I recently read a delicious novel, Debra Ginsberg's THE NEIGHBORS ARE WATCHING (to be published this fall) and I told Debra it reminded me of PEYTON PLACE, but realized that most people think that term simply connotes "soap opera."

Anyway, blah, blah, fish cakes, here's an article I wrote about this seminal book, which is (c) Baltimore Sun. It appeared in 1999. There will probably be some typographical weirdness; I'll try to fix it later.

THE WOMEN OF PEYTON PLACE

The photograph is known as Pandora in Blue Jeans, although no one knows who coined the phrase. Grace Metalious sits at her Remington typewriter, dressed in blue jeans, of course, but also a plaid flannel shirt and sneakers, no socks. It is the summer of 1956. She is 31, a New Hampshire housewife, a mother of three, the wife of a high school principal. She drinks too much. In eight years, she will be dead.

Metalious clasps her hands to her face, as if contemplating the next sentence in the novel she has called her fourth child, "The Tree and the Blossom." The photograph is something of a shuck, because Metalious has actually already finished her book. The photo is for the publicity machine, which is already cranking up, trying to create excitement about a first novel, in an era where a lucky first novel might sell 3,000 copies. Her publisher, Kitty Messner, has been persuaded to put $5,000 into promoting the book for which she has paid $1,500. A love scene has been added to spice it up. The publisher has even changed the title -- to "Peyton Place."

The rest is, if not history, then publishing history. "Peyton Place" has been called the first blockbuster, a book so successful that, at its height, an estimated 1-in-29 Americans had purchased it.

Far more read it. "Peyton Place" was the original under-the-bed book, the one parents hid and children found, reading fragments on the sly.

In Baltimore, a 10-year-old John Waters thrilled to see the book on his grandfather's shelf. "The V of Betty Anderson's crotch," the director exclaims today, slightly misquoting the salacious line. "I was electrified."

In the Midwest, 12-year-old Emily Toth, who would grow up to be Metalious' biographer, decided that "Peyton Place" and Elvis Presley were the only promises of a more exciting life beyond the staid conformity she knew.

Throughout the country, some booksellers faced criminal charges for selling the book to minors. And, while reviews from out-of-town newspapers were largely respectful and admiring of Metalious' gifts as a writer, she quickly became a pariah in her hometown of Gilmanton, N.H.

Over the next eight years, Metalious' life followed an arc that reads like someone else's pulp novel -- Harold Robbins, to be precise, for he claimed "Lonely Lady" was inspired by her. She went from rags to riches, from her first husband to her second and back to her first. When she died from cirrhosis in 1964, she was broke.

"Peyton Place" endured, however, becoming a part of the American vernacular as surely as "Catch-22." People who have never read the book understand the shorthand that is "Peyton Place." As recently as the fall of 1998, U.S. Rep. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., invoked the phrase when he attacked the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

Yet the book was out of print when Graham made his remarks, and had been for several years. Those who remembered "Peyton Place" were more likely to know the television show, starring Mia Farrow, or the film before it, with Lana Turner. Few recalled that it was a book primarily about a young woman's determination to become a writer, and another young woman's desperate fight to escape an impoverished past of unspeakable horrors.

Fewer still realize the book's celebrated sex scenes centered on romantic, fulfilling love between consenting, even married adults. It is not the lovers whose behavior Metalious finds scandalous, but those who watch them -- an old spinster, a strange little boy.

Ardis Cameron, director of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine, didn't read "Peyton Place" growing up. But a few years ago, she decided she wanted to teach the book in a course on regional literature. Stunned to find it no longer in print, she decided to find a new publisher for the book.

Northeastern University Press agreed, and this year brought out a trade paperback edition with a serious, scholarly foreword by Cameron, who considers "Peyton Place" a seminal feminist work.

"By reinterpreting incest, wife beating, and poverty as signs of social as well as individual failure, Metalious turned `trash' into a powerful political commentary on gender relations and class privilege," Cameron writes. "Reading `Peyton Place' today, one is especially struck by the carefully drawn, vivid descriptions of northern New England in the 1950s."

Some are unpersuaded by Cameron's enthusiasm. "A perfectly decent popular novel and an honest one. But it never was an important one, and no amount of retroactive puffery can make it so," Kirkus Reviews warns. Yet the book has gone back for a second printing. At Amazon.com, those who purchase it from the online bookseller are buying books by Jacqueline Susann, but also by Betty Friedan.

The primary difference between Peyton Place 1999 and Peyton Place 1956 may be one of numbers. Packaged as pulp, it sold 12 million copies. In its latest, more serious, incarnation, it has sold slightly more than 8,000.

Yet "Peyton Place," as Cameron's preface reminds us, was always a story about women -- not only on the page, but behind the scenes as well.

The best friend

Indian Summer is, as the most casual fan of "Peyton Place" can tell you, the ripe, hotly passionate, fickle woman, the laughing, lovely Indian woman who came to a town called Peyton Place one October and "spread herself over the countryside and made everything hurtfully beautiful to the eye."

Indian Summer is also the season that reporters tend to do anniversary stories on "Peyton Place." They always call Laurose Wilkens MacFadyen, Grace Metalious' last friend in Gilmanton, N.H., the town that for almost 50 years has been tightly interwoven with Metalious' fictional town on the Connecticut River.

Never mind that Metalious' Peyton Place differs from Gilmanton in key ways. And never mind that her book was in progress when she moved there in the mid-1950s. Gilmanton and "Peyton Place" remain forever linked, bitter spouses in an arranged marriage.

Of course, as MacFadyen says by telephone from Gilmanton, she's not really the one to speak for the locals. "I'm a New Yorker," says the 86-year-old woman, who has spent most of her adult life in the town and raised three children there. "I've never really been laced into the town."

She was a reporter for the Laconia Citizen when she tracked down this new woman in town who was rumored to be writing a novel that Simon & Schuster had bought. (The rumor was wrong, although Simon & Schuster would come to own the rights to "Peyton Place" for a time.)

Basically shy, although she often masked this with her aggressive humor and confrontational opinions, Metalious began dropping by MacFadyen's farmhouse to read that day's work. Between sips of beer and bites of cheese, she read the book in a straightforward, undramatic style. MacFadyen was riveted.

Was it shocking, this story of incest and rape and suicide and greed and ambition and abortion and -- well, just about everything else one can imagine?

"No, no, no," MacFadyen protests, laughing. "I'm an old hen, and it takes a lot to shock me. I just thought it was going to be a good book."

But she was as shocked and saddened as Metalious when her New York publisher asked for a key editorial revision. In Metalious' original work, inspired by a murder trial in a nearby town, a girl kills her father after years of sexual abuse.

The publisher decreed the man must be the girl's stepfather; readers of the 1950s were deemed not ready for incest. Metalious felt this made the subsequent abortion, performed by a sympathetic doctor, less urgent. She was devastated.

"She almost died," MacFadyen recalls. "She said, `My book was tragic, and now it's nothing but a dirty book. and it did degrade her book, let's face it. Oh, it was terribly hard for her."

Always a champion of Metalious' writing ability, MacFadyen is thrilled that "Peyton Place" has been reissued by a university press. She loves the new cover, a black-and-white photograph of a church steeple rising above a line of trees.

Most of all, she loves the "Pandora in Blue Jeans" author photo, resurrected for the new edition. After all, it was her idea and was shot in her farmhouse. The New York publisher had wanted her in a cocktail dress and pearls, but MacFadyen believed Metalious should look as she did on those winter nights, reading her manuscript aloud.

The scout

Leona Nevler was a young woman in her 20s, working as a part-time reader in Lippincott's New York office when literary agent Jacques Chambrun forwarded her the manuscript known as "The Tree and the Blossom."

