Thy Neighbor's Wife (62 page)

But although Betty Dodson was aware and proud of the progress made by the women in her group, she was not so naïve to think that they were representative of American women in the 1970s, a large percentage of which still opposed the women’s Equal Rights Amendment and doubted that they could, or even wanted to, survive personally or economically outside the conventional system of marriage. Women were not as sexually spontaneous as men, Dodson conceded, but she again attributed this to the historical conditioning of the double standard; and until this tradition was altered, until more women could enjoy one-night stands and “open-ended” marriages—in which the man and woman both maintained casual sex outside the marital unit—too many women would remain largely dependent on a husband or a single lover, instead of on themselves, for sexual, economic, and emotional fulfillment. “It takes a lot of courage to be who you are in any life situation…” Betty Dodson said, and “when you get into varietal sex, you have to confront your orgastic potential on a social basis just as a man does,” which was another way of saying that varietal sex for women would be less restricted to the “meaningful relationship” and more to fun and recreation experimenting and experiencing. “To love only one person is anti-social,” Dodson said, reflecting a view expressed more than one hundred years ago by Oneida’s John Humphrey Noyes; and she added: “It’s a beautiful concept, social sex for life-affirmative pleasure instead of sex based on economics and power, buying and selling, and manipulating with your genitals.”

The problem remained, however, that there were very few safe places in America where an adventuresome woman could go to learn through experience what men had been living for centuries. There were numerous swing clubs, of course, but these tended to be surreptitious gatherings in overcrowded suburban houses with the shades pulled down, and they were frequently raided by the police following complaints by prying neighbors. Indeed, probably the only place in the nation where recreational sex could be indulged in by women in a pleasant and open environment was Sandstone Retreat; and when Betty Dodson first arrived there
during an extended visit to California, she was pleased to discover that it was exactly as it had been described to her by friends on the West Coast. The grounds were beautiful, the hilltop setting was ideally remote, and her host and hostess, John and Barbara Williamson, clearly had a marriage that epitomized equality between the sexes; it was a union of two committed people to whom adultery was not a taboo and lying was never a necessity.

Among Sandstone’s hundreds of club members there were a few familiar faces and bodies that Betty Dodson recognized from her parties in New York, and there was also among the membership her close friend and sister feminist, the anthropologist Sally Binford. Dodson made new friends, too, during her days and nights at Sandstone, one of the most interesting of them being a gray-haired English gentleman that she had first noticed one night in the downstairs “ball room.” At the time, she had been lying nude on a mat with two equally nude men, lightly engaged in a massaging threesome and pleasantly preoccupied; and yet she could not avoid being aware of the riveting attention she was receiving from a man who sat alone across the room, an owlish-looking bespectacled man who seemed unembarrassed by the fact that she was watching
him
watching her. Finally she waved to him, gesturing for him to join them; and, unhesitatingly, he got up and did so. When he arrived and sat at her side, she extended her hand in greeting and then took his hand and placed it between her legs, realizing as she did so that his hand was lacking fingers. This was Betty Dodson’s introduction to the gentleman who was then the most successful writer and observer of sex in America, Dr. Alex Comfort.

As unlikely as it might have seemed to an occasional visitor, the “ballroom” at Sandstone Retreat, in addition to presenting the mazurka of sexual cotillions, was also a place where love could be kindled and cultivated—which had been the happy experience of one of Sandstone’s most sophisticated and perspi
cacious women, Dr. Sally Binford. After three divorces, assorted affairs, some varietal after-hours cavorting near the campuses where she taught anthropology, and much recreational romping on the unhallowed grounds of Sandstone itself, Sally Binford became acquainted in the ballroom one day with a handsome and sensitive character-actor named Jeremy Slate, who had appeared in several Hollywood films and had discovered Sandstone in 1970 while dating a Los Angeles journalist who had written an article about the Williamsons.

