"Suddenly, like Nicole in 'Tender Is the Night,' she declares, 'I’m going to kill both of us!' Roth grabs the wheel, and they continue on to the Rhône Valley. Roth started seeing Hans Kleinschmidt, an eccentric name-dropping psychoanalyst, three or four days a week. Asked later how he could justify the expense ($27.50 a session), Roth said, 'It kept me from killing my first wife.' He told Kleinschmidt that he fantasized about dropping into the Hoffritz store on Madison Avenue and buying a knife. 'Philip, you didn’t like the Army that much,' Kleinschmidt told him. 'How will you enjoy prison?'... Roth has a fling with Alice Denham, Playboy’s Miss July, 1956, who, as her cheerfully unapologetic memoir 'Sleeping with Bad Boys' revealed, also slept with Nelson Algren, James Jones, Joseph Heller, and William Gaddis. 'Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank,' she wrote. So did Roth. Roth and [his first wife] finally split up in 1963."
From "The Secrets Philip Roth Didn’t Keep/Roth revealed himself to his biographer as he once revealed himself on the page, reckoning with both the pure and the perverse" (The New Yorker).
Here's Denham's rather decorous Playboy centerfold from 1956, when sex, apparently, entailed pillow fights, with feathers flying, and a big fluffy feather was always right there as an impromptu pastie, lest you see too much.
I had to look up "pastie," because... is it "pasty" or "pastie"? Don't want any mixup with the meat pie. Turns out it's either "pasty" or "pastie," and, really, how often do you need the singular? But I did get to while away a few moments — disrupting my contemplation of the "a river of men" that was Manhattan in the 50s — with the Wikipedia article "Pasties".
There, I encountered this photograph — cc by Mark Lidikay — captioned "A group of women protesting for the right to go topless anywhere a man could. Venice Beach California. The demonstrator with the microphone is wearing a pastie in the shape of a nipple":
Posts
47 comments:
I love that she looks a bit thick through the middle by modern magazine standards.
Cute tits (tit?) on the Venice broad, but who's the freak to her left?
If you search for 'Alice Denham Playboy' (unfiltered results) you will see that she is well put together...
Roth sounded like a mess, but I think everyone already knew that...
"Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank." Well, that pretty succinctly sums up the scope of life for so many miserably lost and lonely urbanites. Of both sexes, mind you.
Cute tits (tit?) on the Venice broad, but who's the freak to her left?
C'mon man, he was transitioning then.
"During a trip to Italy, [his wife] gets behind the wheel of a Renault and speeds along a mountainside road outside of Siena....Suddenly, like Nicole in 'Tender Is the Night,' she declares, 'I’m going to kill both of us!' Roth grabs the wheel, and they continue on to the Rhône Valley."
He held on to the wheel until they got to France?
He held on to the wheel until they got to France?
My thought as well...am guessing it's hundreds of miles : )
when sex, apparently, entailed pillow fights,
Wait, what?! It doesn't?
Rut-row.
Oh, that explains so much...
Denham posed for several men's magazines during her modeling career, but she is notable for her academic achievements as for her physical attributes. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina in 1949 and earned a master's degree from the University of Rochester in 1950. Several Playmates have written the text that accompanied their pictorials, but Denham is the only Playmate to have written a short story that was published in the same issue as her centerfold.
Writing
Denham pursued a career in writing and education. She's written several short stories and novels, including Amo and My Darling from the Lions, and taught creative writing at the City College of New York, where she served as an adjunct professor of English from 1970 to 1980. She also held fiction-writing seminars at the University of Toronto for several years. According to The Playmate Book, she has completed her memoirs and also is writing a non-fiction book about her family's "migration from South Carolina and Scotland to Florida at the time of the Seminole Indian Wars."
She recently completed a memoir, Sleeping with Bad Boys (ISBN 1-58042-206-3) published by Cardoza Press in October 2006.
Was a Jr Lifeguard at the Venice Breakwater in 1972-1974. It was a infamous nude beach. Salarymen would eat lunch at the beach. White shorts sleeve collar shirts, pencil tie, charcoal pants and carrying their wingtips.
Hell, I've done that hundreds of time. Look at centerfolds, I mean.
An All-American cutie, she was . . . solid.
Never caught the Roth bug myself, for whatever reason.
Narr
If any
I never cared for Richard Benjamin either
removing her shirt was not an attention-getter....
Interest lady...
https://flashbak.com/alice-denham-the-topless-model-who-wrote-for-playboy-424322/
When I am trying to explain Cornish meat pies to people by their proper Wisconsin /Upper Peninsula name, in sentences such as "Make sure to look for the restaurants that have up a sign that says pasty so you can try those" I pause when it is time to say that word and cast around in my head for the right pronunciation. Not sure I ever succeed.
"I pause when it is time to say that word and cast around in my head for the right pronunciation. Not sure I ever succeed."
Don't know for sure, but my assumption was always that the British pronunciation is 'Pass-Tee.'
Like how Gordon Ramsey says 'Pass-ta.'
And the American pronunciation is 'Paste-Ee.'
I wrote about Philip Roth in my blog about the movie Dirty Dancing.
The movie's screenplay was written by Eleanor Bergstein, who previously had written a largely autobiographical novel titled Advancing Paul Newman. The novel portrays a years-long friendship between two Jewish women, named Kitsy and Ila. The character Kitsy is based on Bergstein herself.
At one point in the novel, in August 1962, Kitsy and Ila spend a weekend at a beach house with some friends. In the house, there happens to be a paperback copy of Roth's novel Goodbye, Columbus. The novel comes up in conversation, and it turns out that everyone there has read it.
The fact that everyone has read the novel reveals subtly that everyone there -- in particular, Kitsy (i.e. Bergstein) -- is a mostly assimilated Jew.
The theme of the novel Goodbye, Columbus is psychological problems that the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants still experienced when they ultimately became romantically involved with non-Jews at about the beginning of the 1960s.
In the movie Dirty Dancing, the heroine Baby Houseman becomes romantically involved with a non-Jew, Johnny Castle. The Jewish aspect of this relationship is portrayed only very subtly, but it was more apparent in an earlier screenplay.
I discovered Goodby Columbus and later Portnoy's Complaint as a teen living in NJ, going to a Jewish day school a few minutes away from the Newark neighborhood Roth describes. The psychotic break/rant on the beach in Israel (even the garbagemen are Jewish!) was revelatory and hilarious. I was too young to appreciate his later Zuckerman books, although I tried. One day I'm going to revisit Portnoy, which I went through a few times as a teen, to see how it holds up. I'm a little afraid of that, as it's such a touchstone for me.
@Churchy
Thanks. The memoir is mentioned in the post, so I put a link on it in case anyone wants to read it.
Plenty of excellent reviews at Amazon. From a 2-star review:
"I don't expect great writing from bimbos or literary/celebrity groupies, but I do expect decent writing from someone with a master's degree in English who spent much of her life striving to become a published writer and taught writing at the college level. While I find her single-minded devotion to writing and literature commendable, I think the beautiful Alice Denham writes no better than most BAD students in a lot of elementary college writing classes. I actually feel sad for her, because one can tell she really, really wants to be a writer. This book is replete with bad writing. If you turn to nearly any page, the bad, clumsy, disjointed writing leaps off the page. The tortured prose, the weird metaphors, the non sequiturs, the odd language, the punctuation--someone needs to teach her the proper use of a comma--is self-evident. Her biggest problem probably is that she's trying way too hard to be clever. Some examples of her over-reaching prose:
* On James Dean: "His startling bright meteor crashed to earth..." and "His new silver Porsche Spyder screamed head-on into..." (Cars scream?)
* "Our cab drove downtown through the dark glamour of Manhattan. Eyes whirling night lights like street stars in black canyons. The shimmering thrill of action..." (Dark glamour? What the hell is a street star? Thrills are shimmering?)
* "Wrothfully, Philip [Roth] pounded on my door." (I'd pound too if I was wrothful. Was this a play on words...wroth...Roth?)
* "Norman's (Mailer) bright blue eyes danced with scintillating light." (Blue eyes should always be seated when their scintillating.)
* With James Jones' face in her crotch: "...I came, flowing all over Jim's face as he tried to suck it all into his mouth. Then looked up at me from that humble position to see if I was pleased. Yes, smiled my body, oh yes." (Illuminating...a body can smile. Who knew?)"
Continued:
"* "As Maggie was pulled away to talk by other book people, milling about the brownstone living room, I smiled snidely up at Philip."
* "Conversing with Philip was like jumping a barricade that made winsome friendliness more suspect than blithe nastiness." (Ugh.)
* "Roth smiled with handsome superiority."
* "Las Vegas was like a neon campfire on the moon." (Huh?)
* "When he stumbled back into their apartment, bloody, Adele supposedly spoke sharply to him, as who would not."
* "Ken let out a sigh of almost annoyance."
* "But his high spirit radiated smack into my heart."
* "...my encounter with Ken made me feel I could only compensate to my psyche by utter monastic devotion to my novel." (Ugh.)