Already developing a reputation as a reader with an uncanny sense for popular fiction, Nevler wrote a positive report on the book, even though she knew her staid, Philadelphia-based employer would reject the novel.

But in her search for a full-time editorial position, Nevler interviewed with Kitty Messner, one of the few women to run her own publishing house -- Julian Messner, her late husband's firm. The job interview didn't work out -- Nevler wanted to edit, Messner had only a marketing job available. But Nevler mentioned "The Tree and the Blossom," and Messner asked Chambrun to send a copy.

Chambrun, who had a reputation for cheating his writers out of their royalties, kept his writer at a distance from her publisher, Nevler recalls -- perhaps because he didn't want Metalious to find out about that reputation.

After buying the book, Messner asked Nevler to work as the editor, although she had already found a full-time job at Fawcett. "All the editing was done at my suggestion," says Nevler, now a senior vice president and editorial director at Ballantine. "Grace was very crazy, even then, she was already quite alcoholic {but} I was terribly rushed, and I wrote my suggestions on the manuscript. It was like sticking knives into her child."

Finally, Messner took over, telling Nevler, "She needs a mama's hand." But Nevler maintains that virtually all the changes to the manuscript -- save the love scene added at the publicity team's request -- were based on her original suggestions.

To be associated with such a huge success so early in her career was exciting, yet Nevler speaks of the experience with ambivalence, in part because it reminds people just how long she has been in publishing, and in part because Metalious held such a formidable grudge against her.

"I was terribly hurt by Grace. She gave a terribly nasty interview to one of the New York tabloids and referred to this `sinister little woman behind dark glasses.' " (Nevler wore dark glasses to their first meeting because she had a sty.) "After that, I was just crushed."

Asked about the revisionist scholarship that has recast "Peyton Place" as a forerunner to the feminist novels of the 1960s and '70s, Nevler says, "You know, it's hard for me to say because I haven't read it in -- whatever it is, more than 40 years."

The professors

In recent years, several professors have taught "Peyton Place," but two academics deserve most of the credit for restoring Metalious' reputation as a writer.

Emily Toth was a young woman on the tenure track at Penn State, known for her writing about Kate Chopin, when she decided to tackle a biography of Metalious in the late 1970s. She had fond memories of the book that "brightened my life," as she later wrote. "I learned there was more to life than the bland conformity of the Midwest in the '50s. for that discovery alone, I will always be grateful to Grace Metalious."

The subsequent work, "Inside Peyton Place," published in 1981, remains the only serious biography of Metalious. But Toth's colleagues were shocked at what they considered a declasse subject, Toth says, and a price was exacted. She earned tenure, but she wasn't promoted for two years.

"The outstanding misconception about the book is that it's worthless trash," she says from Baton Rouge, La., where she's a professor of English and women's studies at Louisiana State University. "It's a story about strong women."

Toth has more mixed feelings about Metalious, who proved a problematic role model -- a strong woman, a gifted writer, but not, in Toth's opinion, a good mother.

"I wanted to think of her as a woman who's really had a wonderful drive and an ambition to tell the truth as she saw it, and to break out of poverty and despair," Toth said. "But she neglected her kids. She would do things like lock her kids out of the apartment so she could write."

Still, she marvels at Metalious' determination: "When I was researching Grace Metalious, I was more interested in scandal than I would be now. Now I'd be more interested in ambition. `Where does a woman get the drive to write continuously for 17 years without ever getting published, with a typewriter on her lap, because she was too poor to get a table?' "

Ardis Cameron, on the other hand, had never even read "Peyton Place" when she decided she wanted to include it in her course on New England literature at the University of Southern Maine. Because it was out of print, her students had to scour second-hand stores and their parents' attics for used copies.

Cameron decided to find a way to get the book published again. Northeastern University Press was persuaded to take on the project, and Cameron wrote a 20-page preface for the new edition, with 51 footnotes -- several of which cite Toth's work.

