Thy Neighbor's Wife (44 page)

The success of Gauer’s first speech was such that Keating urged him to continue as a CDL spokesman, and dozens of other appearances by him followed, not only before service clubs but also on the stages of auditoriums where he and other CDL members debated ACLU lawyers and various First Amendment advocates. By 1967 Raymond Gauer had accepted Keating’s offer to head the CDL’s Los Angeles chapter and to represent the CDL before school audiences and on radio-television talk shows in California and around the country. On one occasion Gauer flew back to his hometown, Chicago, to condemn pornography on a talk show where the opposing guest was a twenty-nine-year-old local porno merchant and massage parlor owner named Harold Rubin. Gauer and Rubin disliked one another instantly. Gauer viewed the outspoken young man as a vulgarian lacking scruples and standards, while Rubin saw in Gauer signs of his own Chicago-born father, a repressed blue-collar conservative who was more offended by sex than the war in Vietnam.

In 1968 Raymond Gauer was in Washington as an unofficial CDL lobbyist. There, with the help of DeWitt Wallace of
Reader’s Digest
, Gauer and a CDL attorney named James J. Clancy met privately with several congressmen to urge the introduction of stronger antiobscenity legislation. The men were given access to a small room below the Senate floor, and, equipped with
a slide projector and screen, they exhibited to the congressmen—among whom were Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Robert P. Griffin of Michigan, and Jack Miller of Iowa—examples of the type of obscenity that was being sent through the mail and sold nationwide largely due to the liberal standards of the present Supreme Court.

Quite coincidentally, while Gauer and Clancy were in Washington, the Senate Judiciary Committee began public hearings on the nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to replace the seventy-seven-year-old retiring Earl Warren as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Many politicians and special-interest groups, including the CDL, were opposed to Fortas, and during the early summer and fall of 1968 the jeremiads against Fortas would range from the lucrative seminar fees that he had received to the chiding telephone calls he had allegedly made to important people who had been critical of President Johnson’s foreign or domestic policy. Several Republicans, led by Senator Griffin, were outraged that President Johnson, who had already announced that he would not seek the Democratic renomination in 1968, would try during his final months in office to elevate his judicial friend to an exalted position that might otherwise go to a man preferred by the incoming President, who might be a Republican.

The CDL’s quarrel with Fortas was based on his tolerance of pornography as revealed in several recent obscenity cases, including his vote to legalize the long-banned English novel about the prostitute Fanny Hill (entitled
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
) and his permissiveness in the case of
Corinthe Publications
v.
Wesberry
for such paperback sex novels as
Sin Whisper
. Furthermore, the CDL was aware that the publisher of
Sin Whisper
had once been a client of Fortas’ law firm in Washington—indeed, the CDL claimed to have learned from an FBI agent that the publisher had allegedly boasted of his Fortas connection, suggesting that it would protect him from federal prosecution; and the CDL further asserted that its spreading of this FBI notion through the Senate ultimately influenced Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois (who had originally favored
Fortas’ promotion) to tilt the senatorial momentum against Abe Fortas.

After Richard Nixon had been sworn in as the President in January 1969, and after his Attorney General, John M. Mitchell, had come forth with new evidence against Fortas—the latter had been receptive to a $20,000 fee from a foundation created by a financier who had once been convicted of selling unregistered securities—Abe Fortas was driven to resign altogether from the Court, creating a vacancy that Nixon would fill with a conservative.

A month after the Fortas resignation, there was additional rejoicing within the CDL as Nixon appointed Charles Keating to the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and the CDL newspaper expressed optimism that Keating’s forceful personality (though he would be joining the commission a year after it had been set in motion by President Johnson) would soon inspire the other members to discover effective ways and means of excoriating smut. The other members, most of whom Keating saw as representing high moral standards, included Winfred C. Link, a Methodist minister from Hermitage, Tennessee; Irving Lehrman, a rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Miami Beach; and Morton A. Hill, a Catholic priest who had previously led pickets against pornographers in Manhattan and was president of a censorial organization called Morality in Media, Inc. There was also on the list an ordained clergyman and teacher from Southern Methodist University named G. William Jones; the attorney general of the state of California, Thomas C. Lynch; and two women—an English instructor from South Dakota named Cathryn Spelts and a New York attorney with the Motion Picture Association named Barbara Scott—who might be expected to add more than a touch of womanly resentment to the manner in which female bodies were so often used in the world of pornography.

The other commissioners also appeared to represent a responsible cross section of society: Morris A. Lipton, a professor of psy
chiatry at the University of North Carolina Medical School; Otto N. Larsen, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington; Edward D. Greenwood, a child psychiatrist at the Menninger Foundation; Joseph T. Klapper, a research sociologist with CBS; Thomas D. Gill, chief judge of the Juvenile Court in Connecticut; Freeman Lewis, president of the Washington Square Press in New York; Edward E. Elson, president of the Atlanta News Agency; Marvin E. Wolfgang, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; Frederick H. Wagman, director of the University of Michigan Library; and the chairman of the commission was William B. Lockhart, dean of the University of Minnesota Law School.

The commissioners were assisted in their work by more than twenty staff members and several outside research specialists who were assigned to travel around the country gathering the information that the commissioners would later evaluate. During the first year, before Keating became involved, the commission had dispatched research teams to interview and analyze the major manufacturers of hard-core material, the proprietors of the stores that sold it, and the customers who regularly bought it. The researchers sought out the postal inspectors and law-enforcement authorities who were the most knowledgeable about pornography, gaining not only facts and insights into the size and scope of the illegal industry but also an estimation of the Mafia’s possible influence in the production and distribution of pornography. The researchers entered prisons in the Midwest and in New York to interrogate the inmates who had been convicted of rape and other sex crimes, seeking to learn about their family backgrounds and the kinds of films, books, or magazines that they had found interesting prior to their difficulties with the law.

One hundred national organizations were consulted by the commission and asked to submit in writing their views on pornography. A commission investigator was even sent to Denmark, where hard-core pornography and live sex shows had recently become legal, hoping to discover what effect this had on the number of Danish sex crimes, the trends in social behavior, and the
moral atmosphere of the nation. At the University of North Carolina, a scientific team showed twenty-three male students sex films for ninety minutes a day, for five days a week over a three-week period, in an attempt to determine what effect the films had on the student’s personal habits and passions. All of the student volunteers watched the films while wearing robes under which their penises were sheathed in condoms attached with electrodes that gauged penile erection, and they also wore bellows around their chests and electrical instruments in their ears. Prior to each daily film session, the researchers privately asked the students whether or not they had masturbated or had intercourse during the intervening twenty-four hours.

The commissioners themselves saw hard-core movies; in fact, the commission’s first official meeting in 1968 was held at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, where, in addition to being shown Dr. Kinsey’s vast collection of erotica and being briefed on the latest national sex statistics, the members were escorted into a screening room to see examples of antiquated “blue” movies as well as an assortment of contemporary sex films done in living color. Perhaps the most mesmerized viewer in the audience, though he blushed after the house lights went on, was Father Morton Hill, one of New York’s most knowledgeable and indefatigable enemies of pornography. After that screening and further exposure to such material, Father Hill expressed his concern to the female lawyer on the commission that she was obliged to watch such filth; but when she indicated that the experience did not really horrify her, he was clearly dismayed and said he would pray for the redemption of her soul.

