You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO comes from longtime reader, Hanne:
So, the book is quite old – I remember finding it in my parents’ bookshelf, probably during the mid-to-late-nineties, and it may be from around then or even earlier. My parents’ hardcover was in black, white, and red, I believe – but I may misremember. It was in one of the hard-to-reach shelves, which of course meant that it was one of the more interesting shelves to early teenage me.
I don’t remember a lot about the plot, but it was a quite outlandish spy/suspense kind of thing, with the first lady of the US as the protagonist, and KGB spies in the other corner. I’m very sure that it is Very Old School and should come with a boatload of trigger warnings. The first lady was abducted and replaced with a dopplegänger, and the dopplegänger was supposed to extract secrets from the big man himself. As I remember it, a big part of the plot was the KGB guys worrying that they didn’t know how the prez liked his bedroom activities. Their grand solution was to seduce the abducted first lady in order to find out how she liked it, and give the intel to the dopplegänger, as they were sure that pillow talk would extract the maximum amount of national secrets. Somehow, the first lady deduced the reason for the seduction, and acted quite “wild and wanton” (…) instead of her usually sedate and vanilla self, which translated to her trying to give the KGB Don Juan a very practiced blow job. And somehow, the KGB Don Juan deduced that she was bluffing, and told the dopplegänger to act vanilla. What I don’t remember, is how the actual suspense plot ended, and it bugs me!
That’s all I remember – hope someone else has read it!
This sure is something.
The Second Lady
by
Irving Wallace
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Oh, I know this one! It’s “The Second Lady” by Irving Wallace. And yes, it was bonkers.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/irving-wallace-5/the-second-lady/
“Actress-agent Vera Valilova, thanks to a touch of plastic surgery and a pubic-hair transplant, is now an exact double for U.S. First Lady Billie Bradford–so when gorgeous Billie visits Moscow, she’s kidnapped (fake floor in her hotel room), held in comfy captivity while Vera takes her spot for three weeks.”
Of course it’s Irving Wallace 😀
OMG a pubic-hair transplant!!! That’s like an 80s soap opera plot on steroids.
Can’t stop laughing about the pubic hair transplant!
Haha, here I was thinking “sounds like Sydney Sheldon, but not quite right.”
Well done, KarenF
A HABO I actually knew. It is bonkers!
Wow, eight minutes from posting to resolution!
The whole thing is bonkers, but how did they even know how to match the First Lady’s pubic hair?
Is this the one that ends and you don’t know which lives?
Ah, Irving Wallace. There’s a name I haven’t thought of since my teens (a loooong time ago). Do any of my sister “matriarchal bitches” remember Irving Wallace’s THE SEVEN MINUTES? It was about a book being prosecuted for obscenity because it detailed the thoughts in a woman’s head while she was having sex (amazingly, “Hurry up, we’re going to miss Jeopardy” was not one of them). Anyhoo, the thing I remember about it most was the justification that it’s ok to use the c-word because “Chaucer used it.” I supposed Wallace figured if it was good enough for the Canterbury Tales, it should be good enough for us!
/Slightly o/t: I refer to Kate Canterbary so often that my autocorrect was trying to change Canterbury to Canterbary.
Wow, that was quick! You’re of course absolutely right KarenF, that definitely has to be the one – there just can’t be two, right? I had forgotten about the pubic hair transplant, but that seems to fit right in.
Thanks! I’m… not sure if I’m up to revisiting this one, but at least I have the choice now
@DiscoDollyDeb @KarenF. OMG My first guess was Sidney Sheldon! And DDD I remember this title, I figured it was about a nuclear bomb so I never bothered with it! DAMN!
“Ah, Irving Wallace. There’s a name I haven’t thought of since my teens (a loooong time ago). Do any of my sister “matriarchal bitches” remember Irving Wallace’s THE SEVEN MINUTES? It was about a book being prosecuted for obscenity because it detailed the thoughts in a woman’s head while she was having sex (amazingly, “Hurry up, we’re going to miss Jeopardy” was not one of them).”
I think I need to read this book. I’ll pass on the pubic hair transplant. And can we just give mad props to the Hanne for their great description and 21st C spin on the synopsis. <3
I knew this one too! Didn’t even have to read past the second paragraph.
I read it in the 80s as a teen. I so rarely remember both the title and plot of books but this one is seared into my memory.
I read this in 1981 or 1982. A teaching colleague who belonged to the Book of the Month Club passed it on to me.It was wild.
Reading this HABO made my day – it made me laugh and brought back memories of raiding my aunts’ bookcases to read Irving Wallace, Sidney Sheldon, and Joan Collins. Time has mercifully erased memories of their books, but they were huge best sellers back in the day. To think romances are criticized for their sexual content, but I’m not sure if any romance I’ve ever read can top the public hair transplant.
I can’t stop cackling at the pubic hair transplant oh my gosh.
Coming back to comment on the whole blow job / vanilla sex plot. It didn’t make much sense to teenage me when I first read it but I remembered it in college and it led me to one of my earliest feminist aha moments.
Which is that implying that “nice” women only like vanilla sex and only “bad” women like (more interesting) sex like blow jobs (or anal, in some other book I read) is just as bogus as any other version of the Madonna / whore division.
I still remember how proud of myself I was for identifying this in maybe 3 popular books that I read and drawing my own conclusions.