Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Watching hundreds of hopeful actors audition, Elkins and Levy made sure that no one making the final cut was too well endowed, for fear of inciting the police. They weren’t looking for porn bodies, because they didn’t want anyone’s dangling member to take focus. Still, “We wanted an attractive cast,” said Elkins. “If you have a show where every cast member is going to get naked, you have to know what you’re dealing with.”

  Equally important, all traces of effeminacy in speech or gesture from the male actors met with a forceful “Thank you very much. We’ll call you.” Despite the three men’s gaydar, one male homosexual did make the final cut. Somehow, the fact of his employment never caused Mark Dempsey ever to feel any loyalty to his employers, calling them “heterosexual fascists! All of them!” shortly after rehearsals began in late March.

  Dempsey, as it turned out, was the least of the show’s problems.

  That winter, a popular evangelist preacher took to walking in Times Square. In his strolls, he found nothing good to say about the place. “When we take down all the rules and barriers and all the regulations, it all goes out and becomes like Sodom and Gomorrah,” Billy Graham told the TV cameras. “And it ends in God’s judgment of the country when we change our way of life!”

  It wasn’t the kind of change Tynan or Elkins wanted. “Simultaneously with our opening of Oh! Calcutta! was this push, with a lot of press, to clean up Broadway and get rid of all this nasty stuff,” said Elkins. “And there we were having people simulate sexual congress, not wearing clothes. A lot of people were really pissed.”

  And there were other storm warnings. One week before the Oh! Calcutta! rehearsals began, the New York Police Department closed the Off-Off-Broadway play Che!, about the last days of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, on charges of obscenity and indecent exposure. The actors’ crime? Being naked and simulating sex onstage.

  It’s precisely what Oh! Calcutta! was promising its future audiences at the Eden.

  WHAT BUSTED CHE! AND threatened Oh! Calcutta! is what kept the itinerate Living Theatre busy on the road. The actors of the Living Theatre didn’t always restrict themselves to simulation when it came to sex onstage, nor did they restrict their sex partners onstage to fellow actors. Which is why the troupe rarely played more than one or two performances in any city.

  That winter, Jim Morrison of the Doors saw the Living Theatre perform its signature Paradise Now at the University of Southern California, a theatrical experience enhanced by thirty helmeted, gas-masked Los Angeles cops who strategically positioned themselves in the auditorium lobby.

  “What was great about the Living Theatre is that virile young men and nubile young women were actually taking their clothes off onstage, outraging audiences,” said the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. “And it rang a bell with Jim.”

  The previous fall, at Yale University, the Living Theatre’s one-night performance of Paradise Now saw not only many troupe members disrobe completely—Living Theatre’s more modest founders, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, performed in their well-worn G-strings—but several in the audience followed suit, including critic Richard Schechner, editor of the Tulane Drama Review. High on LSD, a few naked actors and theatergoers groped and humped each other during the play’s “Rite of Universal Intercourse” section, which preached “to overcome violence we have to overcome the sexual taboo.” Everybody then left the Yale theater en masse to take to the streets, where Mace spray and paddy wagons greeted the totally naked among them.

  The USC performance that Morrison witnessed was a little less raucous, not to mention more clothed, thanks to the presence of the police inside the theater. Undeterred by that disappointment, the rocker followed the troupe up to San Francisco for their next engagement, where things got a lot raunchier and, for their efforts, Morrison gave the cash-strapped company a $2,500 donation. From there he flew to his next gig with the Doors, in Miami, where Morrison decided to replicate on the rock ’n’ roll stage what he’d just seen on the legit stage. The difference was a few thousand spectators and the fact that Dade County, Florida, is not the campus of a northern California university.

  On February 28, the Doors performed for twelve thousand people at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium, converted from an old seaplane hangar. “Jim had decided to do a whole theatrical presentation, unbeknownst to anyone else in the Doors,” said Manzarek. “You could see this man was a little bit out of control.” The first thing he did was berate the audience.

  “Why did you people come here?” Morrison began. “You didn’t come to just hear a good rock ’n’ roll band play some hit songs. You want something more, don’t you? You’ve come to see something. What can I do? What do you want from me? I’m just a rock ’n’ roll guy. What did you come for? What if I showed you my cock?”

  A few men in the auditorium yelled no; quite a few women yelled yes.

  Morrison tore off his shirt and placed it over the bulge in his leather pants. “Now watch!” he ordered. “I’m going to show it to you!” He moved his shirt away from his crotch, then covered it again—back and forth went the shirt. “Did you see it? Did you see it?” he taunted. “Come onstage if you want to get closer. Whatever you want to do. You’re free. No one is going to tell you what to do.” Sometime during this tirade, Morrison got down on his knees to put his face up to guitarist Robby Krieger’s groin.

  Manzarek, standing behind Morrison, doubted that the group’s lead singer actually exposed himself. The concertgoers were the only ones stripping that night, as dozens of shirts, scarves, panties, socks, and shorts began to litter the stage. The audience also followed Morrison’s command to storm the stage, which immediately began to list under their growing weight. That’s when the Doors concert at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium came to an abrupt halt.

  Teenagers who’d attended the concert and been duly offended expressed their outrage to the local TV cameras. “I wonder if anyone has the courage to come forth and stop this kind of trash,” said one distraught girl. Those teenagers who’d been thrilled by Morrison’s impromptu performance somehow never received equal airtime.

  Surprised by the criticism, a somewhat more sober Jim Morrison made feeble attempts to defend himself in the following days. “In the realm of art and theater there should be complete freedom for the artist and performer,” he said in one interview. “I’m not personally convinced that nudity is a necessary part of a play or film. But the artist should be free to use it if he chooses.”

  The concerned citizens of Miami did not care about art. They cared about nudity, and regardless of what actually happened on February 28 at the Dinner Key Auditorium, the police in Dade County charged that Morrison “did lewdly and lasciviously expose his penis, place his hands upon his penis and shake it, and further the said defendant did simulate the acts of masturbation upon himself and oral copulation upon another.” It was also reported in court that Morrison screamed at the audience, “You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots. Your faces are being pressed into the shit of the world. Take your fucking friend and love him. Do you want to see my cock?”

  It sure sounded like the Living Theatre.

  While a few concertgoers claimed to have seen the “ivory shaft,” which is what Manzarek nicknamed Morrison’s penis, one-hundred photographs offered in evidence at the trial recorded no such sighting.

  JIM MORRISON APPEALED THE five-hundred-dollar fine and sentence of six months in jail, but would die before the case could be retried.

  Dade County, where he had been convicted, was ultraconservative. Manhattan, where the Che! actors had been arrested, was not—and their theater was only five blocks away from where Oh! Calcutta! would soon be performing.

  The Che! bust took place on March 24, moments after the play’s third performance ended at the Free Store Theater on Cooper Square in the East Village. Arrested and fingerprinted but still eager to publicize their show, the Che! cast posed for photographers at the East Fifth Street police station. Actress Jeanne Baretich got espec
ially cheeky when she stuck a red rose in her mouth to offer up her best Carmen Miranda impersonation. In addition to the four actors, six persons associated with the direction, writing, and production of Che! were arrested on charges of “consensual sodomy, public lewdness, obscenity, and conspiracy to commit such acts under the stage penal code.”

  It was a local clergyman who made sure that the police knew all about Che! Having bought a ticket to the March 22 opening-night performance, the reverend stopped by his local precinct afterward to register extreme moral displeasure. Warrants were secured, and two days later, Assistant District Attorney Kenneth Conboy, accompanied by Judge Amos A. Basel of criminal court, broke from their usual evening of watching TV to go to the Free Store Theater to witness actress Mary Anne Shelley simulate sex with Che Guevara doppelganger Larry Bercowitz, who simulated fellatio on Paul Georgiou, who impersonated the president of the United States. There was also much “rubbing of the genital areas,” as the ensuing police report noted. From what Conboy and Basel could decipher, no article of clothing prevented one actor’s groin from contact with another actor’s groin. In total, the two male actors tallied up no fewer than four such offenses against public decency.

  “This is a clear case of political suppression,” Che! director Ed Wode complained to reporters. “There have been seventy plays depicting nudity throughout New York City and no one arrested them. We are being singled out because of the political message in our play.”

  The police rejected that charge, saying that it was the physical contact and movement of the naked actors that felled Che! and spared works like Hair.

  Eventually, Che! did continue its performances, but with a fully clothed cast. It closed a few performances later.

  Kenneth Tynan saw no point in turning Oh! Calcutta! into another money-losing cause célèbre, even though his lead producer had an appetite for provoking audiences, if not the censors. Four years earlier, Hilly Elkins produced Golden Boy on Broadway, a musical that received much hate mail when its star, Sammy Davis Jr., kissed a white actress, Paula Wayne, to the sweet strains of “I Want to Be with You.” Elkins remained philosophical then and he remained philosophical now with the far racier content of Oh! Calcutta!

  “If I were afraid of trouble,” he said, “I’d be selling cars.”

  A flamboyant showman, Elkins courted controversy, even when it came to marrying his girlfriend of a few weeks, Claire Bloom. Elkins insisted on being married by a judge, not a rabbi, and asked his Oh! Calcutta! general manager, Gregg Platt, to find him one.

  “I know a judge,” said Platt. “He’s up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.”

  “I wouldn’t go to the Bronx to get married if Richard Nixon himself married us,” said Elkins.

  Platt smiled. “Oh, Bill knows a judge,” he said, nodding at the show’s company manager.

  “But he won’t marry you,” said Bill Liberman.

  “Why not?” asked Elkins.

  “Because he’s the judge who closed Che!”

  That bit of legal prudery didn’t deter either Elkins or Amos A. Basel. A judge whose flair for the theatrical matched Elkins’s, Basel married the producer and Claire Bloom that winter in the producer’s East Side townhouse, a residence that the bride would later described as being of “faux-Napoleonic grandeur as though purchased, top to bottom, from the basement of Bloomingdale’s.” The ceremony took place in the presence of Liberman and Platt and a few relatives like Elkins’s father and Bloom’s daughter, Anna Steiger, who would soon refer to her future ex-stepfather as “the unmentionable.” It was a typical civil service, except when Basel took a few minutes to lecture the couple on show-business people’s bad reputation for not taking their marriage vows seriously. “I was a little mortified,” said Liberman.

  Elkins knew having his wedding officiated by Judge Amos A. Basel would get him some publicity; it might even help inoculate his show from being challenged in court.

  It was a real fear.

  On the first day of rehearsals, director Jacques Levy told his cast, “There’s a good chance we’ll all be arrested. We might even be arrested today.”

  It had not escaped the actors’ attention on the first day of rehearsals that uniformed and plainclothes cops alike waited outside the Anderson Theater as the company filed into the rehearsal space, just across Second Avenue from the Eden. “It’s only fair to warn you that you’re taking a chance with your livelihood,” said Levy, raising the specter of some bluenose Joe McCarthy. “What we plan has never been done in America before, and a public outcry could lead to a blacklisting. In radio and television especially. You just may not be welcome anymore.”

  Indeed, an Actors’ Equity representative would warn in the days to come, “The worst that could happen is that they be arrested and convicted, and given a sentence and very seriously have their careers compromised.”

  For that first rehearsal, Levy showed up in his usual cowboy outfit. The cast sat around him in a circle, wearing nothing but matching yellow bathrobes. The middle-aged Levy was balding, showed some paunch, but possessed a soft-spoken, comforting charm. “I think all of the women in the company had a crush on Jacques,” said actress Boni Enten, who considered him as much “a guide” as a director.

  In addition to their stage performances, Levy counseled his actors on potential personal problems. “Especially from relatives, and particularly husbands and wives,” he added. For reasons of propriety, Levy instituted what he called the “no-fuck law,” which quickly devolved into the abbreviated “NFL,” which meant, in effect, that no cast member could sleep with another cast member. Bringing his Menninger Clinic experience to the discussion, Levy launched into a long discourse on The Naked Ape. Subtitled “A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal,” the book by Desmond Morris had recently made a surprise visit to the top of the bestseller lists, aided in that ascent by its cover of a naked man, woman, and child, their bare backsides completely exposed. Morris’s lurid and somewhat mundane thesis held that sex partners were territorial to the detriment and exclusion of their nonsex partners. Afraid of what was apparently commonplace in the world of monkeys, Levy didn’t want any of his Oh! Calcutta! humans to feel left out.

  But some were left out regardless.

  It took three long weeks of rehearsal before Levy let his actors cast off their yellow bathrobes and perform naked. Nature soon took its course despite Levy’s NFL rule. “How can you touch and fondle a person and spend so much time in getting on an intimate basis without learning to feel close to him when you’re away from the theater?” asked one of the actresses. “I have been seeing somebody from the cast on the outside. It would seem unnatural not to.”

  If sex within the company was forbidden, anyone’s spouse remained fair game. Shortly after the actors performed a number of Esalen-style “sensitivity exercises” under Levy’s direction, they abandoned more than their yellow robes. When the new Mrs. Kenneth Tynan visited the theater one day to watch rehearsals, an actor in the company took the opportunity to leave the stage during a break and sit down beside her in the auditorium. “I’d like to fuck you,” he said by way of introduction.

  Kathleen Tynan, who had not visited Esalen or the Menninger Clinic or read The Naked Ape, politely thanked the actor for his interest, then voiced strong objections to her husband, who turned the matter over to Elkins, who turned it over to Levy, who just hoped the whole problem would go away.

  Next up on the cast’s firing line was photographer Michael Childers. Elkins had been impressed with the multimedia work Childers had done for the party scene in Midnight Cowboy, and thought Oh! Calcutta! could benefit from a similar psychedelic touch. Although the party sequence in Midnight Cowboy filmed for more than three days, Oh! Calcutta! was a two-hour show, requiring, as Childers envisioned it, no fewer than fifty-six movie projections with superimposed photographic images fading in, out, and off several screens mounted around the stage. In one aspect, the mechanics and logistics were the easy part. The hard part came
when Childers showed up to photograph the cast. Since they were going to be photographed naked, they demanded that he follow suit and get out of his street clothes, too.

  “You lose a lot of inhibitions quickly!” said Childers, who was allowed to wear his tennis shoes.

  Samuel Beckett did not make the trip to New York City to see the company rehearse his one-minute “Prologue,” in which three naked bodies appear entangled in a lot of garbage onstage as the prerecorded strains of female orgasms washed over them. In his place, Beckett sent a missive of minimal instructions. “Do not change a word of this script,” he wrote, even though the totally mute “Prologue” contained no dialogue.

  Less shy were Sam Shepard, Robert Benton, and David Newman, all of whom made visits to the Eden to oversee rehearsals of their respective skits. Benton and Newman, who wrote Bonnie and Clyde for Warren Beatty, contributed a dark ode to wife-swapping called “Will Answer All Sincere Replies.” In Shepard’s “Rock Garden” a father tells of his interest in “corn” and “cattle”; his son then tells of his interest in “fucking” and “cunts,” at which point in the drama the father drops over dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Spring 1969, Fetishes

  As Jacques Levy rehearsed his actors, Kenneth Tynan and Hilly Elkins worked out a multi-pronged approach to both stoke publicity and, at the same time, subdue reporters, police, and potential theatergoers, although not necessarily in that order.

  The politically liberal and socially conservative New York Times held forth with one of the more uptight pre-opening reactions to the show. Although Tynan nearly genuflected at the ample derriere of Trouille’s odalisque, the censors at the Gray Lady were a little less adoring of the chosen Oh! Calcutta! poster and insisted that the female model’s tattooed buttocks be painted over in advertisements that graced the newspaper’s pages.