Now that the book has been re-issued, will other college courses include it in their curriculum? Cameron hopes so. She has come to feel great affection for Metalious, whose voice she heard for the first time this year when a New Hampshire disc jockey sent her tapes of several interviews the writer had given.

"I had imagined her as the Roseanne of the 1950s," says Cameron. (Waters maintains Roseanne should play Metalious, and Toth's book was optioned by PolyGram in 1997, so a film is a distinct possibility.) "She was witty and bold and wore flannel and she would say what she wanted to say and spare no language.

"Listening to these tapes, it's clear how timid and naive and scared she still was. And I can understand now how she got swallowed up by the New York publishing industry."

The daughter

"Would you believe me," asks Marsha J. Duprey, "if I told you our childhoods seemed normal to us?"

The oldest of Grace's three children, Duprey -- twice married, twice divorced -- now lives with her younger sister in Key Largo, Fla. Christopher, the middle child, is thinking of relocating there as well. Their father is still alive, still living in New Hampshire, and still identified, by way of his surname, with "that book."

But for Marsha and Cynthia, it's a secret that they keep more or less to themselves. Not because they're ashamed of the book, far from it.

"About five years ago, they interviewed me on New Hampshire public television," recalls Duprey, who works as a driving license examiner for the state of Florida, "and the next day, everyone looked at me differently."

Duprey married young, as her mother did, and had three children. Her eldest son, Billy, was the only grandchild Metalious had a chance to know before she died in 1964. To her children's shock her last will left everything to a British journalist, John Rees. They contested and lost.

But as it turned out, Metalious' debts, mostly in taxes owed the IRS, were far greater than her assets. Rees, stung by bad publicity, gave the rights of all her work back to her children, so they were the ones who gave Northeastern permission to publish the new version.

They liked the idea of a university press putting out their mother's work. But they also sold the rights to Random House, who will bring out yet another version this fall, coupled with the sequel Metalious reluctantly provided, "Return to Peyton Place."

Duprey was 12 when she asked her mother if she could read the book she was always working on. Metalious readily gave her permission. Did she worry her mother had written a "dirty book?"

"Dirty? What's dirty, especially now. I thought it was a nice book."

As for the book's success, and the financial windfall it brought the always-struggling family, Duprey says: "I think she had fun for about two weeks when she could go out and buy anything for anybody but I think that once she realized what went with it, she was not quite as happy."

She adds: "If she could have just been able to write and not deal with the rest of it, she would have been fine -- the agents, the publishers and the fame and going to Hollywood."

Did her mother ever give her any advice? "Other than not smoking on the street?" Duprey laughs. "It's not really advice, but when I was going to get married the first time and I was about ready to walk down this aisle, she said, you know, you don't have to marry this jerk if you don't want to. You can leave with me, we'll drive to Boston. I almost did. And I should have."

Why would a mother make such a strange offer on her daughter's wedding day? "I think she knew however well you know someone, you don't know what it's like to be married to them."

Metalious, Grace, 1924-1964

That's all it says on her tombstone. "It's a beautiful grave," says John Waters, who made a pilgrimage to Gilmanton a few years ago, and left behind a bottle of liquor. "She put me on the wrong road early on, and I am better for it."

Metalious, asked to write her biography for her publisher's files, sent in these words: "I was born. I married. I reproduced."

As a teen-ager, she had written in her aunt's bathtub, the only corner of solitude she could find. It was her "room of her own," biographer Toth noted. She couldn't afford a desk until after she wrote "Peyton Place." She managed to write three more books -- "Return to Peyton Place," "The Tight White Collar" and "No Adam In Eve" -- despite the distractions of fame and the ravages of alcohol. The last two are long out of print.

She told one interviewer she did not expect her work to be remembered. But in another, more defiant mode, she also said: "If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste."