Eminentoes / Cosmo's Aging Vixen

...What else can an intelligent woman in her position do, as the passage of time forces itself upon her awareness...

...Her trademark, though, is unquestionably her early sixties ladies-lunch vocabulary ("How to begin...

...You must connect with men...

...This is the offensive and disturbing aspect of Having it All...

...She dispenses with the theory that the cards are stacked...

...The "something else" was the life recorded in movie magazines, and it was consequently on this world that she fixed her considerable energy and desire...

...Women's career books, on the other hand, have tended to stress defense-against certain kinds of labor which to do, their authors believe, is to be exploited...

...It's better up there," she explains, "in almost every way...

...For one thing, the advice is almost uniformly excellent, and so-as wise advice about practical things is wont-it indirectly illuminates large matters as well as small ones...

...Brown devotes a great deal of space to the simple getting along with people that is a prerequisite for the production and exchange of work...

...At the end she tosses in a couple of caveats about how it is brains that really matter, and how sweetness works, too-the stuff women tell themselves, all the time-but they don't really have any greater effect, in this chapter, than they do in real life...

...to lavish money, time, and attention on your appearance is to refuse to take lying down the looks you were delivered...

...Am I getting too intense...

...Having it All goes on for pages about the cataclysmic importance to a woman of whether she is beautiful...

...Her treatment of adultery is here revealing and pathetic...

...She ruthlessly destroys the series of defenses most women have constructed for their own, "different" good looks-no, Brown tells you, the truth is that you just haven't got it and you never will...

...The healthy woman sets limits to this vice in herself...

...She is 59 years old, and exercise isn't going to do it forever...

...It may be cheap, but like most commercial products this voice is highly effective...

...The sexual you is part of the whole you, and doesn't snap' off-God, we hope not, anyway!-between nine and six...

...It is the ebbing away of this most fundamentally reassuring of all capabilities that terrifies her into huffing and puffing, and submitting herself to plastic surgery, and "starving" herself to 105 pounds-all in the name of "staying female...

...The rest, as they say, is history...

...When you're single," she writes, "it's important to have heterosexual male companionship...

...She considers this early deprivation to have been, in a way, her good fortune-the original stimulus behind everything she has attained...

...Having it All is a how-to book of wide range-how to organize a day efficiently, write a resume, apply cosmetics to tiny lines and wrinkles, snag a husband-and it is considerably more interesting than such books usually are...

...Brown asks...

...She has-as she eagerly confesses--all of that beauty which money can buy...

...In the photos released upon the publication of Having it All, she already looks a bit freakish-a no-longer-young woman in girl's clothing...

...about her frequent suspicion that looks are all that matter in life...

...She has the vigorously won appearance of youth, despite her 59 years...

...Trying to please somebody you're nutty about can be productive...

...In the very course of her advice on the logistics of carrying one out, she indicates her awareness of both the instincts and the arguments that such behavior violates...

...I didn't like my little-girl cousin who peed in the creek in front of a lot of other people...

...Rachel Flick is a speechwriter living in Washington, D.C...

...For her, grooming is not simply a diversion, it is a grim and essential struggle, which she pursues-with her characteristic discipline-unto and beyond even the point of pain...

...As the discussion continues one thing becomes absolutely clear: beauty is important to Brown and to other women, she believes, because women perceive that it attracts men...

...Helen Brown, in short, has absolutely no stake in the future...

...What is most rare about Brown is a personal quality perhaps best called by its Greek name, thymos, loosely definable as a combination of anger, spirit, and ambition...

...Hence, she is willing to consider the inevitable sexual aspect of office interactions in terms more complicated than those of simple power and abuse...

...Helen Brown is unusual among women's career counselors in assuming that an office is a reasonable working environment-tough, but reasonable...

...It is this that Helen Brown cannot bear to lose...

...A huge part of Having it All though, is not advice about careers...

...More sensibly still, she does not fear admitting gender to office life...

...With commendable realism, she urges women to work within their femininity-to use it-rather than to take on the impossible and disagreeable task of evading it or rendering it irrelevant...

...This brings Helen Brown to what must be the most clear-headed assessment of the business of "sexual harassment" yet written...

...Helen Brown would have us understand that this book is a thoughtful and generous work, and I believe that it is...

...She describes it as power...

...They were, and are, dear, lovely people who lead honorable lives in the Ozark Mountains, but I wanted something else...

...Even Cosmopolitan does not often employ this voice as well as does Brown when she is speaking for herself...

...And so I began to feel and be "separate...

...The voice is systematically conversational and intimate...

...For another, its authoress is a rare and fascinating woman, and the book gains as much from what her anecdotes and occasional reflections reveal about herself as it does from its revelations about dinner table conversation and disorganized closets...

...However unremittingly tacky her own professional attainments, they do represent a substantial achievement, and much of her information about how she pulled this off is transferable to other ends...

