Mary Higgins Clark - Early Career

Early Career

Soon after Joseph died, Higgins Clark graduated from high school and chose to attend Wood Secretarial School on a partial scholarship. After completing her coursework the following year, she accepted a job as the secretary to the head of the creative department in the internal advertising division at Remington-Rand. She soon enrolled in evening classes to learn more about advertising and promotion. Her growing skills, as well as her natural beauty, were noticed by her boss and others in the company, and her job was expanded to include writing catalog copy (alongside future novelist Joseph Heller) and to model for the company brochures with a then-unknown Grace Kelly.

Although she enjoyed her job, Higgins Clark's imagination was sparked by an acquaintance's casual comment, "God, it was beastly hot in Calcutta." Inspired to become a flight attendant like her acquaintance, Higgins Clark underwent rigorous interviews to earn a position as a flight attendant (then known as stewardess) for Pan American Airlines, making five dollars fewer a week than her secretarial job. Her supervisor at Remington-Rand hosted a goodbye dinner for her, and Higgins Clark invited her neighbor, Warren Clark, whom she had admired for years, to be her date. By the end of the evening Warren Clark had informed her that he thought she should work as a stewardess for a year and then they should be married the following Christmas. Higgins Clark accepted the somewhat unorthodox proposal.

For most of 1949, she worked the Pan Am international flights, traveling through Europe, Africa and Asia. One of her flights became the last flight allowed into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain fell. On another of her flights, Higgins Clark escorted a four year old orphaned child down the steps of the airplane into the waiting arms of her adoptive mother, a scene that was heavily televised.

At the end of her year of flying, on December 26, 1949, Higgins Clark happily gave up her career to marry Warren Clark. To occupy herself, she began taking writing courses at NYU and, with some of her classmates, formed a writing workshop in which the members would critique each other's works in progress. The workshop, which persisted for almost forty years, met weekly, and at each meeting two members would have 20 minutes each to present their latest work. The other members would then have three minutes each to offer constructive criticism.

One of her professors at NYU told the class that they should develop plot ideas by reading newspapers and asking "Suppose...?" and "What If." Higgins Clark says she still gets many of her ideas by asking those questions, along with "Why?" For her first NYU writing assignment she used this method to expand her own experiences into a short story called "Stowaway", about a stewardess who finds a stowaway from Czechoslovakia on her plane. Although her professor offered high praise for the story, Higgins Clark was continually frustrated in her attempt to find a publisher. Finally, in 1956, after six years and forty rejections, Extension Magazine agreed to purchase the story for $100.

Whilst those six years were devoid of professional milestones, on a personal level Higgins Clark and her husband were very busy. Their first child, Marilyn, was born nine months after their wedding, with Warren Jr. arriving thirteen months later, and a third child, David, born two years after his brother. Two months after Higgins Clark's short story sold, the fourth baby made her appearance and was promptly named Carol, after the heroine in her mother's story.

After selling that first short story, Higgins Clark began regularly finding homes for her works. Through the writer's workshop she met an agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, who represented Higgins Clark for twenty years until her retirement, and became such a good friend that Higgins Clark named her fifth and last child for her.

While Warren worked and Higgins Clark wrote, they encouraged their children to find ways to earn money as well, with all five children eventually taking professional acting and modeling jobs. Young Patty served as a Gerber baby, while David was featured in a national United Way ad. Higgins Clark herself filmed a television commercial for Fab laundry detergent. The commercial, which aired during the I Love Lucy show, earned her enough money that she and Warren were able to take a trip to Hawaii.

In 1959, Warren Clark was diagnosed with severe angina, and, although he curtailed his activities on his doctor's order, he suffered three heart attacks within the next five years, each time returning from the hospital in poorer health. After the last heart attack in 1964 they felt that Warren would be unable to work again, so Higgins Clark called a friend who wrote scripts for radio shows to see if there were any job openings. The day that she accepted a job writing the radio segment "Portrait of a Patriot," Warren suffered a fatal heart attack. His mother, who was visiting at the time, collapsed at his bedside upon discovering that he was dead. In one night, Higgins Clark had lost her husband and her mother-in-law.