Kink: An Autobiography

Dave Davies - 1996

Three years younger than his brother, Ray, Dave Davies founded The Kinks without him in 1963, only to have Ray join soon after and essentially take over as lead singer, primary songwriter and mastermind. This early sibling rivalry is at the core of Dave’s grudge against his brother, one that was never resolved in the entire 33-year history of the group, (which disbanded officially in 1996, the same year as this book’s publication). The eccentric Ray Davies became one of the top songsmiths and rock visionaries of the 60s alongside Bob Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, Brian Wilson, and Pete Townshend, producing a string of classic concept albums in the 60s and 70s. It might never have happened if the rebellious, Eddie Cochran-worshipping Dave hadn’t started the band in the first place and created the signature raucous guitar sound that made the first few Kinks singles so sensational. At only seventeen years old, he experimented with his guitar and manipulated his amps to create the raw sound that characterized the legendary riffs in the songs ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night.’ Skyrocketed to fame overnight, Dave was more than ready to dive into the swinging sixties with regards to fashion, drugs and groupies. Dave was the outgoing and good-looking rock star while his brother Ray was the brooding, suffering and distant artist. They apparently had so little in common that it’s hard to believe they are related. Dave claims that Ray manipulated and stole credit from him repeatedly throughout their career, but (as happens with many successful musical partnerships) neither of them could break away; they needed each other to produce the magic that was The Kinks – Ray's wizardry in the studio and Dave’s dazzling onstage guitarwork and outgoing rock image. Neither could have fired the other, nor gone solo with the same success as they had together. The book seems to be Dave’s attempt at therapy, unloading a lifetime’s worth of grievances all at once in the hopes of relieving his pain. It probably didn’t work since what it seems he’s really after is some basic human warmth from his big brother. The other big trauma of his life was being torn from his girlfriend at the age of 15 after she became pregnant and both sets of parents conspired to separate them, persuading the girl that Dave wanted nothing to do with her and vice versa. Dave spent 25 years wondering what became of this girl and the daughter she raised without him. The most heart-wrenching aspect of the book is this story, with Dave eventually being able to meet his daughter as an adult. While lovable in a rascally way, Dave is also frustratingly capricious all his life, alternately bragging about his sexual conquests of nameless (often underage) girls while also professing a deep-seated spirituality that encompasses Jesus, Zen, magic, witchcraft, ESP and UFOs. On one page, he may wax poetic about falling in love with the woman of his dreams and marrying her, and on the next describe nonchalantly cheating on his wife while on tour. Dave is nothing if not bold, and that’s what makes the book so interesting. Aside from essentially inventing hard rock with those early Kinks records, creating an edgier sound that none of their contemporaries had attained, he also had the longest hair of any rocker in 1964, longer than any of the Beatles or Rolling Stones, and additionally was unabashed about pursuing sex with men when he felt like it too. While not a great writer of prose, Dave Davies makes up for it with sheer genuineness. If ghostwriters and editors were involved, they seem to have stayed out of the way and allowed Dave’s personality to come through. You come away feeling like you really know the guy and that he’s truly let his guard down, and that more than anything makes the book worthwhile.

Ritual

David Pinner – 1967

“Your God, my God, our God, is freedom! Complete freedom! To do anything! Run faster than wind! Play till stars are tired! In this tree, the blood is sleeping, waiting for you to revive it. It will give you strength to grow. To be the best! And one day you will take the world by the throat and wring it until winter is dead and summer lasts forever! So touch the oak! Touch it! Grow!”

A neurotic, repressed Christian police detective is sent from London to a remote village in Cornwall to look into the mysterious murder of a young girl. After investigating, he is convinced the death was a Celtic sacrifice of some kind, which is borne out by the villager’s delight in taunting him for his religious fundamentalism. The policeman’s insufferable self-righteousness makes him impossible to root for and a ripe target of the villagers’ malicious pranks. They delight in sending him through a maze of wild goose chases and testing his chastity with their brazen sensuality. Ultimately, he is incredulous that the community seems to easily bounce between mainstream Christianity by day and the region’s traditional ways of nature worship by night, comparing the situation to the dichotomy of voodoo and Catholicism in Haiti. As a whodunit, the plot remains misty as the inspector’s sanity increasingly comes into question. The real appeal of Ritual for me was David Pinner’s florid language. A prolific playwright, actor and novelist, he has a poet’s delicate flair for allusions and metaphors, combined with a biting satirical edge that can be hilarious. Pinner sold the film rights to the book, but the filmmakers only adapted some key elements and crafted their own version instead, which became the cult classic The Wicker Man.

Cruising

Gerald Walker – 1970 

While not a bestseller, Cruising caused a bit of a sensation by being so relentlessly lurid and one of the earliest exposes of the gay subculture in New York City. Though written before the Stonewall riots, it depicts both closeted and uncloseted gay men actively pursuing their sexual needs despite the dangers inherent in the practice of “cruising,” picking up, or being picked up by, random strangers. My interest in the book came from the fact that it was the foundation for not one but two great movies released in 1980, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and William Friedkin’s Cruising, the latter of which was freely adapted from the novel. De Palma had developed the project before Friedkin, having been impressed with the book, but after he lost the rights to it, he modified some of its themes and details into a new story, which became Dressed to Kill. The novel is a parallel narrative about a college student (Stuart Richards) who brutally murders gay men out of a thinly veiled rage against his own latent homosexual feelings, and a rookie policeman (John Lynch) who is assigned to go undercover in the gay “community” to draw out the killer. Lynch has been chosen because he resembles the victims and is deemed the killer’s “type.” He is hopelessly backwards and simple is his thinking on homosexuality, women and racial minorities, and is in many ways just as irrationally homophobic as Richards and many of the cops who routinely harass and beat up gays. The book’s numberless chapters go back and forth between Lynch’s and Richards’ stories as they gradually converge. Lynch’s visceral repulsion at the thought of sex between two men is mirrored by Richards’ contempt for the succession of women he sleeps with, with varying success, as he tries to force the homosexual impulses out of his psyche. The two young men resemble each other so much that Lynch is actually mistaken for Richards by a bullying cop who encounters them separately a day apart in the same vicinity. (This is a potent element missing from Friedkin’s film due to a miscast Al Pacino, at least 15 years too old for the lead role, although he was admirably brave to do so.) As far as I can discover, Cruising was Walker’s only published novel. He was a writer and editor with the New York Times Magazine for several decades. The book is not great literature by any means, but it’s not a mere potboiler either. The sometimes cliché psychological ideas ultimately give way to genuine suspense and a startlingly downbeat and foreboding conclusion.

Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark

Cassandra Peterson – 2021

Speaking as a onetime pre-teen hypnotized by the sight of Elvira on TV on Sunday afternoons in the early 80s, I was excited to get Cassandra Peterson’s long-awaited autobiography. Her varied career reads like a guided tour of show business in the 70s, 80s and 90s. She was a Vegas showgirl (her childhood dream), a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, the singer in an Italian rock band, and a shameless (though allegedly chaste) groupie who found her way into the hotel rooms of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Tom Jones and Elvis Presley. Eventually – through drive, talent and luck – she found her greatest fame as the horror hostess Elvira, a Vampira knockoff, on a Los Angeles television station in 1981. The show Movie Macabre showcased B-grade and worse horror flicks punctuated with her withering comedic commentary. I remember being introduced to movies like The Devil’s Rain, Homebodies, Count Yorga and of course the classically awful Attack of the Killer Tomatoes via Elvira’s show. Now to the book. While a good, light read, as expected, I found myself frequently wishing it was better. Despite being in the works for so long, it somehow feels rushed. Peterson may not be a gifted writer, which is fine, but a good editor could have helped her avoid so much off-putting grammar, structure and mood swings. I found the strongest material to be the pre-show biz early years, with Peterson as a wide-eyed, hopeful and lusty teenage girl in the 60s, with her delirious fanhood for Elvis, The Beatles and others, using pluck and cunning to make her way from Midwest go-go girl to Las Vegas dancer to Hollywood starlet. There is much pathos in her story, being a frequent victim of sexual harassment and sometimes assault. The book, however, never shakes an unfortunate feeling of triviality. I hoped for something a little more insightful, profound and even epic, like Keith Richards’ Life, but instead got a fairly routine celebrity memoir. Not a big disappointment; a minor disappointment but more than worthwhile for any Cassandra Peterson fan.

Pimp: The Story of My Life

Iceberg Slim - 1967

"I turned my back to the sunlight. I felt old Morpheus slugging his velvet hammer against my eyelids. ...I woke up in darkness."

Culturally influential autobiographical novel by retired pimp Iceberg Slim, (a.k.a. Robert Beck). The book details his hardship-riddled childhood before moving on to his successful career managing prostitutes in New York City in the 1940s and 50s. The story is compelling on its own, but Slim’s deadpan writing style – a talent he discovered and developed after completing a prison term in the 60s – is what gives the book its alternately chilling and satirical tone. As in a Kubrick film, events are sometimes so hopelessly horrifying that you can only laugh at the absurdity of it all. Even though he claims to be sharing a cautionary tale, there is unmistakable pride in Slim’s descriptions of his own sharp intellect, his bella figura, and his sexual prowess, and the book famously became a Bible of sorts for young men seeking success in pimping and other vocations. Slim claimed to be reformed and was happily married for the rest of his life, but the most glaring theme that pops off every page is a deep-seated and nearly psychotic level of misogyny. In the world Slim operated in, women are thought of as almost subhuman, barely more intelligent than chickens, and can only be managed by being treated like livestock. Not even pets, but livestock. If you can compartmentalize that aspect of the book, you can’t help but be impressed by Slim’s clipped literary style and flair for turns of phrase. Although there is a glossary in the back, the task of wading through the tangle of arcane street slang throughout the book is downright brutal at times, especially when so many phrases aren’t even included in the glossary. All the interruptions to look things up make reading the book take about twice as long as it should, but I do admit this is part of its strange appeal as well, being comically frustrating. It’s almost like Anthony Burgess’ invented futuristic vernacular in A Clockwork Orange.

Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages

Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince - 2014

A long, meandering title for a long, meandering book, a 700-page, tabloid-style tome focused loosely around three of the most important and colorful writers of the mid-20th century. The fact that they were gay is incidental to their careers and legacies, as they prospered well before the Stonewall era, but it is central to the lascivious agenda of this book. Don’t expect much exploration of the artistic process or intellectual struggles; this is strictly a gossip-padded fantasy about the sex-lives of celebrities, in particular Hollywood stars. The first thing to understand is that - in the world imagined by Porter and Prince - every single famous or quasi-famous person you can possibly think of was either homosexual, bisexual or, at the very least, dabbled in same-sex escapades now and then. Many laborious paragraphs describing imagined orgies and other decadence can only be laughed at, but only if you’re not too bleary-eyed from reading the twelfth one within the same chapter. Then you flip through the hefty remaining 600 pages real quick to see if this is what the entire book is like, and finding that it is, you have to decide how much more you can take. What kept my interest most of the time was the book’s bizarre and schizophrenic ambitions. Buried deep is a genuinely well-researched and interesting triple biography of three literary titans of their day, and a portrait of the literary and theatrical worlds of the 1940s and 50s. Despite the impressive scope of the book, the authors sabotage themselves on every page with their lack of citations, flat prose, maddeningly excessive typos, barely concealed puerile obsessiveness, and most of all the odd lack of interest and knowledge of Williams’, Vidal’s and Capote’s major works. They briefly run through descriptions of various books and plays, but with even less insight than a quick glance at Wikipedia can offer. If there is a fatal flaw, it’s the quality of writing, including a lack of any imagination when conjuring dialogue for their famous cast of characters. Celebrities in every age group and from diverse continents all have the exact same wit and speech patterns as the authors of the book. It is sometimes claimed that direct quotations originate from second-hand reports the authors had with participants, and just as often it’s clear that the tales have scant credibility, being third or fourth generation gossip and libel against the dead, or even pure fabrication from Porter’s and Prince’s imaginations. If the book was a fifth the length, it would qualify as harmlessly silly light reading, but its sheer volume is what makes you keep wanting, in vain, to take it seriously.

In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master

Tim Teeman – 2013

Granted, Teeman’s book doesn’t purport to be the definitive biography of Gore Vidal, but still it comes off as a bit insubstantial. While acknowledging Vidal’s gifts as an author and public intellectual, the book is ultimately preoccupied with demonstrating a core hypocrisy in Vidal’s public statements; i.e. the fact that Vidal claimed to be less interested in relationships than he really was, claimed to be more bisexual than he really was, and claimed to have been more involved with his first crush than he really was. In every case, Teeman seems to be under the impression that Vidal had some special obligation to bare all in his various interviews, essays and even private conversations, as if he lived his life on the witness stand. The bulk of the examples of conflicting ideas that Teeman cites didn’t strike me as all that controversial at all. Vidal was of a generation that did not make a spectacle of its emotions. His generation was not prone to picketing in public either. Neither of these things are a crime. But Teeman portrays Vidal as willfully unsupportive of the gay liberation movement of the 70s, apparently believing, as many activists did, that simply disliking the label “homosexual” was itself a homophobic or even a self-hating act. In retrospect, Vidal seems vindicated in this regard. He was hardly a closeted or fearful person. There was little mystery about his personal tastes when it came to his sexuality. He merely believed, though, that boxing people into categories would have no long-term benefits, and was in fact the opposite of liberation. He believed in the Freudian and Kinseyan concept of borderless sexuality in which human beings could gravitate one way or the other for different reasons throughout their lives and had every right to enjoy that freedom. As for Vidal’s personal relationships, much stuff in the book was well-known already, and the rest is little more than celebrity gossip. If Teeman reports something salacious about Noel Coward, for example, it’s because someone told it to him, not because he really believes it to be true, nor because he’s even aware of a confirming source. The book is not a hatchet piece by any means, but like a lot of biographers of famous people, Teeman is alternately scintillated and scandalized by his subject, yet without ever reconciling the two attitudes. He can read hypocrisy in the fact that Vidal may have been joyously promiscuous in the 60s and 70s while refusing to become a leader of the gay rights movement, but Vidal addressed both issues often in his lifetime, citing his reasons for doing and believing what he did, and he expressed himself a lot more eloquently than the underwhelming prose Teeman uses to critique Vidal.