Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  “I wanted to know whether or not this change vis-à-vis her relationship with the housekeeper had occurred while Mrs. Wirt was doing writing on the series,” the lawyer explained. “Not the way Mrs. Wirt wrote them. But I edited them,” Harriet equivocated, admitting that Mildred had written the books even as she tried to take full responsibility for them. “I also felt that she was too bossy, too positive . . . there are places in early books where Nancy spoke to people too sharply . . . So I changed her.” Arguing for a legacy as much as creation rights, she then added, “I think after I changed her is the way she has been thought of for years and years.”

  Mildred claimed just as passionately during her own testimony that she had created the Nancy that so many women loved and remembered. “In the course of writing the first seven books, did you attempt to develop the character of Nancy?” an attorney asked her. “Yes, it came naturally, I think. In each book it developed a little more . . . It’s just like life, a character is always evolving. So long as you’re writing, you’re contributing to your character.” Finally, Mildred admitted that perhaps she cared a bit more about old Nancy than she had previously been willing to let on. “I didn’t intend . . . to come until just a few days ago,” she announced to the judge. “After all that wave of publicity I decided to come.” She was referring to the stories that had come out on Nancy Drew’s fiftieth anniversary, the ones, as she put it, “about the fact that someone was a writer of those books.” Even the editor of her own newspaper had left a copy on her desk without comment, humiliating her and making her feel as though he took her for a liar when he read that Harriet Adams, not Mildred Benson, was Carolyn Keene. The story, she said, “just flooded the whole countryside . . . My friends are sending them to me and scribbling on them ‘How come?’ That’s the time I thought if I’m ever going to tell the story of Nancy Drew, this is it.”

  Tell it, she did. But rather than trying to take full credit for anything, she tried to explain that just as there had been two Carolyn Keenes (and a few interlopers like Karig along the way), there had simply been two Nancys. “Mrs. Adams’s style of writing Nancy is not the style I had, and I imagine that things I wrote in there did not hit her as Nancy. I mean, the Nancy that I created is a different Nancy from what Mrs. Adams has carried on,” she said. “There was a beginning conflict in what is Nancy. My Nancy would not be Mrs. Adams’s Nancy. Mrs. Adams was an entirely different person; she was more cultured and she was more refined. I was probably a rough and tumble newspaper person who had to earn a living, and I was out in the world. That was my type of Nancy. Nancy was making her way in life and trying to compete and have fun. We just had two different kinds of Nancys.” All she wanted was credit where it was due. “No, I’m not angry at them [the Syndicate],” she told the judge, falling back on the tenets of journalism that had served her so well. “I don’t resent anything. I think if there are misstatements of fact, they should be corrected. Because when a statement is made wrong and is repeated over and over and over again, it becomes firmly entrenched in the mind of the reading public as truth.”

  When it was all over, the judge, as Mildred had suspected, found in favor of the Syndicate and Simon & Schuster, which walked away with the very lucrative rights to take three of America’s bestselling series into the rapidly expanding global marketplace. (Grosset & Dunlap was given the rights to publish only the hardcover versions of the pre-1979 Nancy Drews, Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, and Dana Girls, a sorry consolation prize in a world full of inexpensive paperbacks.) Mildred was satisfied, writing to Geoff Lapin: “Even if I didn’t get it across to the court, I know who wrote those books and set up the form which made them top sellers. I judge that the trial just about nailed the coffin lid in future sales, so perhaps we finally have heard the last of Nancy Drew.”

  It was wishful thinking on her part. “SKYROCKETING SALES PROMPT ACCELERATED EXPANSION OF NANCY DREW AND HARDY BOYS SERIES,” boomed a press release from Simon & Schuster in January of 1981. Over one million copies of the new paperback additions to the series had been sold in less than a year, and as a result, the publisher was planning to add four more Nancys and four more Hardys to its list in upcoming seasons. Nostalgia had also created high prices for first editions and other memorabilia, like lunch boxes and Halloween costumes that had come out around the time of the failed TV series.

