Michaela Morris is the general manager of a Country Club in a leading city, Jarrico Junction, in the South. The Club is staging an important Golf Tournament, but Michaela is under pressure not only from a rival attraction that is being staged at the ball park, but from illegal campers who have erected their tents on a small but vital part of the course. So she befriends the newly elected District Attorney. He is under other pressures, particularly from the city's leading citizen, a highly eccentric and somewhat recluse multimillionaire, who insists that visitors remove their shoes before coming into his presence. The millionaire's first wife died under mysterious circumstances while he himself was abroad. His new wife is frightened to death of him. His name is Newman Nesdorf, but he bears two nicknames: Next-Door Nesdorf and Whiplash Nesdorf. In fact, as our heroine, Michaela Morris, comments at one stage, Nesdorf is not content unless he has two of everything: two wives, two nicknames, two bodyguards, two...

This novel tells a story instigated by a fictitious movie star named Bess Dress Blighty. Bess made the startling discovery that all a woman had to do to attract attention from the nation's press, radio and budding TV, was to take her clothes off. But alas, that action was the sum total of the attention she received. If Bess spoke about the obstacles placed in the paths of career women, or the denial of equal rights and opportunities with men, or drew attention to the plight of women who were deserted by their husbands or lovers and left to raise children on an income of less than zero, nobody gave a damn. But on the other hand, the mere action of taking her clothes off excited frenzied attention from everybody - including the nation's top church leaders, newspaper editors, radio commentators, gossip columnists, TV programmers, and even Washington politicians. Indeed, although the line-up of would-be censors was prodigious, it seems that some bigot was especially envious of Bess's successful efforts.