It's been a while since I've seen Cosmopolitan in the news stands, but I remember eyeing the covers of it when I was younger and, time and time again, deciding not to buy it. Buying a woman's magazine was an act of pure self-indulgence (and still is), which would have made it natural for me to go for the most garish and unashamedly shallow of the bunch. But some particularly lurid headline would always put me off. The magazine made sex seem like a competitive sport, and the sultry glamour pusses on the cover signalled that awkward bookish girls weren't exactly Cosmopolitan's target readership. In short, I was never a Cosmo girl.
With this background, I felt torn when reading the novel Park Avenue Summer by Renée Rosen. Its focus point is the transformation of Cosmopolitan in the Sixties, from failing if respected magazine to what it still is today, at the hands of its new editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl. The events are seen from the point of view of a fictional character, Alice Weiss, who becomes Helen's secretary and is very loyal to her. In a novel, it's often a good wheeze to view a significant character from the sidelines like this – novels told directly from the point of view of some fascinating figure we want to know more about, even a great villain, tend to disappoint. The trick works well here too – Alice is sympathetic to Helen but doesn't always agree with her and can see her flaws. Nevertheless, we are clearly meant to root for Helen and wish her success in her endeavour.
Which is where my feeling torn comes in. On the one hand, Helen Gurley Brown did turn Cosmopolitan around from a newspaper about to fold any day to a success story. On the other, she turned a middlebrow magazine with a good reputation (which actually sounds like the kind of publication I wouldn't mind buying now and again) into a sex-obsessed rag.
As with the TV mini-series The English Game, Park Avenue Summer got me thinking about the advantages and drawbacks of a "based on actual events" drama. Julian Fellowes and his co-writers tried to frame the events described in The English Game as the triumph of the underdog – so it was a little embarrassing for them when the working-class heroes of the tale decided to switch teams because of the better pay. Rosen frames Park Avenue Summer as a tale of female empowerment, but as with Fellowes and Co., the real events don't quite gel with the narrative. On the upside, the grit in the fictional machinery makes the story told less predictable and in many ways more interesting. The downside is you're less inclined to be led where the author wants you to go.
Helen Gurley Brown is a fascinating character, in many ways resembling an eccentric teacher: quirky, strong-willed and convinced she is fighting not just for herself but for "her girls" (the expected new readership of Cosmo). Seeing as she is based on a real person, she is allowed to do things that a fictional counterpart probably wouldn't, such as burst into tears (secretly) when she has been attacked and use feminine cooing as a way to get ahead. It's also intriguing to see that as early as 1965, when the sexual revolution hadn't even properly got underway, she apparently turned Cosmopolitan to exactly the kind of magazine I saw in the news stands as a young girl a couple of decades later. She certainly had a vision, whether you agree with it or not, and plenty of personality – and personality is what I have been wanting to see in female characters of modern fiction.
At the same time, I did find it hard to root for her, as she dismisses any too-ambitious content as "dull" and "boring", not even seeing fit to use it as filler in an issue of the magazine she's already giving up on, cutting out short stories by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and instead accepting things like an article about crash diets which reads "like a child wrote it". She pushes for sexy, sultry cover girls, as she thinks women will buy the magazine in order to learn how to become more like them. And her ideas for magazine features are often cringeworthy. At one time, an internal memo from Helen to female staff asking them to share how they like their "bosoms" to be fondled during foreplay is leaked to a rival magazine which makes fun of it. Helen is furious about the betrayal and realises how bad it looks – but if you don't want your rivals to slate you for writing bosom memos, don't write bosom memos! It was all going to be a part of a feature anyway, so the reaction would have come then if not sooner – though one of the bigwigs of Hearst (owner of Cosmo) points out that they would never have greenlighted such an article. In fact, I couldn't fault the Hearst bigwigs at all for being sceptical of Helen's approach.
Alice, the fictional heroine, is pleasant enough and acts as a good foil to her boss, and parts of her story were really affecting. It is a more streamlined story than the one based on real events, though, especially where her love life is concerned. If anything surprised me about it, it's that Erik Masterson, a guy at the office (hostile to Helen) with whom she has a fling and who is clearly Mr Wrong, accepts being pushed around by her as much as he does. Their affair is supposed to be no-strings, yet she forbids him to see other women, and he accepts (though if he really keeps his promise in this regard is open for question). But is that really what's meant by no-strings? We're supposed to wonder why Alice sticks it out with Erik for so long, but I was kind of wondering why he sticks it out too.
Park Avenue Summer is what I hoped it would be when I impulse-bought it: a light read set in a glamorous work environment in New York. But as to the Cosmopolitan make-over, I remain unconvinced that it was really such a great win for the sisterhood. There was obviously a readership for the new Cosmo, and the magazine was going to fold anyway, so it feels perfectly OK that things panned out the way they did. But when it comes to the magazine's content, I can't help thinking of a song from Mean Girls: The Musical where daft hot chick Karen praises Halloween because then she can change her look and disguise herself "as someone else who isn't me but is still hot". "I can be who I want to be and se-e-e-e-xy" is the refrain. This, Karen claims, is "modern feminism talking".
I also come to think of a scene from the TV adaptation of Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan. Judith Krantz actually wrote for Cosmopolitan, which adds interest (Nora Ephron was another Helen Gurley Brown hire, so yes, she had some good writers at her disposal at least). In I'll Take Manhattan, Krantz's heroine Maxi bemoans the state of the women's magazine market: the magazines are a depressing read, always extolling their readers to change in order to become slimmer, prettier etc. In contrast, Maxi aims to make her magazine one that makes women feel good about themselves the way they are.
I can't know for certain, but I have a feeling that Cosmopolitan under Helen Gurley Brown was not a magazine that made women feel good about themselves, unless they were already confident and attractive. The Cosmo girl could be who she wanted to be – as long as she was sexy.