  ON March 27, 1982, while watching The Wizard of Oz on television at her farm, Harriet Adams died, very swiftly, of heart failure. The response was immediate and overwhelming. On and on went the obituaries: “THE NANCY DREW LEGACY”; “GROWING UP FEMALE WITH NANCY DREW”; “FAREWELL TO THE WOMAN BEHIND NANCY DREW”; “HARRIET ADAMS, CREATOR OF NANCY DREW.” Many of them also noted her devotion to educating her readers—as per all the Shakespeare in The Clue of the Dancing Puppet—and her great zest for life. Above and beyond anything else, the obituaries made it clear that regardless of the two different Nancys Mildred had brought to light at the trial, the sleuth would never have survived in any form without Harriet’s devoted guardianship. Simon & Schuster ran perhaps the most poignant ad of all, which said, simply: “We mourn the passing of a great lady.”

  They did not mourn her so much, however, that they did not keep their eye on the bottom line. In 1984 the Stratemeyer Syndicate was bought outright by Simon & Schuster. The little company had been damaged financially by the cost of the lawsuit and other mishaps—like the Playboy ads—and was now running at a loss. At Harriet’s death, it had been split fifty-fifty between her three remaining children, who were inactive partners much as Edna had been, and her three junior partners. When the children realized that no one in the family was in a position to take over, they agreed, at last, to sell. On July 31 of that year, Simon & Schuster paid $4,710,000 for the honor and privilege of publishing, forever more, the century’s most famous young detectives. They now had total control over the future of the original series and any spin-offs they could come up with.

  “Juvenile publishing is a key area for expansion and development,” said the company’s chairman, “and I cannot think of a more auspicious way to grow than by acquiring Stratemeyer—a remarkable company . . . These books are true pieces of Americana, and I’m proud to bring them to the company. We’ll help ensure that future generations of children can lose themselves in the adventures of these characters just as we did.” The vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster was less dewy-eyed about his new series. “We have to breathe new life into them,” he told a reporter for the Wilson Library Bulletin. “The characters are showing signs of age and need updating. Nancy, for example, doesn’t reflect the reality of 1980s girlhood.”

  By the time S&S launched the new Nancy Drew Files series two years later, they found it “necessary to give her a complete makeover,” one more time. Now, however, Harriet was not around to control the changes, and so they included many things she would no doubt have disapproved of, like a flashy car, designer jeans, credit cards, and even the occasional foray to a rock concert—though only for the purposes of solving a mystery involving record piracy. “Nancy Drew,” predicted one writer, “will now skillfully maneuver a Mustang into another exciting adventure—and another generation of readers’ hearts.”

  The first volume of the Nancy Drew Files, titled Secrets Can Kill, was published on June 1, 1986. Clocking in at 153 pages, its cover showed a distinctly eighties Nancy with feathered hair and tight jeans, and its format was what Simon & Schuster called “rack-size”—larger than the “digest size” paperbacks it had been publishing since 1979—to appeal to older readers. The smaller books were geared toward ages eight to eleven, whereas the new Files series would “reflect the interests and concerns of today’s teens.” From the very first pages of Secrets Can Kill—the plot involved Nancy going undercover at Bedford High to investigate a series of crimes—it was clear that not only Nancy, but Bess and George, had arrived in the present, and that S&S had identified “the interests and concerns of today’s teens” primarily as boys and clothes and
the kind of superficial issues that the Nancy of old would never have considered:

  Nancy studied herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw. The tight jeans looked great on her long, slim legs and the green sweater complemented her strawberry-blond hair. Her eyes flashed with the excitement of a new case. She was counting on solving the little mystery fairly easily. In fact, Nancy thought it would probably be fun! “Right now,” she said to her two friends, “the hardest part of this case is deciding what to wear.”

  “That outfit, definitely,” Bess said, sighing with envy at Nancy’s slender figure. “You’ll make the guys absolutely drool.”

  “That’s all she needs,” George joked. “A bunch of freshmen following her around like underage puppies.”

  “Oh, yeah? Have you seen the captain of the Bedford football team?” Bess rolled her eyes. “They don’t call him ‘Hunk’ Hogan for nothing!”

