Girl Sleuth (35 page)

Though total sales of
The Secret of the Old Clock
passed one million in the spring of 1963, and sales of the series in the United States increased by another 36 percent in the following year, it was the sleuth's older fans, not her new ones, who were about to usher her, with enormous fanfare, into the swinging sixties. As the seventy million children born in the postwar baby boom began to reach adulthood in the early and mid-1960s, a second wave of feminism arose, fueled by intelligent, stalwart young women who discovered that they had something in common with their thirty- and forty-something cake-baking mothers after all: Nancy Drew. Having hit reading age before the revised books came out, they knew the same Nancy as the previous generation, and they loved her just as much. Unlike their mothers, though, they were determined not to forget what she had taught them.

She was first elevated to the status of activist icon in the summer of 1964, in the pages of
Mademoiselle
magazine, a paragon of modern young womanhood, which devoted twelve full pages to a nostalgic Nancy Drew fashion shoot complete with captions from various stories and a beautiful young TV star named Joanna Pettet as Nancy. “What better way to open MLLE's first mystery number than by revisiting the girl girls have adored for the past 34 years?” the article asked, before turning to photos of Nancy in everything from her trusty convertible to a tasteful nightgown, accompanied by Bess, George, Ned, Carson Drew, and the occasional spinster in need of rescue. There were no hot pants or revealing tops in sight, and though the feature certainly had its share of campy sensibility, it was overall a loving tribute to the girl sleuth with a few concessions to the here and now. Ned, the text
noted, “has become an exchange student at Chung Chi College, Hong Kong, and wants to go into the U.S. Intelligence service.” Coming just after the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination, there was certainly no more noble pursuit.

Harriet was thrilled to discover that Nancy's junior adorers had grown up and were now working for the media. “Again, may I say how much I enjoyed meeting you and being taken around to chat with my ex-fans?” she wrote to her contact at
Mademoiselle.
“I shall treasure particularly the comment, ‘Miss Keene, you have really made a great contribution to America.'” Writing in to the Wellesley alumni magazine that same year, Harriet could not suppress her great joy at having left a mark on her country's culture: “It is my hope that the real children in my life have permanently benefited from their actual or imaginary kinship with me and my fictional characters,” she wrote, taking credit for the entire series in one fell swoop.

Her Nancy was going strong, and the books Harriet wrote in the 1960s and '70s were full of the tidbits of educational information and good manners that she loved. In
The Clue of the Dancing Puppet,
published in 1962, Nancy proved that in spite of her revised self, she could still crack a case. Centered on a life-size dancing ballerina puppet that spins out, unassisted and only at night, onto the lawn of a couple who run an amateur theater group right outside River Heights—Bess, as giggly as ever, is a member—the story takes Nancy and her chums to the farm where the troupe performs. There, the husband of the frightened couple confesses, “That ghostly dancer is getting me down.” Almost immediately, as per the fast-paced formula that now governed all the books, Nancy gets knocked out by a mysterious bowling ball in the attic of the house and has to be put to bed with some chicken broth to recover—not the kind of treatment
she would ever have agreed to in the past. Nevertheless, she's still on the case. “You mean that someone sneaked up to the attic and deliberately knocked you out?” Bess asks her. “‘I'm inclined to think so,' Nancy said. ‘And I intend to find out who it was!'” Soon enough, the girls are rammed from behind while out in Nancy's convertible, which allows them to enlist the help of the local mechanic in tracking down just who it is that doesn't want them to discover the secret of the puppet. Thrown into the mix is another houseguest who walks around reciting suggestive lines from Shakespeare (“O, what may man within him hide. / Though angel on the outward side!”), all of which the girls have no trouble identifying, adding scholar to Nancy's already long list of talents; a vicious leading lady named Tammi Whitlock; a jewel theft; and several frightening episodes with masked men. “You're cool customers,” one of them says to Nancy and George. “But you won't keep so cool if you stay around here.” At one point Nancy is forced to take over Tammi's role in the play, which she does so brilliantly, it's suggested she give up sleuthing for acting.

