Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  In its cover story on Couples, Time magazine approved of this tableau of domesticity, and noted that “the Updikes are the ringleaders of a group of like-minded couples whom the older Ipswichers called the Junior Jet Set.”

  For Updike, the biggest problem was how to swallow a pill, not the pill. “In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person became as good as I could make it. I choked only when attempting an especially hearty vitamin pill, and a stammer rarely impeded my incessant sociability,” he noted.

  But then came Couples.

  Originally, Updike was going to call it Couples and Houses and Days because, as Updike described it, life “was about not just couples but about the houses they lived in. The fascination exerted by other people’s houses; the notion that more happiness is happening in those houses than in your own; the look, in a small town, of other people’s lit windows and the imagined bliss and contentment transpiring behind them as you drive by. And then of course the days, the days that keep delivering sunrises to and then sunsets, and that seem, in their long parade, to bring us some treasure which we persistently misreceive.”

  But yes, Couples was a much better title, if for no other reason than it was shorter. Plus, no one would remember the short story called “Couples” that he’d written a few years earlier, which generally covered the same spouse-swapping terrain, but which, Updike felt, at forty pages was “very overcrowded.”

  Updike liked to use a typewriter, but he wrote this new sex tome longhand on the back of old manuscripts in between an inordinate number of book review assignments from The New Yorker, most of which were French novels. He joked, “I seem to get all the religious ones or the dirty ones. Somehow the two go together; they are the ultimates of life.” All those reviews had a telling effect on Couples because that’s what it was about: how the upper middle class had turned sex into a religion to replace the old church kind of prayer. Equally curiously, Updike thought up much of the novel, he claimed, when he was supposed to be praying.

  “I plotted Couples almost entirely in church—like shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program and carry down to the office Monday,” where he would write it out longhand on an old army-green desk that rested atop a well-worn Oriental rug when he wasn’t reviewing a dirty French novel.

  After publication of his new novel, the Boston newspapers had a field day speculating on who the randy couples of Tarbox, Massachusetts, really were. Updike claimed that “only the marsh geography [of Ipswich] peeps through in Couples.” If that wasn’t emphatic enough, he added, “I disavow any essential connection between my life and whatever I write.”

  And there was the sobering fact that Updike had an in-house censor, wife Mary, a Unitarian minister’s daughter who was raised to be a harsh critic of both licentiousness and literature. Upon reading Couples, she told her husband that she felt smothered in pubic hair. “Actually I did take some of it out,” Updike confessed to Time.

  In their slightly mixed but basically upbeat review, Newsweek’s editors (no doubt in competition with Time for an Updike interview) mused on the book’s origins: “It is very tempting to believe that Updike’s story is autobiographical, because his book’s defects are precisely those you would expect to find in a novel based too closely on life.”

  Updike insisted otherwise, and the more he talked about his new book, the more conservative he began to sound. To the reporters at Time, he noted, “There’s a lot of dry talk around about love and sex being somehow the new ground of our morality. I thought I should show the ground and ask, is it entirely to be wished for?”

  A few weeks later, he stopped asking questions and gave an unqualified no to another journalist: “This book deals with the contemporary world—with people living in the atmosphere of economic affluence and the Cold War. Today, work is available and people want to do it with their left hand. They don’t believe in the importance of vocation but of varying degrees of friendship. Life in bed and around the table is what they care most about. The eight-hour day does create the kind of recreational opportunities that belonged formerly to a tiny minority of aristocrats. Now those opportunities are available to all. I guess I must feel this is bad or dangerous.”

  That dollop of puritanism was printed in the Vineyard Gazette, the local newspaper on Martha’s Vineyard, where the Updikes had taken to spending their summers. Updike bantered with the Gazette reporter about how he’d written some of the novel’s racier sections as he sunbathed out on the island’s Menemsha Beach, to help cure his incipient psoriasis. The reporter was flattered that such genius had transpired on her island, and duly noted that Updike and his book “condemned” the modern morality; she never for a moment acknowledged that modern morality is what had given Updike the literary freedom to write such a book.

