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  In the spoof Wake Up Alone and Like It!, a young female narrator follows Brande’s precepts for success and races through four husbands by the age of thirty—the subtitle is A Handbook for Those with Cold Feet. The gleefully violent satire is distinctly gendered, with a note purportedly about the author describing her as both superficial and sadistic, “a mean little brat even when she was three years old, when she was found by her mother trying to give the cat a fashionable, stream-lined tail by pulling out all the tail hairs one by one.” Its main target, however, was the self-help trade in general, a vast confidence game in which the only people really profiting are the likes of Brande, Carnegie, and Hill. “Use the book in every way you can think of,” the author instructs the reader, with tongue in cheek. “Wear it out as soon as you can and buy another. If you buy enough of them, I shall feel that I have Not Failed.”31

  It was undeniably true that the public’s yearning for a formula for happiness translated into huge sales for self-help books, which always promised to be the last one the reader ever need buy (unless, of course, the author produced a sequel). How far these books changed anyone’s life is impossible to measure, but even the most gullible of readers must have realized that not all the millions who bought Hill’s Think and Grow Rich actually, well, grew rich. Did that mean they were all failures? Or might there be a way to reassure those who weren’t at the top that they could still be happy, and learn to appreciate what they had, finding satisfaction in daily living, cheap everyday pleasures, and, especially, life at home. At times of economic strain and political uncertainty, in the 1930s and today, some savvy self-help authors found a way to recast belt-tightening and penny-pinching as opportunities to clear the clutter and focus on what’s truly important.

  These contentment writers often looked overseas for inspiration. To this day, a popular corner of the self-help section is stocked with books that promise to share the wisdom of another place as a counterweight to American consumerist excess. The appeal of Japanese decluttering guru Marie Kondo’s bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and its sequel, Spark Joy, relied heavily on quirky, distinctly non-Western precepts like thanking rejected objects for services rendered before tossing them into the garbage. Such books romanticize older and more seemingly “traditional” cultures, usually European or Asian, in order to teach readers how to eat better (without getting fat), raise better-behaved children, have better sex, and take more time for themselves.

  The foremost contentment guru of the late 1930s was the prolific Lin Yutang, a Chinese author, translator, and inventor who emigrated to America in the middle of the decade. He fed readers’ desires for wisdom from a far-off place with roughly a book a year, including The Wisdom of Confucius, The Wisdom of China and India, The Wisdom of Laotse—and eventually, Lin Yutang on the Wisdom of America. But it was his 1937 bestseller The Importance of Living that established his winning formula of mythologizing Chinese village life and translating its lessons for Western readers. The book conjured up a world of slow, settled, supportive communities that contrasted favorably with thrusting, urban, dog-eat-dog America. Lin turned the pillars of the success gurus’ gospel—efficiency, tireless dedication to work, and the drive for achievement—into his core vices.

  At a time when documentary photographers funded by the WPA were traveling the country to record the desperate poverty of migrant farmworkers, any idealization of rural life during the Depression depended heavily on fantasy. Contentment writers like Lin Yutang have been called “apologists for unemployment,” who by praising the blessings of leisure, reinvented forced idleness as soul-enriching free time, and overlooked the severe psychological strain of being poor and out of work.32 But the contentment books did not simply encourage their readers to drift through the day, smelling the roses and savoring the sunset. Instead—as suggested by the rather aggressive title of Edmund Jacobson’s 1934 self-help guide You Must Relax—they often turned leisure time into an extension of productive work, a time when readers could develop skills and positive mindsets that might in turn make them more competitive in the job market. The benefits of rest and relaxation were usually touted with one eye on the corporate workplace: a well-rested worker, after all, could redouble her efforts in the office, and a happy, optimistic demeanor (as Dale Carnegie emphasized) could help secure her promotion.

