Art originals.
This is an iHeart original.
So as the woman here at very special episodes, I feel like it's incumbent upon me to note that, as we all know, Friday, March eighth is International Women's Day, So it feels important at least to take a few minutes at the top of the episode to honor some of the incredible women in our lives, especially because this is such a female centric episode.
So Dana, I'm going to queue you up.
I don't think we need my perspective as a father of daughters, nephew of aunts.
Why don't you tell us.
About a professional person in your life who's been an idol or a mentor, Oh.
My god, an idle. I have a lot of idols. Alyssa Mastromonico, who is just an incredible woman in person. She worked in the Obama administration and now I've worked with her on this podcast called Hysteria. She's just so smart and grounded and cool and down to earth. She's just sort of like the model that I try to base everything I do on in terms of just like
other idols. Sometimes when I feel too good about myself, I'll read a Joan Didion book and be like Oh, we're both writers, but we're not doing the same thing.
Oh, man, I know exactly what.
You mean by that. Saren.
Any any women mentors you want to shout out for International Women's Day?
Oh well, I mean, I wouldn't even be on this show with y'all if it wasn't for my two English teachers, Vicki Serati and Pamela Mauri. Thank you both. But like I have, and I think as a guy, it's incumbent upon me to point out how many female role models, women who inspire me, Like I have a list here before me, Jason, I just kind of jotted down a couple.
Agatha Christi right, mystery writer, Lucy Parson's political organizer, stage coach, Mary Black woman on the front here alone, Erica Jong, writer, Bessie Coleman pilot, Thelma Shuna maker editor, Catherine Bigelow filmmaker, Agnes Varda filmmaker, Anita Franco Folk sanger, Vera Rubin astronomer, Poncho Barnes, pilot friend of the early astronauts, Emily Noather, mathematician who developed the theory of least action, and of course Amelia Earhart, my first role model.
So there you go, that's pretty impressed.
I think we got five or six future episodes out of that list right there. Just taking notes, but I feel like we should probably start to get to the episode here, Dana, in honor of International Women's Day. Yes, we're have Zaren tell you the story this week.
This is great. I get a week off. This is exactly how I want to spend International Women's Day.
Saren, you want to just set this one up for us before we get in.
We'll talk about it at the end.
Okay, Well, this one is. I loved this story. It was told to me, and the question of the story I think is so central to the story. I'll just hit you with the question, which is, do you know who wrote Nancy Drew?
No, but here's an really embarrassing confession. So I don't know who wrote Nancy Drew, just like off the top of my head, which I feel like I should. I was never a big Nancy Drew kid, but I did like the computer games.
Okay, I feel ja hunky.
That's my Nancy Drew connection. If anyone shout out to the Nancy Drew computer games, hit me up in my DMS. If you also loved those games.
Rereader's gammers. You're all welcome to this story, because this is Nancy Drew. In the late nineteen seventies, an eleven year old girl was kidnapped from the town of Richfield, Minnesota. The eighty pound girl was trapped in the trunk of her kidnappers car for fourteen hours. The young girl never gave up. She eventually figured out how to escape from the trunk of the nineteen seventy Ford. She unscrewed the bolts from the car's tail light. Then she kicked out
the light and squeezed her way out. The girl was able to flag down a passing car. How did an eleven year old manage to do this simple? She asked herself, what would Nancy Drew do? Then she did exactly that. The astounded police told the local press that the girl had read around forty five Nancy Drew books, and the mystery stories prepared her mind to deal with the situation
and to escape. The story was often repeated in nineteen eighty, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first Nancy Drew books. Nineteen eighty was also the year that the mysterious publishing syndicate behind Nancy Drew was dragged into court to settle a dispute over who owned the rights to the mystery series. Millions of dollars of profits and royalties were on the line. Two women, both accomplished and successful in their respective careers, sat in that New York courtroom.
One was seventy four years old, dressed in a powder blue pantsuit and not exactly eager to take the stand. The other was an eighty seven year old woman, and she owned the publishing house. It had been decades since the two women had seen each other. Both would be called to testify, and both would swear to the judge and jury that she was the real writer behind Nancy Drew. Welcome to very special episodes an iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Zaren Burnett, and this is the case of
the two Nancy Drews. It should be no surprise that Nancy Drew has enjoyed an enduring relevance in the culture, nor should it surprise anyone that she remains such a beloved fictional character. Nancy Drew was and is the plucky teen girl detective with a wicked, sharp mind who's just as fearless as she is smart, It's a rather irresistible combination for a detective. The most interesting mystery of this teen girl detective isn't her popularity, and it also isn't
hidden in the plots of the books. The greatest mystery is right there on the cover of the books. It's the name of the author. Most folks have no idea the author, Carolyn Keene, never really existed, which begs the question, well, then, who was Carolyn Keene? That was not the mystery that author Melanie Rayjak set out to solve. Melanie originally was
just looking for a good story to tell. She'd wanted to write a biography of the Ohio based journalist in general all around badass, Mildred Wirt Benson.
And there were all these tidbits in the obituary that were really fascinating to me, like that she had a pilot's license and that she had been a journalist for decades.
