Telling Tales (35 page)

What if, Shepherd wondered out loud to his listeners, all of you went into a bookshop tomorrow and asked for a book that you knew did not exist. The first person to ask for it would be given the brush-off and told there’s no record of any such book. The second person to come in that week asking for it would be told the book is on order. And by the third and fourth request for the book, the bookseller would be on the phone to his supplier, who would in turn consult his big list of all books scheduled to appear, and on not finding it there, start looking at where to find it. A buzz would be born. All book-buying New York would be talking about this hot new read.

As Shepherd continued to talk through this plan, his listeners began to ring in suggesting titles for the nonexistent novel. And an author’s name was invented: Frederick Ewing. Shepherd decided that Ewing ought to be an Englishman: a lieutenant in the British Army now a civil servant in Rhodesia with his wife Marjorie. Ewing’s area of interest had long been eighteenth-century court affairs, and this first in a planned trilogy of novels on that subject was intended not for the common reader but for scholars and historians so, the story went, he was taken aback but not unpleasantly surprised by its run-away success amongst the general English reader on publication by an imprint of Cambridge University Press. The back-story now confirmed (and having a sense of the author’s life was, he reminded his listeners, prerequisite in these days of celeb writers like Faulkner), a title had to be picked from the many suggestions that had been pouring in all night.
I, Libertine
was born. About to go off the air at 3.30 a.m., Shepherd encouraged his devoted listeners to write in over the coming weeks and tell him how their search for Ewing’s masterpiece was going. And don’t forget, he said, ‘The day man is not listening to us – he thinks we’re nuts.’

Neither Shepherd nor his band of followers could have foreseen the massive impact of his hoax. The next night he was able to report stories of New York’s intellectually snobbish booksellers saying things like: ‘Yes, it’s about time the general public caught on to Ewing.’ And when the more commercial shops told Ewing fans they had no record of the book in their lists, they were nonplussed to hear the customer say: ‘Oh never mind, I’ll go get it at Doubleday.’

A few days later one woman phoned in to say that she had mentioned the book at her bridge club, and four of her fellow players claimed to have read it, three of them liking it immensely. A college student sent in a graded essay he had produced on ‘F. R. Ewing: Eclectic Historian’: a nine-page paper with footnotes. His professor gave it a B+ and commended him on his excellent research.

Some of Shepherd’s listeners were in fact writers and media people themselves, and true to their favourite DJ’s injunction that they should pull out all the stops to make
I, Libertine
the most talked about book in town, one reviewer even got a piece published in one of the weekend literary supplements, and one PR man engineered it so that one of the city’s leading gossip columnists, Earl Wilson, claimed to have had lunch with Freddie Ewing and his wife Marjorie who were passing through town on their way to India.

But the crunch came for Shepherd when a prominent Boston church had the book put on their list of proscribed books. He was starting to worry, he said later, that soon the president would be talking about it and then he wouldn’t be able to believe in anything. Just as he was wondering how to out his listeners as the perpetrators of the hoax, one listener phoned in revealing himself to be a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
. He had, he said, been following the prank from the outset and felt that a very important thing had been happening. Wasn’t it time to reveal all in the newspaper? Shepherd, feeling that his prank was spiralling out of control, agreed that it was.

The story hit the news-stands at three p.m. the next day, and as Shepherd remembers it, three minutes later he had six countries on the phone seeking an interview. The foreign press had already picked up on the latest big novel to be wowing New York, so when they found out it was a hoax they were desperate to get a quote from the horse’s mouth. British newspapers loved the story, being on the whole in agreement with Shepherd that popular culture in New York was a phoney and vain thing. Even the anti-American Russian newspaper
Pravda
took the story almost word-for-word from the pages of the
Wall Street Journal
– a highly unusual and probably unprecedented act on their part.

The New York press was not so delighted with the deception however, and mostly wrote up the story as one about a mean radio DJ having pulled one over on his listeners by telling them to go out and ask for a book that didn’t exist.

