by Jon Ronson
‘Are S&M clubs comfortable places to be?’ I asked him. ‘Are they relaxing?’
‘Well, yes,’ Max said. From his look I guessed he considered them places of integrity - non-exploitative, shame-free retreats from a world that overvalues shame as a weapon.
‘Were you worried about getting caught?’ I asked.
‘I was careful,’ he said. ‘Especially when I began seriously annoying a big section of the car industry.’ What Max meant was that by the early 1990s he had become a campaigner to reform car safety laws, forcing manufacturers to carry out crash tests. ‘And when you think of what they did to Ralph Nader …’
*
Ralph Nader. In 1961 a young man called Frederick Condon crashed his car. Back then sharp edges and no seat belts were considered stylish in car interiors. But the sharp edges turned Frederick Condon into a paraplegic. And so his friend - the lawyer Ralph Nader - began to lobby for mandatory seat-belt laws. Which was why General Motors hired prostitutes to follow him into stores - a Safeway supermarket and a pharmacy - to seduce and discredit him.
‘It happened twice,’ Nader told me when I later telephoned him. ‘They were women in their mid to late twenties. They were pretty good. They both acted in a very spontaneous manner, not a furtive manner. They started a little small talk. Then they got down to it.’
‘What did they say to you?’ I asked him.
‘The first woman said, “Would you help me move some furniture in my apartment?” And the other one said, “We’re having a discussion on foreign affairs. Would you like to join it?” Here I was at the cookie counter!’ Nader laughed. ‘“Foreign affairs!”’ he said.
‘And all because you wanted them to put seat belts in cars?’ I said.
‘They didn’t want the government to tell them how to build their cars,’ he replied. ‘They were very libertarian that way, to put it mildly. They had private detectives follow me everywhere. They spent $10,000 dollars just to find out if I had a driver’s licence. If I didn’t have a driver’s licence they could have called me un-American, you see?’
Eventually General Motors was forced to admit the plot and apologize to Nader in a congressional hearing. The incident proved to him, and later to Max, that the car industry was not above trying to shame its opponents into silence in its battle against safety do-gooders, and that people in high places were prepared to ingeniously deploy shaming as a means of moneymaking and social control. Maybe we only notice it happening when it’s done too audaciously or poorly, as it had been with Ralph Nader.
*
One Sunday morning in the spring of 2008 a PR man telephoned Max to ask him if he’d seen the News of the World. ‘He said, “There’s a big story about you.” So I went to the news stand.’
And as Max stared at the grainy photographs that millions of Britons were simultaneously staring at - a naked Max being bent over and spanked by women in German uniform - a line from Othello came into his head: I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself and what remains is bestial.
All he’d worked for had been pushed away by a thing he had always considered a tiny part of his life. He took the newspaper home and showed it to his wife. She thought he’d had it specially printed as a joke. And then she realized that it wasn’t a joke.
Max’s behaviour from that moment on was the opposite of Jonah’s. He gave an interview to BBC Radio 4 in which he said that, yes, his sex life was strange, but when it comes to sex people think and say and do strange things and only an idiot would think the worse of him for it. If our shame-worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world, Max was narrowing that gap to nothing. Whereas Jonah’s gap was as wide as the Grand Canyon.
And Max had an ace up his sleeve. The News of the World had made a fatal mistake. The orgy was definitely German-tinged. But it was not Nazi-themed.
And so Max sued.
James Price QC (Max Mosley’s barrister): I’m going to ask you to go through [the photographs] quite carefully with me, if you would. On page 291, nothing Nazi there?
Colin Myler (News of the World editor): No.
Price: Page 292, that’s Mr Mosley having a cup of tea, nothing Nazi there?
Myler: Correct.
Price: That is the SS-style inspection sheet?
Myler: Yes.
Price: You can quite clearly see from the photograph that it is a plastic spiral-bound notebook. I suggest to you that it is inconceivable that anybody could possibly honestly describe that as a SS-style inspection sheet.
Myler: I disagree.
Price: What do you know about medical examinations by the SS?
Myler: I’m not a historian of them.
