The Magazine  The Cosmo Girl  Helen Gurley Brown is no
mouseburger.  May 25, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 34 • By EMILY YOFFE
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It's a mystery why some people are crushed by painful
circumstances and others are motivated to dig themselves out.
Brown was a digger. One of her many suitors was the boxer Jack
Dempsey (no kidding), and she recalled he said of the two of
them that they weren't like some people "who could take
shortcuts and get what they wanted," but that she and Dempsey
"had to go right through the tunnel .  .  .chug chug chug chug
until we came out at the other side."  Her response to her early
life was an almost pathological optimism, what seems to be a
belief that if she stopped moving forward she would be returned
to her family's slough of despond. It's easy to see why the
childless Brown thought creating a family meant the crushing of
hope, not a new beginning.  Without her father's death she
surely would have grown up comfortable in Arkans