America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Phil Harvey had his own run-in with Utah. In 1986 Adam and Eve was raided by law enforcement officials from the U.S. government, the state of Utah, and the state of North Carolina as part of then Attorney General Edwin Meese’s war on porn. Meese’s campaign had proved effective at first, because twenty years ago most adult retailers were mom-and-pop operations or small-time businessmen who had neither the stomach nor the finances for a fight. By 1986, though, Adam and Eve was a multimillion-dollar business big enough to punch back.

  The government figured it had an easy way to shut Harvey down by having the state of North Carolina prosecute him in nearby Alamance County. Bible Belt conservatives would be eager to convict, prosecutors thought. But they hadn’t reckoned on Harvey’s being considered a good neighbor and an important employer. Some of his employees had deep roots in the county. The jury also responded to Harvey’s defense attorneys, who framed the case in terms of the government’s trying to tell people what they could read or watch. It took the jury about five minutes to reach a not guilty verdict.

  Then the Justice Department decided to file charges simultaneously in multiple districts around the country, cherry-picking the most conservative communities, including Utah. The idea was to make fighting the charges so prohibitively expensive that Harvey would have to give up and plead or lose his business altogether.

  But Harvey, a cantankerous libertarian at heart, refused. The war between the government and Adam and Eve lasted eight years and cost Harvey $3 million, but in the end, after Harvey filed a civil suit against the government over its tactics, and a federal circuit court slapped the Justice Department for its behavior, saying, “We conclude that appellants satisfied their burden of showing that the indictment is the tainted fruit of a prosecutorial attempt to curtail PHE’s future First Amendment protected speech,” the Justice Department caved in return for a token face-saving guilty plea from Harvey to a minor mail offense in Alabama. He paid a fine. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve’s sales grew at a rate of 20 percent per year over the period of the legal war.

  Knowing that history, and the products they sell, you would think the people who work here would shun the conventions of respectability, but they are boring. Not in a bad way. They are all very nice and have given me a surprisingly open welcome considering they have no idea what I will say about them or their company. It’s just that I was sort of hoping for dark personalities or women running around in thong bikinis. Something.

  But Martin Smith grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, the son of a partner in Pete Marwick Mitchell, then a big international accounting firm. He graduated from Choate prep school, then Vassar, and went to work for Procter & Gamble. He started a little Internet business. Then he came to PHE.

  Mark Schoen, a native of Brooklyn, taught junior high school and coached hockey in New York until, almost by default, he began teaching sex education. He received a PhD and became an expert at creating sex education materials, including films.

  Peggy Oettinger used to be a kindergarten teacher. She has three granddaughters.

  Susan Montani worked for Ralph Lauren and a couple of cosmetics makers.

  Katy Zvolerin, the director of public relations for Adam and Eve, is the daughter of an assistant high school principal and the secretary of the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. She graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in journalism and PR. Now Katy writes press releases like this:

  Adam & Eve Pictures is pleased to present exclusive contract star Austyn Moore in her naughtiest role yet! In Headmaster 2, all-American Austyn crosses the line! See her as a promiscuous schoolgirl who seduces teacher Tommy Gunn with her sweet lips on his cock. Spanking only makes her worse! Sister Roxanna Hall must do penance after pleasuring herself with a horny priest. She seeks forgiveness for the multiple orgasms she receives…and he blesses her with his own holy liquid!

  The second night I am in town, I drive over to Montani’s home, a big place surrounded by woods, for some dinner. Candida Royalle, a 1980s porn star turned director and producer, happens to be there with a couple from Holland who design Candida’s line of Natural Contours vibrators, one of the biggest-selling items for Sinclair and Adam and Eve. Candida and I sit on Montani’s couch and talk, taking time every few minutes to look at a drawing made by Montani’s little girl, who runs upstairs excitedly, retrieves a new picture, and runs downstairs to show us. If it weren’t for the fact that I had seen a few of Candida’s movies in college—I remember one about a woman’s prison and another one, called Ultraflesh, about an alien female coming to earth—I could not distinguish this gathering as being at all different from any other group of smart executive types figuring out marketing strategy. Later, we’ll go out to Fuddruckers and have hamburgers.

  Montani walks in and tells me about a recent PTA meeting at her daughter’s school. “There were all these things you can sign up for and so I had to write down any special skills I had for possible job sharing and when you can come in and talk to the kids about what you do for a living. Well, there was a brand-new teacher and I was standing next to her and she handed me the clipboard and said, ‘Can you please read down the list what the different things are so I can explain them?’ When I got to the job share part, half the parents in that room fell out of their chairs.” The thing was, Montani has told exactly two people at the school where she works. “So in the two years we have been at that school, half the room had discussed what I do for a living. It does make me feel odd sometimes.”

