Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  Rather than criticizing the office world for its repressive conformity, then, Sloan Wilson appears to be admiring its capacity to respond to simple truth telling. If only the men in the gray flannel suits would occasionally show a little nerve—and stick to the absolute middle of the road! is its tepid message. Not exactly the sort of stuff to get an office worker’s blood boiling. Though The Organization Man and Wilson’s novel were often mentioned in the same breath, Whyte scorned The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. For him, it was a novel that wanted to “have it both ways,”47 suggesting that men could retain their moral center and still make it in the go-go marketplace of the 1950s. Rampant materialism and spiritual life could be unified in a “self-ennobling hedonism”—another one of those phrases, like “antagonistic cooperation,” that seemed to nail the conflicted world of the mid-century office worker.48 Lest anyone doubt the novel’s conservatism, Wilson opens and concludes his book with fulsome panegyrics to his wife’s fastidious attention to all the household details while he was busy writing. In addition to keeping the children away, she “managed all the household finances, repaired the children’s bicycles, made excuses about why I didn’t have any social engagements,” and, proper to the feminine mystique of being seen and not heard, “was cheerful and ornamental.”49

  Still, a current of unease courses through Wilson’s otherwise cheerful encomium to the corporate workplace. It comes from Rath’s memories of the war, which—in the book and the film as well—are triggered by passing details: a man’s bald head, a scar on someone’s neck. In these long, discursive accounts of grim battles, and a brief but intense love affair with an Italian maid, Rath—otherwise laconic to the point of straining credulity—exhibits some semblance of an inner life. It is one that his daily existence forces him to repress—much as the interview test was no place to recount the single most important memory he had. All the talk of conformity wasn’t necessarily wrong, but its emphasis was misplaced. The monumental conflicts of the early twentieth century, in which so many office workers’ lives had been defined, somehow disappeared in the quiet hum of the desperately unheroic office environment. “Each alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a battle-trench”: Sinclair Lewis’s satire, written during a previous war, seemed to be echoed in the more melancholy postwar passages describing white-collar experience.

  In Life in the Crystal Palace, Alan Harrington, a PR man like the fictional Rath, describes a corporate munificence as bounteous as it is stifling, at once coddling and completely inadequate to real, deep, unspeakable human needs. When one of the workers in his office, “tall, blonde … one of those nervous, efficient unmarried girls in a man’s world,” at last takes a three-week vacation in Spain, she returns and tells stories of adventure, some of them implicitly sexual, that startle her office compatriots. “The stories this lonely and excited girl told about her vacation were the kind that evoke a humorous response at the Crystal Palace,” he writes. “One of our girls somehow ought not to have such marvelous experiences.” Yet, Harrington goes on,

  many of us have been rovers and known the edges of life. Ralph Butler, for instance, was an engineer for five years in Turkey and had a mountain girl for a mistress. Arthur Moore led guerrilla troops in the Burmese jungle. On the bridge of a cruiser at Okinawa, Carleton Bell says, “I roared with terror” when a kamikaze leveled out a few inches above his head. Carl Jensen stunted and wire-walked at air shows in the early days. George O’Brien was a cub reporter dancing with excitement at Le Bourget when Lindbergh landed. And in his senior year Robert Cloud actually won the big game with a sixty-yard run.

  “Today,” Harrington concludes, ruefully, “you see such formerly robust individuals, now mild of mien, poking along our corridors in groups and committees with administrative papers in their hands. They have lost something … verve … appetite.”50

  Yet the perquisites of the Crystal Palace are anything but drab, and its denizens are as well treated as any human beings have been in the history of the planet. Their job security is mostly assured; their pension plans generous; their work lives as slow and easy as they want them to be. “We are not worried about our jobs, about the future, about … much of anything,” Harrington writes. “This is a curious sensation, not to have any real worries.” He calls it a “private corporate welfare state,” European-style social democracy for office workers, a bastion against the brutalities of the American free-enterprise system that, in Harrington’s view, made the country great. Its success permits the members of the newly great American corporations to snooze through days that all seem to blend into one another. In a typical day, the company bus takes them from the commuter rail station to the Palace. Light music—provided by the Muzak corporation—starts up, going off and on every fifteen minutes. “It is said that this music increases office productivity by a sizable percentage,” Harrington says, “but I find that if I listen to it at all it puts me in a revery. It makes me feel as if I were in a cocktail lounge.” The entire scene conveys unbelievable comfort and a drowsy atmosphere of pleasant boredom, like the episode of the Lotus-Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey:

  Our employees … have a view unequaled by any offered to a group of employees since time began. Rolling hills go on to the horizon; they will burst into flower next week, and when autumn comes they will flare red and gold, and winter will put snow on them like frosting. Our landscaped grounds, too, will flower. We can smell honeysuckle; our lawns are so green that they hurt your eyes. Meadows extend to the hills and beyond like a perpetually green future.51

  This almost frighteningly blissful portrait of a work environment already suggests all the leitmotifs of all the corporate critiques that proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s. The zoned-out cool of the mid-century corporation, Harrington argued, depended on divesting its workers of any opportunity for initiative or creativity. It was a critique from inside the office world that cohered with the journalistic and sociological accounts from without. But the moral had become too simple: the office had squelched entrepreneurship, and the meritocracy wasn’t set up to encourage it; in its place lay bureaucracy. Riesman and his ilk were after something much greater: a critique of the American character itself, and the class politics of the country, as revealed in and outside the workplace. But in the shallow reception of their writings, the parable had turned into one about encouraging more entrepreneurs and cutting down on bureaucracy—an elision that would come to have enormous ramifications.

  So, the office was destroying the frontier-exploring spirit in man; it was forcing excessive sociability and inane attentiveness to others; it was digging into his very soul, uprooting his native genius, trimming its wildness to fit the willful impulses of the organization. The solution that the situation begged for was as overdetermined as the original premises of the critique had been. For what Whyte and Riesman and the others seemed to imply—or sometimes say more explicitly—was that the old sources of manhood were being crushed in the office. When they spoke about individuality, they did so purely in the terms of one sex. Which isn’t to say that women were irrelevant to their picture. As Riesman wrote, “Depleting the expense account can serve as an almost limitless occupational therapy for men who, out of a tradition of hard work, a dislike of their wives, a lingering asceticism, and an anxiety about their antagonistic cooperators, still feel that they must put in a good day’s work at the office.”52 There’s a poisonous mushroom lurking amid the sociological weeds: dislike of their wives?

  The corporation had usually displayed a certain interest in the family lives of its male employees. When CEOs like Thomas Watson Sr. referred to the “IBM Family,” it was meant to suggest, warmly, that IBM hired not only an engineer but his wife and children as well.53 But the phrase was not so facetious: wives—particularly executive wives—found themselves performing a multitude of tasks for their husbands employed in corporations. And the corporations knew it. They frequently screened the wives of potential employees, either by strongly suggesting that a
wife attend an interview with her husband or by arranging an informal breakfast or dinner with the prospect and his wife. According to a study by Fortune in 1951, half of all companies screened prospective employees’ wives; one company estimated that 20 percent of candidates were turned down because of their wives.54 Corporate control extended in mid-century America well beyond the office; it reached deep into the family as well. Or—perhaps more precisely—the office worked to incorporate the family, and the family began to bear the imprint of the office. “We control a man’s environment in business and we lose it entirely when he crosses the threshold of his home,” one executive told Whyte. “Management, therefore, has a challenge and an obligation to deliberately plan and create a favorable, constructive attitude on the part of the wife that will liberate her husband’s total energies for the job.”55

  Who was the Mrs. Executive that the companies were looking for? In Whyte’s summary of his interview findings, “she is a wife who is: (1) highly adaptable, (2) highly gregarious, (3) realizes her husband belongs to the corporation.”56 But the implication of item number three also meant that the wife inevitably belonged to the corporation as well (she was not supposed to be working). In the management theorist Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s study of a major corporation in the 1970s, which she called “Indsco,” she found wives who similarly felt that their entire private lives were structured around the corporation:

  Until two years ago, when I thought about going back to school, I was an Indsco wife, married to the company as much as to Fred. No one ever demanded anything of me per se except going out to dinner with so-and-so. But in my own being, I was very dependent on Fred’s experiences in Indsco. It chose the area we lived in. Our friends, except for a few neighbors, were Indsco friends, made because of the company. I always felt that our goal was to settle down, to set down roots when the kids were in junior high school. Now they are, and the company tells us to move, so we move, pushing that goal further ahead … If Fred was doing well, I felt I was doing well. I’m the woman behind the man, I could take some pride in his achievements.57

  On the one hand they had to act as a “stabilizing” influence at home. “A man gets so frustrated at the office,” one interviewee reported. “It’s such a rat race—he should be able to come home to calmness.”58 On the other hand they had to attend corporate events—dinners, parties, conferences, golf tournaments—and incessantly pluck the grace note that might enhance their husbands’ reputations. And because of the various assumptions about proper women’s behavior, there were often greater expectations placed on corporate wives than on the men themselves. A charming wife could save an unpopular husband’s career. Deciding to have that fourth martini and making mildly off-color comments could just as easily end it.

  As a man climbed the corporate ladder, his wife faced tough choices. For the deeper her husband got into the institution, the more entangled she became in her role as institutional helpmate. It wasn’t just that social choices were determined by living in or around the company: as a corporate wife, one made friends for strategic reasons, to help one’s husband in the company. Sentimental choices became corporate choices: office politics pervaded everything. “You have got to leave behind your old friends,” the wife of an upwardly mobile plant manager reported. “You have to weigh the people you invite to parties. You have to be careful of who you send Christmas cards to and who you don’t. It sounds like snobbery, but it’s just something you have to do. You have to be a boss’s wife.”59 It was a form of employment that never made it into the statistics.

  The powerfully restricted role of women in mid-century almost seemed to be a retrenchment from the “out to work” years that marked their entry into the office. Low-level clerical worker or corporate wife? Neither was an option that spoke of freedom, let alone power. In lieu of a major change in the way the workplace functioned, there was one thing left to do: play pranks. One of the most popular was a game called scuttle. A famous description of it from a former office worker (then working at a radio station) goes like this:

  The Scuttle rules were simple to get the hang of. All announcers and engineers who weren’t busy at one particular time would select a secretary or file girl, chase her up and down the halls, through the music library and back to the announcing booths, catch her and take her panties off. Once the panties were off, the girl could put them back on again if she wished. Nothing wicked ever happened. De-pantying was the sole object of the game. While all this was going on, the girl herself usually shrieked, screamed, flailed, blushed, threatened and pretended to faint, but to my knowledge no scuttler was ever reported to the front office. As a matter of fact, the girls wore their prettiest panties to work.60

  “Nothing wicked ever happened”: the line is defensive, knowing that the description of the game can be read by some—perhaps many—as appalling. When the TV show Mad Men repeated the game, the show’s writers couldn’t help but tame it down: Ken Cosgrove chasing down the secretary Allison and merely finding out what color her panties were, without removing them. But the author of the anecdote, Helen Gurley Brown, had made it her business to counter the notion that an office was somehow a minefield for women. The girls wore their prettiest panties: they wanted to get scuttled. All the shrieking was a melodramatic act, a secret acknowledgment that everyone was in on it. Not dangerous, and certainly not as soporifically boring as the anti-conformity authors made it out to be, the office was in fact the most sexually exciting place on earth. “Based on my own observations and experiences in nineteen different offices,” Brown wrote in her tremendous best seller Sex and the Office (1964), “I’m convinced that offices are sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends, Hollywood swimming parties, Cary Grant’s smile or the Playboy center-fold, and more action takes place in them than in a nymphet’s daydreams.”61 The system was there to be taken advantage of; you just had to work it.

  Helen Gurley Brown in the photo department of Cosmopolitan. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

  Brown had become the most notorious writer in the country in 1962, with Sex and the Single Girl, an advice book/memoir that informed the prurient and the horrified alike that sex was pleasurable, and women not only could but should take as much of it as they could get—especially before marriage, if they could help it. Readers rewarded her by buying her book in huge quantities. In three weeks, it had sold two million copies. But her success wasn’t just due to her subject. Her style, in particular, was charming to many, and largely inimitable, though it of course spawned thousands of imitators (the creator of the show Girls, Lena Dunham, among them): at once chatty, frank, debauched, and frothy, it seemed to millions to be the voice of uncompromised female common sense—at last liberated from male strictures on propriety. Unlike The Feminine Mystique, which it preceded by a year, Sex and the Single Girl spoke to women already ensconced in the workplace: working-class secretaries rather than middle-class housewives. And unlike Betty Friedan, Brown didn’t call for a repressive order to be overthrown. The existing order only offered opportunities to be conquered and pleasures to be snatched, through strategies of small subversion. Sex and the Office extended the franchise to speak directly about the workplace, in a way that scandalized conservatives and offended many liberals. Later, when Brown became editor of Cosmopolitan, she was seen as totally opposed to second-wave feminism; editors from Ms. once occupied her office. But she was as much a part of the movement as anyone—and her obsessive focus on the workplace distinguished her.

  Brown’s air of unshakable confidence, her assurance to all that the office was a sexual playfield as rich as a college dorm (but cleaner and with better-dressed inhabitants), belied a trying work life. She was born in rural Green Forest, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, the child of a schoolteacher and a housewife. Green Forest was a place she almost never acknowledged in later years, because it lacked the glamour of skyscraper cities like New York and Chicago, where her message pealed most clearly.62 “I had no money, no college degree, I had wall-t
o-wall acne, and my family were hillbillies,” she recalled in an interview in 1980.63 She attended a business-secretarial school, working at a radio station after classes—the same radio station where others were scuttled, a favor Brown herself, supposedly, never enjoyed. “Sometimes I would look up hopefully from my typewriter to see three or four scuttlers skulking in the doorway mulling it over, but the decision was always the same—too young, too pale, too flat-chested … Clearly I was un-scuttleable.”64 Working in Los Angeles for a film studio, she began to accept the favors of an executive, whom she called M. in her autobiography. Eventually, she became his mistress. M. set her up in her own apartment, gave her money to furnish it, and asked that she simply behave as a classic mistress must: learn to switch naturally from work clothes to lingerie when he was coming over, ensure that he had drinks to accompany their assignations, and give him the latest gossip.65 It was an arrangement she soon grew to hate: M. was a virulent anti-Semite who hated Brown’s Jewish friends, and he insisted Brown stay home most nights on the chance that he could escape his wife.66 Yet it was also an experience that, stripped of complexity and difficulty, she turned into a source of sassy advice in Sex and the Office, in which she advised her readers about how best to conduct an office affair with a married man. After the relationship, she continued to remain proudly and defiantly single for years, even during the doldrums of the 1950s, when marriage rates were high and average marriage ages hovered around the early twenties.67