Talk magazine, four issues old and already dying a public death, has topped itself (pardon the term) in its latest attempt to sell sex, and, one presumes, magazines, movies and everything else Miramax has to offer.
The sordid vehicle, in the February issue of the mag, is a story called “The Sex Lives of Your Children.” Raising the bar of tastelessness to dizzying heights, the magazine doesn’t just vivisect the sex lives of the usual suspects — Leo, Gwyneth and Donald. It gets into the pants of middle school students, most of them white, middle- to upper-middle-class kids. Now there’s a new twist on the old sex story. Not Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice, but Sean, Mica, Tiffany and Kaitlin.
Well, sorry. It’s not a new story. It’s more of a threadbare tale guaranteed to satisfy adults who like to publicly bemoan the values of adolescents while privately drooling over the graphically described “real life” activities of underage sex addicts.
It’s not a new story (or a news story) that kids experiment with sex. Any adult who has sex was once a kid who found out about sex through experimentation. (Check your Spock and Penny Leach for details.) It’s not kids and sex that has changed; it’s how adults choose to talk — and write — about kids and sex.
The Talk story is just one of many recent articles written by (and for) adults with an excessive preoccupation with the sex lives of young teenagers. This summer, the Washington Post ran a story called “Way Beyond Spin the Bottle” that included graphic descriptions of an oral sex ring and culminated with a description of a meeting in the school library during which parents and teachers sat around more or less asking one another if their kids swallowed and if so which kids. (One thing that has not changed is the sexual double standard; only the parents of girls were called to the meeting.)
This fall, Newsweek followed up with a paranoid cover story, filled with “Freudian fear and cooked statistics,” that was supposed to show that early puberty equals early sex, but only showed that adults look at the developing bodies of children in a sexy way.
Now Lucinda Franks, a Talk special correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has established through “dozens” of interviews with real middle school teens that “child’s play is not what it used to be.”
In a show of real concern for this “problem,” Talk chose to illustrate the article with a salacious (in this context) painting by Balthus of a sly schoolgirl, eyes closed, head turned away from the viewer, whose attention is immediately drawn to the girl’s exposed panties in the center of the frame. How interesting that this illustration is prominently dated 1938, a sign, perhaps, that adults obsessed with the sex play of children have been around for a very long time.
I suppose that Tina Brown & Co. believed that Balthus would gild this peep show with high art. But it’s not Balthus’ art that draws the eye. This is a story about adults looking up children’s dresses. This is the journalistic equivalent of drilling a hole in the changing room wall. It is pornography in an acceptable package (for the Talk set anyway) produced by and for the kind of people (aren’t we all?) who are terrified of the creeping pedophilia we hear so much about. Talk editors seem to see no problem in providing plenty of reading material for said criminals.
Frank’s article — a collection of unfounded conjecture by “experts,” warmed-over social clichis and anecdotes from teenage Deep Throats made even more shadowy by pseudonyms set off by self-conscious quotation marks — offers very little in the way of new statistics on kids and sex.
“There are few hard statistics on the trend,” Franks concedes in the story. The most she manages to reveal is that the percentage of teens who have intercourse by the age of 15 has risen in the 27 years since 1970. This, too, is hardly news. (What is news, which Franks fails to mention, is that teen pregnancy has declined steadily since 1991.)
But the lack of hard statistics doesn’t keep Franks from speculating that an entire generation of children is growing up without sexual morals. She says at one point: “The kids indulge in behavior that seems a far cry from what their parents generation called ‘free love.’ The children’s version is ‘free sex.’”
But as we all know, “free love” was never more than a euphemism for “free sex.” This comparison would be simply laughable if it weren’t so damned mean-spirited. What can Franks possibly hope to gain by turning contemporary children’s sexual experimentation into pathology, while claiming that sex play in their parents’ generation was nothing but good clean fun?
And nowhere does she prove that the kids’ involvement in sex has anything to do with their values in the first place. Indeed, there is nothing to indicate that their sex play, which rarely seems to involve intercourse, is anything but play, at least in their minds.
Franks paints a world where kids from 12 to 16 experiment with everything “from French kissing to fellatio” — nice alliteration but a rather wide range of experience. Of course, one might expect this range. Franks herself cites statistics that show that, in the U.S., 38 percent of teenage girls and 45 percent of teenage boys have had sexual intercourse by the age of 15. Although even Franks admits that sexual experimentation isn’t quantifiable, she chooses, for the pleasure of her readers, to dwell on fellatio (and the less alliterative cunnilingus). Franks, it turns out, can only think of one thing.
Basically, it all adds up (conveniently) to a rather cynical excuse to print hardcore porn from the mouths of babes. And for the rest of the article, that is what Franks does.
For example, “Darcy,” 13, describes “playground sex” — the perfect fusion of childhood innocence and sexual wantonness: “It’s not dangerous — the crazies are scared of us ’cause we’re butt naked in like, five minutes. I do gymnastics. My thing is the rings.”
I’m not going to tell you what “Darcy” does on the rings, but Franks does. There are several interesting aspects of this confession (or boast, we don’t really know). But nothing about the statement would indicate that our kids are going to hell. (Although, God willing, Franks just might be.)
Just imagine the kind of questions Franks is asking these kids. No one would expect an adult to answer queries designed to elicit graphic detail about their sex lives — literally blow by blow — especially when the answers are meant to appear in a mainstream magazine. (I’d like to see someone ask Leo about his exact position during his most recent sexual encounter.) I’m 26, so I think my mother assumes that I have something of a sex life, but I don’t expect her to ask me about my blow job technique. Nor would I expect a reporter to ask me to describe my last tryst in graphic detail. And if she did, I’d tell her to go fuck herself. But that is because I am her peer — not a 13-year-old trying to please or impress an adult, or, even cooler, to get a quote in Talk magazine.
To ask these questions of 12- to 16-year-olds is to exploit — even endanger — any number of relationships between adults and kids. Kids’ tendency to want to please adults means that, when confronted by a reporter asking salacious questions, they may feel that they have no choice but to answer. Their desire to appear more sophisticated, worldly and experienced than they actually are may lead them to exaggerate or just plain make stuff up. And their fear of being judged or punished means that they follow every confession with a penitential plea for leniency.
But regardless of the answers, no kid should be asked these questions. For an adult to sit down with a kid and lavish attention on him in the form of an intimate probe about sex has many — obvious — ramifications. I’m more shocked by the idea of an adult asking teenagers to reveal the intimate details of their sex lives than I am by the idea that teens have sex lives to be revealed.
What question, exactly, did Frank pose to get “Marcia,” 12, to describe the taste of semen? Or “Caroline,” 14, to disclose that “I know this girl who” sprayed her labia with Yves Saint Laurent? (It’s significant to note that both “Marcia” and “Caroline,” like many of the teens interviewed, gave the most detail on things they’d heard other kids had done. As a bona fide former adolescent, I remember all sorts of wildly improbable rumors about the sexploits of other students.) One can just see Franks egging on her teen subjects with eager nods and leading questions: Then what did you do? Did you swallow?
Somebody should call Child Protective Services — and not on these kids, who in most cases, maybe all cases, seem to be partaking in a sexual curiosity appropriate to their age. Franks is the one who needs remedial education in age-appropriate behavior. The only danger in pointing out that none of us actually knows what goes on in each other’s bedrooms is the possibility that Franks — or some other well-meaning authority figure — will take this as license to ask for an eyewitness account in the name of journalistic accuracy.
Since this article is titled “The Sex Lives of Your Children,” it dwells on the children of readers that Talk magazine expects to be within its demographic: “middle- to upper-middle-class” kids of baby boomers, in “urban and suburban areas of the East and West coast.” (“Though,” Franks adds ominously, “the language of this youth culture is universal.” How she knows that kids in Ohio are giving the same blow jobs as kids in New York and California is anyone’s guess.)
Sex in this article is dark and foreboding, not natural or innocent, and is brought on by (bad, bad, bad parent!) neglect. The causes of teen sex are predictably linked to the most tired clichis of bad parenting: parents who aren’t home, parents who want to be seen as “cool,” parents who are afraid to parent, parents who are too busy at work. (One father of a wayward teen, a psychotherapist for at-risk kids, laments that he was too busy working on his book to notice his daughter’s downward spiral.)
Academic pressure also takes a hit. The pull quote on the first page, from “Richard,” 14, reads, “We work so hard during the week, because of college pressure, that by the weekends, we’re totally, like Let the games begin.” Becca Bendler, the psychotherapist’s daughter whose rescue and rehabilitation makes her the Cinderella in this fairy tale, has her behavior explained away by the fact that she had to attend a public school where a “fast crowd” gave her more attention than her own family.
A diagnosis of dyslexia and attention deficit disorder (one of Becca’s “issues”) adds more credence to the idea that teenage experimentation is always the result of disease or environment. Oddly enough, in an essay that takes parents to task for undue academic pressure, the solution for Becca is private school. At private schools, her older sister assures her, the students “are intellectually and socially more mature.” (Never mind that “mature” in the context of this article tends to mean “one thing” — lots of sex.)
And it goes without saying that this article is not concerned with the kids who don’t have the option to leave public schools, nor the kids whose parents aren’t around because they are working two jobs to pay the rent. I don’t know that all of these kids are white, but I do know that the only time race is mentioned, it’s in the context of a 14-year-old girl, described as a New York public school student, who says she was adopted by a group of boys: “They were African-American and they loved my boobs.”
Girls, too, are doubly saddled with the old baggage of the virgin/whore dichotomy (“girls are sluts and boys are players”) and the new unwelcome fruits of feminism. Franks tells us breathlessly: “Girls insist on a ‘do-me’ and boys, closing their eyes, comply, hoping the favor will be returned.”
“James,” 14, evokes the age-old vagina dentata when he laments, “Boys get pussy-whipped by girls. They cheat on their boyfriends and all they want to do is be eaten out.” And “Scott,” 15, is happy to blame the sex scandals on a “war between the sexes” that started when the girls were taken off to Take Our Daughters to Work days while the boys had to listen to lectures on gender discrimination.
Elsewhere in the same issue of Talk, a profile of Karenna Gore — headlined “She Lived Through Grunge” — is devoted to telling her happily-ever-after story of coming out on the right side of a troubled adolescence. Karenna is reported to have “pushed the boundaries of average teenage experimentation.”
