture. Each edition is indigenous to that country and the editor decides what is in the magazine.' While this is true, the head office in New York oversees the training of the international editors and makes instantly available so much material, especially artwork, that it is easy to repackage The Formula at great speed. The Turkish first edition came out in three weeks, the Russian was put together in 45 days between Hearst handshake and news-stand appearance. In Bangkok, the launch team was actually replaced at the last minute by the local publisher who appointed a new managing editor - his sister - in the middle of January. She chose a blonde Western model for the first cover who smoulders amid the cover lines, all of which are in Thai script. Apart, that is, from the one which contains the words 'Melrose Place.' Hearst executives themselves admit surprise that Thai Cosmo has opted to be so overwhelmingly American. Hong Kong Cosmo, for instance, which was launched 12 years ago and now the market leader in the territory with a 40,000-strong monthly circulation, tends to favour local covers. 'This is a new one for me,' agrees Kim St Clair Bodden who is responsible for the international editions. 'But we have to rely on the local publishers to make it a success. We never impose. They come to us and we indoctrinate them, if I can use that word without sounding like Waco, Texas. We give them a wonderful jigsaw puzzle for them to create in their own country'.
'There is an homogenising impact that I'm not totally in agreement with,' admits George Green, president of Hearst Magazines International. 'But I think the key is to allow the culture to evolve and we're not the culprit. It'll come out of the sky into your website anyway.' The wooing of Hearst by foreign publishers - and vice versa - is itself worthy of a Cosmo how-to guide. 'You do it the same way you get into bed with anyone else,' muses Green. 'You meet, there's some foreplay, then you consummate. Publishing is a relationship business. I can tell you how I feel about a partner in my stomach. It's personal, emotional, arbitrary - like love. And if you get the wrong partner and you end up divorced, you're not coming back for 10 years.' This scenario happened in post-Franco Spain in 1978, where Cosmo, relying heavily on source material from the Mexican edition, lasted an ignominious four months. The market simply wasn't ready. It took 12 years to break back in, a lesson the company bears in mind as it eyes up China the most desirable hunk of all, as one of David Brown's cover lines might put it, and carefully searches for the right partner. Singapore, meanwhile, has resolutely refused to be courted, apparently finding its suitor's style too brash to be endured. India, which is normally fairly resistant to overseas blandishments, tied the knot last October and has been, as Cosmopolitan invariably is, a huge success. The magazine's pass-along factor among Indian women is, at 11, exceptionally high.