Jungle Fun,
Dancing Men &
Women
Photographers
Reading Black Orchid, a new romantic ad
venture novel written by, according to the
book’s dust jacket, “Nicholas Meyer author
of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and Barry Jay
Kaplan” (Dial Press, $8.95), one can almost
smell the popcorn. What a movie this one
will make!
What reader, caught up (however in
voluntarily) in this rich, lush saga of love
and danger in the jungles of the Amazon,
will not long to actually see and hear the
orange-haired dancer Athene “gasping and
panting like a racehorse” in the arms of
travel-worn soldier-of-fortune Harry Kin
caid — or the same Kincaid’s coupling with
the calculating Mercedes Coutard in the
mud of the Rio Negro? What heart will not
thrill to the spectacle of an opening night at
the opera, full of secretive flirtation and in
trigue — but on the very edge of the mys
terious, foreboding rain forest? What pulse
will not quicken as Kincaid and company
kidnap the plantation owner’s beautiful
daughter, Dolores Mendonca, even as a
Black Orchid is a successful, undemanding
entertainment, almost worth reading for the
comparative novelty of its setting alone. It is
not so carefully written as Meyer’s Holmes
books were: Meyer’s Dr. Watson would
never have permitted himself the inelegance,
for instance, of speaking of “three ships that
had to be gutted and the holds rebuilt to
accommodate the girders.” And some of the
language borders on pure pulp: “ ‘Don’t go,’
she begged, knowing no shame now, only
her own desperate desire,” or “ ‘We have
several advantages,\ the Colonel said . . .
‘We know the river; he does not.’ ” But the
book is mostly easy fun — and is easily as
full of decorative detail as, if no more endur
ing than, the city of Manaus was herself.
Women See Men (McGraw-Hill, $12.95
hardcover; $7.95 softcover), edited by
Yvonne Kalmus, Rikki Ripp, and Cheryl
Wiesenfeld as a successor to their previous
book, Women See Women, may or may not say
something about men, or about women, or
about the spaces (or lack of spaces) between
the two halves of the human species — but it
certainly doesn’t say very much about pho
tography.
With a handful of exceptions (Eileen K.
Berger’s ritualistic “Two boys fighting in
landscape”; Karen Tweedy-Holmes’ comic
nude, “Franks”; Inge Morath’s classic
masked portrait of Saul Steinberg; etc.), the
images presented here are mostly pretty
splcndorous costume ball in her honor spins
on and on? And — let’s face it — w hich of us
will not watch with fascinated hoj-ror as
piranhas nip at Kincaid’s legs (for all is not
orange-haired dancers and plantation own
ers’ daughters for travel-worn soldiers-of
fortune), or as the adventurer’s assistant is
eaten to the bone by killer ants?
Ironically, Black Orchid started out as a
movie — or, anyway, as a movie script.
Meyer, whose witty and well-crafted Sher
lock Holmes parodies — The Seven-Per-Cent
Solution and The 1 Vest End Horror — estab
lished him as one of the best and most clever
of our popular novelists, grew fascinated
with the true story of the city of Manaus. A
kind of boom town built around the rubber
trade, Manaus, deep in the Amazon wilder
ness, was, in the late 19th century, the
sixth-richest city in the world — with a
sophisticated system of public transporta
tion, complete electrical power throughout,
and an opera house said to have been more
magnificent than La Scala. Based loosely on
historical fact, Meyer wrote, as a screenplay,
a story about a man sent to Manaus by the
British to steal rubber seedlings for replant
ing in Southeast Asia — in order to break
the Brazilian monopoly on the product.
Meyer’s script was bought but never pro
duced; he liked the story well enough to buy
it back from the studio and to work on turn
ing it into a book, with the help of Barry Jay
Kaplan, a college friend of his, who had
written “a dozen romances and gothics
under various pen names.” It will be
Meyer’s sweet revenge on whatever lag
gardly studio bosses they were, presumably,
if Black Orchid is bought again for film prod
uction — as it almost certainly will be, and
at a good price to boot.
dreary ones, undistinguished as craft and
unconvincing as art. (And too many of the
really good female photographers in
America today are missing — Claire Stein
berg, Lynn Davis, Jane O’Neal, Jennifer
Griffiths, even Annie Leibowitz, even De
borah Turbinville.)
The equivocatory introduction and pre
tentious text are by Ingrid Bengis, author of
Combat in the Erogenous Zone.
Another, rather more interesting, volume
of photographs of men is Danseur: The Male
in Ballet {A Rutledge Book, McGraw-Hill,
$19.95) by Richard Philp and Mary Whit
ney. “Ballet has long been stigmatized by
men in America,” the authors note, “as a
‘sissy’, ‘elitist’ art form, but as dance in
creases in popularity and our society relaxes
its puritanical guard about male self
expression, more and more men are at
tracted to dance.” Some of the most famous
and best of the men who have been attracted
to dance, despite its stigmata, in the recent
and distant past — from Nijinsky to
Nureyev to Richard Cragun, Anthony Dow
ell, and the remarkable Peter Martins — are
shown here, in action, in rehearsal, and in
repose. The text is sensible and the photo
graphs, which include some original mate
rial by Herbert Migdoll, art director of
Dance Magazine and After Dark, are emi
nently workmanlike.
Dream Diary (William Morrow, $4.95) is a
harmless non-book — a cleanly designed lit
tle journal inspired by Hugh Lynn Cayce’s
advice that “The best book on dreams you
will ever read is the one youjvrite yourself.”
Presented here are neatly-lined pages in
which one’s dreams may be recorded, a
check-list of important dream imagery, and
(Continued on page 15)
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