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| (left to right) Marijane Meaker's book; Ed Wood's script. |
One of Ed Wood's professional rivals—or, perhaps, one of his influences—just died. And I mean just died. Marijane Meaker, who wrote under a number of names (including her own) from the 1950s to the 2000s, passed away at the age of 95 on November 21, 2022. Think of that: she was only two and a half years younger than Ed, and she was alive until just a few weeks ago.
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| The late Marijane Meaker. |
Like Ed Wood, Marijane hailed from the great state of New York, though she was from Auburn, a few hundred miles to the north and west of Ed's native Poughkeepsie. As a writer, Ms. Meaker rivaled Eddie in terms of versatility and productivity. Over the course of her half-century-long career, she jumped from alias to alias and genre to genre. As "M.E. Kerr," for instance, she wrote young adult fiction (Gentlehands; Deliver Us from Evie). As "Mary James," she wrote children's books (Shoebag; Frankenlouse). That's all very nice, I'm sure, and brought her a comfortable income and even critical acclaim.
But what concerns us here today is the fact that, in 1952, Marijane Meaker pioneered the genre of so-called "lesbian pulp fiction" with a novel called Spring Fire. She wrote it under the pen name "Vin Packer," which she generally used for her mystery and crime books. In the heteronormative Eisenhower years, when being gay was still very much a taboo, the pulp publishers were the only ones who'd dare to release a book about lesbians. Marijane was a lesbian herself and eager to write about the Sapphic lifestyle, even if she had to do so under an alias.
Between 1955 and 1972, credited as "Ann Aldrich," she penned a series of five nonfiction paperbacks about lesbianism. The second of these, released in 1958, had a strangely familiar title: We, Too, Must Love. If you care to, you can read it here. Compared to the kind of stuff Ed Wood wrote, including his (often quite salacious) stories and articles about lesbians, Meaker's book is tame, tasteful, and subdued. The author based it on interviews with real women and approached the project as a journalist. The fact that these books were marketed as quasi-smut, complete with suggestive cover art, says more about the times than it does about the author.
But I'm sure Eddie was well aware of "Ann Aldrich." He kept pretty close tabs on what was happening in the adult publishing world, so Marijane Meaker's books about lesbianism would have been on his radar. Sometime in the 1970s, he wrote an unproduced screenplay called We Too Must Love, the title a direct lift from Meaker. This script might have been commissioned by Stephen C. Apostolof, since it wound up in the Apostolof archives. Thanks to Bob Blackburn, we have a brief glimpse of this never-to-be-filmed screenplay.
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| A couple of pages from Ed Wood's We Too Must Love. |
Now, those of you who bothered to zoom in on that picture will see that Ed Wood's We Too Must Love was not about lesbians, at least not at first. Instead, it seems to be about the erotic adventures of someone named Jerry Hopper. But I think it's safe to say that, wittingly or not, Eddie was influenced by the works of Marijane Meaker. He had to grab that title from somewhere. So, MJ, we owe you a debt of gratitude.