Price: Would it be fair to say you know nothing about SS medical inspections?
Myler: Not in great detail, no.
Price: Anything at all?
Myler: Not in great detail, no.
When Colin Myler and the paper’s investigative journalist Neville Thurlbeck were asked in court to specify exactly where Max was mocking Jewish concentration camp victims, they pointed to the photographs of the women guards shaving a naked Max and pointed out that Jews were shaved at concentration camps. But, as James Price QC indicated, they were shaving Max’s bottom. That wasn’t resonant of concentration camps at all. Furthermore, as Max explained during his evidence, if they’d wanted to look like Nazis, ‘it would have been easy to obtain Nazi uniforms online or from a costumier’. Yes, there were uniforms, but they were generically German military.
The News of the World‘s case crumbled further when an email exchange between two of the women guards was read out in court:
Hi ladies. Just to confirm the scenario on Friday at Chelsea starting at 3. If you’re around before then, I’m doing a judicial on him at noon so if you’d like to witness that, be here for 11am but don’t stress if you can’t make that.
Can’t wait it’ll be great … My bottom is so clear for a change. Lots of love.
A ‘judicial’? A Nazi scenario might have been called a ‘Volksgerichtshof trial’ or maybe a ‘Gerichtsverfahren. But a judicial? James Price asked the News of the World to explain why, if the orgy was so Nazi, one of the guards was constantly referred to on the tape as ‘Officer Smith’. They had no answer. Max won the case.
He won big: costs plus PS60,000 in damages, the highest in recent British legal history for a privacy case. And now, as Max told me, people regard him ‘primarily as someone who has been wronged and who has pushed rather successfully for certain things. I’m a lot better off than I would have been if I’d gone off to hide.’
Within three years the News of the World was no more. In July 2011 the Guardian revealed that a private investigator working for the paper had hacked into the voicemail of a murdered teenager, Milly Dowler. In an attempt to control the scandal, Rupert Murdoch shut the paper down. Later, Neville Thurlbeck pleaded guilty to phone hacking and was imprisoned for six months. Colin Myler wasn’t implicated and is currently the editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News.
Max felt as if he’d been fighting not only for himself, but for the dead who preceded him. He meant people like Ben Stronge. ‘He was an English chef living in northern France, divorced, and he was a swinger. A man and a woman from the News of the World swung by his place. He gave them dinner, disappeared upstairs, and apparently came back down wearing nothing but a pouch.’ Max paused. Then he said, softly, ‘Pathos.’
That was June 1992. When Ben Stronge discovered that the people looking at him weren’t swingers but News of the World journalists he started to cry. He telephoned the paper’s editor, Patsy Chapman. According to Max, ‘He said, “Please don’t publish, because if you do I’ll never see my children again.” Well, they published anyway. They didn’t give a damn. So he killed himself.’
Then there was Arnold Lewis. In the spring of 1978 the News of the World decided to infiltrate sex parties in caravans in the forests of mid Wales. The journalist Tina Dalgleish a
nd her photographer Ian Cutler answered a small ad in a swingers’ magazine. It had been placed by a lay preacher, Arnold Lewis. They met in the local pub.
The turnout was small. Five people showed up, three of whom were Tina Dalgleish, Ian Cutler and Arnold Lewis. Arnold left a coded note for potential latecomers with an arrow pointing in the direction of the caravan and the exact walking distance: ‘3.8 miles’.
At the caravan they drank sherry, ate biscuits, an orgy occurred (which Ian Cutler and Tina Dalgleish witnessed but didn’t participate in), and then a few days later Tina Dalgleish telephoned Arnold to reveal her identity.
Later, after I left Max, I managed to get Tina Dalgleish’s photographer Ian Cutler on the phone. He was recovering from a major stroke but he wanted to talk. He’d never stopped thinking about Arnold Lewis, he said. For thirty-five years it had plagued him.
‘Arnold told Tina that if she published the story he would kill himself,’ Ian said. ‘He was a preacher. Fucking hell. He was a preacher in a small Welsh village.’
