Showing posts with label Hugh Barron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hugh Barron. Show all posts

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Special People


Special People, by Hugh Barron
April, 1978  NEL Books

Okay, now that we’ve all taken a moment to appreciate that cover photo… Seriously though, this British paperback original has long been a mystery to me. As every schoolkid knows, “Hugh Barron” was a pseudonym used by Burt Hirschfeld early in his career; he seems to have dropped it upon the success of his 1970 blockbuster Fire Island, which was published under his own name. But then there’s this 1978 “Hugh Barron” book, only published in England; we know it’s by Hirschfeld, as it was reprinted in hardcover in 1988 – again only in the UK – under Hirschfeld’s name.

I picked this one up many years ago, before the blog, shortly after I learned of Hirschfeld’s work – probably around 2009, after I discovered Cindy On Fire at a used bookstore. I’m glad I did, as it appears Special People has become pretty scarce. I’ve often wondered what the story was behind it, but put off reading it because, per the back cover copy, it was about a football player, and I’m just not into football – and also, the back cover only refers to “football,” not specifying for British readers that it’s American football, not soccer. And there was also that 1978 date that put me off; I prefer my trash fiction from the late ‘60s to mid ‘70s. But now that I’ve actually read the book, I can confirm two things: it’s not much about football at all, and it was clearly written in the late ‘60s, probably 1969.

The ostensible protagonist, Cotton Tate, is indeed a famous running back for fictional football team the Truckers (apparently based out of New York), but there’s only one “football scene” late in the novel, and the narrative is more concerned with the large cast of characters that congregates around Cotton’s nightclub in the fashionable East Side of Manhattan. There’s a bunch of them, too, meaning that Cotton himself is lost in the shuffle; his subplot has it that he’s in debt to a mobster type, and is being requested to fumble plays and the like so as to affect the point spread. He borrowed the money to get his club, The Nubiles, and he’s desperate to maintain his lifestyle – secretly 37, which we’re told is ancient for a pro footballer, Cotton has a wife and kids back home but lives on his own, picking up women left and right. As described he seems to a Joe Namath type, only with “orange” hair.

Cotton’s a bastard for sure, a real love ‘em and leave ‘em type who walks over lesser mortals. The only part where we get to see any humanity is a brief bit where he visits home and we see that his young son looks up to him – and that his wife is quite happy with Cotton out prowling around, as she prefers sleeping alone! But regardless of whether he’s a hero or antihero, Cotton Tate doesn’t show up much, hence the subplot of him being in danger with the football commission and such doesn’t resonate with the reader. The sprawl of supporting characters is just too large, and the reader is left wanting a center, something to hold it all together. Only Cotton’s club, The Nubiles, performs in this capacity, with the titular “special people” being the screwed-up regulars who frequent the place, which is on First Avenue in the Sixties.

There are a lot of them, but Hirschfeld does his usual admirable job of juggling the large cast of characters; in this way the novel comes off like a prototype of Fire Island. First we have Deke Mann, a former PR guy in his 30s who now works as a writer for a TV talk show. While he starts off as a minor character – and an increasingly annoying one at that – Deke turns out to be pretty much the protagonist of the tale, as the narrative focuses on his sort of redemption through love. But for the majority of the tale his plot revolves around his increasing plunge into despair; divorced, with a young son he only sees once a week, Deke gets drunk a lot and starts fights he knows he can’t win, apparently looking to be beaten up. Eventually he starts stalking one of the female characters in the book – a pursuit that eventually pans out for him, #metoo be damned!

Kate is that female character, a hotstuff young babe with a heart of gold who lives with a small-chested wildchild named Libby. Kate initially falls in love with Cotton; she’s just one of his many one-night stands, but to her it seems to be something else, and she pursues him, only to be crushed. From here she ends up dating Cotton’s lawyer(!?), another doomed romance. Meanwhile Deke meets Kate in the Nubiles, falls for her, and starts making a nuissance of himself; there’s a bizarre sequence where he sees Kate looking at an expensive dress in a store window, and he goes in and buys it for her, even though he’s only ever said hello to her. She of course turns down the “nice gesture,” thereby setting off an also-bizarre subplot where Deke keeps carrying around the damn dress and trying to give it to her. Only when Kate realizes that this slouchy dude with the “angry eyes” and a propensity for stalking is really a sweetheart does she accept the gift.

Speaking of Libby, she’s another character who starts off as minor but gradually gets a little more focus. Her storyline seems to be a precursor of Cindy On Fire, in that she starts off as a partygirl bimbo but descends into drug-induced madness; there’s even a part where she literally runs from an orgy, same as Cindy would in her novel a few years later. She’s the daughter of some famous actress or something, just a total jet-setting nympho without a care in the world; one of the many subplots has it that the Nubiles bartender lets his mobster pals know when certain girls are at the club, and the mobsters send over guys to loot their apartments while they’re gone. When this happens to Libby and Kate’s apartment, Libby laughs it off. Her heart is broken by that same bartender, though, which leads her into a spiral of sex and drugs and swinging and whatnot, with her subplot mirroring Deke’s in that she finally finds redemption through love and understanding and all that jazz.

The novel seems to occur in a bland continnuum, Hirscheld for once failing to bring his world to life. There are hardly any topical references to the era, other than some of the outlandishly mod outfits Cotton Tate wears. This brings me to the matter of dating the manuscript. An early reference to Jimi Hendrix means Special People couldn’t have been written earlier than 1967, as that’s when Jimi came into the spotlight. There are also a few references to The Beatles which help pinpoint the date: we’re told someone says a lyric from “the new Beatles song,” and later someone mentions “All You Need Is Love,” implying that this might’ve been the earlier-referenced song. But late in the novel Libby, in a drug frenzy, hallucinates that the Blue Meanies are chasing her(!!!), and this would have to date the novel to late 1968, when The Yellow Submarine was released in the US. Another factor that makes me think the novel was written in early 1969 is a minor character states there are “no black quarterbacks” in football, a statement which was no longer true by 1969.

The Jimi mention occurs in one of my favorite parts of the book, if for no other reason than it’s a sad premonition of the average mentality of some of today’s “special people.” Deke ends up hooking up with some lady in her 30s at the Nubiles; she’s a proto social justice warrior, ranting and raving that America is a racist society founded on a lie. She also proudly announces that she’s had sex with several black men, just to prove that she herself isn’t a racist. (Little does she realize that this too will one day be considered racist.) She takes Deke back to her place, where Deke is shocked to discover the woman has left her seven year-old daughter alone (Hirschfeld masterfully calls out the hypocrisies of his characters with just a few subtle asides). She plays Jimi on the stereo – I guess because he’s black and all, but it’s not like Jimi really ever made “being black” a major part of his identity – and eventually she and Deke have some off-page sex (the majority of the sex is off-page, with the few on-page instances relayed in Hirscheld’s usual metaphorical prose of “cresting waves” and the like).

Unfortunately, there’s not much meat to the tale – it’s just a bunch of screwed-up characters congregating at a vaguely-descibed Manhattan nightclub. There are other characters besides the ones I’ve mentioned, like an older lady who looks young who sleeps around with a host of Nubles personages, all so as to gather “research” for the trashy novel her husband wants to write! This part could be its own novel, as the lady eventually is fashioned into a Jackie Susann type who will be positioned as the true author of the trashy tome. But nothing much comes of this subplot, like so many of the other subplots, save for a memorable bit where the lady is raped by a pair of over-eager football players…a situation the lady soon begins to enjoy!

As mentioned the football stuff isn’t that integral to the plot, other than Cotton’s woes with the commission – woes which are quickly dispensed thanks to a call to his lawyer. But it’s hard to give much of a shit about the guy because he’s presented as such an arrogant demigod of perfection, which is probably the same as what could be said about any real-life football star. He learns though that he’s gotten over his head with the mobsters who loaned him the money to buy the Nubiles, thus he will still have to affect the point spreads and etc to skew the betting numbers, but there’s no resolution to the storyline as the novel just sort of ends, so far as Cotton’s story goes: we see him playing a big game, giving his best, then we jump over to Deke and Kate, who have decided to leave New York and head off into a happily after ever.

The most interesting thing about Special People remains the question on why it was only published in the UK, even again under Hirschfeld’s own name. Perhaps Pyramid, the main publisher of his “Hugh Barron” work, just rejected it, as it must be said the novel isn’t very good. I mean it’s not bad, it’s just that it simmers for a couple hundred pages and never even reaches a low boil. And you don’t care about any of the characters. But then there’s the possibility Hirschfeld himself wasn’t happy with it, and maybe it’s what he was writing when Fire Island hit the bestseller list and thus he decided to postpone his “Hugh Barron” material. But then that again raises the question of why the novel was still published in the UK.

I guess we’ll never know. Otherwise though Special People isn’t up to the caliber of the other “Hugh Barron” books, all of which had great period details and more-gripping plots. However this one certainly had the best cover of them all! Now let’s get back to appreciating it…

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Fun City


Fun City, by Hugh Barron
August, 1968  Pyramid Books

Burt Hirschfeld poses as “Hugh Barron” in another of his paperback originals for Pyramid Books; this one, while not perfect, might be my favorite Barron yet. I was in the mood for a piece of trash fiction set in the swinging psychedelic ‘60s, and for the most part Fun City fit the bill perfectly. Unfortunately though just as much of it is inconsequential “city politics” boredom that seems lifted from the earlier Tilt!.

In fact, parts of Fun City are almost identical to Tilt!, though I enjoyed this book a lot more. While Tilt! started off promisingly in the acid rock clubs of California before becoming mired in a belabored “evils of politics” storyline, Fun City at least still remembers to give us the good stuff, with many scenes featuring the ‘60s jetset in all its vapid glory. Hirschfeld well captures the over-the-top pretensions of the era, from arrogantly serious “artists” to would-be fashion kingpins. And I love how the back cover informs us that this “caustic novel” is “as vivid as an LSD trip”!

Our hero is Eddie Watson, a very traditional Hirschfeld protagonist. He’s a bitter, 38-year-old alchoholic who was once a trailblazing journalist. But then his paper folded and Eddie spiralled into a period of drunkeness. He’s got an on-again, off-again girlfriend named Molly Purdy who is of course pretty and well-endowed (practically every single woman in Fun City is stated as having big boobs, by the way). But Molly, who works as a reporter herself, has finally gotten sick of Eddie’s uselessness. She loves him and pines for him, but he refuses to see his potential and wallows instead in self-pity. That being said, she doesn’t mind throwing him a free lay every once in a while. 

Speaking of sex, there’s a bit of it in Fun City, from orgies to romantic couplings to even gay sex, but Hirschfeld is in his lyrical mode this time. The sex scenes are written almost identically to the Hirschfeld-esque sex material Dean Koontz capably spoofed in Writing Popular Fiction. For example, here’s what passes for a sex scene later in the book, as Eddie engages with another lovely young lady who pines for him:

All the swelling desire. The pendulous need from out of some foreign and mysterious place, a call that drew them together in a tidal wave natural and harmonious, all rhythms easy, swinging. Time ceased and there was only the twilight of loving, the stroke of flesh against flesh, of membranes softer than soft, the wetness deep and sensuous, drawing endlessly on reservoirs so long untapped…

All right! I’m not sure what exactly is going on, but it sure sounds hot!!

Through Molly Eddie is brought into the world of New York politics. Eddie is fascinated by Charles Harrison, an altruistic millionaire known for his charities and acts of good will around the world. Harrison’s having a party in his deluxe Manhattan penthouse and Molly’s invited. There Eddie meets the man himself, a graying-haired paragon of manly virtue who likes Eddie’s cynicism and indeed is familiar with Eddie’s work for the paper. Harrison tells Eddie that he loves New York and plans to run for Mayor. He offers Eddie the job of becoming his campaign manager.

Meanwhile Hirschfeld takes us into the swinging jetset via Lilly Harrison, hot-to-trot young wife of Charles. She has a body to kill for and enjoys showing it off with the latest mod fashions. She’s vivacious and obsessed with being famous and comes off way too much like a vapid, modern-day Reality TV star. Eddie wonders why Charles is even with her, but gradually we’ll see there’s a strange bond which unites the couple. For Charles Harrison, you won’t be surprised at all to learn, has several skeletons in his own closet, from switch-hitting to group sex, not to mention ties to various underworld figures. This is revealed rather early on, but our hero Eddie doesn’t discover it until near novel’s end.

Lilly, apparently Hirschfeld’s attempt at writing a Jacqueline Susann-type antiheroine, is ultimately too listlessly self-involved to be very memorable; not to use the word yet again, but “vapid” is the perfect description for her. She yearns to be world-famous, but she’s such a cipher that you neither care for her nor despise her. She lacks the catty cruelty you’d expect from a character like this. Rather, the character who more closely captures this antiheroine nature would be Hester Quinn, basically the Eddie to Lilly’s Charles, a “birdlike” celebrity hanger-on who knows all the hip people in Manhattan and serves as Lilly’s adviser on how to become a mover and shaker in the jetset world. This includes wearing revealing clothes and having sex with random famous men.

Center stage in these jetset portions is Marcello, Hester’s Italian “discovery” who plans to take the fashion world by storm. Flamingly gay, Marcello storms and struts through the novel, stealing every scene despite being a walking cliché. (He’s also, we eventually learn, really just a dude named Victor Mellulo, from Wheeling, West Virginia!) Hirschfeld provides several scenes in which the jetset cavort at the latest Marcello happening, from an art exhibit to a fashion show to a Warhol-esque porn film he’s directed – one which leads to an orgy among the audience. Molly, bringing to mind the heroine of a later Hirschfeld novel, literally runs away from this orgy.

And that again is the problem with Fun City. Hirschfeld seeks to capture the “psychedelic salons and beauty-bugged bedrooms” of the “swinging, go-go world of New York City” (per the back cover copy), but he sabotages it with his cynical characters. Eddie hates this world of artifice, Molly distrusts it. And those who do live in it, like Lilly, Marcello, and Hester, are so cipher-like in their narcissim that the reader is unable to vicariously enjoy it through them. The “acid-rock” nightclubs and mod fashion happenings are capably brought to life, as are the mostly-nude, sexually-voracious gals who flock to this underworld in their “psychedelic blue” lipstick, but it’s all undermined by protagonists who yearn for the straight-laced world of yesteryear.

This was the same thing that bogged down Tilt!, by the way, as well as the “politics” material. In Fun City as well we read seemingly-endless sequences in which Charles Harrison will filibuster this or that New York bigwig. Not only is it rendered moot given that these are one-off characters he meets with, but his speechifying about how to make New York great again comes off as so much padding. Clearly this is Hirschfeld’s attempt at eventually pulling the rug out from under us, as Charles is later revealed to be just as “sick” as his wife Lilly; in the course of the novel he cruises a gay area and picks up some dude (later beating him in his shame), then later on he picks up a pair of young girls and takes them back to their place for some nondescript lovin’.

