Girl Sleuth (33 page)

They were also buying books in record numbers. “Even the proudest firms are titans leaning on tots,” wrote
Time
magazine's book reporter in 1957. “At Grosset & Dunlap children's books comprise two-thirds of the firm's publishing operation; 35% of Random House's sales volume is estimated to be in juveniles; fully $13 million of Simon & Schuster's $18 million gross last year came from books for kids.” In a world this receptive to children's literature, Harriet and her pet characters hit their highest sales numbers for more than a decade and even expanded into new areas. The first edition of the Nancy Drew board game appeared in 1957, complete with miniature roadsters for game pieces and a stack of cards that players drew from as they tried to solve mysteries while traveling to many of the locations named in Nancy Drew books. Nancy Drew and other Syndicate books were also being translated and sold overseas again. In Finland Nancy was known as “Paula”; in Sweden her name was changed to “Kitty Drew.” The United Kingdom and Denmark left her as Nancy, and France, where she was published under the name “Alice Roy”—possibly because the French had a difficult time pronouncing the name “Nancy Drew”—proved to be a huge market.

Harriet felt more strongly than ever that she had to protect the integrity of her characters by being the sole person to authorize their use in any way. “I am constantly made aware of the fact that the publishers, producers and manufacturers are more interested in dollars and cents than in following any established precepts or formulas which I and those working for me insist upon in order to keep the books and corollary rights up to the high ethical standards to which they have always held,” she complained to Edna. “I have continual arguments along these lines with company officers, editors, and artists who are greatly swayed by present day trends toward gun play, the shading of the truth by characters, and deviations from the factual.”

Nevertheless, her characters had survived, and Harriet herself had passed a milestone: the twenty-fifth anniversary as head of the Syndicate. Just how much she had relied on her own counsel when she insisted on taking over the business back in 1930 was brought home to her in a letter of congratulations from Hugh Juergens of Grosset & Dunlap. “As I sat there I couldn't help thinking what the old gentleman would have thought of the picture of that G&D mob around that festive board with his daughter picking up the check,” he wrote after a celebratory party. “Just the same, I think he would have been rather proud to see how well the Syndicate he had built up was being carried on under his daughter's administration.”

There was one person, however, who refused to fete Harriet. Despite the fact that royalties were higher than ever, Edna was
still refusing to authorize a higher salary for her sister. Her husband had passed away recently, and her daughter was grown, leaving her with even more time to obsess over her income and to heckle Harriet over even the tiniest things. “Better watch the office expenditure,” she wrote to her sister. “Last year you certainly went to town with new items—I'll not agree to any such new gadgets this year, so watch out.”

Harriet tried one last time to appeal to her sister's conscience. “In your recent letter you mentioned Christmas, and the thought came to me that the best Christmas gift which you could give me would be a change in attitude towards your sister,” she wrote. Then, the decades of bad blood were aired at last as she cut straight to the heart of Edna's years of suspicion and resentment.

 

Perhaps you are not aware of how you have hurt me over a long period of years, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Back in 1942, soon after I had suffered a tragic sorrow [Sunny's death], you told me that in my whole life I had never done anything for you. Since in my own mind I felt that both Russell and I had done a great deal for you, I told you a few truths. The matter was entirely a personal one and had nothing to do with business, yet I heard from two relatives that you said I had forced you out of the office because I wanted to get the business away from you. That was utterly ridiculous of course. Since that time you have harassed me by suspicious remarks in letters, but even worse by asking secretaries to spy on me . . . You have been away from the office for fourteen years. In that time I have built up the business from an annual income of 20,000 in 1942 to 115,000 so far this year, yet no recognizance of this has been taken by you.

 

She implored Edna to listen to her. “Now Edna, I bear you no malice for the rift and the hurts, and I hope you will forgive me
for any hurts I have caused you. Let's make this a happy Christmas! What say?”

Edna said no. The following year, Harriet tried to buy her sister out of her share of the Syndicate for $75,000. Edna said no to that, too, and as the decade wound down, the two of them remained locked in disagreement. Harriet simply stopped consulting her unless it was absolutely necessary and focused instead on her work. But she could not hold on to her detective forever. Before long, Nancy Drew would get even further away from Harriet than the European continent, and there was nothing she could do about it.

A
FTER FORTY-FIVE YEARS
of dominance, series books finally began to decline in the late 1950s. Television was just on the cusp of becoming the number-one entertainment for kids, and the competition was too stiff for all of them—all of them, that is, except for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. “Offhand I would say that the continuing volume of sales on your books is little short of miraculous,” John O'Connor, the president of Grosset & Dunlap, wrote to Harriet in 1958. In 1959 the year's sales for the thirty-six volumes in the Nancy Drew series would be close to one and a half million, a number that was almost unfathomable considering that the trend in children's books since the end of the war had been toward realism. With new fears about communism and nuclear bombs in the air, so the theory went, fantasy had fallen by the wayside. Books had to describe “the ‘here and now' . . . in which nothing happens except what happens every day, from alarm clock to applesauce,” as one disapproving writer put it. “The fad reached some kind of climax,” he groused, “when [an eminent psychiatrist] declared that in the atomic age
it is wrong to teach children to believe in Santa Claus on the ground that they will refuse to ‘think realistically' when they grow up.” Newly attuned to the angst of their generation and worried about the future as they hid under their school desks during airraid drills, teenagers wanted books that dealt with their most delicate and all-consuming problems.

So it was that by the mid-1960s, even Nancy and the Hardy Boys were slipping down from the juvenile Olympus atop which they had reigned for so long. Though Harriet's royalties were still pouring in, it had more to do with the higher price of her books than actual sales numbers. In addition, there was the issue of content. As far back as 1948, concerned mothers and fathers had been writing in to Grosset & Dunlap about the prejudice and racism they saw scattered throughout the Syndicate's books, in the form of uneducated dialect for all the foreign or non-Caucasian characters and villains who were invariably from these same two groups. Harriet had been infuriated by the charges at the time, writing to her latest editor at Grosset that she and her employees had gone over the Hardy Boys book in question,
The Hidden Harbor Mystery,
“very thoroughly, to see what kind of a case your ‘conscientious objector' might have on the subject of race prejudice. As to the ‘Jewish' angle, I am sure the woman has no case at all. The word ‘Jew' is not mentioned on Page 156 nor anywhere else in the book. A ‘second-hand man' who says ‘Vell' instead of ‘Well' could be a German, a Scandinavian, or a native of any of various other countries.” Oblivious as she was to new sensitivities following the Holocaust, Harriet was even more naive when it came to racial prejudice closer to home. “On the subject of Negroes, the woman has more of a case,” she admitted, “but the whole story idea revolves around ‘Can't a Negro be an evil-doer in the story?'” Of course,
The Hidden Harbor Mystery
did much
more than just use a black man as its villain. In an act of misguided self-defense, Harriet herself listed the instances that “might have a bearing on race prejudice, etc.,” in a memo she mailed off with her letter. They included a “mention of a burly, thick-set Negro who puts his feet up on seat of a train car”; “mention of a young negro, badly dressed”; “more about the same Negro, Luke Jones. He is described in unfavorable terms”; “More about the nefarious colored man” and “scheming by colored folks.” Still, she insisted, none of these things added up to “give any child reader the idea all colored folks are bad.”

This was clearly a matter of opinion, and it was not the first time that Harriet's genteel manners failed to cover the racism so typical of her generation and class. That same year she had also hired a lawyer to prevent a vaudeville act from using the name Rover Boys in their show. While it was an issue of general infringement rather than who exactly was doing the infringing—as ever, she guarded the Syndicate properties fiercely—her letter to the lawyer that handled the case made plain the “soft racism” that passed for tolerance in her circles. “Thank you for your prompt and efficient handling of the case of ‘The Heirs of the Rover Boys vs. The Two Colored Vaudevillians,'” she wrote. “It is pleasant not to have to worry about the matter any longer. Although I have no desire to be allied with our Southern governors, I did come out boldly agin the negroes usurping white folks rights, didn't I?”

Harriet's reference was to the creation of the southern “Dixiecrat” party, a splinter group of the Democratic Party made up of southern delegates who opposed the adoption of new protections for minorities in Truman's civil rights platform. The buildup to the civil rights movement had begun with Truman's own 1946 Committee on Civil Rights, formed to ensure that black Americans did not lose the progress they had made during the Depression and World War II. In spite of the Dixiecrats' efforts—they ran Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their presidential candidate in 1948, and he won four southern states—by the mid-1950s the tide had turned. In 1954 the Supreme Court handed down the groundbreaking
Brown v. the Board of Education
decision. The following December in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus.

When, in the fall of 1957, the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High School in their hometown, to the dismay of thousands and accompanied by the National Guard, the civil rights movement gained a public teenaged face that energized it even further. Sit-ins at lunch counters followed, as did the creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Then in 1962 James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, setting off riots that forced President Kennedy to send in federal troops. The center of the plush, postwar world was beginning to crumble, and America's young men and women were helping it along. Harriet, meanwhile, was happy in East Orange with her safe and sane stories that also happened to be riddled with racism, guns, and outmoded clothing and cars. “The Syndicate is a challenge to me to spread happiness and good principles among the young people of the world,” she chirped, even as America's restless youth roamed in search of something much more earth-shattering than a new mystery.

Now complaints about prejudice in Syndicate books, laced with real anger, flowed in with greater frequency. In 1961 the very same Hardy Boys book that had prompted such a reaction in 1948 elicited another furious letter from a parent whose son had been assigned a book report on
The Hidden Harbor Mystery.
“It
had never occurred to me that you might still be ingraining the old race-riot type of fear that was prevalent in the thirties,” the woman fumed. “We are trying to raise our children to appreciate Negroes for their contributions; not to fear them because of their color . . . Temporarily we will not be buying any more of your series books. If, however, you can suggest any point in the Hardy Boys series after which this sort of prejudice does not appear, your advice would be appreciated.”

Luckily for such parents, Grosset & Dunlap had already decided it was time to take matters into their own hands. In 1958 they instituted a huge revision program designed to overhaul and reissue the early books in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. Eventually the rewriting would extend to the first thirty-four Nancys and the first thirty-eight Hardys. The news sent Harriet into a tizzy. “All of a sudden Grosset & Dunlap decided that these books were to be instantly revised because the plates were worn out and the stories antiquated and not in line with acceptable reading material for today's children (heros [sic] and heroines carrying guns, playing tricks on the police to outwit them, a drunken character, repetition of content, etc.),” she wrote to Edna. Though Harriet did not mention race in her letter, it was no doubt one of the biggest issues for Grosset & Dunlap. While girls might tolerate Nancy wearing a dress in situations where they would wear pants, if any more parents wrote in to say they would no longer buy series books, the financial ramifications would be enormous.