Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  During his press chores, Burgess took time to attend a screening of A Clockwork Orange with a paying audience. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about. He wanted to see how Americans were responding, and found that “the theology passed over their coiffures.” He was especially dismayed by “the blacks” in the audience who shouted, “Right on!” at the thug-hero Alex.

  Even so, he defended the film, the novel, and himself. In between interviews, he wrote a defense of the film: “Neither cinema nor literature can be blamed for original sin. A man who kills his uncle cannot justifiably blame a performance of Hamlet. On the other hand, if literature is to be held responsible for mayhem and murder, then the most damnable book of them all is the Bible, the most vindictive piece of literature in existence.”

  From England, Kubrick said pretty much the same thing when the MPAA and the BBFC gave the film their respective X ratings, which in America had provoked a boycott. The one-two punch of A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs, which later cut a few seconds of footage to be reclassified R, alarmed several newspaper editors and publishers, who instituted a policy of refusing to carry advertisements for X-rated films. Of these newspapers, the Detroit News boasted the most readers, and its editorial page declared, “In our view, a sick motion picture industry is using pornography and an appeal to prurience to bolster theater attendance: quite simply, we do not want to assist them in the process.”

  The editorial didn’t mention Kubrick, but that didn’t stop him from attacking the editors of the Detroit News. His letter to the newspaper referenced Adolf Hitler’s response to a Munich art exhibition in 1937: “Works of art which cannot be understood and need a set of instructions to justify their existence, and which find their way to neurotics receptive to such harmful rubbish, will no longer reach the public. Let us have no illusions: we have set out to rid the nation and our people of all those influences threatening its existence and character.”

  Kubrick went on to condemn the newspaper’s policy: “In this day and age, the Detroit News censors may feel better equipped to make such fine distinctions—though I do not envy them their task. But what they are doing is, in essence, the same.”

  The Bible and Adolf Hitler. Burgess and Kubrick weren’t afraid of going after the big guns.

  IT WASN’T THE BIBLE and it wasn’t Hitler. It was something much more popular: The Tonight Show.

  Johnny Carson’s guests that January night were Burt Reynolds, the burly beefcake star of such forgettable testosterone epics as Skullduggery and Sam Whiskey, and Helen Gurley Brown, libido-driven editor of Cosmopolitan and bestselling author of Sex and the Single Girl. There on the Tonight Show couch, Helen was laughing at Burt for saying that men read Playboy for the articles, and he was laughing at her for putting out such an editorially lowbrow magazine.

  “Are you a sexist?” she asked.

  “I bet in ten years that word will be very tired and so dated that you’ll sound like a dipshit to ask,” he replied. Helen Gurley Brown called him, essentially, a Neanderthal. To which Reynolds remarked, “You know what? I want to go back to fighting my way through crinolines in the backseat of a car. It was a hell of a lot sexier. Painful, but sexier.”

  Somehow, in the midst of that heated exchange, the Cosmo editor knew she’d found her man. She’d been on a months-long search for just the right male specimen, when she put it to Reynolds on-air, “I want you to be the first male nude centerfold in Cosmo!”

  Reynolds thought fast. He joked that Cosmo could show his left arm in the May issue and his right leg in June. But Brown wasn’t letting him go. “You’re the only one who could do it with a twinkle in your eye,” she said.

  In truth, he was about the only one who wanted to do it. A slew of major stars had turned Brown down. Reynolds, in his pre-Deliverance days, wasn’t really much of a star at all, but he and his publicist, David Gershenson, could only pray that he would one day be a star—and in Hollywood, there are all kinds of ways to find God.

  Burt Reynolds found his religion by downing a fifth of vodka and starting on another bottle when famed photographer Francesco Scavullo asked him to get naked and lie down on a bearskin rug. Scavullo shot all the Cosmo covers, but this session was particularly arduous because Scavullo knew he couldn’t airbrush Reynolds’s hairy body into the plastic perfection that had become his trademark with so many female models’ bosoms. He had to get the focus just right. Perhaps that’s why “the session lasted several hours,” Reynolds noted. In addition to the “Arctic” temperature in the studio, Reynolds had to contend with the photographers’ two male assistants.

  “Each one seemed so gay his hair was on fire,” Reynolds revealed in his memoir. Maybe it was his naïveté or inebriation, but the actor never questioned why Scavullo always wore those silly little Carnaby Street caps.

  Regardless, the April issue of Cosmopolitan, with the first male nude centerfold not counting the thousands of male nude centerfolds in hundreds of specialty “athletic” magazines, sold out its 1.5 million print run within two days of publication. The actor would contend that it was that year’s release of Deliverance that made him a star. Others thought it was his spread in Cosmo.

  Shortly after that issue appeared and quickly disappeared from newsstands, Reynolds was enjoying dinner with his current girlfriend, Dinah Shore, in a fancy Manhattan restaurant. A small combo played, and during a break the violinist approached the actor to say, “You wouldn’t be anything if it hadn’t been for that magazine picture.”

  Reynolds just smiled. “You ought to pose for one and then you could be playing at Carnegie Hall,” he shot back.

  BURT REYNOLDS WASN’T THE only one battling the cold that January.

  Marlon Brando’s first nude scene in Last Tango in Paris also hit a nearly freezing wall of resistance. When director Bernardo Bertolucci told him to take off his clothes, Brando took off his clothes. “But it was such a cold day that my penis shrank to the size of a peanut,” the actor reported. “It simply withered.”

  Instead of turning up the thermostat, Bertolucci let his star suffer. “Because of the cold, my body went into full retreat, and the tension, embarrassment, and stress made it recede even more,” Brando wrote in his memoir. “I realized I couldn’t play the scene this way, so I paced back and forth around the apartment stark naked, hoping for magic. I’ve always had a strong belief in the power of mind over matter, so I concentrated on my private parts, trying to will my penis and testicles to grow; I even spoke to them. But my mind failed me. I was humiliated, but not ready to surrender yet. I asked Bernardo to be patient and told the crew that I wasn’t giving up. But after an hour I could tell from their faces that they had given up on me.”

  The Godfather was a good two months away from being released, and Marlon Brando, naked or clothed, remained the very compromised, unbankable star of The Nightcomers, Burn!, The Night of the Following Day, and, yes, Candy. But he was still Marlon Brando, naked or clothed, and as Last Tango producer Alberto Grimaldi explained, “Brando had the personality and charisma which could allow for an easier public absorption and reception of the considerable shock which such a film would provoke.” The graphic sex scenes in Last Tango demanded a star, even one of questionable box office reliability.

  In describing his film to Brando, Bertolucci talked about his fantasy of being trapped with a woman in a room. He also spoke of his deep love for Francis Bacon paintings—“In Bacon, you see people throwing up their guts and then doing a makeup job with their own vomit”—and the short stories of Georges Bataille, whose characters “breathe in their farts and breathe in their come . . . that is what I want Tango to suggest,” he said. And Bertolucci added, “Let’s talk about ourselves, about our lives, our loves, about sex. That’s what the film is going to be about.”

  “He wanted me to play myself,” Brando said of Bertolucci’s sales pitch, “as if [the character of] Paul were an autobiographical mirror of me.”

  Grimaldi had initially gone to Paramount Pictures to find
a home for Tango, and yet despite The Godfather being in the studio’s can, the executives there didn’t see the potential in another Brando film, at least, not this Brando film. “No one was willing to take the risk, especially with such a film. . . . But finally, despite their fear that it might stain or throw a shadow over their image, United Artists, after much reluctance, agreed to a coproduction with me.” (The final film cost $1,430,000, of which UA put in $800,000.)

  United Artists knew what it was getting. Bertolucci made sure of that.

  “Films like Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday would not have been made by any other studio,” said UA’s David Picker. “Last Tango would have been made by another studio.” It was a secret that Picker made sure to keep from Grimaldi.

  Bertolucci, for his part, withheld nothing. “The sexual scenes as Bertolucci described them were even more candid than in the actual film,” said David Chasman, head of UA in London. “He didn’t talk about butt-fucking, but he conveyed that it would be very explicit. From what he said, I thought we were going to get a look at Brando’s balls.”

  If Bertolucci had his way, the world would have gotten much more than a tour of Brando’s crotch. The director’s original vision was to have his two actors perform, not simulate, sexual intercourse. “Bernardo wanted me to fuck Maria,” Brando said of his leading lady, Maria Schneider. “But I told him that was impossible. If that happens, our sex organs become the centerpiece of the film. He didn’t agree with me.”

  Bertolucci had auditioned more than two hundred actresses, a process that quickly devolved into an exercise of instant déjà vu. “It was like seeing the same one, because they were all exactly alike. All absolutely the same—same makeup, same hairdress,” he said of nearly all the female contenders.

  Fortunately, one eighteen-year-old novice was different. When Bertolucci asked Schneider to take off her clothes for the audition, she stripped without stopping to blink. “She was a little Lolita, only more perverse,” he said of the edgy girl with the corkscrew curls. Later, he surmised, “Undressed, she became much more natural.”

  It’s what George Cukor said of Joe Dallesandro’s appeal. Careers have been made on less.

  If Schneider was relaxed with her nudity, Brando was not. Where she walked around naked almost from day one, Brando demurred. “We have to wait a bit longer,” he kept saying. “I’m not thin enough yet.”

  Finally, Bertolucci had waited long enough and insisted that his male lead get naked for the camera. Traumatized, Brando confided his nudity phobia to his longtime secretary. Alice Marchak gave him a very sympathetic ear; she deplored the sexual explicitness of the Last Tango script and advised her boss to leave the project. “I can’t,” Brando replied. “The picture is half-done. They’ll sue for millions.”

  Initially, Bertolucci wanted a full frontal shot of the star, but he never got it.

  Later, when Bertolucci was asked why Schneider’s groin was exposed in the film and Brando’s wasn’t, he defended his male star, saying that scenes with a fully naked Brando were cut “for structural reasons, to shorten the film.” He made up other reasons as well. Like, “I wanted to show it as essentially an oedipal relationship,” he said. “Her nakedness makes her more childlike, his clothes make him more fatherly.”

  Schneider gave a simpler reason for the disparity in their respective wardrobes. “It was just his complex about his body,” she said of Brando.

  Even with his body only partially exposed, Brando did have to get naked on occasion. During one such scene, Bertolucci offered his star some unusual direction, motivation, therapy, or just plain blather. “You are the embodiment of my prick. You are its symbol,” he said. Brando later said he didn’t know what the hell Bertolucci was talking about.

  Schneider could only laugh at Brando’s reluctance to expose his body, and she often rolled her eyes at his habit of having to disrobe behind drawn curtains. “I’m much more free sexually than Bernardo or Brando,” she bragged. She also said that making love to one of the screen’s great leading men was no turn-on. “It was a very paternalistic thing, and a good friendship. I wasn’t excited by him, although my friends told me I should be, and I don’t think he was excited by me. He’s old, almost fifty, you know, and he’s flabby, and he has a big . . . ,” she said, gesturing over her own tight abdomen.

  Despite Schneider’s seeming nonchalance on the set, her confidence was tested for the soon-to-be infamous sodomy scene. It was not in the original script. Brando conceived it over café au laits with Bertolucci when the two men were having a script consultation at a café near the Arc de Triomphe. The director embellished on the idea, giving it a novel twist: The lubricant would be a stick of butter that Brando grabs just before entry.

  “Maria and I simulated a lot of things, including one scene of buggering in which I used butter, but it was all ersatz sex,” said Brando. He respected his inexperienced leading lady, who tried to adopt his improvisational/autobiographical approach to her own role. As he put it, “We lived out our characters entirely. The complicity between us was the complicity of two ghosts to whom we had lent our bodies.”

  Perhaps Schneider’s ghost was a little less complicit, because the actress claimed not to have been told about the buttery sodomy scene—until they shot it. “And I was so angry,” she later said. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force somebody to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that.”

  At the time, what Brando did try to do was calm her. “Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ he said.

  But during the scene, even though Brando wasn’t really sodomizing her, “I was crying real tears,” said Schneider. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Brando and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

  Near the end of the production’s twelve-and-a-half-week shoot, Bertolucci staged the titular dance scene, shot at the Salle Wagram. It didn’t go well. After several takes, Bertolucci asked Brando, who turned forty-eight that day, “I want you to do something outlandish!” He didn’t ask Brando to tell him what he was going to do. “Just something outlandish.”

  Brando’s concept of outlandish was to finish the dance by dropping his trousers and mooning one of the extras. “Kiss this, Kiss this!” he shouted at an old woman. “Farewell, my peach blossom!” and then, grabbing his trousers, he ran out of the dance hall with Schneider in hand.

  The production ended on that fairly upbeat note. But perhaps Brando shared more of Schneider’s reluctance with regard to all the sex and soul-searching than even he knew at the time. Years later, in his memoir, he wrote, “I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore.”

  THE YEAR’S OTHER MOST controversial film began shooting almost to the day that production started on Last Tango in Paris. But it was an ocean away, in America, and no one in Hollywood had heard of its director, Gerard Damiano, or its star, Linda Boreman, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a Yonkers, New York, policeman. The movie began, unlike most movie productions, as the result of a love affair. And a twisted one at that.

  What first attracted Linda Boreman to Chuck Traynor was his burgundy Jaguar XKE. What attracted Traynor to Boreman was her willingness to overcome the gag reflex when it came to giving him a blowjob. Hers was a bored life, even for a twenty-one-year-old living in Yonkers. She worked in a boutique, trying to save enough money to buy her own shop, when a near-fatal car accident ended that modest fantasy. That’s when Traynor pulled up in his burgundy Jaguar XKE, and even though he came off like a gas station flunky, he offered to take care of her. He could afford it, having been a pimp and a drug smuggler, and he certainly had the money to give Linda Boreman a better place to live than her cop-father could.

  Years later, Boreman would reveal, “There was no love, no affection, no normal sex with anyone from the day I met Chuck Tra
ynor until the day I finally got away. I did not have a single orgasm for six or seven years. I never had any enjoyment from any of it at all.”

  There were, however, benefits to living with Traynor. Through hypnosis, Traynor got his girlfriend to give up smoking cigarettes. What else he hypnotized her into doing, she never knew. He might have hypnotized her into being one of his prostitutes, making a few porno movies, and meeting with the porn director Gerard Damiano, who was immediately taken with what Boreman called her “sword-swallowing or deep-throat trick.”

  Damiano liked to believe that his old job of cutting women’s hair in New Jersey made him the ideal pornmeister, because “I could relate to women,” he said. “Most of them were unhappy in their relationships.” He got the idea for his “biggest movie yet” just a few days after meeting Boreman and Traynor in his Manhattan office. He told them, “I was driving over the bridge when it hit me. We’re going to do a whole film and I mean a feature, thirty-five millimeter—about a girl who has her clit in her throat.”

  “Hey, that’s cool!” said Traynor.

  “I’ve even got a title. Deep Throat. It came to me all at once,” said Damiano.

  He also had another idea. He thought movie stars needed alliterative names, like Marilyn Monroe and Rin Tin Tin, so he decided to give Boreman the screen name Linda Lovelace. Even though she wasn’t voluptuous like most porn actresses, Damiano liked that Boreman looked “sweet and innocent” in an emaciated sort of way. The film’s moneyman, who put up the entire twenty-five thousand dollars, wasn’t so impressed. Lou Periano, aka Lou Perry, wanted a blonde and he wanted a blonde with big tits. Periano didn’t even know if Boreman could talk. When he demanded a screen test, Damiano had his brunette, small-breasted discovery read aloud the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She read it. Periano remained unimpressed, but Damiano gave her the job anyway.