TO HAVE a lovely work life you don’t have to have fantastic drive or looks or brains or be a nymphomaniac or have the hide of a Burmese elephant or sacrifice any of the joys of having a normal healthy husband and normal healthy children. To have the best of all possible times in the office you do have to work hard, however!
Work? YOU? Hard? AT A JOB? I can see you laughing right into your dimpled little hand. Working hard on a job is for sallow spinsters with nothing else in their lives. If you’re eighteen and pretty, any company should be happy to have you just as an ornament. If you take a job at all, it’s just for Easter-in-Honolulu money ... or to wait for him. You certainly don’t intend to get your brain all sweaty.
My dear, you must stop reading (if you can read) right now! This book is not for you. You’ll never have a speck of fun if you think you’re doing somebody a favor just by filling a posture chair (even though most offices are crying for helpers). You don’t have to be driven and compulsive, but you must try to do better and better in your job if you are to have this rich, full daytime life . . . the hours filled with surprise, excitement and, among other attractions, wonderful male companions. Forget the fact that working hard in a job seems kind of antique . . . something girls did only during the Great War or the Great Depression. Girls who want to have fun in offices do it now.
The better job you have and the better you are in it, the better the men you get to fraternize with (instead of just stealing hungry looks at them from your file-girl perch). And though it may seem to the untrained eye that you are selflessly working on office projects together, what you are really doing is sinking into them like a cobalt treatment so that you may make off with them after work—if that’s your pleasure. (Of course I think getting married to the first man you make off with in an office or anywhere else is so dull. You ought to sample several before you make up your mind.)
There are other prizes for high-voltage workers. As one girl I respect very much says, “If a girl doesn’t have all the money she needs to do everything she wants—including buying clothes, taking lovely vacations and furnishing a beautiful apartment—I can’t for the life of me understand her not moving toward a job that will pay for most of it. Not to do so is not only unsexy—it is unholy.”
Are career girls—the ones who get those lovely things—different from other women?
Not usually.
You’ll find not half so many successful girls were inner-directed or told-to-by-voices as they were simple fluffheads who started working because they had to. Then the fun and games began and they stayed.
But men hate career girls! Really, dear, you probably still believe storks bring babies! Do men hate Elizabeth Taylor, the glamorous columnist Suzy, Barbra Streisand, Queen Elizabeth and Sophia Loren? Raging career girls all! The men who hate career girls hate the career girls who hate men. These girls really don’t like men or sex very much and use their jobs to hide out. Some of the most sensational career girls I know career all day, then whomp it up all night with the men they’ve collected during the day (at least until they’ve settled on one).
Let’s list the ground rules for having the most fun in the office; i.e., access to the most men and the most money. Some of the rules won’t sound like anything but drudgery. Well, the details of doing a good job are not particularly glamorous. Neither is the whale oil that goes into Arpege (except to another whale) or the metallic thread that makes a silver lame dress—it’s the wearing of those things that makes them sexy. On an attractive girl a great job looks and smells good too, even though certain mundane choring goes into the making of that job.
First though, we must have the job, and most jobs are found in offices.
Every place a girl works is an office—the opera house, the Boeing 707, the laboratory, the movie set, the fashion show runway, the ad agency. I’m afraid there isn’t room to put down the rules for all offices even if I knew them. Most offices are more alike than different, however, and most of the ones where girls get a crack at success are conventional business offices rather than the more exotic varieties. So we’re going to talk about business offices.
There you are with your M.S. in Political Science, but does Adlai really need a lovely girl to chin with about Mao and Nikita? (After what happened to British War Minister John Profumo over the girl he chatted with, it’s a wonder any political dignitary is chatting with anybody female.) What is more likely needed by Mr. Stevenson or anyone like him is somebody to turn out about thirty pounds of correspondence a week.
The personnel director of a company that has delicious jobs for girls says, “Pretty, degreed and pedigreed Vassar and Radcliffe girls are always streaming through here asking what opportunities there are—in other words what we can do for them. They all want the big break. The catch is, none of them has a single thing in mind she can do for us. We can always use a good stenographer, and furthermore we do give her a chance to get ahead.”
