The Browns at home.

When Helen Gurley Brown died this Monday, she left behind a legacy of sexual liberation, generations of bereaved Cosmopolitan fans and a four-floor penthouse in one of the Beresford's Southwest towers.

The fate of the tower apartment, which Brown and husband David Brown bought in the 1970s from director Mike Nichols, remains unknown. But its high place in Brown's affections was no secret—it ranked right up there with sex, ambition and her husband. When asked by Vanity Fair where she would most like to live, Brown replied:

"Exactly where I am living—the Beresford Apartments, on Central Park West and 81st Street. We have the top four floors of a tower apartment. I'm slightly prejudiced, but I think it's the best apartment in New York."

Don't change a thing: Brown's dining room is perfect. (UsaToday)

Brown's apartment was said to be both magnificent, with a huge, tower-top terrace overlooking Central Park, and magnificently groovy, with pumpkin shag carpeting in the living room and zebra-print wallpaper.

It may well come on the market given that Brown died without any immediate relatives who might take up residence for sentimental reasons: her husband, a film producer responsible for such blockbuster delights as Jaws, died in 2010 and the couple had no children. Brown's sister also died before the nonagenarian.

If it did, it would be the first of 211 Central Park West's quadruplexes to come on the market since July 2004, according to data provided by Donna Olshan of Olshan Realty. That 14-room Southwest-facing tower apartment, #21A, sold for $15.3 million. Of course, 2004 seems a distant epoch when it comes to real estate prices.  The most salient point of comparison is more likely the $29.5 million that Bob Weinstein has been asking for his 14-room Beresford penthouse (not in the tower) since he listed it in 2009. (The listing for the apartment, which was available until just a few weeks ago, has been pulled, suggesting that it may have been snatched up in the luxury buying craze sweeping the city). Another penthouse apartment, a three-bedroom with a total of 90-feet fronting Central Park (also not in the tower), was listed for $22 million, but appears to be off the market as well now.

But nothing could be quite like the mouseburger's apartment—a swinging pad for a small-town girl who clawed her way to a lofty perch with a set of perfectly-manicured nails. A USA Today reporter who toured the home in 2007 found that hardly anything had changed since the Browns had the place decorated in the 1970s. Also, that it was awesome: she found a leopard-print rug in the office (over the parquet), bubblegum shag carpeting in the master bedroom, a dining room with lacquer red walls and cushy banquettes. Ficus trees grew on the terrace. The famous clotheshorse had a dressing room lined with pink-painted closets, including "one devoted entirely to racks of black slingbacks and pumps," as well as the maid's room. She also confessed to overtaking half her husband's closet downstairs.

The couple moved to the Beresford from a chic Park Avenue pad. Brown told The USA Today reporter that "it was supposed to be sort of tacky over here."

kvelsey@observer.com

Helen and David. (Image via Hearst Corp.)

With the help of a $30 M. gift from longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University's School of Engineering have established the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the two universities and the Hearst Corporation announced today.

The Institute is inspired by David Brown, Ms. Brown's late husband, a former journalist, publisher, film and theater producer who graduated from both Stanford and Columbia Journalism School.

The collaboration is intended to connect "the best in West Coast technology with East Coast content," according to a joint press release, giving each school $12 M. to endow a professorship. The remaining $6 M. will go toward the construction of a "highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom." It will also support graduate and post-graduate fellowships, as well as competitive "Magic Grants" to develop most promising ideas conceived of by Brown fellows. It is the largest gift in Columbia Journalism School's nearly 100-year history.

“David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content," Ms. Brown, who turns 90 next month, said in the announcement. "Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

“New York City, as the major center for the television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who is the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

In December, Stanford withdrew its bid for Mayor Bloomberg’s Roosevelt Island tech campus. The $100 million grant went to Cornell to a 50-50 partnership between Cornell and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; Cornell announced $350 M. gift to back its proposal hours after Stanford dropped out. Carnegie Mellon, one of the rejected proposals, is still working on building an entertainment-tech campus in partnership with Steiner Studios in Brooklyn's Navy Yards.

He published prodigiously: more than a dozen major books, collections and anthologies; a textbook that introduced thousands of college students to history; plus a handful of first-rate ruminations laid away in the magazines and journals. The American Political Tradition (1948) sold 400,000 copies in its first two decades. The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) each won the Pulitzer Prize. Even lesser volumes called out high praise. Gore Vidal described The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) as “a most engaging essay” and commended Hofstadter as one the “best contemporary critics” of “the collective madness of the electorate.” In 1970, Hofstadter signed a contract with Knopf, his longtime publisher, for a three-volume history of American political culture. The trilogy was to take 18 years to complete, and was to earn the author $1.3 million in today’s dollars, according to David Brown’s new biography.

Hofstadter’s reputation is strong among contemporary historians of the United States, and his books still sell briskly. Mr. Brown’s biography should be welcomed accordingly. It’s a quiet book for a quiet life: a childhood in Buffalo as the son of a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother; an early marriage to Felice Swados, a hot-blooded fellow student at the University of Buffalo; emigration to New York City in the middle of the Great Depression; a brief membership in the Communist Party; then graduate school at Columbia, followed by a rise to prominence in the 1940’s and 50’s. No reversals, no scandals, no puzzling discrepancies, no purblind mistakes. From beginning to end, Hofstadter held the confidence of the center. In high school, he was both valedictorian and class president. In 1968, after Columbia University president Grayson Kirk discredited himself, it was Hofstadter who stepped forward to deliver the commencement address to the shattered campus. He’s still the only member of the faculty so entrusted, according to Mr. Brown.

A moderate by temperament and an historian by training, Hofstadter was an intellectual by conviction. The animus of his thought set the life of the mind against “the populistic democracy.” To the activist wing of the left, he resolved the conflict in favor of conservatism, for he insisted on the value of civility and on the need for institutions to uphold it. “In this age of rather overwhelming organizations and collectivities,” he said at the 1968 commencement, “the university is singular in being a collectivity that serves as a citadel of intellectual individualism.” To the activist wing of the right, he transformed dissent into pathology. “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” one of his early essays about McCarthyism, set out to explain “its dense and massive irrationality.” But Hofstadter won his insights into the emotional roots of mass movements from a certain detachment from politics as such. “I can no longer describe myself as a radical,” he said in a 1962 letter, “though I don’t consider myself to be a conservative either. I suppose the truth is, although my interests are still very political, I none the less have no politics.” One of his essays on the Goldwater insurgency, “The Contemporary Extreme Right Wing in the United States,” carried a preface by Nietzsche on the “herd mentality.”

Mr. Brown records Hofstadter’s hypochondria and suggests that the premature deaths of his mother and first wife affirmed his natural melancholy. But the main incidents and sentiments of Hofstadter’s life do not make for a very interesting portrait. The significance collects in the writings. Hofstadter was the postwar historian most respected by Trilling—and by Messrs. Bell, Gay and Kristol—because the quality of his convictions bespoke a traditional Jewish mistrust of passion in politics at a time when that mistrust seemed most necessary. The absence of dogmatism and jargon in his writings has attracted a variety of historians-as-cultural-critics. Eric Foner, a former student, has written admiringly about him. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has observed that he was the first major historian to come out of New York City.

Hofstadter’s anatomies of extremism, moreover, can be read with much interest in our age of political hatred and culture war. Though it’s rarely consulted in these days of furious party competition, the genre to which his work belongs has much to say about the decline of argument and the relationship between politics and emotion. Hofstadter’s distinction was to marry the conceptual sophistication in such works as Harold Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics and Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality with an unusually deft prose style. The portrait of John Calhoun etched in The American Political Tradition, for example, mixed the Marxist theory of false consciousness with a style attuned to irony and paradox: “Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. Quite understandably he developed a certain perversity of mind.”

Hofstadter’s method (“literary anthropology,” he once called it) also commends him to us today, since our best writers have no ideas and our best thinkers have no style. Hofstadter grew to maturity in the mid-1940’s, alongside a generation of intellectuals searching for a style freed of the sectarian solemnity of the Depression decade. Dwight Macdonald titled a 1943 Partisan Review essay “A Rousseau for the NAM.” Soon afterward, C. Wright Mills titled one of his essays “A Marx for the Managers.” Hofstadter followed suit in The American Political Tradition, titling his chapter on Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.” The book, a collection of biographical portraits, made Thomas Jefferson “the Aristocrat as Democrat” and Franklin Roosevelt “the Patrician as Opportunist,” and so on. Academic historians read The American Political Tradition as a founding text in the “consensus” interpretation of politics, but it was the playful irreverence of the portraits, the mocking accent, which resounded in the public’s ears. Hofstadter said of Calhoun: “There is no record that he ever read or tried to write poetry, although there is a traditional gibe to the effect that he once began a poem with ‘Whereas,’ and stopped.”

