Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  This was something I wanted to leave to the individual contributor’s discretion. I wanted to do nothing that might inhibit creativity.

  If one were to spell this out, however, I would have surely mentioned the dot-dot-dot technique. Pioneered by the Victorian writers, perfected by Walter Winchell, the dot-dot-dot gambit is used in BM books to indicate breathless uncertainty. A sample from Miss Susann’s work: “She could hardly believe this was happening to her … happening exactly as she had hoped it would … feeling as she had dreamed she would.…”

  And I might have mentioned the two-syllable rule: if words of more than two syllables are to be used, they should be reserved for direct quotes. The theory here: while it is permissible for a character in the book to demonstrate glimmers of intelligence as part of his personality, the BM author is under no such compulsion.

  I would have devoted pages to the Angry-Concrete-Animal approach, also known as the mangy-metaphor syndrome. This style of writing derives its name from the unforgettable opening paragraph of Valley of the Dolls: “The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming—an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unreasonable hot spell.”

  It would be wrong to single out Miss Susann in this instance since inept imagery is something that all BM writers share in common. Miss Susann might or might not acknowledge her literary debt to Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place (“I haven’t met ten people in this goddamned town who don’t need to spend the next year douching out their goddamned souls.”) and to the early works of Harold Robbins (“Her mouth neither gave nor took. It was like a well on an oasis in the desert.”).

  The single worst image ever to appear in a BM book must be credited to James Jones, author of Go to the Widow-Maker, which, incidentally, may also be the worst Big Money book ever published. Not only did Jones have his characters walking around in a “labia-pink haze of happiness”; he actually wrote and had published this sentence:

  It was a kiss of such thirst and depth and questing tongues that Grant imagined he felt his soul being sucked down from within his brainpan and out through his mouth into this girl by the force of it, and happily he let it go.

  These examples were never mentioned in my original memo, possibly because they might intimidate those of us who could never conceive of reaching such depths. Brainpan! All that was important was that the coauthors realize how little was expected of them, that writing style is wasted on a BM book, a fact that Geis also made clear in conversation.

  “Style, while it appeals to you and to me, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to the average reader, the mass reader,” Geis said. “He has no sense of style. And Theodore Dreiser didn’t have much style. But for the most part these popular novels are rather execrably written. That doesn’t make any difference. Because people who read them have no taste.”

  And yet, and yet. There had to be some style guide. Some yardstick that we might measure our efforts against. Some model that might help two dozen writers achieve a hint of consistency. Why not add a typical BM sex scene to the memo, a selection that might offer us all some helpful hints?

  Miss Susann approaches sex gingerly. It is the approach of a matronly virgin. She has, as one critic pointed out, a rare instinct for the varicose vein. Mr. Robbins, on the other hand, writes about sex as sensitively as some men write about, well, bowling—it’s good healthy physical exercise, even better when played as a team sport.

  The style guide finally selected came from Evan Hunter’s Strangers When We Meet. The sex scene on page 303 was duplicated and sent to each interested party. Evan Hunter was a natural selection. His super-smooth and ultimately innocuous writing style was easily imitated; moreover, the scene illustrated the prime rule of writing effective sex scenes: build slowly. The trick is to keep delaying the inevitable—throw in a weather report, a phone call, a hot shower, a flat tire, anything at all. Spend paragraphs and pages whetting the reader’s appetite for a feast, then slip him the Metrecal. Critic Nora Ephron, reviewing The Love Machine in The New York Times Book Review, explains why: “Most women, I think, do not want to read hard-core pornography. They do not even want to read anything terribly technical about the sex act. What they want to read about is lust.”

  The model selected for our style guide opens with Felix, a lecherous butcher, escaping a summer thunder shower by dashing into the home of the frustrated housewife, Eve. Most of the page describes the summer storm.

