Heiress Strangled in Molten Chocolate at Nazi Sex Orgy!: A Memoir

By Peter Hochstein

Yes! It's the memoir about the adventures of a young, bewildered, naive, and totally terrified big city newspaper reporter back when journalists were raffish, fast-talking swashbucklers. And when some were almost as creative with the facts they reported as they were with their expense accounts.

Learn why, as a young neophyte, the author dove into the business of journalism totally unprepared, and nearly drowned in it. How his crazy mother became frantic, not because he might get killed racing alone to crime scenes in bad neighborhoods at two o'clock in the morning, but because she thought his apartment was embarrassingly small. And how he inadvertently uncovered scandals — from the first sign of a rift between Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher, to the (deliberately unreported at the time) philandering of John F. Kennedy, to the identity of "terrorists" who were burning crosses on a college campus.

Oh, and also how our hero discovered the private poetry written by an infamous mobster and his drop-dead-gorgeous stripper girlfriend.
And how he uncovered hush-hush news about the spy whose father came in from Virginia.
But there’s still more.

There was the human zoo of misbehaving reporters at Brooklyn police headquarters.
And then there was the scandal rag story about "Fidel Castro's All-Girl Firing Squads."
Not to mention the small-town newspaper editor who made off with the local Little League baseball team's funds.

It's all in the book, and more. Such as why the author bit Eddie Wagner. (Eddie who? You’ll find out.) And how, as a small boy, the author gave a grownup woman “leg cancer.” And how his mother terrified him with what she insisted were the unbearably awful career consequences of getting a woman pregnant.

Imagine someone like the hero of Portnoy’s Complaint dropped into a raffish crowd of aggressive reporters from The Front Page and you’ve got an idea of the madness and excitement you’re about to encounter in HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY! ­– A MEMOIR.

It’s one of those rare crazy-but-true stories that will make you chuckle. Or snigger. Or giggle. Or...who knows? You might even enjoy a few belly laughs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Hochstein
• Release date: Sep 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781938701436

Peter Hochstein

Author, ghostwriter, advertising copywriter and business journalist Peter Hochsteihn has worked as a creative vice president at general, direct response and financial advertising agencies. These included Ogilvy & Mather, Rapp Collins, Doremus and Benton & Bowles. He has won many advertising creative awards, including several Echo and Caples awards. He also has authored several books. The most recent is, "HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY! A MEMOIR." On commission he wrote "Cigars and Other Passions: The Biography of Edgar M. Cullman," and co-authored theatrical producer Rodger Hess's autobiography, "No Biz Like It." Hochstein has worked as a daily and weekly newspaper reporter, and has conducted more than 35 lengthy interviews for a corporate oral history project. Specialties Ghost writing, direct response advertising, business-to-business direct response, subscription direct response, financial advertising. Plus business journalism and interviewing.

Book preview

Early in my teens, I decided I wanted to be rich. Wealth would solve all the problems of a teen-aged schlub. It would give me power. It would make me sexy. It would get me out from under the oppressive thumbs of my parents. All I needed was lots of money.

I lived on a street in Brooklyn called Albemarle Road—on the middle class side of an open subway line trench. Across the tracks, traversable in those days by a footbridge, was the rich side of Albemarle Road, where the kids in my high school lived whose fathers were doctors (and one very prosperous undertaker). When we were teen-agers, the wealthy undertaker’s expensively dressed daughter dramatically rejected me by vomiting on me at a party. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, the rich are different from you and me.

The rich end of Albemarle Road was filled with stately Victorian and ante-bellum style houses that you may remember seeing in the movie Sophie’s Choice. I used to walk through that neighborhood, staring at those magnificent houses with envy. One day, I thought, I would live in a house like these. I’d be rich, too. But how could I get there? In those days, at least by my family’s lights, all doctors were rich. Unfortunately, a career as a doctor was out of the question. I was flunking high school algebra. I wasn’t doing all that well in chemistry. The only subject at which I excelled was English composition. I was not, as they said in those days, medical school material.

I overheard my mother say that some best-selling author or other was a millionaire. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, and if true whether he made the money from his books or not, but I believed it. So I decided that the way to get rich was by becoming an author.

I was the naïve product of an extremely sheltered upbringing.

***

I was also a horny teenager—or is that a redundancy? I read then (and continue to read) about teens having illicit sex. They always found a place. They did it in cars, for example. Middle class Brooklyn teen-agers had no cars. You couldn’t get a driver’s license in New York City until the age of eighteen, and by the time I was eighteen I was in college. Nor were there many great alternative locations for sex.

We had no woods to go to. Home? Our parents were always there—that’s simply the way parents were in those days. Besides, I came from a milieu where parents turned sex into a horror story. It was the kind of thing that ought to begin with a line like, It was a dark and stormy night and go on to unfold a tale that takes place in a deep forest where kids get stalked by a horror movie slasher like Freddy Krueger. The terrifying sex stories always ended the same way: Remember, even if you’re only fooling around, you’ll get a girl pregnant. Then you’ll have to go to work to support her and the baby. You won’t get a good education. You’ll never get a good job. You’ll end up being a ditch digger the rest of your life.

I didn’t know what ditch diggers earned. Or how they lived. Or where. But I didn’t need to know. A career digging ditches was the ultimate nightmare—like running into a zombie and getting eaten alive from the brain down.

I’ll come back to the ditch digger nightmare further on. What’s important was that while sex was agonizingly important to my generation of Jewish kids from Brooklyn, it was also terrifying. Remember … ditch digger.

We all remembered. And so sex terrified us, even as it tantalized and tortured and beckoned us.

One day, a French teacher at Erasmus Hall, the public high school I attended, arranged for us to have pen pals in France. We drew lots for names. I pulled a 14-year-old girl from a town called Argenton-sur-Creuse, in the province of Indre. Not exactly big city France. She lived on a street named after a French philosopher, Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau. My French teacher, a Miss Sebrée, who was one of the two authentically French-born teachers who taught me French in high school, must have been delighted. Imagine, one of her students, corresponding in French with a charming girl who lived in an adorable French village, on a street named after an acclaimed French philosopher who was too advanced for any of us actually to read in First Year French class.

With my handy English-French dictionary, a fountain pen (in the 1950s, everybody had a Waterman fountain pen) and a great deal of effort, I sent my newly appointed French pen pal a short letter in what most assuredly must have been terrible French. I don’t remember what it said, but I got back a letter that included her picture (she was not a great beauty) and contained a line that is seared indelibly in my memory.

After school, she wrote in English, I go down to the river and I smoke with the boys.

Holy shit! That was so sophisticated it was terrifying. Almost as terrifying as getting a girl pregnant and becoming a ditch digger. My heart began pounding, not out of lust but out of raw fear. Smoking! Down by the river! With the boys!

I began to tremble. Her letter, written on faintly lined graph paper, rattled in my hand. I held on to it for a day or two, not quite sure how to dispose of it. Finally, I crumpled it up and threw it down the incinerator. In those days before anybody worried about air pollution, many Brooklyn apartment houses had incinerators. You went into a little garbage room in the hallway outside of your apartment and dropped the garbage down a chute. The garbage usually made a satisfying crashing sound when it landed, and soon after that, it burned. The letter was too small and lightweight to make a crashing sound, but I know it went up in smoke. That terrifying thing, that letter about smoking with the boys, a thing like some kind of horrible critter from a Stephen King novel—although there were no Stephen King novels at the time—was safely out of my life. She never heard from me again, nor I from her.

And I was still horny.

Chapter Two

Most people of my generation wanted a laundry list of rewards in exchange for getting a college education. They wanted academic achievement. They wanted admission to medical school, or law school, or a graduate business school. They wanted prestige. They wanted to find a marriage partner. They wanted a free education or at least a scholarship. They wanted social and business connections. Me, I only wanted two things.

I wanted to learn how to be a writer (so I could make a gazillion dollars.) And I wanted to get laid.

In those days, public high school faculty advisors in New York only permitted us to apply to three colleges. An aunt who made a lifetime sideline out of giving me bad advice, convinced my parents and me (I was only 16 at the time) that I should apply to Dartmouth. It was a wasted application, as I knew deep in my heart that it would be, my high school faculty advisers knew for a certainty that it would be, and as the admissions committee at Dartmouth quickly concluded. I was not Dartmouth material any more than I was medical school material.

I also applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This may or may not have been a good idea but I’ll never know. I was accepted by a third institution, a small college in Ohio called Antioch, and before North Carolina had an opportunity to make up its mind, I told Antioch that I was coming.

This was in the days before Antioch folded and then arose from its own grave and become the undead (but still struggling) college that it is as I write this. At the time it was a decent liberal arts school with some wonderful quirks that made it just the place for me. It had a work-study program that operated like this: You took courses on campus for a while. Then they placed you somewhere on a job related to your major for a while. Then you returned to campus and took more courses for a while. And so on.

They also had a creative writing program. Or so the college catalogue led me to believe. By repute, the college also was very bohemian, a word that was later junked in favor of beatnik and then to hippy. All this went on before America’s present-day drivers of the national economy in the Congress, the White House and the banking business turned into juvenile delinquents and vandalized the system, looting it of most of its money. As best I can figure, almost nobody has the inclination or the luxury of being counter-cultural any more. The economy is too shaky. Survival is too iffy. There’s a renewed threat of becoming a ditch digger, and these days that means competing with illegal immigrants for sub-minimum wages. Too scary.

Too bad.

At any rate bohemian had certain connotations. It meant that unlike middle class Brooklyn girls who wouldn’t sleep with you (or so I thought) bohemian girls would. (Or so I thought.) Incidentally, I’m avoiding the politically correct phrase women here because political correctness hadn’t been invented yet either. Everybody knew the lyrics to a song that began, I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad. Audrey Hepburn always got referred to in movies as a girl. If you called a girl a woman she might feel insulted, as if you had over-guessed her age by forty years.

So off I went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, an overnight trip on the now-defunct Pennsylvania Railroad. I got on the train in Manhattan’s Penn Station early in the evening, and around six o’clock in the next morning I and my old summer camp trunk, now filled with polished cotton chinos and oxford button down shirts, got dropped off on a railroad siding somewhere on the edge of Xenia, Ohio. I remember hearing crows cawing and seeing corn growing close to the railroad tracks. (It was late August.) After a while, a beat-up yellow taxi came by and the driver, a woman (not an insult because she was well past retirement age—an age at which womanhood in those days was finally appropriate) … anyway, the woman stuck her head out of the window, chomped down on the filter of her cigarette so it wouldn’t fall out of her mouth when she spoke, and asked through clenched teeth if I was looking for a ride.

In those days when most women were called girls—and when more-or-less radical nonconformists with some kind of artistic bent were called bohemians—I became an Antiochian. I arrived full of enthusiasm, with dreams of best selling novels and sexually-eager girls dancing in my head, but within days of arriving at Antioch I faced two bitter disappointments.

The first was that bohemian girls, like other girls, sometimes did and sometimes didn’t, but usually wanted a fairly long and arduous romance first even if they would—same as almost everybody else. The second was that Nolan Miller and Jud Jerome, the two professors who had pioneered the Antioch creative writing program and had been editing a mass-distribution annual paperback called New Campus Writing, had suddenly decided that you couldn’t teach students how to write and had dropped the creative writing program I had come for.

Shit! I probably could have gone to North Carolina.

But I still wanted to be a writer, whatever the hell that meant. I nosed around campus to see who might teach me how to write, and learned that the college newspaper, the Antioch Record, was looking for freshman recruits. I went to a meeting there, met the editor, a student named Bob Larouche. And before very long I was reporting and writing for the Antioch Record. It was as if a drowning man, exhausted, hungry, and desperate, had grabbed a piece of flotsam and discovered that miraculously, it had a little door on top. And when he opened the door it revealed a compartment containing a week’s supply of gourmet meals and a small outboard motor he could use to propel himself back to shore. For years afterward, involvement with journalism at one level or another influenced my thinking and colored my life. But for the first few years, this situation was particularly intense.

Writing for newspapers became a fierce passion. It consumed my time. It took precedence over my studies. I became a low B student, and even harvested several Cs in my major, which of course was English. I was busy covering stories, writing stories, dealing with the Community Government board that oversaw the student newspaper, or just hanging out in the Record office—too busy to hit the books with anything vaguely akin to fervor.

There were no journalism courses at Antioch, but one day, in the Record office, I found a textbook on journalism stuffed into a desk drawer. I read it several times. It was from that textbook that that I learned to do everything wrong. For example, it recommended the pyramid story, a technique still used by the Associated Press but by almost nobody else. You put all the details—the who, what, when, where, and how—into the first sentence. An alleged stickup man was subdued at 3 am yesterday by Howie Shlumpp, short order cook at the 68 Grill on Route 68 in Yellow Springs, when Schlumpp threw a meat cleaver that cut off the man’s hand, police said.

That’s usually the whole first paragraph. The second paragraph expands on the story a bit more. According to Police Officer Andy Boggs, the robber entered the diner with his gun drawn and demanded a bag full of hamburgers and all the money in the cash register when Schlumpp, who had been splitting chicken breasts with his cleaver …

The third paragraph contained even more information, and so on. That way, an editor who needed to cut your copy to fit a hole in his newspaper could cut from the bottom up and no matter how much he cut, the readers would still know the gist of the story.

I learned this lesson just before journalism began to morph into the new journalism, a school of reporting led by wild men the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. During the 1960s, Wolfe wrote a story about Las Vegas that began by repeating the word hernia about sixty times. No who, what, when, where and how there. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Breslin’s coverage of the funeral focused on an interview with the gravedigger, and Beslin wrote a story that began with what the grave digger ate for breakfast. During a Democratic presidential convention, Thompson mostly covered the distorting effects of hard drugs on his perceptions about what was going on. The pyramid lede was not to be found. Lede? That’s an affectation in a trade jargon called Journalism for a word that ought to be spelled lead, as I will if I use it again in this book. In plain English it’s the first sentence or first paragraph of a story.

