Man’s Diet for Mind and Body, a he-guy celebration of beans, nuts and wild greens. Low on cholesterol. High on flatulence. It, too, became a bestseller.
And then it blew up big time. Mega-big time.
Thor had just left Ruth for little Clethra. The pair claimed to be madly, passionately, blindly in love—and Ruth be damned. Devastated, outraged and humiliated, Ruth first tried to take her own life with sleeping pills. When that failed, this noted champion of battered spouses then tried to take Thor’s life with an eight-inch boning knife, an attack for which she was widely applauded by sympathetic women on a number of television talk shows. When that failed she went to court—suing for sole custody of Arvin. According to Ruth, Thor was perverted, evil and totally unfit to be a father. According to Ruth, this was a man who had actually been having sexual relations with his own stepdaughter in their own home while Clethra was only sixteen, which in New York State constituted statutory rape. And which opened the door to criminal proceedings. Thor had countersued, branding Ruth as not only desperately insane but as a physically abusive parent. Clethra was claiming that her famous mom routinely beat both her daughter and Arvin about the head and neck with her fists, her open hands and sometimes a rolled-up newspaper. The Village Voice, if you must know. Frequently, Clethra charged, she even drew blood. For the time being, a judge had sided with Ruth, barring Thor from seeing Arvin. But the bitter custody case was still working its way through the courts.
And, mostly, through the media. It was a first-class tabloid whopper, an egonomic calamity of global proportions, the loudest, tawdriest, horniest real-life soap opera of the year.
Everyone, it seemed, had dirt to spill. Arvin’s onetime nanny, a Colombian woman whom Thor said he’d fired years before for stealing, claimed she found the macho author and his stepdaughter together on the girl’s bed when Clethra was only fourteen. His finger, the nanny revealed, was where it shouldn’t have been. And Clethra was moaning with pure animal pleasure. And little Arvin was watching … A would-be poetess who had once been a college classmate of mine and was now a high-ranking official of the Home Shopping Network claimed Thor had routinely forced her and other attractive young students to perform oral sex on him in his office while he talked dirty to them. She said he smelled like a goat.
Everyone, it seemed, had a joke. Did you hear? Thor Gibbs is writing his life story. He’s going to call it Honey, I Fucked the Kids.
Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion. “I’m sorry, but decent men do not mess around with the siblings of their children,” wrote one outraged Daily News columnist. “I don’t care if she was fourteen at the time or sixteen or seventeen. It’s still de facto incest.” Many of his followers felt betrayed by him. “Thor Gibbs showed me the way,” wrote a Fortune 500 CEO in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. “He taught me how to live my own life when I thought I had forgotten how. Now who do I turn to?”
Opinion about Clethra was quite divided. Some thought she was a dirty, conniving little nympho. Others felt she was merely the sexual prey of a sick, cruel older man. Her mother’s stand remained unequivocal. “Clethra is not to blame,” Ruth stated flatly. “I want her to know I love her. I want her to know she can come home anytime she wants.” Possibly the most poignant opinion of all came from the youngest member of the family. “Dear Dad,” young Arvin wrote in an open letter that was widely reprinted. “Why can’t we be a family again? Why can’t we just love each other?”
Why, indeed. No one had a very good answer to that one. Except that it was way too late. All of them had become the human bait in that season’s media feeding frenzy. Trashed for cash and burned. And once that happens there is no going back. And there are no