The Bed opens with Jamie, a young man, looking round an old, deserted country house. Through flashback we see Jamie as a boy, scared out of his wits when his older sister and her boyfriend, left alone in the house to babysit Jamie for the evening, play cruel tricks on him.
A journalist sets out to report on a minor earthquake in the Australian outback, and finds that the tremor was a result of a small nuclear explosion - part of an extortion threat that has the government fearing nuclear blackmail.
In 1963, living a routine life on Norma Place in Los Angeles, recluse writer Dorothy Parker and bisexual husband Alan Campbell recall their often-rocky relationship, started thirty years earlier.