Came the pained voice, the beady stare: ‘Thank you, Mr Neville, are you finished yet?’
‘Almost, your Lordship.’
To everyone’s surprise Argyle announced a short recess and hurried off. ‘A pee break,’ said Jim. The tension was broken, chatter rose from all parts of the courtroom. An old friend drifted over to the dock, John Wilcock, who had just flown in from New York. He grabbed a batch of the latest Other Scenes from a canvas carry-all, handed one to me and others to court officials, remarking, ‘I’m certain you’ll all get off. I can read it in their faces, as clear as daylight’. John had attended many Movement trials, and had a reputation for infallibility in this area. He padded around in his grey slacks and sandals until the court was called to order.
‘Sex is just part of the revolution of values which is taking place among the young. Drugs are another part. It seems to me, therefore, that the question to ask is not, “Why does Oz include references to police as ‘pigs?”’ but, “What sort of pressure makes a fifteen-year-old girl refer to those who are paid to protect her, the lovable British bobby, as pigs?” Her anger is similar to the anger that many young people feel about those who plant drugs, falsify evidence and invade the privacy of people because of the way they look. An Englishman’s home is his castle – except when it’s a pad in Notting Hill Gate.
‘Those who grew up in the early Fifties were known as the Silent Generation because they seemed to accept that the most important goal in life was to get rich as quickly and ruthlessly as possible, while ignoring those who were poor, homeless and discriminated against. But suddenly it became too dangerous to be complacent. Old men with cigars and curly moustaches could push buttons and blow up the whole world. So young people came into the streets with their duffel coats and guitars to protest. They discovered they had a collective identity. They sprouted bright plumage to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, and gathered in large numbers to hear their own kind of music. As they searched for new values and experiences, they stumbled upon an old drug, cannabis, which would also help distinguish them from their parents’ generation. It was a new world, with novel dangers. Nearly ten years ago, Bob Dylan sang: Come mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don’t criticise what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly ageing/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand/For the times they are a-changing.
‘Members of the jury, will you lend a hand? With your verdict, you have a chance to bridge the generation gap, the culture gap, the ignorance gap, call it whatever you like. You have a chance to demonstrate that parents are not necessarily intolerant of the young, or unsympathetic to change. Acquitting Oz does not mean that you endorse what is in the magazine, but it does mean that you have confidence and compassion for the tender ideas of the young, for people who, in one witness’s words, want to solve old problems in new ways.
‘A free trial in a open courtroom only has any meaning if the voices of reason are listened to, if decisions are made according to evidence, if people are prepared to leave this building with different ideas from those with which they entered, if the freedom to talk within the courtroom is extended to the society outside and if the verdict is one which confirms the values of tolerance, reason, freedom and compassion. Let it be a verdict which helps to remove the barriers between us all, which helps us understand one another even through our disagreements, and to live together as many communities with many alternatives, and yet still at peace and with love for one another.’
I sat down. Murmurs of support from the gallery were swiftly silenced, and some of the jurors seemed – or was it my imagination? – less poker-faced than at the start.
Tuesday morning, 27 July 1971, marked the sixth week of the trial and the start of the judge’s summing up. Geoffrey Robertson arrived at the Old Bailey early, and overheard a court official remark to Frederick Luff, ‘I see the press boys kept their word – no reports of Neville’s final speech’. This was an exaggeration. The Evening Standard ran a snippet about ushers wearing Oz badges and the Evening News alluded to my defence of Marty Feldman.
The overall bias of the court reporters had so infuriated Tony Palmer that in his weekly Spectator column he called them ‘beersodden’. Arnold Latcham of the Daily Express started legal proceedings against the Spectator, forcing it to retract and to reappraise the group as ‘men of integrity’. In his pointy shoes, paisley shirt and gilded cufflinks, Latcham, the dandy wannabe, made no bones of his dislike for the defendants.
That morning, Argyle ordered the sound recordist to pack up his gear. The only official transcript of his address would be provided, six months later, by the court stenographer (an occasional dining companion of both the judge and Frederick Luff).
The defendants were of good character, Argyle explained, which is like a deposit in a bank. ‘As we go through this weary vale of tears, exposed to all manner of things, the more valuable this becomes.’ It was a phrase which struck me – weary vale of tears – and not at all how I viewed life. His next remark was a shock.
‘Let us consider the accomplice Vivian Berger – what we call a police informer. Do not rely on anything he said.’ Vivian flushed, tears welled into his eyes and his mother jumped to her feet. David Offenbach quickly whispered something in her ear. Grace Berger sat down, glaring at the judge. At this point – 11.30 a.m. – I scribbled in my notebook: ‘I expect to be found guilty on some of the charges.’
Vivian Berger was not a police informer. His inclusion in the indictment was a ploy, undertaken without his consent. The boy slipped me a note, ‘I’m so tired of life since the indictment . . . Fred Luff approached my chick in the street and warned her that I was likely to rape her . . .’
The judge continued: ‘Despite the claims of Mr Neville, this is not a trial about big issues, but about a little magazine. Outside, the rest of the world grinds on – let us not inflate ourselves.’ Argyle was impervious to criticisms made of his conduct of the case, and he would not be intimidated – not even by the American Bar Association, who, having laughed, ‘behaved in the court like they were still in Chicago’.
Argyle spoke all day. He reiterated the evidence of Frederick Luff and reminded the jury of several affidavits tendered by the Crown. These were statements taken from headmasters who condemned Oz and predicted dire consequences for the nation, should the magazine ever penetrate their playgrounds. The following morning, the judge dealt with the experts.
All of them, he claimed, revealed ‘double standards’. At first ‘they started off by saying nothing in the magazine was obscene, and eventually they had to admit that Oz was obscene . . . or tell lies.’ He banged the mag on his bench like a gavel. In response, Felix slammed his own pile of papers on the dock. Crash! The judge paused.
I began to regret the little indulgence the three of us had shared that morning – the last day of the trial – a joint. The roach was still sitting on top of an Old Bailey cistern. The judge pressed on: ‘I can open my throat pretty well if a guy has a really long cock . . . I love it when he cups my face in his hands for those last few strokes.’ The court had never been more attentive. ‘I dig fucking too, but I never want to give up sucking . . .’ Well aware of its power as a jury selling point, the judge gave vent to his fascination with the Suck ad by reading it out in full, right down to the variation involving an ice cube.
Oh yes, I had completed my research into the case of Fatty Arbuckle, the silent comedian, who, after a starlet had died at a Hollywood party, was charged with her murder. It was alleged the actor had inserted ice into her vagina. After two mistrials, Arbuckle was acquitted by a Californian jury in 1921. In a note to the judge, the jury stressed not only the actor’s innocence, but their opinion that he should never have been brought to trial. Too late. The victim of a morals backlash, Fatty Arbuckle’s career as a comic was ruined. That a judge of the Old Bailey, fifty years later, was still parroting the verdict of gossip and rumour, rather than t
hat of his own profession, did not bode well for our future.
Argyle droned on about the menace of the blow-job. ‘I wonder how many of you, members of the jury, had heard of fellatio before you came into court?’ Some of the witnesses had talked about it a lot, he said, including ‘Mr Melly, an atheist, who was very verbose’. Melly had introduced another horror. ‘Again, I wonder how many of you had heard a word like cunnilingus before you came here?’
‘Plenty of us,’ I felt like shouting from the dock (Wow! This weed!), although I’d never thought about it as ‘yodelling in the canyon’. Argyle wagged his rolled-up Oz at Mr Melly’s family values: ‘He uses words like “cunt” and “bollocks” in front of his children. Well, there it is.’
Then came Caroline Coon, who, according to the judge, ‘sounded like an old-fashioned British Imperialist’ when she reminded the court that Middle Eastern countries had barbaric penalties for cannabis. It was Argyle himself who had raised the subject. ‘What Miss Coon’s views on sex were, we don’t know, and perhaps it’s just as well.’
This was turning into a comedy routine, or was it a cannabis rush? For me, the world’s most wonderful weed (when I finally understood how to enjoy it) had shattered perceptions irrevocably. The grey fixed compass of rationality exploded into a more metaphysical landscape, spurring the desires and dreams of a decade. As the judge pounded our lollipop lifestyle into offal, I remembered the morning that Martin Sharp had spiked my tea. ‘If our ideas are quashed in the future’ – Sharp read from an IT editorial – ‘we can look back on the ball we’re having now.’ It had already happened. Look back on the ball we had then.
Argyle’s slings and arrows continued. Dr Klein was a ‘lady of Dutch birth’. She ‘affirmed’. An unmarried woman, she claimed she was more in touch with young people than Brian Leary, though she did not understand the meaning of ‘grass’. ‘Whenever this witness was asked a perfectly simple question – like “what is pornography?” – she was unable to give a simple answer. If you find her evidence incredible, you are entitled to do so.’
Edward de Bono was ‘a gentleman from Malta’. ‘The one thing he didn’t lack was self-confidence. “Are you a world authority on thought?” he was asked. “Yes,” he said.’ De Bono himself had written for Oz in issue 8 – ‘Think Sideways with Edward de Bono’. ‘You may remember the description of issue 8 in their Back Issue Bonanza – “the most unreadable Oz ever”.’ Touché! I joined the laughter, which was not suppressed. ‘Finally, de Bono said that Oz was a window on the hippie sub-culture. Well, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes a window needs cleaning.’
Argyle switched his attack to Felix. ‘The defendant Dennis told us how often he was warned by Scotland Yard, and yet he was still surprised to be prosecuted. Well, there we are.’ Dennis claimed that all the ads were seen by the schoolkids, except the one for Suck, which arrived late. ‘From the witness box, he gave a Black Panther salute and said, “Fucking in the streets does not mean open copulation, but free sexuality.”’ If so, why not use these words? It was a matter for the jury. ‘Dennis also made the astonishing claim that homosexuality is not a perversion.’
Next came Ronald Dworkin, ‘a Professor of Jurisprudence, no less. He was brief, fortunately. He said “I am an expert in public morals,” and then he gave a lecture on morals, which I’m sure was of great benefit to all who heard it. Dworkin called the prosecution a corruption, but we all know how much the police had warned the accused, don’t we?’
It was so sad about Marty Feldman, the pop-eyed comic who made us laugh on television. ‘He condemned the Bible as obscene.’ As for the defendants, the judge felt it appropriate to remind the court of the Book of Matthew: ‘But who so shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him if a millstone were hanged around his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.’
A summing up is supposed to be an even-handed presentation of both sides of the argument.
The jury retired at 12.45 p.m., implored by the judge to deliver a unanimous verdict on all counts. During their absence we were confined to the court.
20
the WAILING WALL of WEIRDIES
Two and a half hours after the jurors retired, they returned with a scrap of paper that the foreman passed to the Clerk of the Court, who handed it to me, then to Mortimer, to McHale, to Leary and finally, to the judge. The jury couldn’t agree. Further, to the irritation of Argyle, they sought a clarification of the meaning of obscenity. He read from the Act: ‘An article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect, taken as a whole, has a tendency to deprave and corrupt.’ He produced a desk dictionary and read out the synonyms, some of them archaic: filthy, loathsome, indecent, lewd – ‘or any one of those things’. He told the jury that just because the trial was long, it didn’t make their task difficult: ‘Go back and try again.’
Which they did, for three and a half hours, at which point they came back and presented a second note. This time, one of their number still held out, and I hoped it was the Henry Fonda juror from Twelve Angry Men. The judge sighed, and said a ‘majority verdict’ could be returned by ten jurors. He sent them out again. During the break, Geoff and I reminisced about Mrs Bathurst, the juror who had seemed to be leaning our way and had been discharged by Argyle. Where was she now when we needed her most?
At 5 p.m., the foreman announced the verdicts.
