In the late 1960s, law officers raided the Atlanta, Georgia, home of Robert Eli Stanley, expecting to find evidence that would help convict him on charges of being an illegal bookmaker. Instead, they found sexually obscene materials in a desk drawer in his upstairs bedroom. That raid led to his arrest and conviction, in which the Supreme Court of Georgia found Stanley guilty of the possession of pornography. In January 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case and then unanimously overturned that lower-court decision; it was a ruling that helped to establish the “right to privacy.”
The U.S. Congress, outraged that the court invalidated all state laws forbidding the private possession of pornography, immediately commissioned a study in the new year. They called it “The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.”
HAIR HAD CELEBRATED NEARLY a year of performances at the Biltmore Theatre before a twenty-one-year-old Broadway dancer named Margo Sappington got around to seeing it. “It was research,” she said. Research, in this case, was her new gig. Kenneth Tynan had just hired her to choreograph his Oh! Calcutta!
Tynan first noticed the beautiful brunette with the 180-degree leg extension in the new musical Promises, Promises, in which she and other dancers performed the showstopper “Turkey Lurkey Time,” about a drunken office party. Tynan had originally hired Promises, Promises’s choreographer Michael Bennett to choreograph Oh! Calcutta!, and it was Bennett who wanted Sappington to dance the female half of the revue’s controversial centerpiece, a naked pas de deux.
“Why me?” she asked Bennett.
“Because every time I come into the dressing room at Promises, Promises, you’re naked,” he replied.
And so Sappington was cast in Tynan’s revue. But before Oh! Calcutta! went into rehearsals that winter, Bennett left the production. “Michael had been there for the Oh! Calcutta! auditions,” said Sappington, “but his career just took off. He got busy with other projects,” one of those being Stephen Sondheim’s Company. In a lucky break for the dancer, she inherited the assignment to choreograph Oh! Calcutta!—and that’s when Tynan suggested she go see Hair. The hippie musical surprised her.
“When they took off their clothes, nobody onstage moved,” observed Sappington. “They just stood there. Plus, the stage was pretty dark.”
The full-frontal stasis of Hair was purely intentional. Naked breasts, penises, and buttocks were allowed onstage, but only to create a theatrical tableau. Private body parts attached to unclothed actors who walked, ran, danced, or otherwise moved onstage were in violation of the city’s penal code. With Oh! Calcutta!, it would be Sappington’s job to challenge that law with a nude ballet. “We just took a chance,” said producer Michael White.
Tynan liked that Sappington was a “nonqueer,” as he sometimes labeled people of his own sexual orientation. The dancer’s heterosexual credentials were strictly in order (unlike the closeted Bennett, who was dating Promises, Promises dancer Donna McKechnie at the time).
“Tynan made a hard-and-fast rule there was to be no homosexuality,” said Bill Liberman, the show’s company manager. “Oh! Calcutta! would be a completely hetero show. That was a Tynan edict.”
Sappington saw Oh! Calcutta! as a chance to leave the chorus line and launch her career as a choreographer. For the middle-aged Tynan, the show not only meant more, it was also much more complicated, since his ambitions were driven in unequal parts by creative frustration, financial hardship, and lust. As a theater critic, he wielded power, but it was power without much financial income. He wrote thousands of words a year, but he also wrote nothing of consequence that would be read a year, or even a few weeks or maybe even a day or two after it left his typewriter for the printed page. He’d tried to write a book, even a play, but he finished neither. “Oh! Calcutta!, he thought, would make him money,” said Michael White. Oh! Calcutta! would also attach his name to something other than a thousand-word review of somebody else’s hard work and labor. And more important, according to Bill Liberman, “Ken had a lot of sexual fetishes, which he was very open about having to do with ladies’ underwear or S&M. His doing Oh! Calcutta! was definitely part of that.” Those sadomasochistic fetishes worked their way into a least four skits that Tynan himself wrote for the show.
Obviously, “queers” were not part of his fantasy, although Tynan did let his lead producer, Hillard Elkins, hire John Schlesinger’s new lover, Michael Childers, to be the show’s photographer. As Childers described the general ambiance around the project, “Tynan was a real cocksmith, and Oh! Calcutta! was an ode to cunt. It was a very heterosexual production.”
In addition to it being a very heterosexual show, Tynan desperately wanted Oh! Calcutta! to be a very Broadway show.