  Then she looks at me. “How about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “If you look around at our company, 90 percent of the people who work there, you could categorize them as a rebel. They have rebel characteristics. Just think of yourself. You are writing about this because you are a rebel somewhere and because it is a little bit taboo and you are a part of this cause.”

  I am? I generally don’t like causes, but if I were part of the cause Montani is referring to, what cause is it exactly? I’m not sure I want to be enlisted into Montani’s cause. I’m the guy who wouldn’t jump in the deep end with two cute, naked girls.

  I can’t decide if I am a rebel, but I know Phil Harvey is. Like the others, though, you’d never know it by looking at him. He is a most unlikely-looking pornographer: thin, a little careworn, mostly bald. His narrow lips make him look as if he is in a permanent bad mood, but he has a wry sense of humor. He dresses like a haggard college professor, and for years Oettinger, who has been with PHE almost since its inception, has been trying to get him to buy a better car.

  For me, the quintessential Harvey moment arrives when I drive to Adam and Eve’s headquarters on my second day in town and pass Harvey as he walks along the side of the road picking up trash. Adam and Eve sponsors one of those clean road campaigns, and Harvey, who is sixty-eight years old and runs a company that earns over $100 million per year, takes his civic duty seriously. (A few months after my visit, the Hillsborough / Orange County Chamber of Commerce will name PHE business of the year, citing PHE’s “foundation club” membership and “its good corporate citizenship and generous support of so many worthy causes in Orange County.”)

  Harvey is the son of a farm implement manufacturer in Illinois and a mother who descended from Chicago aristocracy. When he was twelve, the family moved to Connecticut. Harvey attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, then Harvard. He enrolled in the Peace Corps, served in the army instead, and then joined CARE. He spent five years in India feeding children and coming to the conclusion that ever more food from the West was not going to solve the hunger problem there. Not only did the charity serve to depress prices of local farm products, but Indians kept making more Indians and more mouths to feed. What India really needed, Harvey decided, was better family planning.

  He enrolled in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to study for a master’s degree in family planning. There he met Dr. Tim Black, a British physician who had worked i
n Papua New Guinea. Together the two of them decided on a social marketing project to see if they could use free-market forces to promote and distribute condoms. At the time, federal law could be construed to make selling condoms by mail in the United States a crime. But they obtained permission from the university and Harvey made the project part of his thesis.

  The two birth control entrepreneurs placed smart-alecky ads in college newspapers (“What Will You Get Her This Christmas…Pregnant??”) and were a little surprised to discover that the project made a profit. They started a charitable organization called Population Services International (PSI) and funded it partly through the for-profit business they dubbed Population Planning Associates (PPA). Harvey and Black began adding other products to the PPA lineup, like books on contraception and a couple of nudie magazines, then other goods that might appeal to men, including ship-building kits and barbecue grills. But porn and lingerie and condoms were far more popular. Eventually, the partnership dissolved and PPA became Adam and Eve. PSI still exists. It branched out into other public health areas and is active in the third world. Ashley Judd serves on its board, as do other notables like Frank Carlucci, former chairman of the Carlyle Group, the private investment company that has minted money for George H. W. Bush, James Baker, and former British prime minister John Major, among others.

  Harvey started a second charity, Washington, D.C.–based DKT International. It focuses exclusively on family planning and sexually transmitted diseases. He still serves on the DKT board. DKT receives grants from the U.S. government. (“That was what was so shocking to the feds when they came in,” Oettinger told me, referring to the 1986 raid and subsequent prosecutions. “Over here they are trying to put him in jail, and over there they are giving him grants for his nonprofit work!”) DKT also receives funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but in a very real way America’s hunger for porn and sex toys finances contraception in Africa, Latin America, and Asia because PHE donates 25 percent of its profits to DKT.

  Harvey has been through far too much to ever be the slightest bit apologetic about the way he has lived his life. I sit in his office—really, you’d think a guy making as much money as he does would get a decent office; this place is tiny, full of papers strewn everywhere, and the desk and the chair look like cheap rental stuff—and ask him about being an Ivy League do-gooder turned sex industry kingpin, and it quickly becomes clear that Harvey has never seen any point in being embarrassed. He is a defender of American liberty, a stance that jibes with his libertarian instincts and his support of the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank (though he is a registered Democrat). He was never condemned by his family; his father actually owned a stake in the business during its early days. His mother chose to ignore it. “If I said to her, ‘Gee, Mom, we are selling a lot of vibrators or sex videos,’ she would have talked about something else.”

  The truth is, being in a controversial business is a kick, because it fosters a feeling of camaraderie, a “siege mentality. We all recognize we are doing something controversial and that our mothers and grandmothers might very well not approve, and everybody handles that in a different way, but we all have that in common.”

  All the good feelings come easier when the company is doing well, and lately it has been doing very well. PHE’s growth slowed as it began to face what Harvey calls “fierce” competition from online retailers, but it has been able to bump sales by about 9 percent annually. “Over the past two or three years there has been a rapid acceleration in the demand for things that buzz. Overall we probably sell between $25 and $30 million worth of toys per year, a lot more than five years ago.”

  Sinclair has helped. “Sinclair’s positioning in the marketplace removes some of the barriers a lot of people feel toward sexually explicit materials,” he says, and then repeats the code phrase: “It is permission giving.” For example, he says, Sinclair is able to place its ads in Ladies’ Home Journal because the approach is softer than that of Adam and Eve, though these days, he tells me, “If you take the six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand women who buy from Adam and Eve,” it is not necessarily true that women need a softer approach anymore. “Women want more explicit these days.”

  After being in the business for thirty-five years, Harvey sees the sexual landscape changing more rapidly than ever. “There are now fifty thousand porn titles cranked out of Southern California every year. The national sexual dialogue has changed. Like the appetite for sex toys.”

  The company is finding itself having to sprint in order to keep up. For most of its existence, Adam and Eve sold only what Harvey considered mainstream porn. In fact, he was chagrined during the conflict with the government to find that some S&M materials had found their way into his inventory. After that, he created an advisory board to screen out what it regarded as inappropriate or unhealthy depictions of sex.

  “We still have the same standards with some interesting variations,” he says. “Like tattoos. There was a time when we would not sell anything where the people were tattooed. Well, we’d be out of business now if we did that.” In recent years, Adam and Eve has had to assert its power to tone down the work of porn producers and it is trying to figure out a new balance in depicting, say, fetish, which Harvey says “is much more common now.”

  “The last ten years have certainly seen much greater availability of some of the really bad stuff, violent stuff, some animal stuff. I am not sure why…We can sell bondage material if it is clearly consenting. But we have to try hard to explain that to directors.” Earlier I had visited with an employee who filters porn titles. His discard box had more DVD packages in it than his “acceptable” box.

  Harvey is extremely thoughtful on the subject of sexuality—he’s a very smart guy in general—but he can’t fully explain the surge of interest in, or acceptability of, his products. He has his theories, though.

  Information is one. As more information about sex filters through society, people decide they want some of what they hear about. “If you have a woman who was told for twenty-five years, ‘Just lie there; wait until he is finished,’ well, she may develop a desire to have an orgasm once she discovers such things exist. Knowledge can precede desire.”

  Schoen, the educator, told me something similar. We are becoming more sophisticated about sex with more information, he said, and so we become more open to different varieties of it.

  “Like espresso and lattes?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” he said. “There’s a coffee shop on every corner in the country now and so people want better coffee.”

  Pornography can help people discover: “‘Oh, I did not know you could have sex that way, from behind or standing up or sixty-nine.’ That could become a desire,” Harvey says.

  Too much knowledge is exactly what has alarmed many others. Back in the 1980s, when Adam and Eve was considering a move to Alamance County before it was prosecuted there, Harvey ran into strong opposition stirred by a local minister who told his congregation that such a move would pollute the community. “Would you feel your wife and children were safe?” he asked. It worked, and Harvey chose Hillsborough in Orange County. At the 1986 trial, the same minister stated that employees of such a company could never “be good citizens of our community” because they would be so corrupted by the influence of porn it would change them. The information would make them dangerous.

  To Harvey, this smacks of a wish to maintain social control. “I think there are issues of power going in many, many ways. The crowd that is really afraid of this is afraid because it has to do with loss of control. Loss of control is a part of sex. It is one of the things most of us find is good about it.” At first he seems to be referring to sexual power—we’re talking about bondage—but he is also referring to something much more profound.

  I have had enough years of Catholic education to recall St. Augustine’s exhortations to keep one’s mind disciplined and aimed at God from whom all good emanates. Destiny is in God’s hands, not ours, and it is t
he sin of hubris to think otherwise.

  But if sex is controlled by each person individually, church and state have lost an element of collective control. Pope Paul VI referred to this forty years ago when he issued Humanae Vitae, a document I had to study in school to learn church teaching on contraception and sex. “No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law,” he wrote. “It is in fact indisputable, as Our predecessors have many times declared, that Jesus Christ, when He communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and sent them to teach all nations His commandments, constituted them as the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law, not only, that is, of the law of the Gospel but also of the natural law. For the natural law, too, declares the will of God, and its faithful observance is necessary for men’s eternal salvation.”

  The church literally controls your sex life. Moral order was established by God, Pope Paul wrote, and so husbands and wives “are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. On the contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do corresponds to the will of God the Creator. The very nature of marriage and its use makes His will clear, while the constant teaching of the Church spells it out…Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.”