Girl Sleuth (41 page)

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?

“T
HE 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 second 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.”

Then in 1993 the University of Iowa organized a Nancy Drew conference. A three-day extravaganza devoted to the girl sleuth and to Mildred, it was held in Iowa City that April. The media went wild—as Mildred remarked wryly in a letter to Geoff Lapin, having learned her lesson by this time, “Anything about Nancy Drew sells instantly.” Peter Jennings and ABC News chose her as their “Person of the Week.” “Recognition for this woman we
choose was a very long time in coming,” Jennings said at the start of the broadcast. Then Mildred appeared, every inch the hard-boiled author: “I didn't analyze things,” she informed Jennings pertly. “I just sat down at my typewriter and put a piece of paper in there and let 'er roll.” Also on the show were interviews with a series of girls who were devoted to Nancy: “She gets into a lot of trouble, but always gets out of it. I wish I could do that,” sighed one. “When my mother was very little, my grandma used to buy her all the Nancy Drew books, so it like . . . it runs through the family,” said another.

At the conference itself—which featured academic panels with names like “The Crack in the Cannon: The Nancy Drew Novels as Subversive Reading”; “Lesbian Code in the Nancy Drew Stories” (which outraged Mildred); and “Can This Relationship Be Saved” (about Nancy and Ned, of course)—the adult fans were no less doting. “One woman . . . said she had joined a police department, after drawing on Nancy Drew for inner strength to overcome her innate shyness, and later was able to investigate the mess left behind after a triple murder,” the
Chicago Tribune
reported. “Another said that, after a bad marriage, she had withdrawn to her bedroom ‘with all my old Nancy Drew mysteries and brought myself back together.'” The conference's keynote speaker, feminist literary scholar and mystery author Carolyn Heilbrun—who, the
Tribune
noted, “last year took early retirement as a professor of English at Columbia University to protest her department's treatment of women”—was less emotional about the sleuth but just as affecting. “Everybody perks up at her name, though few remember the plots or many of the details,” she said. “The pleasure comes from her autonomy, her taking events into her own hands.”

At a press conference with Mildred, the star of the show, the
venerated author refused to take the bait on a question about Harriet—“I think she took some of the spice out of them. But I don't think . . . never mind, that's enough”—and then denied that Nancy Drew had influenced her life in the way she had influenced so many other girls'. “No, I was the same. You can't change me—that's what they say at the office. They try. They've tried for a whole generation to change me and I am impossible. There's only two things I believe in—well, a few more things than that—but I believe in absolute honesty and honesty in journalism . . . and I believe in integrity.”

Perhaps that was why, stranded in Chicago's O'Hare Airport on her way to Iowa City, “carrying a red leather pocket book and wearing a crinkly plastic rain bonnet,” she had snapped, “I'm so sick of Nancy Drew I could vomit,” at the
New York Times
reporter who was traveling with her. True to form, she then tried to get the facts on the record correctly yet again, telling her captive audience, a woman “49 years her junior who spent her childhood addicted to Nancy Drew,” that she had never been bothered by giving up her rights to the stories. “The only thing that did [bother her], she said, ‘was a period when doubt was expressed that I'd written them.'” Then, in spite of her irritation—she was later annoyed that the reporter had included the vomit comment as well—she offered some helpful advice about writing a good story: “To the woman who has written more than 120 tales, today's plot was obvious,” the reporter recounted. “‘I'd tie this into being stranded here,' she said, ‘if you want some advice from an old hack.'”

Still writing for the
Blade
every week, Mildred was hardly a hack. Her column was called “On the Go,” and it covered the doings of elderly people who, like Mildred, had more going on in their lives than just golf and card games. There were also many
pieces on how outraged she was when people suggested to her that she, too, might be old. Her resistance to joining the senior set was so ingrained that one day in 1998, when she was ninety-three years old, she dropped by the desk of a much younger fellow reporter and announced, “Well, I'll see you later. I gotta go interview some old fogey.”

The year after the Iowa conference, Simon & Schuster made the next big push in expanding the Nancy Drew brand when it launched a spin-off series for girls from five to eight years old called the Nancy Drew Notebooks. In them Nancy, Bess, and George are in third grade, and Nancy has already developed the habits of good sleuthing. She keeps track of the details of her mysteries in a blue notebook in between hobbies like playing on the school soccer team and solves important crimes like
The Slumber Party Secret,
in which she must find out what has happened to her friend Rebecca's stolen invitations. At eight years old, she already has an inquisitive mind, as her opening lines make adorably clear: “‘But how can party invitations just disappear?' Nancy Drew asked. She stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at her friend. ‘Don't ask me,' Rebecca Ramirez moaned. ‘All I know is my birthday party is ruined. Now no one will come!' She stuck out her lower lip and pouted.”