When she was alive, Helen Gurley Brown struck me as a bit of a joke. The veteran Cosmo girl was still getting boob jobs in her 70s and still insisting that the two best things for a girl, even a very aged one, were having a great deal of sex and earning a great deal of money.
Although both are fine in their slightly limited ways, they are surely incompatible. If you work the whole time you don’t meet anyone to have sex with; and even if you do, when your mind is filled with interest-rate swaps, great sex surely proves hard to achieve.
But now that Gurley Brown is dead, I have taken her on as a role model. Almost everything I’ve read about her in the past week has made me want to emulate her – apart perhaps from the frequency of her visits to the plastic surgeon and the way she made her husband a cooked breakfast every morning. What she did and what no one else seems to do any more was to say exceedingly sensible, realistic things about work.