Table Of ContentDedication
To Johnny and Louise
Contents
Dedication
Preface
Introduction: 1966 and 1967, Caution
1 - Winter 1968, Guts
2 - Spring 1968, Partners
3 - Summer 1968, Politics
4 - Autumn 1968, Revelry
5 - Winter 1969, Bonanza
6 - Spring 1969, Fetishes
7 - Summer 1969, Revolution
8 - Autumn 1969, Trauma
9 - Winter 1970, Outrage
10 - Spring 1970, Kisses
11 - Summer 1970, Retreat
12 - Autumn 1970, Arrests
13 - 1971, Fatigue
14 - 1972, Frenzy
15 - Winter 1973, Backlash
Epilogue: Spring 1973 and Beyond, Finales
Photographic Section
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Robert Hofler
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
S
explosion began as one of those decades books.
I’d worked as entertainment editor of Penthouse magazine for most of the
1970s, when publications like Penthouse and Playboy were each selling well
over five million copies a month. It seemed like the sex life of America had
exploded back then, and there were plenty of bestselling novels, manuals,
movies, magazines, Broadway shows, and other cultural artifacts to support that
hyperbole. If the 1980s were truly greedy and the 1920s actually roared, it
seemed to me, in retrospect, that the 1970s were genuinely oversexed—and that
this might warrant closer inspection in terms of its impact on our culture as a
whole.
After visiting a few libraries to scour the microfilm files, and interviewing
several writers, directors, actors, and producers, I was surprised to discover that
research served me much better than memory. As a result, I decided instead to
write about a slightly earlier period of history, one that did not conform nicely to
any one decade but rather awkwardly straddled a couple of them. The years 1968
to 1973 coincided with what were my college years, as well as a whole
generation of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ rollers who were the ideal audience for
such seminal works as Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Myra Breckinridge,
Performance, Portnoy’s Complaint, and many others.
Artists have been breaking sex taboos from the beginning of time, but
probably no greater number of those totems to repression were smashed than in
the year 1968. It was a veritable sexual explosion that continued and only
slightly abated for the next four years, before repetition and exploitation diluted
the creative pool. My college-age fantasy conjured up a world in which the
writers and makers of everything from The Boys in the Band to Bob & Carol &
Ted & Alice were somehow connected and actually formed a community.
Writing this book, I was delighted to learn how true my youthful conjectures
were and, better yet, how current and genuinely adult most of those artists’
creative output during that time remains nearly half a century later.
Sexplosion is the story of how a number of very talented, risk-taking rebels
challenged the world’s prevailing attitudes toward sex, and, in the process,
changed pop culture forever.
INTRODUCTION
1966 and 1967, Caution
I
t was the artists. But it was also the audiences.
In 1966, director John Huston picked the plum role of Noah for himself and
turned his movie The Bible into the highest-grossing film of the year. Also in
1966, most critics’ groups drank from the same pool of holy water and anointed
A Man for All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More, a Roman Catholic saint,
as that year’s best film.
The Bible and A Man for All Seasons may have been highly respected efforts
but they hardly generated the most heated talk or press. That distinction of high-
profile controversy went to two very different films in 1966: Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, in which erstwhile paramours Elizabeth Taylor and Richard
Burton talked dirty to each other, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-
language picture, Blow-Up. Moviegoers who didn’t know L’avventura from
L’eclisse would sit through nearly two hours of Blow-Up, a murder mystery in
which the murder is never solved, to get a two-second glimpse of a young
woman’s pubic hair, delivered in long shot, as she and a girlfriend frolic nude
with star David Hemmings in a photographer’s studio.
The audiences were, indeed, different then. They were curious because they
had seen and heard so little with regard to graphic sex onscreen, and even more
important, they were patient. And they were patient because they were hungry
for what they hadn’t seen or heard.
Somewhat less patient was an especially acerbic twenty-nine-year-old Texan
émigré named Rex Reed, who had only recently been enlisted as a freelance
writer at the New York Times. Despite his intense antipathy for Antonioni’s
entire oeuvre, Reed had been assigned the task of interviewing the esteemed
Italian film director for the Sunday newspaper’s much-revered and feared Arts &
Leisure section. Antonioni’s Blow-Up had recently turned into something of a
cause célèbre when the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency condemned it and
the Motion Picture Production Code refused to bless it with a seal of approval.
Rather than snipping those two seconds of pubic hair, MGM instead released
Blow-Up through a corporate front, given the classy name of Premier
Productions; then the studio aggressively pushed the film into Oscar
competition, releasing it in the final two weeks of 1966. Reed, whose movie
aesthetic had never really evolved beyond the pleasures of All About Eve, much
preferred the year’s front-runner for the Oscar, A Man for All Seasons, which, in
its faithful mix of sainthood and knighthood, couldn’t get any classier. Or duller.
In his Times profile of Antonioni, Reed emphasized his own total lack of
appetite for the assignment at hand by openly complaining in print that watching
an Antonioni film was surpassed in tedium only by trying to conduct an
Antonioni interview.
The feeling was mutual. Antonioni actively resisted Reed’s questions about
“your favorite” this and that—until he finally just spat it out.
“No American films,” he told Reed. “I go today to see Andy Warhol’s film
The Chelsea Girls. I am told we make movies alike. I also think Scorpio Rising
is lovely,” he added.
“Lovely” is a word few people in the 1960s (or any other decade) ever
applied to Kenneth Anger’s short experimental film about contemporary Nazi
homosexual bikers who wield S&M leather gear the way most kids play with
their toys.
Upon hearing Antonioni’s critique, Reed did not do what any mildly curious
journalist would do; he didn’t ask follow-up questions (anyway, none that made
it into print) about The Chelsea Girls or Scorpio Rising, an underground film
that had played (and been busted) at grungier basement venues around the world.
The Chelsea Girls was also an underground film, and it also would run into
trouble with the law here and there. But unlike Scorpio Rising, The Chelsea
Girls managed to graduate rather quickly from its lowly birthplace, the Film-
Makers’ Cinematheque basement theater on West Forty-First Street, to the plush
Cinema 57 Rendezvous on the prime Manhattan moviegoing turf of West Fifty-
Seventh Street. The Chelsea Girls was, in fact, the first underground film to
make the leap to the mainstream, and its upgrade thoroughly outraged another
writer at the New York Times, in this case, its chief film critic.
“It was all right so long as these adventures in the realm of independent
cinema stayed in Greenwich Village or on the south side of 42nd Street,” wrote
Bosley Crowther. “But now that their underground has surfaced on West 57th
Street, and taken over a theater with real carpets . . . it is time for permissive
adults to stop winking at their too-precocious pranks.”
And the carpet at the Rendezvous was the least of it. Unaware of how
lucrative really bad publicity can be, the Chelsea Hotel’s manager was
threatening to sue Warhol!
The Chelsea Girls. It wasn’t really so much a movie as it was a dozen short
movies, projected side by side on a double screen; these short movies had little
to do with each other but what Warhol and his codirector, Paul Morrissey, had
dreamed up after the fact. Their idea of filmmaking was to load the camera’s
magazine (limited to thirty minutes of film), point the lens at some of the more
colorful denizens of Warhol’s entourage, and let them talk and carry on with all
due extravagance. It took patience to follow The Chelsea Girls’ story line for the
simple fact that there was no story line.
Warhol and Morrissey never bothered with things like a script, but at some
point Morrissey realized that whenever he and Warhol filmed their actors, whom
they called superstars, “it was in someone’s bedroom,” he recalled, “and many
times it was in the Chelsea Hotel.” So why not make it look like all the scenes
were taking place simultaneously in rooms at the Chelsea? Morrissey gave
Warhol credit for the word “girls” in the title. “But it was my idea that it looked
like a hotel movie. So we brought it to the Cinematheque and showed it.”
If Scorpio Rising was about gay leather bikers, The Chelsea Girls was about
hothouse flowers who seemingly never left their hotel rooms. They told wild and
obscene stories, as if lifted from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl but without the poetry,
and they swore more than Lenny Bruce at the Cafe Au Go Go; they also took
drugs on camera, and rather than have sex—real or simulated—they
occasionally exposed themselves. There was also Nico, who was a singer with
the Velvet Underground. She did not sing in The Chelsea Girls but rather cut
and combed her long blond hair for thirty minutes. In other words, it took
patience to sit through the entire three and a half hours of Warhol and
Morrissey’s film to get to the parts of it that would shock or titillate or simply
not bore.
An underground film like The Chelsea Girls might never have been
mentioned in the same anticipatory breath as Blow-Up and Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? if not for two very aboveground publications that alternately
loved and loathed it.
In his review titled “Underground in Hell,” Newsweek’s Jack Kroll called it