But how could she? In
Dancing Puppet
alone, she gets to be “thunderstruck” and recite lines from
Henry
VI—after which she “beams” and “blushes” in a way she never would have before. She also gets to wear loafers instead of those pesky high heels—so much easier to step into when one has to run out across a dewy lawn to investigate the appearance of a creepy puppet. By story's end, the puppet has been revealed as the hiding place for a stash of stolen jewels, and the Shakespearean actor, no longer a suspect, ties up the bard with the mystery most satisfyingly by quoting some lines from
As You Like It:
“All the world's a stage, / And the men and women merely players,” he tells the girls, adding, “Has it ever occurred to you that people are really puppets in this world?”

The same feeling was starting to permeate the world outside River Heights as well, which was becoming more complicated by the hour, it seemed. The sixties were transforming every aspect of American culture from music to clothes to politics, and women were at the forefront of many of the changes. In November of 1961 fifty thousand housewives had organized “Women Strike for Peace” to protest the ongoing militarism and nuclear proliferation of the cold war. The strikers were “perfectly ordinary looking women, clad in sundresses and pushing baby carriages,” marveled a report in
Newsweek.
“They looked like women you would see . . . shopping at the village market, or attending PTA meetings.” That same year, President Kennedy appointed the Commission on the Status of Women, with Eleanor Roosevelt as honorary chair, which eventually led to the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Though the group decided that an Equal Rights Amendment was not necessary for the time being, it was the first acknowledgment on the part of the government that women's issues mattered. Women, as
Harper's Magazine
noted in 1962, were “ardently determined to extend their vocation beyond the kitchen, bedroom and nursery.” In 1963 a poster advertising a public appearance by Betty Friedan challenged, “What kind of woman are you?”

As the decade progressed, the culture only seemed to shift faster and faster. The percentage of married women who worked had hit 30 percent in 1960—double the number in 1940—and it kept growing. While Nancy was going on an African safari in
The Spider Sapphire Mystery
(1968), the Vietnam War raged and the student movement that cropped up to oppose it became, in the words of one historian, “the final ingredient for the rebirth of feminism.” Within the movement, a kind of “macho radicalism” prevailed, and women were fed up with it. The call for revolution went out across campuses and cities nationwide, and, in the words of radical feminist Charlotte Bunch, the personal became political.

In a split that echoed the divide between feminists of the 1920s and the generation that came after them, the women's lib movement divided into two camps: the radical feminists, who wanted to dismantle what they viewed as a patriarchal class system and saw themselves as a single, politically oppressed unit; and the less militant groups, like NOW (National Organization for Women), which had been founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan and others to press for “integration, not separation, and reform, not revolution.” As things heated up, protests took many forms. One of the more memorable ones occurred in 1968, when members of the Women's Liberation Front threw their bras, girdles, and other symbols of oppressive female beauty standards into a trash can outside the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. Despite the fact that they were being monitored by FBI anti-riot agents, they managed to get into the pageant hall and create a ruckus loud enough to be heard at home by television audiences, shouting, “No More Miss America” and “Freedom for Women.” Young America ruled the culture, and it was not shy about making its myriad voices heard. The cover of the September 30, 1970, issue of
off our backs: a women's liberation biweekly
showed a woman on a motorcycle wearing a flak jacket and holding a baby in the crook of her arm.

While women in their twenties and thirties heralded the intrepid Nancy Drew of their youth, for young girls both the new books in the series and the revised old ones (of which there were nineteen by 1969) served as the antidote to everything happening off the page. Nancy's car was fashionable, her hair was now in a neat pageboy, and she had lost the gloves and hats of her
early days, but she was still a steady, stable influence. “When you have to top last year's sales figures, isn't it nice to know there's a new Nancy Drew,” ran the copy at the top of a 1968 Grosset & Dunlap sales pitch. The sleuth—“titian-haired, still with those twinkling, serious, interesting blue eyes . . . [wearing] double-knit suits, stretch pants and stacked heels”—became the subject of more and more admiring articles that marveled at how she continued to defy the counterculture with such success. “Remember how you used to thrill to the adventures of Nancy Drew?” a piece in the
Chicago Tribune
teased. “She's still around and still a best seller.” Noting that Ned had managed, after all this time, only to be promoted to “special friend,” the writer then pointed out that the cranky librarian she had interviewed, who disapproved of the books, was, in fact, “the only female below the age of 50 who didn't tell us: ‘Of
course
I read Nancy Drew when I was little.'” Nancy had successfully made the transition from the Atomic Age to the Age of Aquarius, and she had done it her way. “The dauntless, bewitching girl detective is still happening,” wrote another admirer. “In a world of gaudy exhibitionism, subteens find refuge in Nancy's enviable, secure, conservative world . . . Like the Land of Oz, Nancy Drew Land is in another time dimension.”

Both of these articles, as well as several others in the late 1960s, identified Harriet as Carolyn Keene. She had been referring to herself that way for some time, especially when she thought it gave her more authority with her editors (“Your inference that I do not know how to construct a good mystery . . . is a bitter dose to ask Carolyn Keene to swallow,” she wrote to Anne Hagan at one point), but only now had she consented to such a revelation in public. She had done it for the simplest reason possible: She was tired of other people trying to claim the name for themselves.

She had had another nasty round with Walter Karig, or rather the ghost of Walter Karig since he had died in 1956, when a reader who wrote in to the
Sacramento Bee
in California was erroneously told that Karig was Carolyn Keene. (“Mr. Karig never was Carolyn Keene,” she wrote back, equally erroneously. “As for proof of my authorship of the books, Mr. Karig has been dead for many years!”) The biggest blow, however, and the decisive one for Harriet, had been the 1966 publication of a book by Howard Garis's son, Roger Garis. Called
My Father Was Uncle Wiggily,
the book was a harmless, rather self-involved memoir, but Garis did imply that his parents had been essentially responsible for the Bobbsey Twins and that his father had written the Tom Swift books from scratch. Howard Garis himself had died in 1962, so he was not around to prove or disprove any of his son's claims for him. “Needless to say I would like to go to court about this,” Harriet wrote to a friend in the business, “but our attorneys say one has to prove either libel or financial harm. They also tell us that the book probably will not have much of a sale and perhaps it would be better to let the whole thing die a natural death.” But she could not help a bit of petty retaliation. “I am also enclosing a copy of material sent to Miss Elisabeth Stevens [sic], who is writing an article on the
BOBBSEY TWINS
for Life magazine,” she wrote to another friend. “It may or may not get published, but if it should be, and Roger Garis sees it, I am wondering what his reaction will be. On purpose I've left out his parents as among the ghost writers.” She also wrote to Grosset & Dunlap's publicity department, enclosing a complimentary article from 1966. “It will give you an idea of the kind of publicity we are permitting. For years we kept the ghost-writing angle a secret because children liked to think of an author as one individual without complications. But now, with Roger Garis's unwarranted claims for
his parents, I decided we would have to break down and tell the true story.”

There was another reason why Harriet threw herself into this new campaign with such zeal. The year before Roger Garis published his book, Russell Adams had died, leaving her bereft. As ever, she was determined to work through her pain. One of her employees at the time remembered that Harriet seemed to have “decided she was going to have a new life and start over. She [was] not one to . . . feel sorry for herself. By her behavior, it was evident that she just decided that she was not going to die because her husband died.” Having lost her partner, the man who had supported her in her unorthodox decision to take over the Syndicate and for thirty-five years after, Harriet turned as much to her fictional family as her real one for comfort.

Suddenly she was everywhere as articles began to appear like wildfire. The press, which had long wanted to reveal the secrets of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, was now thrilled to get the real story behind the rising “it” girl of the 1960s women's lib movement, Nancy Drew. The opportunity to interview the woman who they thought had dreamed her up was too good to pass up. “
THIS GRANNY MASTERMINDS THE THRILLS AND SPILLS
,” ran one headline. In a piece in the
New York Times,
Harriet, by now almost eighty, held forth about her books from a rocking chair in her Maplewood living room. “‘They don't have hippies in them,' she said in an interview in her 14-room home here. ‘And none of the characters have love affairs or get pregnant or take dope.' Mrs. Adams, writing under assorted male and female pseudonyms, is the mastermind of several mystery adventure series that have been thrilling and chilling children for years.” Harriet, it seemed, was taking credit for everything from the Rover Boys and the Dana Girls to Nancy Drew. Never mind that many of these series had been started when she was just a child, or that she had had help in one form or another with all of them—not least from Edna. This was her moment, and she seized it.