The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (4 page)

“The moment [my father] went to the States, the party began,” according to Nick Comfort. “He had a suffocating upbringing. When he discovered what life could be like in California there was no stopping him.”
Joy
had yet to be released, but already Alex had embraced his new role as the run-amok British intellectual. In 1970, he and Jane flew to Los Angeles, to get their first taste of Sandstone.

Most of the couples that made the trip to the Topanga Canyon community went in search of utopia. Like Alex and Jane, they believed Sandstone offered the first glimpse of what society would be like in the future, when Americans built their lives around pleasure rather than duty. Founders Barbara and John Williamson handpicked the members, seeking out professors, journalists and scientists who might show up at one of the naked dinners, stay for the orgy, become a convert to the philosophy, and then spread the word in newspapers and academic studies. Their schmoozing paid off. George Plimpton, Dean Martin, Tim Leary and Daniel Ellsberg were just some of the pop luminaries and intellectuals who rubbed up against each other, perhaps literally, during weekends. Sammy Davis Jr. materialized one night in full Vegas drag—diamonds on his cuffs and cigarette lighter—escorting both his wife and porn star Marilyn Chambers. As he stripped, the cufflinks bounced to the floor and Chambers dove for them.

But this was no mere sex club. Only couples could join the Sandstone community, and everyone had to abide by a set of rules. The Williamsons saw Sandstone as a revolution in lifestyle: they wanted no less than to redesign commitment between men and women, to teach husbands and wives to put aside “hang ups” and
give each other complete freedom. It was a have-your-wedding-cake-and-eat-it-too philosophy of love: men and women were supposed to be able to screw anyone they fancied, and do it on a mattress in front of their spouses; this would (in theory) deepen their trust in one another. Alex himself couldn't have designed a better test-tube for his ideas.

One evening in 1970, he maneuvered a car up the Pacific Coast Highway, heading to his first orgy. The road to Sandstone was marked only by discreet stone pillars, and the visitor had to bump along a private drive until he reached the main house.

That evening, Alex parked next to a fleet of Jaguars and Porsches, and climbed out into the smell of eucalyptus, pot smoke, and suntan lotion. At the door, Barbara Williamson, a slim woman in her 30s wearing nothing but spectacles, checked his name against a list. The house was a 1970s California suburban spread—redwood deck, low-slung furniture, wagon-wheel chandelier. The wallpaper, in various shades of brown and mushroom, appeared to be paisley until you got up close to it; then you saw the naked bodies worked into the design. A sign hung above the garlands of incense, informing all visitors about the rules inside these redwood walls:

Once inside, Alex was free to lounge by the fire in the living room and chat with other naked professionals. Or he could descend the stairs into the “ballroom,” a wall-to-wall carpet of seething flesh: breasts, butts, astonished faces, hair, writhing legs, errant arms, coos, sighs, slurps, giggles. Later, he would write about those Sandstone parties as mind-expanding experiences akin to LSD trips. Usually, the woman ended up being the more enthusiastic half of the couple, he remarked, and led the way downstairs into the orgy room; because of her superior anatomy, she could keep going all night, long after her husband was sidelined. In the morning, the first-timers tended to go on talking jags, as they tried to hold on to revelations from the night before. They would linger over their coffee, “trying to work out what had happened to them,” Alex wrote. “Breakfast often ended as an impromptu seminar on something,” as the Sandstone-ites rapped
about how to take their insights to the wider world. “Some of these morning-after experiences were even more rewarding than the specifically sexual part of Sandstone,” he wrote.

Alex fell in love with the community. From 1970 through 1972, he lived there for weeks at a time. Occasionally Jane accompanied him—for they were still very much in love—but often he pilgrimaged to Sandstone solo or with a male buddy.

It seemed that Alex could break the rules. Gay Talese described Alex as a fixture at the place, its eminence grise. “The nude biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net,” Talese wrote in
Thy Neighbor's Wife.
“With the least amount of encouragement—after he had deposited his cigar in a safe place—he would join a friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.”

It was at Sandstone, and often in mid-orgy, that Alex met many of the other minds behind the sexual revolution. For instance, Betty Dodson—the feminist writer who championed masturbation in her own bestselling book—first noticed Alex across a crowded room at Sandstone. At the time, Dodson happened to be stretched out on the floor with a man and a woman licking her. Looking up from the
proceedings, she saw a gent with gray curls who studied her intently. She waved him over, and he tottered toward her obligingly. When he was near enough, she reached for his left hand, as if to shake it, and found nothing there but a stump and a thumb. Unperturbed, she slapped his hand down on her crotch. “Oh, he was so happy,” Dodson remembered years later.

But it all came at a cost. Alex felt he had to cut himself off from his family and old friends, and even his son. “He was always strongly resistant to the idea that I or any of the family should visit him in California—largely because he didn't want us privy to the Sandstone community and all the rest,” according to Nick. Father and son had no contact for years. The relationship “was very much a one-way thing,” according to Nick. For all Alex's talk of freedom from shame, he was too mortified to let Nick witness the goings-on in California.

When
The Joy of Sex
came out in 1972 it hit the bestseller lists in most English-speaking countries. However, its success was most blazingly spectacular in the United States, where it climbed to the top of the charts, stayed at number one for more than a year, and remained
a bestseller for six. “Nothing makes a recreation more respectable for Americans than the rumor that it takes know-how,” the critic Hugh Kenner would later quip about the book. Alex's writings fit perfectly with the American zeitgeist: he'd presented sex as wholesome sport, sanctified by puritanical labor and an effortful sheen of sweat.

Even as the book became a superstar, Alex himself remained in the shadows. He might have exploded into fame as Timothy Leary had, might have become a walking advertisement for his own brand of utopia. Except, of course, Leary possessed the movie-star jaw, the Pepsodent teeth, and the boyish physicality that allowed him to transition from professor into pop-culture icon, and Alex… didn't. Had you met him in 1973, you might well have mistaken him for a car mechanic. He made the rounds of newspaper interviews in a blue jumpsuit—no need to wash shirts, he liked to brag, if you only wore zip-up suits. He slumped in his chair with a hunched-over posture that made him look older than his 53 years, and kept his breast pocket stuffed with a line of cigars, and another stogie clamped in his mouth. Photographs of him during this period suggest that he washed his gray hair as infrequently as his costume.

And anyway, Alex did not crave fame of the Leary variety. Rather, he saw himself as the man who lobbed the bomb, caused
the big explosion that changed society, and then ran away. An avowed anarchist, he lived for the moment when the old system fell apart and the new order was born.

Ever since the early '60s, he'd imagined himself in the role of world-class trickster. In his 1961 novel
Come Out To Play,
he had created a character—Dr. Goggins—who represented his ideal. A genius in bed, the doctor opens a school in Paris where he and his girlfriend teach their students advanced love-making skills. “Bill Masters thought I was writing about his clinic, but I was able to tell him I wrote that book back before Masters and Johnson were heard of,” Alex bragged in 1974. And now it appeared that what Alex had imagined a decade earlier might come true.

In the novel, Dr. Goggins meets “a French chemist who's happened on a drug [that] can turn people on. Not raise the libido, but thaw the superego, the part of the mind that says ‘mustn't.' I call [the drug] 3-blindmycin,” Alex explained in one interview. Dr. Goggins—believing that enough orgasms could bring an end to war—constructs a Molotov cocktail, fills it with a huge dose of the drug, and sets it off in front of Buckingham Palace. The queen, parliamentarians, barristers, peers and bureaucrats all huff in the substance and become flower children. The military brass retire to
the country. The rocket scientists lose interest in building phallic weaponry and run naked through their neighborhoods. War ends forever.

“Come Out To Play
started to be simply a comic novel. I think now it was the manifesto of which
The Joy of Sex
commences the implementation,” Alex told a journalist. After 1972, he tried hard to sell
Come Out To Play
to Hollywood—with no luck. Still, he could imagine exactly how it would look on the big screen. Peter Sellers would star as Dr. Goggins, the ultimate prankster, a man who brings about true democracy by wiping out the will to power. In the early 1970s, Alex could believe that he had himself become the Peter-Sellers-as-Goggins character;
Joy
was his drug, his 3-blindmycin. With the right words, he had transformed the mores and habits of the entire English-speaking world. He'd turned what used to be called perversions into “pickles and sauces”; he'd written the manifesto that people were using to refashion their lives, putting the orgasm at the top of their agendas.

Up until now, Alex had been out-of-step with the mainstream; in the 1940s, his countrymen denounced him as soft on the Nazis; in the 1960s, moralists had crusaded against the radical
agenda he put forward in
Sex and Society.
Now, for the first time, he led the crowd.

The runaway success of
Joy
presented one problem for Alex: he'd made Ruth's life hell. Every one of her acquaintances, from grocer to next-door neighbor, had likely heard about her husband's exploits with Jane. And though Alex had gone through gyrations to pretend he was only the editor, that subterfuge evaporated after the book came out. The press called him “Dr. Sex.” Ruth coped with this disaster by pretending it wasn't happening. According to Nick, “my mother never discussed [
Joy
] at all.” When she absolutely had to allude to her husband's bestseller, she called it “that book.” The marriage, which had survived so many betrayals, now crumbled.

In early 1973, Alex negotiated a divorce from Ruth. A few months later, he and Jane married in a quiet ceremony in London. Nick—and many old friends—were not invited. Then the couple jetted off to their new home in California. The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank in Santa Barbara, had offered Alex a sun-drenched office near the beach. He'd take it.

“Here we have a new genre: the coffee-table book that should be kept out of the reach of the children. Higher coffee tables would seem to be the answer,” John Updike joked in the 1970s, about
The Joy of Sex.
But the coffee tables stayed low, and the book splayed its pages suggestively in living rooms across the nation. It matched the Danish Modern furniture; the understated cover was all white space, the epitome of space-age minimalism. The book became a fashion accessory, a symbol of the New Good Life. Along with a waterbed, a hot tub, and a high-end stereo, this was a toy for adults at play.

And suddenly, so many were at play: in 1970, California adopted the first no-fault divorce law, and by the end of the decade splitting up had become easy. Now, entire consumer empires catered to the single and middle-aged: these swingers needed fern bars, sports cars outfitted with quadrophonic 8-track tape machines, amusing drinks (Harvey Wallbanger, Harvey's Bristol Cream), aftershaves, designer jeans, beachside condos, shag rugs, silver coke spoons.

Alex Comfort had never meant to create a faddish product or storm the consumer market. Just the opposite: he dreamed of a utopia where tribes of people shared their bodies, where greed
dissolved. In such a world, talking about money would be the ultimate gauchery. Examine the illustrations in
Joy,
and you catch a glimpse of what heaven might have looked like in Comfort's mind. The lovers float in the freedom of white space; seemingly they own few possessions beyond pillows and a mattress. They need nothing but their erogenous zones. In the sequel,
More Joy,
their friends come over, and now the foursome copulates on some hazy surface. (The floor? A bed?) The reader of
Joy
steps into a demimonde something like Sandstone in the early years—just men, women, and mattresses. Pleasure belonged to everyone. Didn't it?

The last thing Alex Comfort had expected was for his guidebook to become a status symbol. The book made a fortune for its publisher and became a must-have furnishing for the vacation house or bachelor pad. It both promoted Alex Comfort's utopia and undercut its essential message: in
Joy,
he exhorted readers to get beyond all the pre-packaged ideas about sex, and to fully inhabit their own minds and bodies. “Play it your own way,” he lectured readers. Once “you have tried all your own creative sexual fantasies, you won't need books.” Ah, but his readers did need the book; they bought it by the millions; they wanted the cool white cover; they longed for an artifact.

Likewise, his beloved Sandstone became an upscale consumer product in the late 1970s. Its original owners, bankrupted by a lawsuit, had no choice but to sell the place. The new proprietor, an ex-Marine, instituted a $740 initiation fee for members, which made the club as expensive as a Hawaiian vacation or a share in a yacht. Once Sandstone turned into a money mill, Alex divorced himself from the place. By all accounts, he gave up on group sex entirely around that time.