No Fear of Flying : ‘Bad Girl’ Novelist Erica Jong Is Back with a Steamy New Book

Erica Jong stretches out on her big brass bed, leans back comfortably on a mound of plump white pillows and positions herself for the photographer. Suddenly, she sits up and frowns.

“You know, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this,” Jong says, nervously fluffing her mane of thick blond hair. “My literary reputation is in bad enough shape as it is. Maybe I shouldn’t be, hmm, photographed in bed.”

The moment of doubt passes. Jong settles back onto the pillows and strokes a pet poodle that has jumped onto her lap. As the camera clicks away, she talks excitedly about a coming trip to Italy to plug her latest novel, “Any Woman’s Blues.”

“I’m really looking forward to going there,” she says. “In Italy, they treat me as a serious writer. Here, they treat me like the happy hooker.”

Ever since Jong burst onto the literary scene in 1973 with her bawdy best-selling novel “Fear of Flying,” the outspoken writer says she has been fighting for respectability. The battle rages on, but it hasn’t been all that painful for the 47-year-old Jong, a master of self-promotion.

“Fear of Flying,” a satiric and sexually frank book about a woman’s quest for independence, sold 10 million copies and made Jong an overnight star. Formerly a little-known poet and essayist, she suddenly became a household name, a hot topic on talk shows, magazine covers and in gossip columns.

Her madcap book, which was published in 20 countries, reflected the turbulent changes in sexual relationships between men and women that surfaced in the early 1970s. But critics were divided, and the resulting debate set a tone for Jong’s career that has persisted. While some praised the novel as a chronicle of Everywoman’s struggle, others said it was cliched, oversexed and a disservice to the women’s movement.

Today, 17 years later, “Fear of Flying” seems tame, even dated, and Jong herself appears to have mellowed. The woman who once ironically referred to herself as “the patron saint of adulteresses” now lives quietly in Connecticut and Manhattan with her fourth husband, New York attorney Ken Burrows. She has one child, 11-year-old Mollie, from her third marriage.

Given a choice, Jong says she would rather go to a movie with her family than attend a celebrity bash. But if she herself has shed the “bad girl” image, her novels have not. Jong has continued to stir up controversy on the literary scene, and if the past is any guide, her latest book, “Any Woman’s Blues” (Harper & Row, $18.95), will be no different.

Billed as a social history of the 1980s, the novel is a steamy smorgasbord of sexual obsession, drug addiction, alcoholism and self-destruction. Some of the lengthy X-rated passages may repel readers, especially graphic scenes of sexual bondage and humiliation. But Jong insists she has a duty to be outrageous.

“Everybody has to claim their territory, and I’ll touch stuff that other people won’t touch,” she says. “I’ll talk about what many women writers won’t talk about. And since I seem to validate and heal people with my books, I feel it’s a calling to do so.”

In her book, Jong charts the distance that American women have traveled from the 1970s to the present. Although feminists have made great strides toward sexual freedom, the experience has left many of them confused, she says.

“These days, women are entitled to sexual pleasure. Women are entitled to be mommies and workers. But are they more liberated? I’d say no. We’ve only had a partial revolution.”

As the book begins, Jong informs readers that novelist Isadora Wing, the plucky heroine of “Fear of Flying,” has disappeared in a plane over the South Pacific. But she has left behind a manuscript telling the story of Leila Sand, a rich painter who drifts from one sick relationship to another--and through a series of crippling addictions--before achieving inner peace.

She also has lots of sex, beginning on Page 1.

“I had no penis envy,” says Sand, reflecting on her adolescent years. “I actually thought I had a penis.”

Rhapsodizing on her lover’s erotic powers, she seems to faint with the recollection: “Who can describe lust when it is this hot, this succulent, this compelling? Words cannot touch it. Perhaps only music can echo the swell and heft of it, the heat, the vibration.”

As the novel nears its conclusion, the heroine hits rock bottom during a visit to Madama Ada, a Greenwich Village dominatrix. Asked how she got into the field, the siren in black stiletto heels doesn’t miss a beat.

“Let me tell you what I told Phil Donahue,” she says.

Jong contends that the S & M episode is relevant because “I think that’s what’s happening. . . . I think there’s a great deal of dark sexuality that has come out of women’s liberation.

“Women are saying, ‘How can I prove I’m female?’. . . . So what are women doing? They’re wearing black leather garter belts. They’re playing with their men in a very submissive, kind of ‘Story of O’ way. And I think it’s directly related to the confusion of sexual roles that has come out of liberation.”

The underlying problem, Jong says, is that the 1980s were a time of doubt and insecurity. It doesn’t matter if people were hung up on a person, a drug, credit cards, shopping or chocolate, because “in the book it’s all the same thing. It’s a recurring theme.”

It’s also autobiographical.

Like her heroine, Jong comes from a New York Jewish family, lives in suburban Connecticut and has had several marriages. She too has had obsessive relationships with men who drove her to drink. And, like her character, she went to Alcoholics Anonymous to get her life back together.

Is the entire novel--including the, uh, candlestick scene--autobiographical? Jong looks uncomfortable.

“That’s kind of dicey . . . it’s the unanswerable question really. Let’s just say that all the details in the book are not true. I did some research. But not all of the stuff that deals with the dominatrix is true.”

Like many writers, Jong says there is a clear line between her own voice and those of her characters. Still, she is passionate in discussing the travails of Leila Sand and their reverberations in her own life.

The key issue, of course, is sex. Jong insists that most American women--despite all the feminist rhetoric--are still obsessed with men.

“Are women better off today? No. Is society less sexist? No. Is this the fault of women? No. Women are still hung up on men, with love as a way of having identity. That simply hasn’t changed.”

Haven’t many American women gone beyond that stage? Jong is skeptical.

“Oh, sure, there are some,” she says. “But I look around me, at all the women whom I admire, who are fabulous women, who are doing well . . . and if they’re not with a man, they’re unhappy. Society treats them as failures.”

The author says she learned this from her experiences as a single woman. For much of the ‘80s, she was looking for Mr. Right, but with no luck. The quest left her feeling like a pariah in polite society.

“You know me, I get invited everywhere, right? Because I’m well-known and because I’m an affable, gregarious person and fun to be around. But there’s always, when you’re a single woman, an edge of fear and envy about the way other women treat you, particularly women who are married.

“They always act as if you might possibly steal their husbands. And the married men are always coming on to you.”

In the book, Leila Sand dwells obsessively on her lovers, bragging about their sexual prowess and bewailing their infidelities. One of them, a surly young stud, lives off her money and cheats on her like a bandit. The humiliation is overwhelming, but Sand is incapable of freeing herself from the affair. Jong says she too has experienced that helpless, sinking feeling.

“Have I sat by the phone, drinking wine, because my man didn’t come home? Absolutely, I’ve done that. To the degree that I couldn’t move. I think there isn’t a woman with a soul so dead that she wouldn’t say yes to that.”

Ultimately, she says, these frustrating affairs led her into co-dependency, a state in which men and women inadvertently take on the worst addictions and character flaws of the people with whom they are involved.

Much of “Any Woman’s Blues” deals with that downward spiraling, and Sand’s fight to get free. Although supermarket bookshelves are overflowing with “self-help” books about this problem, Jong says her novel is different because it deals with a human story and offers no magic solutions.

“Co-dependency is just a trendy term for being a well-socialized woman,” she says. “We’re all trained to put other people’s needs before our own. We’re trained to be validated by what our husbands, children and lovers think of us.

“It’s not uniquely feminine, but it’s considered normal in women, whereas in men it’s considered a disease,” Jong adds, with a sardonic laugh.

As Leila Sand plummets downward, taking on the drinking, cocaine and sexaholic tendencies of her lovers, she finally seeks help from Alcoholics Anonymous. In her own life, Jong was lured to AA meetings out of concern for addicted friends. But she soon found the same problems in herself.

“In my own way, I’ve been an addict,” she says. “You cannot have been alive in the last decade without knowing someone whose life has been affected by these problems. To me, (AA) has been a very important tool, it’s a self-diagnosis tool, and a real path to introspection and spirituality.”

Since much of the book mirrors her own life, Jong expects critics to zero in on the more lurid episodes. By now, she says, it’s all part of the game. A visitor gets the feeling that she isn’t too terribly concerned--and may in fact be laughing all the way to the bank.

“Hey, I’m Erica ‘Fear of Flying’ Jong,” she says. “And the Erica Jong that people expect is a kind of monster, created by a series of articles that began to be published around 1973, when the book became a worldwide phenomenon. You know, the Erica Jongs of this world who have led women into depravity and pornography. But nobody could be that person.”

It doesn’t matter, she says, that her upcoming projects include a critical biography of author Henry Miller, a book on the art of writing and a new collection of poems. Forget the serious work she has done in the past, including essays on 18th-Century literature, volumes of poetry and thoughtful introductions to classics such as “Lolita.”

“If you go around fighting this image that people have of me, it just comes out worse, right? You get articles written as if you were a Charlie’s Angel who now wanted to take serious acting lessons, or a Marilyn Monroe who had the temerity, after posing nude, to study with Lee Strasberg.”

Jong looks dismayed, but only for a fleeting moment. Her new book is No. 3 on the Italian best-seller lists, and she believes it has a chance to do equally well in America. The S & M scenes may generate controversy, the author explains, and the resulting debate could boost sales.

“Look, this is my 14th book,” she says with a big, confident smile. “I’m a veteran of this process, and I don’t expect nice things to be said. After all this time, I’m just grateful if they spell my name right.”