The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  LAST DANCE

  The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1997

  LIONEL BART, COMPOSER of Oliver!, once told me that he did so many drugs in the late 1960s that he came round in the early 1980s and realized that he didn’t have a single memory of the 1970s. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I replied. For Lionel and the similarly situated, Anthony Haden-Guest’s The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night (Morrow) and John Heidenry’s What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution (Simon & Schuster) are here to fill in the missing gaps.

  If you can remember the Sixties, so the old gag goes, you weren’t really there; if you can remember the Seventies, chances are you aren’t here. For Mr. Haden-Guest, researching his “culture of the night” is now an act of archeology: Deep in the basements of Manhattan warehouses, you can discern traces of the physical landscape, but the witnesses are gone. Steve Rubell, Studio 54’s presiding genius, is dead of AIDS; so’s his onetime partner’s sometime lover, Roy Cohn; so are celebrity regulars like Halston and Nureyev; so are their paramours like “the notorious livewire of Nightworld” Victor Hugo—no relation to the author of Les Misérables, though in his final days he wound up sleeping in a park.

  In Mr. Heidenry’s account of landmark victories in the sexual revolution, most of the freedom fighters end the same way: Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and S&M devotee, is dead of AIDS; so’s Franco Rossellini, producer of Caligula, the “first sexually explicit first-run movie in history”; so’s John (“Johnny Wadd”) Holmes, the gifted star of a hundred lesser epics.

  But before it shriveled away to an emaciated cadaver of its former self, what a world it was! Sometimes it seems to blur into one composite haze, involving copious use of Quaaludes and grottoes. There were those so eager to get back to the nonstop party that they’d leap from bed and get an early breakfast at four in the afternoon.

  Once upon a time, there were famous concert pianists and novelists and impresarios, but the heyday of hedonism blended such distinctions into one homogenized category of “celebrity”: The photographs of Studio 54’s celebrity couples are like a computer breakdown at a dating agency—“William Burroughs and Madonna,” “Regine and Salvador Dali,” “Margaret Trudeau on the floor with marijuana importer Tom Sullivan.”

  What happened during the Seventies can be neatly encapsulated by the career of one Linda Boreman. Miss Boreman fell in with Chuck Traynor, an abusive gun-toting pimp who put her to work servicing business clients who liked to spank and whip. One day Mr. Traynor landed her a starring role in a film where she was mounted—there is no delicate way to put this—by a German shepherd (by which I mean a dog, not a shepherd). On the strength of this effort, she was signed for another film, called Deep Throat, for which she changed her name to Linda Lovelace. The movie earned the first ever “100” rating from Screw magazine, but even more surprisingly Time magazine and other mainstream publications ran stories on it, and the film took off—a porn film for Mr. and Mrs. America. The star was invited on The Tonight Show, shot a cover for Esquire, and turned up at Hollywood parties.

  Linda Lovelace’s translation from involuntary prostitute to celebrity darling exemplifies the more general trend—of how the dark fringes of society crept into the centrality of our culture. Celebrities were decadent in the Twenties, but they kept it to themselves; in the Seventies, they came out of the closet, trailing nightclubbers and swingers with them. But Miss Lovelace’s original film moniker fits better: In this world, there’s little lace, less love, but it is a bore, man. Mr. Haden-Guest calls it “the last good time,” but look at those snapshots again: Baryshnikov and Jagger and Liza, all dead-eyed. “Grace Jones came in naked. Quite a few times,” says a doorman. “Probably more than she should have. Because after a while it became boring.”

  Mr. Haden-Guest’s is the more elegant read: An urbane Englishman, he descends to the lowest depths of New York’s Hellfire Club but always gives the impression he’s just passing through—Haden-Guest as Hades guest. Mr. Heidenry is more earnest, as you’d expect from a former editor of Penthouse Forum, and he mourns the lost Arcady of America’s cities, “where once tourists could obtain both topless and bottomless shoeshines.” For him, the final nail in the coffin was that big 1994 survey showing that the Americans who get the most sex are . . . monogamous married couples.

