Penelope's Playmates

Together, like garden snakes, they contorted, moaned, gasped and throbbed . . . Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.

Naked Came the Stranger, by Penelope Ashe

Moaning garden snakes? Melted fillings? Cervantes and Milton! What is this nonsense? And just who is this Penelope Ashe, anyway? Until last week, she was a "demure Long Island housewife" seen stroking her Afghan hound on the book jacket of Naked Came the Stranger. Dutifully, `a la Jacqueline Susann, she made the rounds of radio and TV interview shows saying things like "a writer's gotta impale his guts on the typewriter." C'mon Penelope, you gotta be putting us on.

She was. It all started more than three years ago, when Newsday Columnist Mike McGrady was sitting at his desk reading Valley of the Dolls and getting madder with each page. "I was appalled by the kind of books making enormous successes," he remembers. Rather than curse the darkness, McGrady lit upon the idea of how to succeed in bestsellerdom without really trying. He turned to his typewriter and, within a week, finished a plot outline and a memorandum that he distributed to nearly a hundred of his friends. "As one of Newsday's truly outstanding literary talents," the now-historic document began, "you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a bestselling novel." Each contributor would write one chapter of no fewer than 2,500 words centered around a sexy suburban homewrecker named Gillian Blake. "There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex," the memo ordained. "True excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion."

Too Good. The two dozen recruit novelists who signed up for the project--including Newsday Editor Bill McIlwain --plunged in. Less than three weeks later, with 15 chapters in hand, McGrady issued a stern warning against inconsistencies: "Four chapters have described Gillian's body in terms of alabaster," he noted. "Two have insisted she is heavily tanned. For future reference: she will be lightly tanned during the summer months; the word alabaster will be appropriate beginning midway through the month of November." The real problem, however, was in the quality of the writing. "Everybody has the feeling they can write a bestseller," says McGrady. "But it simply isn't true. Some of the chapters were much too good, and I had to work like hell to make them bad enough to use."

McGrady's rewriting was interrupted by a reporting stint in Viet Nam, so at midpoint he turned the task over to another columnist, Harvey Aronson, who finished the manuscript last September. Fine, but who is the temptress on the book jacket? She's Billie Young, a Long Island housewife, mother of six, and not incidentally, McGrady's sister-in-law, who managed to sell the manuscript to Publisher Lyle Stuart with a straight face. Stuart learned of the hoax only after he had agreed to publish, and now gamely insists he was even more delighted than before.

Scorching Novel. Out less than a month, the book has already sold more than 20,000 copies (at $5.95 apiece) and has gone into a third printing, thanks mainly to an outrageous promotion campaign featuring photographs of the heroine's conquests, each posed for by one of the authors. ("Meet Melvin Corby" reads the blurb next to Aronson's picture, "faithful, frustrated, he canceled his men's magazines when Naked Came the Stranger.") Paperback rights have been sold to Dell for a $37,500 minimum (escalating to a possible $127,500 depending on hard-cover sales), and Stuart reports no fewer than 23 producers and directors interested in the film rights.

Though reviews have been generally deserving, one that particularly delighted the perpetrators appeared in Newsday's rival Long Island Press. Wrote Columnist Walter Kaner: "Penelope Ashe's scorching novel makes Portnoy's Complaint and Valley of the Dolls read like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'" McGrady still insists that the stunt was an exercise in gullibility, not profiteering. But with any luck, success may yet spoil his two dozen Penelope Ashes. In his latest memo, he has urged his fellow novelists "to be thinking about a sequel. One suggested title is Son of the Naked Stranger. Personally, I prefer Naked Came the Stranger Again."

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