I Should Have Stayed Home – Horace McCoy (Signet, 1939)

McCoy’s second novel is also pretty short, maybe 30K words, bleak, first-person, and covers similar ground as They Shoot Horses: the struggles of hopeful wannabe actors scrambling each day for extra work in the 1930s Hollywood industry.

The narrator is Ralph, a young and naive kid from Georgia, a strapping farm boy who is handsome but cannot get a break, mainly because of his thick accent. He lives on a couch in Mona’s Hollywood bungalow, a would-be actress who has a history of finding young men who need her mothering. They do not have a sexual relationship but the way they act with one another is almost like a marriage. Her previous stray boy is now the sex toy for an older woman, a rich Beverly Hills widow who has a lot of influence in the film industry and gets written up in the gossip columns and fan magazines.  This woman sets her sites on Ralph as her next boy toy, something Mona is not too keen on…unless it might help her career.

The novel opens with a neighbor of theirs being sentenced to three years in the women’s prison for grand theft — out of desperation, this staring wannabe actress turned to crime. She later escapes and gets Ralph into legal trouble too.

Ralph moves about the shallow and materialistic power players and movie stars of Hollywood, both wishing for what they have and loathing the kind of people fame, money and attention has turned them into.

Other bloggers have recently written about this lost classic, noting its noir attributes and probable influence on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. It takes on some interesting 1930s social and political issues, such as the beginnings of Nazi Germany, union strikes among actors, and budding Communist ideals in Tinsel Town that would later destroy many, even Mona in this story. There is a telling scene where Ralph gets riled up when he sees a white woman kissing a black man at a party; Mona has to hopld him back from beating the black fellow up — Ralph is a Georgia boy and seeing interracial affection is an abberation in his eyes, even though he is surrounded by naked women in pools, drunken lechers and wild lesbians, a black man kissing a white woman to him is a crime.

Mona is similar to Glora from They Shoot Horses: she is angry that others have gotten breaks in the biz she feels she is better at; she hates the shallowness and broken dreams of Hollwyood; she is jaded, witty, and self-destructive.

What is sad is that we know Ralph, or even Mona, will never become the famous actors they hope for; they will be crushed by Tinsel Town, used by rich people until they are too old to be desirable for the sharks, men and women alike; and will wind up going back home with their tails curled under their rears. And it ends on that very bleak note: they are all doomed failures.

The Woman Chaser by Charles Willeford (Newstand Library, 1961)

What is it with vintage sleaze books and having protagonists as used car salesmen in Los Angeles? It worked well in Robert Carney’s excellent Anything Goes, as it does here in this early Willeford novel. And like Anything Goes — both published by Newsstand Library — this is an example of superb literary fiction marketed as softcore smut in the 1960s. Someone at Newsstand had a good eye for writing.

Stylistically, The Woman Chaser is an experimental novel for its time, taking its cue from John Dos Passos’ American Trilogy, with transitions between “chapters” using screenplay format: CUT TOs, WIPEs, DISSOLVES, etc. Near the end, one section takes the form of a short play (Moby-Dick?). At the top, we are presented a third person text, then go to first person as the narrator, Richard Hudson, sees himself in the third person as a different person as he changes his life: he’s a used car salesman for the Honest Hal franchise in San Francisco; he’s come down to Los Angeles to open an Honest Hal lot.  Hudson grew up in L.A., with a diva mother and a father who wrote a “True Grits” jungle that made a lot of money. Her current husband, the narrator’s stepfather, was once a visionary filmmaker in Hollywood, but art in the end did not sell movies and he lots a lot for the studio, so he had to retire from the biz. But Hollywood seems to always lure those who have returned back into the game of moving photo narratives…

The Gay Ones by Eve Linkletter (Fabian Books, Z-134, 1959)

Sanford Aday’s Fabian and Saber imprints were the first of the sleaze paperbacks to seriously publish explicit books about gay men, years before Greenleaf jumped into that untapped market.  Even the lesbian titles did not have the moral endings that stated the third sex route was a sin, the way the Gold Medal titles did.

Linkletter’s third book for Fabian is about gay men, cross dressers, drag queens, lesbians and the gender-explorers of the tawdry New Orleans nightclub crowd in the 1950s (the same crowd that Lee Harvey Oswald had hung around with).

The novel opens with ten-year-old Jerry confused by his feelings — he’s an introvert who likes to try on his mother’s clothes and lipstick. His mother always wanted a daughter so she encourages this (the same way Ernest Hemingway’s mother did, because she too wanted a daughter and called Hemingway “Ernestina”).  He befriends a nine year old girl nextdoor, Norma, and they have fun, play house, etc., but a year later she moves to California. They vow love. They write to each other for years. In high school, a gay boy comes on to Jerry and Jerry is appalled, and the gay boy says Jerry just doesn’t know what he is.

Wine, Women, and Love by Adam Snavely (Kozy Books #160, 1962)

When I previously examined Adam Snavely’s The Big Flick, I was impressed and wondered who this guy was, or whose pen name it was and to date I still don’t know (I have heard Adam Coulter, but I don’t know who that is either).  “Snavely” published seven books with Kozy, the rest are Bait, 2-4 Sex, Love Drive, Pool Side Pushover, and Split Level Love. I will get to them all eventually — they are all set in Los Angeles, so that’s one clue; the writer was probably L.A.-located.

Wine, Women and Love is a subtle suspense thriller involving domestic espionage, blackmail, and a group of shady government operatives.  The protagonist is a woman in her mid to late 20s, Peggy Porter; the first chapter opens with her in bed with some drunk man, a man who is important in some way.  She has lured him to her hotel room.  Just as the clothes are off and they are in the middle of coitus, several men burst into the room and start taking photos.

The intention here: blackmail the guy.

At first you think they’re grifters targeting rich men, or private eyes, but we get the sensation — it’s never quite said, only hinted at — that Peggy works for these government agents who target certain “key” men in Los Angeles with blackmail and extortion, to make use of at a later date. The group is headed by a sleazy suit named Al Manning, who seems to be power hungry in the political arena.  Is he an operative of . Edgar Hoover?  The operation sounds like the sort of illegal doings Hoover had FBI agents do in the 1950s-70s.

Peggy isn’t an agent; she seems to be a woman with some sort of criminal entanglement,  possible conviction, and she herself is under extorted measures:  she is doing this to keep out of prison.  She’s not the only one; the group has several women working undercover to get dirt and sleaze from various people….

Lust Queen by Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg), Midnight Reader #401, 1961

Another Hollywood novel with a writer as a narrator…but this wrter is not a screenwriter but a pulp hack.

Silverberg had the first Nightstand (1501) with Love Addict, reviewed here, and had the first Midnight Reader (401) with Lust Queen.

I love the “waterbaby” Robert Bonfils cover, a companion to Robert Carney’s Anything Goes.

Joey Baldwin writes detective and science-fiction books and makes an average living. Then his agent gets him a lucrative gig: ghostwrite the autobiography of a 50s star, Mona Thorne, who is making a come-back.  He stands to get $15,000 for the initial job, with a possible $50K more with foreign, film, and other rights.  Big money for 1961!

He’s about done with a sticky divorce and wants to marry his girlfriend, Lisa.  He has to leave her for a few months to go to L.A. and write the book. He assumes he will be put up in a hotel but Mona Thorne wants him to live at her Pacific Palasides estate…and, he finds out the first night, be her sex toy.

This is no Norma Desmond/Sunset Boulevard gigolo situation.  Mona is in her mid-30s, well-fit, well-endowed, tanned, sexy, and likes kinky things in bed.  Joey likes doing kinky stuff he’d never ask Lisa to do.

So begins their business arrangement: breakfast early, work on the book, pool and marinis by four, dinner, Hollywood parties, sex all night, and so on…

L.A. people find Joey fascinating since he’s not a screenwriter. When people ask, “What studio are you with?” they cannot get their minds wrapped around the fact that Joey is not in the game.

