Naughty '50s Novel But Who Knew Then?

The Boston Herald

I never would have described Rona Jaffe's 1958 best seller  “The Best of Everything, ''which I read in 1958, as “vintage heavy breathing.''

I don't remember heavy breathing at all or “sweaty, illicit and brain-fogging sex; furtive hotel room trysts; tussles in boardrooms and darkened apartments; and searing emotions.’'

Apparently I missed something, for this is how the New York Times described the newly reissued book. 

I remember a story about a girl who wanted to be a writer (I read everything about girls who wanted to be writers), who heads to New York and lands herself a job in a publishing house. There she makes a friend, April, who does what every good Sister of Notre Dame warned a girl must never do - and becomes pregnant.

I read this book when I was in the seventh grade, when I was under the watchful eyes of nuns five days a week. So I came away from it not with any sexual acumen but with a reinforced sense that if you messed with the sixth commandment you'd end up just as the nuns said - pregnant and unemployed with no place to go.

Now I learn, a half century later that this wasn't the theme at all. The author herself, who is 73 and lives on New York's Upper East Side described it as ”Sex and the City' without the vibrators.''

Swear to God, I never knew. I read this “very prototype of the hot women's novel'' (writer and editor Michael Korda's words) over a weekend, having checked it out of the adult section of the Codman Square library. ”It's for my mother, ''I told the librarian. This was a big, fat lie that the librarian in Randolph, where I lived, would never have bought. The librarian in Dorchester, however, I snookered regularly.

It amazes me that I read this book unaware of the sex. I was also unaware of the themes: “trying to balance professional success and personal happiness; pursuing an often futile search for Mr. Right; making mistakes without looking back; and finding solace in friendships with other women.’'

It was none of these things to me. It was only a story about a girl who got a job in publishing, who was working for a woman who may as well have been a Mother Superior, she was that bossy. And all the friends she made there.

The whole thing makes me feel better about life and kids today. Maybe they're as oblivious as I was. Maybe they don't pick up on all the adult things we think they do. Maybe it washes over them.

I'm going to reread “The Best of Everything'' in search of the “torrid encounter between a virginal typist in a prestigious Manhattan publishing company and a booze sodden much older man'' which I clearly missed the first time around.