Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 128: Some thoughts on 'Purple Thighs' (1968) and 'Forced Entry' (1974)

Two of Ed Wood's salacious novels: Purple Thighs and Forced Entry.

In November 2021, I reported to you that I was drowning in a sea of Ed Wood. What I meant by that was, I decided to read a bunch of Ed's novels and nonfiction books back to back over the course of just a few months. Why? Well, Eddie wrote a ton of books in his heyday, and if I'm ever going to understand this strange and complicated man, I have to make it through at least some portion of his vast literary canon. Why not just dive in headfirst and see what happens? 

Now, I don't own any of the rare and pricey paperbacks from the '60s and '70s, but a reader of this blog was kind enough to share with me some of the reprints from the extremely short-lived "Woodpile Press" series from 2009. Mainlining these volumes over the course of a few months was a real education (or Ed-ucation, I suppose), but the books tended to blend together in my mind. So recently, I decided to revisit some of these books and see if they made a stronger impression on me the second time around.

The edition of Wood on Acid that I consulted.

For whatever reason, I settled on a "Woodpile Press" volume entitled Wood on Acid, which contains the text of two full novels: Purple Thighs aka Lost Souls Delivered (1968) and Forced Entry (1974). I vaguely remembered both of these from the first time around, but a lot of the details had faded from my memory. They seemed like perfect candidates for revisiting. What did I think of them this time? Well...

Purple Thighs, Eddie's take on hippies and LSD, is definitely the more interesting and fun of the two novels. I think it helps that Eddie wrote it six years before Forced Entry. He was on the downward spiral by '68, for sure, but things weren't as dire as they were in '74. Ed Wood may not have been at the peak of freshness when he wrote Purple Thighs, but he hadn't completely curdled yet. Speaking of curdling, though, it's remarkable how much America soured between 1967 and 1968. We went from the Summer of Love to the Entire Year of Hate in a very short time. In its own cockeyed way, Ed's novel reflects this sad societal change.

The plot of Purple Thighs revolves around Adam, an honest, hard-working law student who just wants to get an education, darn it. He can't concentrate on his studies, though, because of all these darned dirty hippies loudly protesting against the war. (Seriously, in this book, Ed never passes up an opportunity to remark how filthy and foul-smelling the hippies are.) What's Adam to do? The only logical thing: drop out of school, ditch his nice girlfriend, and go "undercover" among the acid-dropping hippies. It's sort of like Ed Wood's variation on John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (1961). Call it Hippie Like Me. Oh, by the way, there's a rather gratuitous framing device wherein Adam tells his adventures to a psychiatrist named Dr. Thyme Hammer, who's paying him for his time.

So, anyway, Adam goes to some hippie neighborhood -- I think it's supposed to be Haight-Ashbury, but Ed never really specifies -- and starts to blend in among the locals. Almost immediately, he meets and moves in with a groovy chick named Eve, who introduces him to the wonderful world of LSD-enhanced sex. Right from its bewildering first chapter, Ed's parody of the Book of Genesis, Purple Thighs is full of references to the biblical Adam and Eve. This makes sense because Kathy Wood said that her husband frequently took inspiration from the Good Book. The snake, the garden, the apple, they're all here in this novel, serving some vague allegorical purpose.

Even on acid, Adam is kind of a dullard, the sort of square-jawed, macho hero Eddie seemed to love to put in his stories. Fortunately, Purple Thighs has an outstanding supporting cast of characters, many of whom have truly asinine names straight out of an AIP biker flick. My favorite has to be Rigor Mortis, a local creep who dresses like The Phantom of the Opera and is toted around in a cheap coffin by his henchmen, Crisp, Crap, and Head. (Or was that Snap, Crackle, and Pop?) Rigor likes to be buried alive in a different spot every night, and his thugs begrudgingly comply... until it all inevitably goes wrong. And we mustn't forget Glory Girl, the friendly neighborhood drug pusher who turns out to have an incredible secret. I don't want to spoil the plot too much, but if Purple Thighs had been made into a movie (and it should have been), Ed Wood might've played this part himself.

