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.

But What is the Cat Thinking?

WHERE’S ANNIE? is not just the title of this 1963 novel by Eileen Bassing, it’s also the question I kept asking myself while reading it. Specifically: Where’s Annie, and why is she name-checked in title? Because this novel isn’t really about Annie at all.

Annie, the young trophy wife of a retired navy admiral, is but one of a group of American ex-patriots living in an un-named village in Mexico, and even then she is only a peripheral character, having only slightly more impact on the book’s story as the natives of the village.

The book’s actual main character is Victoria, a middle-aged writer who, after ditching husband No. 4, has settled in the village to write a great novel, provided she can get past her writer’s block. Victoria is not an easy character to love. We first meet her when she nearly collides with Andrew Cunningham, Annie’s unhappy husband, while he’s out for his morning walk. “Out of my way,” she says, as though he’s the one at fault. Victoria is too involved in her own thoughts to waste time with social graces.

Victoria is bitchy, but she’s not heartless. She later comes rushing to Cunningham’s aid when his fishing boat sinks in the lake at the edge of the village, then later she organizes a search for Annie when the admiral’s young bride disappears from a party (insert title drop here).

Annie is ultimately found in the arms of another (younger) man. Annie lamely defends herself, telling Victoria that Cunningham is “so…old.”  Victoria encourages Annie to remain faithful to her husband a little longer. “You have time,” Victoria says. “He has…almost no time.” (Bassing is fond of ellipses.)

The Cunninghams leave for the U.S. the next day and Victoria once again focuses on her work. But first, she walks to the post office to see if her agent has sent her a check, then she goes drinking with Charlie, a recovering morphine addict who fights off cravings with booze and pot, and Harry, a junkie who’ll take whatever drug is available. She later meets Ned, a homosexual and gifted artist. Though Ned is perfectly charming, Victoria, who couldn’t give less of a fuck about making a good first impression, is openly hostile. Still, Ned invites her to visit him. She refuses.

Days later she decides to apologize for her rudeness, visiting Ned on the exact same day he comes down with malaria. Victoria elects to stay with him and nurse him back to health, partly out of penance for her earlier treatment of him, but mostly to avoid her typewriter. It’s during this chapter that we get one of the book’s best lines, when Victoria tells Ned, “I’d rather deal with your excrement than your gratitude.”

The pair become friends, but it’s not a healthy friendship. Victoria had to deal with Ned’s literal shit when he was sick but dealing with his metaphorical crap may be worse. It turns out Ned’s charm masks his cold, selfish nature. The pair fight and make-up constantly. He finds her too dowdy, too bohemian, too emotional. She resents his criticisms of her and her writing, but when her temper cools she’s back at his door, seeking his approval. It’s Harry, of all people, who’s the voice of reason:

“[Do] you know what I see Neddy-boy doing? I see him trying to make my Vickie, my original, over into his own mold. He is fashioning, as though he were God, another little Neddy-boy.”

Harry is a drug addict and shit-stirrer, so Victoria dismisses his observations. Besides, she’s too preoccupied with what Ned’s cat is thinking to pay attention to what Harry says.

Let me explain: Late in the book Ned gives Victoria his cat, Hassan, to care for while he’s out of town. This cat behaves like most cats (lies there, mostly), much to the consternation of Victoria.

Could it think? She stared at it and the cat stared back at her, in cross-eyed indifference. After a moment — and she was aware that a lot of time passed this way, hypnotically, with her staring at the cat and the cat staring back at her — it reached out with its paw and pushed at an envelope which was on the shelf near it. The cat did not watch the envelope flutter to the floor, as she did. But wasn’t that proof, since it was a deliberate act, that the cat must have some thought, some reasoning process? Then what could its reasoning process be?

The above text is but a mere taste of Victoria’s obsessing over this cat. Bassing devotes almost three fucking pages to Victoria wondering what makes this goddamned cat tick. I only bothered with one of those pages.

And this tangent about the mysteries of cat thought highlights my biggest problem with Where’s Annie? For all the well-drawn characters and sharp observations, Bassing too often gets bogged down in minutiae at the expense of the story’s momentum. This is a loose, character-driven narrative, with as much attention given to the characters’ inner lives as to the story’s minimal action, but I would argue that any inner life that dwells on the inscrutability of cats is perhaps not a life not worth reading about.

Not helping is Bassing’s tendency to try too hard, her writing often self-consciously literary, as if she’s more interested in impressing critics than engaging readers, similar to how Victoria tailors her writing to please Ned rather than herself. Consequently, this book felt longer than its 382-pages.

But Where’s Annie? has a lot to recommend it. Victoria isn’t particularly likable, but she is relatable. I’ve known people like her—I’ve been friends with them—and as in real life, I was alternately drawn to Victoria for her acerbic wit and put off by her surly attitude. Still, even though I didn’t entirely like her, I didn’t think she deserved the treatment she got form Ned.

Speaking of Ned, while I wouldn’t nominate Bassing for a GLAAD award, her treatment of Ned’s homosexuality is pretty progressive for 1963. She matter-of-factly acknowledges Ned’s queerness (Ned has a boy toy, Manuel), but his homosexuality never becomes his sole character trait. In fact, there are only a couple instances in the book when characters make derogatory comments about Ned’s sexuality. People don’t dislike him because he’s gay, they dislike him because he’s an asshole. 

I didn’t know anything about Eileen Bassing when I was given this book five years ago (my nephew saw it at a used bookstore and thought it looked like something I’d read). Besides Where’s Annie?, she wrote the novel Home Before Dark. According to her obituary — she died in 1977 at age 58 — she also was a screenwriter (she adapted Home Before Dark into a 1958 movie starring Jean Simmons), a story editor and an advisor for the motion picture and TV industries. I’ve seen Home Before Dark and recommend checking it out next time it appears on the TCM schedule. Where’s Annie? is worth checking out, too. If you can fight the temptation to abandon the search early, Where’s Annie? is ultimately a satisfying read.

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.

Simultaneously Timeless and of Its Time

America is sharply divided, one side fighting to change the status quo while the other will stop at nothing to maintain it. Amidst this unrest rise Machiavellian politicians, self-serving pundits and fear-mongering preachers. The country is a powder keg, a single tragic event the match that could light its gasoline-soaked fuse.

No, I’m not about to launch into a right/left-wing screed about our current political climate. This is a review of Burt Hirschfeld’s 1973 novel, THE MASTERS AFFAIR, a political potboiler that’s simultaneously timeless and of its time.

I’m a fairly recent convert to the works of Burt Hirschfeld. I recall his novel Return to Fire Island being prominently displayed on the bestsellers rack at my local K-mart in the 1980s, when I was in high school. Back then I wanted brand name trash, so I by-passed Hirschfeld in favor of Harold Robbins. It wasn’t until I read some reviews of his books on the Glorious Trash blog that I actually sought out any of his work, starting with his 1970 novel Fire Island. I was immediately won over, surprised by just how gifted a writer he was, with a prose style more comparable to Irwin Shaw than Harold Robbins. Though his work does fall under the dismissive label of popular fiction, I could detect the ambitions of a “serious novelist” in Hirschfeld’s writing. But the ambition to be a bestselling novelist was clearly more important (hey, we all gotta pay bills), so he wrote whatever sold. Fire Island was not only a success, but a template, Hirschfeld following it up with a series of soap opera tales set in glamorous locales (Aspen, Acapulco, Key West). He also wrote non-fiction (A State is Born: The Story of Israel, Stagestruck: Your Career in Theatre), TV and movie novelizations (Bonnie & Clyde, The Ewings of Dallas), and, under the name Hugh Barron, trashy tales of Hollywood (The Goddess Game, The Love Thing).

And sometimes he wrote novels of political intrigue, like The Masters Affair.

The book begins with the assassination of W.W. Masters, the head of the secretive Internal Investigation Agency, sort of like the C.I.A. for domestic affairs. Hunting for the shooter, separately and with separate agendas, are by-the-book I.I.A. agent Peter Malone and liberal activist Dan Hellman. For Malone, catching Masters’ killer is personal: Masters was his mentor in the agency, and he was Masters’ devoted acolyte. For Hellman, who aspires to be the next Ralph Nader, identifying Masters’ killer and, just as importantly, discovering his motive, is a career opportunity. Also, just think of all the sweet pussy he’ll get when the spotlight’s turned on him.

Though the Malone character has a stick so far up his ass he risks puncturing a bowel, I found his storyline more engaging. His investigation leads him to a fundamentalist zealot, Rev. Willie Joe Tate, training a militia to fight atheist liberals and Godless communists, and later to an armory in Texas he suspects of supplying Tate his weapons. Hellman’s investigation, on the other hand, gets mired in too much pretentious philosophizing and side trips, as when Hellman appears on a talk show to battle wits with other political journalists. This chapter wastes too much time on pundits smelling their own farts (15 pages worth) when its primary purpose is introducing Joanna Cook, a Gloria Steinem-esque character and the novel’s only significant female character. 

Of course, Joanna and Hellman end up in bed, because Hellman is just that irresistible to women. Here it should be noted that while the paperback cover depicts Hellman as looking like Warren Beatty, Hirschfeld’s description of him brought to mind a thirtysomething James Woods. It’s should also be noted that while his contemporaries on the best seller lists of the day wrote unapologetically of throbbing cocks and quivering cunts, Hirschfeld’s sex scenes are either described in florid abstractions or happen off-page and referenced after the fact. Below is this book’s most explicit sex scene, an earlier encounter between Hellman and one of his college groupies. Be sure to have your lotion and tissues ready:

She lowered her face between his legs, reached for his slack member with her lips.

Hot.

Some out-of-left field accusations regarding Masters’ sexuality, courtesy of Joanna, ultimately leads Hellman to suss out the assassin’s identity, and it’s here that the book really shows its age. Though published the same year the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, The Masters Affair makes it clear it was written prior to this 1973 resolution. Broad generalizations are made about homosexuals, including a psychiatrist spewing some horseshit about gays being drawn to highly structured professions, such as the military and law enforcement, because they supply a “representation of a father figure,” and how conversion therapy can help gay men lead “reasonably adjusted” hetero lives. This is also where Hellman, the free-thinking liberal protagonist, is revealed to be a homophobe (another similarity to James Woods), coercing a closeted government employee to talk by threatening to out him. This makes perfect sense for a book set in the early ’70s, but it killed whatever goodwill I had toward the character of Hellman.

The ending of the book is a bit puzzling. Hirschfeld describes how the killer is about attempt another assassination, except for much of this final scene the killer is thinking about shooting Masters, making the chapter read like a flashback to the book’s opening. More than likely Hirschfeld was just conveying that the killer had gone batshit, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, but I just found it confusing.

While I wouldn’t count it among my favorite Burt Hirschfeld novels, The Masters Affair is a fairly entertaining read, its take on the U.S. political climate of its time sadly just as relatable today. Hirschfeld’s take on homosexuality, however, is very much stuck in 1973.