Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

Kramer and Russell proceeded to film anyway, and some time during the sixteen-week shoot of his $1.25 million production, Kramer saw the newly opened London production of The Boys in the Band, which featured the original Off-Broadway cast.

  “It was very emotional,” said Kramer. “As a writer who was writing screenplays, I knew how difficult it was to write about gay stuff, and here this play was very bold and a big success.”

  In some respects, Women would be even bolder than Boys.

  Weighing heavily on Kramer was Trevelyan’s recent decision to cut a lesbian sex scene involving actresses Susannah York and Coral Browne in the Robert Aldrich film adaptation of The Killing of Sister George. As the British censor had put it to Cinerama, the releasing company, “This scene is by far the most explicit scene of lesbian physical love that has ever been submitted to us, and it goes farther than any similar scene in this context, although we have, of course, accepted passionate scenes of this kind, with nudity, but only when the relationship was heterosexual. Also, as you well know, we are not ungenerous to scenes of female nudity . . . but it is a totally different matter when the context is one of lesbian physical love.”

  The Aldrich movie had been having a tough time of it stateside as well. In Boston that winter, The Killing of Sister George did ho-hum business at the box office. That is, until the seventy-two-year-old chief justice of the Municipal Court, Elijah Adlow, saw the film and promptly offered, “Certainly one lesbian scene is unsightly and lewd. That part of the picture is highly objectionable,” and thereupon sentenced the theater management to six months in jail. The defense filed an appeal, won that appeal, and when Sister George continued its run in Beantown, it now played to sold-out houses.

  In Britain, Larry Kramer thought he might have better luck than Robert Aldrich—if he could appeal to the noble, chauvinistic, pretentious side of Lord Trevelyan. Women in Love was based on a classic British novel. The Killing of Sister George was based on a mediocre boulevard comedy. Also, Aldrich’s film adaptation deemphasized the play’s humor, added a lot of soap opera, and, most offensive to the censors, it made obvious what onstage was merely suggested—that the characters are lesbian. Perhaps even worse, for a snob like Trevelyan, the movie had been directed by an American, best known for having paired Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in a piece of Hollywood Gothic claptrap called Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

  Kramer avoided the American mistake of Sister George by hiring a British director, Ken Russell. He also made sure, as producer and screenwriter, to remain as faithful as possible to the novel Women in Love. Not that it was easy to find a cinematic equivalent for D. H. Lawrence’s purple prose. In the sexually frank novel, sisters Gudrun and Ursula fall in love with two men, respectively, Gerald and Rupert, who appear to have an unspoken but strong physical attraction for each other. Shortly after the book’s publication in 1921, the esteemed critic W. Charles Pilley wrote the following critique of Women in Love: “I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.”

  Yesterday’s stinking garbage, today’s high art.

  Kramer and Russell knew they needed to make a movie that was very faithful to the novel, especially with regard to three sequences: In one scene, Rupert climaxes too soon when making love to Ursula in the woods; in another, Gudrun enjoys being raped by Gerald; and in a third scene, Gerald and Rupert wrestle in the nude and end up in an exhausted heap on the drawing room carpet in front of a blazing fire. The heterosexual Russell felt passionate about the rape scene, the homosexual Kramer felt equally attached to the wrestling scene, which in the novel appears in the chapter titled “The Gladiatorial.” Kramer loved that the novel ended with the thesis that opposite-sex and same-sex relationships were equal. For the film’s ending, he had Rupert tell his now-wife, Ursula, “You are enough for me as far as a woman is concerned. But I wanted a man friend as something as eternal as you and I are eternal.”

  She replies, “You can’t have two kinds of love. You can’t have it because it is impossible.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he counters.

  End of film.

  Kramer lifted that dialogue directly from the Lawrence novel. “I wasn’t quite out of the closet at the time I was writing this,” he recalled. “Now you could look at it as full, ripe and redolent with gay themes.”

  In his research, Kramer found an unpublished section of the novel, he noted, “in which Rupert and Gerald go off and have a full-blown homosexual affair. Of course, it was not used. You get the sense, though, that Lawrence is playing around with all this, perhaps subconsciously. In a quote from the unused passage, Lawrence described the two characters’ relationship: ‘They scarcely knew each other, yet here was this strange, unacknowledged, inflammable intimacy between them. It made them uneasy.’ ”

  Kramer knew he couldn’t get away with reinstating what Lawrence, in a preemptive strike against the censors of his day, had cut. But he did believe he could bring a faithful adaptation of Women in Love to the screen, sex scenes and all.

  “By God, we were going to try,” he insisted. “One way is that we literally duplicated the book, which had been in print since 1921. The scene, the actors, the decor, the dialogue: We just filmed it.” Regarding the wrestling scene, he remarked, “It’s an incredibly passionate scene in the book. There’s no question it is sexual. There’s no question these two men are battling homosexuality and the closeness of their relationship. And in the book it results in some hint of climax for them. Lawrence wrote about it in peculiar ways. Lawrence was troubled by sex. There’s a great deal of homosexuality in this film. Had Lawrence written and lived today he could have been [openly] gay.”

  Kramer’s ploy to “get around” Trevelyan’s objections to the male nudity hinged on providing a “faithful adaptation” of the Lawrence novel. “The scene I wrote always had them wrestling in the manor in front of the fire, just like the novel.”

  His director, however, told a different story of what transpired regarding the scene. According to Ken Russell, an early draft of the script was more reticent and set the wrestling match in a forest pond so that the two actors would end up tossing in the water and, just possibly, not expose their respective genitals. Objections to that less graphic approach came from an unlikely source.

  Oliver Reed, who’d been cast as Gerald, never bothered to read the Lawrence novel, but his girlfriend did—and it was supposedly she who told him how the script had bowdlerized the wrestling scene. With girlfriend in tow, Reed made an impromptu visit to Russell’s home to confront the director, saying, “In the script, you’ve got the two naked men wrestling in the pouffy moonlight on a river bank.”

  “Pouffy” was one of Reed’s favorite words. He used it to describe homosexuals, like Kramer, as well as the “pouffy” lace curtains in Russell’s kitchen, and the “pouffy” candles Russell used there instead of electric lightbulbs.

  Russell tried to explain that in the script they would start wrestling and fall into the river and “continue wrestling there in the water.”

  Reed apparently snorted at the notion. “All in slow motion like a pouffy commercial.”

  “Well, if [Rupert] Birkin and Gerald are going to strip off and wrestle nude at all, it’s more plausible if they do it in a natural setting than in Gerald’s stately home amongst suits of amour.”

  “But that’s how it is in the book.”

  “It’s one thing to get away with it in a book and quite another to bring it off on the screen,” Russell said.

  “You mean it’s more of a challenge.”

  “It’s bloody impossible.”

  “Is it?” he asked. Reed looked around the kitchen, and then gestured to his girlfriend. “And she tells me they’re both in evening clothes enjoying a drink by the light of a log fire. Make mine a large brandy.” Reed then lunged at Russell and proceeded to wrestle him jujitsu style.

  Whether Ken Russell or Larry Kramer’s version of the story is accurate, Oliver Reed�
��s enthusiasm for playing the scene as D. H. Lawrence wrote it definitely began to wane as the big day loomed on the production schedule. He developed a bad limp and complained of having somehow injured himself. Kramer only exacerbated the situation by reminding the zaftig actor, “You’re going to be seen naked shortly by millions of your fans. You’d better start losing weight.”

  Alan Bates, the film’s Rupert, also came down with a good reason not to film the wrestling scene, even though he’d already twice appeared nude onscreen, in Georgy Girl and King of Hearts, leading one critic to remark that he had “one of the most exposed behinds in cinematic history.” Women in Love would mark Bates’s first full-frontal nude scene before the term “full-frontal nudity” had been coined, Kramer believed.

  Two days before the wrestling scene was to be filmed, Bates developed a very bad cold.

  “They both had doctor’s certificates to prove it,” Russell said of his actors’ ailments. Fearing that he might not be able to film the controversial scene as planned, the director was forced to come up with an alternative shoot. “I had scheduled a secret scene with the girls if [the men] didn’t show up,” said Russell.

  The night before the big shoot, Reed’s longtime stand-in and friend, Reg Prince, arranged that the two actors meet for a drink in a pub. “Which relied on Reg getting the boys to visit the loo for a pee simultaneously,” said Russell.

  Kramer, for his part, doubted that such a look-see of the actors’ penises ever took place. “Alan had very little time for Oliver Reed,” he noted. “Alan was a closeted gay man, very much a gentleman. Reed was kind of a pig.”

  Regardless of which tale is true, at 8:30 A.M. on the day of the scheduled shoot—“The crew were taking bets,” Russell reported—Reed and Bates showed up in robes, then threw off those robes simultaneously. “Tumultuous applause followed as forty pairs of eyes registered the fact that their dongles were exactly the same length . . . that trip to the loo had paid off,” noted Russell. “Even so, Oliver cheated a bit by disappearing behind a screen before each take for a quick J. Arthur.”

  Kramer could also relax, seeing that Reed had indeed succeeded in losing twenty pounds by using a steam box every night for ten days.

  On the more sensitive subject of penis size, Kramer’s expert eye did note a slight discrepancy. “It was a difficult scene to shoot. Neither actor was happy about displaying it all,” he said. “Oliver would disappear for a few moments before each take, we later discovered, so that he could make his penis look bigger, which on the closest of inspections it appears to be, though in reality Alan’s was.”

  Reed wanted both men to be inebriated for the scene. When Bates refused to enhance his performance with booze, Reed observed sobriety for once in his life.

  Perhaps it would have been easier to have done it drunk. “The task was quite shattering,” Bates said of the scene, which took not one but two days to film. Worse was watching the dailies. “You get to see only a few moments of it in the film, but we saw hours of it,” said the actor. “It seemed to go on forever, and it was torture. I thought at the time it all looked so—well, so wrong, and that I looked so hideous. I suppose it’s a great lesson in humility. If you can get over the awfulness of yourself in the flesh, you can get over anything.”

  The actresses, Jennie Linden and Glenda Jackson, were much less skittish than the men. Jackson, who was pregnant during the filming, summed up the prevailing nonchalance from the distaff side: “The scenes in which I’ve been nude were scenes about sex and it seemed absurd to pretend that the character I was playing would have sex with her clothes on.” Then again, Kramer’s script didn’t ask Jackson to roll around on the floor with Jenny Linden, their legs up in the air, as the two men were required to do.

  The script, however, did require Jackson’s character to be raped. Jackson saw it one way, Reed another. Although he was playing the repressed, possibly homosexual son of a wealthy coal mine owner, the sexual ambivalence of the role eluded the macho, hard-drinking Reed, who was not about to let a woman dominate him sexually in the film.

  He admired Jackson as an actress. “But I wouldn’t budge one inch when it came to putting my masculinity on the line, and it came to it once, this confrontation, when Glenda said she wanted to dominate me sexually,” he said of the rape scene. “Russell and I were trying to convince her that I should rape her and be the dominant factor in that particular love scene. She was so aggressive about it, saying no, she should dominate me. In the end, we had to call in the producers, because this unknown girl was being so headstrong. It made me wonder whether she’d read the book, because she thought she had to rape me, had to completely dominate me, had to climb on top of me and become the aggressor. But she wasn’t experienced enough to know that to be on top is not the be-all and end-all of the conquest. I don’t think she would have compromised had she not believed that there was still enough superstition left in male vanity to warrant the leading man, and the director, to think that she should be underneath getting fucked for the things that she said.”

  While Reed proceeded to throw tantrums, Jackson played it calm. As Women in Love actor Vladek Sheybal said of his costars’ fights, “Poor Ollie, because he was really jumping up and down with rage, ranting, ‘This should be played like that you, you know,’ she just sat quietly almost immobile and either looked out of the window at the snow and the Matterhorn, or smiled at me, but she refused to react to Ollie’s behavior, refused to reply to anything he said.”

