By Gloria Cooper

Question: Why is Helen Gurley Brown’s new book like a certain Vermeer painting? Answer: Because they both celebrate the eternal (if not necessarily divine) art of letter writing. But there the resemblance ends. In “Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maidservant” — part of a recent exhibit at Connecticut’s Bruce Museum of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings with an epistolary theme — a woman bends intently to her task as an aproned servant stands nearby gazing through a tall window that illuminates the scene as only a Vermeer window can. To whom is this lady-in-green writing, and what does her letter say? In Dear Pussycat, however, a collection of letters from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, there is no such mystery. The letters all have destinations: the maître d’s at Daniel and Le Cirque, the designers Pucci and Gucci, the make-up artist, the seamstress, the interior decorator, the resort director, the green grocer (the spinach was wet). All that’s left to the imagination is the reaction of the recipient. One would dearly love to know, for instance, what response, if any, Brown got to a letter that began “Dear Punch,” and went on to excoriate the publisher of The New York Times for “keeping a reviewer” like Frank Rich — “a totally irresponsible prick” — who had written a “scurrilous” review of a play produced by her husband, David Brown. Or that of the Times reporter Tim Whitmire, who, having had the temerity to write in a story that “Brown has been criticized for keeping issues like AIDS and sexual harassment off the pages of Cosmo,” is saluted thusly: “I think you are a shit!”

But Brown’s verbal assaults are rare. Mostly, intense expressions of feeling go to the opposite extreme: even Frank Rich eventually gets a letter purring over a “brilliant . . . brilliant” column she agrees with. To Katie Couric, who’d apparently been spooked by the impending arrival of Diane Sawyer on the morning scene, Brown soothes, “Nobody but NOBODY could detract from your lustre. You’re you and absolutely golden.” To Sawyer, she raves, “You are a total delight.”

Such are the glimpses into the world of boldface names. In the background are the family figures: father, an Arkansas state representative, killed, as Brown mentions in a letter to President Bill Clinton, in an elevator accident in the capitol building in Little Rock; sister, robbed by polio of a normal life, and a source of continuing anguish; mother, helping Helen strike out, as she herself could not, on a path that took her from seventeen secretarial jobs and a stint as advertising copywriter to the publication of her groundbreaking book Sex and the Single Girl and the queenship of the women’s mag beehive. In the foreground are the demands of daily life. There are gifts to acknowledge: a bustier from Madonna, caviar from Elaine, a crate of thirty grapefruits from Gene Shalit: “I am once again almost mortally flabbergasted by your giving-ness.” There are causes to support, and perks to enjoy, like the shamelessly wheedled free pass to Loews Theatres. There is comfort to give — warmly personal letters to Walter Cronkite, to Carol Burnett, to the Gerald Levins, to her longtime art director, dying of AIDS.

And there is work. Would Nancy Kissinger contribute a piece on what it’s like to love a powerful man? Would Norman Mailer like to write an article on powerful men and their sex drive? The editor of the Turkish edition needs direction — that man on the cover with an open fly is “totally unacceptable!” not to mention the whip and the snake. Far less amusing, even verging on the painful, is the apparent disregard of a request for a meeting that the aging Brown, in 1999 still involved with the magazine’s international editions, has sent to Kate White, her successor as editor in chief. Explaining that her only purpose had been to point out a couple of things in White’s otherwise “fabulous” U.S. Cosmo, Brown observes, “I guess I am sort of aghast that you would refuse a meeting. If I wanted to talk about the laundry, politesse would indicate that you’d see me.”

Admirers will prefer to focus instead on her proud defense of her “brain child” to a potential advertiser (Toyota) leery of an association with the magazine’s libertine image. “We now have 27 international editions of Cosmo — young women all over the world who want what we want for them . . . a better life through their own efforts while enjoying good relationships with the loved ones in their lives.”

Centuries from now, with any luck, the civilized world will still be standing, awed, before Vermeer’s enigmatic scribe. The outlook for Dear Pussycat is somewhat dimmer. Still, it is not impossible to imagine that even then, social historians will be studying her brain child, Cosmo, as a significant cultural artifact. If they also happen upon these letters, they will know, at the very least, that its mother cared. Or, as she would probably put it, she cared.

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