Thy Neighbor's Wife (42 page)

Couples wishing to overcome the boredom of their marital bedrooms, while preserving their marriages, could become eroticized by contact with other people at Sandstone, and later they could divert this sexual energy back into their own relationships. Men who noticed that their wives aroused other men became in many cases aroused by her themselves and strove to repossess her; while women, particularly those who had been monogamous in long-term marriages, could reexperience with a new man old feelings of being desired, sexually free, unaccountable—indeed, many couples could relive during an evening at Sandstone, in ways that were not always harmonious to their marriages but were individually regenerative, the élan of youthful courtship.

A few women who had recently undergone disturbing divorces, and were not yet ready for another
affaire de coeur
, adopted Sandstone temporarily as their second home, a halfway house to which they could bring dates but also maintain their independence by enjoying sex and companionship with other people. For women who were sexually energetic and at least moder
ately aggressive, Sandstone was perhaps the only place where they could boldly pursue men as objects of pleasure, could approach any desired stranger in the crowd upstairs and ask, after a minimum of conversation, “Would you like to go downstairs?”

There was no need for coquetry or traditional feminine coyness at Sandstone, no thoughts about one’s “reputation” nor the legitimate concerns that most women had about their physical safety whenever conversing with male strangers in bars or other public places. A
Goodbar
scene was impossible at Sandstone, where women were protected by those around them from being victims of one man’s hostility. At Sandstone a sexually adventurous woman could experience, if her mind were willing, her body’s capacity to exhaust in a single evening the best efforts of a succession of lusty Lotharios.

Anyone who doubted the superior sexual stamina of women over men—a fully erect male, according to Kinsey, averaged only two and one-half minutes of thrusting after penetration—had merely to visit Sandstone’s downstairs “ballroom” on a party night and observe in action such women as Sally Binford, an elegant gray-haired divorcee of forty-six whose beautifully proportioned body invariably effused the passions of one lover after another, although her bright dark eyes did not look to any man for a confirmation of her desirability: She was as emotionally secure as she was physically alluring. She was also an adventurer and a feminist dedicated to the establishment of a more egalitarian society between the sexes, a world in which women could be as good as men, or as bad as men, and be similarly judged.

Having spent the first two decades of her life in New York, where she was born and reared, and the next two decades in Chicago, where she acquired four college degrees and three husbands, she moved to California, where during the mid-sixties she participated in, and contributed to, the continuing radicalization of the West Coast.

In the early summer of 1970, after learning of the existence of an unusual commune in Topanga Canyon, she drove alone one afternoon up the hilly roads into the bucolic splendor of Sand
stone Retreat, where, after parking her car and looking through the large front window of the main house, she saw in a corner of the living room a blond man sitting nude behind a desk tapping on a typewriter.

John Williamson stopped typing when he heard her knock; and after Barbara had opened the door, and Sally had presented her credentials, she was welcomed. Williamson, impressed with what he saw, invited her to take a swim and introduced her to other members of the family, including a perky young brunet named Meg Discoe who had been a UCLA student in Sally Binford’s Department of Anthropology.

From then on Sally Binford became a Sandstone habitué and a sex partner of, among other men, John Williamson.

B
Y PROFESSION
, Sally Binford was an anthropologist and archaeologist, a student of extinct civilizations and Neanderthal cavemen; but, unlike many of the prehistoric subjects she excavated and studied, she was adaptable to various climates, atmospheres, and habitations, and was quick to move from place to place whenever she became dissatisfied with her environment and the people who were part of it.

The social and sexual mores that influenced the behavior of most female members of her generation were largely ignored by her from the time of her adolescence in suburban Long Island, where she was reared by wealthy parents in a home with servants, but where—unlike her favored older sister, a conformist whom she deeply resented—Sally Binford had been a rebel, a tomboy, a kind of changeling that her mother tolerated but could never understand.

Sally was no more understanding of her mother, a woman who had earned a law degree from NYU but had neglected her career for a suburban marriage that centered around the home and such diversions as mah-jongg parties and charitable activities with other idle ladies, one of whom introduced her to the preaching of the celebrated network clergyman Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, under whose influence Sally Binford’s Jewish mother converted to Catholicism.

Sally’s father, a shrewd and domineering man who had been born in London of German-Jewish parentage, made a small fortune in America during the Depression through the importation of shellac. With money, he cultivated a smooth personal style and sporting habits, enjoyed the private affections of other women, and bought a Cadillac that carried him on weekends to the best country club in Long Island that accepted Jewish golfers.

Sally’s awareness of anti-Semitism, racial discrimination, and the class snobbery that cut across every hedge and lawn on Long Island—to say nothing of the double standard between the sexes—ignited in her a drive to be different, untraditional, unaffected by community standards, remote from the decorative domesticity of her mother and closer to the free-wheeling ways of the parent she preferred.

As a daring young equestrian riding out of the Cedarhurst stables, she was excited by her ability to control a large and powerful animal; and as an unbridled teenager in a low-cut gown at school dances, she lured young men with an ease that was the envy of her female contemporaries, who regarded her as bold and shameless. After completing her junior year at Woodmere Academy and getting a summer job as a theater apprentice in a Cape Cod playhouse, she met a Yale sophomore, and equipped with a diaphragm she had obtained from a woman gynecologist on lower Fifth Avenue, she embarked on her first affair.

A year later, in 1942, reacting against her mother’s insistence that she attend Vassar College, an all-girl institution that Sally found oppressively dull, she cut classes so often that she was expelled before the end of her freshman year. Cashing in the war bonds that her parents and relatives had given her after graduation from Woodmere Academy, Sally moved to New York, rented a one-room apartment on West Thirteenth Street, and got a job in the psychiatric-treatment clinic of the Children’s Court, where she typed case histories that made her own past seem prudent.

She was happy with her life and enjoyed the bistros and bohemian character of Greenwich Village, where, one night in a bar near Sheridan Square, she met a forty-year-old black jazz musi
cian who would introduce her to Harlem, to the serene stimulation of marijuana, and to techniques of lovemaking that were new and sophisticated.

After nearly two years in the Village, which included a brief career as a journalist on the Long Island
Daily Press
, Sally decided that she should return to school; and with financial help from her father she entered the University of Chicago in the fall of 1945, being drawn to that campus because of its undergraduate program and its innovative president, Robert M. Hutchins.

She would not be disappointed by the move to the Midwest, where she distinguished herself as an undergraduate student and later earned a master’s and Ph.D. in anthropology, and she would also participate in archaeological expeditions in Europe and the Middle East. In Chicago she lived in the Hyde Park section, a charming neighborhood of Victorian houses near the lake populated by university faculty members, writers, artists, young married couples, and a gaunt dark-haired publisher on whose living room floor was laid out the first issue of a magazine he would call
Playboy
.

Though the city’s political system was corrupt and racist—and, in Saul Bellow’s words, “No realistic sane person goes around Chicago without protection”—Sally Binford felt safe in the streets and perceived a more civilized representation of the voting public in the rising popularity of Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, whose cause she served as a campaign worker. She took pride, too, in Chicago’s cultural life, including its Second City theater club that introduced such talents as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Severn Darden, and Barbara Harris. Only in one area—marriage—did Sally Binford fail to find fulfillment in Chicago, and in this her quarrel would finally not be so much with the three men she married and divorced as with the male world that they typified. They were, like most men of their generation, unable to accept a liberated female, one who abhorred the double standard and the assumption that, despite her career ambitions and intelligence, she should concentrate on the domestic chores, the child-rearing and
cooking. She was a decade ahead of the feminist movement in America; and yet, bright as she was, she had a facility for falling in love with the very men who made the least compatible husbands—male chauvinists like her father.

As a consequence, her marriages were contentious and temporary; and Sally, often alone and restless, unable to satisfy her amorous desires, spent many solitary evenings in bed masturbating to images of vaguely defined men, strangers that she imagined meeting on trains, in airports, or in the streets of unidentifiable cities; men who would follow her and then gently, skillfully coerce and control her, and finally seduce her in scenes similar to the ones that she read in pornographic books that she kept in the bedroom of her Hyde Park apartment.

Nearly all of these books, which were contraband in Chicago during the 1950s, had been smuggled into the United States by faculty members and Fulbright scholars who had visited Paris; and the titles included
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, the
Kama Sutra, My Secret Life, The Perfumed Garden
, Henry Miller’s
Tropics
, and a number of erotic French novels that Sally, who was fluent in that language, read in their original editions. What most aroused her were the descriptions of sexual acts that she personally craved but were not available to her in real life, such as cunnilingus, which one husband disliked doing; or acts about which she was curious but reluctant to try, such as anal sex. In these fantasies she sometimes imagined herself in the center of a luxurious orgy, surrounded by artful lovers who simultaneously catered to her every whim, stimulated her orally, genitally, and gratified every inch of her body, while she in turn aroused them to peaks of orgasmic jubilation.

But in real life, when she and one of her husbands tried to experience group sex by answering an advertisement in a swingers’ periodical, the only result was a rendezvous in a restaurant-bar with a portly burgher wearing a Goldwater button on his lapel, and his timid wife, who wore a plastic daisy in her hat. After moments of awkward amiability, during which the couple explained that they were not interested in a foursome but wanted to swap
partners in private, they all shook hands and the couple disappeared into the balmy summer night.

In this time of marriages and affairs, teaching and traveling, Sally Binford was also raising a disenchanted young daughter who would leave home as soon as she was old enough to do so, and would during the 1960s become a hippie and a dropout. As Sally herself entered the sixties, she was embattled but stylishly slim, wearing tight-fitting blue jeans and rose-tinted granny glasses through which she viewed the world with a rejuvenated sense that her personal liberation was within reach. She had moved to Southern California, transferring to the anthropological department of UCLA, and there became involved with the campus peace movement as a faculty activist.

In her rented beach-front apartment in Venice, she befriended student radicals and other young people who shared, as her contemporaries had not, her anger with the policies and methods of the men who influenced the nation. She participated in the UCLA classroom strike in May 1970 that followed the Kent State incident in which four students in Ohio were fatally shot during a confrontation with National Guardsmen; and she made antiwar speeches and marched in parades. It was during this period that she became reunited with her drifting daughter, who now had a child of her own.

Sally also met, at the home of a UCLA student, a large man with a Fu Manchu moustache and long hair named Anthony Russo. A year later he would be known across the land as the furtive idealist who, with Daniel Ellsberg, had acquired and leaked to the press the Pentagon Papers, thus revealing to the public the American government’s history of lying about its political and military dealings in Vietnam. But when Sally first met Russo, there was in his manner no hint of the political desperado; a southerner in his mid-thirties of Italo-redneck ancestry, he was a recent convert to the counterculture, a man not yet entirely accustomed to his long, shoulder-length hair. After years as a security-cleared corporate thinker, he was now living in Los Angeles on unemployment insurance, and he described himself to
Sally as a “Rand dropout.” She liked him. And as she became better acquainted with him, and through him met his friend Daniel Ellsberg, she decided to introduce them both to Sandstone.

Of the two men, Ellsberg adjusted more quickly to the place. He had been among nudists before, having visited Elysium in Los Angeles and also the famed Ile du Levant in the South of France; and after rejoining Rand in 1967, following a two-year tour of duty in Vietnam with the Department of Defense, Ellsberg—who was then almost forty and between marriages—had participated in orgies with people whose ads he had answered in the Los Angeles
Free Press
or whom he had met at a special Los Angeles bar in Studio City called The Swing.

Perhaps the first tavern of its kind in the nation, The Swing was owned by an attractive married couple named Joyce and Greg McClure—the latter, a former movie actor, had starred in
The Great John L
—and Ellsberg befriended the McClures and frequented the bar, introducing himself during 1968 as “Don Hunter.” In deference to his position at Rand, Ellsberg did not want his real name to be listed in the address books of people he did not known very well, particularly since nobody was then sure of the legal status of group sex in California. But aside from the pseudonym, he was hardly cautious about the people he associated with in the bar, or the places he later went for sex parties; he was open to suggestions, was as comfortable in large crowds as in threesomes, and he took pride in his energy and style as a lover. Even after he had made copies of the Pentagon Papers, and might have assumed that the FBI would soon be tapping his telephone and tailing him by car, Ellsberg made no attempt to conceal his nocturnal carousing, traveling from swing bar to orgy—and also to Sandstone—as casually as if he were attending a reunion of Harvard alumni.

In retrospect, after he had been indicted for espionage and conspiracy in 1971, Ellsberg conjectured that it had possibly been his openness about sex that had most aroused the curiosity of the Puritans in Nixon’s White House. They perhaps felt that if Ellsberg was so blasé about attending orgies, his real secret life must
indeed be kinky and sinister. In any case President Nixon, determined to defame and punish Ellsberg for leaking government documents to the press, authorized a penetrating investigation that would expose the nature of this turncoat who had once been a loyal Marine and a high-ranking hawkish bureaucrat in the Department of Defense. And it was this investigation, conducted by a former CIA agent named Howard Hunt and a onetime FBI agent named Gordon Liddy, that would lead to the break-in of the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

Eight months later, Hunt, Liddy, and their fellow infiltrators would be assigned to use similar tactics against other enemies of the President, enemies who resided in Washington and had offices in a building called Watergate.