Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown was born on 18 February 1922 in Green Forest, Arkansas, USA. She was an actress and writer known for Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Stoney Burke (1962), and What's My Line? (1950). She was previously married to David Brown. She died on 13 August 2012 in New York City, New York, USA.

Brown worked at eighteen different secretarial jobs between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. From 1942 to 1945, she worked at Music Corporation of America, a Beverly Hills talent agency. In later years she would recall how secretaries were required to use the back stairs because the fancy lobby staircase was only for the use of clients and male executives of the company.

A major career move for Brown occurred in 1948 when she became the first woman to hold a copywriter position at Foote, Cone & Belding, a Los Angeles advertising agency. Her ability to write bright, noticeable copy won her two Francis Holmes Advertising Copywriters awards during her years at the firm. She went on to work for Kenyon & Eckhardt, a Hollywood advertising agency, as an account executive and copywriter from 1958 to 1962.

In 1959, at the age of thirty-seven, Helen Gurley married David Brown, then vice president of production at the 20th Century Fox movie studio. In later years Brown co-produced films such as Jaws, Cocoon, and The Sting. The couple had no children. Brown once remarked that one secret of the success of their marriage was that her husband never interrupted her on Saturdays and Sundays when she was working upstairs in her office.