The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

by Pagan Kennedy

  Why so many names? I suspect it’s because everyone has a different opinion about the truth. For some writers, it’s OK to alter minor details in the service of the story; for others, this fudging of the truth amounts to a lie. I spent too many years as a fact-checking drone to be able to cheat the details—I don’t fabricate at all. Still, I have to say that great art excuses everything. I understand when a nonfiction author makes a few minor tweaks in service to the scene. When you examine some of Truman Capote’s true stories—for instance, the psycho-killer-on-the-loose thriller “Handcarved Coffins”—it becomes clear that he must have smudged some facts, for the story fits together too neatly. At the end of the piece, Capote “solves” the mystery and “finds” the killer inside of a fantasy—because, in real life, he was unable to nail the powerful rancher who probably committed the murders. Had he published the piece today, he no doubt would have been called on the carpet by Oprah and forced to account for his lies and inventions. And that would have been a shame, because “Handcarved Coffins” is a masterpiece; indeed, when you read it you feel yourself gripped with a fever dream in which accuracy is simply beside the point.

  And yet, Capote was at his greatest when he stuck to the facts. Even the most fertile imagination could not invent some of the dialogue of In Cold Blood. Perry, on death row: “I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat.” That’s the kind of dialogue you can only bag after spending days listening to someone, and then sifting through your transcripts for the one sentence that contains that character’s very DNA.

  We talk about certain statements as having a “ring of truth” to them, as if a sentence is a tuning fork, something that we can tap and listen to for its tone. And I think that’s right. Truth has a hum to it. You can tell.

  Several years ago, I found myself in a park in Savannah, leaning on a croquet mallet. I’d flown to Georgia to write a profile of Cheryl Haworth, a 19-year-old who had recently thrown more than three hundred pounds over her head, proving herself the strongest female weightlifter in the world. That day, her best friend Ethan—a beanpole of a boy—had tagged along. I watched in the shade with Cheryl’s mother, who did her best to answer my barrage of questions. At one point, out of nowhere, Cheryl’s mom told me that Ethan planned to become a Catholic priest and then work his way up so one day he could be Pope. Right then, I knew I had a story. An aperture had opened up, a chink through which I could peer at the Looking Glass Land of two Southern kids. I had found one of the magic spots where the ordinary melts into the fantastic. Ethan wants to be Pope. Ethan wants to be Pope. My tape recorder hummed in my hand, its reels collecting the evidence. This is what I lived for.

  In official terms, I was a “magazine writer.” But, really, I’d embarked on a safari, searching out a particular kind of true story. I tracked down visionaries who dared to find solutions to the big problems. These people shared my homesickness in America, and it motivated them to reinvent this country (and others) as a kinder, sexier, smarter, funnier, or more compassionate place. They were possessed of such large ambition that they seemed to violate the very laws of space and time. And, quite often, they managed to bring about the impossible.

  For instance, I became fascinated with Gordon Sato, a chemist who had figured out a way to transform the ecosystem of an entire African country. When I met Sato, he’d already succeeded in creating a three-mile strip of mangroves, enough to furnish an entire village with food. But he was running out of money.

  I followed the 76-year-old Sato in the suburbs of Massachusetts as he plotted the future of the African coast, argued with his wife, and ate a few bites of the lunch meat she put on his plate. All the while, I waited to find out why he—a frail old man—needed so badly to transform a desert into a tropical paradise. Eventually I learned that Sato (who is Japanese-American) had been interred in a concentration camp in California as a teenager. Sixty years later, he is still trying to erase the memory of another desert long ago, of a boy—himself—digging in the dust. His outrage is so large as to warp the very fabric of reality. Months after I published my story about Sato, I heard he was sailing to Africa on board a luxury cruise ship with a band of millionaire donors. It was the kind of surreal adventure that seemed ordinary to him.

