$500

$500, by Nancy Weber

December, 1976  Ace Books

In late July I went to Montreal for vacation, my first time there in around 17 years, and I was surprised to discover this ultra-scarce PBO – so scarce that it isn’t even listed on author Nacy Weber’s Goodreads page – at a cool little book and record store called Encore Books.  And they only wanted five dollars Canadian for it! 

Many years ago I created a few Amazon Wish Lists of paperbacks I was looking for, and I see that I added $500 to the “Trash Fiction” list in April of 2014. So I guess I discovered it sometime around then; not sure why I didn’t order a copy at the time. Maybe no copies were available (which seems to be the case now), or the few copies listed were overpriced. At any rate, patience as they say is a virtue, so one can imagine my surprise to discover a copy of the book, wedged behind a stack of vintage sleaze novels at Encore – and I mean real sleaze paperbacks. (Curiously, there was a ton of vintage English-language sleaze paperbacks scattered in antique stores throughout Montreal…those dirty French Canadians!) 

But this sleaze packaging is part of the curious, mysterious story of $500. First of all, it has a stepback cover – the black outer cover opens to reveal a photo of a model lying on a groovy 1970s bed, complete with princess phone in the background:

There is no info at all on the back cover; just a wraparound shot of the groovy bedroom: 

Curiously, the “back cover copy” is on the back of the inner cover, and only here could a prospective reader in 1976 actually learn what $500 was about: 

Note the reference to Life Swap. This was a nonfiction book Nancy Weber published in 1973, which from all accounts caused quite a stir at the time (I was born the following year, so was a bit outside of the target reading audience). A stir that still resonates today – or at least still did in 2006, when Life Swap was reprinted and The Guardian tracked Weber down and interviewed her. 

Life Swap concerned Nancy Weber trading places with another woman – to the extent of sleeping with this woman’s husband and working in her office – and in a way $500 sort of deals with the aftermath of this, at least in a fictional context, as main character Anne Gilbert is a pretty and sophisticated journalist who has carried off a similar experiment, one that caused her much notoriety. 

Indeed, Ace Books even saw fit to remind us of the stir Weber caused in the Author Bio at the end of the book:

So by all accounts $500 should have been a big thing…a novel from an up-and-coming young author who had recently made waves in the publishing industry. And yet $500 came out as a paperback original, one packaged like their other sleaze books – something like Massage Parlor or, uh, Massage Parlor II – courtesy an imprint that was more known for its science fiction line. 

So what happened? I’d love to know. Maybe Weber’s agent got a bum deal, or maybe none of the hardcover imprints were interested…and yet Weber certainly writes the book as if she intended it to be a hardcover, a big bestselling followup to Life Swap. Instead, $500 is so obscure that it’s not listed anywhere online, save for that Amazon listing I came across in 2014…which even then didn’t have a cover photo. 

This is a shame, as $500 is a good book, and certainly not on the level of a sleazy cash-in of the day…though humorously, Weber actually mentions such books in her novel, with Xaviera getting two name-drops, as well as an obscure “hooker-turned-writer” named Shannon Canfield – whose 1975 Dell PBO Why Men Call Girls is so obscure I didn’t even have it listed on any of my old Amazon Wishlists! 

Taking place during the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 (I believe my earliest memory is actually of the Bicentennial…and I would’ve been two and a half years old at the time!), $500 concerns the aforementioned Anne Gilbert, a writer with a penchant for doing outrageous things, who goes undercover as a hooker for a magazine article…up to and including having sex with paying johns. But then Anne goes even further undercover when she vows to take down her pimp, Lenny Michaels, who might have killed another hooker, an Irish beauty named Mary Connolly whom Anne fell in love with. Not only that, but it develops late in the novel that Lenny “turned the ultimate trick,” pimping out Mary’s corpse to a necrophiliac customer for $500,000!! Man, and I thought $500 was expensive!! 

But as you might have guessed, the title refers to the cost for the services of Lenny’s stable; his is an elite class of “courtesans,” high-class and sophisticated and ultra-beautiful. We only get cursory overviews of these women and their various specialties, and Weber pulls no punches when it comes to the raunchy stuff…save for the actual sex scenes! While there area few sex scenes in $500, they are nowhere near the sleazy, explicit level one might expect from the way the book is packaged. Again, the impression is that this was intended as a hardcover novel from a more prestigious imprint…soon to be a major motion picture, etc, etc. 