But Hirschfeld does bring to life psychedelic New York City. There’s an enjoyable part where Eddie sees Lilly go off with some new stud and rushes after her, drafting Hester to lead him to her, Marcello tagging along. They go to the Lower East Side, first stopping in the headshop of The Czar, then head on over to a hippie “crash pad” where legions of teenagers have sex on the scuzzy, garbage-strewn floors. Hirschfeld really goes for it in this scene, which culminates with Eddie finding Lilly in an LSD daze, meditating in the lotus position while her latest stud, a playboy named Tolan, whips some other girl who has displeased him.

We also get a lot of Hirschfeld’s typical soap opera-style melodrama: Molly as mentioned constantly spurns Eddie, only to later welcome him back to her apartment with open legs. And Eddie promises to quit the booze and devote himself to both her and Harrison’s campaign. Instead he blows off dates with Molly and gets drunk a bunch of times. After the latest Molly breakup Eddie happens to meet a young social worker named Sarah Jane Parker (yep, she’s busty too!). In a complete disregard for character depth, Hirschfeld has this gal openly throwing herself at Eddie soon after meeting him, offering to make him a meal in her apartment.

Eddie I forgot to mention is an annoying asshole. He eats the meal, has a drink, and tells the girl she’s practically a slut! She’s only in her twenties and he feels she should straighten up and stop bringing strange men back to her place. He leaves without even taking her up on her open offer for sex…then “coincidentally” meets her again during a too-long scene where Harrison filibusts at a school in Harlem. In the ensuing riot (started by Black Panthers), Eddie runs into Sarah again. The two eventually become an item (the “sex scene” above is between Eddie and Sarah), but Molly is still on the sidelines. She’s found out how corrupt Harrison is – he’s almost penniless and indebted to the mob, who funds his campaign – and Molly intends to tap into wealth via Eddie.

The finale of Fun City plays out on an unexpected sequence of turnarounds; Eddie, hearing the truth of Harrison’s underworld activities, hunts the man down in a gay bar. For his troubles Eddie is almost beaten to death by a gang of gay stooges at Harrison’s command(!). Eddie manages to escape them, stealing the gun of one and shooting him before escaping. But he finds no salvation in Molly; when Eddie refuses to play ball and go back to Harrison – Molly wants Eddie to keep working for the man so they can strike it rich when he wins the election – she grabs Eddie’s gun, puts it on him, and calls Harrison to come get him!

After yet another escape Eddie finds true salvation with Sarah, still treating her like shit as he eats breakfast with her, his pistol at hand. The final face-to-face with Harrison isn’t exciting at all, playing more on a suspense angle than the Sharpshooter capoff I wanted. Eddie has gotten hold of some photos of Lilly in compromising positions, and uses these as blackmail to get Harrison to call of his dogs and to drop out of the race. After which it’s back to Sarah, who tells Eddie they should leave the city together. And Eddie has finally gotten an idea for a novel; he’s going to write about these very events, which will make for a surefire bestseller(!?).

Hirschfeld’s writing has the same positives and negatives as ever. He keeps the story moving, brings us into this world, and makes us care for the characters. But at the same time the plot is a bit plodding and the politicking becomes grating. Also Hirschfeld’s affected style is firmly in place – you know, how he takes a sentence, expands upon it greatly, going on and on with it, getting to the heart of it, the core, working it up into a theme, a construction of depth and meaning. Polishing it. Elaborating it. Hammering it out, over and over again, endlessly, infinitely. Until the reader. Cannot take it. Anymore. (You get the drift….)

The core of later Hirschfeld novels can be found here; the entire “psychedelic hippie hell” section in the Lower East Side for example would return in Father Pig, where Hirschfeld made it seem even more hellish. And as mentioned there are many paralells with Cindy On Fire. One thing missing this time is the Hollywood starlet character ususally typical of the “Hugh Barron” books.

Anyway, despite the affected style and the sometimes-plodding pace, Fun City is really vintage Burt Hirschfeld, and did the job of providing the piece of go-go ‘60s pulp fiction I was hoping for.

Here’s the cover of the NEL edition:


And here’s the cover of the Dell edition from 1984, published under Hirschfeld’s name (interestingly, the back cover copy of this one spins it as a hardboiled yarn):

Monday, January 19, 2015

Bonnie


Bonnie, by Hugh Barron
November, 1970  NEL Books
(Original US edition, 1965)

One of the more obscure Burt Hirschfeld novels, Bonnie is also the most fun, and certainly the most sleazy and pulpy. Originally published under the house name “Oscar Bessie,” Bonnie is all about a horny young woman who becomes “the princess of the motorcycle gangs.”

If ever there was a Hirschfeld novel that should’ve been an AIP biker movie, this is the one. Curiously, it was never reprinted under Hirschfeld’s name in the US (more of which below), and it only appeared under his “Hugh Barron” pseudonym in the UK. The “Oscar Bessie” edition was published by Domino Books, a sleaze imprint of Lancer, however be aware the novel isn’t explicit, really, and not just due to the year it was published (1965); Hirschfeld is very much in his metaphorical mode this time out, with climaxes compared to cresting waves and etc.

Bonnie shares almost the exact same template as a later Hirschfeld novel, Cindy On Fire. Like Cindy Ashe, Bonnie Dixon is 19, beautiful, blonde, and bored. Living in Bayville, an area of Long Island, Bonnie like the later Cindy is saddled with a loser of a fiance, super-square Bob Horner. The dude doesn’t even believe in premarital sex! The novel opens with yet another of his refusals, as Bonnie implores Bob to take her one night after a date. Throwing a fit when she’s turned down for the umpteenth time, Bonnie runs away from Bob’s car, whips off her clothes, and runs nude along a deserted stretch of the beach.

After spying on a couple having sex, Bonnie swims nude in the ocean. When she lays back on the sand she’s almost raped by a pair of bikers. She’s only saved by the appearance of their leader, a muscular, good-looking dude who wields a riding crop. This is Mike Shaw, leader of the Apaches “motorcycle club.” The two would-be rapists are Leo and Buster. Mike gives Bonnie a ride home, and she’s so excited she can’t sleep that night and must pleasure herself (again, written in a very metaphorical style).

Bonnie, increasingly distant from her parents and Bob Horner, runs into the Apaches again, and tells them she wants to join. But she doesn’t just want to be a “squaw;” she wants to be a full-fledged member, with her own bike. First though she must pass the “Ordeals” all new Apaches must face. The first ordeal is a mugging in a park, Bonnie distracting a pair of random dudes while a few Apaches swoop in and attach them, and then Bonnie must join in the fight. She enjoys it so much she nearly beats the victims to a pulp.

The next ordeal is a brutal fight with another female Apache, while the rest of the gang watches. It takes place in an old farmhouse the Apaches have taken for themselves, and Bonnie is able to overcome her more-powerful opponent, using her wits and her speed. This leads immediately into the final ordeal, which first has Bonnie bathed by “handmaidens,” and then, nude, put up on an auction block! The Apaches bid for her, and the winner gets Bonnie for the night.

Hirschfeld, realizing he was required to write a sleazy tale, goes all the way – a female Apache bids for Bonnie at an exorbitant cost. This is Paula Hart, gorgeous redhead with a shitkicker bod. Paula takes Bonnie to a separate room and has her put on thigh-high boots and hands her a whip. Yes, friends, Hirschfeld really goes for it, here – Paula gets off on being whipped, and urges Bonnie to lash the hell out of her, after which Paula crawls on her hands and knees to an exhausted Bonnie and starts dining at the Y…friends, I never knew ol’ Burt had it in him!

