As a journalist, not unexpectedly, he had been attracted to people who had strayed from the straight and narrow, the unnoticed wanderers in the city of New York, the itinerant bridge workers
on high steel, the eccentric Bartlebys on the New York
Times
copydesk, the children of the Mafia, the smugglers of illegal literature, the dropout co-eds in massage parlors, and now Williamson’s pioneers in impropriety. But even to such an individual as Talese, who prided himself on his capacity to long endure incompatible company if he thought he would ultimately be rewarded with a good story, there nevertheless were limits; and just as he was ready to acknowledge to himself that his limit had been reached, the door to the guest house opened one afternoon, and, unannounced and nude, there appeared the demurely smiling countenance of John Williamson’s wife. Softly placing her hands on his shoulders as he remained seated behind his typewriter at his desk, she began to massage his back and to stroke his neck; and with a minimum of words and no resistance on his part, she guided him into the bedroom and proceeded to make love.
It was the first time that he had been so directly sought out by a sexually aggressive woman, and there was no doubt in Talese’s mind or body that he was receptive to the experience. After she had finished, and
only
after she had finished, Barbara Williamson began to talk freely, confiding in him for the first time since he had arrived at Sandstone. While not apologizing for her husband’s sullenness, she sought to explain that a number of business reversals concerning the sale of the property had constantly frustrated her husband’s desire to resettle in Montana. But, she added, John Williamson was, like most dreamers, a man given to exaggerated despondence, and she recalled that back in 1970—after his adoring Oralia Leal had run away with David Schwind and gotten married in Elyria, Ohio—he had brooded in his bedroom and had barely spoken to anyone at Sandstone for nearly two months.
As Talese listened with interest, and prompted her with questions, Barbara Williamson began to tell him the story of how Sandstone had begun, recalling her affair with John Bullaro, and her husband’s later relationship with Bullaro’s wife, describing as well the dramatic weekend at Big Bear Lake in which the two couples had shared a cabin and each other’s spouses. Although
John and Judith Bullaro a year later had quit Sandstone and had ceased living with one another, they had subsequently become partners in an open marriage, Barbara said, adding that the couple was still friendly with the Williamsons and that, if Talese wished, she would arrange for him to meet them.
A week later, this was done; and during the next two years, as Talese flew back and forth between New York and California, he often visited the Bullaros in Woodland Hills, where he gradually gained their confidence and permission to write about them, and to make use of the diary and other notes that John Bullaro had kept during those traumatic days when Judith had been lured away by Williamson and the group that would form Sandstone’s charter membership.
During this time, Talese’s own marriage, which had been in existence since 1959, and which now included two young daughters, was responding adversely to the flagrance of his research, its attendant publicity, and his recent agreement to be interviewed at length by a reporter from
New York
magazine about the challenges and difficulties Talese was confronting in his new project. The reporter was a friend, someone he had known for years, a journalist he thought would write more about the method of his work than his intimate involvement with the subject; and so Talese felt confident that there was little in his life he would need to hide.
One evening, with the reporter at his side, Talese returned home to find his house quiet and an envelope awaiting him on the dining room table. Opening it, he read that his wife had left the house and she did not say when she would return. Her right of privacy, which she valued like few other possessions, was being violated, she declared, by his unwitting willingness to discuss with the press what was none of its business; and she warned further that his candor on the subject of sex, while it might titillate some magazine readers, would only bring ridicule upon himself.
Distressed by her departure, but eager to conceal the contents of the letter from the
New York
reporter who stood silently next to him, waiting to accompany him to a restaurant to conclude the interviews that had been going on for days, Talese put the note in his pocket. Repressing his emotions, Talese spent the next few hours in the restaurant conversing with the reporter, hoping that the tension and anxiety he felt was going unnoticed.
It had been a Friday when he received the note, and on the following Monday she was back without explanation. She did not volunteer where she had been, nor did he feel he had the right to ask. Their marriage continued through the fall of 1973 and winter of 1974 with an uncertain aura of reconciliation. That the marriage survived at all was due not only to their love but more to the fact that through the years they each had developed an insight into the labyrinth of one another’s ways, a special and not-always-spoken language, a respect for one another’s work, a history of shared experiences good and bad, and a recognition that they genuinely liked one another. There are times in marriage when it is more important to “like” than to “love”—and thus the marriage continued and deepened through a second decade; and during the summer of 1974 Talese returned, as he did each year with his wife and children, to the Victorian beach house he owned in his hometown of Ocean City, New Jersey.
The negative reaction to his publicized “research” had, as his wife predicted, preceded his arrival and had become the subject of an unflattering editorial in the weekly newspaper where he had begun his journalistic career as a high school sportswriter. This editorial, more than all the gossip and articles in the big-city dailies and national magazines, most offended his parents, who still resided in the town, and who for a half century had exemplified the moral propriety that had characterized at least the surface of this small seaside city. While Talese was at first irritated and made self-conscious by the effect his book-in-progress was having on his family, he gradually ceased to care about what people thought of him personally. He had now found a way to begin the book, his first chapter was completed, and during mid
day breaks from his work he would walk through the town, visit the local newsstand and casually thumb through the racks of men’s magazines, and continue to explore the changing sexual mores that surrounded him—both in his hometown and in the larger resort of nearby Atlantic City, and in the extended area of provincial farms and villages.
Twenty miles from where Talese had been raised, concealed deep in the woodlands along the Great Egg Harbor River, there was a nudist park that he had been aware of since his boyhood, but, as a young man, had never dared to enter. It was called Sunshine Park, and had been founded in the mid-1930s by a stocky, volatile, controversial minister named Ilsley Boone, who was recognized by a small group of shameless adherents of nudism as the father of the movement in America. A onetime pastor of the Ponds Reformed Church in Oakland, New Jersey, Reverend Boone discovered nudism in 1931 during his travels through Germany, where, until closed down by Hitler, there had been a number of private parks used by naturists who believed that the removal of clothing in the outdoors was liberating and healthy for both the body and spirit. Although Reverend Boone’s first attempt at founding a naturist settlement in Schooley’s Mountain in central north Jersey was terminated by an eviction notice from the landlord, he did succeed in acquiring eighty acres of forest land in south Jersey from a German-American family living in the community of Mays Landing; and in 1935, driven by a messianic fervor and assisted by his followers, Boone built within the shading of tall oak trees and cedar and clusters of pine, a riverside retreat he called Sunshine Park. He erected a large white frame house, in which he lived with his wife and children, and also smaller houses and cabins, an auditorium, and a school. He published a nudist newsletter and a picture magazine called
Sunshine & Health
, which, though regularly banned by the local postmaster in Mays Landing, was just as regularly defended in countersuits by Boone himself, who asserted in an editorial: “Until the ‘moral’ leaders of America accept reality in the body and allow the hoi polloi to become perfectly familiar with the
body’s complete physical appearance, a more or less feverish interest in the ‘forbidden’ parts of the body will continue.”
A “feverish interest” in the body’s “forbidden” parts—no phrase was more appropriate to Talese’s boyhood in Ocean City; and while he always lacked the nerve to inquire if
Sunshine & Health
magazine was available for sale under the counter at the corner cigar store, where the most indiscreet publication on display was the
Police Gazette
, he listened with unabated interest whenever his school chums discussed the daring possibility of sneaking into the park at night and climbing the trees and hiding until daylight brought its promised view of naked female splendor. And whenever he was taken to baseball games in Philadelphia, and was driven along the riverside road that led past Sunshine Park’s stone gate and its bold white billboard sign, he looked into the blurring trees futilely searching for a forbidden sight. He had also heard that there were boat owners in his town who, particularly on weekends, sailed or motored their vessels along the Great Egg Harbor River and anchored opposite the shoreline of Sunshine Park in order to catch the wondrous view of the wicked bathers sprawled along the wooden pier and tiny beach.
One summer weekend, returning to Ocean City after a few days’ visit to Sandstone, Talese drove alone through the treelined road leading to Sunshine Park. Noting that the park’s familiar white sign had been unchanged since his boyhood, he turned into the entrance and followed a long, winding dirt road that led past thick trees and bushes, and finally ended at a log-cabin gatehouse where an elderly nude man sat in the sun behind a rustic wooden desk. The man welcomed Talese, handed him a registration card to be filled in, and accepted a fee. In reply to Talese’s question, the old man said that he was not Ilsley Boone, who died in 1968, but added that he had helped Boone build the park, which, except for the motor homes, still looked essentially as it did when it was opened forty years ago. After the man had waved him
through the inner gate, Talese drove along a sandy roadway toward the river, where he could now see dozens of people of all ages, shapes, and coloring, strolling or lying nude in the sun, and swimming in the river. There were parents holding babies, old folks with tan sagging skin, young women with—or lacking—beautiful bodies, men who were muscular, flabby, frail, and teenagers of both sexes who lay next to one another on beach towels or stood talking in a casual manner.
After parking his car and removing his clothing, Talese walked slowly toward the water, feeling unselfconscious and pleasant. It was a sweltering July afternoon, but the shaded ground was cool under his feet, and the cedar-colored water, when he entered it, was warm and soothing. He waded in the water toward a wooden ladder leading up to the pier; and when he climbed up and mingled with a crowd of other nudists, none of whom he had ever seen before, he noticed that a few of them were facing and waving toward a number of sailing vessels and motorboats that were anchored beyond the long extended line of rope that separated the park property from the common sea.
Painted on the stern of most of the boats beneath the declaration of their names was the lettering of their locale: “Ocean City, N.J.” and seated on the decks were people wearing Bermuda shorts and sailing caps, bathing suits, straw hats, and dark glasses; and in their hands they held cans of beer, thermos bottles, transistor radios, and handkerchiefs that they waved at the nudists. There were also some catcalls coming from the boats, whistles and cheers; and after watching for a few moments, Talese stepped forward on the deck, separating himself from the other quiet nudists, and he faced the boats, recognizing a few of the sailing ships and, he thought, some of their passengers. He also noticed for the first time that many of the passengers held silvery telescopes and dark binoculars, and they sat rigidly on their decks and swayed in the water and squinted in the sun. They were unabashed voyeurs looking at him; and Talese looked back.
T
HE COMPLETION
of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
in 1980 marked the best and worst year in my life as a writer.
The book became a sensational bestseller, garnering four million dollars in advanced earnings even before the first copy was sold in a store, but the sensationalism surrounding the book’s publication drew readers’ attentions away from
what
I wrote to
how
and
why
I wrote it, and particularly
why
I cheated on my wife while gathering information about the accelerating trends toward infidelity and sexual experimentation in modern-day America.
The fact that my wife publicly supported me throughout my nine years on the book, and later accompanied me on talk shows to explain that our marital love had remained unthreatened while I conducted research in New York massage parlors and a hedonistic nudist colony in Los Angeles, seemed only to heighten the wrath and ridicule that I and my book received from such reviewers as Jonathan Yardley in
The Washington Star
(“a slimy exercise”); Ken Adachi in the
Toronto Star
(“he ought to take a bracing cold shower”); Dale L. Walker in the El Paso Times (“disgusting”); Mordecai Richler in
New York
magazine (“subversive”); Paul Gray in
Time
(“painful”); Anatole Broyard in
The New York Times
(“how can we expect him to make sense out of sex?”); and John Leonard, a
Times
employee and author of several novels who accepted the assignment to review my
book in
Playboy
, and began: “When at last we take leave of Gay Talese, he is naked, no longer an altar boy but a young God, about to brave the cedar-colored waters of the Great Egg Harbor River, somewhere in surprising New Jersey. It is certainly time for a bath.”
While I know that little is gained from quarreling with critics once their negative reviews have appeared in print, I felt compelled to strike back at John Leonard. We had previously met at social gatherings in New York and our relationship had never been friendly, especially after I had objected to an erroneous column he had written in the
Times
a year before my book was published claiming that I had written the copy for a full-page newspaper advertisement that had favorably compared the embattled pornographer Larry Flynt with political freedom fighters in the Soviet Union.
I immediately wrote to John Leonard asking for a correction. He ignored my request and later, in his critique of my book in
Playboy
, he repeated the false information. I sent him a second angry letter, which he again ignored, and when a reporter from
People
called to get my reaction to the negative reviews I was receiving from Leonard and the other writers, I replied: “There’s a lot of envy in these writers who can’t write successfully at book length. Leonard is a terrible writer. And he’s a man who had an affair and ran off with his friend’s wife—and here he is, reviewing
Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
”
As I recount this now, more than twenty-five years after the publication of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, I wish that I had been less defensive about the criticism. But in those days there was so much pettiness and petulance attached to the publication that I was not always able to control my frustration over the fact that what I had actually written and observed in the book was being ignored or diminished in the wake of all the publicity speculating on the state of my marriage, on my personal involvement with certain people in the book, and on the huge financial sums invested in the book even before it was released to the general public.
There was the $50,000 that
Esquire
magazine paid for a prepublication excerpt, the advance of $1 million from paperback and foreign editions, and the $2.5 million that Hollywood spent in acquiring the movie rights.
After obtaining and reading bootlegged copies of the manuscript while it was being circulated to magazine editors for excerpt consideration, several studios competed for what eventually went to United Artists for $2.5 million—the highest amount ever paid for the rights to a book. The sum eclipsed the $2.15 million that the Zanuck-Brown partnership had paid for the rights to Peter Benchley’s
The Island
, and far exceeded such recent book-to-movie sales as William Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice
($500,000), Christina Crawford’s
Mommie Dearest
($650,000), and Robin Cook’s
Sphinx
($1 million).
Although
The Denver Post
’s book editor, Clarus Backes, wrote that
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
was “certainly not a $2.5 million book,” the United Artists spokesman, Steven Bach, a senior vice president who helped negotiate the deal, said that as many as three films could be made from the stories described in the book. He suggested that one film might focus on the chapters dealing with the very conservative vice president of the New York Life Insurance Company and the attractive and aggressive young saleswoman with whom he has an affair; a second film could be inspired by the fantasy romance associating a beautiful pinup girl in Los Angeles and a schoolboy in Chicago who falls in love with her photograph; and a third film could center around the days and nights of ecstasy and angst as lived by Hugh Hefner in his Playboy Mansion.
“I think it’s going to be the book of the year,” Steven Bach predicted in an interview with
The New York Times
, adding, “It is about the most explosive topics in contemporary life, sexuality and morality, and the personal relationships are described with enormous insight.” His film company hired a Pulitzer-winning playwright, Marsha Norman, to do the script while working with the acclaimed director William Friedkin.
But, alas, the film was never completed.
A year after buying and paying for
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, the studio collapsed in the aftermath of the release of one of its films called
Heaven’s Gate
, which had been budgeted for $7.5 million but ended up costing $36 million. The film, directed by Michael Cimino, would not survive beyond opening night. Most of the studio’s top executives, including Steven Bach, were soon fired, and the completed script of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
would thereafter gather dust in the archives of the no longer functioning film company.
The book itself sold well throughout 1980—a bestseller for three months, and number one on
The New York Times
list for ten straight weeks; but again I believe that many readers bought the book for the wrong reason. They had been drawn to it because of the prepublication publicity, but this publicity had little to do with what was written between the covers. And so people expecting a shocking or “dirty” book were undoubtedly disappointed by
Thy Neighbor’s Wife’s
understated literary tone and its lengthy depiction of people and places that in my opinion represented the dramatic shift in moral values occurring in the United States between my college years in the early 1950s and when I started researching this book in the early 1970s. One of the few positive reviews that
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
received in 1980 appeared in
The New York Times Book Review
under the byline of Robert Coles, the author and professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, who wrote:
Gay Talese, the well-known journalist who has a knack for taking on projects that others would believe to be awesomely difficult, if not impossible (the workings of the Mafia, for example) now offers us a report (the result of no less than nine years of work) on just how far some of us have willingly, gladly strayed not only from 19th-century morality, but from the kind that most of the 20th century has taken for granted. His method of inquiry is that of “participant-observation” as a matter of fact, I doubt that any so-called “field worker” can claim to have surpassed Mr.
Talese with regard to personal involvement. He talked with men and women who have embraced uninhibited or unconventional sexuality, but he also became a distinct part of a world he was trying to comprehend. That is, he not only worked in Manhattan’s massage parlors, he became a beneficiary of their favors. He joined, briefly one gathers, a nudist camp. He did not fail to get at least some pleasure out of the activities (“communal sex”) that took place at Sandstone, near Los Angeles.
Yet this long narrative will probably disappoint those with prurient interests. It is not an exhibitionist’s confession; it is not a journalist’s contribution to pornography. Mr. Talese will be made a good deal richer than he already is by this book, but one suspects a substantial number of his readers will find him surprisingly restrained. He has a serious interest in watching his fellow human beings, in listening to them, and in presenting honestly what he has seen and heard. He writes clean, unpretentious prose. He has a gift, through a phrase here, a sentence there, of making important narrative and historical connections. We are given, really, a number of well-told stories, their social message cumulative: A drastically transformed American sexuality has emerged during this past couple of decades.
In 1981 the paperback edition of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
sold well enough, but then it and other books about the sexual revolution fell from favor as readers concentrated on the well-publicized medical reports announcing the nationwide spread of genital herpes and AIDS—diseases in the 1980s that many people attributed to the sexual permissiveness introduced in the 1960s. This opinion was not only shared by individuals favoring tighter controls over liberal expression and behavior but it was also believed by such outspoken defenders of freedom as the essayist and academician Camille Paglia, who in the 1960s was a student activist but who later wrote in one of her books (
Sex, Art, and the American Culture
):
The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster. The gentle nude bathing and playful sliding in the mud at Woodstock were a short-lived Rousseauist dream. My generation, inspired by the Dionysian titanism of rock, attempted something more radical than anything else since the French Revolution. We asked: why should I obey this law? and why shouldn’t I act on every sexual impulse? The result was a descent into barbarism. We painfully discovered that a just society cannot, in fact, function if everyone does his own thing. And out of the pagan promiscuity of the Sixties came AIDS. Everyone of my generation who preached free love is responsible for AIDS. The Sixties revolution in America collapsed because of its own excesses.
But did it really collapse? Like everyone else, I have read numerous newspaper accounts in recent years based on poll-takers’ surveys indicating that, due to AIDS, single’s bars were no longer such promising preludes to sex, married couples were now less prone to adultery, erotic novels were less successful commercially, New Puritanism was pervading the consciousness of the country. In 1984 there was a cover story in
Time
with the headline: “Sex in the ’80s—The Revolution Is Over”; and in 1986 there was the report of Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography, which hinted at the arrival of a new moral militancy across the land, the revival of traditional values, and the spirited efforts of citizens groups and law-enforcement officials to curb the distribution and sale of pornographic literature and also girlie magazines.
While it is true that the proprietors of Wal-Mart refuse to sell
Playboy
and other men’s magazines in its stores, and that the
Playboy
enterprise itself has toned down its covers (no longer displaying completely nude models) and now wraps its newsstand issues in cellophane hoping to discourage underage browsers, it is also true that
Playboy
’s cable television station has become decidedly hardcore in recent years (showing copu
lating couples, erect penises, sexual penetration, fellatio, cunnilingus, et al).
In addition to this, there is the burgeoning use of the Internet, and it seems to me that there are now few controllable restrictions on the citizenry of this nation that the writer John Updike has identified as “the paradise of flesh.” On the Internet there are daily and nightly solicitations of masseuses, swinging couples clubs, and admittedly lonely men and women—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual—seeking long-term or short-term relationships. I recently read a
New York Times
article (May 19, 2008) describing the ninth annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which affirmed the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed. Months later I watched the televised broadcast of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, at which crowds of spectators gave a cheering welcome to the unwed and pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter of the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palm.
“Americans have always wanted it both ways,” wrote
Time
magazine’s Richard Stengel back in 1986. “From the first tentative settlements in the New World, a tension has existed between the pursuit of individual liberty and the quest for puritan righteousness, between Benjamin Franklin’s open road of individualism and Jonathan Edwards’ Great Awakening of moral fervor. The temper of the times shifts from one pole to the other, and along with it the role of the state. Government intrudes; government retreats; the state meddles with morality, then washes its hands and withdraws. The Gilded Age gave way to the muscular governmental incursions of the Age of Reform. The Roaring Twenties gave rise to the straightlaced Hays Office of the ’30s. The buttoned-up ’50s ushered in the unbuttoned ’60s. And, most recently, a reaction to the sexual revolution spurred a spirited crusade to reassert family values that helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the presidency.”
And, I might add,
a lack of family values
in the 1990s almost swept Bill Clinton out of the presidency!
Still, if one were to assume that President Clinton’s near removal stemming from his dalliances with a female White House intern
should
have discouraged other politicians from indulging in sexual misconduct, one must concede that this did not happen—and it is evident in such recent news items as: