‘Rolling Stone phoned this morning,’ he said. ‘They wanted to know why there was . . . ‘‘such an emphasis in my work on cunnilingus’’.’
‘And?’
‘I said, ‘‘because I like it.’’’
Yoko giggled and I repeated an old joke about an Australian in a Paris brothel, who was heard to yell to his mate in the next room, ‘Hey, Bazza, what’s French for soixante-neuf?’
John reckoned the police were ‘pissed off’ with him for giving money to Michael X, to start a black culture centre in Notting Hill. Actually, John and Yoko had given him the trimmings from their hair and he had flogged them for a large sum.
The phone rang again and John excused himself, the pattern of the afternoon.
The Rolls glided me back to the basement.
Germaine’s marriage to Paul de Feu, a builder’s labourer, had, as rumoured, been a fiasco. When she delivered her piece for the next Oz she would not discuss the details. Her latest contribution was called ‘The Slag Heap Erupts’. ‘The average housewife is dulled and confused by her day-to-day diet of pulp journalism and crap television,’ she wrote. ‘Many militant women show too plainly by their inefficiency, their obesity and their belligerence that they have not succeeded in finding any measure of liberation in their own company.’ The best thing they could do was to ‘mate down, instead of up’, so their education might serve the class it was supposed to. The main problem was male violence, to which women needed to create an alternative. ‘The cunt must take the steel out of the cock.’ She challenged female readers to come up with new ways of thinking, which she would publish in a forthcoming Cunt Power Oz.
With the Oz deadline upon me, I sat down and wrote the ad which made history of a sort. ‘Some of us at Oz are feeling old and boring, so we invite any of our readers who are under eighteen to come and edit the April issue. We will choose one person, several or accept a collective application . . . You will receive no money, except expenses. You will enjoy almost complete editorial freedom. Oz staff will assist in an administrative capacity.’ Interested readers were invited to present themselves at the office in Princedale Road, any time up to 7 p.m. on Friday 13 March 1970 – the date was an undetected coincidence. The last words assured them, ‘Oz belongs to you.’
In March, Louise flew off to a holiday in Ibiza, where I promised to join her as soon as I had gasbagged enough about the book, and set the next Oz in motion. But first came the lure of a starring role at a sex fair in Denmark, where the government had abolished censorship.
13
DROWNING in SPERM
The cigar-chomping producer from Hollywood was ‘hiding out’ in Mayfair. ‘I’ve just produced a flop,’ he said. Until then, Judd Benarr had been flying high with a credit on an Elvis Presley vehicle, Double Trouble. ‘But then I had a brainwave, Godamnit.’ Judd splashed bourbon on to ice and recounted the recent disaster – a Western set in England, with Terence Stamp playing John Wayne. It was called Blue. But Judd’s latest idea was bluer. Appetite whetted by the reviews of Playpower, he had wheedled me to this office-in-exile with the promise of a ‘no-holds-barred docudrama’ based on my book. It was March 1970.
‘I’ve just bought the rights to a sex fair in Denmark,’ he said. ‘Mix it up with your stuff and we’ve got a smash. You’re my main man.’ The sex fair started in a week. So far, he had no cast, no director, no crew, no script.
‘Don’t you get it, Dick? It’s hip, it’s hot. A big screen smash about the clash of sexual attitudes between the flower kids of today and the power creeps of yesterday.’
It seemed dubious. But this sex fair was a world first and the one thing he did have was financial backing. ‘Give me the number of your agent,’ he barked.
Days later I was flying to Copenhagen, ‘sex capital of Europe’, with the hastily signed director, Tony Palmer, former producer of How It Is. Three members of the Living Theatre had joined the cast, as well as a Penthouse pet.
