Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (13 page)

Most companies get nervous when you come to them with vast experience in one field, but you’re twitching to switch! Make it easy for them to take you. When being interviewed for totally unfamiliar work, don’t chat too much about your ultimate ambitions. You’ve obviously talked them over with advisers who think you can make good. Just get
in.
Insist you won’t be a malcontent in the menial job that’s open. Save up money like mad beforehand, so you can subsidize yourself for a year or two.

Don’t hari-kari if you’re a slow starter. I held seventeen jobs (that’s all I can count up now, but I think there were more) before “falling” into the secretarial job that led to copywriting that led to the fun and the money. (Three years ago I became Los Angeles’ highest-paid advertising woman, though some other people have probably caught up by now.) Child labor deserves a chance to mature! You need a few years to put boys first, to goof (My specialty was poison ivy. I would “come down” with it on Sunday and be unable to report to work until Wednesday, plastered with Mercurochrome and milk of magnesia to “hide the infected areas.”) and try on different jobs. A lot of just plain luck is involved in getting into scoring position with
the
boss in
the
company. Of course if you keep spelling better and typing faster in some of your less exalted positions, your chance to score may come sooner.

Some companies are still so narrow, mean and stuffy, particularly regarding women, that Elizabeth Cady Stanton couldn’t have cracked them. A personnel manager I know gives un-pep talks to all girl job applicants to discourage them from ever trying to hold even minor executive posts. A chat with Old Ironsides and you’re ready to will your corneas to the eye bank.

You’ll never do all you’re capable of doing until somebody fans you and loves you and appreciates you into it!

My husband, for example, has advanced his secretary, Pamela, to production assistant. She goes to story conferences, screenings, casting meetings and seems to keep her head when all others are carrying theirs in a basket. If anything ever happened to her, I think David would just get on the next boat to Mazatlan. He picked Pamela out of the studio steno pool five years ago because she was beautiful and had an English accent! He didn’t know she had a brain, and
she
didn’t know she had a brain. Encouraged to speak up by a boss who liked the sound of her voice, she spoke up so often and so well she now has a secretary of her own. (Pamela’s four-year-old son
is
one of the sunniest, most secure moppets I have ever met, and a housekeeper has looked after him since birth. Pam’s husband, an electronics wizard, is proud of his smart successful wife. They are having another baby that will also be cared for by a nurse when Pamela goes back to work.)

If you are working for toads, drain all the experience you can from the pond and move to a new one. It’s still a boom economy. Don’t be a scaredy-cat. Be sure
you
aren’t the toad who’s holding you back, however.

The more brilliant the boss, the more you will have to reach and stretch and use all your faculties to keep up with him or her. Elizabeth Ornduff, vice president of I. Magnin Stores, credits her success with “always having had the luck to work for brilliant bosses.”

You don’t usually start with one. If you did, you might not be ready for him. Usually you have to work your way through some toads. Shiny bright junior executives are the worst. They’re afraid to send you to the accounting department to cash their expense check for fear you’ll pick flowers on the way. Poor things have to have secretaries, but try to work them off during
your
junior years too.

A “big” boss is usually delighted when you show promise and may even spot it before you do. The ad tycoon who sent me home with fresh-lemon radio commercials to write did so on the strength of funny letters I used to send him when he was out of town. It never occurred to me that I might do something creative (if you put radio commercials in that category!). I was already thirty-one and had been Mr. B’s secretary for five years. And I would never have left him, dreamboat of all bosses, even then, if he and his wife hadn’t goaded me to a copywriter’s cubbyhole, mercifully in the same company.

Rumpsprung gabardine skirts with nondescript paisley blouses do not
guarantee
failure, but it’s a fact bosses love to have chic, sleek cats around to show off to company.

Do put everything on your back (or almost) for a promising job. Time enough to trade down to $12.95 shirtwaists when you’re married and laundromatting or living on social security. I know one forty-five-year-old woman who landed a job as wardrobe selector for a network television show on the strength of her beautiful personal wardrobe.

We owe the “battle-axes” of another era more than we can ever pay. They
had
to be hard as nails and drive themselves
in
like nails too to compete with men. Not you, magnolia blossom! The charm that brings him to your side after five will enlist him in your behalf at the six-months’ salary review.

A famous magazine editor I know gazes deep into a man’s eyes when he talks (like a flirt!), dimples when he compliments her, says, “George, or Frank, or J. P., what do
you
think?” ninety times a day. Not for an instant, not for a trice, does she try to outsmart men. Her work does it for her.

Publishing and advertising are both wonderful fields for women because you are paid handsomely
not
to think like a man. However, a company that deals in Geiger counters or paper-milling equipment can reap the benefits of women’s business acumen as well as those selling products with purely woman-appeal.

Was it you who told the switchboard where Iris really was the afternoon she was supposed to be at the dentist’s? Was the last time you worked overtime without pay when you put up prom decorations in the high school gym? Do you manage to be frantically busy (writing a letter to your cousin) when a co-worker is stuck with a mimeograph assembly job? So don’t be a girl scout, but I have never ever seen a genuine 102 per cent whiner-shirker-pill get anywhere.

It is up to a company to pay you as little as it can and still get you to stay (any company that makes a profit, that is). It is not in business to keep you contented like Elsie the Cow! You’d play it the same way if you were boss. Do you raise your faithful cleaning woman to fourteen dollars a day when you can still get a dozen other competent workers for ten?

