Reading This Book Qualifies as a #MeToo Experience

The cover is the only thing I like
about Rosemary Rogers’ The Insiders.

Trigger warning: This so-called romance is chock full of sexual assault and stupidity, so proceed with caution. Also, the review is a bit long (sorry about that).

Well, I have no one to blame but myself. Though I’m not a fan of romance fiction, I went ahead and bought a copy of the late Rosemary Rogers’ 1979 novel THE INSIDERS, anyway.

In my own defense, The Insiders is from a period in the late ’70s and early ’80s when Rogers, primarily known for writing bodice-rippers, was writing more contemporary—and more explicit—fare that seemed to be aimed at Jackie Collins’ audience. Indeed, cover up Rogers’ name and The Insiders could easily be mistaken for one of Collins’ or Harold Robbins’ novels. Even the book’s synopsis (“From the breathtaking northern California coastline to the fierce, competitive media worlds of Los Angeles and New York City, Eve is caught in a whirlwind of the beautiful and the rich…”) suggests it’s more about a woman trying to make it in the sordid world of show business—well, TV news in this instance—than finding true love. I may not like romance novels, but I love books about the sordid world of show business!

I was tempted to read these Rosemary
Rogers' titles as well...until
I read The Insiders.

The Insiders is not about show business, or the TV news business. It’s not really a romance novel, either. What it is, is a total piece of shit.

The synopsis was at least honest about one thing: Eve is our main character. I guess she’s supposed to be the heroine, except that would reply she’s admirable in some way, and Rogers makes it clear that the only thing admirable about Eve, a former model turned TV reporter, is her beauty. In fact, Eve’s hotness is one of her defining character traits. The other two traits (she only has three) are her inability to get over her ex-boyfriend David and being a total idiot.

The book’s first chapter details how Eve is sleeping with Peter, “San Francisco’s most fashionable analyst,” but only on weekends, and only to distract her from David’s absence. “I take other men’s rejected lovers and make them over, doll,” Peter tells Eve. “I fuck them into forgetfulness.” Yet despite that claim, he just can’t fuck David out of Eve’s thoughts. Eve barely sheds any tears over David’s predecessor, the rich, handsome Mark Blair, who was not only instrumental in getting her a job at a local TV station but was also her lover for two years before he fucking died, yet breaking up with David has left Eve practically curled up on the floor in a fetal position, blubbering helplessly—until it’s time to fuck Peter, of course.

Given Eve’s crippling heartbreak, one would think that David is unbelievably handsome, with a successful career, a great sense of humor, a giving lover, and always supportive of Eve and her interests. Only the first two things are true. David’s most dominant characteristic is being an hemorrhoidal asshole. Rogers tries to soften David’s edges with a past tragedy, revealing that both his parents were killed in a car wreck, leaving him to care for his siblings, ranging in age from 7 to 17, yet David’s care amounts to little more than looking in on the kids every now and then. He doesn’t even live with them, paying a live-in housekeeper to stay with them in the family home in Albany, because who wants to look after kids when you could be getting laid? (OK, I’ll grant him that, but still….)

So, why did these two break up? During a weekend house party thrown by Howard Hansen, a senior partner at David’s law firm, Hansen’s conniving admin assistant/mistress Gloria sent another male guest to get into bed with a sleeping Eve, with the sole purpose of stirring shit up (and steering David to her bed). Eve protested as soon as she discovered it wasn’t David on top of her, but the man refused to stop doing what he was doing until David walked in. Eve was sexually assaulted, but David just thought she was a cheating ’ho and immediately broke up with her. Consider that foreshadowing. 

Of course, a relationship as toxic as Eve and David’s can’t end so easily. Eve poses for some cheesecake photos that appear in Stud magazine, the photos first enraging David, then making him so horny that he gives Eve a call. Eve, ever the doormat, is all too happy to let David back into her life. David, however, stipulates they will not be a monogamous couple. Though not entirely comfortable with this arrangement, Eve goes along with it if this is what it takes to keep David. David, of course, is jealous of her screwing other men, but feels he’s entitled to other women. Here’s an excerpt, detailing David’s views on commitment:

Someday, David knew, he would marry. Because it was expected of him and because it would help him form and mold the façade he expected to present to the world. But the woman he would marry would be carefully picked by his head and not by his loins. A suitable wife—suitable was the key word. Well-bred and intelligent, but not too intelligent. Not too astute or worldly-wise. Because there would always be other women—this he already realized and accepted.

Eve eventually comes to her senses and dumps David. Her taste in men, however, doesn’t improve. In fact, she ends up with someone much worse: Brant Newcomb.

The Psychopath and the Jailbait Masochist

Eve encounters Brant Newcomb earlier in the book, when she accompanies her fuck-buddy Peter to a party thrown by “a well-known rock singer” (Eve accepts the invitation when told she’d likely appear in the society pages on Peter’s arm, which would make David jealous). Brant is described as very handsome, very blond and very tan. Eve wonders if he might be gay, though it’s not exactly clear why she thinks this, especially when she knows he has a playboy reputation. Brant is also ridiculously wealthy, and about as charming as Elon. “I think—I just have the feeling we might like the same kind of things,” he says when he meets Eve. “Why don’t you come home with me tonight and find out? I’d really like to fuck you, Eve.” As charming as that offer is, Eve refuses. So, Brant offers to pay her. Eve (and the reader) come away from the encounter thoroughly disgusted.

In case it’s not entirely clear how loathsome Brant is, Rogers introduces a subplot involving David’s rebellious 17-year-old sister, Francie. After school one day, Francie, her dark hair hidden under a blond wig, hitches a ride with “some old guy driving a late-model Caddy” into San Francisco (allowing him to finger her for his trouble), where she has an appointment with photographer Jerry Harmon—the same photographer who took the pictures of Eve for Stud. Jerry hires her on the spot and starts taking photos immediately. There’s one other person present for the photo session, however: Jerry’s good friend Brant Newcomb. Brant wastes little time propositioning her, telling her that he’ll pay double what Jerry’s paying (exact amounts are never discussed) for her to pose for a “special” photo, without the wig, or much else. Following the official picture-taking, Francie joins Brant and Jerry in the bedroom, the men taking turns snapping Polaroids of her taking turns with them. Looking at the photos afterwards turns Francie on so much she “began clawing at Brant’s groin with her hands [as opposed to clawing with her nose?] until he tumbled her down onto the floor and began screwing her again, taking his time this go around, laughing all the while at her eagerness and wildness.”

And, in case a three-way involving two adult men and an underage girl aren’t enough for you:

His laughter seemed to mock at [sic] her, and she got so mad she began to bite and claw at him; then he slapped her hard, slapped her coldly again and again until her anger and viciousness subsided, and she was clinging to him, begging him in a choked voice to do it to her again, quickly.

“You’re one of those, are you, you little hellion? You dig being hurt. Okay, honey, I’m willing to oblige. Sometimes it even turns me on.”

Francie is fully in Brant’s thrall by the time he drives her home. Two days later she’s back for more abuse:

“How old are you, by the way?”

His question caught her by surprise, so that she stumbled over her lies, her voice uncertain.

“I’m—I’m twenty.”

He slapped her hard, knocking her off the bed and onto the floor.

“You’re a lying cunt. Now tell me.”

“Okay, okay, so I’m still nineteen.”

This time, he got off the bed and pulled her to her feet by her hair, walking her over to the far corner of the room, where he proceeded to wipe off all her carefully applied makeup with tissues dipped in cold cream.

Francie wriggled and cried and called him all the filthy names she could think of until he smacked her a few more times across the rump. Then she begged him to stop.

“I’m seventeen,” she sobbed. “Really, I swear it. But I’ll be eighteen this year, soon after I graduate. Honest, Brant, I’m not lying this time.”

Like an alley cat, she rubbed herself up against him, touching him eagerly, licking at his skin with short, urgent jabs. Suddenly, he began to chuckle, his anger gone.

Yes, decades before Erika Mitchell ever wrote her first sentence as Snowqueens Dragon, Rosemary Rogers was confusing abuse with BDSM.

Rosemary Rogers demonstrating in 1985 how best to enjoy her work.

Though he only visits on weekends, David notices a change in Francie’s behavior. By the time he confronts her, Francie has been a regular fixture at Brant’s place in San Francisco, helping herself to whatever drug is offered and letting herself be used by Brant and whoever happens to be visiting, including a rock band that treats her so rough that even Brant feels compelled to intervene. However, David can’t get her to confess to anything, and spanking her only turns her on, which horrifies her oldest brother (remarkably Rogers doesn’t cross that line). Only after Francie runs away does David learn of her relationship with Brant, Francie ratted out by their younger siblings.

David is furious, yet he refuses to get the police involved. Why? Because Brant Newcomb is a client of his firm. Yep, David is putting his career ahead of the safety of his sister. Eve just happens to know that Brant is having a party that very night (she was invited to attend as a gay actor’s beard) and suggests David attend so he could look for Francie. David is adamant that he cannot be involved. Eve, on the other hand…. Eve refuses, but caves when David applies just a little bit of emotional manipulation.

When Eve arrives at the party she’s surprised by, as well as suspicious of, Brant’s polite treatment of her. She accepts a drink from one of the nudie models in Jerry Harmon’s company and then wanders through Brant’s house, keeping an eye out for Francie. This part includes one of my favorite observations from Eve, one I had when I first moved to Atlanta: She could smell the acrid, burned-leaves odor of marijuana—it seemed to hang in the air, stinging her nostrils. Didn’t anyone smoke cigarettes anymore?

Eve spots Francie, looking strung out, her dress torn, and her body bruised. The crowd is too thick for Eve to get to her. Then, to Eve’s horror, Brant announces he’s having a slave auction, and Francie is the featured merchandise. Eve does try to fight her way through the crowd to get to her, but only after Brant smacks Francie around when she protests being sold to some hippie dude named Derek and is forcibly carried away to go live on his commune in New Mexico. Let’s repeat that: Eve passively watches Francie get auctioned off and only springs into action when the girl is being carried out the door. As suspected, David sending Eve to rescue his sister made about much sense as asking Lauren Boebert to lead a college course in theatre appreciation.

Obviously, Eve’s too-late attempt to do fuck-all is unsuccessful. Brant dismisses her protests, assuring that Francie was auctioned off for her own good and that Derek is a psychiatrist “into social work.” Do you trust him? Me neither, but Eve and the reader are asked to take him at his word, because Francie is now out of the book for good.

Now, with Francie gone, Eve must contend with Brant, who gets her another drink and then, under the pretense of wanting to discuss Francie, takes her to another room. This other room is his “playroom,” and the only thing Brant wants to discuss is fucking Eve. Eve announces she’s leaving. Brant accuses her of putting on an act. “Eve, it’s too late to stop anything. If you want it to be rape, then I guess I can oblige you.” And so, he does, slapping her around for good measure. As if that’s not bad enough, the party’s other guests barge in (“We watched you through the two-way mirror for a while,” says one), and proceed to join in, making this a gang rape.

It only gets worse from here.

Sorry About Raping You. Will You Marry Me Now?

We’re only at the novel’s midpoint, and already Rogers has crammed in an epic amount of offensive material. I’ll admit I was kind of impressed as I didn’t think she’d have it in her. I also hoped this would be the point in the story where Eve might develop a spine if not a personality and dump David, get violent revenge on Brant and, only because this is allegedly a romance novel, meet a man who actually treats her well.

Instead, this happens: Eve regains consciousness after her gang rape (her drinks were drugged, naturally) in Brant’s bedroom. Brant tells her that he had a physician friend check her out while she was out, assuring Brant that Eve would be OK. Isn’t that sweet? You better think so, because from this point forward Brant will be gaslighting Eve (as Rogers is gaslighting her readers) into falling in love with him, though maybe he’d stand a better chance if he didn’t start slapping her and threatening her with blackmail/revenge porn the moment she says she’ll go to the police.

Brant drives Eve home, where David is waiting for her. David, seeing Eve get out of his car, is immediately and predictably consumed with jealousy. Though Eve doesn’t do the best job of explaining what happened to her, she does make it clear she was raped. David, however, doesn’t believe her (“My God, everything you’ve told me sounds like part of some crazy trip—some coke nightmare.”) He says he’s going to leave and come back when she’s regained her senses. In a rare show of spinal rigidity, Eve tells him not to bother, they are through. Good for you, Eve!

Alas, Eve just can’t stand up to Brant (the only character to do so is Marti, Eve’s lesbian roommate, whose own story arc has very little bearing on the overall narrative other than adding homophobia to the list of this novel’s sins). His courting very much reads like an abusive husband pleading with his wife to come back from her mother’s, insisting he’s changed. Of course, in this case the abuser has unlimited funds and connections, enabling Brant to arrange for Eve to get tapped to audition for a nightly anchor spot with a New York City station, one of the few times in the book when her career is mentioned. Eve thinks she was selected because of her on-camera skills (that she allows her possible co-anchor introduce her to the joys of anal sex should also give her an edge) but learns the truth when Brant surprises her on her return flight home.

Then Brant proposes, which proves, once and for all, that he is certifiably a psychopath, especially when he says: “You’re a bloody Puritan in some ways, and yet you like to fuck, but only when you’re ready and when you want it—and that night you wouldn’t give in, would you, you stubborn bitch? You made us take it[.]” See, it was Eve’s fault for just not giving in.

Eve is not stubborn bitch. Stubborn implies she is capable of thinking for herself. No, Eve’s a stupid bitch, because she ultimately marries Brant and has a son with him! Good thing Brant is rich, because that boy is going to need lots of therapy, especially when he’s old enough to hear about how his parents met. Christ, I think Massimo and Laura of 365 Days had a healthier relationship.

This book was written during a time when rape-and-forgive trope was common in romance fiction, especially in the bodice-rippers, which had been Rogers’ bread and butter. The thing is, while rape is no less problematic in a story set in the 1800s, the mental gymnastics to explain it away as fantasy are less strenuous: the 1800s weren’t exactly a time of sexual permissiveness, especially for women, who were culturally discouraged from openly enjoying sex. “No” was the default answer, and thus men wouldn’t always accept it. But Rogers’ rape fantasy schtick doesn’t work so well in a story set in the late ’70s, making the mere act of reading of The Insiders feel like #MeToo experience. Yes, men need to learn about what consent means, but it seems like romance authors could also benefit from sitting in on those consent workshops college athletes have to attend. It’s too late for Rosemary, but maybe E.L. James could sign up, and since she’s on campus, sign up for a few writing courses as well.

I mentioned waaaaay back at the beginning of this review that The Insiders seemed to be Rogers’ attempt to muscle in on Jackie Collins’ territory. Rogers had a more expansive vocabulary (Rogers attended the University of Ceylon; Collins was expelled from Francis Holland School at age 15), but Collins was way more playful and, in her prime, had no problem getting raunchy (The Insiders has a lot of sex, but Rogers refrains from getting too graphic). The two writers had lot in common stylistically, with both taking a laissez faire—if not just plain lazy—approach to plotting (I’m pretty sure Rogers never wrote an outline for The Insiders and just made it up as she went along); both writing American characters that sound British; and neither author having much patience for describing settings, to the point where San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles could just as easily be Fresno, St. Louis and El Paso. Like Collins’ novels, The Insiders is populated with hot, vapid people, but none of the Jackie Collins novels I’ve read were ever this mean-spirited, vile and misogynistic. Eve has no real identity or agency, so maybe it’s no surprise she’s stuck choosing between two abusers. All I know is even Collins would balk at having, say, Lucky Santangelo marry her rapist. No, Lucky would make the motherfucker pay.

A Story of Big Business and Blue Balls

Harry Whittington is one of my favorite novelists, so I’m kind of surprised I’m just now getting around to reviewing one of his books. But better late than never, and this particular book is even somewhat topical, it being about the railroad industry, which is kind of a hot topic in the U.S. now. Although the likelihood of people following the disaster in East Palistine, Ohio, immediately seeking out historical fiction about the expansion of a railroad in Florida during the 1800s is negligible, I figure it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, back to Harry. I first discovered Harry Whittington when I caught the movie adaptation of his 1956 novel Desire in the Dust on the Fox Movie Channel, back when that was a thing. I thought the movie was awesome and immediately sought out the book, which was just as good. Since then, I’ve been going on periodic eBay binges, searching out his work. Luckily, there’s a lot to choose from, and in a wide variety of genres: westerns, crime thrillers, mysteries, sexploitation, soapy potboilers and even queer pulp.

Of course, not all of Whittington’s books were written under his own name. Among his many pseudonyms was the name Blaine Stevens, which he used for a trio of historical epics he published in the very late 1970s and early ’80s, the first of which was 1979’s THE OUTLANDERS.

Set in the late 1800s, The Outlanders is the story of Ward Hamilton, a man with a dream: to own his own railroad. He’s so driven to achieve this goal that he hunts down his older brother Robert, wanted for stealing $100 thou in gold, so he can collect the $20,000 bounty. Also, he wants to know where Robert hid the gold. “I can use that money you stole,” the 19-year-old Ward explains to Robert when he finds him, hiding in a shack in the wilds of Florida with his servant (and recently freed slave) Thetis, “and warrant you a tenfold return you’ll never get with it planted somewhere in the ground.” Robert, out of spite, doesn’t admit to having stolen the gold, let alone divulge where it’s hidden. Ward will just have to make do with the $20 grand reward money.

Twenty-thousand dollars isn’t enough to buy a railroad, but Ward doesn’t let that stop him from bidding on the East Florida & Gulf Central railroad when he learns it’s for sale—information he gets when he beds the frustrated wife of its owner (“It’s been ten years since [my husband has] had an erection. Five since he’s wanted one.”) With some financial sleight of hand and the kind of self-confidence only found in those too young to know better, Ward’s bid for EF&GC is accepted. Now he must cover the full purchase price. So, he heads to Atlanta, where he calls on Lily Harkness, the prettiest of the Harkness daughters and Robert’s fiancée prior to his incarceration. She’s pretty, sure, but what Ward wants as much as access to her pussy is her knowledge of where Robert stashed the hidden loot—surely, he’d have told the person he loved the most. He gets neither, even when they marry. Lily has her own motive for marrying Ward, and that motive ain’t sex, the very concept of which she finds disgusting (the couple only bones two times during their decade-long marriage). Worse, Lily has no clue where Robert stashed the stolen gold (hint: the person Robert loved the most was not a woman). Ward gets more out of a business arrangement with one of Lily’s other suitors, the homely but goodhearted bank vice-president Hobart Bayard, from whose bank Ward secures a generous line of credit.

As the story progresses, Ward’s business success increases while his home life becomes more and more miserable. He and Lily have two children, only one of which is Ward’s: a son, Robin, and daughter, Belle. Lily becomes a religious nut, and then just plain insane. Ward isn’t always the easiest guy to root for — he’s a bastard in many instances — and his reasons for courting Lily were hardly admirable, but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him as he tries to do everything possible to give Lily a happy life, only to see her grow more hostile, poisoning Robin against him and resenting Belle for her closeness to Ward. Lily is also a sad case, but since The Outlanders is told from Ward’s point of view her behavior is often presented as the result of her being a spoiled bitch and not mental illness.

Adding to the tension is Julia Fredrick, the daughter of Dayton Fredrick, a one-time successful developer who was depending on buying EF&GC to transport vacationers to his struggling resort in Port St. Joe, Florida. When the two first meet, Julia is a precocious 13-year-old who develops an immediate crush on the young Ward Hamilton, which, fortunately, Ward doesn’t take advantage of even though the book is set at a time when sex with underage girls wasn’t necessarily frowned upon (“I like to pluck ‘em young, too,” a sleazy EF&CG rail executive tells Ward conspiratorially when he discovers Dayton Fredrick’s teen daughter in Ward’s company). Her feelings change, kind of, when Ward buys EF&GC, and she swears she hates him as much as she loves him, even though Ward and her father continue to be friendly. Ward’s feelings also change, from viewing Julia as a smartass kid to seeing her as a woman and realizing he has romantic feelings for her (mitigating factor: by the time Julia is in her twenties Ward’s balls are the color of Concorde grapes).

Ward’s fortunes begin to turn as the 19th century draws to a close. He is granted a divorce from Lily, but by the time it’s final Julia has married someone else — Hobart Bayard, now a bank president. Ward’s son Robin will have nothing to do with him, while Belle is uncontrollable, having been kicked out of every school she’s been enrolled in. Then Belle marries Laddie, an arrogant aspiring artist and abusive prick who beats Belle as regularly as she cheats on him. 

The stresses aren’t confined to Ward’s personal life, however. Industrialist Henry Flagler needs a railroad to transport guests to his Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, and the railroad he wants to buy is Ward’s. He asks Ward to name his price, but Ward is too proud to sell. But Flagler’s not the type of man to take no for an answer. If Ward isn’t going to sell willingly, Flagler will use his power and influence to make sure he’ll have to sell. Still, Ward holds out, until a hurricane forces his hand.

