Alice Denham
"Sleeping With Bad Boys"
Alice Denham's lusty memoir is a juicy tell-all about a time when male writers were gods and an aspiring and gorgeous female novelist tries to win respect - and sometimes more. Caught between the sheets are James Dean, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis. The steam rises page by page as Denham the only Playboy Playmate to have her fiction published in the same issue as her centerfold - chases her dream of writing as a young, oversexed beauty in the literary swirl of 1950s Greenwich Village, New York City.
Alice Denham Obituary
Alice Denham – 1927-2016 - Writer, Former Playboy Centerfold
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 Jan. 27 at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.
The cause was complications of ovarian caner, her husband, John Mueller, said.
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 actor James Dean, a close friend until he fell hard for Italian actress Pier Angeli, 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," 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 painter Ad Reihhardt. "As a proper Southern girl, I was bred to be good at men," she wrote. "I was too."
NYT News Service.
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