Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  Fortunately, the popularity of sexual experimentation, Eastern religions, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Janis Joplin, marijuana, and any number of other psychedelic 1960s by-products that seemed to emanate outward from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury with alarming consistency had absolutely no bearing on Nancy Drew. Though the average age of her readers had gone down thanks to the newfound sophistication of America’s young adults, they were as devoted to her as ever. “Apparently there is a rock-ribbed streak of conservatism in the nine-to-eleven group,” summed up a 1969 article by Arthur Prager called “The Secret of Nancy Drew—Pushing Forty and Still Going Strong,” which was published in the Saturday Review. By that time more than thirty million copies of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories had been sold. “She is an example of the fantasy world in which prepubescent girls live in daydreams,” Prager opined, and then offered a few more reasons as to her continued success, not least among them the fact that “a girl usually gets her introduction to Nancy Drew from someone else: a gift or loan from some friend or relative.” As much as the sixties had changed youth culture, he observed, girls were still girls. “They will participate in outlandish fads for the sake of show, but they like things simple, basic, well organized. Just as the brashest smart aleck will still gulp down a massive lump of anguish when Amy, in Little Women, comes in out of the snow and says, ‘Beth, the baby’s dead . . .,’ the loudest little cynic will retire to her room, curl up among the psychedelic posters and ‘Legalize Pot’ buttons, and devour some forty Nancy Drews in a row with deep concentration and heartfelt involvement.”

  WHILE NANCY DREW had been busy showing off her Shakespeare, Mildred had been learning to fly. She had been interested in it since she was a little girl, when a pilot out barnstorming on the Iowa prairie had landed his wooden-strutted “Jenny” biplane in the grass near her house in Ladora. Seized with, as she later called it, “the fever to fly,” Mildred had scraped up the $15 fee for a ride, “donned a helmet and was buckled into an open cockpit for 15 minutes of joy. Off we went with a breathtaking rush,” she remembered. “As we cruised over the town, I sat in a paralysis of delight, staring straight ahead until the pilot tapped me on the shoulder, pointing down.” After begging to go up again and being refused by her father, who chewed her out for taking what he considered to be an enormous risk, she turned to her other passion, writing a “glorified essay on my first plane ride, greatly enlarging upon the dangers,” for school. Later, in the early 1930s, she had taken it one step further, writing a juvenile series about a girl pilot named Ruth Darrow.

  By the second half of the century, her interest in aviation had dovetailed perfectly with her growing curiosity about archaeology. As part of her repeated trips to visit Mayan ruins in the 1950s, she had begun to charter private planes to fly her out to remote sites. This had led, in short order, to flying lessons, and in 1964 when she was fifty-nine years old, she was awarded her pilot’s license. Writing about her first solo flight for the Toledo Times, she admitted she had not been a natural: “Touch the throttle and it would snort with rage. Step too hard on the brakes and it would try to pitch the instructor through the windshield. Airborne, it arrogantly flew itself, tying me into a mental pretzel.” Her stubbornness paid off as always, though, and when she finally got a handle on the controls, she was elated.

  When flying was not adventurous enough for her, Mildred went back to Mexico for what she described as “a three-day dugout canoe trip down the crocodile-infested Usumacinta River in Mexico’s most remote section of Chiapas.” Even Nancy Drew could not have topped her adventures there, which included whirlpools in the river that were as large as houses, an unplanned plane crash in a swamp, a treacherous climb up a steep, mossy cliff, and having her wristwatch cut off by thieves in the middle of the night as she slept, unsuspecting, in a hammock. At sixty-two years old, Mildred was exhilarated by the whole experience, writing it up in a piece for the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Sunday magazine called “A Woman Dares the Jungle.” After extolling the natural beauty of the landscape (“From low, overhanging branches, huge lizards plopped into the water, barely missing the cedar log dugout. At every turn there were orchids, scarlet mushrooms, swarms of sapphire butterflies, herons, falcons, unknown exotic birds and small game”), she admitted it had been a rough ride. But not for long. “I was tired, my feet swollen, skin riddled by bites from flies, chaquistes and pulgas . . . The trip was worth it . . . I had lived in a breath-taking, enchanted world.”