  They saw the lightning streak simultaneously. It flashed across the sky with sudden, startling brilliance, a jagged, luminescent yellow-white. And then, after the space of a heart beat, the thunder followed, and the heavier rain was unleashed all at once, lashing across the development streets in unchallenged fury.

  Then, followed by dialogue designed to illustrate two factors crucial to most BM sex scenes—the man is anxious, the woman is reluctant. Felix asks Eve to remove her dressing gown. She refuses. Then …

  He took a slow step forward. She saw his hands reaching out, but she could not move to stop him. He grasped the lapels of her robe and with a swift motion pulled it open down the front. She felt cold air attack her nipples as her breasts spilled free. Felix backed away from her and studied her appraisingly. She made no motion to close the robe. She stood facing him, staring at him.

  At five o’clock on a Monday morning in June of 1966 the memo was finished. I had no doubts. At that time in the morning many strange notions seem to make sense. The memorandum made sense. The entire concept made sense. And going to bed made the best sense of all.

  By midday the memo was duplicated and distributed. Not just to “the finest writers at Newsday”—but to anyone who had ever been seen tapping on a typewriter: secretaries, editors, repairmen, anyone.

  I had no intention of being selective. Literary background has seldom been a prerequisite for BM writing. It might well be a hindrance. Harold Robbins, unsurprisingly, was once a money-man, a two-thousand-dollar-a-week accountant for a Hollywood studio. Miss Susann, also unsurprisingly, was known only to be one of television’s best-dressed actresses before achieving instant bestsellerdom.

  Not until the memo was distributed did I entertain doubts. Then they came in a flood. Was it going to be possible? Would it be possible for twenty-five professional writers to write that badly? Would they even want to? Was there a publisher on earth who would publish the book? Was there anyone who would actually buy a copy?

  Some initial reactions were depressingly negative. Only three editors on the newspaper showed any interest in the project. This didn’t surprise the reporters. It simply confirmed long standing suspicions we had shared about editors. Either they did not know how to write, even badly, or they had no knowledge of sex.

  Reporters, however, responded with enthusiasm. Too much enthusiasm in some instances. In story conference after story conference, suggestions had to be debated and often turned down.

  There was, for example, the police reporter who wanted to do a chapter based on a blind dwarf. I searched through the great BM books of the past but could find no precedent and the blind dwarf was rejected.

  Some entire themes were adjudged unsuitable. A whipping chapter was rejected for two reasons. In the first place, it is a staple of the “flag” books, the flagellation books, and carries definite hard-core connotations. Secondly, I’ve never been able to understand why the thought of whipping should excite anyone. Therefore, no whipping.

  The weeding-out process, accepting some notions and rejecting others, was by no means flawless. In fact, we managed to reject what was potentially our most exciting chapter. The suggestion came during a long lunch with the nightside reporters.

  One of these veterans had an intriguing suggestion. He suggested that he do a chapter focusing on a woman who had once been a man, a person who had undergone a sex-change operation.

  “You know, I once dated _____ _____,” he said, naming such a person.

  “Dated?” he was asked.

  “More than that
,” he said.

  “Do you mean that you actually …?”

  “All the way,” he said.

  “What was it like?” he was asked.

  “You know, it wasn’t bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

  Incredible. But there was at that time no history of sex-change operations in the body of BM literature. It seemed too extreme, possibly even hard-core, and it was finally rejected. But prematurely. Because Gore Vidal soon shattered the sex-change barrier with Myra Breckinridge and other Big Money authors, Rona Jaffe among them, quickly seized upon the sexually altered human as suitable subject matter.

  Our mistake. A second miscalculation: we turned down the notion of using a battery-operated vibrator, an instrument that is now a staple of BM literature. One cannot apologize for all such errors in judgment. The fashions in perversions change from one year to the next, even from one publishing season to the next. This year’s aberration is next years’ party game. And while I have no regrets about passing up the blind dwarf, I do have some small qualms about missing the potential of a sex-change operation.

  The true BM author must avoid merely repeating what has been described in the past. He must be prepared to push out the borders, to experiment creatively, to take all the risks that separate the bestselling BM author from the hack. For this reason, we tried not to be too rigid in setting out the guidelines. This led to some confusion, as when John Cummings inquired about the copulatory frequency of the heroine.

  “John, there are no specific …”

  “I know,” he said, “but it seems to me that there should be some general patterns …”

  “This is something best left to individual taste.”

  “Well, is two times all right with you?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “I figure two times,” he said. “It’s my thinking there should be at least two assignments in each chapter.”

  “Whatever you think is best, John.”

  There were, as the writing week approached, some changes in the original memo. The initial title had been Strangers in the Valley, obviously inspired by Miss Susann’s epic. The word Strangers is one of the classic title words. Yet, the title was not quite right. Here, a major breakthrough must be credited to Beulah Gleich, editor of Newsday’s house organ.

  “The title just doesn’t make it,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “You left out the word ‘Naked’,” she said.

  “Naked?”

  “That’s a very big title word,” she said. “‘Stranger’ is all right but if you want a real success, you should have ‘Naked’ as well.”

  “Like The Naked Stranger?”

  “No, no,” she said. “That’s too blatant. It doesn’t have the right feel to it. It should have more class, something like … oh … Naked Is The Stranger.”

  And for three weeks that was to remain the title of our book. From there it was only a short dirty step to the stronger Naked Came the Stranger, and I took it.

  Suggestions were welcome—for their own value and because they indicated that people actually felt our little project had a chance for success. Another suggestion led to a change in the dedication.

  Originally, I had tried for a nice homey touch: “To Mother.” The importance of the BM book dedication, often the first words the critic reads, must not be underestimated. It is possible to strive for an impressive note: “To U Thant, With Thanks.” Or possibly to try and soften the wrath of the critic: “To my beloved brother, Jeremy, in the hope that the proceeds from this book will someday enable him to walk again.” My favorite dedication for a BM book was Henry Sutton’s tribute to the Internal Revenue Service and its director at the start of The Voyeur. “To Sheldon Cohen, and all the guys down at the office.”

  “I don’t like your dedication at all,” said Delores Alexander, a reporter in the women’s department.

  “No?”

  “The author of this book wouldn’t do that,” she said. “She would make it ‘To Daddy’.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Oh, it’s much more Freudian,” she explained.

  The change was made on the spot. And as the big starting day approached, the pattern formed. The newspaper’s most talented writers were staking claims on characters who would fall beneath the charms of Gillian Blake. John Cummins, an ex-Marine from a Pennsylvania coal-mining town, would write about Ernie Miklos, an ex-Marine from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Bob Waters, the best boxing writer in the country, would write about a boxer. Bob Greene, our chief investigative and gangland reporter, would write about a Mafia chieftain. And Harvey Aronson was going to write about a husband incapable of infidelity.

  Naked Came the Stranger

  BILLY AND GILLY

  SCREWED. It was, Gillian realized, an obscene word. But it was the word that came to mind. Screwed. It had been, after all, an obscene act. She tried not to think about it. She was driving, floating actually, toward her new house, floating past the freshly butchered lawns dotted with the twisted golden butts that were the year’s first fallen leaves, past the homes built low and the swimming pools and the kempt hedges and all the trappings that went into the unincorporated village of King’s Neck.

  Screwed. The word kept coming back to Gillian Blake. Small wonder. For on that bright first Friday morning of October, Gillian had discovered through relatively traditional methods—specifically through the good offices of the Ace-High Private Investigators, Inc.—that her husband had been spending his every weekday afternoon in an apartment leased by one Phyllis Sammis, a twenty-two-year-old Vassar graduate with stringy hair, gapped teeth, horn-rimmed glasses and peculiarly upright breasts. Gillian Blake had paid the Ace-High people six hundred and seventy-five dollars (including expenses) to learn that William—or Billy, as he was known to the rest of the world, or at least that portion of the world described in certain circles as the Metropolitan Listening Area—had been leaving his office every afternoon at 2:45, taking a taxicab to the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 23rd Street, walking a half block south, climbing two flights of stairs and entering the apartment rented by Phyllis Sammis, recently hired production assistant on The Billy & Gilly Show.

