Literature for the young included How to Be a Successful Teenager, by one William C. Menninger. In a chapter on “How to Live with Parents” Menninger described techniques of handling mothers and fathers who tried to dictate to them: “One of the best ways to maintain family peace and insure cooperation is by holding family councils periodically about important matters.” There were plenty of other sources of advice for youth. The Chicago Daily News carried a column of adolescent gossip called “Keen Teens”; the Ladies’ Home Journal a department, “Profile of Youth.” Pulps for adolescents included Confidential Teen Romances, Teen Times, Hollywood Teenager, 16 Magazine, Teen World, Teen Parade, Modern Teen, and Teen Screen. Among their magazines were Ingenue, Calling All Girls, and Seventeen, which observed its seventeenth year of publication in 1961 with a breathless editorial, “It’s Our Birthday”—“Seventeen is 17… Isn’t Everybody?”
I Was a Teen-Age Frankenstein was one of the more memorable films produced for the adolescent trade. The editor of Teen Magazine, Charles Laufer, said that “the music market for the first time in history is completely dominated by the young set.” They were the most musical generation ever, and their taste, at its best, was very good; the swing generation could hardly improve on the Beatles, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and forty-four-year-old B. B. King, whom the youth of the 1960s discovered after he had been ignored by his contemporaries for twenty-one years. Unfortunately the youngsters had other idols who belonged aesthetically with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans, among them the ruttish Presley. Presley’s voice and appearance were at least his own. That wasn’t true of most rock stars. To a striking degree they were all alike—short youths, running to fat, who were prepared for public consumption by strenuous dieting, nose surgery, contact lenses, and luxurious hair styles. And they couldn’t sing. Most couldn’t even have made themselves heard in the back of a theater. Their voices were amplified in echo chambers and then created on tape, a snippet here and a snippet there, destroying false notes. When they appeared in public, they would mouth the words while the records were being played over the loudspeakers. Wiggling their hips and snapping their fingers, their features always fixed in a sullen expression, they would desecrate good songs: “I loved, I loved, I loved yuh, once in si-ilence,” or “The rain, yeah! stays mainly in the puh-lain.”
“What I mean to kids,” said Janis Joplin, shortly before she killed herself with whiskey and drugs, “is they can be themselves and win.” John Lennon of the Beatles said, “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” Their listeners may have tuned such things out. They were, after all, accustomed to meaningless words—“Learn to forget,” said a writer in Crawdaddy; it was one of the wiser apostrophes directed to that rock magazine’s readers. Purdue polled two thousand teen-agers on the gravest problem facing American youth. A third of them said acne.
Policemen would have disagreed. Over the previous ten years arrests of the young had jumped 86 percent. “Teen-Agers on the Rampage,” proclaimed a Time head after a single week which had seen violence “among high schools from California to Maine.” Professor Ruth Shonle Cavan published the first sociology textbook to deal with upper- and middle-class delinquency, including what she called “alcohol-automobile-sex behavior.” Felonies were almost commonplace in some neighborhoods which had once been serene. The FBI reported that Americans aged eighteen or younger accounted for almost half of all arrests for murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and auto theft—and in the suburbs it was more than half. Beginning in 1960 suburbs began setting up teen-age codes of conduct, but they had no legal status, compliance was voluntary, and their chief value was evidence that parental authority was bankrupt. “Mit dose kids society is nix,” said the cop of the Katzenjammer kids, and it often was. Gallup found a startling difference between the values of parents and those of their children. Three out of four youngsters said they knew that cheating on examinations was common. It didn’t bother them, Gallup reported.
The first evidence of widespread teen-age drug parties in the paneled rumpus rooms of the affluent was turned up in 1960 by the Westchester County vice squad. After the shock had passed parents said that at least it wasn’t liquor. Then police on Santa Catalina Island, the southern California resort, announced that drunkenness had become common among thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children in wealthy families, and in the future they would charge the parents $2.50 an hour to babysit teen-age drunks till parents came to take them home. Nationally the number of adolescents who drank regularly was put at between 50 and 66 percent. In Yonkers, New York, where it was 58 percent among high school juniors and seniors, 64 percent said they drove the family car while doing it. Parents in Rose Valley, a Philadelphia suburb, allowed children to bring their own bottles to parties. Their fathers did the bartending. One wondered what Clarence Day’s father would have thought.
