Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (24 page)

By now the article, Xeroxed copies of which were floating around in New York publishing circles, had achieved a sort of underground notoriety; my editor at Knopf got a wire from Willie Morris, then editor of
Harper’s
, saying he would love to publish it. I was on the point of turning it over to Morris when William Abrahams at last did “get back” to me: the
Atlantic
wanted it after all. Furthermore, Manning had canceled the magazine’s advertising contract with FWS.

How does one go about researching such an article? My first step, before laying siege to the Famous Faculty, was to accumulate and absorb every available scrap of information about the school, my objective being to know more about its operating methods than did the Famous Writers themselves—which, as I soon discovered, was not hard. Via the
Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature
, I found articles in back issues of
Business Week, Advertising Age
, the
Wall Street Journal
from which I was able to trace the school’s phenomenal growth over the years. Robert Byrne lent me his vast file containing among other treasures the school’s glossy promotional brochures, its annual financial reports, and the original correspondence between “Louella Mae Burns” and the “registrar.”

Wishing to make contact with some live ones who had actually enrolled in FWS, I hit on the idea of taking an ad in the
Saturday Review’s
classified columns, giving my name and a box number: “Wanted: Experiences, good, bad or indifferent, with Famous Writers School.” I chose
SR
for the purpose because it seemed just the kind of middlebrow magazine whose readership might include likely victims. Nor was I disappointed; my ad drew several letters from dissatisfied students. Faced with the agony of selection from these, I decided eventually to use the one that seemed most representative—from the couple in “the boondocks of Arkansas,” as they put it, conveying in authentic tones of frustration their earnest expectations of the school and their dashed hopes. (My Yale students, to whom I imparted this story, loved the idea of using the classified columns as a research tool. I was told that during my stint there as instructor, the advertising revenues of the
Yale Daily
soared as a result of ads placed by members of my journalism seminar.)

Thus prepared, I set about interviewing those of the Guiding Faculty whose home addresses were listed in
Who’s Who
and whose phone numbers I got from Information. Early one Sunday morning my husband found me at the telephone. “What are you doing?” “Dialing Famous Writers.” He insisted I was wasting my time: “They won’t talk to you, why should they?” “No harm in trying,” I said. “Wait and see.” He stood by fascinated as one after another they talked on interminably—it was hard to shut them up. Needless to say, their off-the-cuff comments—and their unanimously admitted ignorance of the school’s operating methods— made for some of the most successful passages in the piece.

I was now ready to advance on the ultimate stronghold, the school itself. Armed with my list of questions, carefully graduated from Kind to Cruel, I called the director, Mr. John Lawrence, and explained that Miss Faith Baldwin, Mr. Paul Engle, and other faculty members had suggested he could help me with an article I was writing about the value of correspondence schools. He immediately offered to pay my fare, first class, to New York where I would be put up at the hotel of my choice, and to set aside a day to show me around the school. (When I reported this to the articles editor at
McCall’s
, she insisted that as a matter of principle
McCall’s
should pay. I suppressed the fleeting and unworthy thought that I might collect the price of the fare from both.)

My day at the school was long, grueling, and on the whole satisfactory. Late in the afternoon, having elicited through persistent questioning Mr. Lawrence’s firm and unqualified assurance that
never
had the school demanded a medical certificate of ill health as the condition of a student’s withdrawal, I sprung the final Cruel: Bob’s file on the Oakland widow, which contained a letter stating, “It is the policy of the School that when difficulties such as yours arise that we require a statement from the physician in attendance attesting to the inability of the student to continue on with the studies....” After listening to Mr. Lawrence’s murky attempt at an explanation—“unfortunate occurrence ... a slipup”—I took my leave. There seemed to be nothing more to say.

I saved Bennett Cerf for the last. My interview with him in New York went as described in the piece; the high point his illuminating remark about mail order selling: “a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible,” which he immediately regretted and asked me not to quote.

How, then, could I justify quoting it? I have been asked this many times by my students, and even by other working journalists. Was it not “unethical” of me? The technical answer is that at no time had Mr. Cerf indicated that his conversation was to be off the record, hence I had violated no agreement. Yet there is more to it than that. I can easily visualize interviewing an average citizen who is unused to dealing with the press, and acceding to his plea not to quote some spontaneous and injudicious comment. But—Bennett Cerf, at the top of the heap in publishing, television star performer, founder of FWS, who was cynically extracting tuition payments from the “gullible” for the augmentation of his already vast fortune? This hard heart felt then, and feels now, not the slightest compunction for having recorded his words as spoken.

We had one more brief encounter. I had just submitted the finished article to
McCall’s
and was showing a Xerox of it to a friend at Knopf, up on the twenty-first floor of the Random House building. We were giggling away about the Famous Writers when who should pop in but Bennett Cerf. The Random House offices are on the twelfth floor. What was he doing up here, I wondered —had somebody tipped him off to my presence? Genial as ever, Mr. Cerf took a chair and remarked jovially, “So HERE’S the archvillain. I hope you’re not going to murder us in that piece of yours.”

“Murder you? Of course not,” I answered. “It’s just a factual account of the school, how it operates, and your role in it.”

“I don’t like the look in your eye as you say that,” said Cerf. “Where are you going to publish it?”

Three possible answers flashed through my mind: (1) I haven’t decided, (2) I’d rather not say, (3) the truth. I reluctantly settled on the last. “If I tell you, do you promise not to try to stop publication?” I asked. Cerf made pooh-poohing sounds at the very suggestion. “It was commissioned by
McCall’s
,” I said. He sprang out of his chair: “
McCall’s!
They’re out of their mind if they think they can get away with this.”

By the time the article had finally found safe haven at the
Atlantic
, I was aglow with unbecoming pride which, as we know, precedes a fall. It seemed to me I had diligently and fully explored every facet of the school’s operation. The luck factor had been with me all the way; short of reading matter in a motel where I was staying, I had picked up the Gideon Bible, which miraculously fell open at the very passage in St. Luke’s gospel quoted in the epigraph, “Beware of the scribes ...” And somebody in Robert Manning’s office had spotted and forwarded to me the postcard inserts in paperback books, an incomparable example of FWS’s sloppy yet devious methods, which I used for the box, “Object Lesson.”

The fall came after the piece was published, and it still gives me nightmares. The
Atlantic
ran a letter from Cecelia Holland, a young novelist, who once when in financial straits had taken a job as instructor for FWS. She wrote: “Students are led to believe that each letter of criticism is personally written by the instructor. It is not. The instructor has a notebook full of prewritten paragraphs, identified by number. He consults this book and types out, not personal comments, but a series of numbers. Later, the paragraphs are written out in full by a computer-typewriter.”

How could I have missed this stunning bit of chicanery which so neatly epitomized the ultimate swindle perpetrated by the school? I shall ever regret not having set eyes on those automated typewriters, sincerely clacking out “This opening is effective. It captures the reader’s interest....” “I can see you made a try at writing a satisfactory ending, but you only partially succeeded....” I had spent much of my day at the school watching the instructors at work—why had I not asked to see some of the “two-page personal letters of criticism and advice” promised in the advertising? Why had I not quizzed Mr. Lawrence as to whether I had been shown the entire premises—was there anything interesting in the basement that I might have overlooked? To this day it pains me to think of this lapse in my investigation, and I only relate it here as a solemn warning to the would-be muckraker to take nothing for granted, and never to be lulled into the assumption that one’s research is beyond reproach.

Robert Manning scheduled the article for publication in July. Once having taken up arms against the school, he proved himself a most effective ally. It was he who thought of the clever and apposite title, “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers,” and who commissioned the brilliant cover cartoon by Edward Sorel, depicting Famous Writers William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Johnson, Gertrude Stein, Voltaire, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dylan Thomas gathered to pose for their publicity photograph.

Before the July issue appeared on the newsstands, Manning telephoned to say the
Atlantic
had already received fifty letters about the school from subscribers, who get their copies early. He was amazed—generally, he said, even a controversial article draws no more than a dozen letters during the whole life of the issue. (I can attest to this, having often published in the
Atlantic
on far more important subjects, such as the Spock trial and prisons, which generated maybe six to ten letters apiece. What stirs up readers to the point of writing letters to the editor will ever remain a mystery to me.) Before the month was over, more than three hundred letters arrived, all of which were forwarded to me and all of which I answered. Most of them were from FWS students who felt they had been swindled and who wanted to get out of the contract. To these I replied, “Don’t make any more payments and tell the school I advised this.”

Developments now came thick and fast. Manning reported that the July issue of the
Atlantic
had the largest newsstand sale of any in the magazine’s history—which recalled to me a line in the “registrar’s” letter to “Louella Mae Burns”: “Just consider how a single article can cause a magazine’s newsstand sales to soar....” Both the Washington
Post
and the Des Moines
Register
ran the piece in their Sunday editions, the first and only time one of my magazine articles has been picked up and republished in a daily paper. It was subsequently reprinted in England and West Germany, both countries in which the school was trying to establish a foothold. The state universities of Washington and Indiana ordered reprints for distribution to all secondary-school principals and counselors, and all university directors of independent study. Television producers invited me to discuss the school on programs ranging from the
Dick Cavett Show
to ABC’s
Chicago
.

As a result of all this, the controversy heated up in the most exhilarating fashion, reaching an audience far beyond the readership of the
Atlantic
. I put up a map of the United States and began shading in the battle areas as they developed: D.C., Virginia, Maryland, covered by the Washington
Post;
Middle Western states, the Des Moines
Register;
and so on.

Soon the consumer watchdogs got into the act, and my map filled up accordingly. Congressman Laurence J. Burton of Utah read the whole thing into the
Congressional Record
as a warning to the public. The Attorney General of Iowa filed suit to enjoin the school from sending its literature into that state, charging use of the mails to defraud. Louis J. Lefkowitz, New York State Attorney General, announced a crackdown on the school’s “deceptive practices” and, adding injury to insult, ordered the school to pay $10,000 in costs. The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs demanded “substantial revisions” in FWS advertising and required the school to pay $3,000 to cover the cost of the investigation. The Federal Trade Commission launched a full-scale inquiry, sending investigators around the country to take depositions of the school personnel, the Famous Faculty, and disgruntled students.

Cartoonists merrily joined the fray. A drawing in
The New York Times Book Review
portrayed an amply proportioned middle-aged lady writing a letter at her desk: “Dear Bennett Cerf and Faith Baldwin, Yes! I have a strong desire, nay, a
lust
to write....” The
National Lampoon
ran a caricature of a disheveled Cerf, red pencil in hand, captioned: “Unlikely Events of 1971: Bennett Cerf Stays Up All Night Correcting Student Papers from the Famous Writers School.” A
New Yorker
cartoon showed a scowling husband at the typewriter, saying to his smirking wife: “Go ahead, scoff. Bennett Cerf and Faith Baldwin say I have writing aptitude, and they know more about it than you do.”
Screw
magazine ran a full-page ad for the Famous Fuckers School: “We’re Looking for People Who Like to Fuck. Earn money at home. We know that many people who could become professionals—and
should
become professionals—never do.”

The letters, the media interest, the cartoons filled me with nostalgia—they were so reminiscent of the response to
The American Way of Death
, published seven years earlier. So, too, was the school’s counteroffensive, which was not long in coming, its opening shot a letter to the
Atlantic
saying that my article contained “at least twenty-three errors according to our latest count.” Famous Writer Bergen Evans repeated this libel on the
Dick Cavett Show
, where he was given equal time to rebut my remarks. Pressed for what the errors were, Evans was unable to answer, nor were they ever revealed by the school; although
Time
, in its roundup of the story, said the list was “long but quibbling.” The Evans effort drew a sharp comment from Harriet Van Horne, television critic for the New York
Post:
“One might have expected a professor of English to refute Miss Mitford objectively and efficiently. One expected wrong. Dr. Evans leveled a purely personal attack.”