Hot, Horny and Depressingly Relevant

The 1984 edition of Miami Golden
Boy from British publisher
Granada Publishing.

Though my review of The Movie Maker went a whole year and a half without a single view, I am going to try once again to gin up interest in author Herbert Kastle, this time reviewing his 1969 novel MIAMI GOLDEN BOY.

While The Movie Maker was Kastle’s take on the Harold Robbins/Jacqueline Susann-style showbiz potboiler, Miami Golden Boy has more in common with the works of Arthur (Hotel; Airport) Hailey and Burt Hirschfeld, with multiple characters and their parallel narratives converging at a single location.

In the case of Miami Golden Boy, that single location is the Bal Metropole, a swanky Miami Beach hotel that out-Fontainebleaus the Fontainebleau (the Beach’s three main themes, Kastle writes, are “BIG—ORNATE—MORE.”) Not only is the hotel able to accommodate a thousand(!) guests around its pool, it also features two nightclubs, a bar or three, a variety of restaurants and snack shops, and, on the Arcade Level, a veritable shopping mall.

The Bal Metropole (or the BM, as I’ll refer to it only once) also leases office space to the ad agency Andrew Stein Associates, which is why ad exec Bruce Golden, the titular Golden Boy, is frequently roaming the hotel’s giant halls. Bruce is young and hot, with a smooth confidence that makes panties dissolve almost instantly (“That’s what this hotel’s needed. A work of art,” remarks a horny socialite upon spotting Bruce in the lobby.) But while Bruce isn’t above indulging in some recreational sex, he has ambitions beyond just scoring pussy. He’s on the hunt for rich pussy, and the Bal Metropole is the perfect hunting ground: Where a Golden Boy might wilt and die outside the magic circle in Palm Beach, he could flower and triumph in Miami. The money was arriving. The women with money were arriving. Somewhere among them would be his bride.

The woman he sets his sights on is Ellie DeWyant, a waifish beauty with an even more attractive bank account. What Bruce doesn’t realize when he first hits on her is she’s also the daughter of the Bal Metropole’s owner, and she’s not charmed by Bruce’s come-ons. She’s also a bit of basket case, given to bouts of depression and easily panicked, especially when someone at the hotel begins blackmailing her. Ellie’s vulnerability ultimately works to Bruce’s advantage, allowing him to become, if not her Golden Boy, then at least her perceived White Knight, but he may have gotten himself more than he bargained for. Ellie, in turn, has gotten less than she’s hoped. But, hey, the sex is fantastic!

Avon’s 1971 paperback gives the
impression that Miami Golden
Boy is a romance novel.

Besides Bruce and Ellie, we meet Marjory Fine, the aforementioned horny socialite, who, when her fat husband leaves for business, hosts parties primarily so she can spy on her guests’ sexual dalliances. She even has a two-way mirror installed in her private bathroom so she can watch her guests fuck in the adjoining bedroom (voyeurism sure was a lot of work before the Internet). Among the guests she sees in action are hunky lifeguard Jerry Leech and the wife of men’s shirts magnate Max Prager, Ruthie, who’s got plenty of cushion for pushin’. Marjory sees more than she wants to, however, when swishy decorator Marco brings Democratic up n’ comer Sen. Richard Christopher into that bedroom and things get weird.

Fortunately for the senator, what happens in Marjory’s suite stays in Marjory’s suite. Were people to find out, the scandal would not only ruin Dick Christopher’s presidential aspirations, but it would also positively destroy him in the eyes of his father-in-law, former President—and father-in-law of the book’s current President Jonathan Standers—Michael Wheeler (did you get all that?) The former President is also at the hotel, and though he’s recovering from a stroke his iron grip on his political dynasty is as strong as ever. When Christopher remarks to his father-in-law’s nurse, Eve, that he’d want her as his nurse if he ever needs one, Wheeler says, “You seem to need one right now. Nurse…or nursemaid.” 

Wheeler might also be touchy about anyone eyeing Eve, a shy, sheltered young woman, as he hopes to groom her to be his mistress when he fully recovers. And he recovers quickly, thanks to Eve’s therapeutic hand- and blowjobs. But as awed as Eve is by Wheeler’s money and power, it’s manwhore Jerry Leech who moistens the crotch of her cotton panties.

Other characters include May Krasmer, owner of a successful chain of Chicago jewelry stores, who is in Miami to get some strange since her manipulative, impotent husband has given up even trying to get her off; Dan Berner, Sen. Christopher’s speechwriter, who gets a diagnosis that forces him to choose between the sex he lives for and just living, period; John McKensil, manager of the Bal Metropole, who has a weakness for underage girls and just might not be able to control himself once he discovers his new secretary, Violetta, is much younger than the 18 years she claims to be; and Wally Jones, an entertainer in the Sammy Davis, Jr. vein, whose celebrity provides little protection against America’s racism, especially when he accidentally punches the girlfriend of rival entertainer—and avowed racist—Benny Barker.

Some of these characters aren’t who they present themselves as, however. Some are actually involved in Cuban ex-pat Ivan Cesar Lamas’ plot to kidnap Sen. Christopher. Too bad some of Lamas’ henchmen are only in it for the money, not revolution.

Trash, But Not Disposable

Avon gave Miami Golden Boy a sexy
makeover “in the Harold Robbins
tradition” for its 1976 edition.

 

Miami Golden Boy is the type of novel that gets dismissed by intellectuals as popular fiction, the type of people who say the word “popular” in the same tone of voice one says, “You’re wearing that?” To that end, I’d like to say: fuck them. However, I sometimes wonder if Kastle might not have had a similar opinion of pop lit as those sneering intellectuals. His books may be written to appeal to the unwashed masses (or “deodorized masses,” as Sen. Christopher terms them), but he’s critiquing them, too. In Herbert Kastle’s world, there are no saints. Millionaires, politicians and criminals are all one and the same, they just get what they want through different means.

Beneath all the sex and sleaze in Miami Golden Boy is a scathing social commentary that, depressingly, is as applicable in 2021 as it was in 1969, especially in matters regarding race. There’s even a scene in which Wally Jones is stopped by police for “walking while Black,” though unlike in recent real-life incidents, the cops don’t shoot Jones, content to just humiliate him instead.

Then there’s Sen. Christopher’s speech, which originally includes these passages about America addressing its history of slavery and its continued practice of systemic racism. (A heads up, I’m quoting these passages as written and, as the book was written in the late 1960s, they use a dated term for African Americans.)

“What we must do is expand our understanding in terms of history, and also in terms of the human heart, sadly deficient when dealing with our Negro compatriots. These people who were kidnapped from their homes, packed into the bowels of ships like no intelligent cattle shipper would pack his stock, sold like any domestic animal, and bred in the same way. Now, overnight as it were, we expect the recent descendants of these tormented people to accept all middle-class virtues at face value, even when they have no part in middle-class benefits. We expect them to leap into the mainstream of American life, and we speak of our poor-folks’ childhoods to show it can be done easily enough. But our grandparents were not Black and were not slaves, and we are not Black and are not saddled with the malaise of recent slavery.

“Answers, you say, not questions, are what we need. Answers, I’m afraid, are not easily come by. And when offered, not easily accepted. Germany has dug into its pocket to indemnify, massively, the remnants and descendants of those killed in the Nazi holocaust. Not all Germans were Nazis. Not all Germans are, strictly speaking, responsible for what happened to the Jews. Yet all are paying.

“Not all Americans are responsible for what happened to the Negro people. Yet all Americans must dig into their pockets and then into their minds and hearts.”

Considering that the concept of critical race theory currently has the right wing’s collective catheters in a knot, I could imagine the above speech causing Scanners-style explosions of the talking heads at Fox News and NewsMax if delivered by a politician today. (The Internet, always quick to miss the forest for the tweets, would just focus on the use of the word “Negro.”)  But then, no real politician would risk saying these words, and neither does the fictional Sen. Christopher, who cuts them from his speech because to utter them in front of a largely white crowd on live TV would destroy his chances at securing the presidential nomination.

So, yeah, Miami Golden Boy may have all the elements of trash fiction, including a scantily clad woman on its cover, but it’s too well written and has too many pointed observations to be disposable. 

 

Not to be Outdone: Burt Hirschfeld’s ‘Key West’

Burt Hirschfeld wrote his
own Florida-set sex, scandal
and (overthrowing) Castro
novel in 1979, but his heart
just wasn’t in it.

I have no idea if Burt Hirschfeld wrote Key West in response to Miami Golden Boy, or if he in fact ever read Herbert Kastle’s novel. Regardless, his 1979 novel has a lot in common with the novel Kastle published a decade earlier, including a plot to overthrow Fidel Castro as one of its main narrative drivers. 

Unlike Kastle’s novel, however, Hirschfeld’s politics in Key West are more conservative — the man planning an assassination of Castro is an ex-CIA agent who frequently laments the weakening of America’s moral fiber — and his plotting less disciplined. The only instance where the majority of characters cross paths is during a party thrown by that stuffy ex-CIA man. I could believe the described bacchanal, which includes people doing drugs and having gay trysts in the bathroom, taking place at a party thrown by a staunch Republican, but that that said Republican’s guest list includes middle class slobs as well as the town’s elite strained credulity.

As a whole the book reads like the novelization of a Prime Time soap that got canceled after its eighth episode. Narratives are either wrapped up quickly or just dropped, resulting in the book simply petering out without a satisfying conclusion. Key West isn’t a total waste of time — Hirschfeld’s writing is as engaging as always — but only Hirschfeld completists need bother seeking this one out.

Queer and Loathing in the San Joaquin Valley

The original cover of Lost on Twilight
Road is as misleading as it is tacky.

I really intended this to be my second Pride Month post, but work, life and shit got in the way of me meeting my self-imposed deadline. But then, shouldn't Pride be celebrated all year long?

With that in mind, let’s get back in the closet! Let’s get LOST ON TWILIGHT ROAD.

I first learned of this 1964 novel, written by the late Joseph Hansen under the pseudonym James Colton, in the early 2000s when I read about it in Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback. While there were many titles discussed in Queer Pulp that piqued my interest, only Styker’s overview of Lost on Twilight Road, which she described as a “white trash epic,” sparked an obsession. I didn’t just want to read Lost on Twilight Road, I had to. 

Of course, Twilight Road was long out of print and difficult to find. I discovered a copy on Alibris shortly after reading about it in Queer Pulp but was put off by the nearly $60 price tag. Turned out, $60 was a bargain. The next time I found the book for sale online, the price was over $200, and it just went up from there. I gave up when I saw it listed for over $450 on Amazon. But then, in the mid-2010s, it popped up on eBay with a relatively modest opening bid. The price didn’t stay modest for long, but I managed to stay one step ahead of the escalating bids, until I finally got the news I’d hoped for: I had won Lost on Twilight Road! I won’t reveal how much I paid for it, but it was worth every penny.

The protagonist of Lost on Twilight Road is Lonny Harms, who, contrary to what the cover illustration would have readers believe, is a cute, blond 16-year-old boy, not a 38-year-old alcoholic man.

The cover painting appears to be modeled on B-movie
actor Sonny Tufts.

For Lonny, home is wherever his drunken slut of a mother parks their trailer. At the book’s opening, said trailer is parked in a dusty trailer camp in California’s San Joaquin Valley, baking in April sun, turning its interior into an oven. No wonder Lonny gets naked the moment he returns from school. If only his own nakedness didn’t awaken all these confusing urges.

It was crazy to get this way when you took your clothes off. Did it happen to everybody? … Did the rest of it happen, too — the part of you that was supposed to ride quiet and harmless in your pants — did that do this, stretch out, stand hard like this, for other guys? And was there no controlling what you did about it, what your hands did, how your body shouted to be released out of itself, and nothing you could do to stop it?

No sooner has Lonny shot his load than his mother comes home, drunk after having spent her day at “some cheap bar” rather than at work. The mortified teenager waits for the full force of her rage. Instead, she grins and says, “My God, little Lonny’s growing up.” 

A couple days later Lonny returns from school to discover Mildred, a friend of his mother’s, waiting for him inside the trailer. Mildred is described as dark (“maybe part Mexican or something”), younger than Lonny’s mother (“maybe somewhere around twenty-five”) and dressed in a halter top and flimsy gingham shorts. Mildred claims she’s just stopped by for a friendly visit, but it’s clear she’s not there to just to chat. After serving Lonny spiked lemonade, Mildred’s undoing the buttons of his Levi’s (“Don’t you know that’s what a woman’s for?”) Only when Mildred is in a post-orgasmic haze is Lonny able to get away “from her [... ] and from his mother, from the men with big cars, from the constant drunks, the early morning escapes, the old Chevy, the dirty trailer, all of it. Forever.” 

So begins Lonny’s journey down “Twilight Road.” He’s first taken in by Linus and Martha Brucker, helping the elderly couple on their small farm. The Bruckers are the family Lonny always wished he had, but his happiness is threatened by a visiting nephew, Hal. Though the boys are around the same age, Hal has little interest in being Lonny’s friend — except at night, when he and Lonny are alone in the guest room. But Hal is no queer, as he makes clear the next day. Lonny can suck Hal’s dick (or jerk him off or whatever — the sex isn’t graphically described), but during daylight hours he’d better keep his faggot ass away from him. This doesn’t sit too well with Lonny, though he doesn’t put his foot down until the last night of Hal’s visit. As revenge for being denied a farewell nut, Hal outs Lonny to Uncle Linus, and the old man sends Lonny packing.

He attempts to settle down in another town, taking a job as a dishwasher at a drive-in restaurant, but loses that gig when he refuses to be kept by Mr. Porter, the fat queen who owns the restaurant—and half the other businesses in town. Time for Lonny to hit the road again.

Things improve for Lonny considerably in Lordsburg, where he lands a job as an assistant at the town’s weekly paper, the Standard, owned and edited by handsome, 35-year-old Gene Styles. Lonny throws himself into his work, thankful to have Gene as a mentor and relieved to have such a demanding job to distract him from his homo desires.

An emergency at work returns Lonny’s thoughts to his sexuality. A local judge and the sheriff barge into the Standard office when Gene’s away, demanding an unflattering story about the pair being cruel to out-of-work migrants be pulled (this was over five decades before “being cruel to out-of-work migrants” would be a GOP flex). Lonny calls Gene as soon as the two men leave, surprised when another man answers. The man tells Lonny to come over to Gene’s house, instructing him to come around to the side patio instead of the front door. Lonny does as he’s told, and discovers what most readers will have already guessed:

French doors stood open, and beyond them, inside the room, Lonny saw a rumpled white bed, its blankets fallen to the floor. And on the bed sprawled two naked figures. The back of one was turned, but Lonny recognized Gene Styles. And tangled with his lean, brown arms and legs were paler ones. But not those of any woman, of any wife.

It was a man that was with Gene, another man. What went on? For a crazy instant, Lonny thought it was a fight he saw, a beating, an attempt to choke, to kill. He almost yelled. Then he realized what was happening. His knees went weak. He felt dizzy. He turned and ran.