Mildred was the first woman to graduate with a master's degree from the University of Iowa's School of Journalism, and she went on to be one of America's great mid century journalists, one who happened to be a woman. Mildred's other claim to fame. She was the main writer behind the Nancy Drew books. There was another big reason that Melanie was interested in that fact.
I was a crazy Nancy Drew reader.
These books were sort of always floating around in our house, and I read all of them millions of times.
But as she started looking through Mildred's archives, she kept running across something else, another.
Name I kept coming across. Threaded in with all of her stuff about you know, her upbringing and her schoolwork and all the things she'd done in Iowa and her career afterwards, these stories about Harriet Straatemeyer. And although clearly was connected to Nancy Drew, that seems odd to me that she would preserve the story of this other person in her personal documents.
It grabbed Melanie's full attention, intrigued her, and as she looked further into it, she hit upon a realization.
It kind of emerged, you know, as if sort of out of the ether. I was like, oh, she's preserved this story because there are these competing narratives about how Nancy Drew came to be.
Melanie stepped into her own real life Nancy Drew mystery. It was up to her to solve the mystery of who is the real Carolyn Keene. The next thing Melanie Rayjak discovered was that she was not alone. Others had also attempted to solve this mystery before her, most importantly one other teen detective Jeffrey s. Laban.
He didn't do it for anything. He did it for Mildred. I think that to be a fan is to be a volunteer champion, and is only ever motivated by love and passion. And those are great things in the world.
Motivated by love and passion. This quite accurately describes our other amateur detective, Jeffrey s Laban.
Jeff is fine, saves time.
Jeff is a retired cellist. He played for four decades with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. He is a man powered by love and passion. Back when he was a boy in the nineteen fifties, he was a young reader of series mystery books. Later, those same forces would fuel his desire to solve the mystery of who is the real Carolyn Keene.
One of the department stores downtown would have once a year a sale on children's series books, and so it would generally be the first two or the three volumes of each series.
His mother would order a box of these books for her young, voracious reader, and one of those boxes of books would change the shape and the course of her young son's life.
I remember that the first one that I opened to read was The Hidden Staircase. And here she sneaks into the house during a rainstorm, and while she is hiding in the closet in this room, she feels something poking in her back, and she turns around and pushes it, and its door slides open, and she falls down this long stone staircase.
Jeff poured through all of the available Nancy Drew books. Along the way, he grew more and more enamored with the voice of this author. What so clearly resonated with young Jeff was not just the dark and moody vibe, but also the mysterious presence on the other side of the page. He'd read a lot of series books, but the writing of the Nancy Drew books was a cut above. Over time, Jeff also noticed that in some Nancy Drew
books the writing was noticeably better than in others. He didn't yet know it then, but even as a young reader, Jeff could intuitively tell one writer hadn't written all of the books in the Nancy Drew series. Indeed, there was more than one Carolyn Keene. What that meant was a mystery yet for him to solve. But soon enough he would discover that truth, which would lead to the most important question, who is the heroine of this tale? And could that same woman also be the villain? Our two
amateur detectives, Jeff and Melanie, were both undaunted. They'd cracked this case, just like their girl, Nancy Drew. The long hot days of summer finally gave way to the embrace of the cool and brisk of autumn. It was nineteen twenty nine September, to be exact. Looking to the future, a businessman put his thoughts to paper as he typed up a memo. Edward Stratamier had first started his company
Stratamire Syndicate back in nineteen oh five. Back then, he wrote and published dime novels, most notably books that were aimed at children. This was his main business series books, adventure books, mystery books. He was quite good a natural storyteller. Edward eventually began to use pen names so he could write more and more books in different genres. Soon enough, he couldn't keep up with all of the contracts for
books he had signed, so he hired ghostwriters. He'd come up with the story and they'd write it out.
To keep things.
Simple and to make sure that there were plenty of books, Edward attached a pen name to each series. That way, if the author behind it changed, the public would never be the wiser. This marked the true beginning of the Stratamier syndicate, and then for decades his firm cranked out series novels meant to be devoured by young readers. His business plan proved steadily profitable. In nineteen twenty nine, Edward Stratemier had an idea for a new series. He put
his thinking down in a memo. It was straightforward, matter of fact, as was his style.
These suggestions are for a new series for girls verging on novels. I've called this line the Stella Strong Stories. Stella Strong, a girl of sixteen, is the daughter of a district attorney. He is a widower and often talks over his affairs with Stella. Then, quite unexpectedly, Stella plunged into some mysteries of her own and found herself wound up in a series of exciting situations and up to date American girl at her best, Bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy.
Edward found a partner in a small publishing house called Grosset and Dunlap. They agreed to a contract for three books of the new series. After Edward Stratemire got the green light, one of the first things he did was to rework the name of the girl. Detective Stella Strong lacked a certain realism. She sounded like a comic Carowin. Edward wanted something that made her seem more relatable to the everyday girl. He and the publisher traded ideas until boom,
they landed on it. The name we all know Nancy Drew. Now with the right name and a contract in place for a three book series, Edward took his next important step. He reached out to a young writer he'd worked with a few times before on a series for girls, in particular his Ruth Fielding series.
I have just succeeded in signing up one of our publishers for a new series of books for girls. These will be bright, vigorous stories for older girls, having to do with the solving of several mysteries.
