Mike McGrady, Known for a Literary Hoax, Dies at 78

Mike McGrady, a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America — the best-selling collaborative novel “Naked Came the Stranger,” whose publication in 1969 made “Peyton Place” look like a church picnic — died on Sunday in Shelton, Wash. He was 78 and lived in Lilliwaup, Wash.

Associated Press

Mike McGrady in 1969.

The cause was pneumonia, said Harvey Aronson, who with Mr. McGrady was a co-editor of the novel, written by 25 Newsday journalists in an era when newsrooms were arguably more relaxed and inarguably more bibulous.

Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value, “Naked Came the Stranger” by all appearances succeeded estimably on both counts.

Originally issued by Lyle Stuart, an independent publisher known for subversive titles, the novel was a no-holds-barred chronicle of a suburban woman’s sexual liaisons, with each chapter recounting a different escapade:

She has sex with a mobster and sex with a rabbi. She has sex with a hippie and sex with at least one accountant. There is a scene involving a tollbooth, another involving ice cubes and still another featuring a Shetland pony.

The book’s cover — a nude woman seen from behind — left little to the imagination, as, in its way, did its prose:

“Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.”

The purported author was Penelope Ashe, who as the jacket copy told it was a “demure Long Island housewife.” In reality, Mr. McGrady had dreamed up the book as ironic commentary on the public’s appetite for Jacqueline Susann and her ilk.

For interviews and public appearances, Mr. McGrady conscripted his sister-in-law Billie Young to pose as Mrs. Ashe.

“Naked Came the Stranger,” which remains in print, has sold about 400,000 copies, according to its current publisher, Barricade Books, which rereleased it in 2004.

That year, The Village Voice rapturously described the book as being “of such perfectly realized awfulness that it will suck your soul right out of your brainpan and through your mouth, and you will happily let it go.”

First published in summer 1969, “Naked Came the Stranger” quickly sold 20,000 copies. Later that summer, Mr. McGrady and his co-conspirators came clean, and news of the book’s genesis made headlines round the world. By the end of the year, the novel had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

“What has always worried me,” Mr. McGrady told Newsday in 1990, “are the 20,000 people who bought it before the hoax was exposed.”

Michael Robinson McGrady was born in New York City on Oct. 4, 1933. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale; in 1968 and 1969, he studied at Harvard as a Nieman fellow.

For Newsday, Mr. McGrady covered the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. His series of columns from the front, “A Dove in Vietnam,” won an Overseas Press Club Award in 1967 and was published as a book.

Mr. McGrady conceived “Naked Came the Stranger,” fittingly, in bed.

“It came after a night of reading ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ ” he later told Newsweek, “which I couldn’t put down because I was asleep.”

Surely, he reasoned, a newsroom full of journalism’s best and brightest could together produce something just as schlocky — and just as successful. He fired off a memo to his colleagues.

“As one of Newsday’s truly outstanding literary talents, you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a best-selling novel,” it read. “There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.”

Two dozen journalists — mostly men and a few women — signed on, each contributing a chapter. True to his word, Mr. McGrady rejected submissions that were too well written.

Among the contributors was Bob Greene, Newsday’s distinguished investigative reporter; Gene Goltz, a Pulitzer Prize winner; and George Vecsey, a sportswriter who went on to work for The Times.

Reviewing the novel in The Times before the hoax was divulged, Martin Levin wrote, “In the category of erotic fantasy, this one rates about a C,” a quotation that quickly found its way into the book’s print advertisements.

Neither Mr. McGrady nor his co-authors were involved in the cinematic adaptation of “Naked Came the Stranger,” a pornographic film released in 1975.

Mr. McGrady was later a film and restaurant critic for Newsday. His other books include two as-told-to memoirs by the pornographic film actress Linda Lovelace, “Ordeal” (1980) and “Out of Bondage” (1986), and an instructional manual, “Stranger Than Naked: Or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit” (1970).

After an early marriage that was dissolved, Mr. McGrady wed Corinne Young. She survives him, along with two sons, Sean and Liam; a daughter, Siobhan Benoit; a brother, Seamus; and five grandchildren.

Also surviving is Mr. McGrady’s sister-in-law Billie, who went on to write books of her own under the name Penelope Ashe.