A few dozen blocks uptown, the powers behind the new Off-Broadway musical Hair had already decided to make the jump to Broadway.
Mart Crowley knew James Rado. They’d been classmates at American University in Washington, D.C. “Even in college he had a hair fetish,” said Crowley, referring to Rado’s premature toupee. Ironically, Rado and his lover, Gerome Ragni, had conceived this new stage musical called Hair, and could not wait to add all the freethinking, mind-expanding elements to the upcoming Broadway production that impresario Joseph Papp wouldn’t permit when the musical opened downtown the previous October at the brand-new Public Theater. Top of their list was the song “Sodomy,” which went on blasphemously to declare the joys of fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty, and masturbation.
Ragni and Rado were on something of a mission. “We thought people should know those words, that it was a gift to the people to know these words about human sexual practices,” said Rado.
That gift also included naked bodies onstage, in other words, a nude scene. “Joe wouldn’t allow it,” said the show’s composer, Galt MacDermot. “ ‘Sodomy’ was not in the Joe Papp version, neither was ‘Black Boys.’ That’s why Jerry and Jim wanted Tom O’Horgan to direct. Tom was much more the troublemaker, a controversial director. Jim and Jerry knew they could do almost anything with Tom, and they did,” said MacDermot.
In one altercation with the boss at the newly formed Public Theater, Rado and Ragni had sent Papp a long memo of complaints about the nascent Off-Broadway production of Hair, which, being the theater’s inaugural show, had much riding on it. Even though Papp’s office was only a few yards away, an assistant returned to the rehearsal space, asking, “Who’s Rado and Ragni?”
When the two men nodded, Papp’s assistant promptly dropped several torn bits of paper on the floor in front of them. It was their memo.
How dare he? Hair, in Rado and Ragni’s opinion, was their show. They’d conceived the story about a bunch of free-love hippies who burn their draft cards; they’d written the book and lyrics, and felt they had every right to have veto power over Papp’s director of choice, Gerald Freedman, who’d not only turned Hair into a shrill antiwar screed but fired Rado from starring with his lover Ragni in the Off-Broadway production.
After Hair played a couple of months at the Public, Papp didn’t so much lose interest in the musical when it closed on schedule as he became more interested in other projects, like his own production of Hamlet, which he directed. As he explained the situation to Rado and Ragni, “We do shows for eight weeks only.”
The Hair story might have ended after its first eight weeks of performances, the victim of Papp’s Shakespeare ambitions, if not for another would-be impresario, in this case a political dilettante with showbiz ambitions. For the handsome scion of Chicago’s J. W. Butler Paper Company, it was a question of what came first, the U.S. Senate or Broadway. Hair, with its liberal political bent, made the choice an obvious one for Michael Butler. He promptly acquired the Broadway rights to the show and immediately found himself more in synch with Rado and Ragni than with Papp and Freedman. Did it matter that he’d never produced a Broadway show? He’d never run for the U.S. Senate either.
Butler agreed completely with the Hair writers’ complaints about the Off-Broadway production. “I had questions about Gerald Freedman, because he never had smoked grass,” said Butler. Equally important, “I wanted Jim Rado back in the show. His relationship with Jerry, their energy, was at the core of the show.” And he liked Rado and Ragni’s original choice for director.
Tom O’Horgan, known as the Busby Berkeley of the acid set, came out of the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway scene, where he immediately made waves by staging The Maids the way its author, Jean Genet, intended it to be performed: in drag with men playing the female roles. Rado and Ragni were impressed, and they also loved his production of Rochelle Owens’s play Futz!, about a farm boy who falls in love with a pig.
O’Horgan knew just what to do with Hair: Add all the songs that Papp and Freedman found offensive. Also, “We were looking for the real thing, but the kids who did it at the Public were like glossy print kids—regular kids that they dressed up like hippies,” said O’Horgan. “It was pretty awful.”
He instead cast a lot of real hippies, culled from various East Village haunts. They weren’t easy to find. “Frustration was so high we had taken to chasing anyone down the street who vaguely looked right,” said O’Horgan. His original concept was for the actor-hippies to live in Broadway’s Biltmore Theatre, which would have forced theatergoers to walk through their laundry, clutter, and garbage in order to find their seats.
“That was one of Tom’s major things, he wanted to make it an environmental theater piece, like people were living in the theater,” said Marc Cohen, a longtime friend and professional associate. “He wasn’t able to do that, but otherwise he thought he got pretty much what he wanted with Hair.”
Various city and union laws ruled out O’Horgan’s environmentalism. He lost that battle, but with Papp and Freedman out of the way, there was no resistance to O’Horgan’s giving Broadway its first nude scene—or, more accurately, Broadway’s first group nude scene.
The nudity wasn’t something Rado and Ragni dreamed up on an acid trip. In March 1967, they’d seen a couple of men strip naked during a be-in that brought ten thousand people into Central Park. Rado recalled, “These two guys in the midst took their clothes off, and everybody was just amazed and astounded, just like an audience. It sent them into this incredible place they had never been before.” Undercover cops in the park alerted officers on horses, and suddenly the Sheep Meadow looked as though it was being overrun by a cavalry of men in blue. The two naked men escaped, never to be arrested, as the crowd began to chant, “We love cops! We love cops!”
“It was the perfect hippie happening,” said Rado, “and we felt it had to be in the play.”
So did O’Horgan. Rehearsals for the Broadway version of Hair were, for a while, a total meeting of four minds: O’Horgan’s, Butler’s, Rado’s, and Ragni’s.
“Galt MacDermot didn’t fit in. He did his job. He didn’t hang out,” said Butler.
MacDermot agreed with that assessment. “I didn’t find them far-out,” he said of his Hair cohorts. But they were different.
Rado and Ragni, who had recently split with wife Stephanie, were lovers who lived in Hoboken. MacDermot had a wife and four kids in Staten Island. Rado and Ragni dressed like hippies and had long hair, although the balding Rado usually wore a wig. MacDermot kept his hair short, and he even wore a business suit and tie when Rado and Ragni took him to the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park to research the hippie scene. The park’s denizens, camped out in tents among the crumbling brownstones, thought he was a narc. Despite his crewcut and crisp white shirts, MacDermot wrote music incredibly well and he wrote it fast—so fast that, even though he polished off his initial batch of fifteen Hair songs in just two weeks, he didn’t play them publicly for another two weeks, in case anybody got the impression that he’d cranked them out in only two weeks.
Rado and Ragni never talked publicly about being gay. Even decades later, Rado would prefer to use words like “pansexuality” and “omnisexual” to describe himself. Those words also described Hair, he said, “which is about the idea of a close friendship, a male bond, a strong male bond in which love happens. That was the thing going for it, that outward love and being unafraid to embrace and be free. In that sense, we reflected that ourselves. We went with those feelings, that was the core of the piece. One thing that came through during the hippie movement was actual physical contact between men. You see that now, but you never did before—at least not in America—until the hippies started doing it.”
For Rado and Ragni, the musical’s basic triangle of three men—the renegade Berger, the draftee Claude, and the openly bisexual Woof (“I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger out of bed”)—might have looked like merely a tribe thing, as Rado also termed it. “With all people in the tribe, there was affection and physicality,” he said.
To Hair’s choreographer, Julie Arenal, the tribe looked more like just a guy thing. The lone woman on the show’s creative team, Arenal complained that the show’s principal female characters—the free-loving Sheila and the already pregnant doormat Jeanie—were in danger of becoming minor distractions to the main event of the three men’s free-roaming love affair.
It was an example of art imitating life and vice versa.
“Working on Hair was a very guy situation,” said Arenal. She also called it a very delicate situation, working with the three men. “They weren’t militant. It’s just that they liked the boys. They had a good time together. It’s what they preferred. It wasn’t a statement.
“Ragni and Rado were like any couple,” Arenal continued. “They fought. They didn’t fight.”
O’Horgan was a bit more complicated. Back then, “Tom was very secretive about himself,” said Marc Cohen. “He was more like a straight man who liked young guys. He wasn’t very overt about it. He expressed his sexuality through his theater.”
It was Michael Butler’s opinion that Ragni and Rado were essentially writing about themselves, with the charismatic leader Berger being Ragni and the middle-class Claude being Rado. It’s the major reason why, unlike director Gerald Freedman, Butler wanted Rado to costar with Ragni in the show when they took it to Broadway. “They were lovers,” he said. “Their chemistry had a very strong effect on the show. Jim was a lost child following this crazy man. Ragni was wild, very difficult to deal with. Jim was the reverse. They were essentially playing themselves onstage.”
In rehearsals, however, Arenal found the show oddly off balance. At one point, she dared to ask O’Horgan, “Why aren’t the girls onstage? Are there no girls?”
Which is what made it a delicate situation.
Only twenty-seven years old, Arenal was the youngest and least experienced theater professional of the group. Even though Rado and Ragni were playing young hippies, they both now lived on the dark side of thirty and routinely shaved a few years off their respective ages in order to observe the era’s “don’t trust anyone over thirty” credo. The very petite Arenal was the only one who looked like a teenager, and it was her opinion that the forty-four-year-old O’Horgan had hired her at Ragni’s insistence—she and the writer-actor used to hang out together at a coffeehouse on Tenth Street and Second Avenue—and, more important, “I was the least threatening, hadn’t done much, and O’Horgan didn’t want anyone who had a huge presence,” she said.
O’Horgan also didn’t want to give Arenal any credit for choreographing Hair. Thanks to Galt MacDermot and the choreographers’ guild, she eventually got credit. It wasn’t so much their heterosexuality as their sobriety that bonded Arenal and MacDermot. “It was crazy backstage,” she recalled. “They did everything. That’s why I became friendly with Galt. We were the only ones who didn’t do drugs.”
Michael Butler had hired Dr. John Bishop, the erstwhile physician of LSD advocate Timothy Leary, to administer vitamin injections to his company. Even before the show opened on Broadway, there were suspicions among the cast that those shots contained something more than just B12. At one early preview, after Dr. Bishop had made his rounds at the theater, Arenal noticed that a lot of the actors were “spaced-out. It was the worst preview.”
Cast member Marjorie LiPari sampled Bishop’s brew three times, then stopped. “You tasted the Vitamin B12 mode in your mouth instantly,” she said, “and then you felt the speed mode. And when you crashed, you got a bit of depression.”
Given the cast’s amphetamine intake, their long hair and hippie clothes, their four-letter-word language, and the show’s two male leads being openly in love backstage, it wasn’t surprising that some people would take offense.
“The stagehands hated us,” said Arenal. The middle-aged stagehands from Jersey wished they were employed in Eydie Gorme’s and Steve Lawrence’s new musical, Golden Rainbow, about normal people who worked in Las Vegas casinos. Instead, they had to watch night after night as a bunch of dirty longhairs burned their draft cards, yelled obscenities, and got naked.
And it only got worse when it came to getting naked. In the beginning, O’Horgan considered having the cast wear body stockings for the nude scene, but costume designer Nancy Potts advised against it. He did, however, make it voluntary for the actors to participate in the nude scene at the end of act one. “Only a few did it at first, three or four guys and girls. Then most everybody did it,” Galt MacDermot noted.
At the very first preview, on April 11, only three cast members disrobed—Ragni, Steve Curry (who played Woof) and Steve Gamet, a member of the tribe—and even they were law-bound. Nudity on the New York stage was legal only if the naked actors did not move. That very first night, the three daring young men of Hair took off their clothes under a slitted scrim and then rose up through the scrim’s openings, their naked limbs bathed in a rather dim overhead lighting. The whole scene lasted about twenty seconds. Lighting designer Jules Fisher called the low wattage “a totally artistic decision. The brightness level was related to what was right emotionally at that moment, not to public mores.”
Although O’Horgan had discussed the possibility of doing a nude scene with the cast, he never rehearsed it. When Ragni, Curry, and Gamet disrobed at the first preview, “[e]veryone was momentarily shocked,” reported cast member Lorrie Davis. “They never did it at rehearsals.”
In following previews, two other cast members joined the original three and stripped, but Michael Butler worried that the nude scene looked underpopulated, and talked about hiring ringers. “At first I was apprehensive about doing the nude scene,” said cast member Erroll Booker. His hesitance had as much to do with exposure as the effect of Dr. Bishop’s injections on his physical appearance. “The shots ‘shriveled up my member,’ as they say in Victorian novels. Not only mine, but you’d see all the dudes under the scrim pulling at their own, trying to straighten them out.”
By opening night, more actors consented to strip, and in time, it was not uncommon for various members of the ensemble to jockey for optimum exposure at the front of the tribe. “Many of the girls were so anxious to strip they didn’t even take time off while they were menstruating, and we and the audience were treated to the sight of hanging tampon strings,” reported Lorrie Davis.
Butler never had to carry out his threat to hire professional strippers, and since everybody obeyed the tableau rule, which forbade swinging penises and breasts, the authorities never made any arrests. O’Horgan, however, made up for that lack of publicity by having his nude scene accompanied by a bogus “raid” on the theater, with flashing red lights and the appearance of two actors dressed in cop uniforms to “arrest” the audience.
O’Horgan never got to see his cast actually take up residence in the Biltmore Theatre, but the show’s free-love ethos permeated the place nonetheless. “There was a time when you couldn’t go anywhere in the theater—hallways, dressing rooms, the balcony, and especially the johns—without falling upon two or three members of the cast doing drugs or having sex, or both,” reported Lorrie Davis. “There were any number of gay or straight combinations.”
If the stagehands hated Hair, at least they could wear earplugs to block out the loud rock music and lyrics. Likewise, the producers in the Broadway League had their own way of blocking out the show: The League denied Hair a place at its Tony Awards that spring, arbitrarily moving up the eligibility date to mid-March so that Hair with its April 29 premiere date did not qualify.
It didn’t matter. The show, thanks to all those naked stationary bodies, became an immediate sellout.
“I have to thank the nude scene for getting a lot of people into the theater,” said Michael Butler. “That was the end of the first act, and then we had them for the second act, which is when the antiwar message was really laid out for them.”
Even before the show officially opened, it was already attracting the famous and the newsworthy. John Schlesinger and his new lover, photographer Michael Childers, saw Hair in previews, and the film director was so impressed with Jonathan Kramer, who cross-dressed in the musical, that he cast him to play the sexually ambiguous Jackie in his new movie Midnight Cowboy.
Celebrities had their choice that spring: Hair or that new homosexual play, which also opened in April, at the tiny Theater Four on West Fifty-Fifth Street.
As the set designer of The Boys in the Band had surmised, “I’m sure everyone gay in New York will come, and when they’ve seen it we’ll close it.”
NEW YORK, AS IT turned out, had a lot of gay theatergoers. In a near state of shock, the reviewer for the Saturday Review felt compelled to alert readers that at the performance of The Boys in the Band he attended the audience was “98 percent male!” That bit of warning aside, the review was a rave. Most of the reviews were raves. Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx, and Margot Fonteyn (who had to sit on Rudolf Nureyev’s lap to see the sold-out show) made their daring pilgrimage to Theater Four, giving the show the imprimatur of hipness, if not respectability. The cast, equally in awe and star struck, even fashioned a peephole in the back of the living room set so they could watch the reactions of the famous out front in the audience.
The play’s detractors saw another reason for its success with nonhomosexual audiences. As Edward Albee described it, “I saw straights who were so happy to see people they didn’t have to respect.”
The review in Time magazine, while positive, could only have reinforced Albee’s concern. It called The Boys in the Band “a funny, frank and honest play about a set of mixed-up human beings who happen to be deviates. The occasion is a birthday party for Hank, an event as ominous for a homosexual as for an aging woman with its reminder that good looks can fade and desirability diminish.”
Wilfrid Sheed in Life applauded The Boys in the Band, because it “calls a fag a fag, so that we do not get the unlovely confusion that some people claimed to find in Virginia Woolf, where everyone got the worst of both sexes. . . .”
Unlike Albee, who had never written an overtly gay-themed play, Mart Crowley had no choice but to come out with The Boys in the Band, his sexual orientation a given with journalists—like the New York Post reporter who wrote that his play presented “a party of bitchy fags and queens.”
In reply, Crowley offered a strong defense of his play’s fictional characters and their real-life counterparts. “Probably most homosexuals today are unhappy,” he told the reporter from the Post. “But that’s because of stupid social taboos, not because of their state. I hope in a few years attitudes will change. There won’t be the fear about blackmail, the hang-ups, the self-doubts.” He especially objected to people taking out of context his character Michael’s suddenly infamous line “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
“Michael needs his analyst, but he is aware of his problems. He’s working them out gradually,” the playwright offered.
But even Crowley couldn’t resist the urge to protect his actors from getting the gay rap. “Cliff Gorman, the one who plays the queen, has a wife and children. He’s nothing like that offstage. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” Crowley asked in answer to his own question.
In the New York Times, The Boys in the Band finally came full circle. The paper’s new theater critic Clive Barnes wrote: “A couple of years ago, my colleague Stanley Kauffmann, in a perceptive but widely misunderstood essay, pleaded for a more honest homosexual drama, one where homosexual experience was not translated into false, pseudo-heterosexual terms. This I think The Boys in the Band, with all its faults, achieves. It is quite an achievement.”
According to Edward Albee, The Boys in the Band couldn’t lose with theatergoers: It attracted the gays who were eager to see themselves onstage under any circumstances, as well as the straights who were eager to feel superior. The heterosexual embrace of the play even extended to Kenneth Tynan, who came to see The Boys in the Band and promptly asked its author to write a sketch for his new sex revue. Crowley, suddenly flush from royalties and now living at the famed Algonquin Hotel, could afford to pass on that assignment. “People like Tynan scared the shit out of me,” said the playwright. “He was so ruthless as a critic. Who knew what he was going to say or do?”
But there were other takers, as well as decliners, to Tynan’s offer, which apparently had gone out to nearly every New Yorker who’d ever put a sheet of paper through a Smith Corona.
Philip Roth declined the offer. Roth’s friend Jules Feiffer said he’d give it a try.
Roth and Feiffer had recently taken up residence at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, to work on respective projects. Roth was a Yaddo veteran; Feiffer, a Yaddo virgin. Roth had helped his Village Voice cartoonist friend get accepted there. Both men had sex on the brain: Roth was working on a novel about masturbation. Feiffer had this half-finished play about two men who befriend each other in college, and then proceed to go through life making love to lots of women without really liking women.
In addition to his weekly strip for the Village Voice, Feiffer also contributed cartoons regularly to Playboy and made frequent visits to Hugh Hefner’s Chicago mansion, where that winter Drs. William Masters and Virginia Johnson had taken up residence to pursue their sex research under the largesse of the Playboy founder-publisher-editor. While the two good doctors tried to remove the mystery from sex with their bestselling Human Sexual Response, Feiffer was far more intrigued by those who followed the diktat of the brass plate on the Chicago mansion’s front door, which gave notice in Latin, si non oscillas, noli tintinnare (“If you don’t swing, don’t ring”). Those who rang included all these “studs and cartoonists who made out like crazy,” said Feiffer. One man-to-man conversation at the Hefner mansion gave him the idea for his new play. “A Playboy cartoonist told me how his girlfriend was mad at him because every time they had sex he took a shower, and he didn’t know why she was mad when he came back to bed.”
Hearing the sex-then-shower story, Feiffer told himself, “I have to use this somehow.”
That “somehow” turned out to be his next play. But it wasn’t easy to write—until Philip Roth told him about Yaddo.
For Feiffer, the cold isolation of the upstate retreat that year worked like a tonic. Writing twice the hours he normally did back in Manhattan—it took an hour to walk into Saratoga Springs, if the subfreezing weather didn’t kill you—Feiffer soon had a first draft of his play, which he considered calling The Thirty-Year War. Then he had a better idea. When he’d polished the play and come up with the new, improved title Carnal Knowledge, he sent the script to his friend Alan Arkin to see if he wanted to direct. But Arkin declined. He told Feiffer it was “too dark.” Next on Feiffer’s list was Mike Nichols, who’d rejected his previous script, Little Murders, without so much as an acknowledgment of receipt. This time Nichols was a little faster to reply. He phoned the next day.
“I want to do it. But I don’t think it’s a play. It’s a movie,” said Nichols.
Feiffer asked, “Can we get away with the language on film?” The word “fuck” had been heard the year before in the film adaptation of Ulysses, but writer-director Joseph Strick had been careful to quote directly from the James Joyce novel, long banned but now a revered work of art. Even more controversial for Feiffer’s script was his use of the equivalent of the N-word for females, “cunt,” never before heard in a major English-language release.
Nichols dismissed Feiffer’s language concerns. “We can do anything we want,” said Nichols, who ought to know, having directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate back-to-back.
“Give me thirty seconds to think it over,” Feiffer replied. “Okay.”
But Feiffer liked his play. He thought it worked as play. Perhaps he could rework all that bitter sex into something suitable for Oh! Calcutta!
Philip Roth, on the other hand, wasn’t about to dilute his Yaddo project with yet another spin-off, not even for Kenneth Tynan. He’d already sold a chapter of his novel, titled Portnoy’s Complaint, to Partisan Review. The chapter “Whacking Off” had titillated readers of Partisan Review in ways that the readers of the William Shawn–censored New Yorker never were.
Roth had been toying with his ode to “whacking off” for years, even before he finished his most recent novel, When She Was Good, published only the year before.
He took stabs at writing, and even titling, two unpublished novels, The Jewboy and Portrait of the Artist, and a play, The Nice Jewish Boy, which had received a workshop with Dustin Hoffman at the American Place Theater in 1964. In essence, all three works were about a Jewish boy, his father, and the Gentile girls—the shiksas—whom they both desired sexually. Having taught at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Roth noticed that there, among the cornfields and the farm boys, several of his more urban Jewish students were prone to writing, in essence, that same story. “The Jewish women are mothers and sisters. The sexual yearning is for the Other,” Roth noted. The shiksa.
Meanwhile, Roth had been entertaining friends with something a bit more theatrical, something that Kenneth Tynan had heard about from friends and would have killed to get his hands on for his stage revue. It was, in fact, a slide show or, more accurately, a fantasy slide show that would exhibit the sex parts of the famous, including “L.B.J.’s testicles, Jean Genet’s anus, Mickey Mantle’s penis, Margaret Mead’s breasts, and Elizabeth Taylor’s pubic bush,” which is how Roth described them. He never got around to titling his slide show monologue, because he knew “it was blasphemous, mean, bizarre, scatological, tasteless, spirited,” and therefore would always have to remain unfinished, unperformed, unpublished, and, at best, a private joke for friends after dinner and too many highballs. Roth reckoned that if this slide show monologue ever did surface, it would make his new novel Portnoy’s Complaint “appear to be the work of Louisa May Alcott.”
It could be said, however, that the imaginary slide show monologue begat the very real novel. Roth found sixty or seventy pages about jerking off in the monologue “to be funny and true, and worth saving, if only because it was the only sustained piece of writing on the subject that I could remember reading in a work of fiction.”
For some reason, the most mundane sex—masturbation—had also been the least explored by writers.
But that April, Portnoy’s Complaint, despite its “Whacking Off” chapter in Partisan Review, remained as unfinished as the slide show monologue. Roth was blocked, and his writer’s block had something to do with hating his estranged wife, Margaret Martinson, who would not divorce him after tricking him into marriage by claiming a false pregnancy (verified at the time by her purchase of a vial of urine for ten dollars from a pregnant woman in Tompkins Square Park). For that deception, she was now receiving about 50 percent of what Roth made as an author, which left him approximately $250 a week. Maybe that had something to do with his not finishing Portnoy’s Complaint, which, Roth knew, could make him as much money as Couples was now making for John Updike. It was potentially an awesome sum, 50 percent of which would go to his ex.
COUPLES, A TALE OF upper-middle-class spouse-swapping in old New England, contained long paragraphs of sexual explicitness, the kind that the author had been forced by his editors at Knopf to excise from his first novel, Rabbit, Run. Back in 1959, the battles over printing and selling D. H. Lawrence’s long-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch were still being fought in the courts, and even when the respective publishers won those cases, Knopf continued to ask for revisions from its twenty-seven-year-old author, then a staff writer at The New Yorker. Especially egregious, thought the Knopf editors, were the eight pages it took Updike to have his hero, Rabbit, sexually mount a part-time prostitute named Ruth. A distraught Updike wrote to his parents, “The issue seems to me to amount to whether I am really going to write in my life, or just be an elegant hack.”
But it wasn’t just Knopf editors who were having doubts. Updike also started editing himself because, according to his one of his editors, “John could see himself having legal suits and ending up with no money and four young children to support. So he said to Alfred Knopf, ‘maybe you should get a lawyer in to look at the obscene parts.’ Alfred arranged for the lawyer to come in at the weekend, then telephoned John in Massachusetts. And John said: ‘Oh no, I can’t come down this weekend, I’m teaching Summer Sunday School.’ ”
Out went most of the eight pages of Rabbit mounting Ruth, as well as a few other sexually vivid paragraphs here and there.
Eight years later, that same esteemed publisher, Knopf, was only too happy to capitalize on the graphic details of married New Englanders who committed so much adultery in the fictitious town of Tarbox, Massachusetts, that in Updike’s ingenious prose the Applebys and the Smiths were dubbed the Applesmiths, and the Saltzes and Constantines became the Saltines. (The story line included eight other promiscuous couples, so many couples, in fact, that most readers couldn’t tell them apart.) And the details were graphic, but for a purpose. “In Couples,” Updike claimed, “I was sort of a crusader, in a way, trying to make the reader read explicit sex: this is what sex is, blessed reader, take it or leave it—sort of an ‘in your face’ approach.”
That in-your-face approach pushed the book’s original print run of seventy thousand copies to the top of the bestseller lists, where it did battle with Myra Breckinridge and Arthur Hailey’s Airport for the number one slot for several months, and Updike’s earnings of half a million dollars in royalties were quickly matched by a half-million-dollar sale of the movie rights to the Wolper Company.
None of which was hurt by the fact that Time magazine, then selling a few million copies a week, put Updike on its cover that April with the cash-register-friendly headline “The Adulterous Society.” Word got back to Updike that the higher-ups at Time, Inc. didn’t much like the profile—either they thought the book was not well written enough for their esteemed cover or that it was just too darned dirty, or both. The result was a written-by-committee article that never really praised or damned the book. Instead, readers were told that Couples was not an “upper-middle-class Peyton Place” as “some critics” had claimed, even though some of those critics happened to be editors at Time. Updike dismissed the whole treatment of his novel in the pages of the magazine as “kind of a mess. I didn’t think they said much about American morality or, indeed, the book,” he would later complain. “My observation about American morality was that the introduction of the pill, and now whatever other handy contraceptive device there is, has had an effect on sexual morality, and that the fading of the work ethic and of Protestant belief has certainly changed our way of looking at things.”
Updike, the son of a junior high math teacher who raised his family of five on $1,740 a year, saw none of these things, especially the pill, as a good thing, even though it was 1968. But then, he had always been an outsider, especially at Harvard, where his poor upbringing, his chronic psoriasis and stammer, and fear of spiders set him apart from the blue-bloods.
Add to that his rather late-blooming sexual awareness, which did not lead him to masturbate until well into his teens, and his having to learn about sex from erstwhile banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, and The Story of O. The sexual revolution of the 1960s freed Updike to write books like Couples, and not unwrite books like Rabbit, Run. But that literary freedom did not make Updike any more forgiving of the sexual, as well as political, licentiousness that he saw around himself and his wife, Mary, and their four children, Elizabeth, Michael, David, and Miranda. He drove a beat-up Corvair. They lived in a white saltbox house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, population: twelve thousand. And when he wasn’t working on a novel or a short story for The New Yorker in his office above a greasy spoon, Updike could be found devising one of those 17th-century-day pageants that the citizens of Ipswich were so fond of putting on around the holidays.
It was a pretty wonderful, comfortable life, if Updike said so himself.
“There was a surge of belonging—we joined committees and societies, belonged to a recorder group and a poker group, played volleyball and touch football in season, read plays aloud and went Greek-dancing and gave dinner parties and attended clambakes and concerts and costume balls, all within a rather narrow society, so that everything resonated. . . . As a group, we had lovely times being young adults in Ipswich, while raising our children more or less absent-mindedly and holding down our jobs in much the same style.”
In its cover story on Couples, Time magazine approved of this tableau of domesticity, and noted that “the Updikes are the ringleaders of a group of like-minded couples whom the older Ipswichers called the Junior Jet Set.”
For Updike, the biggest problem was how to swallow a pill, not the pill. “In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person became as good as I could make it. I choked only when attempting an especially hearty vitamin pill, and a stammer rarely impeded my incessant sociability,” he noted.
But then came Couples.
Originally, Updike was going to call it Couples and Houses and Days because, as Updike described it, life “was about not just couples but about the houses they lived in. The fascination exerted by other people’s houses; the notion that more happiness is happening in those houses than in your own; the look, in a small town, of other people’s lit windows and the imagined bliss and contentment transpiring behind them as you drive by. And then of course the days, the days that keep delivering sunrises to and then sunsets, and that seem, in their long parade, to bring us some treasure which we persistently misreceive.”
But yes, Couples was a much better title, if for no other reason than it was shorter. Plus, no one would remember the short story called “Couples” that he’d written a few years earlier, which generally covered the same spouse-swapping terrain, but which, Updike felt, at forty pages was “very overcrowded.”
Updike liked to use a typewriter, but he wrote this new sex tome longhand on the back of old manuscripts in between an inordinate number of book review assignments from The New Yorker, most of which were French novels. He joked, “I seem to get all the religious ones or the dirty ones. Somehow the two go together; they are the ultimates of life.” All those reviews had a telling effect on Couples because that’s what it was about: how the upper middle class had turned sex into a religion to replace the old church kind of prayer. Equally curiously, Updike thought up much of the novel, he claimed, when he was supposed to be praying.
“I plotted Couples almost entirely in church—like shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program and carry down to the office Monday,” where he would write it out longhand on an old army-green desk that rested atop a well-worn Oriental rug when he wasn’t reviewing a dirty French novel.
After publication of his new novel, the Boston newspapers had a field day speculating on who the randy couples of Tarbox, Massachusetts, really were. Updike claimed that “only the marsh geography [of Ipswich] peeps through in Couples.” If that wasn’t emphatic enough, he added, “I disavow any essential connection between my life and whatever I write.”
And there was the sobering fact that Updike had an in-house censor, wife Mary, a Unitarian minister’s daughter who was raised to be a harsh critic of both licentiousness and literature. Upon reading Couples, she told her husband that she felt smothered in pubic hair. “Actually I did take some of it out,” Updike confessed to Time.
In their slightly mixed but basically upbeat review, Newsweek’s editors (no doubt in competition with Time for an Updike interview) mused on the book’s origins: “It is very tempting to believe that Updike’s story is autobiographical, because his book’s defects are precisely those you would expect to find in a novel based too closely on life.”
Updike insisted otherwise, and the more he talked about his new book, the more conservative he began to sound. To the reporters at Time, he noted, “There’s a lot of dry talk around about love and sex being somehow the new ground of our morality. I thought I should show the ground and ask, is it entirely to be wished for?”
A few weeks later, he stopped asking questions and gave an unqualified no to another journalist: “This book deals with the contemporary world—with people living in the atmosphere of economic affluence and the Cold War. Today, work is available and people want to do it with their left hand. They don’t believe in the importance of vocation but of varying degrees of friendship. Life in bed and around the table is what they care most about. The eight-hour day does create the kind of recreational opportunities that belonged formerly to a tiny minority of aristocrats. Now those opportunities are available to all. I guess I must feel this is bad or dangerous.”
That dollop of puritanism was printed in the Vineyard Gazette, the local newspaper on Martha’s Vineyard, where the Updikes had taken to spending their summers. Updike bantered with the Gazette reporter about how he’d written some of the novel’s racier sections as he sunbathed out on the island’s Menemsha Beach, to help cure his incipient psoriasis. The reporter was flattered that such genius had transpired on her island, and duly noted that Updike and his book “condemned” the modern morality; she never for a moment acknowledged that modern morality is what had given Updike the literary freedom to write such a book.
Perhaps because Updike agreed with the reporter. And perhaps because he had lied about his Ipswich marriage and how it bore no resemblance to the philandering spouses in Couples. Updike would wait more than two decades to write, in his memoir: “I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irradiated with light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.”
Updike gave the Vineyard Gazette his bowdlerized interview on sex at the beginning of his last summer on Martha’s Vineyard, right before his royalties and movie sale from Couples gave him and his family the money to escape to London, where his four children would now go to school for the coming year, and he and his wife could leave behind the social and political liberals of his chosen island—or, as Updike called them, “the almost universally anti-war summer denizens of Martha’s Vineyard,” which included Philip Roth, Jules Feiffer, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman. That liberal/Updike divide had everything to do with the Vietnam War.
The previous September, the New York Times had identified Updike as the only major American writer who was “unequivocally for” U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Updike had previously taken issue with the liberals’ stance on the war, especially Feiffer’s, which he found to be “too reflexive, too Pop.”
Indeed, Feiffer had said, “The solution to the problem is so simple I’m amazed it hasn’t occurred to anyone else. Lyndon Johnson should go on nationwide TV and say to the American people, ‘Ah have goofed.’ ”
Updike would later comment that “the protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bojunk from Texas.”
Besides, Updike liked that bojunk from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson, a former schoolteacher. Updike’s father was a schoolteacher, and if Johnson had gotten America into a war, then he could get America out. As Updike explained, “It was a citizen’s plain duty to hold his breath and hope for the best, not parade around spouting pious unction and crocodile tears.”
Updike’s Martha’s Vineyard neighbors Philip Roth and Jules Feiffer did more than spout and cry. In his syndicated cartoon strip, Feiffer came out against the war as early as 1963, and by 1968 “was in a mood of black despair about the country and where we were going. I thought the Vietnam War was going to go on for the rest of my life and my daughter’s life,” he said. Out on Martha’s Vineyard, Feiffer wanted to picket the summer residences of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, but Roth and others dissuaded him, and instead they all chipped in to take out a full-page ad in the Vineyard Gazette. Roth wrote the copy and Robert Brustein and John Marquand rewrote it. Feiffer described it as a “coded assault certain to offend all those in the Pentagon or State who had attended Ivy League schools” and now supported the war. Which included John Updike, the lone major writer in America to support the war. (Updike would counter that James Michener, author of the potboiler Hawaii, was also a supporter.) It came to be known as “that Village Voice ad,” a reference to Feiffer’s comic strip, even though “I had not written a word of it,” the cartoonist claimed.
When he wasn’t writing antiwar copy, Philip Roth toiled away on the long-gestating Portnoy’s Complaint. Then, that May—just as Updike’s Couples and Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge were topping the bestseller lists, and Updike was thinking that Vidal’s characters were surprisingly stupid and angry, and Vidal was thinking how much he agreed with Norman Mailer that Updike was a hack’s concept of a good writer—something wonderfully awful happened to Philip Roth to help him complete his own libidinous opus.
Roth’s estranged wife, Margaret Martinson, was killed in a car crash in Central Park. It was a relief. Pure and simple. And since he no longer had to divide his income with a loathed ex-partner, for the first time in years, Roth splurged on a cab to ride across Manhattan to make the necessary arrangements at Frank Campbell’s Funeral Chapel on Madison and Eighty-First Street. Attending that funeral a couple of days later, Roth had to wonder if many of the mourners didn’t consider him an “accomplice,” since the character Martinson had inspired in When She Was Good also came to a violent end. Roth certainly considered the man driving the car, who attended the funeral with no more than a Band-Aid over one eye as proof of the accident, as his “emancipator.”
The writer’s block that had prevented Roth from finishing Portnoy’s Complaint lifted like a miracle. He contacted the people who ran Yaddo. He was in need of another round of solitude at the artists’ retreat, and left for Saratoga Springs in record time after putting Margaret in the ground.
He wrote of his escape with unqualified glee: “The bus from Port Authority Terminal was for me very much a part of the stealthy, satisfying ritual of leaving Manhattan for the safe haven of Yaddo, and so instead of renting a car, which would have been more in keeping with my new relaxed attitude toward taking a New York cab, I showed up at the bus station in my old clothes and boarded the north bound Adirondack bus, reading on the long trip up the thruway the rough first draft of the last two chapters of my book. At Yaddo, where there were only seven or eight other guests in residence, I found that my imagination was fully fired: I worked steadily in a secluded hillside cabin for twelve and fourteen hours a day until the book was done, and then I took the bus back down, feeling triumphant and indestructible.”
In addition to finishing Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth had survived his wife, who had been conveniently killed. “And I didn’t do it,” he noted. And he’d finished that fourth book, which was “unlike any I’d written before in both its exuberance and its design, had been completed in a burst of hard work.”