Daisy Bacon

Bacon continued writing, but without further success, later recalling that she "worked like slaves to get into Liberty and never made it".[11] In March 1926 she was hired by Street & Smith, one of the major pulp magazine publishers, as a reader for "Friend in Need", an advice column that ran in Love Story Magazine.[12] The magazine had been launched as a monthly in 1921, and was successful enough to switch to weekly publication in September 1922.[13] The advice column received about 75 to 150 letters a day, and between ten and twenty were printed each week. About ten percent of the letters were from men. Another Street & Smith employee, Alice Tabor, also worked on the column. Street & Smith insisted that no matter what the letter-writer's problem might be, divorce could never be recommended as a solution. The letters covered every kind of romantic and matrimonial problem, and Bacon's biographer, Laurie Powers, suggests that the letters "gave Daisy a priceless education in the magazine's audience ... [and] became the foundation of Daisy's uncanny ability to know what her readers wanted to read in a romance".[14] While working on "Friend in Need", Bacon also wrote fiction for Love Story, beginning with "The Remembered Fragance" which appeared in the September 11, 1926 issue. She sold six more stories to Ruth Agnes Abeling, Love Story's editor, over the next two years, and two non-fiction pieces.[15]

In March 1928 Abeling was fired, and Bacon was made editor of Love Story Magazine.[16] She hired Esther as her assistant; to ensure that their relationship appeared professional at the office, the two of them switched to using their last names, Bacon and Ford, for each other, both in and out of the office.[17] Bacon found she had to adapt her usual soft-spoken and rather genteel speech to be successful in some of her working relationships at Street & Smith: "well-bred tones did not spell authority to them", she later recalled, but "after I learned to talk to them in language which I had heard my grandfather's stable boys use, everything was fine".[18]

The volume of submissions to the magazine was so great that other staff had to be employeed to reduce the volume of stories that reached Bacon's desk to a manageable quantity, but even so Bacon found herself reading about a million words of manuscripts each week.[19] The fiction in the magazine was Victorian in tone,[20] and Bacon was scornful of the characterization: "The heroines were usually paid companions, governesses, or employed in some such genteel occupation and were always so sweet that it made you want to choke them!"[21] She wanted the heroines of her stories to more closely resemble her readership, working as secretaries or beauticians. She also understood the role of glamor in the magazine: readers liked to read about chorus girls and models struggling to succeed, and about women in unusual roles such as pilots.[22] A common stereotype in romance fiction was a poor girl with rich relatives who cruelly mistreated her; Bacon argued that "... anyone who thinks that only those people who do not have to work for a living have the capacity for making other people's lives miserable has just never spent an hour inside of the average factory, hotel, school, or department store or around almost any office."[23]

In her first year as editor, Bacon was forced to write the ending to a serial by Ruby Ayres when the last instalment did not arrive in time for publication. In Bacon's version the wife of the male protagonist falls from a high window and dies, leaving him free to marry his secretary. Bacon was criticized for the ending, but Ayre's own version of the instalment, which finally arrived, had the wife die in the same way.[24]

Bacon became friends with some of her writers, inviting them to her apartment and buying them lunch. She was friends with Maysie Grieg, who was already successful when Bacon met her, and with Gertrude Schalk, an African-American writer who sold her first story to Bacon in 1930. Douglas Hilliker, an artist who drew interior illustrations and later painted magazine cover art, lodged with the Bacons for a while in 1930, along with his wife and daughter.[25]

In 1929 Bacon and Miller spent two weeks together in England and France, just before the Wall Street crash in October.[26] A rift between the two at the end of the year was quickly healed, and since Alice Miller was often away in Hollywood or overseas, Bacon spent many weekends with Henry at Botts, Henry's house near Kinnelon in New Jersey.[27] In 1931 Bacon rented a house in Morris Plains, New Jersey, with plans to write a novel there. She often took Esther and her mother with her, but the other two would frequently be left to themselves as Miller would come to pick her up and take her to Botts.[28] It is not known if Alice Miller was aware of her husband's infidelity, but she may have been. Powers suggests that her long poem, Forsaking All Others (1931), is a veiled reference to her own marriage: the protagonist has an affair with a younger woman, but refuses to leave his wife for her.[29]

In mid-1934, Street & Smith decided to resurrect Ainslee's Magazine, which had been merged into Far West Illustrated in 1926, as another love story magazine.[30] It was titled Ainslee's, and given to Bacon to edit from its first issue, dated December 1934.[30][31] It was in bedsheet format, with slightly more risqué plots: nudity was occasionally mentioned, and Powers comments on the language used: "More explicit kissing scenes used word such as 'sensuous' and 'intimate' [and] the word 'damned' showed up several times".[32]

In 1935 Bacon submitted a manuscript of a novel to William Morrow. It was rejected, and she seems not to have submitted it elsewhere.[33]

She stayed as editor of Love Story until the magazine's run ended in 1947.[34] "In her pages, she offers to the average woman – not a flight from actual life — but a heightened reality," explained one profile in 1942, noting that the magazine's circulation was between two and three million readers a month.[35] She also edited Smart Love Stories, Detective Stories, The Shadow, and Doc Savage (the latter two, superhero adventure series).[36]

As a writer, she published several stories and essays, and a how-to manual, Love Story Writer (1953).[37] In the 1960s, she launched her own imprint, Gemini Books.

On romance in mid-twentieth century America, she noted that "It is better for girls to acquire careers first, husbands afterward," and "financial independence for the wife is an ideal basis for marriage. To be singled out by a girl with a good job is the highest form of flattery for a man. She does not need his support. Therefore she loves him for himself."[38]