The Crime Lady: Pulp Dangers
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When I was working on The Real Lolita, one of the many research rabbit holes centered around an ex-con named Russell Trainer, who began to write and publish pornographic books while incarcerated for various wire and mail fraud schemes in the late 1950s. After he got out, writing continued to be his new way to make a living, and in addition to the smut for basement-dwelling publishers, Trainer also wrote The Lolita Complex (1965), which purported to be a serious psychological study of actual middle-aged men who were sexually obsessed with pre-pubescent girls.
It was no such thing. Trainer’s book was just one of a once-thriving subgenre of fake psychological case studies, like Lawrence Block’s books written as John Warren Wells or Benjamin Morse, M.D. “Non-fiction has the great advantage of not needing to make dramatic sense, and what was more important in a Wells case history was that it seem real,” Block wrote in 2012.
Trainer followed that idea to a tee, making up case histories and quoting nonexistent medical professionals in order to present a “serious” consideration of what was described in Nabokov’s novel. The Lolita Complex arrived with, if not exactly fanfare, at least some attention from its publisher, Citadel. Trainer even did some local television and radio spots to hawk the book in his home state of Michigan.
The book ought to have been forgotten. It’s not very good, and extremely creepy to read. (I first learned of it, early in the research for my book, from Megan Abbott, who owns a copy and has read it several times.) But then The Lolita Complex was translated into Japanese in the early 1970s, and spurred the birth of “lolicon”, which found fruition in anime and manga over the ensuing decades.
Lost in translation was that The Lolita Complex was hackwork for hire (followed up, naturally, with a 1969 sequel, The Male Lolita), viewed with appropriate disdain at the time, and a complete misunderstanding of what Nabokov was doing, but no matter when there’s cash to be made. Once a book is out in the world, the author has no clue who will read it — and be influenced by it, rightly or wrongly.
I thought of The Lolita Complex and its bizarre role as sub-cultural torchbearer while reading Leland Nally’s excellent, squirm-inducing Mother Jones feature on calling every single name in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. The range of reactions is astonishing, from bewilderment to dogged defense to confusion at being associated in any way with him and his crimes against young girls.
What stuck with me most was Nally’s recounting of one of his last conversations with an actress he calls Julie: “During one of our last conversations, Julie mentioned, in throwaway fashion, a diary entry she had stumbled upon about a book recommendation from Epstein. Summarizing for me, she explained that she’d asked Epstein why he had so many girls around. ‘I asked him why he was like this,’ she recalled, ‘and he said to me to read some book….He told me it influenced him to become wealthy.’”
The book was The Man From O.R.G.Y., which Nally refers to as “an obscure 1965 James Bond ripoff written by Theodore Mark Gottfried under the pen name of Ted Mark.” Nally quotes from the book and deems it an “unbearable horror show.” Julie had no idea of what the book was about. “It was one of the last things we talked about,” she told Nally. “He said to me, ‘Read this book, and that will help you understand…I never read it and don’t think I ever will.”
The Man From O.R.G.Y. was not obscure. It landed on bestseller lists upon publication in 1965, and spawned many sequels, all featuring the sex-crazed spy Steve Victor. There was a 1970 film adaptation, written by Mark and starring Robert Walker as Victor. It was a bit of a James Bond ripoff, sure, but the title directly parodied the popular television show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. As Steve Miller explained in his 2004 New York Sun obituary for Gottfried, the books were never meant to be taken seriously:
"O.R.G.Y. is the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth," Gottfried wrote by way of introduction to Here's Your Orgy (1969). "It's a one-man operation devoted to sex research with 'guidance' actually a secondary function - which I admit, hasn't ever really been exercised…I see myself as carrying on the traditions of Dr. Kinsey. The difference is that I've cut out the paperwork and substituted a personalized methodology."
Ted Mark Gottfried was born in the Bronx in 1928, grew up in Far Rockaway, and committed himself to full-time writing after a stint in the publicity department at Warner Brothers. He got a regular gig with the men’s magazine Scamp, and within a few years, was turning out pulp fiction at the rate of 4-5 books annually, at minimum, which sounds like a lot — it is — but not quite to the productivity levels of Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake and other writers working for the Scott Meredith Agency and other pulp mills.
When the O.R.G.Y. books took off, Gottfried was able to purchase a house in the Long Island suburb of Cedarhurst, and move his wife and children there. In 1967, Newsday columnist Mike McGrady — who would mastermind the publication of famed literary hoax Naked Came the Stranger a couple of years later — featured Gottfried and his family in a two-page profile for the paper.
McGrady noted the apparent disconnect between the salaciousness of the Steve Victor novels (which numbered nine at the time, soon to be a dozen, total sales of a million copies) and Gottfried’s anodyne existence, raking leaves, kids playing chess or doing homework, his first wife headed out to a church bazaar. He also noted that the books might sell well but weren’t getting much critical acclaim, unless someone happened to compare them to Lolita or Terry Southern’s Candy.
“The books are not deathless prose,” Gottfried told McGrady. “I’m not putting them down but I am trying to be realistic about them. I think they’re good. They’re entertaining, funny. But I don’t kid myself. They’re not great classics of literature, or even of their genre.”
The Victor books didn’t originate with Gottfried. One editor at Lancer Books came up with the idea of a modern-day retelling of the Kama Sutra. That idea was given to Gottfried. “It seemed to me you’d have to have this guy travel from country to country in the Near East. So I did that. And then I asked what’s going to get him around. Well, make him a spy.” And no ordinary spy, but a Russian-American one who made sex his profession. “As I started building the story, it seemed pretty ludicrous to me. The whole thing became idiotic, so I wrote it idiotic.”
McGrady posed the question about how Gottfried reacts when someone accuses him of writing dirty books. “No one has said that to me directly, but if they did, my feeling would be this — why did you read it then? I can go into a whole dialectic on the subject of dirty books. What do you mean by dirty? And they say, presumably — well, the sex. And what do you mean by dirty sex? And they’ll say the perversion. But what’s perversion?”
Even members of his own family weren’t impressed. His daughter, Julie, then fifteen, had read six of them “without suffering visible harm.” When McGrady asked her opinion, she gave her father a long, questioning look.
“You can tell the man, dear.”
“I think…that they’re….trash.”
“Yeah,” said Gottfried, “but you have to face the fact that Julie’s a literary snob.”
Gottfried would write many more X-rated novels, but quit doing so by the late 1980s, when it was clear the market had finally bottomed out, supplanted by video, pay-per-view television, and eventually, over-21 internet video sites. He also published dozens of fiction and nonfiction books for children under his own name. He was, per the New York Sun obituary, “particularly proud of a series of books about the Holocaust, with separate volumes treating child victims, Nazi perpetrators,and those who deny it ever happened.”
Gottfried had also marched in Mississippi for civil rights and later, for women’s rights. The move to ardent feminism jarred with his longtime pseudonymous career in smut. “In later years, when his writing had taken up more serious topics, Gottfried would say that he felt an uneasy combination of chagrin and pride in his pulp productions… he
felt he had portrayed women in too stereotypical a light. Yet, he was gratified that the books remained popular with pulp enthusiasts.”
He died never knowing that one of those pulp enthusiasts was a Brooklyn-born-and-raised boy named Jeffrey Epstein.
The Man From O.R.G.Y was published the year that Epstein turned twelve. Its subsequent sequels overlapped with his adolescent years, and the film was released when he was seventeen. It boggles my mind that such clearly parodic novels could inspire Epstein to “become wealthy” and perhaps, to engage in far more monstrous behavior. That pulp fiction churned out as a half-joke on a crash deadline could influence such a worldview.
But then, as Nally writes in Mother Jones, the rich behave as if they are in a permanent state of adolescence:
The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all.
This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down.
The tragedy, of course, is that countless young women and girls were irreparably harmed by Epstein’s particular form of grift. That his arrested teenage desire for a cohesive narrative, finding resonance in pulp paperbacks never meant to be read as how-tos, hurt so many.
I can’t help but think that if he had read The Lolita Complex, he would have taken that book at face value, too.
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More soon. Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady