Refore she took over as editor of Cosmopolitan in 1965, Helen Gurley Brown had never worked at a magazine; her husband once said he had never even seen her reading one. No matter. Brown had produced the 1962 best seller "Sex and the Single Girl," and she figured she knew a lot better than Freud what women wanted. She changed Cosmo from a droopy, general-interest magazine to one with a clear and relentless mandate. Sex and makeup, sex and movie stars, sex and career changes, sex and liposuction, sex and winter boots—after a while not much seemed to change from issue to issue, but then, not much had to. Cosmo's circulation went from less than 800,000 to more than 3 million, and at campus bookstores it outsells every other women's magazine. Last week Brown, 73, announced that after her long and astonishingly successful run, she is planning to step aside. "How long can you go on editing a magazine for a 23-year-old woman when you're way, way, way out of age range?" she said.
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