The Extra Woman Read online

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  SOLITARY SPLENDOR

  The Bestseller

  On Saturday, August 1, 1936, the woman who was poised to become the Depression-era guru of the smart single girl was alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment, preparing to celebrate the release, and the early glowing reviews, of her first book. The following day, the New York Times would sound a note that would soon become familiar, calling it “amusing, sensible, worldly wise and very practical”—not gushing words, perhaps, but perfectly suited to both the book and its author, a plain, good-humored magazine editor in her midforties, who would soon be America’s most famous “bachelor girl.” But this description won’t quite do, still less the sour-sounding “spinster.” The best word for who and what she was is the one she coined herself: “Live-Aloner.” It explains her by the choices she made, not the husband she happened to lack. It was a status that depended on equal parts knowledge, pluck, willpower, and self-indulgence—all of which she would share with readers in her book: the bluntly titled, wildly popular self-help manual, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman.

  For a celebratory occasion like this Saturday night, a single lady needed rituals. First came a long soak in the bathtub, and with it the habitual prayer of thanks that she wasn’t at that moment being jostled onto a train at Grand Central Station by commuters bound for the suburbs. After the bath came whatever lotions and perfumes she most loved, whether they were gifts from admirers or treats she’d bought herself. Then, wrapped in a summer-weight negligee (single women ought to own at least two, to be changed with the seasons), she might pour a glass of sherry or shake up a cocktail from the small stash of liquor she kept on a pantry shelf—something her teetotal parents would never have done, but which was now not only acceptable but a marker of a single woman’s sophistication. With glass in hand, she could apply her makeup—another formerly scandalous practice, now perfectly commonplace—and choose what to wear for her evening out.

  Marjorie Hillis had never been a beauty, especially not in the wide-eyed, china-doll style that was popular when she was growing up in the first decades of the twentieth century. But by the age of forty-five she had grown into her height and strong features, and knew how to command a room. Working for more than twenty years on the staff of Vogue magazine, rising from caption writer to associate editor, had taught her how to dress and set her dark hair in flattering and fashionable finger waves. Although she could afford to shop at the best department stores in town, with money she both earned and inherited, she was no spendthrift. Instead, she invested thoughtfully in well-made clothes, making sure they coordinated with what she already owned, and taking care of them diligently so they would last. This philosophy had implications far beyond her wardrobe. Happiness, she believed, lay in making one’s own careful choices about everything from what to wear, to where and how to live. And now, in a slim little greenish-gold jewel of a book, she was going to share those lessons of glamorous independence with single women everywhere.

  The shiny cover of Live Alone and Like It was deliberately enticing and slyly misleading. It depicted a series of bellhops in matching red uniforms marching to the Live-Aloner’s door, bearing flowers, gifts, and invitations, suggesting that the ultimate goal of her solitary lifestyle was romantic attention from men—and plenty of it. In his introduction to the book, the irreverent Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield played up this idea, suggesting that the truly successful Live-Aloner was just playing hard to get. Like medieval nuns, he wrote, self-reliant single ladies “would soon find suitors playing the guitar under their windows, [. . .] placing ladders against the walls, [and] sending them amulets by the Mother Superior.”1 But Marjorie Hillis’s model of the Live-Aloner was far more proactive than this cloistered sister. She made her own choices, mixed her own cocktails, and enjoyed the company of men without feeling any desperation to land one for life. She might spend her evenings in thrall to the adventures of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, another brand-new bestseller in 1936, but she had no intention of behaving like the swooning heroine of romantic fiction.

  Live Alone and Like It announced in its first sentence that it was “no brief in favor of living alone.” Marjorie was not here to argue that a solo state was preferable to any other arrangement, but rather that it was quite likely, “even if only now and then between husbands.” A woman could be plunged by death or divorce, as much as by choice, into what the book called “solitary refinement,” and in these circumstances the challenge—and the necessity—of learning to make the best of it was more important than ever. Although marketers and reviewers preferred to focus on the lighter, sexier model of the Live-Aloner, a stylish young woman having too much fun to settle for marriage just yet, the author herself never lost sight of those who were single against their will, nor of how quickly the sands could shift under a person’s feet. Conventional wisdom still held that marriage meant security—but then again, people had believed the same thing about the stock market before the crash.