Among the recurring news stories of the 1960s—the ghetto disorders, the annual anniversary of Dallas, the war moratoriums—were accounts of rioting at the Newport Jazz Festival and at Fort Lauderdale, the watering places of the young. Yet the extent of teen-agers’ drinking ought not to have been surprising. In a sense they were expressing their social role. Opulence, the lack of genuine responsibility, and a position outside the unemployment pool gave them all the attributes of a leisure class.
In their ennui or their cups, youths of the 1960s frequently turned destructive. A brief item from Hannibal, Missouri, gave melancholy evidence of the revision of a cherished American myth. At the foot of Hannibal’s Cardiff Hill stands a famous statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, barefoot and carrying fishing poles; a plaque explains that this is the neighborhood where Tom and Huck “played and roamed at will.” But any boys who attempted to emulate them after dark in the late 1960s would have risked arrest. Because of the rise in adolescent vandalism, loitering by the young on Cardiff Hill—and indeed anywhere in Hannibal—was forbidden after 10 P.M.
It was a harsh but necessary law; the vandalism was a real problem, in Missouri and elsewhere. During one week in February 1968 thirty New Haven high school students were arrested in the wake of china-smashing cafeteria riots, five hundred boys in the Chicago suburb of Maywood battled police at a rally protesting the selection of a homecoming queen, and nearly three thousand students at Chicago’s Dunbar High left classes to pelt rocks at cars. In a typical suburban incident, an Alexandria, Virginia, gang, the children of government officials, did between $7,000 and $8,000 in damage by smashing automobile windshields with baseball bats. When arrested, they said they had done it “for fun.” Another widespread expression of violence was party crashing. For a time there was a rash of such incidents each weekend in Westchester, Fairfield, Rockland, and Bucks counties—the exclusive suburbs ringing New York. Characteristically, six or eight uninvited youths would arrive at the height of a party, break open the parents’ liquor cabinet, and destroy glassware and furniture.
Sometimes invited guests were worse. They would rival one another in seeing how much they could damage their host’s home. One memorable debutante party celebrated the coming out of blonde Fernanda Wanamaker at her stepparent’s thirty-room mansion in Southampton, Long Island. Over eight hundred children of what Vogue was then calling “the beautiful people” were invited. After the band had left, a hundred and twenty-seven of them wrecked the mansion, smashing windows, tearing down curtains, swinging on chandeliers, ripping out phones, breaking lamps, carting off appliances and throwing most of the furniture on the beach. The cost of the mischief was estimated to be somewhere between $3,000 and $10,000.
Affluent youths were often the worst offenders, but disorders could break anywhere. On one Independence Day five hundred drunken youths in Arnolds Park, Iowa, hurled rocks, beer bottles, and pieces of concrete at policemen; the tumult was set off when one of them yelled at the police chief, “Hey, punk, we’re going to take over this place.” In Chicago a free rock concert series—arranged by municipal officials to build camaraderie with y
outh—had to be canceled. At the first performance the audience rose up swinging tire chains and clubs; 135 were injured, including 65 policemen.
North Dakota University was one of the quietest, best-behaved campuses in the country until the Student, its undergraduate newspaper, proposed a weekend of fun in the nearby town of Zap. Zap’s Mayor Norman Fuchs, delighted, wrote to all neighboring colleges promising “Zap-Burgers with special seasoning” and lots of “good, clean, beer-busting, food-munching, tear-jerking, rib-tickling fun.” He acquired a sweatshirt with the legend “Zap, N.D. or Bust” and announced that the occasion would be called a “Zap-In.” There was talk of Zap becoming the Fort Lauderdale of the North. The mayor could scarcely have understood the implications of all that. His town had a population of three hundred. By the evening of Friday, May 9, 1969, nearly a thousand students, 90 percent of them male, had arrived in Zap from five states. The town’s three taverns were packed. When the thermometer dropped below freezing the students started a bonfire in the street, ripping out tables and booths from the taverns for firewood. Then they began breaking into stores and houses. Fistfights followed. A fire truck arrived; they seized it and dismantled it. Before five hundred National Guardsmen could arrive, the visitors had done $10,000 worth of damage.
