Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part Nine by Greg Dziawer

"Come with me and you'll be in a world of Ed Wood speculation!"

We spend a lot of time around here at Ed Wood Wednesdays talking about Ed's work and debunking claims of Ed's authorship. This week, we're shifting gears a bit, with no research-based claims for or against, and (perhaps some will see the near-blasphemous irony) sharing a couple of snippets that could be Ed's work.

As we know, the playing field of adult magazines in which Ed's work could have appeared is immense. We've previously and thus far indexed over 600 individual issues filed for copyright from 1970 through 1975 by the Pendulum family of publishers (associated imprints including Calga, SECS Press, Gallery Press, Edusex and Libra Press). Bernie Bloom incorporated Pendulum in the state of California in the spring of 1968 (meaningless trivia: two and a half weeks after yours truly was born). He and Ed left Golden State News, and Ed's work there (in both duration and volume) still remains largely undocumented. After Pendulum and Calga disappeared by 1974, followed by Gallery Press in 1976, the so-called "triple-dot" magazines appeared for a brief period before transitioning into the Swedish Erotica mags, rooted in both the infamous loop series as well as one-offs that carried a single story, largely pictures accompanied by a corresponding text.

"The Monogrammed Panties"

In all, it's possible that Ed's work could have conceivably appeared in upwards of a thousand adult magazine issues, in some form. He himself claimed a thousand stories and articles from 1963 through the latter half of the '70s. While some stories and articles were later reprinted, that's the exception. And while the current frontier of Ed's work still remains an accurate and comprehensive attribution of his stories and articles in adult magazines, there remains a new horizon on the other side of that frontier for the masochistic Woodologist. Beyond the stories and articles, largely credited even if only pseudonymously, lie the editorials, the photo captions, the texts accompanying pictorials, etc. Any and all text in the mags was written by the magazine staff, and that could have included Ed.

The pseudonyms are sometimes all we need to make an attribution. Dubiously credited to Jill Bones, for instance, the story "The Monogrammed Panties" from Gold Diggers vol 2 no 2 1970 has a suspect title, and there's plenty of incidental drinking in it, but it doesn't sound like Ed's writing style at all:

"We looked at the gib [sic] black Caddy stopped at the intersection, and sure enough, sitting in the seat behind her chauffeur was Estelle Dunn, the hottest, sexiest piece to hit Hollywood since Paula Price! Jesus! We couldn't get over it. Sitting right there! At the intersection in front of us! The most gorgeous piece of ass in Hollywood!"

Intriguingly, the titular panties are clearly monogrammed E.D. ...for Estelle Dunn. The pseudonym Jill Bones is clearly William D. "Bill" Jones, a fellow mag staffer of Ed's at Pendulum. Like Ed, he wrote his fair share of titles based upon the fabled T.K. Peters source.

In the pictorial texts, there's never a credit, and sometimes the text is so scant we'd be hard-pressed to discern a recognizable signature. Hence, past the full attribution of Ed's stories and articles, even past a comprehensive accounting of his work in 8mm porn loops, there lies the pictorial text.

Tanya from Two Girls In Paris.

The format of Two Girls in Paris vol 1 no 4 1974 from Gallery Press, solo pictorials with first-person accompanying text, would reach its zenith with the pair of Sam magazines from Gallery Press featuring solely the impossible Roberta Pedon.

In Two Girls, one of the females, Tanya, tells her story this way:

"His months of being in jail must have stored up a lot of sex in him because, I had never, up to that time, been taken like that, with such force, with such complete abandonment of any shame. And when it was finished he rolled off of me and stretched out on his back on the floor exhausted while I got up and dressed then sat on a couch until he revived. I had to wait him out. I did need a job."   

Uncredited, and we'll refrain from opining whether or not it was written by Ed. Passages of Tanya describing being taken by force are accompanied by photos of her smiling.

With more brevity, not far beyond captions, here is the text accompanying the pictorial "Natural Resources.........." (yes, I counted: 10 ellipses in all) from Male Lovers vol 3 no 3 Oct/Nov 1971:

"Naturally they pick the most rugged spots for their action because that lessens discovery even more. But other than their obvious homosexual activities the boys are great sun enthusiasts. As soon as they arrive at any of their picked spots they get undressed and just lay around letting the sun do its healthful work. Of course Chuck doesn't need a suntan. He's dark enough!"

This time, we'll refrain entirely from comment.

And we'll certainly need to continue traversing the frontier of stories and articles, picking up valuable clues along the way to leverage once we go beyond that next and final horizon: Who wrote "The Legend of Washington York"?