The book opens like it’s Silverberg’s autobio:

I was busy making the typewriter move. My fingers were writing as if they had their own private case of St. Vitus Dance, and every time they twitched more nice black marks appeared on the white paper in the machine. I was 40,000 words into the new detective novel… (p. 5)

Writers who have never worked on a manual typewriter do not understand what a physical task it was to use the machine, pressing down on keys, putting paper and carbons in, changing ribbons, matching one’s typing skills to the keyboard of any given typer…some old writers, like Harlan Ellison, still write on manual machines, never having graduated to an electric one (Ellison didn’t like how they hummed) or computer…Silverberg is on a computer now, and online, having embraced the 21st Century…I understand that T.C Boyle still writes on the old Sears typewriter he had when he was first writing.

Joey meets a lot of typical Hollywood characters — the miscle boy models, the shady producers, the jealous actresses…at one party, Joey meets a down to earth TV announcer on a kid’s network and has a quickie outside with her. She also has “small breasts,” unusual in sleaze where all women are at least 37-42 D cups.

Mona gets outrageously jealous over his sex fling…but gets over it…but when Lisa comes to visit him, she loses her mind…

Mona is petty, insecure, clingy, cannot take rejection for a big famous rich star…Silverberg does a good job showing how the famous lived isolated, lonely lives for the most part, outside their films and publicity shots.  I have seen the same with well known actors I have met in Malibu (staying at the home of a certain big produce once and getting to know the neighbors like Bruce Willis, etc.)…one thing Silverberg did’t mention that I find funny is how so many film/tv stars are short…they’re all so damn short..

This is one of the better Don Elliots, I think, up there with Sin Servant, Love Addict, and Convention Girl.  It’s also a dark story of greed and petty jealousy, with quite the violent outcome with a nice Hollywood iroic twist about commercial marketing of tragedy.

The Many Faces of John Dexter #2: Shame Dame Penned by Lawrence Block

Published in 1963 as Midnight Reader #471, Shame Dame is the only John Dexter book that Lawrence Block has admitted to writing, although there are probably others since in the past he has denied writing any Dexter, and denied writing any Sheldon Lords when he wrote many. His general pen name at Nightstand was Andrew Shaw, with one or two Don Hollidays and J.X. Williams tossed in there, maybe a Alan Marshall collaboration, since Dnald Westlake collaborated on some Andrew Shaws.

A better title for this would have been Bad Wife, as there are two of them.  The novel opens with Frank Fisher, 20s, sitting in a bar on Hollywood Blvd. and celebrating a letter he just got from his agent, stating that a publisher wants to buy his first novel.

He had been working on the novel for several years, since getting out of the Marines, and then meeting Helen, a rich woman who has been his sugar momma.  He feels good that he will have an income now.

He meets a girl in the bar and almost has sex with her but backs out, pissing her off. He has to think of his wife.  But when he goes home to surprise her with the good news, he overhears her and another man talking — her lover, and they make fun of him, and she says she used him for sex but now he isn’t enough, and she ridicules his desire to be a novelist.

Frank sees red. He attacks the other man and beats the other man to such a pulp that it’s murder.  Frank takes off, on the run.

The next chapter opens a year or two later in Fort Lauderdale, FL (Gil Brewer and Harry Whittington country, I can’t help but think Block did this on purpose) with Hank making a meager living as a drifter and boat hand.  His novel was published but he has been unable to collect on the money or else the cops would find him.

A series of strange events happen…this is definitely Block’s style here, and by 1963 he had honed his crime fiction pacing well, publishing alternately between Cornith, Gold Medal, Beacon, and Midwood. There’s plenty of sex in this one, sometimes lacking in his Beacon sleaze books as Sheldon Lord.

Frank has a series of encounters with three women — 30 year old Norma, married to a rich older man (again that theme); her 19 year old stepdaughter, a rebellious wildcat; and a revivalist preacher who was a former stripper and still has a body.  He has sex with them all. he’s a stud.  Norma wants him to knock her up and she will pay him $5K, so she will have something to hold onto her husband’s money…the stepdaughter needs sex because her boyfriend won;t do it until they are married…and, drunk, he rapes the preacher but she gets into it, since she once liked rough sex in her sinner years,  and then she falls in love with Frank…

What Norma doesn’t know is that her rich husband will also pay Frank to knock his wife up, because she does not know he had a vasectomy and he will use it as  a surprise on her plan during the divorce…but seems Norma really wants Frank for something else…she has had a private eye do a background, she knows Frank is wanted to murder in Los Angeles, and she puts it this way: shoot her husband dead or she will turn him into the cops.

This is a fast paced and enjoyable read and with some toned down sex, this could have been a Gold Medal crime novel; perhaps Block gave it to Hamling to meet his contractual obligation.  There are some interesting sub-plots: Hank working on another novel, Hank getting caught up in a student street riot, the preacher woman’s sordid past and her own sins and crimes…

Frank is indeed a “fisher” in Florida, fishing for crime noir and trouble everywhere he turns.  Seems he can’t make a move without having strange things happen.

The ending was a little too moralistic and unrealistic for my tastes — Frank is a likable character and who could blame him for killing his wife’s lover on what was supposed to be the greatest day of any young writer, the sale of a first novel…I wanted to see Frank vanish with his love and the money and getting away from jail…

Two thumbs up as both a Dexter and Block book.

The Big Flick by Adam Snavely (Kozy Books, 1961)

Along with Jerry Goff, Max Collier, and John Turner, Adam Snavely is my next “big find,” and he’s at the top of the heap.  I have no idea who he really was, but he did a dozen or so books for Kozy.

Snavely may have been a house pseudonym, as a quick glance at a few titles I have, the writing styles look different.  One of them, Love Drive, credits Snavely on the cover, but on the title page the book is called The Love Drive by Orrie Hitt, also listed that way in the back of book catalogue of a number of Kozy books I have.  I’m not sure yet if Love Drive is Orrie Hitt, haveb’t scrutinized yet, but it’s set in L.A., not Hitt territory. Could be Kozy had titled a Hitt book Love Drive and changed it in favor of Snavely…

The Big Flick is also set in L.A. and the film industry.  The protagonist is 20-something Terry Wilson, a young writer with a smash first novel and a collection of stories on th way.  An old college friend, Zip Zachery, has established himself as a hot young producer with a couple of hit indie films under his belt, and has brought his old buddy Wilson to Tinsel Town to write his next film.  What that film is is anyone’s guess — there is no script, not even a treatment or idea, as  Zachery has rounded investors and studio backing based on the strength of Wilson’s hit novel. He’s also casting small parts for actresses, in exchange for investment from parents and sex from the eager starlets.

Whoever wrote this odd little Hollywood novel wrongly packaged as a sleaze wank book knows the business of filmmaking and the seediness of behind-the-scenes machinations of sex, lies, and double-speak required to get stories on screen.

This is territory I know well myself, having dealt with producers, agents, actors, and other types in Tinsel Town. (See the indie flick I wrote, The Watermelon, now distributed on DVD and Blu-Ray; plus I have had published novels and screenplays optioned here and there,won some screenwriting and festival awards, have optioned and pitched TV pilots, had a short documentary screen at Cannes last May, and soon.) There are some scenes and situations in this book that ring true to my experience, and probably just about any other writer whose virgin eyes have been popped when the illusion of Hollywood is shattered like a cheap wine bottle, and the whole tawdriness and ugliness of how things really work is revealed like a drunk, old, and worn stripper in a dark hole-in-the-wall bar.

Why The Big Flick wound up with Kozy is anyone’s guess  — was the author unable to place it with a mainstream house?  It could have been a Dell, Avon, Pryamid, or Ace title at the time, companies that surely paid better than Kozy.

The sexual stuff is minimal, as the case usually is with some sleazecore books; the core is a well-written yarn of a reclusive literary author’s slow corruption with sex, booze, and drugs as people chase after dreams of the visual image on the silver screen and all the lies fame and fortune Hollywood presents to the neophyte, writer, actress, directors alike.  It is a business truly run by fast-talking “producers” who are two steps away from the label con artist or thief.

Although published decades before Robert Downey, Jr., there is a Downey-like character, a damn fine actor who keeps having to go to detox, running off sets with models and hookers, and just a mess…

Wilson is placed in a hotel room, then an  apartment, to write the script.  He has been assigned a “secretary” who takes care of his any sexual need, but he has his heart set on this actress, Harriett.  Eventually he moves in with her.

Zachery goes over budget and to get more money, he signs a three-film contract with the distributors to do some monster movies. “Find me a lizard!” he cries.

When the movie screens, Wilson thinks it’s horrible but the audiences like it, get gets more writing work, the reviews are good…he doesn’t understand how Hollywood can like the crap the movie came out as, but he takes the money, the actress, and the life…

Screen/Hollywood by Barry N. Malzberg (Olympia Press)

Sometimes you can find rare Malzbergs from Olympia or Midwood/Oracle in UK pirate editions…or the nifty translation, such as Hollywood, which is the German translation of Screen. There was a second German edition, credited to B.N. Berg:

Screen is probably the best known of Malzberg’s handful Olympias, that he did under his name, Gerrold Watkins, or the one-shot as Francine di Natale.

After he sold Olympia Orancle of a Thousand Hands, Maurice Girodas pitched Malzberg on a book he could not get his other writers to tackle. In an essay at Earl Kemp’s special Olympia Press-cenetered edition of  el, “Reptenace, Deisre, and Natalie Wood,” Malzberg writes:

“The problem with your pornography,” an editor at Olympia named Uta West said to me in relation to the problem, “The only real trouble is that you write about sex the way that 95% of us experience it 95% of the time but it’s hard to get us to pay to read about it, you know?”

Still, like the Common Man in Marat/Sade, I had plans. If my sex scenes were dreamy, my intentions and style were, I trusted, not: I wrote the opening chapters of Oracle of theThousand Hands in a dead fever of February 1968, trying to figure out what might impress Nabokov’s publisher’s first reader and came up with a crazed pastiche of Pale Fireand Despair, the memoirs of a compulsive masturbator narrated in the alternating first- and third-person with quarts of semen spewed over electric fences, cattle mooing nostalgically in the background at the instant of self-defloration and ultimately a powerful shock from that electrified fence at the moment of final consummation. Girodias or someone there noticed what was going on, he summoned me to Gramercy Park (the Press and four employees worked out of his apartment, skirting the mattress on the floor as they sidled from room to room) and offered me a $2,000 contract.

Well,” he muttered six weeks later when on an impossible June afternoon I came to hear the verdict on the completed novel mailed oh-so-recently, “it’s not your number one best seller but it’s amusing and interesting isn’t it?” Amusing and interesting were his favorite attitudes and everyone in the ideal Traveller’s Companion or Ophelia Press book would climax with a smile and a sigh. “I have to accept this, I guess, but now you do something for me. I have a novel I want you to do as a special project for me.”

That novel I soon discovered had been offered to and declined as an idea by every writer who had come trooping around or past the mattress: a young man with an empty life and much seminal backup is obsessed with film, watches five films a day, falls vividly in love with actresses, has an imagination so passionate that he can place himself on the screen with and make passionate love to Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia and the ever-popular “others.” “Use their real names,” he said, “I want scandale; without scandal this cannot work.”

“What becomes of the boy?”

“I don’t know. Who the hell cares? Maybe he becomes Joe E. Levine, what’s the difference. I’ll give you a clause protecting you against lawsuits. I love lawsuits,” he reminded me.

I delivered Screen in two weeks, taking Martin Miller, a Department of Welfare investigator in Brooklyn (as I had been) through a series of Bijoux and into and out of the genitalia of some actresses, also to Aqueduct race track in the borough of Queens and also through more desultory (if unrequested) collision with a fellow social worker whom he did not love (roman a clef here) but who intimated his obsession and pointed out that Martin had better get wise, “because I’m for real. I’m also your last chance.” (No, she wasn’t.) I hold no great brief for the novel but doubt if any better has been written faster, pace A.J. Liebling, and it contains for whatever it is worth probably the best sentence I ever wrote and maybe the best sentence published in a novel of lust in 1969; the last sentence of that novel as Martin Miller having walked away from the suddenly desperate colleague, pounds it into a star (and pounds it an pounds it and pounds it, “her body a map, her hands a road to carry me home”):

It is strange and complex, complex and strange and my orgasm is like a giant bird torn wing to wing by rifle fire, falling, falling, in the hot drenched sun of that damned Southwestern city.

That sentence written (as were many of the sentences of that and Oracle) with two-year-old Stephanie Jill burbling and cooing and muttering and bounding and volubly discussing matters of climate at her father’s knee didn’t have in draft the word “damned,” something seemed to be lacking and in the only revision in either of those two novels, the word was put in for rhythm and emphasis and all of it placed on or next to the Girodias mattress shortly after Independence Day.

“You son of a bitch,” he pointed out, “you made me crazy, do you know that? I ask you this time for pornography, a simple work of pornography, give you a plot and everything and ask you to keep it simple and low-class, I publish one book for you and ask you to this forme and what do you do? You give me 40 pages which are beautiful, just beautiful, you even know the color of that one’s bush how you tell that? And then what do you give me? You give me horse-racing, you give me existentialism, you give me despair! You give me terrible anxiety and depression! You give me pain and thwarted desire! This book will sell 400 copies, I have to publish it hardcover too because in paperback everyone will throw it away; I have to publish it because it is a masterpiece, but you destroy me, do you understand?”

It sold 350 copies in hardcover, actually, making it the leader of the second “new hardcore line” (Oracle sold half that and a novel by Alex Austin, Eleanore, sold according to statement 52 copies) but none of this was my fault, was it? I mean it was indeed (Lehmann-Haupt backed me up on this) anti-pornography for the coming age of Nixon and under the circumstances, the time could have been right.

It never became the controversaial bestseller with lawsuits and scandal that Girodas was hoping for.  As for his Olympias, I prefer some of the others over this one, such as A Bed of Money or The Circle.

===============================

Barry Malzberg’s Olympia Press (NY) Bibliography

LP/2 Screen, by Barry Malzberg, 1968 boards
LP/3 Oracle of the Thousand Hands, by Barry Malzberg, 1968 boards
444 The Circle, by Francine Di Natale, May 16, 1969
460 Southern Comfort, by Gerrold Watkins, 1969
474 A Bed of Money, by Gerrold Watkins, 1969
476 A Satyr’s Romance, by Gerrold Watkins, 1970
479 Giving It Away, by Gerrold Watkins, 1970
483 The Art of the Fugue, by Gerrold Watkins, 1970
OPS/8 Screen, by Barry Malzberg, 1970 paperback
OPS/17 In My Parents’ Bedroom, by Barry Malzberg, 1971
OPS/29 The Confessions of Westchester County, by Barry Malzberg, 1971

Mardi by Herbert Roberts (Robert Carney), Softcover Library, 1966

Mardi is written  by Herbert Roberts, pen name for Robert Carney, who wrote the wonderful Anyting Goes (1961), that I raved about and recommended to Black Mask Books to reprint.

I was expecting too much.  Mardi is hard-boiled and fast-paced, but essentually the same story as Anything Goes…instead set in the sleazy world of used car sales, it’s set in the sleazy world of television production. Both are set in Los Angeles.

Larry is a twenty-something exec assistant to fat, old rich Dave, the TV exec — Larry has had a past fling, now renewed, with Dave’s daughter, and is sleeping with Mardi, the new 19 year old wife of 50 year old Dave.  Carney seems to be obsessed with disgusting old rich men marrying young women.  Like Anything Goes, Mardi wants Larry to kill Dave so she will inherit the fortune and they can be together.

The cover says: “The fascinating story of a Lolita — several years later.”  She’s like the teenage sex slut in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, with a little more finesse, but the same: using her body for older men in the entertianment biz.

I’m still not sure if Carney write any other novels under his name or Roberts. Sin-a-Rama lists him in the back with pen names, mainly because it reprinted the Anything cover for its cover.  I am keeping my eye out for any Carney/Roberts books — if anyone knows of any other books, do tell.

Snappy dialogue and depraved couplings but lacking the same character depth as Anything Goes — we don’t really know what makes Larry trick, and doesn’t go on a jorueny of self doscovery via his sexual antics.  Then again, this is a novel about the television content makers of the 1960s, so can there be depth to these soulless, disaffected people who live only for money and power?

This novel was published the year I was born…that is something to cook my noodle alone.

Meg by Loren Beauchamp and Backstage Sinners by Don Elliott

Both Meg (Midwood Books) and Backstage Sinners (Nightstand) are similar stories — young women seeking fame and having to sleep with certain men to get it.  Meg is about the cimb to supersardom in Hollywood and Backstage Sinners is about New York theater and grindhouse films in L.A.  Both were published in 1961 so probably written around the same time (if not the same month), and meg was following on the success of Connie.  What a drag it must be for a writer to have a hot seller under a pen name and no one knows whose behind the mask — or maybe it’s fun?

Meg is big, busty redhead from a small Idaho town with stars in her eyes. She saves $1000 and takes a bus to New York, after having lost her virginity to Jack, a potato farmer’s son and an ox of a boy.  Since she gave up her virtue, he expects they will get married so Meg high-tails it out of town.

In NY, she meets a talent agent, Bonaventura, a short middle aged slimeball who knows he can make Meg into a star.  He doesn’t require her to sleep with him — he does not mix buisiness with pleasure — buit she does have to sleep with certain men to get places: beauty contest promotoers and judges, money men, directors, producers, actors.  Bonaventura moves Meg around like a puppet — every act is pre-planned and for publicity.  This is the Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield story re-told.  Meg does’t mind sleeping with the men, she just isn’t into anything kinky like spanking and whips.  She also gets into a faux marriage to an aging Hollywood hunk who is a lot like Rock Hudson or Raymond Burr — ladies men on the outside, gay in secret. The marraige is for publicty to help both their careers.

Meg’s family and friends back home disown her for all the semi-nude photos and the racy films she makes.  Within two years sibce her arrical to NY, she is a superstar with a large Beverly Hills mansion and a satff of four waiting on her.

The sex is often glazed over and not much — you can find more action in a Harlequin romance.  This is pure guilty pleasure soapopera reading. It seems to end too quickly, as if Silverberg was reaching his word limit (all Midwood seem to clock in at 158-164 pages) and had to wrap his story up.

In Backstage Sinners, Jean Bruce is a young actress who is serious about her craft, but in Hollywood, she makes grindhouse junk films where she showsa lit of her body, and has slept with 40 men in a year to get where she is, which seems to be nowhere.  With a year’s money saved, she moves to New York to get away from sleaze Hollywood and study Sid Reinfheld, a method actor who is a lot like Brando but quit acting in his 30s and now coaches hot young actors and actresses. There is a lot of interesting and insightful discussion about acting tecnique, Checkov’s Uncle Vanya and other plays that makes me think Silverberg had some theater background, or had friends who were actors — since he lived in NYC and went to Columbia, no doubt he did, as you could spit on the street and hit three actors in the 1950s, and now.

Jean sleeps with her Svengali teacher, of course.  She wanted to from day one, although he is twice her age and twice her size.  She falls for him and his teaching, as many young actresses have, only to regret it, as most do from a Svengali.  Hollywood beckons for her return, and she cannot decide between a career or living a destitute, artistic life in the theater.

Reed Nightstand (Greenlead Classics) reprinted the book a decade later as The Bed and the Beautiful.