But Broadway declined. No matter that many of those old and venerable venues were underused and falling apart in the late 1960s; the Nederlander and Shubert organizations, the largest theater landowners in midtown Manhattan, preferred to keep their Broadway respectability intact by eschewing the rent money from “such a dirty show,” as Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. described Oh! Calcutta! The year before, the powers behind Hair had run into a similar puritanical wall of resistance from the New York City theater monopoly, but lucked out by securing the Biltmore Theatre, one of the only Broadway venues not owned by either the Nederlanders or the Shuberts. With the Biltmore already occupied, Tynan had no choice but to look downtown to Off Broadway to open Oh! Calcutta!
It fell to the company manager to secure that theater. One day, Bill Liberman found himself walking by the Gaiety on Second Avenue, just below Fourteenth Street. “It was a theater. I thought it might be appropriate, so I bought a ticket,” he recalled. Inside, strippers bumped and grinded, and as they were finishing up their act, a movie screen lowered. “And a film came on showing a penis going into a vagina,” said Liberman. “But it was light enough, and I could see it was a real theater.”
An old burlesque house, to be more precise.
It had once been known as the Phoenix, popularized by a green-eyed ecdysiast named Ann Corio. Then, in a less sexually ambivalent era, the management called it the Gaiety, which sent out the wrong message for its potential new tenant. Tynan quickly rechristened it the Eden, as in the Garden of Eden. At least that’s the way Americans interpreted it. For the British Tynan, the theater’s new name was “a tribute to a great English statesman,” the British prime minister Anthony Eden. It was a wicked salute, since Tynan despised the conservative pill-addicted politician who spied on the members of his own cabinet by ordering government chauffeurs to report back to him any questionable activities, especially those of a carnal nature.
To rename it the Lord Chamberlain Theatre might have been more apt, albeit a little lengthy for an Off-Broadway marquee. The Lord Chamberlain had been the British theater censor, up until the end of 1968, when the office was abolished. In the beginning, Tynan had considered opening Oh! Calcutta! in London. But, “I was afraid there might be some sort of backlash. The public prosecutor can still make trouble,” he believed. “I’ve decided it will be better to be [in New York City] and go to the West End next year.”
Ever since Tynan uttered the word “fuck” on the BBC, he’d harbored a paranoiac fascination with censors, and he rightly feared that his name on a sex revue might “attract the killers, the bluenoses,” who, under the new, less restrictive censorship laws, could possibly still make trouble. “I don’t want to be one of the first test cases,” he said. As long as it didn’t cost him anything, Tynan was all for freedom of speech.
He wasn’t alone in his bridled licentiousness. Hair also delayed its London opening a year to avoid dealing with the Lord Chamberlain. But unlike Hair, Tynan chafed at being forced to put his show into an old strip joint rather than a prestigious Broadway house. And there were even worse indignities on his ride to notoriety. While he’d been successful in securing skits from, among others, Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, and John Lennon, the coup of having a heavyweight theater director (“Harold Pinter was tempted,” said producer Michael White) devolved into the mundane necessity of hiring someone who’d actually do the job—in this case, a clinical psychologist-turned-stage-director. Dr. Jacques Levy of the Menninger Clinic had recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition to direct a play, Motel, which Michael White had produced as part of the experimental New York–based theater group La MaMa’s America Hurrah project in London. Hilly Elkins and Bill Liberman, despite their sizable theater résumés, had never heard of Levy, which compelled them to see a play he’d directed in New York City. It was by some equally no-name playwright.
At the final curtain of Sam Shepard’s Red Cross, the producer asked his company manager, “Do you know what we’ve just seen?”
“I have no idea,” replied Liberman.
Tynan had seen Motel in London and told his wife, Kathleen, that he liked Levy’s cool “nonorgiastic style.” How could Elkins and Liberman possibly disagree?
There was, however, total agreement on one thing: what had to be done with the Eden.
“We’re disinfecting the place before we move in,” announced Elkins. “Speaking of whorehouses, there were at least two beds in each dressing room.” Fifty-four cots, to be exact.
“They were, indeed, running a whorehouse,” Liberman verified.
In addition to creating a run on Lysol at the local A&P, there were other purges as well. Before they even got to the auditions, Tynan made it clear to Elkins and Levy that he wanted an all-heterosexual cast. To American eyes, this Brit with his stiff demeanor and chronic stammer seemed an unlikely arbiter of all things machismo. It was a cultural divide that, in her review of the gay-themed film Victim, critic Pauline Kael pinpointed with her assessment that “actors, and especially English actors, generally look so queer anyway, that it’s hard to be surprised at what we’ve always taken for granted. . . .”
Tall, immaculate, and very reserved, except when talking about taking a cane to a woman’s behind, Tynan often showed up in a white silk suit, a pink shirt, and wine-colored patent leather loafers on his visits to the once-grungy Eden, which he promptly painted green in his re-creation of the world’s first garden. Tynan’s clothes screamed Carnaby Street, especially when seen in contrast to the typical costume outside the theater’s doors on Second Avenue, where the real-life hippies whom Tom O’Horgan hadn’t already cast in Hair limited their wardrobe to blue jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and sandals. Not that the Americans in charge of Oh! Calcutta! were any more adventuresome in their appearance. Jacques Levy grew his mustache big and black to compensate for the baldness above, which he tried to disguise with a bad comb-over and cowboy hats. Hilly Elkins, an impresario who fashioned himself after the late Mike Todd of Around the World in 80 Days and Elizabeth Taylor fame, sported a well-trimmed goatee and naturally gray hair. According to his girlfriend of the moment, actress Claire Bloom, Elkins was also “some middle-aged urban cowboy,” with his motorcycle, sun-lamp tan, and a libido that matched, if not surpassed, Tynan’s. As Bloom reported, “Elkins’s entire being was centered on sexual gratification; his fantasies were alternately voyeuristic and sadistic.” In other words, the perfect man to produce Oh! Calcutta!
What Elkins also shared with Tynan was his ability to see the same bottom line. Oh! Calcutta! had the potential to make them wealthy. “I don’t mind anything that’s profitable,” Elkins liked to say. “In six months, you’ll be hard put to ignore this show anywhere. I’m sure you know how far a Jewish boy can go with a dirty joke.”
Watching hundreds of hopeful actors audition, Elkins and Levy made sure that no one making the final cut was too well endowed, for fear of inciting the police. They weren’t looking for porn bodies, because they didn’t want anyone’s dangling member to take focus. Still, “We wanted an attractive cast,” said Elkins. “If you have a show where every cast member is going to get naked, you have to know what you’re dealing with.”
Equally important, all traces of effeminacy in speech or gesture from the male actors met with a forceful “Thank you very much. We’ll call you.” Despite the three men’s gaydar, one male homosexual did make the final cut. Somehow, the fact of his employment never caused Mark Dempsey ever to feel any loyalty to his employers, calling them “heterosexual fascists! All of them!” shortly after rehearsals began in late March.
Dempsey, as it turned out, was the least of the show’s problems.
That winter, a popular evangelist preacher took to walking in Times Square. In his strolls, he found nothing good to say about the place. “When we take down all the rules and barriers and all the regulations, it all goes out and becomes like Sodom and Gomorrah,” Billy Graham told the TV cameras. “And it ends in God’s judgment of the country when we change our way of life!”
It wasn’t the kind of change Tynan or Elkins wanted. “Simultaneously with our opening of Oh! Calcutta! was this push, with a lot of press, to clean up Broadway and get rid of all this nasty stuff,” said Elkins. “And there we were having people simulate sexual congress, not wearing clothes. A lot of people were really pissed.”
And there were other storm warnings. One week before the Oh! Calcutta! rehearsals began, the New York Police Department closed the Off-Off-Broadway play Che!, about the last days of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, on charges of obscenity and indecent exposure. The actors’ crime? Being naked and simulating sex onstage.
It’s precisely what Oh! Calcutta! was promising its future audiences at the Eden.
WHAT BUSTED CHE! AND threatened Oh! Calcutta! is what kept the itinerate Living Theatre busy on the road. The actors of the Living Theatre didn’t always restrict themselves to simulation when it came to sex onstage, nor did they restrict their sex partners onstage to fellow actors. Which is why the troupe rarely played more than one or two performances in any city.
That winter, Jim Morrison of the Doors saw the Living Theatre perform its signature Paradise Now at the University of Southern California, a theatrical experience enhanced by thirty helmeted, gas-masked Los Angeles cops who strategically positioned themselves in the auditorium lobby.
“What was great about the Living Theatre is that virile young men and nubile young women were actually taking their clothes off onstage, outraging audiences,” said the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. “And it rang a bell with Jim.”
The previous fall, at Yale University, the Living Theatre’s one-night performance of Paradise Now saw not only many troupe members disrobe completely—Living Theatre’s more modest founders, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, performed in their well-worn G-strings—but several in the audience followed suit, including critic Richard Schechner, editor of the Tulane Drama Review. High on LSD, a few naked actors and theatergoers groped and humped each other during the play’s “Rite of Universal Intercourse” section, which preached “to overcome violence we have to overcome the sexual taboo.” Everybody then left the Yale theater en masse to take to the streets, where Mace spray and paddy wagons greeted the totally naked among them.
The USC performance that Morrison witnessed was a little less raucous, not to mention more clothed, thanks to the presence of the police inside the theater. Undeterred by that disappointment, the rocker followed the troupe up to San Francisco for their next engagement, where things got a lot raunchier and, for their efforts, Morrison gave the cash-strapped company a $2,500 donation. From there he flew to his next gig with the Doors, in Miami, where Morrison decided to replicate on the rock ’n’ roll stage what he’d just seen on the legit stage. The difference was a few thousand spectators and the fact that Dade County, Florida, is not the campus of a northern California university.
On February 28, the Doors performed for twelve thousand people at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium, converted from an old seaplane hangar. “Jim had decided to do a whole theatrical presentation, unbeknownst to anyone else in the Doors,” said Manzarek. “You could see this man was a little bit out of control.” The first thing he did was berate the audience.
“Why did you people come here?” Morrison began. “You didn’t come to just hear a good rock ’n’ roll band play some hit songs. You want something more, don’t you? You’ve come to see something. What can I do? What do you want from me? I’m just a rock ’n’ roll guy. What did you come for? What if I showed you my cock?”
A few men in the auditorium yelled no; quite a few women yelled yes.
Morrison tore off his shirt and placed it over the bulge in his leather pants. “Now watch!” he ordered. “I’m going to show it to you!” He moved his shirt away from his crotch, then covered it again—back and forth went the shirt. “Did you see it? Did you see it?” he taunted. “Come onstage if you want to get closer. Whatever you want to do. You’re free. No one is going to tell you what to do.” Sometime during this tirade, Morrison got down on his knees to put his face up to guitarist Robby Krieger’s groin.
Manzarek, standing behind Morrison, doubted that the group’s lead singer actually exposed himself. The concertgoers were the only ones stripping that night, as dozens of shirts, scarves, panties, socks, and shorts began to litter the stage. The audience also followed Morrison’s command to storm the stage, which immediately began to list under their growing weight. That’s when the Doors concert at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium came to an abrupt halt.
Teenagers who’d attended the concert and been duly offended expressed their outrage to the local TV cameras. “I wonder if anyone has the courage to come forth and stop this kind of trash,” said one distraught girl. Those teenagers who’d been thrilled by Morrison’s impromptu performance somehow never received equal airtime.
Surprised by the criticism, a somewhat more sober Jim Morrison made feeble attempts to defend himself in the following days. “In the realm of art and theater there should be complete freedom for the artist and performer,” he said in one interview. “I’m not personally convinced that nudity is a necessary part of a play or film. But the artist should be free to use it if he chooses.”
The concerned citizens of Miami did not care about art. They cared about nudity, and regardless of what actually happened on February 28 at the Dinner Key Auditorium, the police in Dade County charged that Morrison “did lewdly and lasciviously expose his penis, place his hands upon his penis and shake it, and further the said defendant did simulate the acts of masturbation upon himself and oral copulation upon another.” It was also reported in court that Morrison screamed at the audience, “You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots. Your faces are being pressed into the shit of the world. Take your fucking friend and love him. Do you want to see my cock?”
It sure sounded like the Living Theatre.
While a few concertgoers claimed to have seen the “ivory shaft,” which is what Manzarek nicknamed Morrison’s penis, one-hundred photographs offered in evidence at the trial recorded no such sighting.
JIM MORRISON APPEALED THE five-hundred-dollar fine and sentence of six months in jail, but would die before the case could be retried.