...She herself avows that her work is not enduring...

...For no matter how exciting it is to hear someone say that vanity is OK, vanity in truth is still a vice and it doesn't make you happy to indulge it too far...

...She does not believe that menial office labor is a trap...

...Indeed, it's all so artfully achieved that if not for the book's countless sound and often subtle insights, one would think Having it All was intended purely as a money-making venture...

...She insists that her routine is unremittingly unpleasant...

...She appears to understand that it has left her forever without what she at one point calls "elegance...

...It is disturbing, but not surprising, for this is a woman whose ambition has fixed exclusively on the world of the present...

...This, then, being the truth about men and women, Brown declares vanity to be OK...

...in one anecdote, she explains that Cosmopolitan's virtue is in its consistency, rather than in the contribution of memorable writings...

...Career advice for men has tended (at least, until recently) to stress hard work, initiative, and careful planning...

...you against failure, against defeat, even against death...

...Most important of all, she is an unabashed social climber...

...The fast-food voice that her Sex and the Single Girl introduced in 1963 is widely imitated but seldom equaled...

...It is to enter actively and positively into the game of attraction that she boldly assumes us all to be playing...

...She does not offer the ordinary women's career advice of defend, defend, defend, but the career advice traditionally offered to and by men...

...Married men] are there during a drought...

...So desperate is she for the kind of affirmation that sex gives her that she allows it to override both her reason and her moral sensibilities- no merely sensual need would make such a slave of an otherwise deliberate woman...

...She is rich...

...Kings and lesser men," she writes, "have been toppled by this power of ours, but you and I don't want to destroy anybody, we just want to enjoy a man's being totally hooked on us...

...Yet to Brown, sex is meaningful precisely because it is the furthest extreme from death...

...which she was born...

...On the strength of this logic, Brown launches into page after page of instruction in the business of dressing up...

...In fact, she believes, it even demonstrates a sort of fine spirit...

...Her obsession with beauty is clearest-and its profound significance for her begins to surface-in her discussion of exercise...

...It makes sense, after all, for her to make such an effort now...

...She writes: This very morning I looked in the three-way mirror and observed this unsymmetrical face-not ugly or repelling, just totally undistinguished, and, what with the aging, I said to myself, My God, I've got to be nicer to people, got to endear myself to them with love pouring out of every pore of me to make up for this face\ I've got to be Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Scarlett O'Hara's mother and why, Lord, didn't I start sooner...

...going to get the hang of this...

...In speaking sensibly on this subject to a readership of women, Brown is a voice in the wilderness...

...he first part of Having it All is devoted to work, and, as expected, Brown's advice on this subject is excellent...

...A few pages later, she eloquently describes how she would feel if she discovered her husband to be cheating on her, and then explains to single women that they should consider married men to be at their disposal...

...Endearing herself "to people," though, is not really what she means...

...But consider the poignance of her position now...

...She has "Johnny Carson Show" celebrity...

...Brown is frankly delighted with her present station in life...

...Brown makes it absolutely plain that she has the vices of a woman born poor: she fights a lingering, persistent miserliness, and is the victim of what she calls "a crush on rich people," ("Rich, powerful men who run empires are my idols," she writes...

...Although Brown believes this characteristic is hers by.nature-she has felt "different" almost since she can remember-she also insists that the material conditions of her childhood molded the distinctive spirit with Simon and Schuster, $17.50...

...and a former editor at the Public Interest...

...She has fantastic success in her work...

...She even suggests volunteering for extra menial work-"those denigrated 'personal chores!' "-as a demonstration of good faith...

...Well, on little pussycat feet you just pad into it...

...EMINENTOES COSMO'S AGING VIXEN by Rachel Flick T he title of Helen Gurley Brown's recent book of advice for ambitious young women is Having it All,* and "it," not surprisingly, turns out to mean everything Brown has...

...She makes no effort to rationalize this staring moral contradiction (in fact, she confronts it almost ostentatiously...

...Just let me sit at their feet and hear how they cornered soybeans...

...you are no longer vulnerable, but like breathing, if you stopped, you might die...

...Brown claims to have exercised with extraordinary rigor and discipline every day since she "discovered" it 13 years ago, "missing only two days (to have a D-and-C in the hospital, but I exercised the day I went in and the day I got home and the day my mother died) in that entire time...

...Brown has no children...

...You get to feeling that as long as you exercise every day, life not ever really do you in...

...She has a long-standing and happy marriage to an equally successful man...

...After a lifetime of triumphing over seemingly impossible obstacles-59 years of successfully buying time-she is soon to be confronted with something against which no discipline in the world will prevail...

...Brown grew up in a poor, backward part of the world and cannot remember a time when she was not consumed by the longing for more...

...She writes: I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me-ordinary, hillbilly, and poor-and I repudiated it from the time I was seven years old, though I didn't have many means of repudiation...

...Now, Cosmopolitan may be trash, but Having it All reveals a Helen Brown both intelligent and breathlessly, heartrendingly genuine...

...She understands that the personal- and the interpersonal-are fundamental to the professional...

...I didn't like all my cousins saying "ain't" and "cain't" and "she give five dollars for that hat...

...Brown makes it plain that she knows exactly how wrong and destructive extramarital affairs are...

...Arid she adds that she is never ("never...

...It has more or less accepted hardship and hazard as "dues"-legitimate and necessary steps in the rise to the top...

...She writes: "Of the millions of naughty suggestions made by millions of male employers to their 'defenseless' female employees yearly, I'd say half cheered the girls up, half brought the girls down, but probably nothing bad came out of most of them...

...Why shouldn't she fear mortality...

...it has a real, gossipy swing...

...Yet she is "an addict," she explains, because it has gotten to be "a test of will...

...She is simply helpless before the fear of erosion that overtakes her without the constant reinforcement of sex...

...Helen Brown, however, does not quit when it stops being fun...

...Moreover, it's an affectionate intimacy...

...Her success is an enormous credit to her, the triumph of her discipline and fortitude, and she knows this and relishes it...

...and against any manifest recognition that one is a woman, because such recognition is surely a prelude to exploitation...

...about the hours that she, Helen Brown, has spent in crying over her own ordinary appearance...

...She's about ready to confront her first full face-lift...

...I think sexual tension and electricity between men and women in an office can help get the job done...

...She can't make herself love children, if in fact she does not love children, and she can't make herself trust in the transcendent, if in fact she does not so trust, but she can try to write something real, and that is what she has done...

...Brown knows the deep-running importance -the importance to character-of having been born to money and sophistication, and the impossibility of ever transcending the fact she was not...

...For a while she will permit herself to become absorbed by her appearance, but then will tire of it...

...Having it All establishes a marvelously persuasive air of confidentiality...

...The instruction is on the whole superb, the writing is lively, and the frankness about its ultimate purpose is exciting, but eventually- as Brown goes on and on-one becomes aware of disquieting excess...

...She has no shame about where she's come from, but no false pride in it either, for she understands that it is also responsible for what she is not...

...Brown devotes her last chapter to broad reflections on life and happiness, and it is a serious effort...

...She urges her readers to be hard on themselves...

...even if the job remains imperfect, she will feel it improper and unnecessary to continue...

...In a section called "Sexual harassment isn't what it's cracked up to be," she advances the idea that "man-woman awareness" in offices is at least unavoidable, probably useful, and, at best, enjoyable...

...You can 'use' them selectively...

...You should not go without sex too long...

...If you are practicing up for elegance," she lets on, "one of the secrets is that you practice when you're alone, not just for company...

...She punctuates not according to standard usage but to the pattern of speech used by the women she is addressing-her writing is heavy on dashes, exclamations, and catty asides...

...Shortly thereafter she retreats from this point, explaining that she exercises not because she fears death, but because.she fears aging, and that she fears aging because it means the loss of sex-"of femininity, of attraction between me and a man...

...After twenty years of success, she is still not "used to" where she is, and never will be...

...In short, she has all the things you can neither take with you nor leave behind, in any enduring way...

...Her voice, here, is that of an older woman passing along her accumulated wisdom to a generation of girls for whom she feels affection and concern, and the voice sounds sincere...

...rather, she insists on the inevitability and utility of delayed gratification...

...about her inability to trust beautiful women...

...By the end, the reader truly feels as if she and Brown have become girlfriends, so to speak...

...Brown writes exclusively in the first person...

...Helen Brown has created for herself an immensely likable persona...

...Yes, I am intense...

...Her theory is that employees aren't in danger of anything they don't deserve, but that niceness greases the wheels, because people are still people, even at work...

...Yet she manages to avoid the usual up-from-the-ghetto cant...

...Whatever reservations one may have about her work, she is indisputably the mistress of a certain slick, effortless, chatty writing for women...

...In the end, Having it All is a touching piece of work, and deserves to be taken account of, when her life is reckoned up...

...At first the candor of Brown's discussion packs an illicit thrill...

...it is advice about grooming, and discussion about what beauty means to women, and it is here that Helen Brown reveals her uneasy reasons for taking up the pen...

...Helen Brown is the editor who brought Cosmopolitan magazine from the brink of extinction to one of the largest circulations in America...

...An ambitious person of no substance may be a fool, but an ambitious person of some real excellence is not, and Helen Brown is no fool...

...Which comes back, perhaps, to the reason for Having it All...

...She is absolutely comfortable with the sexual undertones of office interactions between men and women, and enthusiastically endorses a woman's use of charm to get out of those interactions whatever it is she wants...