Sexplosion Read online

  Dedication

  To Johnny and Louise

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction: 1966 and 1967, Caution

  1 - Winter 1968, Guts

  2 - Spring 1968, Partners

  3 - Summer 1968, Politics

  4 - Autumn 1968, Revelry

  5 - Winter 1969, Bonanza

  6 - Spring 1969, Fetishes

  7 - Summer 1969, Revolution

  8 - Autumn 1969, Trauma

  9 - Winter 1970, Outrage

  10 - Spring 1970, Kisses

  11 - Summer 1970, Retreat

  12 - Autumn 1970, Arrests

  13 - 1971, Fatigue

  14 - 1972, Frenzy

  15 - Winter 1973, Backlash

  Epilogue: Spring 1973 and Beyond, Finales

  Photographic Section

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Robert Hofler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  Sexplosion began as one of those decades books.

  I’d worked as entertainment editor of Penthouse magazine for most of the 1970s, when publications like Penthouse and Playboy were each selling well over five million copies a month. It seemed like the sex life of America had exploded back then, and there were plenty of bestselling novels, manuals, movies, magazines, Broadway shows, and other cultural artifacts to support that hyperbole. If the 1980s were truly greedy and the 1920s actually roared, it seemed to me, in retrospect, that the 1970s were genuinely oversexed—and that this might warrant closer inspection in terms of its impact on our culture as a whole.

  After visiting a few libraries to scour the microfilm files, and interviewing several writers, directors, actors, and producers, I was surprised to discover that research served me much better than memory. As a result, I decided instead to write about a slightly earlier period of history, one that did not conform nicely to any one decade but rather awkwardly straddled a couple of them. The years 1968 to 1973 coincided with what were my college years, as well as a whole generation of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ rollers who were the ideal audience for such seminal works as Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Myra Breckinridge, Performance, Portnoy’s Complaint, and many others.

  Artists have been breaking sex taboos from the beginning of time, but probably no greater number of those totems to repression were smashed than in the year 1968. It was a veritable sexual explosion that continued and only slightly abated for the next four years, before repetition and exploitation diluted the creative pool. My college-age fantasy conjured up a world in which the writers and makers of everything from The Boys in the Band to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice were somehow connected and actually formed a community. Writing this book, I was delighted to learn how true my youthful conjectures were and, better yet, how current and genuinely adult most of those artists’ creative output during that time remains nearly half a century later.

  Sexplosion is the story of how a number of very talented, risk-taking rebels challenged the world’s prevailing attitudes toward sex, and, in the process, changed pop culture forever.

  INTRODUCTION

  1966 and 1967, Caution

  It was the artists. But it was also the audiences.

  In 1966, director John Huston picked the plum role of Noah for himself and turned his movie The Bible into the highest-grossing film of the year. Also in 1966, most critics’ groups drank from the same pool of holy water and anointed A Man for All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More, a Roman Catholic saint, as that year’s best film.

  The Bible and A Man for All Seasons may have been highly respected efforts but they hardly generated the most heated talk or press. That distinction of high-profile controversy went to two very different films in 1966: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which erstwhile paramours Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton talked dirty to each other, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language picture, Blow-Up. Moviegoers who didn’t know L’avventura from L’eclisse would sit through nearly two hours of Blow-Up, a murder mystery in which the murder is never solved, to get a two-second glimpse of a young woman’s pubic hair, delivered in long shot, as she and a girlfriend frolic nude with star David Hemmings in a photographer’s studio.

  The audiences were, indeed, different then. They were curious because they had seen and heard so little with regard to graphic sex onscreen, and even more important, they were patient. And they were patient because they were hungry for what they hadn’t seen or heard.

  Somewhat less patient was an especially acerbic twenty-nine-year-old Texan émigré named Rex Reed, who had only recently been enlisted as a freelance writer at the New York Times. Despite his intense antipathy for Antonioni’s entire oeuvre, Reed had been assigned the task of interviewing the esteemed Italian film director for the Sunday newspaper’s much-revered and feared Arts & Leisure section. Antonioni’s Blow-Up had recently turned into something of a cause célèbre when the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency condemned it and the Motion Picture Production Code refused to bless it with a seal of approval. Rather than snipping those two seconds of pubic hair, MGM instead released Blow-Up through a corporate front, given the classy name of Premier Productions; then the studio aggressively pushed the film into Oscar competition, releasing it in the final two weeks of 1966. Reed, whose movie aesthetic had never really evolved beyond the pleasures of All About Eve, much preferred the year’s front-runner for the Oscar, A Man for All Seasons, which, in its faithful mix of sainthood and knighthood, couldn’t get any classier. Or duller.

  In his Times profile of Antonioni, Reed emphasized his own total lack of appetite for the assignment at hand by openly complaining in print that watching an Antonioni film was surpassed in tedium only by trying to conduct an Antonioni interview.

  The feeling was mutual. Antonioni actively resisted Reed’s questions about “your favorite” this and that—until he finally just spat it out.

  “No American films,” he told Reed. “I go today to see Andy Warhol’s film The Chelsea Girls. I am told we make movies alike. I also think Scorpio Rising is lovely,” he added.

  “Lovely” is a word few people in the 1960s (or any other decade) ever applied to Kenneth Anger’s short experimental film about contemporary Nazi homosexual bikers who wield S&M leather gear the way most kids play with their toys.

  Upon hearing Antonioni’s critique, Reed did not do what any mildly curious journalist would do; he didn’t ask follow-up questions (anyway, none that made it into print) about The Chelsea Girls or Scorpio Rising, an underground film that had played (and been busted) at grungier basement venues around the world.

  The Chelsea Girls was also an underground film, and it also would run into trouble with the law here and there. But unlike Scorpio Rising, The Chelsea Girls managed to graduate rather quickly from its lowly birthplace, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque basement theater on West Forty-First Street, to the plush Cinema 57 Rendezvous on the prime Manhattan moviegoing turf of West Fifty-Seventh Street. The Chelsea Girls was, in fact, the first underground film to make the leap to the mainstream, and its upgrade thoroughly outraged another writer at the New York Times, in this case, its chief film critic.

  “It was all right so long as these adventures in the realm of independent cinema stayed in Greenwich Village or on the south side of 42nd Street,” wrote Bosley Crowther. “But now that their underground has surfaced on West 57th Street, and taken over a theater with real carpets . . . it is time for permissive adults to stop winking at their too-precocious pranks.”

  And the carpet at the Rendezvous was the least of it. Unaware of how lucrative really
bad publicity can be, the Chelsea Hotel’s manager was threatening to sue Warhol!

  The Chelsea Girls. It wasn’t really so much a movie as it was a dozen short movies, projected side by side on a double screen; these short movies had little to do with each other but what Warhol and his codirector, Paul Morrissey, had dreamed up after the fact. Their idea of filmmaking was to load the camera’s magazine (limited to thirty minutes of film), point the lens at some of the more colorful denizens of Warhol’s entourage, and let them talk and carry on with all due extravagance. It took patience to follow The Chelsea Girls’ story line for the simple fact that there was no story line.

  Warhol and Morrissey never bothered with things like a script, but at some point Morrissey realized that whenever he and Warhol filmed their actors, whom they called superstars, “it was in someone’s bedroom,” he recalled, “and many times it was in the Chelsea Hotel.” So why not make it look like all the scenes were taking place simultaneously in rooms at the Chelsea? Morrissey gave Warhol credit for the word “girls” in the title. “But it was my idea that it looked like a hotel movie. So we brought it to the Cinematheque and showed it.”

  If Scorpio Rising was about gay leather bikers, The Chelsea Girls was about hothouse flowers who seemingly never left their hotel rooms. They told wild and obscene stories, as if lifted from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl but without the poetry, and they swore more than Lenny Bruce at the Cafe Au Go Go; they also took drugs on camera, and rather than have sex—real or simulated—they occasionally exposed themselves. There was also Nico, who was a singer with the Velvet Underground. She did not sing in The Chelsea Girls but rather cut and combed her long blond hair for thirty minutes. In other words, it took patience to sit through the entire three and a half hours of Warhol and Morrissey’s film to get to the parts of it that would shock or titillate or simply not bore.

  An underground film like The Chelsea Girls might never have been mentioned in the same anticipatory breath as Blow-Up and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if not for two very aboveground publications that alternately loved and loathed it.

  In his review titled “Underground in Hell,” Newsweek’s Jack Kroll called it “a fascinating and significant movie event. It is as if there had been cameras concealed in the fleshpots of Caligula’s Rome.”

  Even better for the movie’s box office, a reviewer from Time labeled The Chelsea Girls “a very dirty and very dull peep show.” Never a stickler for accuracy, the newsweekly went on to complain that “the characters are all homosexuals and junkies,” despite the fact that Nico had sired a child by actor Alain Delon and committed other flagrant acts of heterosexuality. The review in Time fixated on what made its anonymous critic apparently nauseous: “A faggot who calls himself the Pope advises a lesbian to sneak into church and do something obscene to the figure on the cross. There is a place for this kind of thing, and it is definitely underground. Like in a sewer.”

  Whether or not he’d read those twin opinions, Michelangelo Antonioni went to see the newly released Chelsea Girls, a trek to the Rendezvous that had already been made by many other notable directors, writers, and producers, as well as more than a few socialites, including Honey Berlin. She was wife of Hearst Publications president Richard Berlin and mother of Brigid Berlin, whose performance as a lesbian in The Chelsea Girls required her to stick a hypodermic needle into her buttocks without first removing her trousers. Honey summed up her daughter’s performance in just one sentence: “I can’t believe you would lower your family like that.”

  Others were equally impressed, but in a good way—writers like Gore Vidal and directors like Tom O’Horgan and John Schlesinger and, perhaps most important, United Artists president David Picker, who felt The Chelsea Girls would open doors for artists due to the film’s frank language, nudity and subject matter. It signaled a new artistic freedom for the American cinema.

  The French, surprisingly, were a little less accepting of what Warhol and Morrissey had wrought. Invited to the Cannes Film Festival, Warhol arrived there only to be told that the festival’s film board had second thoughts about The Chelsea Girls and would not be screening it at the Riviera movie confab as promised. That spring, A Man for All Seasons did, indeed, win the Oscar for best picture, beating Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which, for all its bold language, never let the word “fuck” cross the lips of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. That movie taboo was broken in 1967 by British actress Barbara Jefford when she essayed the role of Molly Bloom in Joseph Strick’s small-budget film adaptation of Ulysses, which carefully used the F-word only as a direct quote from James Joyce’s much-revered prose.

  The Cannes film board, which ultimately barred The Chelsea Girls from its festival, did go ahead that spring with its decision to screen Ulysses, but at the last minute, unbeknownst to Joseph Strick, they protected their French moviegoers by failing to provide several significant subtitles. Strick was not happy, and stormed the projection room to try to bring an end to the screening.

  Compared to the movies, book publishing had pretty much sorted out its major censorship contretemps by the mid-1960s, thanks to court cases regarding the long-banned novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Fanny Hill, and Candy. The theater also had been something of a refuge for the more sexually provocative: In Tennessee Williams’s 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth, Paul Newman’s hustler character ended up being castrated for having deflowered and impregnated his girlfriend Heavenly Finley, while in the movie version, made three years later, the Production Code saw to it that Newman’s Chance Wayne got to keep Heavenly, as well as his penis.

  With Blow-Up and Ulysses, however, the movies suddenly leapt ahead of Broadway, which had yet to permit full nudity or allow the ultimate four-letter word to be uttered there. Television, with its conservative sponsors and huge viewership, remained literally stuck in the Eisenhower era. The most incendiary show in the mid-1960s was Peyton Place, ABC’s recycling of Grace Metalious’s 1956 potboiler about people who conceived children out of wedlock in small-town America. The discovery of illegitimate children so shocked the public that the network had no choice but to air the nighttime soap opera three times a week.

  In 1967, Hollywood’s most cutting-edge films—major-studio films that many historians would later say signaled a New Hollywood—included Bonnie and Clyde, in which Warren Beatty’s Clyde went from being bisexual in the script’s original draft to merely impotent in the finished film, and The Graduate, in which director Mike Nichols, as he put it, had “to sneak in” a condom in long-shot for one bedroom scene. That kind of cautious approach to sex pretty much summed up 1967, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court finally got around to making interracial marriage legal in all fifty states, and the year that B-movie star Ronald Reagan took office as governor of California after promising to “clean up the mess in Berkeley.” Steps forward were met with steps backward. The following year, however, such timidity would be put aside for good, lost in a veritable sexual explosion that would rock not only the movies but the theater and publishing worlds as well.

  “I think this is a golden age for creative work of any kind,” Candy novelist Terry Southern said as he embarked on writing what he thought would be another groundbreaking book, Blue Movie. “The people who go all out will make it. We’ve only scratched the surface of our Freudian heritage. We are undertaking an exploration of the mind and we’re making some interesting discoveries. We have discovered the value of not being prejudiced. The assumption has always been that there have been limits. But we now know that there are no limits.”

  Until the courts, a corporate culture, arbiters of political correctness, a Silent Majority president, and the public’s ennui with the sexually exploitive coalesced to form new limits—or reimpose old ones—many writers, directors, and producers agreed with Southern. These artists knew each other, often collaborated, and just as often competed to be first at discarding whatever the censors threw at them. In many cases, there is only one degree of separation between
the novels, movies, TV shows, and plays that they created in the Sexplosion years.

  This is their story—a tale of the pop rebels who broke all the taboos.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Winter 1968, Guts

  For purveyors of the moral status quo, the first four weeks of 1968 emerged as an unqualified disaster.

  In January alone, Off-Broadway performances began for Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, about an expletive-laden, gay birthday party gone bad. Terry Southern fulfilled his fantasy, and then his nightmare, of seeing his long-banned Candy finally go before the movie cameras. Jane Fonda, still filming Barbarella in Rome, fretted over the film’s outer-space striptease, which director-husband-svengali Roger Vadim had promised to fix in postproduction by hiding her privates with the film’s opening credits. Kenneth Tynan went from theater critic to theater impresario, asking everyone from Samuel Beckett to Jules Feiffer to contribute skits for his new erotic stage revue, Oh! Calcutta! Director Lindsay Anderson began filming If . . . , set in an English boys’ school rife with anarchy, homosexual love, and a heterosexual wrestling match. United Artists green-lit John Schlesinger’s exploration of the Forty-Second Street hustler scene, Midnight Cowboy. Director Tom O’Horgan toyed with adding a nude scene to his upcoming Broadway incarnation of the new musical Hair. Little, Brown published Gore Vidal’s novel about a transsexual, Myra Breckinridge, while over at Knopf, Inc., they began printing the first seventy thousand copies of John Updike’s tome on suburban spouse-swapping, Couples. And Lance Loud, only a few years away from being TV’s first gay star, was so inspired by seeing Warhol’s Chelsea Girls that he promptly dyed his hair silver to match his idol’s wig.

  In 1968, the world did not yet know of the teenager from Santa Barbara, but Lance Loud was already well on his way to being the Zelig of the Sexplosion years as he filtered and absorbed the rapid changes in pop culture, not to make art but to turn his life into art. All he needed was a little help from some documentary filmmakers, the yet-to-be-launched Public Broadcasting Service, and, of course, Andy Warhol himself.