The spruced-up inhabitants of this fairytale city showed no visible scars at the plethora of porn, but what lay under the surface? The first day’s shoot was in Palmer’s hotel suite. I was to interview a leading Danish sociologist, Professor Yurngst, a slight man in a houndstooth suit. The professor sat on a stiff-backed chair and marshalled the usual arguments against censorship, while I played devil’s advocate. A woman from the Living Theatre, Jenny, snaked slowly across the carpet to the foot of his chair. I remembered her performance in Paradise Now at the Roundhouse, when she was naked and spit-soaked. The cameras rolling, she unbuttoned the fly of the professor, who had not been forewarned. Yurngst continued to unravel the theories of Wilhelm Reich – that sexual repression leads to violence – which he bolstered with statistics showing that sex crimes had declined since the abolition of censorship. Jenny embarked on a vigorous fellatio. Apart from the beads of sweat on his eyelids and the erratic intakes of breath, Yurngst’s manner was valiantly professorial. His eyes remained camera-glued. Jenny’s lips remained fluid. In the midst of a dissertation on Freud and the libido, the prof suddenly jerked in his chair and let out a couple of gasps. ‘Cut,’ shouted Tony Palmer, immensely pleased.
I was pleased, too. We were the cutting edge of the sex revolution, slashing away at the media, academia, everyday life. This action proved something of vital importance, but, for the life of me, I can’t recall what it was.
By chance, we met the British morals campaigner, Mary White-house, in the lobby, after our camera crews collided. She had come to Copenhagen to decry the abolition of censorship. Our encounter was civil, even warm. The single-mindedness of Mrs Whitehouse was impressive, as was her willingness to flout the turning tide, but her agenda was mad and dangerous. In the bar after dinner, a producer from her doco crew, World in Action, was asking around for strong sleeping pills.
‘Not for me,’ he confided, ‘it’s to spike Mary’s Ovaltine.’ The boys from ITV were dying to sample the nightlife of Copenhagen, but didn’t dare leave the hotel until she was sleeping soundly.
I caught up with Alex Popov, now married to Lin Utzon, with two children and studying architecture; then flew to Odense, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. It was also the site of the fair, Sex-for-Millions, which had been officially opened by a seventy-one-year-old Danish feminist, Fanny Miranda, who described herself as a sexual suffragette. The pre-fab pavilions offered continuous blue movies and a range of the latest sex toys. Inside a cage labelled Marquis de Sade and decorated with instruments of torture, Super 8 scenes of S&M were projected on to a fake TV screen. All around the marquee, mammoth murals depicted close-ups of intercourse, not only among humans. Nude go-go girls gyrated down catwalks, and blue-rinsed ladies passed out creamy pastries and porno magazines. Visitors with enquiries were assisted by uniformed Girl Guides.
In the main arena, two women entered a makeshift stage and took off their clothes. The speakers blared. ‘There will now be a demonstration of public fucking.’ The women arranged themselves on a heap of mattresses as two men shambled onstage in socks and smoking jackets, like villains from a Victorian music hall. In a leaden rhythm, the couples copulated. On cue, Jenny and her Living Theatre guerrillas threw their clothes into the air and sprang to the mattresses. They caressed the sullen performers, stroked them, kissed them, chanted OM. It was the clash of two kinds of sexual revolution, I realised, one motivated by mammon, the other by spirit. The impresario rushed on stage and bellowed at the hired hands, who disentangled themselves and disappeared. Jenny arose serenely, Venus in a dosshouse. ‘When you make a sexual revolution, make it for love,’ she told the crowd, quoting D. H. Lawrence. ‘If you can’t make it for love, make it for fun.’ And then, maintaining her perfect poise, she put on her clothes. Sex-for-Millions, as it turned out, was liberation for no one; a trading of human flesh, which borrowed the hippie slogans of freedom and ran like a sweatshop.
Back in London, Tony Palmer pulled together our improvised weirdness into a movie, although, like the rest of the world, I nev
er did get around to seeing it.
The Living Theatre divided itself into four ‘cells’. In Paris its ‘orientation would be political’; in Berlin, ‘environmental’; in London, ‘cultural’; in India, ‘spiritual’. Followers were urged to liberate themselves from ‘dependence on the economic system’, but guidelines were not provided. It was the beginning of a slow death.
Jenny posed for the cover of Oz 26. Laughing defiantly, she stood next to a naked Steve, also of the Living Theatre, who had his groin bandaged. Jenny held aloft a mock-up of Steve’s penis (a dildo from the Odense Sex Fair) and wore a sash inscribed PUSSY POWER. It was partly an illustration of Germaine’s latest cri de coeur, DEFUSE THE COCK, but Jim Anderson, who directed the shoot with Oz’s latest photographer, David Nutter, gave a lateral stir to the mix by linking the bandages to the fact that a horrifying percentage of injuries to soldiers in Vietnam were to the genitals.
We had Candy Darling as a nude ‘is she or isn’t he?’ centrespread, and on the back cover was an ‘artoon’ by Martin, which married Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe. Inside was an extract from the journal of Bill Levy, an editor of Suck, who was jailed by immigration police for landing on British soil with six copies of the sex paper, and deported back to Holland.
Jim disconcerted me by including an image of an Aleister Crowley devil’s head. ‘Keep the occult out of Oz,’ I often told him. In the light of what I later learned about the origins of the word ‘Oz’, this was like asking someone to keep the Holy Ghost out of the Bible.
Jim stayed up night after night getting stoned at the design table. It was difficult for me to check all the pages before press time. I was irked, for example, by a heading on Felix’s music spread – HEAVY SHIT – and shouted at Jim. He burst into tears. I yelled at Felix, too, but he just yelled right back at me. Even louder.
This was the Oz which included the ad for schoolkid editors. By chance, it was laid out next to the transcript of the Chicago conspiracy trial, which dragged on, still largely ignored by Fleet Street. Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Mark Lane and Judy Collins all performed in court under the steely, paranoid gaze of the elderly judge. The defence lawyer, William Kunstler, asked the singer Country Joe MacDonald to describe his first meeting with two of the defendants, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. This had occurred at New York’s Chelsea Hotel. The yippie twosome had told the singer that the forthcoming Democratic Convention would be a ‘celebration of death’, and that the yippies wanted to ‘counterbalance the evil and negative vibrations’. Since Country Joe had written Vietnam Rag, a popular protest song, it was important he appeared at Chicago to be, in the singer’s recollection, ‘positive, natural, human and loving’. At that point, Abbie Hoffman had wanted to hear the words of the song, so now, in court, Country Joe sang it: And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?/Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn/The next stop is Vietnam . . . The judge shouted ‘stop’ and a marshal clamped Country Joe in a headlock.
Each week, the transcripts appeared in the Liberation News Service, an Underground Reuters. I scanned them with fascination. The staple yippie hyperbole of ‘uptight, youth-hating establishment’ was being played out each day in the courtroom. Judge Hoffman (no relation) was showing symptoms of paranoid lunacy, just like America’s foreign policy.
A year before, while on trial for fronting a demo, Danny the Red, hero of the Paris barricades, had sung in the dock of a Frankfurt court. Joined by supporters in the public gallery he broke into a lusty version of the Internationale. ‘We older people must sometimes be grateful,’ commented the appeals judge, ‘that young people today come to grips with problems that we, as youngsters, frequently refused to face.’ Judge Gravert reduced the sentence.
As an act of fashionable solidarity, Danae Brook and her friends, including myself, organised an event at the Roundhouse to raise money for the Chicago Seven.
This was the first public event I attended where everyone who consumed the fruit punch was also consuming LSD. A red balloon the size of a blimp bobbed over the heads of the trippers. Donations were collected in a wide-brimmed black hat. ‘Burn money,’ someone shouted. ‘Money buys freedom,’ retorted the hat-holder. A curly-haired woman spun towards me. Jenny Fabian had been the cashier at Middle Earth during Oz benefit nights. Lately, she had made a splash with a novel, Groupie, a kaftan-ripping romp through the crashpads of stage-hands. On acid, we kissed.
My previous trips had been audio-visual. The luminous dots in Martin Sharp’s celluloid portrait of Van Gogh, taped on the basement wall, had, in my personal universe, swirled for days like a celestial firestorm. (And still swirl, from time to time.) In his pivotal Playboy interview, Timothy Leary had promoted acid’s tactile potential, especially in the erogenous zones, but most users found it hard to get beyond gazing at tea cups. One Oz writer spent a weekend on acid with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but he never moved past the entry for Aardvark. A famous folksinger who had shared a London flat with Michael Ramsden was renowned for using LSD to catch up on the Hoovering. That night at the Roundhouse, after my trip-kiss, I became a groupie’s groupie.
Jenny Fabian accompanied me to the basement, where she threw herself into researching a sequel.
She told me of a forthcoming charter flight to New York. It would be ‘full of freaks, full of groovy people’. The charter was part of a stunt to turn an unknown rock band into an overnight sensation. Brinsley Schwartz had been booked to make their momentous debut at the Fillmore East, the hottest venue in the West. The jet of groovers would land at Kennedy Airport on Saturday afternoon, where a string of limousines would ferry them direct to the Fillmore. A hotel room was included. The trip was free to musos, roadies and . . . rock writers. ‘You can wangle a ticket,’ Jenny said.
In March 1970, the owner of the Phoenix Art Gallery in Berkeley, California, was charged with selling the ‘obscene’ Underground comic books Snatch and Cunt, which featured, among others, the works of Robert Crumb. A former card illustrator for the American Greetings Corporation, Crumb swallowed a tab of LSD and launched his Zap Comics on to the streets of San Francisco in 1968, creating cult characters Mr Natural and Fritz the Cat. A defence witness told the court that Crumb’s drawings were examples of the ‘art of humour’.
‘Orgies involving oral intercourse and other goings on,’ raged the District Attorney, ‘and which include a character who looks like Charlie Brown – do you really claim this to be humour?’
‘Such things don’t happen in the street,’ replied the professor of Art History. ‘It’s so extreme, it’s absurd. That’s why it’s funny.’
After an hour of deliberation by a jury of seven women and five men, the defendant was acquitted. Cunt and Snatch were protected by the Constitution.
In April 1970, over a long Greek lunch in Soho, Bob Hughes and I had a bit of a grizzle about Australia. Our homeland hadn’t changed since we left; unlike us, ho, ho. Actually, it hadn’t changed much since the day we were born (Bob a few years before me). The Aussies were still slaughtering the gooks, shafting the Abos and shutting out new ideas. The brightest and best jumped ship, leaving the politicians becalmed in an Edwardian stupor. What to do? I joked about organising a charter flight of freaks: a shimmering spectrum of yippies, blacks, Situationists, rock icons, the Living Theatre and go-go dancers.
‘Absolutely bloody wonderful, my dear Richard,’ said Bob, pulling a face at the retsina. Bob, clad in heavy black leathers, lavished with metal studs and snaps, a loosely knotted silk scarf at the neck, was in his radical phase. ‘A return charter to Australia, glowing with the brightest stars in the underground firmament.’
‘Definitely. We smuggle in a crateload of Ozes, whip up a bit of street theatre.’
‘The whole trip will be street theatre,’ he said, flicking an olive into his mouth, ‘an ambitious spectacle, with as many international revolutionaries as possible.’ The Chicago Seven, the Dutch Provos, if they are still active, and may
be ‘a Panther or two’. Bob’s main worry was obtaining passports for the radical American black pack: Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver. Rumours of Michael X’s fiscal fiddles were a little unnerving, and he had reportedly pulled a knife on the paymaster at IT, but we pencilled him in. From Paris there was Jean-Jacques Lebel and Danny the Red. Maybe Angelo Quattrocchi could rustle up an incendiary from Italy. Jenny of the late Living Theatre would be there to spice up the TV interviews.
‘We’ll be labelled traitors.’
‘Richard, Richard,’ he scolded. ‘We must make it clear from the outset, that the evils which our country epitomises exist all over the world.’
‘The press will still tear us to shreds.’
‘In that case, we shall bring our own.’ Reporters, a TV crew, even a film crew. ‘Make it a world news event – in fact, if we can’t make it a world news event, then it’s not worth doing.’
‘OK. Marvellous.’
There was the problem of finance.
‘Simple. This is a movie. We write a treatment.’ It was just a matter of finding a backer. ‘Most of all, my dear Richard,’ he said as he forked the last of the feta cheese, ‘this is an act of revolution – not a pleasure trip for narcissists.’
Bob swung a leathered leg over his Harley Davidson and roared down Wardour Street.
The next day, he sent me a typed record of the conversation and suggested we publish a two-page treatment in Oz. He wanted everyone on the trip to be well briefed on Australia’s political history, and to that end he was already planning a rigorous schedule of homework. I hadn’t seen Bob this enthusiastic since his Floods of Florence party turn. Later, I realised why. Bob was pitting the strength of his radical credentials against the opposite inclinations of his older brother, Tom, who had just landed a position at the core of the establishment – Attorney-General of Australia.
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