Thy Neighbor's Wife (45 page)

The effect of pornography on such men did not, as some alarmists insisted, drive them madly into the streets to rape or provoke them into breaking up their homes and abandoning their families. Instead, if it stimulated them at all, it might lead to private acts of masturbation; or, if the individual had a receptive wife or mistress or girl friend, it might add impetus to the desire to make love. But criminal behavior did not result from exposure to pornography, the report reiterated, and for this reason the Lockhart majority advocated that the United States Government—which annually invested many millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to harass and prosecute the pornographers, with questionable results—should now abolish all laws that sought to deprive adults of the right to see or read any and all so-called obscene materials.

Charles Keating was alarmed by this suggestion, and, after warning Nixon’s office about what was forthcoming from Lockhart, he filed a suit in the federal district court in Washington that temporarily stalled the commission’s plans to proceed with the publication of its report. After the judge had granted Keating a restraining order, Keating rallied his people in the CDL to write letters and send telegrams to Washington urging a “prompt and full Congressional investigation of the Commission.” Of the
eighteen members, only Keating and three others were totally opposed to the report that had been drafted by Lockhart’s staff. Keating’s fellow dissenters were Father Morton Hill, Rev. Winfred Link, and the California attorney general, Thomas C. Lynch. Father Hill was as angered as Keating was by the report; and the Hill-Link dissenting response began with the statement: “The Commission’s majority report is a Magna Carta for the pornographer.”

Soon, many important people had joined Keating’s protest. Among them were Vice-President Spiro Agnew, the United States Postmaster General, the leaders of both parties in the Senate, and the head of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Attorney General John Mitchell asserted: “If we want a society in which the noble side of man is encouraged and mankind is elevated, then I submit pornography is surely harmful.” Finally, after verifying that the report was as unpunitive as Keating had claimed it was, President Nixon declared in a public statement that he would “totally reject” the recommendations of the commission, which he accused of having performed a “disservice” to the nation. “So long as I am in the White House,” he added, “there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life…. The Commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting, harmful threat on man’s character…. Centuries of civilization and ten minutes of common sense tell us other wise…. American morality is not to be trifled with.”

Had it been in Nixon’s power to shred the report he might have done so, but the commission was operating under a congressional act requiring that it submit in writing its findings and recommendations; and so after a ten-day delay due to Keating’s injunction, the commission report was revived and processed through to the government printers with the proviso that Keating would be allowed to publish a separate report that would reflect
his
views on the question of pornography.

The Keating report was a 175-page document that condemned Lockhart and his research methods, characterized the commis
sion fact finders as a mixture of naïve “Ivory Tower” academicians and young “green graduates,” and reprinted police records and the opinions of commentators that cited sexual immorality and pornography as the most acute problem confronting modern America. Keating quoted Arnold Toynbee’s view that the most progressive culture is the one that postpones the sexual experience of its young adults, and Keating added Bruno Bettelheim’s observation: “If a society does not taboo sex, children will grow up in relative sex freedom…but so far history has shown that such a society cannot create culture or civilization; it remains primitive.” Keating also included a paragraph that Alexis de Toqueville had written after visiting America between 1835 and 1840: “I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and ample rivers—and it was not there; in her fertile lands and boundless prairies—and it was not there. Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good—and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

The controversy generated by Keating’s report kept the story of the commission’s findings in the newspapers for several days; and just when it appeared to be subsiding, another event occurred that would compound the conflict. In November 1970 there was produced in California an unauthorized illustrated edition of the Presidential Report, a large, glossy, $12.50 paperback that contained on its 352 pages not only a full text of the commission’s project and Keating’s rejoinder, but graphic depictions of the subject matter—photographs and drawings of copulating couples, groups involved in orgies, females masturbating men, men vibrating women, homosexuals engaged in sodomy, lesbians in cunnilingus, medieval nuns fornicating with candles, ancient oriental prints of elaborate debauchery, concupiscent cartoons of popular comic-book characters, salacious engravings by Pablo Picasso, leather-clad high-heeled females flailing manacled men,
interracial Bacchanalias, spread shots of vaginas, and a red-haired woman caressing with her tongue the penis of a horse. No fewer than 546 illustrations of every imaginable type were included in the book, and their use was justified by the publisher on the grounds that this was specifically the sort of material that the commission members had scrutinized and evaluated prior to completing their report.

In addition to publishing a first edition of 100,000 copies and delivering them to “adult” bookshops around the country, the California firm also mailed out more than 55,000 advertising brochures that contained selected pictures from the book, told readers how they could order copies of the illustrated edition, and also carried a statement denouncing President Nixon for having rejected the commission’s recommendations. “Thanks a lot, Mr. President,” read the headline on the brochure, and the text underneath continued: “A monumental work of research and investigation has now become a giant of a book. All the facts, all the statistics, presented in the best possible format…and…completely illustrated in black and white and full color. Every facet of the most controversial report ever issued is covered in detail. This book is a
must
for the research shelves of every library, public or private, seriously concerned with full intellectual freedom and adult selection. Millions of dollars in public funds were expended to determine the
precise truth
about eroticism in the United States today, yet every possible attempt to suppress this information was made from the very highest levels. Even the President dismissed the facts, out of hand. The attempt to suppress this volume is an inexcusable insult directed at every adult in this country. Each individual
must
be allowed to make his own decision; the facts are inescapable. Many adults,
many of them
, will do just that after reading this Report. In a truly free society, a book like this wouldn’t even be necessary.”

Predictably, a copy of the illustrated report was soon in the hands of FBI agents, who dispatched it to J. Edgar Hoover’s office in Washington—where the director, after expressing rage and wonderment that such a book could exist, called it to the at
tention of the President. Nixon had already seen it, having been sent a copy days earlier by the irate Keating, who had been alerted about the book by Raymond Gauer, who had noticed it while browsing through a sex shop in Los Angeles and had purchased several copies. Nixon was aghast at what he saw, and soon federal prosecutors and agents were discussing the legal strategy that might most effectively punish the publisher, a feisty fifty-year-old named William Hamling about whom they already knew a great deal.

William Hamling had been cited in obscenity cases earlier during the last decade in San Diego, where his firm had made millions through the sale of racy paperbacks and magazines, radical political treatises, science fiction novels, general nonfiction, best sellers like Henry Miller’s
The Rosy Crucifixion
, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s
Candy
, and work by De Sade, Alberto Moravia, and Lenny Bruce. It was Hamling who, as a onetime client of Abe Fortas’ law firm, had been quoted by the FBI as allegedly saying he was beyond federal conviction—the memo that had been referred to by Gauer and Clancy in 1968 while they were lobbying in the Senate building against the nomination of Fortas as Chief Justice.

Much of what the government knew about Hamling had in fact been published in the CDL newspaper by Gauer, who had assembled from court records a case history of Hamling’s litigious career; and Gauer would later learn much more about Hamling when, in a San Diego television studio where Gauer was to participate in a talk show, he met William Hamling for the first time face to face. Although Gauer was prepared to loathe him on sight, he was oddly disarmed by Hamling in the several minutes they spent backstage in casual conversation, waiting for the show to begin. In manner and appearance, Hamling and Gauer were not unalike: They were both middle-aged, gray-haired men wearing nearly the same conservative suit and tie; they were both natives of Chicago, the products of a strict Catholic upbringing;
and as they continued to talk, Gauer discovered that they had practically been moving in one another’s shadow throughout their lives.

Each had been born in the summer of 1921 in the same North Side neighborhood, each had served Mass as altar boys; they had played ball in the same sandlots, had attended neighboring high schools. Hamling and Gauer had both left Chicago for the first time to serve in the military, and after the war each had returned to marry young Chicago women with whom they would raise large families. After a number of oppressively cold Chicago winters, each would move with their families to Southern California, where in time each would establish his identity on opposite sides of the issue of erotica. And now in a television studio in San Diego, as they were introduced to an audience as adversaries in the debate, Gauer felt a reluctant kinship with Hamling, and he was initially in no mood for quarreling and fretting.

But after Gauer in his opening statement had referred condescendingly to the thriving business of tainted literature, Hamling became hostile, defensive—a tender spot had been touched, and the two men were quickly involved in an acrimonious exchange. Hamling insisted that he had the right to personally possess and to professionally publish girlie magazines and sex books, while Gauer challenged that right and argued that such tempting material should be prohibited to adults and adolescents alike because it was socially reprehensible and morally dangerous. For nearly an hour the men confronted one another in a dialogue characterized by interruptions and scorched emotions; and the animosity that the program inspired continued to be felt by the men even when the show was over. After the cameras had stopped and the overhead lights were lowered, Gauer and Hamling shook hands with the moderator and then coolly turned away from one another, leaving the studio with little more than a formal good night.

Gauer wondered afterward what it was, considering all they had in common, that made the two of them so different on this one issue; and he could only conclude that somewhere between
the altar of a Chicago church and the bench of a federal courtroom, Hamling had lost touch with the spirit of his religion.

Had Gauer been able to talk more to Hamling, he might have confirmed his assumption, for William Hamling had indeed lost his faith after leaving Chicago and joining the Army in the 1940s; although Hamling might well have argued that it was the
Church
that had lost faith in that it had deviated from many of its traditions during the war, becoming more mundane, less ascetic, less spiritual, and therefore less worthy of the awe and devotion that he had once bestowed upon it.

As a younger man who had contemplated the priesthood, Hamling had felt ennobled within the confines of the Church, secure in its rigid rules and regulations, humbled by the certainty with which it identified and punished sin. Restrictive as it was, Catholicism at least represented a clear position on all human issues, it seemed absolute and omniscient, and a parishioner wishing to achieve eternal salvation was
not
required to find his own way in a world clouded with confusion and alternatives—he had only to follow faithfully the clearly marked path charted by the Church.

But in the Army, Hamling’s perspective changed; it was there that he saw the Church, in deference to the war, becoming less celestial, more nationalistic and permissive. Sins that had been called sins for centuries were suddenly no longer condemned as such by the Church. Catholic soldiers could eat meat on Fridays, could miss Mass, could avoid the weekly exhortations of their confessors. Bishops blessed bombers; the officers of the Church were allied with the generals—indeed, the generals outranked the clergymen who, frocked in the drab khaki clothing of chaplains, saluted the stars; and when tons of pinup magazines were transported by the military up to the front as substitute stimulants for the womanless warriors, the Church, once so strict and censorial, was silent, and in its silence was complicitous.

While such ecclesiastical concessions were no doubt unavoidable given the disruptive circumstances that the war imposed on almost every level of social and family life, Hamling nevertheless
believed that the wartime secularization of the Church did undermine the religious fervor of numerous Catholic G.I.s like himself; and after he was discharged and had returned to civilian life in Chicago, he was no longer dominated by his early conditioning, his narrow view of sin, his guilt about unsanctified sex.

In time Hamling found himself working as an editor in a publishing company that distributed a variety of monthly magazines, among them a pinup-adventure magazine called
Modern Man
and a nudist periodical,
Modern Sunbathing & Hygiene
, which printed airbrushed photographs. Handing’s boss, who owned all the publications, was named George von Rosen; and one of the first employees to befriend Hamling was Von Rosen’s young promotion director, Hugh Hefner. Though Hefner was more than four years younger than Hamling, he was far more certain about what he wished to achieve in life, and he had already decided to soon quit Von Rosen’s firm and risk his talent and luck on a magazine of his own invention. When Hefner described to Hamling the type of magazine that he had in mind, hoping to entice Hamling as an investor, Hamling listened with interest but he finally concluded that, despite the liberalizing effect of returning veterans on postwar society, not enough men were yet ready to financially support on a national scale such a sexually bold publication as Hefner envisioned.