Aside from helping aspiring journalists get it all wrong by writing pyramid stories, this textbook—I wish to hell I could remember its name—contained one more piece of career-wrecking advice. The most powerful subjects for newspaper stories, it counseled solemnly, are sex, money, violence, food and Nazis.

So go, show me a true news story that contains all that. It’s like lightning striking the mayor of a village during a tsunami, while his attention is distracted by a volcanic eruption, whose lava flow is slowly engulfing a terrorist suicide bomber, whose one uncharred hand is on the detonator of an atomic bomb. As they used to say on my side of the subway tracks in Brooklyn: yeah, sure.

But I still can’t override my own skepticism. I yearned, mostly especially in my late teens and twenties, although I still yearn in my old age, to encounter an opportunity to write the ultimate story. It wasn’t much of a leap to conclude that if I could write a story that contained all of those powerful elements—sex, money, violence, food and Nazis—it would be the most powerful news story ever written. I’ve worked out the headline several times in anticipation and it inevitably comes out to be some variation of Heiress Strangled In Molten Chocolate At Nazi Sex Orgy.

That’s it. The newspaper equivalent of the holy grail, the killer app, the ultimate orgasm, the three-star Michelin meal, the Academy Award, the Nobel Prize, and of course the Pulitzer.

If only I could find that story I’d be famous. And maybe rich.

I came across the textbook in 1957.

I’ve been looking for the story ever since.

It has been a spectacular waste of time.

Chapter Three

My parents grew up poor, the children of immigrants. I remember hearing stories from one of my father’s sisters that the family moved regularly. Sometimes they moved into a new place two months after they’d moved into a different new place. The driving motivation was saving on rent. Sometimes they couldn’t pay the rent and had to go on the lam. More often, the rent angle had to do with thrift. If they could save two bucks a month by moving from the Bronx (north of Manhattan) to Far Rockaway (miles to the south and east of Manhattan) they’d do it. True, two bucks then was a whole lot more than two bucks is today. (According to an Internet inflation calculator, it’s over $28 in current dollars.) But even so, it would take a lot more than a twenty-eight dollar saving on rent today to get me to make several round trips on the subway (five cents subway fares in those days) between Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and Gillespie Street in Brooklyn—one trip to carry clothing, five more to carry the dishes, spoons, and what few sticks of furniture my grandparents owned. Moving vans? Who could afford moving vans?

My paternal grandparents’ poverty had to be desperately grinding. My grandfather, or so my father told me with an unconscious but nevertheless well-honed sense of hyperbole, never made a nickel. What that really meant, even then, was that he never made ten dollars in a single week. Most days, he was lucky if he made enough for the family to eat. His English was a bit spotty, his accent was somewhat pronounced, he had none of the specialized job skill that other Jewish immigrants brought with them such as tailor, and most of all he was Jewish. Discrimination against Jews was why so many Jewish immigrants became small merchants, some of them eventually making fortunes, between the 1860s and the 1940s. They had to work for themselves. Nobody else would hire them.

My paternal grandfather’s bouts of self-employment were sometimes practical and sometimes desperate, but almost always unsuccessful. At one time, he owned the only Jewish Chinese laundry in the Bronx. Or at least it would have been called a Chinese laundry if a Chinese immigrant had owned it. A bit of explanation seems called for here.

Certain jobs seemed reserved for certain ethnicities in the working class immigrant New York of the early 20th Century. Or at any rate, different ethnic groups, for reasons I can’t fathom, gravitated toward different occupations. The Chinese owned just about all the hand laundries. The Jews were proprietors of candy stores, delicatessens, and also were small garment center subcontractors. The Italians filled the building trades and of course the Italian delis and butcher shops. Just about all the cops, firemen and subway motormen were Irish.

For reasons it’s too late for to inquire about since everybody who might have had an answer is dead, my paternal grandfather swam futilely against the tide. He opened a hand laundry even though he wasn’t Chinese. I wonder why. It’s possibly because, unlike candy store proprietors, he didn’t have to invest in any stock other than some laundry soap and an iron.

My father told me that when he was about five, he was sitting in the storefront laundry, playing around with objects in the shop the way five-year-old boys will do. There was a bottle of black ink used to mark shirts with a code inside the collars, so that the right shirts could get returned to the right owners. My father accidentally knocked an open bottle of the indelible black ink into a laundry sink filled with white shirts.

Reviews for Heiress Strangled in Molten Chocolate at Nazi Sex Orgy!

[tyson · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

jewish fairy tales.. not even useful for toilet paper. good thing its digital.