Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  When it came to writing about work-life satisfaction in the office, Brown was her own best example. (Her autobiography was called Having It All.) Though she got married in 1959, she had worked in all those offices, could tally quite a number of relationships and casual flings, and was successful in the working world—as an ad copywriter and a magazine writer—before she became wildly successful out of it. But Brown’s unique solution to the problem of professional success versus marriage and home life was simply to deny the opposition—or perhaps to outline a third path. Women didn’t have to get married, and being single in an office wasn’t a liability. A thoroughgoing romantic life and climb up the business ladder (at least as far as one could go, as a woman) were complements rather than contradictions. All the hand-wringing of previous generations could simply be tossed out the skyscraper window. (If it had a window.) Though Brown strained to detail all the powerful obstacles that women had to navigate in the workplace, she believed she was preaching a philosophy of liberation. And her influence suggests that it was received that way by millions.

  The office world that Brown spoke to was one seized by one of its now-habitual upsurges of fear over moral breakdown: women were always emasculating men, and men were constantly debauching women. The film The Best of Everything (1959), made from Rona Jaffe’s best-selling novel of the same title, was supposed to expose the terrible choices that women faced in the callous, amoral corporate environment. “This is the story of the female jungle,” the trailer voice-over intoned ominously, “of the girls who didn’t marry at twenty, and of the men who wanted them—but not as wives.” Filmed in CinemaScope, The Best of Everything took full advantage of the large floor plates of the mid-century office and the wide gridded streets of Manhattan: it opens with shots of Park Avenue at dawn, with women pouring off buses and out of subway stations, wearing white gloves and skirts, filing en masse into mid-century skyscrapers; the enormous steno pool it depicted way up in the Seagram Building seemed to speak of possibility, opportunities. Holding an ad in her hands, Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) arrives at the Seagram plaza, fresh out of Radcliffe, bearing an ad for the Fabian Publishing Company:

  SECRETARIES. You deserve the Best of Everything!

  The Best Job—The Best Surroundings

  The Best Pay—The Best Contacts!!

  As the film unfolds, it poses as an open question what the “best of everything” means: whether it’s an adoring husband or a successful career. It was one of the few pieces of popular culture to suggest, plausibly, that a woman might be able to have both. It also seemed to imply that a woman might need both.

  The portrait of office friendships, the casual intimacy between and among the women in the office, is careful and loving: in the early morning hours, a loud, chattering chorus of typists comes in, pulling off the typewriter covers, putting on last-minute makeup, adjusting their girdles. There’s an easy solidarity at work. People talk about boyfriends saving checks for a wedding ring. And they exchange tips about work. When Caroline gets her first lunch hour, the head of the typing pool, Mary Agnes (Sue Carson), advises her to take a long lunch. Her boss, Amanda Farrow (Joan Crawford), “doesn’t get back till 3:30.”

  Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) and April Morrison (Diane Baker) in the steno pool in The Best of Everything (1959). Photofest

  CAROLINE: She doesn’t?

  MARY AGNES: Of course not, she’s an executive.

  CAROLINE: How does she get any work done?

  MARY AGNES: Executives don’t do any work. The higher up you go, the less work you do.

  But the friendships only conceal deeper divisions in the office: between generations and between classes of people. The head of Fabian, Fred Shalimar (Brian Aherne), occupies the corner office; he’s a lizard from an earlier generation, with irrepressible frisky hands, an alcoholic glaze to his bright blue eyes, and an affected British-sounding accent that thickly coats his constant enunciation of the name of his old friend Eugene O’Neill—an acquaintance he brings up to gull (unsuccessfully) the younger female staff members into “having a little fun.” His counterpart is the editor, played by a steely Joan Crawford, her eyebrows darkened and sharply arched into condor wings. She is demanding and inhuman, and her every jagged word bears the scars of an unspoken history of struggling to rise to the position of editor in a hostile environment. Caroline’s friend at the company, the heavy-drinking Irish American editor Mike Rice (Stephen Boyd), warns her against her own ambitions: rising to the position of editor will make her “a ruthless, driving, calculating woman,” like Farrow.

  But Caroline’s destiny is different. She has the aura of being one of the elect. Unlike the girls in the steno pool, who went to business college, she went to Radcliffe. Her friends either are seeking jobs elsewhere or come from provincial backgrounds; they don’t understand the city or the men who prey on them. Caroline instinctually takes work home with her; when her long-distance boyfriend ends up leaving her for another woman, she commits herself to a career wholeheartedly. She ducks the “organization woman” impulse simply to play along, and she recommends manuscripts that Farrow rejects. Before long, she gets promoted—first to a reader and then to editor. “Why do you want this job?” Farrow asks her. “Because this is what I went to college for,” she replies, “this is what I worked for. It means everything to me.” Farrow herself attempts to restart her romantic life—to no avail. For her generation, the film implies, it is too late. But by the end of the film, Caroline not only has a successful career but ends up attached to Mike Rice, the man from her office. The powerful intimation is not just that work and romantic life can coexist; it’s that they can only coexist when your romantic life is at your office—which is what it means to have the “best of everything.”

  A bleaker spin on the argument lies in The Apartment (1960), a Hollywood film whose depth of feeling and dark portrait of the workplace might make it the best office film of all time. It put paid to all the common nonsense over middle-class respectability in the office while seeming to push further the general idea that offices were full of repressed single women and amoral married men. C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a bachelor and clerk at desk number 861, sits at the very center of an exaggeratedly large accounting pool in his insurance company. The establishing shot that locates him is a classic of the office film—from the opening scene of The Crowd, with its sea of desks, all the way to Office Space, with its sea of cubicles. Charming in his lack of confidence and congenitally hapless with women, Baxter serves as a kind of john for his bosses, arranging to have his apartment available for after-work dates between his married superiors and the women in the steno pool and switchboard room. The general conceit turns out to be a joke about the office meritocracy: while Baxter does nothing special in his actual job to move up the ladder, his efforts on behalf of his bosses’ sex lives quickly move him up to the highest rungs. People use office language (“You’re executive material!”) to describe actions that have nothing to do with work. “I put in a good word for you with Sheldrake [the company president],” one of the middle managers and one of the apartment regulars, Al Kirkeby (David Lewis), says to Baxter. “We’re always on the lookout for young executives. You’re on the way up, buddy boy!” When Baxter gets his first promotion, the man at the neighboring desk cries, “Say, what’s the deal, Baxter, are you getting promoted, or fired? … I’ve been here twice as long as you have!” Seniority means nothing; merit—with all its dubious fources—is everything. Meanwhile, the working-class elevator girl Baxter has a crush on, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), moves physically up and down the building all day and is having an affair with the president of the company, Sheldrake, but can’t get anywhere, job-wise.

  The Apartment imagines the office as oozing with sex, but more like a grotesque fraternity than the harem of Sex and the Office, with men ogling the new girls and routinely pinching secretaries as they emerge from the elevators. The office Christmas party, true to legend, turns into an incredibly drunken and powerfully un
pleasant make-out party. But sex is entirely attached to office hierarchies. The steno pool and the telephone operators sleep with the bosses with the closed-door offices, but drones out on the floor like Baxter haven’t got a chance. As he moves up the ladder, he tries to parlay his new authority into sexual charisma—by trying to grant Fran favors. He invites her to the Christmas party and into his office to discuss her job:

  C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) gets a promotion in The Apartment (1960). Photofest

  KUBELIK: I’d better get back to my elevator, I’m going to be fired.

  BAXTER: You don’t have to worry about that, I have quite a bit of influence in personnel. (Takes a drink.) You know Mr. Sheldrake?

  KUBELIK: (Warily.) Why?

  BAXTER: He and I are like that. (Twisting his fingers.) … I thought I could put in a word with Mr. Sheldrake, get you a little promotion. How would you like to be an elevator starter?

  KUBELIK: I’m afraid there are too many girls around with seniority over me.

  BAXTER: No-o problem! Why don’t we discuss it sometime over the holidays?

  Fran considers him cute and charming, but it’s only when Sheldrake completely humiliates her (by giving her a cash gift for Christmas) that she even considers his innocent proposals. At the end of the film, Fran seems to end up with Baxter, but there’s never a question of the office hierarchy being overturned. Only two people, among the thousands in the building, are saved.

  Helen Gurley Brown’s achievement, such as it was, was to see a way to carve out a realm of freedom for secretaries in what was destined, as far as Brown could see, to be an unequal environment. In the bright assurance of her prose—which, in her typically accurate and annoying way, she called “pippy-poo”—all the anxieties of the old guidebooks just floated away. There was no problem with looking good and being taken seriously as a professional, with being aggressively feminine and making a living: “In an ideal world we might move onward and upward by using only our brains and talent but, since this is an imperfect world, a certain amount of listening, giggling, wriggling, smiling, winking, flirting and fainting is required in our rise from the mailroom.”68 What about getting stuck as a secretary? “Secretarial work isn’t a bad thing to be ‘stuck’ in, anyway. Executive secretaries are close to some of the most glittery men in the world and have great lives.”69 What about flattering your bosses? It was a good idea, she said. “If you can imply that the prettiest girl in the filing room has a secret crush on him, your profit-sharing might really amount to something by Christmas.”70 There was a wry manner to Brown’s way of treating office difficulties that thrilled some and irritated others. She tended to satirize her subjects and indulgently excuse them at the same time: for example, teasing male executives for being insecure and needing flattery while nonetheless suggesting that women go ahead and flatter their bosses. Working was great, and sex was great—ergo, Brown concluded, “being great at a terrific job is sexy.”71 Everything could seemingly be resolved in a warm bath of dirty talk and double entendres about work. When it came to office politics, Brown said, “abstinence won’t save your job.”

  In the end, there was an undercurrent of strategy to it. Brown knew that office jobs were hard to come by and easy to lose—something especially true for women, who not only were paid less but had less power. The only way to win that power was to spin everything as positive. This included saying yes to propositions by men at the office. Being able to say yes, affirmatively and ecstatically, was the only way that it would also be meaningful to say no (calmly, without wounding men’s pride). While Brown conceded an actual power gap between men and women, she believed that women should still take as much power as they could get—and this meant the ability to be completely in control of their sexuality, if not, in fact, their jobs. In retrospect, much of what Brown argued for seems naive or reckless—affirming so much of what one easily sees as harassment or powerlessness. But it was powerlessness that Brown was determined not to concede. Within, of course, the rules of the game.

  6

  OPEN PLANS

  The caveman was undoubtedly very pleased to find a good cave but he also undoubtedly positioned himself at the entrance looking out. Protect your back but know what is going on outside is a very good rule for survival. It is also a good survival rule for life in offices.

  —ROBERT PROPST, The Office: A Facility Based on Change1

  In the French director Jacques Tati’s film Playtime (1967), the hero, the Chaplinesque, more or less silent Monsieur Hulot—a stereotypical Gaul, trench-coated and sharp-nosed—finds himself on an unnamed mission in a futuristic Paris of slab skyscrapers and wide streets. Entirely constructed from sets, it is the dream of Le Corbusier realized: a ville radieuse of pure rational planning, with every detail mapped out in advance and seemingly nothing that can go wrong. The old Paris, symbolized by the Eiffel Tower, is always spied in the background, reflected in the glassy facades of the curtain walls and the massive transparent doors that open into the wide lobbies of the modern buildings. The film lingers on how long it takes to cross the new, enormous distances inside the buildings, to emphasize the homogeneous, empty time of the zealously bureaucratic future. Though Hulot discovers that it takes forever to move from one end of a building to another, or to rise in the elevator from the ground floor to the top, the message the film sends is of a civilization that has moved too fast, has grown too large, for its poor human inhabitants to understand. Hulot is constantly lost or misdirected; the electricity in the gleaming modern restaurants fails routinely; the brand-new architecture turns out to be poorly made and falling apart.

  Jacques Tati’s uncannily prescient image of the future in Playtime (1967). Photofest

  And there is one scene that, for modern viewers, will come as a hallucination: ascending an escalator in a modern office building, he finds himself standing above a wide, open floor, where all the suited clerks are working, isolated in square boxes. Tati lingers on it, to convey its absurdity and mild horror. In the future, he seems to say, there will be no more offices. We will all work inside these cube-like shapes—hidden from each other and from ourselves.

  In 1958, the Herman Miller Company hired Robert Propst, a professor of art at the University of Colorado, to head the company’s new research wing. The company was aiming to expand beyond its traditional realm, office furniture design, and into realms hitherto untouched by designers—agriculture, hospitals, schools—and Propst seemed an ideal candidate. Though moonlighting as an arts academic, he was in fact an exuberantly, almost maniacally creative freelance intellectual, sculptor, and theoretician. A sandy-haired and brash westerner, he came to Herman Miller with patents in playground equipment, airplane parts, heart valves, timber-harvesting machines, and livestock-tagging machines.2 Yet he had no formal training in design. This appeared to be a selling point. Untethered from the traditional concerns of designers, he could explore deeper problems and come up with solutions that they could make real. Propst’s polymathic mind, the Herman Miller executives thought, might help them take their company in new directions.

  Working with Propst was “fascinating,” said Bill Stumpf, one of Herman Miller’s chief designers. “In one hour, he would reinvent the world. His mind went off like fireworks.”3 Propst’s inquisitive soul was coupled with—indeed fed on—a perpetual discontent with his environment. This sometimes translated into discontent with anyone around him who disagreed with him. “Those who were not supportive of his ideas or way of thinking found their personal relation with him changed,” said Tom Pratt, another Herman Miller associate. “He believed his way was the right way and usually he was right.”4 Many of the people who worked with him testified to his impatience with things as they were and his irrepressible desire to fix them. In seeking design solutions, he always started from the premise that human beings were mismanaging the world they had built—that in fact they had gone about it all wrong. Only the smallest amount of empirical research, which few bothered to conduct, would naturally confir
m his hypothesis. In the lore surrounding Propst, one prominent example is retold endlessly. Early in his career as Herman Miller researcher, Propst slipped a disk and had to spend several weeks in the hospital, bedridden. He immediately began to observe inefficiencies in the delivery of care. A nurse informed an administrator that one of the patients was taking reams and reams of notes. When the administrator spoke to him about his activity, Propst took out his notebook and showed him his exhaustive studies of the wasted energy, the lost time, and the useless motions that he observed. Years later, Propst would turn his insights into a modular system of cabinets, trays, and medical furniture—Co/Struc—easily constructed, moved, and dismantled, which came to be adopted throughout hospitals everywhere.

  Despite occasional forays into areas like patient care, Propst returned obsessively to the one area that Herman Miller was trying to get away from: the office. Propst “immediately began flooding us with ideas, concepts, and drawings ranging from agriculture to medicine,” Hugh De Pree, who was Herman Miller’s president at the time, told John Berry, a historian of the design company. “It is interesting, though, that despite our mutual desire to explore other fields, the first project that attracted his continuing attention was the office.”5 Interesting, perhaps, but unsurprising. Propst, in his move from art and academia to corporate life, simply discovered what millions have always discovered—that anyone who works in an office spends an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the arrangement of offices.

  He had set up his research camp in a small building in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Herman Miller was based on the eastern side of Lake Michigan, in Zeeland, a hidebound hamlet made up of descendants of Dutch burghers. Propst found the baccalaureate air of Ann Arbor more conducive to his ideas; it also furnished him with a greater variety of postgraduate researchers. Freed from the arbitrary arrangements and furniture demanded by the office industry, Propst had relative autonomy to manage his own work space. Immediately bored with the traditional single, flat desk space, he fabricated over time a number of different “workstations,” including a stand-up desk and a display surface for magazines and other reference materials he needed for his work. Noticing that keeping things in files created the problem of “out of sight, out of mind,” he developed an open display surface and a color-coded system of visual cues to remind himself of what he should be doing at any given moment. And rather than the sedentary monotony of normal office work, Propst found himself constantly in motion, moving from one working area to another, standing to sitting. All this activity made him feel more productive, alert, vital.