  Neither author questions the assumptions underlying the excesses, but then those assumptions are probably the sexual revolution’s most lasting legacy. The Me Decade is over, but its philosophy—hey, man, whatever’s your bag, it’s cool—endures, no matter if it kills you and your friends and even some uptight squares as well. Both books contain vivid portraits of Seventies nightlife—of basement floors invisible under a writhing mass of interchangeable bobbing heads and thrusting members. There is no joy, no passion. Mr. Heidenry writes of a group called the Sexual Egalitarian and Liberation Festival, a revealing acronym: SELF. At “the last party” the floor was always full, but ultimately everyone danced alone.

  WE’VE FIGURED IT OUT

  The Spectator, February 3, 2001

  WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? Who cares? Nick Marshall knows what he wants. Raised in Vegas, Nick is now a Chicago ad executive with a fabulous pad that’s great for nailing chicks. Unfortunately, life is about to get more complicated.

  Nancy Meyers’s film What Women Want opens with a bleary Nick on the morning after. Happily, last night’s piece of tail was obliging enough not to stick around for breakfast, leaving only the flimsiest of undergarments for Nick’s indulgent housekeeper to tidy away. Although Nick is played by Mel Gibson, he’s really Dino in the Matt Helm movies, or Tony Franciosa, or Jack Lemmon in How to Murder Your Wife, which has an identical opening, except that the babe—Virna Lisi—is still there and the sassy Hispanic housekeeper is a stiff-upper-lipped English valet played by Terry-Thomas. But, accessories aside, Nick is a Sixties swinger updated to the Oughts, and Mel plays him with a finger-snappy Rat Pack cool. As Sinatra observed in “Come Blow Your Horn”:

  In civilized jungles

  The females adore

  The lions who come on swingin’

  If you wanna score

  Roar!

  Of course, it was easier in Frank’s day. And something of the problem with this film’s concept is indicated by the fact that, in order to establish what passes for Nick’s character, the soundtrack relies exclusively on Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Bobby Darin, etc. Indeed, there are moments when the picture teeters dangerously on the brink of Austin Powers played straight. Anyway, when Nick gets to the office, there’s bad news. The booze and car ads that made the agency the king of the Eighties don’t work anymore: female-angled advertising is where the big bucks are, and so a hotshot woman has been brought in as Nick’s boss to reorient company strategy. Nick instantly picks up on what’s needed. “I gotta think like a broad,” he says. And a broad is another country: they do things differently there. The new creative director, Darcy (Helen Hunt), sends him home with a bunch of female products whose accounts are up for grabs: lipstick, leg wax, push-up bra, pantyhose, etc.

  Flicking through the channels, Nick despairs. “There’s way too much estrogen on TV. The perfect antidote to estrogen is Frank. I need some Frank.” He puts on Sinatra’s “I Won’t Dance” and twirls joyfully around the room, although one can’t help feeling this represents a fundamental misreading of the Sinatra oeuvre: Frank was the first male pop singer to get in touch with his feminine side and sing women’s torch songs, and, as to whether or not he knew what women want, he is by my reckoning the only celebrity all of whose ex-wives speak well of—go on, ask Mia Farrow.

  But let that pass. After his shot of Frank, Nick puts on the lipstick; tries out the leg wax—ouch!; pulls up the pantyhose—more shtick, efficient enough; spills the pills for PMT, HRT, whatever they are, slips on them, falls in the bath, electrocutes himself, and somehow the combination of the electric shock and the feminine personal prod
ucts results in him waking up with the ability to hear what women are thinking.

  This is a mixed blessing. He discovers that every woman in his office is only pretending to like him—they think he’s a jerk, a dog, a schmuck, a pig, a boor. . . . Even his sexual confidence is dented, as he hears his bedmate absent-mindedly musing to herself in mid-congress, “Is Britney Spears on Leno tonight?” The only exceptions are his two assistants, played by lovely Valerie Perrine and Delta Burke, who dote on him uncritically. His mind-reading powers don’t work on them, because apparently they don’t have minds to read. This is a rather patronizing joke on the part of Ms. Meyers and her writers, and a reminder that women can be as crudely insensitive to women as any man. Incidentally, if you were able to read my mind right now, you’d know I’m thinking about when Val Perrine, back in the Seventies, had an affair with Bob Fosse, performed a little bit of seasonal topiary on her pubic hair for Valentine’s Day, and then walked nude into Fosse’s room saying “Look, I have a heart on for you.”