Harry Whittington by Any Other Name is Just as Good

I’ll admit that I was wary of this one before I started reading it. Several years ago, I read Whittington’s second Blaine Stevens novel, Embrace the Wind, which was marketed as a bodice-ripping romance, and found it tough going for its first fifty pages or so, when Whittington really leans into the romance genre, adopting an uncharacteristically florid prose style (the book picks up when it becomes more of an adventure story). Thankfully, Whittington keeps the flowery descriptions to a minimum in The Outlanders, the novel being more discount John Jakes than Johanna Lindsey rip-off, though the eBay seller I bought it from categorized it as a western, probably because of the cover.

The Harry Whittington copyright
was enough to sell me on this book.

Essentially a rags-to-riches story, The Outlanders doesn’t necessarily offer a lot of surprises—you’ll realize early on that Dayton Frederick’s story foreshadows Ward’s, that Ward and Julia are destined to end up together—but that doesn’t diminish its entertainment value. Whittington’s writing keeps the story moving, and he cleverly weaves in real people (Flagler, Dr. Lue Gim Gong) and events (e.g., using prison labor to build railroads), as well as a few Easter eggs. One character that I thought was a real person in history was Marve Pooser, leader of a homesteader uprising against Ward’s ever-expanding railroad. I was sure I’d read about him somewhere before. And I had: that was the name of the villain in Whittington’s 1959 novel, A Moment to Prey (a.k.a. Backwoods Tramp).

If I have one quibble with the book, it’s that while Whittington successfully keeps us in the world of the late 1870s, a few of his characters behave as if they stepped out of the 1970s, specifically Julia. Yes, she’s supposed to be wise beyond her years, but sometimes she’s a little too sexually blunt for the time. The likelihood of a young woman in this time period declaring, in her father’s company, that she would like to go to bed with a man, and that her father would not rebuke her for doing so, strains credulity. Less anachronistic, though still behavior more closely associated with our time, is when Ward’s sister-in-law Lavinia seduces him (hey, Ward was bound to stray sooner or later), immediately giving him a BJ (He felt her face pressed against him, her breath across her parted lips hot and moist upon his glans). I realize blowjobs were discovered long before the Summer of Love, but I don’t think one would be so freely given by a young woman with limited sexual experience and raised in the Antebellum South. But considering that readers of the 1970s expected at least a dash of smut in their pop fiction, this can be written off as fan service. The sex scenes, BTW, aren’t all that frequent and are just explicit enough to make it clear what’s going on without straying too far into raunch.

I find Harry Whittington to be a safe bet, no matter what the genre. Even his lesser books are, if nothing else, entertaining. The Outlanders, while no classic, is a satisfying read, well worth checking out if you should happen upon a reasonably-priced copy.

He Should’ve Let It Ring

The 1984 paperback edition of Eyes
teases a different novel than the
one Felice Picano wrote.

Though it’s difficult to believe now, there was a time—before smartphones, before voicemail, and when answering machines were still priced as a luxury item—when people felt obligated to answer a ringing telephone. To just let it ring was simply never considered. It’s true: the past was fucking awful. So is the present, but at least we can block unwanted callers. 

It’s during that barbaric time when we blindly answered our landlines, with no caller I.D. to warn us of who was on the other end, that Felice Picano’s 1975 novel EYES is set.

That impulse to answer a ringing phone is what kicks off the story proper, when Stu Waehner, a twenty-something, New York City social worker, returns from his workday, after a shittier-than-usual subway commute, and hears his phone ringing on the other side of his locked apartment door. Thinking it might be his semi-estranged girlfriend Jennifer, Stu is positively desperate to get inside to take the call, yet he has as much difficulty unlocking his apartment door as a teen-aged girl has trying to start a car in a slasher movie:

“Coming,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket for his key chain.

The phone kept on ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet, Jenny. I’m coming…”

He had to switch everything to under the other arm—these locks had to be opened left-handed.

The phone was still ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet.” One lock. Now for the top one. It squealed, then seemed to be stuck. There it was. Now the long key for the police lock. There! The door swung inward, then abruptly stopped short after opening a few inches.

With the impact, everything under Stu’s arm fell to the hallway floor.

The police lock was stuck.

The phone kept ringing.

And the phone keeps ringing, until Stu finally makes it inside his apartment to answer it. It’s not Jennifer, but a woman asking for Bill. A fucking wrong number. Yet the woman calling doesn’t just apologize and end the call. Instead, she belligerently asks if Stu is sure no Bill lives in his apartment. Stu insists she has the wrong number, and then the woman takes issue with his justifiable annoyance. Remarkably, Stu does not just hang up, but continues arguing with the woman, who calls him a paranoiac and recommends a stay in Bellevue. The conversation just as quickly de-escalates, with Stu apologizing for yelling and the woman apologizing for having the wrong number, and readers just wondering why the hell didn’t either of them hang up the moment it was realized the woman misdialed.

But the woman hadn’t misdialed. Her whole plan was to get Stu on the phone and keep him on it. That woman is Johanna, a freelance editor, also in her twenties, who lives in the tenement across from Stu’s building, and who has a perfect view into Stu’s apartment from hers, and, with opera glasses in hand, has been watching him intently. She’s also struck up a casual friendship with Gladys, the retiree who lives in the unit below Stu’s, to get some insight and gossip about Gladys’ upstairs neighbor, and even encourages the old woman to badger Stu into adopting a stray cat/plot contrivance. She keeps a journal as well, detailing facts she’s learned about Stu—including his previous address and current employer—and her observations gleaned from spying on him (“He seems to have no close friends of ether gender.”)

For all Johanna’s learned about Stu, she is unprepared for him to have a girlfriend, and is dismayed when Jennifer, who had been touring with her dance company since before Stu moved into the apartment across the street, returns. Stu is a little disappointed, too, but for different reasons. Jennifer’s affections for Stu have cooled significantly in the time she’s been away, while her love for her career has intensified. Women’s Lib may have been in full swing when this book was written, but Stu still has a chauvinistic mindset, viewing Jennifer’s dancing more as a hobby than a career, not to mention he’s suspicious of her constantly praising her choreographer Caspar (he dismisses Caspar as a romantic rival, however, later referring to him as looking like “the Fairy Godmother”).

In Stu’s defense, Jennifer is a bit of a pretentious twat, always bitching about how small the apartment is and often taking shots at Stu for his lack of ambition. No wonder he’s receptive when Johanna, now using a voice changer and adopting a British accent, calls back. Stu pushes for a name (“You know my name, why not tell me yours?”) Johanna tells him to call her by any name he wants, horrified when he settles on Joan (Joan was so close to her own name, so uncannily close. As if… he’d intuited it or somehow knew and was teasing her.) Still, she endures the moniker as long as Stu keeps taking her calls.

