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.

The Lurid and the Literary

“Out here books are crap,” explains a screenwriter character in Herbert Kastle’s 1968 novel THE MOVIE MAKER. In Hollywood, this character goes on, books are just “words to be boiled down to a plot skeleton and refleshed for the screen. No one reads novels for the movies. They read story, skimming along and noting interesting twists and turns. Bestsellers are bought for their titles more than anything else.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out Kastle got a similar talk when he was working as a screenwriter, one of several of his early writing jobs—including editor and copywriter— before he became a full-time novelist. I also think this statement could be modified to apply to trashy Hollywood novels: no one reads these type of books for the writing; they read them for the sleaze.

The Movie Maker delivers the sleaze, but it’s too well written to be labeled mere trash. In fact, it’s so well written I can imagine Kastle’s agent having to lecture him about the hard truths of writing trashy Hollywood novels.

“Goddammit, Kastle,” his agent would have groaned, “why do you do this to yourself? All we wanted was a look at the sordid goings on in the movie business. Lots of sex, drugs and characters that are fictionalized versions of real stars, you know the drill. I know you know it because you’ve got this Mona Dearn character in this thing—a definite stand-in for Marilyn Monroe, all neurotic and fragile and shit. And giving her some lesbian leanings was brilliant. Man, I was getting hard just thinking of the possibilities, imagining Marilyn-but-not-Marilyn going down on, I dunno, an Ann Margaret stand-in, or maybe a fictional Jayne Mansfield. That would’ve been hilarious!  Sounds hot, though, doesn't it? But no, that was too easy for you. You had to go into her loneliness and insecurity and how her feelings for the movie publicist, Terry Hanford, are never reciprocated. Then the stuff about her painting, how she’s afraid to show her paintings to anyone in case they don’t like them, kind of a metaphor of how she’s afraid to show people her true self. I mean, Jesus Christ, who’s going to get hard thinking of that?

“At least you redeemed yourself with the Lois Lane and Sugar Smart characters,” the agent would continue. “God, what a couple of bitches. That poor egghead writer, Charley Halpert, didn’t know what hit him when he opened his motel room door to those two. You almost feel sorry for the bastard until you remember that it’s his fault for saying yes to a three-way with two teenagers. Serves him right, thinking with the wrong head.

“But maybe you should’ve been thinking with that other head, Kastle, instead of giving us all this insight into Charley Halpert’s inner conflicts—cheating on a wife who doesn’t support his writing ambition, his wanting to prove himself in Hollywood to win her respect but thinking maybe they should just divorce, except he doesn’t want to risk never seeing his son again. Then you involve him with this Cheryl character, the fat secretary—okay, okay, Rubenesque, but as far as today’s readers are concerned a Mae West figure isn’t much better than an Orson Welles figure. If Jacqueline Susann had that character in one of her books, Cheryl would be rejected repeatedly, maybe sexually humiliated when she does get laid. Then she’d spend a good third of the book slimming down until the men who rejected her earlier are begging to take her to bed, and then she rejects them. But I guess imitating a proven moneymaker was too simple for you, wasn’t it Kastle? Cheryl not only has two men hot for her—Charley and that producer, Alan Devon—she’s got that alcoholic, paraplegic husband of hers who seems to only want to stay married to make her life miserable. So, now the reader’s conflicted, wanting to write off Cheryl as a slut but having to wrestle with her relatable emotions. It’s too… too gray.

“Speaking of gray—or just gay—there’s that whole subplot with the schlock horror director, Carl Baiglen, being blackmailed by that young policeman from Baiglen’s hometown in the Midwest. That was good, a clever way for the cop to leverage his way into the movie business, transform himself into Brad Madison. Making him a closet case was a nice touch, too. Who was the real-life inspiration? Hudson? An amalgamation? Fine, you don’t have to tell me. Anyway, the homosexual stuff adds a bit of spice to it, but then you have to humanize him. I mean, people might forgive Baiglen for maybe-accidentally-on-purpose killing his first wife, but expecting readers to sympathize with this homo blackmailer? Worse, have him carrying on with Baiglen’s gay son Andy, and then present a reasonable argument—from Andy’s mother, no less—why Baiglen should not kill Madison? Look, Kastle, times are changing, but expecting people to sympathize for a fag actor is just too much.”

Kastle’s agent would pause here to light a cigarette, because it was the 1960s and everyone smoked. “But here’s my biggest problem,” he’d say, exhaling a pale blue cloud. “It’s your two main characters, Nat Markal and Isa Yee. Nat Markal is the head of Avalon Pictures, right? You’ve got his look right—I pictured a younger Edward G. Robinson—and he’s got the right take-no-shit personality, what people expect from a studio chief. Yet, he’s been faithful to his wife all this time, that it’s a point of pride for him? Christ, if anything could make Harold Robbins laugh, that would. Do you know how many starlets Nat Markal would’ve fucked if he were a Robbins character? At least four, within the first fifty pages. Yes, I know Markal’s staunch fidelity to his wife makes his falling for Isa Yee that much more dramatic, but who cares? And Robbins wouldn’t have Markal risking it all to make this grand epic—what did you title it? The Eternal Joneses?—for the sake of his artistic legacy. No, in a Robbins novel Markal would only make that movie if he thought it would be a huge blockbuster that would make him even richer. Fucking and making money, Kastle. That’s Robbins’ formula for success, without any of these petty concerns for three-dimensional characters. Do you know how many copies of The Adventurers Simon & Schuster sold? I could buy a yacht with that kind of money.

“Isa Yee almost gets this lost ship back on course. The sexy starlet with a dark secret. Dark, get it? C’mon, I’m not being racist, it’s a joke. Seriously, though, I thought Isa was a spitfire, and I can already see her on the paperback cover, a naked Eurasian girl—your word—practically draped over a director’s chair. The way you described her in those early chapters, especially when she strips for Nat Markal in his office, is hot stuff. But you couldn’t just let her be a conniving bitch, and one who does anal, no less. No, you had to make her smart and conflicted, adding in this race stuff. Christ-a-mighty-damn, first gays then race relations. I get it’s the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, etcetera, etcetera, but people don’t pick up books like this for cultural insight. They just want sex and scandal, with cliché characters that are clearly good or clearly bad. You’re killing me with all this nuance, Kastle.

“No, no, I don’t want you to re-write it,” the agent would sigh, waving his hands dismissively. “It is a good book. I just wanted you to understand you don’t have to work that hard in the future. They can play up the sex and scandal when they market this thing, maybe compare it to Valley of the Dolls and The Exhibitionist, because it does fit in with that market. I just hope we don’t get any backlash when people discover they’re having their viewpoints challenged, or that the people making movies aren’t presented as just shallow vessels motivated solely by sex and greed. Who knows, readers might find it refreshing. But I still think Harold Robbins is going to laugh his ass off when he reads this thing.”

But, seriously, The Movie Maker is well worth your time, blending the lurid with the literary.  I’ve enjoyed the works of Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins, but their books are the equivalent of devouring a box of Ho Hos. Kastle’s books are a fattening meal that sticks to the ribs. You can read reviews of his other books here and here, and check out another review of The Movie Maker here.