  Finally, it was the day Kramer dreaded most: showing the film to Lord John Trevelyan. It was not their first encounter. In the late 1950s, Kramer worked as a production assistant on Suddenly, Last Summer, and even before that Tennessee Williams project began filming at Pinewood Studios in London, Trevelyan smelled something foul. Homosexuality, procurement, and cannibalism in the hot Caribbean sun! The British censor demanded major revisions in Gore Vidal’s screen adaptation.

  “Trevelyan was a real character, a social butterfly,” Kramer recalled. “England had a lot of men like that. Men who had sick sex lives, like he’s into S&M or a Peeping Tom. He gave you that feeling. He loved his work, and he had an enormous amount of power.” He also smoked a lot—so much, in fact, that his well-appointed suits were often so covered with ash that it turned to a kind of gray chalk covering his tweed chest.

  As for Trevelyan’s power, it was indeed formidable. Kramer’s contract with United Artists obligated him to deliver a film approved by the British censor. If Trevelyan didn’t approve Women in Love, UA took over control of the final edit. Like most films released in the late 1960s, Women in Love was screened in the British censors’ own private theater. It was an appropriately sterile place, with pale blue walls and a scattering of threadbare seats, two of which were behind desks equipped with working lights and indicators that allowed the two examiners to pinpoint items they might find objectionable. If these two examiners disagreed, Trevelyan got to cast the deciding vote.

  With Women in Love, Kramer and Russell personally met with Trevelyan; they tried to reason with him, comparing the movie to the novel and how faithful they’d been in replicating Lawrence’s story onscreen, especially with regard to the sex scenes. “How can you exercise those kinds of restrictions today?” Kramer pleaded. He and Russell had cleverly included more footage of the rape and the wrestling scene than they thought necessary, to give them some room to bargain.

  “In the end, it was a compromise,” said Kramer. “We snipped a couple of feet from mainly the wrestling scene and the revenge fuck, but not so you could tell in any way. That shut him up.”

  Fortunately, Trevelyan personally liked Women in Love, so much so that he didn’t want to butcher it. At least, that’s what he recalled. “Although there were strong and explicit sex scenes, we passed it without cuts,” he reported. “This film included a remarkably brilliant scene in which two young men wrestled naked. We had to consider this carefully, but decided to pass it; in a sense this was a milestone in censorship since
male frontal nudity was still a rarity. We had little criticism, possibly because of the film’s undoubted brilliance.”

  Kramer’s gambit to position Women in Love as an art film paid off. As the British film director Roy Ward Baker noted, “Trevelyan had that schoolmasterly habit of pigeon-holing people. If you were in the box marked ‘art cinema,’ you could tackle anything, however controversial: sex, violence, politics, religion—anything. If you were in ‘commercial cinema,’ you faced obstruction and nit-picking all the way. He chose these categories and allocated everyone according to his estimation of them. He was a sinister, mean hypocrite, treating his favorites with nauseating unctuousness.”

  Baker had directed low-budget films like Scars of Dracula and The Vampire Lovers, and possibly it was one of these titles that Trevelyan censured, but he let a couple of seconds of female pubic hair flash by in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Trevelyan explained his apparent flip-flop: “I remember that after Blow-Up a filmmaker who had sent me an unsavory script of no merit answered my objections by saying, ‘I intend to make this film in the style of Blow-Up.’ I replied that if he could make it as well as Antonioni we would probably pass it, but that I thought this unlikely.”

  Upon the release of Women in Love, the debate among critics focused almost exclusively on the wrestling scene. “Because it was the first studio film to have full-frontal male nudity,” said Kramer, “no one paid much attention to the regular, i.e. heterosexual, fuck scenes.”

  In some countries, the wrestling scene got excised almost completely. In Argentina, for example, the censors edited the scene so that it showed the two men shaking hands before they begin their nude fight, and then it cuts directly to their panting on the rug, lying side by side. “It was known as the great buggery scene,” said Ken Russell. “So that’s censorship working backwards.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Summer 1969, Revolution

  Mourners gathered outside the Frank Campbell Funeral Home on West Seventy-Fifth Street in Manhattan on June 28 for the last rites of their idol Judy Garland. A few days earlier in the New York Times, film critic Vincent Canby had eulogized, “The real shock is that she wasn’t already dead.”