Anyway, Adam and Eve's neighborhood is being ruined by a bunch of phonies who have moved in just to party, take drugs, have sex, and mooch off others. I couldn't help but think of the song "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention: "Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet. Psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street." I also thought about R. Crumb's comic, "I Remember the Sixties," in which he talks about the decline and fall of "the Haight." Eventually, Adam, Eve, and some of the more responsible hippies move away to some kind of quasi-utopian commune. I guess it's a happy ending. Ed Wood's contempt for the counterculture seeps through nearly every page of this novel, so it's nice that he shows at least a little leniency towards them in the book's final pages.

By the way, the book's original title, Lost Souls Delivered, is Ed Wood's punning variation on "LSD." He used the same title for an article in 1972. As for the new title, Purple Thighs, I think it's a reference to body painting, a practice that was popular among hippies in the late '60s. There's a brief body painting sequence in the novel in which a young woman's body is bedecked with garish colors.

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Lost Souls Delivered" (1972)

The needle and the damage done. (Illustration from Savage Sex)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Lost Souls Delivered." Originally published in Savage Sex (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 2, April/May 1972. No author credited.

Excerpt: "There has been certain agreements that the child might be cured of the addiction right there at the start. But little is known how much of the drug hunger remains in the makeup, thus what future demands in their young adult life they might have. So far the doctors can only report what is happening there in the hospital where they have the control. In most cases when the baby is removed from the hospital it is lost into the metropolis probably never to be heard of again."

Author Sophy Burnham

Reflections: The phrase "lost souls delivered" was already familiar to me from Ed Wood's fiction. His notorious 1968 anti-drug novel Purple Thighs was originally published under the name Lost Souls Delivered. That book—which reads like it was written by Jack Webb's grandmother—is Eddie's singularly absurd take on hippies and the acid scene. The novel's hero, Adam, utters the final line of dialogue: "LSD really stands for LOST SOULS DELIVERED!" 

Because of that, I thought an article called "Lost Souls Delivered" would also be about hippies dropping acid. I prepared myself for some psychedelic Dragnet-style fun. Nope. Not even close. It's actually about heroin-addicted babies and the terrible social problem they represent. That makes this one of the least fun articles in When the Topic is Sex. When Ed Wood uses the word "delivered" here, he means babies being delivered in hospitals. Why Eddie felt he needed to write about this sad topic, especially for a magazine like Savage Sex, I have no idea.

It's possible that Eddie was simply inspired by something he read, in this case a grim article called "Heroin Babies: Craving a Needle Not a Nipple" by Sophy Burnham in The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. It's about drug-addicted mothers giving birth to drug-addicted children and what happens to those very unfortunate babies once they leave the hospital. It seems that this same article ran under a different title in The New York Times on January 9, 1972. Perhaps the Herald-Examiner picked it up from a wire service. 

Burnham states that this problem is most prevalent among poor black and Puerto Rican mothers, a claim Ed Wood repeats with a certain emphasis. Interestingly, Burnham's original article inspired a Bronx nurse to write to The New York Times to say that "drug use among white mothers is far from negligible." This nurse also says that white women have more access to abortion, an issue neither Sophy Burnham nor Ed Wood addresses. "Lost Souls Delivered" offers expert commentary from various doctors, all of it taken directly from Sophy Burnham's research.

So what does Ed Wood bring to the table? Well, this depressing topic provokes a few ponderous sermons from Ed. He even starts the article by decrying drug use in general:

One of the most frightening aspects of modern times is the steady and increasing use of harmful drugs by the younger generations of this modern world. No matter how many articles, newspaper stories or radio programs and television presentations are brought to the foreground little attention is being paid to the message. Even though the words are becoming more and more a message of death these people go out of their way to ignore the dangers.  Many are saying, "What the hell, we're going to die one way or another anyway." And perhaps that is the deepest of the underlying thoughts concerning drugs and the people who use them. Perhaps there is somewhat of the death wish involved there. Death has been shouted loud enough both vocally and in large, tremendously black headlines, so therefore the death wish has an overpowering motivation in such things. 

This entire article might be considered a stern, humorless anti-drug lecture. Now, it's possible that Ed Wood wrote this strictly for a paycheck and didn't give a damn about heroin-addicted babies, but I'd like to think that "Lost Souls Delivered" is entirely sincere. What is unclear is whether Eddie thought of his own, out-of-control alcoholism as a form of drug addiction. Did he have the "death wish" that he describes above?

Next: "Yes or No—The Candidates and Busing" (1972)