A six-foot blondish man in his forties with blue eyes, a graceful athletic body, and an equally graceful sense of humor, Jeremy Slate had begun his acting career in 1958 on the New York stage with a substantial supporting role in the Broadway version of Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel
. His performance in that Pulitzer Prize-winning play was instrumental in getting him to Hollywood, where during the next decade he appeared in dozens of films and television shows: He costarred in the CBS-TV series “Malibu Run,” playing a scuba diver; portrayed a rocket captain in “Men in Space”; made guest appearances in such shows as “The Defenders” and “Naked City.” Slate was an outlaw in the film
True Grit
, starring John Wayne; a Canadian airman in the
Devil’s Brigade
, featuring William Holden and Cliff Robertson; and played character roles in a number of other action films, Westerns, and comedies starring such performers as Bob Hope and Elvis Presley. In 1968, after being divorced from his second wife, actress Tammy Grimes, he injured himself in a motorcycle accident while acting in a film about the Hell’s Angels; and for the next eight months, with a broken leg encased in a forty-pound cast, he lived in virtual isolation in his Laurel Canyon apartment, brooding and meditating, smoking pot and masturbating—a supporting actor unsupported for the first time in years by roles, directors, and controllable scenarios.

It was during this time that he spent long hours reading books, including the works of Wilhelm Reich; and after he was again mobile, he decided to concentrate less on the business of playing parts and more on trying to piece together his own disjointed life.
Moving into a new apartment at Venice Beach in a community of artists and hippies, he stopped scanning the Hollywood trade papers each day, avoided the actors’ bar he had once frequented, and became interested in the peace movement, the counterculture, and alternate life styles. Among the young women he was then dating was the journalist who had told him about the Williamsons and Sandstone; and with a minimum of convincing, he agreed to accompany her there, thinking that it would be fun to mingle with people in the nude. But after he had driven up the curved roads to the mountaintop, and had toured the estate with its uninhibited house, and had caught erotic glimpses of the bodies in the dim downstairs light, he felt almost vertiginous and intensely self-conscious—and impotent with his girl friend when they tried to make love.

Still, he was not discouraged from returning, for he did enjoy being nude in the outdoors; and as he gradually became better acquainted with other people, and more comfortable with himself, he reveled in the rarity of being sexually approached by Sandstone women, among them Dr. Sally Binford. Though he was attracted to her when he first saw her, and was delighted by their later lovemaking in the ballroom, the recreational sex was mainly an excuse for them to be together and to explore within their embrace the deeper intimacy that they both sensed was there. They were two people in their mid-forties who, until now, had preferred much younger lovers, using sex as an escape from the intellectual challenges and uncertainties of their lives. But after years of disenchantment with the values of their contemporaries, and seeing at times their entire generation as symbolized by materialism and racism, police dogs and napalm, they were overjoyed to discover in one another a fellow dropout from the fifties. Although Sally Binford had been more politically active than Slate in the Los Angeles antiwar movement, he soon joined her at rallies and demonstrations; and after Daniel Ellsberg’s fellow conspirator, Anthony Russo, had been arrested during the Pentagon Papers controversy, Jeremy and Sally went together to visit Russo at the federal prison on Terminal Island,
which was an hour’s drive from Sandstone, where Russo had been given a farewell bacchanal just prior to his incarceration.

It was after the Russo party, in fact, that Jeremy and Sally began living together in Venice; and since she had stopped teaching at UCLA, and he was not working as an actor, they were free to move around the country as they wished, and in 1972 they settled for months in the San Francisco Bay Area, existing financially on their savings and on Jeremy’s acting residuals and his song royalties from two country-western hits that he had written—one for Tex Ritter entitled “Just Beyond the Moon,” and another that was written with Glenn Campbell and appeared on the subside of Campbell’s popular “Galveston” record; it was called: “How Come Every Time I Itch, I Wind Up Scratching You?”

Later in 1972, Jeremy and Sally moved temporarily to Vermont, where during the next nine months Sally taught courses in anthropology and women’s studies at the progressive, freethinking Goddard College, and Jeremy conducted a male consciousness-raising seminar in which he disseminated Sandstone’s equal-rights sex doctrine, getting a positive reaction from many men who shared his view that the elimination of the double standard would be liberating for men as well as women. On weekends, Jeremy and Sally occasionally visited couples in New England or New York who had been to Sandstone, and who enjoyed sharing their beds with socially compatible house guests; and it was only a matter of time, Jeremy thought, before ersatz versions of Sandstone’s ballroom would go public—an event that would indeed begin to happen years later with the opening of Plato’s Retreat in Manhattan and similar clothes-optional recreational centers for couples in other cities.

In the fall of 1973, after Sally Binford had purchased an elaborate motor home, she and Jeremy headed back to California via Canada, stopping for a few days near the Glacier National Park in Montana to visit the recently arrived John and Barbara Williamson, who had just optioned about two hundred acres of land in a community called White Fish, hoping to create another
Sandstone in a more spacious setting than their fifteen acres atop Topanga Canyon that had suddenly seemed very confining. In recent months, along the adjacent hills of the canyon within sight of Sandstone, a number of new homes were being built, intruding upon what had once been an uninterrupted view of trees and mountainsides extending down to the misty edge of the Pacific. And after years of being at the center of an often intense group marriage—and simultaneously trying to operate a couples club in which new members constantly had to be guided and reassured through their traumatic introductions to open sexuality—the Williamsons felt emotionally exhausted and claustrophobic, in need of a reprieve from other people’s intimacies. While waiting for a successor to buy and carry on the work in Topanga Canyon, the Williamsons had brought with them to Montana a select few from Sandstone; and though many people in Los Angeles had expressed an interest in taking over the canyon property, it was not until 1974 that a marriage counselor and Gestalt therapist named Paul Paige had acquired enough capital and bank loans to buy Sandstone and to reopen the couples club that in the interim months had been inactive.

Paul Paige, who at thirty-four was eight years younger than John Williamson, and had graduated with a master’s degree in social work from UCLA, was a six-foot, trimly muscular former United States Marine with blue eyes and neatly trimmed dark hair; and while he was soft-spoken and exuded the poised manner of a professional counselor, he nonetheless gave the impression that there was simmering within him much restless energy and conflict that he was trying with some difficulty to control. He smoked excessively, and the articulate flow of his speech was sometimes marred by a slight stutter. Except for his interest in sex, and his belief that much of world history had been influenced by the demons dwelling in human erotic nature, Paul Paige had little in common with John Williamson, whose slumberous style he typified and whose portly, potbellied body he saw as consistent with the sloppy manner in which Williamson had kept the business records at Sandstone. Paige was a man
striving for order, discipline, and good management; and he saw no reason why these traits could not blend in with whatever utopian principles Sandstone presumed to represent.

Having been a frequent visitor and dues-paying member of Sandstone since early 1972, Paige had a sense of its failings long before he bought the place. The building and landscaping were not receiving the fastidious maintenance that was required; the approach roads had become cracked and bumpy, and John Williamson appeared to have lost his enthusiasm as the resident guru. Instead of mixing with the crowds in the main house before dinner, Williamson often took his meals in the motor home that he parked on Sandstone’s highest peak, or he sat alone in the living room reading a book near the fireplace; or, if he deigned to converse with anyone in the living room, it was usually with one of the few people he looked upon as a peer, such as the columnist Max Lerner, or Dr. Comfort, or Dr. Ralph D. Yaney, a Beverly Hills psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who had long been a habitué of Sandstone.

Although Sandstone had received much publicity in newspapers and magazines in 1972, the Sandstone management had lacked the imagination and energy to take advantage of this by recruiting large numbers of new members; and it was no secret among the Sandstone regulars that Wiffiamson had lost considerable money in the past year—which Paul Paige attributed not only to Williamson’s listless leadership but also to the fact that he had kept the annual membership dues down to $240 per couple, a figure that Paige quickly doubled after he had purchased the property and had begun to make improvements. Among other things, Paige ordered that the main house be repainted and redecorated, that the sun deck be enlarged, and a Jacuzzi be installed on the front lawn. The surrounding grounds were restored, the roads were repaired, and the guest houses were remodeled. He advertised Sandstone in the press and made himself available for television interviews (which the camera-shy Williamson had avoided); and joined by his piquant, raven-haired lady friend, Theresa Breedlove, who lived with him at Sandstone, Paul Paige
warmly greeted the arriving guests and members in the living room and was a decisive factor in Sandstone’s successful revitalization.