The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy

In the early fall of 1958 there appeared in Paris, in the familiar dull-green cover of the already notorious Olympia Press, a novel entitled Candy, a Rabelaisian satire loosely based on Voltaire's Candide by one Maxwell Kenton, pseudonym of its coauthors Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Following a modest first printing, the book drew the attention of the French censors, was banned, reissued by Olympia's intrepid publisher Maurice Girodias under the title Lollipop, rebanned, then again reissued. Within years it became one of the most talked-about novels of the tumultuous 1960s, selling in the millions of copies in America alone, its success prompting Hollywood to turn it into a movie. The rollicking, hilarious, and sometimes tragic story of Candy's public career is recounted here in full detail by Nile Southern, son of Terry Southern. From the book's humble beginnings in Paris in the late 1950s through an agonizing three-year gestation (often on paper napkins, lost, stolen, or destroyed) and the authors' wily, often self-destructive business dealings with their equally wily French publisher, to its chaotic and controversial publication in the United States, The Candy Men follows with unblinking scrutiny Candy's underground then mainstream success, the legal shenanigans surrounding it, the blatant piracy that plagued it almost from the start, and the star-studded cast with whose help it was made into one of the worst motion pictures of all time. Replete with deceptions and self-deceptions, midnight dope runs, betrayals left, right and center, court cases galore, and, in short, general pandemonium, The Candy Men -- starring Terry Southern, Mason Hoffenberg, and Maurice Girodias -- is as much fun to read as the original novel itself.