Ms Helen Gurley Brown is in the news again. Now 78, the woman who became a celebrity in her mid-thirties with the publication of Sex and the Single Girl, and who created the world of Cosmo Girl, has just published her new book, I'm Wild Again - Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts. And in it she reveals how at the age of 22 she was mistress and secretary to a Hollywood mogul she still refers to only as M.
With Cosmo Girl directness, Ms Gurley Brown admitted in a Daily Telegraph interview the other day that her motives in this negotiated arrangement were purely financial: "And I left him because he did not deliver. He promised stocks and shares and a piece of land he owned on Mulholland Drive, and these things never materialised."
Oh, the wicked ways of Hollywood moguls. In fact, that latter sentence is indicative of media attitudes to Ms Gurley Brown in recent times. With her numerous face-lifts, her tiny food-deprived figure, her dated views ("Sex objects? Why not? At least it means men want to go to bed with you"), she is now regarded more as Comedy Girl than Cosmo Girl. In effect, she is being mocked for attempting to shock us with revelations about her Hollywood affair, when most of us would be shocked to find that any secretary to a Hollywood mogul had not also been his mistress. At best she is to be laughed at and at worst she should be pitied. That's the message.
All the implications in the recent media coverage are that something is missing from Ms Gurley Brown's life. The Telegraph interviewer concluded sadly by saying that "Brown clings to her youth and her market value and her office among Manhattan's skyscrapers because there is nothing else."
This is like saying that Donald Trump clings to his millions and his mansions and his mots and his real estate and his stockholdings and his limousines and his swimming pools and his private planes because there is nothing else.
For God's sake: what else is there?
In reality, what is revealed for the first time in the Gurley Brown coverage is a person who has everything. It is hard to cope with that, particularly for us journalists, who by nature are cynical, jealous and begrudging.
Snide remarks have been made. Desperate attempts have been made to find something, anything, that Ms Gurley Brown lacks. So critics have pounced on the fact that she has no children to leave millions and memories to (though she does have a husband, film producer David Brown, aged 83).
In fact, the Cosmo Girl has a daughter, Anna Marie, to whom the "Letter to my Daughter" in her new book is addressed. Of course she is "only" a literary device, but a daughter is a daughter and once again this is surely only jealousy on the part of enemies and critics, of whom Gurley Brown has always had plenty. As for real children - "No way. I have never, ever wanted a child of my own."
Furthermore, the poor woman is also slyly mocked because when she was gently pushed from the editorship of Cosmopolitan some four years ago, the Hearst group created a new title for her (International Editor) without actually assigning her any duties.
This mockery must be a media insider joke, because many of us fail to see any irony or insult here. Apparently this patronising ploy was then compounded when the publishers also assigned her an enormous office in which to do nothing in. Worse, they let her decorate it in her own over-the-top style, involving a pink ceiling, a leopard print carpet, plus lots of gilt and Louis XIV retro.
Gurley Brown plays up to all this with comments geared towards evoking pity and contempt. She talks of money as being all-important in buying recognition and popularity, and even friendship, and of course right-on journalists turn up their noses, believing, in their twisted way, that money only buys you a better class of enemy.
The concern of journalists that the fabulously wealthy Helen Gurley Brown should find peace and contentment at this stage of her life reflects only their own fears: that they will never find peace and contentment themselves, and won't have the cash consolation either.
At least we now know the answer to the question of what you give to the person who has everything: publicity, and a rope long enough to hang oneself with.