Robert Silverberg's Meg

Meg is one of the sleaze novels written by Robert Silverberg in the late 50s and early 60s, before he went on to become one of the greats of the science fiction genre. Meg is one of the books he wrote using the pseudonym Loren Beauchamp. It was published in 1960.

This is another tale of the horrors that lie in wait for small-town girls who try to make it in Hollywood.

Meg lives in a very small town in Idaho. She is twenty when she loses her virginity. She has a sudden glimpse of her future. Her boyfriend Jack is going to be a potato farmer. She is going to be a potato farmer’s wife. By the time she’s thirty she’ll have a tribe of kids underfoot. This is not a future that appeals to Meg. Meg is going to be a movie star.

Meg decides it would be smarter to go to New York first, rather than Hollywood. Once she has established herself in show business in New York the Hollywood studio will come courting her. So she goes to New York and she finds an agent, Max Bonaventura. Max knows immediately that Meg is going to be a star. She has no talent but she has a stunning body and she has the right attitude. Meg is prepared to do anything, anything at all, to become a star. Max knows that that is the magic ingredient that separates those who make in in Hollywood from the losers.

The first step is for Meg to win a minor beauty contest. Then she will go on to win the Miss Galaxy crown. That will win her a screen test. Winning the contests will be no problem. They’ll be rigged. Max knows how these things work.

The screen test is a disaster but Meg gets a contract anyway. Max has created so much publicity for her that the studio doesn’t care if she can’t act.

Meg’s rise is rapid. Before she’s twenty-two she is the new Queen of Hollywood.

But is she happy? No, she isn’t. 

And this is the major weakness of the novel. We know that Meg wants success at any price. Max explained to her just how sleazy her road to the top was going to be, and how many sleazy guys she’d have to sleep with. Meg wasn’t worried at all. But now suddenly she doesn’t care about success. Certainly her experience in Hollywood have been humiliating, but she knew she’d have to humiliate herself and whore herself to become a star. Her experiences haven’t really been traumatic enough to explain her sudden change of heart. Her disillusionment sets in too early to be totally convincing.

A couple of years pass and now we can see that she really does have reason to be disillusioned. It’s not so much the things that she’s had to do to reach the top. The disillusionment comes from the fact that she can’t find love. She can find sex. She can have as much sex as she wants, and she has a great deal of it. But she always has the feeling that the men who bed her are doing so for the thrill of sleeping with a famous movie star. She fears she’ll never find a man who loves her for herself. It’s not that she’s grown tired of the money. It’s just that she’d like to have love as well.

If you enjoy exposés of the seamy side of Hollywood with lots of sleaze then you’ll find plenty to enjoy here. The sex is not the least bit explicit but there’s a lot of it and the atmosphere as sleazy as your heart could desire. This is a book that really goes for Hollywood’s jugular.

You never know how these sleaze noels will end, whether the bad girl will get punished or find salvation. I’m not going to tell you how this one ends, but I found the ending quite satisfying.

We do get some insight into Meg’s inner world. However the most memorable character in the novel is Max Bonaventura. Max has zero ethics. He is entirely corrupt. He will do anything to boost Meg’s career, and he gets twenty-five percent of everything she makes. He comes up with some breathtakingly cynical publicity stunts. And yet, in spite of all that, he’s a really nice guy. He’s likeable because he’s so open about his cynicism and his unscrupulousness. He never tries to cheat Meg, he never tries to hurt her, he never tries to sleep with her. He never made her any promises he didn’t keep. He told her he’d make her a star and he told her the methods he’d use and he told the truth on both counts. You just can’t help liking the guy.

Meg is a fun novel about the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood and it’s a novel about a woman’s search for love and for some reason to keep going. It works quite well on both levels. Recommended.

This novel has been re-issued by Stark House Noir in a two-novel paperback paired with Silverberg’s slightly earlier novel Connie. Meg’s claims to being noir fiction are a bit thin, but I guess it has some slight noir flavour.