Girl Sleuth (40 page)

H
ARRIET'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 they 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.

“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.

O
N
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.”