Bonnie Golightly’s Beat Girl

Bonnie Golightly’s Beat Girl was published in 1959. It’s included in Stark House’s three-novel Beatnik Trio paperback edition. I’m not at all sure how to categorise Beat Girl in genre terms.

Bonnie Golightly’s main claim to fame is that she sued Truman Capote for libel, alleging that Holly Golightly in his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s was based on her. Her allegation was so flimsy that the matter never went to court. Bonnie Golightly wrote quite a few books. She later joined the counter-culture and wrote books about LSD.

One can’t help suspecting that the title Beat Girl was chosen (probably by her publisher) in a desperate attempt to cash in on the craze for all things Beat. There are beatniks in the book but they don’t appear until very late in the story.

Mostly it’s the tale of a rather mixed-up seventeen-year-old heiress, Chloe. After her mother’s death Chloe is packed off to an aunt in England. After a chance meeting with an old flame, a young American named Pritchard Allyn, Chloe decides to return to New York. Pritchard was the man to whom she lost her virginity some time earlier so he’s a bit special to her even though she’s since slept with countless men. Chloe at this stage is no beatnik but she is a bit of a wild child, and she’s a very rich wild child.

The entire book focuses on Chloe’s romantic dramas. Which is OK but if you’re expecting a sleaze novel or a hardboiled story or something noirish or beatsploitation (which are the kinds of things you would expect from a Stark House reprint) you’re going to be disappointed. It’s just a regular romantic melodrama with barely a hint of sleaze. I guess in 1959 a female protagonist who admits to promiscuity would have been shocking, and most sleaze fiction of this era is very tame, but in this case the actual sleaze content is close to zero.

And beatniks make only a very brief appearance, mostly as a warning to innocent young girls to stay away from these dangerous weirdos. Having the beatniks as dangerous weirdos might have been fun, except that they don’t seem very dangerous or very weird.

We get only the briefest of glimpses of the beatnik culture. We discover that they smoke joints and take their clothes off. That seems to be all they do.

Chloe is your basic spoilt rich brat. She’s the narrator and you may very well grow tired of her. She feels sorry for herself a lot. In fact most of the characters spend a good deal of time on self-pity. I guess being rich is pretty tough.

Of course nobody in Chloe’s family understands her. Her husband’s parents are horrible to her. They seem to regard her a spoilt rich brat. It’s hard to disagree with them. They’re also only moderately rich and didn’t go to the very best schools which makes them beneath contempt in Chloe’s eyes. We don’t know how Chloe feels abut the working class. She’s never met a working-class person. Apart from the servants of course. The servants look up to her, which is only right and proper as far as Chloe is concerned.

As you may have gathered it’s difficult to like any of the characters.

Chloe’s romantic woes are not especially interesting.

Overall the book just didn’t grab my interest very much at all. I don’t think I could seriously recommend it.

The other books in the Stark House Beatnik Trio are Dell Holland’s The Far Out Ones (which is very enjoyable) and Richard E. Geis’s Like Crazy, Man (which is so-so). I do think it’s cool that Stark House are making these very obscure beatsploitation titles available even if the genre does seem to be a bit hit-or-miss.

Dell Holland's The Far Out Ones

The Far Out Ones by Dell Holland is included in Stark House’s three-novel paperback edition A Beatnik Trio. It was published in 1963.

The authorship of late 50 and early 60s sleaze novels can be challenging to untangle. Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, prior to finding fame as crime writers, made a very good living churning out sleaze fiction using pseudonyms such as Andrew Shaw. They figured it would be cool if they could get other writers to ghost-write some of these novels. Which is how William R. Coons came into the picture. He wrote sleaze novels as Andrew Shaw and as Dell Holland. The Far Out Ones is one of the books he wrote as Dell Holland.

It has to be said that The Far Out Ones doesn’t have a huge amount to do with beatniks. The only beatnik is Jim, and he never considered himself a fully-fledged beatnik.

Jim is hitchhiking and gets picked up by two gorgeous young women, Sue and Joan. Sue and Joan are headed for New York. The three need a place to stay for night and end up at Zach’s Inn. The inn is hard to miss, what with the nude girl on the roof and all. Not a picture or a statue but a real nude girl. Her name is Emmy. She’s fixing the roof for her pa. Emmy isn’t keen on wearing clothes.

Her pa is Sam. He has a distant cousin by the name of Charlie working for him as handyman. Charlie belongs to the local tribe but they’re a bit embarrassed by him. Every time he ventures into the woods he gets lost. Charlie has no more idea how to survive in the woods than any greenhorn city boy.