Nobody is asking you to forget your college education or what you really want to do in life. But maybe the way of achieving what you want is offering to do something somebody actually needs now. (The way to becoming a man’s wife may be skinning halibut with him on a live-bait barge, even though you don’t expect to be doing that when you’re Mrs. Halibut.)
A cosmetics company tycooness once told me, “Some very important men will throw their arms around you if you’re a good secretary but they wouldn’t let you in the place if you did something else. Once you’re in, you look around and plot.” Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller worked in his office, but we’re not talking about marrying the boss. That could be merely a fringe benefit compared to the other splashy rewards of a happy work life. Anyway, there’s no better known “in” than being a Miss Girl Monday through Friday. (Probe below the surface, and you’ll find about 72 per cent of all female tycoonesses have a secretarial job somewhere in their past.)
If you plan to use secretarial work as a wedge to get elsewhere, there are two ways to go about it:
1. Do tell them what you have in mind for later.
2. Don’t talk about later but just get in.
Sometimes advertising your goal makes people nervous, and it’s better just to get in on any basis and be your own lookout. If you do take Route 1 and agree to be a secretary temporarily, don’t pin them down . . . “Yes, but when will I start writing editorials?” That kind of dialogue before you’ve even started the filing is a sure sign of a malcontent. Who needs a sour face at the file cabinets?
Always remember that as a beginner you need them more than they need you. Sure, they require typists and run lots of ads for them. In fact, I never saw anything like the ads for secretaries in The New York Times—”Glamorous job with magazine publisher. Beautifully decorated offices. Short hours.” . . . “Be an integral part of top television show. Meet interesting, famous people.” . . . “We guarantee two trips to Europe a year—all expenses paid. Teach you a foreign language.” For a girl who got her first secretarial job when lines were still forming for them, this kind of talk sounds like a white-slave invitation. But never mind that they’re begging you to come in. You need their arena to work out in if you’re to become a full-fledged gladiator.
Some people think that once you’re a secretary a company will never think of you as anything else. I’m convinced the only people who get stuck in secretarial jobs are happily or willingly stuck. Would you believe it—good companies prowl like tigers to find people they can move upward. Secretarial work isn’t a bad thing to be “stuck” in, anyway. Executive secretaries are close to some of the most glittery men in the world and have great lives.
Very well, you may use this spot to stay happily “stuck in” or to spring forward from, depending on your tastes and talents.
I asked the fashion director of one of America’s biggest fabric companies how to make secretarial work your tool. (It was an important one for her.) “While you’re a secretary,” she said, “learn as much as you can about whatever the company does, whether it publishes books or packs sausages. Snoop and study and volunteer to work on any kind of little project they’ll let you in on. Be everybody’s helper. When you go to look for another job, you may not have the actual title to your credit, but you can say, ‘Look, my name doesn’t appear on this report, but I actually interviewed most of the people in it.’ Save every scrap of paper that will authenticate your participation.”
More about moving out of secretary-hood later. First, let’s say you are a secretary, with or without other plans in mind. How do you get the sexy most—which is to say the successful most—out of this job?
If this is to be that most satisfactory of all man-woman relationships—the one that transcends all others—the first thing to do is hire the right boss. You may hire several wrong ones while you’re young, but after you’re experienced, you certainly should be able to hire a rich, successful, beautiful, kind, wonderful, lovable employer with fabulous friends. This eliminates most bosses under thirty-five (who are so selfish, nervous and irritable most of the time that about the only way you can get along with them is to keep them under sedation), but it still leaves a rather large field to choose from.
If after careful screening you’ve still managed to hire a loser—and it’s long after the time when you should have to put up with such a thing because you yourself are now efficient—the kindest thing to do is fire him. Give him a couple of weeks’ notice and a set of character references that he can show to his next secretary if she wants them.
