Thy Neighbor's Wife (30 page)

A
LTHOUGH THE
twelve-story brick building into which
Screw
moved had been designed in 1907 as a factory loft, it was architecturally elaborate; it had corniced columns, and curved front windows, and escutcheoned metal trimming across its facade, and carved on its front wall, above an ornate row of second-story windows, were the initials of the millionaire realtor who once proudly owned it—E.W.B., for Edward West Browning, better known in old tabloid headlines as “Daddy” Browning after he had become scandalously involved during the 1920s with a curvesome, blue-eyed, flirtatious girl of fourteen named Peaches Heenan.

Browning had first noticed Peaches at a high school dance one night at the Hotel McAlpin on Broadway; and though he was then a gray-haired man of fifty, it was not considered unusual for him to be among such young people because he was renowned in New York as a leader in youth work and a philanthropist who donated generously to underprivileged students, hospitalized children, and orphans.

In 1919, having no children of his own after three years of marriage, Browning and his wife had adopted a little girl. A year later, after adopting another girl, Browning built for their pleasure, over one of his large apartment houses on the Upper West Side, a luxurious rooftop residence that was surrounded by a gar
den with Japanese lanterns and temple bells, fountains and songbirds, and a lake large enough to allow a boat to be rowed about. The celebrated largess of Daddy Browning, extolled in newspapers throughout the nation, possibly lent inspiration to the cartoonist who in 1924 created the comic strip characters of Daddy Warbucks and Little Orphan Annie.

In 1925, however, Browning’s wife had divorced him, taking their older adopted daughter with her to Paris, and leaving him with the younger child named Sunshine; and while he received favorable publicity and thousands of letters after he had advertised in the press for a “girl of 14” to become a companion to the eight-year-old Sunshine, Browning’s altruism suddenly became suspect after he had met, and later began to date, young Peaches Heenan, who would be seen smiling along Fifth Avenue in the back of his peacock-blue Rolls-Royce surrounded by gift boxes containing toys, expensive clothing, and jewelry. In 1926, with the consent of her separated parents, who had reared her in a tenement building in Washington Heights, Peaches Heenan became, on her sixteenth birthday, the second Mrs. Browning.

At this time Edward Browning was worth more than $20 million. Born in Manhattan to solvent Victorian parents who had exhorted in him the Bible and the virtues of hard work, Browning advanced into manhood with a limited knowledge of youthful frivolity. With his marriage to Peaches, however, he vowed that he would devote less time to business and more to leisure, and he adjusted rather quickly to his new public image as a debonair rake. Suddenly he was part of the Jazz Age, and as he escorted the ermine-cloaked Peaches into fashionable restaurants, he paused patiently on the sidewalk in the flashing light of photographers. He provided Peaches with a chauffeured limousine, and underwrote her buying sprees along Fifth Avenue with her mother, a hospital nurse who had encouraged the relationship with Browning from the start and had received in turn cash gifts during the courtship.

In his office, Browning kept a large scrapbook filled with news clippings that mentioned his name, and he never turned down an
opportunity to be interviewed—even when, ten months after the marriage, he was sadly forced to admit to a noisy gathering of newsmen that Peaches had run away. The servants had reported seeing her leaving the Long Island house with her mother and a moving van loaded with everything he had given her. Though bitterly disappointed, Browning announced that he still loved her, and through the press he pleaded with her to return.

But Browning’s next glimpse of his wife was in a crowded New York courtroom where her lawyers demanded a divorce with a huge settlement, and where Peaches herself took the stand and charged him with mental cruelty and immorality. She said that he liked to see her in the nude at the breakfast table, and that he had once given her a book of nude photographs, and she hinted that he was a gentleman of unnatural desires.

When Browning’s attorneys cross-examined her, however, they elicited the information that prior to the marriage Peaches had kept an erotic diary containing the names of other men with whom she had made love—a fact that she tearfully admitted above the sighs and groans in the courtroom and the judge’s banging gavel. Although the final settlement was far less than Peaches Browning had hoped for—she received $170,000 in cash and eventually six West Side buildings—she capitalized on her publicity by becoming, under her mother’s guidance, a vaudeville personality and aspiring actress. But she was professionally unsuccessful, and during the ensuing decades the news about her was restricted mainly to her remarriages—she would marry and divorce three more men after Browning—and finally, in 1956, there was the headline that the former Peaches Browning had taken a fatal fall in a bathroom at the age of forty-four.

Edward Browning, who died in 1934 shortly before his sixtieth birthday, had spent his final years concentrating on what he knew best, the real estate business; and long before most of his contemporary tycoons, he foresaw the Depression and profitably
sold off the bulk of his West Side property prior to the crash, including the loft building at 11 West Seventeenth Street.

Decades after his death the exterior of the building remained pretty much as he had left it, retaining its embellished turn-of-the-century facade and his deeply carved initials; but the interior soon showed signs of deterioration and neglect. The paint peeled, the cracks widened in the walls, and the city soot settled so thickly on the windowpanes that it dimmed the daylight. The various small dress factories and milliners that had traditionally rented space in the narrow twelve-story building, south of the Garment Center, gradually moved out due either to their bankruptcy or to dissatisfaction with the building’s outmoded fixtures and the fact that its single small slow-moving elevator often broke down.

Between the 1930s and the 1960s the property was sold and resold to several owners, none of whom found it profitable, and by the 1970s the upper floor space was rather indiscriminately rented out to tenants who, in grander times, would have been deemed undesirable. In addition to
Screw
, which occupied the eleventh floor, there was on the tenth floor the headquarters of the American Communist party; and on the top floor there was a homosexual commune consisting of young men who had converted Browning’s old business office into living quarters. On the floors below, most of the tenants were, if not socially or politically deviant, at least quaintly unconventional, somewhat mysterious, or borderline bizarre.

One tenant was a metal craftsman who made brass knuckles. There was a group of middle-aged men who on certain evenings each week gathered to tinker with their model trains and run them around the miniature tracks that encircled the room. There was the editorial staff of a science fiction horror magazine called
Monster Times
, and on another floor was the office of a scandal tabloid entitled
Peeping Tom
. A divorced New York socialite, a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, used his floor as an atelier and romantic retreat. There was also in residence a reclusive red-haired lady bookbinder who was often visited at night
by her twin sister. Two floors below was an Israeli repairman who worked in an office surrounded by several tapping typewriters with nobody behind them—all the machines were automatic. Shortly before Christmas in 1970, two men who had been in the fast-food business rented space on the ninth floor and opened a massage parlor.

They concealed the cracked walls with brown Formica paneling and installed wall-to-wall carpeting that covered the floorboards between which were thousands of rusty pins and needles dating back to the days when garment workers were employed there. They built a reception room near the elevator entrance, furnishing it with a Danish modern desk and cushioned swivel chairs, a stereo and a large coffee table on which were copies of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
. In the rear they built a shower room and a sauna, and also four small private massage rooms. Each room was equipped with a massage table and a bedstand containing bottles of rubbing alcohol, oil, talc, and boxes of Kleenex.

Then they placed ads in
The Village Voice
and other newspapers seeking female employees to work as “figure models” or “masseuses.” They hoped to hire at least eight or ten women who would coordinate their daily schedules so that at least four of them would always be on duty to keep the four massage rooms in operation during the expected busy hours of noon, 5
P.M.,
and 11
P.M.
Since massage parlors were still relatively new to New York, and were not yet identified by the police as fronts for prostitution, dozens of unsuspecting young women applied for work thinking that the job was in a photographer’s studio or perhaps a health club; and when they realized that they would be rubbing the nude bodies of men, and confronting erections and sexual propositions, they sought employment elsewhere.