Edward laid out his expectations for their working relationship. The writer would pen all three books for the Nancy Drew mystery stories. The novels would be based on outlines supplied by him. The writer would have four weeks to turn in a manuscript, and in turn, the writer would receive one hundred and twenty five dollars for their work. That's one hundred and twenty five per book, no royalties, nothing else. Most importantly, the ghostwriters would sign away their rights to
their work and would receive no credit for their writing. Instead, the author of the series would be the fictitious Carolyn Keene. The young writer considered the offer, and then in October nineteen twenty nine, she agreed to the deal. The writer's name was Mildred Augustine. Later Mildred worked by marriage, and
even later Mildred worked Benson by a second marriage. As contracted, Mildred wrote the first three books in the Nancy Drew series, The Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, and The Bungalow Mystery. Those first three books would become an instant success for the publisher. They marked the beginning of a new American icon. While Edward Stratemeyer created the bones of Nancy Drew, and he drew the sketches of the
outlines of the first three stories. It was Mildred who would go on to flesh out the character and give Nancy Drew life. She transformed the outlines into a compelling, in vivid world of mystery and spooky portent, culminating in the payoff of well earned justice at the end. According to Mildred's diaries, Edward Stratamier never really gave her much to work with In those original outlines.
The basic plot was simply that there was an old clock in which there was a booklet hidden, and the booklet gave the clue to the fact that the will was in a safe deposit box. Then there was detail on that and the conflict of people wanting to get the old man's money. But that was the basic plot, which was a very old, hackneyed thing.
That's all there was, which left much for Mildred to do. What was particularly fresh about Nancy Drew was that she was made specifically four girls, and not only that she was a new type of American girl, as Edward Stratamier put.
It, an up to date American girl at her best right, clever, resourceful and full of energy.
This same attitude was reflected in his own home and in how Edward raised his daughters.
Stratamar were a very sort of upstanding, fairly upper class family, and I think he cared a lot about patriotism of the day, and he educated his daughters, which was not always the case in that era.
More than a mere capitalist, Edward Stratmeier was the sort of American we don't see much of these days.
I would have loved to sit down and talk to him.
I mean, I think that he really was a wonderful person who was very smart and cared a lot about how people take up their place in the world.
Yet Edward was still a man of his time, and thus he never actually expected his daughters to follow him into business and take over his publishing empire. But cruel reality stepped in. The first Nancy Drew mystery story was published on April twenty eighth, nineteen thirty. The thing about any beginning is that it also marks the end of something. In this case, that was the literal truth, because just as this new American icon first came into being, Edward
stepped out of the frame. On May tenth, nineteen thirty, a mere twelve days after the first Nancy Drew book was published, Edward Stratemeyer dropped dead. He passed away at home after a bout of pneumonia. He was sixty seven. Left behind in his impressive wake of success and brought low by loss and bereavement were Edward's two daughters, Harriet and Edna. After his sudden passing, his daughters inherited their father's publishing empire, built on the backs of ghostwriters in
series books. Their father never taught them about business affairs, so most folks assumed his daughters would sell the company and live off the profits. But the trouble for that plan there was this thing called a Great Depression. In October nineteen twenty nine, the same month Mildred first started work on the new series, the stock market cratered, plunging America into a financial catastrophe. America entered the Great Depression.
The heiresses tried the reasonable response first, they actively courted buyers, but the collapse of America's economy six months prior to their father's death made it exceedingly difficult for the two heiresses to sell their father's publishing company. There were no buyers to be found anywhere.
They are unable to do that because it's the depression and no one is buying this company, no one has any money. And so this is the moment at which my feelings about Harriet's Roudemyer Adams and the story kind of changed.
It's a real and raw moment. What would or could the Stratomeyer daughters do. The one asset the daughters had on their side was their father's personal secretary. She'd worked with Edward for fifteen years and was familiar with the inner workings of the business.
They decide they're going to have to keep the company, and they're going to have to run the company. To me, Harriet sort of emerges in this moment as someone who has suddenly been given an opportunity to really do something in the world, which she.
Hadn't had and probably wouldn't have had any other.
Way, because she was sort of well to do, housewife and mother for and I think she was really into it. I think she was like, I'm going to actually have a chance to use my education and to run this company that I love, which was started by my father who I adored. And so they take it up and they really made a go of it.
In the beginning, the sisters shared the daily workload of they're new to them publishing empire. But rather quickly it became self evident that Harriet had a head for business. Edna did not, so she took a step back.
Well.
Harriet, whose married name was Adams, plunged herself into the business world, which was not at all ready for someone like her.
There's a lot of correspondence in the files where people just address her as mister Adams, like they can't even conceive of the idea that a woman is running this company and she just sort of.
To deal with it. And so I really sort of came to admire her this way.
It really gave me a different perspective on her, to think about what it must have been like in nineteen thirty to take that over, and how in some ways it must have fulfilled some dream she had.
To aid the fulfillment of her dream. Harriet had a few key assets on her side. One her father's publishing empire's track record of success, two his profit minded business model, three the guidance of her father's personal secretary. And above all else, Harriet had one all important asset Nancy drew that said, Harriet also had one other key asset, her ghostwriter, Mildred. The sisters reached out to their ghostwriter and asked her about writing another Nancy Drew book, a fourth in the series.
It would be followed by many, many more. The resulting contracts made official their long and lucrative partnership. When our other amateur sleuth, Jeff, first encountered the mystery of who is the real Carolyn Keen, he didn't yet know it at the time, but he'd stepped into a role he'd only ever imagined, a real life teen detective. For both real and fictional detectives, to solve a mystery often requires
a great deal of shoe leather. For Jeff, just like for Melanie RayJack, it meant a great deal of time spent in the library. Before the Internet, the library was a great place to solve a stubborn mystery. There the library in the nineteen sixties, That's where Jeff came across his first big clue that Carolyn Keene wasn't who he thought she was. The clue was discovered in the library's
card catalog index. Jeff recalls well that moment when he first read those three magic words Carolyn Keene pseudonym.
Well, first of all, I didn't one with pseudonym meant, and so I asked the librarian and she said, well, that means. It is what they also call a pen name. They have made up a name to write under to hide their identity. For some reason, he.
Had to know more. It was like a magic spell had been cast, or perhaps more accurately, it felt like the burn for justice of a gumshoe. Detective Jeff knew he had to solve this mystery.
I had gotten bitten by the bug, so that's why I just went on this quest to figure out what is going on here.
The teen detective discovered his next clue at a second library, Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.
It was really exciting. On the main floor they had their general reference section, and on the one set of bookcases they had these huge, huge volumes, massive tones, and they listed by year all the books that had just been published or came into print that year. And I remember just simply looking up the name Carolyn Keene because I was wondering, well, what can I find out about
this pseudonym? And someone had very thoughtfully penciled in an ass to risk next to the name Carolyn Keene and it says real name word Comma Mildred A.
Wirt Mildred A. The asterisk note led Jeff to another one of those massive tones where he found more.
Clues, and they listed not only her name, but a lot of other pseudonyms. It also said Carolyn Keene. Well, so that was when the bells went off for me, and I said aha. And then also in the same reference room, they had telephone books from around the country, and since it listed that she lived in Toledo, I looked at the Toledo telephone book and sure enough, there she was listed.
Jeff jotted down the information, but then time passed. In fact, it was years. During college, Jeff moved Indianapolis. Once there, he realized he didn't live far from Toledo, Ohio. Jeff was no longer a teen detective. Now he was a young adult about to pursue his own career, and one day he was reminded of the mystery who is the
real Caroline Keen? When The Saturday Review published an article in nineteen sixty nine with the title The Secret of Nancy Drew and in the article the writer credited Harriet Strademeier as the author of all at the time forty three published Nancy Drew Books. Jeff was surprised to see that that was much different information than what he'd learned in the library as a kid. So Jeff decided, since he was so close, perhaps he could meet Mildred in person and hear what she had to say about that
particular article. Since it was the nineteen sixties, Jeff sent Mildred a letter sure enough good to her Midwestern nature. She responded she invited him to come meet her, not at her home, because who knows what sort of fan he might be, but he could meet her at her office. Jeff was elated.
I took a Greyhound bus over to Toledo and met her at a newspaper office where she worked, the Toledo Blade. And I remember that when she would just opened her desk drawer to put away her scarf, sitting in the top of the drawer was that issue of Saturday Review. I knew I had come to the right place.
When Mildred was confronted by the diligent young detective, she wasn't keen to talk. You see, Mildred had legally sworn in contracts that she'd never speak publicly about her work for the Stratamyer Syndicate. Consequently, Mildred rarely revealed her identity as a ghostwriter, whether out of professional courtesy or out of fear of the syndicate's lawyers. She was a professional, and she had her newspaper career to think of. The result,
her identity remained a secret. That is save for in the Ohio area, where local newspapers often proudly cited Mildred as the author and ghostwriter of the Nancy Drew books. So Mildred's neighbors they may have known the secret of the Stratamyer Syndicate, but most folks, even those in the publishing industry itself, had no idea. However, Mildred was still human, and slowly, over time and after numerous visits, she warmed to Jeff and she trusted him with her secret.
It eventually got to the point where there were quite a few Thanksgivings when I would drive over and have Thanksgiving dinner with her at the Toledo Club, and after that we would go back to her house and just sit and talk and talk.
During these long conversations, Mildred opened up about her secret life as Carolyn Keene. For one, it wasn't super glamorous. When Mildred was writing the books, she had to make time to write. She paid serious costs to get those words down on paper. Her routine was this, She'd return home from work at the newspaper. Her mother would be
there taking care of Mildred's kids. Her husband, Asa worked was sickly in bedridden, so there at his bedside, she'd set up a little table, situate her typewriter and write her Nancy Drew stories.
Lots of people think that Nancy Drew just came, but I paid for that with blood, with real blood. I sweat when I wrote the books, and I worked hard, unbelievably hard. I don't think very many people would ever work as hard as I worked during the most active years of my life. I would never do it again.
Over the course of their friendship, Mildred expressed the same sentiment to Jeff. She shared the cost of bringing Nancy Drew to life, and she spoke of the time that she lost.
From her own.
