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Knockabout Bankrupt. Maurice Girodias is a second-generation pornographer. Obelisk Press, the spiritual father of Olympia (it published Lady Chatterley, Miller's two Tropics), was founded by Girodias' father, a knockabout Englishman named Jack Kahane, who wore a monocle and may have been the only man ever to serve in both the French Foreign Legion and the Bengal Lancers. Kahane was the sort of bankrupt who in the '60s would pose for vermouth ads. But it was the '30s when he ran out of money, and his solution was to turn out such teasers as Susy Falls Off and Daffodil. Young Maurice helped wrap packages.
Father died in 1939, and Maurice found it expedient to take the name of his French Catholic mother. He tried going straight but finally went broke and applied his father's remedy. He set up Olympia in 1955 with Miller's Plexus and Apollinaire's Memoirs of a Young Rakehell. New authors were no problem: the G.I. Bill was running out, and Girodias became a foster uncle to a number of stranded Americans who owned typewriters but not money.
Little Golden Dream. Like race horses, pornographic writers have short, strenuous careers. Mostly, it is imagination that fails. One promising panderer began to sneak dialogues about music into his work only to find that "the type of people I write for do not care for my subjects to discuss Scarlatti." He is still hoping to write the sort of novel he can show to his parents. Girodias treats his burnt-out cases well; he will empty out his pocket for a hungry writer. Says one of his few female pornographers, a Barnard graduate: "Maurice has a very old-fashioned sense of honor."
The profits of pornography enable Girodias to indulge himself in a hobby—running a questionably successful nightclub —and a passion for lawsuits. "My only pleasure is legal conflict," says the publisher, and Olympia's history is a maze of such pleasure, most of it involving the French government and its sporadic efforts to put the firm out of business. Girodias' weakness is his disastrous yearning for respectability. Some suspect that he hopes the law's brigade mondaine will close Olympia. If they do, Girodias has a new career in mind: he talks of becoming a publisher of children's books.