Thy Neighbor's Wife (32 page)

Closing the door and spreading the sheet over the table, she waited until the man was completely nude before she began to remove her clothing. It was the belief of most studio managers that, if the customer happened to be a plainclothes police officer, the masseuse could not be prosecuted for immorality if the policeman had preceded her in exposing himself; and while this assumption had yet to be tested in court, it was nonetheless adhered to in most parlors.

Although the majority of customers were old enough to be the masseuse’s father, there was a curious reversal of roles after the sexual massage had begun: It was the young women who held the authority, who had the power to give or deny pleasure, while the men lay dependently on their backs, moaning softly with their eyes closed, as their bodies were being rubbed with baby oil or talc. For these men it was possibly their first intimate contact with the sexually emancipated youth movement that they had read and heard so much about, the world of Woodstock and the Pill; and as they became better acquainted with certain masseuses through frequent visits to a parlor, they often gained insight into the alienated generation that they had helped to sire.

The masseuses in turn learned much about the frustrations of middle-aged men, their marital difficulties, their job problems,
their fantasies and insecurities. Some men were so nervous as they lay on the table that their bodies shook and they perspired excessively. Others could not ejaculate, or maintain their erections, unless the masseuses expressed a personal interest in them, flattered them on the condition of their bodies, and reassured them that their penises were as large as, or larger than, other men’s. There were men so guilt-ridden that they could not experience maximum pleasure unless the masseuse, complying with their requests, verbally admonished them as she masturbated them, berated them and scolded them as if they were schoolboys caught during moments of “self-abuse.”

There were customers who had recently left the priesthood and were trying to acclimate themselves for the first time to a woman’s touch; and there were Orthodox rabbis who covered their penises with condoms or plastic sandwich baggies so that they could be masturbated
without
fleshly contact. There were distinguished stockbrokers and bankers who negotiated with masseuses for fellatio, explaining that this was something their wives refused to do; and there were blue-collar workers who were similarly satisfied by masseuses but admitted that this was something they would never ask their wives to do.

Old men carrying canes, widowers and divorcees, modern-day Daddy Brownings, had regular appointments at certain parlors, and they sometimes kept bottles of their favorite whiskey in the linen cabinets; and there were also vigorous younger men so brimming with energy that they paid double rates for two masseuses at once, and enjoyed three orgasms during the half-hour session. An extremely shy individual named Arthur Bremer, wearing a suit with a vest, arrived one day at the Victorian Studio on Forty-sixth and Lexington, but he was too tense during the massage to have an orgasm. A month later, at a political rally in Maryland, Arthur Bremer shot and paralyzed the governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace.

There were many romantic men who frequented massage parlors and occasionally fell in love with a masseuse, and became clearly upset on days when they arrived early for an appointment
and discovered that she was in a room with another man. At the Secret Life Studio, on Twenty-sixth and Lexington, a frequent customer was a Harvard graduate and recent divorcee who practiced psychiatry in Manhattan, and his regular masseuse was an attractive blonde who had graduated from Louisiana State University and had worked for
Look
magazine. After many sexual sessions in the parlor, the couple began to date on the outside, and within a year they were married and later moved to Florida.

In time, a few businessmen who had patronized massage parlors—but were dissatisfied with the fact that these undercapitalized establishments rarely possessed even such basic facilities as a shower room—began to build parlors of their own, larger places with molded plastic chairs, air conditioning, new massage tables, steam rooms, saunas, sun lamps, Muzak, and credit card billing. The first of these franchise-modern studios was Experience One, on the ninth floor of Daddy Browning’s old loft, owned by the men from the fast-food business; but within a year this studio would be surpassed in comfort and gadgetry by several others, all of which would eventually be visited by
Screw
’s top editor, Al Goldstein, who began publishing in his newspaper a weekly connoisseur’s column on the booming massage business—and he could thus claim that each of his joyful orgasms was a tax deduction.

It was Goldstein’s intention to visit, unannounced, each parlor in the city, the new and the old, paying the same price as any other customer; and after experiencing the manipulative skills of the various masseuses, and keeping mental notes on the cleanliness of each establishment as well as the courtesy of the management, he would then write a brief description of each parlor in
Screw
and assign to each a rating of from one to four stars.

When Goldstein began the assignment in 1971 there were not more than a dozen parlors, but by late 1972 the number in New York had exceeded forty, and Goldstein learned that the services and prices varied from place to place, and sometimes from day to day, depending largely on the mood of the masseuse and her compatibility with her customer. At the Pink Orchid on Four
teenth Street, which was hot and overcrowded when he arrived, and still had neither showers nor air conditioning, Goldstein paid fourteen dollars to be massaged by a sullen brunet wearing hot pants; and for a promised fifteen-dollar tip, she masturbated and fellated him perfunctorily, while looking mainly at her wrist-watch. Goldstein gave the Pink Orchid one star in the next issue of
Screw
, describing it as “not recommended.”

At the Mademoiselle Studio on Fifty-eighth and Lexington, owned by three Israelis who equipped their air-conditioned seven-room layout with a refreshment bar and a movie projector that flashed erotic color slides on the walls of the reception room, Goldstein was able to buy with a twenty-dollar massage charge, and a subsequent tip of twenty-five dollars, intercourse on a water bed with an attractive divorcee of twenty-six who said that she had two children in the Connecticut suburbs and that she sold real estate there on weekends. She was amiable and fun to be with, and Goldstein awarded Mademoiselle three stars—“recommended: the best of its kind available.”

At the Middle Earth Studio, on the second floor of a brick building at 835 Third Avenue, Goldstein paid the manager eighteen dollars and selected as his masseuse a blue-eyed brunet with long straight hair and pure complexion who wore a Rosicrucian cross around her neck. She was serene and graceful, and in the private room she easily aroused him. She had beautiful hands with long fingers and she seemed to enjoy what she was doing, never once taking her eyes off his erect penis as she fondled it, knowing no doubt that most men loved to watch a woman caressing this strange object with familiarity. He wanted almost desperately for her to put it in her mouth; but when he asked if she would do it, she politely refused, saying that the policy at Middle Earth strictly forbid this—only “manual release” was allowed, and this service was automatically provided with the massage, no extra tipping was required. She then confided that the small mirror on the wall of the massage room was made of one-way glass, permitting the manager to peek in to make certain that the rules were being obeyed. This disclosure suddenly upset Goldstein,
disrupting his feeling of intimacy with the masseuse; and while he enjoyed her masturbatory massage, he gave Middle Earth only two stars.

The many mirrors that he later saw as he visited the larger studios, mirrors that sometimes extended across the entire walls and ceilings of the private rooms, continued to discomfort him, not only because he half suspected that a voyeuristic manager might be watching but also because
he
did not want to be exposed to the corpulent reflection of himself as he lay nude on a table.

At the multimirrored Caesar’s Retreat, however, a plush mock-Roman studio at 219 East Forty-sixth Street, Goldstein was sufficiently diverted by a toga-clad masseuse and her extraordinary pampering to overcome his self-consciousness; and he bestowed upon Caesar’s a four-star citation. Nothing in New York yet compared to Caesar’s Retreat, where thousands of dollars had obviously been spent by its owner—a Bronx-born onetime stockbroker named Robert Scharaga—in decorating the many private rooms, the sauna, the circular baths, the plaster-cast Romanesque statuary and fountain; and the customers could drink free champagne in the reception room while waiting for their half-hour massage sessions done with warm herbal oil. A proper massage cost twenty dollars, but more money could buy more, and for one hundred dollars a customer could have a champagne bath with three liberated ladies.

After Goldstein had surveyed the parlors of New York, he traveled around the country and discovered that erotic massaging had become a national preoccupation—it was the fast-food business of sex, a nutrient for the libido. In the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, the ten-room Tiki-Tiki massage parlor was located in a shopping center. There were parlors in Charlotte, in Atlanta, in Dallas; and in the strongly Catholic, Daley-dominated city of Chicago, there was a downtown parlor on South Wabash Street that was decorated to resemble the interior of a church. The manager’s small reception desk was enclosed within a six-hundred-pound wooden Gothic confessional that had been purchased from a wrecking company that had demolished a
South Side church; and there were prayer benches and other ecclesiastical objects in the parlor, as well as ornate dark-wood bookcases in which were displayed hard-core sex magazines and dildoes.

Hoping to protect the parlor against infiltration by the police, the owner established his business as a private club that customers could join only after they had produced verifiable identification papers and had signed a document stating that they were not affiliated with any law-enforcement agency—a statement that customers were not only required to sign but also to read aloud in front of the confessional, unaware that their voices were being recorded by a hidden microphone, and their faces were being filmed by a camera peering through the folds of the purple velvet draperies that hung within the confessional. The cautious owner of this parlor was named Harold Rubin; and when Goldstein walked in requesting a massage, Rubin eagerly introduced himself as an avid reader of
Screw
and he insisted that Goldstein take a session with two masseuses at the management’s expense.

In Los Angeles, Goldstein saw dozens of parlors located along Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Strip, some of which were open twenty-four hours a day. Los Angeles’ most prominent parlor—owned by forty-two-year-old Mark Roy, a former Arthur Murray dance instructor who later prospered as a director of several ladies’ weight-reducing salons—was called Circus Maximus, and it occupied a spacious three-story house located a half block south of Sunset on La Cienega Boulevard. The house had a parking lot large enough for eighty cars. Like Caesar’s Retreat in New York, Circus Maximus’ decor sought to suggest Roman hedonism; its thirty masseuses wore mini-togas of purple, gold, or white crepe, and its advertising proclaimed: “Men haven’t had it so good since the days of Pompeii.”

A half hour’s drive from Sunset Strip, in the quiet hills of Topanga Canyon high above Malibu Beach, Goldstein visited a nudist “growth center” called Elysium, seven acres of lovely land hidden from public view by trees and tall fences behind which
nude members could massage one another, or be massaged by staff professionals. Like the Esalen Institute in Northern California, Elysium offered its visiting members and guests a varied schedule of “awareness” seminars and psychotherapy programs; but unlike Esalen, Elysium was pleasure-oriented, having in addition to pools and saunas, tennis courts and riding horses, semi-private rooms in the main building where people could go to have sex.

Goldstein had previously published in
Screw
photographs taken at Elysium, but he was even more impressed when he saw the place in person and interviewed its founder, Ed Lange, a tall, well-built former fashion photographer with an elegantly trimmed gray beard. Lange had been born fifty-two years earlier into a conservative German family in Chicago, had become an outstanding school athlete, but had recognized within himself a strong inclination toward a less regimented, more creative lifestyle. Ever since purchasing his first under-the-counter copy of
Sunshine
&
Health
magazine as a teenager in the late 1930s, Lange had been fascinated with nudism; and when he moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, working as a Hollywood set designer and freelance photographer for such magazines as
Vogue
and the
Bazaar
, he joined a pioneering nudist club that was sometimes raided by the police. In the mid-1950s at this club he met an extremely attractive young married couple, Joseph and Diane Webber, and it was Lange who during the next fifteen years took most of the nude pictures of Diane Webber that appeared in magazines around the country. Later these and other nude pictures were reprinted in magazines that he began to publish; and the purchase of the land for Elysium was the fulfillment of Lange’s longtime fantasy.

At the time of Goldstein’s visit, Lange was engaged in a dispute with Los Angeles County officials who were trying to close his commune under a local zoning ordinance which they interpreted as prohibiting nudist groups from assembling within the district. It was not only Elysium that was being cited but also a neighboring “growth center” located higher in the hills of To
panga Canyon, Sandstone Retreat. Sandstone was a fifteen-acre estate occupied by several nude couples who were living in open sexual freedom and seeking to eliminate possessiveness and jealousy. The owner of Sandstone was named John Williamson; among the couples were John and Judith Bullaro.