Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  Before too long, “unsettled” was a mild way of describing relations between the sisters. When, in the middle of 1947, Harriet tried to address the issue of giving herself a raise after five years of backbreaking work at the Syndicate, Edna’s response was to demand a complete and thorough accounting of all Syndicate profits and expenses before she would even consider the matter. She had pushed too hard. Harriet was both hurt and furious, and she did not mince words in her reply. “Actually, the picture from 1942 to the present is a very good one, but I have yet to hear one word of commendation from you. And despite the ever increasing amount in your pocket due to new business, you keep silent, and let me be the only one in the office who has had no raise since 1942,” she wrote. “I’ve had all the headaches, and have given increasingly of my time and efforts, but still the sum of 37.50 a week from you that I agreed upon as a starting salary has never been changed. Frankly I cannot understand your attitude, and psychologically the effect does not make for good business . . . Sincerely, Harriet.” A permanent rift had opened. While Harriet would continue to write letters about family news and holidays to her sister over the next decades, there was a part of her that would never forgive Edna for her mistrust and selfishness. The playful notes between “Syndicate Sisters” were a thing of the past.

  In June of 1947, having decided to give her one more try, Harriet sent the plot for the next Nancy Drew, The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, off to Mildred in Toledo. The reply she got astonished her. As usual, Mildred had buried the lead. After four paragraphs about Blackwood Hall, of which the first eight chapters had been written, she wrote, rather abruptly: “On the day that the plot arrived, my husband died after a very long and hard illness. He has been a complete invalid for the past two and a half years, requiring almost constant attention. The time has been a most trying one, but I have returned to my newspaper work now and expect it to continue, as I always have enjoyed hard work.” Upon hearing the news, Harriet could not have been more sympathetic, nor could she have agreed more heartily with Mildred’s prescription for self-medication. “It was with surprise that I read of the passing of your husband, and I am deeply grieved that you have had this tragedy in your life,” she wrote. “Such a parting is not easy, and I do send you my deepest sympathy . . . You are right in thinking that work is the best solace at a time of grief. Nevertheless, it must have been hard for you to have undertaken the Nancy Drew just now. I do appreciate your going ahead with it.” When it came time to pay Mildred for her work, Harriet included a small bonus, and with it a kind thought: “You will notice that the check is somewhat larger than formerly. I think you certainly deserve the extra amount!”

  Mildred was, indeed, grateful. Like Harriet, she was worn out. The war years and assorted family tragedies had weighed unduly on both of them, and each was ready for a new beginning. For Harriet, it would come in the form of new blood for the Syndicate; for Mildred, it would mean finding a new husband. For all their differences, the two women were alike in their determination to move forward no matter what. As Mildred wrote to Harriet during that difficult summer of 1947, “All one can do in the last analysis, is just carry on.”

  11

  The Kids Are Hep

  IN THE WANING MONTHS of the war, publishers, even as they continued to print their books on low-grade paper and cut back on their orders, had kept one eye on the future. At the start of 1944, Hugh Juergens at Grosset & Dunlap wrote to Harriet: “We feel here that all of us should be alert to the changes that the end of the war will bring. That it will bring sweeping changes in the Juvenile field goes without saying . . . everyone seems to agree that children’s books will come in for much more attention from all the publishers . . . We want to be ready when peace comes. We’ll probably make some mistakes, but we can’t afford to sit still and wait.”

  He couldn’t have been more prophetic. By the end of the 1940s, there was no longer a doubt in anyone’s mind that children’s books were going to be buoyed up by America’s new fortunes along with everything else. The “sweeping changes” Juergens had foreseen were not limited to his field alone, though—if anything, the postwar transformation of the juvenile book industry from a sleepy offshoot of adult publishing to a lucrative business in its own right was simply one more symptom of the energetic makeover of American business and culture in general. Nothing would emerge from the next decade unchanged, least of all the girl detective, as everything from home ownership to the birth rate to what it meant to be teenager and a woman was transformed in the swirl of excitement and prosperity that tore across the nation after 1945. The country was full of promise and consumer goods for the first time in almost two decades, and having a family was “the ultimate symbol of security for Americans tired of depression and war.”

  But the expanding economy and focus on family also had a downside, and it affected women most emphatically, even as they participated in it willingly. In 1946 alone, three million women left the workforce, “eager to set up households and get on with the postwar baby boom.” That same year the first edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was published, giving all these ambitious young mothers a manual that helped them but also standardized parenting in a way that made it possible to feel inadequate on a whole new level.

  Just as they had resurged in the late 1920s and ’30s, womanly virtues were back with a vengeance. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1950, Agnes Meyer, an outspoken supporter of the return to what would come to be known in later generations as “family values,” wrote: “What modern woman had to recapture is the wisdom that just being a woman is her central task and greatest honor . . . Women must boldly announce that no job is more exacting, more necessary, or more rewarding than that of housewife or mother.” And though 1947 brought the number of working women higher than it had been during the war years by about three million, their average pay dropped by 26 percent as they were pushed into unskilled, unsatisfying jobs. There was little incentive to work under such conditions.

  By the middle of the 1950s, 60 percent of women had dropped out of college to get married or because “they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar.” Higher education for women became merely a way station on the path to matrimony as the average marriage age dropped again to twenty and kept going down from there. As one Harvard graduate said about his wife in 1955, “She can be independent on little things but the big decisions have to go my way. The marriage must be the most important thing that ever happened to her.” One of his counterparts, a 1951 Radcliffe graduate, admitted, “We married what we wanted to be. If we wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor we married one.” Rosie the Riveter traded in her overalls and head scarf for pointy bras and big hairstyles that were worn with full scratchy skirts and petticoats. Suburbs sprung up to house all these shiny new families, who, thanks to GI benefits that made it possible to start a family before husbands were even out of college, had more children sooner. According to one study of middle-class couples, 39 percent of them wanted at least four.

  It was no wonder that children’s books were taking off like never before—all those babies were going to be reading soon, and someone had to serve them. Even the biggest publishers in New York couldn’t deny it. “‘The tail is now wagging the dog,’ said Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, in stressing the extent to which juvenile publishing has become big business,” reported Publishers Weekly in the fall of 1949. Over the course of the 1940s, the juvenile departments of big publishers had gone from small divisions to serious business operations with bottom lines and sales quotas as inflexible as they were in other industries. As it became easier to track the tastes and preferences of young America, there was no excuse for publishing books that children didn’t like.

  Caught up in the whirl of postwar publishing, Harriet felt pressed like never before. “With life going along at a slower pace where you live, you probably think everybody up here is loony,” she wrote to Edna at one point, trying to make her understand the new u
rgency of business decisions in her changed world. “ Well, we probably are. Everybody is in a mad dash, feels free to change his mind at a moment’s notice, but often has good ideas about which there should not be procrastination.” This was by no means an endorsement of the new order of things. To Harriet, many of the changes taking place were just as much anathema as the idea of Russell doing the dishes or changing a diaper. Having taken over the Syndicate in a more genteel era, she was dismayed and irritated by the newly developed rush and tumble of New York publishing. Grosset & Dunlap had hired a new president to guide it smoothly into the Atomic Age, and she was not pleased by his attitude, an opinion she felt free to make known. He had written her a long letter trying to explain that her inability to meet their fast-paced schedule was costing everyone money, leading her to complain to one of her editors there: “I have had a feeling for some time that the new Etat Major of Grosset and Dunlap does not have the same feeling for my heroes and heroines as the former paterfamilias. It worries me to see a growing hysteria to meet printers’ and mail order house demands to a point where all laughter and enjoyment is taken out of conferences.” Then with a final upper-class smack that also picked up on the anti-Communist sentiment sweeping the country, she added, “In this transitional period of history, are we going to succumb to the push of the proletariat?”

  Apparently, the answer was yes. As Harriet continued to turn in manuscripts late and quibble with her editors over everything from cover art to Nancy’s outfits in the interior drawings, Grosset & Dunlap began to panic that she would eventually have an effect on production and sales of her very lucrative series. More and more, the company tried to exert control over the content and look of the Stratemeyer books, vetting outlines, picking art, even offering to take the burden of getting the books written off of Harriet by hiring writers themselves. This, they reasoned, would leave her free to “carry on your negotiations with the radio and movie people and perhaps to give some thought to ideas for new series. We could discuss the new titles long in advance with you, and then we could find the proper authors to write them . . . Our one objective is to keep the series alive, to keep their sales up, to make sure that they maintain their top ranking in the book trade.”

  Appalled by Grosset & Dunlap’s suggestions, Harriet dug her heels in even further. It was true that she had made a few errors in negotiating over the years, the largest of which had been to sell all the Nancy Drew movie rights outright to Warner Brothers, rather than licensing them for a limited period of time. She was now trying to buy them back because, as she told Edna, “No prospective radio and television buyer will take the stuff with the idea that Warner can put movies on the air with a totally different cast. Since they [Warner] did not consider them money makers, it’s just possible they would turn all rights back to us for a fee.” Warner Brothers, naturally, would do no such thing. But even while their refusal was preventing Harriet, and Edna by association, from earning a good deal of money, in no way did Harriet consider herself unable to run her business. She did see the necessity for some changes, though, mostly to help her manage the increasing workload.

  Accordingly, in 1948 she finally hired the Syndicate’s first full-time nonsecretarial member, a young man named Andrew Svenson. A sportswriter for the Newark News, Svenson was a thirty-seven-year-old father of four. He was, Harriet wrote to Edna, “interested in the church, Sunday School, Scouts, Junior Chamber of Commerce, and very particularly sports . . . Mr. Svenson would be able to turn out a lot of work, including writing, and we in turn might be able to open up new fields that would bring in money after the present series begin to wane.” When Edna acquiesced at last, Harriet was thrilled and couldn’t help feeling that kismet had played a part in the timing of everything. “Mr. Svenson plans to come here on May 10,” she told her sister. “I told him this might be a good omen, as that is the anniversary of Dad’s death.”

  The hiring of Andy Svenson proved to be a rare concession on Edna’s part. Just a year later, matters between the sisters had deteriorated again to such a degree that Harriet could barely contain herself. Edna was refusing to give Svenson a raise, and her obstinacy came at a particularly bad moment. Harriet was about to embark on a long-postponed vacation to Europe, where she and Russell would visit Patsy and her husband in England and then tour the Continent for a total of nine weeks away. Tearing along at breakneck pace as she tried to keep up, the stress had finally overwhelmed her. “My long period of good health took a nose dive about six weeks ago,” she wrote to Edna in the summer of 1949. “They started pumping penicillin into me every six hours until I had the maximum they can give . . . I had to have my passport picture taken while I was feeling extremely punk,” she laughed. “I am sure you would never recognize me. I look like dope fiend No. 1.”

  Her leaving was possible only because she had hired Svenson, whom she trusted implicitly. “I believe he eventually could run the SS,” Harriet tried to explain to Edna while asking for his raise. “With the thought that I might suddenly drop out of the picture, I’m sure you would find him loyal and progressive.” Trying, yet again, to make peace, she appealed to Edna’s conscience and finances simultaneously. “Do you realize that it has been seven years that I have carried on under very trying circumstances? Any ideas you had in 1942 must have been disproved by this time about the business. The output of books has been good and your coffers have been well-filled.”

  It was more than Harriet could bear to think that her family was not harmonious, so even as she left the country fuming at Edna, who had not replied on the matter of the raise, once abroad she made sure to send home a raft of postcards as well as a few detailed letters about her experiences in Monte Carlo, Frankfurt, Holland, Italy, and the other places she and Russell were traveling on their grand tour.

