When it comes to books, good things often come in misleading packages. This is particularly true when it comes to pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were sold at newsstands and drug store check-out lines, where the key to a sale was more about catching the eye than conveying truthful information about content. And the demand for new titles to push into those display racks meant that publishers tended to be undiscriminating about content.
Sometimes, this means the content is pure formula, nothing more than a rush-job assemblage of one-dimensional characters, hackneyed plots, and ineptly written prose. Sometimes — not too often, but sometimes — this means the content is pure gold. A masterpiece in disguise. And sometimes, this means the book is just, well, interesting.
Interesting. Yes, that’s the word our mothers taught us to use when we couldn’t think of anything nice to say. But to me, interesting hasn’t lost all its meaning. Interesting here means that the book is perhaps not fully successful yet still worth reading, often because it leaves me wondering about what might have been.
The minute I saw The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress (1961), I knew it would at least be interesting. “Ginsburg – Kerouac – MORHAIM” announces the banner at the top of the back cover. Morhaim? you ask. So did I. But this was a somewhat rare (for Signet Books) original novel, not a reissue of something from a major publisher, so it looked promising.
And promising it certainly is. The girl of the title is Rena, an undergraduate at UCLA (or something like it) who’s unhappy with the choices that life is presenting her. Which is understandable, given that we first see her heading off to a frat party with a superficial honor student too dumb to realize what an unusual woman he’s with.
For one thing, while he’s wearing the same sportscoat/tie/loafers combination as every other male in sight, Rena is wearing a hand-tailored dress made out of glove leather the color of wheat. She’s a knock-out in it and she knows it. So she’s not surprised when Tom, a football player and one of the alpha dogs of the fraternity, tries to steer her into his bed. The scene is the same pathetic melodrama played out every Friday night by undergraduate men all over the world:
“Oh, honey, help me, help me,” he said. His voice was as spoiled as a child’s begging candy.
“Help you what?”
“You know.”
“Say it.”
He struggled for a moment, not wanting to verbalize his desire.
Then he said, “I’m so excited.”
“You want to …” began Rena, pausing for him to finish the sentence.
“… make love,” he said.
“That’s a lie,” said Rena, her face showing scorn. “You don’t want to make love, you want to screw.”
Rena rejects him, pointing out that football is “merely a society-approved sublimation of homosexual impulses.” This happens in the book’s first ten pages. I knew I wanted to see where Victoria Morhaim would take Rena.
Rena is at an experimental stage in her life. She’s willing to sleep with a man when she feels the attraction (as with the maker of the gold leather dress) and just as willing to turn them down. She will drink or smoke pot if she’s in the mood or toss someone from her apartment for offering either when she’s not. That apartment reflects the unsettled state of her life: “At times Rena would suddenly see the tangle of things and feel a desperate need to straighten them out, but that desire never lasted long and the apartment remained untouched.”
Her parents are ready for the experiment to end. Actually, her mother is more than ready. After calling Rena a slut, her mother ejects her from their house, telling her to “Take the stench of your way of life and your mind with you. Don’t ever come back here again.”
As many young people discover, knowing what you don’t want doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to knowing what you do, and this is both Rena’s dilemma and the source of Morhaim’s difficulties in turning The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress into a coherent work of fiction. If one had to predict what will happen after the first few chapters, it would be natural to guess that Rena will go through a series of relationships that will ultimately lead to either happiness (with some form of Prince Charming) or wisdom (with some form of acceptance that Prince Charming doesn’t hold the key to happiness).
And while that’s essentially what does happen, the problem lies in the execution. At several points in the book, Morhaim switches from Rena’s point of view to that of one of the men she’s involved with. These transitions are neither well-executed (the men are names without character) nor useful for advancing the narrative.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Morhaim doesn’t trust her own creation. Rena lacks no confidence when it comes to her opinions. When Dr. Altman, an older “more sophisticated” history professor, invites her to his home, he proudly displays his collection of books on early American history, expecting her to be in awe. Instead, she’s in shock:
“Look at this, this collection of prints.” Rena lifted the leather cover. “It’s pornographic. Look at those pictures: scalpings, burnings, murder, mutilations.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Look, look here.” She pointed at one particularly gory print. An Indian was in the process of decapitating a pioneer woman. “This is the most perverse thing I’ve ever seen.”
Yet within another twenty-some pages, we see Dr. Altman coming to Rena’s rescue, calling her “Rena girl” as she begs, “Help me, Leonard. Please. Help me.”
A similar problem exists with Morhaim’s second novel (also a Signet original), The Girl Who Had Everything. Here, she offers us a portrait of a woman a few years older than Rena but none the wiser. Samara — Sammy to everyone — is a former homecoming queen from the San Fernando Valley now working for an electronics firm in San Francisco. Though she’s “just” a secretary, she is, in fact, the administrative glue that holds the marketing department together, and not long into the book is offered the job of running it.
Unfortunately, Sammy has completely bought into the idea that a wedding ring is the key to happiness. Worse, she also accepts wholeheartedly the myth that men have all the brains in business.
Around the same time that the door to career advancement opens, Sammy meets the perfect man. Charles runs his own company, owns a fabulous home with a bay view, knows the maître-ds at all the best restaurants in town, and — very much a stereotype of the “sophisticated man” in those days — confidently knows what to order for Sammy without asking her. She’s as giddy as a baby on a swing when he asks her out for the first time.
