Longtime Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown dies

NEW YORK (AP) - Helen Gurley Brown, the editor who made Cosmopolitan magazine into a single girl's handbook of sex and glamour, has died. She was 90.

Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack, Jr. said Brown died Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization.

Brown first became famous with a best-selling 1962 book called “Sex and the Single Girl.” Three years later she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan

It became her bully pulpit for the next 32 years, featuring big-haired beauties and racy cover headlines. Brown said her aim was to tell readers “how to get everything out of life.”

Brown was a controversial figure in the women's movement, filling the magazine racy articles and centerfolds like a photo of Burt Reynolds in the buff that created a sensation in 1972.