  “AUTHOR OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS WORKS OUT ENDINGS FIRST; FINDS SYSTEM PAYS OFF,” ran the headline of a glowing article about Mildred in the Toledo Times that same summer. “NEWSPAPERWOMAN HAS HAD 126 VOLUMES PUBLISHED; NANCY DREW SERIES IN 2OTH YEAR.” Nowhere in the piece, which was three columns long, did the name Stratemeyer appear. “Her system may be unorthodox,” the author wrote, “but it has produced such popular fiction characters as Nancy Drew, Doris Force, Honey Bunch, the Dana Girls, Dot and Dash, and Ruth Fielding. The Nancy Drew series, written for a syndicate under a pen name, was started in 1929 and is still going strong.” It was not the first time Mildred had linked her name to Nancy Drew. It had been mentioned in the little profile in Inside the Blade back in 1944, and she had also revealed herself as Carolyn Keene in an encyclopedic volume called American Women, 1939–1940, a kind of Who’s Who that detailed her writing career thus far.

  For whatever reason, perhaps because she could not spare the energy, or perhaps because all of this publicity was appearing in local sources and she was not always aware of it, Harriet did nothing. When Edna had wanted to have Andy Svenson sign a confidentiality agreement in his new contract, Harriet dismissed the idea outright, implying that the horse was already out of the barn anyway. “The only confidential matters are the names of the series we control, and who the ghost writers might happen to be. As to the former point in question Mr. Garis and Mrs. Wirt publicized those things even though they had been told not to.”

  In any case, Mildred either gave false information to the Times reporter or simply didn’t bother to correct it when she had the chance, and the idea that she was solely responsible for all of the Syndicate characters she had worked on was firmly established. Accompanying the piece was a photo of Mildred in her study at home, surrounded by the dozens of series books she had written and looking quite peppy in a striped shirt as she leaned over her typewriter to smile for the photographer.

  In addition to the stacks of books testifying to a flourishing career, there was another reason for Mildred’s cheery demeanor in the Times photo. She had fallen in love with George Benson, the recently widowed associate editor of the Toledo Times, and he with her. Something of a dandy, Benson was given to
wearing a homburg and took Mildred dancing frequently at the Commodore Perry Hotel in downtown Toledo. An excellent writer who had come to the Times from the Washington bureau of the Minneapolis Journal, Benson was very politically engaged. He was also known for his love of the English language. “Generally writers, eager for their daily bread, become craven collaborators of this cabal,” wrote one admirer in a piece about the decline of the vocabulary of the American writer. “But columnist and quidnunc Benson has refused to bow. From the great riches of the English language (the richest in the world) he draws such symbols and conjures up such images as are necessary to his thoughts.” An avid reader of everything from Chekhov and Camus to Roald Dahl and Jean Stafford, Benson was a perfect match for Mildred in other ways as well. He was “a gregarious soul, a ready wit, a fount of knowledge on almost any subject, a colorful speaker, an all-round newspaperman of great excellence, and, above all else, a very rugged individualist,” as described in his own newspaper. He and Mildred were married in the summer of 1950.

  The effect of this newfound happiness was immediate and apparent to everyone. Even Harriet, who barely knew Mildred but had recently brought her back into the Syndicate fold once again, took note. “The new Dana book is being written by—of all people—Mrs. Wirt,” she wrote to Edna the following summer. “After trying out some new writers and not being satisfied with them, I began to wonder if perhaps she might be able to do it. Knowing that she had gone back to work and that her troubles of a few years ago were now sometime behind her, I decided to take a chance. To my amazement, she wrote that she had married again . . . The whole tone of her letter proved that she had regained her health and spirits, so I have high hopes [for] the new story.” Harriet’s happy suspicions were confirmed when Mildred and George dropped by the Syndicate office on their way to a vacation in Nantucket. “I like him very much,” Harriet told Edna, “and she is so completely changed I would never have recognized her. You recall when she dropped in here before how thin and wan and listless she was in her plain black dress? Last week she was dressed in a very becoming blue frock and a large hat. She had taken on some weight and looks very well. Furthermore she was very talkative and full of fun.”