But Brown isn’t here to discuss Cosmo, the thriving publishing phenomenon she’s run since 1965. Nor is she planning to rehash “Sex and the Single Girl,” the pulpy 1962 manifesto that gave young career gals permission to be sexually aware, not to mention active. No, this is 1993 and she’s been married to movie producer David Brown for 34 years. Most significantly, she’s 71, though the lifting and tucking has made her look younger. Now, the aging process has prompted The Late Show: A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women over 50 (Morrow. $23). It’s 373 pages of saucy reflections on everything from flabby arms to genital dexterity to stock investments, as if written by some mutant hybrid of Hunter Thompson and Jane Pratt.
Here’s Brown on sex after 50: “Unisex sucks. I feel the actual act of sex-and I’m not talking orgasm here … orgasm is easier by masturbating … but sex with a man somehow removes you from being a prim, stuffy, puffy, correct, respected, respectable, finished old person.” Few of Brown’s aging tips are novel; exercise, she writes, “makes you feel better [and] helps keep weight down.” Then there’s the matter of her “research subjects,” those “darlings” and “dear friends” straight out of La Grenouille. Will the average woman really find it useful to know that Georgette Mosbacher tattoos her eyebrows and Charlotte Ford “glues” her hair with spray? “This is a ritzy book with a lot of celebrities in it,” Brown admits. “But civilians”-her word for regular humans-“can learn from it too.”
Brown’s greatest gift-or curse, depending on how you look at it-has always been her ability to energize young women with her writing, irritating though it may be. Clearly, she takes a kind of perverse glee in this fact. But that’s nothing compared with the salvo she reserves for those feminists who scorn “Cosmo girl” feminism, which holds that women can be liberated and look like Joan Collins. “Well,” she begins, “Gloria Steinem streaks her hair and uses lip gloss. She’s divine looking. You don’t have to wear turtlenecks and have greasy hair to be a feminist.” In other words, it’s never too late to bring the Gurley out of the woman.
