In addition to calling himself a whore, Sam Peckinpah liked to brandish photographs of dead deer. “I shot that stag in Scotland,” he’d brag to reporters. “All my family are hunters, meat-hunters, not for sport. They hunt to kill an animal as quickly as possible. I hunt for meat. I shot that stag and killed it and skinned it and roasted it over a fire, and I ate the meat . . . and it was good.”
No, it wasn’t easy being a woman—the only woman—on the set of Straw Dogs.
The actual shoot began in January, and the Cornwall weather cooperated with Peckinpah’s story by being brutally cold and otherwise inhospitable—kind of like the way Peckinpah treated Susan George. In the beginning, Dustin Hoffman behaved much more deferentially to the film’s leading lady. “Like a princess,” said Daniel Melnick, the film’s producer. Hoffman kept his Lolita-ish opinion of George to himself. Peckinpah, on the other hand, “became increasingly cold and hostile to Susan. . . . He got the performance by provoking her into it,” said Melnick.
In contract negotiations, Susan George’s representatives had approved the rape scene but asked for a body double, a request that was immediately refused. A few weeks into the shoot, as the violent scene loomed on the production schedule, the actress had severe second thoughts about the rape and the requisite nudity. It didn’t help her cause that she expressed her concerns to Melnick about Peckinpah’s being an animal. Word of their talk got back to the director, who immediately fired off a memo to Melnick:
“This afternoon when we discussed the rape scene and Susan George’s relationship to it, I was stunned.” Peckinpah felt betrayed by both Melnick and George. “I have no intention of coming anywhere near anything faintly smelling of pornography. Pussies and penises do not interest me. The emotional havoc that happens to [the character of] Amy is the basis of our story.”
Melnick, for his part, thought his actress had reason to be worried. “She didn’t trust Sam and a couple of the actors, who were quite primitive in their art, not to really rape her,” he said. “I didn’t want to devastate her and didn’t think it was worth having a huge drama about. But Sam insisted.”
Finally, Melnick told George that he would be present for the filming of the rape scene.
Peckinpah balked at that news. “You don’t trust me,” he told his producer.
“It’s not that I don’t. She doesn’t,” Melnick replied. “Between you and me, I think you really would have someone fuck her.”
“I’d only do it if it were really necessary,” replied Peckinpah.
HOW BADLY WERE HOLLYWOOD movies doing at the box office?
For two weeks that spring, Melvin Van Peebles’s tiny Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song outgrossed Paramount’s Love Story, starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. That wasn’t supposed to happen, because Sweet Sweetback wasn’t supposed to happen.
Van Peebles, after receiving a fifty-thousand-dollar loan from friend Bill Cosby to finish his film, had little luck securing a distributor and he finally had to go with Cinemation. Even then, the nearly bankrupt company could book the film into only two theaters: one in Detroit, the other in Atlanta.
“There were only two people at the first screening in Detroit,” Van Peebles recalled, “no one at the second, then three or four black guys came to the third. They were Black Panthers and they spread the word, and that evening there were lines around the block. I knew it was a hit when the theater ran out of hot dogs that night.”
Eventually, the Black Panthers’ Huey P. Newton saw Sweet Sweetback, and quickly dashed off a ten-thousand-word paean, devoting an entire issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper to the film. Panther member David Hilliard agreed with Newton’s high opinion of Van Peebles’s work, because in the movie “the [black] community comes to Melvin’s defense. We see this as a self-defense movement. The community embraces Melvin and he’s a hero.”
That year, the Black Panthers had forty-eight chapters. “And every one of our chapters mobilized to see the film,” said Hilliard.
Newton’s assistant Billy “X” Jennings saw Sweetback at his leader’s recommendation. “When we arrived at the theater,” Jennings recalled, “there were comrades coming out who had just seen it, and they were slapping each other five, saying, ‘It’s going to be a bad movie; they’ve got some good shit in there.’ And this was the first time you’ve ever seen sex on-screen, and there were some people saying, ‘The young guy getting some!’ actually talking to the movie.”
Of course, the young guy getting some in the film was Van Peebles’s own thirteen-year-old son, Mario, cast as the adolescent Sweetback, a nickname for “a man who could make love,” as the director described it.
In his Black Panther Party essay, Newton praised the opening scene, wherein the boy loses his virginity at the coaxing of a prostitute. Newton wrote, “Not only is he baptized into his fullness as a man, he gets his name and his identity in this sacred rite. After that, whenever Sweetback engages in sex with a sister it is always an act of survival and a step towards his liberation.”
Newton linked the sex to the violence, and put them both on equal ground in a positive, revolutionary light: “Sweetback grew into a man when he was in bed with that woman and he also grew to be a man when he busted the heads of his oppressors. When he was with the woman it was like a holy union, and when he takes the heads of his oppressors it is like taking the sacrament for the first time.” (Tellingly, Newton is one of the few commentators who correctly identified Sweetback as “not a pimp” but an employee of the brothel.)
Others disagreed vehemently with Newton. And they disagreed in publications that far exceeded the readership of the monthly Black Panther Party newspaper. The Los Angeles Times assigned the Kuumba Workshop of Chicago, a collective of black artists, to write an article to voice its collective opinion: “Van Peebles pictures sexual freakishness as an essential and unmistakable part of black reality and history—a total distortion and gross affront of black people. . . . We don’t know what film Huey Newton watched but neither the background spirituals nor the whore’s reminder that nobody will take his picture makes the scene ‘spiritual.’ Van Peebles does not use sex as a spiritual force as Newton argues, but the same as any other pornographer—to arouse and to give his audience a vicarious thrill.”
Van Peebles didn’t see the big fuss over the scene—or the fact that he had his own thirteen-year-old son strip naked to lie on top of an equally naked adult woman and grind their hips together. “Hell, my father got me a girl. What’s the big deal?” he asked critics.
Van Peebles found the film’s many graphic sex scenes downright revolutionary. “Up to this point we’d never seen black people with sexuality. We didn’t have a Mae West. Only time you have sexuality was [black women] being raped by the Ku Klux Klan.”
Nor did he offer excuses for his portrayal of Sweetback as a superstud, one who proves his sexual prowess in not one but two staged scenes: first, in the brothel, when he performs before paying customers, and second, when the white female leader of a biker gang taunts him into having sex with her in front of the other bikers. “I took a stereotype and stood it on its head,” Van Peebles bragged.
The MPAA, true to form, slapped an X rating on the film. Van Peebles called it “cultural genocide” and enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union to take up his cause, which they did.
“They don’t have the right to rate a film dealing with the black community,” said the ACLU’s Eason Monroe. But of course the MPAA did have the right.
In the end, Van Peebles turned even that brouhaha to his advantage by creating a classic T-shirt to help promote the film. It read “Rated X by an all-white jury.”
He won in other ways as well. Over at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, executives studied the Sweetback grosses, then took another look at their Shaft script, its lead private-detective character written for a white actor. They promptly cast Richard Roundtree instead.
ONE DAY THAT SPRING, with nothing better to do in America’s capital, John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman were sitting in the Oval Office, chewing the fat about the Black Panthers and welfare mothers, when their boss just couldn’t help but tell them about something he’d seen on the tube the night before. It was this new hit TV show on CBS called All in the Family, about this lovable “hard-hat father” and his “hippie son-in-law.” In this particular episode, titled “Judging Books by Covers,” the hard-hat father, named Archie Bunker, goes to a bar to meet an old friend, an ex–professional linebacker. Archie is shocked to learn that his macho friend is gay.
The president of the United States was equally mortified.
“God, he’s handsome, strong, virile, and this and that,” said Richard Nixon, almost swooning over the masculine image he’d seen on the little screen. Then the president couldn’t contain himself. “They were glorifying homosexuality!” he yelled at Ehrlichman and Haldeman. “Goddammit, I don’t think you should glorify homosexuality on public television. I turned the goddamned thing off. I couldn’t listen anymore. What do you think that does to eleven- and twelve-year-old boys? You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. We all know Aristotle was a homo, so was Socrates.”
“But they didn’t have the influence of television,” Ehrlichman chimed in.
Back in the Sodom and Gomorrah of America, otherwise known as Hollywood, the show’s producer, Norman Lear, had fought long and hard for that “homo-glorifying” episode of All in the Family. Just as he had fought for every “coons” and “Hebes” and “spics” and “Polacks” and “micks” that aired in the show’s first episode, on January 21.
Against even stronger objections from the CBS brass, Lear had fought to keep the show’s initial story line in which Archie and his wife, Edith, come home from church on Sunday to find their daughter and son-in-law in bed upstairs having sex.
The CBS censors objected, but Lear held firm. He told them, “It’s gonna go the way it is or it’s not gonna go.” Carroll O’Connor, the show’s Archie, recalled Lear’s telling the executives, “We’re going to be getting into a lot of this stuff as the series goes on, and we might as well get the audience used to it.” The network buckled and Lear won: The young couple would get to have sex, even if it was Sunday morning.
CBS, fearing a deluge of angry phone calls, posted extra telephone operators on its switchboard the night of January 21. CBS also expected no fewer than “fifty stations to jump off the network!” one executive predicted.
O’Connor feared as much and took out insurance by insisting that his contract guarantee him and his family round-trip tickets back to their home in Italy when the network yanked All in the Family.
But no stations fled CBS, few angry viewers phoned to complain, and the O’Connor family had to give up their home in Rome. By season’s end, All in the Family was the number-one-rated show, having explored such hot topics as Sunday sex, impotence, and Archie Bunker’s homosexual friend.
“That was awful!” Nixon said of the latter. “It made a fool out of a good man.”
AMID HIS TABOO-BUSTING, Norman Lear never got around to exploring man-boy love in All in the Family. He left that to the Italians.
Despite all of Luchino Visconti’s talk about purity and beauty and love and angels, the director of Death in Venice found that when he visualized Thomas Mann’s abstract prose, what he ended up with onscreen was a middle-aged man chasing but never quite getting his hands on a thirteen-year-old boy.
At least that’s what the executives at Warners saw when Visconti flew to Hollywood to show them a rough cut of his latest movie starring Dirk Bogarde.
Bogarde referred to those execs as “the American Money.” Visconti simply lumped them together as “terrible Los Angeles,” even though the studio is located in Burbank.
At first, Visconti was encouraged by the silence in the studio’s big screening room when his film ended. “The full house,” he reported, made not a sound at the final scene in which the black hair dye runs down Bogarde’s makeup-encrusted face and his character, Gustav von Aschenbach, dies on the beach alone. Visconti found the silence encouraging. Had he stunned the executives with the film’s absolute brilliance? Then someone in the screening room actually said something. “Well, I think the music is great. Just great. It’s a terrific theme. Terrific! Who was it did our score, Signore Visconti?”
Visconti said the music had been written by Gustav Mahler.
“Just great. I think we should sign him.”
How could Visconti tell them that Mahler’s Fifth Symphony had been written at the turn of the century and its composer died a few years later? Quiet disgust soon filled the pause in conversation. Eventually, the good family men at Warners deemed Death in Venice “un-American,” according to Visconti, and told him that if it were released it might be banned in some states. If it were released?
Plus, it really needed a new ending. The death scene was just too big a downer.
“How can I give Thomas Mann a happy ending?” Visconti wondered aloud. “It is what he wrote, it is his conception, it is the story, it is sacrosanct.”
There was the usual talk of “killing” the movie, writing it off as a total loss. But Visconti wasn’t dumb and immediately threatened to create “a great scandal in all the world papers if such a thing should happen.”
Instead of watching Warners kill it, Visconti wrapped his movie in a continental aura of prestige and art, and quickly offered Death in Venice as part of a London gala to be titled “Venice in Peril,” a fund-raiser to help save the sinking city. The Queen of England would attend with Princess Anne, at the Warner Cinema in London, with a berth to follow at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. Even so, “the American Money” remained unconvinced. And the queen herself wasn’t much help in the end.
After the command screening with her highness, Dirk Bogarde heard one of the studio executives remark to a fellow executive, “You know, what I can’t understand is how the Queen of England could bring her daughter to see a movie about an old man chasing a kid’s ass. . . .”
Two persons who weren’t invited to the gala to see Death in Venice but should have been were Jan Fudakowski and Wladyslaw Moes, the novel’s real-life friends, Jasio and Tadzio. Fudakowski considered buying a ticket but “the ticket prices were rather high, from five to fifty guineas,” he reported. Instead, he waited, seeing Death in Venice with his movie doppelganger at a local cinema. “Undoubtedly the film is good,” he noted, “particularly when considered from the artistic point of view, although to my mind the plot is not very interesting and a bit difficult to follow.”
Moes also waited, seeing the film near his home in Paris. According to his sister Maria, he wanted to watch it alone, because “he would not have wanted to show his feelings about it, even to me,” she explained.
Visconti knew of Moes and Moes knew of Visconti, but when the Italian director came to Warsaw to audition potential Tadzios, both men kept their distance. They knew it was better not to confuse the fantasy with the reality. Moes said as much in a letter to Fudakowski when he wrote, “It would have been detrimental to have seen an old man with all the signs of ageing when [Visconti’s] imagination was concentrated on re-creating the character of a young boy in the style of Thomas Mann.”
In the end, Death in Venice was no The Damned. For once, the Warners executives were right: Gay Nazis easily trumped gay composers at the box office.
THE MOVIES HAD A long tradition of adoring whores with hearts of gold. Think Shirley MacLaine’s Irma la Douce. Or better yet, Ona Munson’s Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind.
The movies, however, had never portrayed anyone quite like Vera de Vries, aka Xaviera Hollander, the happy hooker.
To write the book The Happy Hooker was not Hollander’s idea. It was her client’s idea.
Robin Moore, esteemed author of The Green Berets and The French Connection, knew there was a bestselling book in this story of a young Jewish secretary from the Netherlands who worked as a secretary at the Dutch consulate in New York City and within a couple of short years became the top madam in the city. Prostitutes had told their stories before, but not without apologies. It’s why he—or Hollander’s other ghostwriter, Yvonne Dunleavy—wrote the following introduction for the secretary-turned-prostitute:
“Don’t think of me as a poor little girl gone astray because of a misguided or underprivileged childhood. The contrary is true. I come from a very good background and grew up in a loving family atmosphere.” Plus, she spoke five languages fluently!
Moore might never have met Hollander had a rival madam not gotten pregnant and married, in that order. To seal her retirement, the madam known as Madeleine sold her little black book to Hollander for ten thousand dollars. It was an investment Hollander made back in two months. “While I had come to be regarded as a friendly and witty madam to the Jewish community,” she reported, “Madeleine was more or less known as a leading lady to the WASPs, so when I took over her business I became a force for religious brotherhood.”
Hollander, who always looked on the bright side of her profession, established this brotherhood by quickly phoning Madeleine’s vast list of clients, advising them of the change in locale and management. “Hi, I’m Xaviera Hollander, I’m from Holland. I’m twenty-five years of age, I live in a beautiful three-bedroom apartment in midtown, and I have taken over the management of Madeleine’s business because she has retired to have a baby. Why don’t you drop over for coffee and a chat with us and see if you like the atmosphere? If you do, we would be glad to have you as a guest occasionally.”
When she called a relative of Robin Moore, Moore himself answered. He wasn’t polite. “I’m not into that stuff,” he replied. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Robin Moore. You wrote The Green Berets and The French Connection,” Hollander shot back.
“Oh, so you’re a hooker who can read?” he asked.
Hollander took a deep breath. She might be a whore, but she hated being called a hooker.
Much to her surprise, Moore expressed second thoughts about Hollander’s initial offer, and arranged to meet at her East Side brothel.
“Robin never took his clothes off,” said Hollander. Instead, he asked her to tell him about her adventures as a call girl. In exchange for one hour of taping, he paid her fifty dollars for very graphic talk about orgies, lesbian sex (“It is known that most madams are bisexual, and I am no exception”), the police (“No brothel can operate more than a year in New York without being raided at least once by police”), penis size (“I could take care of the big cocks, any length, any width, because I love it”), a call girl’s take (“$500 a week during a good week in January, February, and March”), and race (“We have a saying that going to bed with an Oriental is like washing your hands: clean and simple”).
After a few such interviews, however, Hollander became suspicious and asked her lawyer, Paul Sherman, to be present for Moore’s next visit. “I don’t trust this guy. Let’s frisk him,” Hollander advised.
Instead, as soon as Sherman and Moore got together, they negotiated the book contract in the living room of Hollander’s brothel. “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done,” Moore kept saying.
Sherman, who represented a number of authors, also found the situation highly unusual. “I’d never negotiated a book contract in a house of ill-repute before,” he said.
With business out of the way, Moore soon introduced Hollander to a surveillance expert, who installed a tape-recorder system in the brothel’s bedrooms in order to get “authenticity” for the book.
“[He] had a sideline: selling information to law enforcement agencies and others. I found out about the hidden bug and [his] sideline only when Knapp Commission investigators called me as a witness many months later. They had in their possession tapes made in my apartment without my knowledge or consent,” said Hollander.
A police raid put Hollander on the front page of the city’s tabloids, and while headlines like “Midtown Madam” and “Penthouse Prostitutes” caught the public’s attention, it was Xaviera Hollander’s risqué quotes that forced them to read on. She was proud, defiant, and extremely articulate. “And she was blatant,” said Yvonne Dunleavy. She was also read by a top editor at Dell Publishing.
“Bob Abel wanted it because the story was headlines,” said Dunleavy, “and there was an upscale element to it,” thanks to all that East Side Manhattan sex.
For its part, Dell “crashed” the book, bringing it out in paperback within six weeks of purchasing the completed manuscript. Despite his Green Berets and French Connection credentials, Moore really wasn’t much of a writer, which is why he brought Dunleavy to the project. “Robin wrote one chapter, it was awful,” said Hollander. “He was a Jerzy Kosinski,” said Dunleavy. In other words, Moore could package and edit a book; he just couldn’t write a book.
Later that year, when Hollander testified before Mayor John Lindsay’s crime commission, formally titled the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption, it ended her brief stay in America. But it also sent The Happy Hooker to the top of the bestseller lists, where it would eventually sell more than fourteen million copies.
“It brought sex out of a plain brown wrapper,” said Dunleavy. “You saw people reading The Happy Hooker on subways and in laundromats everywhere. That hadn’t happened before.” Readers were intrigued not only by the graphic sex talk but the blind items that included such notable clients as Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Oh! Calcutta! producer Hilly Elkins.
Hollander never offered any apologies for her work—“To tell you the truth, I am very happy in the business”—but she did harbor one regret. “I wanted to call the book Come and Go, but Robin insisted on calling it The Happy Hooker.” She had to admit the seemingly oxymoronic moniker Happy Hooker made for the better title, even if she hated being called a hooker.
Shortly after the publication of The Happy Hooker, Hollywood offered yet another portrait of prostitution, in this case the very contrite Bree Daniels, as embodied by Jane Fonda in Klute. It was a rough-edge portrayal, but in the end Bree Daniels was as repentant and emotionally troubled as Xaviera Hollander was defiant and carefree.
HOLLYWOOD’S MOST FAMOUS GAY director, George Cukor, all but came out of the closet with his Oscar campaign to get Holly Woodlawn nominated for best supporting actress that winter. The legendary helmer of The Philadelphia Story and My Fair Lady had absolutely fallen in love with Trash, and his admiration included trying to make Hollywood believe that a drag queen is a woman. He thought Paul Morrissey’s male Galatea sported a great pair of pecs, and who knew he could act? “Joe Dallesandro does some enormously difficult things,” Cukor observed, like “walking around in the nude in a completely unselfconscious way.”
Dallesandro found inspiration in being naked, in Flesh and now in Trash, although in the latter he never exposed his erection, for the simple fact that his heroin-addict character is incapable of getting one. “If you watch closely, you’ll see that my best performing comes when I have my clothes off,” observed the actor. “When I’m dressed, I really don’t give very good performances.”
Cukor, however, didn’t put his muscle behind trying to nab an Oscar nomination for Dallesandro. He knew full well that the academy had a long tradition of honoring the most acting rather than the best acting, and Dallesandro had given a very understated performance as the strung-out Joe.
Holly Woodlawn, on the other hand, displayed enough acting in Trash to sink a ton of garbage in the Hudson River, and Cukor took note. He went so far as to have big orange buttons made, declaring “Holly Woodlawn for Best Supporting Actress.” He even got Ben Gazzara and Joanne Woodward to join him in signing a petition to the academy. But to no avail. Like Andy Warhol, who was entering a new phase of filmmaking, the Oscars weren’t having anything to do with “chicks with dicks,” as the king of pop art now called them.
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY FOR STRAW DOGS ended the last week of April, which is when Sam Peckinpah began his editing chores. He had particular trouble working on the final reel, but after a few sleepless days in the editing room he was able to say, “I think I’ve made my statement on violence.”
The first cut of the siege and rape clocked in at one hundred minutes. When cut down to eighteen minutes, “it became a very different animal,” said Roger Spottiswoode, one of the film’s editors. “It turned from an exciting but standard battle into this strange, otherworldly scene.”
Producer Daniel Melnick anticipated trouble from the censors, less for the blood than for the back-to-back rapes. In the United States, he cut a few seconds from the second rape to get an R, rather than an X, from the MPAA.
The Brits were tougher, and he feared he might lose the entire second rape—the one that the wife really, really doesn’t want. At the censor’s office, Melnick sat in front of a Moviola with “this venerable member of the aristocracy, explaining to him by looking at the rape scene that what was going on was rear entry, not sodomy,” said the producer. “By British standards, rear entry was acceptable but sodomy was not.”
The American/British divide was even greater when it came to the film reviews. No fewer than thirteen prominent British critics wrote to condemn the censor’s passage of Straw Dogs. Theirs was a joint letter in the Times of London, calling Peckinpah’s film “dubious in its intention, excessive in its effect.” One of those critics actually threatened a lawsuit over copyright infringement—and won!—when a London cinema used his pan review in its advertisements to entice theatergoers to buy tickets. According to Sir John Trevelyan, the outraged notice “immediately doubled the queues” outside the theater.
Stateside, pre-release test screenings brought out the worst in American audiences. Melnick recalled, “I hoped people would be devastated and shocked and horrified by the siege. Suddenly, I heard six hundred people shout, ‘Kill him, get him!’ I thought, My God, what have we unleashed?” And there were reports of little old ladies watching the film and cheering Dustin Hoffman to kill the thugs who had raped his wife.
After one such screening, a man asked who was responsible for the film. Peckinpah immediately pointed at Melnick. The man screamed at the producer, “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I’m a pacifist and I’ll kill you for making it!”
As a result, Straw Dogs turned out to be a bigger box-office hit than Peckinpah’s previous blood-fest, The Wild Bunch. The American critics, however, were divided. Reviewers for Newsweek, Time, and Saturday Review loved it. Richard Schickel in Life and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker disliked it intensely, and even got personal in their attacks.
“Straw Dogs is literally sophomoric,” wrote Schickel. “Unable to question either Peckinpah’s craft or the insincerity of his motives, one must question his intelligence and perception.”
Kael wrote, “Peckinpah’s view of human experience seems to be no more than the sort of anecdote that drunks tell in bars.” She went on to call Straw Dogs “a fascist work of art.”
For some reason, the word “fascist” struck a nerve in Peckinpah’s otherwise thick, deer-hunter hide. He fired off a letter to Kael, scolding her: “Shall I discuss this with my lawyer or are you prepared to print in public the definition of the film? Simply I think the term is in incredible bad taste and I intend to take issue with it.”
He also fired off a missive to Schickel: “If I am at fault, part of it is because I expected too much, my vision of morality is certainly not yours, but I damn you for having the bad taste to speak of me as you did of my life in conjunction with my film.”
Peckinpah deliberately blurred those lines between life and film by embracing not only the violent mantle but the male-chauvinistic-pig mantle. “There are two kinds of women,” he told Playboy. “There are women and then there’s pussy. . . . I ignore women’s lib. I’m for most of what they’re for, but I can’t see why they have to make such assholes of themselves over the issue. I consider myself one of the foremost male lesbians in the world.”
What didn’t help the Straw Dogs cause was the nearly concurrent release of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, two films laden with sex and violence.
Bakshi’s animated feature, based on the famed Robert Crumb comic collection, had the distinction of featuring anthropomorphic animals who, in some cases, were anatomically correct, depending on what the viewer saw them as—animal or human. “They were animals fucking. And that, to me, was like the best of Terrytoons and the best of what I wanted to do,” said Bakshi. Actually, the characters were often male animals fucking female humans with tails and floppy ears, all of which gave a definite tinge of bestiality to the project. Which was the least of it for a few animators. “Sometimes I’d have to lean on some guy who’s been doing animation for Disney or somebody for thirty years and tell him to pinch a chick’s tit a little harder,” said Bakshi, a former Paramount Pictures animator. “And some of them would just throw their hands in the air and walk out.”
Kubrick, also, had considerably sexed up his movie’s original source material, Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. He did his eroticizing less with dialogue than with his visuals. For example, the Korova Milk Bar, barely described in the novel, got the full Kubrick treatment: The director had admired the nude sculptures of Michel Climent, but when Climent demanded to be paid for his work, the parsimonious Kubrick hired another designer (Liz Moore, who had created the Star Child for 2001: A Space Odyssey) to make tables and drinking fountains from naked female mannequins, complete with fluorescent wigs and matching pubic hair. Elsewhere in the film, girls in a record shop suck on phallic lollipops. And one victim, the Cat Lady, received a major makeover, as did her abode, the walls of which were now replete with erotic art. In a production memo, Kubrick detailed many of his original touches, including the Cat Lady’s death by dildo when she is bludgeoned by a huge penis-like work of art.
During production of A Clockwork Orange, the movie’s Alex, Malcolm McDowell, inquired if Kubrick had ever met with Burgess to discuss the project.
“Oh, good God, no!” exclaimed Kubrick. “Why would I want to do that?”
Or, as McDowell surmised, “Kubrick didn’t want interference from the author, who probably didn’t know the first thing about making a movie.”
McDowell turned out to be the perfect Alex. He conveyed the requisite antic anarchy, and had no qualms about appearing naked on camera either alone or with an equally naked actress—a fact Kubrick well knew from viewing McDowell’s first major stint in front of the camera, Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . , about a revolution in an English boarding school. In that film, McDowell and actress Christine Noonan got so carried away filming their nude tussle that an assistant director quit the production in a fit of moral pique.
Burgess was equally squeamish. He harbored his doubts about Kubrick’s making an acceptable screen version of his novel. Despite having much admired the director’s Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Burgess was not a fan of Kubrick’s Lolita, and he feared what would happen to his A Clockwork Orange when all the sex and violence had to be visualized onscreen. “Lolita could not work well,” Burgess wrote, “because Kubrick had found no cinematic equivalent to Nabokov’s literary extravagance. Nabokov’s script, I knew, had been rejected; all the scripts for A Clockwork Orange, above all my own, had been rejected too, and I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complimentary pornograph.”
Initially, Burgess liked what he saw—or, at least, he said he liked what he saw—when Kubrick eventually deigned to meet and give him a private screening of the complete film. Burgess didn’t hold it against the film version of A Clockwork Orange when his wife, repulsed by its choreographed sex and violence, asked to leave that screening after a mere ten minutes. After seeing the movie, Burgess initially told the press, “This is one of the great books that has been made into a great film.”
Maybe he meant what he said. Or maybe he simply wanted to persuade Kubrick to direct his screenplay “Napoleon Symphony.” In the following weeks, as well as years, Burgess would radically reassess his opinion of A Clockwork Orange the movie.
THE SEX-AND-VIOLENCE CONTROVERSIES REGARDING Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange were to play out on such a grand stage that a little X-rated film could come and go with scant notice that year—even one directed by a movie star.
At the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Jack Nicholson put aside his actor’s hat to watch for the umpteenth time the film he’d produced, directed, and cowritten. As soon as the end credits started to roll on Drive, He Said, there were screams of approval from the gala audience. “I thought I was Stravinsky for a moment,” said Nicholson. For a moment. Then the boos and catcalls began. To Nicholson’s eyes and ears it looked like “a riot,” and one that was not going to help his picture. “It was a disaster and I knew it was going to set me back,” he said.
Drive, He Said got hit with an X rating from the MPAA, the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it, the Canadian censors asked for forty-five cuts, and the British censors rejected it outright. Columbia Pictures, which released the movie, stood by their star director and refused to make any cuts. The studio even went so far as to obtain a few hundred affidavits from psychiatrists who declared it a morally fit film, which was enough to convince the MPAA to reconsider and give it an R rating.
Nicholson had a theory for why his film inspired all the censorship woes, and it had everything to do with a scene, early in the movie, where actor William Tepper simulates sex with Karen Black as she is slumped over the steering wheel of a car. “I felt it was because they didn’t have orgasms in American films up until now,” argued Nicholson. Plus, “The orgasm is audible, not visible. The person says, ‘I’m coming.’ ” He explained, “You can have everybody moaning and saying, ‘It feels good’ and ‘Screw me,’ but you can’t have someone saying, ‘I’m coming!’ ”
One reporter at Cannes found the front-seat sex scene unattractive and especially demeaning to women. Nicholson challenged the journalist, telling him that he’d had intercourse in the front seat of a car many times and the man-behind-woman position is the only one that works. And as for being “unattractive,” Nicholson wanted to know, “Well, is it only beautiful people who are allowed to enjoy sex?”
Others charged the film with being racist, since its locker-room sequences featured full-frontal nudity of only the African-American actor-athletes; it was an accusation that ignored the fact that Caucasian costar Michael Margotta, playing a draft dodger, is featured streaking full-frontally across a college campus for a good sixty seconds of screen time.
Despite the controversy, Drive, He Said sunk like reinforced concrete in the public consciousness, garnering both bad reviews and box office.
Being a Mike Nichols film, Carnal Knowledge had no such place to hide. Jules Feiffer thought he sat on an unqualified hit, both with the critics and the moviegoing public. Then a few weeks before the film’s official June release, he and Nichols attended a Directors Guild of America screening in Los Angeles. They stood in the theater’s foyer as their illustrious colleagues in the movie business made their collective exit.
“Uncompromising,” said William Wyler, director of The Best Years of Our Lives.
“It was like open-heart surgery,” said John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate.
Feiffer turned to Nichols. “We’re dead,” he said.
It seemed to Feiffer that the Hollywood establishment hated his movie. “It was too raw, too revealing, it stuck in their craw,” he would later write in his memoir. And there were other problems, ones that had nothing to do with Hollywood’s snub (only Ann-Margret would receive an Oscar nomination). On the right, the state of Georgia banned Carnal Knowledge. On the left, feminists hated Carnal Knowledge. “It was assaulted by some women writers as sexist and exalted by other women writers as the first film conceived by men to show what we’re really like: creeps,” wrote Feiffer.
There were a few good reviews—like Vincent Canby’s in the New York Times, a review that managed the print legerdemain of offering a long dissertation on the history of the word “cunt”—it goes back to Chaucer—without actually printing the word “cunt.”
And there were bad reviews. And not just bad reviews, but damning reviews. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, “This movie doesn’t just raise a problem, it’s part of it.”
In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert saw Carnal Knowledge as a film that succeeded commercially because of that rarest of phenomena: “bad word-of-mouth. The more people hear that Carnal Knowledge is only about sex, or that its characters seem obsessed by sex and lack three dimensions, etc., the more people want to go so that they, too, can agree about the movie’s lamentable shortcomings.”
In that regard, feminist writers definitely led the charge. In the New York Times, Rosalyn Drexler railed against Carnal Knowledge: “But what do we learn of the flesh that any self-respecting carnivore does not already know? Only that if you are a male, it can lie there like a lump of pasta until woman, as magical fork, lifts it up again. Sexual attitudes and activities are the meat of this picture, but there are maggots in the meat . . . dead meat . . . meat laid out, not laid!”
Jack Nicholson didn’t help matters. He threw a lot of combustible bad language into the feminists’ bonfire when he told a Newsweek interviewer, “I’ve balled all the women, I’ve done all the drugs, I’ve drunk every drink.”
To help publicize the movie, his interview in Playboy further stoked the flames, especially when he sang the praises of cocaine and why “chicks dig it sexually. . . . While it numbs some areas, it inflames the mucous membranes such as those in a lady’s genital region. That’s the real attraction of it.” Or when he said, “Within three days in a new town, you are thinking, Why can’t I find a beaver in a bar?” Or that his word for unattainable women was “skunks.”
At moments like these—and there were a lot of them—Nicholson sounded just like that sex-crazed Jonathan cad from Carnal Knowledge.
“I can’t go around picking up stray pussy anymore,” Nicholson complained, blaming his predicament on the high-profile Carnal Knowledge. “The Jonathan role turned off a lot of chicks. In a casual conversation with me, you could have a certain difficulty in separating my sexual stance from Jonathan’s. You can imagine what that does to a chick who sees the film, then meets me. For her, I become that character, the negativity she saw in the film. And she doesn’t want to be in a pussy parade. I mean, no chick wants to be part of some band of cunts. And I certainly don’t blame ’em for that.”
Feiffer weathered the Carnal Knowledge firestorm with feminists, owning up to what he’d written. “Men don’t like girls,” he said. He also didn’t write another screenplay for ten years.
Mike Nichols had the better cover. “I was going with Gloria Steinem at the time,” he said.
Jack Nicholson, however, immediately took his place on the feminist hit list, somewhere between Hugh Hefner and Norman Mailer, as one of the most reviled men in America.
Mailer made the list with his recently published Prisoner of Sex, written in response to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which didn’t have much good to say about Mailer’s—or D. H. Lawrence’s or Henry Miller’s—attitude toward women. Mailer resented Millett’s attack on his novels, especially her opinion that his novel An American Dream “is an exercise in how to kill your wife and be happy ever after.” He retaliated in the book Prisoner of Sex, pointing out that “some of the women were writing like very tough faggots.”
To promote Prisoner of Sex, Mailer appeared at Town Hall in New York City to debate the feminists. Millett declined the invitation to speak, but Germaine Greer, ready to promote her Female Eunuch book, accepted, as did Jill Johnston, who wrote about being a militant lesbian on a weekly basis for the Village Voice. The Town Hall debates were mud-wrestling for the intelligentsia or, as Jules Feiffer put it, “ego-tripping at a very high level.”
Sometime after Johnston and Greer spoke that night at Town Hall, two women in dungarees emerged from the audience and walked onstage to embrace Johnston. The three of them then began to kiss and hug but quickly lost their collective balance and fell off the stage.
Mailer was outraged. “C’mon,” he ordered. “You can get as much prick and cunt as you want around the corner on Forty-Second Street for two dollars and fifty cents. We don’t need it here.”
The crowd at the Town Hall applauded that reprimand, but booed when Mailer later called fellow feminist Betty Friedan “a lady.”
VANESSA REDGRAVE UTTERING THE word “cunt” was not the biggest problem Ken Russell confronted in getting The Devils approved by the British censors. That spring, Sir John Trevelyan met with the director to give him the bad news. “I’m afraid I’m going to cut your best scene,” he said. “Don’t hold it against me. That’s my job, lad.”
In truth, Trevelyan wasn’t talking specifically about the “cunt” scene. He was talking about “The Rape of Christ” scene, as Russell well expected.
Russell affectionately called Trevelyan a “garrulous” old character, and he thought he “worked wonders” in getting the BBFC to approve as much controversial material as the board did over the years, namely the nude wrestling match in his Women in Love.
But the director had no such luck getting Trevelyan to approve either “The Rape of Christ” or the scene near the end of the film where Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne masturbates with a burnt fragment of Grandier’s shinbone. Also, there was that language problem.
“I’m afraid we can’t have Vanessa saying ‘cunt,’ ” Trevelyan told Russell. “It’s taken me ten years of fighting just to get ‘fuck’ accepted. I’m afraid the British public isn’t ready yet for ‘cunt.’ ”
Trevelyan also cut seconds of footage here and there, most of them having to do with scenes of torture, as Russell recalled, “such as the skewering of Grandier’s tongue with needles, or the breaking of his knees—all Trevelyan did was to tone down or reduce the scenes as I had cut them.”
It could have been much worse for The Devils—if someone other than Trevelyan had headed up the censorship board.
“Trevelyan admired the film greatly and prevented them from cutting it further,” said BBFC member James Ferman. “Many members of the board thought [The Devils] was shameful . . . and needed to be censored heavily.”
Trevelyan retired shortly after the release of Russell’s film about a philandering priest and sexually obsessed nuns. Many critics were glad to see him go, and thought he shouldn’t have approved The Devils under any circumstance. Russell, for one, understood the uproar. “There’s nothing too subtle with a naked nun waggling her breasts in front of the camera,” he quipped. In truth, there were lots of naked nuns waggling their breasts, as well as their bums. This much female nudity had never been seen in a mainstream movie—and that the women were young, voluptuous actresses playing nuns only compounded the problem in some critics’ eyes.
The Evening Standard film reviewer Alexander Walker called it “the masturbation fantasies of a Roman Catholic boyhood,” and went on in his review to imagine a scene in which Oliver Reed’s character has his penis cut off. Since the scene was never shot, much less put in the movie, Russell whacked the critic over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Evening Standard in a BBC encounter and, even worse for his cause, Russell uttered the word “fuck” on-air, which only further incensed the organizers of the Festival of Light, led by that sixty-one-year tower of self-appointed puritanism, Mary Whitehouse. Together with the festival, Whitehouse’s letter-writing campaign forced seventeen British municipalities to ignore the BBFC ruling and ban The Devil outright in those townships.
Other high-profile critics of the film included no less a personage than the future Pope John Paul II, then the Patriarch of Venice, who called out “excesses never seen before” when The Devils screened at the Venice Film Festival that summer.
More problematic than the future pope were the current executives at Warner Bros. They’d read and approved Russell’s script (the same script that UA’s David Picker had read and rejected), and voiced no preliminary objections. But there was a difference between reading directions like “they give Sister Jeanne an enema of boiling water” and seeing it depicted onscreen. There’s even a difference between those visuals and how Aldous Huxley in his novel described it: “The purging of Sister Jeanne was the equivalent of a rape in a public lavatory.”
Russell offered a defense of his script, which was really a defense of the film medium or, at least, an explanation of its powers as well as its limitations. “When one reads these events in Huxley’s account, one can sift the words through one’s imagination and filter out as much of the unpleasantness as one cares to,” he maintained. “You can’t do this when you are looking at a film.”
Maybe Warners chief Ted Ashley never actually read the screenplay—that’s what he paid readers to do—but he most certainly didn’t see what he expected to see when he and a few other studio “henchmen,” as Russell called them, first saw The Devils in a London screening room. Russell showed them the version that had already been cut and approved by the BBFC. Even without witnessing “The Rape of Christ” scene, “they walked out stunned,” said Russell.
A Warners vice president told him, “Better come and see us in our suite at the Dorchester in an hour.”
An hour later, Ashley and the others let him have it. “That’s the biggest load of shit I’ve ever seen,” Ashley told Russell. “I’ve never seen the likes of this disgusting shit.”
Russell said something about their having seen the script; he’d shot it as written. “But the fact is they weren’t very visual people,” despite their exalted jobs at a movie studio, he said.
Overall, the British censors didn’t have a problem with the nudity in The Devils. The American executives, however, were another story. According to the director, “Ashley cut The Devils to pieces because of an apparent fear of pubic hair.” And there was a lot of pubic hair to be cut. “They took the film and got my editor to cut out all the shots which they wanted removed, which basically consisted of all the shots in which there was graphic nudity. This adversely affected the story, to the point where in American the film is disjointed and incomprehensible,” said Russell.
JOHN SCHLESINGER’S SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY made it to premiere night without any cuts from the censors or its studio. Schlesinger, on the other hand, did a lot of editing when it came to publicly discussing his love life. The subject matter of the film made that veil of privacy difficult to maintain, especially on opening night, when reporters asked if he identified with the gay characters in Sunday Bloody Sunday or if the film’s plot in any way resembled his own life story.
“I make no personal statement about my private life,” Schlesinger replied. “My private life is my private life. Actually, I identify with all three characters in Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
Regardless of such noncommittal statements, his date that night was boyfriend Michael Childers.
The executives of United Artists thought they had a real box-office dud with Sunday Bloody Sunday, but they also knew it was Schlesinger’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning picture, Midnight Cowboy, and they treated it accordingly. So did some of London’s most famous residents. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton attended, as did Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier and Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret, who turned out not to be a fan of the movie. At the reception afterward, within earshot of Schlesinger and Childers, the queen’s sister, sloshed on too much gin, let out with her critique, “I thought it was horrific. Men in bed kissing!”
“Oh Margaret, shut up!” said Tony Snowdon.
The reviews were kinder; in fact, they were arguably the best of Schlesinger’s career and relatively free of homophobia. Sunday Bloody Sunday would go on to receive five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, but there were no wins. And it did not perform well at the box office, as they say in the trades. Gore Vidal, an admirer of the film, expressed his opinion on why it didn’t succeed with the moviegoing public. “Americans are taught that either you’re a faggot, and dress up in women’s clothes and get fucked, or you’re a ‘real man’ and would die if another man puts his hand on you,” he said. “So, as a result, the Americans believe there is no such thing as bisexuality. What fascinated me about the movie was it takes for granted the bisexuality of the boy, and makes no point of it. I’ve known so many situations like that one. But it all came down to that one core: ‘How could a nice, manly, Jewish doctor have an affair with a boy who doesn’t seem to be wearing women’s clothes.’ They just couldn’t get it.”
LANCE LOUD WAS ALSO not wearing women’s clothes when he fulfilled his fantasy to live in the hotel of Chelsea Girls fame. He and his friend Kristian Hoffman had traveled east after high school graduation, and when the money from home had run out and they were evicted from an apartment on Seventh Avenue and Fifteenth Street, Hoffman returned to Santa Barbara. His more adventurous and resourceful friend remained behind in New York City.
“Lance had this sense of destiny, of being where you were meant to be,” said Hoffman. “Lance took that hunger and turned it into reality. He believed there was this moment that was waiting for him, and to be clever and rise to that moment.”
What was waiting for Lance was a man at least ten years his senior named Soren Agenoux, who lived at the Chelsea Hotel and worked as managing editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. If Soren wasn’t love for Lance, he was destiny.
That year, Lance Loud’s life would change even more, and that change had nothing to do with the Chelsea Hotel or Andy Warhol or, for that matter, Soren Agenoux.
Back in Santa Barbara, the half dozen other Louds were meeting with Mary Every, an editor for the town’s News Press. Every knew producer Craig Gilbert, who had a deal with the PBS affiliate WNET to do documentary-style programs on five American families. Gilbert wanted upper-middle-class families like the ones that once populated 1950s sitcoms Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The happy family genre hadn’t entirely disappeared from the tube, The Brady Brunch being the most notable survivor in 1971. But Gilbert wasn’t looking for a sugarcoated family to be played for laughs in his documentaries. He wanted real families, with real houses, with real problems. Gilbert had already done some interviewing in Palo Alto and Los Angeles, but hadn’t even found one family when he decided to visit Santa Barbara.
Every thought she knew just the family he wanted, and one evening in May she took Gilbert to the William C. Loud residence at 35 Wood Dale Drive in Santa Barbara. It was there at the Louds’ eight-room stucco ranch house that he met Bill and his wife, Pat, as well as four of their five children. Gilbert described what he wanted to do: A film and sound crew would tape their day-to-day lives for four weeks and then edit it down to a one-hour program, with each of the five families getting their own one-hour special.
According to Pat Loud, everybody in the family thought it would be “fun.” Pat also had a couple of other reasons for wanting to be on TV, reasons that she kept to herself: She hoped that doing the documentary would keep her husband, who owned a mining equipment company, home in Santa Barbara more, and most important, she couldn’t helping thinking of all the people who would see the show and read about them, “and the first ones I thought of were all Bill’s women . . . they would turn on their televisions to look at the Louds, and they would weep. There we’d be, all seven of us, a portrait of family solidarity, all interwoven by blood and love and time and mutual need and a thousand other ties those poor things couldn’t even comprehend,” she would later write in her memoir.
And she also thought, “This documentary will never air.”
Pat Loud wasn’t the only one who had severe doubts about Craig Gilbert’s project, to be called An American Family. Jacqueline Donnet, coordinating producer of the PBS show, recalled that back in the early 1970s “no one ever looked at public television. We thought that we were working on a little series like The Working Musician. Of course, there was an audience out there, but we didn’t think the family was going to make the cover of Newsweek.”
In Pat Loud’s first few talks with Gilbert, she didn’t mention her husband’s infidelities. She and Bill had already discussed getting a divorce; perhaps they would wait until their youngest child, thirteen-year-old Michelle, was out of high school before they made the big break. For all Gilbert knew, the Louds were the perfect, average American family. Pat also didn’t say much about her oldest son, Lance. Regardless, Gilbert found himself so impressed with the Louds that he decided to abandon his search for the other four families and devote all five hours to just this one. (The series eventually ran twelve hours.) Pat recalled, “That was flattering, to say the least.”
There were a few ground rules. Gilbert told the Louds that they would be filmed on a daily basis from 8 A.M. to 10 P.M. “They were to live their lives as if there were no camera present,” he said. “They were to do nothing differently than they would ordinarily.”
Pat mentioned her upcoming visit to New York City to see Lance, and Gilbert decided that her trip east might be an excellent time to start taping. He asked where Lance was staying, she said the Chelsea Hotel, and his eyes widened. It hadn’t really occurred to Pat that the Chelsea Hotel was the hotel of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, the film that her son so adored. She imagined a hotel called Chelsea being “a nice, quaint middle-class hostelry where a white-haired grandma type with a big bunch of keys at her waist clucked over boys far from home and brought them hot toddies and did their laundry.”
Gilbert lived near the Chelsea Hotel. He knew its tenants. He knew its outré reputation. He knew he’d struck TV gold. Or as Pat put it, “He got the idea before I did that the life Lance was leading wasn’t that of just any normal healthy twenty-year-old loose in the big city.”
It was there, at 222 West Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan, that Pat Loud stepped from a taxicab to meet for the first time the American Family crew, all two of them: Alan Raymond, the cinematographer, was receiving $1,000 a week for his efforts; wife Susan Raymond, the sound person, got $900. There was no introduction as the Raymonds started to film Pat making her way across the sidewalk and into the Chelsea Hotel. They instructed her to “just ignore us, like we’re not here.”
“I was like a deer in headlights,” Pat recalled.
The Chelsea Hotel.
While Lance adored the Chelsea—“I love it. All these little identical cells of people, and they’re all famous and exciting and know what to do,” he believed—Pat found it to be a seedy rip-off, its rent exorbitant, and its general air redolent of mildew and marijuana.
It was at the Chelsea that Pat met Lance’s new boyfriend, Soren Agenoux, and Lance’s new friend Holly Woodlawn of Trash fame. That first day, Lance took his mother to La MaMa, where Hair’s Tom O’Horgan came to fame, and where Pat was to see her first drag show, Vain Victory, starring those Warhol superstars Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling who’d romped together briefly in Flesh. Thanks to her Warhol-fixated son, Pat Loud was perhaps the only homemaker in Santa Barbara who’d heard of this transvestite triumvirate—Woodlawn, Curtis, and Darling.
After the show, over late-night coffee in a greasy spoon, Pat said she was alternatively shocked and bored by Vain Victory, Soren said he didn’t understand it and sort of apologized to his boyfriend’s mother, and Lance said it was thrilling. After all, future movie stars like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Jill Clayburgh had preceded them to see Vain Victory at La MaMa.
The next day, mother and son had a heart-to-heart talk in Central Park in which he revealed how much he’d wished that the family had tried to “understand me.”
Before Pat Loud left New York City, Gilbert met with her at a restaurant in Grand Central Terminal for a brief chat. Showing an openly homosexual person on television had never been done before. Gilbert loved the challenge but feared the repercussions. “Patty, what do you really feel about Lance?” he asked.
She told him, “I believe in teaching kids responsibility for their own actions. He’s been wanting to come here for a long, long time. Lance is . . . well, gotten himself into a pretty weird scene. I can’t keep bailing him out. I encourage him to stick it out so he can see I’m not going to swoop in and carry him back to the sterile and safe family hearth. I want him to grow up, and that’s a job he’s got to do on his own.”
What Pat Loud did not do was criticize Lance for being homosexual or living openly with his boyfriend. “If Lance seems not to care what others think of him it’s not a cover-up,” she told Gilbert. “His attitude is ‘Here I am the way I am,’ and he means it.”
What she also knew is that “Lance would be all right. I knew that after visiting him.”
Back home in Santa Barbara, Pat found Bill recovering from a bad sunburn, which he’d gotten “lolling around a pool,” as he put it. No one working on the American Family series asked about Bill’s affairs with other women, but there was, in Pat’s words, a “thickening of the atmosphere around the house as the filming went on.”
That atmosphere exploded on camera when Pat called Bill “a goddamned asshole,” and a couple of episodes later she revealed to her brother and sister-in-law why she was getting a divorce. “If we had any sex life, that could be kind of nice. But it is kind of a courtesy thank-you-ma’am thing. I’m too young for that, too old for women’s lib, but I’m too young for that. We don’t have any rapport anymore. And everything’s more obvious now—lipstick, powder, and gunk on his shirt. It has turned into a game.”
Viewers had never heard such sexually explicit dialogue on television, and that such intimate details of an unraveling marriage came from not a fictional character but a real person would only compound the shock value.
In the following episode of An American Family, Pat asked Bill for a divorce. Actually, she simply informed him she’d hired a lawyer, gave him the lawyer’s card, and said it was time for him to move out of the house. “At least I don’t have to unpack my bags,” replied Bill, just back from a business trip—or was it a pleasure trip? They could have ended the taping right there—except Pat came down with a bad guilt attack, typical for good Catholic girls. “Almost a million dollars had been poured into filming the Louds,” she explained. “I felt an obligation to live up to our part of the bargain. . . .”
Meanwhile, Craig Gilbert dispatched another film crew to Europe to record Lance’s journeys there. Ensconced in Paris, he imagined himself Edith Piaf in an apartment overlooking the Seine and sang atop an upright piano. Lance would be the only family member to speak directly into the camera, very much the way the actors did in Chelsea Girls. In one such interview, he looked into the camera to say, “New York has so many things that really do interest me or that could interest me that for . . . for my own good, I think I’ll just have to stay. Even if I really don’t want to. In fact, I guess I really don’t. It is so much easier just to go home. I could get a little job and make everyone happy on a day-to-day type basis and get a little money and live by myself in my own apartment or something.”
Later, once he decided to leave New York City and return to Santa Barbara, he donned a floppy picture hat and flowing scarf, and made sure to be the very last passenger off the airplane to greet family and camera on the tarmac. He was now sporting blue eyeliner and lipstick, and back at 35 Wood Dale Drive he showed his sisters, Michelle and Delilah, how to apply such extreme makeup. Delilah told him he looked great.
During the taping, his four siblings never called him a fag or fairy or queer, and there was no eyeball-rolling at his theatrics. “I was so influenced by him, in the idea of being outrageous,” Lance said of Andy Warhol. “When the cameras were on me I was really thinking, you know, Chelsea Girls and Bike Boy and stuff like that when they were filming. I was just so taken with it. I felt like I was in Chelsea Girls II, the sequel.”
Off camera, the Raymonds broke the cardinal rule of cinéma vérité. While the Loud family let Lance go his way, Alan and Susan Raymond told him to tone it down—he was coming off too flamboyant, too outrageous, too gay.
Lance didn’t see it that way. He thought he was being “terribly avant-garde” and not trying “to dress like a woman or femmy.” Only later, when he saw the twelve-hour documentary, with each sequence laid out one after the other, would he then realize, “I came off like a big fag.”
One day, the Raymonds followed Lance to a fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum. He arrived with his friend Jackie Horner, and they were both wearing makeup—Horner, swathed in a blue feather boa, had put black dots around his eyes, while Lance stuck to his basic blue mascara and lipstick. Even though both of them had tickets in hand, the museum guards wouldn’t let them through the front door because of the way they looked. The Raymonds’ camera and sound equipment was also a bit much. Finally, Jack Baker, the fashion show director, intervened. “The museum director wanted me to guarantee that they would behave,” said Baker, who had been Lance’s and Jackie’s art instructor in high school.
“The Santa Barbara matrons thought we were monsters. That scared me,” said Lance. But then, amazingly, Edie Sedgwick materialized, like a calming tonic. She introduced herself. “I haven’t seen you for eons!” she told Lance, giving him a kiss. It was true—not since that day at the beach with her dog and the college boys playing football and her tirade about all those fags in New York City. How could he forget?
Lance asked where she’d been.
“I’ve been put away for a while!” she said.
A Santa Barbara matron, intrigued by the cameras, asked Edie who she was. “Edie Sedgwick Post . . . temporarily,” she replied.
Lance knew what the erstwhile Andy Warhol superstar really wanted. She didn’t care about him, but rather was “drawn like a moth to flames by those cameras.” She looked frail, sickly, horrible, and Lance believed “that I was standing there with a ghost of myself in the future. It would seem like ‘Oh, look, there’s Lance, and that’s what’s going to happen to him.’ ”
Lance and his friend drove Edie home. There in the foyer of the Sedgwick manse were dozens of bottles of pills, displayed openly like so much candy for the kids. They said good-bye.
The next day, a week before Thanksgiving, Lance received a phone call from Jackie Horner, who told him, “Edie Sedgwick is dead of an overdose.”