Inevitably, Stu and Jennifer break up, leaving Stu’s evenings free to take Joan’s calls. “Does she get real dirty? You know, breathy and hot, all that kind of stuff?” asks Bill, Stu’s coincidentally named co-worker, after Stu tells him of his mysterious caller. Alas, she does not, and Stu never pushes their conversations in that direction, either. Though Johanna is romantically fixated on Stu, she’s not overtly horny for him. In fact, the one other time she’s done this phone-stalking thing—with the previous occupant of Stu’s apartment, a Texas dude named Colin—she presented herself in person shortly after establishing a rapport over the phone, appalled to discover that the guy immediately wanted pussy. Because of that unpleasant experience, Johanna wants to keep Stu at a safe distance, determined to establish not just an emotional connection, but a co-dependence as well.

That distance is jeopardized when a Joan slips up during one of their phone conversations and remarks on the whereabouts of Stu’s cat, revealing that she is, in fact, watching him. Stu, predictably, wonders from which of the many windows across the street Joan is spying on him.

Stu later brings home a young hippie chick he met a nearby park and doesn’t bother to pull down the shades before they do the nasty. He senses Joan is watching and is briefly troubled by the possibility before deciding, hey, if she wants to watch, he’ll give her a show (regretfully, said show is not explicitly described). Joan/Johanna is not pleased. “I’m very disappointed in Stu,” Johanna writes in her stalker journal. She later laments that she can’t even complain: Did she expect him to be faithful to strange woman on the telephone whom he never even met? It was her fault. She was the one who set the limits.

That all changes when Johanna accompanies her horny best friend Alice to the Hungry Hat, a restaurant/singles bar, to meet-up with Alice’s coke dealer, Bill, who’s sitting at the bar with his friend from work...Stu! Alice, who’s made Johanna her project (she’s already goaded Johanna into getting new clothes, updating her hairstyle and accepting a full-time job with a book publisher), sends Stu over to chat with her reclusive friend while she and Bill take care of their transaction. A mortified Johanna says she must leave, but neither Alice nor Stu will let her escape that easily. Ultimately, Johanna thaws enough to give Stu her work phone number.

To Johanna’s amazement, Stu is genuinely attracted to her, and a real, in-the-flesh romance blossoms. It’s a fantasy come true, but it’s also a problem. What to do with Joan? Things get especially awkward when Stu wants to discuss with Joan the wonderful new woman in his life: Johanna. Johanna decides the best way to dissolve this phone friendship—as well as find out what Stu’s true feelings are— is for Joan to become a jealous bitch, shit talking Stu’s new flame at every opportunity (“She didn’t strike me as being the picture of glowing femininity, but, after all, she’s probably just fine for a little therapeutic sex.”)

Joan’s snarky comments about his new girlfriend aren’t enough to drive Stu away, nor are they enough to kill his curiosity about her identity. It’s that curiosity—with help from a horny tomcat and one of Johanna’s neighbors—that’s going to get one of them killed.

Not the Book It’s Marketed As

Though it drags here and there, I found Eyes to be a fairly engaging read (I’ll forgive Picano’s inclusion of a feline ex machina). However, I was also mildly disappointed and for that I blame the book’s marketing, which teases a much different novel. “There are many ways to satisfy desire,” reads Dell Publishing’s teaser copy on the front cover of the 1984 paperback. “Some people dream. Some people watch. Some people kill.” My expectations were further manipulated by the ellipses-heavy synopsis on the back cover:

Day and night, a mysterious woman called, a voice from the darkness telling him she was all alone… that she wanted to talk to him… needed him…desired him…

Day and night, the eyes followed him, no matter what he did, whom he held, whom he kissed. And what the eyes saw would lead to love…and fear—and then to terror.

Because of the cover text, I was expecting something much more salacious: Joan/Johanna would be a dangerous psychopath. Her calls to Stu would be unsettling, even threatening, not to mention obscene. Stu would be more of a player, and all the women he brought home would ultimately end up dead. And when Stu discovers his new girlfriend Johanna is not just his harassing caller but the one who’s killed all the other women in his life, it would lead to a more intense confrontation.

Also, while the model used for the book cover suggests that
Stu looks like Frank Stallone (left), going by Stu’s description
in the book, he more closely resembles the
1979 Playgirl model on the right.

Instead, Eyes is much more subdued, barely qualifying as a thriller. The body count is low—a mere two deaths, one from natural causes—and the calls Stu receives from Joan, while at times testy and irritating, are far from threatening. Johanna is not a psychopath, she’s just a sad, lonely woman with some serious self-esteem issues. She does not, as some other reviewers claim, have dissociative identity disorder; she’s well aware of the persona she’s creating when she calls Stu, hence the voice changer and fake accent. Joan is the confident woman Johanna wants to be. What she’s doing is the phone-based equivalent of catfishing, except the real person is as desirable as the fake one she’s presenting herself as, she just doesn’t realize it.

Stu, though mildly chauvinistic and a bit of a homophobe, is also more nuanced than expected. He’s good at his job but not entirely sure he wants to make it his life’s work. When he and Jennifer break up, he doesn’t immediately hit the bars looking for sex (his sole hookup prior to meeting Johanna happens when that hippie chick casually offers herself, no strings attached, because 1970s). What Stu wants more than sex is someone to talk to, someone to be in his corner, and Joan fulfills that need.

Felice Picano wrote a few more mainstream thrillers after Eyes, his second novel, before becoming a prominent name in gay literature, publishing the queer-centric novels Late in the Season and Like People in History, as well as the memoirs Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel and Nights at Rizzoli. He even co-authored The New Joy of Gay Sex. Nearly twenty years ago I heard Picano speak at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, and among other topics he talked about the trap of writing genre fiction solely for commercial viability. Interestingly, I don’t recall him bringing up any of his work in genre fiction. I learned about that through the Too Much Horror Fiction blog. I haven’t read any of Picano’s gay books (well, I did skim through The New Joy of Gay Sex a few times at various bookstores when I thought no one was looking, but I was too deep in the closet at the time to even consider doing something so brave as buying it), but I was immensely curious about his early horror and thriller novels. Does the fact that I bypassed Picano’s acclaimed LGBTQ books in favor of what I thought (hoped) were his stabs at tawdry mainstream horror make me a self-loathing homo? No, just taste impaired.

I don’t think Picano is ashamed of his earlier books, nor should he be, but he clearly didn’t want to risk becoming a hack horror writer, and for a CisHet audience no less. Not that anyone would mistake Eyes as the work of a hack. Rather than the trashy erotic thriller Dell was hyping, Eyes is a more thoughtful story about loneliness, restlessness and alienation. That’s to the novel’s credit, but it’s also its biggest letdown.

BTW: According to his Wikipedia page, Picano wrote a screenplay adaptation for Eyes in 1985. The movie was never produced (1978-81 would’ve been the ideal time to have made the pitch), and now, thanks to technology rendering its primary device irrelevant, it likely never will be.

A Kennedy Era ‘Melrose Place’

For all the racy passages in L.A. 46, what
got me hard was the revelation that the
luxury building at the center of the book’s
action had rents as low as $275*.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t seek out books set in expensive hotels or apartment buildings, but they always seem to find me. I was hunting for a vintage paperback copy of Day Keene’s Joy House on eBay (OK, another book that has a piece of real estate in the title, but it’s a single-family residence, not a multi-family), despairing that I couldn’t find any copies under $150, when I found two other Day Keene titles that looked wonderfully lurid, and for the combined price of $15. One of those novels was 1964’s L.A. 46.