  Perhaps because Updike agreed with the reporter. And perhaps because he had lied about his Ipswich marriage and how it bore no resemblance to the philandering spouses in Couples. Updike would wait more than two decades to write, in his memoir: “I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irradiated with light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.”

  Updike gave the Vineyard Gazette his bowdlerized interview on sex at the beginning of his last summer on Martha’s Vineyard, right before his royalties and movie sale from Couples gave him and his family the money to escape to London, where his four children would now go to school for the coming year, and he and his wife could leave behind the social and political liberals of his chosen island—or, as Updike called them, “the almost universally anti-war summer denizens of Martha’s Vineyard,” which included Philip Roth, Jules Feiffer, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman. That liberal/Updike divide had everything to do with the Vietnam War.

  The previous September, the New York Times had identified Updike as the only major American writer who was “unequivocally for” U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Updike had previously taken issue with the liberals’ stance on the war, especially Feiffer’s, which he found to be “too reflexive, too Pop.”

  Indeed, Feiffer had said, “The solution to the problem is so simple I’m amazed it hasn’t occurred to anyone else. Lyndon Johnson should go on nationwide TV and say to the American people, ‘Ah have goofed.’ ”

  Updike would later comment that “the protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bojunk from Texas.”

  Besides, Updike liked that bojunk from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson, a former schoolteacher. Updike’s father was a schoolteacher, and if Johnson had gotten America into a war, then he could get America out. As Updike explained, “It was a citizen’s plain duty to hold his breath and hope for the best, not parade around spouting pious unction and crocodile tears.”

  Updike’s Martha’s Vineyard neighbors Philip Roth and Jules Feiffer did more than spout and cry. In his syndicated cartoon strip, Feiffer came out against the war as early as 1963, and by 1968 “was in a mood of black despair about the country and where we were going. I thought the Vietnam War was going to go on for the rest of my life and my daughter’s life,” he said. Out on Martha’s Vineyard, Feiffer wanted to picket the summer residences of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, but Roth and others dissuaded him, and instead they all chipped in to take out a full-page ad in the Vineyard Gazette. Roth wrote the copy and Robert Brustein and John Marquand rewrote it. Feiffer described it as a “coded assault certain to offend all those in the Pentagon or State who had attended Ivy League schools” and now supported the war. Which included John Updike, the lone major writer in America to support the war. (Updik
e would counter that James Michener, author of the potboiler Hawaii, was also a supporter.) It came to be known as “that Village Voice ad,” a reference to Feiffer’s comic strip, even though “I had not written a word of it,” the cartoonist claimed.

  When he wasn’t writing antiwar copy, Philip Roth toiled away on the long-gestating Portnoy’s Complaint. Then, that May—just as Updike’s Couples and Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge were topping the bestseller lists, and Updike was thinking that Vidal’s characters were surprisingly stupid and angry, and Vidal was thinking how much he agreed with Norman Mailer that Updike was a hack’s concept of a good writer—something wonderfully awful happened to Philip Roth to help him complete his own libidinous opus.

  Roth’s estranged wife, Margaret Martinson, was killed in a car crash in Central Park. It was a relief. Pure and simple. And since he no longer had to divide his income with a loathed ex-partner, for the first time in years, Roth splurged on a cab to ride across Manhattan to make the necessary arrangements at Frank Campbell’s Funeral Chapel on Madison and Eighty-First Street. Attending that funeral a couple of days later, Roth had to wonder if many of the mourners didn’t consider him an “accomplice,” since the character Martinson had inspired in When She Was Good also came to a violent end. Roth certainly considered the man driving the car, who attended the funeral with no more than a Band-Aid over one eye as proof of the accident, as his “emancipator.”

  The writer’s block that had prevented Roth from finishing Portnoy’s Complaint lifted like a miracle. He contacted the people who ran Yaddo. He was in need of another round of solitude at the artists’ retreat, and left for Saratoga Springs in record time after putting Margaret in the ground.

  He wrote of his escape with unqualified glee: “The bus from Port Authority Terminal was for me very much a part of the stealthy, satisfying ritual of leaving Manhattan for the safe haven of Yaddo, and so instead of renting a car, which would have been more in keeping with my new relaxed attitude toward taking a New York cab, I showed up at the bus station in my old clothes and boarded the north bound Adirondack bus, reading on the long trip up the thruway the rough first draft of the last two chapters of my book. At Yaddo, where there were only seven or eight other guests in residence, I found that my imagination was fully fired: I worked steadily in a secluded hillside cabin for twelve and fourteen hours a day until the book was done, and then I took the bus back down, feeling triumphant and indestructible.”

  In addition to finishing Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth had survived his wife, who had been conveniently killed. “And I didn’t do it,” he noted. And he’d finished that fourth book, which was “unlike any I’d written before in both its exuberance and its design, had been completed in a burst of hard work.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Summer 1968, Politics

  Random House publisher Bennett Cerf advanced Philip Roth $250,000, which, after his agent, Candida Donadio, took her 10 percent share, expanded the writer’s bank account a hundred times over. He purchased two first-class tickets on the France, a luxury liner passage to England, for his girlfriend May and himself. It was there in London that he watched the 1968 Democratic National Convention on television, a spectacle that included antiwar riots on the Chicago streets, as well as a near fistfight between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. on the little screen. The two pundits had been hired as commentators by ABC to dissect the two national conventions, which the network, unlike NBC and CBS, no longer considered worthy of gavel-to-gavel coverage. Vidal and Buckley were part of ABC’s attempt to package politics in a convenient two-hour nightly program. That concept worked well for the Republican convention, which turned into a near coronation for prodigal son Richard M. Nixon. The Democratic convention turned into something much more.

  Despite Vidal’s insistence that his latest novel wasn’t any “different from any other book I’ve written,” he noticeably winced when moderator Howard K. Smith introduced him on-air as the author of Myra Breckinridge and failed to list any of his other novels.

  Vidal, of course, knew better. Myra Breckinridge was very different. Briefly, in 1967, Vidal had considered reentering the political fray; he’d run for the elected office of a New York congressional seat, and lost, in 1960. Some supporters wanted him to run again, in 1968, for the California U.S. Senate seat. But with the publication of Myra Breckinridge, he knew it wasn’t possible. “With this book, we won’t be able to get through,” he said of the press’s condemnation of his transsexual-themed novel.

  In between the Republican and Democratic confabs that summer, Vidal’s conservative opponent on the ABC telecasts finally got around to reading Myra Breckinridge and immediately trashed it as “pornography.” Buckley found Vidal morally unfit to ponder the political doings of the day, and in their penultimate meeting at the ABC studio, when the streets of Chicago were alive with angry cops and protesters, Buckley proclaimed, “Let Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography!”

  Vidal, for his part, had called Buckley “a crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley had defended himself, saying, “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamned face and you’ll stay plastered, you queer.”

  “Gentlemen, please!” cautioned their referee, Smith.

  For their follow-up interview on the air, a distraught Buckley demanded that a screen be erected between him and Vidal, to keep his homosexual opponent out of eyeshot.

  It was a long way from Myra Breckinridge’s Hollywood to LBJ’s Vietnam, but not for Gore Vidal. “I’m all for the breaking down of the sexual stereotypes. That was the theme of Myra Breckinridge,” he explained that long, hot summer. “The United States is filled with fat, flabby men who think of themselves as Gary Cooper—two fisted, he-men—when actually it’s a country of beer-drinking fat men looking at television. American men are the fattest in the world, incidentally, and certainly the weakest physically. Then they have all this machismo poured into their poor fat heads, and the result is . . . that’s why we’re in Vietnam.”

  Vidal confronted those men only days later on the equally sweaty streets of New York City.

  Shortly before taping The Dick Cavett Show, Vidal witnessed a street protest against the mayor of New York City, John Lindsay. One hard-hat banner shouted, “Lindsay is a faggot!” The incident stuck in Vidal’s mind, and he mentioned it to Cavett on air, and addressing the hard-hats in the TV audience, he told them, “I saw your sign. That was just brilliant, you know, good political thinking, ‘Mayor Lindsay is a faggot.’ You really have added something. Now I know what happens to midnight cowboys when they get too fat to do Forty-Second Street. They become construction workers.”

  ANDY WARHOL SPENT THE summer in New York City, recuperating in Columbus Hospital after a near-fatal gunshot wound; it required no fewer than four surgeons to perform a six-and-a half-hour operation on his chest. Before the attack, Andy had been having these strange early-morning phone conversations with this teenager from Santa Barbara who had somehow located his home telephone number and now sent him his perfumed clothes and told him he loved him.

  Actually, it was Andy who begged that Lance Loud tell him he loved him. These verbal protestations of love began when Lance told his idol that he wanted to leave his home in Santa Barbara and hang out at the Factory. “Could I please be in one of your movies?” Lance asked. He’d read about Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in Time magazine and seen Chelsea Girls and even dyed his hair silver. Since Andy and Edie were no longer speaking, Lance thought he could be the new Edie Sedgwick.

  Andy told Lance that he could come to New York and appear in his movies. “Sure, but you can’t stay at my house, because . . . well, no one stays at my house, because I have a thing about that. But I’ll find you a place to stay,” Andy promised. Then he pleaded in his thin-as-smoke voice, “Oh, tell me you love me.”

  “I love you, Andy,” Lance said.

  “Oh, say it like you mean it. Oh, tell me again.”

  “I love you, Andy.”

  In addition to
his love, Andy Warhol asked his teenage phone mate for a nude picture of himself. Lance Loud didn’t have a nude picture of himself, but he had one with his shirt off, taken at the beach. He sent him that photo. He also sent him a big package of his underwear that he spray-painted fluorescent pink and soaked in his mother’s perfume and then doused with his father’s after-shave lotion. Lance waited patiently for the box to arrive at the Factory. After a week he called to ask Andy, “Did you get my package?”

  “Ugh!” said Andy. “We gave it to people we didn’t like so we’d be able to smell them coming!”

  In their last phone conversation, a few days before Andy got shot, Lance told his idol that he’d just seen I, A Man, yet another movie that Andy had wanted to call Fuck.

  “Did you like it?” Andy asked.

  “Yeah, it was great, but I liked Nude Restaurant better,” said Lance, referring to a Warhol film set in a diner in which everybody, patrons and waitresses, wore nothing but G-strings.

  “Uh-huh,” Andy agreed.

  “Hey, you know that girl that plays the bull dyke in it?” asked Lance, his mind jumping back to I, a Man.

  “Oh, Valerie, yeah,” said Andy.

  Valerie Solanas was one of many Factory hangers-on who saw Warhol as her ticket to superstardom. She’d given him her dreadful, albeit very pornographic script “Up Your Ass” to read and hopefully make into a movie. But it was too downbeat, too lesbian for Andy’s apolitical taste. Neither he nor Paul Morrissey wanted anything to do with it. Regardless, Valerie continued her pursuit of Warhol. Like a lot of crazies who congregated at the Factory and thought its owner should pay for their upkeep because they were so fabulous, Valerie kept demanding rent money from Andy. To shut her up, he offered her twenty-five dollars—the going rate for his actors—if she’d appear in I, a Man. The shoot didn’t go well. It was supposed to star Jim Morrison of the Doors and his current girlfriend, Nico. They didn’t have to do much, just have sexual intercourse on a couch at the Factory. But when Morrison’s handlers got word of the movie, they convinced the rocker’s drinking buddy Tom Baker to star instead. Baker agreed but balked at having sex on camera, much less taking off his clothes. So the movie that was supposed to be called Fuck ended up being a string of encounters between Baker and a lot of women, one of them being Valerie Solanas. In her improvisation, Solanas told Baker that she didn’t like his “tits.” He surmised she was a committed lesbian, and wondered aloud, “Wow, man! You’re missing out on a lot of things.”