Thy Neighbor's Wife (67 page)

• The 2008 acknowledgment of infidelity by Democratic presidential aspirant and former senator from North Carolina John Edwards, who had an affair with a female campaign worker.
  
• The 2008 exit from office of the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, a self-promoting family-values man and ardent campaigner against vice, who was revealed to be a frequent patron of a call-girl service that advertised on the Internet.
  
• The admission by Spitzer’s political successor, David A. Paterson, who voluntarily informed the press that in years past he had been unfaithful to his wife—while she, too, as she conceded in a separate interview, had been unfaithful to him.
  
• In 2008 the gay boyfriend of New Jersey’s former Governor Jim McGreevey told the press that he and the governor (who resigned in 2004) participated in threesomes with the governor’s wife (now estranged). Although she denied it, the ex-governor did not.
  
• In 2007, Senator Larry Craig (Republican, Idaho)—a longtime married man and strong proponent of family values—was accused by eight gay men of having sexual encounters with them. He vehemently denied this shortly after he had been arrested for lewd conduct in the men’s bathroom at the Minneapolis—St. Paul International Airport. In 1989, when it seemed that Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank might be expelled or censured from office because of his dealings with a male prostitute, Senator Craig had been among those calling for Mr. Frank’s ouster. The latter survived the scandal and remains a strong voice in Congress.
  

More than a quarter of a century ago, as I was finishing
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, I wrote in the final chapter: “…despite the social and scientific changes relevant to the Sexual Revolution—the Pill, abortion reform, and the legal restraints against censorship—there were millions of Americans whose favorite book remained the Bible, whose marriages were unadulterous, whose daughters in college were still virgins…and though the national divorce rate was higher than ever, so was the rate of remarriage.”

Today, I believe that this remains fundamentally true. And yet I believe as well that what Richard Stengel wrote in
Time
magazine in 1986 is true: “Americans have always wanted it both ways.” And so what I am suggesting, essentially, is that contrary to publicized opinion garnered by poll-takers, I doubt that the America of the twenty-first century—with all due respect for the trepidation and fear over AIDS—is subjecting itself to a New Puritanism that is curbing the temptations and prerogatives that seemed so shocking when they went public in the ’60s and ’70s. More true, I think, is that what was defined as novel in those days has become so integrated into the mainstream that it remains “new” only to those news editors who are new to their jobs—or who are so guided by the daily pressures of their profession that they’re driven to pinpoint as “trends” aspects of personal behavior that have long been the practice of people in private.

And so, in one sense,
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
is about the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. It is about the men and women who personified that revolution. It is specific to certain people and certain places. But in another sense the information is timeless and placeless. For what can it tell about temptations and tempests between men and women that has not been told before, and lived before, in eons going back to the Dark Ages and companionship in caves? Since men and women first comingled, there has been an ongoing conflict between the sexes, an eternal love-hate relationship that predates the Babel over languages; for men and women have always spoken and understood separate languages. These languages are beyond translation and interpretation—whether spoken in a law office once
occupied by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his ex-colleague and accuser, Anita Hill, or spoken in a garden occupied by Adam and Eve.

And so there is nothing new in
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
.

Nor is there anything old.

—Gay Talese
2009

(Presented in the order of appearance in the book)

C
HAPTER
1

Harold Rubin, the Chicago-born teenager who had a masturbatory love affair during the 1950s with photographic images of a young nude figure model in Los Angeles named Diane Webber—who later inspired him to open a Chicago massage parlor serviced by balm-palmed masseuses who were regularly arrested in police raids—died in Chicago of natural causes in January 2007. Mr. Rubin was sixty-seven. Divorced from his only wife, he is survived by a son, Jules Rubin, who was quoted as saying in the
Chicago Tribune
’s obituary that his late father had lived and died believing that the U.S. Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to having access to pornography.

C
HAPTER
2

Diane Webber, whose ambition as a nudist was certainly
not
to become one of the nation’s premier dream goddesses for masturbating men, rather naively believed that while posing nude for art photographers in the 1950s she was viewed and appreciated solely as an exemplar of bodily art that was far removed from the lust it aroused in such unqualified appraisers of art photography as young Harold Rubin of Chicago. Now in her mid-seventies, she continues to reside in Los Angeles, often in the nude.

C
HAPTER
3

Hugh Hefner, who dwells in the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles and who in 1955 selected Diane Webber to appear as a Playmate in the May issue of his magazine, is now eighty-two. When I last visited him in April 2008 he was contentedly sharing his vast residential quarters with three buxom blondes who also join him as regular guests on his popular television series called
The Girls Next Door
. Despite his age and extracurricular preoccupations he steadfastly retains final authority over the editorial content of the magazine he launched in 1953.

C
HAPTER
4

Anthony Comstock, who gained prominence more than a century ago as the nation’s leading petitioner against the sale and distribution of erotic pictures and publications, was such an uncontrollable masturbator as a teenager in Connecticut that he saw no solution to his problem other than to remove from the nation’s newsstands and postal system anything that might prompt him into a state of tumescence. He gradually became a control freak and vigilant censor who attained the power to imprison most of the publishers and freethinkers who opposed his restrictive policies. One who stood up to him, and landed in jail, was the underground publisher D. M. Bennett.

In 2006, Prometheus Books of Amherst, New York, released a biography of Bennett—
D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker
, by Roderick Bradford.

Books about Comstock (who died in 1915) include:
Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America
, by Nicola Beisel (Princeton University Press, 1997), and
Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career
, by Anna Louise Bates (University Press of America, 1995).

C
HAPTER
5

Hugh Hefner’s early years as a married man and
Playboy
editor are discussed in this chapter. He married for the first time in
1949 a fellow Northwestern student from Chicago named Mildred Williams. In 1952 the couple had their first child, Christie. The couple’s second child, David, was born in 1955, but their ten-year marriage would be terminated in 1959. While Mildred would soon discover her second husband in the attorney who helped with her settlement, Hugh would remain a bachelor for the next three decades, although he had sustained relationships with such Playmates as Barbi Benton and Karen Christy (both described in Chapter 24 of this book). But in 1989 he married a Playmate named Kimberley Conrad and sired two sons—Marston Hefner, born in 1990, and Cooper Hefner, born in 1991. Even though Kimberley and Hugh Hefner separated in 1999 she continues to live with their boys in separate quarters on the mansion’s property.

Since Hefner’s breakup with Kimberley—to whom he said he was faithful during their decade of marriage—his roommates have rotated with such frequency that it is difficult to identify any one of them as the First Lady of the Mansion. Among the triad currently claiming his affections is a singularly outspoken twenty-eight-year-old Playmate named Holly Madison, who in February 2008 told a reporter from
Us
magazine that she and Hefner were trying to have a baby. Mr. Hefner would not comment.

C
HAPTER
6

Samuel Roth, an erudite pornographer with an unerring sense of literary merit but with a predilection for the penitentiary because of his reckless disregard for obscenity laws, died in New York in 1974 at the age of eighty. He spent a fifth of his adult life in jail for publishing dozens of books and magazines containing sexually explicit material, among them such novels as
Ulysses
in the 1920s and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
in the 1930s, both sold underground without the permission of the authors. In 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed an earlier conviction against Roth but did so in language that liberalized the definition of obscenity. As a consequence much that had been previously forbidden
was now made available to the public in libraries and on the shelves in bookstores.

A biography about Samuel Roth is currently being written by Jay A. Gertzman, an emeritus professor of English at Mansfield University in Mansfield, Pennsylvania.

C
HAPTER
7

Barney Rosset, the avant-garde publisher of Grove Press, in 1959 capitalized on the Supreme Court’s newly liberalized (Roth-inspired) obscenity ruling by publishing (legally for the first time) such works as D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
, and other sensuous novels and films that would be distributed by Grove Press from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

In November 2008, at the age of eighty-six, Barney Rosset received the Literarian Award at the fifty-ninth annual National Book Foundation dinner in New York in recognition of his career in the forefront of literary freedom. Earlier in 2008 he was similarly honored at an event sponsored by the National Coalition Against Censorship. He recently completed an autobiography scheduled for publication in 2009 by Algonquin Books.

C
HAPTER
8

John Bullaro, an insurance executive in Los Angeles whose adulterous affair with a female colleague during the 1960s is not only recounted in Chapter 8 but serves as a reference point through most of the remaining chapters of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, is now seventy-six years old and long retired from the insurance business. He lives with his second wife, Cynthia, in northern California. He does, however, maintain friendly relations with his first wife, Judy, whom he regularly visits in Los Angeles as part of family reunions usually involving their son, now forty-four, and their forty-two-year-old daughter. John Bullaro has long been out of touch with his onetime inamorata, Barbara Williamson.

C
HAPTER
9

Barbara Williamson, whose forty-five years of nonpossessive marital love with John Williamson has never in the least been affected by her intimacies with John Bullaro nor her many other lovers, has traveled extensively around the United States with her husband since they sold their free-love Sandstone community in Los Angeles in 1973. In recent years they have settled down in Fallen, Nevada, where they preside over a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of their many resident cats, which range in size from tabbies to tigers. Their organization is called Tiger Touch.

C
HAPTER
10

John Williamson is now seventy-six years old. On occasions when it might afford him opportunities to promote projects he cares about, he will grant interviews to the press and appear on television. During the spring of 2008 he agreed to be a guest on a four-part documentary called
Sex: The Revolution
, produced by Perry Films of New York (www.perryfilms.com). In January 2009, he and his wife, Barbara, established a new Web site, SandstoneCommunity.com, as an information center for the principles that the Williamsons and many of their followers have in common.

C
HAPTER
11

John Williamson’s boyhood in Alabama, and his pre-Sandstone years when he served as a space engineer in Florida and elsewhere, are referred to in this chapter, but there is little to add.

C
HAPTER
12

The Masters and Johnson’s sexual research clinic is mentioned in this chapter in the context that it was partly what John Williamson had in mind as a model when he contemplated starting Sandstone.

A new book about Masters and Johnson will be published by Basic Books in 2009. It is called
Masters of Sex
and is written
by Thomas Maier. It discloses that Dr. William Masters, after twenty-one years of marriage to Virginia Johnson, stunned her on Christmas Day in 1992 by requesting a divorce. At the age of seventy-eight he had fallen in love with a seventy-five-year-old woman he had briefly known a half century earlier. He married her in 1993. In 2001 he died of Parkinson’s disease complications at the age of eighty-five in a Tucson hospice. Virginia Johnson, who is now eighty-three and has not remarried, lives alone in an apartment in St. Louis. The once-famous Masters and Johnson clinic died with their marriage and other factors mentioned by Thomas Maier in his forthcoming book. He writes:

“The medicalization of sex, introduced by Masters and Johnson with their anatomical discoveries and clinical descriptions, soon entered a new realm of drug-induced orgasms fostered by America’s pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma, previously on the fringes of psychosexual research, reaped a fortune from Viagra and other highly marketed methods for solving erectile dysfunction. Pfizer, the company that put Viagra on the market in 1998, was earning $1.3 billion annually by decade’s end from the little blue pills.”

Mr. Maier goes on to explain that the Masters and Johnson “medical-oriented approach—with its seemingly miraculous 80 percent cure rates—was now supplanted by more surefire solutions in a bottle.”

C
HAPTER
13

Sandstone’s founding couples—John and Barbara Williamson, John and Judy Bullaro, Oralia Leal and David Schwind, and other couples who joined them as extended family members in the early 1970s—are now distantly scattered across the United States. But one Sandstone member who in those days helped John Williamson to manage the property—Martin Zitter, currently residing in Pasadena—has taken it upon himself to serve as a kind of alumni director for Sandstoners. More than anyone else he knows how to track down former members. He is also writing a screenplay about his own experiences at Sandstone.

C
HAPTER
14

Judy Bullaro, whose relationship at Sandstone led to the breakup of her marriage to John Bullaro in the early 1970s, is now seventy-three. After living in Los Angeles as a divorcee for decades, she is currently dating a man she plans to marry.

C
HAPTER
15

Al Goldstein’s career as the founder of
Screw
magazine in the early 1970s is recounted in this chapter. He and his periodical prospered for several years, but then a combination of factors—his ill health, his costly divorces, his reckless spending and mismanagement—led him into bankruptcy. In 2007 it was reported in the
New York Post
that he had defaulted on a loan of nearly fifty thousand dollars from the family of one of his ex-wives. Al Goldstein, then seventy-one years old, was also homeless.

C
HAPTER
16

This chapter describes the proliferation of massage parlors in the early 1970s, and how they called attention to themselves by placing advertisements in such papers as
Screw
. But now massage parlors advertise on the Internet, which of course has contributed to the economic decline and disappearance of
Screw
and other sex-trade periodicals that thrived in the ’70s.

C
HAPTER
17

The mate-swapping referred to in this chapter was certainly not restricted to Sandstone during the ’70s. Swing clubs existed throughout the nation, and, like the massage parlors referred to in the paragraph above, they advertised their activities in sex-oriented periodicals. But now the swingers, too, are using the Internet; and, according to one researching writer, swinging is more prevalent than ever. The writer, Jeff Schult, who lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, said that he is now writing a book about “cybercourting”. He also told me that in Ocean City, New Jersey—my native community of seven thousand households that was founded a century ago by Methodist ministers and where
the sale of alcoholic beverages is outlawed to this day—there are twenty couples who are members of Adultfriendfinder.com and fourteen more who are members of Swinglifestyle.com.

C
HAPTER
18

John Humphrey Noyes and his mid-nineteenth-century polygamous community located in Oneida, New York, is given considerable attention in this chapter. It seems to me that the activities practiced by Noyes and his followers in those days were similar to those occurring at the polygamist community in West Texas that was raided by the police in April 2008. More than four hundred community children were seized by state authorities who said they were following up on a telephone call allegedly made by a sixteen-year-old girl complaining about the behavior of her forty-nine-year-old husband. The police did not locate the girl nor did they identify who had reportedly called in to complain.

C
HAPTER
19

The fifteen-acre Sandstone estate—its main buildings located at a height of 1,700 feet in the Malibu Mountains—looks today pretty much as it did when John and Barbara Williamson operated their community there in the ’70s. It is currently owned and used as a homestead by a Santa Monica family that made its fortune in land development.