While the commissioners and staff were free to discuss among themselves their reactions to the material brought before them, they were urged by the chairman, William B. Lockhart, never to reveal their personal opinions to the public or to political officials. Lockhart sensed that he was part of a potentially incendiary research project; and if mishandled or prematurely disclosed in fragmentary form to the newspapers before the commission had completed and interpreted all of its research, it could elicit much
misunderstanding and controversy that would diminish the impact and importance of the final report and recommendations. Therefore, all interim queries by the press or politicians were to be directed and replied to by Lockhart or this personal staff; and while Lockhart’s authoritative posture as a law school dean and his superior role as the commission’s chairman were duly respected by his colleagues during the first year of operation, the assertive arrival of Charles Keating in 1969 quickly introduced into the interworkings of the membership an element of tension and confrontation.

The discord began when Keating discovered that most of the fieldwork was not being done by the commissioners themselves but by a staff and researchers largely selected by Lockhart. Keating was further offended when Lockhart’s chosen counsel, an ACLU-affiliated lawyer named Paul Bender, was permitted to participate in the commission’s sessions while Keating’s friend and counsel with the CDL, James J. Clancy, was denied even the right to observe the proceedings. Keating was also disturbed when Lockhart would not allow him to serve on all the committees that he wished to become affiliated with; and when Lockhart persisted in his opposition to the holdings of public hearings that in Keating’s opinion would have properly publicized the epidemic of erotica and exposed the merchants who were becoming rich through the sale of smut, Keating decided to boycott all future meetings of the commission.

But such haggling between Keating and Lockhart was minor when compared to the wrath and acerbity with which Keating would greet the preliminary conclusions and recommendations that the Lockhart-dominated commission arrived at in the fall of 1970 and were planning to edit and deliver to the government printing office. After all the money, the energy and time spent in investigating the problem of pornography, Keating was stunned to discover that the Lockhart majority had ultimately decided that pornography was not a national problem after all, and that the wisest way to deal with it—at least where adults were concerned—was simply to ignore it.

“The Commission believes that there is no warrant for continued Government interference with the full freedom of adults,” the report said, “because extensive empirical investigation, both by the Commission and others, provides no evidence that exposure to or use of explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of social or individual harms such as crime, delinquency, sexual or nonsexual deviancy or severe emotional disturbances.”

Rapists and other sexual delinquents, the report went on—after taking into account the research done in prisons and mental institutions—were less likely to be consumers of pornography than products of “conservative, repressed, sexually deprived backgrounds”; and the people who were most incensed by the popularity of pornography in America, the report added, were the “overzealous” and “religiously active” older citizens who also believed “that newspapers should not have the right to print articles which criticize the police, that people should not be allowed to publish books which attack our system of government, and that people should not be allowed to make speeches against God.”

The effect of showing sex movies to the twenty-three college boys in North Carolina resulted largely in their boredom; and not only had the legalization of pornography in Denmark failed to produce the crime wave that some Danes had earlier anticipated, but there had been instead a substantial decline in such offenses as voyeurism, the latter fact suggesting that “Peeping Toms” were less willing to risk being arrested for looking into people’s windows since they were able to see more in bottomless bars, porno films, and live sex shows. Contrary to the assumption of many United States citizens, the report went on, the sex industry in America was not controlled by the Mafia or other factions in organized crime; while the pornography business certainly supported many people who had criminal records (which was not surprising since the police were constantly arresting them for trafficking in sex) there was no evidence of a “monolithic ‘smut’ industry” interlinked with Mafia mobsters. The tycoons in the sex
industry—such men as Milton Luros and Marvin Miller of Los Angeles, William Hamling of San Diego, Reuben Sturman of Cleveland, Michael Thevis of Atlanta—were hardly honored members of the Better Business Bureau, but they were not a national network of Mafia godfathers each ruling a “family” of hit men. And, the report continued, the majority of American consumers who spent millions annually in attending porno films, buying “skin” magazines, patronizing massage parlors, and depositing tons of coins into sex-film vending machines were typically not the reprobates, the rapists, the motorcycle gangs, the assassins or other deranged dregs of society, but were instead what the Supreme Court might define as the Average Man, or, in the words of the commission report, “predominantly white, middle class, middle aged, married males, dressed in a business suit or neat casual attire.”