On the major charge of corrupting public morals, the three of us were found Not Guilty – a unanimous verdict. An audible sigh of relief. On Count 2, publishing an obscene magazine, the verdict was Guilty – by a majority. On the indecency charge, the verdict was Guilty, by the same majority, ten to one. Before I could gather my thoughts – a mixture of relief and disappointment – the judge called Detective Inspector Luff: ‘Have deportation orders been prepared for Richard Neville?’ They had. Vivian Berger started to cry, and was warned by a cop to ‘shut up or get out’. Argyle ordered the three of us held in custody until such time as the Crown had prepared its ‘reports’ – medical, psychiatric and probationary. John Mortimer protested that it was inhuman to keep us in suspense, prior to sentencing. Vivian and Grace Berger were both dragged from the court. I said to Argyle, ‘These reports are a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, as well you know.’ Louise started to cry, and Marsha put her arms around her.
‘I do not accede to your request – send them down.’ As we were bundled downstairs, the court erupted with booing and hissing.
That night, Jim Anderson and myself lay on adjacent beds in the psychiatric ward at Wandsworth Prison, forbidden to move away from them without permission. The dormitory held about fifteen mentally disturbed prisoners, and apart from the bars and a white-coated guard at a corner table, it was not unlike my sleeping arrangements in the early Fifties at Knox Preparatory School. In regulation pyjamas, Jim and I swapped bitter remarks about the summing up, while ‘patients’ were served their evening dose of medication. This procedure was strictly supervised, to ensure the draught was ingested and not stored for a later overdose. Both of us worried about Felix, who, for lack of a bed in our dorm, had been placed in a separate wing.
As for the upcoming sentence, Jim was, as usual, sanguine. Judges were prone to use a ‘spell in the nick’ to frighten offenders before passing a non-custodial sentence. Plus, this was our first offence and the major charge had been defeated unanimously. Surely a fine and suspended sentence was the obvious penalty. Our fellow prisoners thought we were heroes. Not because we had produced Oz, but because we had produced Marty Feldman. When the comic called the judge a ‘boring old fart’, he had spoken for every man in Wandsworth jail. I hadn’t been given a dose of Largactil, but that night, I slept soundly for the first time in months.
In the morning, after breakfast in bed, the warder told us we would be taken to another wing, to be ‘tidied up’.
‘We haven’t been sentenced yet,’ we chorused.
He chuckled. The warder was elderly, gearing up for retirement. His head wa
s mostly buried in a book – The Territorial Imperative, by Robert Ardrey, which he recommended highly.
Jim and I were taken along a linoleum-floored corridor that inmates were swabbing with disinfectant. Our mood was defiant. We were shoved into a cell. There on a chair sat Felix. The Cavalier was already a Roundhead.
‘You got a choice, Richard,’ said Felix, whose luxuriant mop lay on the floor around him. ‘Shearing now by this friendly inmate, or tomorrow by the official prison barber. Even shorter.’
The grinning embezzler gave a final tuning to Felix’s coiffure, and gave his scissors a snap. ‘Who’s next?’
When we returned to the ward, Jim said, ‘Well, I needed a trim,’ but I felt embarrassed. Short-back-’n’-sides had never suited me. I checked in the washroom mirror to see if it looked as bad as it felt. It did – a cover shot for Decline and Fall.
Jim and I scrounged newspapers. The Daily Telegraph congratulated Argyle for seeking ‘mental reports’ – such an unsavoury trio required ‘expert examination’. The Evening News agreed that ‘something is wrong with the minds of those who not only produce a magazine like that for children, but enlist the help of children in producing it’. I worried about my parents. If the British press was this bad, the hometown media would be unspeakable.
Arnold Latcham, the ‘man of integrity’ from the Express, described the aftermath of the verdict: ‘Bearded weirdies with long and frizzled hair did a wailing act outside the Old Bailey. They stood feet astride, clawing the granite blocks and mouthing frenzied protests about justice, freedom, love and the fuzz. City of London police officers looked on good humouredly – refusing to be goaded into action.’ It was Fleet Street’s idea of objective reporting, encapsulated in the headline: WAILING WALL OF WEIRDIES.
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