The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy

by Nile Southern

Overview

In the early fall of 1958, the notorious Olympia Press in Paris published a novel entitled Candy, an erotic, Rabelaisian satire loosely based on Voltaire's Candide by one Maxwell Kenton, pseudonym of its coauthors, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. The novel drew the attention of the French censors, was banned, reissued by Olympia's intrepid publisher under the title Lollipop, rebanned, then again reissued. Within years it became one of the most talked-about novels of the tumultuous 1960s, selling in the millions of copies in America alone, its success prompting Hollywood to turn it into a movie.

The hilarious, rollicking, sometimes tragic story of Candy's public career is recounted here in full. From the book's humble beginnings in late 1950s Paris through its agonizing three-year gestation (sometimes on paper napkins) and the authors' wily, often self-destructive business dealings with their equally wily French publisher, to its chaotic and controversial publication in the United States, The Candy Men follows Candy's underground then mainstream success—with unblinking scrutiny on the details, including the legal shenanigans that surrounded it, the blatant piracy that plagued it, and the star-studded cast that helped make it into one of the worst movies of all time.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628724585
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Nile Southern is the coeditor of Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995 and is working on a biography of his father. He lives with his wife and children in Longmont, Colorado.

Table of Contents

	Author's Note	xiii
	Introduction	xv
Part I	Beyond the Beat
1	Paris: 1947-1953	3
2	A Booklegger's Son	14
3	Greenwich Village: 1952-1955	23
4	Enter Candy Christian	28
5	Giving the Old Head a Breather	36
6	Our Poets Love It So	45
7	A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: Geneva, 1956-1958	52
8	Publishers and Other Criminals	62
9	Essentially More Warm Than You	68
10	I to the Hunchback, and Thou Therefrom	74
11	Mason Gets Cooking	81
12	This Souped-Up Correspondence	91
13	"... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Jack Off!"	101
14	Flashpoint: 1958	113
15	A House O'Porn Extraordinaire	119
16	Just Call Me Lollipop	125
Part II	Stealing Candy
17	New Life, New England	137
18	Candy Goes to Italy, Mason Gets Nervous	148
19	Getting the Kaiser on Paper	157
20	The Olympia Review	164
21	sHit Habit (#6)	172
22	The Naked and the Sucked	179
23	Fuzz Against Junk	192
24	What the Fuck Is Wrong with Your Eyes?	204
25	The Candy Wars	208
26	Something Worth Blasting	220
27	A Suitable Vehicle for Prosecution	226
28	Candy Does America	235
29	Going Hollywood	248
30	Enter the Pirates	257
Part III	Unreeling Candy
31	"Good Grief, Me a Movie?"	269
32	Half of Paris for the Rights	278
33	Bedlam Was Never So Hectic	284
34	Tangled Up in Gid	292
35	With the Spring Comes Mason and Brando	303
36	Scrawlings on a Cave Wall	316
Part IV	Birds of a Feather, Falling
37	Weird Scenes Inside the Big Pink	325
38	Mason Licks Terry	337
39	The Refreshing Ambiguity of the Deja Vu	349
	Afterword	355
Appendix A	Selected Interviews with Terry Southern Concerning Candy and "Pornography"	357
Appendix B	Anatomy of a Pornectomy	360
	Acknowledgments	367
	Notes	369
	Index	381

Editorial Reviews

The adventures of Candy have been related before, but never as fully and sympathetically as here, with letters, contracts, legal minutiae, multifaceted biography and, now and then, a wistful personal detail, all conspiring to take the story forward. As the son and trustee of the estate of one of the authors of Candy, Southern is uniquely placed to do justice to the story. He quotes at length from his father's correspondence and from the archives of Hoffenberg and Girodias, and his treatment of the material at times gives The Candy Men more the feel of a collection of letters than a slice of literary history. Southern is generous to all the parties involved, even when circumstances, as outlined by him, suggest that they scarcely deserve it.
— The New York Times

James Campbell

“The touchstone of Nile Southern’s compilation lies half-hidden in the deliciously disgusting correspondence between its disreputable heroes, who come shifting off the page in hipster mode just as, years ago, they leaned out of the shadows of the Dôme in Montparnasse. Old poops, puritans, and the politically correct may choke on indignation and outraged sensibilities, but the rest of us must laugh along with these anarchic voices. Such wild metaphors and riffs of fervid imagination, daring to celebrate our frailties and folly, are the stuff of literature and life.” —Peter Matthiessen

"Thoroughly enjoyable . . . a highly successful example of an underexploited genre, the biography of a book." —New York Times

“In a magnificent epistolary style . . . offers valuable insight into the Beat scenes of Paris and New York, as well as into the publishing world [and] . . . the lives and minds of two wildly creative literary characters: the authors themselves.”—Publishers Weekly

"At times more fascinating and readable than the original novel . . . An important chapter in the history of popular culture and a worthy second look at one of the . . . masterpieces of erotic literature." —Booklist

“The touchstone of Nile Southern’s compilation lies half-hidden in the deliciously disgusting correspondence between its disreputable heroes, who come shifting off the page in hipster mode just as, years ago, they leaned out of the shadows of the Dôme in Montparnasse. Old poops, puritans, and the politically correct may choke on indignation and outraged sensibilities, but the rest of us must laugh along with these anarchic voices. Such wild metaphors and riffs of fervid imagination, daring to celebrate our frailties and folly, are the stuff of literature and life.” —Peter Matthiessen

"Thoroughly enjoyable . . . a highly successful example of an underexploited genre, the biography of a book." —New York Times

“In a magnificent epistolary style . . . offers valuable insight into the Beat scenes of Paris and New York, as well as into the publishing world [and] . . . the lives and minds of two wildly creative literary characters: the authors themselves.”—Publishers Weekly

"At times more fascinating and readable than the original novel . . . An important chapter in the history of popular culture and a worthy second look at one of the . . . masterpieces of erotic literature." —Booklist

From the Publisher