Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  AMID HIS TABOO-BUSTING, Norman Lear never got around to exploring man-boy love in All in the Family. He left that to the Italians.

  Despite all of Luchino Visconti’s talk about purity and beauty and love and angels, the director of Death in Venice found that when he visualized Thomas Mann’s abstract prose, what he ended up with onscreen was a middle-aged man chasing but never quite getting his hands on a thirteen-year-old boy.

  At least that’s what the executives at Warners saw when Visconti flew to Hollywood to show them a rough cut of his latest movie starring Dirk Bogarde.

  Bogarde referred to those execs as “the American Money.” Visconti simply lumped them together as “terrible Los Angeles,” even though the studio is located in Burbank.

  At first, Visconti was encouraged by the silence in the studio’s big screening room when his film ended. “The full house,” he reported, made not a sound at the final scene in which the black hair dye runs down Bogarde’s makeup-encrusted face and his character, Gustav von Aschenbach, dies on the beach alone. Visconti found the silence encouraging. Had he stunned the executives with the film’s absolute brilliance? Then someone in the screening room actually said something. “Well, I think the music is great. Just great. It’s a terrific theme. Terrific! Who was it did our score, Signore Visconti?”

  Visconti said the music had been written by Gustav Mahler.

  “Just great. I think we should sign him.”

  How could Visconti tell them that Mahler’s Fifth Symphony had been written at the turn of the century and its composer died a few years later? Quiet disgust soon filled the pause in conversation. Eventually, the good family men at Warners deemed Death in Venice “un-American,” according to Visconti, and told him that if it were released it might be banned in some states. If it were released?

  Plus, it really needed a new ending. The death scene was just too big a downer.

  “How can I give Thomas Mann a happy ending?” Visconti wondered aloud. “It is what he wrote, it is his conception, it is the story, it is sacrosanct.”

  There was the usual talk of “killing” the movie, writing it off as a total loss. But Visconti wasn’t dumb and immediately threatened to create “a great scandal in all the world papers if such a thing should happen.”

  Instead of watching Warners kill it, Visconti wrapped his movie in a continental aura of prestige and art, and quickly offered Death in Venice as part of a London gala to be titled “Venice in Peril,” a fund-raiser to help save the sinking city. The Queen of England would attend with Princess Anne, at the Warner Cinema in London, with a berth to follow at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. Even so, “the American Money” remained unconvinced. And the queen herself wasn’t much help in the end.

  After the command screening with her highness, Dirk Bogarde heard one of the studio executives remark to a fellow executive, “You know, what I can’t understand is how the Queen of England could bring her daughter to see a movie about an old man chasing a kid’s ass. . . .”

  Two persons who weren’t invited to the gala to see Death in Venice but should have been were Jan Fudakowski and Wladyslaw Moes, the novel’s real-life friends, Jasio and Tadzio. Fudakowski considered buying a ticket but “the ticket prices were rather high, from five to fifty guineas,” he reported. Instead, he waited, seeing Death in Venice with his movie doppelganger at a local cinema. “Undoubtedly the film is good,” he noted, “particularly when considered from the artistic point of view, although to my mind the plot is not very interesting and a bit difficult to follow.”

  Moes also waited, seeing the film near his home in Paris. According to his sister Maria, he wanted to watch it alone, because “he would not have wanted to show his feelings about it, even to me,” she explained.

  Visconti knew of Moes and Moes knew of Visconti, but when the Italian director came to Warsaw to audition potential Tadzios, both men kept their distance. They knew it was better not to confuse the fantasy with the reality. Moes said as much in a letter to Fudakowski when he wrote, “It would have been detrimental to have seen an old man with all the signs of ageing when [Visconti’s] imagination was concentrated on re-creating the character of a young boy in the style of Thomas Mann.”

  In the end, Death in Venice was no The Damned. For once, the Warners executives were right: Gay Nazis easily trumped gay composers at the box office.

  THE MOVIES HAD A long tradition of adoring whores with hearts of gold. Think Shirley MacLaine’s Irma la Douce. Or better yet, Ona Munson’s Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind.

  The movies, however, had never portrayed anyone quite like Vera de Vries, aka Xaviera Hollander, the happy hooker.

  To write the book The Happy Hooker was not Hollander’s idea. It was her client’s idea.

  Robin Moore, esteemed author of The Green Berets and The French Connection, knew there was a bestselling book in this story of a young Jewish secretary from the Netherlands who worked as a secretary at the Dutch consulate in New York City and within a couple of short years became the top madam in the city. Prostitutes had told their stories before, but not without apologies. It’s why he—or Hollander’s other ghostwriter, Yvonne Dunleavy—wrote the following introduction for the secretary-turned-prostitute:

  “Don’t think of me as a poor little girl gone astray because of a misguided or underprivileged childhood. The contrary is true. I come from a very good background and grew up in a loving family atmosphere.” Plus, she spoke five languages fluently!

  Moore might never have met Hollander had a rival madam not gotten pregnant and married, in that order. To seal her retirement, the madam known as Madeleine sold her little black book to Hollander for ten thousand dollars. It was an investment Hollander made back in two months. “While I had come to be regarded as a friendly and witty madam to the Jewish community,” she reported, “Madeleine was more or less known as a leading lady to the WASPs, so when I took over her business I became a force for religious brotherhood.”

  Hollander, who always looked on the bright side of her profession, established this brotherhood by quickly phoning Madeleine’s vast list of clients, advising them of the change in locale and management. “Hi, I’m Xaviera Hollander, I’m from Holland. I’m twenty-five years of age, I live in a beautiful three-bedroom apartment in midtown, and I have taken over the management of Madeleine’s business because she has retired to have a baby. Why don’t you drop over for coffee and a chat with us and see if you like the atmosphere? If you do, we would be glad to have you as a guest occasionally.”

  When she called a relative of Robin Moore, Moore himself answered. He wasn’t polite. “I’m not into that stuff,” he replied. “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re Robin Moore. You wrote The Green Berets and The French Connection,” Hollander shot back.

  “Oh, so you’re a hooker who can read?” he asked.

  Hollander took a deep breath. She might be a whore, but she hated being called a hooker.

  Much to her surprise, Moore expressed second thoughts about Hollander’s initial offer, and arranged to meet at her East Side brothel.

  “Robin never took his clothes off,” said Hollander. Instead, he asked her to tell him about her adventures as a call girl. In exchange for one hour of taping, he paid her fifty dollars for very graphic talk about orgies, lesbian sex (“It is known that most madams are bisexual, and I am no exception”), the police (“No brothel can operate more than a year in New York without being raided at least once by police”), penis size (“I could take care of the big cocks, any length, any width, because I love it”), a call girl’s take (“$500 a week during a good week in January, February, and March”), and race (“We have a saying that going to bed with an Oriental is like washing your hands: clean and simple”).

  After a few such interviews, however, Hollander became suspicious and asked her lawyer, Paul Sherman, to be present for Moore’s next visit. “I don’t trust this guy. Let’s frisk him,” Hollander advised.

  Instead, as so
on as Sherman and Moore got together, they negotiated the book contract in the living room of Hollander’s brothel. “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done,” Moore kept saying.

  Sherman, who represented a number of authors, also found the situation highly unusual. “I’d never negotiated a book contract in a house of ill-repute before,” he said.

  With business out of the way, Moore soon introduced Hollander to a surveillance expert, who installed a tape-recorder system in the brothel’s bedrooms in order to get “authenticity” for the book.

  “[He] had a sideline: selling information to law enforcement agencies and others. I found out about the hidden bug and [his] sideline only when Knapp Commission investigators called me as a witness many months later. They had in their possession tapes made in my apartment without my knowledge or consent,” said Hollander.

  A police raid put Hollander on the front page of the city’s tabloids, and while headlines like “Midtown Madam” and “Penthouse Prostitutes” caught the public’s attention, it was Xaviera Hollander’s risqué quotes that forced them to read on. She was proud, defiant, and extremely articulate. “And she was blatant,” said Yvonne Dunleavy. She was also read by a top editor at Dell Publishing.