The News of the World published and Arnold Lewis killed himself. He inhaled exhaust fumes. His body was found in his car the morning the story appeared. The headline read, If You Go Down To The Woods Today You’re Sure Of A Big Surprise.
Max and I spent the afternoon trying to work it out. There was something about his behaviour in the aftermath of the News of the World story that made the public totally uninterested in annihilating him. He just naturally seemed to get the formula right. People melted. But what was it?
At one point he raised with me the possibility that he might be a sociopath. Maybe he’d survived it all by drawing on special sociopathic powers. Maybe his instantaneous ‘whoosh’ of resilient fury at the news stand was a sociopathic whoosh. Maybe that was what we liked about him - that resilient fury. He told me that in 1991, two years before getting the job as president of motor racing’s governing body, they ‘commissioned a psychiatrist to analyse me, and the man concluded I was a sociopath’. As he said this he gave me an anxious glance.
I sighed.
‘Do you feel empathy?’ I asked him.
‘Yes!‘ he said. ‘The motive of most of the main things I’ve done in my life is feeling sorry for people. And the psychiatrist never met me. He just did it from the outside.’
‘Well, I don’t think you’re a sociopath,’ I said.
‘Phew!’ said Max.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘a psychologist once told me that if you’re worried you may be a sociopath that means you aren’t one.’
‘Thanks, Ron, another phew,’ Max replied. He paused. ‘Jon,’ he said. ‘I meant Jon.’
‘More proof you’re not a sociopath, because sociopaths wouldn’t care about calling me Ron,’ I said.
‘Another phew!’ said Max.
It was getting dark by the time I left Max’s house. We both felt we hadn’t quite managed to solve the mystery and so we agreed to keep thinking about it.
‘Oh, by the way,’ I said on my way out. ‘Have you heard of an S&M place in America called Kink? I think I’ve got an invitation to visit them.’
‘Kink?’ said Max. His eyes widened. ‘That is the place! I’ve only seen it on the Internet. They’ve got machines. They’ve got electrics. They’ve got water. You name it, they’ve got it. I’m quite envious!’
‘Exciting!’ I said.
My invitation to Kink had come about after I’d mentioned on Twitter that I was writing a book on public shaming. One of my followers - his name was Conner Habib - asked me if I was going to meet people who derive sexual pleasure from being publicly shamed.
‘No!’ I replied. ‘That hadn’t crossed my mind at all.’
He said that as it happened he was a gay porn star and if I wanted to know more about his work I should google him. I did and immediately saw many close-ups of his anus. I emailed him to ask how he managed to do that kind of work without feeling embarrassed.
‘I do think there’s lots to learn from porn stars about how not to be embarrassed or feel vulnerable,’ he emailed back. He added that a lot of sex industry people go on to become hospice workers: ‘They’re not freaked out by the body, so they can help people transition through illness and death. I’m not sure what would humiliate me at this point. If you want to talk at length about this, I’m open to it. Just don’t make me seem any goofier than I already am. Maybe that’s what could humiliate a porn star - a Jon Ronson essay?’
I frowned.
Conner’s emails got me interested in journeying into the porn world. Was it really populated by people who had learned how to be immune from shame? It suddenly seemed like a good talent to have.
He put me in touch with a famous porn impresario - Princess Donna Dolore of Kink studios. We swapped emails. ‘Growing up I was ashamed of everything,’ she wrote, ‘and at a certain point I realized that if I was open with the world about the things that embarrassed me they no longer held any weight! I felt set free!’ She added that she always derives her porn scenarios from this formula. She imagines circumstances that would mortify her, ‘like being bound naked on a street with everybody looking at you’, and enacts them with like-minded porn actors, robbing them of their horror.
Donna and I arranged to have dinner in Los Angeles. That morning I emailed her: ‘See you tonight at 7 p.m.!’
At 5.40 p.m. I emailed her again: ‘Don’t forget we’re suppose to be meeting in an hour and twenty minutes!’
‘Sure!’ she replied.
I arrived at the restaurant at 6.50 p.m. Two hours and ten minutes later, still sitting there, I checked her Twitter feed. Her last message, written four hours earlier, read, ‘Somebody please tell me what the fuck I am supposed to do at 7 p.m.! Why the fuck don’t I write this shit down?!?’
I trudged miserably back to my hotel. ‘If keeping people waiting in restaurants for hours is what it’s like to live in a post-shame world,’ I thought, ‘give me a bit of shame.’
At midnight Donna emailed me: ‘FUCK! I’m SO sorry.’
‘That’s FINE!’ I emailed back.
‘There’s a Public Disgrace tomorrow if you want to come,’ she emailed.
*
It was midnight outside a sports bar in the San Fernando Valley. From the front the place looked dark and empty - all shuttered up. But Donna had told me to go around the back to the fire door behind the bins. When Max had told me how impressive Kink was he didn’t mean the sports bar. Kink headquarters is a giant, ornate 1914 armoury in San Francisco, equipped with all sorts of dungeon and torture equipment. I knocked on the fire door. A security guard ticked me off a list.
I scanned the barroom. There were twenty people in there - middle-aged men sitting alone, some young couples. Everyone looked nervous. A man walked over to me.
‘I’m Shylar,’ he said. ‘Shylar Cobi.’
‘Are you a porn person?’ I asked him.
‘Twenty-three years,’ he said. ‘It’s all I know.’
He had a sweet, melancholy face. He reminded me of Droopy.
I asked him a bit about his life. He said he didn’t just work with Donna. He was a producer for hire, averaging fifty porn shoots a year. Which meant he had a thousand credits in all, including - I later discovered on IMDb - Orgy University, Wet Sweaty Boobs and My Slutty Friends.
‘So what’s the plan for tonight?’ I asked him.
Shylar shrugged. ‘Same as always. They fuck, he finishes, we clean up, everyone goes home.’
He gently squeezed my arm to make sure I was OK. He wasn’t the only one. Various members of the production crew kept doing it to me all night - rubbing my back, squeezing my arm. I suppose being tweedy and owl-like I just don’t look like the sort of person who normally hangs around extreme porn shoots, and I think everyone wanted to ensure that I was not feeling intimidated or about to faint. It was sweet. Porn professionals were being so nice and considerate towards me it was almost as if I was the person about to have their genitals electrocuted. But it wasn’t to be my genitals
. It was to be the genitals of the porn actor Jodi Taylor, who was sitting in the corner of the bar discussing logistics with Princess Donna, who now stood up, hushed everyone, and made a speech about what was expected of us.
‘So,’ she began. ‘The name of the site is Public Disgrace. It’s a site about public humiliation. You guys are all just people drinking and having a good time and you have no idea that we’re going to be turning up at this bar. When we come in, you’re all invited to participate to a certain extent. You can grope the model, assuming you have clean hands and short-filed fingernails. We have nail clippers and nail files if anyone thinks they’re going to need them. You can smack her ass, but this is not about you showing us how hard you can smack someone. I don’t want to see anyone take full swings. Sometimes people try and show off with their spanking. I’m sure you guys can all spank very, very hard, but I don’t want to see it. Other things you can do. You can spit on her body. You can pour your drinks on her. You can pull her hair. You can gently smack her in the face. But try not to be too obnoxious. You are totally welcome to shout things out and verbally degrade her. That is encouraged. But just don’t be that guy.’ She summarized: ‘So. Don’t get shitfaced, don’t fist her ass, enjoy.’
Donna and Jodi Taylor disappeared to a corridor outside where Donna attached a ball and chain to her. She gave a signal to the cameraman. He pressed Record. And it began.
The drinkers feigned surprise at the sight of Donna pulling a shrieking Jodi Taylor into the bar. ‘What IS going on?’ said a man in a beanie hat. He slammed down his drink in ‘outrage’.
Donna ripped off Jodi Taylor’s clothes and attached electrodes to her genitals.
‘What are you DOING?’ said the man. He seemed to be the only crowd member daring enough to improvise dialogue or simulate emotion of any sort.
‘It’s electricity,’ Donna said. ‘Do you want to shock her?’
‘Do I want to SHOCK her?’ he said. ‘I just came in to get a drink. Oh. OK.’