Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  ‘Don’t you think that was a nasty smear to spread about a master interested in your son’s education?’

  ‘Never! My son had suffered a beating, and that was a nastier hurt – not part of his education at all. He was asking a question about the nature of people who beat boys in the guise of teaching them.’

  ‘And Rupert Bear?’

  ‘It was a joke. Children today are surrounded by and cannot escape the sexual nature of our society. Vivian was hitting out at the hypocrisy of telling children “You must know nothing about sex”, when these adults live in a sex-ridden world of their own making. Every child is aware that this innocent little bear has sexual organs.’

  ‘I believe your son has been to see Hair.’

  ‘Yes, I took him.’

  ‘Did you take your ten- and twelve-year-old daughters?’

  ‘No. I’ve brought my children up, Mr Leary, not to be ashamed of their bodies. I can’t think it was wrong to take my son to see Hair.’

  ‘But some of the songs have words which rhyme with masturbation, don’t they?’

  John Mortimer objected. ‘This has gone far enough. We can’t embark on a discussion of Hair.’

  The judge seemed confused. ‘Hair? What is it? An article?’

  ‘It’s a play, my Lord. It’s been running about three years.’

  ‘Vivian is not ashamed of what he did,’ she told the judge, ‘and I’m not ashamed for him.’

  All that was left now were the final addresses, and a summing up by the judge. A piece of cake, surely.

  19

  a MILLSTONE around his NECK

  Brian Leary began with a little joke. ‘M’Lord, members of the jury, you’ve been sitting here for so many days and listening to so many words, that your brains must have become well nigh . . . OZZified.’ There was a groan from the gallery. Leary cleared his throat and moved on. This was proof, he told the inscrutable eleven, that a joke didn’t need to be dirty to get a response.

  First, the question of indecency. It was ‘less dirty’ than obscenity, though still a crime to send it through the post. A man naked on a beach is indecent; but if he masturbates, it’s obscene. Leary recalled Jim’s example of urinating in Court. ‘Mr Anderson was then asked to have a look at the cartoon which shows a lady with her private parts exposed, urinating on a pot which contains a phallus in the form of a cactus. He said, no, that was not indecent.’

  On the day that Oz was raided, Felix had snarled at Luff, ‘You’ll get us under the Post Office Act.’ Thus the defendant had ‘clearly recognised that what was sent through the post in the shape of Oz 28 was an indecent publication’. Fait accompli – guilty! Next – the count of obscenity.

  If a man masturbating was obscene, then Rupert Bear deflowering a virgin was even more so. He asked the jury to contemplate the effect of that sort of thing on little girls, ‘seeing the blood pouring out of the vagina, as Rupert goes in, plonk’. It was fine for children to do smutty drawings, if they wished, but ‘there’s all the difference in the world between that and responsible adults putting out for public consumption a magazine they realise will have a readership of half a million!’

  Dennis had also complained of the numerous warnings by Scotland Yard. And when at last the police did pay a visit to the Oz office, what did he do? Call in a photographer!

  Each expert was dismissed, apart from Hans Eysenck, who wasn’t mentioned. John Peel was sneered at. ‘It may be fine to have Richard Neville as a son-in-law, but would you really welcome Mr Peel as a father-in-law?’

  Dr Klein was recalled with distaste as an ‘unmarried woman’ prepared to use the Oz cover as wallpaper. ‘Lesbians in the lavatory,’ he shouted. ‘And surely that’s where they should be left!’

  The ebullient Mr Melly extolled a pop revolution. He came from a very advanced household, where ‘they all sit around talking of nothing but “bollocks” and “cunt”’. Surely this didn’t square with the jury’s own living rooms? Marty Feldman was tragic, discourteous, sacrilegious – he said the Bible was obscene.

  As for Richard Neville, he was asked about his attitude to oral sex. If schoolkids wished to indulge in it, then it was okay by him. ‘As I sought to point out to Mr Neville, it isn’t every lady that likes to take into her mouth a man’s erect penis.’

