Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  Naked Came the Stranger

  Penelope Ashe

  To Daddy

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  BILLY AND GILLY

  ERNIE MIKLOS

  MORTON EARBROW

  JOSHUA TURNBULL

  ARTHUR FRANHOP

  MARIO VELLA

  MARVIN GOODMAN

  ALAN HETTERTON

  PADDY MADIGAN

  TAYLOR HAWKES

  ANSEL VARTH

  MELVIN CORBY

  WILLOUGHBY MARTIN

  ZOLTAN CARADOC

  PREFACE:

  DISROBING NAKED CAME THE STRANGER

  The year 1966 cannot be reckoned a good year for literature. Oh, there were the usual number of new books published that year—more than twenty thousand new titles in the United States alone. Of that number, less than two thousand were works of fiction. And of those, the two runaway bestsellers were Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann and The Adventurers by Harold Robbins. In June of 1966, hardly by coincidence, Naked Came the Stranger was also conceived.

  The act of conception took place, fittingly, in a gin mill. Fittingly—because the gin mills that year were filled with writers anesthetizing themselves against the harsh new realities of their profession. To be a serious writer in the year 1966 was to also be, by inclination if not by definition, a serious drinker.

  The reasons are clear enough. They were articulated that spring by New York Times literary critic Lewis Nichols who glanced at the best-seller list and winced; “Seldom has there been so wretched a collection of titles as appears today.” Nichols was seeing more than a wretched collection of titles. More than the awesome spectacle of Miss Susann and Mr. Robbins battling it out groin to groin atop the list. What he saw was the beginning of this country’s true Golden Age of Big Money books.

  The gin mill in question was known unofficially by its largely journalistic clientele as “the bureau.” And on a Tuesday night in June there was the usual assortment of regulars—a scattering of Newsday reporters, a half-dozen off-duty detectives, a similar number of local Mafiosi, a former flagpole sitter, a water commissioner, and three hookers who had reached the age of semi-retirement.

  The conversation that night began on a bookish note. Primarily because of two recent personal experiences involving the literary giants of the hour. One was an interview I had with Harold Robbins in his suite at the Plaza (“I have no influences,” Robbins had said. “I don’t feel I write like anyone else and that’s what influence is all about.… And being a complete egoist, I’d have to say I’m the best in the business today.”) Depressing. The second was an attempt to read Valley of the Dolls, a task as formidable and challenging in its way as reading, oh, Ulysses. Also depressing.

  “I keep thinking of Peter Zenger,” I announced to my fellow drinkers.

  “Who?” the water commissioner asked.

  “Peter Zenger. I keep thinking of him standing trial to defend the freedom of the press. For books like those—is that why he stood trial?”

  Two of the men who were to make profound contributions to Naked Came the Stranger were with me that night. One was Harvey Aronson—a Newsday colleague, columnist, successful freelance writer, and the man generally acknowledged to be the most faithful husband in journalistic history. The second was John Cummings, a reporter who had covered most of the big stories of the decade. Both men were at that time writing novels. Aronson had written one hundred pages before creating his first sex scene, an encounter that then took up only two paragraphs of print.

  “It’ll never sell,” I said.

  “Why not?” Harvey Aronson said.

  “Harvey, it’s got to have sex.”

  “Thomas Wolfe didn’t need big sex scenes,” Aronson said. “F. Scott Fitzgerald did it all right without that stuff. Salinger didn’t need.…”

  “Salinger who?” the water commissioner asked.

  “Exactly my point,” I said. “Those guys couldn’t even make a living today.”

  “But how can I write about sex?” Aronson said. “I don’t know about that sort of thing.”

  “You could research it,” Cummings suggested.

  “My wife would never.…”

  “You could ask people about it,” Cummings said. “You could ask Manly, he’d tell you anything you wanted to know.”

  “You could ask me anything,” Manly, the bachelor reporter said. “I could tell you some things. I once knew this girl who made love on a trampoline.”

  “A trampoline?” Harvey said.

  “What happened to her?” Cummings said.

  “Bad back,” Manly said. “First my back went out. Then she did.”

  Manly constantly brightened conversations in this manner. I once knew this girl who … he would begin. And then we would recall a girl of unparalleled acrobatic agility or perhaps a girl with an incomparable gift for invention. At such moments there was nothing for the rest of us to do but sit silently and listen, listen in wonderment to tales of trampolines and telephone booths, of snowbanks in Vermont and rickshaws in Hong Kong. For nothing—nothing—had escaped Manly’s range of experience.

  At this point the conversation tended to deteriorate. There were attempts to match Manly, attempts foredoomed to failure. I dimly heard John Cummings counter with a story centered on a little-known Philippine Island sexual practice, something involving crushed ice to heighten stimulation.

  “Why not?” I interrupted.

  “Why not what?” said Aronson.

  “Why don’t we all do one?”

  “One what?”

  “A novel,” I said. “Everyone could do one chapter. We would each get to write about one specific perversion and.…”

  “But I don’t know any,” Aronson said, grinning.

  “You could ask Manly for one of his,” Cummings said.

