A Tynan interview in the Times was equally skittish, the staff reporter resorting to a coy nom de plume. “Intelligent Puritan” asked, among other things, “The subject matter of pornography has inherent limitations. After all, how many ways are there of making love?”
Tynan replied, “A remarkable number.” And so it went.
To both spur publicity and head off any problems, the makers of Oh! Calcutta! opened one rehearsal to the press. The invitation read: “There have been innumerable rumors about Oh! Calcutta! To scotch most of these rumors, to give the communication media an opportunity to know what is going on, we are throwing down the barrier and are opening our rehearsals. You may watch the rehearsal for one hour, and for another hour you may speak to either director Jacques Levy, producer Hilly Elkins, or to Kenneth Tynan, who devised the entertainment with music.”
A couple dozen members of the Fourth Estate attended. During the question-and-answer section, one reporter wondered aloud, “Will sexual intercourse be performed onstage?”
It’s exactly the kind of rumor the Oh! Calcutta! team wanted dispelled. “No. We’re not trying to top anybody,” said Tynan, clearly evoking the specter of Che! A recent New York Times article on the shuttered play had indicated that Che! was a “guideline” for Oh! Calcutta!, and it was expected that the Tynan revue would, according to the newspaper, “include actual sexual intercourse,” since actors had actually “done it” onstage in the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now.
Tynan continued to pooh-pooh such reports. “I personally would not be attracted by the idea of seeing sexual intercourse onstage, because if I did I’d be jealous, and if I weren’t jealous I’d be yawning,” he said.
“Are you going to out-nude Hair?” asked another reporter.
“How would you out-nude Hair?” Levy replied. “They’re completely nude. We’ll be completely nude. Nude is nude.”
Of course, the men behind Oh! Calcutta! had every intention of going farther than Hair if for no other reason than their nudes would move. A lot.
In the time-honored tradition of buyer-beware, a house board in front of the Eden both warned and enticed passersby with the suggestion “Recommended for mature audiences only.”
Elkins also took out censorship insurance, of sorts, by “unofficially inviting,” as he put it with great fanfare, several members of the police vice squad to see Oh! Calcutta! before it opened, “to check on the material.”
The presence of uniformed officers surprised the cast during previews. One night in the women’s dressing room, Margo Sappington looked in her makeup mirror and saw a man in blue standing there. She turned to ask, “Well, can I put on my clothes before we go?” He let her know there would be no arrests that night; he was getting a VIP backstage tour, courtesy of the management.
Newsweek, which generally ignored Off-Broadway shows in its coverage of the arts, began to offer a near-weekly report on the doings of Oh! Calcutta!, and amply quoted Hilly Elkins on his success with massaging the conscience of the NYPD. “They offered extremely reasonable, nonrestrictive points of view about it,” reported the producer. “No one rendered moral judgments about it. Now I’m confident about opening the play, because I know I’m dealing with reasonable people.”
Elkins and Tynan presented a unified front to the press. Behind the scenes, “Tynan threatened to take his name off the show at least once,” said Michael White. “He and Elkins didn’t get along. It was a tempest in a teapot.” The primary riff came from Elkins’s decision to cut two of the four skits Tynan had written for Oh! Calcutta! Most participants thought Elkins should have cut all four. “Tynan’s skits were very dark, not funny,” said Bill Liberman.
Fortunately for the project, Tynan saw himself as a cultural revolutionary, and didn’t mind sharing that exalted status with any reporter who’d listen. “There is no theatrical consensus yet as to how to respond to sex,” said Tynan, who relished pontificating from his newfound platform. “No one knows how he feels about watching people make love. So, every night, we have an experimental laboratory in people’s reaction to sex onstage.”
After all the pre-opening publicity, the ticket-buying public might have been expected to know what it had purchased.
Obviously not. Early in previews, after the closing nude scene, actor Leon Russom turned to the audience one evening to say, “Good night.”
A woman shouted back, “Go get dressed!” And then half of the audience started applauding, while the other half booed. “And the two groups tried to drown each other out,” said Russom.