David Brown calls Hofstadter “a modern-day Mencken,” but like much else in this biography, he leaves the comparison to sit on the page with nothing much to do. It’s not obvious that Hofstadter and Mencken have anything in common. Mencken was an entertainer and a philistine who attacked the possibility of moral passion. Hofstadter was morally engaged in his times in positive as well as negative ways. Mencken drew all the wrong conclusions from his exposure to Herbert Spencer (“social Darwinism in shirtsleeves” was his philosophy, according to Terry Teachout). Hofstadter’s first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, praised the pragmatists for rescuing the theory of evolution from petit bourgeois bachelors like Mencken, who were always smacking people across the face with “survival of the fittest” slogans.

And yet there is a remarkable similarity in their cultural criticism. Probably no two writers did more damage to the reputation of prairie radicalism. The American Political Tradition attacked the populist leader William Jennings Bryan in the same urbane manner, and for many of the same reasons, as Mencken’s famous obituary in the American Mercury. Of Bryan’s 1896 campaign for the Presidency on a free-silver platform, Hofstadter quipped: “It was the only time in the history of the Republic when a candidate ran for presidency on the strength of a monomania.” The Age of Reform returned to the subject with a vengeance. The book argued that, rather than being crushed by “the interests,” the farmers had lacked the moral and imaginative resources by which to respond intelligently to the transformations wrought by industrialism. Hofstadter assailed the “pathetic postwar career of Bryan,” bemoaned the “shabbiness of the evangelical mind,” and dismissed rational grounds for the populist complaint. Mencken lampooned the genteel tradition for its unreality. Hofstadter set out to destroy the sentimental treatment of agrarian radicalism in the writings of Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner.

The Columbia historian Alan Brinkley has called The Age of Reform “the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America.” This is true but not necessarily salutary. Hofstadter’s mockery made it possible for generations of urban liberals to sneer at the “folklore of populism” without confronting its criticisms of industrial capitalism, much as Mencken made it easy for generations of conservatives to mistake smartness for intelligence. Mr. Brown, interestingly, says Hofstadter later softened his attack on the farmers when he was confronted with evidence that anti-Semitism was as strong in the eastern cities as it had been in the Midwest. (If Hofstadter had learned of Mencken’s own anti-Semitism, perhaps he would have made more such concessions.) In any case, the social thought of Christopher Lasch, a Hofstadter student, and the writings of Wendell Berry show that today’s populism has developed considerably beyond its early racialism. One measure of The Age of Reform’s influence lies in the large literature refuting it.

Hofstadter distributed his satire liberally, but not liberally enough to check the patronizing tone that crept into his style over time. The Beats, he wrote in 1962, “have produced very little good writing. Their most distinctive contribution to our culture may in the end be their amusing argot. The movement seems unable to rise above its adolescent inspiration.”

As the center dispersed in the strenuous 1960’s, the absurdities of American politics sprouted new styles of satire and longing. Hofstadter kept his hair short and his bowtie tight. He suffered bouts of “intellectual confusion” (in Mr. Brown’s words), much as Mencken grew disoriented when the fat targets of the 1920’s made way for the realities of the 1930’s.

Soon after he delivered the commencement address at Columbia, Hofstadter abandoned his home in the “Upper West Side Kibbutz” for a quieter spot on the East Side. In the summer of 1970, his three-volume work incomplete, he confided his disappointment in an interview with Newsweek. “I can’t see much that is positive coming out of this period. If I get around to writing a general history of the recent past, I’m going to call the chapter on the 60’s ‘The Age of Rubbish.’” A few months later he died of leukemia, age 54.

John H. Summers teaches intellectual history at Harvard. His biography of C. Wright Mills will be published by Oxford University Press.

"Excuse me," he said. "My name is Alex Von Furstenberg."

The woman flipped through pages of names. "I'm sorry, sir, but you're not on here," she said.

"The last name is Von Furstenberg," Mr. Brown said. "I RSVP'd for this party and I'm not sure if a ticket came up. I was wondering if we could work something out."

"I'm sure we can work something out, if you can just be patient with me," the P.R. woman said. "I don't see you on any list. What company are you with?"

"Well, I'm Alex Von Furstenberg. Diane Von Furstenberg's son," Mr. Brown said.

"I never knew she had a son," she said.

"She has a son and a daughter," Mr. Brown said.

"I know Tatiana. Okay. Here you go. Nice to meet you."

He was in.

For the past year, Mr. Brown has attended more than 60 Manhattan benefits, cocktail parties, media events and political fund-raisers claiming to be the 30-year-old New York socialite Alex Von Furstenberg. Wearing a gray suit that he picked up from the Salvation Army and a $5 pair of black shoes, Mr. Brown would usually just show up at the door, tell the security that he was Alex Von Furstenberg and demand a seat. Sometimes it worked. Many times it did not. When he could, he hustled in an accomplice to take pictures of him with as many celebrities as possible. Those photos-40 of them-will form Mr. Brown's first solo exhibition, which opens on Sept. 15 at Roebling Hall in Williamsburg.

"I think they'll love it," Mr. Brown said. "And I think they'll buy it."

What is the point of it all?

"It's sort of like living out a fantasy," Mr. Brown said. "People want a statement from me about what it's about. But it's all just questions. I'm just asking this stuff to you. My work is hilarious. The ideas are there, if you want them. But it's funny as shit."

Not everyone is amused. When contacted by The Observer upon his return from a two-week sailing holiday in the Mediterranean, the real Alex Von Furstenberg said he was unaware of Mr. Brown's ruse. "You're kidding," he said, then promised to call back.

"It's not really flattering," Mr. Von Furstenberg said later. "My wife said the guy could be dangerous. I think it's best to say, 'No comment.'"

Mr. Von Furstenberg is the son of Diane and Prince Egon Von Furstenberg. Diane Von Furstenberg is famous for inventing the wrap dress in the 1970's and spending a lot of time at Studio 54 (the old one). With the money from the dresses, Ms. Von Furstenberg bought an estate in Connecticut, which she named Cloudwalk Farm. She has yet to remarry and spends a lot of time with USA Networks C.E.O. Barry Diller.

Alex Von Furstenberg grew up with his mother in New York, attending Allen Stevenson and Brooks School, then Brown University, from which he graduated in 1993. He settled in an apartment in the Carlyle Hotel and went out to nightclubs. Along with Prince Pavlos of Greece, he became a partner in Griphon Capital, a hedge fund, which he has since left to become chief investment officer of Arrow Investment, Mr. Diller's investment vehicle. In 1995 he married Alexandra Miller, youngest of the three fabled Miller sisters, the daughters of duty-free-shop baron Robert Miller.

Mr. Brown is not married to one of the Miller sisters. In fact, Mr. Brown, who does have a girlfriend, rarely leaves his ground-floor Williamsburg loft, which is filled with photographs of himself with celebrities, tidbits of Americana and half-completed sculptures. There are slogans written on the walls in black marker. "Employ ideas that break out of stupid conceptual rigidity," it says above the kitchen sink.

Mr. Brown stands 5-foot-10. He has thinning brown hair. When he's not pretending to be Mr. Von Furstenberg, he likes to wear a floppy white canvas cap. He looks very little like Mr. Von Furstenberg, who has dark curly hair and strong features.

"Other artists have dealt with celebrity, but my personal involvement is more complex," Mr. Brown said one afternoon in his loft. He was wearing a T-shirt with a McDonald's M on it and blue sweat pants. "Warhol was always fronting about his life. He created a whole world. He never gave in. People say he was a very mysterious person. A lot of people say I'm a very mysterious person as well. One critic asked me, 'Do you think this show will shed a lot of light on who you are?' I said it will probably shed a little light on it. Starlight, that is. Heh-heh. A little starlight on the subject."

On his nights out as Mr. Von Furstenberg, Mr. Brown shook hands with Henry Kissinger, told Bo Derek that she looked great, posed twice with Puff Daddy, put his arm around Conan O'Brien, got Hillary Clinton to sign a photograph and even met the real Alex Von Furstenberg, though he didn't reveal his scam.

"Of all the celebrities I've met, the person that was most impressed that I was Alex Von Furstenberg was Ivana Trump," he said. "She was like, 'Oh, hel-lo !' I'd love to go to lunch with her, but I don't know how to reach her."

"When I go out, I am Alex, I act like him," said Mr. Brown. "I'm thinking that I'm a person of privilege and I'm out to have a good time and I like to meet celebrities and politicians. I've met him and I gather he's pretty low-key. He'd probably get a good laugh out of it."

But acting like Mr. Von Furstenberg has not always worked. At a Playboy birthday party for Hugh Hefner's twin girlfriends, Sandy and Mandy, Mr. Brown was foiled by a bouncer who knew that the real Alex Von Furstenberg was vacationing in Hawaii. Mr. Brown extricated himself by explaining that his name was Alex Von First enberg and that he and Alex Von Furstenberg often get confused.

Mr. Brown grew up in Yardley, Pa. At 13 he was kicked out of high school for trying to bust open a candy machine. "I didn't have a model when I was young, and I think part of being an artist is creating your own alternative model," Mr. Brown said. "Before I had my own structure, all I had was freakin' trouble."

It was at Blair Academy in New Jersey that Mr. Brown first heard of the family with the magic two-word last name. "My roommate, Michael Polsky, knew the Von Furstenbergs and was completely infatuated with Tatiana Von Furstenberg," Mr. Brown said. "He would come back from New York and he would go, 'I love Tatiana Von Furstenberg. She is so hot .' He was hyperactive. I was really small, and he would get so worked up about Tatiana that he would go into a rage and throw me around."

Mr. Brown attended a few East Coast colleges but never graduated. In 1991 he came to New York and got a job at Pearl Paint. He made some strange-looking sculptures, but no one bought them. Always fascinated by celebrity culture, Mr. Brown wanted a way to address it. In 1998 he created a company called Carpet Rollers, which for $99 offered to roll out a red carpet for private parties.

"We were able to get into private people's affairs," Mr. Brown said. "The kind of people that liked to enjoy life. We'd come up to a party with our red carpet and people would gather around us. Hundreds of people would come and watch and we would say that we didn't know who was coming. The red carpet was a symbol. It created a discussion and people would say stuff about who they thought was coming. It was like Waiting for Godot. They were all waiting for this grand thing to happen that never happened, and the real thing was the waiting."

Then one night, as he was driving to Manhattan to try and meet Barry White at the nightclub Chaos, Mr. Brown had his epiphany. "It had occurred to me that I needed to come up with some way to get into these parties," Mr. Brown said. "I'm never really going to be that interesting of a fanatic until I get inside . I was like, ' Kling! -Alex Von Furstenberg.' It just hit me. Just the sound of the name: 'Von Furst -en-Berg.' Like in English, the t, it just has such a ring to it. Also the name has the word first , which I know is spelled f-u-r-s-t, but it rhymes with first , 'number one.' Sometimes when I'm driving or when I'm just working at my day job-it's always when I'm not focusing on art-that's when problems get solved." That night, Mr. Brown gave his new concept a dry run at Chaos.

"I came up to the door guys, and there was this guy named Chip who does parties and who's very eager to please, a nervous sort of guy," he said. "I went up and I said, 'Hi, I'm just waiting for Diane Von Furstenberg. You don't know if she showed up, do you?' They were like, 'No, I don't think so.' And the thing about Chaos is, they really wanted to attract people. So I waited there for five minutes. Then I was like, 'Well, it doesn't seem like my mom is going to show up. I'm Alex Von Furstenberg.' The guy was like, 'Oh, hi, Alex . How are you?'"

He got in. He was sitting at the bar when Michael Ault, an owner of Chaos, approached him. "He was all over me," Mr. Brown said. "He was like a stalker. He wanted my number, everything. He ended up giving me a tour of the whole club. He's like, 'Do you want some free drinks?'" Mr. Brown left Chaos with one of Mr. Ault's business cards. The back of the card was signed with a note written to John, the head bouncer at the club. It read, "Take care of Alex always."