How DO YOU switch over to the job with the taffeta-rustle sound?
One of my successful friends says that from tiny tothood straight through all your slavey jobs, you have to imagine yourself opulent. While transferring files to the basement in sneakers and coveralls, you have to keep feeling mink around your shoulders and smelling Shalimar rising from the valley of your bosom. That way, she says, you inexorably slither toward a high-powered job.
She’s not kidding me. Annie is talking about Positive Thinking (and it worked for her—she’s a department store wheel now). I, however, couldn’t positive-think myself out of bed in the morning if the mattress were on fire.
Are you too a molasses-foot? Do you have so little vision or confidence you think the gods would roll over and die laughing if you aspired to a fancier job? Join the club! We meet Tuesdays and Fridays, have the secret handshake, and then pass around a pitcher of martinis. Our trouble is that were ready for the bigger job every way but emotionally.
There is hope for us molasses-feet, however. First, no matter how modest and un-go-gettum you are, a far-sighted management may literally force you to do something bigger if it thinks you’re capable. (It happened to me.) Also, there are other helpers—a few bouts with a psychiatrist, for example!
I’m not bouncing this psychiatry recommendation around lightly. I know you don’t drop in to be shrunk as casually as you would visit your friendly neighborhood saloon, but it is possible to talk with a psychiatrist without signing away years of your life.
When I was plucked from my secretarial post to write copy at Foote, Cone & Belding, a major advertising agency, I was utterly terrified. Though I could afford just one half-hour session a week, a patient, adorable psychiatrist used to prop me up and spoon-feed me my ego ration every Saturday morning until I’d begun to score a few points in my new job.
Why am I plumping for a better job for you if I found taking one so painful myself? Because the only thing painful about it was the fear of failing. Aside from that, the better job, with its new men, more money and more prestige was a pleasure dome.
Sometimes people have reasons for not wanting to get on with a career which are not the real reasons at all. A glamorous young woman I know showed extraordinary talent in the University of California drama department but decided not to pursue an acting career “because of the wolves.” Wolves do pursue actresses, of course, just as they pursue models, typists and campus representatives in stores. The only way to be safe from wolves is to disguise yourself as a lamppost and stand very, very still. (I’m not even sure you’d be safe then!) I doubt that my young actress friend was really afraid of wolves—I think she just didn’t want to work as hard as you have to work to be an actress.
Other girls are frightened of the life that success can bring . . . very dangerous and threatening, with people and men and involvements sifting through it. Therefore, though smart and able, some girls remain slobs. NO management is going to pester a slobby girl with threats of promotion.
What about people who aren’t scared—who are ready for bigger things but can’t seem to get a crack at them? (Some cooks—and some managements—just don’t know when to take a cake out of the oven.)
Don’t worry too much. A retarded beginning is better than taking off like a jet and having your tail drop off. Take the case of little Terry Jane Moss. Terry Jane and I worked together at radio station KHJ in Los Angeles as stenographers. The child was only seventeen but what a pusher! The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, little Terry Jane realized with her child’s mind that something Big was up. She popped on the bus, got herself down to the station and worked through the night with newscasters, AP and UP representatives, engineers and executives. She was even out on the roof spotting bombers for them. On Monday morning when the rest of us nincompoops showed up for work, Terry Jane was being driven home in the station manager’s limousine with a hundred dollar bonus in her purse. Now by all rights, Terry Jane ought to have her own broadcasting company by now. The last time I saw her (she would be about 41 now) she was working in a laundromat. I figure she burned herself out as a teen-ager.
All right, you didn’t start too early! You’re eager for a real break, and you’ve done more than your share to show management you’re ready. What do you do now?
Don’t do anything against the grain!
I believe it takes a very special kind of girl to brazen her way into a spot where nobody’s invited her. If you feel spooky and uncomfortable about what you’re going to ask them to let you do, maybe you shouldn’t ask them. This has nothing to do with being a molasses-foot but simply shows you have perception about what’s right for you.
A $40,000-a-year department store buyer told me what happened to her when she was a secretary at CBS. They were interviewing girls for the ingenue role on a top network show. She’d never even had the lead in a high school play, but suddenly visions of fame, money, and marrying one of the brothers from One Man’s Family crowded her head. Why shouldn’t I march in there and read for them too, she asked herself.
She just couldn’t do it. Every time she got up from her desk her knees buckled. “You know I was right,” she says. “I’d had no acting experience. I have no acting talent now. It would have been a humiliating and embarrassing experience. A real actress probably wouldn’t have felt that way, and this break would have been exactly what she needed.”
Not everyone is so wise.
A beautiful and ambitious young clerk at Kenyon & Eckhardt (the second ad agency I worked in) had been told by one of our nine successive creative directors that she could attend a creative meeting and submit copy ideas. This was important to her, because it would be the first step toward leaving her clerk’s job to become a copywriter.
Unfortunately the creative director left on a trip without having made arrangements with us meeting-attenders for the girl to be present. This was only a technicality to her, so she just marched in to the meeting and started bombarding us. Every time she said Soap de Champagne or Suds-Sational (we were naming a shampoo) we regular copywriters acted as though we’d just got some in our eye. The kinder ones just hadn’t heard her.
Super bitches? No, just run-of-the-mill. The girl may have been worthy, but she didn’t have proper sponsorship and sank without a trace.
But suppose it’s the right time and the right place, and you’re in the right frame of mind to move up. You’ve done everything you can for a firm for more than a year—worked with what you had to work with, asked for more chores when you weren’t busy, got junk out on time, seemed to have cared about management and other people in the company (not just whether you lived or died) and nobody has rewarded you with a chance to advance. What do you do now?
First, you ought to have a heart-to-heart talk with whoever is in charge. Hopefully, you know of a specific job you could take over. Ask for it. You’ve earned the right. If who’s-in-charge is deaf, I think the thing to do is move out—at your convenience. Don’t let anyone force you to quit then and there.
You can go to another company, start as a secretary, work hard again and hope they won’t be so dense. Or you can try talking your new employer into letting you start at something other than secretarial work. (I’m assuming now you’re not a beginner but a mature, seasoned secretary.)
There’s another route you can take. Perhaps you have a little money saved, quite a lot of courage and would like to take the plunge into something that has nothing to do with secretarial work. Just on the chance these ideas may spark others for you, here are some possibilities. (Incidentally, each one of them has been tried by somebody I know and it worked.)
Approach the new venture with the idea that if you fail, it isn’t the end of the world. A chap named Ed Howe—I don’t know who he is, but he sounds wise—said in Forbes magazine recently, “I try to have no plans the failure of which would greatly annoy me. Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable and often impossible.”
With this in mind:
1. Get a job selling a product—not in a store where they come to you and commissions are paltry but door to door, office to office or by telephone from leads supplied by a company. Your product could be reducing equipment, insurance, freezers, encyclopedias . . . anything. Maybe the company you’re in would let you take a whack at their product—or you may have to track down a new one. Some firms will take you with virtually no experience if you’re eager. The prestige may not be great, but the money could be, and someday you may have salesmen who work for you.
2. Be a decorator. Any bona fide A.I.D. (American Institute of Interior Designers) decorator will spit at the idea that a girl with little more than good taste to qualify her can sneak up on this profession, but I’ve seen it done. Suppose you worked as a secretary for W. & J. Sloane or any other good furniture store. During that time you should have, with your little pitcher ears and big green eyes, seen and heard a lot about fabrics, woods, periods, decors, scaling furniture to rooms, etc. You could augment this knowledge with reading in depth, decorating courses, friendships with decorators and manufacturers, haunting museums, visiting antique stores and touring famous homes when they’re open. You could start with just one client who’s willing to take a chance on you (perhaps while you’re still a secretary). Charge a minimal fee, do a good job and you’re off and running.
3. Become a couturier. Your taste is superb. The clothes you make yourself look as good to most people as Givenchy’s (though you know better—Givenchy seams could be worn on the outside). Perhaps you could interest one or two women in letting you design and make a costume. They might even want something copied they’ve seen on you. Add a few more customers; then you can hire an assistant to sew and open a small boutique shop. You’ll buy some of the things and design others yourself. Easy does it. Start tiny.
4. Do research for a successful writer. One important novelist I know has experienced none of the adventures he writes about. His research girl has ferreted out everything from the conduct of an archeological survey in Crete to the performing of a lobotomy. You could combine your survey work with secretarial work for a writer, or keep your regular secretarial job and do free-lance research until you gain experience. A girl who hopes to become a writer herself would find this experience profitable (though of course to write, you must write!).
5. Become a photographer. A recently-fired secretary I know owned a Leica camera (worth about $800 but bought from a distressed party for $100). For years she had been taking pictures in the park of mothers, children, dogs and trees. After she was fired, she got a magazine-editor beau to set up appointments for her with the picture editors of his magazine—food department, fashion department, etc. She took her portfolio, consisting entirely of her Sunday afternoon amateur stuff, around to each editor and got her first assignment—to photograph the Columbia University campus. She expects to work up a lot more pictures and a regular clientele by the time her unemployment insurance runs out.
6. If you’ve a great face and photograph well (some pretty girls don’t), become a model. For photography, you need some terrific pictures of yourself. You might go to work for a photographer as a secretary and take part of your salary in merchandise. Maybe he’ll use you as a model sometimes. With your pictures you will go visit other photographers, magazines and art directors of advertising agencies. Actually amateur pictures of you don’t do badly if somebody talented takes them and blows them up big. Naturally, being signed by and working with a model agency helps.
I’m not going to suggest kinds of modeling other than photographic because they don’t pay any better than secretarial work and girls are made to feel very crepey-necked and ancient at age thirty-two.
7. Be an entertainer. You sing. You play the mandolin. You do flamenco. Start by entertaining at parties for a small fee. You may get enough experience and confidence to audition for clubs or a show. (Ethel Merman did while she was still a secretary.)
If you have looks and stamina, get a job as a Playboy Club bunny. You’ll make about as much money as a good secretary, but a producer may spot you for a show.
8. Become a tour conductor. If you’ve been to Mexico nine times and know more about bullfighting than anybody but the bull and the matador, you might as well take people south of the border and get paid. If you know that much about other places, you could open your own travel agency or take tours there.
9. Cook with your cooking. Write a recipe book. (Yes, there’s always room for one more.) Peg Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book has sold over 100,000 copies to date, and she was a busy wife and mother when she wrote it. (She might have been a secretary.) At least send in your best recipes to women’s magazines. They often buy from outsiders.
10. Open your own secretarial service. You simply rent space in a hotel and hang out a shingle. The public stenographer at the Statler Hotel in Los Angeles wears glorious hats while she types and makes bundles of money.
Perhaps you’re not quite up to these plans yet, but you’re damned if you’ll do secretarial work one more year without some guarantee of a chance at something else. Okay . . . strike a bargain with the people who have a job open.
The public relations director of Ladies’ Home Journal, Charlotte Kelly, was “still a secretary” at thirty, though a good one. When she applied for the job of secretary to the then-publicity director of the Journal, their filing was piled up to the rafters. Memos were backed up like bills in Congress.
“Look,” Charlotte said, “I will work like a robin red-breast as a secretary and make this a smooth-functioning department. Then in return I hope you will let me have a whack at writing publicity releases some time. I won’t badger you about it night and day or consider that that’s my job and not secretarial work, but perhaps you’ll give me some extra ones you’re too busy to do.”
Two years later she was making the same bargain with other young girls.
The trick, Charlotte says, is that you must keep your end of the bargain almost to forgetting what they promised. You have to do more than your share to get them to do any of theirs.
You could try this kind of bargaining in an interview even if you don’t know of a specific job to aspire to. “Look, I’m ambitious,” you say, “and I will do whatever you need me to do and work like a potato bug. But I want to do something besides secretarial work, and I hope there’ll be a spot for me.” (This is a little different than coming in as a baby and demanding your big chance. Now you have poise and experience to offer them.)
After you make this pact and they say yes they’ll try, don’t stay longer than a year if things aren’t working out. If they don’t live up to their bargain or ever let you do anything but secretarial work, make another bargain with somebody who keeps promises. Remember, though, you must pitch in and do the dirty work with enthusiasm as though that were all that mattered.
Of course, there are dozens of companies who won’t bargain. They want a secretary with no fancy notions in her head. Well, there are dozens of companies that don’t even want a secretary. You have to “interview” a lot of impossibles to find the company and job for you. I have no doubt you can find it.
Now . . . what if you get the fancier job or the promise and find yourself saying as follows: “And I’ll have my own office and my own secretary and probably an assistant and three phones of my own (with your voice bearing down heavy on the my own’).” That means you probably won’t know what to do with any of these things when you get them (if you should, which is doubtful). The only important consideration is whether the new job lets you give more, be more, fulfill more of your promise. Never mind whether you’ve got a secretary and several phones to lord it over—the big thing is whether it provides you a more exciting day and a closer relationship with men on their level.
Now on to fraternizing with men on the level where things happen—glamour, travel and romance.