Three weeks later and Bonnie’s such a diehard Apache she threatens to usurp Mike’s position as leader. She has her own crew now, in particular Paula, Leo, and Buster, and she and Mike are on the verge of open warfare. Not that this stops Bonnie from occasionally screwing Mike. Hirschfeld also intimates that Bonnie’s screwed most of the Apaches, but wisely, for such a short novel (124 pages), he limits the narrative to just a few named characters. Strangely, Bonnie is still engaged to Bob Horner, who not only still refuses to have sex with her, but apparently is oblivious about her secret life as an Apache.

Now our antihero needs her own motorcycle. One thing I should mention is that Bonnie is pretty scant so far as biker stuff goes – I mean, motorcycle models aren’t mentioned, and there’s maybe two or three parts where people even ride their bikes. It’s more about Bonnie’s need for constant thrills, and the increasing levels of sadism and danger she compels her fellow Apaches to. It’s also your typical morality play-type tale, about the dangers of peering too far into the abyss.

Anyway, Mike Shaw pokes fun at Bonnie that she could just ask her loaded parents for the money to buy a bike. But Bonnie’s plan wins yet more favor from the Apaches – she’s going to rob her own parents. Once again employing Paula, Leo, and Buster, Bonnie and her three followers dress “completely in black leather, including full-face wind masks and leather helmets” and head for Bonnie’s home. There they break in, threaten Bonnie’s parents with knives, tie them up, and raid the safe.

But before Bonnie can even buy a bike, she goes back to the farmhouse, where new Apaches are being inducted…and bids on the new girl for herself! This is buxom, vixenish Leah, who is game for a little lesbian fun with Bonnie, though again it doesn’t drop into outright sleaze. I mean, to be sure, there’s lots of dirty stuff going on, but it’s written so “poetically” that it never descends into porn. Bonnie has outbid Mike for Leah, which furthers the potential Apache rift, something compounded when Bonnie gets her own chopper and starts leading around her own little crew.

The Apaches are at war with the Monarchs, a gang from a few towns over that greatly outnumbers the Apaches. Mike has never been able to defeat them. Bonnie knows that if she comes up with a strategy to destroy them, she’ll immediately become the leader of the Apaches. Her plan is as usual mean-spirited and crazy; she breaks into a beach house, hides weapons in it, and invites the Monarchs over for a big party.

Having the “squaws” and other female members “be nice” to the Monarchs (including the memorable image of Leah standing over three satiated and unconscious Monarchs), Bonnie gets the other gang nice and drunk while she and the Apaches stay sober. Then, after Bonnie’s had (unfulfilling) sex with the Monarch “war chief,” she blows a whistle and the battle begins. The Apaches beat the shit out of the Monarchs, trashing the beach house in the process.

A recurring element – same as in Cindy On Fire -- is that Bonnie cannot achieve satisfaction in anything, especially sex. Constantly spurred to greater lengths, she ends up screwing Mike Shaw yet again, and then racing with him on the night roads at top speed. When a cop gives chase, Mike attempts to lead him to his death, but Bonnie panics and crashes herself, saving the cop’s life. She’s sprung from jail, and it’s even worse because her parents and Bob Horner are even more understanding and etc.

But it’s worse with the Apaches – Bonnie goes to the farmhouse to discover that she’s now persona non grata, thanks to her saving a cop’s life. She has to murder someone to make amends with the gang, or they’ll kill her. When Bonnie refuses to kill a bum that night at a park, she runs from Mike and Paula, almost killing the former with the wrench she was supposed to use on the bum. Bonnie, just like Cindy Ashe, ends up running to the man she’s treated like shit since page one – her fiance, Bob Horner.

Humorously enough, Hirschfeld only bothers to inform us here in the eleventh hour that Bob was formerly a collegiate wrestler, and is still a big and muscular guy! (The image previously presented to us clearly made him out to be a 90-pound weakling.) The couple goes to the beach, where Bonnie unloads her story to a noncommittal Bob. Then, right on cue, Mike, Paula, Leo, and Buster show up, staging an ambush right where this whole story began.

Would you be surprised that Bob Horner makes short work of the three men? Better yet is Bonnie’s fight with Paula, who comes at her with a knife. This is a pretty vicious catfight, which ends with Bonnie finishing Paula off with “a perfect karate chop” to the throat. Then Bob, suddenly the man, hops on one of the choppers, tells Bonnie to get behind him, and blasts off! Then he insists they swim nude…and have sex right there on the beach!

And of course, just like Cindy Ashe who too was reunited at long last with the man she’d treated like shit, only to find he was the perfect match for her, Bonnie Dixon finally knows true satisfaction and happiness with Bob Horner. As mentioned, it’s a morality play, or whatever you all it, only one filled with leather-clad biker chicks and lesbian sex and occasional mentions of “pot parties.” In other words, it’s pretty great.

Maybe the one thing holding Bonnie back from true greatness is, again, Hirschfeld’s ornate style, which admittedly isn’t as busy here as it is in some of his other books. And also you have to admire how much he packs into so few pages. Given that Bonnie was never reprinted under his own name, you have to wonder if Hirschfeld maybe disowned it, but I think there might be another story there.

Bonnie was first published by Domino, as mentioned a Lancer imprint; this NEL reprint is copyright Lancer Books. When Hirschfeld reprinted his “Hugh Barron” books in the ‘80s, Bonnie was not included – but then, all of the other Hugh Barron novels had originally been printed by Pyramid Books. Lancer had been out of business since September 1973. So what I’m trying to say is, maybe Bonnie was never reprinted in the ‘80s because Hirschfeld couldn’t secure the rights to it.

Who knows. At any rate Bonnie is pretty fun. Here’s the cover of that original Domino/Lancer edition, from 1965, which not only gets it wrong by making Bonnie a brunette, but also by making her look like a drag queen:

Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Love Thing


The Love Thing, by Hugh Barron
June, 1970 Pyramid Books

I can't believe I let summer pass me by without reading a Burt Hirschfeld novel; the guy's books are perfect summer reading. I realized this around mid-October and so proceeded to read The Love Thing, one of Hirschfeld's last novels to be published under his "Hugh Barron" psuedonym. Given that it was still 90 degrees here in Dallas, my "home" of the past several years, it was like summer hadn't ended anyway. (But then, "summer" really isn't an appropriate term for the season here; "hell on earth" would be more fitting.)

Once again the cover compares Hirschfeld's novel to Jacqueline Susann, and The Love Thing does focus on the Hollywood life, only it's not as trashy or campy as you'd wish. In fact the novel was kind of boring; once again Hirschfeld has stuffed too many characters into a novel too thin on plot or action. "The Love Thing" is Maggie Love, a 40 year-old screen superstar who has gone to seed, drinking heavily and gaining weight, her star fading fast. (In other words, Elizabeth Taylor circa 1970.) She's just starred in a big studio picture titled The Big Ones, and the gist of the novel is the studio's attempts to publicize the new film.

Maggie really isn't the protagonist here; again, there are many characters, but the foremost two are Roger Hare, a wily PR man who will do anything to get into a position of power, and Tony Parker, one of Roger's PR men, but a guy with a bit more class and heart. A big portion of The Love Thing is devoted to Tony's failing marriage with his wife Serena (feel free to make up your own Bewitched joke). In fact, too damn much of the novel is given over to this middling storyline.

Events are spread over several weeks as various characters attend meetings and go to the occasional party; here Hirschfeld shines, with his usual dopesmoking groovy psychedelic-era sequences of hotpants-wearing girls swinging it to pounding mod freakbeat while older guys watch the action from behind beaded curtains, smoking Chesterfields and wondering how they can get in on the action. But unfortunately such scenes are few and far between. The novel misses that flair for trash Hirschfeld displays in his other novels, and comes off as the fulfilment of a contract with Pyramid Books.

Like many Hollywood novels of the era, The Love Thing is concerned with the "death" of the Hollywood studio system and the emergence of the "New Hollywood" (which didn't last nearly as long); many characters spend pages discussing cinema verite and the work of artsy French directors.

And "The Love Thing" herself is lost in the shuffle; Maggie Love is of course the most interesting thing here, a fallen star given to drink and excess, preparing for her death trip. There could've been a great novel here about the lady, in fact a novel that would've justified the Jacqueline Susann comparisons, but instead we have tiresome sequences of various characters discussing PR events and Tony Parker wondering how he can win back his wife.

The best thing about The Love Thing is the cover for the New English Library edition, which was published in 1971. This was actually the cover that got me obsessed with finding all of the Hugh Barron novels a few years ago:


And you've gotta love the mirror image on the back cover:


Like the majority of the Hugh Barron novels, The Love Thing was reprinted by Dell Books in 1984 under Hirschfeld's own name. The cover for this edition is pretty cool, too:

Monday, April 4, 2011

Burt Hirschfeld: A Face For The Name

I've wondered for years what Burt Hirschfeld looked like. Thanks to the hardcover editions of his 1978 novel Key West and his 1984 novel Flawless, I finally know. Each book features a photo of the man himself, and he looks nothing like I thought he would.

Here's Hirschfeld on the back cover of Key West:


And here he is from Flawless:


I have to guess that Hirschfeld probably shrugged off those mortal coils a long time ago. As I theorized in an earlier post, it was probably sometime in the early 1990s, as that's when his steady stream of novels came to an abrupt stop.

But as I also stated earlier -- he left behind a huge body of work, one that's ripe for rediscovery.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Tilt! (aka The Corruptor)


Tilt!, by Hugh Barron
October, 1967 Pyramid Books
(Published in the UK as The Corruptor, 1969)

This was the second novel Burt Hirschfeld published under his Hugh Barron psuedonym, and though the Pyramid cover references Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls and Harold Robbins's The Adventurers, Tilt! is its own thing, unlike either of those two novels. It's about a sleazy PR guy named Deke Dixon who is certain his latest find, a huckster named "Preacher" Pope (really) is guaranteed to become the next governor of California. Tilt! exploits the then-current psychedelic scene, but gradually becomes mired in unrelated subplots and endless rhetoric courtesy Preacher Pope and the other politicians he and Deke become associated with, which gradually makes reading the novel a bit of a slog.

It starts off pretty good, though: thanks to Deke's manuevering Preacher has become a regular fixture at a psychedelic-themed strip club on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, where he preaches love and sex to the Day Glo-painted masses. Orgies generally follow his preachings, and business is good. Yet Deke wants more. He figures Preacher's "free love" preaching will so overcome the youth population that Preacher could easily become the governor of California.

Unsurprisingly, the duo find this is easier said than done. After being turned down by one heavyweight in the political field, they become involved with a far-right nutjob who too sees the potential in Preacher. In true pulp fashion this guy lives in a sort of Medieval castle in the middle of the woods, where he controls an army and plots the conservative Republican takeover of California...and from there, the entire country!

This section of the novel is so prescient as to be both hilarious and sad. The far-right nutjob, Hiram Woodward, runs the Breed's Hill Congress, which caters to the fears and prejudices of the average conservative Christian Republican. It's as if the novel suddenly takes place in 2005 (or any other year during the Dubya Bush reign) and not 1967. Preacher is refashioned into a champion of Old Virtues and Morality, demagoguing his way through the conservative trenches of California, speaking to the fear and paranoia of the "true American." This entails way too many political/religious speeches on Preacher's part, but again, it's funny in that it provides further proof how little things change.

But then, as if realizing he doesn't have enough story to fill an entire novel, Hirschfeld flashes back for a long section which details how Deke became involved with Preacher. We see Deke's conman beginnings in New York City, how due to an affair with his boss's wife he had to leave the city and decided upon LA as his new base of operations. Next comes an endless and bizarre sequence, unrelated to the rest of the novel, in which Deke attempts to make a busty young dancer into a superstar. He arranges one crackpot scheme after another, each of them failures: the strangest is when he hires two bikers to "pretend" to rape the girl, so she can stagger to the nearest news outlet and relay her story. Meanwhile the bikers rape her for real and, instead of even telling the story, the poor girl calls Deke and goes home to recuperate. There's another goofy sequence where she parachutes, wearing nothing but a bikini, into the pool of a famous producer's house while a party of Hollywood notables is in progress.

After all of this Deke finally meets Preacher, and we get little understanding why he so latches onto the guy as a surefire means to success. Preacher's just a hollow-eyed huckster, a man who truly believes in Christianity and yet enjoys sleeping with young girls, the younger the better. Deke, through one of his crackpot schemes with the wanna-be starlet, has inadvertently started a sensation at the local college. There, influenced by Deke's style, two guys have started a sex club. They invite Deke to the next orgy and, after one poor new girl is "initiated" via rape, they all head out to the beach, where Preacher appears like some prophet. Deke watches him work, somehow making the kids listen to his fire and brimstone spiel, and the big idea hits him.

The novel gets even stranger. Deke's big idea is to have Preacher headline at a strip club where, as nude girls gyrate about him, he exhorts the club-goers on the justness of free love and casual sex. And people line up around the block to pay to hear him! This of course generates a bit of publicity, which makes it all the more unbelieveable that Preacher can later be remodeled as a proclaimer of morality and purity. Any muckracking reporter could easily dig up the guy's sordid past, but Deke and new boss Hiram Woodward overcome this by having Preacher get married...to Deke's ex-wife, a failed actress and all-around-drunk named Margot.

I guess my issue with Tilt! is that it's just all so hard to buy. The psychedelic club stuff is pretty good, with lots of go-go dancers and flashing lights, but it doesn't gel with the old traditions rhetoric Preacher must later spout. Also, Preacher himself doesn't even want to become the next governor of California, so again Deke's single-minded determination rings hollow. And there's too much going on, none of it satisfactorily tied together, including the subplot of Deke trying to woo a major superstar named Margot Sain -- the suspense is ruined because a third of the way through the novel we see, via a long flashback, Deke's vain attempts to win the girl over; meanwhile, we already know from the first half of the novel that the two are a couple.

Normally I enjoy Hirschfeld's writing but I found parts of Tilt! a bit wearying. His style here is more affected than usual, and I'm certain this is due to his trying to fill a page quota. This too would explain all of the random and unrelated backstory for Deke. Also the page-long diatribes of Preacher and the other conservative politicians. But despite it all I still enjoy the guy's writing. It's a toss-up; I love the Hugh Barron novels because they're so pulpy and exploitative, but the novels Hirschfeld published under his own name are just better written.

NEL published Tilt! under the better title The Corruptor in 1969. Here's the cover:

And here's the cover for the rarely-seen Dell reprint from 1985:

Friday, February 25, 2011

The Goddess Game


The Goddess Game, by Hugh Barron
November, 1969 Pyramid Books

Between 1967 and 1971 Burt Hirschfeld published a handful of novels under the psuedonym Hugh Barron (with a final novel, Special People, published in the UK only in 1978). Each of the Hugh Barron books were "in the tradition of"-type novels, the "tradition" in question usually being "Harold Robbins."

Hirschfeld's 1969 novel The Goddess Game however is "in the tradition of" Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls -- so much so that Pyramid Books even references Susann's novel on the cover. (Incidentally, the cover of the Pyramid edition of The Goddess Game, shown here, is by far my favorite of all the Burt Hirschfeld/Hugh Barron novels: taken by photographer Lester Krauss, the shots are almost like stills from an imaginary film based on the novel, one redolent with the groovy, swingadelic vibe of the time -- and The Goddess Game would've made for one helluva groovy, swingadelic movie.)

The novel opens in 1969 or thereabouts; Mandy Brooke, rabble-rousing movie star and all-around queen bitch, goes missing on the night of the Oscars. Mandy is beloved by the heartland of America; she is so known for heartwarming roles that the public thinks of Mandy herself as a golden-hearted samaritan. In reality however Mandy's into all sorts of sordid shenanigans, and this is just her latest escapade: despite the round-the-clock watch the studio placed on her on this most important of days (Mandy's up for an Oscar), she still manages to escape and disappear. Tod Little, head of the studio's PR department, is tasked by studio chief HH to track Mandy down. Tod's only clue is a tidbit the watcher overheard as Mandy was on the phone, shortly before she disappeared: something about "after all these years, it sounds like fun!"

From there the novel takes up a sort of trash fiction Citizen Kane approach. Working under the assumption that Mandy is going to meet up with some old friends, Tod tracks down three of Mandy's former acquaintances: Ursula Lawrence, Holly Parker, and Trish Sanders. The majority of the narrative, then, is given over to flashbacks for each of them, occuring the decade before, when the four girls all shared a room in New York City and together sought fame in the acting world.

It's this flashback nature which hampers The Goddess Game. In short, the storylines for each of the four women are mostly the same. The material in 1969 however is true trash gold and makes one wish for more of it. For as the narrative progresses we learn that Mandy hasn't just escaped; she's been kidnapped, and the kidnappers already have a stash worth of photos of Mandy taking part in "unwholesome activities" with a bunch of men and women.

Only Mandy's flashback sequence comes close to equalling the 1969 portion: Mandy is a true trash fiction bitch, the "Neely O'Hara" of the novel. (The entire novel comes off like a "spot the Valley of the Dolls analogue" guessing game.) Like Neely, Mandy Brooke is a pill-popping man-eater, a malicious monster who schemes and manipulates and backstabs. Her flashback is the juiciest, as she sets up "friend" Holly so as to steal her part in a Broadway play: Mandy pays some bikers to rape the poor girl, and then, while it's happening, places an anonymous call to both the cops and the gossip rags that a "wild sex orgy" is taking place with a Broadway actress in attendance. From there Mandy becomes only more deliciously conniving: she makes a famous, elderly director fall so in love with her that he divorces his wife of decades; then she sleeps with a variety of men so as to become pregnant and fool the director into believing that it's his child, so he will marry her; then she gets an abortion while he's away. Finally she literally screws the poor bastard to death; now that she has the standing of his name, she doesn't need the man himself.

The flashbacks for the other three girls just can't compare to this. And to make it worse, there isn't much difference between Mandy Brooke and Ursula Lawrence. Like Mandy, Ursula is a scheming, backstabbing beauty, one who will do anything for fame. She isn't as cruel as Mandy, so therefore Ursula's backstory isn't as fun. Instead, it's rather boring: Ursula cons a gay theater director into making her a Broadway star.

Trish Sanders is the good girl of the lot, the "Anne Welles" of the novel. A smalltown girl who has come to the big city to hone her craft, Trish is the only one of the four who has any acting talent. She doesn't seek to become a "star" like the rest of them. So again, her flashback can't compare to Mandy's, but makes for a fine character study -- Trish is very much in the mold of the female characters in later Hirschfeld novels. Her particular fate is marrying a closeted gay actor, finding him in bed with another man, and then breaking down. Her fate is more rosy than the others: like Mandy, Trish also finds lasting fame in the acting business, becoming a well-respected actress. She's up for an Oscar in the 1969 portion as well, but like the other girls Tod Little speaks to, hasn't seen Mandy in the past ten years.

Finally there's Holly Parker, the blonde with the brick shithouse-bod and the intelligence of a pea. Her flashback comes last and it's a smart gambit from Hirschfeld; we read about Holly's "wild sex orgy" setup early in the novel but must wait until near the end to discover how it went down and its aftermath. She is of course The Goddess Game version of Jennifer North, a gorgeous gal with a big heart who, despite her good nature, runs afoul of supremely bad luck. After being torn apart in the newspapers due to her alleged orgy antics, Holly escapes back home to the simple life of a farm. Wanting to become smarter, she reads voraciously and eventually decides to go to college. (Only in the world of trash fiction can gang rape lead to heightened intelligence.) Holly falls in love with one of her teachers, a man twenty years older than she, and marries; she of all the girls is given the "happily ever after," content with her small world and family life.

The 1969 framing story culminates with Mandy freed from her kidnappers, who turn out to have been the same three bikers she hired a decade ago to rape Holly. But Mandy was a willing attendee of the orgy; she gloats to HH and Tod Little that "two other girls" were there and "there was nothing we didn't do, nothing." Sadly, Hirschfeld skips the promised action scene here; we're only told that Mike Toland (HH's security chief) and his men beat up the bikers, we don't see it happen. From there Mandy is taken, still nude and spaced-out on various drugs, to a doctor who injects her with Vitamin B, and then she's dressed and sent to the Oscars, where it's expected she will win Best Actress.

Hirschfeld's writing is mostly good, but I get the feeling The Goddess Game was churned out quickly. One can see why he eventually gave up the psuedonym game and started publishing better-crafted stories under his own name. In an amusing bit of page-filling Hirschfeld repeats snatches of text whole-hog throughout the novel; a few scenes recur during the four flashbacks, and Hirschfeld just re-uses text he's already written. He also POV-hops a lot in this novel, which always causes me to die just a little.

Here's the cover for the NEL edition, from 1969:


And a bonus cover -- in 1985 Dell Books reprinted the Hugh Barron novels under Hirschfeld's own name. I have to say, though: none of these cover models really fit my description of a "goddess!"

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Acapulco


Acapulco, by Burt Hirschfeld
October, 1972 Dell Books

Acapulco was first released in hardcover in 1971, coming out after Hirschfeld's breakout hit Fire Island. And it's mosty the same novel, another "beach read" -- a large, diverse group of people come to a scenic locale and deal with their various hangups while getting hammered and having sex. Of the two I think Fire Island is the better novel, even though Acapulco is really good in its own right. There's just something missing here, as if Hirschfeld has spread himself too thin with the huge cast of characters and subplots.

At the center of the novel is Paul Foreman, a gifted director who, after hitting it sort of big with a low-budget film, now drinks himself to death in a Mexican slum. Enter Harry Bristol, loudmouthed producer who's shooting a new movie titled Love, Love (really) in Acapulco -- Bristol's got his star, he's got his crew, he's got his funding...he's got everything but a director, because he fired the last one after a day's work due to the man's insistence upon retakes. Bristol is a man who cares only for money and hopes to become rich with the success of Love, Love.

The filmmakers are the central characters of the novel, and we see how they affect and interract with others in the expat community of Acapulco (for a novel set in Mexico, there's only one or two actual Mexican characters on display). Prime among these fringe characters is Samantha Moore, a once-famous socialite now in the decline of her glory; she owns a massive estate in Acapulco in which she allows the crew to film a nude swimming scene. Clinging to Samantha is Theo Gavin, an entrepreneur who pretends to be wealthier than he is, and Charles, Theo's hippie son. The father and son have come to Acapulco to reconnect but it's a hopeless cause; and honestly Charles is a deadweight of a character, the male version of Cindy Ashe from Cindy On Fire. Just another bland rich kid who mopes and pines about the world.

Nothing much really happens in Acapulco, though there are some good setpieces. Samantha throws a Christmas costume party at her estate, in which guests come dressed as characters from Mexican history. This is a ribald scene filled with drunk jetsetters and royalty duking it out by the pool. Charles Gavin justifies his presence in the novel by going on an actual dopequest; with a trio of fellow hippies he goes off into the hills in search of "magic mushrooms." Hirschfeld writes the ensuing trip with a nice psychedelic touch. And, unlike boring Cindy Ashe, at least Charles comes out of his trip a changed man.

A lot of narrative is spent on the filming of Love, Love, which sounds truly awful. Imagine Love Story as directed by Dennis Hopper and produced by Roger Corman and you might have an idea. Paul Foreman, the director, is the ostensible lead protagonist here, but he too is a shattered man, a drunk who lashes out at everyone. Paul has a quest of his own, in another of the novel's good moments: he spots a gorgeous caucasian woman in the crowded Acapulco marketplace and is obsessed with finding out who she is. It turns out to be Grace Biondi, another American expat here to study one of the dangerous mountain tribes which lurk about Acapulco. Paul forces himself into her life -- Grace, too, has hangups she must overcome -- and the two gradually fall in love.

Hirschfeld includes all of the trash fiction standards: there's sex, drugs, even a bit of violence. A late plot development features Samantha kidnapped by another of those dangerous mountain tribes, but after a lot of setup Hirschfeld downplays the promised action. In fact, maybe that's the core problem with Acapulco. It just seems like a retread of Fire Island, only without the skill and craftsmanship of that earlier novel. But on the other hand, Acapulco has a bit more of an exotic flair about it, and it better captures the groovy sexadelic era.

As far as the actual writing goes, I'll admit I lack any objectivity when it comes to Hirschfeld's prose. For whatever reason I really enjoy his writing; he has a definite skill for putting you inside a character's head, for creating three-dimensional worlds and situations. I will say however that he's guilty here of a bit too much POV-hopping for my tastes. And also a few of the characters are too similar; Theo Gavin and Harry Bristol could've easily been combined into one character.

Speaking of movies, Acapulco would've made for a fine early '70s film. It again mystifies me that none of Hirschfeld's novels were picked up for a movie; the closest he got was when his '76 bestseller Aspen was turned into a TV miniseries.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Cindy On Fire


Cindy On Fire, by Burt Hirschfeld
April, 1971 Avon Books

As mentioned in my review of Fire Island, Cindy on Fire was my introduction to Burt Hirschfeld. I discovered the novel in the time-honored tradition: browsing the mass market paperback shelves at a local used books emporium. The title caught my eye, and I checked out the cover and its groovy illustration of partying people. But it was the back-cover copy that really drew me in:

Welcome to Cindy's world -- the decadent playground of society studs and jet-set perverts, of dirty old men out for naked young bodies and freaking hippies into acid-rock scenes. Follow her search for fulfillment -- out of her middle-class upbringing into the sordid glamour of international film making and on to a non-stop merry-go-round of exotic lovers. It's a trip too hot to forget!

By the time I got to "freaking hippies" I was already on my way to the register. The book seemed to offer all I demand in trash fiction: sex, drugs, rock, gorgeous gals. Globetrotting jet-setters living at the peak of mod fashion. But I soon discovered that Cindy On Fire was a psuedo-sequel to Fire Island, so I tracked that novel down and read it first. Really though, Cindy On Fire isn't much of a sequel and could be read completely separate from Fire Island. Though if features a few of the same characters, they don't impact the narrative at all; Cindy herself is the main character throughout, and she herself only received a few passing mentions in Fire Island. For whereas the former novel was a Harold Robbins-esque study of a large cast of characters and how they interracted with one another over the years, Cindy On Fire is a picaresque, following our bland heroine from one sexual misadventure to another.

But it's not as trashy as that back-cover blurb implies. Instead it appears that Hirschfeld here was attempting a sort of "commentary on the late 1960s" thing, and so the novel comes off like Candy meets Forrest Gump, with our heroine inadvertently encountering all of the countercultural milestones of the era while being chased by countless horny men.

Cindy Ashe is an 18 year-old knockout living in the New York City of 1968. The novel occurs at the same time as the final half of Fire Island: Cindy learns that her huckster father Roy has been arrested for murder. Cindy meanwhile is busy turning tricks for her heroin-addicted closet gay boyfriend BB (a great reverse image of Fire Island, where Cindy and BB appeared to us as wholesome teens). But after hearing of Robert Kennedy's death, Cindy freaks out and realizes she's wasting her life. She runs away from BB and his sordid life and vows to never prositute herself again. She finds herself in the artistic caul of downtown NYC, hanging out with artists and revolutionairies. Her closest friend here is Rafe, a strikingly handsome gay dude who serves throughout the novel as Cindy's surrogate brother/asexual lover.

After a brief lesbian fling with a female artist, Cindy hooks up with a young radical and goes with him and his pals to the Chicago Democratic convention. Anyone who knows their US history can suspect what's in store for her: after endless pages of hippie prattle, Cindy finds herself chased through the streets of Chicago by rabid cops who smash in hippie skulls with glee. Traumatized yet again by these events (Cindy is traumatized at least a dozen times in the novel), Cindy goes back to her home in New York where she convinces her mother to send her off to Europe.

Here the novel becomes a true picaresque. Over the course of a few hundred pages, Cindy goes from party-hopping with a pair of mod "birds" in London, where she falls in love with a deathly ill scion, to living in Paris with a French revolutionary who involves Cindy in the kidnapping of a former Nazi, to assisting Rafe (who pops in and out of the narrative with a complete disregard for deus ex machina) as an assistant photographer for a magazine pictorial on a big-budget Hollywood movie filming in Spain, where Cindy finds herself the sexual goal of the two male stars.

Yes, all of this really happens. It's like five books in one, and the depressing thing is that none of the segments have anything to do with each other. When Cindy finally returns to New York City around page 400 of this 515-page book, I realized with dismay that you could cut out the entire 300-page trip to Europe and it wouldn't make a difference. Cindy is unchanged by the events she endured, still as dumb and bland and naive as ever.

So, as usual, I have a theory. Before striking it big with Fire Island, Hirschfeld published a handful of novels under the name "Hugh Barron." These were moreso trash fiction than Fire Island, usually involving Hollywood harlots or depraved businessmen looking for new kicks. My suspicion is that the entire "Europe section" of Cindy On Fire is composed of material Hirschfeld planned to use for his Hugh Barron novels. I mean, what's more "trash fiction" than a group of French radicals kidnapping a former Nazi? But upon realizing that he could have a nice career publishing less trashy stuff under his own name, he just shoehorned this material into a quick and dirty sequel to Fire Island.

The problem is, the novel wants to be trashy but refuses to go all the way. Cindy is a bland and stupid character, never learning from her mistakes and living in a world of eternal naivete. She comes off like the protagonist of an R-rated Romance comic. And despite the cover blurb that Cindy is "a passionate young girl making all the scenes," Cindy throughout the novel is only searching for "true love;" she isn't some jet-setting nympho looking for the latest wild scene. Indeed, she runs from a few orgies in the novel -- and I'm not kidding, she actually runs from them. She goes to acid-drenched parties, strip clubs, meets all sorts of people who actually enjoy the ribald world in which they live, but Cindy herself pines and mopes her way through the novel, eternally picking one wrong guy after the next.

