Attractive, smart (as in fashionable and intelligent) upper middle class housewife Penelope Ashe became a literary sensation in 1969 with the publication of her adult novel Naked Came the Stranger. Ashe was the perfect person to become a pop culture sensation – a wholesome, pretty brunette suburbanite wife, possessing a mind spinning with hot, sexy, forbidden fantasies. The prior year Glenn Campbell had the hit “The Dreams of the Everyday Housewife”, elaborating on the pathetic notion that once a woman gives up her freedom to become a housewife she has nothing left in life but to fantasize about what might have been;
“She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles that weren't there yesterday
And thinks of the young man that she almost married
What would he think if he saw her this way?
She picks up her apron in little girl-fashion as something comes into her mind
Slowly starts dancing rememb'ring her girlhood
And all of the boys she had waiting in line
Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see ev'rywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me.”
Let’s face it – popular songs become popular because they reflect what a large segment of the public wants to romanticize about. Ashes’ book, however, was promoted as revolutionary because it showed what the bored housewife of the time really thought about to while away her lengthy days around the house. (Just as a scandalous predecessor Peyton Place tore the patrician façade off of small town living.) Although (or because) it played against the old fashioned notion of the wholesome housewife who thinks only of pleasing her husband, there was a very large segment of the public who clearly wanted to wallow in Mrs. Ashes’ type of fantasies. The book became a huge best seller.
According to Wikipedia:
“(The novel told the story of) Gillian and William Blake, hosts of a popular New York City breakfast radio chat show, The Billy & Gilly Show, where they play the perfect couple. When Gillian finds out that her husband is having an affair, she decides to cheat on him with a variety of men from their Long Island neighborhood. Most of the book is taken up by vignettes describing Gilly's adventures with a variety of men, from a progressive rabbi to a mobster crooner.”
Ashe clearly relished all the attention – conducting interviews with the press and making the rounds of the talk shows of the day. Refreshingly, Ashe did not seem to take herself, or her book overly seriously. Had people been more attuned to it, they might have picked up on her foolish comments as facetiousness; “A writer’s got to impale his guts on the typewriter”, Penelope offered as advice to struggling writers. Indeed, she seemed smarter than her book, and somehow, she even seemed smarter than her own comments.
By October 13, 1969, the book had sold 90,000 copies. It was on that date, though, at the height of her popularity, that Penelope Ashe was destroyed by an appearance on The David Frost Show.
After Frost introduced Penelope, the band played “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” and twenty four men walked on to Frost’s set. The men were Mike McGrady and 23 of his fellow Newsday reporters. “Penelope Ashe” had not written Naked Came the Stranger – it was written by these 24 men. McGrady resented the fact that horrendously written novels were being touted as valid works of literature just because they were popular, and they were popular only because they were full of explicit descriptions of sex.
McGrady wrote the first and final chapters of the book, and enlisted his fellow reporters to each pen a chapter – each a salacious, intentionally terribly written sex fantasy – the more ludicrous and un-erotic the better. As editor of the book, McGrady cleaned up a few blatantly inconsistent descriptions of the book’s heroine, but left in enough anomalies to make it obvious that the “author” was not even consistent in describing her main character. He collaborated with his cohorts to rewrite a few chapters because they were too well written.
They were originally toying with a title along the lines of “The Naked Stranger”, but felt that title lacked resonance. Eventually someone suggested Naked Came the Stranger. It had a mysterious quality. It had a pretension of poesy. Most importantly, one had to dwell on it for a while before its full naughty implication sank in – in the days of women’s lib, this woman was thoroughly enjoying her experiences. Yet, you could say the title on TV-- a child could hear it and not be corrupted. It was the perfect title for a potboiler. Surprisingly, the cover had a photo of a nude woman. While it was not full – frontal nudity, it was certainly full – dorsal nudity. The woman was shown from the back, kneeling on the floor, her rump resting on her feet. They could get away with this in 1969, but I doubt they could have a mainstream novel with a nude photo on the cover nowadays. I was going to just include a picture of it, then it dawned on me my mom is recommending my weblog to her friend in her sewing circle this week, so I decided I better not! (If you wanna see it, just look up the novel on Wikipedia.)
Not only did Penelope Ashe not write the notorious novel, Penelope Ashe didn’t even exist! While McGrady was hatching his scheme for this literary hoax, it dawned on him that his sister – in – law looked like a Jacqueline Susann type. She was a somewhat chic looking woman, who looked sporty enough to unashamedly make an industry out of her naughtiest ideas. Mrs. McGrady (sorry, I couldn’t find her first name anywhere on the ‘net – it was surprisingly hard to even find her photo) really played it to the hilt, and obviously had impressive improvisational skills to fool so many people. The men behind the book finally revealed the truth, because the popularity of the book proved Mike McGrady’s theory, and they felt a certain moral obligation to the public -- particularly out of concern that they were exploiting an unsophisticated segment of the book buying public.
Yet, there is no such thing as bad publicity. For a while the hoax became quite a cause celebre, and the public continued to buy the book in large numbers. The authors were even made an offer to write a follow – up, but they had the good taste to decline.
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