Jim is keen to get Joan into bed. Sam and Charlie are equally keen to bed Sue. They all get their way. Sue is a very broadminded girl and she’s happy to have two men alternating as her bed partners. Joan is a bit more prim and proper but Jim’s charm wins her over and she’s soon shedding her clothes for him.

It’s all rather cosy, until disaster strikes. But it’s not a real disaster, since Sam ends up with quite a bit of money. Sam likes making his friends happy so they all head for new York. They end up in Greenwich Village. Emmy comes along as well - she has dreams of making it as a dancer.

Joan is the only one with any keenness for work. Emmy does however get a job as a belly dancer. Jim has decided to become a famous playwright. It sounds like a good way to make a living, as long as he doesn’t actually have to write plays. He thinks he’s found a way to make his plan work.

Along the way there’s lots of sex for everybody.

Despite the fact that some later scenes take place in the Village and despite Jim’s semi-beatnik status it’s a stretch to call this a beatnik novel. It’s basically just a sleaze novel.

A sleaze novel with major comic overtones. In fact at times it approaches farce. And it is genuinely amusing and pleasingly crazy and frenetic.

It’s also reasonably sexy, with the sex being described moderately graphic (by 1963 standards). One nice thing is that everybody enjoys the sex. The women enjoy it every bit as much as the men. This is a cheerfully amoral good-natured feel-good story. Nobody gets punished for having sex. Nobody gets punished for choosing freedom rather than the daily grind of a 9 to 5 job. It’s OK to have a good time. In that respect, in its rejection of the conventional social norms of its day, I guess it could be considered a sort of counterculture or beatnik novel.

This isn’t a work with any literary aspirations but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Richard E. Geis's Like Crazy, Man

Like Crazy, Man is a 1960 sleaze novel by Richard E. Geis. It was his debut novel. It belongs to the small but fascinating beatsploitation genre.

Jeff (who narrates the tale) is the advertising manager for a department store in Portland, Oregon. At the novel opens he’s in California, in Venice Beach, looking for his wife Dawn. She ran off with a lesbian and now she’s living among the beatniks. It wasn’t a happy marriage but Jeff needs to get her back. His boss only employs married men. If he has no wife he has no job.

This is a fish out of water story. Jeff is a square and he finds the beatniks bewildering.

His efforts to get Dawn back get off to a bad start. Her butch girlfriend beats him up. He gets drunk, which is his standard response to setbacks.

He spends the night with a soft-hearted hooker named Shirley who offers him a freebie and a place to stay. He’s grateful for both. He’s such a square he had no idea she was a hooker. He also had no idea that she had a lesbian girlfriend, Lena. Lena does not like men and she does not like Jeff.

Jeff movies into an apartment house full of beatniks. They get him high. He gets drunk again. He gets seduced by a crazy sexually insatiable beatnik chick named Rill.

All of this is not helping him to regain his wife. A wild beatnik party doesn’t help either.

Jeff’s life spirals out of control. Squares like Jeff can’t dig the beat scene at all.

Dealing with beatniks and lesbians is enough of a nightmare for Jeff but he also has to face up to his very conflicted feelings about his wife. He isn’t sure he really wants her back. And in the space of a couple of days he sleeps with Shirley, Rill, Lena and Rosemary. They’re all complicated women with their own issues to deal with getting sexually involved with any of them is not exactly conducive to Jeff’s psychological or emotional stability.

The crazy world of the beat scene has also unleashed Jeff’s wild side. He’s not sure he can deal with some of the things he’s done. He feels there’s no way out for him.

Jeff is not exactly a likeable protagonist. His biggest problem is the booze but when he starts thinking about that he needs a drink. He is not a happy drunk.

Neither the squares nor the beatniks come out of this story looking good.

It was a common practice for sleaze writers (and exploitation film-makers) in that era to include a square-up that seemed to come down strongly on the side of traditional morality. Like Crazy, Man certainly appears to condemn deviant behaviour but it didn’t do the author any good. Like a lot of writers, publishers, editors, artists and photographers at that time he found himself prosecuted for obscenity, almost went to prison and was persecuted by the US Government for several years.

Richard E. Geis also wrote lesbian sleaze novels under the name Peggy Swenson and then went on to write some really outrageous stuff which suggests that the apparent championing of traditional morality in Like Crazy, Man was simply an attempted square-up. I believe that Geis wrote other beatsploitation novels as well.

There are elements in this novel which will have some modern readers foaming at the mouth in rage, but I can’t reveal what those other elements are without revealing crucial spoilers.

Like Crazy, Man is a reasonably entertaining entry in an oddball genre. Recommended.

Stark House have included this novel in their three-novel paperback volume A Beatnik Trio.