It Wasn't Just the Beatles Who Changed Everything in 1964:

Remembering Terry Southern's "Candy"

By Steven Rosen

This year, we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in America - the appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show," the conquering of American radio and transformation of American pop culture with an irreverent cheekiness, the jolting shock of something radically new to awaken a society depressed by President Kennedy's assassination.

As well we should.

But while this may seem hard to believe, the late Terry Southern made just as big an impact that year. As a co-screenwriter for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," he was credited with turning fears of nuclear war, and the beliefs of Cold War hawks, into the stuff of pitch-black satire. The movie was more than a hit; it was a watershed in cultural thinking.

And as the principal author of the beyond-randy novel "Candy," that year's publishing sensation, he took a wild, sexually explicit spoof of pornography to the top of the charts. He broke down one very big barrier separating sexually explicit language from art, and everyone from Lenny Bruce to Madonna has tried to one-up him since.

"Candy," with a nod to Voltaire's "Candide," is the story of a young, naive Wisconsin woman who intimately meets all sorts of lecherous men including - most famously - a hunchback.

But where did "Candy" come from and how did it get published in the first place? Its history has been shrouded in haze and mystery, because the Texas-born Southern and American pal Mason Hoffenberg actually began writing it while living in Paris in the 1950s. Southern was slow to work on it, more interested in his "real" novels like "Flash and Filigree" and "The Magic Christian." So it took years to finish.

It got published in Paris in 1958, under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton by a publisher specializing in "dirty" English-language books for American tourists. That publisher, Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, was releasing quite a few now-classic literary books too hot for American or British editions, such as Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," Henry Miller's "Tropic" novels and more.

But "Candy" proved too hot even for the French. Charles de Gaulle did his best to suppress it and Olympia Press. And President Eisenhower's America just wasn't ready for "Candy."

Because of French copyright laws involving American authors, the book was unprotected from bootleg editions once an American publisher, Putnam, felt the time finally was right to release it under its authors' true names. In a precursor of today's battles over CD and DVD piracy, spurious editions flooded the marketplace and deprived the authors of royalties.

More confusing, bootleg editions listed the author as Maxwell Kenton. People wondered who wrote "Candy." If Kenton was a pseudonym, was the little-known Hoffenberg one, too?

It was one of the strangest episodes in the history of best-sellerdom. And it took its toll on both Southern and especially Hoffenberg, who was battling heroin addiction.

It falls to Nile Southern, Terry's son and a Boulder, Colo., resident, to sort it all out in a new, doggedly researched and engrossing book, "The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel 'Candy.'"

Nile has devoted himself to trying to restore interest in his late father's life and work, which includes novels, screenplays and journalism. In this project, he's aided by letters written between Southern and Hoffenberg, as well as those between both men and their various publishers. And he also ventures into the sordid details of how a terrible movie, starring Marlon Brando, Ringo Starr and a Swedish actress (Ewa Aulin) as the all-American Candy, came to be made from the novel.

The story behind "Candy" is, in many ways, more timely than "Candy," itself. But it's a lot harder to follow. Nile does his best to navigate the legal morass, although there's only so much he can do with the business correspondence of publishers and lawyers.

He is far luckier with the entertaining letters that Southern and Hoffenberg traded each other. They were both free-spirited post-war hipsters, although Southern also was a serious and dedicated writer. Neither appears to have been much of a businessman. If both had been able to make the money they deserved from "Candy," neither might have had the financial problems that bedeviled them.

At least early on, the letters have the tone of giddy young men laughing at the world around them. To each other, they often signed with pseudonyms, sometimes women's names. Their language, often intentionally coarse, still would make many blush. It also could be filled with now-nostalgic slang.

Here's Hoffenberg to Southern, circa 1956: "I received your letter, and understand very well your desire to insinuate yourself and your chick into this groovy pad during the awkward first week of arrival."

Southern, something of a gleeful prankster, responded this way when Girodias in 1958 asked him to prepare a fictitious biography for "Maxwell Kenton." From Geneva, Southern answered in a way that indicated where "Dr. Strangelove" would later come from:

"'Maxwell Kenton' is the pen-name of an American nuclear-physicist, formerly prominent in atomic research and development, who, in February 1957, resigned his post, 'because I found the work becoming more and more philosophically untenable,' and has since devoted himself fully to creative-writing. 'Instead of bringing brief horror into man's life,' he has said, 'I would like to think of bringing some measure of entertainment and happy diversion to it. There is certainly a dearth of it in our times.'"

Where did "Candy" come from? Ultimately, Southern's strong sense of humanism.

(This story originally appeared in the Denver Post.)

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

By Nile Southern

Arcade, 408 pages, $27.95