cover image Sleeping with Bad Boys: A 1956 Playboy Model's Escapades with James Dean, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer and the Famous Writers of the 1950's Beat

Sleeping with Bad Boys: A 1956 Playboy Model's Escapades with James Dean, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer and the Famous Writers of the 1950's Beat

Alice Denham. Cardoza Publishing, $14.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-58042-206-2

Denham, an essayist, television writer and the only woman whose fiction and breasts have appeared in the same issue of Playboy, offers up a fast-paced memoir that chronicles how a pretty girl from suburban Washington ended up on a bar stool at the storied Lion's Head. Run-ins with notorious figures-Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Marlon Brando, Hugh Hefner-pepper nearly every page, though readers interested in the hot dirt promised by the flap copy will be disappointed, as the ""bad boys"" here come off as little more than horny juveniles, and Denham skimps on the steam when she sacks with, say, James Dean. Most of the narrative is consumed with her slow-out-of-the-gate literary career that limps along; as her peers became icons, Denham modeled until the gigs dried up, and then wrote freelance. Though Denham reveals little that isn't widely known (Roth is a perv, Mailer is a freak), the sheer number of names dropped and follies recounted make for a fast and fun read.