Before Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, before Janet Cooke (but after War of the Worlds), there was Naked Came the Stranger. This racy 1969 novel was supposedly the work of a “demure Long Island housewife,” one Penelope Ashe. In truth, the hot-burning Ashe was the creation of a Yale-educated newsman, Mike McGrady ’55.
McGrady died this week at age 78. Although he was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and wrote award-winning coverage of the Vietnam war, he “was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America,” his New York Times obituary says.
A columnist at Newsday, McGrady dreamed up Naked Came the Stranger as “a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value,” the Times reports—a response to the bestselling sex novels of Tom Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. He recruited a couple dozen Newsday colleagues to contribute chapters recounting the sexcapades of a Long Island housewife much like the putative author.
The book sold quickly, even (or perhaps especially) after McGrady and his coauthors ’fessed up. In 1970 he published Stranger Than Naked: Or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit. Subsequent books, according to the Times, included “two as-told-to memoirs by the pornographic film actress Linda Lovelace.”
Long before that, however—as a brand-new Yale grad, in fact—McGrady penned an Associated Press article about Gordon Sawatzky ’55MN, the first man to graduate from the Yale School of Nursing. Facetiously casting the story as part of a war between the sexes, the article quotes two nursing school officials praising Sawatzky—anonymously. Did anyone check those quotes?
Americans told Yale researchers that they would pay extra for clean energy. Now somebody needs to tell Congress.
