Thy Neighbor's Wife

M
OST BIG BESTSELLERS
of the past deserve to be relegated to the damp bookshelves of guest bedrooms in country houses, but
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
is not one of them. The writing of it took Talese nine years, and those years show, in the richness of the stories, in the density of detail, in the sweeping, panoramic view he gives us of America in flux.

Though at first glance
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
may seem like a scenic tour through an exotic and faded world, the tensions and conflicts it chronicles are still pressing. Talese reveals an America enamored with the orderly surfaces of its perfect homes, and intrigued by rogue sexual attractions. The culture at large may be in less obvious upheaval—we are, after all, more conventional than our parents—but the particular perplexity Talese explores is with us still. How do we resolve our old-fashioned ideas of marriage with our need for novelty and freshness? How do we overcome what the writer Radclyffe Hall called “the infinite sadness of fulfilled desire”? The forms and varieties of our solutions may be different now, we may have suburban husbands surfing the Internet for porn, or restless wives G-chatting with coworkers, but the fundamental conflict remains the same: the tension between our puritanical heritage and our obsession with sex.

When Talese embarked on this enormous project, it must have seemed impossibly ambitious to anyone he mentioned it to. He was taking on nothing less than the spirit of the times.
How does one get at the zeitgeist, in a way that is not drab, reductionistic, or flagrantly untrue? Talese’s answer is through character. Paradoxically, the deeper he goes into the people he writes about, the more specific and elaborate and idiosyncratic the detail, the more effectively he gets across the larger cultural moment. He captures the landscape of the nation through the endless, fascinating elaboration of character. With his intricate portraits of Hugh Hefner, Judith Bullaro, John Williamson, Diane Webber, Al Goldstein, and others, he communicates better than he could in a million finely wrought abstractions exactly what was going on the ground. It is this method, of burrowing deeper and deeper into the individual to get at broad cultural truths, that is the inspiration of this book.

Thy Neighbor’s Wife
is often misread. People are misled or distracted by the prurience and flashiness of the subject matter. But this is not a dirty book, or rather it is a dirty book with long exegesis on Comstock’s crusade, with lively and learned elaborations of Supreme Court cases about obscenity, with historical digressions into utopian communities and the trials and tribulations of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, it is a cultural history in the best and most serious sense of the word. In
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, Talese captures perfectly the delicate psychological contradictions, the residual influence of our puritan past, and the adventure of freedom in all of its new, seductive incarnations. He approaches big, vague cultural trends through the quirky specificity of individual history, through Hugh Hefner’s passion for F. Scott Fitzgerald, through the way Al Goldstein’s father treated Chinese waiters, through a photograph of Harold Rubin’s father in the army, through Anthony Comstock’s diary entries on masturbation. After Talese is finished peopling his America, we can see in action the contradictory pulls of our wildest impulses and our most conservative instincts. He measures the shifts in morality, the real historical change, in its minor drags and tears at the psyche; he watches the exhilaration and headiness and destruction of the sexual revolution, man by man, woman by woman.

There is a curious section at the end of the book where Talese refers to himself in the third person. All of a sudden we come across sentences like this: “During this time Talese’s own marriage, which had been in existence since 1959, and which now included two young daughters, was responding adversely to the flagrance of his research, its attendant publicity, and his recent agreement to be interviewed at length by a reporter from
New York
magazine.” Talese has been criticized for his field research in adultery, for the enthusiasm of his immersion, for being there on the table in the massage parlor receiving very extensive massages, but this stylistic choice answers that critique. An “I” would be too simple. For he is both there and not there; he is in the massage parlor getting jerked off, but he is also thinking, as he is there getting jerked off, “Who is the masseuse? What was her childhood like? How do her other customers feel about their jobs?” In the room there is always the writer, the observer watching the room, and that subtlety, I think, was missed by many of the book’s harsher critics and moralizers. Talese is writing himself as character; he is processing the story through his own experience; he is always writing. It is an unusually ardent approach to journalism, but it is nonetheless an approach to journalism. The book was his life, and this was a serious thing, not the cheap excuse for a little extramarital fun that some critics at the time seemed to think it was. If that’s what he wanted, I don’t know that he would have had to spend nine years and five-hundred-plus pages on it.

Talese has an unrivaled appetite for stories, for the variety of human experience in all its glorious and perverse detail. He devotes an attention to the minutiae of the lives of strangers that most people can barely muster for their closest friends and family. It is his bottomless interest in other people, famous and unfamous, his loving immersion in their pasts, in what their mothers said to them when they were children, and what their childhood bedrooms looked like, that distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill journalist. For him the story is not over when the book
is sent off to the publishers. He stays in touch with many of his sources for years, for decades, still interested in what happens to them, still gathering information, still involved. This is not the detached, utilitarian anthropology of most reporters. The line between subject and friend is dangerously, interestingly blurred. Without exception, the characters in this book allowed Talese to use their real names, which is quite extraordinary given that they were talking about cheating, about sexual fantasies, about unusual erotic occurrences. But Talese gained that level of trust by the depth and intensity of his engagement, by the precise, humane nature of his grilling, by the charm of the very specific kind of attention he was offering, by his true companionship.

Isn’t it exhausting, one could ask, this emotionally wrought involvement with so many sources, so many intimacies? For most of us it would be. But it is this novelist’s heart, this writer’s strange and insatiable passion for observation, for describing in all of its spectacular complexity the bewildering and plentiful world, that raises this brilliant and unruly book from its time, and makes it a classic of cultural journalism.

—Katie Roiphe
2009

ONE

S
HE WAS
completely nude, lying on her stomach in the desert sand, her legs spread wide, her long hair flowing in the wind, her head tilted back with her eyes closed. She seemed lost in private thoughts, remote from the world, reclining on this windswept dune in California near the Mexican border, adorned by nothing but her natural beauty. She wore no jewelry, no flowers in her hair; there were no footprints in the sand, nothing dated the day or spoiled the perfection of this photograph except the moist fingers of the seventeen-year-old schoolboy who held it and looked at it with adolescent longing and lust.

The picture was in a photographic art magazine that he had just bought at a newsstand on the corner of Cermak Road in suburban Chicago. It was an early evening in 1957, cold and windy, but Harold Rubin could feel the warmth rising within him as he studied the photograph under the streetlamp near the curb behind the stand, oblivious to the sounds of traffic and the people passing on their way home.

He flipped through the pages to look at the other nude women, seeing to what degree he could respond to them. There had been times in the past when, after buying one of these magazines hastily, because they were sold under the counter and were therefore unavailable for adequate erotic preview, he was greatly disappointed. Either the volleyball-playing nudists in
Sunshine &
Health
, the only magazine showing pubic hair in the 1950s, were too hefty; or the smiling show girls in
Modern Man
were trying too hard to entice; or the models in
Classic Photography
were merely objects of the camera, lost in artistic shadows.

While Harold Rubin usually could achieve some solitary fulfillment from these, they were soon relegated to the lower levels of the stacks of magazines that he kept at home in the closet of his bedroom. At the top of the pile were the more proven products, those women who projected a certain emotion or posed in a certain way that was immediately stimulating to him; and, more important, their effect was enduring. He could ignore them in the closet for weeks or months as he sought a new discovery elsewhere. But, failing to find it, he knew he could return home and revive a relationship with one of the favorites in his paper harem, achieving gratification that was certainly different from but not incompatible with the sex life he had with a girl he knew from Morton High School. One blended with the other somehow. When he was making love to her on the sofa when her parents were out, he was sometimes thinking of the more mature women in the magazines. At other times, when alone with his magazines, he might recall moments with his girl friend, remembering what she looked like with her clothes off, what she felt like, what they did together.

Recently, however, perhaps because he was feeling restless and uncertain and was thinking of dropping out of school, leaving his girl, and joining the Air Force, Harold Rubin was more detached than usual from life in Chicago, was more into fantasy, particularly when in the presence of pictures of one special woman who, he had to admit, was becoming an obsession.

It was this woman whose picture he had just seen in the magazine he now held on the sidewalk, the nude on the sand dune. He had first noticed her months ago in a camera quarterly. She also had appeared in several men’s publications, adventure magazines, and a nudist calendar. It was not only her beauty that had attracted him, the classic lines of her body or the wholesome features of her face, but the entire aura that accompanied each pic
ture, a feeling of her being completely free with nature and herself as she walked along the seashore, or stood near a palm tree, or sat on a rocky cliff with waves splashing below. While in some pictures she seemed remote and ethereal, probably unobtainable, there was a pervasive reality about her, and he felt close to her. He also knew her name. It had appeared in a picture caption, and he was confident that it was her real name and not one of those pixie pseudonyms used by some playmates and pinups who concealed their true identity from the men they wished to titillate.

Her name was Diane Webber. Her home was along the beach at Malibu. It was said that she was a ballet dancer, which explained to Harold the disciplined body control she exhibited in several of her positions in front of the camera. In one picture in the magazine he now held, Diane Webber was almost acrobatic as she balanced herself gracefully above the sand on her outstretched arms with a leg extended high over her head, her toes pointed up into a cloudless sky. On the opposite page she was resting on her side, hips fully rounded, one thigh raised slightly and barely covering her pubis, her breasts revealed, the nipples erect.

Harold Rubin quickly closed the magazine. He slipped it between his school books and tucked them under his arm. It was getting late and he was soon due home for dinner. Turning, he noticed that the old cigar-smoking news vendor was looking at him, winking, but Harold ignored him. With his hands deep in the pockets of his black leather coat, Harold Rubin headed home, his long blond hair, worn in the duck’s-ass style of Elvis Presley, brushing against his upraised collar. He decided to walk instead of taking the bus, because he wanted to avoid close contact with people, wanted no one to invade his privacy as he anxiously anticipated the hour at night when, after his parents had gone to sleep, he would be alone in his bedroom with Diane Webber.

He walked on Oak Park Avenue, then north to Twenty-first Street, passing bungalows and larger brick houses in this quiet residential community called Berwyn, a thirty-minute drive from
downtown Chicago. The people here were conservative, hardworking, and thrifty. A high percentage of them were descendants of parents or grandparents who had immigrated to this area from Central Europe earlier in the century, especially from the western region of Czechoslovakia called Bohemia. They still referred to themselves as Bohemians despite the fact that, much to their chagrin, the name was now more popularly associated in America with carefree, loose-living young people who wore sandals and read beatnik poetry.

Harold’s paternal grandmother, whom he felt closer to than anyone in his family and visited regularly, had been born in Czechoslovakia, but not in the region of Bohemia. She had come from a small village in southern Czechoslovakia near the Danube and the old Hungarian capital of Bratislava. She had told Harold often of how she had arrived in America at fourteen to work as a servant girl in a boardinghouse in one of those grim, teeming industrial towns along Lake Michigan that had attracted thousands of sturdy Slavic men to work in the steel mills, oil refineries, and other factories around East Chicago, Gary, and Hammond, Indiana. Living conditions were so overcrowded in those days, she said, that in the first boardinghouse where she worked there were four men from the day shift renting four beds at night and four other men from the night shift renting those same beds during the day.

These men were treated like animals and lived like animals, she said, and when they were not being exploited by their bosses in the factories they were trying to exploit the few working girls like herself who were unfortunate enough to be living in these towns at that time. The men in the boardinghouse were always grabbing at her, she said, banging on her locked door at night as she tried to sleep. When she related this to Harold during a recent visit, while he sat in the kitchen eating a sandwich she had made, he suddenly had a vision of what his grandmother must have looked like fifty years ago, a shy servant girl with fair complexion and blue eyes like his own, her long hair in a bun, her youthful body moving quickly around the house in a long drab
dress, trying to elude the clutching fingers and strong arms of the burly men from the mill.

As Harold Rubin continued to walk home, his school books and the magazine held tightly under his arm, he remembered how sad yet fascinated he had been by his grandmother’s reminiscing, and he understood why she spoke freely with him. He was the only person in the family who was genuinely interested in her, who took the time to be with her in the big brick house in which she was otherwise nearly always alone. Her husband, John Rubin, a former teamster who made a fortune in the trucking business, spent his days at the garage with his fleet of vehicles and his nights with a secretary who, if referred to at all by Harold’s grandmother, was referred to as “the whore.” The only child in this unhappy marriage, Harold’s father was completely dominated by
his
father, for whom he worked long hours in the garage; and Harold’s grandmother did not feel sufficiently close to Harold’s mother to share the frustration and bitterness she felt. So it was mainly Harold, sometimes accompanied by his younger brother, who interrupted the prevailing silence and boredom in the house. And as Harold became older and more curious, more remote from his parents and his own surroundings, he gradually became his grandmother’s confidant, her ally in alienation.

From her he learned much about his father’s boyhood, his grandfather’s past, and why she had married such a tyrannical man. John Rubin had been born sixty-six years ago in Russia, the son of a Jewish peddler, and at the age of two he had immigrated with his parents to a city near Lake Michigan called Sobieski, named in honor of a seventeenth-century Polish king. After a minimum of schooling and unrelieved poverty, Rubin and other youths were arrested staging a holdup during which a policeman was shot. Released on probation, and after working at various jobs for a few years, Rubin one day visited his older married sister in Chicago and became attracted to the young Czechoslovakian girl then taking care of the baby.

On a subsequent visit he found her in the house alone, and after she had rejected his advances—as she had previously done
with men when she had worked in the boardinghouse—he forced her into her bedroom and raped her. She was then sixteen. It had been her first sexual experience, and it would make her pregnant. Panicked, but having no close relatives or friends nearby to help, she was persuaded by her employers to marry John Rubin, or else he would go off to prison because of his prior criminal offense, and she would be no better off. They were married in October 1912. Six months later they had a son, Harold’s father.

The loveless marriage did not greatly improve with time, Harold’s grandmother said, adding that her husband regularly beat his son, beat her when she interfered, and devoted himself mainly to the maintenance of his trucks. His lucrative career had begun when, after he had worked as a deliveryman on a horse and wagon for Spiegel, Inc., a large mail-order house in Chicago, he convinced management to lend him enough money to invest in a truck and start his own motorized delivery service, thus eliminating Spiegel’s need for several horses whose performance he said could not match his own. After buying one truck and fulfilling his promise, he bought a second truck, then a third. Within a decade John Rubin had a dozen trucks handling all of Spiegel’s local cartage, as well as that of other companies.

Over the futile protests of his wife, his son was summoned as an adolescent into the garage to work as a driver’s helper, and although John Rubin was amassing great personal wealth at this time and was generous with his bribes to local politicians and the police—“If you wanna slide, you gotta grease,” he often said—he was a miser with the family budget, and he frequently accused his wife of stealing coins that he had left around the house. Later he began deliberately to leave money here and there in amounts that he precisely remembered, or he would arrange coins in a certain way on the bureau or elsewhere in the house in the hope that he could prove that his wife took some or at least touched them; but he never could.

These and other remembrances of Harold’s grandmother, and similar observations that he made himself while in his grandfather’s chilly presence, gave Harold considerable insight into his
own father, a quiet and humorless man of forty-four resembling not in the slightest the photograph on the piano that was taken during World War II and showed him in a corporal’s uniform looking relaxed and handsome, many miles from home. But the fact that Harold could understand his father did not make living with him any easier, and as Harold now approached East Avenue, the street on which he lived, he could feel the tension and apprehension, and he wondered what his father would choose to complain about today.

In the past, if there had not been complaints about Harold’s schoolwork, then there had been about the length of Harold’s hair, or Harold’s late hours with his girl, or Harold’s nudist magazines that his father had once seen spread out on the bed after Harold’s had carelessly left his door open.

“What’s all this crap?” his father had asked, using a word far more delicate than his grandfather would have used. His grandfather’s vocabulary was peppered with every imaginable profanity, delivered in tones of deep contempt, whereas his father’s words were more restrained, lacking emotion.

“They’re my magazines,” Harold had answered.

“Well, get rid of them,” his father had said.

“They’re
mine!
” Harold suddenly shouted. His father had looked at him curiously, then began to shake his head slowly in disgust and left the room. They had not spoken for weeks after that incident, and tonight Harold did not want to repeat that confrontation. He hoped to get through dinner peacefully and quickly.

Before entering the house, he looked in the garage and saw that his father’s car was there, a gleaming 1956 Lincoln that his father had bought new a year ago, trading in his pampered 1953 Cadillac. Harold climbed the steps to the back door, quietly entered the house. His mother, a matronly woman with a kindly face, was in the kitchen preparing dinner; he could hear the television on in the living room and saw his father sitting there read
ing the Chicago
American
. Smiling at his mother, Harold said hello in a voice loud enough that it would carry into the living room and perhaps count as a double greeting. There was no response from his father.

Harold’s mother informed him that his brother was in bed with a cold and fever and would not be joining them for dinner. Harold, saying nothing, walked into his bedroom and closed the door softly. It was a nicely furnished room with a comfortable chair, a polished dark wood desk, and a large Viking oak bed. Books were neatly arranged on shelves, and hanging from the wall were replicas of Civil War swords and rifles that had been his father’s and also a framed glass case in which were mounted several steel tools that Harold had made last year in a manual-arts class and which had won him a citation in a national contest sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. He had also won an art award from Wieboldt’s department store for his oil painting of a clown, and his skill as a woodcraftsman was most recently demonstrated in his construction of a wooden stand designed to hold a magazine in an open position and thus permit him to look at it with both of his hands free.

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