It’s my last book review repost, and it’s one that I’ve regretted inflicting on the wrold. Sheesh, this one brings back memories that might have been better buried. Just look at the cover:
Looking through the shelves of fiction in UNLV Special Collections for pulp crime/gambling novels to read, I stumbled across this gem. If nothing else, I got some interesting looks from the guy sitting next to me on the plane as I was reading this one; I pored over it with a look of studious absorption, like it was a highly significant text.
WARNING: this book contains strong sexual content, violence, and general sliminess, and so does this review. If you don’t like these things, go look at some nice, safe casino carpet.
Otherwise, read on:
When this was first written in 1961, it was probably meant as a heart-wrenching story of a lovely young woman mercilessly crushed by prostitution. But forty-some years later, it’s almost impossible to look at the cover without laughing. Here’s the text:
$50 a Night
Ann’s price was high but she had a book full of satisfied customers to prove she was worth every penny.
Fifty whole dollars, huh? I might have to get a part-time job down at the malt shop for a few weeks to get up the scratch for a night with Ann. Seriously, when $50 will not buy the standard dinner-and-a-movie (unless your cheap ass took your date to Panda Express and a matinee), $50 hardly seems like the gold standard of high-class call girls. According to a recent story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a standard cabbie-referred skank will cost you in the neighborhood of $500. That’s 1000% inflation, right?
With an opening vignette of Ann’s sadistic beating and rape by a “client,” the book starts off on the lurid side, and it continues in that vein for all 144 pages. It doesn’t have much of a plot, in the sense that Ann is trying to earn $500 to by herself a farm by the end of the week, or she’s trying to foil a bank robbery. Rather, $50 a Night purports to share a week in the life of Ann Freeman.
Ann had drifted into prostitution after moving to “a West Coast city” (we never find out which one) from Montana to become an actress and model. Though she gets a few bit roles, the money starts to run out, and she drifts into prostitution. Ann doesn’t seem to get much joy out of sex; she is monumentally underwhelmed in her first sexual encounter, which seems kind of like date rape, because she keeps begging the guy to stop. Most people find that consent makes for a better sex life, but I guess things were different back then.
Anyway, even though Ann is depicted as a decent young woman who is taking an unwise shortcut to wealth, virtually every other character in the book is coated in a few layers of slime:
–Casey Shean is her first boyfriend, but he’s a well-meaning dolt who ends up taking her for granted and dumping her. He’s the one who introduces her to the “joys” of sex, and first inadvertently turns her on the prostitution by bragging about having been with hookers.
–Clara Lindy, Ann’s upstairs neighbor, was a “strictly hundred-dollar girl,” who maintains a worthless pimp, Mike, who has just graduated to a serious heroin habit. He also scams on a nameless blonde and Ann, trying to add either or both to his “stable.” As promised on the back cover, Clara makes a play at Ann, giving the novel a few pages of girl-on-girl action, something that must have been rather novel in the literature of 1961. I’m sure that for many guys back then, that was the redeeming feature of the book. Today, it reads kind of funny. After Clara makes a move, Ann asks her, “Are you a les?” Personally, I thought of Les Nesman from WKRP in Cincinatti when she asked that.
–Cal Marker, the smooth, Ivy League-looking pimp, who is trying to seduce Ann into becoming his “head chick.” His big pickup line: “Let’s take a country drive in my Jaguar.” It actually worked, too. The lesson: you can be a complete slime, but if you have an expensive car, women are completely powerless to resist your advances. Besides having nice clothes and knowing judo (and the car), I don’t see how he was such a “smooth operator.” He was, after all, known pimp. I also don’t get why he was so “Ivy League.” In all my time at Penn, I never looked at any of my fellow students (or professors) and thought, “You know, that guy would make a really smooth pimp.” Maybe its a Princeton thing.
–The vice cops are also crooked and generally corrupt, lascivious wretches. That’s about all we get to know about them.
This book is a genuine artifact of 1950s/1960s West Coast underworld argot. Take, for example, this exchange between Cal and Ann. Ann is upset that Mike is trying to get a second woman as his prostitute:
“So he needs a lot of horse to satisfy the monkey he carries,” Ann said, reverting to the idiom of the place. “He had to do this to Clara? She’s a star. You know she is. So does Mike.”
“She’d still be head chick,” Cal said. “So what’s a wife-in-law or two when a girl’s head chick? She’ll just have someone sharing the work with her.” (p.51)
That’s about the peak of literary sophistication in $50 a Night. All in all, it’s just a depressing glimpse into a miserable week in the life of a prostitute. There’s a lot of weird stuff about pimps, too. According to $50 a Night, prostitutes don’t get pimps because they necessarily need protection or contacts: they maintain otherwise worthless men as status symbols, buying them clothes and cars. In exchange, the men get to run around a lot and physically abuse their “girls.”
If there was a single likable character in the book, I didn’t find them. The main point of $50 a Night, I guess, is that prostitution is bad. As a document of the culture of the West Coast underworld of the early 1960s it might be valuable, but as an edifying piece of literature, it comes up way short.
This is one of those books that actually makes you feel physically unclean. Ann showered four a five times a day, particularly after her “dates,” but I felt like showering myself after reading this. So I’ll save you the discomfort and give you “the message” here: prostitution is a brutal, hopeless way of life that promises great riches ($50 a night, if you’re classy enough) but exposes women to vicious predators.
Bottom line: You can safely avoid this one. There’s probably a great reason why it’s not on amazon.com–it is a flat-out depressing book with little redeeming literary or artistic merit. Now that you’ve got “the message,” there’s no real reason to read it.
Originally reviewed September 2004.