My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Twenty-five

THE COMMERCIAL popularity of American porn novels peaked during the 1970s, coinciding with my father’s most prolific and energetic period. In 1972 alone he published eighteen novels. Dad wrote pirate porn, ghost porn, science fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn, and Atlantis porn. An unpublished Old West novel opens with sex in a barn, featuring a gunslinger named Quiet Smith, without doubt Dad’s greatest character name. By the end of the decade, Dad claimed to have single-handedly raised the quality of U.S. pornography. According to his private papers, he believed future scholars would refer to him as “King of XX Century Written Pornography.”

Many of the early publishers used a “house name,” a pseudonym shared by several writers. It concealed identity, which writers preferred, while allowing the publisher to give the illusion of a single author. This was an early attempt at branding, with proven success in other genres. Dad didn’t mind, but he was determined to separate himself from others.

His first published novel, before any science fiction, was Bondage Babes, released by Greenleaf under the name Alan Marshall in 1968. Payment was six hundred dollars. The plot was a clever conceit. Someone murdered a model for a photographic bondage shoot, and her sister was investigating the crime by posing as a model, which allowed for soft-core descriptions of restrained women. As Dad recalled in a letter:

The book was Different: it dared mention clitoris and that some women don’t just bop off into orgasm because some dude fills and drills them, and it had a bit of a plot.

The name John Cleve first appeared on Slave of the Sudan, published by Brandon House in 1969, an imitation of Victorian pornography so precisely executed that the editor suspected my father of plagiarism. Dad found this extremely flattering. He published four more novels with Brandon House until it folded.

Dad moved to Orpheus Books, which paid thirteen hundred dollars per book. He used three pseudonyms to conceal his prolificity. Two years later, he switched to Midwood for more money. He invented another pen name, John Denis, based on his favorite Reds players, Johnny Bench and Denis Menke. He published fourteen books with Midwood. After a falling-out with an editor over a title change, he returned to Orpheus. The new editor soon became irritated with Dad and stopped buying his work. Desperate for income, my father invented another pseudonym, Opal Andrews, who specialized in “lightweight incest,” and sold eight books to Surrey House.

Curious about the changing market, Dad read a dozen recent Orpheus books, concluding that all were watered-down versions of his own work, his style overtly copied by lesser writers. To him the proof was clear — they’d begun writing about the clitoris. Dad believed he was responsible for the widespread knowledge of its existence in porn, but he couldn’t place a book with Orpheus. Outraged, he devised a plan to prove the editor wrong.

To get a different font, he bought a new ball for his Selectric typewriter. He changed his usual margins, used cheaper paper, and rapidly wrote two books as Jeff Morehead. He asked a friend in another part of the country to submit the manuscripts to Orpheus. The editor bought both. Dad called the editor, told him he was Jeff Morehead, and suggested they get back in business. The editor concurred, and Dad stayed with Orpheus throughout the 1970s.

Over the course of his career, he used a total of seventeen pseudonyms:

John Cleve

Turk Winter

Jeff Morehead

Jay Andrews

Opal Andrews

Drew Fowler

J. X. Williams

Jack Cory

Jeremy Crebb

John Denis

Alan Marshall

Jeff Woodson

Joe Brown

Jeff Douglas

Roscoe Hamlin

Camille Colben

Anonymous

Two are female names and six are variations of his own. Three share the initials of J.C., the same as Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ. Dad never quite clarified how he invented the name John Cleve. It first appeared as a character’s name in a 1967 manuscript for Clansman of Andor. Publicly, Dad claimed John Cleve was a variation of John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill, the first pornographic novel printed in English.

In 1973 Grove Press published his novel The Palace of Venus under the Zebra imprint. Dad sent them a new novel, Vendetta, set during the reign of Pope Innocent III, whom my father characterized as “history’s most misnamed monster.” The editorial staff didn’t want to publish it, and Vendetta never saw print, because according to Dad, “It is a class historical and Class is gone.” Nevertheless, the strength of the manuscript resulted in a phone call from New York. Barney Rosset, Grove’s publisher, wanted a pornographic historical series about a single character during the Crusades. Dad was initially resistant, writing in a letter:

I do not know if this is or could be my thing or not. I have difficulty with series. Like, I get bored and want to go back to creating. It is most difficult for me to write as if cranking the arm of a copy-machine. I am an artist, whether these series books will be “art” or not.

He was equally uncertain about traveling to meet Rosset in New York, a city he called Babylon-on-the-Hudson. Grove offered to cover all expenses and Dad made the trip. He returned to Kentucky with a cash advance, a contract for an unwritten book, and more autonomy than he’d ever had from a publisher. My father had bought Grove books for fifteen years and revered the courage of Rosset for fighting the U.S. government on obscenity charges — and winning. The seventies were financially difficult for Grove, which barely staved off bankruptcy. Dad regarded his new contract as a mission to save Grove Press. The four-book Crusader series sold well, and for the first time in his career, Dad earned royalites.

At the time, pornography was still a taboo business. Paperbacks were sold in the back rooms of adult theaters, on hidden racks at newsstands, and at adult bookstores in cities. People in less-populated areas bought them through the mail. Within a few years of Crusader’s publication, Grove suffered further economic problems and the series was in danger of going out of print. Grove wanted to raise the price of Dad’s paperbacks one dollar and asked him to cut his royalty percentage in half. If my father didn’t agree, Grove couldn’t afford to order another printing. Dad got mad and refused, allowing his books to go out of print over the sum of $130 per year, the only professional decision he ever admitted regretting.

In the 1980s, John Cleve’s career culminated with a nineteen-book series for Playboy Press, the magazine’s first foray into book publishing. Spaceways allowed him to blend porn with old-time “space opera” reminiscent of the 1930s pulps, his favorite kind of science fiction. Dad’s contemporary twist included aliens who possessed the genitalia of both genders. Galactic crafts welcomed the species as crew, since they could service men and women with ease. The Spaceways series ended in 1985, coinciding with the widespread use of consumer VCRs. Men no longer needed “left-handed books” for stimulation when they could watch videotapes in their own homes. The golden era of written pornography was over.

That same year Dad sent D’Artagnan’s Son to Grove Press, but the pace at which he wrote had finally caught up with him. The prose became sloppy, characterization shrank, and story vanished. A letter of rejection from Grove says:

The problem appears to be that its superior sophistication removes it from the usual market, while its outspoken content might be something of a drawback with the literary crowd. Maybe one way of putting it is that it falls between two chairs.

In my twenty years of writing, I have received nearly six hundred rejections — by mail, phone, email, even text messages. Each one stings. The tendency is always to blame the editor, then oneself, and finally to inspect the language of the rejection letter for hidden meaning. The note my father received resists scrutiny. “Falling between two chairs” is not a conventional literary term or a discernible metaphor. A strict interpretation is that one chair is sophisticated and the other is pornographic, but I remain uncertain as to what lies between them. The editor was probably attempting a diplomatic tone, suggesting the book was too literary for porn and contained too much sex for literature.

The novel opens with a French marquis recalling the death of his first wife while secretly observing his current wife being pleasured by the maid with her “practically prehensile tongue.” The marquis’s wife is described as having:

… hectares of black hair, a volcanic vulva and great melonous breasts that shivered and slithered about on her chest, her entire belly a mass of maddeningly molten flesh. Sweat sheened it sleekly.

The maid leaves the room, encountering the marquis, who promptly takes up with her for several pages. In the meantime, the marquis’s wife realizes she has enough time for a liaison with the stable master. On her way, she detours past the kitchen, where the steward is standing on a footstool behind the naked German cook whose backside is in view:

… her fine big broad plush snowy buttocks standing well out above her sturdy snowy legs, with her also large and snowy breasts out of her bodice.