It may not have existed then, but a few years later it would. In 1956 Shepherd’s friend, the sci-fi author Ted Sturgeon, called him up and told him that there was a publisher trying to get his hands on the paperback rights to
I, Libertine
. This publisher was Ian Ballantine, and as soon as he realized the non-existent book could be put together quickly by the combined writing team of Sturgeon, Shepherd and Ballantine’s wife Betty, and given a cleverly illustrated jacket by the sci-fi artist Frank Kelly Freas, he drew up a contract.

So, finally, the book became a reality. It did indeed sell enough copies to be called (legitimately, no doubt) a bestseller. Nowadays editions are prized amongst book collectors, and its cover art has achieved cult status itself: a gaudy scene from the eponymous rake’s progress featuring the strap-line ‘Gadzooks! quoth I, “but here’s a saucy bawd!” ’ over an image of a busty wench, a pub called the Fish & Staff whose sign references the two main authors’ names, and Shepherd’s well-known catchphrase ‘Excelsior!’ concealed in the ruff of the heroine’s dress.

The proceeds of the real
I, Libertine
were donated to charity, as is the norm for the intellectual twentieth-century hoaxer, and although the whole affair is less well known now than others of its time and ilk, there can be no one to rival Shepherd, before or since, in encouraging ordinary people to beat the media at its own game. Soon after his grand hoax, WOR tried to sack him for not being sufficiently commercial. His protest was immediately to record an advertisement for a rival company (he was sacked but a public outcry brought him back). Shep, as he was better known to his thousands of devoted listeners, maintained his commitment to storytelling with a purpose, and his broadcasts on the days of Martin Luther King’s rallying speech and the funeral of Kennedy will always be remembered by those who heard them. Although best known now for writing
The Christmas Story
, which became one of the favourite holiday movies of all time, there is a generation of New York radio fans who love him best for just one thing: pulling off the cheekiest hoax of the post-war period.

I
F THE ERN
Malley poems were aimed at sending up the avant-garde of Australian letters, the
Naked Came the Stranger
hoax was intended to ridicule an entire nation’s literary mainstream. Advertising itself as a saucy erotic novel by a glamorous new author called Penelope Ashe, the work was in fact the brainchild of Mike McGrady, a well-known columnist for
Newsday
in America in the mid-1960s, and had nearly as many authors as the Bible. McGrady was hardly the stuffy reactionary that the Malley hoaxers were, but as a lover of literature and believer in the power of the great American novel, he found himself increasingly vexed at publishers’ promotion of trashy authors like
Valley of the Dolls
writer Jacqueline Susann and Irving Wallace (whose
The Chapman Report
was a Kinsey-influenced look at female sexuality in suburbia) over better written but less saucy works.

So he hatched a plan to prove once and for all that as long as a novel had at least one sex scene per chapter, such conventional literary qualities as plot, character development and fluency of style could go out the window. Working for
Newsday
, of course, he had a host of versatile writers of all ages and descriptions at his fingertips, so he asked twenty-five of them to help him perpetrate what he hoped would be the literary hoax of the decade.

It would be a novel about a sexy married woman who resolves to avenge her cheating husband by receiving as many gentleman callers at their suburban home as possible and entertaining them in any number of ingeniously erotic ways. And in true porn-film style, each candidate would have his own clearly defined look and character: a boxer, a mobster, even a progressive rabbi and a gay man who fancies a bit of subversive straight sex. Throughout, she drinks, smokes and swears, and generally disports herself in a way that is carefree to say the least.

Each of the group was commissioned to write one chapter, and told to take special care to make the writing frightful. Although some contributors initially had their attempts returned by their demanding editor on the basis that they weren’t bad enough, before long a manuscript heavy on soft-porn nonsense and light on good writing was ready to be submitted to New York’s lucky publishing houses. It was sent off in late 1966 with a covering letter about Penelope Ashe, claiming she was a ‘demure Long Island housewife who thought she could write as well as J. Susann’.

The publishing house Stuart Lyle Inc. took the bait, and, as predicted by McGrady, threw a huge amount of money into promoting it prior to publication in August 1969. Interestingly, this was after McGrady had decided to come clean and confess to the director of the company that the book was a hoax title: obviously, the last thing he wanted was to be accused of fraud. Stuart Lyle was so keen on the idea, and so sure that the unusual nature of the book’s authorship would not impact on its sales one jot and might in fact increase it, bringing the book to a wider audience than would normally buy his racy paperbacks, that he signed McGrady up without even having read the book.

In advance of publication in the summer of 1969, Lyle threw his publicity machine into overdrive. With risqué advertisements featuring some of the book’s authors dressed up as characters from particular sex scenes
Naked
was big news even before anyone had bought it, with more than $50,000 spent on publicity for what promised to be the year’s most outré title.

As soon as it hit the bookshops, copies flew off the shelves. Its success was due in part to the seductive figure of Mrs Ashe herself, who was played by McGrady’s sister-in-law Billie Young at a number of personal appearances and signings, and gave sterling performances as the lusty housewife and outspoken commentator on the sexual liberation issues which were at the forefront of everyone’s minds that summer in 1969. Almost immediately, two things became clear to the authors: their hoax had worked perfectly – sales figures were even better than imagined. And because of this, the perpetrators stood to make quite a lot of money. Keen to retain credibility as intellectual pranksters rather than get-rich-quick con-artists, and emboldened by their publisher’s assertion that no one would mind if the book turned out to be a joke, they decided to come clean. Being journalists, they were well able to orchestrate a mass outing in the local New York and national press, and on 7 August 1969 the
New York Times, Newsweek
and the
Washington Post
were among the publications who ran stories on the real authors of the book everyone was talking about. Then one night on the
David Frost Show
, the host announced that his next guest would be the popular erotica writer Penelope Ashe, and out trouped the whole group of mostly male writers, led by McGrady.

As predicted, sales began to soar, the hoaxing aspect lending
Naked
an even more cultish identity – and, no doubt, enabling high-minded littérateurs and armchair critics legitimately to go out and buy a trashy book with a naked lady on the cover in the name of current affairs. By the middle of October that same year, 90,000 copies had been sold, according to
Publisher’s Weekly
, and with almost constant print runs for months afterwards, this bold collaborative hoax quickly took its place on the bestseller lists. In the years that followed, it was translated into all the languages a 1970s porn-watcher might expect: Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish and French.

One happy consequence of the hoax was that it brought out the best in reviewers, both in America and the UK. Alan Coren remarked in
Punch
that ‘the book fails all the tests of true pornography (there are sixty-nine). It is a victim of its own constant insistence on self-parody, and with pornography the last place the tongue should be is in the cheek.’ And Miles Kington observed that ‘the print is tolerably readable and all the pages in the last two chapters are correctly numbered’.

It is hard to imagine and may be hard to remember now just how sex-obsessed the publishers’ lists were in the last few years of the 1960s. Apart from the slew of erotic bonkbusters about which McGrady was so disparaging, there was John Updike’s
Couples
, Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
and of course the classic
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask
.

And indeed the book itself went on to spawn many imitators in the field of collaborative, jokey fiction, the most famous of which is probably the 1996 comedy thriller
Naked Came the Manatee
, in which Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard got together with eleven other mystery writers to produce a chapter each of a story about an environmentalist in Miami who gets a visit from a mysterious sea-creature called Booger. All proceeds went to charity.

Identical in aim if not title was 2005’s
Atlanta Nights
, a book submitted by a group of sci-fi writers to the publishing house PublishAmerica. It was deliberately written as badly as possible, with two of its chapters actually generated by a computer program, and was in fact accepted for publication, but when the hoaxers revealed themselves prior to the presses rolling, the deal was scrapped and the hoaxers resorted to self-publishing under the pseudonym Travis Tea.