And the male characters on display are even worse, as impossible as that may sound. Each guy Cindy meets is a motormouthed asshole, going on and on about how great they are, how terrible the world is, and how they're going to change it. The French radicals are the worst. I can't tell you how numbing it is to read a hundred or so pages of one French revolutionary after another delivering endless banal speeches -- and they all sound the same! You could say this was Hirschfeld's commentary on the drone-like minds of the '60s radical set, but seriously, I could've picked up on the satire in about 10 pages or so. Every one of these guys is loathsome and despicable; at the top of the list would have to be Henri, the radical film-maker who blathers about "true art" for countless pages. It all drove me to drink.

The Hollywood film section in Spain is mildly better, but again it has nothing to do with the preceeding adventures. Adding further fuel to my theory is that Alain, the French radical who brought Cindy along on the Nazi-kidnapping scheme, here transforms into a fame-obsessed wanna-be actor, with no further mention of the revolutionary fervor which so consumed him in previous pages. It's as if Hirschfeld has made two separate characters into one. But the promise of an old-fashioned '60s/'70s Hollywood-sex trash fiction epic is denied as Cindy again buzzkills it for us; she falls of course for the meanest guy in the pack, a black American footballer who spends countless pages going on about being black in America. The novel, really, is just one speech after another, and it wears down your soul. But all of the speeches are so tiresomely dated. It's like the novel should've been published with an expiration date.

But then something magical happens. Around page 400 Cindy returns to New York and, after a few boring chapters of Cindy again resorting to a depression of pills and booze, traipsing from one 42nd Street grindhouse to another, it's as if Hirschfeld suddenly remembers who he is. For here he gives us some pure trash -- and if my theory is true then this section for sure was once a "Hugh Barron" novel-to-be. Cindy meets Adam Gilbert, a successful rock producer who throws orgies in his mansion and flies from one "recording crisis" to another. Cindy of course falls madly in love with the guy, but again here's another man who treats her like shit. Gilbert refuses to sleep with Cindy, and after she throws herself at him, begging, he orders her to pleasure him orally. For it turns out that this is all he wants her for, to make Cindy his "private sucking machine." And she goes for it, a willing slave, waiting for his command to drop to her knees at any time or place to blow him. Now that's trash fiction!!

It gets even trashier, too, and in a grand way: after ignoring Cindy for weeks, sleeping with various singers and movie queens, Gilbert finally has enough of Cindy's implorements for sex. "You want to get laid," he tells her. "Well, that's what you're going to get." After drugging her with some spiked booze, Gilbert plants Cindy in a sideroom and sends in four men who each have their way with her, one after another.

Cindy awakens to find herself in Bellevue, where she's been committed as a mental patient. After some banal parlaying with her shrink, she's discharged and lives again with her mother and stepfather. Bored with her meaningless existence, Cindy again plummets into a booze-and-pills depression, eventually becoming a world-class Easy Lay, sleeping with a succession of men. After a bizarre sequence where a guy on the street masturbates on her, Cindy breaks down yet again -- only a few pages after her previous breakdown! But this one finally has an effect on our girl's limited brainspan. And so, in the final pages of this endless novel, Cindy smartens up. She realizes she never has left the prostitution game, after all.

Throughout the novel Cindy has been courted by David Altman, a geeky guy her age who aspires to be a society-improving lawyer. Again, the bad Romance comic similarities -- Hirschfeld tries to "shock" us with this, as Cindy berates Altman when she first meets him in the opening pages, scoffing his advances, never responding to the letters he sends her during her European quest. But we all know where it's going. For, just like in those maudlin old comics like Teen Romance or Our Love Story, wholesome values prevail, and Cindy finds TRUE LOVE once and for all, in the last place she'd expect (the last place she would expect, that is...the girl's an idiot, you see).

Hirschfeld tied up this loose trilogy the following year with Fire In The Embers; this one featured Mike Birns, Hirschfeld's ostensible stand-in, and one of the main characters in Fire Island. Like Hirschfeld himself, Birns is a trash fiction author looking to publish "real novels" under his own name. I have Fire In The Embers but I've never finished it; rather than focusing on Birns's writing life it's about his gambling addiction. What's more boring to read about than gambling? And, like Cindy On Fire, it's too long for it's own good, coming it at nearly 600 pages. Several years later, in 1984, Hirschfeld capped the series with Return To Fire Island, another one I have but haven't read -- it appears to be about Cindy's old boyfriend BB.

Despite my qualms with Cindy On Fire, I still recommend Burt Hirschfeld's work -- there's something about his writing I find very appealing. He has a way to pull you into his narrative, to make his characters seem real. He's a definite craftsman and it's a shame he's been forgotten. But he left behind a huge body of work, one that's ripe for rediscovery.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Fire Island: Glorious '70s Trash



Fire Island, by Burt Hirschfeld

Avon Books, 1970

That novel, at last!

So proclaims the cover of one of the many mass market paperback incarnations of Burt Hirschfeld's now-forgotten 1970 blockbuster Fire Island. And that blurb isn't far off the mark; this is a true piece of Glorious Trash, a novel so designed to capitalize on the take-a-novel-to-the-beach market that it's actually about people going to the beach.

For a brief time last year I was obsessed with Burt Hirschfeld. I discovered him via the usual means; happening across one of his novels (Cindy On Fire, an indirect sequel to Fire Island) in the paperback section of a used bookstore. I bought the book because it promised all sorts of sordid fun: drugs, psychedelia, sex. (These are the things I demand in my trash fiction.) I looked up this author whom I'd never before heard of, only to discover that he'd published a plethora of novels over the years, all of them paperback originals, all of them steamy soap-operatic tales of beautiful people in beautiful places having beautiful sex. I also discovered that Fire Island was his first hit; before that he'd churned out a whole 'nother plethora of novels, these ones even trashier tales about jet-setting sex-maniacs which he published under the psuedonym Hugh Barron.

This is where the obsession kicked in, because the Barron titles were first released in the UK, under the wonderful New English Library banner. All were sex-and-drugs-filled tales with nude or mostly-nude women on the cover; I had to have them all!

One day I'll cover the Barron books, but today I'll start with Fire Island. It appears that after a somewhat-successful career churning out trash, Hirschfeld thought he'd strike out for the big leagues. Harold Robbins novels were all the rage, so Hirschfeld followed suit; take The Carpet-Baggers, set it in the late '60s, and place it in the New York island getaway of Fire Island, and you have this novel...er, Fire Island. Whereas the books he published under his Barron psuedonym traded on lurid plots or themes, this novel would be themeless; instead, it's a slice of life story of several friends who over the years vacation together in a beach-house on Fire Island. It spans the years, focusing on a large cast of intertwining characters, detailing their soap opera lives, their rises and falls, their trials and tribulations. And it is very, very good.

So what happened to Hirschfeld? Sorry to say, but I think he's dead. He published a steady flow of novels on through the '80s and early '90s; the last novel I can find published under his name is Daybreak, from 1992. Given his steady rate of output previous to this, I can't buy it that he ran out of ideas or retired from writing. The only answer is that he passed away. What's saddest about this is that no one seems to care; search online for Hirschfeld and, though you'll find plenty of sites which list his countless books for sale, you'll hardly find a review (or even a plot) for any of them, even Fire Island. And indeed, those reviews that you will find for his books are usually negative, because the reviewers just don't get Glorious Trash, man.

But you and I do. And I'm telling you, Burt Hirschfeld is in a class of trash fiction all his own. Find him. Read him.