SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
This 1964 comedy is a real captured-in-amber look at the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, and the chauvinistic male reaction to it. In 1962, psychologist Helen Gurley Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl, a frank book that was the spiritual precursor of Sex and the City – the column and the HBO series. This movie, based on that book in the loosest sense, stars Natalie Wood as Helen Gurley Brown, and Tony Curtis as a magazine reporter who signs on as a new patient of hers in order to both seduce and expose her. Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall co-star, and one of the screenwriters is Joseph Heller, who just three years earlier had written his iconic anti-war novel, Catch-22. And one year after this movie was released, the real Helen Gurley Brown got a job she held, influentially, for three decades – as the editor of Cosmopolitan.