Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Pat begged that the press kit not be given out at the upcoming Los Angeles screening, to which the Louds had all been invited. Instead, WNET mailed the press kit to editors and reporters. Pat wondered, “This is educational television?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Winter 1973, Backlash

  The initial advertisement for An American Family in the New York Times looked like something put together by ABC or NBC or CBS for one of its afternoon soap operas. Coming from WNET, it shocked the Louds. “Are You Ready for an American Family?” the ad asked provocatively, referring to their house not as a home but as the “headquarters” and the “message center.”

  The second ad, promoting the episode devoted to Lance and Pat Loud in New York City, was even more inflammatory. It proclaimed, “He Dyed His Hair Silver!” The ad featured a portrait of Lance, torn out of a family photo, as if he had been disowned by the six other Louds, and the copy wondered if he’d “dyed his clothes purple as a personal expression of . . . something . . . something he wasn’t fully aware of at the time.”

  Which was strange. Lance had never hidden his sexual orientation from his family or the filmmakers. He didn’t “come out on camera,” as many reviewers would soon report. “The sexual preference has always been there,” Lance told interviewers. “When I went through puberty, I wanted to have sex with boys.”

  Despite Lance’s frankness, WNET used code words to describe him. A press kit photo of a leather-jacketed Lance carried the caption: “This is Lance Loud, public television’s flamboyant 21-year-old member of ‘An American Family.’ ”

  Two years earlier, All in the Family introduced TV’s first openly gay character—the macho athlete whom Archie Bunker mistook for being straight. Lance Loud was also gay but he was also different. Not only was he a real person; he was the first openly homosexual “character” on television to have a story line that carried out over multiple episodes.

  Anne Roiphe, author of the feminist bestselling novel Up the Sandbox, had coffee with Pat and Bill Loud at the Carnegie Deli in New York City that January, right after the series began airing. Their interview was to be the centerpiece of her upcoming article on An American Family for the New York Times Magazine. She didn’t speak with Lance, but that didn’t prevent her from turning the nine-page article, awkwardly titled “Things Are Keen but Could Be Keener,” into what was first and foremost an attack on him.

  In that article, before Roiphe got around to detailing the show’s various highlights—the breakup of the Louds’ marriage, a fire that almost destroyed their home, a car accident, Bill Loud’s business problems—she took space to describe “the flamboyant, leechlike homosexuality of their oldest son, Lance.”

  She quoted Shana Alexander’s essay in Newsweek, which preceded Roiphe’s article by a few weeks: “The silence of the Louds is also a scream, a scream that people matter, that they matter and we matter. I think it is a scream whose echoes will shake up all America.”

  What appeared to bother writers like Alexander and Roiphe, but none more than Roiphe, was that the Louds—Bill, Pat, Delilah, Michelle, Grant, and Kevin—did not openly criticize Lance for being homosexual. Certainly both parents devoted several minutes of the twelve-hour series to criticizing Lance’s lack of initiative in getting a job. Totally missing, however, were those chats about his making a sincere effort to become a heterosexual. Also absent were any antigay taunts from Lance’s four siblings. It was the family’s implicit acceptance of Lance’s sexual orientation that outraged journalists like Roiphe, who wrote in her Times article, “Lance Loud, the evil flower of the Loud family, dominates the drama—the devil always has the best lines . . . he is beyond understanding in a wonderland of city cats whose morality and values, whose actions and reactions can only mock those of us on the other side of the mirror.”

  Regarding Pat’s reaction to Lance, Roiphe wrote, “I shared her unacknowledged sadness for a son whose childishness runs wild, whose ability to survive is in question.”

  Roiphe’s surmise of Bill’s reaction to his oldest child is even more inflammatory: “[Bill] tries to go along with jokes he doesn’t quite get, to admit to no one, not the camera, not his son, not himself, the disappointment, puzzlement, haunting shadow such a son as Lance must be to a man whose business is to sell parts for strip mining machines, whose life work takes him out among the hard hats, the dump trucks, the huge grinding steel teeth of the steam shovels. A world where, I was reminded as I saw it on the camera, men seem strong and decent, large and dependable.”

  Roiphe wondered, “Is Lance the true American son?”

  Then she compared him to a fish: “I suspect getting close to Lance must always have been like swimming alongside an electric eel.”

  She also pinpointed Lance’s homosexuality as the reason why Bill cheated on Pat: “Why the infidelities? The camera doesn’t tell us, but we can guess. Bill reached his early 40’s and his first son was not going to be a man; his sense of himself could have been badly shaken by that unacknowledged discovery. The disappointment may have driven him to prove himself with others.”

  After reading the Times article, Pat Loud placed a middle-of-the-night call to Craig Gilbert, who had set up the interview with Roiphe.

  “Pat was screaming,” said the filmmaker. “She’d taken a below-the-belt hit, and it hurt. That, right there, was the beginning of my own confusion. What have I done? What do I do?”

  What the Louds did that February was try to defend themselves on The Dick Cavett Show. Regarding the hot-button topic of Lance’s homosexuality, brother Kevin challenged their famous interviewer. “We don’t say ‘homo,’ ” he told Dick Cavett. “That’s what the newspapers say. We don’t say it.”

  The Loud family’s appearance that February evening doubled the talk show’s ratings.

  BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI HAD TO defend himself and his actors in the Bologna court. “I can confirm that neither the performers nor myself ever contemplated for a moment commercial benefits or entertainment devices,” he said. “We were interested in the question of possession of a component of a relationship, a self-destructive one prevalent in today’s society.”

  The three judges hearing the case agreed and all three defendants—Bertolucci, Marlon Brando, and Maria Schneider—were acquitted.

  The Italian court case delayed the official New York City opening of Last Tango in Paris until February 1, giving the box office at the TransLux East adequate time to promote the controversy and rack up more than $100,000 in advance ticket sales at the small movie theater.

  After testifying in Italy, Bertolucci flew directly to New York City for his film’s premiere. Jet-lagged, he picked up a newspaper to read about what he’d just experienced six thousand miles away, and glancing at the paper’s photo he remarked, “I look like a criminal the moment he goes before the judge.”

  After Pauline Kael went orgasmic in The New Yorker, everyone in New York suddenly had an opinion about Last Tango, including people like William F. Buckley Jr. and ABC commentator Harry Reasoner, both of whom condemned the film as being pornography without their having actually seen it. Others, like Norman Mailer, thought the film didn’t go far enough, offering, “Brando’s cock up Schneider’s real vagina would have brought the history of cinema one huge march closer to the ultimate experience it has promised since its inception—that is, to embody life.”

  Prior to the film’s commercial release, Bertolucci had kept his analysis of Last Tango simple. “Can a man and a woman still live together today without destroying each other?” he asked.

  Now, with Kael’s review in hand and the film about to open, Bertolucci felt compelled to pontificate. “Women are the only ones who really understand the film,” he believed. “Because it’s a film that’s built on the concept of the inside of the uterus. Not just the room. Marlon, in fact, makes a voyage back to the uterus so that at the end he’s a fetus. The colors in the film are uterine colors.”

  Women, of course, didn’t all love it. Many of t
hem hated it, women like feminist Grace Glueck, who called Last Tango “the perfect macho soap opera,” and went on to write, “Brando’s and Bertolucci’s dislike of women is intense.”

  When reporters asked Bertolucci about quotes like Glueck’s, he shot back, “I consider myself a member of women’s lib, but I don’t want to talk with women who believe my film is misogynistic. That is too narrow a vision . . . because they make this equation: Marlon brutalizes Maria, therefore the film is against women. It’s a very simplistic interpretation. . . .”

  It had been a long haul for Bertolucci, and sitting there in a Manhattan hotel room trying to defend/promote/explain his movie, he admitted, “I’m more than bored. I’ve been taking all this as a game, and now I’m tired of playing the game.”

  Much newer to the game, Maria Schneider wasn’t bored in the least, and neither were the reporters who sat down to interview her. Only seven years earlier, Julie Christie had shocked reporters by telling them that she lived openly with her boyfriend Don Bessant without the benefit of marriage, an admission that linked the actress to her party-girl character in Darling.

  Likewise, Schneider became Jeanne from Last Tango, especially after her unexpected, open admission to the New York Times, “I’m bisexual completely, and I’ve had quite a few lovers for my age. More men than women. Probably fifty men and twenty women. I’m incapable of fidelity; I have a need for a million experiences.”

  And she didn’t stop there. She and Brando got along so well “because we’re both bisexual,” she insisted, and regarding the making of Last Tango she revealed that “Bertolucci was in love with Marlon Brando, and that’s what the movie was about. We were acting out Bernardo’s sex problems, in effect trying to transfer them to the film.”

  Bertolucci stoked the rumors of his being infatuated with Brando, declaring, “He was so wonderful. I always fall in love with my actors and actresses, but especially with Marlon.” He even went so far as to kiss a photograph of Brando. “Isn’t he beautiful?” he asked a reporter. “Just look at that face. Oh, Marlon, you are good enough to eat.”

  The rumors were already circulating that Bertolucci had originally conceived the film as the love story of two men, and no less a movie personage than Ingmar Bergman gave those stories oxygen, if not validity, when he speculated that Bertolucci “got worried about taboos” and so turned Last Tango into a heterosexual love story. “There is much hatred of women in this film, but if you see it as being about a man who loves a boy, you can understand it,” said Bergman.

  Same sex or different sex, Last Tango in Paris did very well for its participants. It cost $1.4 million and grossed more than $45 million, with Brando’s take being about $4 million.

  FINALLY, DEEP THROAT ALSO got its day—ten days, to be exact—in court that winter.

  The prosecutor, William Purcell, argued that the film had no social redeeming value.

  The defense, Herbert Kassner, argued, “It indicates that women have the right to a sex life.”

  On the contrary, Purcell countered: Deep Throat could be injurious to a person’s health, especially if that person happened to be female. “A woman seeing this film may think that it is perfectly healthy, perfectly moral to have a clitoral orgasm that is all she needs. She is wrong. She is wrong. And this film will strengthen her in her ignorance,” he said with a straight face.

  The words “clitoral orgasm” baffled the judge for the simple reason that the Honorable Joel J. Tyler had never heard of such a thing. Not a good sign for the defense.

  As the trial progressed, Norman Mailer threw a fiftieth-birthday party for himself at the Four Seasons restaurant. Mailer used the occasion to launch something he was calling the Fifth Estate, a group to monitor the CIA. To kick off the party, Mailer told his assembled guests an anecdote about “an Oriental cunt.”

  No one at the Four Seasons laughed. But they did talk about Mailer being drunk, being a joke, and their having to pay fifty dollars a ticket to attend his stupid birthday party. After his “cunt” comment, the conversation elevated a bit as guests switched to discuss the two major cultural events in New York City that winter: Last Tango in Paris, which had just opened officially, and Deep Throat, which the New York Times Magazine called “Porno Chic” in a recent cover story. Andrew Sarris didn’t know Mailer and never got around to meeting him that day, but the critic’s film credentials from the Village Voice made him more of an authority on Last Tango and Deep Throat than most people at the fete. Sarris told anyone who’d listen that Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “wasn’t that good.” He had a reason not to like Last Tango, especially after Pauline Kael had made it her cause célèbre. Kael and Sarris could never agree on anything after she had panned his beloved “auteur theory” in print years ago, and had offended him once by suggesting he bring his “partner,” that is, male lover, to lunch one day, even though Sarris was straight and now married to fellow film critic Molly Haskell. Sarris had less reason to dislike Deep Throat, saying it “certainly didn’t invent oral sex, but it may well have been the first porno film to exploit it.”

  Last Tango and Deep Throat. It’s all anybody talked about.

  Bertolucci didn’t make it to Mailer’s birthday party to defend his film, but Harry Reems did, although Sarris somehow missed seeing or speaking to the porn actor. Instead, the rather owlish-looking movie critic held forth in a sizable circle of listeners on “how ridiculous it was for Mailer to make such a fuss over the lack of full-frontal male nudity in Brando’s Last Tango performance when, only a few years before, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed had bared all when they wrestled nude in Ken Russell’s Women in Love.”

  Sarris laughed as he went on and on about Bates and Reed and Brando and Bertolucci when, suddenly, he looked up and there was Alan Bates staring at him across the Four Seasons restaurant, listening to his every word. The actor was in New York to perform on Broadway in the play Butley. It was a terribly embarrassing moment for Sarris, who just stood there wanting to evaporate. Bates then did something “remarkable,” according to Sarris, something that made him relax and know that everything was all right. “He simply winked at me with a friendly, conspiratorial expression,” said the critic.

  After a ten-day nonjury trial, Judge Tyler mulled over more than one thousand pages of expert testimony regarding Deep Throat. Then he ruled, “This is one throat that deserves to be cut.”

  The next day, the New World theater, fined for $3 million, put up a few new letters on its marquee: “Judge Cuts Throat, World Mourns.”

  EPILOGUE

  Spring 1973 and Beyond, Finales

  By the time PBS finished airing all twelve episodes of An American Family, drawing more than ten million viewers per week, Lance Loud had already received three Bibles in the mail. Also, “I got a lot of letters from gay guys, gay suburban kids, who thanked me for being a voice of outrage in a bland fucking normal middle-class world,” said Lance, who went on to call himself, with rueful accuracy, “the homo of the year.”

  His major nemesis, the New York Times’s Anne Roiphe, went on to write more articles about television for the newspaper, including one praising the CBS series The Waltons, which featured, she felt, a good and hardworking American family from the Depression that was everything the Louds were not.

  Roiphe did not mention Lance or the other Louds in her Waltons critique, nor was he mentioned, despite his self-proclamation as “the homo of the year,” in the Times’s less-than-celebratory article “Doctors Rule Homosexuals Not Abnormal,” which reported on the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to delete homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. Nineteen seventy-three was definitely a good year for sexual liberation, bracketed by the APA decision in December and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in January, which made abortion a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution. The court’s abortion ruling and the APA decision were applauded by liberals; those twin edicts, however, also functioned to galvanize conservatives, uniting them around causes to sto
p reproductive rights, stop gay rights, stop pornography, stop whatever else they thought contributed to a permissive society. And people are always more willing to fight battles they think they’ve just lost than defend those they think they’ve just won.

  As the pop culture scene in America grew much less New York City–centric, the sexual taboos continued to fall but at a much slower pace than in the Sexplosion years. The daring subject matter and language of the Broadway stage had already been co-opted by the movies. And the Manhattan world of book publishing would never again enjoy the sexual halcyon of Myra Breckinridge, Couples, and Portnoy’s Complaint: three smart novels by East Coast intellectuals that dominated the bestseller lists.

  Pop culture would also become much less man-made.

  This tale of pop rebels has been, essentially, a male tale. A few women have made appearances, as actresses. But performers, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were rarely instrumental in making a project happen (Jane Fonda and Natalie Wood being the possible exceptions), and there were no female executives, producers, or directors to help in those groundbreaking endeavors. Only one major female writer was a significant force, Penelope Gilliatt, and even her screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday was not her story but rather John Schlesinger’s, conceived by him and based loosely on an incident in his life. The choreographers Margo Sappington and Julie Arenal made significant contributions to the stage shows Oh! Calcutta! and Hair, respectively, but they would be the first to admit that those projects did not tell their stories or necessarily reflect their worldview.

  After the sagas of An American Family, Last Tango in Paris, and Deep Throat played out in early 1973, the marketplace began to open for female artists, with book publishers providing the most inviting platform. Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, the first published compilation of women’s sexual fantasies, went on to become a bestseller, as did Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying, published later that year. Tellingly, both books were late bloomers, doing only respectable business in their hardcover editions in 1973 but selling millions in paperback in 1974 and beyond as the culture became more accepting of female provocateurs.