  Marjorie Hillis blended the positive-thinking approach of the success manuals with the contentment writers’ emphasis on satisfaction, tempered with a dose of Dorothy Dix’s common sense, in order to create her decidedly modern, funny, and nascently feminist version of self-help. She firmly believed that living alone did not exempt a woman from creating a stylish and comfortable home, and that objects could be sources of genuine pleasure. Her philosophy was a deliberate assault on the Puritan tradition that denounced worldly pleasures as sinful and shallow. Indeed, in the newspaper column she began to write shortly after the publication of Live Alone and Like It, Marjorie went so far as to suggest that carefully chosen “glamorous things” for the home could make up for missing human company. “I do believe that those who lack just the personal relationships they’d like can fill their lives so full of charming things that they scarcely miss the other,” she wrote—a daringly materialistic claim to make at any time, but especially in the midst of a Depression. She insisted, however, that a beloved lamp or scarf or armchair was not just a consumer good, but also, and more importantly, an expression of an individual’s taste and personality, which could bring lasting joy. “A great many people are much too noble about what they call the material things of life,” she added, with a dismissive scoff. “They are usually rather drab people.”33

  In Live Alone and Like It, Marjorie’s message, that single women could work, play, and live exactly as they chose, was nothing short of revolutionary, although its trappings were lighter than air. The pleasures of eating, drinking, decorating, and entertaining for nobody else but yourself were the kinds of things that could be called brazenly selfish, especially when women of Marjorie’s generation had been raised to expect that they would devote themselves to others: parents, husband, children, and then anyone else who asked. The Live-Aloner refused all that, and poured her energy instead into stylish living quarters, well-mixed cocktails, and the company of charming guests—no chaperone required. Her independence came at a practical cost, however, unless she truly was an heiress. How realistic was it, for an ordinary single woman during the Depression, to reject family ties and make a life of her own?

  3

  (NOT) A QUESTION OF MONEY

  “A Slight Financial Pressure Sharpens the Wits”1

  The success of Live Alone and Like It made the fall and winter of 1936 a whirlwind for its author. By year’s end the book had sold more than one hundred thousand copies, and was the eighth most popular nonfiction book of the year, according to the tally compiled from booksellers by Publishers Weekly magazine, which was touted by the publishers in its promotional efforts. Marjorie’s syndicated column “Says Marjorie Hillis” could be found in sixty-five daily newspapers across the country, and it was becoming impossible to devote her full attention to her duties at Vogue. In January 1937 she hung up her editor’s hat, said her goodbyes, and applied herself full time to her new position as America’s guru for the single girl. By February, having moved to a new, larger apartment in a neighboring Tudor City building, Marjorie Hillis was hard at work on her new book, still untitled, which she promised to her publishers by April 1.2

  In the course of her promotional tours, visiting department stores and women’s clubs, giving lectures and interviews on the radio and to the women’s pages of newspapers, Marjorie had heard over and over again the same worry from interviewers and readers alike: money. How could an ordinary woman, who was not a bestselling author, magazine editor, and the daughter of a famous clergyman, possibly hope to replicate the Live-Alone lifestyle? What was the hope of happiness for a single woman who was merely scraping by?

  Marjorie and her pub
lisher agreed early on that her second book ought to dive more deeply into this question of personal finance, but it was a tricky subject to make appealing, even in a climate of cautious recovery. The very notion of budgeting relied on a steady and predictable income, healthy enough to be parceled out with something left over—but steadiness and predictability were the very economic pillars that had crumbled since the crash. In such circumstances it was difficult to convince people that their money was in their control. So in order to repeat the success of Live Alone, Marjorie’s budgeting book had to give the impression that it was actually about something else: pleasure, indulgence, and shameless fun—a cocktail that had done the trick before.

  Live Alone and Like It had taken a breezily optimistic approach to money. Its chapter on budgeting was called “You’d Better Skip This One,” suggesting that the sparkling Live-Alone fantasy would be muddied by too much economic reality. It didn’t help that writing about budgets was no more fun than sticking to them. A month after the deadline for her budgeting book had passed, Marjorie confessed she’d hit a major snag: “The fact is that I HATE budgets.” Until that point, she had been able to convince herself that she wasn’t really writing about them, but it was pretty hard to keep up the pretense once she hit the chapter called “Almost Balancing the Budget.”3

  In the end, the budgeting system Marjorie would advocate in her new book was basic enough to be followed even by those who shared her dislike, with only one ironclad rule: “Don’t follow anyone else’s figures.”4 As with everything else in the book, the binding principle was the same one she had established in Live Alone: for the reader to know herself. From there, she could cut back on whatever didn’t matter—to her, not to the world at large. If she lived to travel, then she ought to take a smaller apartment. If going to the theater mattered more than clothes, so be it—just the same as if fashion was more important than fine food. Marjorie wasn’t going to judge anyone’s priorities—she simply advised making sure the “miscellaneous” envelope was sufficiently padded in order to cover “the fun and the flavor and the trimming in your life.”5

  Wherever her passions lay, there was one arena in which a Live-Aloner could not afford to skimp: her savings. Here Marjorie whipped off the gloves. “You might as well face the fact early in the game that if, at forty, you are living alone, you will probably still be living alone, or wishing you could, at fifty, sixty, seventy, and even eighty,” she wrote. “Some of that time, at least, you will not be able to go out and earn your own Martinis.”6 It was far better to economize while you were young, in order to look forward to an independent and comfortable, even glamorous old age.

  In telegrams back and forth, Marjorie and her editor, Laurance Chambers, hashed out the title of the book that would entice her original readers back, while also playing down the “live alone” language in order to appeal to a wider audience. Chambers favored a bold bait and switch: The Art of Being Smart: It’s Not a Matter of Money. That was a little too strong for Marjorie—of course, it was a matter of money, or at least what you did with it. She pushed blithely for a different subtitle, distinctly of its time: A Guide for Gay Economists. Eventually they settled on the phrase Live Smartly on What Have You, implying that the book’s lessons could be freely adapted for whatever happened to be lying around.

  That left only the main headline. Chambers and his team favored the blander, broader Art of Being Smart, but Marjorie wanted a phrase that promised a specific luxury to balance the ugly word “budget.” She toyed with champagne, but didn’t want to risk offending the temperance types who had reacted so violently to her earlier praise of drinking. Orchids represented a purely decorative, slightly exotic, and entirely frivolous pleasure. But how much of that pleasure could she promise? Even as Bobbs-Merrill was hyping the new book to newspapers for reviews and syndication deals under the working title An Orchid on Your Budget, Marjorie wasn’t satisfied. “I tried it on some of the Vogue Staff,” she wrote to the New York office in April, “and they all thought AN ORCHID was stingy!” Orchids it was—as many as you could afford.7

  When the manuscript came back from its anonymous readers, however, it became clear that stinginess was hardly Marjorie’s problem. Rather, her assessment of “what have you” was wildly out of touch. In her chapter “Almost Balancing the Budget” she throws out a sample annual income of $4,000, because the figure was easy to divide and “we may as well be optimistic.” But for most Live-Aloners, $4,000 a year—equivalent to around $150,000 today—was more daydream than reality. It was more than Marjorie’s own Vogue salary, even in her most senior editorial role. Indeed, it was a number she could arrive at herself only through a combination of her salary, inheritance, and the royalties for her books—she made almost twice this amount in the first three months of the release of Live Alone. Almost all the book’s advance readers raised the alarm at the figure, calling it “much too high to be of vital interest to the average budgeter.” Cutting it in half would still be “fairly optimistic,” one said, at a time when $2,000 was enough to place a family comfortably beyond the worst effects of the Depression.8

  Marjorie won the battle. Her instinct was that her readers would prefer to imagine that she was, or could become, a “successful business woman” on four thousand a year, than to base her budget on a more pinched reality. Optimism was everything. Even skeptical readers seemed to understand that fantasy was more powerful than practicality. “I hope she took care of the great multitudes who cannot swish along beside big bouquets of pale pink roses in a perfumed room after a perfumed bath, having the maid bring in a tray of mosquito’s wings on toast,” wrote Leola Allard, the women’s columnist at the Chicago Daily News, privately to the Bobbs-Merrill publicity department before the release of Orchids. “It sounds grand, but how to do it!”9

  Different worries began to plague the author once the manuscript was finally turned in—chiefly over the new book’s case studies. In late May, Marjorie wrote her editor in a panic to ask if she could make some last-minute edits, worried that two of the cases in particular were too revealing of their real-life inspiration. On learning that it was too late to change anything, she wrote back apologizing for her anxiety. “Do all inexperienced authors take on so about a second book?” she asked. The pressure of expectation after her first success was “distinctly nerve racking,” she explained, adding that she “would love to hibernate or take dope till a month after publication.”10

  As it turned out, no drug-induced oblivion was necessary. The “case studies” were flattered, rather than offended, by their inclusion. “Mr. L”—described in Orchids as a smart young man-about-town with an “almost embarrassing” reputation as an excellent chef and host—came to the book’s release party at the Gladstone Hotel “as pleased as Punch,” Marjorie reported, adding that he was the only guest who got drunk. Her worries about the originals of her other case studies proved baseless: “You’ll be entertained to know that the friends I thought might be insulted were among the first and most cordial to write me,” she told Chambers the day after the party.11

  The buoyant mood that accompanied the release of Orchids was borne out by the reviews, many of which proclaimed the book to be even better than Live Alone. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “more pungent, equally sane, and broader in view,” and other reviewers agreed that this second outing would appeal still more widely than Live Alone had. “There are 132 pages of succinct and lively wisdom in this slim and sapient little volume,” the New York Times wrote, alliteratively, while the Herald Tribune praised its “chipper common sense.”12 By August, three months after its release, Orchids had sold more than forty-four thousand copies and was vying with How to Win Friends and Influence People for the top spot on the Herald Tribune’s bestseller list.

  The cover of Orchids jettisoned the quartet of bellhops bringing gifts and flowers to the Live-Aloner’s door. Instead, it presented a quartet of women who could clearly pay for and enjoy their own flowers. Lithe and smart in their outfits of na
vy blue and raspberry pink, the women swing briefcases and baskets of flowers. The shiny cover proclaimed that this was an object to treasure, and would not contain dreary admonishments of self-denial. Orchids encouraged readers to take pleasure in money: in amassing it, allocating it, and spending it. Even savings, Marjorie made clear, were a source of pleasure, not just duty: “we have observed that most people seem to get as much fun out of buying a bond as out of buying a bracelet, once they’ve tried it.” The nudge in the ribs to the female reader is deliberate—she goes on: “That money-in-the-bank strut appears to be very satisfying, and it’s nice to observe that it’s no longer a purely masculine goose-step.”13

  The last in the line of elegant budgeters gracing the cover of Orchids holds a small child by the hand, making it clear that the audience was no longer just the self-supporting Live-Aloner. It might even be for the single mother, though there wasn’t much in the book that addressed her situation directly. Marjorie recognized that the elegant simplicity of budgeting for oneself was no longer much use when the needs and desires of husbands, children, and relatives were thrown onto the balance sheet. Nevertheless, she urged women to take care of themselves, perhaps haunted by the memory of her mother’s vulnerable position, back when her husband’s reckless investing had threatened to shame and sink the family. Faced with husbands who refuse to confront reality, or who treat their wives as useless objects, or who become depressed and bitter when they don’t achieve the success they think they deserve, the married “case studies” in Orchids either get out or go under. Divorce, as in Live Alone, carries no obvious stigma. During the Depression, married women were encouraged to see supporting their husbands as their most important job, but Marjorie made it clear that he had to be worth supporting. In the burned and sober years after the crash, no woman could afford to let a man hold the purse strings and remain in the dark about the waxing and waning of her family’s wealth.