Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 176: Bye Bye Broadie (1968)

You'd never guess the plot of this book by its cover. Or its title, for that matter.

In the turbulent year of 1968, Los Angeles adult publishing giant Pendulum launched a series of highly unusual books it called Pendulum Pictorials. Listing for $1.75 apiece, these volumes interspersed text and photos to tell wild, action-packed stories rife with sex and sadism. The publisher claimed that the Pictorials were adaptations of feature films, but the (black-and-white) photos in them were obviously staged and the alleged movies did not exist.

Mrs. Grundy closes in for the kill.

In all, six Pendulum Pictorials came out that year. Two of those, Bye Bye Broadie and Raped in the Grass, were credited to Edward D. Wood, Jr., Pendulum's best-known and most prolific author. As for the other four, I highly suspect that Eddie either wrote or cowrote these under assumed names. While some Woodologists disagree—even getting testy about it—the authorship of Broadie and Raped is undisputed. All you have to do is look at the covers.

I've had the text from the Pendulum Pictorials for a while now, but I never felt like I could review these books fairly until I saw the photographs that were supposed to accompany the words. Recently, reader Dennis Smithers, Jr. kindly shared with me the images from Bye Bye Broadie, the first book in the Pendulum Pictorials series and one of the strangest erotic works I have encountered anywhere. So now is the time to talk about it.

Folks, this is one inexplicable book, even in the topsy-turvy world of Ed Wood. Let's start with the title, apparently a pun on the 1960 stage musical and 1963 film Bye Bye Birdie.  Whatever its inspiration may be, the name Bye Bye Broadie does not describe any aspect of Wood's story, nor are there any obvious or hidden parallels between Birdie and Broadie, apart from the fact that they both feature characters who are school-age girls. Never is the word "broad," let alone "broadie," uttered by any character. Meanwhile, the cover photo is so generic—merely a man and woman embracing on a lawn—that the prospective customer would have no idea what he was getting for his $1.75.

So what did readers get from Bye Bye Broadie, apart from the "80 photos" promised by the cover?

Well, what we have here is the surreal, almost free-associative story of an unnamed peeper and self-admitted rapist who spies on the students at an all-girl boarding school owned by the man-hating Mrs. Grundy. This is the kind of school where the students regularly enjoy frolicking semi-nude on the front lawn and are not discouraged from doing so. In other words, this place could only exist in the imaginations of horny middle-aged men. Male staff members typically only last a week or so, for reasons you might imagine.

The book's story focuses on four eager young pupils: Joni, Barbee, Mary, and (you guessed it) Shirley. When the shirtless peeper approaches the girls in the middle of some topless roughhousing, they respond too eagerly to his advances and begin erotically mauling him. The overwhelmed man can hardly breathe. Remember the female-on-male gang rape scenes from The Violent Years (1956) and Fugitive Girls (1974)? Ed Wood must have spent some time dwelling on scenarios like that.

Suddenly, old Mrs. Grundy shows up and bludgeons the intruder to death with her cane. She then forces her students to help her dispose of the body in a nearby pet cemetery. She says that if the girls don't help, she'll write "toilet letters" to their parents, disclosing all of their bad deeds. Then things really get strange, not to mention supernatural! Not to spoil too much, but the girls may have buried the peeper prematurely. The ending reminded me a bit of the shocking final scene from Carrie (1976), with a bloody hand reaching up from the grave.

Similar moments from Bye Bye Broadie (left) and Carrie (right).

To pad out the narrative, Ed Wood employs a technique he has used elsewhere in his writing, such as the 1972 novel The Only House. Namely, he gives all the characters—the peeper, Mrs. Grundy, and all four schoolgirls—lengthy flashbacks and/or internal monologues that interrupt the main story for pages at a time. Without these frequent asides, the plot of Bye Bye Broadie would be thin indeed. As it is, Eddie takes the time to really get to know his six characters. Some of this material feels like it may have been plundered from other stories or even unfinished novels that Ed was working on at the time.

Perhaps the most egregious padding involves the character Barbee. We are told that she worked as a nurses' aid at a local hospital over the summer. Because of her medical training, it is her responsibility to determine that the peeper is actually dead after Mrs. Grundy's initial attack. Later, we are told about her previous relationship with a "young doctor" that quickly took a turn into S&M territory, with the man asserting his dominance over Barbee. None of this material fits comfortably into Bye Bye Broadie, particularly the detail that Barbee had "a small apartment in a rough section of town." Isn't she supposed to be a teenage girl who lives at the school? This entire flashback seems to have been airlifted in from another story entirely.

Some of the flashbacks are more germane to the story, especially the passages related to Mrs. Grundy. We learn about what the headmistress' childhood was like, how she came to hate men, and what happened to the late Mr. Grundy. It's all quite interesting, though hardly erotic. And then there is the story of Shirley and her first fateful sexual encounter in the Texas badlands. Shirley's flashback bears a remarkable resemblance to the incident that starts the novel Sex Salvation (1975), with her young paramour being bitten by a rattlesnake. It's also worth noting that Shirley is Bye Bye Broadie's resident angora enthusiast. (It had to be someone.)

Even if Ed's name were not on the cover, Bye Bye Broadie would be easy to identify as his work. This is Wood at his Woodiest, wallowing in all four of his major obsessions: sex, death, booze, and women's clothing. His trademark ellipses are here in force, as are many of his favorite words, like "lovely," "youthful," "lowered," "thrill," "jollies," "soft," and "pink." Best of all, Eddie does not let things like coherence, plausibility, or continuity get in his way. As I indicated earlier, he veers away from the main storyline whenever he damned well feels like it. If you like your Ed Wood unrestrained—and I do—Bye Bye Broadie is your kind of book. My only caveats are the casual references to rape and the implied pedophilia (the schoolgirls are called "little more than kids"), but Ed gets these out of the way early in the story.

The peeper is buried, but only up to his neck.

So that's the textual portion of the book. But what about the visual portion? Having now seen the pictures from Bye Bye Broadie, I have to ask that old chicken-and-egg question about which came first. For a project like this, I guess it makes more sense to take the pictures first and then have a writer base a story on them, but how did anyone think to take these particular photos without at least an outline as a starting point?

We start out fairly normally, with some generic-looking snapshots of an ordinary, dark-haired guy canoodling with some vaguely hippie-ish, half-undressed young women in some sunny outdoor setting. There is nothing to suggest that the man is a desperate rapist, nor is it obvious that the women are supposed to be students or that any of this is happening at a school. The women appear to be in their early-to-mid-twenties, well past their boarding school years.

Then Mrs. Grundy shows up and starts walloping everyone in sight with her cane. The photographer makes a point to keep the headmistress' face out of frame or in shadows, so we never get a good look at her. This is definitely for the best, since Ed's text makes such a point of how homely and sexually unappealing the character is. For all I know, it may be a man in drag portraying Mrs. Grundy. The girls are supposed to react with utter horror at the headmistress' violent outburst, but the models are often seen laughing and smiling in these pictures.

I should point out that the photographs in Bye Bye Broadie are pretty sparing in their use of nudity. We see some bare breasts and bottoms but no genitals. And there is no male nudity whatsoever, let alone any explicit sex. If this were a movie (and the book's introduction claims Broadie is being made by a nonexistent company called Image 4), it would likely get an R rating. Even Ed's text is cleaner than usual, avoiding most of the harsh profanities that appear in his adult work.

As the story progresses, we get some photographs of the girls carrying the peeper's body around. He does not look dead so much as dazed. His eyes are wide open in some shots and closed in others. The photographer has bothered to slather some stage blood on the man's face and chest. How this is supposed to arouse the reader, I have no idea. Eventually, they throw him into a pit and bury him up to his neck. This basically aligns with Ed Wood's text, as does the peeper's unexpected revival. Once again, the girls look more amused than horrified. They all seem to be having fun on a nice, sunny afternoon.

The Pendulum Pictorials experiment was brief. Six books were released in 1968, but the series does not seem to have continued after that. I'm not sure if they were a commercial success or not. It seems like, if these titles had been big moneymakers, publisher Bernie Bloom would have kept making them. If so, Ed Wood would have certainly been a major part of the franchise. Do you think it's possible that Eddie himself was somehow involved in the Bye Bye Broadie photoshoot, even "directing" it as if he were making a real movie? That's quite an intriguing thought.