Thy Neighbor's Wife (7 page)
In 1941
Life
published perhaps the most famous pinup picture of the war years, that of Rita Hayworth in a lacy satin slip kneeling on a bed; her stilted but oddly sensual pose—unrivaled in popularity except for a studio publicity photo of the rear view of Betty Grable in a tight-fitting bathing suit—was later reported to
have been attached to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Life
’s photograph in 1943 of a smiling blond model, Chili Williams, whose polka-dot swimsuit seemed to be tucked inward at the crotch, received 100,000 “feverish” letters, according to the magazine, as well as a screen test for Chili Williams that led to small parts in Hollywood.
While some publishers thought that the pinup craze would subside after the troops had returned home, George von Rosen believed that these filaments of fantasy had permanently infiltrated the erotic consciousness of the returning veteran; and during the postwar years he circulated assorted magazines that emphasized what he considered three essential elements—guns, guts, and girls. The laws at this time regarding girlie photographs were not clearly defined, pending the final outcome of such lengthy litigation as that fomented by church groups and postal authorities against
Sunshine & Health
magazine, which persisted in selling on newsstands and sending through the mail its monthly editions containing unretouched nude photographs. Total nudity was lewdity, the Post Office claimed, but members of nudist associations which supported
Sunshine & Health
, and saw themselves as cultists and not pornographers, believed that the First Amendment guaranteed their right to accurately portray the nudist movement, including its pubic hair, in their official magazine.
Similar rights were claimed by unofficial nudist magazines, one of which—
Modern Sunbathing & Hygiene
—was published by George von Rosen. While he obeyed the postal policies banning pubic hair, he featured breasts and nipples almost exclusively on the young bodies of buxom women, some of whom violated nudist tradition by posing alone indoors, far from the bucolic family gatherings celebrated in
Sunshine & Health
—thus lending credibility to the rumor that when Von Rosen was unable to find attractive photos of legitimate nudists, he was not averse to using strippers.
Women who could easily have passed for strippers appeared regularly in Von Rosen’s
Art Photography
magazine, but, as if to
assure the censors of their lofty purpose, they stood nude in statuelike repose, muted as the undraped marble maidens of classical sculpture, their expressionless faces and innocuous eyes avoiding direct contact with the potentially lustful lens of the camera.
Such delicacy was neither expected nor desired by Von Rosen in his more flamboyant girlie magazines because, inasmuch as the models wore some semblance of clothing, he felt that they deserved concomitant freedom of expression, such as the option to wink at the camera, to leer, swing their hips, and smile with their mouths open.
The most successful of his girlie magazines was started in 1951, not long before Hugh Hefner had joined his staff. It was called
Modern Man
, and its first cover girl was actress Jane Russell smiling as she sat on a rail fence, wearing frayed shorts, a tight-fitting jersey, and leather boots. While the pictorial focus of
Modern Man
was voyeuristic, Von Rosen saw himself not as a salacious man but a businessman now bringing to a market craving photogenic females the same detached efficiency that had characterized his career when he was selling
Etude
to piano students and
The Expositor
and
Homiletic Review
to preachers. His initial editorial problem with
Modern Man
was not in determining what men wanted to see but rather what men wished to read, if anything. At the same time he had to attempt to appease the censors by providing in his magazine editorial matter of hopefully redeeming social value to counterbalance the breasts and buttocks that so fulsomely filled his pages.
Deciding to refrain from publishing any word or idea bordering on the pornographic or politically controversial, the editorial content of
Modern Man
became similar to what might have been acceptable in the essentially asexual outdoor men’s magazines such as
True
and
Argosy
. In the first issue of
Modern Man
there was an article on the lure of mountain climbing, an interview with actor Dana Andrews on his boat with advice on how to sail, a feature on such stylish custom-made cars as the 1913 Jaguar, a photo essay on Paris’ Place Pigalle, a shopping guide for collectors of classic guns. The reader response to this last item, and to
subsequent articles on gun collecting and hunting, prompted Von Rosen to eventually start other magazines devoted entirely to these subjects. If there was anything innovative in
Modern Man
, it was perhaps Von Rosen’s decision to print in this one magazine both the photographs of jovial seminude pinups and the solemn totally nude art models, a combination that would later be imitated by Hefner in
Playboy
.
Wishing to present the most respectable examples of art nude photography, Von Rosen spent thousands of dollars during the first year of
Modern Man
to buy the work of a distinguished Hungarian named Andre de Dienes, who in the 1930s had specialized in photographing European art and sculpture exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre and other great museums. Many of De Dienes’ photographs of classical nude sculpture had appeared in
Esquire
before the war, but at the time Von Rosen was starting
Modern Man
the editors of
Esquire
were deemphasizing the titillation that had tinged their magazine since its inception in 1933. Not only did the
Esquire
editors think that girlie magazines would soon become anachronistic in postwar America, as so many veterans advanced educationally through the G.I. Bill, but the magazine had also become weary of defending its rakish image in the courtroom. Though it had won the major obscenity case brought against it by Postmaster General Frank Walker, a prominent Catholic and Democratic National Committee chairman, the litigation had been costly and time-consuming for the magazine, lasting from 1942 to 1946.
Even before this, the
Esquire
management had been intimidated by members of the Church: In an article in one of
Esquire
’s subsidiary magazines,
Ken
, there had been unflattering references to the Catholic Church’s support of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and as a result of the article, written by Ernest Hemingway, the Catholic hierarchy encouraged priests in their Sunday sermons to denounce
Esquire
’s publications, and soon there was extensive boycotting at the newsstands of
Esquire, Coronet
, and particularly
Ken
, which hastened the latter’s discontinuance. And so in 1951 the nude photography of Andre
de Dienes appeared not in
Esquire
but in
Modern Man
, and the most daring publisher in America at this time was undoubtedly George von Rosen, a position he held until Hefner would surpass him after 1953 with
Playboy
.
Hefner and Von Rosen were in some ways similar. Both had been reared in puritanical homes in the Midwest and were the sons of fathers who were accountants of German-American ancestry; and both were orderly, ambitious, and self-absorbed. Von Rosen, eleven years older than Hefner, was a lean, lively, green-eyed man with the taut tidy features of a naval commander, and he controlled his magazines like a fleet of vessels. He demanded strict punctuality from his subordinates, cleanliness in their cubicles, and formality in their dealings with him. The ambience within the company was almost sterile, and the conservative midwestern men and women that he employed were emotionally detached from the nude photographs and layouts that they handled—as was Von Rosen himself, being in this sense quite different from Hugh Hefner. To Von Rosen, the magazines represented an efficient, profitable operation; to Hefner, magazines were a personal passion.
If this distinction was not so apparent to Von Rosen, it was because he did not really know Hefner well during their time together, and what Von Rosen did know left him unimpressed. He considered Hefner’s cartoons mediocre, refusing to publish even one of them in his magazines, and he was mildly shocked one day when Hefner arrived at the office carrying a package and announcing that it contained an excellent pornographic movie. Hefner’s amiable offer to screen it for the staff was peremptorily refused by Von Rosen, who had no desire to see such a film himself and was irritated that Hefner would suggest showing it on company time. Although Hefner performed adequately in the promotion department, he somehow conveyed the impression that he was engaged in several outside interests and adventures, and that his destiny would never be determined by a single employer. This attitude was not gratifying to George von Rosen. Had Von Rosen known the full extent of Hefner’s preoccu
pations, he would have been more bewildered than perturbed, and possibly convinced that there was something about Hefner that was sexually bizarre.
At this time Mildred Hefner was pregnant, and they had finally moved out of his parents’ home into a charming apartment in the Hyde Park section of Chicago; but Hefner was still unsatisfactorily married and was having an affair with a nurse with whom he would soon make a sex movie. This film, which would be shot in the apartment of a male friend and collaborator of Hefner’s, was a private venture that he did strictly for the fun and experience of doing it, having no illusions that he would ever become a professional maker of films, even sex films. However, he did believe that his future career would somehow be related to sex, for this was the subject that more and more dominated his thinking. He began to broaden his curiosity and to be almost as intrigued with other people’s sex lives as he was with his own. He continued to read books about sex laws and censorship, about the social mores and rituals of the ancient past, the attempts by kings, popes, and theocrats like Calvin to control the masses by declaring certain private acts of pleasure to be forbidden and punishable. He read the scurrilous classic tales of such writers as Boccaccio and the banned books of Henry Miller that many G.I.s discovered in Europe during World War II and smuggled into the United States. Hefner examined in art books the reproductions of nude paintings by the masters, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, Titian, Ingres and Renoir, Rubens, Manet, Courbet, and many others who often portrayed the body with the genitals uncovered, the breasts grandly revealed, the eyes focused more directly on the observer than Von Rosen would have permitted in his photographic art magazine. It was doubtful that Von Rosen’s magazine had yet presented anything as suggestive as Manet’s painting in 1865 of an almost leering young nude woman, or Courbet’s two voluptuous naked ladies embracing in bed, or Goya’s naked maja reclining on pillows with her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes staring at the spectator, her dark pubic hair exposed.
Of course the difference between this and what appeared in men’s magazines was characterized by one word—art; and yet what was defined as art, and what was condemned as pornography, often changed from one generation to the next, depending on the audience for which a work was intended. The nude art that hung in the great museums was created for the nobility and upper classes that commissioned it, while the photographs that appeared in the magazines were printed for the common man in the street, whose museum was the corner newsstand.
And it was this latter group that the censors wished to protect from indecency, and to control as well, when in 1896 the United States Supreme Court sustained a conviction against a publisher named Lew Rosen, whose periodical
Broadway
contained photographs of women defined as lewd. This was the first federal conviction under the Comstock Act, named in honor of the most awesome censor in the history of America, Anthony Comstock.
A
NTHONY COMSTOCK
was a vengeful, evangelical man born in 1844 on a farm in New Canaan, Connecticut. The death of his mother when he was ten left him extremely morose, and throughout his life he idolized her and later dedicated his purification campaigns to her memory.
As one who had masturbated so obsessively during his teens that he admitted in his diary that he felt it might drive him to suicide, Comstock was terrifyingly convinced of the dangers inherent in sexual pictures and literature, and was aware that legal authorities were very lax in dealing with the problem. Though a federal law had been passed in 1842 banning the importation of French postcards, Comstock had often seen these small erotic pictures circulated among soldiers while serving with a Connecticut regiment in the Civil War. And he was equally appalled in New York after the war by the prevalence of prostitutes on lower Broadway and the sight of sidewalk vendors selling obscene magazines and books.
There were no federal laws at this time against obscene publications, although in the state of Massachusetts there had been antiobscenity statutes as early as the 1600s. These statutes, however, denned obscenity not in sexual terms but rather as words written or spoken against the established religion—for example, in the Puritan colony of Massachusetts until 1697, the penalties
against blasphemy included death, and even later the statute stated that offenders could be tortured by such methods as boring through the tongue with a hot iron. The laws in Puritan-dominated Massachusetts also opposed the distribution and possession of religious literature expressing Quaker opinions, and in 1711 there were additional sanctions against the singing of irreverent songs, with the offenders sometimes locked in a pillory.
It was not until 1815, in Pennsylvania, that a man was cited for sexual obscenity—he displayed for sale a picture of an “indecent” couple; but since this violated no American law, the arrest was supported by an existing English law dating back to 1663, the case of
Rex
v.
Sedley
, in which Sedley was fined and jailed for a week after exposing himself naked from the balcony of a tavern, drunkenly shouting obscenities and pouring urine from a bottle on other customers. While this blatant behavior appears to have little relevance to the case of the American caught showing a sexual picture, the Pennsylvania law enforcers regarded both acts as examples of public indecency contrary to common law as well as to the moral strictures of religion.
The first erotic book banned in America was the illustrated edition of the English novel by John Cleland,
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, sometimes called
Fanny Hill
. This book, published in London in 1749—and prosecuted in Massachusetts in 1821, following a similar order in England—described the social and sexual life of a young prostitute, and among the early Americans who owned a copy was Benjamin Franklin.
It was not unusual to find in the libraries of colonial American leaders books that might have been defined as sexually obscene, by such writers as Ovid and Rabelais, Chaucer and Fielding. But since the reading of books in those days was largely limited to the well-educated minority, the need for literary censorship was not considered so important as it would in succeeding generations, when the common citizen became more literate, printing presses became more numerous, and religion in the expanding nation ceased to dominate daily Me as it had among the early settlers. As more schools opened, including the first public high school in
1820, there was increasing concern in government over the type of books that should be available to students; and it was a similar concern for youth, and a desire to protect it from corruptive influences, that Anthony Comstock expressed in the 1860s when he sought to justify his censorship campaigns in New York.
At this time, after the Civil War, Comstock was working unenthusiastically as a New York grocery store clerk and later as a dry-goods salesman, but he was an inspired member of the YMCA, and it was with the help of this organization that he persistently petitioned public officials to strengthen and enforce the laws against immorality and sexual expression. He strongly believed that erotic books and pictures were the plague of the young and also drove adults to degeneracy through masturbation and fornication, abortion and venereal disease.
While many politicians agreed with Comstock’s conclusions, there was some reluctance to support him because his corrective methods—which included the use of informers, spies, and decoys, as well as tampering with the mail—threatened constitutional freedoms in America and were more like the repressive practices that now existed in England in the interest of combating immorality. In 1864 the English government, hoping to eliminate venereal disease, had passed a law that forced women suspected of spreading the disease to submit to medical examinations and to wear yellow clothes until they had been cured. In hospitals the women were segregated in special sections known as canary wards. This practice continued for more than twenty years, until the protests of feminists successfully led to the repeal of the law.
Also in England at this time were several presumed cures for masturbation, including a sort of chastity belt that parents could lock between their son’s legs each night before he went to bed. Some of these gadgets were adorned with spikes on the outside, or came equipped with bells that would ring whenever the youth touched his genitals or had an erection.
Citizens’ antivice societies were now abounding in England, baiting not only prostitutes, adulterers, and alleged pornographers but also the publishers of certain instructional sexual
manuals. These groups had actually existed in one form or another for centuries in England, being particularly conspicuous during the mid-1600s as Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans overthrew the monarchy and abolished a putrid source of profanity, the theater. But in the mid-1800s, during the righteous reign of Queen Victoria—when the joy of secret sex possibly reached its zenith and pornography proliferated—the antivice societies became fanatical, and their attitude was reflected in a series of oppressive laws that were passed at this time.
There was a law allowing the government to conduct searches of private shops to see if obscene material was held for sale, and in 1868 the Chief Justice in England defined obscenity in such restrictive terms that Queen Victoria’s enforcers could prohibit adults from reading anything that seemed inappropriate for children. Obscenity, according to the Chief Justice, was whatever might “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” This law also permitted the courts to declare an entire book obscene even if it contained but a few sexual paragraphs and the author’s motive in producing these paragraphs was deemed irrelevant.
Even more remarkable was the fact that this Victorian law of 1868 would not only outlive England’s most enduring governess, who died in 1901 after more than sixty years on the throne, but would continue to influence obscenity convictions in both England and the United States until the mid-1950s. An American nation that had audaciously rebelled against the mother country over economic and political issues remained nonetheless subservient to English laws on sex, and no man was more successful at reinforcing America’s puritanical roots than Anthony Comstock, who referred to himself as a “weeder in God’s garden.”
Undeterred by those who opposed him, Comstock and his followers from the YMCA vigorously appealed to the New York State legislature and to federal officials in Washington to combat immorality with strong antivice laws, and it was a propitious time for such a proposal. The federal government, following the tur
moil of the Civil War and continuing street crime and poverty—and the scandals of the wealthy robber barons—welcomed any excuse to divert attention from its own ineptitude and corruption and to gain greater control over the restive population; additionally, several business leaders and industrialists, believing that sexual permissiveness diverted workers’ energy from the job, also favored tighter regulation over the common morality. Church groups, too, being aware of the prostitutes in the streets and the vendors of controversial literature, felt that reforms were overdue, that writers had become excessively impious, including the poet Walt Whitman, who had recently been dismissed from his government position in the Interior Department for writing an “indecent book” called
Leaves of Grass
.
Far worse was being published without punishment, Comstock claimed, and as proof he displayed before congressmen cartons of marriage manuals, erotic pamphlets, and revealing pictures that he collectively described as a “moral vulture which steals upon our youth, silently striking its terrible talons into their vitals”; and with the support of such influential citizens as the soap manufacturer Samuel Colgate and the banker J. P. Morgan (who had his own collection of pornography), Comstock finally persuaded Congress in 1873 to pass a federal bill banning from the mails “every obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character.” The bill, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, included an amendment that appointed Comstock a special antiobscenity agent of the Post Office Department. Two months later, an organization that Comstock had founded, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was endowed with police powers by the state legislature, and Anthony Comstock was given the right to carry a gun.
During the years that followed, Comstock and his Society terrorized publishers, arrested hundreds of citizens caught with questionable literature, and caused fifteen women accused of immorality to commit suicide rather than face the humiliation of a publicized trial. The various charges against the women included
prostitution, performing abortions, selling birth-control devices, and—in the case of Ida Craddock—writing a marriage manual called
The Wedding Night
.
A New York publisher named Charles Mackey was handcuffed, sent to jail for a year, and fined $500 for having in stock nothing more lascivious than Ovid’s
Art of Love
. A bookstore owner on Canal Street received a similar sentence for selling a copy of Dr. Ashton’s
Book of Nature and Marriage Guide
, which had been routinely sold in New York stores for twenty years. A young news vendor on Chambers Street, enticed by a persistent customer eager to pay handsomely for erotic pictures, was shocked after he had procured the pictures to learn that he had sold them to a Comstock informer, resulting in a jail term of one year.
Most of Comstock’s convictions in New York were attained through entrapment. Either he or his associates personally posed as customers or wrote registered letters under pseudonyms, enclosing money for certain books and pamphlets that later served as Comstock’s evidence in court. Since the sale or dissemination of birth-control information was illegal, many unsuspecting pharmacists served prison terms for selling condoms or even the rubber syringes that many women used strictly for hygienic purposes.
Photography studios were often raided and the files searched for sensual pictures, and an exhibitor of stereopticans was investigated, and later arrested, after he had shown to an audience interested in art a few photographs of classic nude statuary. One night in 1878, Comstock and five male associates from the Society visited a brothel at 224 Greene Street and, after inducing three women to strip naked for fourteen dollars, Comstock pulled out his revolver and arrested them for indecent exposure.
There was relatively little protest against Comstock’s tactics in the major newspapers, most of whose publishers felt, as did the politicians, that opposing Comstock might be interpreted as tolerating crime, as well as perhaps subjecting their own private lives to Comstock’s scrutiny. A few smaller publications, however, representing the underground press of that time, were vehement in
their coverage of Comstock, particularly one paper with offices on lower Broadway called
The Truth Seeker.
This weekly was owned and edited by an unremitting skeptic and Bible-debunking agnostic named D. M. Bennett, whose inspiration was Thomas Paine and whose editorial policy favored birth control, the taxation of church property, and a respect for freedoms that Comstock would deny.
In his writings, D. M. Bennett compared Comstock to Torquemada, the inquisitor general of fifteenth-century Spain, and to the seventeenth-century witch finder Matthew Hopkins. “Hopkins,” wrote Bennett, “was clothed with a species of legal authority to prowl over several of the shires of England, seizing his victims wherever he could find them, and Comstock had been clothed with a similar sort of legal authority to prowl over some of these American states, hunting down his unfortunate victims in the same kind of way.”
Since sexual obscenity was now a federal offense in America-punishable by fines as high as $5,000 and imprisonment as lengthy as ten years—Bennett insisted that it should be so clearly defined by the government that every citizen would understand its meaning as well as citizens understood the meaning of such crimes as murder, homicide, rape, arson, burglary, and forgery. But regrettably the crime of obscenity was imprecisely defined, and was therefore interpreted variously by different citizens, judges, juries, lawyers, and prosecutors, thus remaining on the lawbooks to be exploited by powerful people whenever they felt the need, for whatever reason, to create criminals.
If the circulation of sexual material was to be excluded from the mail primarily for the moral protection of the young, as Comstock claimed, then Bennett suggested that all mail being sent to homes and schools be inspected by parents, teachers, or guardians, and not by government censors and religious fanatics. Bennett believed, as did many prominent skeptics of his time, that organized religion was oppressive, anti-intellectual, and con
trived to control and deceive people with its promises of posthumous paradise for those who obeyed its doctrines, and threats of eternal hell for those who did not; and its liturgy, based on myth, went unchallenged by the government because it mollified great masses of people who might otherwise be rebelling in the streets against the injustices of life on earth.