Some people might argue that girls who read the Hardys would buy the HARDY BOYS’ DETECTIVE HANDBOOK, but the overwhelming number of girls who peruse the Nancy Drew section of my bookshop indicate to me that a Nancy Drew Detective Manual could sell equally as well, and maybe better than the Hardys.
If you can excuse me for making a title suggestion how about “How To Become A Girl Detective.”
Though a second version of The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook had gone to press at the same time as The Nancy Drew Cookbook, it would take until 1979 for Harriet and the Syndicate staff to realize the wisdom of this suggestion. The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book: Clues to Good Sleuthing was finally released that year, and on the back cover, the real appeal of Nancy Drew was acknowledged at last: “Every reader of the NANCY DREW MYSTERY STORIES has wished at some time that she, too, could solve a mystery. This is now possible.”
13
Becoming the Girl Detective
BY THE LATE 1970s, Harriet had taken to referring to Nancy Drew as her daughter in interviews, and the sleuth had become Harriet’s way of communicating her values to the world at large. She was as protective of Nancy’s image as she was of her own, whether it was in new titles or a revision that was still being worked over. “I feel you overstepped your position in trying to revamp Nancy’s character,” she wrote to her old nemesis at Grosset, Anne Hagan, in 1972. “She is not all those dreadful things you accuse her of and in many instances you have actually wanted to make her negative.” The following year, she was incensed on her “child’s” behalf yet again: “Anne, are your remarks intended to mend story holes or do you get some sadistic fun out of downgrading and offending me? It will take me a long time to live down the remark ‘Nancy sounds like a nasty female.’” She was even more distressed about the revisions to The Clue in the Crumbling Wall: “I must tell you quite frankly that you cause me a great deal of unnecessary work, which brings my creation of a new story to an abrupt halt. There are hundreds of unwarranted word changes which are apparently whims on your part, like ‘peer out’ to ‘look out.’ What bothers me even more is your supposition that you, not I, know what Nancy, Mr. Drew, et al. would say or do, like deleting Nancy’s lovely gesture of putting an arm around an elderly woman who has just done the young detective a great favor. In the future will you please stick to the functions of an editor and not try steering my fictional family into a non–Carolyn Keene direction.”
But if Harriet thought Nancy’s treatment by Grosset & Dunlap was rough, she was in for a big surprise. By allowing her beloved detective to move into the cultural mainstream as a symbol to girls and women everywhere, Harriet had unwittingly opened her up to the so-called highest praise of all: imitation—or, rather, parody. It’s not difficult to imagine how Harriet must have felt in the summer of 1974, when that bastion of foul-mouthed humor, National Lampoon magazine, decided to set its sights on Nancy in the June “Pubescence” issue. Along with ads for “I am not a crook” Nixon watches ($19.95 apiece) and features ranging from “VD Comics” to “Masturbation Foto Funnies” appeared “The Case of the Missing Heiress,” in which Nancy Drew and Patty Hearst meet up. Hearst, still on the run with the Symbionese Liberation Army after her kidnapping some months before and a spectacular robbery at a Sacramento bank, had recently made headlines yet again by participating in a shootout at a sporting goods store. In the Lampoon version, Nancy was called in to deduce the identity of Hearst’s kidnapper, who turned out to be not the SLA but her own newspaper magnate father. The SLA got involved in the plot regardless, trying to kill Nancy along the way by giving her an overdose of Midol, the over-the-counter remedy for menstrual cramps. Full of racial epithets and outrageous situations, the story wound down with a gentle mockery of the teen sleuth’s propensity for emerging unscathed from any situation.
“There’s still one thing I don’t understand,” Bess Marvin called from the rumble seat as they motored east for River Heights . . . “When the SLA gave you that fatal overdose of Midol, how come you still could set the fire and escape without being knocked out?” “That’s still a real puzzler,” Nancy laughed pertly. “I still haven’t been able to figure that out for myself!” With a chorus of appreciative chuckles, Nancy and her chums sped merrily into the darkening landscape, little knowing that Nancy’s next adventure, The Secret of the Fatal Motoring Mishap, would solve more than a few mysteries.
Depending on how you thought of it, Nancy had either scraped rock bottom or reached the very height of popular culture. But when the New York Times Magazine ran another parody, “The Real Nancy Drew,” in October of the following year, Harriet could not keep quiet. The piece, which ran as a mock interview with an aged Nancy, did everything from imply that the sleuth had grown up to be a lonely old maid (“Old age has its compensations and royalties,” she answers jauntily to that question) to state outright that George was a lesbian. “George didn’t come clean with me, pretending she was a tomboy, when actually she was a . . . Q: She didn’t come out of the closet? A: Kept it locked and threw away the key.” It was too much for Harriet to bear. She wrote a letter to the Times, berating them for violating their own standards as well as hers, and for “belittling and reversing the principal characters in this famous series (which I write under the name Caroline [sic] Keene) with innuendoes of sex and pornography. Surely the millions of loyal Nancy Drew fans of all ages will find this travesty most distasteful.” In her reply, the parody’s author simply piled on more. “I did not tell all,” she wrote. “Now that my back is up against the haunted house, I feel it is my duty to set the record straight . . . it was Nancy Drew who backed Calvin Coolidge all the way, who was the first woman to wear a tube dress in the jungle in order to be more feminine, who photographed Bomba the Jungle Boy for Life magazine (making him an overnight sensation), who personally slapped Bertrand Russell to teach him that infidelity doesn’t pay.” Nancy had officially gone from private to public property.
As much as the besmirching of her prized “daughter” bothered Harriet, it was good for business. By 1976 sales of the series had been increasing steadily for four years, reversing the gradual drop-off that had been happening since the late 1950s. “Nobody’s sure why,” one reporter wrote. “Except mothers who grew up with the books now seem to be buying them for their daughters.” Often these mothers were unaware that the books had been revised, but in any case the new Nancy seemed to be exciting enough for the younger set. The nostalgia factor was still running high, too, as women’s libbers fell more in love with Nancy than ever. “In the Drew books, there were mysteries to be solved and she solved them,” the president of NOW told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “[Most juvenile heroines] never did anything. I think the idea that she may have had a lot to do with liberating women is probably the case.” A former staffer at Ms. opined that “Nancy Drew, whose exploits have filled the contents of 50 books, is one heroine who qualifies in many ways as a role model for young feminists,” leaving the reporter on the story to conclude that “her daring, self-confident, competent personality may be increasingly attractive to today’s ‘new woman’—and today’s children.”
Part of her appeal, it seemed, was that she didn’t make a big fuss about her independence. “Their impact on me was simply that I read every one I could get my hands on,” explained one fan, now twenty-six years old. “I was excited by what she was doing. I didn’t realize how feminist they were because I sort of figured that’s the way the world was.” Taking her passion to the extreme, another woman wrote, “I can foresee the day when Nancy Drew stories will be transmitted via satellite to colonies on the moon . . . She’ll be 19, wear a space helmet, and drive her own space ship. And if the space ship runs short of atomic energy . . . Nancy will say: ‘Don’t worry . . . only one rocket is out.’”
Nancy had become such a familiar, accepted presence in the cultural landscape that she had even breached the stratosphere of groovy music. Twenty-four-year-old folk singer Janis Ian, one of the country’s hottest stars at the moment th
anks to her hit single “At Seventeen,” called her up as a reference point in a 1976 interview. “Janis Ian is proud to be arrogant. She figures she’s earned it. ‘Arrogance means to me that you know what you’re doing, and you’re not polite or humble about it . . . It’s like self-confidence, but self-confidence is like Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew was self-confident and if anybody said to her “Nancy, you suck,” Nancy would say “Okay,” and walk away. Now if Nancy had been arrogant, she would have said “Fuck you.” That’s the difference between arrogance and self-confidence to me.’”
