WWW- MANY of the horny actors and literary geniuses of 1950s and ’60s Greenwich Village were hot and heavy with former Playboy Playmate Alice Denham, who’s dishing the sexual dirt on James Dean, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and others in a new memoir.
In “Sleeping With Bad Boys,” Denham writes that Dean was a “tender and considerate lover” who instantly fixated on her size 36-DD breasts: “You’re so huge for a small girl,” he said. “Jimmy was a t – – man, and he loved to nuzzle . . . He was skilled.” But the young star also had an Oedipus complex, once asking her, “Are you my mother? You are, I think. You look like her.”
Denham also recalls that Mailer, one of her literary heroes, turned out to be a bit weird. At one party, Mailer and his second wife, Adele, stripped and began jumping up and down on a bed, with Adele trying to coax Denham to get naked, too. “Norman was just square, no particular waist or pectoral definition, sturdy legs, large at the knees,” and an “ordinary” sex organ.
When novelist Roth, who was married, hit on Denham, he didn’t waste any time. “Roth was clearly a makeout artist. It was in his actions, his movement, and he was ever cocksure. Philip expected. Philip got,” Denham writes. ” ‘Come here, baby,’ he snarled as his shoulders and arms and flat athletic body . . . surrounded me in full athletic grope . . . Philip was a sex fiend.” But Denham got turned off when Roth next suggested a threesome with his wife and then refused to listen to her as she tried to describe a novel she was writing. “Only the young and naive do that. I don’t rap about it; I do it,” Roth scolded her.
When Hugh Hefner selected Denham as a Playmate, he brought her into his bedroom and, to set the mood, turned on a cheesy stag film called “Switcheroo,” featuring a psychedelic orgy that was “about as sexy as a carwash.” And while she admits that Hef “had staying power [and was] a good ride . . . I was left with no particular feeling, no personal feeling of connection or uniting.”
Denham, who still lives in the Village, will read from her book Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Cornelia Street Café.