Last Kiss by John Lustig for March 05, 2025

“Naked Came The Stranger.”

Mike McGrady was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. To test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of Newsday colleagues (according to Andreas Schroder,3 nineteen men and five women) to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever.1 McGrady co-edited the project with Harvey Aronson, and among the other collaborators were well-known writers including 1965 Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Goltz, 1970 Pulitzer Prize winner Robert W. Greene, and journalist Marilyn Berger.4

The group wrote the book as a deliberately inconsistent hodge-podge, with each chapter written by a different author. Some of the chapters had to be heavily edited, because they were originally too well written. The book was submitted for publication under the pseudonym “Penelope Ashe” who was portrayed by McGrady’s sister-in-law Billie Young for photographs and meetings with publishers. The back of the first print run’s dust jacket features a black-and-white picture of a fully clothed Young with her pet Afghan Hound and the accompanying caption “PENELOPE ASHE is a demure Long Island housewife….”5