  But that’s what guys want. What do women want? Well, it turns out that what they want is—stop me if you’ve heard this before—a man who’ll listen. To them, that is. As the movie progresses, Helen Hunt and full supporting cast marvel ever more deliriously at Mel’s amazing ability to listen!

  So all women want is a man who’ll “listen” except for throwing in the odd flight of faux-sensitive psychobabble? Nancy Meyers’s solitary insight has been the conventional wisdom for two generations, and boils down to little more than flattery dressed up as pseudo-analytical sensitivity as general in its application as a tabloid horoscope. And because men have been told that’s what women want for thirty years they’ve got very good at faking it because it’s a surefire way to get ’em into bed. Any guy who doesn’t know that what women want is a guy who’ll listen is a guy who’s managed to avoid listening to a quarter-century bombardment on the subject from chick flicks, Oprah, radio call-ins—in which case he’s probably clinically deaf, not merely chauvinist. Even us clapped-out old sexists have got hep to the listening angle. It’s painless enough: just nod sympathetically every now and again, and lie back and think of England. The 2001 equivalents of those Sixties swingers Mel digs are the hordes of guys out every night faking listening to the way women fake orgasm.

  So the surprising thing about What Women Want is how little they want. Nonetheless, Nick embarks on the inevitable transformation into a born-again feminist, and the equally inevitable realization that he’s falling for Darcy. In the traditional male-makeover sex comedy, Rock Hudson would be reformed by the steely determination of Doris Day. But here Mel Gibson’s miscast leading lady is little more than a bundle of insecurities: What Women Want really wants is a strong woman’s role to go mano a mano with Mel. Instead, the somewhat programmatic script just delivers him from one setpiece scene to another, letting the central romance fall a little flat.

  Still, in his first romantic comedy, Mel gives a masterful performance, full of wonderful touches: I like the way, as he passes his female colleagues and hears how they despise him, just a flicker of hurt crosses his face. But that’s another oddity: the uncomplicated chauvinist hound dog Nick seems far more of a rounded character than the sensitive listening Nick. When you compare the buoyancy of his “I Won’t Dance” dance to his new-man smooch with Helen Hunt, you can’t help noticing that Mel’s character seems far deeper when he’s shallow and at his shallowest when he’s being deep. This may be a useful insight if Ms. Meyers wants to make a sequel about What Men Want.

  THE AUDACITY OF GROPE

  The Spectator, April 4, 1998

  DURING THE GULF WAR, a United States pilot was captured by Iraqi troops. As luck would have it, she was a female pilot, so the Iraqis raped and sodomized her. Safely back home, the plucky gal declared that this was all just part of combat risk.

  “Combat risk”: there’s a lot of it around at the moment. In the ongoing war between women and the phallocratic tyranny, Gloria Steinem recently clarified the rules of engagement. For months now, conservative women have been assailing feminist spokespersons for their inconsistency with regard to, on the one hand, Anita Hill and, on the other, Paula, Monica, Kathleen, a former Miss America, a former Miss Arkansas, a couple of stewardesses on the ’92 Clinton campaign plane, etc. Those of us in the phallocratic tyranny have mostly had to twiddle our thumbs in the members-only cocktail lounge with a martini in one hand and a showgirl in the other while the little ladies slugged it out. But in The New York Times, Ms. Steinem has now issued a definitive ruling: “It’s not harassment and we’re not hypocrites.”

  The founder of Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus says “for the sake of argument” she’s willing to believe all the President’s female accusers. But, even so, what’s the big deal? After considering both Kathleen Willey (a “reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life”) and Paula Jones (“he asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers”), Ms. Steinem comes to the same conclusion: “It never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.” He showed a fine understanding of “the commonsense guideline to sexual behavior that came out of the women’s movement 30 years ago: no means no; yes means yes.”

  I confess I didn’t notice the piece at first; I was too busy drooling over the Playboy Implants of the Month centerfold. But a pal pointed it out to me and my reaction was as immediate as his: as the eponymous swinger of Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery would say, “Shagadelic, baby! Let’s shag!!” It turns out we’d both completely misread “the commonsense guideline to sexual behavior that came out of the women’s movement.” For years, the more straightforward feminists have stomped around in fierce T-shirts demanding, “What Part of NO Don’t You Understand?” Quite a big part, it seems. I didn’t realize “No” includes one complimentary grope with optional pants-drop and positioning of feminist hand on aroused male genital area. If she doesn’t go for it, well, no hard feelings (except on your part): just extricate your fingers from her underwiring and move on to the next broad. Your feminist credentials are impeccable: you didn’t rape her, so give yourself a pat on the back and the next one a pat on the butt.

  Frankly, I was skeptical. “It’s too easy,” I said to the guys after reading Ms. Steinem’s column. “There must be a catch.”

  But we went through it again, and there isn’t. If this is feminism, hey, let’s have more of it!

  At this point, I ought to declare an interest: I’ve met Ms. Steinem just once, on the eve of the 1993 presidential inauguration. She told me an interminable anecdote about coming across a turtle in the middle of the road, moving it to the shoulder, only to see the turtle waddle back onto the asphalt again—I think the turtle was meant to represent the American people, or the Democratic Party, or maybe Jimmy Carter. Anyway, my mind wandered and, like most predatory males, I found myself undressing her with my eyes, Ms. Steinem being one helluva looker, as many of these feminist babes are. If only I’d been au courant with feminist orthodoxy, I’d just have lunged straight for her bazongas.

  Nor is it just Ms. Steinem. Anita Hill, the distinguished former University of Oklahoma law professor, enthusiastically endorsed the new feminist line on the President’s behavior: “We aren’t talking about sexual harassment,” she declared. But, in that case, what does constitute sexual harassment? In her recent book, Speaking Truth to Power, Professor Hill offers some specific examples, like the revealing uniforms waitresses at the Hooters restaurant chain are forced to wear. Shocking.

  This is, as legal scholars say, an “evolving” area. According to a survey in Working Woman magazine, over 60 percent of respondents claimed to have been sexually harassed. Presumably the remaining 40 percent are just women who’ve been at the receiving end of one of the President’s “consoling hugs.” But in theory, there are seventy million women out there waiting to bring sexual harassment lawsuits. They can’t all be Hooters waitresses. One who did sue was the woman wh
o objected to a colleague displaying a photo of his wife in a bathing suit on his desk. Others include the college students in Houston who are suing their drama professor because, by teaching Shakespeare, Molière, and other sexist oppressors, he’s creating a “hostile work environment.” He, in turn, is suing the university for sexual harassment because, by supporting the students’ suit, they’ve created a hostile work environment for him. At the University of Pennsylvania, a woman in a short skirt complained of a “mini-rape” because some fellow strolling past observed, “Nice legs.” If only he’d thought to drop his pants and invite her to “kiss it.”

  In such a world, many of us potential rapists have found it easier to stay indoors and finish that novel or concerto we’ve always meant to write—although even then our sins will find us out. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, according to feminist musicologist Susan McClary, reveals “the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.” As they say at the Vienna Conservatory, “What part of Nein don’t you understand?”

  Happily, in this minefield of confusion, Ms. Steinem has now simplified the rules. In the dark ages, senior executives would simply sidle up to the new girl in the typing pool and utter boorish, chauvinist, intimidating cracks like, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without your glasses.” Today, under Ms. Steinem’s “commonsense guideline,” the sensitive Clintonian New Man can instead say, “Why, Ms. Jones, you’re beautiful without my pants on.” I think I speak for most unreconstructed old sexists when I say that we’ll gladly tear up the offensive snaps of the missus, willingly forswear insulting remarks about nice legs, lay off allusions to that misogynist Shakespeare, and swap that rapist stuff by Beethoven for something more enlightened (“Yo, bitch, sit on this”) if in return we can solicit fellatio from every well-stacked chick in the accounts department.