“Yippeeeeeeee,” she screamed.
“My God, what was that?” Maxine appeared suddenly in the doorway.
“That, Maxine,” said Sammy, “was a man. Man, man, man!”
To which we can only respond, “Oy, oy, oy!”
Things too good to be true usually are. Beneath Charles’ man of the world mask is a petty, violent, jealous boy. So it’s no surprise when, suspecting Sammy of having another lover — her gay interior decorator, of course, because jealousy rarely improves discernment — Charles shows her that he must be the only one to control her in a predictably adolescent way: he rapes her.
Once again, Morhaim makes her heroine weak and unstable. Sammy has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Rolfe, on a regular basis for over five years. “He helps me live through the week. I don’t think I could make it without him,” she tells a friend. In truth, Dr. Rolfe is a model of the kind of shrink who turned a generation or more of women into therapeutic co-dependents. When Sammy tells him about meeting Charles, he dismisses her enthusiasm:
“No, my dear girl, that is not the answer. You don’t need another man right now. You need something to get rid of all that hostility that is in you…. I have told you many times that it does no good to be angry at me. I am only the voice of your conscience.”
Dr. Rolfe’s answer to Sammy’s problems: “Why don’t you join a dramatic group?” And with that, he sends her on her way, reminding Sammy, “Don’t forget the check next time.”
Instead of encouraging Sammy’s development into emotional independence (she has, after all, already achieved financial and social independence), Dr. Rolfe’s guidance ultimately sends her into a literal regression. She returns to her parents’ house and, digging through her high school and college souvenirs, reverts to Homecoming Princess and “Queen Samara, SDM Fraternity,” imagining herself in a white ballgown, descending the staircase to awaiting admirers: “All the best, the blond and the dark and the young.”
Morhaim’s trilogy of conflicted feminism concludes with the most misleadingly packaged of her books, Casebook: Nymphomania — “Based on Actual Case Histories,” the front cover declares: “A Book that Probes Beneath the Skin of Four Women Ruled by Sexual Compulsion.” The book includes an introduction by Dr. Albert Ellis, then a prominent psychotherapist and prolific author on sexual topics, to encourage the reader to think this is some sort of clinical text.
It would be more accurate to describe Casebook: Nymphomania as a collection of four linked short stories, four sketches of women for whom sex is a major source of unhappiness. Unhappiness because each, in her own way, seeks fulfilment or advancement through sex, only to find the resulting relationships shallow, unsatisfying, or downright harmful.
Whether what any of them exhibits is a form of nymphomania is beyond my ability to answer, but if any reader was expecting to be titillated or shocked by Casebook: Nymphomania, they were certain to be disappointed. The book is about as sexy as a manual on venereal diseases. These not four vixens. These are four miserable women.
“Angelique Adams,” for example, the first story in the book, tells about an ambitious and calculating beauty who sleeps her way into Hollywood stardom, starting by allowing a powerful agent to rape her at the age of fifteen on his proverbial casting couch. Angelique considers herself an opportunist, choosing her partners and the occasions based on the advantages she expects to realize as a result. Unfortunately, she has no exit strategy, and at the ripe age of 38, finds herself more and more isolated: like “she was living in an elevator — going up and down endlessly, but never getting off at any floor, never exploring the world beyond the confines of the elevator.”
“Lois Love,” Morhaim’s second subject, grows up in a family that has apparently arrived at emotional exhaustion without ever venturing to any other destination. Morhaim’s description of a Love family dinner is grim:
Mrs. Love sighed deeply as she reached for the bowl of stew. It was not that she had worked hard to prepare dinner and was now sighing over the quick disappearance of so much labor … no, she had opened several packages of frozen stew, and heated the contents a quarter-hour before the meal; rather, she was sighing over the rapidity of the entire operation. She prepared, the family ate, and then each disappeared to his own corner. But she, herself, was incapable of bringing any warmth to the ritual of dinner and so she submitted, with that sigh, to the machine-like process of feeding her family.
With no model to ground it in, Lois’s initial attempts to find love are unsuccessful, if not self-destructive. Where Rena pretty ruthlessly rejected the football star, Lois goes along with a good-looking boy at a frat party and ends up being gang-raped. She bounces through several other short affairs until she ends up in an awkward arrangement with a wealthy bisexual man named (creepily) Dad. In the end, the most satisfying relationship she experiences is with a cross-dressing lesbian she initially mistakes for a man.
The writing in Casebook: Nymphomania is often strong. Carefully chosen words, striking images, little muddling around in making a point. We cannot help but feel sympathy for these four women. But I found it unsettling how consistently Morhaim treats her women as victims. To her credit, she does not suggest that there is a single or common reason they become victims. To paraphrase Tolstoy, she believes that every victim is victimized in her own way. Taken together, these three books offer a comprehensive catalogue of the factors oppressing the lives of women in the early 1960s. But in none of them do we see women moving beyond victimhood or exploring other ways of staking out an identity for themselves. And so, I would argue, Victoria Morhaim’s fiction from the early 1960s is of greater sociological than literary interest.
Morhaim went on to publish further under a variety of names. As Victoria Kelrich, she wrote two pulp paperbacks, Charades (1978) and High Fashion (1981). As Victoria Reiter — taking the name of her second husband — she published another thick soap opera-ish novel, Big Hawaii in 1977, and then translated several of the novels that Daniel Odier published under his pseudonym of Delacorta, including Luna (1984) and Vida (1986).