  Some people I profiled in this book are famous. Others live in semiobscurity, each struggling to build his or her paradise out of nothing but sand. Two of the people who appear here went on to win the MacArthur “genius” award. For me, researching these stories felt like scientific observation, an investigation into the nature of personality and reality. How can one man like Sato violate the laws of common sense and live according to his own lights? And how can he convince so many others to join him? Does it come down to American self-invention, this knack we have for making ourselves up out of nothing? Or does the urge come from some more primeval part of the personality? The method of study was simple: I showed up in the right place, and I stayed as long as I could. If possible, I would follow people for days—observing, snooping, asking questions, rifling through their drawers, searching in the cracks between the upholstery in their cars.

  And, too, I intended to illuminate and celebrate genius, which always has one foot in reality and another foot in Wonderland. The subjects of these stories consulted the backwards land of their own imaginations, and then made scientific breakthroughs or started new cultural movements.

  Most of the stories I wrote under contract to magazines. Two editors—Hugo Lindgren at The New York Times Magazine, and John Koch at The Boston Globe Magazine—became my champions. They suggested story ideas and provided the enthusiasm that fueled my work. Knowing that I could place these stories in magazines kept me going.

  However, the title story, The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex, was simply too odd to publish in a glossy magazine. I wrote it anyway. When I found out that Alex Comfort, the author of The Joy of Sex, had started his career as a virgin and workaholic, I had to know more about him. I wanted to trace his evolution from somber scientist into a pop-culture guru nicknamed Dr. Sex. How could one man change so utterly?

  Comfort died in the year 2000, so I couldn’t report on him in the usual way; instead, I had to resort to the methods of a biographer. I interviewed his son at length—and here I should thank Nick Comfort for graciously opening up his life to me. I also tracked down many others who’d known Alex Comfort, and read through dozens of books and clippings. In the end, I became fascinated by Comfort’s decline rather than his rise—his final ten years trapped in a paralyzed body. That was the kind of plot twist beyond my powers of invention.

  As I trailed after my subjects, I was continually amazed by the lines of dialogue that they dropped—their speech so much more poetic than anything I could have made up. And I was awed, too, by the sheer creativity that goes into being human: the anecdotes people think up to explain themselves, their rituals, their plots, their costumes.

  In most of the stories collected here, I have tried to open up a doorway between the ordinary and the fantastic. My method was to hang onto the coattails of exceptional people and let them zoom me through magic doorways, into a strange new realm: America as it exists all around us. America, the real.

  Pagan Kennedy

  March, 2008

  Table of Contents

  PRAISE FOR The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

  PRAISE FOR Confessions of a Memory Eater:

  Also by Pagan Kennedy

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  SECTION 1: Visionaries

  The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex: The story of Alex Comfort, in 17 positions

  Genius on Two Dollars a Day

  Bird Brain

  The Strongest Woman in the World

  Battery-Powered Brain

  Vermin Supreme Wants to Be Your Tyrant

  The Chemist in the Desert

  One Room, Three-Thousand Brains

  The Mystic Mech
anic

  The Ballad of Conor Oberst

  How to Make (Almost) Anything

  What We Mean By Freedom: Three ways of looking at alternative fuel

  SECTION 2: First Person: Stories From My Own Life

  Boston Marriage

  The Encyclopedia of Scorpions

  Off Season

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SECTION 1:

  Visionaries

  The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex:

  The story of Alex Comfort, in 17 positions

  In 1972, The Joy of Sex skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed for most of the decade. It brought the sexual revolution—which had exploded on college campuses a few years before—into the suburbs. Housewives read it and experienced their very first orgasms. Couples pored over it together. Swingers referred to it in conversation with arched eyebrows. The Joy of Sex became the Bible of the American bedroom, and it added new terms to our language: g-string, tongue bath, water works. Yet, though Joy was as much a ’70s superstar as Farrah Fawcett, few people can tell you who wrote it. Its author, Alex Comfort, might be considered one of the greatest and strangest minds of the twentieth century.

  This is his story.

  FIREWORKS

  One day in 1934, he sequestered himself in his family’s greenhouse in London to perform an experiment. Alex Comfort—then 14 years old—had decided to invent his own fireworks. He ground together sugar, sulfur, and saltpeter, an operation so dangerous that most chemists pour water over the ingredients to prevent a blast. Alex neglected to take that precaution. The container exploded. The roof of the greenhouse blew out. A red-tinted vapor hovered in the air before him. Four fingers on his left hand had vanished, leaving a lump of meat with one thumb hanging off it. He felt no pain. Indeed, he found it thrilling to be blown apart.

  Or, at least, that’s how he told the story later. Alex Comfort loved explosions, even the one that mutilated him. He never would admit any regret at the loss of his four fingers. As a middle-aged physician, he bragged that his stump could be more useful than a conventional hand, particularly when it came to performing certain medical procedures—exploring a woman’s birth canal, for instance.

  One thing was clear after the accident: Alex should avoid laboratories, at least until he was older. So he set his sights on literary greatness instead. When he was 16, his father took him on a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires and then Senegal; Alex scribbled notes along the way. In 1938, his final year of high school, he published a little gem of a travel book, titled The Silver River, billed as the “diary of a schoolboy.”

  THE GLOVE

  When Alex arrived at Cambridge University, the other students stood in awe of him—a published author! He regarded himself as brilliant but ugly. A reed-thin boy in a tweed jacket, he kept his eyes caged behind glittering round glasses and wore a glove on one hand. “I didn’t like to ask him why,” said Robert Greacen, who befriended Alex during his university years. One day, when they shared a train car together, Alex removed the glove, and Greacen noticed the stump, but still didn’t dare mention it.

  The truth was, Greacen had fallen under the spell of Alex Comfort. “Even though we were the same age, he seemed like a man ten or twelve years older than me in ideas, reading and opinion.” Greacen decided that Alex was the cleverest person he’d ever met.

  Indeed. At age 22, Alex began sparring with George Orwell in the pages of Tribune; in rhyming verse, they debated whether Britain should have entered World War II. Alex sneered at the concept of a “good war” and denounced the group-think of the British. He was, already, an anarchist.

  SNAIL SHELL

  Strangely enough, for one so devoted to free thought, Alex remained a virgin throughout most of his university days. “I was a terribly learned little man. I swotted away at my books,” he said later. At Cambridge, he rarely spoke to young women—except on Sundays. Then he broke from his studies to run up the stairs of a Congregational church to join an antiwar gathering, young people in corduroys and tweeds, with bobby-pinned hair and precocious pipes. There he met Ruth Harris and her friend Jane Henderson. They seemed to be opposites: Ruth, a pale girl shrouded in a dark coat, had a submissive air about her; Jane, with an explosion of curls, liked to argue about books. Both girls pined after the boy-genius with a leather glove on his hand, but Ruth confessed her love first. Once she’d spilled out her feelings to him, Alex felt honor-bound to her.

  In 1943, they married. They commenced to fumble their way through sex acts, ineptly deflowering one another, then set up house in a tree-lined neighborhood outside London.

  Did Ruth realize what she was getting into? Raised by churchgoing Congregational parents, she aspired to be a social worker, to help the poor and then return home to tea cozies. “My mother was happier in a much more stifling, suburban atmosphere than my father,” according to their son Nick.

  Everyone knew Alex to be an eccentric visionary, and he behaved like one, making odd demands of his shy wife. One day he asked her to wear her bikini when she gardened; he wanted to be able to peer out the window and watch her bend over their rose beds in nearly nothing. Ruth complied. Soon he wanted more. After the milkman clip-clopped down their lane in a horse-drawn cart, Alex asked Ruth to go out with a shovel and collect the manure left behind, then use it to fertilize their flowers. Could she do this in her bikini? Ruth obediently climbed into her swimsuit and headed out onto the street with the shovel. Many years later, in his famous book, Alex would reveal a taste for bondage; he liked to tie women up. His garden games might have been an early attempt to experiment with fetish-play.

