Chapter 1

I'm a guy who likes women, and I've had my share of success with them, but I couldn't hold a candle to Eddie Morris. It's been forty five years since I first met him, back in the late 1960s, and I still am amazed at the way he could get women into bed.

I met Eddie when I was in college, working at a summer job as a dishwasher at the Willow Run Country Club. It was a pretty fancy club, and only the richest folks from the Main Line of Philadelphia belonged to it. You know the type: the men all had names like J. Price Williams or Farley Winston III, and the women had short little noses and tans from all the time they spent at their winter homes in Palm Beach. They came from a long line of bluebloods, and they looked down on us poor slobs in the kitchen.

And Eddie was the slobbiest of them all. He was about six years older than me, in his mid-twenties, and he wasn't a college kid like me. Oh, he had dropped in and out of college several times, but basically he was a pot-smoking, overweight, disheveled guy with acne scars who would have spent all his time reading books if he didn't have to make a living. He washed dishes so he could make the minimum amount of money he needed to live, and he had no ambition beyond that.

And women loved him.

I would not have believed that women would have even given Eddie a second glance if I didn't see it for myself. He had girls all the time, tons of them, and very attractive ones, too. Eddie didn't own a car but he didn't need one: there was always a girl dropping him off at work in a snazzy car, and another one (always different) picking him up when his shift was over. He had girls driving him around all over the place, calling him at work, even stopping by the kitchen to bring him sandwiches, sodas, books -- you wouldn't believe what they brought him. He lived in a shabby apartment in the low rent district, but he spent most of his nights in much better circumstances -- in the beds of his various girlfriends.

When I saw all this, it became my mission to become friendly with Eddie, to find out what his secret was. I had tried really hard in my life to have success with girls, but the results had been very mixed so far. I couldn't understand how Eddie could have the success he did when he seemed the opposite of what I thought girls liked: a handsome guy with a nice car and some ambition to make something of himself.

Of course, this was the late Sixties, and things were changing. It was the hippie era, and girls were starting to be more interested in unconventional guys. Long hair was in, drugs were becoming more common, the old model of masculinity was changing.

But still.

It didn't make sense that a guy who looked like he slept in his clothes, who had a paunch, and who seemed to have no ambition other than to smoke a joint and to read Philosophy books, would have girls attracted to him like bees to honey.

"What's your secret?" I asked him, one day when we were on our lunch break, sitting on the loading dock behind the kitchen. "Why are so many girls attracted to you?"

"They like me because I break all the rules," he said. "I'm not the guy their mothers raised them to go out with. They like that I'm different, that I flaunt all the values they're supposed to hold. I'm sloppy, and I'm not good-looking, and I belch and fart in front of them. I especially do that if I meet their parents -- that's a must. Also, I like to put them down. The more of a narcisisstic, self-absorbed bitch a girl is, the more fun I have puncturing her ego. Added to that the fact that I don't have a career, or a college education, and you've got the whole package. It's guaranteed to drive a girl wild. Their mothers too, to be honest.

I know, I know, it doesn't make sense. Even now, all these years later, I can hardly quote Eddie without laughing out loud. That couldn't be the secret, could it?

Well, all I know is that it worked.

I'll give you a little story, to let you see for yourself.

One day there was a wedding at the country club. It was a huge affair, between two of the richest families in our membership. The guy was an up and coming young lawyer, working at one of the blue chip firms in town, and the bride was a gorgeous blonde goddess, who had gone to all the best schools and was so beautiful she actually had done some modeling in New York.

The guest list included some of the biggest movers and shakers in Philadelphia, with judges, lawyers, Society people, CEOs, celebrities -- it was like a Who's Who of Philadelphia's upper crust.

It was a gorgeous day in June and when the wedding party arrived to get their pictures taken on the golf course, Eddie and I were outside taking a break. We saw the limousines pull up and the bridal party disembarked, and we saw the photographer herding them all to a little hill that overlooked a pond by the 10th hole. As he was getting everybody positioned, Eddie said, "She dropped something. Did you see that? She dropped her bouquet getting out of the car, and nobody noticed. Watch this."