An Interview with Alice Denham, Writer, Feminist and Playboy Centerfold, April 1, 2009

(Alice Denham, 1956)

My friend Alice Denham died on January 27, 2016 at the age of 89. She was a Playboy centerfold, novelist and sexual adventurer, pursuing some of the biggest writers of the 1950's and 1960's, including Philip Roth, David Markson and James Jones. (The married Joseph Heller would only make out, no sex.)

I interviewed Alice in 2009. She was a charming Southern belle, very honest and witty about her dating past.  She could also be steely. When I mentioned that her ex-lover Ted Hoagland had wrote a derogatory description of her in his own memoir, she noted that he never brought women to orgasm because his erections were never fully hard, like a piece of asparagus.

Alice was a Playboy centerfold in 1956, and had a short story published in the same issue. She had sex with Hugh Hefner and said that he was technically proficient, but more like a metronome than a lover.

(Alice with human metronome Hugh Hefner, 1956)

 In Alice's memoir Sleeping with the Bad Boys, she noted that her relationship with Playboy ended when the magazine's ad executives tried to pimp her out to their major advertisers. When Alice Denham refused to be used, the magazine cut her off.

Alice was a pure delight, wise and sexy. Here is the interview:

DYLAN FOLEY: You came up from the south to Greenwich Village as a college escapee. It took guts for a woman to do that in 1951. Was there some culture shock for you?

 (Alice Denham in the 1960's)

(Alice's first novel My Darling from the Lions)

ALICE DENHAM: I was always that way.
Back then, James Baldwin wasn’t famous. The Kettle of Fish was pitch black. I was on a great adventure. I went to Louis’ Tavern… because I knew a bunch of actors.
I went to lots of Village parties. I was modeling.

 Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Joe Heller, and William Gaddis all worked at Magazine Management Company[Editor’s note: The company included such men’s magazines as Stag, For Men Only and Swank.]. They would permit them to work on their novels, and would introduce them to their clients as “our novelists.” Nothing was more important than art and literature. Male writers were gods and the women couldn’t get jobs.

There was no occupation more important for the American male than writing the Great American Novel.

I did pin-up modeling. I was known as a classy model.

DF: What were the parties like?

AD: It wasn’t like it is now, where you provide food. They would start after dinner. People would bring liquor….it was B.Y.O.B. The host might provide a cheap bottle of whiskey, some peanuts or potato chips. Most of the parties were open. There was a Village Voice columnist named John Wilcock and he would mail everyone the party list.

I was very leery of being trapped into becoming a mother. I really wanted to be a writer. In those days, if you were married, you were expected to be a wife and a mother.

DF: The writer Dan Wakefield often moaned how hard it was to get a date in the 1950’s. Did you know him?

AD: He never got it. He was a square. At that time, his face was covered with bumps. No one wanted to go with him. He was an unappetizing character.

DF: Did you think much about the sexual revolution in the 1950’s?

AD: I don’t think we thought much about it. We liked sex and had a lot of it. We all had diaphragms and felt pretty safe. We thought of ourselves as bohemians, as opposed to squares. America was very provincial and conservative then. I couldn’t have been free in Washington D.C., no matter where I lived. Things were so constricted in the 1950s. There was no such thing as a single mother. You were a fallen woman with an illegitimate child.

DF: You had a one-night stand with Anatole Broyard, where Greenwich Village’s most famous lover couldn’t perform. Why’d you bed him?

AD: It was because he was terribly handsome and women were all over him. People just assumed that he was a great lover. He always went with someone who was significantly dumber than I was. Equality threw him off. Everybody knew he was part black.

I knew other men who did not like educated women. They called us aggressive.

DF: Did you keep figurative notches on your bedpost for how many men you slept with?

AD: I did. I had a list. I’ve never told anyone my secret number,” [Denham gave the most charming laugh at this point]

DF: Could you tell me about Norman and Adele Mailer doing a striptease at a party at their how to promote a sexual reaction from you and the man you were with, a lion tamer?

AD: I wrote everything down as it happened. I had a good memory. I wrote scenes and I would put them in folders. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.

DF: How did you wind up t the Lion’s Head on Christopher Street? [Editor:The Lion’s Head was a legendary journalists’ bar where Pete Hamill and the Clancy Brothers hung out.]

AD: I moved to this apartment on Grove Street in 1967. David [Markson] came over and said, “Why don’t you come over to the Lion’s Head? That’s where everyone goes.”
They were all dismissive of Frank [McCourt, a teacher who won the Pulitzer for his hard-luck Irish childhood memoir Angela’s Ashes.] They called him “the teacher.”

It was very much a journalist’s bar, but there were longshoremen and everybody Irish. Even the Aer Lingus pilots.

Anita [Steckel, the controversial artist] made herself up so ridiculously. She looked like a whore, the amount of paint she had on.

In the end, we are all too old at the Lion’s Head. By the time it closed, we were all going to the dining room. Most of us were too old to drink.

DF: You’re ex-lover Ted Hoagland wrote mean things about you in his own memoir. What was your experience with him?