  “A group novel,” I said. “Everyone writes one big sex scene and we put them all together. You know what we’d have?”

  “A mess,” said Aronson.

  “A bestseller,” I said. “It couldn’t miss. We could write the whole thing in a week.”

  “I don’t know …” Aronson said.

  “I could do an ice-cube chapter,” Cummings said.

  “Yes, that kind of thing.”

  “What would I do?” Aronson said. “That kind of thing never happens to me.”

  “You could use your imagination,” I said.

  “Better ask Manly,” Cummings said.

  “This will work,” I said. “The beauty of it is no one person could ever sit down and keep that stuff up for a whole book. But anyone could do a chapter.”

  “I’m not sure,” Aronson said.

  “I once knew this girl who made love in graveyards,” Manly was saying.

  That was the beginning. Although the talk quickly resumed its downhill course, the idea had taken seed. And later that night at home, nursing a nightcap, I sat down and began drafting what Time magazine has called “the now-historic document.” There is a sense of history about the memorandum today. The paper has yellowed with age and the edges are curled. There are misspellings, grammatical absurdities, crossed-out words. Document scholars would doubtlessess conclude that the author seemed to be experiencing some small difficulty in making the proper connections between fingers and typewriter keys.

  Still, it’s all there, all intact, all as it was set down on Long Island on the 12th night of June in the year 1966. The birth announcement heralding the arrival of one of the most celebrated BM books of our time.

  To: The finest writers at Newsday

  Re: The writing of a best-selling novel.

  As one of Newsday’s truly outstanding literary talents, you are hereby officially invited to become
the coauthor of a best-selling novel. The novel will be a jointly written venture and all profits (serialization, paperback, Broadway, film rights, etc.) will be distributed equally among the coauthors.

  Serialization … paperback … Broadway … film rights—was there more? Could there be more? Long-playing records? Marionette rights? What then? Ah, if only Harold Robbins had been there. He would surely know. I thought back to the interview with Robbins. The author had talked about what he knew. He had talked about money. I asked him what it felt like when Hollywood’s irrepressible Joe Levine had paid him an advance of one million dollars after seeing nothing more than a brief plot outline.

  “Actually,” Robbins had said, “That’s not entirely accurate. Levine didn’t see the plot outline. All he saw was two words. The title.”

  And actually the total advance, when one had tallied in the contributions from other interested parties, came to two million dollars. All this on the basis of a two-word title: The Adventurer. Therefore, Robbins was receiving an advance of one million dollars a word, a figure that surely set some kind of record for space rates. I wrote feverishly.

  The entire bestseller will be written in a single week—between Monday, June 20, and Monday, June 27. Each chapter must run a minimum of 2,500 words. There is no maximum. Since all chapters will be assembled and edited one time for uniformity of style, neatness does not count.

  So far, so good. I was now approaching the difficult part. What we needed; guidelines. And obviously the formula should be inspired by Miss Susann and Mr. Robbins. I picked up The Adventurers and started to take notes. Let me see, was there any way to unlock its secret, any way to reduce this massive volume to statistics?

  There were fifty-nine killings described in vivid detail. There were twelve instances of what we newspapermen still call criminal assault. There were nine sequences involving one perversion or another. There were six love scenes featuring more than the customary two participants, one involving fewer. The hero alone was involved in a series of bloody killings—twelve soldiers, one grandfather, one polo player, one turkey, three trout, and so forth he was personally featured in twenty-one sexual encounters with fourteen women, three of whom became his wife. He manhandled nine people, including one mistress. Yes!

  “There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex,” I wrote.

  It seemed right. Right but incomplete. Surely there was more to it than that. Perhaps one should say something about the quality of the writing. Was there a thread uniting the writing styles of Jacqueline Susann (“She felt herself responding to his embrace with an ardor she had never dreamed she possessed, her mouth demanding more and more.”) and Harold Robbins (“Her mouth was warm and moist and still tasted of orange soda. Then he moved his head and his lips were traveling down her body, across her throat, over her breasts.”) and, oh, Evan Hunter (“He pulled her to him, his mouth hard, feeling a sudden spasm of desire as her body moved in against his.”)?

  Of course there was. And it was added to the memo.

  There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.

  Those two sentences are heart and soul of the Big Money book writing movement in America. They have been repeated so often since then that I fear they may someday find their way onto my tombstone. So be it. The aspiring BM writer would be wise to commit the lines to memory, possibly even to jot them down and keep them in a safe spot so they may be consulted when inspiration is temporarily on the wane.

  It is a formula that has withstood the test of time. Nothing in the intervening years has caused me to distrust it. None of the BM books that have appeared since 1966 have violated these two cardinal rules.

  Although loath to tamper with the original wording, I might make one subtle addition. Were I embarking on a similar project today, I would change the first sentence to read: “There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex and violence.” But surely it is not necessary to spell out everything. Even without that added thought, the various coauthors of Naked Came the Stranger managed to supply an abundance of murders, madmen, and mayhem.

  “Honey, it’s four o’clock,” my wife, Corinne, called from the bedroom.

  “Not yet,” I called back. “I’m writing a dirty book.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Can’t you do that tomorrow?”

