Books: Short Notices: Jun. 23, 1967

THE KING by Morton Cooper. 433 pages. Bernard Geis Associates. $5.95.

Readers will readily identify “the King,” Singer Harry Orlando, as Frank Sinatra. With that discovery, all public interest in Morton Cooper’s novel should wane—although it probably won’t. The author and his publisher have aimed it confidently at the bestseller list, although Cooper’s literary defects and unerring tastelessness would fill an office wastebasket. Orlando is an unmitigated bore tirelessly indulging his libido, yearning to become head of the White House’s Cultural Exchange program—a prize ultimately denied him. The book is so bad that Bennett Cerf of Random House, who used to distribute books published by Bernard Geis, refused to handle it. Some say this happened because Cerf and Sinatra are friends. But Cerf has an even better reason. “This represents the sleaziest kind of publishing there is,” he says: “Books that vilify a celebrity, living or dead, under the thinnest of fictional disguises. One or two such books have sneaked on our lists in past years.* But as long as I’m here, I can promise it won’t happen again.”

SEVEN KINDS OF GOODNESS by Max Eastman. 156 pages. Horizon. $4.50.

In his early days, Max Eastman was a fiery socialist editor (the Masses, Liberator), a dedicated sexual adventurer and a noisy defender of Communism. Since the 1940s, he has been a sometime roving editor for the Reader’s Digest, a proclaimed expert on Russian skulduggery, and a boastful chronicler of his youthful capacity for hell-raising (Love and Revolution).

Since he is now 84, the title of this book might suggest that Eastman has finally turned to a contemplative study of morality. Not so. In writing these painfully simplistic essays on the lives of Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Socrates, Plato, Mohammed and Jesus, Eastman plainly still sees himself as an eternal Peck’s Bad Boy gleefully provoking shrieks of outrage and accusations of heresy from the Yahoos. Mohammed, for example, was a “neurotic and savagely cruel old man,” and Moses established a dictatorship “that for absolute control and bloody-handed cruelty has few rivals in history.”

Eastman achieves the ultimate in bad taste in his essay on Jesus, whose strictures against fornication, he suggests, “must have been sustained by floridly passionate friendships among men.” Says Eastman: “The picture of Jesus and his 12 male companions, one of them spoken of as ‘the beloved disciple,’ wandering about Palestine together, must ultimately provoke the interest of our all-inquiring psychologists.” So would this book, if it were worth the trouble.

-Among them: last winter’s The Symbol, by Alvah Bessie, a novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe.