Mikhail Zlatkovsky

I'm not getting any younger, and in a weak moment of fret and worry, I foolishly took to my bed with Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown's The Late Show: A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women Over 50 (now in its sixth printing).

Although I'm sure I've flipped through Cosmo in waiting rooms, I'd not read any of Brown's previous six books, which include the 1962 best seller Sex and the Single Girl ("...single girls can have better sex lives than married ones") or the 1982 Having It All: Love Success, Sex, Money, Even If You're Starting With Nothing ("...mousy girls can own the world if they dig in and work hard"). I wasn't prepared for the beauty hints — mix Preparation H with moisturizer and spread on your face to "plump up wrinkles, make skin look baby-fresh!" I was rattled by so much italicized and CAPITALIZED gush, by so many exclamation points and by sentences that begin cozily with "Darling."

I was dazed by the one-after-another dropped names: "Divine Ann Getty," "My darling friend Gloria Vanderbilt," "New York society belle Babe Paley." (The latter, according to The Late Show, "had her secretary cut the pinked edges off all postage stamps so they would be neater.") And, "Donald Trump told me the other night at a United Cerebral Palsy gala, 'Baby, you look beautiful!''" And, "'Hair is what life is all about,' says my delicious friend Nancy Collins of Prime Time Live."

HGB — which is the way Brown signs herself in her monthly Cosmo column, "Step into My Parlor" — explains how she came to write the book. It was late afternoon, time to leave the West 57th Street Cosmo office, with its flowered wallpaper, fake Queen Anne desk, and HGB's sofa pillows that are prettily "needlepointed" with "Nice girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere" and "I love champagne, caviar, and cash." She was headed to the triplex overlooking Central Park, where she lives with David Brown, her husband of 34 years, producer of Jaws I and II and more recently, A Few Good Men. She propelled her emaciated size two, then-64-year-old frame onto a crowded bus. A woman in her 20s offered her seat.

HGB was riddled by "rage, sorrow, and disgust" that she had been "mistaken" for an old woman instead of someone "adorable and cute and young.... I thought nobody, including me, would be able to tell I was older because I was Doing Everything Right — maniacal exerciser (over an hour a day), nutcase dieter (a steady 105 pounds — 4 pounds skinnier than when I was 17), making regular 'payments' to save the outside (silicone injections, face exercises, a little cosmetic surgery) as well as investing in the inside (estrogen supplements, vitamins, veggies) — so how could I age?... I expected to go on forever, the serious, studious, small-boned little waif-girl right into my 90s."

The "little cosmetic surgery" includes "dermabrasion, rhinoplasty (nose), blepharoplasty (eyes) and one complete lift." She also has had her eyebrows and hairline tattooed. And HGB's "killer dermatologist" injected "tiny amounts of silicone into my face and hands every two months for year until the FDA made it illegal. They were wrong."

Querying herself as to whether all this plastic surgery isn't indicative of insecurity on women's part, HGB answers by saying, "Well, Darling, if penises could be enlarged by surgery, I daresay our sex wouldn't be able to book a hospital room — short of having a ruptured appendix — in less than a year — they'd be in all the beds.... Women are simply not the only insecure ones."

To return to how HGB came to write The Late Show. She confesses, "...there's always been this edge of melancholy that creeps in if I don't watch it, and it got worse when I finally woke up and realized how old I was. The truth is I was ready to throw myself in front of a Mack truck."

HGB rushed to a therapist. The therapist suggested HGB write about her responses to aging. She took the therapist's advice. Hence this bestseller.

The Late Show's 12 chapters jumbles autobiography, advice, anecdotes about the famous, and friends' whispered confessions.

HGB was born Helen Gurley four days after Valentine's Day in 1922 in Green Forest, Arkansas. Her father died when she was ten, leaving her mother and older sister and herself poverty stricken. HGB recalls that her mother used to take her to bed and weep with despair and terror. At 19, HGB's older sister contracted polio and never recovered her ability to walk. "And so," HGB writes, "I have this built-in sadness and pain. Oceans and oceans of bottomless pain."

After high school, HGB got herself to radio station KHJ in Los Angeles, where she became an announcer. Later she worked as a secretary (at 17 different jobs) and ad agency copywriter. In 1959, when she was 37, she married Brown, a twice-divorced movie producer six years her senior.

