Thy Neighbor's Wife (65 page)

The film was shot in a manor of a large estate that had been
rented for the occasion, and Talese spent a week with the cast and technical crew. Several members of the group, including the director, had previously collaborated on
Deep Throat
and
The Devil in Miss Jones
; and although the film being made in Pennsylvania—entitled Memories
Within Miss Aggie
—would prove to be less lucrative than
Deep Throat
and
Miss Jones
, it resembled its more successful forerunners in its contrived plot, its group-sex scenes, its views of ejaculating penises, and the aggressive sexual behavior of its actresses on screen. Talese suspected that it was these scenes of women blithely inviting men into bed, and appearing to be uninhibited about impersonal sex, that catered to the wish-fulfillment fantasies of the majority of middle-aged male customers who frequented most X-rated cinemas in large cities and small towns. The porno starlets in the films, unlike women in real life, made their bodies quickly available, rejected no man’s advances, required a minimum of foreplay, seemed multi-orgasmic, and sought no romantic promises. Such X-rated heroines as Georgina Spelvin, Marilyn Chambers, and Linda Lovelace used men for their pleasure, even beckoning a second or third actor after the first had exhausted himself; and while critics of pornography often accused sex films of exploiting women and glorifying violence, such views did not conform to what Talese was watching in person, or what he had seen in the numerous films that he had sat through in Times Square and in shabby theaters elsewhere around the nation.

If it was violence that an audience wanted, then it was more readily available in the R-rated and even the PG-rated films—war movies, the Godfather epics, the psycho-spiritual horror thrillers that were shown in endless imitation of
The Exorcist
. Sex films were passive by comparison; and if there was a legitimate grievance against them it was that the box office’s admission fee of five dollars per customer was too high a cost to pay for the inferior quality of the films, the sophomoric scenarios, the unconvincing acting even in the bedroom scenes in which the actors were constantly losing their erections and futilely trying to simulate intercourse. During his cinematic excursions Talese did see examples
of “kitty porn,” films exhibiting the sexuality of minors; but such films were few indeed, having a very limited audience; and although he saw several S&M films, these tended to show as many women as men in sexually dominant roles—such as high-heeled goddesses flailing men with whips, squeezing their genitals, and not infrequently squatting over the body of a prone man and urinating in his face. Whatever else might be said of such scenes, Talese guessed that many men found the close-up view of squatting women sexually educational, for Talese had long theorized that most men of his generation had no idea that a worn an urinated from a different opening than the one she used for making love.

After Talese had left the movie troupe in Pennsylvania, where the shooting schedule had been extended for an extra day because of the failure of an actor to ejaculate on cue, Talese traveled to Chicago, where in time he met and befriended a massage parlor proprietor on South Wabash Avenue named Harold Rubin. A somewhat short, robust man in his mid-thirties with a jutting jaw, blue eyes, and long wet-combed blond hair, Rubin’s manner, when Talese first met him, was dominated by unbridled contempt for Mayor Daley, for the Chicago police, and for the city’s fire and building inspectors who he claimed were harassing him and trying to close him down. From his desk he removed and showed Talese an eviction notice sent by the landlord-citing, among other alleged misdeeds, the fact that Rubin had displayed in his front window a sign reading: “Dick Nixon Before He Dicks Us.” Rubin said that he had recently been fined $1,200 by a judge for selling reputedly obscene books, and had been accused, falsely, of dumping a cubic yard of horse manure on the steps of the City Hall of Berwyn, the Chicago suburb in which he lived. Rubin’s pretty brunet wife, a masseuse who had lately become disturbed by his continuing controversies with the law, had just abandoned him and gone off to Florida, leaving behind their three-year old son to pedal his tricycle and scatter his toys in the reception room and the hallway of Rubin’s massage parlor.

