Publishing doyenne HELEN GURLEY BROWN (born 1922) worked as a secretary in seventeen different offices before she joined the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding. When her boss, Don Belding, allowed her to write ad copy for the Sunkist Orange account, a career was born: by the mid-1950s, Helen Gurley was one of the top-paid female copywriters on the west coast.
At what was then considered the advanced age of 37, she married movie producer David Brown. She published her first book, Sex and the Single Girl, in 1962, and took over the editorship of Cosmopolitan three years later. The rest is history.