  “It’s going too well,” I said. “All I need now is a name for the heroine.”

  “Call her Gillian.”

  “Gillian? What kind of name is that?”

  “The kind of name they always use in dirty books.”

  I typed on.

  Gillian Blake, 29, and her husband William, 34, are moving on October 1 of this year into the unincorporated village of King’s Neck, a new but fairly exclusive development on Long Island’s (famed) North Shore.

  In seven out of ten BM books the central characters are celebrities—singers, models, television stars, senators. In literary circles this device is known as the roman a clef, which can be translated as a guessing game. The trick, of course, is to make the game not too difficult. It is the kind of game that must be solvable to women between mah-jong sets, and often is. The press release given to me before the Harold Robbins interview, indicated the degree of difficulty: “Is there, for instance, any real-life prototype for the nymphomaniac chain-store heiress? The paranoically suspicious shipping magnate and his girlfriend, the opera star?”

  At the same time it is common practice to deny any resemblance to persons living or dead. This is obviously the truth of the matter; still, no harm in planting a seed of doubt. So one points out that The King is not about Frank Sinatra. That Valley of the Dolls is not about Judy Garland, that The Exhibitionist is not about the Fonda family, that The Voyeur is not about Hugh Hefner. Was there anyone left not to write about? Going over the list, I could see that radio had been ignored in recent years.

  Why not? Why not do a book that was not about a husband-and-wife radio team?

  The Blakes run a morning radio show (10 to noon) and it is called “The Billy & Gilly Show.” They comment on the passing social scene, reflect a sweetness-and-light, and get into profound discussions on what makes marriage work (i.e. “A solid union must be constructed on a foundation of mutual trust.”).

  It would be helpful, I sensed, if something were to happen to our central characters. It would be nice if we had a story to tell. But what story? What story could possibly accommodate this trumped-up pair, not to mention the diverse styles of two dozen newspaper people?

  Fortunately, there are only two basic BM story lines just as there are only two basic BM book environments. And environment always determines story line.

  There is the non-urban environment of Peyton Place, Strangers When We Meet, and The Devil in Bucks County. In the non-urban environment one inevitably encounters a line-up of relatively unsophisticated types—the frustrated housewife, the deliverer of bread, the frustrated housewife, the crusty old judge, the frustrated housewife, the village alcoholic, the frustrated housewife, and every now and then a visiting artist. The setting is tranquil. And sex, when it comes—as it must—leads to pregnancies, abortions, nervous breakdowns, suicides, murders, and an occasional tidal wave.

  The second classic BM book environment is urban. Great jets zing directly from the Beverly Hills Hotel to the Cannes film festival. The children all disappear into Swiss schools and the grown-ups stay home eating Beluga caviar and trying out for Broadway musicals. Sex, when it comes—as it must—leads to nothing more profound than bigger and better sex.

  Would it be possible to somehow combine the two worlds? That was the aim—to bring show business to the suburbs. Why not?

  It was time to consider the heroine. I knew even then that the readers must identify with the central character—which is to say she should be married, not too young, frustrated, wronged, and finally happy. This is essential, I have since discovered, to most BM books, and I’m informed that it is one of the many helpful hints
to be found in publisher Bernard Geis’s Handy Dandy Writer’s Kit.

  “The element that very few writers are aware of is identification between the reader and the heroine,” Geis once revealed in conversation. “One of the secrets is to remember that a lot of women do not have a satisfactory life in the real world and therefore dwell in an imaginary world. And they dream of things and there’s a lot of wish fulfillment and so on. Now, in reading a book about a female protagonist, or heroine, they respond more affirmatively if they can identify with that heroine. And the secret is not to begin at the top, but with the woman or the girl in relatively humble circumstances so that the shop girl at Woolworth’s or the humble housewife can say, ‘Gee, there’s a lot about this girl that’s like me.’ And then, once you’ve made this identification at the beginning of the book, you can carry her up into the clouds—because she’s been there before in her own mind. And she can imagine herself becoming a famous motion picture actress like the heroine of the book, and marrying the most handsome man and most over-sexed man who ever drew a breath and all the rest of it. Then it fulfills its mission.”

  There were other literary factors to consider at the outset. Primarily this matter of motivation. It was clear that our heroine, Gillian, was going to be involved in an extremely vigorous sexual workout. Why?

  Gillian, as the book opens, learns that William has been conducting an affair with one of their production assistants, Esther. She is unfaithful at first to even the score. She is unfaithful for a while because she enjoys it. She is unfaithful, finally, because she makes it a goal to destroy the seemingly happy marriages that surround her.

  So much for human motivation. Possibly it was not necessary to spell it out that much. Most BM book characters climb into bed for the same reason that Hillary supposedly scaled Everest. Because it’s there. And there. And over there as well.

  I sensed that my intial basic writing guide (“True exellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion”) required some elaboration. But how much did I have to tell fellow newspapermen about bad writing? Should I explain that we would be aiming for, in critic Gloria Steinem’s apt phrase, “the reader who has put away comic book but isn’t yet ready for editorials in the Daily News”?