April 02, 2004

Naked Came the Stranger, by Penelope Ashe

Back in 1966, a New York Newsday reporter named Mike McGrady decided to play a joke on the world. He wanted to write a dirty book along the lines of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, but he wanted to make it intentionally bad. He wanted it to be awful, and loaded with sex. He enlisted 24 of his Newsday colleagues to each crank out a chapter of the book, then hired a young woman to pretend to be the author. Imagine his surprise when Naked Came the Stranger shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list and stayed there for 25 weeks, selling millions of copies (each of the writers got their share of the $1.2 million it took in). When the world discovered the hoax, the book sold even more copies, thanks to the masterful way McGrady worked the press into a frenzy, offering an "exclusive" to everyone who called him, and even getting Walter Cronkite to fly out in a helicopter to interview him. Bill Moyers, publisher at Newsday during the time, was fired in part for his participation in the hoax.

In 1970, McGrady wrote a book called Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun & Profit, which reveals the story behind the story. It's been optioned for a by a movie production company. Buy from Amazon