  Ruth regarded herself as the long-suffering wife of a great man. She tried not to complain, though the pure force of his intellect wore her out. He followed her into rooms ranting about whatever subject obsessed him at the moment—ballroom dancing, electricity, cell growth, dulcimers, cooking, pacifism, anarchism, utopia. “Holding a conversation with Dr. Comfort is rather like racing after an express train that has already puffed out of the station,” a journalist wrote later.

  For his part, Alex tried to tamp down the impulses that upset his wife, and it cost him dearly. “I suffered from a severe form of migraine and it produced an intensive depression,” he said later, of that period. In order to rein himself in, he resorted to following a well-established British trope: he became an introverted polymath, pottering from one enthusiasm to the next. His son Nick, born in 1946, remembers his father building a television from spare parts and glue-soaked Weetabix. Alex also wired up innumerable burglar alarms, which only went off when they weren’t supposed to, emitting inappropriate shrieks.

  And he wrote with blazing speed—poetry, novels, science papers, sociology. By 1950, he’d published a dozen books. A medical doctor and biologist, he became a leading authority on snails, that creature that symbolizes the slow and cautious and flabby. It seemed that the younger Alex—the boy who blew things up—had been squashed forever and replaced by a morose intellectual.

  “He seemed like a workaholic—only we didn’t have that word back them. He was puritanical,” said Greacen, who added that the only way to spend time with Alex was to find him in his lab or else tag along to antiwar meetings. The two belonged to a coalition of writers denouncing Cold War hostilities. After their meetings, the writers adjourned to a pub, to huff on pipes and jaw about books. But Comfort refused to join them. Instead of socializing, “he would jump in his car and go home,” according to Greacen. “He thought I was lazy. Once he said to me, ‘Look Bob, you shouldn’t hang around in pubs with people. You’ll get no work done.’ When I spent two or three hours with him, I’d go away absolutely tired—my head would be filled with all he said about literature and politics. I used to wonder when he slept.” Alex Comfort obsessed about poems, political rants, novels, scientific studies—always, he hurled himself into a realm of thought.

  Then, in the late 1950s, Comfort developed a new obsession, one as dangerous, in its way, as the gunpowder had been. He couldn
’t stop wondering about Jane, Ruth’s best friend from university days, now a frequent dinner guest at their house. His wife was the kind of woman who shrunk into middle age. Jane, on the other hand, blossomed at age 40. At ease in her big-boned and athletic body, she made only a token effort to keep her lipstick on straight. To hell with propriety! Her curls blew out everywhere, like springs popping from the active gears of her mind. She was as full of ideas as Alex. Instead of marrying, she’d devoted herself to books, and now she worked as a librarian at the London School of Economics. She spent all day around professors; she understood men like him.

  He had to have her.

  JOHN THOMAS

  By 1960, Alex had performed intercourse innumerable times with Ruth, yet he knew next to nothing about sex. So he and Jane studied it together. In the beginning, they snuck around behind Ruth’s back, rendezvousing at Jane’s flat, which became their laboratory.

  Jane, though sexually inexperienced, was just as eager to learn as Alex. She would try anything. She twisted herself into positions and he named them. The Viennese Oyster, the Goldfish, the X. She wanted him to take notes on each contortion, to draw diagrams. They somehow managed to snap Polaroid photos of themselves (one wonders how they hit the button on the camera) to document their favorite positions for later use. They were two intellectuals screwing in every contortion possible, using the full arsenal of their erudition to explode each other to smithereens of pleasure. In bed, they went to Cambridge University all over again, figuring out everything they could about erotic bliss, which was at that time an arcane art. Back then, four-letter words still shocked people. At the drugstore, pharmacists kept condoms under lock and key. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned for thirty years, had finally appeared in print, only to be slapped with an obscenity charge; the prosecutor in the case had asked the men in the courtroom whether this was the type of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read.” Sex was not just a private matter—it was clandestine.