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.

Hot, Horny and Depressingly Relevant

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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.

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.