Brown persuaded his wife to write what became the 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl. From 1963 to 1965 she wrote "Woman Alone," a syndicated newspaper column. Brown helped HGB parlay the column and book into a magazine proposal, which the couple offered to the Hearst Corporation. Hearst turned over to HGB the 79-year-old failing Cosmopolitan. HGB produced her first issue in May 1965, introducing "That Cosmopolitan GIrl," an ambitious single young working woman without husband, children, or house. "The Girl; I had her quite clearly in mind," recalled HGB, who was 43 when she took over Cosmo. "She was me, 20 years earlier, the girl with her nose pressed to the glass. She knew she couldn't sleep her way to the top, or the middle. It wasn't that one didn't have affairs at the office — where else would you meet nice men? But the only way up was to work at it, to do it."

HGB clearly delivers something women want. Cosmo, in its 28th year under HGB's direction, sells almost three million copies per month. It has been one of the top five newstand sellers for the last 26 years, number one among women's magazines, leading Glamour, Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Mirabella in circualation. Cosmo is distributed in 27 editions in 80 countries and for the past 13 years has remained the bestselling magazine on U.S. college campuses.

The Late Show's chapter on sex is the book's second longest. (The longest chapter is about food or, more accurately, about weight and how to keep the numbers on the scale low. "I would like to put in a good word for diarrhea," HGB writes. "The pounds melt away.")

HGB urged the Cosmo girl: "Always wear your good underwear on a date, just in case." Now she recommends that older women pack vaginal lubricant in purses to have at hand should an opportunity for a "quickie" present itself.

She exhorts older women, wed or unwed, to do whatever it takes, including paying for it or nabbing their friends' husbands, to continue having sex. "Sex with a man somehow removes you from being a prim, stuffy, puffy, correct, respected, respectable, finished old person! You're still womanly."

HGB quotes her friend Alison about a novel way that older women can make sexual contact. Alison has a "very special internist ... in his 70s ... who treats half the wealthy patrons in Beverly Hills.... [He] sometimes just lets me rub up against him but not to the point of orgasm — just scrunching up against him because he's a man and it feels good ... something I used to do when I had lovers. Occasionally he kisses me lightly — very lightly — dry lips — and if I rub too much and he gets an erection, he stops instantly. I have no doubt he performs this 'service' for other of his older women patients."

HGB cites a woman in her 90s who entertains three male lovers per weekend and quotes a Park Avenue ob/gyn as saying that his 70- and 80-year-old patients continue to have frequent sexual encounters. "If we can nab somebody, we can do it," writes HGB. "Vaginas can be lubricated with Vaseline, Astro-Glide..." (page 59).

HGB admits that looking glamorous for intercourse isn't that easy for older women. She suggests that one slip into a kimono that can be slipped off in bed so that the lover won't see the fallen breasts, belly, buttocks, the cellulite. She suggests that after lovemaking the older woman back out of the room so that the lover will not see her back, which HGB believes is usually even less attractive than the "front."

Larry King interviewed HGB on his nightly CNN show and I watched. The diet regime that produced HGB's terrible thinness made her head appear too large for her unfed body. She had the look of an astonished neonate over whose tiny unfinished shoulders a Pucci print dress had been wrapped.

HGB and King commiserated about age. "The pits!" squealed HGB. "It's absolutely unendurable. If you say it's great to be old, I think that's quite insincere, because the older you are the closer you are to croaking."

King nodded agreement. "Terrible," he said about aging. "Terrible."

King asked what HGB meant by the "Semiwild" in her title. HGB revealed, then, to what would become an increasingly befuddled-appearing King, that by "Semiwild" she meant her "little chapter suggesting that you ought to stay sexual if you're a woman over 50, 60, or even 70. And sometimes that's not so easy to do, because who is trying to go to bed with a 67-year-old woman? You can't come on with them very strongly or you'll drive them right straight away. So you have subtly to be seductive until you find somebody who will go to bed with you."

King, gulping, asked, "Do orgasms stop at 67?"

"No, no, no, no," assured a smiling HGB. "There's always masturbation."

The Late Show is a far more readable book than it might be if for no other reason than that Helen Gurley Brown ("I am still this high-strung little person!") is so goofy and touching. "Do you empathize," she writes, "with inanimate objects? It never occurs to me that bobby pins, hair curlers and paper clips do not have feelings."

At book's end HGB provides what she describes as a "wrap-up list" of what she thinks the pleasures are in "our lives as of now" (our lives are the lives of older women). She makes this list under three separate headings: Small Pleasures, Medium Pleasures, Big Pleasures. Under Small Pleasures she lists:

• Rubbing off dead skin
• Smelling your panties

Men should not read this book.