  But despite her widening horizons, Nancy Drew was still on them. Soon after the “The Secret of Nancy Drew” was published in the Saturday Review in 1969, its author, Arthur Prager, received a letter from Toledo, Ohio. In his article, he had attributed all forty-three existing Nancy Drews to Harriet, and Mildred was both curious as to where he’d gotten his information and wanted to set the record straight. Prager had no way to know better, but Mildred, of course, did, and by this time she could no longer bear the machinations of the publicity machine that had put Harriet on high as Carolyn Keene. Though she was wary of going truly public, she felt compelled to correct errors on an individual basis whenever it was possible.

  She had some help from a young man named Geoffrey S. Lapin, who had read the Nancy Drew books as a bored boy on summer vacation in Atlantic City in the 1950s (“the quaint world of roadster, running boards, and touring cars stayed with me into my adult years”). Something of a detective himself, he had discovered Mildred’s Carolyn Keene identity several years earlier through a little research at the Baltimore library where he was employed. He had also discovered that, to his great delight, “Carolyn Keene was alive and well and living in Toledo!” After reading Prager’s piece, he wrote Mildred a letter and, at her request, paid her a visit at her desk at the Toledo Blade. Over the course of years, he would devote countless hours to writing letters to the various publications that printed mangled versions of the history of the Syndicate and Nancy Drew.

  With his one well-timed visit, Lapin set into motion a competing narrative about who the real Carolyn Keene was that made it into newspapers by the early 1970s. “The Artful Ways of Millie—Nancy Drew was her brainchild,” exclaimed one of the articles. In it, Mildred was described as not only the true creator of Nancy, but as “paranoic. She’s afraid that any publicity will get her in Dutch with the Stratemeyer Syndicate . . . ‘You say anything that hurts sales, and they’ll be right . . . on . . . my . . . neck!’ Millie agonized.” In spite of her own efforts to get the truth on the record, and angry as she had become about missing out on the profits from the character she considered to be her own just as much as Harriet did, she was still unwilling to cross her former employer.

  But Nancy Drew was just a sideshow in Mildred’s life, unlike Harriet’s. It was flying that remained her best love, and by 1970 she was writing an aviation column for the Toledo Times called “Happy Landings.” In addition to chronicling her own flight experiences, including a test run in an “acrobatic airplane designed for the sporty businessman” that left her waiting “for my bifocals to track normally again,” she wrote frequently about the goings-on at Toledo’s Wagon Wheel Airport and the local aviators who used it as home base. Among them, increasingly, were women. “Women these days wear coveralls, tear airplanes apart, and put them together again just to gain experience,” she wrote in a 1968 “Happy Landings” column. “For proof that aerospace mechanics no longer is entirely a man’s field, drop in at adult airframe class at Macomber Vocational High School any Wednesday or Thursday night. There, Mrs. Ione Shelton, a Bowling Green nurse . . . more than holds her own with a dozen men . . . Mrs. Shelton explains that her goal is not to become a certified mechanic. Instead, she seeks knowledge which will assure work being done properly on her own plane when she authorizes it.” In the same column, Mildred also mentioned that a series of competitive events were being planned by the Ohio chapter of the Ninety-Nines, Amelia Earhart’s original women-only flying group. “We hope men will enter,” said a Toledo member of the organization, �
�but may the best woman win.”

  Independent women were not just living in Ohio, either. The women’s lib movement was in full swing by now, with NOW fighting relentlessly for the Equal Rights Amendment, which finally passed in Congress in March of 1972 (but has yet to be ratified by every state in America). When Gloria Steinem and others published Ms., the first national feminist magazine in 1971, the first three hundred thousand copies sold out in eight days. By the mid-1970s women’s applications to law school and medical school had risen 550 percent since the start of the decade, while the number planning to teach elementary school or be nurses went from 31 percent to 10 percent. Women were on the move at last.

  Mildred, a self-avowed conservative when it came to the social issues involved with feminism (“I believe in freedom,” she would tell an NPR interviewer in the early 1990s. “I don’t believe in license, which many [women] have interpreted freedom to mean”), nonetheless covered women’s lib for the Toledo Times on more than one occasion. “She’s Studying to Be Aggressive: NOW Generation Surveyed for Clues to Success,” published in the summer of 1969, discussed the travails of people who, like Mildred herself, were not quite with the times. Not only was it impossible to tell the sexes apart thanks to the fad for long hair, she groused, but girls had become, in her opinion, almost unconscionably forward. “‘A man can’t get a good night’s rest any more,’ complained a long-suffering father. He told me that his phone rang the other night at 2 A.M. ‘Is Georgie there?’ inquired the voice of a sweet chick. ‘He’s in bed,’ the father answered. ‘Why the hell aren’t you?’”

  On the eve of the massive Women’s Strike for Equality, which took place on the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the woman suffrage amendment, August 26, 1970, and brought thousands of women to the streets in protest all over the country—fifty thousand in New York City alone—Mildred’s coverage of her gender’s plight took on a more serious aspect. In an article about whether or not Toledo women were militant feminists, she found that much like their counterparts around the country, “Women of Toledo are less concerned with loss of small male courtesies than with equal job and pay opportunities.” For all her nay-saying, Mildred was a feminist at heart, even if she preferred not to be labeled one. “MALE PSYCHES SHAKEN, MILLIE REPORTS AS SHE LANDS NEW BROADSIDE,” screamed a headline on one of her pieces. She had written a column the week before criticizing “the unfairness of the male sex to women.” Now she was experiencing what was fast becoming a by-product of feminism in America. “If there’s one thing the Women’s Lib Movement has done, it’s to make me increasingly unpopular with men.”

  Though she had a different perspective than most reporters, even other women, due to her age, Mildred was hardly alone in her reporting on women’s lib. It was hard to pick up a magazine or a newspaper without finding some kind of coverage. While Ms. was specifically devoted to issues of feminism and equality, even old standbys like Family Circle, once a haven for cookie recipes and harmless fiction, took up the cause. “Are you hurting your daughter without knowing it?” it asked its anxious, newly liberated readers in February 1971. “Are you—like many of our schools—teaching your daughter to have fewer aspirations than the boys in her class?” By two and a half columns into this piece, the author had gotten, as usual, to the evils of series books. Once again, however, the girl detective emerged not only unscathed, but revered as an icon of the new female order: “Of course there are books in which girls figure as principal characters: Cherry Ames is a student nurse, Vicki Barr a flight stewardess, and Peggy Lane an aspiring actress. But these girls seem somewhat pallid beside Tom Swift, budding scientist, and Tom Corbett, space explorer,” the author wrote. “The one exception, the girl who outsells them all—more than a million copies a year as compared with 40,000 for Cherry Ames—is Nancy Drew, who tootles about the country in her roadster, solving mysteries and living a life of freedom. Interestingly, a psychoanalyst . . . discovered . . . that Nancy Drew’s image satisfies the young girl’s daydream that ‘maybe I can be a boy.’”

  As pop psychology took off, the language of self-awareness and self-fulfillment that came to be a hallmark of the 1970s permeated the ever-proliferating examinations of Nancy, many of which were injected with pseudo-Freudian theories to boot. Even the Syndicate got on the bandwagon. “Psychologists say that Nancy Drew provides a perfect release for pre-teen girls,” Andy Svenson told one reporter cheerfully. A sociologist at UC San Francisco thought that her success was due to the fact that “she’s an atypical girl, an adventurous girl who could somehow compete with a boy and not upset the sexual role definitions.” He also thought, however, that no small amount of nostalgia was fueling her revival. “We sense things are changing very quickly,” he told McCall’s magazine, “and traditional values are being challenged. When this happens, one looks inward to anchoring points for some kind of stability.” Nancy as anchor: It must have made sense to the group of Nancy Drew–loving adults who answered an ad in a California newspaper and met for a “Nancy Drew Circle” to discuss their favorite sleuth. In addition to husbands who were dragged to the event by their “N.D. Freak” wives, there was a woman who worked for the local telephone company who confessed to the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle: “You can really get into her character. I traveled through Canada on a vacation, signing myself Nancy Drew.” There was also a more sobering story about the power of the girl detective. “‘In Hungary, I was in the resistance to the war,’ Gisele Chobaji told the group. ‘We couldn’t endure all we had to if we couldn’t read something beyond realism. Our two favorites were Nancy Drew and the Agatha Christie books, we read one a day in the bomb shelters.’” In another article, yet one more former obsessive gushed: “Is it possible that there breathes somewhere a female between the ages of nine and 49 who doesn’t know Nancy Drew?” Nancy was like the cool girl next door, and she was just modern enough to get away with it. “I wasn’t thinking about women’s liberation when I wrote the books,” Harriet told this same reporter. “I’ve never thought of myself as a women’s libber but I do believe that women have brains. Nothing makes me angrier than to have my intelligence insulted.”

  Given this statement and the nature of the press coverage of Nancy, the Syndicate’s big idea for 1973 seemed woefully out of step with the times. The Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking was full of quaint recipes with a secret included in each one (“A DETECTIVE NEEDS ENERGY: Add more protein to your cake by mixing ½ cup of finely chopped pecans to the maple sugar mixture”) seemed like a thing of the past before it even hit bookshelves. With page after page of kitschy dishes named after Nancy’s various mysteries, like Crumbling Wall Coffee Cake, Tolling Bell Tuna Rolls, Mysterious Letter Chili, and a host of others, it almost seemed designed to infuriate feminists who had taken up the sleuth with a vengeance. Young fans bought the book, but press reactions ran the gamut from politely amused to outright enraged. Fortunately for Grosset and the Syndicate, as one reviewer noted, “There are some books that need no reviews to insure their success. This is one of them. If only one per cent of Miss Keene’s readers buy this book, she’ll sell millions of copies.”

  Other pieces were less kind, harping on the throwback nature of a cookbook for girls in a time of social change for woman. “People are always asking me if Nancy is a ‘women’s libber’ [Mrs. Adams] confided, sounding a little weary of the notion,” the New York Daily News reported. “‘I suppose,’ and here she brightened, ‘that Nancy was ahead of her time.’ In the same breath, though, Mrs. Adams refuses to concede that Nancy might lose any analytical powers by putting on an apron.” No doubt when she received her copy of the article, Harriet also refused to admit the implications of the fact that it ran on the same page of the Daily News as a story about women at MIT demanding that the prestigious university admit even more women.

  And then there was Ms., which ran a first-person essay about Nancy Drew and her culinary adventures that not only established her—in her original form—even more firml
y in the feminist pantheon, but took Grosset & Dunlap to task for its “recent innovations.” The writer did not like the revisions, and she liked the cookbook even less. “Even though Nancy Drew was sixteen and I was only nine, I knew she and I were kindred spirits,” the writer rhapsodized as she looked back on her childhood sleuthing exploits investigating a suspicious geography teacher. “I remember Nancy the intelligent, go-getting detective.” Distressed about Clues to Good Cooking, which she believed threatened Nancy’s “feminist value,” the author went straight to the source, whom she referred to, of course, as “Ms.” Adams. There, she learned that “Harriet Adams says she would much rather write a Nancy Drew detective guide.”

  This was, in no uncertain terms, untrue. Though Harriet had balked at a sewing book and one other offshoot of the cookbook, original plans for the Clues to Good Cooking had included further volumes “on cookies and candies, then perhaps on other specialties.” It was only after years of effort on the part of others, and, perhaps, the subtle force of a friendly memo from a bookseller in Charlotte, North Carolina, that she decided to put Nancy Drew in the kind of book she had previously associated only with the Hardy Boys. “I think the NANCY DREW COOKBOOK is a cute idea and we are selling them here in Charlotte,” the writer, who was a man, no less, began. “But I also think, from women’s liberation point of view, that we may be relegating the famous girl detective to the kitchen.”

  I feel that a better selling book would be a Nancy Drew Detective Handbook type of project. I mention this because of the great increase in women in police work. In the future this country may have as many women as men in police departments. Such a Nancy Drew Handbook could be different from the Hardy Boys’ Handbook because you could use world-wide situations. In fact a chapter on Interpol would be highly interesting.