Customer Reviews

Sleeping With Bad Boys: A 1956 Playboy Model's Escapades with James Dean, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer and the famous writers of the 1950's beat generation

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title of this book promises lots of steamy sex, and it delivers in spades. Denham loved sex, and makes no bones about it. From a strategic location in Greenwich Village she knew the leading literary lights of the fifties and sixties, and slept with any of them she cared to. Her descriptions are not so much graphic as emotionally complete. Some of her flights of lyricism are so wonderful that the male reader gets to experience what he can never experience, how it feels to a woman in the throes of ecstacy.
But, although Denham slept with a lot of stars, she was no starjumper. She politely turned down some of the biggest lit stars of the era, and managed to maintain good friendships with them at the same time. Her morality was not conventional, but nonetheless it was there. In the sixties when swinging came into vogue, and Plato's Retreat was the new hot thing in New York she was simply turned off by that scene. She did not require love, but she did require at least friendship and chemistry.
But, in spite of the title, and in spite of the beauty of the way it's rendered, sex is not the best thing about this book. The description of the lit life of the era surpasses that, and the description of the difficulties of being female at a time when women were second class, not thought worthy of their typewriters surpasses that. The best chapters of this book describe her friendship with Katherine Anne Porter. This is fine writing, deeply touching, and a great story.
Denham has never been given the credit she deserves as a serious writer. She is not merely good. She is magnificent.

Sleeping With Bad Boys, Alice Denham's memoir about literary NY in the 1950s and 60s, reads like an intriguing, absorbing novel. Her talent for creating characters, not only the whole gallery of interesting people that appear in the book, but her very own narrative voice, is excellent. The well developed story line, with its twists of fate and suspense, creates an incredibly moving, tight, awesome under current of that so very special combine of the struggle for creativity, love, life itself.

Maria Arrillaga

Though this smart, well-written book will mostly be bought for its gossip, "Sleeping with Bad Boys" is an invaluable literary history source for certain American writers who emerged in the 1950s. We learn much about underappreciated novelist David Markson, for example, and especially about William Gaddis, for whom little biographical info exists. (Two of his letters are quoted in their entirety.) There are eye-opening passages about Mailer, Roth, Heller, Porter, and others, and shocking accounts of how old-boy misogyny persisted in the publishing community throughout the Sixties. This is probably the only work of literary history with a photo-insert of pinup images, but this an enlightening, impassioned book that deserves a wide readership.

Fools are they who kiss and tell the wise poet once sung. Man can hold many a place if he can only hold his tongue. Because of that, I usually avoid kiss and tell books. Who wants to read something written by a fool? But the New York Times reviewed sleeping with Bad Boys favorably and the book did touch on two of my favorite subjects: Literature and Sex. Alice didn't disappoint me. She is a real writer with intelligent things to say. Besides being literate, her memoir does not have the feeling of retrospective falsification that often haunts and sometimes adorns similar works. In fact, I can almost hear the file cards in the background, as she tells us, with a sense of immediacy, about James Dean (his is too small) in bed or Norman Mailer (what he knew about love was nada). And yes she was playmate of the month back in 1956, I think. I'm too lazy to look up the exact date. And yes, she did it with Hugh Hefner as many of the playmates did. Sort of like pay to play only it's play to play. Alas, alack, her sex friends disappointed her by not blurbing her book. She thinks that they are prejudiced against the second sex. More likely, they like women but not those who kiss and tell. Alice Denham is not quite the oversexed ancient Aztec goddess of earth and fire, Coatlicue. But she is close enough to inspire worship by me.

An excellent retelling of her literary and sexual exploits during the 50s. Because she knew so many famous authors, it's also a fun look through a different angle of the beat generations history. The bits about James Dean and Norman Mailer are fun reads, as well as many others. Her writing is evocative and juicy, making the book a relatively quick read and a page-turner. It's all around a fun book to read, her life in the 50s was excellently publishable.

The way she writes about love and sex makes this book amazing and timeless, thanks to her friends and acquaintances, the literary heroes from the 50s, her interesting struggle to have her writing published, and her entertaining rift with Playboy. Not recommended for anyone looking for a literary history, but for any fan of the beat generation or looking for a good, fun read about past times.

Author Alice Denham, whose writings have appeared in "The New York Times", "New York" magazine, "Cosmopolitan", and "Playboy" (her fiction was published in the same issue as her centerfold) presents Sleeping With Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties. Sleeping With Bad Boys lives up to its title and then some, offering lusty, sexy, between-the-sheets tell-alls about James Dean, Normain Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis. Though sensual elements are definitely a highlight, Sleeping With Bad Boys isn't all sex, all the time; chapters also tell of the author's road to maturity, and pivotal events in her life, from private family emergencies to the assassination of JFK. Written in an anecdotal style of brief, discrete passages that lend themselves to being read a little bit at a time or all at once, Sleeping With Bad Boys is utterly absorbing from cover to cover and enthusiastically recommended.

If you love the AMC TV series THE MAD MEN, with its highly stylized picture of Manhattan life circa 1960, you have to read this book! Alice Denham is a trip! "Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank." I haven't read any of her novels, but she can certainly spin a juicy tale. You have to admire her chutzpah, setting off from Jacksonville to hit New York during an era in which women were seen as inferior, especially writing women, and in fact they were often "not seen" at all--Denham refers to herself and others as "invisible women," after Ralph Ellison's classic novel INVISIBLE MAN. In a sense they were invisible even to other women, taught that marriage is the ultimate act of love and that a woman's destiny is to become a supportive wife to her husband. Other women were competition. Alice Denham does, however, sketch a memorable portrait of one fellow woman writer, the much older Katherine Anne Porter, with whom she became drinking pals. "She was my literary guru, powerful as the ancient Aztec goddess of earth and fire, Coatlicue."

She has a long memory and never forgets a slight, nor has she forgotten the equipment of any man she ever knew.. Somehow, fresh from college, Denham managed to find herself involved with many of the movers and shakers of New York culture of the period (roughly 1953 through 1965), when living in New York, she claims, was like Paris in the 1920s. I must correct an earlier reviewer of Denham's book. It was not James Dean who had the small "apparatus," no, his was perfectly average and OK--you're thinking of James Jones whose tiny little thumblike thing certainly did not send Miss Denham from here to eternity. (Though Jones made up for it in other ways!) The one bad boy who appears most often is Norman Mailer, whom oddly enough Denham never did sleep with. She is utterly convincing as a portraitist, with a gift for the telling physical characteristic; among other things her book might be used to reconstruct the physical likenesses of all her leading figures, even if all photographs, paintings, and films of them were to vanish in an instant. Jones had "an abnormally long head front to back while, incomprehensibly, his features were bunched together in the squalling center of his face." Don't you love the touch of that "squalling"? She's a poet from top to toe. "William Gaddis looked New England Gothic, slight, rail-thin with a highboned narrow face, bony hands, yet an insinuating air." Here it's the word "yet" that does all the work, gives us Gaddis to the life. Naked, he's "only slightly muscled, but sporting a fine centerpiece

Throughout all the bedroom hijinx (in what other modernist's memoir will you find out that the late film composer Leonard Rosenman had a fondness for--well, I can't even say it on this family based website?) she never loses her throughline, which is her heartfelt attempt to write a great novel and then to get it published. Again and again she gets the rebuff from nasty male editors who just want her to continue with her career as a Playmate and/or to become a "hostess." Finally she gets somebody to believe in her wild vision and MY DARLING FROM THE LIONS gets published. In the meantime the guys she resents are often enough the ones who are great in bed. Evan S. Connell Jr was the king stud, "tall, noble, with strong perfectly proportioned features and observant eyes, black as his hair. The royal bearing of an Indian chieftain. Was he descended from Sacajawea and Chabonneau?"

In her slightly ironic style, Denham is sometimes so anxious to avoid four letter words that she gets a little cryptic, and some of her touches are sort of odd. "As he passed me, Philip Roth tried to tweak my mound by ramming his paw into my lap." But all in all SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS is a masterpiece of wrath, tenderness, and compassion, and I predict it will someday outshine most of the "boy's books" that defined literature for Denham's generation.

SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS is a provocative, titillating title, to be sure. Sex sells, and Alice Denham doesn't disappoint with this book. But the title doesn't tell the whole story, nor does it convey the book's abiding value. SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS is nothing less than an eyewitness account of the unfolding of an era. Denham's personal memories of key writers frequently segue into keen literary criticism, while her travails as a woman author and model are firmly set against the burgeoning feminist movement of the 60s.

The cast list is jaw-dropping--James Dean, Marlon Brando, Hugh Hefner, James Jones, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, David Markson, and Norman Mailer, just for starters. No, Denham didn't have sex with (quite) all of them, and if your prurient curiosity is getting the best of you, you'll have to read the book. Suffice it to say that these vividly-drawn characters play illuminating parts in Denham's bildungsroman. BAD BOYS relates a writer's apprenticeship in those heady days when literature still mattered, when American readers waited with bated breath for the elusive "Great American Novel."

Then as now, writers learned to support themselves while pursuing their craft, but options for women were limited. Denham hated modeling, especially scantily clothed or not at all, but it seemed a less time-consuming way to pay the bills than, say, shorthand. In 1956, she became the first and only woman to appear as a playmate centerfold in PLAYBOY and publish a short story in the same issue.

It was a stunt, of course, calculated to attract publishers to Denham's work. In that male-dominated age, a woman writer had to think on her feet, for "it was conventional wisdom that no woman could write fiction with the scope of a man." And while Denham remembers her male literary pals with affection, she doesn't write about them with unqualified nostalgia.

To her, Mailer, Roth, Heller, Gaddis, and their ilk were flawed men and flawed artists. "Alienation was the height of male literary chic," she observes. "A refusal to reach out, disguised as inescapable human frailty. Each in his own cell, in solitary. I called it megalomania, suffocating self-love. Whereas ordinary men and women did manage to get close, to know and touch and relate. Even if they failed to make it last. What these hotsy male writers knew about love was NADA."

In Denham's eyes, Katherine Anne Porter rose above those self-imposed limitations. Denham relates her tentative but moving friendship with the then-fading but still effervescent Southern short-story writer. This passage sweetly captures the thrill a young artist feels when being treated as a peer by a genius.

Otherwise, Denham's literary heroes were usually separated from her by time or space. She adored the poetry of T.S. Eliot, responded eagerly to Bernard Shaw's Life Force worship, and especially idolized Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who "combined character, theme, action, and plot movement ALL IN ONE SENTENCE. How I yearned, ached, to be able to do that." Denham embraces Dostoyevsky's spirit best when ruthlessly analyzing her own motives and shortcomings.

Along those lines, much of Denham book relates the writing and publication of her novel MY DARLING FROM THE LIONS, first printed in 1967 and recently reissued by Authors Guild Backinprint.com. One editor offered to show Denham how to make the book more "commercial." Denham turned him down, angry and offended. "If a novel was considered commercial," she explains, "that meant it was NOT literary. We serious writers disdained bestseller writers as a low breed. They were hacks, we were artists."

That was a false dichotomy, of course: "Later I realized I had turned down an opportunity to LEARN through arrogant youthful stupidity. Turned down a bird in hand for an empty bush. . . . We in those days believed literature equals truth, commercial equals crap. We smartasses. Life changes."

Life changed, indeed, during the 1960s, with the rise of feminism, and Denham threw herself into the movement wholeheartedly. Her own experiences as a woman artist--and, yes, a sex object--convinced her of the imperative of advancing women's rights. She wept with joy at the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 ROE V. WADE decision overturning state antiabortion laws, for she had personally endured the trauma of illegal abortion.

Her searing description of one such abortion should be required reading for anyone who remains undecided on the issue of choice. "The first pain scraped raw through me beyond pain," she writes, "appalling my entire body, stretching its range of sensations to the unbearable.... I was my own human sacrifice, killing part of myself to free the rest."

Someday, the sex and gossip of SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS will seem merely one facet in a rich and multi-faceted narrative, and Denham's book will be widely recognized as the important document it is. But don't wait till then to read it. Any college instructor teaching a survey course in 20th-century American literature (or, for that matter, 20th-century American culture in general) would be well advised to include it in the syllabus.

Her struggle to succeed in publishing her writing is admirable, but the titillating bits of sexual exploits though interesting detract from the main story.

Unfortunately, like the rest of the world, Miss Denham has forgotten poor Fred Exley!

Otherwise, this is a fun, breezy read.