Thy Neighbor's Wife (63 page)

Influenced by the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, which Paige had often visited in the past, he added to Sandstone’s staff several specialists who, for a fee, offered the members and guests everything from sessions in Rolfing and the Esalen massage to bioenergetics and hatha-yoga. For the price of $250 that included room and board, nonmember couples were invited to spend an entire weekend at Sandstone, using the facilities and attending Gestalt therapy clinics under Paige’s supervision; and among the participants one weekend was the actor and television personality Orson Bean, accompanied by his wife, Carolyn, both of whom soon became friendly with Paul Paige and actively involved at Sandstone. Bean, who had once undergone treatment in Reichian therapy—and had described it in his book
Me and the Orgone
—now wrote about Sandstone in his column in the Los Angeles
Free Press
, and he favorably referred to Sandstone on the Johnny Carson show. Sandstone was also featured in a
Playboy
article by Dan Greenburg; by Herbert Gold in
Oui;
by Robert Blair Kaiser in
Penthouse
. And in his second best-selling book, More Joy, Alex Comfort devoted a chapter to Sandstone, in which he wrote: “California abounds in ‘encounter’ and ‘sensitivity’ centers—people who go there do or don’t ‘find themselves’…[and] a high proportion have the air of going through a lot of psycho-make-work and verbal behaviors when the real object of the exercise is to get laid. At Sandstone, one could quite frankly go to get laid—but having got that out of the way, participants were surprised to find that ‘sensitivity,’ ‘encounter’ and a good deal of genuine self-education quite often followed; they both enjoyed themselves and did reassess their goals and self-image. As a result,” Comfort continued, “disciples of Sandstone (some of whom may only have been there once) are widely scattered in sex counseling—including that sponsored by the churches. For its size, and the fact that the original experiment, started by John and Barbara Williamson, ran only four years, it has a potential influence
through contacts which will only become evident with time—it was many ‘straight’ people’s first and only encounter with genuinely open sexuality in a structured setting. The fact that it re-created an intense experience of infantile innocence in hungup adults makes many who went there nostalgic or over-enthusiastic about it, but allowing for this its capacity to facilitate the sort of ‘growth’ at which individual psychology aims was pretty remarkable.”

At Paul Paige’s request, Dr. Comfort became an unofficial adviser to Sandstone, and his name was listed among its staff in the brochure that was periodically mailed out; and on special occasions, such as the open-house weekend in early June 1974, Dr. Comfort delivered a speech before an audience that had paid $25 each to listen. More than two hundred people had driven up the foggy roads to attend, joining in the crowded house such veteran members as Sally Binford and Jeremy Slate, who had weeks before parked their motor home on an upper hill and were now residing at Sandstone. It was so cloudy and chilly during the day of Comfort’s presentation that most of the audience kept its clothes on, an uncommon sight at Sandstone.

In addition to the speech by Alex Comfort, the audience heard briefly from Al Goldstein, the publisher of
Screw
, and Nat Lehrman, the associate publisher of
Playboy
; and they also were addressed at length by the second featured speaker of the day, a writer from New York named Gay Talese, who was researching a book about sex in America for Doubleday & Company.

A lean, dark-eyed man of forty-three whose brown hair was beginning to turn gray, Talese was not entirely a stranger to the people in the room. He had visited Sandstone often in the past, including its ballroom, and his book-in-progress had already received inordinate amounts of publicity in many newspapers and magazines. Most of what had been written about Talese in the press, however, had been jocularly presented, strongly suggesting that his reportorial technique as a “participating observer” in the world of erotica—his patronage of massage parlors, his dark afternoons in X-rated cinemas, his intimate familiarity with swing
clubs and orgiasts across the land—was an ingenious ploy on his part to indulge his carnality and to be unfaithful to his wife, while justifying it in the name of sexual “research.”

While Talese had never openly refuted this notion, assuming that any attempt to deny it might mark him as a man on the defensive, which he often felt he was—or might label him a First Amendment hypocrite who condoned pornography but was antipathetic to the media’s right to fair comment when it focused on him—he was nonetheless keenly aware that his allegedly ideal assignment was frequently less pleasurable than other people generally believed. And what bothered him even more was that after three years of research and many months of pondering behind his typewriter, he had been unable to write a single word. He did not even know how to begin the book. Nor how to organize the material. Nor what he hoped to say about sex that had not already been said in dozens of other recently published works written by marriage therapists, social historians, and talk-show celebrities.

Indeed, Talese himself had lately become a frequent talk-show guest, being invited because of the publicity he had received after a newsman had discovered him working as a manager of a New York massage parlor, a prurient Plimpton wallowing in oily delight—an image that Talese always sought to counter, too earnestly at times, by emphasizing on television the seriousness of his literary intentions. His speech at Sandstone was similarly directed—he wanted to present himself to his audience, simply and unpretentiously, as a committed researcher and writer who, apart from his personal life and vices, was currently working on one of the most important stories of his lifetime: It was a story that would intimately describe many of the people and events that in recent decades had influenced the redefinition of morality in America.

After he had been introduced to the crowd by a young Sandstone staff member named Martin Zitter, one of the few people in the room who was completely nude, Talese walked to the podium with a prepared text and began his speech. “This nation,” he
said, “is being gradually overtaken by a silent revolution of the senses, a departure from conventionality. And even within the middle class, which is where I’m concentrating my research, there is now an ever-increasing tolerance for sexual expression in films and books, and a more accepting attitude among couples in the bedroom with regard to what had once been considered ‘kinky’—having mirrors around the room, colored lights and candles, vibrators at bedside, Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie, X-rated movie casettes, oral sex and other acts that many state laws still condemn as ‘sodomy.’ The success of
The Joy of Sex
, which would have been labeled ‘smut’ a few years ago, is another example of how middle-class society has become less squeamish about depictions of erotica,” Talese continued, nodding toward Dr. Comfort, who sat nearby. “That book has sold 700,000 copies in hard cover to date—it’s a mass-market book that you see in store windows on Main Street, and on the coffee tables of Middle America, even though it displays explicit drawings of nude couples making love in every conceivable manner.

“At polite dinner parties,” Talese went on, “you now hear people discussing the intimate aspects of their private lives in ways that in the mid-sixties would have been socially unacceptable. Homosexual bars are no longer the constant targets of police raids since homosexual activists have organized. And most middle-class parents of college students are resigned to the fact that premarital sex is hardly uncommon in off-campus apartments or even in dormitories. While I can’t prove it, I think that middle-class American husbands now, more than ever before in American history, can live with the knowledge that their wives were not virgins when they married—and that their wives have had, or
are
having, an extramarital affair. I’m not saying that husbands are not bothered by this,” Talese emphasized, looking up from his text. “I’m only suggesting that the contemporary husband, unlike his father and grandfather before him, is not so shocked or shattered by such news, is more likely to accept women as sexual beings, and only in extreme cases will he retaliate with violence against his unfaithful wife or male rival….”

Unlike most of his audience, who were ten or twenty years younger than himself, Talese could recall personally the rigid moral atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly as it existed in such small, homogenous towns as the one in which he had been born and reared, a Victorian community in southern New Jersey where even now, in the 1970s, the sale of liquor was forbidden. He remembered hearing, as an adolescent at Sunday Mass, which he served as an altar boy, the parish priest’s strident predictions of heavenly punishment against any parishioner who read a book that was listed on the Index or who patronized theaters that featured films banned by the Legion of Decency. In his parochial school, the nuns had advised him and his classmates that they should sleep each night on their backs with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders—a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible. Talese had been a sophomore in college before he masturbated, being aroused by the imagery of a co-ed he was then dating rather than by a photograph in a men’s magazine, which he would have been too embarrassed to purchase.

And yet suddenly in the late 1950s and early ’60s, or so it seemed to him, the men’s magazines had come up from under the counter, erotic novels were no longer outlawed, nudity appeared in Hollywood films—and these changes were not only evident in the larger cities through which he traveled as a newspaper reporter and free-lance writer, but also in conservative places like his hometown, which he regularly visited; and in 1971, while he was contemplating possible subjects for his next book, he decided that what most intrigued him was America’s new openness about sex, its expanding erotic consumerism, and the quiet rebellion that he sensed within the middle class against the censors and clerics that had been an inhibiting force since the founding of the Puritan republic.

After reading several books on sex laws and censorship, watching many obscenity trials in courtrooms, and interviewing the editors of
Screw
and similar publications, Talese began his personal odyssey in the sex world by venturing into massage parlors and
becoming a regular customer. He had first noticed a massage parlor in his neighborhood one night while returning home from P. J. Clarke’s tavern with his wife. Flickering from a third-story window on Lexington Avenue, near Bloomingdale’s, was a red neon sign that read
Live Nude Models
, and he was amazed that such an establishment could operate so openly.

The next day at noon, alone, he returned to the building, climbed three flights of steps, and passed through a curtained portal into what looked like the living room of an old neglected house. The oriental rug was frayed and faded; the sofas, tables, and floor lamps had probably come from junk shops; and the silent middle-aged men who sat waiting, like patients in a dentist’s office, seemed unable to concentrate on the newspapers and magazines they held before them.

Approaching the manager at the desk, a long-haired young man wearing blue denims and peace beads, Talese was told that the price was eighteen dollars for a half-hour session, and that he could select as his masseuse any of the half-dozen women whose photographs appeared in the picture album that lay open in front of him. Talese chose a pleasant-looking young blonde named June, who was posed in a bikini on a tropical beach; and after he had waited for twenty minutes, dividing his time between glancing at
Newsweek
and watching the quiet arrivals and departures of the men, most of whom were his own age or older, and wore suits and ties—and were, he supposed, largely businessmen on furtive lunch-hour visits—the manager waved toward him. As Talese got up he saw, standing in the hallway, a freckled-faced blond woman who bore only a slight resemblance to the June in the photograph—and was perhaps not even the same person—but who was nonetheless quite attractive. She was sloe-eyed and willowy, wore a pink wraparound skirt, a yellow T-shirt, and sandals. As she escorted him down the hail and led him into Room No. 5, carrying a single starched sheet that she had taken from the linen closet, she spoke with a southern accent.

She was from Alabama, she said—the state in which Talese had attended college; and while she briefly listened in the massage
room while he reminisced about the South, she soon became impatient. This was a business appointment, she reminded him, the clock was ticking, and she suggested that he take off his clothes and lie on the table over which she had just flipped the sheet. After he had done so, she began to undress, and, turning, revealed a well-conditioned body that he found exciting.

“Oil or powder?” she asked, approaching the table. He looked uncertainly around the room.

“Are there showers in here?” he asked, after a pause.

“No,” she said.

“Then I’ll take powder.”

She reached for a can of Johnson’s baby powder, and soon he felt her fingers gently stroking his shoulders and chest, and then she moved down toward his stomach and thighs. He watched as she leaned over his body, her arms and breasts moving, her hands chalk-white from the talc. He could smell her perfume, feel his palms perspire, see his penis rising. He closed his eyes and heard the sighs of other men in the adjoining rooms, and he also heard the street noise from Lexington Avenue, the honking of cars, the grinding of buses pulling away from the curb, and he thought of Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s across the street, and the crowds of customers and saleswomen who at this moment were leaning over counters, buying and selling…

“Do you want anything special?” she asked.

He opened his eyes. He saw her looking at his penis.

“Can we have sex?” he asked. She shook her head.

“I don’t do that,” she said. “I don’t French either. I only give locals.”