  “Bob Abel wanted it because the story was headlines,” said Dunleavy, “and there was an upscale element to it,” thanks to all that East Side Manhattan sex.

  For its part, Dell “crashed” the book, bringing it out in paperback within six weeks of purchasing the completed manuscript. Despite his Green Berets and French Connection credentials, Moore really wasn’t much of a writer, which is why he brought Dunleavy to the project. “Robin wrote one chapter, it was awful,” said Hollander. “He was a Jerzy Kosinski,” said Dunleavy. In other words, Moore could package and edit a book; he just couldn’t write a book.

  Later that year, when Hollander testified before Mayor John Lindsay’s crime commission, formally titled the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption, it ended her brief stay in America. But it also sent The Happy Hooker to the top of the bestseller lists, where it would eventually sell more than fourteen million copies.

  “It brought sex out of a plain brown wrapper,” said Dunleavy. “You saw people reading The Happy Hooker on subways and in laundromats everywhere. That hadn’t happened before.” Readers were intrigued not only by the graphic sex talk but the blind items that included such notable clients as Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Oh! Calcutta! producer Hilly Elkins.

  Hollander never offered any apologies for her work—“To tell you the truth, I am very happy in the business”—but she did harbor one regret. “I wanted to call the book Come and Go, but Robin insisted on calling it The Happy Hooker.” She had to admit the seemingly oxymoronic moniker Happy Hooker made for the better title, even if she hated being called a hooker.

  Shortly after the publication of The Happy Hooker, Hollywood offered yet another portrait of prostitution, in this case the very contrite Bree Daniels, as embodied by Jane Fonda in Klute. It was a rough-edge portrayal, but in the end Bree Daniels was as repentant and emotionally troubled as Xaviera Hollander was defiant and carefree.

  HOLLYWOOD’S MOST FAMOUS GAY director, George Cukor, all but came out of the closet with his Oscar campaign to get Holly Woodlawn nominated for best supporting actress that winter. The legendary helmer of The Philadelphia Story and My Fair Lady had absolutely fallen in love with Trash, and his admiration included trying to make Hollywood believe that a drag queen is a woman. He thought Paul Morrissey’s male Galatea sported a great pair of pecs, and who knew he could act? “Joe Dallesandro does some enormously difficult things,” Cukor observed, like “walking around in the nude in a completely unselfconscious way.”

  Dallesandro found inspiration in being naked, in Flesh and now in Trash, although in the latter he never exposed his erection, for the simple fact that his heroin-addict character is incapable of getting one. “If you watch closely, you’ll see that my best performing comes when I have my clothes off,” observed the actor. “When I’m dressed, I really don’t give very good performances.”

  Cukor, however, didn’t put his muscle behind trying to nab an Oscar nomination for Dallesandro. He knew full well that the academy had a long tradition of honoring the most acting rather than the best acting, and Dallesandro had given a very understated performance as the strung-out Joe.

  Holly Woodlawn, on the other hand, displayed enough acting in Trash to sink a ton of garbage in the Hudson River, and Cukor took note. He went so far as to have big orange buttons made, declaring “Holly Woodlawn for Best Supporting Actress.” He even got Ben Gazzara and Joanne Woodward to join him in signing a petition to the academy. But to no avail. Like Andy Warhol, who was entering a new phase of filmmaking, the Oscars weren’t having anything to do with “chicks with dicks,” as the king of pop art now called them.

  PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY FOR STRAW DOGS ended the last week of April, which is when Sam Peckinpah began his editing chores. He had particular trouble working on the final reel, but after a few sleepless days in the editing room he was able to say, “I think I’ve made my statement on violence.”

  The first cut of the siege and rape clocked in at one hundred minutes. When cut down to eighteen minutes, “it became a very different animal,” said Roger Spottiswoode, one of the film’s editors. “It turned from an exciting but standard battle into this strange, otherworldly scene.”

  Producer Daniel Melnick anticipated trouble from the censors, less for the blood than for the back-to-back rapes. In the United States, he cut a few seconds from the second rape to get an R, rather than an X, from the MPAA.

  The Brits were tougher, and he feared he might lose the entire second rape—the one that the wife really, really doesn’t want. At the censor’s office, Melnick sat in front of a Moviola with “this venerable member of the aristocracy, explaining to him by looking at the rape scene that what was going on was rear entry, not sodomy,” said the producer. “By British standards, rear entry was acceptable but sodomy was not.”

  The American/British divide was even greater when it came to the film reviews. No fewer than thirteen prominent British critics wrote to condemn the censor’s passage of Straw Dogs. Theirs was a joint letter in the Times of London, calling Peckinpah’s film “dubious in its intention, excessive in its effect.” One of those critics actually threatened a lawsuit over copyright infringement—and won!—when a London cinema used his pan review in its advertisements to entice theatergoers to buy tickets. According to Sir John Trevelyan, the outraged notice “immediately doubled the queues” outside the theater.

  Stateside, pre-release test screenings brought out the worst in American audiences. Melnick recalled, “I hoped people would be devastated and shocked and horrified by the siege. Suddenly, I heard six hundred people shout, ‘Kill him, get him!’ I thought, My God, what have we unleashed?” And there were reports of little old ladies watching the film and cheering Dustin Hoffman to kill the thugs who had raped his wife.

  After one such screening, a man asked who was responsible for the film. Peckinpah immediately pointed at Melnick. The man screamed at the producer, “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I’m a pacifist and I’ll kill you for making it!”

  As a result, Straw Dogs turned out to be a bigger box-office hit than Peckinpah’s previous blood-fest, The Wild Bunch. The American critics, however, were divided. Reviewers for Newsweek, Time, and Saturday Review loved it. Richard Schickel in Life and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker disliked it intensely, and even got personal in their attacks.

  “Straw Dogs is literally sophomoric,” wrote Schickel. “Unable to question either Peckinpah’s craft or the insincerity of his motives, one must question his intelligence and perception.”

  Kael wrote, “Peckinpah’s view of human experience seems to be no more than the sort of anecdote that drunks tell in bars.” She went on to call Straw Dogs “a fascist work of art.”

  For some reason, the word “fa
scist” struck a nerve in Peckinpah’s otherwise thick, deer-hunter hide. He fired off a letter to Kael, scolding her: “Shall I discuss this with my lawyer or are you prepared to print in public the definition of the film? Simply I think the term is in incredible bad taste and I intend to take issue with it.”

  He also fired off a missive to Schickel: “If I am at fault, part of it is because I expected too much, my vision of morality is certainly not yours, but I damn you for having the bad taste to speak of me as you did of my life in conjunction with my film.”

  Peckinpah deliberately blurred those lines between life and film by embracing not only the violent mantle but the male-chauvinistic-pig mantle. “There are two kinds of women,” he told Playboy. “There are women and then there’s pussy. . . . I ignore women’s lib. I’m for most of what they’re for, but I can’t see why they have to make such assholes of themselves over the issue. I consider myself one of the foremost male lesbians in the world.”

  What didn’t help the Straw Dogs cause was the nearly concurrent release of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, two films laden with sex and violence.

  Bakshi’s animated feature, based on the famed Robert Crumb comic collection, had the distinction of featuring anthropomorphic animals who, in some cases, were anatomically correct, depending on what the viewer saw them as—animal or human. “They were animals fucking. And that, to me, was like the best of Terrytoons and the best of what I wanted to do,” said Bakshi. Actually, the characters were often male animals fucking female humans with tails and floppy ears, all of which gave a definite tinge of bestiality to the project. Which was the least of it for a few animators. “Sometimes I’d have to lean on some guy who’s been doing animation for Disney or somebody for thirty years and tell him to pinch a chick’s tit a little harder,” said Bakshi, a former Paramount Pictures animator. “And some of them would just throw their hands in the air and walk out.”