PENNY. . . CANDIE?
Sure, it's an improbable name. But that’s only the first
of many improbable things about this pretty Penny.
As 21-year-old editor of Lovelights magazine, she
should know all about love. But she doesn’t-and that
gap in her knowledge is what sets off this rollicking
gambol that goes from one end of New York to the
other, picking up speed and laughs as it goes.
Loaded with slapstick misadventures and sharp satire,
this may well be Ted Mark's funniest book yet. Read
it and judge for yourself!
From Berkeley to Boston,
hip readers are asking...
WHO IS TED MARK?
He's the man of mystery behind the Man
from O.R.G.Y. and other improbable characters
the author of the decade’s most
hilarious bestsellers-the creator of a
craze that’s sweeping the country! Read
his books...and you’ll ask, too!
THE GIRL FROM
PUSSYCAT
TED MARK
1965
CHAPTER ONE
“THE LIQUID sounds of lovemaking . . .”
Squish—squish?
No, that couldn’t be right. Penny Candie re-read the phrase. She put the manuscript aside. She closed her innocent blue eyes and strained her brain to imagine what “the liquid sounds of love-making” might sound like. Squish-squish was definitely out. So was slurp-slurp.
Drip-drip.
Absurd! '
Sizzle-drizzle?
Mmm . . .
Tickle-trickle?
Interesting.
Pitter-patter-putter?
Not very romantic.
Slap-lap-slap-lap?
A possibility.
Eel-squeal?
Yes! That was definitely it phonetically. But What did it mean? Penny didn’t know. But then what did “the liquid sounds of love-making” mean? Penny didn’t know that; either. She’d find out, though. She was determined to find out. And within the next twenty-four hours, too, or her name Wasn’t Penny Candie!
That really was her name. Penelope Candie. But the “Penelope” had been shortened to “Penny” for the past four years, ever since she had embarked on her career.
That was during her last year in high school, when she was seventeen. She had entered a movie fan magazine contest:
“ ............................................ ...... .. (name of favorite movie star) is my ideal because ……………………….”
In five hundred words or less, Penny had justified her choice of Elizabeth Taylor because of virtue expressed in the star’s ability to love. She cited Miss Taylor’s courage in standing up to poorhouse-bound producers, their wailing stockholders, and various wives who had obviously been stifling the talents of their Taylor-made spouses. She stressed Miss Taylor’s talents, waxing indignant at critics who judged them only with a tape measure while neglecting to appreciate the star’s ability to subdue her own sweet personality and portray an ambitious, amoral, husband-stealing Egyptian vamp — a role so obviously foreign to her own nature.
Penny was lucky. Her entry arrived at a time when Elizabeth Taylor’s “sweet” nature was being expressed in a million-dollar libel suit against a rival fan publication. Since lip-licking and oft exaggerated accounts of Liz’s loves had long been selling copies of all the fan mags, fear now ran rampant that she might start slapping subpoenas on all and sundry in the gossip game.
The stall of the magazine whose contest Penny had entered felt themselves particularly vulnerable. The publishers, whose whimsical name, Pussycat Publications, Inc., thinly masked a totally hard-headed and commercial attitude, knew they could never back up their story that the Marc that Cleo would wriggle her asp for when Dick petered out was Liberace. So they had seized upon Penny’s entry, proclaimed it the winner, and printed it in full as a means of assuaging any intentions Miss Taylor might have had to invoke the libel laws against them.
Penny’s price was the job of “Teenage Consultant” to the magazine. In each issue she dealt with a teenage problem submitted by a reader. To the gratification of the magazine’s editors, she performed her task very well and with a refreshing innocence of approach which met with the approval of the readers as well.
After high-school graduation, Penny was hired on a full-time basis. She was given a teenage column in a romance magazine to write in addition to the one she was doing for the movie fan book. The following year she was moved up to assistant editor of the romance book and given a raise. This enabled her to move from her parents’ home in Forest Hills to the independence of a one-room efliciency apartment on the East Side of Manhattan in the eighties.
The promotions kept coming over the next couple of years. The latest one raised her to the position of editor of the romance magazine. Lovelights was now her baby. But the first few weeks of editorship raised increasing self-doubts for Penny. Honesty and sincerity were the hallmarks of her character. She made herself face the fact squarely that there might be certain lacks in her ability to edit Lovelights. She expressed this feeling to her friend and mentor, Fanny Hill, editor of the teenager magazine.
“What lacks?” Fanny wanted to know.
“Experience mostly. Personal experience.” Penny hung her head. “I’ve never had a love affair,” she confessed. “How can I edit Lovelights in the dark?”
“You mean you’re a virgin?” Fanny Hill asked disbelievingly. .
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“I was just twenty-one.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Fanny thought about it a moment. “Still,” she concluded finally, “I don’t see why you feel that disqualifies you from Lovelights.”
"‘But how can I edit a magazine about love problems when I’ve never had any?”
“Simple. Do you know Frank Flabgut?”
“Slightly,” Penny replied. “What does he have to do with it?”
“Just this. Frank edits a muscle man’s magazine. Now just think of him a minute. The only exercise he gets is chasing his secretary around the water cooler. And he deliberately hired a secretary with a club foot. Just take a good look at him some time. Isometrically speaking, he’s a disaster area. Yet he edits a book for muscle addicts. And then there’s Arch Faggot.”
“I don’t know him.”
“He edits a cheesecake magazine. Yet he can’t even stand the sight of women. After a hard day’s work, he goes to the men’s room at Penn Station and stands around watching just to get over the ordeal of having to look at pictures of naked women all day. He does a good job, too, except maybe he tends to run too many derriere shots. Still, he’s fruity as a nutcake.”
“I think I see what you’re driving at,” Penny admitted.
“Sure you do. And it even applies to me. I edited a movie magazine for five years, and for five years I was unable to sit through a movie. Now I edit a teenage book — me, with my name, Fanny Hill, and all it signifies. Me, charting a life-course for young adolescents! What could be more ludicrous? So you see, just because you’re a virgin doesn’t mean you can’t deal with sex problems. It doesn’t mean you can’t edit a romance magazine.”
Penny had allowed herself to be persuaded. She stayed on the job at Pussycat. However, since her editorship involved the constant gleaming of such phrases as “the hquid sounds of love-making,” her sense of her own inadequacies did not diminish.