  Bess and George were Nancy’s best friends, and they were cousins, but that was about all they had in common. Blondhaired Bess was bubbly and easygoing, and always on the lookout for two things: a good diet and a great date. So far she hadn’t found either. She was constantly trying to lose five pounds, and she fell in and out of love every other month.

  George, with curly dark hair and a shy smile, was quiet, with a dry sense of humor and the beautifully toned body of an athlete. George liked boys as much as Bess did, but she was more serious about love. “When I fall,” she’d say, “it’s going to be for real.”

  By the end of the story, Nancy has solved the thefts, but she has also “thrilled to the touch” of another boy. Though the vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster’s juvenile department claimed that the company had “extrapolated the new Nancy Drew out of the old,” it was clear that a new era had begun.

  Gone were the chaste picnics, the worry about being invited to the Emerson College dance. The tension between Nancy’s sleuthing and her boyfriend was now front and center. The back cover copy for Nancy Drew Files number eight, Two Points to Murder, pitted them directly against each other: “All Nancy has to do is catch the practical joker who’s terrorizing the Emerson College basketball team—the team Ned plays for. But then the joke turns deadly—and Nancy’s main suspect is Ned’s best friend! . . . But if she solves this case, can she hold onto the boy she loves?” As one reviewer of the new series put it, “It is the 1980s. Men can wear jewelry. Women can run for vice-president. And Nancy Drew can finally feel tingly when she gets kissed.”

  And this time there were plans for more than just the books, which already had a hefty budget behind them. The vice president and director of marketing at Simon & Schuster told Publishers Weekly: “We’re trying to promote a lifestyle.” It would include the offering of “clothing, accessory and cosmetics licenses to manufacturers. The fashion collections, called Nancy Drew’s River Heights, USA, will be aimed at 12- to 18-year-old girls.”

  But even as Nancy Drew made her way into the 1980s, Mustang convertible and all, a question was looming ever larger in the minds of fans everywhere. Now that Harriet Adams was gone, who was Carolyn Keene?

  “THE DAY THE OBITUARY of Harriet Stratemeyer Adams appeared, Millie Wirt Benson rubbed her wrinkled forehead and frowned. A slight woman with graying hair, Mrs. Benson knew history would come bubbling up again and there wasn’t much she could do about it.” Less than a month after Harriet’s death, an intrepid reporter with a mind to getting the truth on the public record had found Mildred out, and she was none too happy about it. “She fears publicity,” his piece continued. “Mrs. Benson turns down most interviewers and agreed to talk to the Associated Press ‘just to set the record straight.’” (She had already nixed a profile in Life magazine.) Much to her chagrin, it was only the beginning. Thanks to the efforts of Geoff Lapin, the Iowa Authors Collection, and a group of other devoted fans, Mildred Benson was becoming a star as big as Harriet had been—as big as Nancy Drew herself. Eventually, she gave in to it. First came a short notice in Ohio magazine, then a few more newspaper pieces. By 1985 the Iowa Alumni Review ran a tribute that left no doubt as to who was the new reigning Carolyn Keene: “Before Geraldine Ferraro, before Gloria Steinem, before Jane Fonda—there was Nancy Drew . . . And before Nancy Drew, there was Mildred Wirt Benson . . . creator of the Nancy Drew series.”

  Two years earlier she had breathed a sigh of relief to Frank Paluka about the end of the trial and its aftermath—“this should mark the end of my Nancy Drew tribulations”—and assumed, perhaps because she understood the power neither of modern marketing nor the name Nancy Drew, that once Grosset and Simon & Schuster sold out of their current stock, Nancy would be gone for good. Now she was more than happy to hold forth about her newly acknowledged creation: “It seems to me that Nancy was popular, and remains so, primarily because she personifies the dream image which exists within most teenagers,” she told an interviewer in 1985.

  “She never lost an athletic contest and was far smarter than adults with whom she associated. Leisure time was spent living dangerously. She avoided all household tasks, and indeed, might rate as a pioneer of Women’s Lib. In a way, she started a movement.” But, perhaps because the word wasn’t coined until decades after she wrote the Nancy Drew series, Benson said she doesn’t consider herself a feminist. “But I do believe in equality,” she says emphatically. “Which, by the way, women still do not have!”

  Good-bye, Harriet; hello, Mildred.

  Before long, reporters desperate to fill the Carolyn Keene void opened up by Harriet’s death pounced on Mildred. Nobody seemed to care that she was not currently writing the series. It only mattered that she had been there back at the beginning. After all, the women reading magazines and newspapers in the 1980s knew the old Nancy, not the one in Jordache jeans and eyeliner. When the story about Mildred being the true, original Carolyn Keene had finally been reported to death—the only thing better than being able to report on Harriet as Keene was being able to report on the idea that she had lied about it—the press looked over the events of Mildred’s life again and began to proclaim her not just the real Carolyn Keene, but the real Nancy Drew. In 1991 the Smithsonian made it official when it asked Mildred for some of her papers and her fabled Underwood typewriter, which it planned to include in its Americana collection along with Judy Garland’s red shoes from The Wizard of Oz. She had been elected to the Iowa School of Journalism Hall of Fame and wrote repeatedly to Geoff Lapin to thank him for his efforts on her behalf. “If I am not able to tell you later on, please remember that I always will be grateful to you for taking the lead in establishing that I was the original writer of Nancy Drew. To have won against such great odds . . . was indeed amazing.”

  But a strange thing was starting to happen. Just as Mildred had once been written out of history, Harriet was now being sidelined in favor of the spunky newspaperwoman from Iowa. Even when a reporter understood the complicated story of who had authored what and when, Harriet still lost out, thanks to what a writer for the Atlantic Monthly referred to, in a 1991 article, as “the Great Purge.” Where she had once been heralded for keeping Nancy alive, Harriet, when she was included at all in the story of Nancy Drew, was now there only to play the villain. “She directed that all the books in the company’s . . . Nancy Drew series (whose author of record is Carolyn Keene—initially Adams herself, it once was thought, but in reality a woman named Mildred A. Wirt [Benson], who is now eighty-six and lives in the Midwest) be thoroughly revised,” the Atlantic Monthly piece fumed. Nevermind that the author was not aware of Grosset’s role in the revisions. As Mildred herself had acknowledged in court, once the public reads something in print enough times, even if it is wrong, it becomes the truth. In the media at least, the Mildred camp began to take the lead.

  The occasion for this article was the reissue, by a small Massachusetts press called Applewood Books, of what would come to be known as the “original text” Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books in facsimile editions. “Antiques though these novels be, they deserve a s
econd look,” the Atlantic writer opined, “because they’re richer than the versions of the same books now in print.” He was not alone. “Nancy is no longer the intrepid, independent detective of the original novels,” pitched in that old standby Ms. in 1992. “The teenage detective who was once a symbol of spunky female independence has slowly been replaced by an image of prolonged childhood, currently evolving toward a Barbie doll detective.” In the opinion of the writer, Nancy’s latest update was simply more of the same. Ms. had been disappointed in the revisions of the 1950s and ’60s, too, and the magazine’s writers had not forgotten the earlier betrayal. Though Harriet was congratulated for removing the guns and racial prejudices that were so unpalatable, she was taken to task for, as this writer put it, “constricting Nancy’s independence.” As far as critics were concerned, Simon & Schuster’s efforts to modernize her had only made her worse.

  The renewed interest in the 1930s and ’40s rendition of Nancy overwhelmed Mildred, who, while she was glad to have been acknowledged at last, thought too much was being made of the issue she had once testified about so passionately. “Mildred Wirt Benson, arguably the person most responsible for Nancy Drew’s success, couldn’t care less about the hoopla surrounding the reissuing of the early Nancy Drew books,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 1991. By then she was, according to another article, “bemused at this group of grown-ups who were . . . spending their time and tremendous sums of money tracking down her old books, who were wasting their time when they could be out there DOING something, instead of paying homage to a dusty relic like Nancy Drew.”