Street Players

Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

Kinohi Nishikawa

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226587073
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives featuring black protagonists in crime stories, conspiracy thrillers, prison novels, and Westerns. From Iceberg Slim's Pimp to Donald Goines's Never Die Alone, the thread that tied all of these books together—and made them distinct from the majority of American pulp—was an unfailing veneration of black masculinity. Zeroing in on Holloway House, Street Players explores how this world of black pulp fiction was produced, received, and recreated over time and across different communities of readers.Kinohi Nishikawa contends that black pulp fiction was built on white readers' fears of the feminization of society—and the appeal of black masculinity as a way to counter it. In essence, it was the original form of blaxploitation: a strategy of mass-marketing race to suit the reactionary fantasies of a white audience. But while chauvinism and misogyny remained troubling yet constitutive aspects of this literature, from 1973 onward, Holloway House moved away from publishing sleaze for a white audience to publishing solely for black readers. The standard account of this literary phenomenon is based almost entirely on where this literature ended up: in the hands of black, male, working-class readers. When it closed, Holloway House was synonymous with genre fiction written by black authors for black readers—a field of cultural production that Nishikawa terms the black literary underground. But as Street Players demonstrates, this cultural authenticity had to be created, promoted, and in some cases made up, and there is a story of exploitation at the heart of black pulp fiction's origins that cannot be ignored.

PART ONE

Origins

ONE

Up from Domesticity

A beaming Marilyn Monroe, left hand held high in the air, as if caught in mid-wave, graced the cover of a new men’s magazine in December 1953. On its debut, Playboy was showcasing a photograph for which the starlet had posed in 1949, before she became famous. Monroe was both cover girl and centerfold of the new magazine. But she was not the first female figure to catch the reader’s eye once he started flipping through it. That distinction went to the disembodied head of a heavily made-up, middle-aged woman. Taking up half the page, the head gazed down upon on the figure of a much smaller man, a sad sack whose pockets were turned out to show he had no money left. The tableau illustrated the first piece of featured writing to appear in the magazine. It was titled “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953.”

The article by Bob Norman bemoaned the passing of those days when “a man knew where he stood,” and specifically when “alimony was reserved for the little floosies [sic] who periodically married and divorced millionaire playboys as carless [sic] with their lucre as their love.” The problem today, according to Norman, was that alimony had become “democratic”—any woman, “even the simplest wench,” could ask for it. He ran down the list of recent divorce cases in which working stiffs had been taken for a ride by their exes. Truck driver, salesman, television director: all had been victimized by a system that favored a woman’s claim to as much as half of a man’s earnings. In this system, men’s “economic survival” came at the expense of supporting women from whom they could no longer expect any domestic or sexual benefits. Norman concluded the piece on an ominous note: the gold digger of 1953 was still after “wealthy playboys,” but she could “also be after you.”1

Far more complementary to Monroe’s turn as a star pinup was the anonymous piece “An Open Letter from California.” The story it told was the stuff of fantasy. An “eastern boy” had moved to Southern California to “soothe an ugly ulcer and some jangled, city-type nerves.” There, in his “six room house” with “palm trees and a private swimming pool,” he found that the warm weather and laid-back atmosphere suited him just fine. As did his new female friend, a buxom brunette whose poolside pictures he made sure to include in the letter. Apparently uninhibited, the woman can be seen frolicking in and out of the water with nothing on except something to cover her head. The pictures build up to a simple question: Jealous yet? “Yeah, California is a helluva fine state,” the author deadpanned.2

This book begins at the conjuncture of misogyny and libertinism—the point where gold diggers and pinups meet. What might look like opposing positions to us today were, in fact, two sides of the same coin in midcentury America. Before Playboy cleaned up its act and became a mouthpiece for sexual liberalism in the 1960s, it was like any of the other stridently masculinist pinup magazines from the 1950s. Sporting names like Stag, Rugged, and Monsieur, these periodicals were products of their time. They decried women’s increasing ability to assert their socioeconomic independence from the private sphere, but they also celebrated women’s increasing availability as sexual objects in public. The fact that the latter was, to a large extent, made possible by the former did not trouble readers of these magazines. They were more than capable of reconciling the belief that wives belonged in the home with the fantasy that singles belonged in their beds.

Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock were wholly committed to the idea that men could have it both ways. They liked the Playboy model, and, from their perch in Los Angeles, they correctly predicted that there was enough room in the market for their own magazines. Adam debuted in 1956 with an editorial that explained its choice of title: “To what more delightful thing can a man dedicate himself than the ladies! Not since Adam gave up a rib to create Eve has there been anything better than the ladies!”3 The statement may have lacked the bite of Playboy’s gold-digger commentary, but it still connected women’s sexual availability (“ladies!”) to their dependence on men (Adam’s rib). Sir Knight honed the misogyny-libertinism line when it debuted in 1958. It was, in the words of its editorial, “dedicated solely to fostering the proposition that every male with corpuscles pink and surging in his veins has the right to pursue all the happiness he can grasp for himself.” The magazine welcomed “womankind” into the fold, but only if she was “willing to ride on the saddle behind him.”4

I begin with Playboy, Adam, and Sir Knight because the print culture of which they were leading examples constituted the foundations of black pulp fiction. That culture was rakish yet leering, defensive yet outspoken; it embraced the fact that it circulated on the margins of wholesome popular culture. The books and magazines produced within the culture could only be purchased in specialty adult bookstores, which tended to be located in the seedier parts of town, or, as Gay Talese immortalized at the beginning of his book Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1981), out from under the counter at your local suburban newsstand. (Eventually they would become available by mail order.) In their flouting of social niceties and their unapologetic treatment of women as sex objects, these print commodities made up the literary underground of their day. In retrospect, we call that underground by a name that signifies a whole ethos of crude masculinism: sleaze.5

In this chapter, I examine the core ideology around which Morriss and Weinstock built their empire of sleaze: that domesticity was a trap. The threat of feminization posed by the domestic sphere was, of course, hardly new. As Ann Douglas and others have shown, that threat had been a constitutive part of American life since the nineteenth century, when stereotypes of gender difference were mapped onto the separate spheres (public, private) of daily existence.6 What was new, then, was the seemingly infinite variety of ways this ideology could be expressed. Never before had the collective id of American masculinity enjoyed so many outlets for expression. Within print culture alone, the combination of text, graphics, and photography in mass-produced packages allowed for the dissemination of antidomestic sentiment on an unprecedented scale. And with scale came the desire for more. Soon sleaze was in a race to outdo itself—to see how much it could get away with, both visually and textually. Playboy dropped out of the race in the 1960s, rebranding itself as a vehicle for upmarket taste. Morriss and Weinstock, however, very much stayed in it—long enough to hit the craze for black sleaze.

But before I get to that, I spend this chapter taking a closer look at how sleaze operated in Adam, Sir Knight, and the early titles of Holloway House. Though these print commodities had antidomestic themes in common, they were also materially conjoined by Morriss and Weinstock’s overarching business structure. Because sleaze often found itself on the wrong side of decency ordinances and censorship laws—to say nothing of the social opprobrium foisted on its articles, cartoons, and pictorials—it required a high degree of self-contained organization. Morriss and Weinstock could not rely on the mainstream publishing industry, or local authorities, to give them any breaks. What they did, then, was distribute their own media, populate it with hackwork, and create the illusion that the hackwork was the real thing (that is, not hackwork). Beyond the fact that alternately demeaning and objectifying women was simply in bad taste, these were the business strategies that made sleaze the literary underground of its day.

American Venus

Like many Angelenos then and today, Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock were transplants to the city. They had moved from Chicago and Detroit, respectively, to attend college at UCLA. After graduation, they set out to find work in the local media industry. Morriss and Weinstock did a little bit of everything at first: promotion, advertising, scouting for talent—whatever the bigger fish needed. Though little about Weinstock is known during this period, Morriss seemed to thrive in his role as a media insider. In 1947 he emceed an American Jewish Congress fund-raiser headlined by Jimmy Durante and Burl Ives; later he became president of the local B’nai B’rith lodge.7 Morriss’s ambition was further reflected in his choice of a pseudonym.8 He derived it by combining the names of two posh-sounding British automobile manufacturers: Bentley Motors Limited and Morris Motors Limited. “Bentley Morriss” indeed had “hilarious class connotations,” but it also revealed the power of self-invention in the industry.9 Not for nothing did pseudonymous authorship become the foundation for Morriss’s publishing enterprise.

By the 1950s, Morriss and Weinstock had secured enough contacts and capital to start their magazines. They set up operations in an area that was perfectly suited for this sort of business. According to urban historian Robert O. Self, the zone demarcated by North Hollywood, Silver Lake (to the east), and West Hollywood began to lose residents to Beverly Hills and Bel Air around the middle of the century. Flight from the area meant that “the class character of both the principal thoroughfares and surrounding residential neighbourhoods” shifted downward. It was not long before “porn theatres and other sex businesses” were replacing more conventional retailers. West Hollywood was a special case even within this zone, as it was “an unincorporated urban island entirely surrounded by Los Angeles but under the administration of the county.” The somewhat lax oversight of this zone-within-a-zone made it particularly attractive to “gay residents and straight commercial sex.”10

It thus was no coincidence that Morriss and Weinstock based Adam and Sir Knight in West Hollywood. The former was issued by Knight Publishing, with offices in the Prismatic Building.11 The latter was a product of Sirkay (“Sir K”) Publishing, located at 8835 Sunset Boulevard. Adam’s building and Sir Knight’s address were probably one in the same, given Morriss’s reputation as a hands-on publisher who liked to oversee the daily operations of his companies. At any rate, what mattered was that the neighborhood was good for business. This stretch of Sunset Boulevard— Tinseltown’s backyard, so to speak—welcomed more than enough talent to prop up a pinup enterprise. Cheap rents and a boozy nightlife provided a steady stream of models, dancers, and wannabe starlets who could be persuaded to push the bounds of decency. The milieu also attracted writers, usually men, either trying to catch a break in show business or slouching toward the midlife of their careers. In short, this was a neighborhood for the struggling artist, and men and women offered up different talents for Morriss and Weinstock to exploit.

Women filled exactly one role in their operation. Adam and Sir Knight were produced with the express purpose of gratifying the male gaze. The magazines’ visuals captured what Laura Mulvey has called women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness”—that is, a state of objectification in which the depicted female figure “holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire.” Mulvey contends that the female figure in classical Hollywood cinema, and in related culture industries (“from pin-ups to strip-tease”), at once fascinates the male gaze (in a scopophilic extraction of pleasure) and reinforces its activity (by feeding back into its narcissism).12 This is the visual language also taken up by Adam and Sir Knight. Compare the following images from both magazines: a model in the great outdoors (figure 1.1); a cover girl with fabric (figure 1.2); another model in a sheer negligee (figure 1.3); and another cover girl alongside a table of fruit (figure 1.4). Figures 1.1 and 1.4 show women whose eyes are obscured or directed away from the reader. By contrast, figures 1.2 and 1.3 show women who stare directly at the reader. Yet the variability in these acts of looking does not count for much here. That is because all four figures invite the male gaze by virtue of how they are framed. Whether awaiting capture by a voyeuristic glance (unknowing innocence) or legitimating the reader’s desire with a “come hither” look (knowing seduction), these women reinforce masculine self-possession by evoking an essentially feminine passivity.

FIGURE 1.1 Pictorial image from “Meet Sweet Sue,” in Adam 1, no. 4 (1957). Courtesy of Knight Publishing.

FIGURE 1.2 Front cover of Sir Knight 1, no. 10 (1959).

FIGURE 1.3 Pictorial image from “Trick for the Taking,” in Adam 1, no. 8 (1957). Courtesy of Knight Publishing.

FIGURE 1.4 Front cover of Sir Knight 2, no. 1 (1960).

We can push this analysis even further and identify the key element to which the reader’s gaze is drawn. Whatever the state of undress, the women in these images are positioned to accentuate a specific part of the body. That obviously goes for figure 1.1, but it applies to the other three as well: the tease of concealment and anticipatory revelation swirl around their breasts. The obsession with breasts was standard during this time, as the buxom models of wartime pinup calendars continued to influence popular standards of sex appeal. French film critic André Bazin once described this idealized figure as an “American Venus.” “With her narrow hips, the pin-up girl does not evoke motherhood,” he wrote. “Instead, let us note particularly the firm opulence of her bosom. American eroticism . . . seems to have moved in recent years from the leg to the breast.”13 True to that ideal, Adam and Sir Knight decoupled breasts from their reproductive function and turned them into points of masculine sexualization. An editorial statement joked, “As long as watchers of women are liable to public scorn, while watchers of small birds win public acclaim, ADAM and his readers have a cause to promote. For what red-blooded, adult male, wants to watch small birds while women remain available?”14 Sex appeal, rather than reproductive ability, was attached to size: the bigger, the better.

To be sure, sexualizing women’s breasts was of a piece with the antidomestic ideology of sleaze. Women could be the playthings of men’s imaginations precisely insofar as they disclaimed or negated familial and matrimonial ties. The woman who tied a man down was assailed in predictable ways. Above a drawing of a couple getting their marriage license was a joke about the “three stages of man”: “First—tri-weekly,” “Second—try-weekly,” “Third—Try-weakly.”15 But living in a sexless marriage was the least of man’s worries. Sleaze saw all women as potential gold diggers—con artists who, after springing the trap of domesticity, could drain husbands of their money....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: From Sleaze to Street
• part one  Origins
• part two  Transitions
• part three  Trajectories
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index