What I love about the above passage is how Lonny, who, though bit confused about sex, is clearly sexually aware, thinks Gene and his lover are fighting, like he’s an 8-year-old walking in on his parents fucking. (Then again, over half the content on RFC looks like assault to me, so maybe Lonny’s confusion stems from Gene liking it rough.) Lonny’s innocence is further belied when, after getting caught by Gene and assuring the editor he’s not repulsed by his homosexuality and has no intention of quitting, he goes to a diner, cruises a sexy Mexican teen named Pablo and takes him back to his place. Seeing Gene in flagrante-delicto may have made Lonny’s knees go weak, but it also made his cock rock hard.

Anyway, Gene refuses to pull the story, putting him on the sheriff’s and judge’s respective shit lists. But unhappy local officials are nothing compared to his scheming bitch of a boyfriend, Max. Max had set Lonny up to discover the two men fucking in hopes of scaring away Gene’s cute assistant. When that plan backfires, Max just becomes more vicious and pettier. 

Though Lonny has assured Gene he’s accepting of the older man’s queerness, he is tight-lipped about his own sexuality — and his relationship with Pablo.When Lonny does finally come out to Gene, the older man’s response is fear that he’s unduly influenced his fair-haired employee (“This is not hero-worship, surely?”) Perhaps most telling of the time this book is written is Gene’s response to Lonny asking if it’s OK to be gay:

“I don’t know,” Styles sighed wearily. “It’s complicated, Lonny. But even if I believed it’s all right, I don’t think I’d tell you. A decent man has obligations, especially to younger men who trust him and look up to him.”

So, in the name of “decency” Lonny must deal with his sexuality in his own way, and secretly. That secret gets out amongst Pablo’s peers, however, and they jump him and stab him several times for being a joto. Pablo’s mother is also aware of her son’s relationship with Lonny and she makes no attempt to hide her contempt when Lonny appears in Pablo’s hospital room. But the sight of his boyfriend brings a smile to Pablo’s face, so of course Pablo’s family and his confessor, Padre Guzman, must do all they can to wipe it off. Pablo, powerless against the relentless Catholic guilt, agrees to move to Mexico, where he’ll finish his education and become a priest.   

A heartbroken Lonny later visits Gene Styles at his home. Max has left for the evening — taking all the fuses from the fuse box with him. Once Gene and Lonny restore the power, Gene discovers that Max has gouged deep scratches across all the albums in his collection, rendering them unplayable. Gene’s record collection may be ruined, but the evening isn’t. 

Yep, in a turn that’s as surprising as the revelation that Gene’s “family,” the 35-year-old newspaperman and his assistant, now 18, end up spiriting away to a coastal motel for a weekend-long fuck-a-thon. Some might argue that Gene — who has been schooling Lonny on art, literature, and music — has been grooming Lonny all along, but it doesn’t really read that way. Also, Lonny seems to be genuinely in love with Gene (so, fuck off Pablo). They’re more Chris & Don: A Love Story than a SayUncle.com video.

It’s easier to accept Gene and Lonny together if you imagine
them looking like a pre-car wreck Montgomery Clift
and a young Tab Hunter.

But blowing a teenager (presumably) isn’t the worst thing Gene does with his mouth. When Gene isn’t teaching Lonny the many ways to love a man, he’s sharing some more questionable thoughts on what it means to be gay in the early 1960s, such as this tidbit:

“Maybe we always come with the dying of a civilization. I don’t think anybody who took a hard look at the past would tell you differently. When civilizations start to decline, homosexuality not only booms, but gets tolerated.”

He then adds: 

“I only know what I like. And I also feel pretty sure you can’t make a crusade out of it, start clubs, wave banners, or lobby for legislation. When tolerance comes, it comes spontaneously. It’s coming now, by the way. Which now I don’t think bodes well for western civilization.” 

And finally:

“Being born queer is like being born with any other handicap. You have to make the best of it. But as you get around, you’ll notice a lot of boys and men who seem out to make a show, who wave it in everybody’s face, and then feel hurt when the normal world calls them dirty names. These guys are asking for it—camping it up, flouncing around in drag[.]”

Author Joseph Hansen, in addition to being a trailblazer in gay fiction with his series of mystery novels featuring gay private investigator Dave Brandstetter, helped found the Hollywood Gay Pride Parade, so I don’t think Gene represented Hansen’s views so much as the internalized homophobia of men in his generation. Then again, Hansen was married to a woman for 51 years, so what do I know about his real views?

Mad Max and the Search for El Fumador

Gene and Lonny’s weekend of hot sex is short-lived. When they return to Lordsburg, Gene buys Max off, paying the evil queen a total of $5,000 to get out of his life. Max, however, costs Gene significantly more, tipping off local law enforcement about Gene possessing illicit drugs and pornography, then planting plenty of evidence for the sheriff and his deputies to find when they execute a search warrant on Gene’s house. 

Gene is arrested, but, to Lonny’s dismay, doesn’t really try to defend himself during his preliminary hearing (presided over by the same judge featured in the news story Gene refused to pull). It’s better to be convicted on trumped-up drug and pornography charges than reveal the truth about him and Max, whom the prosecuting attorney has already declared “a proven and notorious degenerate. A homosexual.” Worse, the true nature of Gene’s relationship with Lonny could get exposed in open court.

Lonny makes it his mission to prove Gene’s innocence. Max is long gone, so while his daddy boyfriend awaits trial, Lonny goes searching for the only other man who could clear Gene’s name, the ridiculously named El Fumador, a notorious area drug dealer known for his small stature, wearing wide-striped suits, and driving a pink Cadillac. So during the two weeks before Gene goes to trial, Lonny takes the editor’s car and embarks on a search of the San Joaquin Valley for the pink Cadillac.

His search is a failure. At the end of the two weeks Lonny winds up back in the motel suite of Mr. Porter, the predatory queen who propositioned him a year earlier. Broke, defeated, and desperate, Lonny offers himself to Porter, and the hefty homo happily seizes the opportunity (Hansen describes their coupling as a “sad, flabby business”). Yet Porter already has a full-time fluffer, and he’s not about to share his sugar daddy, ordering Lonny to leave or he’ll “cut [his] precious cock off!”

Lost on Twilight Road’s
alternate cover design, which
is...better?

Just when it looks like Lonny’s story is about to end as it began, with him wandering aimlessly down “Twilight Road,” he spots El Fumador’s pink Cadillac in Lordsburg. He confronts the drug dealing runt, and though he gets El Fumador to admit he planted the pills and porn in Gene’s house, Lonny also gets the shit beaten out of him, then shot at, the bullet grazing his skull. El Fumador runs away as Lonny’s begins slipping toward the downer ending that was required of so many queer pulps.

But not Lost on Twilight Road! Lonny’s skirmish with El Fumador occurred right outside the rectory of the Santa Teresa church, and Padre Guzman, of all people, overhead the whole thing and called the sheriff. El Fumador is arrested, and Gene Styles is released into Lonny’s arms. “I want you whole and with me, now,” Gene says while visiting Lonny in the hospital. “I’ve got so very much to learn from you.”

When I first got this book, I expected it to be campy fun. I mean, you saw the cover. How could anyone expect to take this book seriously? Yet Hansen took it seriously when he wrote it under its original title, Valley Boy. (He didn’t care for the publisher’s re-titling, and he described the cover as the “world’s worst cover illustration.” I disagree with him about the publisher’s title, which I find wonderfully lurid, but he’s right about the cover, though I don’t think the boring cover painting of the second edition, which Hansen preferred, was much of an improvement).

