Butler never had to carry out his threat to hire professional strippers, and since everybody obeyed the tableau rule, which forbade swinging penises and breasts, the authorities never made any arrests. O’Horgan, however, made up for that lack of publicity by having his nude scene accompanied by a bogus “raid” on the theater, with flashing red lights and the appearance of two actors dressed in cop uniforms to “arrest” the audience.
O’Horgan never got to see his cast actually take up residence in the Biltmore Theatre, but the show’s free-love ethos permeated the place nonetheless. “There was a time when you couldn’t go anywhere in the theater—hallways, dressing rooms, the balcony, and especially the johns—without falling upon two or three members of the cast doing drugs or having sex, or both,” reported Lorrie Davis. “There were any number of gay or straight combinations.”
If the stagehands hated Hair, at least they could wear earplugs to block out the loud rock music and lyrics. Likewise, the producers in the Broadway League had their own way of blocking out the show: The League denied Hair a place at its Tony Awards that spring, arbitrarily moving up the eligibility date to mid-March so that Hair with its April 29 premiere date did not qualify.
It didn’t matter. The show, thanks to all those naked stationary bodies, became an immediate sellout.
“I have to thank the nude scene for getting a lot of people into the theater,” said Michael Butler. “That was the end of the first act, and then we had them for the second act, which is when the antiwar message was really laid out for them.”
Even before the show officially opened, it was already attracting the famous and the newsworthy. John Schlesinger and his new lover, photographer Michael Childers, saw Hair in previews, and the film director was so impressed with Jonathan Kramer, who cross-dressed in the musical, that he cast him to play the sexually ambiguous Jackie in his new movie Midnight Cowboy.
Celebrities had their choice that spring: Hair or that new homosexual play, which also opened in April, at the tiny Theater Four on West Fifty-Fifth Street.
As the set designer of The Boys in the Band had surmised, “I’m sure everyone gay in New York will come, and when they’ve seen it we’ll close it.”
NEW YORK, AS IT turned out, had a lot of gay theatergoers. In a near state of shock, the reviewer for the Saturday Review felt compelled to alert readers that at the performance of The Boys in the Band he attended the audience was “98 percent male!” That bit of warning aside, the review was a rave. Most of the reviews were raves. Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx, and Margot Fonteyn (who had to sit on Rudolf Nureyev’s lap to see the sold-out show) made their daring pilgrimage to Theater Four, giving the show the imprimatur of hipness, if not respectability. The cast, equally in awe and star struck, even fashioned a peephole in the back of the living room set so they could watch the reactions of the famous out front in the audience.
The play’s detractors saw another reason for its success with nonhomosexual audiences. As Edward Albee described it, “I saw straights who were so happy to see people they didn’t have to respect.”
The review in Time magazine, while positive, could only have reinforced Albee’s concern. It called The Boys in the Band “a funny, frank and honest play about a set of mixed-up human beings who happen to be deviates. The occasion is a birthday party for Hank, an event as ominous for a homosexual as for an aging woman with its reminder that good looks can fade and desirability diminish.”
Wilfrid Sheed in Life applauded The Boys in the Band, because it “calls a fag a fag, so that we do not get the unlovely confusion that some people claimed to find in Virginia Woolf, where everyone got the worst of both sexes. . . .”
Unlike Albee, who had never written an overtly gay-themed play, Mart Crowley had no choice but to come out with The Boys in the Band, his sexual orientation a given with journalists—like the New York Post reporter who wrote that his play presented “a party of bitchy fags and queens.”
In reply, Crowley offered a strong defense of his play’s fictional characters and their real-life counterparts. “Probably most homosexuals today are unhappy,” he told the reporter from the Post. “But that’s because of stupid social taboos, not because of their state. I hope in a few years attitudes will change. There won’t be the fear about blackmail, the hang-ups, the self-doubts.” He especially objected to people taking out of context his character Michael’s suddenly infamous line “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
“Michael needs his analyst, but he is aware of his problems. He’s working them out gradually,” the playwright offered.
But even Crowley couldn’t resist the urge to protect his actors from getting the gay rap. “Cliff Gorman, the one who plays the queen, has a wife and children. He’s nothing like that offstage. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” Crowley asked in answer to his own question.
In the New York Times, The Boys in the Band finally came full circle. The paper’s new theater critic Clive Barnes wrote: “A couple of years ago, my colleague Stanley Kauffmann, in a perceptive but widely misunderstood essay, pleaded for a more honest homosexual drama, one where homosexual experience was not translated into false, pseudo-heterosexual terms. This I think The Boys in the Band, with all its faults, achieves. It is quite an achievement.”
According to Edward Albee, The Boys in the Band couldn’t lose with theatergoers: It attracted the gays who were eager to see themselves onstage under any circumstances, as well as the straights who were eager to feel superior. The heterosexual embrace of the play even extended to Kenneth Tynan, who came to see The Boys in the Band and promptly asked its author to write a sketch for his new sex revue. Crowley, suddenly flush from royalties and now living at the famed Algonquin Hotel, could afford to pass on that assignment. “People like Tynan scared the shit out of me,” said the playwright. “He was so ruthless as a critic. Who knew what he was going to say or do?”
But there were other takers, as well as decliners, to Tynan’s offer, which apparently had gone out to nearly every New Yorker who’d ever put a sheet of paper through a Smith Corona.
Philip Roth declined the offer. Roth’s friend Jules Feiffer said he’d give it a try.
Roth and Feiffer had recently taken up residence at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, to work on respective projects. Roth was a Yaddo veteran; Feiffer, a Yaddo virgin. Roth had helped his Village Voice cartoonist friend get accepted there. Both men had sex on the brain: Roth was working on a novel about masturbation. Feiffer had this half-finished play about two men who befriend each other in college, and then proceed to go through life making love to lots of women without really liking women.
In addition to his weekly strip for the Village Voice, Feiffer also contributed cartoons regularly to Playboy and made frequent visits to Hugh Hefner’s Chicago mansion, where that winter Drs. William Masters and Virginia Johnson had taken up residence to pursue their sex research under the largesse of the Playboy founder-publisher-editor. While the two good doctors tried to remove the mystery from sex with their bestselling Human Sexual Response, Feiffer was far more intrigued by those who followed the diktat of the brass plate on the Chicago mansion’s front door, which gave notice in Latin, si non oscillas, noli tintinnare (“If you don’t swing, don’t ring”). Those who rang included all these “studs and cartoonists who made out like crazy,” said Feiffer. One man-to-man conversation at the Hefner mansion gave him the idea for his new play. “A Playboy cartoonist told me how his girlfriend was mad at him because every time they had sex he took a shower, and he didn’t know why she was mad when he came back to bed.”
Hearing the sex-then-shower story, Feiffer told himself, “I have to use this somehow.”
That “somehow” turned out to be his next play. But it wasn’t easy to write—until Philip Roth told him about Yaddo.
For Feiffer, the cold isolation of the upstate retreat that year worked like a tonic. Writing twice the hours he normally
did back in Manhattan—it took an hour to walk into Saratoga Springs, if the subfreezing weather didn’t kill you—Feiffer soon had a first draft of his play, which he considered calling The Thirty-Year War. Then he had a better idea. When he’d polished the play and come up with the new, improved title Carnal Knowledge, he sent the script to his friend Alan Arkin to see if he wanted to direct. But Arkin declined. He told Feiffer it was “too dark.” Next on Feiffer’s list was Mike Nichols, who’d rejected his previous script, Little Murders, without so much as an acknowledgment of receipt. This time Nichols was a little faster to reply. He phoned the next day.
“I want to do it. But I don’t think it’s a play. It’s a movie,” said Nichols.
Feiffer asked, “Can we get away with the language on film?” The word “fuck” had been heard the year before in the film adaptation of Ulysses, but writer-director Joseph Strick had been careful to quote directly from the James Joyce novel, long banned but now a revered work of art. Even more controversial for Feiffer’s script was his use of the equivalent of the N-word for females, “cunt,” never before heard in a major English-language release.
Nichols dismissed Feiffer’s language concerns. “We can do anything we want,” said Nichols, who ought to know, having directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate back-to-back.
“Give me thirty seconds to think it over,” Feiffer replied. “Okay.”
But Feiffer liked his play. He thought it worked as play. Perhaps he could rework all that bitter sex into something suitable for Oh! Calcutta!
Philip Roth, on the other hand, wasn’t about to dilute his Yaddo project with yet another spin-off, not even for Kenneth Tynan. He’d already sold a chapter of his novel, titled Portnoy’s Complaint, to Partisan Review. The chapter “Whacking Off” had titillated readers of Partisan Review in ways that the readers of the William Shawn–censored New Yorker never were.
Roth had been toying with his ode to “whacking off” for years, even before he finished his most recent novel, When She Was Good, published only the year before.
He took stabs at writing, and even titling, two unpublished novels, The Jewboy and Portrait of the Artist, and a play, The Nice Jewish Boy, which had received a workshop with Dustin Hoffman at the American Place Theater in 1964. In essence, all three works were about a Jewish boy, his father, and the Gentile girls—the shiksas—whom they both desired sexually. Having taught at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Roth noticed that there, among the cornfields and the farm boys, several of his more urban Jewish students were prone to writing, in essence, that same story. “The Jewish women are mothers and sisters. The sexual yearning is for the Other,” Roth noted. The shiksa.
Meanwhile, Roth had been entertaining friends with something a bit more theatrical, something that Kenneth Tynan had heard about from friends and would have killed to get his hands on for his stage revue. It was, in fact, a slide show or, more accurately, a fantasy slide show that would exhibit the sex parts of the famous, including “L.B.J.’s testicles, Jean Genet’s anus, Mickey Mantle’s penis, Margaret Mead’s breasts, and Elizabeth Taylor’s pubic bush,” which is how Roth described them. He never got around to titling his slide show monologue, because he knew “it was blasphemous, mean, bizarre, scatological, tasteless, spirited,” and therefore would always have to remain unfinished, unperformed, unpublished, and, at best, a private joke for friends after dinner and too many highballs. Roth reckoned that if this slide show monologue ever did surface, it would make his new novel Portnoy’s Complaint “appear to be the work of Louisa May Alcott.”
It could be said, however, that the imaginary slide show monologue begat the very real novel. Roth found sixty or seventy pages about jerking off in the monologue “to be funny and true, and worth saving, if only because it was the only sustained piece of writing on the subject that I could remember reading in a work of fiction.”
For some reason, the most mundane sex—masturbation—had also been the least explored by writers.
But that April, Portnoy’s Complaint, despite its “Whacking Off” chapter in Partisan Review, remained as unfinished as the slide show monologue. Roth was blocked, and his writer’s block had something to do with hating his estranged wife, Margaret Martinson, who would not divorce him after tricking him into marriage by claiming a false pregnancy (verified at the time by her purchase of a vial of urine for ten dollars from a pregnant woman in Tompkins Square Park). For that deception, she was now receiving about 50 percent of what Roth made as an author, which left him approximately $250 a week. Maybe that had something to do with his not finishing Portnoy’s Complaint, which, Roth knew, could make him as much money as Couples was now making for John Updike. It was potentially an awesome sum, 50 percent of which would go to his ex.
COUPLES, A TALE OF upper-middle-class spouse-swapping in old New England, contained long paragraphs of sexual explicitness, the kind that the author had been forced by his editors at Knopf to excise from his first novel, Rabbit, Run. Back in 1959, the battles over printing and selling D. H. Lawrence’s long-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch were still being fought in the courts, and even when the respective publishers won those cases, Knopf continued to ask for revisions from its twenty-seven-year-old author, then a staff writer at The New Yorker. Especially egregious, thought the Knopf editors, were the eight pages it took Updike to have his hero, Rabbit, sexually mount a part-time prostitute named Ruth. A distraught Updike wrote to his parents, “The issue seems to me to amount to whether I am really going to write in my life, or just be an elegant hack.”
