By M.Christian
YNOT – Ah, the 1960s — or, to be more precise, the end of that decade: 1969. Richard Nixon was President of the U.S., the Beatles gave their last public performance, the Stonewall riots provided a rallying cry for gay-rights activists, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs was born and.… Oh, yeah — man landed on the moon.
During this frenzy of great achievement, an odd thing happened in the world of publishing. At the time, erotica was dominated by — to be polite — less-than-literary (or, for that matter, literate) fiction by writers like Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) and Harold Robbins (The Betsy, The Carpetbaggers). But in 1969, a new star eclipsed the established firmament.
Naked Came the Stranger by Penelope Ashe had it all: sex, sex, sex and even more sex. Sure it was badly written, but something about the novel caught readers’ imagination — more than likely all that sex, sex and more sex. Naked was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day, skyrocketing up the sales charts until it spent a week on The New York Times Best-Seller List, the pinnacle of publishing success.
But Naked Came the Stranger had what folks in the fiction-writing game call a backstory: a secret history to which readers were not clued in until late in the game. Penelope Ashe, you see, never existed. Naked was penned by a group of 24 professional journalists led by the redoubtable Mike McGrady of Newsday.
Appalled by what they considered the mindless vulgarity of popular literature, the group set out to write a book rife with explicit sex but utterly devoid of redeeming social or literary value. They accomplished their goal.
They also earned a lot of royalties when what has been described as a “mediocre hodgepodge” sold even better than McGrady’s cynical expectations.
Embarrassed by their commercial success, the authors revealed the hoax themselves, predictably generating a bit of a fuss among the literati. After the authors unmasked themselves on The David Frost Show in October 1969, the book became even more in demand.
Although the authors were asked to write a sequel, as a group they declined. However, in 1970 McGrady celebrated the hoax that fooled an entire nation with the release of Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit.
In 1975, Radley Metzger turned Naked Came the Stranger into an explicit movie of the same name. Starring Darby Lloyd Rains and Levi Richards, the movie has been hailed as a classic for its sly wit and sophisticated technique.
