Charlie’s Angels, like Three’s Company, was also set in and around Los Angeles, and this was by design. After all, Southern California in the 1970s represented, to most Americans, something exotic and on the forward edge, especially when it came to matters of sex and love. In those days Los Angeles was “groovy.” It was famed as the place where young people could get in touch with their venal sides. In the second episode of Three’s Company, for example, Chrissy reveals that her father, a minister who lives back in the sleepy central California farm town of Fresno, refers to Los Angeles as “Sin City.” For many young Americans in 1977, that “Sin City” was pretty appealing.
The culture of Southern California coming out of the late 1960s was defined by youthful hedonism. Influenced by the hormone-heavy local beach and car cultures, the drug- and sex-fueled music culture that centered around Laurel Canyon, and the warm sun and attendant sun worship, Los Angeles had become, alongside New York and San Francisco, a main locale for the nation’s emerging sexual openness. In 1974 the founder of the men’s magazine Playboy moved his headquarters from Chicago to a large Gothic-Tudor-style house located in Los Angeles near Beverly Hills. Almost immediately, the new western Playboy Mansion became famous for its elaborate, raucous, sex-charged parties. Amid the crowds of celebrities and gawkers, the avuncular Hugh Hefner would hold court while disco lights flashed, music blared, and bevies of beautiful, nearly nude young women skated, or splashed in the pool, or posed for the paparazzi.
It made sense that Hefner—the ageless elder statesman of the nation’s sex industry—would thrive in Southern California once he settled there. In the middle of the Me Decade, Californians everywhere were in search of one sort of self-gratification or another. This much was clear to Tom Wolfe, at least, when he chose to focus on Los Angeles for his 1976 article on the “Me Decade” for the magazine New York. The article opens at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, in the presence of a local housewife seeking to overcome her sexual and personal “repression” by attending a session with a self-help trainer. “Take your finger off the repress button,” the trainer tells a gathered crowd, leading them through an “est” training session.4 Est training was a method of self-improvement and realization that had been invented by Werner Erhard around 1971.5 Erhard promised that his training would teach people how to transform their lives, and between 1971 and 1984 he sold his bill of goods to more than seven hundred thousand enrollees.
“Take your finger off the repress button!” the est trainer shouted in the hotel conference room. “Let it gush up and pour out!” And the gathered, who were all now lying on the floor of the hotel conference room, did as he asked—they screamed, then screamed again, and again, each time louder and with more abandon, until at the end the room sounded like a frightened, frenzied orgy of wishful release. Wrote Wolfe:
There are no longer 250 separate souls but one noösphere of souls united in some incorporeal way. . . . Each soul is concentrated on its one burning item—my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horror, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other until there is but one piercing moment of release and liberation at last!—a whole world of anguish set free.6
The urge to self-improve, to experience all the joy that is possible to experience in life, to live in orgiastic bliss in perpetuity—all of these impulses reached an apotheosis in Los Angeles in the 1970s. “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold,” wrote Wolfe. “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doing on it. (Me!)” By the later 1970s this self-absorption and concern for self-transformation became a full-time preoccupation in California. There was the nearby Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, with its Encounter sessions. There was Scientology. There was Arica, the Mel Lyman movement, Synanon, Daytop Village, and Primal Scream. The list of sects, cults, alternative communities, and alternative outlooks was nearly endless: ESP, Flying Saucer cults, the “Jesus People,” the Moonies, followers of Carlos Castaneda, the People’s Temple, the worshippers of the acid trip and the occult and the paranormal. “Outsiders,” wrote Wolfe, “hearing of these sessions, wondered what on earth their appeal was. Yet the appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: ‘Let’s talk about Me.’ No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me.”7
In Los Angeles in the 1970s the impulse for self-gratification was so strong that it also led to the development of a multibillion-dollar sex industry. Inspired by the “free love” philosophies of nearby San Francisco and its wild late-1960s music and drug scene, Los Angeles had seen the rise of a “blossoming hippie milieu” along the stretch of music and nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and in the Strip’s “bucolic annex Laurel Canyon.” “Young girls are coming to the canyon,” sang the Mamas & the Papas in 1967, indicating both how Laurel Canyon had entered the cultural zeitgeist and what it was that drove the phenomenon. Mickey Dolenz, a locally born boy who hit pay dirt with the Monkees, had a house in Laurel Canyon that was noted for the constant procession of Hollywood actors—such as Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, and so on—and fellow musicians who would come to visit and swim naked in Dolenz’s pool. According to Jackson Browne, who was a younger member of the Laurel Canyon community, there was always a “gaggle of girls” who mainly lived at the house of Dolenz’s “bandmate” Peter Tork and would show up at various places with “big bowls of fruit and dope and shit” and would “fuck us in the pool.”8 At the house of “Mama” Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas, meanwhile, it was known that young men could go there to catch a good high—in exchange for sexual favors. Jim Morrison, who lived and cavorted in Laurel Canyon, based his song “Love Street” on his experiences.
“L.A. was all about hanging in those days,” said a former music executive for MGM. “It was the constant hanging at other people’s houses, which was the magic of the hills and canyons. All you had to do was drive up into Laurel Canyon and so much would happen en route.” In time, the music scene of Laurel Canyon of the era added to L.A.’s growing reputation for sexual possibility and lack of abandon. As Joan Didion noted in her essay “The White Album,” Laurel Canyon seemed locked in a “mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin. . . . in 1968 and 1969.’” “Everyone was experimenting and taking it all the way,” said a filmmaker from the era. “It opened up a negative force of energy that was almost demonic.” Eventually, in the 1970s, the sex-charged music scene morphed. “The Sunset Strip got really ugly,” said musician and writer Jan Henderson. “Let’s face it, we were all doing shit we weren’t supposed to, but the sharks moved in.”9
By 1977 and 1978 much of this drug-fueled sexual decadence centered on one particular club, the Roxy Theater, which had opened in 1973 on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Among the groundbreaking sexual and drug-addled escapades that occurred at the Roxy was the first American run, in 1974, of the British stage play The Rocky Horror Show. Also in 1974, in the small bar located above the main club, John Lennon and Harry Nilsson spent their “lost weekend” of drug abuse and other acting out. (A few years later, in 1982, John Belushi would spend the last night of his life partying in the same bar before later going home and overdosing on a fatal injection of heroin and cocaine.)10
At the time it seemed natural that all of L.A.’s raunchiness would be highlighted at the Roxy Theater. After all, the club’s owner, Lou Adler, was a high-living, hard-partying playboy, known for fathering seven children with four different women—including the 1970s-era sexual symbol Britt Eckland, a Bond girl in 1974’s The Man with the Go
lden Gun who was a regular fixture at the Playboy Mansion and in the pages of Playboy.11 In the late 1970s the Roxy Theater became home to thousands of young, attractive, sexually open women who had their sights set on brushing up against fame by crawling into the bed of someone famous. Clubs all along the Sunset Strip teemed with women who were available in exchange for a few drugs and a ride up to the canyon. By the later 1970s Los Angeles’s music scene was defined by a new generation of rock-fueled debauchery—in the form of oversexed, be-spandexed, and hair-teased bands like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe, whose songs became a pulsing sexual soundtrack for millions of seventeen-year-old boys and girls of the era.
Adding to the sexualized atmosphere of Los Angeles in the 1970s were the orgiastic parties and sex-fueled happenings at the Playboy Mansion in nearby Beverly Hills. “Sex,” argued Hugh Hefner, the local champion of hedonistic self-fulfillment as a kind of moral imperative, was the “major civilizing influence in our society, not religion.” The alternative to free love, he suggested, was “repression, perversion, obscenity, war and a crushing of the human spirit.”12
Never mind that Hefner’s vision was wholeheartedly male-centric, that his magazine and his parties turned women into one-dimensional objects of desire to be enjoyed by men, and that he himself, a man who was nearly fifty as the 1970s closed, enjoyed the sexual availability of a constant string of “apple-cheeked young women who arrived from the Midwest, eager to be Playboy centerfolds.”13
With Hefner’s slant on sex providing additional impetus, people across the nation began to view Angeleno sexual attitudes and practices with wonder, then increasing consternation, and, eventually, horror. This evolution in the views of L.A. began in the suburbs, away from the nighttime debauchery of Laurel Canyon and the Sunset Strip, where local sexual values seem to have led, at least according to one source, to a social-sexual practice called “swinging.”14 Though humans had been exploring nonmonogamous sexual activities in various ways for centuries, the practice, if the Hollywood movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was to be believed, became common in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s. Somewhat more discomfiting to middle America, meanwhile, was the growing presence of the sex industry, both legitimate and illegal, in L.A. in the 1970s. In 1976 a nightclub owner and publisher named Larry Flynt moved the headquarters of his growing pornographic business from Ohio to Beverly Hills. Chief among the products of Larry Flynt Publications was a magazine called Hustler, which would become notorious for its raw sexuality, scandalous cartoons and editorials, and penchant for pushing the limits of good taste. In North Hollywood, meanwhile, a former ventriloquist named Ted Marche had established a multimillion-dollar business making dildos. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, Marche Manufacturing made nearly five million of its signature sexual toy, as well as more than 350 different sexual products. “These toys,” said Ted Marche’s son Steven, a partner in the business, “have saved more marriages than all the preachers in the world.”15 And Angelenos were only just getting started.
By the mid-1970s the Los Angeles region also became the leading producer of X-rated films. In the early 1970s the arguable kingpins of the pornographic film industry in America were the Mitchell Brothers. Based in San Francisco, the nominal national capital of porn back then, Jim and Artie Mitchell produced pornographic films and owned a collection of X-rated cinemas and strip clubs in the San Francisco area. In Los Angeles at the time, where the proximity to Hollywood might have made the development of a porn film industry seem almost a given, it was believed that Hollywood executives spurred the local police’s notorious vice squad to hassle any such production houses whenever they appeared. By the middle of the decade, however, that all began to change.
In this era, in the years before AIDS and the Moral Majority, pornography was widely accepted, even deemed “chic,” by mainstream audiences. Films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones were “hits” at movie houses. Then, with the proliferation of new home video players—the so-called video cassette recorder that played VHS-based tapes—in 1977, demand for X-rated productions only increased.16 This was just as a growing number of young, hungry filmmakers were graduating from the relatively new film programs at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California only to find a stagnant filmmaking industry in Hollywood. With so many out-of-work and hopeful filmmakers—such as Bob Chinn, Bob Vosse, and Steve Scott—bumming around the Los Angeles area, and the demand for porn growing, it was only natural that pornographic production houses would begin to appear.
At first the porn production houses in Los Angeles were small and based out of quiet, somewhat dull cities in the San Fernando Valley—Chatsworth, Van Nuys, Northridge, Canoga Park. But quickly, driven by the growing VHS market, porn producers and distributors began to figure things out. The adult film industry in San Fernando Valley made several high-profile smash “hits” such as Candy Stripers, The Debutante, Johnny Wadd, and a host of films starring a famously well-endowed porn actor named John Holmes.17 Then, in June 1978, VCX, Inc., became the first adult video company to exhibit at the annual Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Afterward, business exploded, as the company received orders for more than 180,000 tapes. By the early 1980s the San Fernando Valley had become the chief source for adult films, eventually growing to a multibillion-dollar industry, and VCX became the single largest manufacturer of prerecorded videotapes. In 1983 a trade magazine for the adult film industry, called AVN, moved to San Fernando Valley. By then, with around 90 percent of all pornographic films being produced in the area, the region had earned a new nickname: “San Pornando Valley.”
It is perhaps not surprising that California’s sexual freedom would begin to show signs of decadence and disease. Hollywood had, after all, seen its share of corruption scandals and other basic shadiness. In 1977 the ill-fated Hollywood director Roman Polanski was taking sexual liberties that would embroil him in a sensational criminal scandal that would in many ways exemplify the era. On March 10, according to accounts of the victim, Polanski had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl whom he had drugged with a combination of alcohol and a part of a quaalude. Though Polanski claimed that the sex was consensual, it didn’t matter—under California law a person under eighteen cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse with anyone who is not a spouse. In other words, what Polanski did had to be considered rape.
The story was major news in California and around the world for much of the spring and summer of that year. Ironically enough, the criminal trial People of the State of California v. Roman Polanski was scheduled to begin on August 9, 1977, exactly eight years after the death of Sharon Tate Polanski. Under the various terms of an arranged plea agreement, Polanski would plead guilty to a lesser charge and receive, pending a psychiatric evaluation, only probation. Unfortunately, however, just previous to the arraignment, the judge indicated that he had changed his mind and intended to imprison Polanski. Feeling he had no other choice, on the night of February 1, 1978, Roman Polanski boarded a plane to England and left the United States forever. A day later, fearing that he could be extradited by Britain back to the United States, he flew to France, where he held citizenship. He has never returned to either England or the United States.
For moralists like Tom Wolfe, the debauchery among Laurel Canyon’s musicians and groupies, the explosion of pornography in Southern California in the 1970s, and the Roman Polanski case were all manifestations of the self-absorption of the Me Decade—the idea that you could be fulfilled through the solipsistic pursuit of your own sexuality seemed in keeping with what he had observed at the Esalen Institute. Tom Bradley, meanwhile, did not make the growing presence of porn purveyors a focus for his administration, though he was certainly aware of the issue. After all, pornography had always riled up strong emotions in Los Angeles. In the late 1970s, perhaps because of the too rapid expansion of porn productions in San Fernando Valley, a number of adult shops around the area were attacked. On June 1, 1978, in
particular, a bomb destroyed an adult bookstore and massage parlor on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. This was reported to be the third such attack on pornography-related businesses in the valley in the previous two months.18
For Tom Lasorda’s Dodgers, meanwhile, sex was an obvious, and somewhat popular, part of life in California. As Glenn Burke had hinted team members were the toast of the region and often subject to advances by available young women. Of course, American athletes have long had access to more than their share of pretty young women—just read certain passages in Ball Four or in the sordid 1970s-era tell-all biographies of noted baseball swingers like Joe Pepitone (Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud) and Bo Belinsky (Bo: Pitching and Wooing), and you’ll get a sense of this. Nancy Marshall, who was married to Mike Marshall when he played on the Dodgers, later wrote of those years that “most of the screwing around that occurs on the road is just recreational sex. . . . They’re bored and adored, so they get laid. I think just about everyone knows about that.”19 For good reason, perhaps, players are reticent to discuss their own dalliances and those of their peers, so there’s no way to quantify the extracurricular activities of any of the Dodgers of 1977 and 1978. What’s clear, though, is that many on the team found love and affection among the women of Southern California. While Don Sutton married a local girl named Patti after settling in with the team in 1968, according to a Sports Illustrated story from 1982 there were rumors of other women in Sutton’s life from almost the get-go. Patti even once told an interviewer that she had “misgivings” about marrying Don from the moment of their wedding. “Most of us are used to receiving, receiving all the time,” Sutton said of his habits. “Everything is done for us. We’re not used to giving at all. There’s a constant sponge effect. Our priorities get way out of whack. We tend to forget that other people also need some emotional strokes. Everyone needs to feel the space they occupy is important.”20 Years later Don and Patti Sutton would divorce, and Don Sutton would marry a much younger woman.
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