  By the mid-1930s, the Depression had dragged on for so long that its conditions had begun to look like the new normal. FDR’s government tried everything it could to jump-start the economy, but although the New Deal had plenty of individual success stories, the mood of the country as a whole proved harder to shift. Into this sputtering recovery came a crowd of self-appointed sages and a library of self-help books, which brought their readers psychological comfort, even if their formulas for success were questionable at best. The immediate bestseller among these was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936 and like most of its peers, addressed primarily to white-collar men—aspiring salesmen, struggling clerks, and middle managers—to whom the books promised to divulge the secrets of the conquering corporate heroes, millionaires, executives, and captains of industry. In a relentless fantasia of optimism that refused to acknowledge the power of the economy at large, these books encouraged men to look inward in order to generate success for themselves—and couldn’t help but cruelly imply that those who failed had only themselves, not circumstance, to blame. Few addressed themselves directly to a female reader, and fewer still to those who lacked the husband and family that were supposed to make her happy.

  Marjorie Hillis, too, believed in the power of positive thinking, but she also demanded that her reader face the reality of her circumstances. The path from “extra woman” to “Live-Aloner” took guts, and it began with throwing off the disparaging nicknames and grudging charity that single women were used to enduring. It meant rejecting the drummed-in lesson of a lifetime, that a woman’s true purpose was self-sacrifice to the happiness of others. In this new independent light, Marjorie promised, the Live-Aloner could base the major decisions of her life on her own needs and desires—living where she wanted to, not wherever was most convenient for her relatives. Her book is full of anonymous case studies of women who leave behind suffocating hometowns and husbands for a fresh start, and it’s easy to imagine the thrill that these stories of freedom must have offered to readers. It could never be as easy as the book made it sound, to start a life over alone, but Marjorie wrote with such confidence and passion about the value of independence that it was obvious she was speaking from experience. She knew what it was to feel domestically trapped, and she knew what it took to break free.

  In Live Alone and Like It, a solo apartment-hunter in search of a home goes looking for “A View, Sunshine, Chic, Gaiety” until she lands a place that fulfills those somewhat whimsical and abstract requirements. The unidentified case study sounds suspiciously like the author, whose pied-à-terre in the city overlooked the East River and was in the fashionable urban oasis of Tudor City, a newish apartment complex perched on the edge of midtown Manhattan. She liked it so much that when Live-Alone’s success boosted her bank balance, she moved to a different apartment in the same complex. Marjorie did not assume that all of her readers were New Yorkers—her case studies ranged from St. Louis to Los Angeles—but there was no do
ubt it was easier to achieve the kind of life she celebrated in a place that allowed for a measure of freedom and economic opportunity, not to mention excitement. Even Brooklyn Heights, where Marjorie had grown up, was sleepy and dull compared with Manhattan. Besides, it was hard for any single woman to create a genuinely independent life if she still lived within walking distance of relatives and neighbors who’d known her all her life, and kept asking when she was going to settle down.

  Tudor City was ideally suited to a single woman of means—it was safe and secluded, but still close enough to the theaters, restaurants, stores, and major train stations to supply abundant “gaiety” and “chic.” Developed by the real estate tycoon Fred F. French, Tudor City was designed, its early advertisements proclaimed, “not for millionaires but for people of taste and refinement . . . who wish to spend carefully.” When it opened in 1927, it set a new standard in modern urban living as the world’s first residential skyscraper complex, and the biggest such development New York had ever seen. Made up of fifteen buildings arranged around two central parks and housing nearly five thousand people, it became a beacon for livable, high-density development. The towers were (and still are) topped with a striking TUDOR CITY sign, designed to snag the attention of commuters at Grand Central, a 1920s version of the highway billboards that taunt traffic-snarled drivers with the reminder, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.”

  Despite the breathing room that the parks afforded, a Tudor City dweller never forgot she was in Manhattan. Marjorie could see the gleaming turret of the new Chrysler Building from her window and flashes of the East River, which she would later describe as looping the island “like shimmering satin ribbons” and silvering the gap between Brooklyn, where she had grown up, and Manhattan, where she had made her home. She could hear the “friendly, nostalgic river sounds” floating up to her, those “far-off whistles of boats that New Yorkers get to love and miss in inland cities.” The view she’d looked for allowed her a glimpse at all the thousands of lives unfolding in the buildings around her, looking at night like “giant illuminated checkerboards.” New York was, to her, the most “homelike” and least lonely place she could imagine.2 One visitor reported that “few dwellings among NYC’s famed cliffs so eloquently reflected their mistress’ personality.”3

  The success of Live Alone and Like It relied heavily on its author’s willingness to play the part of the exemplary Live-Aloner, enjoying her privacy and solitude amid the glamour and excitement of New York City. The headline of an interview she gave to the Washington D.C. News on November 2, 1936, was typical of the way writer and subject became intertwined: “Author of Best Seller Bases Her Book on Theories She Has Proven for Herself.” When a Boston Daily Globe reporter paid a visit to the “current expert on the art of bachelor-girling your way to happiness,” she found the author living her precepts to the letter. Despite nursing a cold, Marjorie was dressed in “a black velvet lounging robe of the utmost chic,” and sipping “a glass of excellent sherry.” She was busy with plans for a trip to London to launch the English edition of Live Alone, which appeared in December, shorn of its more parochial references to New York personalities and places. The Live Alone message was going global.

  That fall, Marjorie began to write a regular newspaper column on the single life, tackling subjects like drinking alone, escaping family obligations, and “Christmas for One.” Syndicated in more than sixty newspapers, the column also answered letters from readers about the challenges of setting oneself up in solitary splendor. Often these letters expressed plaintive disbelief that it was possible to live quite so self-indulgently as the author suggested on a truly tight budget. In her book, Marjorie had taken an airy, optimistic approach to the problem of financing the Live-Alone lifestyle, confining money matters to a chapter called “You’d Better Skip This One.” But the insistent financial questions gave her the idea for a sequel, which would tackle the unpleasant subject of saving and budgeting head on.

  The Live-Alone message was unabashedly materialist, and its success was at least partly due to an ingenious publicity campaign devised by the book’s publishers, Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis—a mutually beneficial arrangement with department stores, which encouraged them to sell copies of the book alongside carefully selected accouterments for the Live-Alone lifestyle. This was the first time the publishers had undertaken a “tie-up” marketing scheme like this, and their promotional booklet was jubilant at the wide range of potential connections between the book and the department stores’ offerings: “Every kind of merchandise is discussed. Gowns, street frocks, negligees, curtains, clocks, china dogs, beds and bedside tables.” Reminding the stores that their author was on the staff of Vogue, and citing the success of trial campaigns at Bonwit Teller and Wanamaker’s in New York, the publicity team included a cheat sheet of quotations from the book that could be turned into posters promoting all kinds of household goods, from furniture to cocktail shakers.4 They found a receptive audience in stores nationwide: it was a small step from describing the must-have accessories for chic living to displaying them alongside stacks of the shiny little book, on shop floors and in store windows.

  The stores didn’t pay much attention to context, or the book’s more serious message. The Emporium in San Francisco took a moment of tough love for the Live-Aloner—“You will have nobody to make a fuss over you when you are tired”—and turned it into an excuse for self-indulgence, with a display inviting the tired-out single customer to “Make a fuss over yourself, and relax luxuriously in this pink and frothy NEGLIGEE (Negligee Shop, Second Floor).” In New York, Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue dedicated four windows to the Live-Aloner, showcasing “negligees, tea gowns, night gowns, cosmetics, etc.—all the little luxuries that Miss Hillis suggest the extra woman should indulge in to pamper herself.”

