Books: Sex & the Singular Geis

Any book publisher is lucky to get one bestseller out of every 100 titles he prints. But Bernard Geis isn’t just any He manufactures bestsellers, frequently by latching on to sexy manuscripts and spending huge amounts of money on ballyhoo. Thus Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, a vulgar chronicle of three female predators on the make in Hollywood, sold more than 350,000 hard-cover copies and 6,000,000 more in paperback. Helen Gurley Brown’s guide for swingers, Sex and the Single Girl sold about 2,500,000 copies In each case Gais, assisted by his promotion department, a fetching blonde named Letty Cottin Pogrebin, spent more than $80,000 on advertising.

When Geis cannot find a manuscript to promote, he orders one up to specification. His latest product is a novel, The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton. Geis has already sold the paperback rights for $250,000 and has printed90,000 hard-cover copies in anticipation of the great rush.

Dancing with Daddy. The Exhibitionist is the story of a beautiful film star-Jet Merry Houseman, whose father is a fading movie idol. The plot is hardly original. Merry is an oversexed girl in search of herself, but she looks mostly in other people’s beds. What she finds there is a variety of sexual activity ranging from earnest fornication through onanism, homosexuality, and—since these pursuits are so familiar to fiction nowadays—some rather esoteric variations. The denouement takes place at a masked ball, where the participants shed everything but their masks. And who should end up dancing together but Merry Houseman and her daddy.

The Exhibitionist precisely fulfills Geis’s dictum that a story about seemingly real celebrities will sell big, especially if it is crammed with sex. Both Geis and Author Henry Sutton, a nom de plume for David Slavitt, 32, are careful not to suggest that the novel’s characters are based on anybody in particular, but the readers are obviously incited to guess; after all, there are not too many young movie actresses around whose fathers are aging screen stars.

Case in Point. Lest people think that he is promoting pop pornography Geis explains solemnly that “there’s quite a distinction between pornography and erotic literature. We are not publishing a string of sexual scenes for the sake of titillation.” For what other purpose then? Says Geis: “There is a perfectly legitimate public curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes.” Not that people really find out what goes on in the Geis version of the roman è clef. The formula does not require that the novel be based even loosely on truth or, for that matter, on gossip.

The Exhibitionist is a case in point. Geis, who had read a book review written by Slavitt, wrote him a letter inviting him to do a novel. Slavitt was puzzled by the attention. He was a former Newsweek writer who had quit to try fiction and poetry (sample lines from a poem called Variations on an Ancient Theme: “fellah farms while frigatoon/ferries fangots featly”), but had not found much of a market. Geis saw possibilities in him that others missed and over an expensive lunch, the publisher laid out his design. Next, he supplied the author with a $10,000 advance and gave him what he calls his Jim Dandy Writer’s Kit, a sheaf of articles on the novel by several critics among them Mary McCarthy and Norman Podhorets, in effect advising a heady mixture of fact and fiction. Stavitt took 20 weeks to put down the 100,000 words specified in the contract.

Developing a Leer. Not all of Geis’s output panders to the prurient. A former editor for Esquire and Grosset & Dunlap, he established the house of Bernard Geis Assoc. in 1959 with a different notion in mind. His partners included some Diners’ Club executives such celebrities as Groucho Marx Art Linkletter, and TV Producers John Guedel and Ralph Edwards. Their books were conventionally commercial at the start: Max Shulman’s I Was a Teen Age Dwarf (400,000 copies in hard and soft cover), Harry Truman’s Mr. Citizen (230,000), Linkletter’s The Secret World of Kids (925,000). But more and more, the Geis market technique developed a leer. Typical was Lita Gray Chaplin’s My Life with Charlie a laboriously tasteless account of Chaplin’s second marriage.

Gradually, Geis’s partners became disaffected, and Marx, Linkletter and four others quit the firm, some of them claiming that the new trend of the business offended their literary sensibilities. Random House Chairman Bennett Cerf who hitherto had distributed most of the Geis list, read The Exhibitionist and sent it back, declaring that “I wouldn’t touch it with a 40-ft. pole.”

Moreover, the patented bestseller formula can miss. Morton Cooper’s The King, a thinly disGeised peek at Frank Sinatra, sold briskly enough but only nicked the bestseller list. These reverses have not affected Geis’s self-assurance. He can point out that of 78 books published by his firm in the past eight years, 17 have been bestsellers. It is possible that The Exhibitionist will be No 18. And No. 19? Well, Author Sutton Slavitt is already at work on another Geis special. It will detail the adventures of one Grant Gilbert, publisher of a girlie magazine called Tom Cat. Title: The Voyeur. At least, it beats fringatoons ferrying fangots featly.