My family wasn't much for soap operas.
By this I mean that my mother had no use for them, either on radio or television. During the decade when she was a housewife and full time mother, she either read, taught herself to paint in oils, or volunteered for the faculty wives club at the college where my father worked. If she did watch daytime TV, it was either game shows or talk shows. Soap operas were too silly, too emotional, too unrealistic, too, well…over the top? Absurd?
In many ways I'm much more my father's daughter than my mother's, but in this I've pretty much followed her example. With the exception of one summer right after college when I spent way too much time watching Days of Our Lives and wishing I had Kristin Alfonso's hair, I've avoided soap operas of any sort, whether daytime serials about the trials and tribulations of clans of middle class people in fictional towns or glossy nighttime serials about very bad people in very pretty clothes. Just as some people don't like cilantro, I don't like soap operas, even to laugh at. It happens.
My aunt Betty and uncle Lou were another story. Betty adored something called The Edge of Night, a noirish soap opera that was as much ongoing mystery as romantic story, while Lou somehow became addicted to General Hospital after he retired from Jones & Laughlin Steel. I've always had the sneaking suspicion that Betty liked The Edge of Night because one of the characters was a nurse named (of course) Betty, but given that Betty kept watching even after her namesake was shoved out a window onto the not particularly convincing backlot set that was intended to be the mean streets of a fictional city, I am probably wrong.
It's far more likely that Betty, a mystery fan till the end, watched The Edge of Night for the ongoing mystery plots, not the rest of the story. She stopped watching anything but daytime talk shows, the Million Dollar Movie, and (ministers and angels of mercy preserve us) Fox News after The Edge of Night was cancelled, and as far as I know she never so much as glanced at another soap. Just as some people only have one love in them, she only had one soap.
Why Lou, a tough little World War II vet who'd fought his way from Tunisia to Dachau, was so enthralled by the most famous of soaps after his retirement from Jones & Laughlin Steel puzzles me to this day. He wasn't otherwise interested in serials or romances, wasn't much of a reader, and spent his free time golfing, doing yard work, and complaining that Betty was an idiot, so it's not even as if General Hospital fit into the rest of his life. But there he was in front of the TV every afternoon, so enthralled by the rapey romance of Luke and Laura that he scarcely noticed when Mum's Cairn terrier puppy destroyed his brand new shoes.
I asked Lou a couple of times why he liked General Hospital so much but never got much of an answer beyond a shrug and a muttered avowal that he liked what he liked. I suppose some things are meant to remain a mystery.
Tonight for your Labor Day weekend pleasure I bring two books, big, fat, thick, meaty books that are chock full of incident, accident, angels in the architecture coincidence, twisted relationships, rapey romance, bastards, abortions, non-rapey romance, and all the other stuff that have been the mainstay of soap operas ever since Proctor & Gamble sponsored the very first broadcast of Painted Dreams back in the Depression. One is a novel that was so racy that it was banned in many areas for being too explicit, while the other made its author a pariah in her hometown. Even better, the latter was one of the very first prime time soap operas back when I was a child, and launched the careers of several well known actors and actresses:
Forever Amber, by Kathleen Winsor - In many ways this celebrated, notorious novel reads like a Restoration version of Gone With the Wind. There’s a spirited heroine, Amber St. Clare, who rises from poverty and early motherhood to the pinnacle of society; a great deal of class consciousness as the lowly Amber marries/sleeps with a series of successively richer and more important men; a huge fire that destroys a city; and a star-crossed romance. There’s even an ambiguous ending, as Amber, erroneously believing her beloved is finally free to marry her, leaves England for the new lands of America and an unknown fate.
If this sounds like a forerunner to the brawling, sprawling, hot ‘n spicy romance novels of the 1970s and early 1980s, it’s not a coincidence. Forever Amber, all 972 pages of it (edited down from the original 5,000, and no, that is not a misprint) was one of the best selling books of the 1940s. Amber was praised for her pluck and courage during the Great Fire of London (just like those brave English girls in the Blitz!) and her steadfast love for Lord Carlton (just like those brave war brides who marched off the to the aircraft factory!), and the sumptuous descriptions of billowing silk gowns and flowing locks were like balm to a readership starved for beauty by wartime rationing. It was little wonder that the book sold over 100,000 copies in its first week of publication in America alone, and led directly to the popularity of “Amber” as a girl’s name.
All of this sounds very familiar to readers of these diaries; this isn’t the first time I’ve discussed swashbucklers, romance novels, or historical fiction. It isn’t even the first time I’ve featured a book with a sprawling plot or a feisty heroine.
It is, however, the first time I’ve brought up a book that was banned in Boston.
That’s right. Forever Amber, despite being less explicit than the average trade paperback today, was condemned in no fewer than fourteen states as pornographic, beginning with Massachusetts, and was condemned by the Catholic Church for indecency. The attorney general of Massachusetts condemned the book for containing, in addition to plagues, fires, marriages, fashion, and romance, no fewer than seventy references to sex (horrors!), thirty-nine illegitimate pregnancies (eek!), and seven abortions (shocking!). Worst of all, there were no fewer than “ten descriptions of women undressing in front of men,” which of course is the vilest sort of filth and improper conduct.
Kathleen Winsor, who had researched and written her first novel while her husband was at war I the Pacific Theater, denied that there was anything particularly racy in her book. “I wrote only two sexy passages, and my publishers took both of them out,” she said, not that it did any good. Forever Amber had acquired a reputation as a veritable smutfest, and it appeared repeatedly in 1940s movies, novels, radio shows, and even a Merrie Melodies cartoon as shorthand for respectable sex. There was even a movie starring Linda Darnell as Amber, and if modern viewers find it disappointing pure, kindly remember that the Production Code was still firmly in place even for racy, spicy, sexy best sellers.
Now, of course, Forever Amber seems almost like a proto-feminist work despite Amber’s obsession with the class-conscious and frankly rather nasty Lord Carlton (he seduces her at the beginning of the novel, steals her money and leaves her pregnant and alone, and ends up marrying a rich, respectable heiress so he can found a dynasty even though Amber nursed him through the plague). Amber is tough, strong, and fearless, and if she uses her sexuality to rise from poverty to a duchy, remember that this is set in a time when women didn’t have all that many options. It’s frankly rather hard to see what the fuss was about, especially given just how explicit romances, quality fiction, e-books, and (God help us all) fanfiction are.
As for Amber’s creator, Kathleen Winsor herself took the controversy (and royalties) in stride. A stunning brunette whose superb looks figured rather more in publicity campaigns than was perhaps good for either author or book, she divorced her first husband in favor of much-married band leader Artie Shaw right after the war ended. It was not a surprise to anyone (except possibly Winsor) when the marriage failed after two years, and she went on to marry (and divorce) a third husband. Her next book, Star Money, was a mordant look at the price of literary fame, and if it sold well enough that most authors would have been overjoyed, it didn’t measure up to the success of Forever Amber. Neither did any of Winsor’s other books, but she continued to write for the next thirty years.
Alas, despite persistent rumors, none of Winsor’s subsequent books was a sequel to Forever Amber. Perhaps it’s just as well; some books are meant to end with a question, as any reader of the repeated and hideous attempts to continue the saga of Scarlett O’Hara can tell you.
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious - Grace Metalious could not have been less like the gorgeous, elegant, productive Kathleen Winsor. A plain, dumpy housewife who smoked too much, had a fashion sense somewhere to the east of Ma Kettle, and once mistook a dead mouse for a Brillo pad, Metalious was so obsessed with becoming a published writer that she sometimes locked her children out of her apartment so she could work on a novel that was as lifeline as literary construct.
This habit did not exactly endear Metalious to her neighbors, but it did allow her the privacy she needed to write. Her first novel, which centered on the difficulties of a young married couple, never found a publisher, but she kept writing despite this failure. By 1955 she had another manuscript, The Tree and the Blossom, ready to send to her agent, Jacques Chambrun.
Chambrun, who had once represented the likes of Somerset Maugham, had no illusions about the quality of Metalious’ work. This did not prevent him from dutifully shipping the manuscript off to the slush pile circuit. A reader at Lippincott liked it, and when her superiors passed, took the book with her to her next job, at Julian Messner, Inc. Messner’s president, Kitty Messner, decided to give The Tree and the Blossom a look one August night, and by the next morning Jacques Chambrun sent Metalious a telegram that changed her life: Julian Messner, Inc., would be delighted to publish her novel.
There was just one condition: the name would have to be changed, since The Tree and the Blossom didn’t really fall trippingly off the linotype. Would Mrs. Metalious be willing to, say, rename her book after the town where it was set?
Mrs. Metalious, who was on third notice for her bills and had had her well run dry earlier that summer, had no problem doing this. And so it was that Julian Messner, Inc., purchased a book that became a legend: Peyton Place.
The story was both simple and complex. Set in a small New England town that bore a noticeable similarity to Metalious’ home in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Peyton Place theoretically told the story of aspiring novelist Allison McKenzie and her mother Constance, ostensibly upright but trapped by her own dark secrets, but actually encompassed the entire town and its entire population.
Every one of whom has their own dark secrets. Peyton Place has just about everything for lovers of the scandalous, forbidden, and bleak: incestuous rape, a subsequent pregnancy that ends with a kindly doctor performing an illegal abortion on the grounds that he’s saving the mother’s life by freeing her from the horror of carrying her own father’s child, murder, a decadent rich kid who may or may not be bisexual, Constance McKenzie’s sexy romance with manly school principal Tomas Makris, and the revelation that Alison, who has to go away to New York to find her voice as a writer, is the product of her “widowed” but actually single mother’s affair with a married man.
Add that the book was written in a sort of lush, not-quite-literary-but-very-close style that produces opening passages like:
‘Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay."
And sex scenes like:
"Is it up, Rod?" she panted, undulating her body under his. "Is it up good and hard?"
"Oh, yes," he whispered, almost unable to speak. "Oh, yes."
Without another word, Betty jackknifed her knees, pushed Rodney away from her, clicked the lock on the door and was outside of the car.
"Now go shove it into Allison MacKenzie," she screamed at him.
And it’s easy to see why
Peyton Place was a runaway hit. It was exactly the sort of decadent, scandalous, sordid treat America had longed for during the placid Eisenhower years. So great was the anticipation that the book was on the bestseller lists
before it had actually hit the stores, and before it initially went out of print it had sold an astonishing 12,000,000 copies.
The movie adaptation, which managed to keep the main scandal (father/daughter abuse followed by abortion and murder, even if the abuse was never that explicit), was a smash hit that was nominated for nine Oscars and established Lana Turner as a serious actress for her icy portrayal of Constance McKenzie. So popular were Peyton Place and its characters that the inferior sequel also shot up the bestseller lists, as did the subsequent inferior movies. There was even a Peyton Place TV series in the early 1960s that was such a hit that it ran thrice per week and made stars of Ryan O’Neal, Mia Farrow, Lee Grant, and Mariette Hartley.
It seemed that Grace Metalious had made good, and at least for a while, she had…everywhere but in Gilmanton, New Hampshire.
Part of it was Metalious’ own fault. She was completely unprepared for success, and wasted a great deal of the money she made from Peyton Place on spending sprees in New York, a messy divorce from her husband George, and a lawsuit filed by the real Tomas Makris, whose name she had forged on a publisher’s release. Somehow she managed to spend over a million dollars living it up before her death eight years after Peyton Place was published, and her life was such mess by the end that she told her then-lover, “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,” mere hours before her death.
A large share of the blame for Grace Metalious’ fate must be laid at the feet of her neighbors up in Gilmanton, however. Outraged that she’d drawn on several decades of town scandal and gossip in her masterpiece, the good folk of Gilmanton began spreading stories about their most famous resident that weren’t too far off from her book: she did her housework wearing a mink coat! (not true – she barely did housework at all, as demonstrated by the Brillo mouse incident) She greeted the milkman stark naked! (not true, though it sure made a great anecdote) She was having an affair! (true, as patrons of the Rod & Gun Club could testify, though her husband had cheated first)
Worst was the accusation that Grace hadn’t written Peyton Place, but had actually been the front for her husband George. After all, George had gone to college on the GI Bill and theoretically had the training to produce a novel, unlike his lazy, drunken wife. Metalious fired back that her neighbors were a) jealous of her success and b) raving hypocrites since they were also drinking, smoking, neglecting their kids, and having affairs.
That she might well have been correct didn’t improve the situation.
Perhaps the greatest factor in the downfall of Grace Metalious was that for all her need for fame and fortune, she really wasn’t all that comfortable with the spotlight. Her husband had to leave town to find a teaching job, she ripped her girdle just before a major television interview, her marriage failed, her children were bullied in school, and she received threatening phone calls telling her to move for her own good. Things only deteriorated when she went to Hollywood while the movie was filming, and ended up chucking a drink on Mike Wallace as revenge for him asking if Peyton Place was her autobiography.
In the end, the fame and riches cost Metalious what had been the core of her existence: her literary talent. She was able to turn in less than 100 incoherent pages of the sequel to her first novel, forcing her publisher to hire a ghostwriter to flesh out Return to Peyton Place to publishable length, and by the time she’d regained enough of her focus to pen The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden a few years later, no one either noticed or much cared. By the time she died of cirrhosis of the liver in the early 1960s, Metalious had less than $50,000 in the bank, more than $200,000 in debts, had divorced her second husband, and was barely speaking to any of her children. She never saw the television series, and thanks to her signing away certain ancillary rights during a drunken spree at the Algonquin Hotel, her estate never saw a dime of the estimate $65 million the television series reaped over the years.
Metalious’ literary reputation has undergone something of a renaissance in the last few years. Peyton Place is a mainstay of women’s studies curricula, while Grace Metalious is regarded as a pioneer of honesty and truth-telling in popular fiction. That she managed to fritter away much of her talent is rightly seen as tragic rather than decadent, and it’s hard not to imagine that she would have seen herself as vindicated by her posthumous success…
Everywhere but Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where older residents still spit when her name is mentioned, and where the only noticeable evidence that she once lived there is her gravestone. That this, too, may be changing thanks to the information age, Wikipedia, and interest in Metalious and her work by a generation of readers who don’t much care about the tender feelings of small town New Hampshire residents is perhaps the ultimate irony.
%%%%%
So, my friends - have you read either of these once-scandalous tomes? Or an equally beloved but banned bestseller? It's the last weekend of summer, so don't be shy....
%%%%%Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule
DAY |
TIME (EST/EDT) |
Series Name |
Editor(s) |
SUN |
6:00 PM |
Young Reader's Pavilion |
The Book Bear |
Sun (hiatus) |
9:30 PM |
SciFi/Fantasy Book Club |
quarkstomper |
Bi-Monthly Sun |
Midnight |
Reading Ramblings |
don mikulecky |
MON |
8:00 PM |
Monday Murder Mystery |
Susan from 29 |
Mon |
11:00 PM |
My Favorite Books/Authors |
edrie, MichiganChet |
alternate Tuesdays |
8:00AM |
LGBT Literature |
Texdude50, Dave in Northridge |
Tue |
10:00 PM |
Contemporary Fiction Views |
bookgirl |
WED |
7:30 AM |
WAYR? |
plf515 |
Wed |
8:00 PM |
Bookflurries Bookchat |
cfk |
THU |
8:00 PM |
Write On! |
SensibleShoes |
alternate Thu |
11:00 PM |
Audiobooks Club |
SoCaliana |
FRI |
8:00 AM |
Books That Changed My Life |
Diana in NoVa |
SAT (fourth each month) |
11:00 AM |
Windy City Bookworm |
Chitown Kev |
Sat |
9:00 PM |
Books So Bad They're Good |
Ellid |