  Other marketing schemes were more direct. D. A. Cameron, in charge of publicity at Bobbs-Merrill, devised a word-of-mouth scheme in July, shortly before the book was released, that would get its advice directly into the hands of his target audience. He wrote to a number of businesses, asking bluntly whether their offices contained any female clerks or assistants who lived alone. Insisting that he wasn’t being impertinent, but wanted to send Marjorie’s book straight to its target audience, he asked the recipients of the letters for these single staffers’ names and addresses, and several bosses complied.5

  Before long, this kind of outreach was no longer necessary—Live Alone was selling itself. By the time Marjorie saw the New York Times review on August 2, the first edition of her book, published two days earlier, had been “gobbled up.” The second printing lasted twenty-four hours. By the time of its “monstrous” sixth printing on August 29, the book was safely in one of the top three slots on every bestseller list in the country. As Cameron gleefully boasted to one newspaper editor, “the book is selling like American Legion poppies on Armistice Day.”6 More than 16,000 copies were sold in August, 19,000 in September, to a peak of 22,366 in October, when the movie rights were sold to Universal Pictures for $4,500—although no film came out of the book. Marjorie had received no advance for the book, which sold for the modest cover price of $1.50, but by December she had accrued almost $10,000 in royalties.

  Marjorie found herself swamped with fan letters, which revealed that the book was connecting powerfully with its target audience. There were those who found it a delicious temptation toward selfishness, like the woman who confessed that “Before I know it I will have opened all the perfumes I bought in Paris this summer, for Xmas presents, and be using them myself.” Others struck a more earnest note, hinting at how difficult they had found their “extra” status before the book: “Thanks a lot for your grand contribution toward making life a bit saner and more normal for us who walk alone.”7

  Several high-profile women who were already living the Live-Alone principles responded exuberantly to the book. Margaret Fishback, a well-known poet and the highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the 1930s, wrote to congra
tulate Marjorie “on the gaiety and usefulness” of Live Alone and to regret that she hadn’t written it herself. “It will do more good than a ton of medicine,” she wrote. “The psychiatrists should pin a medal on your boozom.”8 Fishback had gone to work at Macy’s as a copywriter in 1926, and had become a well-known single woman-about-town, publishing a hugely successful poetry collection in 1933, Out of My Head, which explored the lives of working women in the city. Her breezy, light style found an audience in women’s magazines, daily papers, and more highbrow publications, at a time when poetry was a regular feature in their pages. “Maiden’s Prayer” was a typical vignette about single life, published in The New Yorker:

  It’s easy now to get a meal

  From eager gentlemen and sporty;

  But how will they be apt to feel

  And who will feed me when I’m forty? 9

  When Fishback announced her engagement in 1935 to Macy’s head rug buyer, her capitulation to matrimony prompted a rash of knowing, crowing articles (“Sneerer at Love Engaged to Wed”). In a few years, Marjorie Hillis would be on the receiving end of a similar outpouring herself.10

  During the height of the Live Alone and Like It boom, the most widely read advice column in the country rarely dealt with the lives of women who lived lives outside the family. But even Dorothy Dix, America’s “Mother-Confessor,” had to take notice of the new single woman in the fall of 1936. That November, a reader named “Estella” wrote to ask, “Is it a disgrace to be an old maid?” Dix wasted no time telling Estella that she was behind the times, and that her question sounded “like something that you had fished out of the hair-trunk in the attic.” Without mentioning Marjorie Hillis directly, Dix made it clear that not marrying is “a matter of personal choice and taste,” and that it was no more disgraceful than it would be for a man to remain a bachelor. Perfectly encapsulating the spirit of the Live-Aloner, Dix went on: “No women are more admired or sought after socially than the smartly dressed, intelligent, up-to-date, humorous and philosophical spinsters who would be highly amused at the idea of anyone looking askance at them because they did not wear a wedding ring.”11