Bad cover images seem to have plagued Mr. Hansen
throughout his writing career.

Though there are plenty of moments in the book that make it read like a novelization of a sweaty sexploitation movie, and the name “Lonny Harms” sounds like a character in a John Waters film, Lost on Twilight Road is more heartfelt than campy. Beneath the titillation of Lonny stumbling from one sexual misadventure to the next is a is an honest exposé of what gay men endure just to get along in the world. Lonny’s transformation from wide-eyed innocent to proud — but not quite out — homosexual may be far-fetched, but it’s also revolutionary for the pre-Stonewall ’60s. Gene Styles’ self-loathing is an unhealthy, hetero-normative way of thinking; Lonny’s self-acceptance is the ideal. Gene Styles is right: he does have so much to learn from his barely legal lover.

Goddamn, this was a long one. (Reader: You’re telling me!) But I really do adore this book, despite its problematic passages. Unfortunately, a more-detailed-than-necessary synopsis might be the closest most readers will get to actually experiencing it. Though Hansen went on to be a successful and acclaimed novelist, his early “James Colton” pulps never got reprinted. I hold out hope that one day these books will find their way into digital markets, like some of Hansen’s mystery novels, but until that day happens, my obsessive review will have to suffice. If that doesn’t get the Hansen estate’s ass in gear to re-release the author’s early pulps, I don’t know what will.

If You Lived Here You’d be Dead by Now

The cover to Condominium’s
1978 paperback edition. Nice
illustration, blah typography.

For all of Florida’s selling points—sunny weather, beautiful beaches, no state income tax, (relatively) affordable housing, plentiful cocaine—there are just as many reasons to avoid the Sunshine State: too fucking hot, hurricanes, corruption, Mar-a-Lago, a shit-ton of sinkholes, these fine people. For authors, however, all of these reasons make Florida a great setting for a story. As humorist and Florida resident Dave Barry remarked, “Florida is a never-ending source of material. It’s a statistical fact that while Florida has only 6 percent of the nation's population, it produces 57 percent of the nation's weirdness.”

Though Florida wasn’t without its weirdness when novelist and Sarasota resident John D. MacDonald was alive (he died in 1986), the state’s tinfoil hat-wearing population hadn’t yet grown into the national punchline/desired voting bloc that now provides fodder for the works of Barry, Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey. Not that MacDonald would write novels like Bad Monkey or Florida Roadkill had he been confronted with today’s Florida Man; though not without humor, “wacky” is not an adjective I’d ascribe to MacDonald’s writing. MacDonald’s Florida is more grounded, at once seductive and sinister. You’ll come for the sunshine (and likely a woman and a large sum of money), but you might not survive your stay.

In MacDonald’s 1977 novel CONDOMINIUM, Florida’s Fiddler Key, the fictional stand-in for Siesta Key, where the author lived, is a haven for retirees, drawn to the beautiful beaches, the warm weather and the affordable luxury of the Golden Sands condominium. They’re easy marks for real estate developer Marty Liss, who built many of the condos on Fiddler Key, Golden Sands among them, and has plans to build another one — Harbour Pointe — next to it, confident his luck will prevail despite a flagging real estate market. Liss, who “had a third wife he mistrusted and two grown children he despised,” gets his confidence bolstered by his secretary Drusilla, with whom he shares trysts between business meetings. Life is good in Fiddler Key, and it can only get better.

Of course, we know it can’t. Residents at Golden Sands begin to suspect they were sold a bill of goods. Many of them are up in arms about maintenance fees being doubled, especially when they’re already made responsible for any repairs needed in their units (Julian Higbee, who manages the Golden Sands with his wife Lorrie, is more interested in bedding the younger female residents than wasting time fixing a geezer’s air-conditioner). This actually sets the stage for a vividly drawn condo residents’ meeting, the tedium, the tangents, the tantrums and, ultimately, the futility immediately recognizable to anyone who has attended a meeting where the floor is opened for attendees to speak.

Retired engineer Gus Garver is a resident who has concerns about Golden Sands’ very structure. Gus only bought his unit because his wife Carolyn fell in love with the place, but the couple were barely in it a year before Carolyn suffered a series of medical emergencies, beginning, I shit you not, with a slip on a discarded banana peel, and wound up in a nursing home. Without his wife around to sing Golden Sands’ praises — and without a job to occupy his time — Gus begins to take note of the condo’s flawed construction. The building wouldn’t stand up in earthquake country, he observes. What are its chances in hurricane country?

Meanwhile, Liss runs into a snag with his proposed Harbour Pointe project when his bank puts a freeze on his line of credit. “The fat rosy ass has fallen off the economy,” the president of the bank explains. In an effort to keep in the developer’s good graces, the bank president puts Liss in touch with Sherman Grome, the shady-as-fuck CEO of an Atlanta-based real estate investment trust. Liss doesn’t like Grome or his questionable deal — a kickback scheme that requires Liss to take over Tropic Towers, a failing property Grome financed — but agrees so he can get Harbour Pointe built. And this is just the beginning of his problems.

Because Liss has greased a lot of palms in city and county government, construction on Harbour Pointe begins almost as soon as Liss deposits Grome’s check. To the horror of the denizens of Golden Sands, the lush tropical jungle beside their building is bulldozed to make way for the new condo. Liss, of course, doesn’t lose much sleep over the cries of his properties’ outraged residents. He doesn’t even worry too much about the FBI looking into Sherman Grome’s business deals — that is, until Liss’s associates start cooperating with investigators.

While Marty Liss’s business crumbles and Golden Sands residents’ dreams shatter, few people are thinking about hurricanes. Garver is like a dog with a bone, however, and with the financial help of Golden Sands’ very rich and very ill penthouse resident LeGrande Messenger (think Warren Buffet with cancer), commissions a colleague, marine civil engineer Sam Harrison, to make a thorough investigation to determine Golden Sands’ chances of withstanding natural catastrophe. Sam is just as dogged as Gus, though he soon becomes preoccupied by feelings for Messenger’s much younger and very attractive wife, Barbara.

And out in the Atlantic, tropical storm Ella is gaining strength as she heads toward the Gulf Coast...

More Than Corruption and Natural Disaster

The paperback cover for the 1980
mini-series tie-in is an upgrade
from the original design, IMO.

Condominium is an epic (1985 Fawcett paperback I read is almost 480 pages) and, consequently, it has a lot of characters. A shit-ton, even — far too many to keep track of, in fact, one of my few minor complaints about the book (my other being that some technical aspects, such as Marty Liss’s financial dealings and the development of Hurricane Ella, are detailed so explicitly they slow the book’s momentum). Yet, while many of these characters aren’t crucial to the story, they are essential to the novel.

As MacDonald introduces us to these various supporting characters — including a horny, hot shot real estate agent; an alcoholic widow; a militaristic blowhard obsessed with condo security; a city councilman’s adulterous wife; and an obsessive conspiracy theorist (a pretty labor-intensive pastime pre-internet) — Condominium becomes more than a novel about corrupt businessmen and natural disaster. It’s a novel about the so-called American dream, introducing us to characters who will do anything to attain it, those terrified of losing it, and those disillusioned by the very idea of it.

A passage that particularly resonates, especially now, is a conversation — a soliloquy, really* — that one of these minor characters, retired diplomat Henry Churchbridge, has with his wife Carlotta, when he observes that “Golden Sands and all of Fiddler Key stinks of fear” and why this explains Golden Sands’ resident conspiracy nut C. Noble Winney:

“On the local level they are terrified of predatory tax increases, drunken drivers, purse snatchers, muggers, power failure, water shortages, inflation and the high cost of being sick. Nationally they are afraid of big government, welfare, crime in the streets, corruption, busing, and industrial, political and fiscal conspiracy. Internationally they are afraid of the Arabs, the Blacks, the Cubans, the Communists, the Chinese, the multinational corporations, the oil cartels, pollution of the sea and the air, atomic bombs, pestilence, poisons and additives in food…

“[It] is the vast and wicked complex of interwoven fears, the personal and the specific to the vast misty uncharted, that gives all these people a feeling of helplessness when it comes to comprehending their total environment. … But these people think they have a God-given right to understand. They are educated Americans. They think that if anybody can understand the world and the times, it is an educated American. C. Noble Winney was an auditor, an accountant. Both sides of the sheet must balance. He could not cope with a nonsense world. He had to find a reason why he could not understand events. His only other choice was a permanent condition of confusion and terror. So one day he came across something which hinted at a vast conspiracy. He read further in that area. God knows, there is a very wide choice of fictional conspiracies to accept. The Rothschild anti-Semitic world-control mishmash made some kind of weird sense to C. Noble, and now he documents it. He is still afraid, but he thinks he is doing something constructive to thwart the conspirators by exposing them to people who will join him in his work.”

And this was in the 1970s. If only C. Noble had Facebook and Twitter in his time he might have learned about the Jewish space lasers.

Though I’m partial to MacDonald’s more concise thrillers (A Bullet for Cinderella, Slam the Big Door), I thoroughly enjoyed Condominium, its hardcore business talk notwithstanding. It was easy to see why it was a huge bestseller. The novel was later adapted into a miniseries in 1980 starring Barbara Eden, Dan Haggerty and Steve Forrest. Unfortunately, the miniseries isn’t available on Blu-ray or streaming. I found a copy of it on YouTube, but be warned it that it looks, well, exactly what you’d expect something recorded on VHS over 40 years ago and uploaded at 480p to look like. I haven’t watched it yet, but from reading the Wikipedia synopsis, the adaptation sounds like it has more in common with a Prime-Time soap than the source novel, because TV’s gotta TV. 

John D. MacDonald’s Florida may not be as whacked-out as his successors in the crime-in-the-Sunshine State genre, but it’s just as fascinating and well worth seeking out.

*I omitted the wife’s interruptions, which are minimal to the point they strain credulity. As if a married couple has the luxury of speaking in complete sentences, let alone full paragraphs.

ADDENDUM: This book just got a whole lot more relevant!

Think Twice Before Signing the Lease

Me thinks the cover artist
was working from a
one-paragraph synopsis,
not the actual manuscript.

“The bedroom doors were always open!” proclaims the front cover teaser copy for Charles Beardsley’s 1974 novel THE APARTMENTS. Signet’s back-cover copy ups the ante with a breathless description that’s just slightly more subtle than a guy intently staring at you while stroking his hard cock through his 501’s:

In a swinging California apartment complex where anything went, these desperate men and women sought to fill the aching void in their lives with the pleasures of the flesh — and the apartments exploded in an orgy of dark desires and scorching shock!

The Apartments is down to fuck! Well, how could a whore like me resist?

Alas, once I got the novel alone it never could quite get it up, for while the novel was promoted as detailing all the bed-hopping at a Bay Area apartment building, Kumquat Gardens (yes, really), the cover copy neglects to mention the numerous unsexy chapters about the building’s older residents grappling with aging, retirement, poor health and their imminent mortality. But I get it: old people bitching about the cruelties of aging doesn’t make for enticing promotional copy (“In a swinging California apartment complex, senior citizens grudgingly anticipate death”). Yet the cover copy also fails to mention the killer loose on The Apartments’ grounds, a pretty significant omission considering people like reading about murder almost as much as—if not more than—they like reading about sex.

I can’t blame the Signet marketing team for taking the easy way out and just hyping the book’s sexier parts. Lord knows I struggled on how best to synopsize the book. On the surface, it looks like a Burt Hirschfeld-style potboiler, with a bunch of different characters brought into each other’s orbit by virtue of being in the same location, à la Aspen or Key West. However, the paths of Beardsley’s characters seldom cross. Making matters worse, they barely exist in the same genre, The Apartments bouncing from sexy soap opera to slice-of-life character study to supernatural thriller and back again.

In the sexy soap opera parts of the novel, we meet Phil and Peggy Carlin, a young-ish married couple whose libidos are so demanding they have turned, quite cheerfully, to swinging. Among their playmates are a pair of vacationing contortionists, Don and (groan) Donaldine (“The air of nonchalance with which Don gave a startling exhibition of autofellatio was enough to make the couple stars of the porno film scene—which is exactly what happened.”); Fran and Fred, whose excessive vocalizations during sex lead Phil and Peggy to refer to them as the Orals; and Pete and Phyllis Begley, whose marriage might not survive their swinging lifestyle (“I never realized when I voted yes on Proposition Orgasm that I’d feel soiled,” complains Phyllis).

Of course, there are rules to Phil and Peggy’s extramarital activities, chief among them being “no single sex for either partner outside the weekly quartets.” However, when Peggy encounters Ahmad, the hunky Iranian student who lives in Apartment 12, she begins to wonder if rules weren’t made to be broken.

Another sexy soap opera storyline involves young Midwesterner Lane Larrabee and the man of his dreams, Shaw Wing, whom Lane jokingly calls the Incredible Doctor Oh Man Screw, because Shaw is Chinese and political correctness hadn’t yet been invented when this novel was written. More significant than Shaw’s ethnicity (about which Beardsley makes a huge fucking deal) or sexuality (treated rather matter-of-factly) is his being an asshole. He not only agrees to an arranged marriage with Carol, to please his traditionalist parents, he does not tell Lane about it until after the wedding. Though marrying someone behind your partner’s back seems like a justifiable cause to burn all his shit on the front lawn, Lane agrees to continue a clandestine affair with Shaw, getting together for lunchtime trysts while Carol is at work. But when Carol gets pregnant, Lane realizes he’ll always be Shaw’s side piece. Again, Lane could just dump the bastard. It’s not like he couldn’t find another man (dude, you live just minutes away from San Francisco). Instead, Lane plots to get rid of Carol by any means necessary — only to discover Carol has plans of her own.

Moving to the novel’s slice-of-life dramas, we have middle-aged Beatrice Ohara, who’s been in a bad mood ever since her husband went to visit his family in Japan and never returned. Living and caring for her sharp-tongued 83-year-old mother, Miss Maerose, only makes Beatrice more embittered. Needless to say, she’s not pleasant company. Her mother, a former madam, is more entertaining: “I shall take my cane and rise and show all of you soft-ass idiots that I’m from tough pioneer stock and not daunted by the likes of old age.” However, a fall during a walk on the apartment grounds lands Miss Maerose in a convalescent home, where she—and Beatrice—awaits her death. But Miss Maerose isn’t going without getting the last laugh.

Also living amongst the middle-class residents of Kumquat Gardens is multi-divorced, fabulously wealthy Madeline Chabot, because, as we all know, rich people just love living near the less affluent. Madeline is also a busybody, and she’s decided to make retiree Shelby Dick her next project (and possible romantic partner), his poor heart and small bank account be damned.

