Books: Sex & the Singular Geis

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Any book publisher is lucky to get one bestseller out of every 100 titles he prints. But Bernard Geis isn't just any He manufactures bestsellers, frequently by latching on to sexy manuscripts and spending huge amounts of money on ballyhoo. Thus Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, a vulgar chronicle of three female predators on the make in Hollywood, sold more than 350,000 hard-cover copies and 6,000,000 more in paperback. Helen Gurley Brown's guide for swingers, Sex and the Single Girl sold about 2,500,000 copies In each case Gais, assisted by his promotion department, a fetching blonde named Letty Cottin Pogrebin, spent more than $80,000 on advertising.

When Geis cannot find a manuscript to promote, he orders one up to specification. His latest product is a novel, The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton. Geis has already sold the paperback rights for $250,000 and has printed 90,000 hard-cover copies in anticipation of the great rush.

Dancing with Daddy. The Exhibitionist is the story of a beautiful film star-Jet Merry Houseman, whose father is a fading movie idol. The plot is hardly original. Merry is an oversexed girl in search of herself, but she looks mostly in other people's beds. What she finds there is a variety of sexual activity ranging from earnest fornication through onanism, homosexuality, and—since these pursuits are so familiar to fiction nowadays—some rather esoteric variations. The denouement takes place at a masked ball, where the participants shed everything but their masks. And who should end up dancing together but Merry Houseman and her daddy.

The Exhibitionist precisely fulfills Geis's dictum that a story about seemingly real celebrities will sell big, especially if it is crammed with sex. Both Geis and Author Henry Sutton, a nom de plume for David Slavitt, 32, are careful not to suggest that the novel's characters are based on anybody in particular, but the readers are obviously incited to guess; after all, there are not too many young movie actresses around whose fathers are aging screen stars.

Case in Point. Lest people think that he is promoting pop pornography Geis explains solemnly that "there's quite a distinction between pornography and erotic literature. We are not publishing a string of sexual scenes for the sake of titillation." For what other purpose then? Says Geis: "There is a perfectly legitimate public curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes." Not that people really find out what goes on in the Geis version of the roman è clef. The formula does not require that the novel be based even loosely on truth or, for that matter, on gossip.