* "In the slow silence of evening Lalo removed my clothes with reverence and we embraced, two pale figures in a glass house standing on tile." (Silence is slow? Is the house on tile or are two pale figures?)
* "Lalo carried me to the bed and we feasted as gods, on one another, his penis connecting us, swirling orgasm incense around like a magic wand." (Ugh.)
* "A shock like death went through me." (How does she know death is shocking? Death is usually gradual. If it's sudden and quick, who's to say we feel anything?)
* "When I landed at Idlewild, not yet JFK, I felt precious relief to have escaped my wild urge to escape forever my destiny. Those Sacred Entities, as Emily Dickinson called Words. New York where I think, as Doris Lessing said about London versus vacation." (I'm not making this up.)
* "With that, I started crying, lurched with tears." (Huh?)
* "Algren had night skin. He was the color of the dusk in my living room." (Does she not know the difference between dusk and dust?)
* "We strolled back through the breezy wavering light and shadows dancing through tall park trees." (Clunky.)
* "Vast humbling horror pushed on my shoulders, shot through with a black streak of exhilaration." (I'm not making this up.)
* "Finally I left his room, tingling with grief, careening in the waves of elsewhere." (Waves of elsewhere?)
* "'Then why did you advertise the price?'" I hollered, vital rage pumping like bellows."
* "His phone rang. Grandiloquently he talked, arching back and revolving his overpuffed chair." (Overpuffed?)
She suggests that writing success was denied her when young simply because she was a woman. I think her ham-handed writing might have had something to do with it."
Well from the comments above her "tell all" sounds like an effort to get published in Hustler magazine.
But she is a woman of mystery of a sort. Her birthday is listed variously as 1918--or is it 1933--or doing a little math on her obituary 1927. Who knows? Who cares? She was an attractive woman, who said she was from the South and had been "trained to be good at men--and I was".
Heh, supposedly none of her author friends would blurb her first novel. I think I see why.
It was a dark and stormy night : )
Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank
I understand being "sex positive," but why all the different men? Were they all that bad at it? Or was it about racking up a high score and snagging a few big names for extra points?
*
I wish we knew about Alice Denham ten years ago. Then we could have started a rumor that she was Obama's real mother and watched it grow.
"I understand being "sex positive," but why all the different men?"
Maybe she was a nympho? Who are we to judge?
At least it was post-penicillin and pre-AIDS so she had that going for her...
Never got into reading Roth. He always just seemed really gross.
"It was a stormy and dark night, and the burgeoning river of men surged through the femaleness of me like a broad snake of tourists back from Cabo, waiting impatiently at the CBP line to be prodded and queried by bored agents about any exotic or prohibited fruits and vegetables they might have returned with--sometimes asking other guys to hold their places while they decamped to the restrooms, or sharing predictions about the bowl games.
Men. How I loved them."
Narr
Don't judge
I actually feel sad for her, because one can tell she really, really wants to be a writer. This book is replete with bad writing. If you turn to nearly any page, the bad, clumsy, disjointed writing leaps off the page.
Reminds me of a guy who worked on an early government health records system back during the transition from procedural to object-oriented programming languages. He had been an English major, not math nor comp sci nor any STEM, just English. He was, and particularly by the standards of the day, a fantastic O-O programmer because he had no preconceived ideas about the “right” way to write good code. But he showed me some of his short stories, and as a writer of prose he was terrible, but as an O-O programmer and producer of very readable technical documentation he was wonderful. Plus, he introduced me to James Lee Burke, so I have a second reason to remember him fondly.
Note for Althouse, do car engines scream? Get onYouTube and listen to Ferrari V12 racing engines at full speed and your question will be answered. However James Dean’s Porsche was a flat 6. Noisy, but not a scream.
Never caught the Roth bug myself, for whatever reason.
@Narr and Tom T, agreed. I tried to get into Portnoy, but put it down because “guys like to receive fellatio” was not much of a revelation to male recent college grads like me. Watched “Goodbye Columbus” in the theater, but it made no impression on me.
Leslie Graves said...When I am trying to explain Cornish meat pies to people by their proper Wisconsin /Upper Peninsula name, in sentences such as "Make sure to look for the restaurants that have up a sign that says pasty so you can try those"
--
In Madison, one might hear about getting a Teddywedger.
That Playboy picture was the best of the bunch. Hef knew how to glamorize women, but in a sort of plastic way. I love the pillow fight motif.
She was the girl next door who needed a man-drink from the Bad Boy River every now and then. She sounds exactly like the kind of girl I was looking for from the age of 15 to 22. Then I started to think ahead.
Note for Althouse, do car engines scream?
The street was deserted late Friday night
We were buggin' each other while we sat out the light
We both popped the clutch when the light turned green
You should of heard the whine from my screamin' machine
They're just breasts except when they're tits.
Even erect nips are contextual.
Product placement:
http://playmate.uw.hu/html/5808.html
When was the first pictorial in Playboy published that showed pubic hair?
Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive ... The New Republic
You is what you is and you ain't what you ain't.
No honest and competent biographer is going to change that.
Bailey may have been "extremely sympathetic" to John Cheever, and he did revive Richard Yates's reputation, but nobody thinks about Cheever in the same way since his bio came out -- and the new way isn't very positive. But maybe Roth doesn't come across as a lonely ornery alcoholic who alienated everyone who was close to him, so good for him.
Portnoy was a very funny book, but is it really something you want to read as an adult? I didn't have a problem with some of Roth's books. American Pastoral and I Married a Communist were alright, I guess. Some of the others were pretty bad. And even the better ones took some unexpected bad turns along the way. Also, how much time do you want to spend in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark in the 1940s? Once you have learned more than you ever wanted about the glove or hat or butcher's business in the old neighborhood, do you really want to go back there?
The old man/young lesbian thing in The Humbling wasn't very convincing, nor was Faunia in The Human Stain (even less convincing when played by Nicole Kidman). The Plot Against America really did a job on American history. It's not surprising that Roth's hit job was made into a television series in the Trump years. The last word on the book was by an Asian-American woman reviewer who deadpanned that the book taught her that if FDR had been defeated we would have had concentration camps in the US.
But who else was there? He was maybe the last survivor of the last generation of American novelists to really matter, so whatever complaints and objections one has have to be weighed against that. I dump on him now, but there were worse and more unpleasant ways to spend one's time than reading his books.
As if there's not enough mindless stupidity on display at Althouse today, the topless people in the fake nipple photo are Raelians. Notice the medallions.
It's a UFO based cult. I believe the US Air Force has joined up recently.
Thanks for publishing the quotes from the 2-star review, Althouse. I've been thinking about writing a sequel to "Writers Gone Wild" lately, and this will go into the file for later use.
I came across the New York Times review from Stacey D'Erasmo, a writer, and she (naturally) didn't mention the quality of her writing:
"The worst moment by far, in a book that is meant to be honest but rollicking, comes when Denham, having labored for years on her first book, can’t get any of the titans she slept or partied with for years to blurb her. Not Heller, of the fervent adulterous kissing; not Gaddis, with the fine centerpiece; not Mailer, so quick to offer the abortion money. “Why had I thought I was one of the gang?” she laments, though two pages later she counts herself lucky to have been there “when literature mattered ... when I knew all those grand, evil, macho literary guys.”
D'Erasmo's notion of "tit for tat" says a lot about her critical judgment.
Naturally, she concludes the above passage with with "But did any of them, one wonders, know her?"
Dorothy Parker would have had fun reviewing this book.
Portnoy's Complaint? They only ate liver once a week.
@Skippy, it had to be late fall of 1970. I remember because I was working in the Pentagon and an Air Farce (sic) LTC came in waving the issue of Playboy and yelling that "You can see her fern!" I remember because right about then I was getting ready to ETS.
In the case of that particular AF officer, probably the first fern he had ever seen.
"'Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank.' Well, that pretty succinctly sums up the scope of life for so many miserably lost and lonely urbanites. Of both sexes, mind you."
How do you know they're "miserably lost and lonely..."? Sounds to me like the reason so many people come to the big city. It's certainly a life many would envy.
And don't think there aren't "miserably lost and lonely" suburbanites. All things being equal, the big city is the place to be!
When was the first pictorial in Playboy published that showed pubic hair?
And when did they stop?
Nemesis was an easy read but quite good and memorable.
Recommended.
"...the big city is the place to be!"
Do you get allergic smelling hay, Cookie?
Trivia: The song "Goodbye Columbus" (for the movie along with three other songs) was by The Association. They had several great songs, but this one was not one of them. The phrase "Hello life, goodbye Columbus" was the only decent part of the song.
THEOLDMAN
“And when did they stop?” When personal grooming procedures changed?
“ In a mine, the pasty's dense, folded pastry could stay warm for several hours, and if it did get cold, it could easily be warmed on a shovel over a candle.”
In real mines they have to put a screw on metal cage over lightbulbs to keep them from breaking. So you unscrew it and put your little can of beanie weenies in and screw it back on, the light bulb will have it warmed up when you get back from the stope.
Post a Comment