What about actually falling in love with or being in love with your boss? It’s heady for a while—being in his arms all night and in his good Eames client chair all day taking dictation and exchanging soul-looks. The trouble is that this sort of thing so often ends badly. You either marry each other—not the worst disaster but it can spoil the best boss-secretary relationship—or he is married and you can’t stand booking their steamship tickets, or he doesn’t marry you and you’re depressed by the other girls who call him up. I think it’s better to keep this darling as a friend, someone who may from time to time advise you about other men. (A divine boss of mine once gave a very good cocktail party so that I could impress a beau.)
You may succumb to a boss or two—they are attractive—but once you’ve finally picked one to be your dearly beloved friend, how do you care for him so that your office life will be all the lovely things we’ve promised?
You must love him like crazy. Denying love and devotion to a good boss who spends eight hours a day with you would be like a yellow-breasted mother swamp finch denying worms to her yellow-breasted swamp-finch babies. Other people give the man trouble. You must be there to help him gird on his armor for battle and then bind up his wounds when he returns. You can’t be as aggressive about this when you’re a shy baby worker but you can at least seem to be concerned.
I don’t feel there’s any justifiable cause to criticize a boss ever. The fact that he is somewhat overextended at Alfred Dunhill and every bar in town is really none of your business. If he wants to make it your business and discuss these indulgences with you, you are his conspirator, not his caviling Aunt Sarah.
You are for all his schemes, up to and including his taking over the company. It’s easier for you than for his wife, who may see his power play costing her the cabanas, the flagstone and the swimming pool.
Adrienne Sausset, devoted secretary to California’s Governor Pat Brown, sent out five thousand letters over her own name, on her own time and with her own postage, telling other secretaries to vote for her boss in the last election. That—among other things—got him re-elected.
Another friend of mine has had her bags packed, her apartment sublet and new homes found for her cats six times, on the strength of her boss expecting a presidential appointment. No action yet but there’s always another election, and she’s staying packed.
A chic Beverly Hills secretary I know found herself hawking avocados one spring. She had shown such enthusiasm for her boss’s ranching ventures, he decided she was just the person to unload his bumper crop of little cuke-size fruit at the Farmer’s Market. She was relieved of duty when she backed his station wagon full of little cukes into a bakery truck one afternoon. He reluctantly decided she was more use to him at the office.
You shouldn’t think twice about embracing any cause dear to your boss provided it won’t land you under federal investigation. I became a Republican to impress my boss, advertising executive Don Belding. It was either that or go underground. Actually, I liked the party so well I only switched back to being a Democrat last year. Other girls have embraced Zen Buddhism, the International Kite-Flyers Society and World Federalists without any harm to their psyche or integrity.
Bosses get their feelings hurt just like hostesses when nobody comes to their parties. Encourage your boss to over-invite for all cocktail soirees and luncheons. Try to get him to give the party at the poshest place instead of economizing on second poshest. More people will show. If an invited guest turns you down, see if he’d like to send somebody else from his company.
Many bosses are on a diet. He’ll adore you if you slip him almond mocha roll and Danish crullers, but that’s a good way not only to fatten him up but also to kill him off. Even though you may rather fancy a Big Daddy boss weighing close to three hundred, I think you have to choose in favor of having him around for a while.
Don’t assume that because a man is just sitting in his office staring out the window that he is available for conversation or can even be interrupted. My friend Ernest Lehman, who wrote the movie version of West Side Story and nine other film hits, once overheard his secretary tell someone on the phone, “No, Mr. Lehman isn’t busy. He’s just thinking.”
Most bosses are insecure (along with the whole human race) and need to be told somebody loves them. It doesn’t necessarily have to be you. Reassurance that management cherishes them (based on inside poop from chatting with the girls) could be exactly what’s needed. If you can imply that the prettiest girl in the filing room has a secret crush on him, your profit-sharing might really amount to something by Christmas. A very young or newly-hired secretary may not be able to execute these blandishments immediately, but she’ll soon learn how.