No, we get a lot of dirty talk and ribaldry, but when Anne has sex with her first john, a congressman with a penchant for sleeping with hookers (ah, simpler times), Weber doesn’t so much go for the juicy details as she does the aftermath of it, with Anne’s mind well and truly blown by the experience: “So that’s what it’s really all about!” 

Like many novels of the day, $500 hopscotches around a fairly large group of characters, to the extent that Anne is often lost. Also, halfway through the book Weber pulls a narrative trick and goes back in time to focus on Mary Connolly, the hooker whose death initiated the novel’s events. I didn’t find this character nearly as interesting as Anne – Mary is an Irish wallflower who comes to the US, falls for a tennis player turned movie star, gets her heart broken, and becomes a hooker for Lenny Michaels – and thus I wasn’t as much into the latter half of the novel. Fortunately the final quarter returns to the “present day” of summer ’76. 

Weber very much brings New York to life – hers is a trendy Manhattan, of people dining at ‘21’ and going out for cocktails after…and a little coke-snorting to boot. From this book I learned the existence of “tooters,” fancy little “nozzled” metal straws for snorting coke; Marc Olden I don’t think even mentioned these in his otherwise-comprehensive Cocaine. Weber also has a great sense of humor, as there are several funny sequences and dialog exchanges in $500, in particular a chapter that is narrated from the perspective of a vagina:

This is just one of Lenny’s girls, and Weber has a chapter for each of them – there’s Veronica, Lenny’s “token black girl,” who has a child and got into hooking after her husband’s death, and also a blonde California girl with a host of STDs (“That’s one very busy vagina, kid,” her gyno informs her), but unfortunately they each only get the one chapter, after which they sort of fade in the background. Instead, the crux of the novel concerns Anne and her desire to get revenge for Mary Connolly – and as mentioned, Mary herself takes up an unfortunate brunt of the novel. 

There’s also the tennis player turned actor who has now also become a late-night talkshow host, but he’s more of a hostile type than a Carson type. Apparently he’s known for ranting about hookers and pimps on his show, given his hatred of them – and we learn why much later in the novel. Anne’s appearance, in costume and wig on this show, is what sets off the novel, there to expose the kinky a-doings of Lenny Michaels, whose tentacles reach all the way to Washington. 

This has the setup for a taut novel, but instead Weber hopscotches around her diverse group of characters. Like Anne’s first john, the senator; this guy has his own brief patches of the narrative, as does his pregnant wife, and we even get a little from the perspective of Lenny’s lawyer. The cumulative effect is that Weber has crowded far too many characters in the book. The problem is that she doesn’t really resolve all of the subplots…especially the main one! Anne appears on the talk show, rats on Lenny, then spends the rest of the novel afraid Lenny is going to figure out that it was her in disguise on the show, and that Lenny will be going after her for revenge…but Weber ends the novel without telling us what happens! Indeed, Anne essentially gives up on the whole thing, deciding on the last page to run off with her lover-slash-publisher. We do at least learn the handy tidbit, courtesy Lenny’s lawyer, that a person can’t even be arrested for pimping a corpse!! You can bet I jotted that down for future reference. 

Despite the lack of resolution, and also despite the latter-half detour into the mostly-uninteresting life of Mary, $500 was still a decent read, and certainly better than the sleazy paperbacks its packaging imitates. Weber writes with a definite panache, and one can tell she was using the narrative to work out the ramifications she experienced after Life Swap. 

This makes it even more curious that $500 isn’t mentioned anywhere. Perhaps Weber disowned it. I came across a 2014 interview with her, where the focus was again on Life Swap, but even here $500 goes unmentioned – however, Weber’s first novel, a paperback original titled Star Fever, is mentioned in the article…and folks it’s a Rock Novel, one that I’d never even heard of (and I’ve spent more time searching for them than you’d want to know), so of course I immediately got myself a copy…and will be reading it soon!