By CharlieBruce Jay Friedman is a novelist and screenwriter. I've become interested in his work since I learned the role he played in "the sweats."
An interesting interview with Friedman at Pif Magazine provides further details.
DA: One of your first jobs was as editor of several men’s adult magazines. What was that like?
BJF: For roughly a decade in the fifties and early sixties, I was editor of four men’s adventure magazines, Male, Men, Man’s World, and my favorite, True Action (as opposed to False Action.) I had to buy forty to sixty stories a a month from free-lance writers. I had three small children at the time and a long commute (three to four hours) from Glen Cove to Manhattan. I didn’t do any writing for the the magazine, just supervised. Oddly enough, I got more “serious” writing done at that time (working at night, on the train) than I do now -- when I have the entire day yawning ahead of me.
DA: You hired an assistant editor who turned out to be a well known writer in his own right.
BJF: One of my better “hires” was Mario Puzo, in 1960. He wrote literally a million words or so for the magazine -- moonlighted “The Godfather” at night. Everyone in our little group was moonlighting something. In my case, it was my first two novels, “Stern” and “A Mother’s Kisses.” We gave our all for the magazines, but we were young and must have had all that extra energy. (There is a good account of those years in a non-fiction work I wrote called “Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos”). Puzo and I, incidentally, became lifelong friends.
Purloined the image from this article.