Dade County, where he had been convicted, was ultraconservative. Manhattan, where the Che! actors had been arrested, was not—and their theater was only five blocks away from where Oh! Calcutta! would soon be performing.
The Che! bust took place on March 24, moments after the play’s third performance ended at the Free Store Theater on Cooper Square in the East Village. Arrested and fingerprinted but still eager to publicize their show, the Che! cast posed for photographers at the East Fifth Street police station. Actress Jeanne Baretich got especially cheeky when she stuck a red rose in her mouth to offer up her best Carmen Miranda impersonation. In addition to the four actors, six persons associated with the direction, writing, and production of Che! were arrested on charges of “consensual sodomy, public lewdness, obscenity, and conspiracy to commit such acts under the stage penal code.”
It was a local clergyman who made sure that the police knew all about Che! Having bought a ticket to the March 22 opening-night performance, the reverend stopped by his local precinct afterward to register extreme moral displeasure. Warrants were secured, and two days later, Assistant District Attorney Kenneth Conboy, accompanied by Judge Amos A. Basel of criminal court, broke from their usual evening of watching TV to go to the Free Store Theater to witness actress Mary Anne Shelley simulate sex with Che Guevara doppelganger Larry Bercowitz, who simulated fellatio on Paul Georgiou, who impersonated the president of the United States. There was also much “rubbing of the genital areas,” as the ensuing police report noted. From what Conboy and Basel could decipher, no article of clothing prevented one actor’s groin from contact with another actor’s groin. In total, the two male actors tallied up no fewer than four such offenses against public decency.
“This is a clear case of political suppression,” Che! director Ed Wode complained to reporters. “There have been seventy plays depicting nudity throughout New York City and no one arrested them. We are being singled out because of the political message in our play.”
The police rejected that charge, saying that it was the physical contact and movement of the naked actors that felled Che! and spared works like Hair.
Eventually, Che! did continue its performances, but with a fully clothed cast. It closed a few performances later.
Kenneth Tynan saw no point in turning Oh! Calcutta! into another money-losing cause célèbre, even though his lead producer had an appetite for provoking audiences, if not the censors. Four years earlier, Hilly Elkins produced Golden Boy on Broadway, a musical that received much hate mail when its star, Sammy Davis Jr., kissed a white actress, Paula Wayne, to the sweet strains of “I Want to Be with You.” Elkins remained philosophical then and he remained philosophical now with the far racier content of Oh! Calcutta!
“If I were afraid of trouble,” he said, “I’d be selling cars.”
A flamboyant showman, Elkins courted controversy, even when it came to marrying his girlfriend of a few weeks, Claire Bloom. Elkins insisted on being married by a judge, not a rabbi, and asked his Oh! Calcutta! general manager, Gregg Platt, to find him one.
“I know a judge,” said Platt. “He’s up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.”
“I wouldn’t go to the Bronx to get married if Richard Nixon himself married us,” said Elkins.
Platt smiled. “Oh, Bill knows a judge,” he said, nodding at the show’s company manager.
“But he won’t marry you,” said Bill Liberman.
“Why not?” asked Elkins.
“Because he’s the judge who closed Che!”
That bit of legal prudery didn’t deter either Elkins or Amos A. Basel. A judge whose flair for the theatrical matched Elkins’s, Basel married the producer and Claire Bloom that winter in the producer’s East Side townhouse, a residence that the bride would later described as being of “faux-Napoleonic grandeur as though purchased, top to bottom, from the basement of Bloomingdale’s.” The ceremony took place in the presence of Liberman and Platt and a few relatives like Elkins’s father and Bloom’s daughter, Anna Steiger, who would soon refer to her future ex-stepfather as “the unmentionable.” It was a typical civil service, except when Basel took a few minutes to lecture the couple on show-business people’s bad reputation for not taking their marriage vows seriously. “I was a little mortified,” said Liberman.
Elkins knew having his wedding officiated by Judge Amos A. Basel would get him some publicity; it might even help inoculate his show from being challenged in court.
It was a real fear.
On the first day of rehearsals, director Jacques Levy told his cast, “There’s a good chance we’ll all be arrested. We might even be arrested today.”
It had not escaped the actors’ attention on the first day of rehearsals that uniformed and plainclothes cops alike waited outside the Anderson Theater as the company filed into the rehearsal space, just across Second Avenue from the Eden. “It’s only fair to warn you that you’re taking a chance with your livelihood,” said Levy, raising the specter of some bluenose Joe McCarthy. “What we plan has never been done in America before, and a public outcry could lead to a blacklisting. In radio and television especially. You just may not be welcome anymore.”
Indeed, an Actors’ Equity representative would warn in the days to come, “The worst that could happen is that they be arrested and convicted, and given a sentence and very seriously have their careers compromised.”
For that first rehearsal, Levy showed up in his usual cowboy outfit. The cast sat around him in a circle, wearing nothing but matching yellow bathrobes. The middle-aged Levy was balding, showed some paunch, but possessed a soft-spoken, comforting charm. “I think all of the women in the company had a crush on Jacques,” said actress Boni Enten, who considered him as much “a guide” as a director.
In addition to their stage performances, Levy counseled his actors on potential personal problems. “Especially from relatives, and particularly husbands and wives,” he added. For reasons of propriety, Levy instituted what he called the “no-fuck law,” which quickly devolved into the abbreviated “NFL,” which meant, in effect, that no cast member could sleep with another cast member. Bringing his Menninger Clinic experience to the discussion, Levy launched into a long discourse on The Naked Ape. Subtitled “A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal,” the book by Desmond Morris had recently made a surprise visit to the top of the bestseller lists, aided in that ascent by its cover of a naked man, woman, and child, their bare backsides completely exposed. Morris’s lurid and somewhat mundane thesis held that sex partners were territorial to the detriment and exclusion of their nonsex partners. Afraid of what was apparently commonplace in the world of monkeys, Levy didn’t want any of his Oh! Calcutta! humans to feel left out.
But some were left out regardless.
It took three long weeks of rehearsal before Levy let his actors cast off their yellow bathrobes and perform naked. Nature soon took its course despite Levy’s NFL rule. “How can you touch and fondle a person and spend so much time in getting on an intimate basis without learning to feel close to him when you’re away from the theater?” asked one of the actresses. “I have been seeing somebody from the cast on the outside. It would seem unnatural not to.”
If sex within the company was forbidden, anyone’s spouse remained fair game. Shortly after the actors performed a number of Esalen-style “sensitivity exercises” under Levy’s direction, they abandoned more than their yellow robes. When the new Mrs. Kenneth Tynan visited the theater one day to watch rehearsals, an actor in the company took the opportunity to leave the stage during a break and sit down beside her in the auditorium. “I’d like to fuck you,” he said by way of introduction.
Kathleen Tynan, who had not visited Esalen or the Menninger Clinic or read The Naked Ape, politely thanked the actor for his interest, then voiced strong objections to her husband, who turned the matter over to Elkins, who turned it over to Levy, who just hoped the whole problem would go away.
Next up on the cast’s firing line was photographer Michael Childers. Elkins had been impressed with the multimedia work Childers had done for the party scene in Midnight Cowboy, and thought Oh! Calcutta! could benefit from a similar psychedelic touch. Although the party sequence in Midnight Cowboy filmed for more than three days, Oh! Calcutta! was a two-hour show, requiring, as Childers envisioned it, no fewer than fifty-six movie projections with superimposed photographic images fading in, out, and off several screens mounted around the stage. In one aspect, the mechanics and logistics were the easy part. The hard part came when Childers showed up to photograph the cast. Since they were going to be photographed naked, they demanded that he follow suit and get out of his street clothes, too.
“You lose a lot of inhibitions quickly!” said Childers, who was allowed to wear his tennis shoes.
Samuel Beckett did not make the trip to New York City to see the company rehearse his one-minute “Prologue,” in which three naked bodies appear entangled in a lot of garbage onstage as the prerecorded strains of female orgasms washed over them. In his place, Beckett sent a missive of minimal instructions. “Do not change a word of this script,” he wrote, even though the totally mute “Prologue” contained no dialogue.
Less shy were Sam Shepard, Robert Benton, and David Newman, all of whom made visits to the Eden to oversee rehearsals of their respective skits. Benton and Newman, who wrote Bonnie and Clyde for Warren Beatty, contributed a dark ode to wife-swapping called “Will Answer All Sincere Replies.” In Shepard’s “Rock Garden” a father tells of his interest in “corn” and “cattle”; his son then tells of his interest in “fucking” and “cunts,” at which point in the drama the father drops over dead.