EVEN WHEN WE WERE kids and navels were really something, Eddie Utterbund foresaw that the kind of magazines we perused in his garage would go further than the rest of us dreamed. The day would come, he kept telling us, when we could walk right into a nice drugstore where everyone knew us, put down half a dollar, and see everything.
“Aw, naw,” we’d say.
“Yeah, yeah, they will. They’ll show the hair and everything.”
“Of old hoars and things.” That was the way we thought you spelled it. Because we’d never seen it spelled.
“Naw. Of majorettes.” We didn’t believe him. I don’t think we even wholeheartedly wanted to believe him. It was too much. But Utterbund, except that he didn’t figure inflation, was right.
And he grew up to be a media consultant, so I still run into him occasionally. He has maintained a strong interest in skin magazines. I remember he predicted a couple of years ago, “Next they’ll show pink.”
I was ashamed to admit I even understood what “show pink” meant. “Aw, no,” I said. “Who really wants to look at pink? Anyway, pictures of it.”
“Hm,” he said, as if to imply that I protested too much. “They’ll show pink. They’ll show purple.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s there.”
Utterbund’s concern with that kind of thing has always struck me as too explicit or something. But after all, one does wonder these days—just as one once wondered about logical positivism or dissent—where dirty magazines can go next. So when Utterbund called me the other day and said he was himself planning to start a new “breakthrough” dirty magazine and needed a contributing editor, I agreed to meet him for lunch.
“What is left for dirty magazines?” I asked him.
“Well, obviously,” he said, “there are lines that still haven’t been crossed.” He was having the huevos foo young. He likes Cuban-Chinese restaurants because they remind him of an act an uncle of his once saw in pre-Castro Havana, featuring a donkey and bound feet. “We haven’t had glossy intromission yet. Or even a full erection in the slicks.
“I’m talking over-the-counter right-there-next-to-Commentary-and-McCall’s now, of course. At that level, frankly, I don’t know that magazines will ever go to screwing. No. I’ll tell you what the next big thing is. I’ll tell you what the next breakthrough skin magazine is going to be.” Utterbund pushed aside his beans. His eyes were unusually bright. He said, he hissed almost: “Inspired.”
He looked off into the distance, such as it was in the restaurant there. “Felt. Complex.
“Achieved.”
There was a pause. In keeping with the cuisine, he looked both inflamed and inscrutable.
I got the feeling Utterbund had been working on his prospectus.
“Let me just give you an idea of what could be done. A class act. Name of the magazine: Myrrh. We get that, as we make clear every month beneath the masthead, from the Song of Songs:
I rose up to open to my beloved;
And my hands dropped with myrrh,
And my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh,
Upon the handles of the lock.”
“You’d use the Bible?”
“Who’s going to sue? And incidentally, you could sell a lot of actual myrrh itself, mail order. But that’s incidental.
“Features. A little imagination. Re-create a 1936 ‘Life Goes to a Party’ spread, same hairdos, same decors, same skin tones, only it gets out of hand. Everybody loses their heads and gets naked, right?
“Here’s another. Modeling session, right? Starts out okay, first page she’s going along, gradually slipping out of things and rubbing herself with a velvet pillow and a bunch of grapes and musing; but then, turn the page, she’s outraged. ‘You want me to what? What kind of girl …’ Furious. Eyes flashing, hair rumpled. Shot of her throwing her blouse and skirt back on; shot of her stomping out half-buttoned with bra in hand. She’s gone. She never gets naked. For months, letters. ‘Can’t you talk Candy Veronese of your August issue into coming back?’ ‘Who does this Candy Veronese think she is, holding out on us? Signed, The Sixth Fleet.’ Does she come back? Maybe. Maybe not. Negotiations ensue. Some months, we report, she seems mollified. Sometimes she’s pouting.
“I know what you’re going to say. We’d never find a model who’d actually get outraged. But the readers don’t know that. We could find one who could fake it.
“Letters. No more ‘I never believed any of those letters you print about prolonged bouts of passionate oral lovemaking right on top of the teacher’s desk while everyone in the room looked on, that is until my History of Western Civ class yesterday.’ That stuff is played out. You need to attract a different tone of letters. You might get a few that sounded like letters to the Times of London on sighting the first cuckoo of the spring, only they would be about vulvae. We could get lively controversies going between top authorities, in which they could call each other filthy names.
“Service articles. Edible panties—how are they nutritionally? Simple methods for keeping count of your climaxes in a swimming pool. What to do for snakebite of the cervix. How to regain your footing on Wesson Oil. Again: imagination.
“Advice column. It’s ‘Ask Our Amy.’ All kinds of gamy questions come in—and Amy doesn’t understand any of them. She has grown up sheltered, refers to beaver as ‘down there,’ gives incredibly naive advice. Gets so embarrassed finally she says she thinks she’s going to cry. So now everybody is writing in, explaining things to her. Nicely. Gently. Affectionately.
“Gradually, gradually, over a course of months, she begins to get hip. Opens up to things. Wears more and more revealing clothes in her picture. Even gets a little rowdy in an unaffected way. Everybody is hot. Everybody’s heart opens. She drives everybody m the country CRAZY!
“Then … she begins to go over the edge. Bit by bit her advice, her features, coarsen. She gets into and advocates hard liquor, drugs, every kind of group and individual debasement. People write in: ‘Amy, don’t cheapen yourself!’ She advises them to shove it. Finally, above her last column, she sits there brazenly spread and smeared all over with margarine and making a pun about it. Well. It’s what America for so long has been dying to see. But now, somehow, it isn’t so great. Her face is not the same. Her advice has become jaded, glazed over. Next month we announce we had to let her go. She is reported doing French Dominant in a Newark massage parlor, for free. Then she drops out of sight entirely. So many people haven’t been moved to tears since the death of Little Nell.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s tough,” Utterbund conceded. “It’s life. Her kid sister takes over the column.”
I told him I thought a job on a magazine like that would be too much for me emotionally. “But, Eddie,” I said, “you’re a visionary.”
“That’s not what you said,” he replied, “when I told you they were going to show pink.”