Not So Good a Gay Man Page 10

  I finally caught up with Beaumont filmwise when one day our tough-as-nails receptionist—Patty—called from the front reception area, “Frank, there’s a Mr. Paul on the phone—wants to talk to you.”

  “I don’t know any Mr. Paul,” I grumbled.

  “He says it’s important.”

  I took the call and a heavily accented voice said, “Mr. Robinson, I am your greatest fan.”

  It was George Pal, calling from Hollywood. He had talked MGM into signing for a film based on The Power. He asked if I wanted to write the screenplay, and like an idiot, I turned him down—I still had hopes of catching up with Playboy. I recommended Charlie Beaumont, who had recommended the book to Pal in the first place. Pal hesitated, then said that Charlie was up to his neck in assignments.

  Beaumont couldn’t have done it, I found out later. He was in the early stages of premature Alzheimer’s, and his writing days were over.

  Making the movie wasn’t easy. MGM was in a stock option battle with Kirk Kerkorian, a big-time movie mogul, and needed money to fight him. The Power starred George Hamilton, who was dating one of LBJ’s daughters. MGM hoped to tap Texas money through him. Whatever George wanted when it came to the film, naturally George got.

  What he wanted was a new script and a new ending. He got both. It was the second script for the film by John Gay, writer of Separate Tables and Run Silent, Run Deep. His first effort followed the book almost exactly, and he was happy with it. His second draft was a butcher job.

  The film was produced by Pal but directed by Byron Haskin, a friend of Pal’s. I had moved to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury during the shooting and finally saw it at the bottom of a double bill. I walked out in the middle.

  Suzanne Pleshette, the heroine, later interviewed for a book about Pal, admitted she had no idea what the new ending was about. (Leonard Maltin gave the movie an undeserved three stars.)

  At this time the enormous MGM lot was almost silent. The Power was being shot, as was Dr. Kildare, a television series starring Richard Chamberlain. The only other item on MGM’s agenda was 2001, being filmed by Kubrick in London. Rushes of 2001 were sent daily to the suits at MGM, but nobody had a clue as to what it was about.

  Years later, Tom Scortia, my writing partner, and I were pitching a property in Hollywood and ran into Pal at the Beverly Hilton. The first thing he said to me was, “Mr. Robinson, how can you ever forgive me?”

  George Pal was a class act.

  * * *

  AT ROGUE WE were putting together the next issue and were looking around for the packet of cartoons by Interlandi. (The artist was Hamling’s discovery.)

  Every week the one thing we dreaded was going through the slush pile of two hundred or more cartoon submissions, trying to find some worth printing. Interlandi was a real find—a natural funnyman with a pen who had a variety of different styles and could come close to imitating some of the cartoonists on Playboy’s staff.

  We finally gave up plowing through the slush pile and turned everything over to Interlandi—we gave him an assignment to draw every cartoon in the book.

  One Saturday we realized we hadn’t received any cartoons from our ace cartoonist. Hamling called him and asked what was going on. When he hung up he was white with anger. Hefner liked Interlandi, too, and had sent a representative to see him. The upshot was Playboy signed him to an exclusive contract. What Playboy got was every cartoon in Interlandi’s office, including the packet ready to send to us.

  I don’t remember who thought of it first, Hamling or myself, but one of us remembered all the years that Hamling had spent working with Hefner at PDC and buying the occasional cartoon from him for Imagination. (Five bucks each? Probably.) He never intended to print any of them—it was a favor.

  But that was then and this was now.

  If Hamling could resurrect the Hefner cartoons from his garage the next issue of Rogue would have “Cartoons by Hugh M. Hefner” in big type on the cover.

  I was the one who decided to add insult to injury and sent a note to “Hugh M. Hefner, HMH Publishing Company”—I didn’t mention Playboy—asking for a photograph and short biography to run on our author’s page (standard practice for new contributors). I mailed the note off that same Saturday.

  I didn’t have to wait long for a reply.

  If you don’t appreciate that printing these cartoons at this time would be a source of embarrassment to me, you can hardly expect me to cooperate.

  A day later, Hefner’s personal secretary called (I had met her through Beaumont).

  “Frank, what the hell is going on up there?”

  I then had one of the few epiphanies I’ve ever had in my life.

  “If I find them,” I assured her, “consider them not found. I’ll burn them. Mr. Hefner has nothing to worry about.”

  Someday, I thought, I might be asking Hefner for a job. But if we had found them that Saturday, the next issue of Rogue would have printed on its front cover, “Cartoons by Hugh M. Hefner.”

  Years later, I was indeed working for Hugh Hefner and occasionally met him in the hallway at Playboy. He never recognized me as the kid who’d poured him a beer at one of Hamling’s parties or who had interviewed him for his master’s thesis.

  Shortly after that, Rogue almost gave up its ghost. The distributor had run into some trouble.

  The regional distributors saw no point in sending their money to a guy who might not be able to publish. The withheld funds included all the monies owed on the sales of Rogue. Hamling was left with about thirty grand in the bank, barely enough to cover the editorial costs of the next issue.

  One of the first things Bill did was slash half the staff. (He wanted to can Dave Stevens, my right-hand man, and I threatened to quit. The compromise was that David would be assigned to spend half his time helping the handyman burn the stroke book returns. It was a long time before David forgave me for his reduction in rank.) In addition to David, we also kept Bruce Glassner, the editor of Bruce’s Bag. Bruce stuck with us almost to the end.

  We now had a new printer. Dick Thompson, the art director, and I went out to Commerce, California, to scout the scene. The printing plant was small, with its main press an offset unit. While we were watching, flames suddenly shot out from the drying oven (the printed web of paper went through it to dry the still-wet ink.) One of the pressmen grabbed the web and ripped it out—the web had stalled in the oven and caught fire.

  Great, I thought. The local fire department probably hated the company.

  With a new printing plant I thought it would be a great idea if one of the staff went with me when I traveled to Commerce to watch the magazine come off the press. The first one up was Bruce, who was fascinated by the equipment. The owner of the company was a real entertainer, hauling us around to various restaurants and bars. I’m not so sure how much of the trip Bruce actually remembered. (When we got back to Chicago Bruce quit and found a job with an advertising company.)

  David and I went to Commerce for the next issue. We got the same entertainment that Bruce had, got piss-ass drunk, pushed each other around a little in our room, and the next thing I remember we were wrestling on the floor in our underwear. I always claimed I’d won, but David was younger and stronger than I was and it suddenly occurred to me that David’s gay boss wrestling on the floor with his very straight employee was not such a good idea. I gave up quickly and David never let me forget it. The next Christmas he gave me a leather-covered brick with “Robinson Sucks” printed in gold on the side. I didn’t take it personally.

  Along with firing half the staff and finding a new printer, Hamling also found a new distributor, Kable News, an outfit that had taken over—and buried—most of the skin magazines that had failed to dethrone Playboy. Hamling moved very fast at this time—as a fellow employee at Ziff-Davis once described him, “all that engine and no steering wheel.”

  Our very last issue—the one to carry our names on the masthead—almost never made it out. The owner of the plant was more than
willing to show me the town, to take me to various shows and fancy restaurants.

  We finally made it to the plant about midnight and I found myself looking at the end of Rogue. There was almost no paper in the plant—a few rolls stored along a wall plus the remnants of rolls—“butt ends”—scattered around. I was told what few rolls of paper there were had been scheduled for another publication—a West Coast skin magazine titled Adam.

  The plant had failed to pay its paper bills and had been cut off. They were negotiating for a new paper contract, but that would take a while. In the meantime, Adam wouldn’t be out for another month. They finally printed Rogue on the paper reserved for Adam, plus the butt ends of paper on the floor. Some of it was eighty-pound paper, which gave the best reproduction I’d ever seen on a magazine. Unfortunately we couldn’t use it—it was too heavy to go through the folder.

  Sometime before this, word had gotten around Chicago that Rogue was on its last legs. Once home I received a call from A. C. Spectorsky, chief honcho at Playboy, who suggested we have lunch.

  Lunch with “Spec” meant lunch at a very high-class restaurant, in this case one with marble floors. I spotted Spec half a dozen tables away and walked over, squeaking with every step as my new leather-soled shoes hit the marble.

  Spec’s first word of greeting was, “What the hell are you wearing?”

  Once we got over that hump he offered me a job with Playboy, the court of last resort for a number of editors who had worked for other skin books and wouldn’t blanch at the shots of naked women.

  I thanked him—and said, “No, thanks.”

  I’d had enough of working in the skin trade, and even though Playboy was the best of the lot, working at Rogue had worn me out.

  Spec looked as surprised as Spec ever allowed himself to look and asked about my assistant editors.

  By this time, there was only one.

  I casually mentioned David, our in-house adventurer, who was ready to go anyplace and do anything, pith helmet in hand.

  David was approached and got the job. I’d like to think I had something to do with it, but I’m quite sure David got the job on the basis of the columns he had written for Rogue and because he had “eager beaver” written all over his face.

  (Once hired, David stayed at Playboy for more than thirty years. He was far more than a diamond in the rough; he was a whole Tiffany’s. He wrote articles about hot-air ballooning, raced in the Mexican 1,000 with another driver, and finished 85th out of 247 entries. He did the bobsled course at Lake Placid and went on a five-week, 3,100-mile trek across the Sahara, photographed baby harp seals off Newfoundland and helicoptered out to the ice floes, went down the Colorado River for a week on a raft, visited Finland for the Arctic Circle Polar Rally in the dead of winter, and tested all the cars that came Playboy’s way—he claimed he was partial to Porsches and Bentleys, though I’m sure they couldn’t match his love for his old Morgan. He’ll reluctantly admit his favorite escapade was the night he got sloshed with Prince Andrew.)

  More than any other member of the staff, David was the real McCoy when it came to being a playboy.

  The next day “Uncle Bunky” (David’s nickname for Hamling) showed up to ring down the curtain. The last issue from Commerce would be our last issue, period. We had another issue set to go, but the pasteups, artwork, etc., were to be sent to the Douglas Publishing Company in Hollywood, the new publisher. (I’m sure that was at the request of Kable, our distributor and obviously the distributor for Douglas.) I could stay on as the editor with a budget of fifteen grand, half the editorial cost of the issues we were putting out.

  I declined.

  The Rogue indicia were not on the issue sent to Douglas; neither was the masthead listing the staff, etc. As far as Douglas was concerned, the issue was anonymous.

  Hamling’s last act was to make out my severance check—two weeks at my present salary. And oh, yeah—would I please sell off the office furniture?

  It was 1966, and my golden parachute for busting my butt for six years had turned to lead. When Hamling was out of sight, I tore up the check and spent the afternoon sending out copyright reversion letters to every author I thought of.

  The last issue was a damned good one. Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” won a Hugo, and George Bamber’s “The Man Who Could Not Feel” was the best story he ever wrote. (He deserved a Hugo, too.) The column by Alfred Bester hung on to the very last, and the final Rogue About Town column by Dave Stevens—titled “Hippity Hobbit”—was a love letter to J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, David’s favorite books.

  I cleaned out my desk, locked the door, and threw my keys down a nearby sewer. Most of the night I spent looking for a friend who might have some Valium, and when I found one, I dropped two tabs and slept until noon.

  I spent the rest of the day sitting on my friend’s front doorsteps trying to accept that six years of my life were now over. For six years I had been the air in somebody else’s balloon.

  XIV

  I WASN’T THE only editor suddenly out of work. Playboy had discontinued their book division, and A. J. Budrys, formerly of Regency Books at Greenleaf and who had defected to Playboy a few years earlier, was also on the street.

  We met at his house one night and he told me about an idea he had: instructional paperbacks to be packed with sporting equipment—one to be packed with a box of skin-diving equipment showing the novice how it should be used, another showing the care and use of a kayak, etc.

  It sounded like a good idea. AJ had experience with paperbacks, having worked at Regency. I was a writer and had some money saved up that could tide AJ over, since he was flat broke. The first project would be a box for an air ventilator for a skin diver who would find an instructional paperback tucked into the side of the box. We would make up a dummy or two and sell the idea to manufacturers. In the meantime, AJ needed something like two grand a month for his family to live on. I could cover that for a few months.

  I left AJ alone for a month and a half—my mistake—then contacted him again and suggested getting together to go over what he was doing.

  For once in my life I was speechless. AJ had spent his time constructing a handmade shoe box (that’s what it looked like) complete with cover and a little pocket in the side of the box for the book to fit in.

  That was it. You could have gone to any box store and bought it for a couple of bucks. What I was looking at was the most expensive box in the world. No printing on the box, no sample book tucked in, nothing.

  It would have been a great box for a pair of Nikes.

  I walked out without a word. I had either been scammed, or AJ was the dumbest would-be publisher in the world. What the hell had he done over at Playboy? Or Regency Books, for that matter? (Unfair, I admit. Regency had once bought a book—Truman and the Pendergasts—that had been plagiarized. AJ rewrote it completely in one weekend. What had happened to that, AJ?)

  I was now nearly broke (both of us had been living on my savings). I was saved from poverty—so I thought—by the most unlikely man in the world.

  William H. Hamling.

  He and his stroke book empire were now in San Diego. The stroke books were doing great, and Hamling said he was thinking once more of a legitimate line, like Regency Books. He wanted me to be the editor.

  I hesitated for a long moment and decided there had to be a catch. But I was also nearly broke. I’d fly out and see just how serious he was.

  Greenleaf was a string of connected offices in a suburb of San Diego. Mine was to be one of those at the end. I unpacked my books and shoved my suitcase in a corner. A few minutes later Hamling dropped by to invite me along on a golf game with a projected partner in the Regency-type enterprise.

  When Hamling was out of earshot I queried his golfing partner about what he thought of the projected enterprise and what part he would play in it.

  He really didn’t have any plans and really didn’t know much about the Regency-type enterprise. I didn’t think
he had even heard of Regency Books.

  After the game and Hamling and I were alone, he filled me in a little more on what my duties would be. There would be a Regency-type book once or twice a month and in my downtime maybe I could help Earl Kemp with the stroke books. Earl was the engine that had made Nightstand Books and Midnight Readers run for the past few years. He chose the books, okayed the covers, and every now and then snuck in a title that was a reprint of an old pulp magazine novel that Hamling had resurrected from his garage.

  Hamling had lost all direct contact with the stroke books. He made out the checks while Earl was the engine that pulled the train.

  Hamling wanted more of a contact with the stroke books and I was the man he had chosen. (Presumably he didn’t trust Kemp completely. I, loyal soul that I was, he thought he could.) He knew—how, I didn’t know—that I was nearly broke and for a little money I could be his man in Havana, reporting regularly to him on what Earl had done or was planning to do. Not that Earl was a bad editor or production man—far from it. Without him, Nightstand and Midnight Reader would have ceased to exist. (Both imprints are now collector’s items among paperback collectors.)

  I was to be Hamling’s spy.

  The first morning of my employment I left my resignation rolled up in my typewriter and left San Diego for Los Angeles. (Hamling wasn’t that much dismayed—he found further use for me in another year or two.)

  The Regency-type line of paperbacks, predictably, never appeared.

  In Los Angeles, I bunked in with old-time friend Walt Liebscher from Slan Shack days. I had the upstairs, he had the down. (Walt didn’t socialize much. After having been outed by another science fiction fan he became pretty much of a hermit and avoided his old friends. Gay liberation was years in the future.)

  I bummed around Los Angeles for a week, getting as used to it as I ever would be—an enormous, sprawling city that was more flat than up, like New York or even Chicago. Its one saving grace was that it had the best fast-food restaurants in the country. I was wondering what I was going to do when a friend back in Chicago wrote and told me there was an opening at a skin book publisher out of L.A. titled Cavalier.