Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (24 page)

HAVING ALREADY IMMERSED
myself in several divisive constitutional issues and on the verge of plunging into yet another, I’m ready for a nice noncontroversial diversion. Hence my detour, while driving to Cleveland, off Highway 80/90’s exit 25 into beautiful Beatosu, Ohio.

Inside the “Every Day Is Christmas!” Candy Cane Christmas Shoppe in Archbold, I ask a sales clerk where Burlington and Elmira are because Beatosu is supposedly wedged between the two. “It should be right where you’ve marked it,” she says, looking at the red
x
I’ve drawn on a regional map. “But I’m not familiar with the town. Bee-a-too-su. I’m from this area, and I’ve never heard of it before.”

There’s no reason she should have, since it’s entirely made up. Beatosu is a “paper town,” one of countless fictitious entries—along with fake roads, alleyways, streams, mountains, lakes—that lurk on various U.S. and foreign maps. Cartographers include these on road atlases as either boredom-killing pranks or, more legitimately, as “copyright traps” to catch competitors who’ve duplicated their information instead of doing original research. Beatosu was snuck onto the map I’m carrying by Peter Fletcher, chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission and a proud University of Michigan alumnus who couldn’t resist poking fun at the Wolverines’ archrival, Ohio State University. Beatosu’s more accurate pronunciation is “Beat OSU.”

Since mapmakers are reluctant to compromise their product’s overall integrity, they usually place the traps in remote areas or make only subtle manipulations to real geographical points, like giving an actual street some slight wiggles when in reality it’s perfectly straight. Print and online reference editors have their own tricks to snare copycats. The
New Oxford American Dictionary
once included the word
esquivalience
—defined reproachfully as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” And years ago the
New Columbia Encyclopedia
profiled Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer and accomplished photo-essayist from Bangs, Ohio, whose life was tragically cut short “at the age of thirty-one in an explosion while on assignment for
Combustibles
magazine.” Bangs was, at one time, a real Ohio town
about forty miles northeast of Columbus, but Mountweazel herself never existed.

Although I’m not sure what to photograph, I take a few landscape pictures of where Beatosu should be, head back to Highway 80/90, and drive west for several hours to Coventry Village in Cleveland. Here I’m on the lookout for my main Ohio site, the former Heights Arts Theatre, a cinema once managed by a shrewd publicity hound named Nico Jacobellis. After Jacobellis showed a barely erotic 1958 French film about adultery called
Les Amants (The Lovers)
, he caught the attention of the nation’s nine most powerful film critics—the justices of the Supreme Court—and got himself a high-profile case that he knew, win or lose, would result in great media exposure for his business.
Jacobellis v. Ohio
became a significant milestone in America’s ongoing struggle between protecting free speech and allowing communities to establish their own obscenity standards, and it also brought to my attention one of the federal government’s most titillating secrets: “adult movie day” at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Located at 2781 Euclid Heights Boulevard with bright, multicolored bulbs lighting up its refurbished marquee, the old theater is easy to find. When I pull up at about 9:00
P.M.
, a steady stream of pedestrians stroll about, leisurely enjoying the warm night. Johnny Malloy’s Sports Pub now occupies the building, and the owners have maintained the cavernous art deco interior well.

Les Amants
, starring Jeanne Moreau and directed by Louis Malle, had its Coventry Village premiere here on November 13, 1959. Suspecting the film might violate Ohio’s decency statute, Detective Earl Gordon attended the opening and told Police Chief Edward Gaffney the next morning that, in his opinion,
Les Amants
was indeed pornographic. Gaffney approved a follow-up raid, and on the evening of November 14, Gordon marched into the theater with two other officers, stopped a showing already in progress, confiscated the reels, arrested Jacobellis for “possessing and exhibiting an obscene film,” and threw him into jail. (I watched
Les Amants
on DVD before visiting Ohio to better understand what all the fuss was about. By today’s standards,
it’s hardly outrageous. Jeanne Moreau does express herself “enthusiastically” during one climactic moment, but I’ve seen shampoo commercials that are more risqué.)

Jacobellis was convicted and hit with a $2,500 fine. He took the case to the Ohio Court of Appeals, but they affirmed the judgment, as did the state’s supreme court. “[We] viewed
Les Amants
,” one peeved justice wrote.

Jacobellis appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but a similar, relatively recent decision suggested that he’d have an uphill battle. Two years before
Les Amants
’ scandalous debut, the Court had ruled against Samuel Roth, a publisher of erotica who’d sent out unsolicited advertisements to random names on a mailing list. Some recipients complained, and Roth was arrested under the Comstock Act for transmitting “lewd, lascivious or filthy” materials through the postal service. This same law, originally passed in 1873, had initially prevented such literary classics as James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Ernest Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
from being distributed. The justices upheld Roth’s conviction, arguing that communities could restrict materials if “to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest” and if they were “utterly without redeeming social importance.”

Among Jacobellis’s staunchest defenders was the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued, “There is no evidence in the record that the motion picture film involved in this case presents a clear and present danger,” referring to a criterion put forth by Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. in a previous free-speech case,
Schenck v. United States
. “We believe that, under the current state of knowledge, there is grossly insufficient evidence to show that obscenity brings about any sufficient evil.”

Leading the charge against Jacobellis was the Citizens for Decent Literature, an Ohio-based group founded by Charles H. Keating Jr. (the same Charles Keating caught up in the savings-and-loan scandals three decades later and sentenced to prison by a young Judge Lance Ito—of O. J. Simpson trial fame—for conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering). “By definition ‘obscenity’ appeals to lustful interests and emotions,” Keating stated in his
Jacobellis
amicus curiae brief. “It does not contain ideas of value. It is not in the competitive market place of ideas. It contributes nothing in the search for truth or the development of civilization.”

Jacobellis won, 6–3.

“We recognize the legitimate and indeed exigent interest of States and localities throughout the Nation in preventing the dissemination of material deemed harmful to children,” Justice William J. Brennan wrote in the Court’s judgment on June 22, 1964. “But that interest does not justify a total suppression of such material, the effect of which would be to ‘reduce the adult population … to reading only what is fit for children.’ ”

Under
Roth v. United States
, obscenity had been defined as something “utterly without redeeming social importance.” In
Jacobellis
, Brennan latched onto “utterly” and used the word to make it considerably more difficult to ban
any
work, asserting that, if the material had even one iota of “literary or scientific or artistic value or any other form of social importance, [it] may not be held obscene.” Brennan also stated that the words “contemporary community standards” set forth in
Roth
applied not to individual towns and cities but the “Nation as a whole.”

Justice Hugo Black also sided with Jacobellis and affirmed his steadfast position that even the most vulgar material was protected by the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court had no business suppressing
it. “If despite the Constitution,” he contended, “this Nation is to embark on the dangerous road of censorship, … this Court is about the most inappropriate Supreme Board of Censors that could be found.”

Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion, also for the majority, was the shortest but by far the most famous. After briefly mentioning
Roth
and sympathizing with the Court’s attempt to “define what may be indefinable,” Stewart wrote:

Chief Justice Earl Warren, joined by Justices John Harlan and Tom Clark, dissented. “We are told that only ‘hard core pornography’ should be denied the protection of the First Amendment,” Warren wrote. “But who can define ‘hard core pornography’ with any greater clarity than ‘obscenity’?”

Warren particularly bristled at Brennan’s groundless (in his view) reinterpretation of
Roth
concerning local versus federal control: “It is my belief that, when the Court said in
Roth
that obscenity is to be defined by reference to ‘community standards,’ it meant community standards—not a national standard.” Warren feared this “national” interpretation would turn the Court into the very “ultimate censor” other justices wanted to avoid becoming and precipitate a never-ending log of obscenity cases, each requiring an individual review. He thought it better to let the states handle it.

Elated, Nico Jacobellis ran a full-page advertisement in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
after his victory announcing: “At Last You Can See the Most Controversial Motion Picture!” Once the hullabaloo surrounding the film petered out, however, Jacobellis left Cleveland for Hollywood to pursue a lucrative advertising and marketing career with 20th Century Fox.

As Chief Justice Warren predicted,
Jacobellis
prompted a surge in the number of movies the Court had to review, and adult movie day became a regular event. The films were shown in a large ceremonial room on the first floor. Justice Thurgood Marshall relished the screenings and particularly enjoyed when directors made gratuitous attempts to bestow an element of educational or artistic merit on their otherwise lurid movies. Near the end of a soft-core film called
Vixen
, one of the female leads is caught up in an attempted hijacking to Cuba, allowing another character to wax philosophical about the differences between communism and democracy. “Ah, the redeeming social value,” Marshall joked. He also took pleasure in needling his fellow justices. After watching a graphic documentary about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, Marshall looked over at a visibly mortified Justice Harry Blackmun and deadpanned, “Well, Harry, I didn’t learn anything, how about you?”

Also according to legend, Justice John Harlan would position himself next to his more conservative colleagues and ask them, because of his failing eyesight, to narrate—in meticulous detail—what was happening on-screen. During especially raunchy scenes he would exclaim, “By Jove!” or “Extraordinary!”

After the March 1966 ruling on the case
A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” et al., v. Attorney General of Massachusetts
, which lifted a ban on the unexpurgated 1963 reissue of Cleland’s eighteenth-century novel, some justices (and many Americans) felt that the Supreme Court had unleashed a wave of smut on the nation. The Court took yet another stab at the obscenity test in
Miller v. California
, a lawsuit against porn distributor Marvin Miller, who’d sent out a mass mailing to hawk his sexually explicit wares. On
June 21, 1973, the Court ruled against Miller in a 5–4 squeaker that established the following obscenity “guidelines”: