Working Girl Wednesdays: “Draw the Line in Your Personal Life If You Wish”

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

The maxim “fake it until you make it” gains a new significance as HGB reveals her techniques for getting her way in Chapter 5, “The Key to the Men’s Room” :

I can see your mouth corners turning down…being nice to people you hate is phony. All right, Miss Pure Motives, have it your way—but in my opinion, a business office is not the place to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy recipients of charm. You can draw the line in your personal life if you wish, although I never do. (I positively slather over the milkman to get certified raw skim milk delivered to my door, and he looks more like a tugboat than a dreamboat.)

After the jump, a thinly veiled tale about a “new young editor” and an “older editor” at a fashion magazine. Next week: “the art of loving a bunch of bastards”!

On a fashion magazine a new young editor is as pretty as carnations and wildly ambitious. Nobody can beat her in to work in the morning and nobody can outlast her in the vening. She’s informed in depth. So far so good. The other day an older editor was showing some new merchandise to an important department store executive. “And this is the sportive cocktail suit,” she was saying. “And the boots…”

Enter the carnation girl who tucked in her tummy, underslung her fanny, and went to work. “Oh, isn’t that a heavenly suit, Mr. Mudd? We just love it at Dazzle, but has Miss Finch shown you…” and she pulled out a tweed evening coat which happened to be the next item on Miss Finch’s list. “Isn’t it divine?” she burbled. “The minute I saw it I said that’s for Mr. Mudd.”

Miss Carnation kept right on slithering, darting around, being a bitch, and let’s face it…charming…while the older editor watched in fascinated horror. The buyer was bamboozled all right—men can’t always tell who is being bitchy if they are the recipient of a lethal dose of charm. One of these days, however, Miss Carnation will find a hatchet in her neck.