Meanwhile, octogenarian Dean Meredith, a former reporter, gets sidetracked from writing a follow-up to his bestselling memoir when he receives threatening letters urging him to drop the project if he values the lives of his family. Though this story thread develops some real tension as Dean searches for the source of these threats, Beardsley quickly deflates it, choosing to emphasize Dean’s “betrayal” of his wife, Crystal, by keeping these threatening letters from her.

Rounding out the slice-of-life dramas is Luise Gerber, a middle-aged college professor and obsessive dream interpreter about whom you will not give one fuck, and Noah Langford, an aspiring artist, paid by his wealthy parents to stay away from them, whose art projects include following random people then writing about what he witnesses—a stalker’s journal as art—and a gallery “show” during which he jacks off inside an enclosed wooden ramp as gallery patrons mill about.

Finally, under the heading of supernatural thriller/WTF, we have Fog, the spirit of a Costanoan (a.k.a. Ohlonean) out to possess someone so he can avenge the murder of his pregnant wife by Spanish settlers, a murder that occurred in the same spot where Kumquat Gardens now sits. It’s all pretty dull—until the killing starts.

A Literary McMansion

Beardsley has a gift for characterization, and there are moments in The Apartments that suggest he could’ve easily turned it into a biting satire of early ’70s culture. He’s not an untalented writer, but he is an unfocused one. The Apartments doesn’t read like a cohesive novel but rather like seven or eight different novellas spliced together and stuck under one roof, forming an ungainly literary McMansion. He’d have done better to jettison the more boring characters (bye-bye Luise) and make Fog’s murder-spree-by-proxy the narrative’s driver while expanding on the tawdry lives of the apartment building’s more interesting residents. Also, maybe reconsider Kumquat Gardens as the building’s name?

Perhaps my biggest frustration with The Apartments is its squandered potential as great trash. It’s as if Beardsley is trying to split the difference between his literary pretensions and commercial greed. As a result, many of the “dirty” parts are disappointingly tame (alas, the building can’t be dubbed Cum-Twat Gardens), while the more serious character studies are long-winded and pointless.

I bought The Apartments shortly after reading a positive review on Charles Beardsley’s 1978 novel, Marina Tower, on the now dormant The Ringer Files blog (are you OK, Kurt?). The Ringer Files’ high opinion of Marina Tower was enough to convince me to give Beardsley’s work a try. This was more than five years ago.

In the interim Joe Kenney posted a less enthusiastic review of Marina Tower on Glorious Trash. Though I don’t agree with many of the political views that creep into Joe’s reviews, his take on Marina Tower pretty much mirrors my takeaway on The Apartments (and thus, through trash fiction, common ground is achieved). In fact, based on the Glorious Trash synopsis, Marina Tower is pretty much The Apartments relocated to Los Angeles, so if you’ve read one you don’t need to bother with the other.

And I won’t be bothering with another Beardsley paperback anytime soon, no matter how hard the cover tries to seduce me. I didn’t hate The Apartments, but it didn’t exactly make me want to move in, either.

A Paperback Mockbuster

The cheesy cover for Pinnacle’s
1978 edition of The Love Merchants.

 

THE LOVE MERCHANTS by Stephen Lewis, first published by Ace in 1974 and republished in 1978 by Pinnacle (the edition I have), is of a genre I love but has been out of vogue for a while: the Hollywood novel. Used to be you could count on the New York Times Best Seller list featuring at least one novel about the sleazy underbelly of glamorous Tinsel Town—and the sleazier the better. Of course, these books were popular at a time when Hollywood tried harder to sanitize its stars’ images. Then the Internet came along and that all went to shit.

But before celebs were showing more than they intended or sharing more than we wanted to know on Twitter, we had authors like Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins revealing, in XXX-plicit detail, the sordid goings on Hollywood tried so hard to keep under wraps. Their books were fiction, but it was understood they were roman à clefs. Half the fun in reading the books was figuring out a character’s real-life celeb counterpart. 

Stephen Lewis was much lower on the literary ladder than his trash fiction contemporaries, a writer who appears to have been more concerned with making a quick buck than earning a solid reputation. I first learned of Lewis on the Glorious Trash blog, which reviewed Lewis’s Massage Parlor and its creatively titled sequel Massage Parlor, Part II, both books published under the pseudonym Jennifer Sills. But Lewis did not restrict himself to providing the pornographic “exposés” of the rub-and-tug biz. He also cranked out novels inspired by other bestsellers, the literary equivalent of mockbusters. 

Such a novel is The Love Merchants. Even its title is derivative of other bestsellers, a mash-up of Susann’s The Love Machine and Robbins’ The Dream Merchants. Its storyline, however, has more in common with another knock-off in the Hollywood sleaze genre, Burt Hirschfeld’s 1970 novel The Love Thing, written under his Hugh Barron pseudonym. Like Love Thing, The Love Merchants is largely told from the point of view of a Hollywood publicist, and as in Love Thing, publicists are portrayed as wielding as much power as any studio executive. 

Hollywood publicist Laura Chesnay still remembers when she was starting out in 1942, when she was still known as Lola Cheifitz and working for Milton Sakowitz in New York, trying to “take second rate actors from one of the second rate shows Milt handled and plant an item that had them ‘spotted’ at a second-rate restaurant, also one of Milt’s accounts.” Ever ambitious, she changed her name to “rid herself of her obviously Jewish heritage,” and with the new name came a greater reputation. After being hired away by the much more prestigious Baker and Hammond firm she not only scored a publicity coup for screen goddess and walking scandal machine Faye Reynolds but befriended the star as well, assuring Laura’s ascension to the top of her field. 

Now running her own P.R. firm in early 1970s Los Angeles, Laura does everything from advising her clients on which projects will best benefit their careers to smoothing over marital spats lest the couple jeopardize their successful husband-and-wife act (and Laura’s income). 

The 1974 cover was better
yet still missed the mark.

Aiding Laura are her two assistants, the oily Bob Siberling and young Karen Hewitt, who was recently hired away from the publicity department of the declining Wolfe Studios. Though Karen finds Laura’s mood swings tough to navigate she enjoys having access to the glamorous life, primarily via arranged dates with one of Laura’s biggest clients, Les Thomas, an aging screen stud and closet case. Karen enjoys the Hollywood glitz but, being a simple girl from Stockton, Calif., she is just as content going to cheap burger joints—and having hot sex—with Keith Stephens, a struggling actor who lives in her apartment complex. She might even be in love with Keith. However, when she’s forced to choose, she takes her chances with Les because, despite the reader being told Karen is smart as a whip, she thinks her love will change his proclivities. That goes about as well as one would expect—anyone except Karen, it turns out.

Jack and Betty Martin also require a lot of Laura’s attention, the couples’ image as, per the back-cover copy, “Hollywood’s Mr. & Mrs. Wholesome” constantly being threatened by Jack’s fucking every woman who steps within three feet of his dick and their teenage son Denny’s drug busts. A more closely guarded secret than Jack’s infidelities is his abuse of his wife Betty, which she forgives because the make-up sex is oh, so good. 

It would seem Laura would be plenty busy with these train wrecks for clients, but she’s always on the prowl for new business. When the smoothly confident Ray Cummings, a media mogul specializing in the teen market, meets with her and proposes working together to make Denny Martin the Next Big Thing, she jumps at the opportunity. The partnership proves profitable, yet Laura finds herself becoming increasingly suspicious of Cummings, though she’s unable to pinpoint exactly why. 

Maybe she’d be able to figure it out if she wasn’t suddenly busy with Faye Reynolds, who has returned from several years of exile in Europe following her firing from Worldwide Studios. Faye has been surgically restored to her youthful prime and is now ready to get back into the Hollywood scene. If Laura helps her buy the rights to the movie she made in Europe, Faye just knows she’ll once again be the reigning queen of the big screen. 

Let Me Ruin ‘The Partridge Family’ for You 

Per his bio in the back page of the book, Lewis used to be a gossip columnist and it shows in his characterizations of the celebrities in The Love Merchants. Though Faye Reynolds most closely resembles Elizabeth Taylor, I thought she was more of an amalgamation of several different movie stars (I detected shades of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in her as well). Les Thomas, on the other hand, is so obviously based on Rock Hudson that he might as well have been named Hock Rudson. Lewis not only includes a flashback to when Les was coerced into marrying his agent’s secretary to quell gay rumors, just like Rock Hudson, he also incorporates a plot point in which Ray Cummings has doctored photos sent to media outlets showing Les marrying county comedian Grant Holmes, very similar to a joke gone awry involving Hudson and Jim Nabors. 

The real-life family of entertainers that Jack, Betty and Denny Martin immediately brought to my mind were Jack Cassidy, Shirley Jones and David Cassidy. Once that association got stuck in my head it put a whole new spin on some of the book’s more lurid passages, such as when Jack enters the bathroom while Betty is taking a bath: 

[Jack] dropped his pants slowly, enjoying her reaction. 

“I have to take a piss,” he said softly. “Want it?” 

Before she could answer, the hot yellow stream was flowing out of him into the tub. She felt it splash over her breasts and shoulders, then onto her neck and face. It happened so quickly that she had no time to react. 

“You bastard!” she shouted. “You son of a bitch!” 

Jack laughed as she hurriedly opened the drain and stood up, turning on the shower. She scrubbed at herself furiously, then Jack reached for her. Betty thought she was going to slip in the wet tub as she tried to pull away from him, but Jack’s arms went around her, lifting her out of the tub in one movement.

Before Betty could stop him, he had lowered her onto the bathroom rug. 

“Now,” he said heatedly, “now you’re going to get what you want.” 

Or when Betty walks in on Denny taking narcissism to a whole new level:

David Cassidy in his 1974 prime.

She gasped at his nakedness. He was sprawled on the bed, hard and swollen, leafing through a magazine. For a time neither of them moved. Betty was amazed—at seventeen, Denny was as large as his father. She blushed, realizing it had been years since she’d seen her oldest son totally nude.

“I—I’m sorry,” she said as Denny slowly brought the magazine down to cover himself. She noticed that it was a copy of Teentime, an issue that had a big story on Denny himself. There was a glimmer of amusement in the boy’s eyes as he watched her growing discomfort. 

“That’s okay,” he said.

And, finally, when Betty hires a hustler:

[When] he returned, the drinks in hand, she was waiting for him. He paused at the edge of the bed, and she swung herself around, her hands reaching for him. His testicles were heavy and swollen. Betty lifted them and released them, then her fingers moved to his penis, sliding it up and down until he was erect.

She moved faster, taking him in her fist, and what she found most enjoyable was not her own action but the passion she provoked in the boy. His eyes were closed and his head back. For a moment Betty thought of her son—was this what Denny and his girlfriend did? Had he ever—

The boy’s legs began to quiver, and a splash of scotch fell on his arm.

“Careful…” she said softly as he climaxed on her breasts. “You don’t want to spill the drinks.”

Then, taking one of the glasses, she used her free hand to guide his lips to hers, then downward. She leaned back as his eyes met hers, then he bent his head, understanding.

Betty smiled, watching him. It would be a long time before anyone came home—and next week she’d see they were all out again.

Rock on, Mrs. Partridge, you kinky bitch.

I’ll never view The Partridge Family the same way again. And if I’m reading the above scene correctly, I believe it’s implying Mrs. Partridge’s Betty’s call boy is lapping up his own load. Of course, I may be reading it that way because the Glorious Trash review mentions that a man gets a similar protein fix in Massage Parlor, Part II.  (Or maybe I’ve just seen too much gay porn.) It could be that Betty’s call boy was just going down on her, I but I think she’d do more than just watch him if he were. My husband thought Betty was just discouraging the hustler from kissing her, which tracks but seems a little too polite for this book.

Easy to Digest, Not as Filling

Lewis’ easy-to-digest style was just what I needed after Gaywyck’s fussy prose. He didn’t elevate the genre above itself like Herbert Kastle did, but he was a better writer than some of the established authors he was ripping off (Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins, specifically). The writer he reminded me of the most was another 1970s sleazemeister, William Hegner, though Lewis is neither as outrageous nor as quotable.

As easy as the The Love Merchants goes down, its story isn’t that filling. I suspect Lewis was trying for a specific word count, because by page 300 he seemed more interested in wrapping the story up than fully telling it. Several dramatic moments happen largely off-page (Faye confronting and assaulting Laura’s ex-business partners) or in flashback (Denny discovering his mom with a call boy), and we don’t get proper endings for several characters’ arcs as Lewis rushes to bring the book in at 341 pages. Usually readers can expect a lot of padding when publishers mandate writers keep to specific word counts, but Lewis could have really used an extra hundred pages or so to flesh out his novel. He also deserved more careful editing. The Love Merchants is riddled with typos and misspellings. Evelyn Grippo, who’s credited with editing the book (yes, this book has production credits), should be embarrassed.

The Love Merchants may not be fully satisfying trash, but it was enjoyable enough to whet my appetite for more of Lewis’ work. I recently bought Buried Blossoms, Lewis’ posthumously published (he died in 1981, in his 30s) Flowers in the Attic knock-off, which I fully intend to review. Eventually.

A Gothic Fit for a Queen

Gaywyck as it first appeared in 1980,
published by Avon.

Back in the mid-2000s, while attending the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, I went to a reading of selections from an anthology of gay erotic short stories. One of the anthology’s authors, a woman, prefaced her reading by telling the audience that her story was originally a heterosexual one but that she re-tooled it to fit the anthology’s genre. Except she hadn’t, really, she just changed the gender of one of her characters, leaving intact the prose of a spicy hetero romance targeting female readers. The give-away was her describing one of her male protagonists as having nipples like primroses.

I thought a lot about that woman’s story while reading Vincent Virga’s GAYWYCK, touted as the first gay gothic romance, published in 1980. Almost all the male characters in this book are written as if they once wore Charvet dresses and had menstrual cycles. In fact, one of the novel’s surprises is there isn’t a revelation that one of our protagonists is a woman in drag, à la Yentl. Were anyone’s nipples described at all, I’m sure they would resemble primroses.

Perhaps no character in Gaywyck could have his gender so easily reassigned as the book’s narrator, Robert Whyte. Really, all it would take is adding an “a” to the end of his first name, changing some pronouns and dressing him in bodices and skirts instead of cardigan vests and double-breasted suits. Robert is a fragile young man, so much so he’s home schooled.  He’s shy, but as he explains to the reader: “‘Shy’ is an evasion of the truth. ‘Easily frightened,’ yes. ‘Morbidly sensitive,’ yes. ‘Timid and cautious,’ yes. But also, much more than that.”

His fragility is indulged by his mother during Robert’s early years living in upstate New York, much to the chagrin of his school principal father. Mrs. Whyte’s mental health begins to decline by the time Robert’s reached his teens, however, and she’s soon institutionalized after being diagnosed with “profound melancholia.” With his mother gone, Robert’s father issues an ultimatum: the 17-year-old can go to Harvard, or he can just go. He is no longer welcome in his father’s home. Robert reaches out to a local priest, who helps secure a new home for Robert at the Long Island estate of the wealthy (and obviously named) Gaylord family. “[O]n 28 September 1899, I left for Gaywyck. My fate galloped to meet me.”

Before arriving at Gaywyck, Robert is first taken to Gramercy Park to meet his benefactor, Donough Gaylord, the sole surviving heir to the Gaylord fortune. He’s hot, of course (think Henry Cavill circa The Tudors or Immortals), as well as mysterious and kind of sad, having lost his mother at an early age, and later losing his twin brother, Cormack, and their father in a fire. He’s initially sympathetic to Robert’s plight—his late mother Mary Rose also had mental health issues—but takes a genuine liking of the teen upon discovering Robert’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for the works of Paul Cézanne. Robert is also easy on the eyes (if you limit your choices to the blonds, you can find a NSFW visual representation here).

At Gaywyck Robert meets Brian, the household’s young, ginger-haired houseboy/apprentice chef, initially described as a mute but he’s later revealed to just have a speech impediment. He quickly becomes Robert’s confidante. Robert also meets Julian Denvers, a former Jesuit who had served as the live-in tutor of Donough and Cormack, and Everard Keyes, the twins’ music teacher, who now has only a tenuous grasp of reality (“Sometimes he is Beethoven and sometimes not”). The two men—especially Keyes—aren’t exactly warm and friendly, but as far as the bookish, “morbidly sensitive” Robert is concerned, Gaywyck is heaven on earth. Not only does he have entrée into a world of extravagant wealth like he’s never known, he’s now part of Donough Gaylord’s world. It’s not long before he’s scrawling hearts with D.G. + R.W. written within them on the pages of his journal. (OK, what he really writes in his journal is “We are the same person, Donough Gaylord and I,” but the gist is the same.)

But Gaywyck houses more than beautiful art and old queens. It is also home to many secrets—secrets that involve incest, hidden rooms, child abuse, mutilated penises, faked deaths and murder. There’s even an out-of-nowhere twins-separated-at-infancy revelation. It’s often too much for young Robert to bear, the poor twink fainting from shock at the merest suggestion of a sordid past or ulterior motive. OK, I’m exaggerating. Robert doesn’t pass out that much, but he does spend an inordinate amount of time in bed recuperating from one thing or another during the course of the novel. I shouldn’t throw shade, though. Who among us hasn’t dreamed of being ordered to stay in bed all day at a fancy estate, waited on by a fawning staff? And yet despite all this time lolling about in bed, Robert is described as having a beautiful, athletic body. Gurl, bye!

Robert isn’t the only delicate flower. The strapping Donough is also frequently so overcome with emotion that he can’t finish stories about his past in a single chapter. Brian disappears when distraught, Keyes locks himself in his room, and Denvers becomes bitchy and brooding.

Gaywyck got a sexed-up cover
when Alyson Publications
reprinted it in 2000.

If the men of Gaywyck aren’t fainting, sulking or disappearing, they’re discussing—and quoting from—the works Walt Whitman, Alexandre Dumas, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and William Shakespeare. And that’s just the authors; art and opera are also discussed at length. When the men get tired of discussing arts and letters with each other, Donough invites his friends from the NYC, an interracial gay couple named Mortimer and Goodbody (they must’ve turned heads in the late 1800s), to spend Thanksgiving at Gaywyck. And what does the group get up to? Reciting passages from The Winter’s Tale.

To be fair, the book is set at the turn of the twentieth century, with characters who inhabit the rarefied air of the One Percent, so it’s entirely appropriate that the majority of the men in the story have a keen interest in music, art and literature. It’s not like they’d be talking about James J. Corbett’s chances in the ring against Jim “The Boilermaker” Jeffries. That said, there is only so much swooning over Paul Cézanne or Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde a reader can take. Virga is a very learned man with an impressive resumé (feel free to download a copy) and he makes sure to share his knowledge on every fucking one of Gaywyck’s pages. By the book’s midpoint I felt I was entitled to college credits in art and music appreciation.

Vincent Virga’s 2001 Gaywyck
sequel, Vadriel Vail.

You can also throw in a half credit for classic literature. As much, if not more, attention is given to Gaywyck’s prose as its story. Almost every paragraph in Gaywyck’s 376 pages is dipped in gold and presented on a red velvet pillow for the reader to admire. I found Virga’s word craft simultaneously effective—it really does transport the reader back to the dawn of the twentieth century—and enervating. By the time I got to the juicy parts I was so exhausted that it was all I could do to raise an eyebrow in surprise.

I know it sounds like I’m shitting all over this novel, but it is not bad. (Armistead Maupin supposedly dug it.) It’s just not to my taste. I bought my copy of Gaywyck a few years ago, excited to discover there was such a thing as a gay Gothic. I tend to prefer a more straight-forward prose, however, and my gay characters a bit more…carnal. Gaywyck’s prose—very purple, bordering on turgid—just isn’t my thing. I enjoyed parts of it more than the whole. One of the parts I especially enjoyed was when we’re introduced to a character named Jonesy, the teen-aged son of a recently deceased employee of Donough’s who comes to stay at Gaywyck. Jonesy is ill-mannered, poorly educated, and willing to use his body to get what he wants (think a young Daniel Craig with poor dental hygiene, or maybe Tiger King’s John Finlay, pre-dentures and minus the tattoos). Jonesy is a horrible character, but he livened up the story considerably. Finally, I thought, after 200 pages this story is springing to life. Alas, Jonesy is only a supporting character, and we’re soon back to the florid observations of Robert Whyte.

Virga published a sequel to Gaywyck, Vadriel Vail, in 2001. A third book in the Gaywyck saga, Children of Paradise, was written in 2010 but it never found a publisher, though there is a copy of the manuscript available to students and faculty of the College of William and Mary. Virga writes on his website about his frustration of trying to get his work re-released:

[A] young twinkie gay editor at Plume recently told my agent he couldn’t understand why anyone would care about old gay romances... He found Gaywyck unreadable! (I admit it bears no resemblance to the dreary stuff being churned out by graduates of the Iowa School of Writing, thank god, which is probably his and most NYC fiction editors’ idea of “real” writing!)

I think that “young twinkie gay editor” was being short sighted, not to mention unfair. There is a market for old gay romances, and that market is straight women. Virga might be asked to punch up the sex scenes, however. (When it comes to sex, Virga is so coy that it’s not always obvious anything naughty has occurred.) I could also see this adapted into a pretty enjoyable movie. A visual medium could bring the story to life in a whole new way, streamlining the narrative by showing in a single shot what the novel takes pages to describe—or show what the novel doesn’t dare describe. Virga would hate it, I imagine, but I’m sure he’d enjoy cashing the check.
 

I’d watch it!

Bonus Vocabulary Section

Not only does Gaywyck bombard one with an avalanche of references to classic literature, art and music, it also expands the reader's vocabulary. Or maybe that’s just me? At any rate, here is a list of some of my newly acquired vocabulary words I can attribute to Gaywyck. I doubt I’ll ever use them in conversation, and I see very few of them finding their way into my writing, but it’s still nice knowing there’s a fancy word for horny.

Eventide — end of the day; evening.

Orangery — greenhouse where trees are grown.

Cupidity — greed for money or possessions. (Eileen Bassing gets credit for exposing me to this one first. Who knew I’d encounter the word again so soon?)

Purling — (of a stream or river) flow with a swirling motion and babbling sound.

Gamboge — a strong yellow

Tintinnabulation — a ringing or tinkling sound.

Dado — the lower part of the wall of a room, below about waist height, if it is a different color or has a different covering than the upper part.

Concupiscence — strong sexual desire; lust.