Business had greatly declined since the acceleration of the
raids, Rubin conceded; and having little else to do during the afternoons, Rubin spoke at length to Talese about his vague hopes for the future, his recollections of a misspent youth, and his history of trouble in Chicago. Despite his protestations and feuds with the authorities, however, Rubin seemed to enjoy his image as a rebel arid rake in a largely conformist city; and after Chicago headline writers had begun calling him “Weird Harold,” be adopted the moniker as the official name of his parlor. But when he was away from the neon lights and pornographic posters of his business, he seemed to be as socially conservative as his most righteous critics; he lived quietly in the community of Berwyn, visited his widowed grandmother twice each week, and kept the apartment that he shared with his son in a fashion that was obsessively tidy if highly ornamental. He was a collector of objects d’art, antique gadgetry, and fragile trinkets which he kept in glass cases or brass boxes that he regularly dusted and polished. On the walls were turn-of-the-century posters, and in his living room were chairs and sofas that were older than his grandmother. He played music on an Edison phonograph built in 1910, and took pride in his wooden icebox, his Packard jukebox, and his equally old Pulver chewing-gum machine. On the bookshelves of his orderly bedroom were old leather-bound volumes; and in his closet were neatly stacked piles of 1950s nudist magazines, most of which featured the photographs of the woman who had been central to his fantasies during most of his life—Diane Webber.

The masseuse that he married resembled more than slightly the California model of his dreams, and during their first year together, in 1969, Rubin would escort her into the Cook County forest preserves, where, in hidden places in the woods, he would take pictures of her in the nude, posing her in the exact way that he had seen Diane Webber in the magazines that he had so carefully kept in his closet. Harold Rubin’s rhapsodic recollections of his imaginary meetings with Diane Webber in his boyhood bedroom soon prompted Talese to fly to Southern California and seek his own rendezvous; and after discovering her home address and private telephone number with the help of photographers with
whom she had once worked, and after writing her and leaving several messages on her answering machine, none of which she replied to—and then enlisting the cooperation of her husband, a documentary film editor in Hollywood—an interview was finally granted in her Malibu home on a gray, cool afternoon made more chilly by the reception he received.

Diane Webber did not smile as she opened the door. A barefoot woman in her forties whose diminutive, somewhat plump figure was concealed in faded blue jeans and an oversized man’s shirt, and whose long brunet hair and dark-rimmed glasses suggested the current fashion of many feminists, her first words to Talese were more in the form of a lecture than a gesture of greeting. She had
not
been impressed by his persistence in tracking her down, she said, and she stressed as well that the interview she was about to give would hopefully be brief. She was now a private citizen, she reminded him, turning to lead him toward a modern sofa in a tidy living room overlooking the beach; and while she admitted to having enjoyed nude modeling at the time, she was now totally devoted to her full-time career as a dance instructor of female classes in the nearby community of Van Nuys. She taught the demanding art of belly dancing at Every-woman’s Village, she said, and occasionally she also performed this dance, accompanied by her top students and a band playing Middle Eastern music, in public places in and around Los Angeles.

As she spoke, Talese listened without interruption, and in time she seemed to relax and to resent his presence less. Though he found her attractive, and would as the interview progressed become even more aware of her intelligence and articulateness, he believed that if Harold Rubin had been in the room he would have been disappointed. As erotic and free-spirited as she appeared to be in the old photographs, she projected none of this in person, and Talese guessed that this was probably just as true when she had posed years ago. After she had removed her clothes and had sprawled nude on the California sand dunes during her youth, most likely nothing was further from her mind than erotica
or pornography, although Talese would not have bet that such thoughts were far from the minds of the male photographers who were working with her. They were males taking male pictures, and they no doubt knew, if she did not, that the pictures they eventually selected for publication would soon excite the male magazine audience, would flourish in the world of male sexual fantasy, and would in many feverish male minds subject her to wild scenes of ravishment and a lifetime of captivity behind the closed doors of bedroom closets.

But as
she
interpreted her modeling career to Talese during their interview, her posing in the nude was an expression of photographic “art”—and Talese resisted the impulse to suggest that “art” to her might be “pornography” to her male admirers. His prudence at this juncture was possibly rewarded, for she later agreed to a second interview, and still later a third; and through her he came to know her husband, to whom she had been married for twenty years, and also her nineteen-year-old son, John Webber, a handsome onetime hippie who had recently become gainfully employed in a nudist colony in the hills southeast of Malibu, a colony called Elysium Fields, which was owned by a former photographer who had specialized in taking Diane Webber photographs, the gray-bearded Ed Lange.

John Webber lived at the colony, performing many menial chores and working long hours; but periodically he wandered off and returned to his parents’ home in Malibu. Late one afternoon, after a dance class, Diane Webber walked into her living room and discovered her son lying nude on the living room floor, his legs spread wide, masturbating to photographs of actress Ursula Andress in
Playboy
magazine. Diane Webber was not pleased.

It was while Talese was on this trip to California that he first ventured into Sandstone Retreat. A writer in New York named Patrick McGrady, Jr., had earlier in the year told him about Sandstone and the experiment in open sexuality that was being conducted by John and Barbara Williamson in their private estate
in Topanga Canyon, and after Talese had seen a Sandstone advertisement in the Los Angeles
Free Press
he telephoned the listed number and was invited by the club manager to drive up the hill for an afternoon’s visit.

Motoring up the zigzagging roads, and twice getting lost, Talese finally located the stone pillars of the main entrance and pulled into the parking lot, never expecting that his brief visit to this permissive paradise would extend from that day through the night, and through most of the next two months. Talese was mesmerized by the place, its tranquillity and freedom, its minimum of rules and regulations, its ballroom and aggressive women. Nothing in his earlier research had quite prepared him for Sandstone—not the massage parlors, nor the swing bars, nor the live shows, nor what he had read or been told by the sexual gazetteers of his acquaintance. Sandstone, during the early 1970s, was undoubtedly the most liberated fifteen acres of land in America’s not-always-democratic Republic: It was the only place he knew where there was no double standard, no place for mercenary sex, no need for security guards or the police, no reason for fantasies as substitute stimulants. It was here, during his first night, that Talese became involved in a group experience, a recreational scene in the ballroom in the exalted company of Dr. Comfort and a famous Hollywood ventriloquist who, though his head was buried between the thighs of a schoolmistress, nevertheless continued a humorous dialogue between himself and his absent wooden-headed alter ego.

It was at Sandstone that Talese gradually became comfortable as a nudist; and though he was not bisexual, he learned at Sandstone to relax in the close naked presence of men, and to develop in this uninhibiting environment a bond of friendship with some men that would lead to greeting them with an embrace as natural as a handshake. But there was much about Sandstone that Talese found not altogether pleasant, especially during the quiet afternoons when the property was occupied only by ten full-time residents—John Williamson’s “family,” who, with a few notable exceptions, seemed cool to his presence, skeptical of his inten
tions, and openly wondered at times why Talese had not brought his wife. After Talese had been living at Sandstone for less than a month, he sensed that John Williamson himself was becoming more remote and unfriendly; it was as if Williamson, after inviting Talese to occupy a guest house and remain for an undetermined length of time, had privately acknowledged that he had made a mistake—but rather than admitting that mistake by suddenly evicting him, Williamson seemed resigned to Talese’s increasing discomfort.

Talese thought at the time that it was possible he was overreacting to Williamson’s nonverbal nature, about which Talese had been forewarned in New York by the writer McGrady; and Talese also speculated on the possibility that he was being subjected to one of the special stress tests which Williamson was known to employ occasionally on outsiders who had chosen to live even briefly among his naked followers and fellow deviants from the deceptive ways of the world below. But Talese remained at Sandstone, dreading the day and eagerly anticipating the nighttime arrival of the club members and their merriment; and that he withstood as long as he did the daily vibrations of Williamson’s silence, and a sense of isolation from most of the family, was attributable in part to the fact that Talese was not unfamiliar with the condition of being an outsider. Indeed it was a role for which his background had most naturally prepared him: an Italo-American parishioner in an Irish-American church, a minority Catholic in a predominantly Protestant hometown, a northerner attending a southern college, a conservative young man of the fifties who invariably wore a suit and tie, a driven man who chose as his calling one of the few professions that was open to mental masqueraders: he became a journalist, and thus gained a license to circumvent his inherent shyness, to indulge his rampant curiosity, and to explore the lives of individuals he considered more interesting than himself.