In eighth grade, the pubescent Gore dressed like a “freak” and attended late-night parties (“at the home of an out-of-town-parent,” of course) where she played “boot and rally” and “smoked a lot of pot.” She also sneaked out of the windows at the Gore homestead to smoke and drink; on one such evening, in the 10th grade, one of her friends drove Al Gore’s car into a chain-link fence. (By college, it’s reported that the Harvard Crimson considered doing an article “tallying up her bong hits.”)
Yet Gore’s teenage antics are not portrayed as pathology, but simply the charming exploits of a high-energy schoolgirl. She turned out OK. At 26, she’s married to a doctor, has a child, is in law school and works as a consultant on her father’s campaign. Talk even speculates about her political future — though there is no doubt whatsoever that she’s inhaled many times.
Karenna’s rebellious youth is seen as a compliment to her father: “He reminded me of the punk rock bands I used to go see.” (Strangely enough, Karenna Gore was not asked about the taste of semen. Her interviewer, Hanna Rosin, was content to allude to Karenna’s “wild days” when she was “dark.”)
What makes Gore’s wrecking the car and smoking pot “average teenage experimentation” while teens 10 years younger are labeled foreign monsters for conducting the same experiments?
We’re not doing our kids any favors by portraying them as sexual predators, nor by portraying them as sexual victims. We do not need any more exposis that portray our children as deviant criminals for having discovered their erogenous zones. If anyone should be writing about the sex lives of teens, it should be teens themselves. If kids could speak on their own terms — without the pressure of currying favor from parents, teachers and journalists — I doubt that they would describe their sexual experiences in the same way.
Sex is sexy, sex is complex, sex is confusing. But sex itself is not a pathology. As sexually active adults, we all should know this. I suppose that we are expected to be shocked and chagrined to find out that kids experiment with sex. I’m not. And I don’t think that it is an indication that the kids are bad.
Franks’ story doesn’t tell us about the sex lives of kids at all. It tells us about the fears and sexual perversity of adults. Teens have their own sexual code, they are each other’s sexual partners, not ours. In the end, they should certainly be allowed to keep their bedroom doors shut — without the fear that journalists like Lucinda Franks will barge in to catch them with their pants down.
The first time Alice B. Toklas met Gertrude Stein, Alice believed Gertrude to be speaking from her brooch: “She wore a large, round coral brooch, and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from her brooch. It was unlike any other else’s voice — a deep, full velvety contralto’s, like two voices.”
Alice also heard bells, which she believed to be an indication that she was in the presence of genius. As Gertrude writes in the “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” a novel about Alice’s life with Gertrude in the voice of Alice (more about that later): “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken.” (The other two bells rang for Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher; and Pablo Picasso, a decent dinner companion.)
The year of their meeting was 1906. Alice was a San Francisco expatriate who came to Paris after becoming bored with serving as housewife to her brothers and father; Gertrude was an Oakland expatriate and the queen mother of a literary salon located at 27 rue de Fleurus. Gertrude had been quite fond of declaring herself a genius long before Alice heard bells, and that became the first thing they agreed upon. They also agreed that a life worth living should include plenty of food, the company of artists and writers, and a general refusal to do the things that did not please them — like learning to drive in reverse, or continuing to entertain writers and artists who had become quarrelsome or boring.
For the 39 years that followed their first meeting, that is the life they lived. Gertrude proposed to Alice on a trip to Tuscany; afterwards they moved back to 27 rue de Fleurus, ousted Gertrude’s brother, Leo (he left, writing, “I hope we will all live happily ever after and suck our respective oranges”), and set about making their home.
Gertrude was ample, and had, by all accounts, a large, well-shaped head which she eventually displayed with a fetching Caesar cut. Alice was small and thin with large dark eyes and a small bit of fur on her upper lip. She had a propensity for flowing dresses and gypsy earrings. When they went to visit Gertrude’s brother, Julien Stein, his 3-year-old son said that he liked the man, but why did the lady have a mustache?
They lived as husband and wife, “she with a sheet of linen and he with a sheet of paper,” as Gertrude is quoted in Diana Souhami’s biography, “Gertrude and Alice.” Gertrude, who was the genius, stayed up all night writing her strange, lovely prose, while Alice, the mistress of the house, woke early to supervise the servants, collected recipes and typed Gertrude’s manuscripts.
The terms of their endearment reflect their respective roles. According to Souhami, “Alice was gay, kitten, pussy, baby, queen, cherubim, cake, lobster, wifie, Daisy, and her little jew [sic]. Gertrude was king, husband, hubbie, Mount fattie and fattuski.” They scattered love notes to one another around their house, signed DD and YD (Dear Dear and Your Dear).
“Such bands of steel are forged by sex,” writes Souhami, “and Gertrude wrote a great deal about the delights of it with Alice.” Gertrude’s work included many private references to her love for Alice — “my delicious dish, my little wife” — as well as many references to cows, which Steinian scholars have suggested are orgasms, given that, according to Gertrude,” cows are between legs” and are given to wives:
I am fondest of all of lifting belly …
Lifting belly is in bed
And the bed has been made comfortable …
Lifting belly
So high
And aiming.
Exactly and making a cow come out.While Gertrude proffered sex in prose; Alice prepared suggestive dishes. In the “Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” she writes, “In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.”
Alice’s role was to play the midwife to Gertrude’s genius, but she also stands as an argument for the idea that midwives, like housewives, are anything but incidental. To her, housekeeping for geniuses was an art in itself:
I must say that you can not tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you can not tell what a book is until you type or proof read it. It then does something to you that only reading can never do.Besides dusting the art, Alice spent quite a bit of time transposing art onto ordinary household objects. Dishes for artists were a frequent necessity at 27 rue de Fleurus, and a key element of the “Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” Alice’s collection of recipes and the stories behind them, published after Gertrude’s death.
A culinary work called bass for Picasso was poached in wine and butter, following the advice of Alice’s aunt, who contended that a “fish, having lived its life in water, once caught, should have no further contact with the element in which it had been born and raised.” The fish, once poached, was covered in “ordinary mayonnaise,” then decorated with a red mayonnaise, “not colored with catsup — horror of horrors — but tomato paste” and topped with sieved hard-boiled eggs, truffles and finely chopped fines herbs.
Picasso, though impressed by the beauty of the fish, said that it should have been made for Matisse, not for him. Nevertheless, he rewarded Alice’s artistry with a needlepoint pattern, which she used to make tapestries for two Louis XVI chairs.
And of course Alice, in the classic role of an artist’s lover, served as Gertrude’s muse. But given that Gertrude’s art was not of the classic genre, this could take the form of not-so-classic endeavors. One guest remembers watching Gertrude instruct Alice to bat a — what else? — cow from one side of a field to the other, while Gertrude sat writing on a campstool.
At some point, Gertrude suggested that Alice write an autobiography. Her suggested titles illustrate her ideas about Alice’s status in their relationship: “My Life with the Great,” “Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With,” “My Twenty-Five Years with Gertrude Stein.” Finally, it was decided that Gertrude, not Alice, was to wear the sole pair of writing pants in the family and that Gertrude would write Alice’s autobiography for her. Here she is, writing as “Alice”:
I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author.About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I’m going to write it as simply as Dafoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.
For Gertrude to write the autobiography of Alice in Alice’s “voice” could be construed as sheer hubris. And the novel, which begins with their first meeting and ends with Gertrude’s decision to write the autobiography, certainly implies that Alice’s life begins and ends with Gertrude. But it is also a love poem of the deepest kind — an attempt to literally become her lover. (For what it’s worth, friends who knew them both say that Gertrude faithfully reproduced Alice’s verbal tics and quirks.)
Besides, there is evidence that Alice had quite a bit of power herself, albeit power of the sneakier, passive-aggressive variety. She served as Gertrude’s amanuensis and editor. She typed all of Gertrude’s manuscripts, making editorial suggestions, and — since she made the astonishing claim that she read Gertrude’s writing better than Gertrude — perhaps rewrote entire passages.
In the published version of the autobiography, “Alice” says (about Gertrude’s “The Making of Americans”): “She wrote it and I typed it. It was over a thousand pages long.” Whereas in Gertrude’s handwritten manuscript it reads: “She wrote it and I typed it. It was over a thousand pages long and I loved every minute of it.”
Hemingway, for one, argued that Alice was the one in control, and that her means of coercion were less than pleasant. He writes in “A Moveable Feast” about a conversation he overheard between the two women which took place shortly before he severed contact with the Stein-Toklas household. First, Alice was heard talking in menacing tones:
Then Ms. Stein’s voice came pleading and begging saying, “Don’t pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything pussy but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t pussy.”But then again, Hemingway had something of a rivalry with Alice. He says of Gertrude: “I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it and it was a good healthy feeling and made more sense than some of the talk.”
Aside from their identity as a committed couple in the world of avante-garde art and literature, Gertrude and Alice were in many ways deeply conventional, even chauvinistic. Quite a few Parisian lesbians balked at various aspects of Gertrude and Alice’s marriage. Natalie Barney, the writer who held one of the most famous lesbian salons in Paris, believed that her own promiscuity was preferable to their stodgy domestic existence. (Gertrude and Alice in turn, could be smug about their own commitment in the face of the musical-chair romances that governed the bedrooms of Barney, Picasso and Hemingway.)
And author Djuna Barnes was furious when Gertrude, rather than commenting on her writing, said she had beautiful legs. Adrienne Monnier, owner of La Maison des Amis, and Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Co., themselves a couple for 38 years, took issue with the infamous treatment at 27 rue de Fleurus of visiting wives, who were expected to talk of hats and cuisine with Alice while the men and Gertrude held forth on literature. Any woman who dared stray into the men’s conversation was soon dragooned by Alice into the kitchen, or forced to comment on some small household object.
As for children, Gertrude and Alice adopted many. They took in impressionable young modernist writers — like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and Paul Bowles (Gertrude suggested that “Freddy” was a better name for him and refused to address him by any other name).
They also had dogs, who mostly sat on the lap of Mount Gertrude. (Gertrude claimed that the rhythm of her dog Basket’s breathing taught her the difference between sentences and paragraphs.) The menagerie of canines, little and large, included Polype, a hound who enjoyed eating his own excrement nearly as much as he enjoyed smelling flowers; Byron, named for his sexual interest in his mother and sisters; Pepe; and Basket the First, whom Gertrude insisted be bathed in sulfur water each day. (She also insisted that Paul Bowles put on a pair of lederhosen and run the dog dry while Gertrude called out the third-story bathroom window, “Faster, Freddy, faster!”) They also had a cat with a mustache, named Hitler.
With their closest friends, Gertrude and Alice created small nuclear families, at least through the terms which they chose to address them. With Carl Van Vechten, the famous photographer and not-so-famous writer, they formed the Woojums family: Carl was Papa Woojums, Alice was Mama Woojums, and Gertrude, the child savant, was Baby Woojums. During World War I, they adopted a young American G.I., whom they called Kiddie, and who remained in close contact with both women throughout their lives.
As commonplace as Gertrude and Alice’s marriage was in its general outline, the detail was, obviously, remarkable. Perhaps the most extraordinary part was the fame. Gertrude and Alice became famous. Stunningly, iconically, rock-star famous.
And, bizarrely, when it happened, the marriage itself became invisible.
“The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ” Gertrude’s love letter to Alice, became one of the unlikeliest blockbuster novels of all time. It is possible that the book’s astounding popular success had more to do with its cast of characters — Picasso, Hemingway, Rousseau, Picabia — and the implication that two Americans were at the Parisian epicenter, than with America’s appetite for experiments in modernist literature.
Nevertheless, when Gertrude and Alice returned to America for Gertrude’s book tour in 1934, they made the front pages of the major New York papers, and a revolving billboard in Times Square spelled out in lights, “Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York.”
Alice, described coyly as Gertrude’s “constant companion,” appeared in all the published photos with Gertrude. Alice topped her outfits with a feathered chapeau; Gertrude wore a deerstalker cap; each wore a pair of Mary Janes. They were interviewed together in their shared hotel room and recognized by strangers while out grocery shopping.
And yet no one commented on the strangeness of a pair of middle-aged lesbians becoming the media darlings of 1930s America. And when they started to do so — years later, when Alice was left alone to fight Gertrude’s would-be biographers — Alice refused to speak to anyone who she believed would delve into her lover’s private life. She preferred to keep her love as it was, an open secret.
“I am nothing,” she said, “but a memory of her.”
Who was Carolyn Keene?
In 1929, Edward Stratemeyer hired Mildred Wirt, a young journalist, to ghostwrite a new mystery series for young girls. The heroine was the wildly popular Nancy Drew, who continues to sell copies — and generate new titles — 70 years later. Today, Mildred Wirt Benson, the “original” Carolyn Keene, lives in Toledo, Ohio. Each workday, she reports to the Toledo Blade, the newspaper where she has worked full-time for the last 55 years; her weekly column appears each Saturday.
So you’re a celebrity. Do people in Toledo know who you are?
Oh yes. I’ve had an awful lot of publicity. I don’t want to sound boastful. I get fan mail from all over the country and from foreign countries. It never lets up.
From children or adults?
I’d say it’s half and half. The original fans now are in their 60s and 70s. But they give them to their grandchildren and I hear from them; I hear from schoolchildren. Oddly enough, I hear from some about books that I never wrote.
They ask a million questions. The questions are all pretty much routine, but once in a while, they tell about experiences they’ve had and they think that Nancy Drew inspired them. I remember one girl said that she was actually locked in a trunk by a hold-up guy and she thought of Nancy Drew. She got out by her own efforts, which she attributed to Nancy Drew. That one surprised me.
I used to answer every letter. Now I answer most of them, but I don’t answer all of them because my eyesight is not good enough now that I can do much writing.
How did you feel about being Carolyn Keene?
I didn’t analyze it. It was just a job to do. Some things I liked and some things I did not like. It was a day’s work. I did it just like I did my newspaper work. I wrote from early morning to late night for a good many years. One year I wrote 13 full-length books and held down a job besides. That takes a good deal of work.
What do you think of the revised versions written by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams?
I wouldn’t want to comment on them, because I don’t read them. She was the owner of the business, so it wasn’t my place to think about it. I just accepted it. But some of the rewriting I did not particularly enjoy.
Do you feel that she changed the character of Nancy?
Yes, considerably. She made her into a traditional sort of a heroine. More of a house type. And in her day, that is what I had specifically gotten away from.
She was ahead of her time. She was not typical. She was what the girls were ready for and were aspiring for, but had not achieved.
Why did they become so popular?
The girls were ripe for a change in literature. They were way overdue for a good, entertaining story, that broke away from the old style of writing. I think Nancy was the character the girls were waiting for. They were just waiting for someone to verbalize it.
What do you think of people who recast Nancy as a feminist heroine?
I don’t align her with the feminist movement at all. That was never in my mind. She was an individual, from start to finish. She was never a person to promote any kind of movement. She was just a person who believed in her own freedom.
What other books have you published?
I only published 23 Nancy Drew books, for which I am known, but I actually published over 130 books. Some of those have different types of characters. I wrote a number of series for the syndicate, but I wrote a great many individual mystery stories in my own name. I wrote a prize-winning book, “Dangerous Deadline.” It won a national contest.
I had one series that was sort of like Nancy Drew. Only I thought it was better. Those were the Penny Parker books.They were under my own name. Only they never caught on like Nancy Drew did, because they didn’t have the distribution. Distribution is everything in the publishing business.
What did your readers get from Nancy?
Most of them identified with her. In my fan mail that I receive, they say that they were inspired to go do things for themselves, to go build themselves careers. I think it was an incentive to go out into the world and to become someone as a woman, you know.
What lessons would you like your readers to learn from Nancy?
I think there’s a lesson they all should learn. Women are entitled to their freedom, but they shouldn’t use that as an excuse for license. Some of them are mistaking freedom for license. I don’t think that should be. I’m a little bit old-fashioned in my thinking, I guess. I didn’t intend for Nancy to be a runaround. I’m a traditionalist when it comes to family. I think Nancy would have stood up for family rights.
What is your favorite novel in the series?
I like “The Hidden Staircase.” They made a movie of that one. A very bad movie. I don’t think they read the book when they wrote the movie. Typical of the industry, I guess.
Do you read Nancy Drew books?
No, I never read them at all. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Nancy Drew book since I wrote them. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t.
Did your daughter read Nancy Drew?
She didn’t ever read very much. She didn’t care much for any kind of books. When she went to school, there was some doubt that I was the author. Some of the kids told her that her mother was not the author of Nancy Drew. She came home and she was upset about that. That was one reason I was glad that they acknowledged me as the author.
I just talked to my mother and told her that there was no Carolyn Keene. She had never known.
That’s like saying there’s no Santa Claus.
As soon as I learned to read, I learned to sleuth. My cousins and I would lie in bed, eating sunflower seeds and reading our mothers’ Nancy Drew novels from their girlhoods in the ’40s and ’50s. This was the late ’70s and early ’80s — both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (in whom we had no interest) had television series, and new episodes of their adventures were still being written. We paid no attention to the modern versions of the books and turned our backs on the made-for-TV Nancy, who was often cast as a bit player in the Hardy Boys dramas and was brunette, not “titian-haired” like our heroine. (We were right to suspect that Pamela Sue Martin was no Nancy Drew; she later showed up on the cover of Playboy, much to the horror of Nancy’s creators.)
Not that we liked Nancy. In fact, we loathed her. It is true that she was the closest thing we had to an action hero when serial novels for girls were dominated by romances. But her saccharine perfection made me want to put a tack on the seat of her roadster. She was capable and level-headed to the point of pathology: She could drive cars and boats, ride horses, pilot planes, fix her own car, break out of a closet using a closet rod as a handmade lever, skin dive and tap dance in Morse code. She was always “attractive,” never “beautiful.” Of course, we knew she was beautiful, but Nancy was far too modest and sensible to be described with such a florid word. In “The Secret of Red Gate Farm” we are told: “Nancy did not like to be told that she was pretty. She preferred to be called interesting.”
Nancy was definitely not conventionally sexy — although she does tear her clothes or get trussed-up in nearly every caper. Ned Nickerson, her beau, had the sexual potency of a Ken doll and is just as peripheral. He first appeared in volume 7, more a romantic prophylactic than a romantic hero. Presumably, readers would have found it odd if their attractive heroine had no romantic interest whatsoever, yet it would not have been appropriate for a young girl from a good family to fall for a new male lead in each of her hundreds of adventures. “For the present,” Nancy tells a roomful of girlfriends who are giggling about their fiancis, “my steady partner is going to be a mystery.”
Quite simply, we were jealous.
What we loved about our books were the yellowed paper, the neat pen marks where our mothers had checked off each title they owned, the painted dust jackets with dresses and hairstyles we had only seen in black-and-white photographs of our dead grandmother. And we loved the fabulously outdated expressions. We loved the “chums” and we recognized the “shady characters,” because it was an expression that our mothers still used in jest. While we wore flared jeans and baseball shirts, we read: “Titian-haired Nancy was a trim figure in olive green knit with matching shoes. Beige accessories and a knitting bag completed her costume.” “Why is she carrying a knitting bag?” we asked ourselves. And where does one find olive shoes? We weren’t sleuthing out the villains; we were gumshoes on the trail of a much more sinister mystery — our mothers’ childhoods.
Through Nancy, we solved the riddle of why our mothers disliked white shoes — even sneakers — after Labor Day; why the proper response to a compliment was a crimson blush; why taste was more important than a trust fund (though Nancy herself had both); why the use of the double negative was evidence of a predilection for criminal behavior and why it was important to stay on your own side of the tracks.
Unfortunately, the Stratemeyer Syndicate — whose very name sounds like a villain who would have been brought down by the attractive girl detective — never quite figured out that their books morphed from popularity into pop art. Nancy appeared in 1930, the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, whose novel factory (with its stable of ghostwriters) had been cranking out children’s serial fiction since 1905. But in 1959, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who inherited Nancy after the death of her father in 1932, decided that if Nancy was going to continue to appeal to the daughters of her original readers, she needed some freshening up.
The roadster became a convertible, the chums became friends. Nancy made her first and last jump into maturity, aging from 16 to 18. Most dramatic of all, her “curly golden bob” became a grandiose titian color — the only revision that I consented to graft upon my inner Nancy. Titian! Who else has ever had such hair? To this day, all I know about the color titian is that it rhymes with “patrician” and has something to do with the 16th century painter of the same name.
Gone too were historical artifacts of a less pleasant variety: the more egregious examples of Nancy’s racism and general social snottiness. (The new, improved Nancy is hardly a Marxist paragon: She continues
to be a lawyer’s daughter who specializes in cases of misdirected
inheiritance; she is always ready to take money and jewels out of the hands
of liars, thieves and “flashy”characters and put it back where it belongs,
into the hands of those with good social standing. )
Although each original novel is riddled with racial and social slurs, one of the worst offenders is the early version of “The Mystery at Lilac Inn,” a sustained allegory about how one cannot get good household help. Nancy, in need of a temporary housekeeper while faithful servant Hannah Gruen (the good German housewife) tends to a sick sister, must go to an employment agency. She interviews and dismisses by turn, a “colored woman” who is “dirty and disheveled,” an Irish woman who is most “unreasonable” and a “Scotch lassie” who doesn’t know a thing about cooking. The villain in this novel is an “impudent,” “dark-complexioned” girl who also fails to find employment at Drew manor. How does Nancy solve this volume’s mystery? The maid in question shows up at the best dress shop in the city, where Nancy herself is looking at dresses. Says Nancy: “Surely a girl in her circumstances cannot afford to buy dresses at such a place as this.”
It’s worth asking why it took Harriet Adams nearly 30 years to realize that a villain pool that included “coloreds,” “Orientals,” “misers” with “hooked noses,” household help and transients might cause some people to look askance at her darling cash cow. But times change. It probably took some readers just as long to figure it out.
Today, both versions — the “originals” and the revised versions, which 40 years later are now antiques themselves — are available in facsimile first editions. In late September, Grossett and Dunlap came out with a boxed set of the yellow-spined ’50s versions, with artwork by Rudy Nappi, Nancy’s illustrator from 1953 to 1979. And since 1991, Applewood Books, a small press that specializes in republishing books from American history and popular culture, has printed exact replicas of the earlier versions, with artwork by Russell Tandy, the fashion illustrator who created the slim clotheshorse Nancy in 1930 and continued through 1949. Each Applewood replica comes with an introductory essay by a female mystery writer, such as Amanda Cross, P.M. Carlson, Nancy Pickard, Sarah Paretsky and Mildred Wirt Benson, the original Nancy ghostwriter, who wrote novels under the pen name Carolyn Keene for more than 20 years. Today, Benson has traded roadsters for “oldsters” — she writes a column for the Toledo Blade under the name Millie Benson.
The Applewood editions are by far the more beautiful. Printed on smooth, heavy, vanilla-colored paper, with glossy inserts for the illustrations, they have blue cloth covers stamped in orange; the sleek dust jackets feature Nancy as the ultimate bluestocking in her crisp blue suits and clipped bob. They are conscious of their status as historical artifact for those with a retro fetish: At $14.95, they are nearly twice the price of the Simon and Schuster editions and can be purchased at that well-appointed emporium of Boomer nostalgia, Restoration Hardware. In contrast, the laminated covers and grainy paper of the Simon and Schuster editions look like they are trying to make history by making books that will reduce themselves to the condition of 40-year-old dime store pulp novels within two years.
The revised editions read like porn: Stratemeyer held her finger on the fast-forward button to cut straight to the action, slowing down just long enough to add exclamation points and physical descriptions of people, rooms and food, with character, scene and dialogue pared to such a minimum that the books barely make sense. Like porn, one eventually gets bored and wonders: Why the hell do I care if this chick’s trussed-up in the cabin of a sinking ship? All I know about her is that she’s a rich bitch in an olive suit.
Harriet Adams had spent years agitating to make Nancy “less bold,” writes Mildred Wirt Benson in her introduction to “The Mystery of Lilac Inn.” While Adams served as editor, Benson says, “A simple ‘Nancy said,’ became ‘Nancy said sweetly,’ ‘Nancy said kindly’ and the like, all designed to produce a less abrasive, more caring type of character.” When Adams finally got her chance to play writer, Nancy went from bold to downright syrupy, as demonstrated in this passage from the revised version of “The Secret of the Old Clock:”
Nancy rode along, glancing occasionally at the neatly planted fields on either side.
“Pretty, ” she commented to herself. “Oh why can’t all people be nice like this scenery and not make trouble?”
It’s a wonder that the revised Nancy could decipher any clues whatsoever with her vision so hampered by those rose-colored glasses.
Phillip Zuckerman, the publisher of Applewood books, subjected booksellers to a “blind taste test” inspired by Coke and Pepsi, presenting them with pages from an original and a revised Nancy Drew side by side. “Seventy-three percent of booksellers,” he says, “preferred the originals.”
It’s true that the original editions have smoother prose, a spunkier heroine and much greater production quality. But who is reading them — or the revised ’50s versions, for that matter? If anything, the reissues seem to be a response to the high prices garnered by adult collectors — who will pay $300 or more for a first edition in good condition. These are the same nostalgia addicts who will buy almost any article of cultural detritus from their childhood, be it baseball cards, comic books, cowboy guns or mystery novels. Companies do not make money when their products are resold by collectors; Mattel began reissuing vintage Barbies and creating new collectors editions at about the same time that the adult collector market became highly visible and highly lucrative. But as much as I loved my childhood Nancy Drew books, I can’t imagine giving them to my own daughter in any context other than a history lesson.
Not that companies haven’t tried to market old Nancys to new children. “Did you know,” exclaims the banner on top of the Web site for Secrets Can Kill, the new Nancy-inspired girl detective game, “that Nancy is the product of ‘Girl Power’? It’s true!” Of course, it’s absolutely not true. If anything, “girl power” is a product of Nancy Drew. Nancy may have been something of a bluestocking, but she was hardly radical — and certainly not a ’90s grrl.
What Nancy Drew mysteries lack in literary merit, they make up for in cultural history. Unlike serious fiction, which aspires to be timeless, popular fiction aspires to be as current as the latest Young Miss — or Fashion Focus, the magazine read by Bess Marvin, Nancy’s “pleasantly plump chum,” whom my mother would call “feminine,” I would call “femme” and my daughter would call a “girly girl.” The butch to Bess’ femme, devoted readers know, is her cousin, George Fayne, described in the series as “an attractive, short-haired tomboy.” Modern readers have other ideas. “Is it true,” asks a recent post to the Nancy Drew message board by a reader who identifies herself as Sappho, “that Nancy always tells George that her breath smells like fish?”
It’s tempting to recycle Nancy as a feminist heroine of sorts — she was smart, athletic, indifferent to boys and devoted to her career. But she simply does not stand up to this kind of analysis. Nancy shimmies under the feminist bar by default: It only works so long as she stays 18 forever. Nancy was a daddy’s girl, free to remain an amateur in the absence of a mother, financial obligations or the larger world of college, marriage and motherhood. Harriet Stratemeyer Adams once said that if Nancy were allowed to go to college, she would go to “Wellesley, of course.”
I prefer my sleuths unrevised, just the way my mother and I loved her back when I was an 8-year-old serial novelist in training, writing mysteries in secret notebooks. “Maybe when you grow up,” my mother would say, “you can write mysteries. Just like Carolyn Keene.” Of course, I knew I could grow up to be Carolyn Keene, but in my house the word “ghostwriter” was as absent as the explanation behind Santa.
Last week, I called my mother — who claims that Nancy is the reason she majored in police science — to laugh over a recent post to the Nancy Drew bulletin board: “I need info on Carolyn Keene. I need to know the month and date of her birth and if she had any children.”
“Did you find out?” my mother asked.
“Mom,” I said, “there is no Carolyn Keene.”
“Keene,” she said. “A mystery writer with a keen mind. I should have known.”
On July 10, I interviewed five Nazis at the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations compound in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The Nazis liked me. I was polite; I was white; I listened to their jokes — even the ones about gas ovens.
Exactly a month to the day after I interviewed the Nazis, Buford O. “Neal” Furrow shot five people, including three children, at a Jewish Community Center in suburban Los Angeles. The connection with my interview was about more than just the date: On the very same Nazi compound I visited, Furrow was married to Debbie Mathews, the widow of Robert Mathews, who founded the Nazi paramilitary organization the Order in 1983. Early news reports identified Furrow as head of security for the compound, but it turned out he was just a lowly volunteer.
Richard Butler, the founder and pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations, officiated at Furrow and Mathews’ wedding, although he claims not to remember. But Aryan Nations leaders frequently do not remember much about their current or former members after they have gone off and done something stupid with a weapon.
Furrow’s vicious deed will now have the world swarming to the Coeur d’Alene compound again. Reporters will hear what I heard: that being a Nazi is not about hate. “It’s about love of your own kind,” they told me. “That is the derivative of the word kindness.” They said that Benjamin Smith, the lone white supremacist sniper who went on a killing spree in the Midwest last month, would not be welcome on the compound. “Killing yourself,” Christian Teague told me, “is a sin.”
Today, Christian was on NBC. She says the word on Furrow is that he was a quiet guy they barely knew. Butler, who also barely knew Furrow, still said he understood what made him do it: “It’s the rage of the white man.”
The Aryan Nations say they are waging a holy war to make the world safe for white Christians. They have neatly inverted the language of oppression: The Jews control the government, blacks control the cities and the white race is on its way to extinction. To be a member of the Aryan Nations is to be denied your civil rights: You will be fired from your job, denied your mortgage and you can’t even get the T-shirt guy to print swastika shirts anymore.
Listening to them speak was like reading the civil rights movement on a photographic negative: All I had to do was switch the word “black” to the word “white.”
A recent article posted on the Aryan Nations Web site reads: “Hate Comes to Northern Idaho, but it didn’t wear a swastika.” The article goes on to describe the protestors who blockaded the parade route for the July 10 Aryan Nations rally, thus denying the Nazis free speech. The Nazis are getting more adept at victimology, and no doubt they’ll find a way to make themselves victims of Furrow’s rampage, too.
Of course, the Nazis liked me a whole lot less after my article appeared. If you ever piss off a Nazi, expect a lot of e-mail. First, they claimed betrayal — they thought I was nice. Then they called me a liar and threatened to sue. Finally, they just sent e-mails that read, “Hail White Victory in Christ.”
Here’s what they did not do: They did not threaten to follow me home, to bomb my office or shoot me on the street. They knew that if they did, I would call the FBI, and the FBI would take me seriously, because their threats have been serious before.
But I understood the Nazis’ upset at finding that I wasn’t a sympathizer, though I appeared sympathetic; that I wasn’t one of them. Because if I hadn’t known I was talking to Nazis, I might not have known that they weren’t just like us.
The other kind of hate mail I received after I wrote the article on the Nazis did not come from the Nazis. It came from the Jewish Defense League. They said that to portray monsters as human was a form of exoneration. I say it’s a form of defense — know your enemy. The most frightening thing about Nazis is not that they are monsters. It’s that many of them are not — at least not visibly.
How can you spot Buford Furrow, the guy who fired on three schoolchildren under the age of 10? He’s the same one who, neighbors say, ran across the busy street to get the mail for them.