The title refers to the postal zone for West Hollywood (this book was written ahead of the introduction of the ZIP code), specifically the stretch of Melrose between Doheny and La Brea. And in that area is the Casa del Sol, a luxury apartment building open to anyone who can afford it, be they psychiatrists to the stars, high class call girls, or small-town hicks with big city dreams—all are welcome so long as they don’t have pets or children.

Casa del Sol’s no children policy means the newly pregnant Eva Mazeric and her husband Paul, both WWII refugees, will have to find a more child-friendly place to live, but this is the least of Eva’s troubles. And Eva, though beautiful and seemingly happy, has had a lot of troubles in her young life, from losing her family during the Soviet occupation of Hungary to enduring (and, sometimes, guiltily enjoying) sexual abuse while in displaced persons camps and with a foster family. What’s got her so despondent that she seeks out the help of psychiatrist—or “sickey-ackey”—Dr. Jack Gam, who resides in the Casa del Sol’s penthouse, is learning that her older brother, whom she never knew, is still alive and living much, much closer than she’d like.

Dr. Gam has problems of his own. One of his patients, movie goddess (and Marilyn Monroe analog) Gloria Ames, has died of a drug overdose, putting Dr. Gam on the radar of police looking for answers and news media hungry for Hollywood scandal. So, he’s a bit preoccupied when Eva shows up for her appointment, and easily irritated when Eva can’t bring herself to discuss what’s got her so upset (“So, what’s your problem, Eva?”) Eva cuts the appointment short, apologizing for wasting the doctor’s time. Dr. Gam’s failure to gain Eva’s confidence, not to mention the suicide of his high-profile patient, has him wondering if he’s in the right line of work. The reader will also come to wonder about Dr. Gam’s aptitude for his profession as he comes across less a compassionate healer than a professional mansplainer.

Another Casa del Sol resident having a shitty day is “second-rate fighter” Marty Romero, a.k.a. Marty the Wonder Boy. When he’s not in the ring, Marty spends his days sexually harassing all the women in the building, including plump matron Mrs. Katz. Even his own mother can’t stand him. Finally sick of Marty’s shit—and taking care of Marty’s neglected wife Alicia and son Pepe —Mama Romero informs her son during one of his visits that he won’t be leaving alone; he’ll be taking Alicia and Pepe with him. And if he doesn’t? Well, maybe the boxing commission would be interested in hearing about how Marty threw his last fight. Then, just to make it clear she’s out of fucks to give, Mama Romero tells her son she wished she’d aborted him (“A goose quill I should have used before I brought such a son into the world.”)

As the book progresses, Eva falls apart, Dr. Gam falls for Eva, and Marty flips the fuck out. But while the bulk of L.A. 46 revolves around Eva, Dr. Gam and Marty, there are a host of other characters residing at Casa del Sol, far too many to be developed properly in a 250-page book. Those other characters include Lili Marlene, a one-time child star now earning a living as a stripper; Ernie Katz, a retiree whose business in New York didn’t always operate within the law; Colette, a high-priced call girl; has-been film director Mike Melkha, who spends his days drinking on the lanai and blaming his flops on a public too dumb to understand his work (sounds familiar); and Grace Arness, a model who, per the back cover copy, “pursued a strange kind of love.” Only Ruby Morgan, a rebellious teenager (exempted from the apartment complex's no child policy, evidently) living with—and desperately trying to get away from—her older sister and brother-in-law, gets a full-fledged story arc. 

A Banker Going Down on Mama and
Other Unsettling Childhood Memories

Day Keene (née Gunard Hjertstedt), better known for his hard-boiled crime thrillers like So Dead My Lovely and Home is the Sailor, is not an author you’d expect to write a melodramatic potboiler. Then again, he was the head writer for a few radio soap operas, so maybe it’s not that unexpected. He certainly had the talent to write this “Peyton Place of the West Coast,” to quote the cover’s ill-fitting teaser copy. (Peyton Place was notorious for exposing the sleazy underbelly of a genteel New England town, while Los Angeles’ trashy side was never much of a secret. Adultery, rape, incest and abortion in 1950s small town America? Shocking! In Los Angeles? That’s a slow Tuesday, even in the 1950s.)

And Keene goes for it, peppering L.A. 46 with several scenes of sexual debauchery, like Ruby’s sister Vera recalling a moment from their childhood, after their father had died and her mother faced foreclosure from the bank. To save the family farm, the girls’ mother gives in to banker Mr. Cronkite’s sexual advances, telling him she won’t enjoy it. Unbeknownst to Mama, her daughters are spying on the action through a crack in the window shutters.

[Vera had] seen animals serviced. She’d listened to her father and mother for years. But this was the first time she’d seen a man and a woman close coupled and the sight of Mr. Cronkite’s rigid protruding flesh, huge out of all proportion to the rest of him, first disappearing into then emerging briefly from the hairy patch between her mother’s thighs, had at the same time so excited and disgusted her that despite Ruby’s protests she’d had to leave the window and be sick.

It had gone on like that all afternoon. Every time she stood barefooted in the hot dust outside the window, the man from the bank had been beating his lean flanks and scrawny buttock even leaner. Then toward the late afternoon when she peered through the crack in the shutter, she thought Mr. Cronkite had gone. At first all she’d been able to see was her mother laying with her back arched and her head thrown back and her eyes closed and her lips drawn away from her teeth as she made small, animal sounds in her throat. Then looking on down between the massive breasts and equally massive thighs and drawn-up knees, she’d seen the top of Mr. Cronkite’s bald head rising and falling industriously, like a banty rooster pecking corn.

It’s not exactly spank-bank material, but still fairly explicit for a book penned in the early 1960s. Keene is just as detailed in his writing of Eva’s childhood sexual abuse, which had me wondering if these scenes were meant to be titillating or just shocking? It’s also interesting to note that it’s only when the sex is coerced or transactional that Keene provides more graphic descriptions. Good, clean romantic —or at least consensual—sex usually happens off page.

I don’t know if Keene was judging readers looking for smut by making the more explicit sex scenes the novel’s more unsettling situations, but he definitely judges some of his characters. As much as I’d like to say he’s surprisingly progressive, many of Keene’s depictions are very much in alignment with people of his generation. So, expect plenty of sexism and homophobia, with just a soupçon of casual racism. Though he writes of Grace, the “lesb” model, with some empathy, she is presented as someone who is broken and therefore needs to be “fixed.” More disheartening is that Grace also thinks there’s something wrong with her. When Ernie Katz comes to her aid after she’s been raped, Grace says: “I’d almost wished I enjoyed it. You don’t think I want to be the way I am, do you?” This attitude is mitigated, somewhat, by Katz, who tells Grace that she should be able to live with her “problem.” “People have lived with worse,” he says, later adding: “What can you expect from a world that was made in six days?” Grace’s rape, BTW, goes unreported because she fears it could cost her her job should it get in the papers. So, yeah, there are some fucked-up attitudes here.

But Keene also skewers some of the attitudes of his (and our) time, particularly regarding the media, represented in L.A. 46 by one of its residents, John Johns, a TV pundit whose name telegraphs that he's not meant to be taken seriously. Though Johns regularly spouts his “liberal” views on air (his editorials are only mildly progressive; readers today would be forgiven for mistaking him for a moderate Republican), his only deeply held belief is that the more controversial his positions, the greater the ratings. He’s nothing more than a rabble rouser. He even conspires with his wife to invite Marty’s poor wife and son over to their apartment for brunch, not out of genuine kindness but because it builds up his own image as the compassionate liberal, not to mention there’s the added kick of pissing off the neighbors. (“Are you certain you don’t believe some of that stuff you broadcast?” Johns’ wife asks.)

Overall, L.A. 46 is better-than-average trash fiction, with Keene steering this Kennedy era Melrose Place toward a violent conclusion worthy of the crime thrillers he’s more famous for. And it’s Keene’s crime fiction that I’ll continue seeking out, though I think I’ll just have to make peace with the fact that if I want to read Joy House and still be able to afford groceries I’ll have to settle on the more reasonably priced (and decidedly less cool looking) Stark House edition. What else can I expect from a world made in six days?

*That’s a boner-killing $2,411 in 2022 dollars, but possibly still worth wanking over depending on where you live.

A Woman of (Four) Letters

Jackie Collins was the Lady Boss of
trash fiction in the 1970s and ’80s.

One of the many depressing aspects about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey was that it highlighted how adult fiction had become so tame by 2011 that E.L. James’ rape-y Twilight fan fic could not only became a pop culture phenomenon but also be discussed by the amnesiac media as if smut had never before dirtied the New York Times Best Seller list.

The NYT Best Sellers had been sullied long before James came along, and on a monthly basis, too. Among those regularly defiling popular literature in the 1970s and ’80s were Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins. Though Rosemary Rogers and Judith Krantz gave them a run for their money, Robbins and Collins had succeeded in making their names synonymous with raunch. Rogers and Krantz wrote racy romances; Robbins and Collins wrote trash.

I was more of a fan of Harold Robbins’ books, but Jackie always seemed a far more likable person, and watching the 2021 documentary LADY BOSS: THE JACKIE COLLINS STORY, currently streaming on Netflix in the U.S., confirmed the late author’s likability. She’s so likable, in fact, that no fewer than four women interviewed identify themselves as Jackie’s best friend.

Jackie’s story is told through interviews with her older sister (you know who), her three daughters, Tracy, Tiffany and Rory, and numerous friends and business associates. Director Laura Fairrie’s best source, however, is Jackie herself, not only from archive footage but from a treasure trove of diary entries, journals and an unfinished autobiography, Reform School or Hollywood.

Teen-aged Joan and Jackie Collins.

Jackie failed to make a
splash in the 1957
movie All at Sea.

Of course, much of Jackie’s story has likely already found its way into her novels in one way or another as her life could be the basis of a Jackie Collins book. It’s a life that includes a domineering father (Joe Collins was temperamental theater agent prone to flying into rages at the dinner table), sibling rivalry (Jackie struggled to establish an identity beyond “Joan Collins’ little sister”), an ugly duckling-to-swan transformation (Jackie matured into a shapely young woman, helping things along with a nose job in 1959), wild times in Hollywood (including a fling with Marlon Brando, whom Jackie describes in a diary entry as “kind of fat”), an acting career that goes nowhere (appearing in the Alec Guinness film All at Sea and a guest spot on TV show The Saint are her more notable credits), and an unhappy marriage (Jackie’s first husband Wallace Austin was a bipolar drug addict who committed suicide a year after their divorce in 1964).

Look back in leopard print: Jackie with her first born, Tracy,
and Jackie’s mother, Elsa Collins.

It’s not until Jackie’s second husband, nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, encourages Jackie to finish a novel she’s all but given up on that Jackie pursues writing with any real ambition. “I’d been writing all my life,” Jackie recalls. “I’d written a lot of half-books that I never finished, and he was the first person that said to me, ‘It’s absolutely terrific and you can do it’.”

That book was The World is Full of Married Men, and Jackie sold it to a publisher for £400 ($536 U.S.). To say that the publisher got a huge return on its investment is an understatement. The book’s mix of strong women and sizzling sex made it an instant—and controversial—best seller in 1968.

Jackie at work, exactly as you imagine.

As the documentary details Jackie’s ascension on the best seller lists, it focuses more on Jackie as a celebrity than a writer. Even her former agent Morton Janklow puts more stock in Jackie’s TV appearances than her prose: “It was one of the reasons she was so successful. She could go out there and promote those books and not be embarrassed.” Her Mob Wives aesthetic—big hair, big shoulder pads, lots of leopard print—was just another aspect of her branding. She looked like a character from one of her books, making her their ideal spokesperson. Lady Boss is peppered with clips of Jackie promoting her work, including a 1980s TV ad in which Jackie urges readers to “get Lucky.” (The voice heard at the end of the clip below is Jackie’s oldest daughter, Tracy.)

Two aspects where I feel Lady Boss drops the ball is that it fails to give viewers a sense of the book market of the 1970s and ’80s (timing plays a role in Jackie’s success as much as her storytelling talent) or acknowledge those who came before her. It’s admirable that Jackie was an active participant in the marketing of her books, but she was hardly the first author—or the first Jackie—to do so. That the documentary fails to pick up on the many similarities between Jackie’s and Jacqueline Susann’s lives and careers is Lady Boss’s biggest oversight. 

Jackie looms over Hollywood.

Lady Boss makes it abundantly clear that Jackie took a lot of shit for her books. The documentary tries to attribute this as mere sexism, i.e., people disapproved of a woman writing bluntly described sex scenes (Fairrie includes plenty of footage of Jackie being scolded and/or belittled by male talk show hosts). Lady Boss even tries to frame Jackie as some sort of feminist icon. Though the author did self-identify as a feminist, her brand of feminism didn’t seem to go beyond speaking out against the double standard. Women should be permitted to be as shitty as men, while true, is not the sort of rallying cry that would land her on the cover of Ms. magazine. 

The 1980s, when Jackie ruled trash fiction and Joan ruled
Prime Time.

The documentary also touches on the rivalry between Jackie and her older sister. Joan says that Jackie hated a couple men in her life (she doesn’t name names), and that these men also hated Jackie, and so things were a bit chilly between the sisters during these relationships. Though they teamed up to adapt one of Jackie’s bestsellers, The Stud, into a movie vehicle for Joan in 1978, and its sequel The Bitch in 1979, things were again reportedly tense in the 1980s when Joan, at the peak of her Dynasty career revival, tried her hand at trash fiction, starting with her 1988 debut novel Prime Time. Jackie was none too happy that Joan was trespassing in her territory, so it’s not surprising she felt some schadenfreude when Joan’s subsequent books for Random House were deemed “unpublishable.” 

On the subject of Joan—excuse me, Dame Joan—I did not always believe she was speaking candidly. Though she doesn’t appear to view her and Jackie’s relationship through rose-colored glasses, she’s careful to present herself as the ever-supportive older sister. (People without siblings might believe that, but rest of us aren’t buying it, Joan.) I also got the idea—through tone of voice and body language—that a few people interviewed didn’t have particularly high opinions of Jackie’s famous sibling. When Joan’s anecdote about Jackie’s spirit inhabiting a persistent fruit fly (seriously) is referenced, Jackie’s former assistant all but rolls her eyes and says her former boss's sister is full of shit.

From the Lost Years: A Supplemental Book Review

Jackie’s 2009 novel Poor Little Bitch
Girl. Love the title, hate the book.

Jackie’s life wasn’t as rosy during the 1990s and 2000s. In 1992 her husband Oscar died of prostate cancer. And though it’s only briefly touched on, Jackie was also losing her mojo as an author. Her books in the latter half of her career, while still best sellers, weren’t selling as well as they once had. “We changed as a world,” says Jackie’s publicist Melody Korenbrot, adding that Jackie tried to change with it. “She sat down and wrote, but eventually she became completely confused and lost.”

Judging by her 2009 novel, POOR LITTLE BITCH GIRL, Jackie was still lost in the late 2000s.

I’ve enjoyed a few of Jackie’s books, including The Hollywood Zoo, the 1975 a.k.a. of Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick (the title later changed again to Sinners) and her 1983 mega-hit Hollywood Wives, perhaps the best thing she’s ever written (but still trash). Unlike grump Harold Robbins, Jackie didn’t take herself too seriously, her writing giving the impression she was chuckling right along with the reader.

Reading Poor Little Bitch Girl, you still get the impression she’s not taking herself too seriously, only this time the tone is less a conspiratorial chuckle and more of a “Whatever,” sighed under her breath.   

Poor Little Bitch Girl is the ninth installment in the Lucky Santangelo series, but the story pretty much stands on its own. Lucky herself is hardly in the thing. Instead, the novel revolves around four separate main characters: Annabelle Maestro, the estranged daughter of movie star parents, now running an escort service in New York with her cokehead boyfriend Frankie; Denver Jones (these names...), a one-time classmate of Annabelle’s, now a lawyer for an elite L.A. firm; Carolyn Henderson, a longtime friend of Denver’s, working in Washington, D.C. as Sen. Stoneman’s assistant (and his mistress); and Lucky’s son Bobby Santangelo Stanislopoulos, who runs a successful NYC nightclub and who was also once a classmate of Annabelle’s and Denver’s. None of these characters are older than 26, all of them are hot, and they all have the emotional maturity of junior high students.

The murder of Annabelle’s mother, Gemma Summer, is what sets the book’s story in motion, with Denver—whose firm is representing Annabelle’s father, the prime suspect—sent to New York to retrieve the titular poor little bitch girl. Denver hates the assignment, until she runs into Bobby. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Carolyn is kidnapped just days after telling Sen. Stoneman that she’s pregnant with his baby. It’s a good thing Bobby, who is just as smitten with Denver, has a private plane and thinks nothing of using it to fly her to D.C. to look for her missing friend.

If you read the above paragraph and asked yourself, Wait, shouldn’t the driver of the story be Denver trying to solve Gemma Summer’s murder? then you clearly aren’t in the right headspace for a Jackie Collins novel. That murder is merely incidental. What matters is that Denver bangs a hunky journalist in L.A., then a sensitive screenwriter in New York, and then falls for Bobby Santangelo Stanislopoulos (though she has trouble forgiving him getting a b.j. from pop singer Zeena, a Cher/Madonna hybrid who speaks of herself in the third person). Even Carolyn’s disappearance is secondary to Denver finding a man. Why waste time cutting into the meat of the story when you can eat Reddi-Wip directly from the can?

Worse than the book’s mishandled plot is its one-note characterizations. Annabelle is selfish and bitchy; Frankie is an asshole; Bobby is charming; Denver is headstrong and kind of kooky (and evidently meant to be a Julia Roberts-type character as Denver is compared to Julia in more than once instance); Carolyn is a hopeless romantic. Jackie, preferring to tell rather than show, often assigns labels for her characters, declaring that Denver and Carolyn are independent and smart, yet Denver is always getting rescued by men and Carolyn just wants Sen. Stoneman to leave his wife for her, and the idea that either of these women have more than a high school education strains credulity. You’d have an easier time believing Denver, whose chapters are written in the first person, is a 16-year-old inhabiting the body of her attorney older sister, Freaky Friday-style, than buy her as a member of the bar. 

Why waste time cutting into the meat of the story when you can eat Reddi-Wip directly from the can?

But, hey, at least there’s all that graphic sex Jackie is known for, except, nope, not in Poor Little Bitch Girl. Sex may be at the forefront of every character’s mind—second only to money—but Jackie backs away from detailing any bedroom activity, preferring to just have her characters give generalized postmortems instead (“I liked that he took his time, kissing me everywhere—and I do mean everywhere”). Considering the first Lucky Santangelo novel, 1981’s Chances, includes a scene in which Lucky’s father, Gino, slurps his spooge out of the pussy he’s freshly plowed—and described about as delicately—Poor Little Bitch Girl is practically PG-13. But then, we didn’t have PornHub in 1981, so maybe by the 2000s Jackie figured she’d just let the Internet fuel the horny imaginations of her readers.

In the book’s defense, it does have an awesome title. Also, it’s fairly well-paced and I was invested in the story enough to want to keep reading. Except, by the time I reached the end I regretted wasting my time with it. Jackie never pretended to be a great writer, but she wasn’t even trying here. This wasn’t the work of an author trying to push herself to be better than her last book; this was a brand name trying to fill enough pages to get a new hardcover on shelves before her previous best-seller landed in the remainder bin. It’s not a novel, it’s product.

Admire Her Spirit if Not Her Books

After her husband’s death Jackie eventually took up with businessman Frank Calcagnini for a very long engagement (the pair never married). If Lady Boss interviewees can’t say enough good things about Oscar Lerman, they struggle to say anything nice about Calcagnini. The way Tita Cahn, one of Jackie’s many best friends, describes him, he could well have been the inspiration for the character of Frankie in Poor Little Bitch Girl: “He was a gambler, a drugger [sic], an alcoholic and an abuser.” About the kindest words anyone can muster for Calcagnini is that he could be charming. When Calcagnini died of a brain tumor in 1998 few people—other than Jackie—mourned his passing.

Jackie Collins in a British TV appearance
shortly before her death.

Unlike her late fiancée, Jackie’s passing was deeply felt by all who knew her. Jackie had been diagnosed with breast cancer years before her death, but like her mother before her, she kept her illness a secret, and like her late-husband Oscar, chose to keep working until the very end. Lady Boss includes a clip of Jackie on the British talk show Loose Women made during her final days and her appearance is startling. She looks gaunt, frail, a good ten years older than her older sister. Still, she never lets on that she’s sick. Nine days after this TV appearance, on Sept. 15, 2015, Jackie Collins died. She was 77.

In watching Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story I came to see Jackie as an entertainer, just one who wrote tawdry beach reads instead of performing live at Caesar’s Palace. The documentary also strengthened my appreciation of her as a person. I just wish I could like her books as much as I like her. Still, I’d read Jackie over E.L. James any day.