Mike McGrady, a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking reporter who rallied his Newsday colleagues to write 1969's suburban sexcapade "Naked Came the Stranger" under a pseudonym, has died. He was 78.
Published as the supposedly true-life tales of a highly sexed suburban housewife, the book was attributed to Penelope Ashe, who turned out to be a wholly invented character. Like J.T. Leroy after her, Ashe was represented publicly by an actual human -- Billie Young, McGrady's sister-in-law -- who had nothing to do with the text.
That book had been written by McGrady and others on the Newsday editorial team. Inspired by popular bestsellers by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, McGrady challenged his newsroom buddies to write their own terrible, trashy, sex-filled bestseller. McGrady and 24 other writers each took a chapter; in every badly-written one, Penelope Ashe engaged in fantastical sexual exploits.
"It was great," McGrady said in an August 1969 Times story, after the scheme had been exposed. "Everybody sat down and wrote his chapter in one night. It was terrific for morale at the paper. We would all pass our chapters around to see how bad everybody else was writing. The only problem was that we had to send several back for rewriting. They were too good." ...
More (w/image of trashy book cover):
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/05/mike-mcgrady-60s-sexiest-literary-hoax-has-died-naked-came-the-stranger.html
Blog, a searchable database of obituaries
back to 2001:
http://DeadCelebrityAlert.com
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