Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (22 page)

From Messrs. Lawrence and Carroll I learned these salient facts about Famous Writers School:

The cost of the course (never mentioned in the advertising, nor in the letters to successful applicants, revealed only by the salesman at the point where the prospect is ready to sign the contract): $785, if the student makes a one-time payment. But only about 10 percent pay in a lump sum. The cost to the 90 percent who make time payments, including interest, is about $900, or roughly twenty times the cost of extension and correspondence courses offered by universities.

Current enrollment is 65,000, of which three-quarters are enrolled in the fiction course, the balance in nonfiction, advertising, business writing. Almost 2,000 veterans are taking the course at the taxpayers’ expense through the GI Bill. Teaching faculty: 55, for a ratio of 1,181 4/5 students per instructor.

There are 800 salesmen deployed throughout the country (for a ratio of 14 3/5 salesmen for every instructor) working on a straight commission basis. I asked about the salesmen’s kits: might I have one? “You’d need a dray horse to carry it!” Mr. Carroll assured me. He added that they are currently experimenting with a movie of the school, prepared by Famous Writer Rod Serling, to show in prospects’ homes.

I was surprised to learn that despite the fact the schools are accredited by such public agencies as the Veterans Administration and the National Home Study Council, they preserve considerable secrecy about some sectors of their operation. Included in the “confidential” category, which school personnel told me could not be divulged, are:

The amount of commission paid to salesmen.

Breakdown of the $22,000,000 “sales and advertising” item in the shareholders’ report as between sales commissions and advertising budget.

Breakdown of the $48,000,000 income from tuition fees as between Writers, Artists, Photographers.

Terms of the schools’ contract with Guiding Faculty members.

If Bennett Cerf and his colleagues haven’t time to grade the aptitude tests, who has? Their stand-ins are two full-timers and some forty pieceworkers, mostly housewives, who “help you find out whether you can be trained to become a successful writer” in the privacy of their homes. There are no standards for admission to FWS, one of the full-timers explained. “It’s not the same thing as a grade on a college theme. The test is designed to indicate your
potential
as a writer, not your present ability.” Only about 10 percent of the applicants are advised they lack this “potential,” and are rejected.

The instructors guide the students from cheerful little cubicles equipped with machines into which they dictate the “two-page letter of criticism and advice” promised in the advertising. They are, Gordon Carroll told me, former free-lance writers and people with editorial background: “We never hire professional teachers, they’re too
dull!
Deadly dull. Ph.D.s are the worst of all!” (Conversely, a trained teacher accustomed to all that the classroom offers might find an unrelieved diet of FWS students’ manuscripts somewhat monotonous.) The annual starting salary for instructors is $8,500 for a seven-hour day, something of a comedown from the affluent and glamorous life dangled before their students in the school’s advertising.

As I watched the instructors at work, I detected a generous inclination to accentuate the positive in the material submitted. Given an assignment to describe a period in time, a student had chosen 1933. Her first paragraph, about the election of F.D.R. and the economic situation in the country, could have been copied out of any almanac. She had followed this with “There were breadlines everywhere.” I watched the instructor underline the breadlines in red, and write in the margin: “Good work, Mrs. Smith! It’s a pleasure working with you. You have recaptured the atmosphere of those days.”

Although the key to the school’s financial success is its huge dropout rate (“We couldn’t make any money if all the students finished,” Famous Writer Phyllis McGinley had told me in her candid fashion), the precise percentage of dropouts is hard to come by. “I don’t know exactly what it is, or where to get the figures,” said Mr. Lawrence. “The last time we analyzed it, it related to the national figure for high-school and college dropouts, let’s say about two-thirds of the enrollments.”

However, according to my arithmetic based on figures furnished by the school, the dropout rate must be closer to 90 percent. Each student is supposed to send in 24 assignments over a three-year period, an average of 8 a year. With 65,000 enrolled, this would amount to more than half a million lessons a year, and the 55 instructors would have to race along correcting these at a clip of one every few minutes. But in fact (the instructors assured me) they spend an hour or more on each lesson, and grade a total of only about 50,000 a year. What happens to the other 470,000 lessons? “That’s baffling,” said Mr. Carroll. “I guess you can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink.”

These balky nags are, however, legally bound by the contract whether or not they ever crack a textbook or send in an assignment. What happens to the defaulter who refuses to pay? Are many taken to court? “None,” said Mr. Lawrence. “It’s against our policy to sue in court.” Why, if the school considers the contract legally binding? “Well—there’s a question of morality involved. You’d hardly take a person to court for failing to complete a correspondence course.”

Mrs. Virginia Knauer, the President’s Assistant for Consumer Affairs, with whom I discussed this later, suspects there is another question involved. “The Famous Writers would never win in court,” she said indignantly. “A lawsuit would expose them— somebody should take
them
to court. Their advertising is reprehensible, it’s very close to being misleading.” Needless to say, the debtors are not informed of the school’s moral scruples against lawsuits. On the contrary, a Finnish immigrant, whose husband complained to Mrs. Knauer that although she speaks little English she had been coerced into signing for the course by an importunate salesman, was bombarded with dunning letters and telegrams full of implied threats to sue.

A fanciful idea occurred to me: since the school avers that it does not sue delinquents, I could make a fortune by advertising in the literary monthlies: “For $10 I will tell you how to take the Famous Writers’ course for nothing.” To those who sent in their ten dollars, I would return a postcard saying merely, “Enroll in the course and make no payments.” I tried this out on Mr. Carroll, and subsequently on Bennett Cerf. Their reactions were identical. “You’d find yourself behind bars if you did that!” “Why? Whom would I have defrauded?” A question they were unable to answer, although Bennett Cerf, in mock horror, declared that the inventive mail order industry would certainly find
some
legal means to frustrate my iniquitous plan.

Both Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Carroll were unhappy about the case of the seventy-two-year-old widow when I told them about it—it had not previously come to their attention. It was an unfortunate and unusual occurrence, they assured me, one of those slipups that may happen from time to time in any large corporation.

On the whole, they said, FWS salesmen are very carefully screened; only one applicant in ten is accepted. They receive a rigorous training in ethical salesmanship; every effort is made to see that they do not “oversell” the course or stray from the truth in their home presentation.

Eventually I had the opportunity to observe the presentation in the home of a neighbor who conjured up a salesman for me by sending in the aptitude test. A few days after she had mailed it in, my neighbor got a printed form letter (undated) saying that a field representative of the school would be in the area next week for a very short while and asking her to specify a convenient time when he might telephone for an appointment. There was something a little fuzzy around the edges here—for she had not yet heard from the school about her test—but she let that pass.

The “field representative” (like the cemetery industry, the Famous Writers avoid the term “salesman”) when he arrived had a ready explanation: the school had telephoned to notify him that my neighbor had passed the test, and to tell him that luckily for her there were “a few openings still left in this enrollment period” —it might be months before this opportunity came again!

The fantasy he spun for us, which far outstripped anything in the advertising, would have done credit to the school’s fiction course.

Pressed for facts and figures, he told us that two or three of the Famous Fifteen are in Westport at all times working with “a staff of forty or fifty experts in their specialty” evaluating and correcting student manuscripts.... Your Guiding Faculty member, could be Bennett Cerf, could be Rod Serling depending on your subject, will review at least one of your manuscripts, and may suggest a publisher for it.... There are 300 instructors for 3,000 students (“You mean, one teacher for every ten students?” I asked. “That’s correct, it’s a ratio unexcelled by any college in the country,” said the field representative without batting an eye).... Hundreds of university professors are currently enrolled ... 75 percent of the students publish in their first year, and the majority more than pay for the course through their sales.... There are very few dropouts because only serious, qualified applicants (like my neighbor) are permitted to enroll....

During his two-hour discourse, he casually mentioned three books recently published by students he personally enrolled—one is already being made into a movie! “Do tell us the names, so we can order them?” But he couldn’t remember, offhand: “I get so darn many announcements of books published by our students.”

Oh, clean-cut young man, does your mother know how you earn your living? (And, Famous Fifteen, do yours?)

The course itself is packaged for maximum eye-appeal in four hefty “two-toned, buckram-bound” volumes with matching loose-leaf binders for the lessons. The textbooks contain all sorts of curious and disconnected matter: examples of advertisements that “pull”; right and wrong ways of ending business letters; paragraphs from the
Saturday Evening Post, This Week, Reader’s Digest;
quotations from successful writers like William Shakespeare, Faith Baldwin, Mark Twain, Mark Wiseman, Winston Churchill, Red Smith; an elementary grammar lesson (“
Verbs
are action words. A
noun
is the name of a person, place or thing”); a glossary of commonly misspelled words; a standard list of printer’s proof-marking symbols.

There is many a homespun suggestion for the would-be Famous Writer on what to write about, how to start writing: “Writing ideas—ready-made aids for the writer—are available everywhere. In every waking hour you hear and see and feel....” “How do you get started on a piece of writing? One successful author writes down the word ‘The’ the moment he gets to the typewriter in the morning. He follows ‘The’ with another word, then another....” (But the text writer, ignoring his own good advice, starts a sentence with “As,” and trips himself in an imparsable sentence: “As with so many professional writers, Marjorie Holmes keeps a notebook handy....”)

Throughout the course the illusion is fostered that the student is, or soon will be, writing for publication: “Suppose you’re sitting in the office of a magazine editor discussing an assignment for next month’s issue ...” The set of books includes a volume entitled “How to Turn Your Writing Into Dollars,” which winds up on a triumphal note with a sample publisher’s contract and a sample agreement with a Hollywood agent.

In short, there is really nothing useful in these books that could not be found in any number of writing and style manuals, grammar texts, marketing guides, free for the asking in the public library.

Thrown in as part of the $785-$900 course is a “free” subscription to
Famous Writers
magazine, a quarterly in which stories written by students appear under this hyperbolic caption: “Writers Worth Watching: In this section, magazine editors and book publishers can appraise the quality of work being done by FWS students.” According to the school’s literature, “Each issue of the magazine is received and read by some 2,000 editors, publishers and other key figures in the writing world.” However, Messrs. Carroll and Lawrence were unable to enlighten me about these key figures—who they are, how it is known that they read each issue, whether they have ever bought manuscripts from students after appraising the quality of their work.

The student sales department of the magazine is also worth watching. Presumably the school puts its best foot forward here, yet the total of all success stories recorded therein each year is only about thirty-five, heavily weighted in the direction of small denominational magazines, local newspapers, pet-lovers’ journals, and the like. Once in a while a student strikes it rich with a sale to
Reader’s Digest, Redbook, McCall’s,
generally in “discovery” departments of these magazines that specifically solicit first-person anecdotes by their readers as distinct from professional writers: Most Unforgettable Character, Turning-Point, Suddenly It Happens to You.

The school gets enormous mileage out of these few student sales. The same old successful students turn up time and again in the promotional literature. Thus an ad in the January 4, 1970, issue of
The New York Times
Magazine features seven testimonials: “I’ve just received a big, beautiful check from the
Reader’s Digest
....” “I’ve just received good news and a check from
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
....” “Recently, I’ve sold three more articles....” How recently? Checking back through old copies of
Famous Writers
magazine, I found the latest of these success stories had appeared in the student sales department of a 1968 issue; the rest had been lifted from issues of 1964 and 1965.

As for the quality of individual instruction, the reactions of several former FWS students with whom I spoke were varied. Only one—a “success story” lady featured in FWS advertising who has published four juvenile books—expressed unqualified enthusiasm. Two other successes of yesteryear, featured in the school’s 1970 ad, said they had never finished the course and had published nothing since 1965.