The catcalls sometimes extended through the final bows. “A man in the audience was bravoing the cast until we came out fully clothed. Then he began booing,” said actress Nancy Tribush.
Despite all attempts to keep Oh! Calcutta! a “totally heterosexual” show—“Exchanges,” a short film by Tennessee Williams, in which a couple beat each other before they could enjoy sex, was excised shortly before opening night—the show received an unexpected plug from one homosexual. Rudolf Nureyev came backstage after one performance to meet the actors; he asked Margo Sappington if her partner in the nude ballet ever got an erection onstage.
“A few times in rehearsals, yes,” Sappington let him know.
Nureyev then got around to asking Mark Dempsey, Sappington’s partner, out to dinner. With his chiseled profile and carefully manicured satyr’s beard, Dempsey was arguably the show’s handsomest actor and inarguably its only gay one. Nureyev asked his dinner date, “But what about the police? Do you really think the police will permit this dance?” His concern soon surfaced in an interview he gave to the New York Times, in which he was asked about dancing in the nude. “Why not?” he replied. “The new permissiveness is all to the good. Of course, it must be done well. And I must say, I thought the pas de deux done in the nude in Oh! Calcutta! was really very beautiful. Of course, if the dancers didn’t have beautiful bodies, it would not be the same,” he added, as if the ballet world ever allowed its dancers’ bodies to be less than perfect.
Not everyone was so thrilled, and that included some of the Oh! Calcutta! writers.
Jules Feiffer wrote the sketch “Jack and Jill,” about the selfishness of male sexual gratification, “to see if I could make it work as a full-length play.” Mike Nichols, still at work on his future bomb Catch-22, had committed to turning Carnal Knowledge into a movie, but Feiffer continued to harbor theatrical ambitions for the project, and he looked forward to seeing his sketch in Oh! Calcutta! While he didn’t attend any of the rehearsals, Feiffer did see a preview. He wasn’t happy. “Tynan cast the actors for their bodies, not for their acting ability,” he reported.
Finally, it was the world premiere. On June 17, one patron complained even before the opening night curtain went up, “I fully expected the girl ticket-takers would be nude.” It was the kind of evening in which everything said or done seemed predigested for maximum coverage in tomorrow’s gossip columns. Joe Namath arrived surrounded by a dozen fawning females. Peter Lind Hayes, Lloyd Bridges, and Abel Green came sans their respective wives. Anita Loos of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fame pointed out that the naked revue had a costume designer, Fred Voelpel. And halfway through the show, Ed Sullivan walked out with much fanfare. “Guess he couldn’t find anything he could use on his show,” a wag remarked.
“Opening night was exhilarating,” said Margo Sappington. “We were so comfortable in our skin. I think that’s what shocked people.”
From the other side of the footlights, the premiere registered as something less than exciting due to a theater filled with uptown swells and all the first-string critics and columnists. In other words, “People who had to be there,” said Bill Liberman, “whereas the audiences in previews were all people who wanted to see Oh! Calcutta! and were highly responsive and appreciative.”
On opening night, the jokes didn’t land, there was never more-than-polite applause, and when the lights came down at the end, people raced up the aisles. “Most of them were embarrassed to
be there,” said Liberman. “Or maybe they knew taxis would be scarce in that neighborhood.”
Afterward, at the Sardi’s party, actress Hedy Lamarr thought back to swimming nude in Ecstasy three decades earlier. “To think when I did it nobody could see me but the cameraman. Now it’s right out in the open,” she remarked. My Living Doll star Julie Newmar, who the year before posed nude in Playboy, called it “brilliant.” Funny Girl composer Jule Styne dismissed it as “witless.” And Shirley MacLaine mentioned something about playing the lead in the movie version.
Even though he didn’t like how his “Jack and Jill” sketch had been performed in previews, Jules Feiffer sent Kenneth Tynan a telegram on opening night. It read: “Break a member.”
Tynan never replied. “Which kind of pissed me off,” said Feiffer.
At Sardi’s, people asked Elkins, “You’re a very nice guy. Why are you doing this dirty show?” He replied, “The same reason I do any dirty show: to make money.”
Then came the reviews. In the Sardi’s building on West Forty-Fourth Street, Elkins, Tynan, and Liberman took the elevator up to the Thomas-Blaine ad agency on the fourth floor to read the notices as they came in over the wire. “They were disastrous,” said Elkins. “They all said it was too much and the sexuality was overbearing.”
Some of the cast members started to cry when they heard the bad news, but Elkins told everybody not to worry. “Let’s wait until tomorrow and see what happens.” As he later explained, “They weren’t bad reviews for what we needed, which is an audience.”
Elkins was right. By the second night, the response at the box office exploded. By the third night, they knew they had something people wanted to see. “Our rental of binoculars was extraordinary, especially in the first row. They wanted to see and they wanted to see more of it,” said Elkins.
In his syndicated gossip column, Earl Wilson reported how Oh! Calcutta! had made history: “A police official told me that once upon a time if a person was nude and moved, that was illegal. But that has been thrown out long ago.”
Well, a few months ago.
Kenneth Tynan’s sex revue opened at a cost of $234,969, including $50,000 advanced to the theater owner for renovation of the Eden. So many tickets were sold in that first week that Hilly Elkins immediately pushed the top price ticket from $10 to $15, a record for Off Broadway. “Scalpers were getting $35 a pair,” he said in defense of the price hike. Others got those ducats for free: Elkins liked to give away tickets to Oh! Calcutta! whenever a cop stopped him for speeding on his motorcycle.
SMASHING TABOOS COULD BE profitable, and Oh! Calcutta! wasn’t the only such venture making money.
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, published that May, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for forty consecutive weeks, a feat that more than justified the publisher’s original commitment of a $250,000 advance to the author. The ultimate seal of success came when Roth’s novel overtook the more than two million copies in paperback that Myra Breckinridge had sold, forcing Gore Vidal to attack Portnoy’s Complaint as “the greatest blow for masturbation I’ve ever read.”
And Midnight Cowboy, despite John Schlesinger’s sleep-depriving doubts, dazzled the executives at United Artists. Even after its first rough-cut screening, “We were stunned by its magic,” exclaimed UA president David Picker, who immediately devised a new release pattern for the film: “Open in New York for a couple of months before anywhere else, play in small theaters for long engagements, letting the word of mouth build up an audience.”
There continued to be, however, major misgivings. Dustin Hoffman sat in the back of theaters at more than one early preview. “There would be seventy-five people there, and a number of people would walk out at the impending blowjob scene,” he said. “They wouldn’t watch the entire movie. It was a tough time.”
Prior to the film’s release, United Artists submitted Midnight Cowboy to the newly organized Motion Picture Association of America ratings board, created in the wake of the old Production Code, which never would have approved the film’s language, nudity, and homosexual subject matter. Picker was surprisingly blasé when the MPAA gave the film its most restrictive rating: The X rating barred persons under the age of eighteen from entering theaters playing Midnight Cowboy, regardless of whether they were accompanied by an adult or parent. Schlesinger was also unfazed. “We felt the X was the correct rating for it. We had made the film for adults, not children,” he said.
UA opened Schlesinger’s controversial movie at the Coronet Theater in New York City on May 25, a premiere that was sullied a bit when Midnight Cowboy novelist James Leo Herlihy took the opportunity at the after-party to complain about a couple of scenes that he demanded be excised—and had just seen on the big screen. Incensed, Herlihy took his argument to reporters, telling them, “I didn’t like the scenes were Buck shoved the telephone in the mouth of the homosexual. I wanted it out of the picture because I thought it was just too much. And I didn’t like the deviate act in the balcony of the movie theater,” he added, referring to the scene where Bob Balaban’s character performs fellatio on Joe Buck. “They invented it, and it was hard to watch and totally unnecessary.”
Herlihy’s criticism hounded Schlesinger. Taking their cue from the Midnight Cowboy novelist, reporters began to harp on the film’s homosexual sequences. Waldo Salt and Schlesinger had created the scenes Herlihy found offensive. Otherwise, “We filmed two homosexual sequences which are explicit in the novel, and this is the only question that the press seemed interested in,” said Schlesinger, who noted a distinct “hostility” in the press’s coverage of the movie. “They felt it was going to be a sexploitation thing, which it absolutely isn’t.”
While the initial reviews were mixed—the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times liked it, Pauline Kael in The New Yorker and Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times panned it—the slow release pattern and all those morally outraged journalists functioned to make the film a succès d’estime, as well as an early contender for the Academy Award. Even Herlihy came around and later apologized—that is, after the film’s success goosed paperback sales of his novel. “I’m afraid I bummed-up Schlesinger’s party after the premiere by harassing him,” said the novelist.
Bummed or not, Schlesinger now had the clout to indulge in a pet project, one that, like Midnight Cowboy, he’d been nurturing for years, and one that, unlike Midnight Cowboy, was based on personal experience. UA’s David Picker couldn’t wait to hear about Schlesinger’s next project.
“I want to do Sunday Bloody Sunday,” said the director. What Schlesinger didn’t tell Picker is what he was thinking: “This is the moment. Cash in the success to make something that we know going in may be a piece of slightly uncommercial chamber music.”
Picker didn’t quite understand the title Sunday Bloody Sunday, or the story. He wondered, Why would a woman be in love with a young man who was also having an affair with another, older man? “Well, we don’t know where you’re going with it, but if you want to make it, make it,” said Picker, who had a way of okaying projects and then letting the filmmakers make their films without interference.
With Midnight Cowboy doing great business, Schlesinger proceeded to put together a cast and crew for his new, controversial, personal picture. It helped immensely that an old friend of Schlesinger’s was showing a rough cut of his own new, controversial, personal picture, also to be released by United Artists. The executives there didn’t understand that screenplay either, and again, Picker came to the rescue, leaving Larry Kramer and director Ken Russell alone to adapt D. H. Lawrence’s classic novel Women in Love for the screen.
Regarding his relationship with Schlesinger, Kramer revealed, “I met him. We went to bed a bunch of times. He was more serious than I was.”
Kramer had significantly more influence on his old boyfriend’s professional life. “Because of me, Columbia Pictures released Darling,” said Kramer, who’d been a production chief at the studio in the mid-1960s. “I told
Columbia that this was a fantastic movie, and they took my advice and picked it up.”
As with Midnight Cowboy, the executives at UA very much liked Kramer’s rough cut of Women in Love, and Schlesinger liked it so much that he hired much of Kramer’s crew, as well as the picture’s leading lady, Glenda Jackson, for his Sunday Bloody Sunday. Kramer could only hope that the cut of Women in Love he’d shown to Schlesinger and Picker was the one that the British censors approved.
Kramer had not only written the screenplay for Women in Love; he was the film’s producer, which meant that the arduous task of negotiating a final approved cut of the movie with the British Board of Film Censors fell to him. Even before shooting began, he’d sent a copy of his script to the board’s chief, a man named Lord John Trevelyan, who liked to brag, “We’re paid to have dirty minds.” Trevelyan didn’t hold out much hope for Kramer and told him he doubted his Women in Love script could be filmed at all. “The wrestling scene,” as it was soon to be dubbed, sent immediate shock waves through the BBFC.
“Trevelyan told us in no uncertain terms that this scene would present an insurmountable roadblock to the film’s release,” Kramer noted, “as would, as presently constituted, the [Rupert] Birkin-Ursula wham-bam sex scene after the water party and a later scene between Gerald and Gudrun, in Switzerland, what we came to call the ‘revenge fuck’ scene. His final decision rested, of course, he hastened to assure us, on the taste with which Ken handled all of this, though, he also hastened to assure us, he did not see how Ken, or anyone, could get around the insurmountable problems of the wrestling scene.”
Kramer and Russell gambled that Trevelyan might give his approval if all the sex scenes, when filmed, “followed the novel to the letter,” said Kramer.
“I had doubts the censor would let us pull it off,” said Russell. “It had never been seen in the history of the movies,” he added, referring to the male nudity. “It’s an essential part of the book.”
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