Like producer David Brown, I first encountered Jaws through Cosmopolitan magazine. Peter Benchley's novel was printed in a shortened version at the back of the UK July edition in 1974. The illustration that accompanied the story showed a shark turning towards a horrified female swimmer in a midnight sea and there was something about the image that reminded me of a picture from my childhood.
The magazine was my mother's, something she had packed for our two week summer holiday on the south coast of England. I had just finished One Bright Summer Morning, a crime novel by James Hadley Chase. It had a bright yellow cover with a bloodied bicycle chain snaking across it. Having nothing else to read, I picked up the magazine.
My mother was a regular reader of Cosmopolitan, which had started its own UK edition in the Seventies, and every month it published condensed versions of popular novels in its back pages. On reflection Jaws seems like an unusual choice for the magazine's female target readership, but the visceral horror and the crude language of the original had been quietly excised - as I discovered when I later read the full unexpurgated version. Unsurprisingly, the brief affair between Matt Hooper and Ellen Brody - the one element that the filmmakers immediately jettisoned - remained. Ellen's embarrassment at becoming over-excited in a restaurant as she indulged in a fantasy with her secret date ('She had to fight to keep from shifting on the Leatherette bench. She wanted to squirm back and forth, to move her thighs up and down. But she was afraid of leaving a stain on the seat'.) was exactly the kind of lurid confessional detail that the readers of Cosmo were likely to embrace.
Helen Gurley Brown, wife of producer David Brown, was the editor responsible for turning the magazine into the bible of the sexually liberated woman, a move which revived the publication's flagging circulation and made it one of the decade's touchstones of popular culture.
As David Brown tells the story on the Inside Jaws feature on the movie's 30th Anniversary twin disc DVD, he first came across Benchley's novel in a summary form on a small index card in the magazine's story department. He was enough of a producer to know from a single paragraph that it might make a good movie. I had pretty much the same thought when I finished reading the condensed Cosmo version in a single sitting. The difference was, of course, that David Brown was in a position to do something about it.
Incidentally, I have always thought the James Hadley Chase novel would make a great film, too.
