Thy Neighbor's Wife (39 page)

His enforced absence, however, did not diminish the determination of Oneida’s outside opposition to destroy what he had created; at the very least, the clergy and lawmen demanded that Oneida’s propagative program be abolished, and that the pregnant young women and unwed mothers sanctify their sinful acts by marrying the men who had impregnated them—a proposal complicated by the fact that many of the men were already married to other women. An unmarried woman who had borne one of John Humphrey Noyes’s recent sons, for example, had also produced a child with another married man as well as a third child with an Oneidan who could not positively be identified. Such issues as questionable paternity had previously been of minor importance in this once-blissful haven where complex marriage had been heralded as the highest form of union, and where the communal businesses had promised sufficient funds to eternally support all the brides of Christ and their distinctive progeny.

But while prosperity still prevailed at Oneida, and while the community’s new silverware enterprise seemed likely to contribute even more money to its half-million-dollar treasury, Oneida’s economic situation depended largely on the public’s continued goodwill and patronage; and if the highly publicized campaign against Oneida continued unabated, it could ultimately induce an economic boycott of Perfectionist products and finally convert the beautiful estate into an infamous landmark of poverty and social isolation.

Were John Humphrey Noyes still residing at Oneida, his forceful leadership and intrepidity might have given strength to his followers; but no amount of inspirational mail written by him in exile could allay Oneida’s uncertainty and consternation, nor could it prevent within the community the gradual emergence of
three distinct factions that each offered different solutions to the problems everyone now shared.

One faction, which included Theodore and several of the younger business-oriented members, believed that the community should become more secularized and capitalistic, perhaps reorganizing into a joint-stock company and deemphasizing its identity as an esoteric religion. Hoping to appease its outside critics, it would discontinue Oneida’s controversial sex practices, at least temporarily, and would publicly announce that it was encouraging marriage among its young people.

A second faction, headed by James Towner, was still militantly committed to Bible communism and all of its sexual freedoms; it was convinced that if the Perfectionists would replace its aging and exiled leader with Mr. Towner, and conform to his vigorous guidance, it could boldly stand fast against the outside agitation. To the suggestion that Oneida soften its position against monogamous marriage, Towner remained unalterably opposed. “I believe in communism of love just as much as I believe in communism of property,” he said. “I do not believe that marriage and communism can exist together.”

A third group, whose one hundred members nearly doubled the combined total of the other two, consisted of Noyes’s loyalists who, having accepted him as God’s only true representative on earth, could not even imagine the presence of another man in his place, especially since they knew that Noyes was still alive and perhaps destined to reappear at any moment. Among the leading members of this faction were some elders who had been converted to Perfectionism more than thirty years ago at Putney, such as Noyes’s sister, Harriet Noyes Skinner; Noyes’s first male partner in complex marriage, George Cragin; and the architect of Oneida’s first mansion, Erastus H. Hamilton.

But on the fringe of this faction and the others, there were some Oneidans who were maintaining their neutrality, or were shifting their alliances from day to day, or were just feeling rooted like trees to the property, but stymied without a source of support or sustenance beyond the communal walls, and quietly
praying that they would not be invaded by the mobs that Mr. Noyes had often identified as “the barbarians.”

Particularly prone to such feelings of insecurity were several unmarried women with children, and many nubile virgins too, who were now less eager to offer up their bodies in the blithe spirit of free love when they no longer felt the pervasive presence of freedom and love extending through the community. Many women abstained from sex during this time, to the chagrin of the men, while other women began to insist on something more than just bodily pleasure and praise from the men they favored—they wanted to be possessed, and to possess in turn, and to extract from the objects of their affection the promise of eventual marriage.

These inclinations, and others that were contrary to the ideals of Perfectionism, were described in many letters that Noyes received from his loyalists at Oneida, and he was saddened and perturbed by what he read. The young university students and teenagers seemed to be particularly rebellious to the traditions of Oneida: They were going off by themselves and becoming romantically attached as couples; they were ignoring the Bible and the criticism of their elders; a number of young men had somehow acquired their own horses, defying Oneida’s longtime rule against private ownership; and a few of the younger women were now letting their hair grow longer, and were also tending toward the longer dresses that were the fashion of the outside world.

The teachers and governesses who formerly exercised complete and unquestioned authority over each and every child were now being challenged by the natural mothers; and one result of the new maternal attention was increased childish unruliness, quarreling over toys, and a general deterioration of discipline.

In addition to the negative reports from Oneida, Noyes was sent clippings from big-city newspapers which, with few exceptions, reflected the condemning views of the nation’s legal and moral establishment and portrayed the Oneidans as prurient eccentrics in a state of disarray. Typical of the news coverage was a feature story in the New York
Times
bearing the headline:
“Oneida’s Queer People; Trouble in the Community of Socialists.”

With the unceasing exposure and ridicule from without, and the deterioration from within, Noyes, after weeks of pondering and deliberating with his most trusted advisers, decided that in the interest of saving Oneida from a long and costly legal battle that might bankrupt its businesses and further demoralize its members—to say nothing of the constant threat of bodily harm from the mobs—he must announce the discontinuation of complex marriage and propagative free love. He knew that this would be interpreted in the press as an unconditional surrender to his enemies, but in his public announcement in August 1879, and in his subsequent statements to the press, he was typically unrepentant, and he even hinted that the day might come when his people would again indulge in the joyful rites of perpetual courtship.

The official statement declared: “We give up the practice of Complex Marriage, which has existed for thirty-three years in the community, not as renouncing belief in the principles and prospective finality of that institution, but in deference to the public sentiment which is evidently rising against it.” In another statement, he reiterated his position: “The community has no regrets for the past; it, on the contrary, considers itself fortunate in having been called to such pioneer work; it rejoices in the general results of its reconnaissance; it abandons no previous convictions, it is simply persuaded that it is best for all interests, including those of social progress itself, that it should give up the practice of Complex Marriage and place itself on Paul’s platform, which allows marriage but prefers celibacy.” Finally, as if presenting a historical assessment of the Perfectionists’ primary purpose and contribution to nineteenth-century America, Noyes observed: “We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it, and returned without the loss of a man, woman, or child.”

But in allying himself with St. Paul in recommending celibacy as the most desirous of virtues, Noyes was not subjecting himself to any great personal sacrifice, for he was at this time in life a sexually satiated man of sixty-eight who had taken full advantage of
the free-love system while it lasted, and he could now relax in his Canadian retirement and rejoice in the health and growth of the nine young Oneida-born children who would bear his name and honor his memory through the twentieth century. Indeed, one of his progeny, an industrious adolescent named Pierrepont B. Noyes—whose mother, Harriet Worden, had been brought to Oneida as a girl of nine—would emerge in the late 1890s as Oneida’s leader, and, with the help of
his
heirs, he would develop the Oneida silversmith business into an international corporation that in the 1970s would be worth close to $100 million.

This multiplied fortune, however, could in no way be attributed even by free-love advocates to the regenerative energies of sexual variety because the libidinal luxuries of old Oneida would never be restored within the community following the founder’s pronouncements of 1879—although it must also be added that few Oneidans were greatly persuaded by John Humphrey Noyes’s belated leanings toward celibacy. After he had issued his dictum, which did pacify his foes in the outside world, a majority of Oneida’s eligible bachelors accepted the lesser of two evils and succumbed in matrimony.

Thirty-seven marriages were soon performed, many conducted by fellow Perfectionists on the lush mansion lawns, but other Oneidans—including twelve women under forty years of age who had children—remained unmarried, and whether or not they adhered to celibacy and whether the married couples remained monogamous were facts unrecorded by Oneida’s social historians. Most of the newly married couples chose to stay at Oneida, living in the fully occupied mansion or in smaller dwellings nearby, and they continued to work at various jobs within the communal complex.

In 1880 Oneida converted itself into a joint-stock company, and all of its remaining 226 residents became stockholders of the Oneida Community, Limited. The division of stock, which gave to the most senior Perfectionists amounts worth $5,000 or more, and lesser shares to the newly arrived and younger members, was a source of contention within the community; and, not unex
pectedly, the members most dissatisfied with the distribution of stock—and also with Noyes’s continued insistence on the abolition of complex marriage—were James Towner and his thirty followers.

In 1882, four years before John Humphrey Noyes’s death in Canada at the age of seventy-four—his body would be returned to Oneida for burial—James Towner and his faction quit the community, converted their shares to cash, and, with a horse-drawn caravan, began a long westward trek toward the more clement atmosphere and loosely federated lands of Southern California. The group resettled in the township of Santa Ana, south of Los Angeles, where in time they gained acceptance and achieved contentment and prosperity—and where James Towner was later to be elevated as a county court judge.

A
S JOHN WILLIAMSON
began in 1970 to recruit new members for Sandstone Retreat, he was not alone in his belief that alternate-life-style communities were finally coming of age in America; in fact, according to a survey published in the New York
Times
, it was estimated that there were now in the nation approximately two thousand separate settlements of various sizes and distinctions, located in farmhouses and city lofts, hillside manors and desert adobes, geodesic domes and ghetto tenements; and they were occupied by hippie horticulturists, meditating mystics, swingers, Jesus freaks, ecological evangelists, retired rock musicians, tired peace marchers, corporate dropouts, and devotees of Reich and Maslow, B. F. Skinner, Robert Rimmer, and Winnie the Pooh.

In Oregon, a few miles west of Eugene, there was an eighty-
acre settlement founded by sexually liberated midwesterners who operated a beef-cattle business. In Berkeley, California, couples lived together connubially, if not always compatibly, in a large house called “Harrad West” that was inspired by one of Robert Rimmer’s novels on sexual utopianism. Within a secluded residence in the woodlands of Lafayette, a suburb of Oakland, lived a thirty-four-year-old advocate of “responsible hedonism” named Victor Baranco, who, having made money in real-estate developing, now had several mini-communes throughout California and in other states; and
Rolling Stone
magazine called Baranco “the Colonel Sanders of the commune scene.”

Not far from San Cristobal, New Mexico, was the 130-acre Lama community founded by a New York artist and his Stanford-educated wife; and in the Colorado mountains, near Walsenburg, were a cluster of chalets belonging to the Libre community, whose members worked as painters, potters, and leather crafters. Ten miles outside of Meadville, Pennsylvania, was the hippie commune of Oz, established on land inherited by a former merchant seaman; and in central Virginia, near the town of Culpeper, was the 120-acre Twin Oaks community that had been founded by young social theorists who ran a farm, manufactured hammocks, and named their main residence “Oneida.”

In New York City there were ashrams located in brownstones that were occupied by spiritually minded communitarians who, when not concentrating on yoga and chanting mantras, hired themselves out as carpenters, plasterers, and house painters. In Putney, Vermont, from which John Humphrey Noyes’s group had been expelled more than a century ago, there were now five countercultural communes, the most anarchistic of which—the Red Clover settlement—was largely financed by a privileged scion of a cereal-manufacturing family. Farther upstate was a farming community named Bryn Athyn that was inhabited by many Reich readers who believed that there was indeed a correlation between monogamy, possessiveness, jealousy, and war; but this agricultural community, like so many others that were populated by campus-bred radicals, would flounder financially
because its members spent too much time reading quality paperbacks and pontificating around the fireplace, and not enough time in the barn milking the cows.

This was the recurring impression of a writer named Robert Houriet, who between 1968 and 1971—while researching his book
Getting Back Together
—visited dozens of communes in every region of the nation; and while he admired the idealism and efficiency he found in such places as Twin Oaks in Virginia, he could not ignore the fact that many other communitarians lacked the discipline and dedication to practice what they preached—they denounced the pollution and plastic of the outside world, yet created a junk culture of their own in squalid psychedelic shacks and lofts overpopulated by drifters who were high on dope and low on energy. Everywhere that Robert Houriet went in his travels, he heard young people yearning to live in organic harmony with the earth, to inhabit a peaceful place remote from greed and hostility; but Houriet also found himself surrounded in communes by “hassles and marathon encounter meetings that couldn’t resolve questions like whether to leave the dogs in or out. Everywhere, cars that wouldn’t run and pumps that wouldn’t pump because everybody knew all about the occult history of tarot and nobody knew anything about mechanics. Everywhere, people who strove for self-sufficiency and freedom from the capitalist system but accepted food stamps and handouts from Daddy, a corporate sales VP. Sinks filled with dishes, cows wandering through gates left open, and no one to blame. Everywhere, instability, transiency. Somebody was always splitting, rolling up his bag, packing his guitar and kissing good-bye—off again in search of the truly free, unhungup community.”

John Williamson was quite aware that communes tended to attract such rootless people, and he was wary of having too many of them at Sandstone. While he wanted countercultural couples to participate in the Sandstone experience—he even placed ads announcing Sandstone’s expanding membership in the underground Los Angeles
Free Press
—he deliberately did not reveal the location of the estate, listing instead the telephone number of
a small rented office in the city in which his followers could arrange to personally interview the applicants and explain to them the basic requirements and costs of joining Sandstone.

Because Sandstone had no farm or industry to provide income, Williamson decided to accept approximately two hundred dues-paying members who would be charged $240 annually to use Sandstone as a kind of club: They could visit during the day to swim in the pool, sunbathe nude on the deck of the main house, picnic on the lawn; and on certain evenings they could join the “family” for a buffet dinner, where nudity was customary but not obligatory, and after dinner they could venture downstairs into a spacious, dimly lit, red-carpeted room that was sixty-by-twenty feet and was lined with soft mats and large pillows to be used by anyone who wanted to make love, or merely wished to relax and listen to the stereo music, or to converse with other people around the fireplace.

To make certain that all prospective members were forewarned about Sandstone’s permissive evenings, each applicant received during his interview a brochure that stated:

Among the few rigidly enforced regulations at Sandstone were that no one under eighteen could become a member; no drugs of any kind were to be used on the property; and, in order to maintain an equal balance between the sexes, only couples were allowed to attend the evening activities. While wine was served with dinner, the consumption of hard liquor was discouraged; and efforts were made during the preliminary interviews in the office, and during the follow-up interviews by John and Barbara Williamson in the main house, to learn if the applicants had a past history of alcoholism, heavy drug usage, mental illness, or other problems that might be revived or aggravated by exposure to the highly charged sexual atmosphere of Sandstone, where committed couples might for the first time become fully aware of, and even be witness to, their lover’s infidelity.

To whatever degree was possible, John Williamson wanted to assemble a large membership of stable couples, young middle-class sensualists who believed that their personal relationships would be enhanced, rather than shattered, by the elimination of sexual possessiveness. Williamson also hoped that the membership would include a high percentage of representatives from the media and academia, leading businessmen, lawyers, physicians, writers, and social scientists—achieving individuals who, as “change people,” might spread the Sandstone philosophy by word if not by deed to their friends, their associates, and the consuming public that was becoming increasingly receptive to new ideas and values.

In the interest of meeting and possibly recruiting influential people, Williamson sent letters to distinguished university-affiliated anthropologists and psychologists, inviting them to spend a day at Sandstone; he hired a public relations associate and gave interviews to the press; and with his wife, Barbara, he
traveled long distances to attend and speak at seminars dealing with alternate-life-style communities and the changing modes of marriage. At one such symposium held at the Kirkridge Retreat in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, Williamson delivered a lecture explaining Sandstone’s goals to an audience that included Robert Francoeur, a man who had left the Catholic priesthood to become a writer, a husband, and a professor of embryology and sexuality at Fairleigh Dickinson University; Rustrum and Delia Roy, two chemists at Pennsylvania State University who were experienced married counselors; Stephen Beltz, a psychologist who was the executive director in Philadelphia of the Center for Behavior Modification; the novelist Robert Rimmer; and several others who, after hearing Williamson, became fascinated with his California experiment and expressed a desire to visit Sandstone and observe what was happening there.

While Williamson was generating enthusiasm in distant places, his family back home was not ideally coexisting in his absence; and even when he was present at Sandstone, he seemed to be looking outward, drifting away from his circle of intimates as he focused on plans for the future, devoted his time to entertaining important visitors, and directed his beguiling charm and sexual energy to the courting and satisfaction of new and different women.

The first person to perceive and resent Williamson’s changing character was Judith Bullaro, who, having been ardently pursued by him in the past, and having become accustomed to his special attention, and even dependent upon it, now felt somewhat ignored and used. For him she had disrupted her family life, had left her comfortable suburban home to move with her children and her disaffected husband into a rented ranch in Topanga Canyon so that she would be close to Sandstone and be conveniently available to help Williamson and the others with the cleaning, the painting, the remodeling, the landscaping, and the overall restoration of the property that now, in its state of splendid com
pletion, was serving as a showcase for Williamson’s ego and expanding ambitions.

Less the romantic guru that he had appeared to be, and more the calculating engineer that had been his true profession, Williamson in Judith’s view was now turning Sandstone into a domestic laboratory in which his nude family were exhibited as models to attract new members, new money, and the interest of the academic world with which Williamson wished to associate himself. Lacking a formal education beyond high school, his only means of achieving academic status for Sandstone was through the establishment of an advisory board composed of university-accredited scientists and random behaviorists who, in return for the revitalization of their own physical drives, might be motivated to support Williamson’s future efforts to obtain private foundation grants, or even government funds, so that he could continue his research into the root causes of jealousy and possessiveness—problems for which Judith thought there were no cures except if people ceased to deeply care about one another.

Judith believed, in fact, that even John Williamson—while he did not restrain his wife—was susceptible to feelings of sexual possessiveness; he seemed to dislike the fact that his cherished Oralia Leal was now spending increased amounts of time in private with David Schwind, and Judith herself had felt a negative response from Williamson when
she
confessed to being physically attracted to Schwind.

Disregarding Williamson’s reaction, Judith had one day invited David to visit her while her children were at school and her husband was at the insurance office; but she told no one about this rendezvous, nor about one that followed. Nevertheless she was unsettled by these clandestine meetings—bothered by the realization that, because she sensed that Williamson would disapprove of her intimacies with Schwind, she chose to conceal from Williamson what was really none of his business; and thus she was acknowledging his enduring influence over her private life. The whole situation was fraught with contradictions: Williamson, the outspoken advocate of open sexuality and unpossessiveness,
seemed to be hypocritical in his manner toward Oralia and herself; and Judith, in resenting Williamson’s “infidelities” with women that he had recently met—and quietly retaliating perhaps in her liaisons with Schwind—was making a travesty of the liberated status that she thought she had attained since joining Williamson’s group. It was possible, despite her experience in consentual adultery with her husband, that she was at heart a conventional woman who was possessive and guilt-ridden where sex was concerned; and it was while in this questioning state of mind, restive and perturbed by Williamson’s elusive leverage over her life, that she concluded that she must somehow separate herself from Williamson and his disillusioning utopia.

What would prove to be decisive in her decision, however, was a relatively trivial incident that on the surface had little to do with her relationship with Williamson, or her sex life, or her marriage, or her children, or anything that was deeply personal. The source of provocation in this case was none other than her pet cat.