The Lifestyle (7 page)

It was the morning of the Bob-and-Carol-and-Ted-and-Alice era. In the seventies a poll would show that almost 5 percent of Americans had shared spouses at least once. Swing clubs were opening all over the country. In the Los Angeles area alone there were eighteen clubs, one a sophisticated resort called Sandstone Ranch, high in Topanga Canyon, which
attracted leading leftwing intellectuals, feminists, and artists. Other clubs were essentially bath houses for indiscriminate orgies. Still others were steel-and-cement discos where sex took place to deafening music. None fit McGinley’s vision of a homey club where middle-class folks could feel at ease. “The clubs weren’t run right,” he remembered. “A screw house wasn’t my perception of what everyday people wanted.” On the other hand, he felt, Sandstone was intimidating. “It was encounter-group oriented. You were supposed to go through some big psychological change there, have a catharsis, find the serious truth of life.” Bob and Geri didn’t believe people had to be put through the psychic ringer in order to experience sexual freedom. “You just had to be given permission and the social context to be who you were naturally. We had a vision: a fireplace, a swimming pool, a very warm, casual environment where people could be comfortably erotic, rather than weeping hysterically because they’d just seen God or the devil in a gestalt session while their partner was screwing in the next room.”

And so he and Geri founded Club WideWorld and eventually purchased the the big house that fit both their visions of a “lifestyle club,” rather than a sex parlor or an Esalen Institute-type center where a personality makeover was the goal. WideWorld was set up as a members-only organization. Before couples were allowed to pay the thirty-dollar initiation fee they had to fill out application forms and then go through an hour-long interview that acquainted them with what they would see at the club and test their willingness to see it. Of the 1,470 members who joined WideWorld by the mid-1970s, roughly two-thirds were white-collar professionals, business people, or skilled workers—almost all from the surrounding suburbs—and three-quarters were between twenty-six and forty-five years old, about five years younger than the average age today, which hovers somewhere between thirty and fifty.
Before each party began, Bob stood in front of the fireplace and led warm-up discussions on sexuality, marriage, religion, or whatever the crowd wanted to talk about. Then people sat around chatting, changed into sexy clothes, danced, went swimming nude, climbed into the hot tub, and many eventually began making love, usually in the boudoirs in the back, some in the glass-walled “group room.” The erotic rituals remain unchanged to this day. “I’m not going to be a Pollyanna about what went on back then,” Bob said. “We had some of the same problems that went on at SFL. Couples dropped out and there were others we’d never let back even if they begged us. But we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of couples. Most of them left happy and came back year after year. They were changed in just this one important area of their life and their relationship. Everything else stayed the same.”

The motto Geri and Bob chose for Club WideWorld came from a line McGinley had read in the collected works of Jack London: “The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist.” In 1972, the couple took the hyphen from between “life” and “style” and the word that would become synonymous with swinging fifteen years later was born. Bob and Geri founded something called “The Society for Alternative Lifestyles.”

“Pretty much everything grew from that,” McGinley told me as we risked our lives crossing La Palma in the middle of the block to get back to headquarters. “We had our first convention at a ranch in Riverside in 1973, which we didn’t call a convention and had no idea it would turn into what it has now—a million-dollar extravaganza. We just had a crowd of 125 people for two days of lectures and one dance. Then we started dances on Friday nights at hotels, and then we began organizing trips for couples. And all of a sudden that word
organize
became very important to me. The press was getting more and more derogatory. There were a lot of police raids around the country. I thought, It’s time for me to get accredited
and its time to make this official, not just an isolated club or a local society for alternatives.”

In 1974, McGinley went back to school and began the five-year haul to get a Ph.D. in counseling psychology, and in 1975 he and Geri formed the Lifestyles Organization.

While McGinley would not create the playcouple philosophy until 1993, he began looking at ways to mainstream the lifestyle the day he founded LSO. He knew it would mean organizing what everyone thought of as unorganizable chaos: swing clubs and swinging holidays. Until McGinley started bringing businesslike order to the swing world in the mid-seventies there were few if any resorts that accepted crowds of openly swinging couples or major hotels that would accept thousands of playcouples for a “million-dollar extravaganza.”

But it was organizing the clubs themselves that was most important to McGinley. “Swingers are really independent people, but they’re not treated as independent by the media and the law,” he told me. “If Joe Redneck in Mississippi opens a club and discriminates, or allows nonconsensual activity, we all get tarred with the same brush. The two things I have always been opposed to are racism and unethical behavior. But how do you persuade a club owner to follow professional guidelines? Who can a club member complain to? Who can you go to for advice if your club’s raided? Who responds to the press? Who prints up a book with all the clubs and what they offer? I felt that if we believed what we were doing was respectable, and I did, then we should have a regulatory body to keep it respectable.”

By the end of the seventies, McGinley had succeeded in persuading big hotels in Southern California like the Town and Country and the Pacifica to host his increasingly profitable
Lifestyles conventions and these weekend gatherings began to draw over a thousand people. Soon club owners from around the country came to realize it was in their economic interest to show up. In the meantime, McGinley had used his academic contacts to enlist seminar leaders who were pretty impressive. There was Dr. Edgar Butler, the chairperson of the sociology department at the University of California at Riverside, a non-swinger who was studying the lifestyle. He would eventually publish a college textbook called
Traditional Marriage and Emerging Alternatives
, which contained a large section on swinging. Butler, who in the 1990s would win a National Human Rights Award for his writings on racism in jury selection, was so offended by the way swinging couples were being maligned in the media that he volunteered to become co-director of Lifestyles conventions and the senior member of the board of advisors of the Lifestyles Organization, a position he still holds, and which McGinley announces proudly in every TV interview. McGinley also succeeded in recruiting as a lecturer the distinguished science writer Edward Brecher, a close friend of William Masters and Virginia Johnson and the author of
The Sex Researchers
, a book which also contained a chapter on swinging, and which argued that swingers were “inherently normal.” At least a dozen academics gave talks on sexuality at every convention, and once the club owners saw this roster of speakers, and heard McGinley deliver his own seminars on such topics as “Contemporary Human Sexual Behavior,” many began to view the LSO president as a spokesperson who could help ameliorate the media’s stereotype of a swing-club leader as something between a pimp and a pornographer.

Everything came together for McGinley in the summer of 1979, at the Convention held at the Pacifica in Culver City, California. He gathered two dozen club leaders from Canada and the United States in one room and persuaded them to form a trade organization that would address all the problems he
listed for me, plus set standards of ethics and establish a professional management plan for prospective owners. The North American Swing Club Association would operate independent of any club, including McGinley’s own. That winter NASCA came up with a logo—an apple with a bite out of it—and a motto, “For those who want more than just one bite.” The extra bite was the one McGinley believed suburban North Americans fantasized taking.

McGinley had hoped the club owners would all be happy with the idea of an overseeing body, but there was some fervid opposition to it from southerners at the 1980 Convention in San Francisco, where they argued that NASCA represented the imposition of McGinley’s ideals on their free spirits, and that it would provide the FBI with a master sheet of owners. He countered that something had to be done or they would all wind up being raided by morality squads who took the negative coverage in the press as good evidence that swingers were violating community standards. In the end, a few of the owners refused to join, and McGinley wound up managing NASCA as the swing world’s watchdog and publicity person, a role he was happy to fill. “Here’s why it’s a success,” he said. “It’s
important
for a club to be a member. It means something to be listed in the book or on the Web page. We publish
Etiquette In Swinging
, that’s our position paper on the proper way for people to behave at clubs. We have an Equal Opportunity Lifestyles Organization—no discrimination on the basis of race or religion. And if an owner breaks the standards and I get a complaint, I’m there to say, ‘Look, you advertised here such and such and you’re not delivering.’ It’s for the good of the lifestyle, so that people can be secure in a nonracist, ethical club environment. I’m really dedicated to NASCA; I poured tons of time into it for five years just getting it set up.”

That happened to be the period during which his second marriage fell apart. At age fifty, Geri still wanted the sexual
freedom of the culture, but she’d never changed her desire to swing within a permanent marriage of “love and romance.” Putting his energies into NASCA, McGinley had neglected two things: preparations for his own club’s parties, the handling of which Geri took over; and Geri herself, which Geri was too strong-willed to handle well. For the first time in a decade and a half, Geri felt she was open to having an affair.

“I suppose everybody would find it strange,” Geri would tell me at her desk in LSO headquarters one evening, where she still works as the vice-president and co-owner of the company. “What happened is what happens to every couple that breaks up. I felt I was not being acknowledged by Bob anymore—ignored while I ran the financial side, took care of half of what was going on at the conventions, which by then were really growing and which I had a large part in planning. And we began to fight over the tensions of running a business and a marriage at the same time. I met someone at the club and would look forward to being with this fellow. It was exactly the same as happens in a normal breakup, except this was in the open. The idealistic goals of our lives—giving people a chance to increase their eroticism by this means if they wanted to—that never changed. But we always said that just because you’re in the lifestyle doesn’t mean your marriage lasts forever. It’s just a part of the big picture. Nothing is really different.”

“If you guys were running a used-car lot together, you don’t think it would have been different?” I asked. “At the club you always had the opportunity to sleep with other people.”

“If Bob and I were running a used-car lot together, we would probably have had secret affairs,” she said. “Marriages break down, inside the lifestyle and outside the lifestyle.”

As Geri acknowledged though, why their breakup would seem “strange” to those in the straight world was that these two leaders of the comarital swing movement ran the swinging business uninterruptedly as apparently happy partners
throughout their 1985 separation and divorce, and continued through the following years to present to the world a model of affectionate, if platonic, cooperation. On the weekends, Geri and Bob oversee LSO’s hotel dances and the parties at Wide-World, although Geri has since moved on from her relationship with the man she met at WideWorld to a permanent relationship with a swinging cop who is with the LAPD.

Without breathing a word to his clients, Bob was actually crushed by the failure of his second marriage and wandered around for months in a depressive daze, hurt and full of self-recrimination. At the time, the business was being run out of a dinky, crowded office on a back street. McGinley’s director of operations, Bob Hartman, a swinging patron of WideWorld who’d come on board the year before, was using his travel agent’s license to expand McGinley’s newest addition to the company, Lifestyles Tours and Travel. Hartman had helped get LTT rolling a few months before by booking the airline tickets for couples attending the convention. Then he added a tour called the Houseboat Getaway, during which 120 swingers floated about on Lake Meade for four days in twelve houseboats chained together. Today Hartman is a tall, silent presence in the office, as inscrutable and soft-spoken as McGinley is emotional and vocal. When he does talk, he usually has something pithy to say, with one eyebrow raised as if to punctuate his words. “There wasn’t too much room in that office to get away from yourself,” he told me. “Robert needed a cruise to nowhere to get away and
with
himself.” However, Hartmann did not have the Houseboat Getaway in mind since the floating swing club could get pretty hectic. Instead, he took the initiative and booked his shattered boss on a free bonus trip for travel agents from Los Angeles called the “Cruise to Nowhere.” It turned out to be a most fortuitous holiday for McGinley.