There were certain things that I felt I needed to steer clear of with her her first husband Asa, when he was ill, and she just set up her typewriter next to his bed, and I remember asking her a question and she said, oh, there, don't go digging up all his memories again. And she just didn't want to deal with it, so I would never press her for details about anything in her personal life.
At the time, back when she spent all those sleepless nights tending to her ill husband as she breathed life into a teen detective. There was a very understandable reason why Mildred did it, as she told Harriet in a thank you note.
During the past four and a half years, while my husband has steadily gone downhill following a series of seven strokes, there have been times when I seriously considered giving up writing. Some of the copy I turned out a year or so ago probably was not my best. But you are very patient, and I feel now that I am over the hump, so to speak. The syndicate gift of one thousand dollars is more than generous, and to say I'm
appreciative expresses it mildly. I trust Nancy will go on for many years, and that she will vie with the Rover Boys in carving a lasting name for herself in popular fiction.
Which Nancy Drew certainly did, but Mildred did not seek to make a name for herself as the writer of the beloved Teen Girl Detective, and thus no one could ever know about what she'd sacrificed to give them. Nancy Drew, that was the deal, and she knew it. She accepted it.
So then why did she open up to Jeff. Maybe it's because, at that very human level, it must have been nice to have someone know what she'd done, what she'd given, to have someone come and thank her and tell her what she and her work meant to him. It must have felt like a small but meaningful reward for her labors. She got to see and feel for
herself the impact her writing had on her readers. While Jeff was slowly uncovering the details of the woman behind Nancy Drew, the rest of the world was hearing a
much different story. Back to that Saturday Review story that Jeff mentioned in the January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine issue of Saturday Review, and a story with the title The Secret of Nancy Drew, the writer purported that the quote grandmotherly lady end quote who penned the Nancy Drew mystery stories was Harriet Strathemier, and that she with the lightly mentioned help before ghostwriters, but mainly she had written
the series dating back to nineteen thirty. That same story claim that in nineteen sixty nine, Harriet was about to complete her forty third Nancy Drew book. That was not exactly true. The number was true, but not the part about her completing the work. But who could question her version of events? The ghostwriter contracts made that near impossible. Meanwhile, at this same time, the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies marked a renaissance for the
teen girl detective. In the culture, Nancy Drew was highlighted as an early feminist icon and heroin for multiple generations of girls and women. And while the articles of the day did credit Harriet as the writer, there was some growing skepticism. For example, an article in the Chicago Tribune. It praised Harriet, but it also included this line that Harriet's secretary quote said she prefers not to answer the questions of whether her boss had written every book in
the series end quote. The answer to that all important question was about to be revealed in a very public place, specifically in a courtroom.
In New York.
There had been early attempts to get at the truth of who is the real Caroline Keene In the first decade of Nancy Drew's existence. The trade publication Blusher's Weekly did the legwork. The subsequent story revealed the actual inner workings of the Stratmeier syndicate under Harriet's leadership. There was mention of ghostwriters. There was another article by Fortune magazine, and it was more of an expose, laying out in detail how Edward used uncredited writers to churn out book
after book. The expose by Fortune provided the undeniable proof that no real Carolyn Keene existed, that Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and all the other book series were the product of a small cabal of ghostwriters, and Mildred was but one. This is another important fact. Mildred was not the only ghostwriter who penned Nancy Drew books, but she
wrote the vast majority of them. Yet, in nineteen thirty seven, for reasons we perhaps can only assume, the Library of Congress credited another ghostwriter as the sole author behind the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, a man by the name of Walter Kerrig. He'd written just three Nancy Drew Mysteries. For many years after,
this error was often repeated in the press. This confusion was particularly irritating to Harriet's Stratamire, and consequently it motivated her to erect barriers around the Stratamire Syndicate and its operations. As well, she labored to correct the record in her favor. Whenever she had the opportunity with the press, Harriet worked to construct a new narrative. The story she spun was that, despite any talk of ghostwriters, she was the real author
of Nancy Drew stories. As the years marched on, newspapers and magazines began to exclusively tell Harriet's carefully curated story, the one where she was the real Carolyn Keene, and through it all, Mildred remained quiet. She didn't come forward to dispute the narrative at first, and for many years decades even things were good. The Nancy Drew books allowed the syndicate to survive the Depression, to thrive after, and to grow into the home of one of the most
beloved American characters. As thanks for her hard work and her loyalty, Harriet was often generous with Mildred. For instance, she'd sent Mildred the extra money while her husband was ill, but gestures like that bonus were infrequent, and over time
tensions crept into their relationship. The two women had developed vastly differing ideas of who Nancy Drew was, and as the years wore on, the tastes of the day changed, the styles and politics followed suit that divide between the women and their view of Nancy Drew only grew more obvious. Eventually it was as if they were talking about two different girls. In the end, it was Harriet who decided to cut ties. She and her sister Edna felt that
Mildred had become argumentative and difficult. The sisters preferred to replace Mildred with someone who'd gladly accept the assignment and do as instructed and contracted without so much hassle, someone who'd likely do it for less money, and, as Harry it saw it, with far less headaches. Finally, in the
nineteen fifties, she made it official. After two decades of working together and twenty three books, Harriet and her sister Edna decided to sever their professional relationship with Mildred when they replaced her. They never even wrote to tell her. Instead, they ghosted her. The irony is almost comical. Mildred turned her back on the Stratamire Syndicate. She went on with her life as a newspaper writer. There would be no
more Nancy Drew for her. Yet, that small indignity and the bitter pill of Harriet taking credit for Mildred's work, those weren't the only insults that she had to endure. Around that same time. In the nineteen fifties, the Stratamire Syndicate began a series of revisions of the original Nancy Drew books. Times had changed, technologies had changed, Television was disrupting everything. Nancy Drew books needed to be updated to reflect this. One example, her age was up to eight team.
Why because it allowed Nancy Drew to drive in all fifty states. This was just one of the many changes made to reflect the real world of the readers.
They did need to make the books shorter.
They were like these books now, you know, children are like watching television and a kind of like precursor to our current era, Like everything started moving faster and kids had less attention, and so the action has to happen much faster, Like we can't have these sort of wandering byways down.
The dark road with the.
Large spooky trees overhanging it as the rain begins, you know, and all that stuff, that atmospheric stuff that made the book so great.
There were also the vast social changes developing in the nineteen fifties, namely the civil rights movement and the sprouting seeds of feminism. These social changes also pushed the Stratumier Syndicate's revisions of some characters and scenes in the Nancy Drew books, especially the carecharacters, who were rendered as rather racist stereotypes of the times. Harriet had labored diligently to make Nancy Drew less independent and more like the new
nineteen fifties ideas of femininity. It was Nancy Drew as a young June Cleaver.
She made Nancy much more wishy, washy and like toned down because the readers could identify with a more wishy washy person and they could you know, make themselves, you know, fitting into that role.
Harriet rewrote the series to her taste. Doing those revisions gave Harriet Stratemeyer the rare opportunity to try her hand at writing, while she also erased and forever changed the work of Mildred. This gave her more of a feeling that she'd actually written the books, since now technically she had, even if it was just a rewrite of the ghostwriter's words.
First of all, she said that, well, her father had written the first three Nancy Drew books, and when he died, she had found them all and she revised them and sold them to the publisher. But then she changed the stories. Eventually she took credit for having written them all herself.
If Harriet wanted to claim credit for the ghostwriter's work, there was little they could do to stop her. All Mildred could do was watch wordlessly as her beloved creation morphed into someone unrecognizable to her. But while Mildred couldn't say anything publicly, that certainly didn't stop Jeff. Harriet's claims on Mildred's legacy bothered him. He decided he'd do something about it. He wanted the rest of the world to
know about his friend Mildred. To Jeff, this was an act of justice, just like something Nancy Drew would do.
It just wasn't fair that somebody else was taking credit for somebody else's work. I just thought that, well, I have a mission, and I can do this.
Jeff wrote articles, He wrote a journal paper. He pushed newspapers to dig into the story and discover the truth. By the nineteen seventies, the public narrative began to shift. One newspaper story carried the title quote the Artful ways of Millie Nancy Drew was her brainchild end quote. That story detailed how Mildred was quote afraid any publicity will get her in touch with Stradamerson.
Close.
Quote in that same article, Mildred confided.
You say anything that hurts sales, and they'll be right on my neck.
This ongoing correcting of the record was a similar motivation for Melanie Rayhack to write her book Girl Sleuth, Nancy Drew and the women who created her. She also wanted to put facts down on paper for all to see, so that they could make up their minds about who is the real Carolyn Keene. Eventually, as with all things, the truth would went out. Back when Melanie Rayhack first stepped inside the University of Iowa's library to pore over the archive of Mildred's papers, she'd come to track down
a pioneering woman. What she disa discovered was not a mystery, but confirmation that Mildred was a badass of mid century America.
All of Nancy's sort of intrepid intelligence comes from Mildred, and I think that's why Edward had her picked out to write the series.
I mean he knew. He was like, this is what this.
Character is supposed to be, and this is a person who is naturally going to be able to put that quality into her, you know, and all this sort of athletic.
Stuff and the physical stuff.
So Mildred was a diver, I mean, she was athletic, so she put all that stuff into Nancy too. You know, there's all kinds of like scrape where she's dumped out of a boat in the middle of the lake and she's swimming.
They were thrilling for readers at the time.
To see this teenage girl performing also these physical acts which now we think of as like, oh yeah, sure, swimming whatever, but you know, kind of a big deal. So Mildred brought all of that to Nancy.
She had put her heart and soul into Nancy. And so over time, Harriet's rewrites would come to bother Mildred to Melanie. That tension between Harriet and Mildred's conceptions of Nancy Drew. It wasn't so easy to sort.
Out I saw from both women's standpoints at that point, right. I mean, I think it's indisputable that Mildred really helped create her as the sort of iconic character that we all remember, and really put a lot of herself into the character. I think where I had a lot more sympathy for Harriet than I originally thought I would was that, you know, without her, we wouldn't have had Nancy Drew, like if they had not taken over the company, if they had just let it fall apart.
Eventually, life did offer up a way to parse the two women's contributions and to determine who was responsible for the enduring popularity of Nancy Drew. In nineteen eighty, the Stratamier Syndicate decided to part ways with their long term publisher, across It and Dunlap. This action would drag the truth into the light of a courtroom for all to see.
After Harry announced her plans to switch publishers to Simon and Schuster, Grossid and Dunlap came forward to protest the sale and sued them both for one hundred and fifty million dollars. Grossid and Dunlap did not want to lose their golden goose, and they were willing to fight in court to prevent the sale. Their lawyers alleged that there were financial improprieties, for instance the royalties that should have
been paid to the firm's many ghostwriters. To help make their case, Grosset and Dunlap flew in a very special witness, Mildred. She was set to testify about how she'd not received proper royalties from the syndicate, which ultimately was the sole credit she did receive for her work the money. The stage was now set. The two women would finally be face to face with a judge and jury to weigh the truth and decide their fates. At the time, Harriet was eighty seven years old and not in good health.
Mildred was seventy four and still in fighting shape. Jeff was there too to support his friend.
She was wearing a powder blue pantsuit and had a black shoulder bag. She had her handler with her, you know, somebody driving her around, whose name was Dick Molina. He was an attorney. And when we arrived, Harriet was already there and Dick Molina introduced Millie to Harriet.
As Melanie Rayhak recorded in her book, when Harriet saw Mildred, she said to her, just one.
Thing, Arthorn, you were dead.
That's ice cold. That's cinema in fact. A moment like that is why fact will always beat fiction. Inside that New York courtroom, the two women met and through sworn testimony, they battled slyly, fighting over the legacy of Nancy Drew. Both women rose to the occasion.
It's like they both have total transference. They both basically speak as though they are Nancy Drew, like I created Nancy.
She is me.
I mean, they're elderly by this point, and they're in this courtroom defending their rights to this character that they became involved with as young women.
Mildred showed up at court dressed in Nancy Drew's iconic powder blue color. She attempted to make her points clear as she distinguished the two Nancys. And when she says, missus Adams, this is, of course, Harriet Strathmier Adams.
My Nancy would not be Missus Adams. Nancy, Missus 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 Nancies.
Mildred took her a moment on the stand to claim her credit for herself.
Now, I'm not angry at them. 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.
Mildred didn't come to court to fight over money from the sale of the company. Nope. She just wanted the world to know she had given them Nancy Drew. Mildred wanted the truth to be known. When Harriet Stratamier took the witness stand in the trial, she made quite a scene. She testified for five days. At one point she got so worked up she even fell out of her chair and out of the witness.
Stand order in the court.
But through it all she stuck to her story.
A friend of mine who was the head of Juvenile Literature division at the Library of Congress. At one point she said of Harriet, she's gone off with the fairies. I mean, she was believing her own hype that she had written all these books herself.
Hearing the account of the courtroom scenes, it feels like poetic justice from Mildred and the other ghostwriters. The enduring mystery was finally revealed and confirmed in a courtroom. Nancy Drew had been written by Mildred and other ghostwriters based off of outlines supplied first by Edward Stratemeyer and later his daughter Harriet, who'd also revised the books after they'd been published. Outside the courtroom, it felt like Mildred had won.
The truth was now on the public record. People would know Mildred had written the books that first made them fall in love with Nancy Drew, while Harriet had merely rewritten them. However, inside the courtroom it was Harriet and Simon and Schuster who won the lawsuit. The sale of the book rights could go forward, and the publisher did not have to pay Grosset and Dunlap for any of
the ghostwriters any additional money. Sometimes justice and truth are not the same thing as any good mystery writer will tell you. So what was it like for Jeff to witness his friend Mildred finally be acknowledged.
Well, let's just say I'm very proud, because it was so important for her to get, you know, the fair credits that she deserved for so much. We were, you know, without being related, We were really family and we had the most gotten Going to start cheering up, we had the most wonderful, loving relationship that was unlike any that I had had with anybody.
For Melanie Rayhak, she also got to come full circle emotionally as well. In writing her book on Nancy and the women who created her. She got to live as an amateur literary detective inspired by her girlhood hero as she chased down a real life mystery. It made her feel more connected to the women at the heart of this story, both women.
Writing this book gave me really a new appreciation of what all the generations of women who came before me.
Had gone through.
That I can do what I do in all kinds of ways as a parent and as a writer just made me very It made me very grateful in a way that I had not been. There's a lot of warring in the Nancy Drew world, and people tend to take a side are you. Are you on the Mildred side or the Harriet side? And I think where I tried to land and my book is in the middle.
That it's important to recognize what each of them did, which was not the same thing, but equally valuable or equally necessary, because without them we wouldn't have her.
Eventually, even Mildred grew a little sick of all the attention on her and the teen girl detective. As The New York Times quoted in her obituary, she'd once told a Times report her quote.
I'm so sick of Nancy Drew i could vomit.
Which this seems sensible considering all that she'd been through over the decades. In the end, though, we'll give Mildred the final word on Nancy Drew a kinder word. Mildred once told the San Francisco newspaper that while Nancy Drew may have seemed a lot like Mildred, it was actually the reverse quote.
I didn't consciously make her like myself. I made her good looking, smart and a perfectionist. I made her a concept of the girl I'd like to be.
So, Zaren Dana.
There were certain book series that I was introduced to as a kid that now I know we're part of the Stratameier syndicate.
The Bobbsey Twins.
The Happy Hollisters, Pardy Boys, Yeah, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew though, have somehow remained in the zeitgeist far.
Longer than all these other ones.
What do you think is it about Nancy Drew that people keep coming back to?
Well, I mean, having just you know, done all this research about her and her appeal and listening to a lot of people have like formed their opinions about it. There is this irresistible qualit about a girl who is defying, not you know, like in an aggressive way, but just defying all of the expectations of her time period, in particular of girlhood. And so she's just out there being adventurous.
She's carrying guns, she's driving her own car. She's just like downright cool, but not in an attitude per se, but in her actions, you know, and everybody was just so impressed with her. You're just like, I want to be like that girl.
I love a mystery book. I read a lot of mystery which is why it's so baffling that I skipped over Nancy Dry For some reason, I loved when I was a kid, cam Jansen, did you ever read those books? This is like our generational divide. It was a girl, like a very plucky girl, solving mysteries because she had a photographic memory. Ooh, I love it, which I'm like, give us that you know network for ce Durrel.
I can remember being in fifth grade. We had something called the book chain, where anytime you read a book you got to write the name of the book and the author, make a little construction paper.
Ring and put it on the chain.
And we came back from from probably Christmas break, and I'd read nine Nancy Drew and Nancy Drew Slash Hardy Boys and Hardy Boys books like this was my wheelhouse for a while. I was so proud, like I was going to walk in here with so much construction paper.
It was going to be like an art class me cutting this up.
And I made all my nine rings and I went to put them on the chain. My teacher said, Jason, you really need to diversify your reading. She was a spot on, totally right, but that stuck with me. Like, all right, don't get too cocky walking into these reading competitions.
Oh my god, this summer reading competition. If you read so much, I'm sure you guys are both readers like I was, where you would come back to people like the teacher, the librarian and they would not believe your list. They're like, come on, did you really read all these books?
I was one of those kids. I was like the annoying kid. He threw off the reading curve totally.
It worked. Look where it got you today.
Casting, No, you don't know if this could be a movie's Aaron, what do you got?
Okay? I thought about this one right, and I did it two ways. I thought modern casting and then timeless casting. Right, So modern casting, imagine Mildred wort Is played by Kathy Bates and Harriet Stratamyer Adams She's played by Jane Fonda, and then you have Edward Stratamyer played by Paul Giamatti. Now timeless casting.
Right, Paul Giamatti, As.
I know, I struggled on that one. I'll freely admit it. I was like, I don't know, but I just kind of liked he had like an honesty and like when he played John Adams. He has this decency that just emotes from him. But either way, I may not be spot on in that call. But say, for timeless one Mildred Wort, how about Shirley Maclain, Harriet Stratamyer Adams as Catherine Hepburn, and Edward Stratimyer as Claude Rains.
Oh how's that?
I mean, you're really good at this.
This is just your segment from now because no one can compete with this.
I love the Giamati.
You could have a big, big name actor there who dies in the first ten minutes and then.
Yeah it is you gotta have someone with integrity, someone with some real gravitas.
Right, Yeah, it's because it feels like he's a decent guy. You don't want him to seem like just like a businessman, you know. So, yeah, did you guys have a very special character from this one? Did anyone jump out for you?
Oh?
I like Jeff Lapan, the amateur detective.
You know?
Oh yeah, yeah, I love an amateur detective showing up in a Nancy Jerry story the right.
How about also as writers, I want for every writer for them to have a like, basically a champion, like Jeff who just goes out there and defends them, defends their work, fights the publishing industry. I think, especially women writers in particular, I think they all deserve at least one Jeffrey Laypan.
One of the things that keeps coming up again and again on these episodes, even episodes that have very little to do with each other topics, is the idea of people's motivations, like why what was so important for Jeff to get involved in this story? And we see this in earlier episodes with the people trying to recapture the moon rocks and the people trying to prove the Pledge of Allegiance is not written by who you think it is.
Yeah, I mean that's just what life is. Find your thing, go be obsessed with something.
I don't know what it's going to be for the three of us, but we will find it by the end of the series and let those enrich us.
So I mentioned it at the start of the show, but the team here at Very Special Episodes is celebrating International Women's Day this week, and so if you're looking for more programming honoring the incredible women at the network and worldwide, head over to iHeart Podcasts. International Women's Day feed by searching Women take the Mic. Wherever you look for podcasts, We're featured along shows like The Psychology of
Your Twenties, Dear Chelsea, Therapy for Black Girls. So if any of those sound good, that's Women take the Mic on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This episode was written by Zarn Burnett. Our producer, editor and sound designer is Josh Fisher. Our story editor is Marissa Brown. Additional editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington, Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser. Original music by Elise McCoy. Research and fact checking by Jocelyn Sears, Austin Thompson, Marissa Brown,
and Zaren Burnett. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Very Special Episodes is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnette, and me Jason English. I am your executive producer and we'll see you back here next Wednesday. Special Thanks to Julia Weaver, Ali Perry, Laura Tropiano and Carry Lieberman for including Very Special Episodes and the International Women's Day festivities. Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart podcasts,