The Fort Lauderdale of the South was never confronted with precisely that problem, freezing temperatures never having been recorded there in May. But Florida was afflicted with youthful firebugs that year just the same. Over a fifteen-month period an incredible number of unexplained fires (120) broke out on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. Fire marshals thought it possible that the entire campus might be razed. The crisis was resolved when residents in Hume Hall confessed they had done it. Students in the east and west wings had been competing to see which could attract the most fire trucks. What made the incident particularly striking was a circumstance which would have been unthinkable in earlier generations. Hume Hall was a girls’ dormitory.
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Men’s rooms in genteel establishments had long displayed a sign over urinals: PLEASE ARRANGE CLOTHING BEFORE LEAVING WASHROOM. Well-brought-up boys didn’t need to be reminded; they had been taught never to fasten the flies of their trousers in public. They were therefore startled when Françoise Dorleac, in the 1966 film Where the Spies Are, emerged from a dressing room, reached for her crotch, and casually zipped up her slacks in the presence of her costar, David Niven. It was one of those moments which served as reminders that the delicate balance between the sexes had been altered, probably forever. Women were moving into jobs which had always been considered masculine: telephone linemen, mining engineers, ditch diggers, truck drivers, Secret Service agents. More of them were sharing men’s vices, too: public drunkenness, juvenile delinquency, and assault and battery. Women’s Liberation leader Ti-Grace Atkinson called marriage “slavery,” “legalized rape,” and “unpaid labor,” and disapproved of love between the sexes as “tied up with a sense of dependency.” The Women’s Lib movement was not confined to the United States; in 1970 Bernadette Devlin was designated Ireland’s Man of the Year by her admirers, and 1,162 pregnant Norwegian women sailors, who had conceived while on the high seas, claimed and were granted compensation from their government. But it was in America that women took to the streets at the end of the 1960s in massive rallies: 3,000 in Chicago, 2,000 in Indianapolis, 2,000 in Boston, and 50,000 in Manhattan, striding down Fifth Avenue with their breasts, unencumbered by brassieres, swaying visibly.
The disappearance of bras among members of the movement was but one of many changes in fashion. When Mia Farrow cropped her hair girls flocked to hairdressers so they, too, could look like boys. They crowded Army-Navy stores buying pea jackets, petty officer shirts, and bell-bottom trousers. Square-toed, low, heavy shoes became popular among them, and so many coeds were using after-shave lotion as perfume that the business journal Forbes protested that the sexes were beginning to smell alike. In 1966 Twiggy, the Cockney model, weighed in at ninety-one pounds, and women dieted to look like her, angularity being considered antifeminine. The idea was to look tough. Shiny plastic came into vogue, and hard, metallic fabrics. Pantsuits appeared—not cute slacks but mannish, tailored slacks. The zippers or buttons were no longer on the side; they went straight down the front, like Françoise Dorleac’s, and some girls reportedly made them to go all the way through and up the back, so they could stand at urinals. Barbara Tuchman protested that too many women were beginning to look like Lolitas or liontamers. A Woman’s Lib leader called her an Aunt Tom.
At the very top of the movement there was some female homosexuality and bisexuality; Kate Millett said she sometimes slept with women, and Joan Baez acknowledged that she had once had a lesbian affair. There was considerable resentment in the movement over being considered “sex objects”; girls objected to being whistled at and featured in fetching ads designed to appeal to males. Most girls in the movement preferred boys, however; Gloria Steinem, a heterosexual Lib leader, said, “Men think that once women become liberated, it will mean no more sex for men. But what men don’t realize is that if women are liberated, there will be more sex and better.” Betty Friedan attested to “the mounting sex-hunger of American women,” and David Riesman noted that “millions of women” had become “knowing consumers of sex” and “pioneers, with men, on the frontier of sex.” Elderly Americans, who had called aggressive women “bold” or “forward,” couldn’t grasp what was happening. Attending his granddaughter’s commencement in 1967, General Eisenhower told miniskirted girls: “Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking but knees are nearly always not.” The girls, of course, knew that what interested boys was higher up.
Certainly more girls were on the prowl, often roaming the streets in pairs or appearing at weekends, available, on college campuses. Bachelors dropping in for a drink at Chicago’s dating bars in the Rush Street district—The Jail, The Store, The Spirit of ’76—would be propositioned by girls who offered to “ball” them and tried to arouse them with a new gesture—the feminine hand, slipped between the man’s thighs, squeezing him there. Over a third of the coeds at a New York university admitted to one-night affairs with total strangers. Nationally, during the 1960s, the number of girls reporting premarital intercourse in surveys more than doubled; in a five-year period it rose 65 percent. European surveyors found that twice as many boys as girls there volunteered to describe their sexual experiences; in the United States it was the other way around. The number of coeds reporting the petting of male genitals soared. High school girls tried to achieve a licentious air. To that end, Seventeen discovered, the number of its subscribers using mascara had jumped from one in five during the late 1940s to nine in ten. Rudi Gernreich said that twenty years earlier girls tried to look sweet and innocent; now, “before they are seventeen years old they cultivate a wild, consciously sexy look.” Demure women all but vanished. Obscene language no longer shocked them; they used it themselves. If they wanted coitus they said so. In the film All the Loving Couples, a jaded wife waiting to be swapped said thickly, “When do we get laid?”
Presently she was in the throes of sexual intercourse, on camera, with another woman’s husband. The movies, once straitlaced, were exploring all the visual possibilities of the sex act. Under the leadership of Jack Valenti, who left the White House to become president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood adopted a rating system for films in 1968. Those in the G category would be family movies; the others would be M (suggested for mature audiences), R (restricted to persons sixteen or older unless accompanied by a parent or guardian), or X (no one under sixteen admitted under any circumstances).
In the late 1960s each season’s X movies went farther than the last. Even the movie ads in newspapers became something to put out of reach of children. I Am Curious (Yellow) was thought shocking when it appeared, showing nudity and coitus, but new productions rapidly made it obsolescent. Ads for The Minx said it “makes Curious Yellow look pale,” and it did
. Then The Fox depicted lesbians kissing passionately and a naked woman masturbating in front of a full-length mirror. A beast had intercourse with a woman in Rosemary’s Baby. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice was a comedy about wife swapping. Blow-Up provided a glimpse of a girl’s pubic hair; it was thought daring at the time, but presently ingenious close-ups showed the genitals in intercourse from unusual angles—some from the bottom—and actresses masturbating actors to climax. The ultimate, or so it seemed at the time, was Deep Throat, a tremendous hit about cunnilingus and fellatio. At the conclusion of it the heroine took a man down to the hilt of his phallus, displaying a talent which the New Yorker compared to that of a sword swallower. The action was photographed at a range of a few feet, and when the man reached orgasm, so did the girl. Technicolor revealed her full body flush.
Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade said: “I wouldn’t be too surprised to see a sex circus in the Cotton Bowl.” On Manhattan’s Forty-second Street, in the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues, a policeman said: “If a little old lady wants to buy the Times, she has to climb over three rows of Screw to get it.” Screw, Suck, Desire, Gay, and Coq—all the smut magazines competed for circulation by trying to show more flesh of models in lewder poses than the others. In Miami, Bunny Dania, one of the more experienced models, said that when she began posing photographers would show nudes playing volleyball or swimming. “Now,” she said, “you’ve got to have wife swapping and sadism and girls making out with girls. It’s moved indoors.”
On stage a performer named Jim Morrison described his latest sexual adventure; it had occurred five minutes before curtain time. Oh Calcutta was billed as “elegant erotica”; its sketches ranged in theme from wife swapping to rape. Che! provided a hundred minutes of faked sex acts. Those who preferred the real thing could find it in New York’s “Mine-Cini Theater,” or in San Francisco taverns where a boy and girl would strip, climb on the bar, and there engage in what was drolly called the act of love. Some spectacles shocked the most hardened observers. A reporter told of going backstage in one Manhattan show and seeing chorus girls, naked, shooting heroin into the backs of their knees while their illegitimate toddlers watched.
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