But it wasn’t just Knopf editors who were having doubts. Updike also started editing himself because, according to his one of his editors, “John could see himself having legal suits and ending up with no money and four young children to support. So he said to Alfred Knopf, ‘maybe you should get a lawyer in to look at the obscene parts.’ Alfred arranged for the lawyer to come in at the weekend, then telephoned John in Massachusetts. And John said: ‘Oh no, I can’t come down this weekend, I’m teaching Summer Sunday School.’ ”
Out went most of the eight pages of Rabbit mounting Ruth, as well as a few other sexually vivid paragraphs here and there.
Eight years later, that same esteemed publisher, Knopf, was only too happy to capitalize on the graphic details of married New Englanders who committed so much adultery in the fictitious town of Tarbox, Massachusetts, that in Updike’s ingenious prose the Applebys and the Smiths were dubbed the Applesmiths, and the Saltzes and Constantines became the Saltines. (The story line included eight other promiscuous couples, so many couples, in fact, that most readers couldn’t tell them apart.) And the details were graphic, but for a purpose. “In Couples,” Updike claimed, “I was sort of a crusader, in a way, trying to make the reader read explicit sex: this is what sex is, blessed reader, take it or leave it—sort of an ‘in your face’ approach.”
That in-your-face approach pushed the book’s original print run of seventy thousand copies to the top of the bestseller lists, where it did battle with Myra Breckinridge and Arthur Hailey’s Airport for the number one slot for several months, and Updike’s earnings of half a million dollars in royalties were quickly matched by a half-million-dollar sale of the movie rights to the Wolper Company.
None of which was hurt by the fact that Time magazine, then selling a few million copies a week, put Updike on its cover that April with the cash-register-friendly headline “The Adulterous Society.” Word got back to Updike that the higher-ups at Time, Inc. didn’t much like the profile—either they thought the book was not well written enough for their esteemed cover or that it was just too darned dirty, or both. The result was a written-by-committee article that never really praised or damned the book. Instead, readers were told that Couples was not an “upper-middle-class Peyton Place” as “some critics” had claimed, even though some of those critics happened to be editors at Time. Updike dism
issed the whole treatment of his novel in the pages of the magazine as “kind of a mess. I didn’t think they said much about American morality or, indeed, the book,” he would later complain. “My observation about American morality was that the introduction of the pill, and now whatever other handy contraceptive device there is, has had an effect on sexual morality, and that the fading of the work ethic and of Protestant belief has certainly changed our way of looking at things.”
Updike, the son of a junior high math teacher who raised his family of five on $1,740 a year, saw none of these things, especially the pill, as a good thing, even though it was 1968. But then, he had always been an outsider, especially at Harvard, where his poor upbringing, his chronic psoriasis and stammer, and fear of spiders set him apart from the blue-bloods.
Add to that his rather late-blooming sexual awareness, which did not lead him to masturbate until well into his teens, and his having to learn about sex from erstwhile banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, and The Story of O. The sexual revolution of the 1960s freed Updike to write books like Couples, and not unwrite books like Rabbit, Run. But that literary freedom did not make Updike any more forgiving of the sexual, as well as political, licentiousness that he saw around himself and his wife, Mary, and their four children, Elizabeth, Michael, David, and Miranda. He drove a beat-up Corvair. They lived in a white saltbox house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, population: twelve thousand. And when he wasn’t working on a novel or a short story for The New Yorker in his office above a greasy spoon, Updike could be found devising one of those 17th-century-day pageants that the citizens of Ipswich were so fond of putting on around the holidays.
It was a pretty wonderful, comfortable life, if Updike said so himself.
“There was a surge of belonging—we joined committees and societies, belonged to a recorder group and a poker group, played volleyball and touch football in season, read plays aloud and went Greek-dancing and gave dinner parties and attended clambakes and concerts and costume balls, all within a rather narrow society, so that everything resonated. . . . As a group, we had lovely times being young adults in Ipswich, while raising our children more or less absent-mindedly and holding down our jobs in much the same style.”
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