Helen Gurley Brown and Lessons in Love

  Flush with the success of her best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl, in 1963, Helen Gurley Brown sought new avenues of media in order to keep her face and name in the public's eye. Contacted by Gene Norman, owner of the Crescendo Night Club in Hollywood and founder of Crescendo Records about reading her book in the studio (for "people who don't like to read"), but finding that Warner Bothers owned not only the film but also the audio rights to the material, Brown wrote an all-new script for the lp that came to be titled Lessons in Love. Unlike the book and subsequent movie, the record sales never really took off, and she only moved around 10,000 copies of the album that year. A follow-up recording was planned: Helen Gurley Brown's Vacation Kit for Lovers, but was never completed. She did go on to release a second offering showcasing her live lecture tour material: Helen Gurley Brown at Town Hall. 

  As appalling as some of the dialogue may be to modern ears, Brown is charming and glib enough to put it over, and I for one get a kick out of her delivery and wording. Today we'll hear side one: How to Love a Girl, and in two weeks I'll be back with side two: How to Love a Man. It's amusing, too, that in a period where most music lps were barely over 30 minutes, if that, this spoken word project, since the grooves could be cut closer together, runs well over 40 minutes, so the consumers of this oddity got their money's worth, as far as quantity. Here, then, are the first six cuts of 12 total, with the remaining six cuts coming up on this saturday the 17th, at six pm EST right here at the superduperstation. And the full album artwork and liner notes by Helen can be found here.

  01  How to Have an Affair - and Live Happily Ever After      02  How to Behave at Home - If You're Misbehaving Away from Home     03  Getting the Most from Your Secretary      04  Little Man You'll Have a Busy Day      05  How to Say No to a Girl      06  How to Love Your Wife and Nobody Else

Comments

[Julesette66]

This is lovely to see & hear. I saw Helen at her last birthday in February (She is an old family friend), and no doubt she'd be excited to know that people are rediscovering this old record.

[Mindwrecker]

Thanks for writing, Julesette! A lot of folks have enjoyed this over the years, but it usually gets sort of snarky/sarcastic writeups. I wanted to to just deal with it for what it is. And like I said, her manner is charming on the recording. Cheers!

[Meekaaeel]

I love her tone and logic in the pieces. How do i go about acquiring these talks?