Literature has a strong precedent for repetition of words, but I’m not convinced that using “snowy” three times in a single sentence gains sufficient reward. As I read the manuscript, I began to wonder what metaphoric chair it could have landed on to ensure publication.

John Cleve retired in 1985. Dad insisted that he himself hadn’t quit, but John Cleve had. It was more retreat than retirement, a slipping back into the shadows, fading away like an old soldier. Cleve had done his duty — the house was paid off, the kids were gone, and the bank held a little savings. Dad was fifty-two. As Cleve, he’d published 130 novels in eighteen years.

Dad continued to write and publish short fiction under his own name, totalling thirty-eight stories between 1954 and 2004. A span of this length is unusual — most writers don’t stick with the form for fifty years. On the strength of these publications and his former service as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, he continued to attend cons, limited to small regional events within driving distance. Ostensibly the reason was practical — Dad couldn’t fly due to mysterious pains in his leg — but the truth was far more personal.

In 1972 Harlan Ellison had asked my father to contribute a short story to the influential anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. Dad supplied “For Value Received,” about a girl who grows up in a hospital because her family can’t afford to pay the bill for her birth. Ellison wrote a respectful introduction to the story, complimenting not only the work but my father’s mind, and mentioning that he, Ellison, had entered the same 1954 college science fiction contest that Dad had won. The two men had much in common: They were the same age, from backwaters of Ohio and Kentucky, brilliant, opinionated, articulate, and angry.

In Dad’s own introduction to the story, he proclaimed:

I love to talk first and write second, and I do both because I have to.

Many working writers are quite talkative — myself included — eager for social engagement after prolonged solitude. Nevertheless, my father is the only writer I’ve known who placed talking ahead of writing in importance. Every thought he had was worthy of expression and therefore deserving of a rapt and respectful audience. His family dutifully gave him that, as did fans at small cons.

Inclusion in Ellison’s anthology increased my father’s profile, and he was asked to serve as Toastmaster for the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention, the most prestigious event in the field. His duties included opening remarks, introducing the guest of honor, and presiding over the Hugo Awards ceremony. Twenty years after his first professional sale and five years after his first con, he’d reached a significant crest in his career. The personal stakes were high. He prepared index cards on which he had bullet points to trigger extemporaneous oration and reduce the chance of sounding canned — replete with dramatic pauses, laugh lines, and grand pronouncements.

At the hotel he dressed in a new leisure suit made of denim with a faux-patch design and flared legs. He wore a white shirt with a broad collar splayed over his suit coat. In the bathroom he trimmed his beard carefully. He double-checked his cuffs, the break of his trousers, and his socks. Accompanied by my mother, who wore a gorgeous white gown, he headed for the banquet.

Worldcon was held in Washington, D.C., at the Sheraton Park Hotel. It had the largest ballroom in the world and had hosted one of the inaugural galas for President Kennedy. By 1974 the infrastructure was disintegrating, and it would soon be torn down. The banquet hall was filled to capacity, with standing room only in the balcony. The air-conditioning failed. The audience was miserably hot, and the hotel staff was unable to resupply pitchers of water at a sufficient rate.

After the meal, Dad commenced his opening remarks about Roger Zelazny, the guest of honor. All went well initially. Perhaps the heat got to my father, or his own anxiety, or he succumbed to the self-destructive pressure he often fought. It could simply have been a case of Dad finally having the floor — the big floor — and he gave over to his love of talking. Whatever the reason, his opening comments began to meander, focusing on himself, and going on too long. Some fans left the room. Others perceived his extended oration as discourteous to Zelazny. People became cranky from the heat and made nasty comments. Open dissent had begun in the audience.

When it became clear that Dad was not moving toward his closing comments, Harlan Ellison decided to intervene. He rose from his spot and began a slow walk toward the head table. Dad ignored him and continued to talk about himself. Ellison reached the podium, motioned to my father and whispered in his ear. The audience erupted with laughter. Dad cut his speech short and Zelazny spoke briefly.

Dad came home incensed at Ellison for interrupting him, the most vile of transgressions against a man who placed talking ahead of every other endeavor. He told me that Ellison had ordered him to pick up the pace. He believed that Ellison was impatient to learn the results of the Hugo Award, for which he had been nominated. Around the house, Dad continually berated Ellison. He made fun of his voice, his height, and his massive ego. Harlan likes to hurt people. He takes everything personally. He sees everything as a direct challenge. Even as a teenager, I realized that Dad could be talking about himself.

According to him, the two writers were deeply engaged in a blood feud that would last until one of them died. Diplomatic reconciliation was impossible. Dad’s sense of himself was enormous but fragile, as if constructed of bamboo and paper, like a box kite. A slender string tethered it to Earth, and the slightest breeze could knock it astray. His experience at the 1974 Worldcon was a strong enough gust that he never attended another. For the next twenty years, Dad attended only regional cons where fans adored him and were willing to listen without interruption. Upon entering a room, Dad often said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Is Harlan here? No? Good. Then I’m among friends.”

In 2002 Michael Chabon solicited a story from me for a special edition of an anthology entitled McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Stories. Chabon wanted to reinvigorate contemporary literature by bringing his beloved genre tales to the attention of readers. I agreed to contribute and wrote “Chuck’s Bucket,” a time-travel story based on string theory that explained the existence of ghosts while exploring the possibility of parallel realities. One alternate reality recounted Dad’s feud with Ellison.

When the magazine came out, I was in Colorado, preparing to present my work at a writers’ conference. I carefully planned my remarks and was attending to my appearance in the mirror when the phone rang in my hotel room. The caller was Harlan Ellison. He’d just read my story and wanted me to know that he had nothing against my father. Stunned, I told him that Dad didn’t get along with a lot of people, me included, and Ellison didn’t need to sugarcoat things. Ellison said he never sugarcoated anything, you can ask around, but insisted that no feud ever existed. He told me he had the utmost respect for my father, whom he considered an excellent writer. He asked me to visit when I was in California, and hung up.

The conversation shocked me, and I thought about it for a long time. Ellison had put forth a degree of effort to track me down at a hotel and make the call. He was known to be rude and irascible, a street fighter in his youth, litigious, a provocateur, and short-tempered. I couldn’t summon a reason for him to lie about the feud or about his sincere regard for my father. In short, I believed him. That meant the decades-long conflict was one-sided on my father’s part.

I wondered how many other altercations were products of Dad’s immense imagination bundled with rage. I’d grown up hearing tales of his disputes, the firing of agents, editors, and collaborators. He had discord with everyone — his mother, his sister, and me. Perhaps he needed foes as much as he needed to talk.

As Dad aged, he outlived the older writers he admired. He had alienated most of his contemporaries, and neglected to befriend the newcomers. All his books were out of print. Invitations to cons dwindled, but Dad told me that he quit fandom due to vanity. He didn’t want to be remembered as old and infirm. He was afraid that younger fans wouldn’t know who he was, a prospect he couldn’t bear.

My brother blamed cons for the erosion of our home life. His reasoning made sense, but I recognized that our parents needed a countermeasure to life in Haldeman. The majority of fans used cons as a replacement for an absent family, and my parents did the same. They preferred cons to their children’s high school and college graduations, or my sister’s appearance on the homecoming court. On one occasion Dad returned from a con proud of having cried in public because he felt comfortable among his “family.” I believe that telling his children this was an attempt to communicate that he was capable of weeping, despite never doing so in front of us. But what came across was the notion that fans were more deserving of his emotional vulnerability than we were.

Dad seldom left the house over which he held utter dominion. When he did leave, he went to cons, an environment that assuaged his ego in every way. He grew accustomed to these two extremes and became resentful when his family failed to treat him like fans did. We disappointed him with our need for a father.