Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 14
“It was great fun,” he later recalled in a memoir about his rampant career in postwar Paris. “The Anglo-Saxon world was being attacked, invaded, infiltrated, outflanked, and conquered by this erotic armada. The Dickensian schoolmasters of England were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was standing on end beneath their wigs, black market prices in New York and London for our green-backed products were soaring to fantastic heights.”
In directing his “erotic armada” from Paris, Maurice Girodias, though adopting the French surname of his Catholic mother, was following a course charted years before by his father, Jack Kahane, an English Jew who until his death in 1939 had been an expatriate writer and publisher in Paris of English-language books often considered obscene.
Jack Kahane had been born in Manchester, and as a young British soldier in World War I he had suffered lung damage from German gasses in the battle of Ypres. But his contempt for the Germans was matched after the war by his disenchantment with Britain, its stringent conformity and enduring Victorianism, and long before the government had instituted its tirades against D. H. Lawrence, Kahane had abandoned England and returned with his piquant French wife to the Continent, where he eventually established the Obelisk Press in Paris, and befriended Henry Miller, and became the first publisher of Tropic of Cancer.
In addition to his own immodest novels, Kahane published works by Cyril Connolly and Anaïs Nin, Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves, Joyce’s poetry and excerpts from Finnegans Wake, and Lawrence Durrell’s first novel, The Black Book. But shortly after completing his Memoirs of a Booklegger in 1939, Kahane died, leaving to his twenty-year-old son, Maurice, along with several unpaid bar bills, the challenge of continuing the Obelisk Press.
For a time the business survived partly through the presence in Paris of American G.I.s who purchased in abundance the works of Miller and Harris and the “Memoirs” of Fanny Hill. But Maurice Girodias made political enemies in Paris after he had published an exposé written by a French Resistance figure charging collusion between public officials and business leaders; and while Girodias was vindicated of libel by a French court, he felt thereafter more conspicuous and vulnerable as a publisher, and in time he began receiving visits from inspectors inquiring about obscenity.
First he was questioned about the works of Miller, which had gone unchallenged for years, and then Nabokov’s Lolita was declared obscene many months after it had been published. Next there were objections to Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and to the Victorian tale Under the Hill, written and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
Suddenly it seemed to Girodias that the liberal tradition of France, the legacy of a bloody revolution, was being subverted by reactionary forces within the government, and his feelings were shared by several political observers and correspondents then residing in France; one of them, David Schoenbrun, believed that the nation’s military frustrations in Indo-China and Algeria had convinced many prideful patriots that France lacked discipline, that excessive permissiveness had drained the nation’s resourcefulness, and that what was needed was a restoration of order, obedience, and old-style morality.
As the purge of pornography often signals the rise of a righteous, illiberal regime—one of Hitler’s first acts in the early 1930s was to ban nudist camps and the instructional sex book Ideal Marriage—the harassment of Girodias during the latter 1950s presaged the elevation to power of General Charles de Gaulle and his dour and pious wife. Under de Gaulle, the Catholic Church and the military enjoyed increased prestige and influence, and soon Maurice Girodias fell victim to what he called the “priggish virtues” of bourgeois extremism, and about France he would write in his memoir: “All the fun and gaiety have left this nation; the Algerian war chased the last colonies of young artists and loafers away from Paris; in this hygienic-looking city, whitewashed by government decree, the spirit is dead, the secular feast is ended.”
Girodias closed the Paris office of the Olympia Press and spent much time in America, where the new definition of obscenity that Roth had provoked helped to transfer a blithe semblance of the literary Left Bank to New York’s Greenwich Village, to San Francisco’s North Beach, to Los Angeles’ Venice, and to the Near North Side of Chicago. Espresso coffeehouses were flourishing in major cities, beatnik writers and poets were prospering, paperback books by Genet and Beckett were selling well in university bookshops, and Lolita, still banned in France, was considered legal in the United States and published by G. P. Putnam’s in 1958, one year before Barney Rosset’s Grove Press would release Lady Chatterley’s Lover
While the French were following their antiquated hero, Americans were becoming increasingly weary of their aging general, were mimicking Eisenhower’s garbled statements to the White House press, and were offended and embarrassed when, after he had set aside Russian charges in 1960 that American spy planes were patrolling over Soviet territory, his deception was exposed by the confession of an American U-2 pilot who had just been shot down and captured by the Russians.
This was one of many incidents that contributed to growing public doubts about the integrity and supremacy of American leadership, and it also served to symbolize a younger generation’s departure from the policies and practices of the past. As the U-2 pilot had violated military tradition in confessing to the enemy—an unthinkable act during Eisenhower’s army days—so were multitudes of younger Americans now disregarding the codes and inhibitions that had influenced their parents, and they thus were contributing to the foundation of a new society that would be less secret, more open, less conformist—a society that would soon be demanding free speech on campuses, denouncing racism, burning draft cards during the Vietnamese war. While most of these and similar acts of defiance would be associated historically with the mid-sixties and later, the initial tremors were felt years before when Eisenhower was still the President; and many early signs of this schismatic trend were sexual.
In 1959 a moviemaker named Russ Meyer, once a cheesecake photographer for men’s magazines, produced a film called The Immoral Mr. Teas that displayed the bare breasts and buttocks of attractive Hollywood starlets. Taking advantage of the recently liberalized obscenity law, Meyer was able to exhibit his film in several art theaters around the nation, reaching an audience much larger than the usual crowd of lonely men, and, on a total investment of only $24,000, Meyer’s film earned a million-dollar profit. This quickly inspired dozens of imitating films that featured nudity, and it launched the multimillion-dollar “skin flick” market in America.
Although Lenny Bruce’s nightclub routines continued to be raided by the police, the obscenity charges against him were often overturned on appeal, allowing him to continue (until his death from drugs in 1966) his harangues against American hypocrisy, his defense of pornography as free speech, and his sardonic speculations on the sexuality of censors and clergymen.
While the nude photographs of women had heretofore appeared almost exclusively in men’s magazines, Harper’s Bazaar in 1960 printed a picture by Richard Avedon of a bare-breasted blond socialite, Christina Paolozzi, that prompted her expulsion from the Social Register but established her as a media celebrity and promoted the Bazaar as a trend-setter in flaunting fashion.
Throughout the country average middle-class citizens were becoming less squeamish about nudity in films and magazines, and more accepting of brief bikinis on beaches. An influencing factor was no doubt Playboy magazine, which, now in its seventh year as an advocate of greater freedom and an irrepressible promoter of the bikini, was selling copies openly and prodigiously not only at urban newsstands but also in small-town drugstores. The magazine also appealed to national advertisers because it had captured a large portion of the affluent youth market—25 percent of all copies were sold on college campuses. Many older Americans who were still repulsed by Playboy’s content were nevertheless impressed by the magazine’s commercial success, and juries now seemed less likely than before to convict the purveyors of similar periodicals, even in Mayor Daley’s Chicago.
In 1959, after a Chicago vice squad had arrested fifty-five independent news vendors for selling girlie magazines, a jury of five women and seven men—uninfluenced by a church group that sat in the courtroom holding rosary beads and silently praying-voted to acquit the defendants. After the verdict had been announced, the judge seemed stunned, then slumped forward from the bench and had to be rushed to a hospital. He had had a heart attack.
By 1960 the multiplying fortunes of Hugh Hefner permitted him to purchase for $370,000 a forty-eight-room Victorian mansion near the exclusive Lake Shore Drive, and to spend an additional $250,000 on renovations and such furnishings as a large circular rotating bed that would become the center of his expanding empire. Hefner also opened during this year in Chicago the first Playboy Club, which featured a new black comedian named Dick Gregory and was decorated by wall posters displaying such centerfold inamoratas as Janet Pilgrim and Diane Webber. Among the first customers, having just turned twenty-one, and currently between jobs, was Harold Rubin.
As if to separate itself officially from the grandfatherly era of Dwight D. Eisenhower and to acknowledge the inevitable ascendance of a new generation, the nation in November 1960 elected to its highest office the youngest American President in history, the handsome forty-three-year-old senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.
During his brief, dramatic term in office—one that would involve him in a failed attempt to invade Cuba, a triumphant nautical confrontation with the Russians, various crises in the Congo and Berlin and Southeast Asia as well as in Mississippi and Alabama—he nonetheless found time to inaugurate the Peace Corps, to promote national physical fitness and body awareness, to go sailing off Newport, to appear on a California beach in bathing trunks surrounded by admiring women, and to embellish the White House with a glamour and glitter that, for those fortunate people who shared it with him, was unforgettable.
Almost everything he said in speeches, or did in public, or read in private had an awesome influence during these trendy times. His publicized admiration for Ian Fleming’s spy novels boosted their sales; he lent distinction to cigar smoking; even his special rocking chair, prescribed for his aching back, became a celebrated design quickly imitated by furniture manufacturers.
His personal popularity was of course enhanced by his fashionable young wife, Jacqueline, who became the most photographed woman in the world and, parenthetically, the masturbatory object of numerous male magazine readers. Never before in American history have so many men privately craved a President’s wife; but as enticing as she appeared to be, it did not curb her husband’s interest in other women. Though a Roman Catholic, he was not monogamous; he was an elitist member of that religion, a wealthy worshiper who, like his father before him, consorted with cardinals and was unaffected by the joyless philosophy that stifled the sex lives of the poor parish regulars.
While his infidelities were not reported in newspapers, the rumors were constant, and various journalists assumed that his lovers included, among others, two Hollywood actresses, a young Radcliffe graduate living in Boston, an attractive secretary on the White House staff, the genteel sister-in-law of a communications executive, and a lovely divorcee residing in Los Angeles. If the name of no particular mistress emerged in the 1960s to personalize or scandalize his secret fervor, it was because he, unlike a few previous Presidents, had no desire for a mistress; he preferred variety, and, according to one correspondent who knew him well, he could make love as casually and quickly as he could swim the length of a pool—which is not to denigrate his fondness for the women who shared his bed, but rather to suggest that sexual intercourse for him was not a clinging complicated act of commitment. It was an indulgence in pure pleasure, a healthy exercise that relieved tension and produced a delightful sense of being alive. Kennedy was—as D. H. Lawrence might have described him—a phallic President.
However representative of the sixties his sexual style may have been, there were White House aides and political associates who were quietly appalled by it, or who, having so long associated the presidency with much older men, were unprepared for the youthful lusty drives exemplified by Kennedy and other New Frontiersmen.
One comely young woman, a campaign worker in 1960 who thought that she had gained a White House job because of her intelligence and idealism, was disappointed to discover that what Kennedy and a few of his men found most desirable about her was her body. Another White House secretary, who also traveled with the President and spent many private hours with him when Jacqueline was away, gradually by 1963 became consumed with anxiety because she feared that soon the press would expose the dolce vita and her own participation in it; and later, hearing the disastrous news of his death in Dallas, her first reaction was a sense of relief. Now his image as a good and gallant leader would be preserved, she thought, untarnished by an exploitative inquiry into his private life.
Hugh Sidey, Time magazine’s Washington correspondent, had before Kennedy’s death written about the libertinism in the White House, but Sidey’s account was a confidential memorandum meant only to inform his editors in New York. In the memo, Sidey suggested that at times the sensuality and sumptuousness of the Kennedy administration evoked thoughts of the hedonism of ancient Rome, and this made Sidey’s reportorial job more difficult since he often could not reach government spokesmen at night or during weekends because they all seemed to be socially involved in Washington or elsewhere. During one weekend when Kennedy and his staff were in Palm Beach, the memo added, even the President’s aging mother, Rose Kennedy, was part of the high life, attending a party with an escort that Sidey had overheard being referred to as her “gigolo.”
Although the Time staff alone was to have access to this memo, Hugh Sidey was later astonished to discover himself in the office of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, hearing the latter say in an enraged voice: “We could sue you for slander.” Robert Kennedy had on his desk a copy of the memo. When Sidey demanded to know how Kennedy had gotten it, the only answer was that someone had sent it to him. Sidey now became angry, and while apologizing for the flippant reference to Rose Kennedy’s escort, he would not retract anything else he had reported, saying that what was going on was “disgusting” and “I don’t think that this is the way the government should be run, or the way you people should encourage it to be run.”
Had Time magazine published the contents of Sidey’s memo, it would perhaps have prompted many favorable replies from readers, particularly those residing in smaller cities and towns away from the eastern seaboard, for despite the Kennedy-inspired excitement and welcomed changes there was increasing sentiment among middle-class Americans that things were moving too fast, that there were too many sit-ins in the South, and that there were too many parties in Washington to which they had not been invited. The Kennedys inspired a clannishness, an “in” crowd of beautiful people and movie stars, Harvard professors and rich liberals who wanted to democratize every place except their well-policed city neighborhoods and exclusive beaches in New England and the Hamptons.
The emphasis on youth made many Americans in their thirties feel older, particularly those junior executives who, having identified with corporations and having associated wisdom with seniority, now felt suddenly uncertain and outmoded in this age of new personalities and vacillating values. College graduates of the 1950s, revisiting their schools in the 1960s, were astonished by the new freedom on campus. Unmarried co-eds, some of them pioneering with the Pill, lived openly with young men, taking for granted liberties that years ago would have caused their predecessors’ expulsion. The male students of the sixties seemed almost devoid of formality, lacking neckties and a traditional respect for elders, and they suggested an easy confidence inspired perhaps by an assumption that with their knowledge of the new technology, and the accelerating obsolescence of the older generation, they could anticipate careers characterized by shortcuts to the top.
While older graduates were often irritated by this attitude, they also envied those who were part of the new freedom, and wished that they were younger and more available to indulge in it. One individual who felt this way, whose emotions were typical of thousands of other men in their early thirties—and who would later be lured into a voluptuous experience that would exceed his desires—was a normally cautious insurance executive in Los Angeles named John Bullaro.
EIGHT
JOHN BULLARO was a compactly built man, just under six feet, with hazel eyes and even features, who arrived each morning at the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles wearing a suit and tie and exuding a pleasant, outgoing manner. His clothes were in the style of Brooks Brothers, and his light brown hair, cut short and neatly trimmed, would have pleased his conservative Italo-American father, who had once operated a six-chair barbershop in the Hearst building in Chicago.
While Bullaro had voted for Kennedy and had mourned his death, he was aware that the Kennedy influence had widened the wedge between the ways of fathers and sons, creating an atmosphere out of which would come the “generation gap” and John Bullaro was personally offended after the Berkeley campus riots of 1964 when one student made headlines by saying: “You can’t trust anyone over thirty.” Bullaro was thirty-three, and he felt at least as trustworthy and idealistic as any caviling self-righteous campus radical.
Since graduating in 1956 from New York University with a master’s degree in educational administration, having resisted inclinations toward medical school, Bullaro spent years in youth work as a director with the Boys’ Club of Hollywood in Los Angeles; and in 1960, following his marriage to Judith Palmer, a pretty blonde who was training to become a nurse at the Beverly Hills Clinic, he shifted his career to a higher-paying position in the insurance business, which he saw as being somewhat related to social work and community assistance and, by extension, to the national welfare.