By the time Janis Ian made her declaration, Harriet was the sole remaining guarder of Nancy’s integrity. In March 1974 Edna had died, after years of very little communication between the sisters. Harriet noted the event in her diary as if her sister was someone she had been vaguely acquainted with: “Edna Squier passed away.” After taking only three days off of work to fly down to St. Petersburg for the funeral and offering her condolences to Edna’s daughter, Camilla, whom she did not know well, she went right back to work. Edna’s 37.5 percent of the Syndicate, which she had hung on to until the bitter end, reverted back to Harriet. Her death, which might once have had a major effect on the Syndicate, came and went. Harriet had long ago written her out of the history of the company, anyway. Occasionally she would tell a reporter that her sister had helped out for “a few years” before becoming inactive, but that was the most press Edna received, so her years of work on the Nancy Drew books and other series went virtually unheralded at her death.
It was Andy Svenson who had taken over Edna’s role, so it came as a much larger blow to Harriet when he died the following year, at the age of sixty-five, from bone cancer. Harriet bought back his 25 percent of the company from his widow for the price of $174,508.34 and assigned her the rights to the Happy Hollisters series (1953–70), one of Svenson’s projects, which he had based on the experiences of his own family. Then she was alone but for the three assistants she had hired over the past decade. Together, they continued to turn out books in the four surviving series, the Dana Girls, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, and, of course, Nancy Drew. In 1974 Nancy had solved the Mystery of the Glowing Eye. In 1975 it was The Secret of the Forgotten City. In 1976 her adventure was called The Sky Phantom, and it took Nancy to flight school in the Midwest, where she unraveled mysteries involving a hijacked plane and a horse thief. In spite of her efforts to make Nancy Drew more up-to-date, however, Harriet was only willing to go so far. When Rolling Stone ran a little piece about the Hardy Boys in the fall of 1976, it couldn’t help but mention that “Mrs. Adams originally agreed to be interviewed for this article, although she had never heard of Rolling Stone. Her secretary went out and bought her a copy, which happened to be last fall’s ‘men’s issue’ and included articles and illustrations on sexual themes. Mrs. Adams cancelled the interview.”
Part of the reason for the magazine’s interest was that after Harriet’s years of arguing with Warner Brothers, and several more years of negotiating with Universal Studios and ABC, she had finally gotten the rights to make television shows out of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. In 1969 there had been a Hardy Boys Saturday morning cartoon, but it had lasted only two years. Now the real thing was about to hit the airwaves. Both shows were produced by, as one article described them, “two extremely bright and pretty young women, who, like millions of others, survived adolescence with the help of Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew books.” Both “30ish” (“With an accent on the ish,” one said. “Not too much accent—we’re not 35ish”), they had worked their way up from secretaries to associate producers. The Syndicate television series were their big chance to break through the glass ceiling. “We’re not card carrying feminists but things are opening up,” one of them told a reporter. “I could see myself being an associate producer for the next 50 years if I didn’t do something.”
After casting teen heartthrobs Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson to play the Hardy brothers and actress Pamela Sue Martin to play Nancy, the shows began shooting. Each was an hour long, slated to broadcast on alternate Sunday nights in the newly conceived “family” slot designed to appeal to—and not offend—an audience of all ages. The viewing public, critics included, waited impatiently to see their favorite detectives brought to the small screen at last, and they knew the reason for the delay. “It has taken Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys a long time to make it to television,” one anticipatory article explained. “This is because Harriet S. Adams, who as Carolyn Keene is responsible for the ‘Nancy Drew’ mysteries and as Franklin W. Dixon is the author of the ‘Hardy Boys’ stories, wanted assurance that the characters would be depicted as they are shown in the books. Now, with the coming of the Family Hour concept in viewing, Mrs. Adams’s requirements have been met.”
Harriet was not the only person with a vested interest in the series. In 1975 Mildred had written to NBC—the station she thought, incorrectly, was airing the program—upon first hearing mention of the show. The letter she received in return, which threatened legal action if she so much as attempted to get in touch with the Syndicate, went so far as to accuse her of potential libel. Mildred was irate. Writing back, she sputtered: “For more than 45 years I have faithfully abided by the terms, making no claim whatsoever to story material, the pen name Carolyn Keene, titles, or any share of the profits. I do feel I have inherent right with respect to the character, and to say otherwise would be a denial of birthright.” Though it was not entirely true that she had made no claim to the series, having by now told her friends at the University of Iowa and several newspapers about her role, she had never tried to make any money off it. Believing she might have a stake in a television show, she saw what she thought might be her chance to do so legally and had simply written to inquire as such. Now she was furious. “Without reason, you have threatened and accused me of untrue and false statements, and of contract violation, demanding that I brand myself as a liar. This, I resent, as my character long has been established as the opposite—an honest and honorable person. Likewise, I believe in fairness and justice. I intend to abide by an agreement I have made.”
Soon thereafter Geoff Lapin, who was still making it his business to tell everyone he could about Mildred’s participation in the series, dropped her a line to see if she was getting anything out of Nancy’s appearance on network television. She wrote back appreciatively: “Dear Mr. Lapin: Indeed, I do remember you, and also I knew of your fine defense [of me] as the unknown author of Nancy Drew . . . Intended to write you about it, but I’ve been on an exciting fly-your-own plane trip—the Louisiana Air Tour, and hadn’t managed it.” She was seventy-three years old. Then, summing up the incident with the lawyer with characteristic pragmatism, she finished: “When series hit TV I tried to assert TV rights. The Syndicate, network and produter [sic] all came down on me, threatening lawsuit. According to my contract, they insist I don’t exist.” Her temper was on the rise, and she couldn’t resist a quick postscript in which she felt compelled to tell her young friend, “Mrs. Adams, so far as I know, never made a success of any books that she started from scratch. Her fortune and success rests almost entirely upon Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.”
Whether this was true or simply her opinion, it’s hard to imagine she wasn’t a little bit satisfied when the show did not turn out to be the great success everyone involved had hoped for. While Harriet was very pleased with it, having won her various battles over sex, drugs, and violence, no one else seemed to be. A few months earlier, ABC had started airing Charlie’s Angels, a much racier show about not one but three female detectives, and though no explicit comparison was made, Nancy’s clean, wholesome adventures must have paled in contrast. In addition, TV viewers were just coming off of seven years of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which much more accurately depicted the feminist ideals of the day, and Wonder Woman, a literally strong character, was on the air as well. The producers also ran into the same problem that had plagued the 1930s Nancy movies: No one wanted to accept another person’s idea of w
hat Nancy looked like or how she behaved. The show had made her a brunette, a huge mistake that was only one of many. “How could they take an untalented little snip who looks frighteningly like Patty Hearst and cast her as the ‘red-haired’ detective of my youth?” snarled one embittered critic. She was equally harsh on George: “The television series only gives us George, but has provided her with Bess’ timid personality.” Bess was added in during the next season, and the actress playing George cut her long brown hair to satisfy outraged fans who demanded the proper boyish style, but it was too late. As for Ned, they had gotten him wrong, too, and for all the worst reasons: “He was the strong, silent type, a far cry from the whimpering bumbler who appears in the television series. This, of course, is producer Glen Larson’s nod to women’s lib. But he’s missed the point. You don’t make a female character strong by playing her opposite a buffoon. You just make her strong . . . Changing Nancy Drew makes about as much sense as giving Superman a mustache.”
In short order, poor Nancy Drew was voted a total failure. “Ratings for Pamela Sue Martin’s ‘Nancy Drew’ series started off with lovely promise, but then, week by week, began to lose a point or so until, finally, the ratings were below the 30 percent share of audience which is classified as minimum success,” wrote one paper. “Why? We conducted a fast phone survey in an effort to find out. The answer seems to be that the shallow level of the youthful mystery detective stories managed to attract initial interest from all-family viewers, but it could not hold that audience. Virtually all of those who had watched the series said they would have continued if the shows had been more adult, offered more meaningful plots and more in-depth characterizations.” Harriet’s plan to keep the show clean had backfired—her requirements had hamstrung the show’s writers and producers. For several generations of women and girls who had by this time internalized Nancy, seeing her and her chums portrayed in such a clumsy manner was a huge disappointment. As one sad fan put it in an essay she wrote upon finding an old flashlight she had bought as a child: “At a younger age I thought that I’d be another Nancy Drew. (I had even thought that I’d one day be dating a Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s college beau.) . . . Anyway, whatever the reason for the drop in ratings, I personally hope that the series makes it. Nancy, you see, is a friend of mine. I grew up with her.”
Girl Sleuth Page 28