Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  And vice versa. “We were all embarrassed as hell,” she said. “And Dyan and I really were making sure that we were all covered up, and that we weren’t nude. It seemed so shocking!” Both actresses wore pasties to cover their nipples.

  Then, Robert Culp looked at Mazursky. “What do we do now, Paul?” he asked.

  “Just do what you want,” instructed their director.

  “That scared the hell out of me,” said Gould later.

  “I was on the edge of the bed and ready to run at a moment’s notice,” said Cannon. Culp caressed her, Cannon laughed. Natalie Wood initiated her kiss with Gould. Then Culp and Cannon kissed. “Bob was kind of getting it on,” said Mazursky.

  “There was some degree of manipulation going on for the four of us to physically interact . . . but I couldn’t do it,” said Gould. “Bob would have liked to have, and I think that Dyan was hysterical enough to perhaps go on and use her hysteria, but the anchor there was Natalie. Natalie was not just there as a star, she was there as a fellow human being, like a sister.”

  None of them went any further than a kiss and a caress. That was going to have to be the big orgy scene in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice—yes, but no thanks.

  Mazursky was left to wonder, “What might have happened if I had told the cast to really get it on, really have an orgy. I think Bob Culp could have handled it, but no one else. I think.”

  ON THE WEST COAST, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice wrapped in time for the holidays. On the East Coast, Candy opened in time to ruin the holidays for Terry Southern.

  He took his girlfriend, Gail Gerber, to the December premiere in New York City. He watched the opening title sequence in which a blazing meteor-like object travels through space and lands in a desert landscape to transform itself into the very blond Ewa Aulin, who begins running across the arid earth only to end up in a high school classroom being lectured by Richard Burton’s poet-professor character, MacPhisto. Gerber laughed out loud when Burton’s scarf gets caught in the auditorium doors. Southern, on the other hand, began to audibly cry, “seeing the travesty of what they did to his novel,” his girlfriend recalled. They left before the screening ended.

  It had been years since Southern last talked to his Candy coauthor, Mason Hoffenberg. Adversity has a way of bringing people together. Southern was so horrified by the first few minutes of Candy that he wrote Hoffenberg a letter, in which he reviewed the film: “It bears precious little resemblance to the true Can—a view which would seem substantiated by the review in both Time and Newsweek mag this week, the former going so far as say the picture is ‘based on the novel in the same way a flea might be based on an elephant.’ ”

  Southern objected strenuously to the movie’s ad line, “Is Candy Faithful? Only to the Book!” He thought it might hurt sales of their novel.

  Hoffenberg, now a recluse and addicted to heroin, agreed “that something ought to be done about that ‘ . . . faithful only to the book’ nonsense,” but not before letting Southern know his “extreme displeasure” of hearing from “such a sneaking fair weather s.o.b. as yours truly.”

  There was a lot of letter-writing that winter. A few weeks later, according to Gail Gerber, Buck Henry sent Southern a letter of apology. Henry told other detractors of the film, “In spite of the results, a good time was had by all.”

  And there was another indignity for Southern: The newly created Motion Picture Association of America graced Candy not with an X but an R rating. The film broke no taboos regarding language, nudity, or content. If only they had left in the scene where the hunchback rubs his protruding abnormality against Candy’s crotch!

  In a way, the R rating fueled Southern. He believed more than ever in his long-gestating Blue Movie novel, about an esteemed director who makes the first X-rated studio movie, complete with A-list stars having full-penetration sex—or as Southern often put it, “full vag-pen.” Southern had gotten the idea when he first met Stanley Kubrick, on assignment from Esquire magazine in 1962. Southern had asked Kubrick about the sex in his new film Lolita, and Kubrick responded with great reticence, “There’s something so inappropriate about seeing it with an audience that it just becomes laughable.”

  Kubrick’s artistic dilemma—making a film about sex but not wanting to show it—intrigued Southern, and he had been writing Blue Movie ever since. If it had been faithful to the novel, Candy should have been the first truly pornographic movie released by a major Hollywood studio. It’s what Southern had wanted.

  He didn’t get it. After that page-to-screen debacle, a reporter from Screw magazine asked Southern if he’d gotten “any ideas or background” for his upcoming Blue Movie from the movie Candy.

  “No,” Southern replied. “I’m not aware there were any ideas at work on the filming of Candy.”

  The year also ended badly for Jane Fonda. In the end, she couldn’t have won either way she played it. Not only did her rejected Candy bomb at the box office but so did Barbarella. Its failure forced Paramount Pictures to yank it from theaters and replace it with a little film the studio executives had told its producers “would never be shown” due to its scenes of violent student rebellion and equally violent love.

  Even before filming began on Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . , British censor John Trevelyan had warned about a scene in which two male students are shown in bed together. “Since they are both sleeping, it might possibly pass,” he wrote to Anderson. But Trevelyan could not have known how graphic the student rebellion would be photographed, nor did he know that a scene in which newcomers Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan wrestle, bite, kiss, slap, and tug at each other on the floor of a roadside greasy spoon would be filmed with the two actors completely naked. Their nudity was actually a last-minute suggestion made by McDowell, who thought it would be intriguing “if we’re naked and rolling around like animals,” although weeks later in the editing room the actor made sure that his director “cut out shots of me and my penis. I didn’t want any of those.”

  Even without his genitals showing, McDowell called it “one of the most animalistic, sexual scenes ever filmed in British cinema.” And audiences agreed, turning If . . . into the surprise hit of the holiday season, even though the movie’s two “notorious” scenes took up fewer than three minutes of screen time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Winter 1969, Bonanza

  In the late 1960s, law officers raided the Atlanta, Georgia, home of Robert Eli Stanley, expecting to find evidence that would help convict him on charges of being an illegal bookmaker. Instead, they found sexually obscene materials in a desk drawer in his upstairs bedroom. That raid led to his arrest and conviction, in which the Supreme Court of Georgia found Stanley guilty of the possession of pornography. In January 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case and then unanimously overturned that lower-court decision; it was a ruling that helped to establish the “right to privacy.”

  The U.S. Congress, outraged that the court invalidated all state laws forbidding the private possession of pornography, immediately commissioned a study in the new year. They called it “The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.”

  HAIR HAD CELEBRATED NEARLY a year of performances at the Biltmore Theatre before a twenty-one-year-old Broadway dancer named Margo Sappington got around to seeing it. “It was research,” she said. Research, in this case, was her new gig. Kenneth Tynan had just hired her to choreograph his Oh! Calcutta!

  Tynan first noticed the beautiful brunette with the 180-degree leg extension in the new musical Promises, Promises, in which she and other dancers performed the showstopper “Turkey Lurkey Time,” about a drunken office party. Tynan had originally hired Promises, Promises’s choreographer Michael Bennett to choreograph Oh! Calcutta!, and it was Bennett who wanted Sappington to dance the female half of the revue’s controversial centerpiece, a naked pas de deux.

  “Why me?” she asked Bennett.

  “Because every time I come into the dressing room at Promises, Promises, you’re naked,” he re
plied.

  And so Sappington was cast in Tynan’s revue. But before Oh! Calcutta! went into rehearsals that winter, Bennett left the production. “Michael had been there for the Oh! Calcutta! auditions,” said Sappington, “but his career just took off. He got busy with other projects,” one of those being Stephen Sondheim’s Company. In a lucky break for the dancer, she inherited the assignment to choreograph Oh! Calcutta!—and that’s when Tynan suggested she go see Hair. The hippie musical surprised her.

  “When they took off their clothes, nobody onstage moved,” observed Sappington. “They just stood there. Plus, the stage was pretty dark.”

  The full-frontal stasis of Hair was purely intentional. Naked breasts, penises, and buttocks were allowed onstage, but only to create a theatrical tableau. Private body parts attached to unclothed actors who walked, ran, danced, or otherwise moved onstage were in violation of the city’s penal code. With Oh! Calcutta!, it would be Sappington’s job to challenge that law with a nude ballet. “We just took a chance,” said producer Michael White.

  Tynan liked that Sappington was a “nonqueer,” as he sometimes labeled people of his own sexual orientation. The dancer’s heterosexual credentials were strictly in order (unlike the closeted Bennett, who was dating Promises, Promises dancer Donna McKechnie at the time).

  “Tynan made a hard-and-fast rule there was to be no homosexuality,” said Bill Liberman, the show’s company manager. “Oh! Calcutta! would be a completely hetero show. That was a Tynan edict.”

  Sappington saw Oh! Calcutta! as a chance to leave the chorus line and launch her career as a choreographer. For the middle-aged Tynan, the show not only meant more, it was also much more complicated, since his ambitions were driven in unequal parts by creative frustration, financial hardship, and lust. As a theater critic, he wielded power, but it was power without much financial income. He wrote thousands of words a year, but he also wrote nothing of consequence that would be read a year, or even a few weeks or maybe even a day or two after it left his typewriter for the printed page. He’d tried to write a book, even a play, but he finished neither. “Oh! Calcutta!, he thought, would make him money,” said Michael White. Oh! Calcutta! would also attach his name to something other than a thousand-word review of somebody else’s hard work and labor. And more important, according to Bill Liberman, “Ken had a lot of sexual fetishes, which he was very open about having to do with ladies’ underwear or S&M. His doing Oh! Calcutta! was definitely part of that.” Those sadomasochistic fetishes worked their way into a least four skits that Tynan himself wrote for the show.

  Obviously, “queers” were not part of his fantasy, although Tynan did let his lead producer, Hillard Elkins, hire John Schlesinger’s new lover, Michael Childers, to be the show’s photographer. As Childers described the general ambiance around the project, “Tynan was a real cocksmith, and Oh! Calcutta! was an ode to cunt. It was a very heterosexual production.”

  In addition to it being a very heterosexual show, Tynan desperately wanted Oh! Calcutta! to be a very Broadway show.

  But Broadway declined. No matter that many of those old and venerable venues were underused and falling apart in the late 1960s; the Nederlander and Shubert organizations, the largest theater landowners in midtown Manhattan, preferred to keep their Broadway respectability intact by eschewing the rent money from “such a dirty show,” as Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. described Oh! Calcutta! The year before, the powers behind Hair had run into a similar puritanical wall of resistance from the New York City theater monopoly, but lucked out by securing the Biltmore Theatre, one of the only Broadway venues not owned by either the Nederlanders or the Shuberts. With the Biltmore already occupied, Tynan had no choice but to look downtown to Off Broadway to open Oh! Calcutta!

  It fell to the company manager to secure that theater. One day, Bill Liberman found himself walking by the Gaiety on Second Avenue, just below Fourteenth Street. “It was a theater. I thought it might be appropriate, so I bought a ticket,” he recalled. Inside, strippers bumped and grinded, and as they were finishing up their act, a movie screen lowered. “And a film came on showing a penis going into a vagina,” said Liberman. “But it was light enough, and I could see it was a real theater.”

  An old burlesque house, to be more precise.

  It had once been known as the Phoenix, popularized by a green-eyed ecdysiast named Ann Corio. Then, in a less sexually ambivalent era, the management called it the Gaiety, which sent out the wrong message for its potential new tenant. Tynan quickly rechristened it the Eden, as in the Garden of Eden. At least that’s the way Americans interpreted it. For the British Tynan, the theater’s new name was “a tribute to a great English statesman,” the British prime minister Anthony Eden. It was a wicked salute, since Tynan despised the conservative pill-addicted politician who spied on the members of his own cabinet by ordering government chauffeurs to report back to him any questionable activities, especially those of a carnal nature.

  To rename it the Lord Chamberlain Theatre might have been more apt, albeit a little lengthy for an Off-Broadway marquee. The Lord Chamberlain had been the British theater censor, up until the end of 1968, when the office was abolished. In the beginning, Tynan had considered opening Oh! Calcutta! in London. But, “I was afraid there might be some sort of backlash. The public prosecutor can still make trouble,” he believed. “I’ve decided it will be better to be [in New York City] and go to the West End next year.”

  Ever since Tynan uttered the word “fuck” on the BBC, he’d harbored a paranoiac fascination with censors, and he rightly feared that his name on a sex revue might “attract the killers, the bluenoses,” who, under the new, less restrictive censorship laws, could possibly still make trouble. “I don’t want to be one of the first test cases,” he said. As long as it didn’t cost him anything, Tynan was all for freedom of speech.

  He wasn’t alone in his bridled licentiousness. Hair also delayed its London opening a year to avoid dealing with the Lord Chamberlain. But unlike Hair, Tynan chafed at being forced to put his show into an old strip joint rather than a prestigious Broadway house. And there were even worse indignities on his ride to notoriety. While he’d been successful in securing skits from, among others, Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, and John Lennon, the coup of having a heavyweight theater director (“Harold Pinter was tempted,” said producer Michael White) devolved into the mundane necessity of hiring someone who’d actually do the job—in this case, a clinical psychologist-turned-stage-director. Dr. Jacques Levy of the Menninger Clinic had recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition to direct a play, Motel, which Michael White had produced as part of the experimental New York–based theater group La MaMa’s America Hurrah project in London. Hilly Elkins and Bill Liberman, despite their sizable theater résumés, had never heard of Levy, which compelled them to see a play he’d directed in New York City. It was by some equally no-name playwright.

  At the final curtain of Sam Shepard’s Red Cross, the producer asked his company manager, “Do you know what we’ve just seen?”

  “I have no idea,” replied Liberman.

  Tynan had seen Motel in London and told his wife, Kathleen, that he liked Levy’s cool “nonorgiastic style.” How could Elkins and Liberman possibly disagree?

  There was, however, total agreement on one thing: what had to be done with the Eden.

  “We’re disinfecting the place before we move in,” announced Elkins. “Speaking of whorehouses, there were at least two beds in each dressing room.” Fifty-four cots, to be exact.

  “They were, indeed, running a whorehouse,” Liberman verified.

  In addition to creating a run on Lysol at the local A&P, there were other purges as well. Before they even got to the auditions, Tynan made it clear to Elkins and Levy that he wanted an all-heterosexual cast. To American eyes, this Brit with his stiff demeanor and chronic stammer seemed an unlikely arbiter of all things machismo. It was a cultural divide that, in her review of the gay-themed film Victim, critic Pauline Kael
pinpointed with her assessment that “actors, and especially English actors, generally look so queer anyway, that it’s hard to be surprised at what we’ve always taken for granted. . . .”

  Tall, immaculate, and very reserved, except when talking about taking a cane to a woman’s behind, Tynan often showed up in a white silk suit, a pink shirt, and wine-colored patent leather loafers on his visits to the once-grungy Eden, which he promptly painted green in his re-creation of the world’s first garden. Tynan’s clothes screamed Carnaby Street, especially when seen in contrast to the typical costume outside the theater’s doors on Second Avenue, where the real-life hippies whom Tom O’Horgan hadn’t already cast in Hair limited their wardrobe to blue jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and sandals. Not that the Americans in charge of Oh! Calcutta! were any more adventuresome in their appearance. Jacques Levy grew his mustache big and black to compensate for the baldness above, which he tried to disguise with a bad comb-over and cowboy hats. Hilly Elkins, an impresario who fashioned himself after the late Mike Todd of Around the World in 80 Days and Elizabeth Taylor fame, sported a well-trimmed goatee and naturally gray hair. According to his girlfriend of the moment, actress Claire Bloom, Elkins was also “some middle-aged urban cowboy,” with his motorcycle, sun-lamp tan, and a libido that matched, if not surpassed, Tynan’s. As Bloom reported, “Elkins’s entire being was centered on sexual gratification; his fantasies were alternately voyeuristic and sadistic.” In other words, the perfect man to produce Oh! Calcutta!

  What Elkins also shared with Tynan was his ability to see the same bottom line. Oh! Calcutta! had the potential to make them wealthy. “I don’t mind anything that’s profitable,” Elkins liked to say. “In six months, you’ll be hard put to ignore this show anywhere. I’m sure you know how far a Jewish boy can go with a dirty joke.”