Leo Guild was a hack.
There’s no two ways about it. The man had the writing talent of a chocolate frog in an active volcano.
Yet, his work is worth talking about, if only for the lessons it teaches…
(And perhaps for the laughs it provides.)
Biographer to the Stars
What do stars like Bob Hope, Jayne Mansfield, and Dorothy Dandridge have in common with infamous Vegas pit boss Mike Goodman, and gambler Nick the Greek?
Leo Guild, of course.
The man started out as a Hollywood Press agent. But he saw that there was real money to be made in Hollywood, even if you didn’t have the looks of Errol Flynn or the talent of Hedy Lamarr.
Because Leo Guild knew that being a ghostwriter would pay off – big time.
He saw that there was a market to write the books that told the wild, unfiltered truth of the lives of some of the most famous names in the world. It is a market that is still going strong today, with royal memoirs and celebrity tell-alls being ghostwritten and going on to sell millions of copies worldwide.
Leo had a simple proposition. If the star would let him ask them enough questions to fill up 50 one-hour audio cassette tapes, then he’d write them a book.
Not only did this pay well – Leo Guild said that he could expect anywhere from a $5,000 to $50,000 advance, depending on the subject – it also allowed him to rub shoulders with the rich and famous.
He’d accompany Jayne Mansfield, then one of the most desirable women in Hollywood, on her daily errands.
He’d have ice cream in Bob Hope’s mansion while scribbling down the man’s words.
And he’d hear the deepest thoughts of some of the most interesting stars.
According to Leo, Dorothy Dandridge once wrote:
“A pretty colored girl to a white man is just a chocolate bar to devour and enjoy for a few moments.”
Which is a terribly sad insight into the racial situation in America at the time. It is also a line that stuck with Leo, showing that he wasn’t just a heartless, money-grubbing louse.
No. Leo Guild, for all his faults, was a human being, doing his best to scrabble together a decent living in a harsh world.
He spoke charitably of Bob Hope, saying that the man would give him ice cream while he worked. Showed sympathy for Barbara Payton, the actress who was destroyed financially and physically by her struggles with alcohol and drugs. And was deeply saddened by the unexpected, tragic death of Dandridge.
However, Leo Guild’s most remembered memoir is also his worst.
Called The Loves of Liberace, it is an almost farcical attempt to convince the world that the very gay Liberace was as straight as an arrow. A man who was sleeping with all the gorgeous women in Hollywood.
It is worth a read for its almost spoof-like absurdity, but even Leo himself admitted that it was a wash.
“I think I know what sells a book on a personality. Frankness. For example, I did a book with Liberace. Lee was averse to probing into his personal life. We had long discussions about it,” said Leo Guild.
Honesty lost out to prejudice. The book flopped hard.
But Loves of Liberace is far from being Leo Guild’s worst work. No. What makes Leo such an amazing hack is his pulp output…
Horny Werewolves and Ho’s, Oh My!
Leo Guild was also a prolific purveyor of some of the worst pulp fiction books there were.
And most of them were published by Holloway House, a name that has keeps popping up in this series.
He started out with Black Shrink, the supposedly “shocking true story of lesbianism, drugs & racism as told by a beautiful black female psychiatrist”.
According to the book, Dr Phyllis James was more help to her patients than she ever was to herself.
(A cursory bit of research by this author can find no information about Dr James herself other than the book, so if you know anyone who can find out about her, maybe it is a good time to get digging?)
Leo Guild would step out of his comfort zone of biographies for most of his pulp fiction work, and boy howdy, would it show.
Streets of Ho’s is one of those books that plainly, painfully shows that it was written by a very white, very middle class author, with no real idea of his subject matter.
(As if the spelling of “ho’s” didn’t give it away.)
Claiming to tell the truth of the teen prostitutes that walked the infamous Minnesota Strip in the 1970s, it reads more like a man whose only contact with the Strip was to read a few news articles about it.
Take this line, for example:
“Sheila made him a ham and cheese sandwich and they made love while he ate.”
Which is so wonderfully evocative of its setting that it really brings you into the story, doesn’t it?
Leo Guild would follow this up with his masterpiece, the wonderful shlock pulp fiction novel called The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman.
It is certainly a title that promises a decent, if silly, read. What the novel delivers, however, is an awful, awkwardly written, and wonderfully funny account of a horny werewolf.
The synopsis reads:
“Werewolf Waldo’s toothy smile flashes on and off like a traffic light. At times he is completely irrational, with hairy paws, long nails, fang like teeth, growling his uncomplicated desires. At other times he is suave, sophisticated, brilliant, romantic, and very dead. The werewolf performs major surgery on YOU without benefit of a doctor or anaesthetic. He wants YOUR body dead or alive. The mystery of Waldo surrounds his strange left ventricle.”
It is, unfortunately, awfully written, with prose that resembles the first draft of a bad writer’s first ever manuscript, and a plot structure that has almost no real structure to it, making it an ironic phrase to use.
Readers get to enjoy Waldo’s epic journey to do… not very much, I’m afraid. But he does kill, fornicate, and pontificate, so at least there’s that.
Waldo even provides some wry social commentary at one point…
“With the kind of wool jackets they make these days it’s getting harder and harder to drive a stake in with a coat on. Well, everyone has his troubles.”
Other books by Leo Guild include Black Bait, Black Champion, The Girl Who Loved Black, and Black Streets of Oakland, as he tried desperately to appeal to the black audience that Holloway House claimed to be targeting with their books on “the black experience”.
To no one’s surprise, almost all of them are as clueless of the “the black experience” of the time as a particularly uninformed slug.
The Hackiest Hack to Ever Hack
Leo Guild’s later years wouldn’t live up to the brilliant awfulness of The Werewolf vs Vampire Women or even the badly-handled subject matter of Streets of Ho’s.
He would write more trash, however, like The Senator’s Whore and the always-useful Bachelor’s Joke Book.
Unfortunately for all us classy collectors of the most classless trash, Leo Guild’s books are rare and quite hard to find these days. But I am sure that they are hiding amongst the shelves of second-hand shops and the less-visited pages of eBay.
And while the man may have been a hack and trend jumper who constantly wrote sensationalist trash, one can only appreciate his hustle.
It takes guts to dive into writing subjects you know nothing about without a care.
Leo Guild is worth remembering, because even the bad writers have a place in history.
References:
Collins, P. (n.d.). The Worst Pulp Novelist Ever. The Stranger. Retrieved April 17, 2024, from https://www.thestranger.com/books/2007/03/15/175195/the-worst-pulp-novelist-ever
Leo Guild: Confessions of a Celebrity Ghost Writer. (1967, November 5). The Los Angeles Times, 194. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-los-angeles-times-leo-guild-confess/6356438/