  Now Gillian was floating slowly past the road signs (Stop and Hidden Driveway and Slow Children and Yield and Stop again). Floating. It was this floating feeling that had drawn her to King’s Neck in the first place. King’s Neck, a boomerang of land twisting out from the mainland into the waters of Long Island Sound. Floating, floating toward the three-bedroom, two-bath, two-car house that was, as the man said, within easy commuting distance (forty-one minutes) of Manhattan and within sight (nine miles, through leaves) of the Connecticut shoreline.

  Screwed. It was not so much that William Blake had cheated on Gillian Blake. Nor even that Billy had cheated on Gilly. In a sense, a quite real sense, he had cheated on that portion of the world known as the Metropolitan Listening Area. For William Blake was half of The Billy & Gilly Show, fifty per cent of “New York’s Sweethearts of the Air,” part of a radio team that five times a week dispensed a blend of controversy, information and … love. The show, so the announcer said every weekday morning at five seconds past nine, provided “a frank and open look into the reality of marriage in the crucible of modern living.”

  What held the show together (every poll indicated) was the quality of the marriage, the fact that this was a meeting of minds as well as bodies. The fact that every woman listening (the listenership was eighty-four per cent female) sensed that this was the way marriage should be. In cheating on Gilly, Billy had cheated on an audience that regularly numbered over eight hundred thousand—or at least he had cheated on eighty-four per cent of that audience. It was, when you considered it, an act of breathtaking infidelity.

  Floating then into the circular driveway, mashed gravel, one and a half acres, imitation Tudor, water view, $85,000. There were several possibilities. She could, and the thought seemed strangely appealing at the m
oment, put arsenic in William’s morning coffee. She could sue for divorce in any state in the Union and get it, along with a fair share of William Blake’s not inconsiderable inheritance. These alternatives were considered, savored, ultimately discarded. The difficulty was that either course of action would mean the demise of The Billy & Gilly Show. And the show was what kept Gilly alive.

  The car was parked. The keys were in her purse. Still, Gillian Blake did not move. There was yet another possibility. Gillian Blake could even the score. Absurd? Well, why not? King’s Neck could be her laboratory, her testing ground. She could, with the cool detachment of a scientist, gather all the raw data necessary to determine how other marriages were faring “in the crucible of modern living.” In the process, Billy would be screwed. Good and screwed.

  She stepped from the car then, walked over fresh slate to the front door, past the bogus pillars, through the twin front doors. The clock showed it to be three in the afternoon. William was, if the pattern of the past week held true, mounting the down elevator from his office, mounting the downtown taxi, mounting a mousy twenty-two-year-old girl with remarkable breasts.

  Damn Billy! Damn him anyway! But why all this outrage? Gillian realized it was not simply that William Blake had made a mockery of her marriage. Even worse he had made a mockery of her radio show. The show had started as a cliché patterned after a formula that was perfected in the thirties. The thing that had kept it alive was Gillian Blake. And vice versa. It was what defined her, fulfilled her. It was what had saved her marriage this long, and it had quite possibly saved her life.

  Gillian did not take full credit for the success of the show, even in her thoughts. It was, after all, a smooth division of labor. Gillian had proved adept at dragooning the squadrons of sociologists, the marriage counselors, the new authors, the broad spectrum of human engineers, onto the show. A few of the guests were clients of William’s youthful public relations firm. Billy clarified, condensed, summed up—seldom departing from the role of straight man. Gilly stimulated, interpreted, played devil’s advocate.