But other women, more liberated products of the sixties, were unappalled by this kind of work. They were not discomforted by the nudity of strangers, nor were they restrained by moral definitions that in the early fifties had inhibited their mothers. Among those hired were students Working their way through New York colleges, as well as dropouts and aging flower children; and also
less-educated females who considered massage work preferable to, and far more lucrative than, toiling as a waitress or a secretary. One applicant, a secretary who had been fired by a
Monster Times
editor on the seventh floor, walked up two flights and gained employment as a masseuse, and soon she had more than doubled her income to $350 a week.

The quick success of the massage parlor brought into the building as customers a new social element—nervous middle-class businessmen whose furtive entrances and hasty exits intensified the building’s already portentous atmosphere. The Communists on the tenth floor, most of them gray-haired Old Left radicals whose revolutionary zeal had reached its peak during the great riots and rallies in Union Square during the Depression, were particularly unnerved by the presence of the massage parlor, not only because they were sexual Puritans but because they knew that having a quasi-brothel located one floor below would inevitably add to the notoriety of the building and soon lead to frequent disruptive visits by the police as well as city inspectors who thrived on harassment. Having already heard rumors circulated through the building that the FBI had considered renting space on the ninth floor, and being regularly taunted over the telephone by anti-Communist bomb threats and hostile pickets along the sidewalk, the aging party members were undoubtedly the most paranoiac tenants on the premises, and they could not be sure that the quiet, tight-lipped conservatively dressed men seen in the elevator were not in fact federal agents.

The only tenants who welcomed the massage parlor were the male members of
Screw
’s staff, who were allowed to use the sauna whenever they wished and, at reduced rates, to be oiled and stroked to orgasm by a topless lady of their choice. The staff in turn published favorable articles about the parlor—which called itself “Experience One”—and
Screw
also began to print paid advertisements in which the parlor listed its telephone number and business hours, and boasted of the magical fingers and rapturous pleasures guaranteed by the masseuses.

Such exalted claims were quickly matched in
Screw
’s adver
tising columns by other parlors in New York, some of which also exhibited photographs of bare-breasted women, a winking, alluring covey of co-eds and hippy courtesans who suggested that they were totally available to the customer for the price of the massage. But
Screw
soon received complaints from its readers that the advertising was often deceptive, and that certain maseuses, after sexually titillating a customer who had already paid twenty-five or thirty dollars for a half-hour massage, would refuse to fellate or even masturbate him unless they were promised a tip of at least fifteen dollars; and there were also complaints that a few masseuses adamantly refused to touch a man’s genitals, no matter how much money was offered, on the grounds that it was against the law.

The law was variously interpreted around the city, and across the nation, with regard to what was morally permissible in the privacy of a massage room. While there had once been specific city and county ordinances prohibiting a professional masseur or masseuse from working on a body of the opposite sex, these Victorian restrictions declined during World War II as nurses and other female medical aides increasingly performed physical therapy on injured G.I.s, and as the massage profession itself asserted its right to treat patients and customers regardless of their sex. It saw no reason why a licensed specialist in massage, whose school training included neurology and pathology as well as a complete knowledge of musculature, could not minister to the opposite sex as ethically as, for example, a podiatrist or psychiatrist; and in such cities as New York it had for years resented the fact that its massaging practitioners—many of them members of the respected American Massage and Therapy Association, or the New York State Society of Medical Masseurs—were licensed by the city Health Board that also licensed barbers and cosmeticians and not by the New York State Department of Education that issued licenses to all categories of doctors and nurses.

By 1968, however, after much lobbying by the professional massage associations, this policy was changed—the massaging professionals became reclassified as medical personnel, with their
licenses issued by the Department of Education in Albany; and each massage student, prior to receiving his degree, had to undergo a five-hundred-hour program of study at special schools and then to pass a comprehensive state examination that scrutinized his massaging technique and evaluated his working knowledge of the body’s muscular and nervous systems.