Once, when things were extremely sticky for my husband at Twentieth Century-Fox studios (because of the death of the studio head, the old regime was out and the new regime was hacking away at the “leftovers”), a lovely steno-pool girl got to be a kind of legend in her time by soothing the beleaguered and once-powerful.
David was a leftover. He had been creative head of the studio and No. 2 man in the old regime. That made him a mud-pie in the new. At the time Laura (not her name, but close) came to him, the glacial freeze was about two yards thick. Hardy old-timers were getting pneumonia in the executive gymnasium. Along with every other executive who had been with the studio more than two weeks, David’s telephone calls and urgent memos were going unanswered. Pamela, David’s regular secretary, left for vacation just then. She was a once-powerful leftover herself, and the snubbing was getting her down.
The very first day Laura reported to work, she shut the door to David’s office, leaned against it and said breathlessly, “Mr. Brown, I shouldn’t tell you this but as you may know, last week I was working for—and she named the new head of the studio—and I heard them talking about you. They couldn’t say enough wonderful things about you and have something fabulous in mind for you.”
It was like water to a parched Bedouin. David barely restrained himself from shaking her like a peach tree as he demanded the details.
“I can’t tell you any more this minute,” she said, “but I’ll be getting other bulletins.”
During the week, Laura continued to develop her original story into a very fancy needlepoint which kept her boss soothed, entertained and contented by the hour—so much so that he hardly noticed Laura wasn’t bringing any new bulletins. In about a week, he came out of his trance long enough to ask Laura if she didn’t think perhaps he should just go in and ask the new regime exactly what it had in mind. No, Laura said, that would be precipitous. It was in the very hush-hush planning stage.
Well, Pamela returned from vacation, the plans apparently never got off the drawing board—or whatever movie moguls plan on—and lovely Laura floated away to cheer up some other beleaguered executive. Did David hate her? No, he wistfully used to ask Pamela if she’d had any news of lovely Laura, and why didn’t she have bulletins. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Pamela said, “I can always fill your head full of lies if that’s what you want.”
“They weren’t lies,” David said. “That girl knew something.”
She knew how to please a boss, that’s for sure. And she probably did know something. The conversation she overheard just wasn’t the final one on the subject.
Maybe you haven’t Laura’s cliff-hanging technique for telling a story, but you can see that under certain circumstances a little encouragement from a secretary goes a long way.
Aside from delivering discreet personal compliments, it is your bounden duty to collect the best gossip the office has to offer—rumors of mergers and firings too. Pass them on each day as a little love offering.
How do you keep from informing on your boss while you gather choice gossip for him? (Other secretaries naturally demand something in return for any big nuggets.) Well, you toss in something not too incriminating every so often—such as the fact that his nose bleeds have been tapering off since he’s been taking Vitamin K.
One slight warning. Since bosses love gossip, they also pretend that anything that comes in the mail is for them. They will even go through your desk on the pretext of looking for a rubber band and then read all your old valentines and love letters. If there’s anything really private, you can hide it between the pages of the telephone directory. Hardly any boss will ever look up a number himself.
It seems quaint for a girl to have any now, and I know men don’t really expect much. One chap I know actually gets tears in his eyes when he finds long, freshly-sharpened pencils in his desk drawer, and the sight of a brought-up-to-date address book chokes him up completely.
Never mind how cavalier other girls are with their bosses. You have to be efficient. Your goal is a sexy office life with marvelous things happening to you and these don’t accrue to girls who are slugs.
If you can’t spell, and hardly anybody can, look it up. You can get away with fowell for foul and stratejic for strategic for ages (half the time bosses can’t spell either), but one day some busybody letter-recipient is going to circle the thing with red grease pencil and send it back to your office. The daddy of the letter is going to raise the roof.
Never give anybody a messy erasure—at least not a big bluish, purplish, blotchy, bruised-looking one. If you do, he’ll simply set a wet Pepsi-Cola bottle or burning cigar down on it. Then he’ll feel free to re-dictate the whole last section, which is what he wanted to do all the time because his thinking had since become crystallized. If you bring in a perfect copy to begin with, you gain character and don’t run the risk of having to transcribe a brand new letter.
If he writes a really nasty letter, have him sign it and think it mailed. Show him the monster next day and say, “I’m afraid this didn’t make yesterday’s mail. Would you like to look it over again before it goes out?”
I wouldn’t suggest such drastic action except for the fact that I’ve never known anybody who wasn’t horrified on re-reading one of his own hate letters. Perhaps he’ll restate his case less petulantly and more effectively.
Tangle with the Mafia if you like but stay clear of his switchboard girls. Most bosses cherish these ladies if only because they know so much. Uncrossed they are very nice people. However, if you say things like, “Pauline, for God’s sake you cut me off again” (and you know it was she because you were doing your nails with both hands and had the phone under your ear), a chill can set in between you and Pauline and between you and your boss, but never between Pauline and your boss. (I tell you she has her methods!) At the very least, you will wind up “losing” most of your personal calls.
If you get somebody on the phone for a man who has since picked up a call from London, apologize profusely. You are genuinely distressed. “Isn’t this dreadful, Mr. Tate? Mr. Fubershaw has picked up another call.” Skip where the call is from, London-dropping will only blacken the rage.
To get somebody out of the John for a phone call, don’t hang around and wait. Seeing you propped up against the wall with an anxious look on your face will make for self-consciousness among the new arrivals and may even drive some of them to different floors. Send somebody in to get your man out.
This is an individual choice, but if you decide in favor of it, the watchwords are, “Don’t get caught.”
I don’t want to make a liar out of you, but sometimes there is no explanation for your mistakes other than you’ve gone clean off your rocker. In that case it’s better to hush up than confess, if you can get away with it.
My boss, Don Belding, used to remember clients’ birthdays, and what a passel of birthday presents we used to send out—music boxes, wooden bears, plates and saucers . . . honestly! Well, one day we got a thank-you note from a man in Honolulu saying, “Dear Don, I loved the ashtray, but can you tell me why it came by way of Osage, Arkansas? We used to know some people in Ozona, Tennessee, but don’t believe we know anybody up in the Ozarks, etc., etc.”
Well, you know whose family lived in Osage. Apparently I had written his name, then my mother’s address, then his address. It was very cozy!
Since I read the mail first, I could act. “Dear Mr. Von Weather-ham,” I wrote. “You don’t know me, but you could certainly do me a big favor. You remember that letter you wrote Mr. Belding about the ashtray. I wonder if you could please write back and say you like the ashtray a lot only not say anything about it coming to you by way of Osage? Etc., etc., etc.” It was a calculated risk, but he did it, the lamb!
A fellow employee, possibly somebody higher up, is stealing . . . or maybe it’s nothing that bad ... he may just be fumbling. You’ve seen him do it.
You really have to be careful whom you rat on—not only out of fear of reprisal, but also because you may not be the world’s most accurate judge of who’s fumbling. I saw a pretty girl get contusions from her own confusions one day. She told a fascinated room-full of executives that a particular account executive was gumming things up badly at the client’s. (She was sleeping with the client and ought to have known.) An immediate check was made to confirm or deny her story, and it turned out the A.E. did pull a mild bumble occasionally but nearly everybody in the organization adored him. He made them feel smart. The client who “talked in his sleep” but who apparently was not quoted accurately did not feel smart, however, and he broke up with the girl. (This is a true story. They all are. I couldn’t begin to make up this stuff.)
If you possess some other kind of knowledge (like a tip on a customer your company could go after, picked up from overheard party conversation), it will usually be appreciated. March right in.
Never alienate the mailroom boy. He probably reads your mail or, if it’s too boring, he at least scans the last three paragraphs to see who sent the letter he just got back marked “Addressee unknown.” (Sending personal mail unidentified in the hopes you won’t get docked for postage is too risky! Put your initials on the envelope.)
Aside from his knowing too much for you to antagonize him, this mailroom child can play Columbus to your Isabella. Send him exploring for a fan during the heat wave, and he’ll come back with two—provided you’ve launched him properly (i.e. chocolate fudge for his birthday and walnut brownies for Valentine’s).
Of course you are a little mother to all the growing boys around the place. You dispense Band-Aids and smiles to anyone who is wounded on the job, aspirin and Bromo to those who got the wounds the night before.
I recently heard about a waiter pushing through the swinging door of an executive dining room just as a group vice-president started through the other side. The executive’s forehead was dented in like a tinfoil sailboat. At the very same time his friends called the doctor, they sent for a twenty-nine-year-old bookkeeper who had a reputation for great kindness. While they stitched up his head, she held it in her lap, murmuring, “There, there.” He’s been reported in love with her ever since.
You know, of course, that you listen when men talk. You compliment them when they do well. You are charmed by them much as you would be by a date. What’s so difficult about that?
A special word about lady bosses and other lady executives around the place. They’re supposed to be a pretty horrible bunch—putting burning matches under the fingernails of little female underlings and all that. I never worked with or for such a lady but I’ve met some of them at luncheons. Usually the women are over forty-five, and the reason they act the way they do is because it was harder to succeed when they succeeded. Men in the office were very mean to them. Most lady bosses under forty are as nice as anybody. If you happen to have drawn a female Tartar, young or old, I’d suggest you learn everything you can from her—some of them are pretty smart. Work as hard for her as you would for a dreamboat, and, when you’ve had all you can take, move on to the next job.
You’re going to hit me with an iced mackerel, but I have to tell you that the way you get the most out of your job is to give the most. You should feel empathy in your bosom—it doesn’t tickle or anything—if you are to get better and better jobs and go on to where the money and deep-piled fun are. When you’re trying to get a number for your boss and it’s busy, busy, busy, you’re as vexed as he is. When you help another girl type some reports, you care that she has a deadline. When the company gets a new client, you’re thrilled.
Some of your girl co-workers may jeer. Look at little Goodie Two-Shoes. You’d think it was her firm. Keep feeling this empathy in your bosom and it could happen. At least you’ll enjoy the loving friendship and high regard of a lot of men.
To win at anything you must not be too withdrawn or negative or fearful. I’m not suggesting you do anything that causes you to feel brassy or embarrassed, but an over-fastidious, never-take-a-chance attitude about little challenges can stymie your chances for fun and success in business. Of course it can be done and yes, of course you’ll help. “Look, you take this end of the desk and lift and I’ll scootch the rug under” is far better dialogue than, “I’m not straining my back—the stupid building ought to tack the carpets down.”
Men adore enthusiastic girls. Think about that!
Summing it up, I’d say give it to them! Whatever anybody wants, dig it, find it, make it, mint it, scrounge it, grow it or crochet it—but never say no! A top secretary should have sources for everything from ringside seats for the bloodthirsty to lomi lomi massage for the weary. (A secretary friend of mine “borrowed” four elephants from Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus for a client who wanted to photograph them for an ad.)
How long do you stay a secretary? Forever, if you like. Some women who work for important men get to be almost an extension of that person and wield more power than they possibly could in a different kind of career. A good executive secretary may have the feeling the place would practically fall apart without her because it practically would! Besides being dusted with power crystals, working beside a man you admire and adore who is smart and exciting is quite satisfying in itself.
Secretaries who don’t work for anybody nearly that glamorous may not wish to get on the launching pad and orbit to a different job either. Their husbands wouldn’t like it, they’re only working to help with bills or until they get married, or they don’t want their water-skiing weekends gummed up with satchels full of work.
But suppose you hear the sound of distant drums calling you to the kind of job in which someone puts you on an airplane and hands you your brief case.
Before you start marching, we’d better make sure you’re dressed for the parade. Let’s march straight to the next chapter for advice on the loveliest uniforms for an ambitious, sexy girl.