AD: I’ll tell you about him because he talked about me. [Denham’s eyes narrowed] He had a dick like a banana. He said he’d never given a woman an orgasm. I know why. His dick was like a piece of asparagus. It was soft.

DF: You state in your memoir that the writer David Markson was the best lover in your life. To your shock and dismay, he got married very suddenly in the mid-1950’s. What happened?

(David Markson, Village heartthrob, 1960's)

AD: David and Elaine Markson went out on their first date and decided to get married.

A month later, David called me, pleading that it was a mistake and trying to sleep with me.

David would show up at 4 a.m. “Go down on me,” he’d say. I’d say, “You go down on me!” He once said, “You give me a hard-on, maybe because you are so mean.”

Alice Denham, Novelist and Sexual Adventurer, RIP, January 27, 2016, Aged 89

 Alice Denham, Who Kissed and Told About Literary New York, Dies at 89

By WILLIAM GRIMES 

New York Times

FEB. 4, 2016

Alice Denham, a writer and former Playboy centerfold who left a vivid chronicle of her literary and sexual adventures in her 2006 memoir, Sleeping With Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties, died on Jan. 27 at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

The cause was complications of ovarian cancer, her husband, John Mueller, said.

Ms. Denham came to New York in the early 1950s, fresh from the University of Rochester, with two things on her mind: literary fame and romance. The city held forth the promise of both, in abundance. “New York in the fifties was like Paris in the twenties,” she wrote in her memoir.

A stunning beauty with a talent for repartee, she made her way easily into Manhattan’s literary salons, and her presence did not pass unnoticed by a long list of editors, publishers, film producers, actors and writers — most of whom made a play for her, quite a few successfully.

“Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty, I drank,” she wrote.

Her conquests, she said, included the actor James Dean, a close friend until he fell hard for the Italian actress Pier Angeli; the authors James Jones, William Gaddis, Evan S. Connell and Philip Roth; and Hugh Hefner, whom she had persuaded, in a clever gambit, to feature her as a centerfold and reprint, as part of the package, her first published short story.

“Of course he was no egalitarian,” Ms. Denham wrote. “But he possessed one of the finer male characteristics I was aware of: He liked my writing.”

She counted among her many friends Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal and the painter Ad Reinhardt. “As a proper Southern girl, I was bred to be good at men,” she wrote. “I was, too.”

Alice Denham was born on Jan. 21, 1927, in Jacksonville, Fla. Her father, a stockbroker, lost everything in the Wall Street crash and moved the family to Coral Gables, Fla., where he found work as a property manager for a large company. In 1940 he was hired by the Federal Housing Administration, and the family moved to a Washington suburb, Chevy Chase, Md.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1949 she won a scholarship to the University of Rochester, where she earned a master’s degree in English the following year, writing her thesis on T. S. Eliot’s plays.

Ms. Denham headed immediately to New York, where, through an actress friend, she met James Dean. “This Jimmy boy looked like an adolescent, like my kid brother, with surprising maturity and great swaths of infantile petulance,” she wrote. She gave him high marks as a lover.

Ms. Denham plunged into the bohemian life. She modeled by day, posing at camera clubs and doing photo shoots for romance and detective magazines, paperback covers, comic strips and movie posters. For a spread in True Adventures magazine, “Girl Gun Runners of Saigon,” she posed as four different Vietnamese women holding an array of weapons as they took position on a ridge.

Always, she wrote. In 1955, Discovery, a well-regarded literary magazine edited by Vance Bourjaily, published her story “The Deal,” about a young woman, an aspiring artist in Las Vegas, who agrees to sleep with an aged gambler for $1,000. The story, she wrote, “ made me a novice artist among artists, I hoped, not a mere model.”

Years of struggle followed. Playboy, after reprinting “The Deal,” with an illustration by Leroy Neiman, in the July 1956 issue that included her centerfold, rejected two more of her stories, informing her in a letter that it did not intend to have any more women’s bylines.

While she searched in vain for a publisher for her first novel, about the love affair between an artist and a composer in New York, she wrote jacket copy for publishers, acted in films with titles like “Olga’s House of Shame” and modeled at industrial shows, appearing as Miss Minute Maid in 1957 and 1958.

Socially, her dance card was full. “Every month I had a mad new crush, a fabulous new romance,” she wrote.

Her novel, My Darling From the Lions, eventually came out in 1967, attracting little attention. She had asked her many writer friends to contribute a blurb. None did.

Ms. Denham later wrote the novel Amo (1974), about a feminist centerfold who has a fantasy life on another planet, and Secrets of San Miguel (2013), a tell-all chronicle of the expatriate artistic community in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which she visited for many years.

Ms. Denham’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her husband, she is survived by a brother, John, and a sister, Leila Starke.

“Sexual friendships taught me politics, race, class, countries, temperaments, occupations, all useful for a novelist,” she wrote of her heyday playing the literary field. “But that wasn’t my motive.”

“Sex,” she added, “was my great adventure.”