Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  But devotion, no matter how pure, was not enough to save the girl detective. When the Nancy Drew series did not do well enough on its own, her character was folded into the Hardy Boys show. Pamela Sue Martin quit immediately, unwilling to share star billing, and went straight to the tabloids, which ate up her story. “Pamela Sue Martin: TV’s Virginal Nancy Drew Is Super-Sexy Lover in Real Life!” Two weeks later she offered the National Enquirer a choice quote: “I’m not gearing my career to the people who watch Nancy Drew. Playing a hooker or a really different kind of character would be great. If I did it well, it wouldn’t hurt me with the audience at all.”

  Harriet, who no doubt never imagined she would read the word “hooker” in the same paragraph as the name of her beloved fictional daughter, must surely have thought things could only get better from there. A new Nancy Drew was hired, and the combined Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys hour continued airing, but by the fall of 1978 Nancy Drew was removed entirely after being eclipsed by Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson’s teen idol status. Nancy’s television sojourn may have been over, but Pamela Sue Martin was not finished with her yet. There was one place that every ambitious young actress who was willing to do certain things for her career ended up in the 1970s, and that was where Martin went next. In July of 1978 she appeared, barely trench-coated and holding a magnifying glass, on the cover of Playboy. “TV’s Nancy Drew Undraped,” read the cover line. Inside the magazine, Martin was photographed in everything from a transparent teddy to a strategically placed swath of red velvet to practically nothing at all. Interspersed with the racy shots were a photo of her with Parker Stevenson, aka Frank Hardy, and one of her in a prissy suit drinking milk. “Pamela’s tired of the assumption she’s as bland as a glass of milk,” read the caption. “Someone recently said to me, ‘Gee, you’re dispelling all my illusions about Nancy Drew.’ I said, ‘What the hell do you think? You think I’m Nancy Drew?’” In the full-page interview that came next, she bashed her former role with abandon. “Nancy Drew never cried or experienced an inordinate amount of pain. There was never any tragedy or extreme emotion. Never a kissing scene or any sign that she would indulge with the opposite sex. A big moment for her was coming across an old skeleton in a dungeon and screaming. Or being attacked by a bat in Transylvania.”

  Harriet, as one of her writers put it, was “fit to be tied.” Ready to sue, she was advised by a lawyer to let the whole thing blow over or risk even more publicity. Instead, she fought back by running ads, at great cost, in Playboy and elsewhere denouncing the piece. Then she simply refused to acknowledge what had happened in public in anything but the most oblique terms. “Can the reputation of an 18-year-old sleuth—ingenious, alert, the darling of generations of preadolescent girls—survive the Seventies unsullied by sex and violence?” questioned one newspaper she talked to. “Harriet S. Adams is battling to see that it does. ‘I fight publishers, scriptwriters, and magazines constantly. It’s gotten to be one confrontation after another . . . They want to put in not just violence, but profanity, politics, and sex.’” Though she had only recently said she thought women’s libbers took their politics “too far,” when another interviewer asked Harriet about her difficulties, she “confessed to having a hard time fighting for what she believes in, not just with the TV studio, but also within the syndicate, of which she is a senior partner. ‘Why? Because of men,’ she said. ‘They don’t like women who disagree, and they don’t like women to have their own ideas.’”

  14

  Will the Real Carolyn Keene Please Stand Up?

  “WE’RE EXTRAORDINARILY HAPPY—and we always have been—about our association with the syndicate, and with Harriet Adams in particular,” Harold Roth, the president of Grosset & Dunlap told the New York Times in 1977. In addition to being “the youngest lady her age I’ve ever met”—she was eighty-four—and “a terrific human being as well as a business associate,” he continued, Harriet’s “royalties would rank, I am sure, with the absolute top of any author, including best-selling authors on the fiction and nonfiction lists. I’m certain of that.”

  There was seemingly no end of love to spread around between the Syndicate and Grosset & Dunlap, which by then had been publishing Stratemeyer books for more than seventy years. What the company’s president did not say, however, was that even though Harriet’s royalties were substantial, well over half a million dollars in 1977 in today’s terms, they were still a tiny percentage of the overall earnings of her books. Despite repeated efforts, Harriet had never had any success in getting Grosset to raise her royalty rate. An attempt in 1969, when she wrote a letter trying to make her case, was typical of her methods. “It occurred to me recently that when my father signed a contract with your company some forty years ago re Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys the books sold for fifty cents and he received a royalty of two cents; in other words four per cent. Since that time the rate has never changed, which makes a unique situation in publishing.” Harriet knew what was wrong—standard publishing contracts now included a graduated royalty rate that increased according to the number of copies that were sold, and Grosset refused to give the Syndicate that deal—but she didn’t know how to assert herself in order to fix it. So she employed her usual method of passive aggression papered over with false cheerfulness. “Don’t you agree that it is high time we update our thinking in line with the present day practices and increase the percentage or royalty to world renowned Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon and Laura Lee Hope?”

  Her challenge went unanswered, and as she had many times before, she let it drop. Frustrated as she may have been, Harriet was also intensely loyal to Grosset & Dunlap, not least because she was still grateful that back in 1930 they had accepted her, a woman with no business training, as a legitimate replacement for her father at the time of his death. But the other Syndicate employees held no such illusions about what was happening. In the late 1970s, Harriet had brought her three assistants into the Syndicate as what she called “junior partners,” giving them each a percentage in the company. Though Harriet did not seem to realize it, this new blood knew that something had to change if the company was going to survive. The younger women sent Harriet back to the negotiating table, and when she failed once again, she finally listened to their arguments about switching to another publisher who would offer the company a more lucrative contract.

  They found it in Simon & Schuster. Bolstered by a promise of higher royalties, the Syndicate signed with their new partner to publish all future books in the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew series (the Dana Girls series ended in 1979). S&S also wanted to host a blowout celebration for Nancy Drew’s fiftieth anniversary, which was coming up in 1980, a wise appeal to Harriet, who had been extremely disappointed that the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bobbsey Twins had come and gone in 1979 without much fanfare. Though the change was critical to the company’s continuation, according to one of the junior partners, “Harriet just absolutely held out for the longest time. She really did not want to make that move to Simon & Schuster or anybody else for that matter, because of this intense feeling of loyalty. Even as we were losing money.” Though Harriet planned to leave the books Grosset had already published with them, she failed to mention to her longtime publisher that she had sold the rights to all future titles to somebody else. When they heard the news, Grosset was furious with her. In a panic over the loss of their lucrative series, they filed a lawsuit for breach of contract and copyright infringement, eventually asking for $300 million in damages. In an article in Publishers Weekly, Harold Roth “said he regretted the necessity of the action in view of his company’s 75-year relationship with Stratemeyer and with Harriet Adams, one of the Syndicate’s partners. ‘The relationship has probably established a record of its kind in terms of durability in book publishing,’ Roth declared.” In public, Harriet announced that the Syndicate found Grosset’s behavior “shocking,” while Simon & Schuster called it “frivolously vindictive.” Privately, she was less stalwart.

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�I think in some way she just felt betrayed,” one of Harriet’s junior partners remembered. Still, “the fact of the matter was it [the arrangement with Grosset] was a bad deal and she had been taken advantage of.” Publishers Weekly agreed, noting that “in spite of multi-million dollar sales of Stratemeyer books, the Syndicate was never treated like best-selling authors by Grosset & Dunlap.”

  The court case was to go to trial in May of 1980, but until then the media would be treated to a steady diet of all Nancy Drew, all the time. With their massive marketing and sales departments ever more finely calibrated to the tastes and whims of young America, Simon & Schuster would be able to capitalize on the Nancy Drew name in a way that a smaller company like Grosset had never done, and they intended to start as soon as possible. If there was anyone in the country who hadn’t yet heard of the girl detective—admittedly an unlikely occurrence—the situation was about to be remedied. By the end of 1979, in addition to a commemorative boxed set of Bobbsey Twins books, Simon & Schuster had brought out new Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys titles in paperback for the first time ever. The first Nancy Drew, The Triple Hoax, was set in New York and Mexico, and its bright blue cover featured a Nancy as modern as the turquoise miniskirt she wore during her adventures. In addition to the new books, word of a “large party” on Nancy’s fiftieth birthday and press interviews with Harriet for the occasion percolated through the publishing world like rumors of a juicy affair.

  Starting in February of 1980, a veritable landslide of press about the anniversary hit newsstands everywhere. Much of it continued along the same lines as the feminist-slanted coverage of the 1960s and ’70s, further cementing Nancy as the thinking woman’s detective. “A model of women’s liberation long before the time for that particular idea had come, blue-eyed, titian-haired Nancy is independent, resourceful, a leader not only of men but of women, girls, and boys, too,” said Good Housekeeping. “She is, in fact, much like her creator—an 87-year-old great-grandmother, writer, world traveler—and astute businesswoman—named Harriet Adams.” Many of the pieces invoked the story of an eleven-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and molested several years earlier and escaped through the large taillight opening of her attacker’s trunk after removing the light itself. The officer on the case had told reporters, “She’s read something like 45 Nancy Drew books. That seems to have prepared her mind to deal with the situation and to escape.” They noted that first daughter Amy Carter and bright, peppy Mary Tyler Moore were fans of the series and quoted a modest Harriet: “I think my father would be absolutely amazed at what’s happened. I doubt that he thought anyone would carry on.” By now Harriet’s standard story was that Edward had died leaving behind only drafts of the first three Nancy Drews, and that she had taken on the series—as well as the whole company—single-handedly from there, rewriting those rudimentary manuscripts, “making Nancy a bit more polite and respectful,” and never once looking back.

  Out in Iowa City, notice of the publicity free-for-all was being taken. “I thought you might be interested in this AP story,” a woman in the University of Iowa’s office of public information wrote in a memo to Frank Paluka, the librarian from the Iowa Authors Collection who had first contacted Mildred in the 1960s. “I don’t see how Adams can get away with these blatant lies. What can be done? Have you heard from OUR Carolyn Keene lately?” Paluka sent a copy of the article on to Mildred, who wrote back with a bit of interesting news. “Many thanks for the Nancy Drew publicity shot on Mrs. Adams. This was the Syndicate’s latest blanketing of the country with a syndicated article, seemingly to establish in the minds of readers that Mrs. Adams is the author of the Nancy Drew books. Immediately thereafter, she was put under oath in connection with Grosset’s litigation, and, at least as I was notified by phone from New York, acknowledged that I, not she, wrote all of the early books. She was especially tripped up by the first three, which for a time, she claimed were written by her father, Edward Stratemeyer . . . I understand I am the only remaining ghost still alive, as the author who wrote the Hardy Boys for her died last year.” The case, she went on, was to come to trial in a few months, and she had supplied Grosset’s lawyers with some letters between her and Harriet and a few other Syndicate-related materials she had to help bolster their story.

  But before the trial came the anniversary. Nancy Drew turned fifty with as much glitz and glamour as a film actress at a premiere. In spite of Judy Blume books, video games, MTV, and all the other distractions that had cropped up over the course of her existence, she was still a star. On April 16, 1980, Simon & Schuster threw a party fit for fictional royalty at New York City’s chichi Harkness House on Fifth Avenue, “with honored guest Harriet Adams (Carolyn Keene).” In addition to “some terribly serious contemporary writers,” the five hundred guests included Mayor Ed Koch, Bette Davis, Barbara Walters (“Seems to me I read all of them”); Joan Mondale (“I was crazy about them”); Fran Lebowitz (“she, for one, said she still reads Nancy Drew”); Beverly Sills (“I loved them. She had a car and she was pretty and to us kids in Brooklyn, that was sophisticated”); and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“I liked Nancy Drew, yes. She was adventuresome, daring, and her boyfriend was a much more passive type than she was”).

  After passing the blue roadster parked out front, attendees had to enter the party via a “cave of chilling, pre-recorded screams. The only defense was a mini-flashlight, given to each cave stroller as a party favor.” A full cast of characters, including a 1930 Nancy and a 1980 Nancy, Ned Nickerson, Bess, George, Hannah, and a dastardly assortment of criminals, decoys, police, and mystics roamed the four-floor party. “For of course,” the writer for the Washington Post deadpanned, “the party had a plot. Every hour a loudspeaker broadcast a clue . . . around midnight, the butler offered the bass player a crème de menthe, and when he declined; the butler brushed the band member’s lapels, and in so doing, removed his emerald stick pin and dropped it into the liqueur. Then the butler sort of pussyfooted across the floor. Halfway, Nancy Drew and Ned Nickerson surrounded him and cried, ‘The Butler did it.’”

  Harriet was in mystery heaven. When a reporter asked her about the impending lawsuit, she simply shrugged it off: “I don’t see any reason for it,” she said. “It’s taken a fabulous amount of time, which interrupts my writing.”

  But a few weeks later, reality hit, and she found herself in the Federal Courthouse in downtown Manhattan. The preceding days of deposition had already taken a toll on her—she was eighty-seven and not in the best of health—and on May 27, 1980, the opening day of what would be a five-day trial, she got another jolt. Seventy-four-year-old Mildred Wirt Benson, whom she had not seen for almost thirty years, appeared in the courtroom to testify. She had been brought in from Ohio—in what turned out to be a self-defeating move by Grosset—to explain that she had written the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories and other Syndicate titles from 1929 to 1953. Upon seeing Mildred, whom she was not expecting and did not recognize without an introduction, Harriet uttered a single, amazed sentence: “I thought you were dead.”

  HARRIET’S REACTION was not, perhaps, as catty as it sounded. After all, the era of the first Nancy Drew books was as bygone as the cloche hats and kid gloves that had accompanied her fashionable entry into the world. Benson must have seemed like a ghost to her former employer, an envoy from Harriet Adams’s early years in business. Furthermore, Mildred’s presence was far from the vengeful act it might have seemed. Just by chance, around the time that the lawsuit had been filed, a small old-time publisher called Platt & Munk, which now owned the rights to Mildred’s Penny Parker series from the 1930s and ’40s, had been bought by Grosset & Dunlap. An editor at Grosset wrote to Mildred to see if she was interested in revising Penny Parker for reissue, no doubt looking for a way to fill the gap if Grosset lost Nancy Drew. When Mildred wrote back to say yes (though the project never came to fruition), she had mentioned something of her interest in the pending lawsuit. “As you no doubt know, I wrote all of the early Nancy originals, continuing until t
hey were established as big sellers at which time Mrs. Adams took them over completely. I sincerely hope that Grosset wins in any litigation and that the Syndicate finally pays for the privilege of benefiting from others’ work, without giving credit.” As she was clearly willing to talk by this time, rights and releases be damned, Grosset decided to call her in to testify, hoping she would somehow be able to help their case by talking about her work on Nancy Drew and other series, thereby proving that Harriet had not written them all and thus did not really own them.

  As the trial dragged on, the story of the Syndicate’s ambiguous writing process and both Mildred’s and Harriet’s attachment to Nancy Drew came out. Though she had admitted in earlier questioning that Mildred had written many of the manuscripts for the early Nancy Drew series, Harriet had become so identified with the sleuth in her own and the public’s minds that she was unable to square her previous statements with her emotions. “In the early books, I did not care for the way she treated her housekeeper, and so I made her and the housekeeper different,” she told the examining lawyer. “Was that during the time that Mrs. Wirt was doing the ghost writing for the Nancy Drew series?” he asked. “She was filling in from my outlines that I did,” Harriet answered, splitting hairs and conveniently forgetting that Edna had also written some of the first Nancy Drew outlines.