The only way I know to get a raise is to be so good they can’t get anybody like you for the same money, or even slightly more, so they may as well give it to
you.
It may take six months while they check the vaults to be
certain
that extra twenty-five bucks isn’t going to bankrupt the company. Stay on their tail!

Incidentally, when you discover (by sneaking a look at the payroll figures in an unlocked desk) that the company cretin is making more money than you are, be philosophical. Nobody knows why, but every company has things completely screwed up in matching the rewards to the workers.

When you ask for a raise, be sure to adopt a martyred attitude and explain that you are doing the work of seven—providing that you plan to leave the company if the raise doesn’t come through. You’ll almost
have
to, to save face. Otherwise, take your Miltown and smile through the interview. You
love
the company, you
love
your job, you are just quietly starving to death. It doesn’t hurt to point out
why
you need the money: your rent is so much, you send your folks so much, you’re
already
bringing your lunch. This approach coupled with an unrecriminatory review of the work you’ve done may unlock hearts … and the cash box.

Plan a picnic with a friend, write a fan letter to an architect who’s completed a great new house, enroll for contract bridge lessons, visit a bakery to see how pastries are made, take your aunt to lunch, make a batch of fudge brownies for the kids in the mailroom. No frontal attacks on your job or yourself at this point (we’ll
get
to them!). Just start minor creative gambits that will establish you in your own eyes as a woman of action.

If you don’t finish them, it doesn’t count! These are relatively painless projects, however, and take only low-grade will power. If you’ve promised your pal at the service station to bring him the picture from
Life
that looks like him, bring it. If you’ve promised yourself an entire Sunday in bed reading movie magazines and drinking hot chocolate, flake out! Make your personal life a history of started and completed projects if you want to be the kind of person a career can happen to. There
is
a connection.

This takes straight high-grade will power. When you get with the right boss in the right company and figure this must be the place, pull out all the stops.
Do
take your shirt off. If there’s work you could finish at home and impress the hell out of somebody at 9
A.M.
next morning, take it home! If your fat little tummy should have been lopped off two years ago, lop it off.

Read, read, read. People have parlayed an ability to quote statistics at meetings into general managerships. (And I think some of them fitted the statistics to the need; they were never the same twice!) If your boss owns stock, check the market quotations, so you can chart
his
highs and lows. If he’s for Beethoven, you’re for Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler. Report your evenings at the concert.

If he likes his wife,
you
like his wife. If he hates his wife, you
like
his wife. (This will establish you as a saint.) Learn to run the projector so that when the hired projectionist has his coronary at the switches, you can be rushed in. Empty ash trays. Sharpen pencils. (Or the equivalent, if you aren’t an office employee. Remember, you must translate these instructions to your own environment.) At this crucial stage you must do
everything you can.

When I got the job as secretary to the ad man who later let me write copy, it was the first good job I’d ever had. I was so over my head I had to pump water out of my ears at five-thirty. Ordinary run-of-the-mill fluffs I couldn’t seem to avoid—leaving two pages out of his speech to a high school graduation class, sending him to a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel that was really downtown at the Statler. Somebody even stole $100 from petty cash the first week I had charge of it. Not
me
, but it might as well have been for all the raised eyebrows. But sensing that this was the man and here was the place (he really was pretty impressive with his autographed pictures of U. S. Presidents and Cabinet members brocaded along the walls with his best campaigns for Purex Bleach and Breast O’ Chicken Tuna), I just did the best I could. He was a madman about punctuality. When he walked into the office every morning twenty minutes before everybody else, I was at my desk ten minutes before
him—
uncombed, unbreakfasted and unconscious but
there.
(During the change-over from Daylight Saving Time at the end of October, the moon was still up when I left home.) No coffee breaks. No typing errors. I did everything over until it was perfect. I figure I used about two reams of paper a week the first year. All this saved me until I had time to become a good secretary.

A friend preparing for an interview with David Selznick (who dictates like the runaway choo-choo in
The Great Train Robbery
) shut herself in her apartment for three days while her mother gave her dictation. She also scanned every book or play he had made a picture from, including the 954 pages of
Gone With the Wind.
She got the job!

After you get used to being introduced as the mayor’s secretary or the girl with the highest sales book in her department or the only woman who eats in the executive dining room, you’ll wear it like mink and wonder what took you so long.

I needn’t remind you, career girls are sexy. A man likes to sleep with a brainy girl. She’s a challenge. If he makes good with her, he figures he must be good himself.

Some men are supposed to prefer weak-headed women. I never met one who did. Not ever in my life! If they do, it must be because they have so little on the ball themselves they need a moron around to make them feel superior.

A career is the greatest preparation for marriage. You are better organized, better able to cope with checkbooks, investments, insurance premiums, tradesmen, dinner parties and the mixing of a really dry manhattan. You know how to please men. If a few more rushing brides stopped rushing and worked for a few years, they might not find themselves so thoroughly bored at thirty.

As for sleeping with the boss to get ahead, you will undoubtedly make certain initial advances in your career if a particular boss has promised them to you. However, these gains are precarious. If anything happens to
him
, the next boss may not be so susceptible to your charms and you’ll be right back in the file room. As for going from company to company in search of susceptible bosses …
quelle
bore! You would probably do yourself more real good by staying right where you are and learning to read a statistical report. After all, girls to go to bed with he can always find. No real training is required, but where is a boss going to get a girl who can read statistical reports?

N
OBODY LIKES A POOR
girl. She is just a drag. It does take money to be successfully single—for clothes, an apartment, vacations, entertainment … to create an aura of seductive elegance about you, so no one will ever be able to feel sorry for you.