Adventures in the Orgasmatron (60 page)

Matusow was catapulted into McCarthy’s inner circle as a result of his testimony. He became assistant to the editor of
Counterattack
, a four-page weekly started by three former FBI men that published an ever-evolving blacklist and fed information from J. Edgar Hoover to McCarthy. He campaigned for his hero, Senator McCarthy, in the 1952 elections, delivering anti-Communist speeches in Wisconsin, Utah, Montana, Idaho, and Washington in which he detailed the “Communist plot against McCarthy.”

Matusow was a “publicity addict,” hooked, he later wrote, on the “narcotic of newsprint.”
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He named more than two hundred people as Communists and was a key witness in several high-profile cases. But he was so keen to incriminate Communists that he made false accusations and perjured himself in the process. He lied to help convict Clinton Jencks—whom he’d met in a left-leaning artists’ colony near Taos presided over by the former Greenwich Village bohemian Mabel Dodge and D. H. Lawrence’s widow, Frieda. Jencks led mineworkers in New Mexico in a strike depicted in the classic movie
Salt of the Earth
(1954), directed by the blacklisted director Herbert Biberman (Jencks played himself in the film), which was later banned as “Communist propaganda.” Jencks stood accused of falsely signing an affidavit stating he was not a Communist, as was required of all union officials under the Taft-Hartley Act, and because of Matusow’s false testimony he was sentenced to five years in prison.

In 1953 Matusow, riding high on his celebrity, married one of McCarthy’s wealthy backers, the millionaire Arvilla Bentley, who had an oil portrait of McCarthy prominently displayed in her house. The couple had fallen in love when Matusow chaperoned her out of the country to the Bahamas Country Club so that she could dodge a subpoena that would have forced her to reveal that she’d given McCarthy’s campaign more money than was allowed under the law. He was only twenty-six; “the Duchess,” as he called her, was forty-three.

Matusow’s marriage lasted only four months. In August 1953 he wrote to McCarthy from Reno, where they’d gotten divorced: “When I testified at the trial of the 16 Communist Leaders in New York, the defense said, ‘You’d do anything for a buck.’ I denied it, but he was right.”
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Matusow, a self-described “mess,” went around telling everyone that he had lied under oath and wanted absolution. A Communist publisher, hoping to provide evidence that would necessitate a retrial of Jencks and others, persuaded him to write a book confessing to having been a false witness. Matusow himself was sentenced to five years for obstructing justice.

When Kinsey’s second volume cataloguing American sexuality,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, appeared in August 1953, it played right into the McCarthyite fears about sex and communism. (The Soviets had just tested their first H-bomb.) To those on the right, Kinsey seemed to be speeding up the deteriorating respectability of America by making controversial moral judgments that masqueraded as science. He reported, for example, that 50 percent of his interviewees had had sex before marriage, and went on to explain how he was in favor of premarital experimentation, arguing that those who enjoyed early sexual experiences adjusted more easily and happily to married sexual life.

Kinsey noted that there was “a marked correlation between experience in orgasm obtained from pre-marital coitus, and the capacity to reach orgasm after marriage.”
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Ten percent of women never did, for which Kinsey blamed the pernicious Judeo-Christian tradition of abstinence outside of wedlock. The orgasm remained his sole unit of measurement of sexual experience, and in the final chapter, “Anatomy and Physiology of Sexual Response and Orgasm,” he provided a graphic description of climax, distilled from the many hours of secret footage he’d shot of the members of his inner circle having sex in his attic.

Conservatives furiously attacked Kinsey for eroding the sacred institution of the American family, on which so much of 1950s America’s romanticized image of itself was based. Catholics and Protestants were in an uproar and there was a very public eruption of disapproval and disgust. One Baptist minister attacked Kinsey as a “deranged Nebuchadnezzar.”
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Louis Heller, the Democratic congressman for New York, tried to get the post office to ban the book (three years earlier the post office had confiscated some photographs that Kinsey had acquired for his collection, and it took several years of legal battles to win them back). Even the journal
Science
dismissed the book as propaganda for Kinsey’s own subversive views.

Kinsey was not a sexual anarchist or Communist and he insisted that all his researchers be happily married (though this was largely for appearances’ sake). Kinsey argued for sexual liberation ostensibly to safeguard the institution of the family rather than to subvert it. In America, Kinsey said, it took years to resolve the sexual repression that had been inculcated from childhood, and he thought that the delay in sexual activity until marriage was directly responsible for the high rate of divorce. “Judged by the departure from the physiologic normal and the damage wrought on the home and society,” Kinsey argued, “the great distortions of sex are the cultural perversions of celibacy, delayed marriage, and asceticism.”
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However, the Kinsey Reports reflected and fueled a new mood. The reports inspired Hugh Hefner to launch
Playboy
, which appeared, complete with Marilyn Monroe centerfold, in December of that year to mock America’s puritan pretensions. (Within two years
Playboy
was selling 500,000 copies a month, at fifty cents a peek; by the end of the decade this figure had doubled.) One of Hefner’s student papers, “Sex Behavior and the U.S. Law,” was the basis for what would become the
Playboy
philosophy. “If Kinsey had done the research,” Hefner reflected years later, “I was the pamphleteer, spreading the news of sexual liberation through a monthly magazine.”
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The magazine
Washington Confidential
used Kinsey’s national averages to calculate that 21 congressmen must be gay and 192 other politicians “bad behavior risks,” which perhaps stirred Congressman B. Carroll Reece, Republican of Tennessee and later chairman of the Republican National Committee, to attack the Rockefeller Foundation for funding Kinsey’s allegedly Communist-inspired efforts at “weakening American morality.” The Reece Committee (the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt and Other Comparable Organizations), established in 1952, was a sideshow to the McCarthy hearings. It aimed to prove that there was “a Moscow-directed, specific plot to penetrate the American foundations and to use their funds for communist propaganda and communist influence upon our society.”
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The committee asked to see the Rockefeller Foundation’s files. In right-wing circles it was commonly believed that the United States had recognized the Soviet Union in the early 1930s only under pressure from the Rockefeller Foundation, which wanted to help Rockefeller’s Standard Oil negotiate energy contracts with Russia’s revolutionary leaders. The Rockefeller Foundation, and others like it, were seen as forming an “unofficial state department,” and it was thought that they should be subject to the same scrutiny as government.
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It was suspected that even if the trustees themselves were beyond reproach, the foundation staff was riddled with Communists. Reece dismissed the Kinsey Reports the foundation had funded as “a bunch of claptrap” and believed they were part of the Communists’ “diabolical conspiracy” to undermine the American home.
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Even if he wasn’t a Communist, Kinsey seemed to share the Communists’ view of human nature and morality. Subversion, Reece said, “does not refer to outright revolution, but to a promotion of tendencies which lead, in their inevitable consequences, to the destruction of principles through perversion or alienation. Subversion, in modern society, is not a sudden, cataclysmic explosion, but a gradual undermining, a persistent chipping away at foundations upon which beliefs rest.”
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The Kinsey Reports did precisely that, negatively impacting on social mores, and Kinsey’s case illustrated, for Reece, how “comparatively small donations may have big repercussions in the realm of ideas.”
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In 1951, Kinsey had won another round of Rockefeller funding by a single vote. Now the foundation, keen to remain behind the scenes and not to have its dirty laundry aired in public, bowed to public prudery and cut off its support. Instead it awarded Union Theological Seminary $525,000, which was considerably more than its total support of Kinsey over thirteen years. (Henry Pitney Van Dusen, head of the seminary and Kinsey’s fiercest critic, was a member of the Rockefeller board.) John Foster Dulles, a Rockefeller Foundation trustee (later Eisenhower’s secretary of state), believed that the foundation should steer clear of the controversial subject of sex.

In 1953, Margaret Sanger, then sixty-eight, whose Planned Parenthood enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of the Rockefellers, arranged for the seventy-six-year-old philanthropist Katharine McCormick, with whom she had become friends in the late 1920s, to meet the scientist Gregory Pincus, the man who would become known as “the father of the Pill.” McCormick, who was the second woman to graduate from MIT, with a degree in biology, had become interested in endocrinology when seeking a cure for her husband’s schizophrenia. Stanley McCormick, the youngest son of the inventor of the mechanical reaper and the founder of International Harvester, had been institutionalized two years after they married (his older brother married John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s sister, Edith, who was Carl Jung’s chief enthusiast and patron). According to the Harvard gynecologist John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill, Katharine McCormick “was as rich as Croesus. She has a vast fortune…she couldn’t even spend the interest on her interest.” McCormick would put two million dollars of her inherited fortune into Pincus’s research.
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McCormick and Sanger, veterans of the first sexual revolution, would coordinate and fund the second.

As early as 1912 Margaret Sanger had envisioned a “magic pill” for contraception, so that sex might be freed from procreation. The founder and editor of
The Woman Rebel
, imprisoned in 1917 for distributing birth control devices, Sanger was described by Mabel Dodge as “an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.” She was married twice and had numerous lovers, enjoying, she said, “being ravaged by romances.”
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Sanger, a keen eugenicist, also saw birth control as an urgent imperative, predicting in 1950 that “the world and almost all our civilization for the next twenty-five years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums and jungles, and among the most ignorant people.”
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It was because of their shared interest in eugenics that Sanger’s Planned Parenthood organization enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of the Rockefellers.

In 1952, in response to contemporary anxieties about the population explosion, John D. Rockefeller III started the Population Council, which was directed by Frederick Osborn, the leader of the American Eugenics Society. Populations were growing twice as fast in “developing” countries as in the United States and Europe, and this “population bomb,” as one eugenicist called it, threatened to create breeding grounds for communism around the world.
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John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill in 1954, wrote that “the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.”
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Overpopulation and communism were, in Rock’s words, “more than synchronous.” The technological breakthrough of the Pill offered a means to control this swarm, and it is interesting that Kinsey’s avenue of research was closed down just as the Pill offered a means to achieve the goals to which the Rockefellers had hoped Kinsey would contribute.

When the Reece Committee submitted its final report in December 1954, the two Democrats on the committee appended a minority report denouncing the enterprise as a “complete waste of public money.” They attributed its trumped-up charges to “the cloud of fear so evident in all phases of our national life in recent years.” By then McCarthy’s star was beginning to wane. The minority report diagnosed the era over which he’d reigned as characterized by “fear-sickness.”
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Kinsey never got replacement funding, though after his death, in 1956, Hugh Hefner gave a grant to his institute in return for free access to its extensive collection of pornographic films. Like Reich, Kinsey publicly identified with scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo who had been persecuted for their discoveries. Kinsey embarked on a swan-song tour of Europe, visiting many places where Reich had left his mark. He interviewed Scandinavian transvestites and visited London brothels in his quest to collect impressions of European attitudes to sex. He found Scandinavia to be an enlightened sexual paradise, which had eluded Reich when he was there before the war.

In November 1953 an agent from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) visited Reich at Orgonon to try to get information on two suspected Communists and to check Reich’s own political beliefs. One of these men was the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, the man who financed Bertolt Brecht’s escape to America from Norway; Feuchtwanger was now living in Pacific Palisades, California. The INS thought Reich might have known him in Berlin.