  And as for Neville’s penis, could it be entirely free of the blight which had engulfed John Peel? After all, he had produced as a witness Dr Arnold Linken, a venereologist, to back up Peel’s claims that VD was widespread, and that its incidence was accelerated by shame and ignorance. The prosecutor reminded the jury that ‘Neville had once consulted Dr Linken on medical matters, although Linken was not his doctor’. Nudge, nudge. Actually, Linken, who had infuriated Leary by suggesting that his use of the term ‘reefer’ was old hat, practised as a GP. He had once provided me with a prescription for eye drops.

  Poor Vivian Berger, Leary continued, was this the brave new Oz generation? The boy, sitting in court day after day, had smeared his teacher, a gentleman who had no opportunity to defend himself. (Later he did sue Oz for damages, winning £1,000.) ‘Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that the Berger family is a broken home!’ (Yet the closeness between Vivian and his mother, as they attended Court and chatted during recesses, had impressed many observers, even the sour-penned Tony Palmer.)

  ‘Ask yourself, what good ever came out of Oz 28?’ Leary was now on the home stretch. ‘What lesson is there for us to learn? Members of the jury, there is none, is there? Save that sex is a God to be worshipped for its own sake, culminating in fucking in the streets, even with minors. That doing one’s own thing is an ideal to be looked up to – by young and old alike – no matter how selfish that ideal might be. That a police officer can be called a pig, that cannabis is harmless and the law against it is silly.’ Oz promoted voyeurism, homosexuality, flagellation, necrophilia and treating VD like a common cold. In short, ‘it was the epitome of the permissive society’.

  Oz worshipped the drop-outs, those who expect the State to provide a living – ‘and by the State I mean nothing more than you and me, ladies and gentlemen of the jury – those of us who are fools enough to work’. He held Oz up between thumb and forefinger, letting it dangle like dirty underwear. ‘We’ve been through the magazine from cover to cover a hundred times, and – wouldn’t you agree? – within its pages there is not one word of tenderness. That’s because Oz does not deal with love. It deals with sex – sex with a capital S.’

  This case was not about the right to speak. It was about a dirty magazine. ‘Is Oz dirty or isn’t it? It’s as simple as that.’

  He adopted an almost avuncular tone, scanned their faces one final time. ‘When all is said and done, ladies and gentlemen, it is you – you eleven – who now have to set the public standard of decency.’ It was over. He sat down. There was silence.

  During the four and a half hours he had been on his feet, Brian Leary had made several telling points. One that struck home was the absence of tenderness in Oz 28. It was true. And strangely so, given that we once claimed that love is all you need.

  Again and again, he returned to a phrase Felix had used in a piece of correspondence impounded by Luff – that the teenage editors had originally said they didn’t want to write about politics or sex. ‘In that case,’ Leary kept asking, ‘who put the sex in Schoolkids Oz?’

  The immediate answer, of course, judging by recent Ozes, was Jim and Felix, and they were certainly responsible for the last-minute cover, but apart from that? Well, there wasn’t much. The Small Ads and the Pellens Personal Products ad had appeared every month for years, no longer given a thought. The Suck ad was tiny and not even read by Jim, Felix or the schoolkids at the time. Perhaps if I had not been sunning myself in Ibiza, or – more certainly – if Andrew Fisher hadn’t been distracted by his TV career in Manchester – the Suck ad (and the cover) might not have appeared.

  But the sex? Despite what some of the schoolkids might have said at the start, the items t
hat caused most consternation in the courtroom, apart from the damned cover, were Rupert Bear and the masturbating schoolmaster – the work of the schoolkids. I was happy to defend the issue to the hilt.

  John Mortimer rose serenely to his feet. His voice exuded that air of weary exasperation that he would later perfect for Rumpole of the Bailey. ‘Members of the jury, I was amazed to hear my learned friend saying that what is being attacked here is not freedom of speech. For myself, I find it impossible to comprehend how a case that places three young men in the dock because of their editorship of a small magazine, which, it is conceded, is not hard-core pornography, and which is attacked because of the views put forward about sex and drugs . . . can possibly not be an attack on freedom of speech.’ As he stretched his arms, another button in his waistcoat burst. Felix muttered, ‘Right on, John!’ The judge stared at the ceiling.

  ‘My Lord has outlawed laughter from the courtroom – and rightly so.’ But this, he suggested, made it tough for the jury. How can Oz be judged in such an artificial atmosphere? Surely it must be evaluated by those who were able to read it and able to find it funny, able to laugh. Of course, it’s in the interest of the prosecution to persuade everyone that this magazine should be treated with the greatest of possible solemnity, and it was easy for them to do.

  ‘By the time a joke gets into Court, and by the time we’ve heard it fifty times and by the time Mr Leary has mauled it – all vestige of humour has been totally anaesthetised; because when you’re laughing, ladies and gentleman, you’re unlikely to be corrupted.’

  Feliks Topolski had found it funny; the former war artist whose work hung in galleries around the world, including the British Museum and the Tate Gallery. Rupert Bear was tremendously witty, he said; opposite elements in the comic culture had been put together to create a riotous clash.

  ‘We heard a lot in the last speech about the alternative society,’ Mortimer continued, getting his fingers under his ratty wig and scratching. ‘The truth of the matter is that our country contains many alternative societies, but the great, the most important thing is that we should all live with each other, that we should be tolerant of alternative ideas and not seek to stifle other people’s lifestyles. “Doing your own thing” is a phrase Mr Leary criticised as though it only applied to the Underground. But in one way or another, we all wish to do our own thing. The stockbroker playing his Saturday golf, the lady in the cathedral embroidering hassocks for the vicarage garden party . . .’

  His novelist’s eye, his cosy examples, his tone of tolerance, civility and urbanity, lulled the courtroom into a state of acquiescence, making everyone feel they were sprawled on the grassy banks watching an Oxbridge regatta, the breast of chicken washed down with the chilled white, secure in the knowledge that the best team would win, the goal was the truth, the stake was civilisation, and all of our parts would be played within the finest British traditions of justice, fairness and freedom.

  ‘What is finally important in this case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the relationship between parents and children. And in that relationship, the important thing is tolerance and understanding. All of us must be able to say what we feel. And if, in putting forth their feelings, however mistakenly, however clumsily, children find our reaction is to trundle out the law, to attack and suppress and censor, then there is a danger that they will shrug their shoulders and smile and turn away from us. Then we shall indeed be a lonely generation, because we shall have lost them for ever.’

  Six hours later, he sat down, leaving us light-headed and confident. The task which lay ahead of me now, in my own final speech, was not to pull the rug from under his feet.

  That night, as I sat at the table by the basement window, I flipped yet again through the forty-eight pages of Schookids Oz. It was not the best issue; nor the worst. The Act stated ‘taken as a whole’, but the Crown had only taken bits. Page after page contained brave bursts of anti-authoritarian humour and spleen, never mentioned. One page commemorated the Kent State students shot by the National Guard, juxtaposed with the comment by President Nixon, ‘These bums . . . you know, blowing up the campuses’. Bob Hughes confessed to his acid days and hailed Theodore Rozak’s book, The Making of a Counter Culture, as a fine introduction to the revolutionary will, ‘without which . . . our history cannot be perceived’.

  Another spread in Schoolkids Oz showed readers how to prepare for an impending ecological disaster: learn to digest grass, grubs, insects . . . fatten your pets for the main course of the future. Called ‘Rehearsal for the Apocalypse’, no date was given, but I suspected my own was getting close.

  As I leaned over the dock towards the jurors, some of them avoided my eyes, others cocked their heads in anticipation. In the past weeks, a few of the men had peeled off drab suits and now faced me tie-less, in jazzy shirts. ‘Sorry it’s all taken so long,’ I said. ‘At times I’ve been bored, just like you.’ In some ways, we had more in common with each other than those who spent their days in court rooms, their evenings at clubs, their weekends in country mansions hunting foxes or breeding whippets. We could pop into the local cinema, couldn’t we? Catch up on the violence in The Wild Bunch, A Man Called Horse and Soldier Blue, a film which shows a struggling woman having her breast cut off. Personally, I had a dainty stomach and, like any member of the jury, could choose not to see a movie, choose not to buy a magazine.

  The world outside was changing. Last night, on the noticeboard at the sweetshop in Kensington High Street, I was offered: French lessons from a Coloured Student and a full course of instruction from a riding school mistress seeking a superior position.

  ‘None of this is relevant, Mr Neville, you must stick to the evidence.’

  Even in this court, I pointed out, the copies of Oz have been dwindling alarmingly. The police keep topping them up, but they’re a big hit with officials, prison officers and distinguished visitors. ‘Some of the ushers wear Oz badges under their lapels.’ As I came to the thrust of my argument, I noticed the court reporters stride to the exit.

  ‘Throughout the trial, the prosecution has failed to draw a distinction between an act and a depiction of an act. A man actually urinating in Court is indecent – we can agree on that. But a drawing of a man urinating in court need not be indecent. A drawing doesn’t smell, doesn’t trickle over the exhibits, doesn’t wet the lawyers’ shoes and splash over the carpets and make the ushers work overtime to clean it up. This is what makes urination in Court indecent and offensive. Yet the prosecution talks about Rupert’s penis being thrust in our face as though it really exists. And as for the masturbating schoolmaster – they seem to think we are actually in the firing line.’

  I told the jury that from where they sat, they couldn’t see the gallery, where spectators were often ejected. ‘Just what sort of temple is constructed here, in the name of the law, which expels anyone who chuckles?’ Marty Feldman, nervous and agitated, was ‘alienated by this courtroom, because this courtoom is alienated from life’. And yet the trial was full of absurdities. I mentioned the party of schoolboys from Surrey, who soaked up the extract from Suck and the antics of Rupert Bear. ‘The boys stayed the whole afternoon and returned to their school with souvenir copies of Schoolkids Oz. So far, no outbreak has been reported of fucking in the playground.’

  The judge was not amused. ‘The object of the final speech is to deal with the evidence – not to bring in fresh evidence.’

  ‘Your Lordship, I believe it is not customary to interrupt the final speech.’

  Argyle turned his back.

  ‘One of the strangest and most menacing allegations levelled throughout this trial is that we are part of a community without love. “Sex is worshipped for its own sake,” said Mr Leary, who went on, “Why have we heard nothing of love?” The answer is – we were never asked. Mr Leary did not introduce it until his final speech. Throughout this case he has been solely concerned with venereal disease, homosexuality, fucking in the streets and pissing in the courts. Since he
has chosen to hold against us an answer that we didn’t give to a question that was never asked – let me answer now.

  ‘For a while, there was so much love around that a whole generation almost died of an overdose. You don’t hear so much about love nowadays, because the alternative society has become more practical and political. People got tired of turning the other cheek. Among young people, love has no power or magic if it just means loving your wife until the divorce and meanwhile hating black people, homosexuals, communists. Love entails tolerance and compassion – not for the person you want to possess, like a sports car – but for those people who are in most need of support. Sometimes our horizons are limited by immediate needs. We’re so busy trying to survive as comfortably as possible in a frenzied and confusing world, that we find it difficult to care about people that we cannot see or hear.

  ‘His Lordship reminded one witness that you don’t have to be a prostitute to understand the evils of prostitution. Likewise, you don’t have to be black to understand the evils of racial discrimination. When you see long-hairs or black people or women marching in demonstrations, they are not there because they want to destroy everything that you believe in; they want to rebuild it and redistribute it, so that everyone receives a fair share.

  ‘Women, for example, are now beginning to reject their male-defined role as housewife, nappy changer, decorative sidekick . . . and the concept of romantic love. That is the sort of love I suspect Mr Leary was searching for in Oz. Violins, moonlit terraces, tuxedos, lace hankies and E-type Jaguars. The sort of world characterised by the novels of Barbara Cartland, where dashing bucks cannot afford to kiss the satined débutante until he slides the wedding ring on her finger. To reject that sort of love is not to reject love at all. It is to reject a myth and an image of love which is not only unattainable but, in the guise of ennobling women, actually enslaves them. I think that is what Oz, or at least the community of which Oz is part, tries to do. To redefine love, to broaden it, extend it, revitalise it. It is true that contained within this reinterpretation of the concept of love is a more candid sexuality. Surely this is a sign of a healthier and more honest relationship between men and women.’