Love & Sin on a Tiger Skin

ELINOR GLYN (348 pp.)--Anthony Glyn--Doubleday ($4.50).

The book which added "It" to the vocabulary of the '20s enthralled readers on two continents and enthroned Elinor Glyn as the sultriest literary siren of the pre-Kinsey age. Even more famous, of course, was Three Weeks, a swoonmaking elixir that Elinor uncorked in 1907. Three Weeks, written in six, eventually sold some 5,000,000 copies, and featured a wildly romantic Balkan queen who greeted her lover from a reclining position on a tiger skin with a red rose between her teeth. The book was boycotted in Boston, blasted from pulpits, and celebrated in an anonymous ditty:

Would you like to sin

with Elinor Glyn

on a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

to err

with her

on some other fur?

As her grandson Anthony Glyn (nom de plume for Sir Geoffrey Davson, Baronet) makes plain in his slightly pious but consistently entertaining biography, the woman behind the legend was no pan-therish love goddess but a proper Victorian who put little sex into her books and found no satisfying love in her life.

Born on the isle of Jersey in 1864, Elinor Sutherland and her sister were brought up there and in Canada by her soon-widowed mother and various in-laws. In backwoods Ontario, the Sutherland girls were schooled in French and all the social graces. A ferociously aristocratic grandmother was a martinet on bearing, forever challenged the girls: "How would [you] behave on the steps of the guillotine?"

In the Brighton Baths. It was not until her mother remarried for money that Elinor was able to put her social training to use. With her red hair, green eyes, and powder-white face, she drew men in Paris and London like so many iron filings. When she was 26, four house-partying young gallants threw each other into a lake at 3 a.m., competing for her favors. This intrigued a longtime socialite bachelor named Clayton Glyn, who decided Elinor was just the girl for him. Elinor, in turn, took one look at his prematurely silvered hair and aristocratic bloodlines and decided he was the dream man she had been scribbling about in her diary.

For the honeymoon at Brighton in 1892, Clayton hired the public baths for two days so that his "Lorelei" could "swim up and down alone, naked, her long red hair, which when uncoiled reached her knees, trailing in the water behind her." But in a short two years all the romance had gone from their marriage. When Elinor confided to Clayton that a friend of his had the gall to kiss her, she was heartbroken to hear her husband chuckle. "Did he? Good old Brookie!" Clayton was ardent only for a male heir. When Elinor presented him with a second daughter, he took off for Monte Carlo in a huff and dropped -L-10,000 at cards and roulette. Elinor put her seething romantic frustrations into bestsellers such as The Reflections of Ambrosine, The Vicissitudes of Evangeline (U.S. title: Red Hair).

Gold Spittoons. The year after Three Weeks stunned the English-speaking world. Clayton stunned Elinor by announcing that they were up to her diamond tiara in debts. Elinor manfully shouldered them, and the rest of her life was a saga of deadlines, potboilers and lOUs. Clayton died in 1915, and Elinor was caught up in friendships with Lords Milner and Curzon. Philosopher F. H. Bradley and Field Marshal Mannerheim. If any of the eminent gentlemen went in for sin on a tiger skin. Grandson Anthony is discreetly mum on the subject.

Hollywood "discovered" Elinor Glyn in 1920, when Famous Players-Lasky offered her $10,000 and traveling expenses to write an original scenario. Elinor stayed on to do nine more scripts (including Three Weeks), to instruct the screen moguls that English drawing rooms were not lined with gold spittoons, and to give the stars--Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and half a dozen others--her pointers on the art of love. "Do you know," she would say of Valentino later, "he had never even thought of kissing the palm, rather than the back, of a woman's hand until I made him do it!" With the invention of "It" ("That strange magnetism . . . There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary"). Elinor became the U.S.'s adopted expert on love. She got more fan mail than most stars, helped others achieve stardom, notably Clara Bow, the "It" Girl, and voiced her views from press and platform.

"The Man Doesn't Matter." Coming from the tiger skin lady, those views were strangely staid ("Touching ought to be reserved entirely for the loved one") and sometimes cynical ("It is wiser to marry the life you like, because, after a little, the man doesn't matter"). Though she was handsomely paid for these gems of amatory wisdom, she kept comparatively little of the money. She once signed a contract in Hollywood giving an agent a 50% commission on all her books and films, past as well as future. (When the family finally demanded that the agent make the contract public, he tore it up.)

During the eight years previous to her death in 1943, checks were doled out to her by her bankers, and she was free to dabble in her pet enthusiasms, automatic writing and reincarnation. She was quite certain that she had roamed the palace of Versailles during a previous existence, but apparently no one thought to ask her about her plans for the next incarnation.

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