THE GRETA GARBO HOME FOR WAYWARD BOYS AND GIRLS

Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.

In his 20s, directionless and drifting, Gaines was living in Manhattan, still under the care of the “talented Freudian psychiatrist” who had treated him during his long hospitalization after a suicide attempt at age 15. As he revealed in his memoir One of These Things First, Gaines struggled with his homosexuality: “I was a gay Jewish kid who lived in a thicket of self-hatred above his grandma’s bra and girdle shop in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a shtetl twenty-five minutes by train and a chasm of erudition from Manhattan.” He worked at an auction gallery, where he moved furniture and faked antiques, and lived in seedy short-term rentals. Encouraged by his psychiatrist, he pursued women in hopes of “curing” his attraction to men, but after one emotional affair, he had an epiphany: “I learned I had to stop trying to love women and I had to stop trying to figure out why I couldn’t, and I had to stop being ashamed of it.” Yet, a decade of psychoanalysis didn’t cure his abiding self-loathing. Sex looms large as Gaines recounts the gritty ambience of New York in the 1970s, fueled by assorted drugs and rife with gay sex. At Max’s Kansas City, the Factory, and Studio 54, he cavorted with characters that led to his unlikely—and ultimately successful—career as a writer. An encounter with Marjoe, who became a star Pentecostal preacher as a child, inspired Gaines to write his biography; meeting a bartender at Studio 54 led to his writing The Club, a roman a clef so incendiary that he was threatened with lawsuits by celebrities who recognized themselves. He fled to California, where the former manager of the Beatles hired him to write the band’s story. In lively episodic chapters, Gaines shares the coincidences and chance meetings that brought his books into being.

A gossipy, raunchy memoir.