Thy Neighbor's Wife (41 page)

Months passed, and while he continued to see his children, his aimlessness prevailed; and it was while in this state of dejection that he heard about Arlene Gough, with whom he had enjoyed a brief affair but who had dropped out of Williamson’s group and had disappeared into the Valley, as Judith had done so recently. Arlene’s name was in the newspapers: She had been found dead at home in bed with a bullet in her body. The police also discovered lying dead next to her, her lover, a young newspaper reporters employed by the Los Angeles
Times
. On the table downstairs was a recently fired .38 caliber revolver. Within hours the police had arrested, and charged with the double murder, Arlene Cough’s sixteen-year-old son.

E
ARLY IN THE
evening, as the sun faded behind the mountain, dozens of automobiles climbed the rocky road to Sandstone—foreign cars and convertibles driven by Beverly Hills adventurers in Gucci shoes and tailored denims; station wagons and new sedans carrying coiffed couples from the Valley and Orange County; Volkswagen buses and Toyotas transporting from lower Topanga and Venice Beach long-haired young people who, after parking their vehicles along the western edge of the property, inhaled the last of the fragrant weed they held dangling from their roach clips.

Even before entering the main house, the visitors could see, through a large picture window near the front door, evidence of a party already in progress: Family members and early guests stood talking, drinks in hand, under the cartwheel chandeliers that hung from the beamed ceiling; flames blazed high in the big brick fireplace; and ensconced in his usual place, in the center of the room, surrounded by his retinue, sat the burly blond emperor without clothes.

John Williamson nodded, smiling softly toward the newly arrived people he knew; but nobody approached him until they had first been admitted to the room by Barbara, who stood behind a registration desk, pen in hand, wearing only eyeglasses—plain gold-rimmed spectacles that suited her clerical countenance
but accentuated the contrast of the fabulous body that blossomed below her small determined chin.

Barbara was not happy with her job as the keeper of the gate; she would have preferred a more leisurely role befitting her position as the First Lady of Sandstone—but no one could match her efficiency at this delicate task: It required that she tactfully yet insistently turn away all nonmembers and wandering intruders; that she refuse entrance to members whose dues were in arrears, or who had arrived at Sandstone unaccompanied by a person of the opposite sex, or who were temporarily under suspension because they had previously violated one of the club rules. While the rejected individuals might have reacted vehemently had they been barred by a male family member, or might have tried to sweet-talk their way past the less formidable Oralia, Barbara’s no-nonsense manner seemed to minimize all confrontations at the door. Though invariably polite, she clearly was a woman unimpressed by false flattery, manifestations of machismo, implied threats, or even overt acts of aggression. Her unflappable nature was emphasized in a story that, while perhaps exaggerated, was circulated with delight by Sandstone members. Once, while driving through the canyon, Barbara saw a struggling woman being molested at the side of the road against a car by a man who was obviously trying to rape her. Barbara pulled her own car off the road, jumped out, and fearlessly approached the man, shouting: “Let her alone! If you want to fuck somebody, you can fuck
me
.” The man, astonished, was quickly intimidated, and retreated.

It was also true of Barbara, however, that she could be charmingly feminine when she wished to be, and that while she was a stern sentinel at the door she was not without flexibility, having an instinct for welcoming people who, though uninvited, might be potentially useful to Sandstone, or at least of sufficient stature to warrant an introduction to her husband. As Sandstone became more prosperous and relaxed about its club operation, a number of preferred people were even admitted as singles, and given honorary memberships, because their presence suggested an in
tellectual interest in, if not an endorsement of, the Williamsons’ research methods and goals.

On some evenings there were gathered around the fireplace, conversing, in varying stages of dress and sometimes nude, such individuals as the British biologist Alex Comfort, who would later write
The Joy of Sex
; the psychologists and authors Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, who would establish the Museum of Erotic Art in San Francisco, featuring their own extensive collection; the marriage counselors William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian, often referred to as the Masters and Johnson of the West Coast; the New York
Post
’s syndicated columnist Max Lerner; the onetime Los Angeles Rams football star turned poet and actor Bernie Casey; the former Rand Corporation employees Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, who had already made copies of the Pentagon Papers and were secretly being investigated by the FBI; the artist and feminist Betty Dodson, whose heroic paintings of sexual passion had dazzled visitors at her one-woman show in New York’s Wickersham Gallery; the editor Kent Carroll of Grove Press, which was planning to produce and distribute a documentary film on Sandstone; the scientific writer of sexual studies Edward M. Brecher, a close friend of Masters and Johnson; the editorial director and former publisher of the Los Angeles
Free Press
, Art Kunkin, whose decision in 1969 to print the names and home addresses of Los Angeles’ narcotics agents led to litigation and $53,000 in fines, and prompted him to sell his newspaper to a man named Marvin Miller, a publisher of sexual literature whose
own
subsequent conviction in a pornography case would be carried to the United States Supreme Court and would culminate in the landmark 1973
Miller
ruling. It was this opinion that would threaten to deliberalize all forms of sexual expression across the nation, thus superseding the celebrated
Roth
opinion of 1957 that had countered the legacy of Comstock in America.

But while the Sandstone living room at times resembled a literary salon, the floor below remained a parlor for pleasure-seekers, providing sights and sounds that many visitors, however well versed they may have been in erotic arts and letters, had never
imagined they would ever encounter under one roof during a single evening.

After descending the red-carpeted staircase, the visitors entered the semidarkness of a large room where, reclining on the cushioned floor, bathed in the orange glow from the fireplace, they saw shadowed faces and interlocking limbs, rounded breasts and reaching fingers, moving buttocks, glistening backs, shoulders, nipples, navels, long blond hair spread across pillows, thick dark arms holding soft white hips, a woman’s head hovering over an erect penis. Sighs, cries of ecstasy could be heard, the slap and suction of copulating flesh, laughter, murmuring, music from the stereo, crackling black burning wood.

As the visitors’ eyes adjusted to the light, there was a clearer view of the many shapes, sizes, textures, tones: Some couples sat cross-legged in circles, relaxing, talking, as if picnicking on a beach; others embraced in many positions: women astride men, couples lying side by side, a woman’s legs extended above her partner’s shoulders, a man in missionary position with elbows pressing into madras pillows, perspiration dripping from a bearded chin. Nearby, a woman held her breath, gasping as the man inside her began to come; then another woman, responding to the sound, arched her body and moved more quickly into her own orgasm, her skin flushed, her face grimacing, her toes clenched.

In one corner of the room, speckled in the spinning light that raced across the wall, were the silhouettes of nude disco dancers. In another corner, supine on a table, was an oil-covered woman being simultaneously stroked by five people who stood around her, massaging every part of her body, while a sinewy man at the foot of the table stretched on tiptoes toward her open thighs to caress her genitals with his tongue.

There were triads, foursomes, a few bisexuals; bodies that could belong to high-fashion models, linebackers, Wagnerian sopranos, speed swimmers, flabby academicians; tattooed arms, peace beads, ankle bracelets, ankhs, thin gold chains around waists, hefty penises, noodles, curly female pubes, fine, bushy,
trimmed, dark, blond, red valentines. It was a room with a view like none other in America, an audiovisual aphrodisiac, a
tableau vivant
by Hieronymus Bosch.

Everything that Puritan America had ever tried to outlaw, to censor, to conceal behind locked bedroom doors, was on display in this adult playroom, where men often saw for the first time another man’s erection, and where many couples became alternately stimulated, shocked, gladdened, or saddened by the sight of their spouse interlocked with a new lover. It was here one evening that John Williamson saw Barbara being gratified by a handsome, muscular black man, and Williamson felt for a few disquieting moments the boyhood emotions of the rural southerner that he had once been.

Often the nude biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net, or an ornithologist tracking along the surf a rare species of tern. A gray-haired bespectacled owlish man with a well-preserved body, Dr. Comfort was unabashedly drawn to the sight of sexually engaged couples and their concomitant cooing, considering such to be enchanting and endlessly instructive; and with the least amount of encouragement—after he had deposited his cigar in a safe place—he would join a friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.

Admirably surnamed, Comfort was comfortable in a crowd and comforting to individuals who, as novices to group nudity and sex, seemed nervous or awkward. He was a rarity in the medical profession, one who brought a bedside manner to an orgy. Reassuring, humorous, erudite but never pompous, it was a measure of Dr. Comfort’s poise and diverting effect on the people around him that hardly anyone seemed to notice that the left hand he adroitly used in group-massage sessions consisted only of a sturdy thumb. His four fingers had been blown off during the 1930s when, as a youth of fourteen, in his home-built laboratory in Eng
land, he had experimented too friskily with a quantum of gunpowder. While the loss of the fingers initially depressed him and haunted him with “delusions of sin,” and greatly limited his virtuosity at the piano, an instrument he nonetheless continued to play, it had little effect on his future career as an obstetrician, poet, novelist, husband, father, wartime anarcho-pacifist philosopher on the BBC, gerontologist, and participating sex researcher.

In the ten years that followed the accident, in fact, he published ten books. The first, begun when he was fifteen, was a travel volume describing his visit to South America on a Greek ship; the tenth, written when he was twenty-four and already listed in Who’s Who, was a novel about the fall of France during World War II. He had also by this time progressed through Cambridge as a medical student; and years later, as a practicing obstetrician, he discovered that his attenuated hand with its mobile thumb was somewhat advantageous in performing uterine inversions.

Comfort’s permissive attitude toward the sexual education of youth established him as a controversial figure in England long before he had written
The Joy of Sex
. In 1963, the year the Profumo call-girl scandal shook the Tory government and launched the careers of many moral reformers, Comfort was widely vilified for publicly advocating contraceptives for teenagers; and a schoolmistress later charged that a student, after reading a treatise by Dr. Comfort, contracted venereal disease—a case of contagion that, Comfort was pleased to discover, did not get very far in court.

After moving to Santa Barbara, California, in 1970, where he served as a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Comfort heard about Sandstone and later made his first of many visits. While he was already a conditioned nudist, being a member of the Diogenes naturist club in England and a frequenter of such retreats as Mont Alivet on the north coast of Bordeaux, he was immediately impressed by Sandstone’s open sexuality, which provided him with an opportunity to ob
serve, in a nonlaboratory situation, the mating behavior of human beings.

Here he could see the multiformity of anatomy, the diversity in foreplay, the lawless acts of tenderness being exchanged between virtual strangers. A seemingly shy woman that Comfort had met earlier when she arrived with her husband upstairs, where she had appeared to be uneasy about removing her clothes, was now downstairs in the nude with another man, bouncing astride his pelvis like a fearless bronco rider. Nearby could be seen the white buttocks, the suntanned back, and gray blow-dried hair of a Hollywood producer, kneeling like a supplicant between the open thighs of a dominant housewife who sat on a pile of pillows giving him directions.

In the room were the flaccid penises of anxious men who, perhaps as first-time visitors to Sandstone, were not yet able to maintain erections in the presence of a crowd; and there were also exhibitionistic men, human coital machines, lancers locked in a medieval duel of endurance. There were people, too, who seemed amazingly blasé about sex, such as the two middle-aged men who sat with their backs to the wall and, while being fellated by two women, carried on a conversation as casually as cabdrivers on a sunny day chatting through their open windows while waiting for the traffic light to change.

Many couples in the room merely watched the proceedings in wonderment, and to them the visit to Sandstone was a learning experience, a biology class, an opportunity to become increasingly knowledgeable about sex in the way that people traditionally learned about almost everything
except
sex, through the observation and imitation of other people. Comfort believed that visitors could learn more about their sexual selves in one night at Sandstone than they could from all the authoritative sex manuals and seminars conducted by sexologists.

Here they could watch other people’s many techniques, hear the varied responses, see the expressions on the faces, the movements of the muscles, the flush of skin, the different ways that some people liked to be held, touched, tongued, tickled, nibbled,
pinched, aroused with genital kissing, anal stimulation, scrotum stroking. Special acts of titillation that some visitors privately fancied, but had never requested of their lovers because such penchants might seem “kinky,” often were on view in the room downstairs, and thus Sandstone served its visitors as a source of reassurance and self-validation. Women who required considerable time and stimulation in order to achieve an orgasm, and had wondered if this was normal, would discover at Sandstone many women like themselves; and women who had been attracted to other women but had been repelled by visions of lesbianism could watch liberated heterosexual women in triads and foursomes fondling another woman’s breasts, caressing the clitoris, happily identifying with female pleasure—and men, too, though more concerned than women by the specter of homosexuality, could in the affirmative ambience of group sex touch other men, massage a male body, kiss a man on the mouth as, decades ago, during the final stage of male adolescence in a Puritan society, they had kissed their fathers.