The Swingers

a new breed of unabashed orgiasts and casual coupler is flourishing in the subcultural hothouse of southern california

Last December 31st, in a glass-and-stucco dwelling cantileveres from a promontory in the Hollywood Hills, an expectant host was busy preparing a wide variety of Middle Eastern delicacies for his annual New Year's Eve orgy. Clad in nothing more restrictive than a silk robe loosely at the waist, the retired real-estate investor periodically visited the Kitchen to check on the kuba (a casserole of crushed wheat with almonds and sirloin chunks), shufta (chopped meat and onions laced to skewers) and bathonjon (eggplant stew)--all tested recipes he had perfected during his youth in Baghdad.

Some of the dozen unmaried couples seated beside his living-room fireplace passed around joints of the best available marijuana--Acapulco gold--while they gazed at the imcomparable view of twinkling city lights visible through a picture window and scooped khubez, an Arabic bread, into a crushed-sesame-seed dip.

Before long, the guests were thrashing in the nude on three mattresses laid side by side in a dimly lit bedroom overlooking a lush garden of Japanese ferns, bonsais and camellias surounding a heated pool stocked with exotic tropical fish. A large-breasted French girl took on two other females with remarkable insouciance. The voyeurs among those assembled were continuously treated to a diversity of performance as rich as the sumptuous buffet. By the time all activity culminated at one o'clock the following afternoon, plans were already being formulated for the next gathering. "We have another orgy going at the end of the week," the host promised. "Who needs an excuse? This time we'll be celebrating the arrival of Friday night."

Two miles to the east, about the same time the Hollywood Hills party was getting under way, uniformed waiters were pouring 12-year-old scotch and jeorboams of Dom Perignon in the sunken 40-foot living room of a penthouse apartment situated high above Sunset Strip. A major television personality warmly welcomed 100 guests who came prepared to celebrate the new year as well as one another. The faces would have been immediately recognizable at such celebrity restaurants as Chasen's or The Bistro. Relaxed by the free-flowing liquor and the oleaginous Mantovani strings purring over a stereo intercom, secure in the comfort of a large kindred group, they repaired at regular intervals to the five mirrored bedrooms. At a time when motion pictures were experiencing an unprecedented sexual emancipation, the spectacle of these actors acting out their wildest fantasies had yet to be depicted on the public screen.

The midnight scene at a high-octane San Fernando Valley night club dedicated to the cross-pollination of swinging married and single couples resembled V-J Day in Times Square. Surrealistically frozen on the crowded dance floor by blinking strobe lights, a capacity throng of 150 customers--who had paid $25 a couple--spent nearly 20 minutes embracing and Kissing their respective escorts and anyone else within range, while a rhythm-and-blues quartet called Dillard Crume and the Soul Rockers played a heavily amplified version of Auld Lang Syne. Early arrivals had viewed some 600 color slides showing regular patrons, which flashed on a screen near the bustling bar every ten seconds. This get-acquainted device was superseded by more direct contact--sending drinks over to some likely-looking strangers across the flocked-wallpaper room and openly exchanging phone numbers.

By 1:30 in the morning, after numerous liaisons had been consummated and extemporaneous parties organised, the club was left virtually empty. Parking attendants wistfully watched the boisterous couples pile six and eight in a car, screech their and proceed to swapping sessions in the adjacent communities of Sherman Oaks, Sun Valley, Encino and Studio City. The morning after, a discarded size-34D brassiere was discovered on the floor of the club among crumpled paper hats and noisemakers, a reminder of the abandon that characterized even the earlier stages of the previous evening.

Not every swinging New Year's Eve party entertained large numbers. Thousands of anonymous couples, responding to frank classified advertisements in publications such as Los Angles Free Press ("Couple desire A. C./D. C. girls or couple, 30--45, local swingers only. Revealing photo and phone must.") were happy to pair off two by two.

As late as 8:30 that night, a 21-year-old Norwegian blonde became the 386th female to enroll at one of more than two dozen highly organised local enterprises that arrange meetings among consenting adults for a fee. The girl was assigned a code number, issued an identification card and handed a bumper sticker to further designate her intensions to eagle-eyed club members. By midnight, she and a male companion were perpetuating the Dionysian tradition with a group of bring-your-own-booze couples they had never met before.

For those privy to word of mouth, there were additional swinging parties spilling through a dozen interconnecting rooms at a Balboa Beach motel, at a mountain cabin at Lake Arrowhead rented year-round exclusively for the use of swingers, and at an indefatigable open house in a Beverly Hills home that reportedly had been flourishing for the past four and a half months.

The more affluent swingers, pursuing their tireless quest for new partners, journeyed to Palm Springs--a sybaritic resort area 80 miles from Los Angles--where some 15 swingers-only parties had temporarily supplanted the sun, spas and starlets as au courant tourist attractions. A sleek Lear Jet deposited six eager passengers at the bustling airport shortly after dusk. A waiting limousine transported them to a tile-roofed hacienda on the outskirts of town, hard by the desert. Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce and 1953 Chevrolets were parked bumper to bumper outside the miniature walled estate. Awaiting the new arrivals were 35 couples, many of them frolicking nude in an Olympic-sized swimming pool faced in marble. Many of the women at pool-side had already changed into camisoles and the provocative lingerie advertised in movie magazines. Physical stamina was the only boundary for the males, adorned in one-size-fits-all hapi robes thoughtfully povided by the host.

The subsequent desert sunrise, a paletter of yellows, reds, and oranges illuminating the mesquite and saguaro, could very well have symbolized the dawn of a cultural phenomenon not only in Southern California--where such latter-day bacchanals have become as familiar as two-phone limousines--but thoughtout the nation. Though perhaps less celebrity studded and affluently appurtenanced, similar--if not equally uninhibited--get-togethers are being held every night of the year at suburban tract homes in Seattle, skylight studios on New York's East Side and nearly every intermediate point with a population of over two. Additional evidence of a widespread inclination toward group sex is geographically apparent in the distribution of box-number advertisement proliferating in mate-swapping periodicals and news-letters such as Swingers Life, The Swinging World, La Plume, National Registry, Hot Line, Communiqué and Clique.

One bustling cell of 2500 Chicago-area mate swappers wears Swingers lapel buttons and holds weekly meetings to answer questions for prospective inductees; reflecting the middle-class conditioning of the members, no single are permitted, fornication in front of others is rare and male homosexuality is completely unknown. Summer vacationers on Fire Island and Martha's Vineyard spend their weekends sharing rental homes and their roommates' dates. Antique-hunting couples journey through the New England countryside, pausing to browse in quaint roadside shops--and to swap mates at small inns in towns such as Vergennes, Vermont. Weekend emigrees from California's San Mateo County sample one another's spouses in the motels that proliferate just across the Bay between San Francisco and Palo Alto on U. S. 101. Hotbeds of activity from Gila County, Arizona, to Cape Kennedy, Florida, serve as lively stopovers for married swingers motoring cross-country.

Not surprisingly, no authoritative figures are available about the extent of this action on the front lines of the Sexual Revolution, but all these manifestations clearly indicate that the trend is both real and growing. The number of participants may range anywhere from the conservative 500,000 cited by some sociologists to the inflated 14,000,000 claimed by enthusiasts such as Leo Gordon--author of All the Loving Couples, one of the four Hollywood pictures on the subject scheduled to be released or filmed during 1969.

"With fourteen million swingers, we got fourteen million tickets right there," Gordon joyfully predicts. "And then we got another fourteen million that are gonna go just out of curiosity. Then there's a third fourteen million who'll go just to condemn the son of a bitch."

Hoping to entice the same audience are the producers of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, a $2,000,000 sextravaganza featuring the Hollywood version of a pot party climaxed by a free-for-all in bed with Nataline Wood and her three co-stars. Other upcoming entries are the adaptation of John Updike's Couples, an examination of mixed-doubles morality in New England, and something succinctly titled The Crowded Bed. Wags were freely predicting that it would only be a matter of time before the Walt Disney studios joined the procession.

Once a carefully gaurded pastime indigenous to upper-income groups, espeacially the suburban nouveau riche, swinging has only lately been embraced by school-teachers, mutual-fund salesmen, aerospace engineers and other members of the predominant middle class. Its swift surfacing (continued on page 216)The Swingers(continued from page 150) from the clandestine to the commonplace has coincide with the increasing availability of leisure time--and consequent unexpected boredom--as well as with the latituade and security provided by general acceptance of the pill.

Although the word "swinging," in its specifially sexual connotation, is too new for inclusion in the 1966 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, the activities it describes--indiscriminate, ultracasual copulation with relative or complete strangers in groups of two, three, four and up--are as old as the two sexes. As Pompeian frescoes testify, the multiple couplings that took place at Roman orgies are indistinguishable from those immortalized by Polaroid buffs at comtemporary parties. And the grapplings of conventioneers with callgirls--or traveling salesmen with farmers' daughters--aren't much different from those engaged in by most of the fun seekers who answer those "personal' ads in the underground newspapers. What's new about swinging, as opposed to old-fashioned hanky-panky, is the fact that it's organised--and almost openely embraced by a sizable and swelling segment of the population that would have been scandalized by such behaviour only a few years ago. Society at large, meanwhile--inured by the mass media to increasingly unabashed expressions of public and private sexuality--has assumed an attitude of indifference (or atleast neutrality) that lends the trend anaura of social acceptability.

With this new semirespectability has come a wave of frankness among swingers anxious to advertise their own behaviour and enlist newcomers by proselytizing on radio and television talk shows, over tea at weekly P. T. A. meetings and among strangers invariably point with pride to their perpetuation of traditions dating back to Greek and Roman cultures. In addition to the beneficial and deleterious aspects of wife swapping, the orgy scene and organised sex have become familiar subjects for discussion in open-to-the-public seminars bearing imposing titles such as "Exploring the Intimacy Barrier in Sexually Liberal Groups"--an over-night conclave for swinging couples conducted by Dr. Gerard Haigh, a psychologist associated with the Elysium Institute in Santa Monica.

The lively sales of works by contemporary artists such as Rick Herold, who photographs orgies and then tranposes these vivid impressions onto canvases of acrylic paint and plexiglas, signal an important trend toward honest eroticism. Some 200 aficionados attending one of Herold's opening at the Molly Barnes Gallery on La Gienega Boulevard, the art center of Los Angles, were recently treated to an impromptu exhibition by one of his female admirers. The total effect of his two-dozen latest efforts--similar in impact to a genuine orgy--inspired her to remove her Gernreich dress and what little was beneath it. There-after, still in the buff, she graciously served as an expedient human screen on which one of the painter's orgiastic films was publicly premiered.

The girl in the Gernreich dress displayed noticebly fewer inhibitions than most newcomers to the swinging scene. Their experience is typified by the recollections of a blonde, blue-eyed mother of two. "I panicked when my husbnadfirst sugested that we swing with another couple," recalls Michelle, who at the time had been married for nearly six years. "I thought he didn't love me anymore. I went into complete hysteria, tears and everything. I thought: 'Why doesn' he divorce me if I'm not enough for him?' But then I decided I wasn't going to be like a lot of other women and let my husband have all the fun. And I hoped he might outgrow it if I went along with him in good grace. He had been telling me for years that sex and love weren't the same thing. And I'd tried to tell myself that. But I'd never been with another man I was 17 when I met and married him."

Michelle and her husband became involved in swinging (most participants prefer that term rather than wife swapping, which they consider a pejorative) by responding to an ad in one of the local swingers' journals. They selected a couple that lived near their west-side home.

"We went there and met a very attractive model and her husband, a writer," MIchelle continues. "I swung with him and he was a very good lover. I had a marvelous time. I found that after being with someone else, I was stimulated. It's such a peak that you own mate, almost to show him what you've learned. It's such a beautiful experience. It's good for people who've been married several years. No matter how much they love each other, everything gets dull after a while. Some of the edge wears off. Swinging just makes the marrige that much better. As a result of that one night three years ago, I've enjoyed swinging ever since."

The process of revulsion-resistance-acceptance-enthusiasm undergone by Michelle paralles that of many, perhaps most of the women involved in the swapiping scene. Once the initial doubts are overcome, most swapping wives report feelings of greater security within their marriages and enhanced sexual relationships at home. The vast majority of more than 200 Midwestern and Southwestern swinging couples recently surveyed by Dr. Gilbert Bartell, a Northern Illinois University cultural anthropologist, concurred that swapping had brought them closer than ever before. "In the developement of their little suburbias, their ticky-tacks, the work effort, the Protestant ethic and all that, these people have become estranged from each other," Dr. Bartell expalined. "Then, for one of the first time in their lives, they do something together without having the Ladies' Home Journal call it 'togetherness.' There are communicating with each other, at least on one level. They join a group that give them time to think about other people and become involved with other people, very much like church activity, the Kiwians or what have you. These people, most of whom have been married quite yoiung, find this tremendously exciting. They feel in a sense that they're rejuvenating themselves. They're acting out what 'swingers' do in the movies, in the magazines and on TV."

Inveterate swappers point with pride to the low incidence of divorce among them. One group of 400 East San Fernando Valley swingers, who have attended Friday-night parties for the past four years, reports that only three split-ups have resulted during that period--a figure dramatically below the national average. But trained social scientists find this statistic misleading, since those who have drooped out are conveniently excluded.

"Turning on to the swinging scene probably has saved a large number of marriages," concedes Dr. William Simon, former senior research associate at the Institute or Sex Research at Indiana University, and currently a sociologist with the Illinois State Department of Mental Health. "Whether they should have been saved is another question. But what about the vast number that phase out? Many of them are badly traumatized by the experience. Unless somebody is intensely pathological, the normal reaction to engaging in this type of behaviour involves somehow the management of guilt and anxiety. For most people, this generate some degree of tension and strain. One gets the feeling in the swinging scene that people are using sex to satisfy motives that are intrinsically non-sexual."

This view is disputed, of course, by diehard swappers, who consider themselves emancipated rather than aberrant. "I was reluctant to attend my first swapping party, probably because of the way I was raised." observes Joan, a confirmed swapper who has been married for 11 years. "My head was just full of social conventions. I had no idea how I would feel seeing my husband having sex with another woman. I was curious as to my own reaction. It excited me. When he came back to me, it made me feel more like he's with me; he can have sex with somebody else, but he's mine. It made me more secure. I don't see where there's any place for guilt feelings, as long as we're doing it together. we're not deceiving each other. Often it will spice up our own sex life for three or four days afterward, when we talk about something that turned us on in a swapping situation."

However many partners they may entertain in the course of a week--or even of an evening--the majority of swingers consider themselves nonpromiscuous and their activities highly moral. "This is the logical conclusion of the average cocktail party in a community where everyone knows everyone else," explains a somewhat prejudiced participant. "The hyporisy that you find in the country-club set--where everyone knows that everyone is balling everyone else, but it's clandestine--simply doesn't exist here."

This kind of self-righteous dialectic is typical among married swingers anxious to cleanse themselves of culpability. "They're using this to condone their own guilt," says Dr. Simon. "Most men involved really want to engage in extramarital activity and can't handle it alone. The easiest thing to do is simply make their wives accomplices. Such men have very little ego strength going for them, and many are really very unattractive, pedestrian types who have to use their wives for barter. It's not surprising that so many of the swapping scenes, as a consequence, don't have the emotional openness and honesty claimed by their spokemen. It's a world in which you can say 'I love what we're doing,' but there's an implicit prohibition against saying 'I love you.' "

In almost all cases, it's the male who instigates the initiation of a couple into mate swapping. "He envisions this as a return to his youth and all its fantasies," says Dr. Bartell. "In a sense, he is making real the juvenile dream of a harem full of women to which he will have ready access." But making this dream come true can often create more problems than it solves. "These people buy tremendous amounts of what used to be called pornographic literature, word-and-picture studeis on how to make love," Dr. Bartell has found. "Almost all of them, at least in my sample, have eight-millimeter stag films. The difficulty arises in trying to live up to the examples displayed in such material. These men have a high expectation rate as well as a constant fear of failure."

Many of the studies conducted by Dr. Albert Ellis, the well-known psychologist and author of several popular books on human sexuality, reveal that such anxieties almost always plague the male at the inception of his swapping activities. "He is especially worried whether he'll be able to do it with his wife present in the same room or, even if they take separate rooms, whether he'll be able to be as proficient as the other woman's husband," Dr. Ellis explains. "So at the beginning, he tends to fail. Practically no male is as virile as he imagines he would be in such a situation. Later on, he may get better. But the female may eventually get more of a charge than he does, because she's more capable of it."

"Women bloom in a swinging situation because they get total attention," explains a well-known Hollywood character actor regarded as the sultan of swap in the San Fernando Valley. "They know they're women. You take just a plain, nice girl and all of a sudden she's got people making love to her like she's never had in her whole goddamn life and turning her on every way imaginable. She's bound to react to that. She finds she has senses she didn't know existed."

"Cardinal rule number one is that if we play, we play together," declares another acolyte. "None of this bullshit--'Can I see you sometime?' The only other basic ground rules are that no one is obligated to do anything he or she doesn't want to and that you must conduct yourself reasonable, without forcing your attentions on anyone. It just takes a little patience. If you've got 20 women in the room and you've got some kind of weird hang-up--like sometimes a broad will like two guys at once or a guy will like two girls--as long as it isn't offensive or painful, you'll certainly find a means to express it."

Hard-core swingers, however, deliberately avoid what are referred to as freaky scenes, such as the regular Malibu parties--thrown by a group of aerospace employees--that feature such kinky divertissements as velvet whips, wet towels, leather fetishism, spanking and other sadomasochistic pursuits. The use of marijuana to heighten the sexual experience is also downgraded by most swappers. "If pot is smoked at a party, the bulk of the people immediately leave," says an informed insider. "That's one damn situation where the police could walk in and arrest everyone. Why leave yourself wide open? Instead, the liquor flows fairly free."

Dr. Tom Grubbs, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, cites another reason for the swingers' aversion to marijuana. "They've done what the establishment has dictated for years--grow up, finish high school, get an eight-to-five job, get married, have kids, buy a home and go to church. Despite their unusual group behavior in private, they still reflect establishment values. And right now, the establishment says smoking marijuana is not only against the law, it's harmful and it's wrong." It may be one of the ironic anomalies of culture lag that such moral and legal censure is no longer meted out to those decent, law-evading citizens who care to experiment with sexual consciousness expansion.

Apart from the obvious attractions of erotic adventuring, says Dr. Simon, "many of the people who go to these parties systematically are suffering from various types of status deprivation. These are people to whom society is not yet prepared to accord the upper-middle-class status they aspire to and identify with. They're not big in the community; they're not big in politics nor even on the job. Swinging becomes one means to act out their frustrations; they feel it's an intense experience and that they're doing something that's significant. It's kind of an overcompensation for what they subconsciously feel is really an act of deviance."

Considering the persistence of this residual guilt, most experienced swingers show an almost cavalier disregard for the possibility of discovery and arrest for violation of such statutes as those defining cunnilingus and fellation--both common activities at swinging parties--as crimes punishable with severe prison sentences. The uneasiness of initiates is assuaged when they learn that swinger parties are very seldom raided, even when the police know what's going on.

"The reason they never bust the swappers is because the court has to prove that there was a conspiracy to commit immoral acts," explains Harold Nebenzal, the coproducer of All the Loving Couples, who conducted extensive research on his own. "They cannot prove that. The people attending the party could very well say: 'We met to play bridge. We didn't meet here to exchange wives.' In many states, fornication and adultery per se are not illegal activities; the authorities have to prove that they're carried on 'openly and notoriously.' This is sufficient to make prosecution virtually impossible."

Still, nagging fears persist among many swappers, even though they know that these laws, and others pertaining to "lasciviousness" and "corrupting morals," are rarely enforced. What they are doing may not be strictly illegal, but it isn't quite legal, either. They occasionally hear reports of undercover activity such as the recent raid on a Hollywood apartment where a dozen swingers were arrested; one of the participants had unwittingly picked up a female vice-squad officer on the Sunset Strip and taken her to the party. But even in this case, the charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.

Two years ago, in an address before the Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce. Sergeant Norman Daeger of the Van Nuys vice squad warned community leaders about the sex orgies, lewd movies and wife swapping he alleged were running rampant in hillside homes overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Several concerned citizens vowed to organize vigilante groups to flush out the sinners, but no serious action ever materialized. Perhaps the involvement of off-duty vice-squad officers as enthusiastic participants in many wife-swapping parties accounts for the absence of even token harassment in most communities.

Periodic attempts at exposés by crusading newspapers have also been fruitless. The Newhall Signal, a thrice-weekly suburban paper published just north of the San Fernando Valley, recently assigned one of its reporters to infiltrate the parties known to proliferate among those living in lower-middle-class housing developments in the unincorporated neighboring community of Saugus. The reporter was unable to gather enough solid facts to substantiate such activity; but before abandoning the crusadek, the Signal satisfied its mandate by printing several insinuating items in an editorial-page gossip column. "Rumor Department," one of them read. "An unusually reliable source reports that a wife-swapping club is going hot and heavy in the Four Oaks tract in Sougus. About 30 members. Partners are chosen simply by drawing straws. You'd think the least they could do is be more creative."

Editor John Newhall received an angry letter signed by several Saugus residents soon after the item appeared. "They demanded one of two things," he recalls. "Either we fire the columnist or we print the names of the people involved. They admitted there were people engaged in wife swapping, but they didn't want everybody in the tract to be implicated."

Increasingly concerned about infiltrators, swappers have begun to voice a good deal of skepticism and suspicion about the classified advertisements in underground newspapers and swapping magazines--the very outlets that provided most of them with their first group-sex contacts. "You don't know who they are," says an articulate spokesman, lately wary of opportunists. "It could be a setup. They could be blackmailers. Or vice cops. Or postal inspectors. We don't want to put ourselves in a vulnerable position. We've become more selective as well as intelligent. Most of the people are also hip on hygiene, so that's the least of our worries."

One notable exception occurred after a party last year, when one of the participants discovered that he had contracted a dose of syphilis. Within 24 hours, everyone in attendance had been contacted and assembled in the office of a West Hollywood general practitioner, who administered penicillin shots and tablets. The atmosphere in his waiting room resembled that of a class reunion. Naturally, the doctor was also swinger.

The communal aspects of swappers' sexual behavior seem to have solidified many of the participating couples into a remarkably close-knit relationship. Unlike single swingers, they tend to be as clannish as the American Legion and as loyal to one another as a mafioso family. Politically, a majority of them embrace the conservative wing of the Republican Party (psychologists explain that swapping often reflects an overcompensation for the puritanical restraints imposed by the up-tight environment in which such people are raised), and Negroes are almost always excluded from their gatherings. But most disparities in income and social status are characteristically forgotten--ample evidence that sex in these circles is the great equalizer. "It's hard to be a snob when you're bare-assed," one of them admits.

It's also hard to remain a stranger to the people you party with. The private lives of the swappers, in fact, often become intricately interwoven with those they enjoy carnally. Groceries are purchased from swinging supermarket owners, accident polices from swinging insurance salsemen, cars from swinging automobile dealers. One woman who recently serviced a tire salesman at a swap party appeared several days later at his garage to aquire five new tubeless Goodyears. He was more than happy to accomodate her--at wholesale prices. Like dedicated Gray Ladies, swappers visit even comparatively unfamiliar bedmates recuperating in hospitals. They baby-sit with one another's children, lend money to kindred souls with no questions asked; and when they leave the city on vacation trips, they know they'll be able to visit total strangers functioning as active participants in the underground network.

Several months ago, a London-based professor and his wife made extraordinary use of that extensive grapevine--co-ordinating a lecture tour of various American medical schools with a swinging tour involving like-minded couples--from coast to coast and back again. Midway through their 26-stop junket, they were entertained like visiting royalty at a San Fernando Valley party attended by some 50 swappers, all of whom were enthralled by the professor's reports of burgeoning group activity from San Francisco to Cape Kennedy. "One of the couples we stayed with were already taking bets about who would be the first swappers in outer space," he told them.

His hosts in Los Angeles were a San Fernando Valley couple who had accumulated a collated list of 1800 swingers' names, broken down according to sexual preference, geographic locale, physical characteristics, age and occupation--a treasure-trove of information stored alphabetically in a locked filing cabinet. Many of the festivities that take place at parties organized by this enterprising pair--and by other swinging hosts--are depicted in extenso in All the Loving Couples. The provocative script--on which the Valley couple served as unofficial "technical advisors"--chronicles in color an overnight, 12-hour marathon among four swapping couples, three of them experienced weekend partygoers, the newcomers undergoing an unforgettable introduction to the scene. But there are significant differences between Loving Couples and its progenitors--the more blatant sexploitation films.

The eigtht participants epitomize middle-class America. They discuss littleleague trophies and recipes for Dutch chocolte cake as avidly as they describe their respective sexual lusts. Before proceeding to the inevitable--and prolonged--seduction scenes, which occur in bedrooms, in a swimming pool and on the living-room couch of a WASPishly comfortable, pine-paneled home, they rail about the A. C. L. U., the John Birch Society, local police and whether the Supreme Court decision quashing prayers in public schools was Communistically inspired.

Revealing the kind of ambivalent mood, manners and mores that characterize many real-life swinging situations, one of the impatient husbands finally bellows: "When do we get laid?"

"Well, you don't have to be crude," reproaches one of the wives, while the others greet this boorish remark with humiliating stares.

"What I like about swinging," says another character, finally changing out of her street clothes in the powder room, "is that no thought processes are going on."

Leo Gordon offers a ready explanation for this shroud of mindlessness that hovers over numerous swinging affairs. "When you're popping your nuts, you can't very well be thinking about whether Mayor Yorty is going to run again," he declares. "It's a sublimation and a moment of escape that happens in times of stress. And we are living in a stressful society. These are the days in the bunker in Berlin, for Chrissakes. This is the blitz in England. The Bombs are dropping. Let's do something. Let's fuck."

The Lesbian scenes in this film, while hardly comparable with the denouement in The Killing of Sister George, do reflect some of the corollary aspects of many swinging parties. Though male homosexuality is almost unknown, it is not unusual to be confronted with women kissing each other's breasts or genitals.

"I once saw a guy making it with a broad who took his wife's hands and put them on the broad's breasts," Gordon reports. "Nobody complained. A woman has much more latitude in her approach to sex, anyway. She'll do any goddamn thing as long as she has a reason. Most of them, after they overcome their initial shyness, turn out to be incredible exhibitionists."

That may be an exaggeration, but the average woman, according to many sociologists, deports herself in group sexual situations in a manner approximating her attitudes in contemporary culture. Not only does she dress exhibitionistically, they feel, but she undresses the same way as well; in either case, her behavior is often compulsive. Women will occasionally arrive with suitcases and slip into provocative bedwear for everyone to ogle. Costume masquerades are also common. In their constant search for novelty, swappers may dress up as children, or as doctors and nurses, before getting down to the business at hand.

"These men and women are crying in the night, trying to say 'Love me,'" says a disenchanted observer. "They're all looking for something, but they never quite find it. They're kind of sad, in their way."

"All this smacks of infantilism, reliving their childhood," explains Dr. Grubbs, whose patients include a significant number of swappers. "The swapping parties actually remind me very much of being a little kid and playing naughty in the bedroom with the kids from down the street and running the risk of getting caught by the parents, who I suppose are represented by the police when you're an adult. They are tantalized about doing something wrong and forbidden."

More complex games are played at an increasing number of night clubs designed to convene and catalyze swinging couples, both married and single. The logical extension of classified "personal" ads, they enable swingers to widen their circle of "friends" beyond the neighborhood grapevine--and to meet one another face to face, rather than waste time corresponding or risk sending provocative Polaroid photographs through the mails.

The West Coast prototype for this new phenomenon is The Swing, an aptly named establishment located across the street from a fashionable restaurant, The Tail o' the Cock, in the otherwise sedate San Fernando Valley community of Studio City. When they were devising a name for their new club, owners Joyce and Greg McClure were sorely tempted to christen it The Head o' the Cock--a bit of japery that might have appealed to their cleintele but certainly would have irritated the local sheriff's department.

The McClures were not deterred by the dozen other night spots that had previously failed on the same Ventura Boulevard premises. Based on their extensive experience in the field, they were able to accumulate a sizable and selective mailing list. The hundreds of printed formal invitions heralding the club's opening in April 1966 more closely resembled wedding announcements. "All the swinging people will be there if you come," the invitations promised, in the double-entendre argot of the erotic underground.

Three consecutive opening nights, each of them attended by a different group of 200 swingers, were necessary to accomodate the huge demand. "It was a strange feeling, like belonging to the Elks or the Masons," recalls one of the celebrants, "like strangers walking into a convention hall in an alien city and suddenly acting like it was old home week, because they all had the same secret handshake."

Three years later, the consanguinity that marked those first giddy nights still prevails. From the time one enters the dimly lit club, pausing to observe himself in a Coney Island fun-house mirror that makes even the chunkiest swinger appear sveltely slender, an insinuating mood dominates the proceedings. Its pulse is a heavy-beated, hard-rock quartet wailing beneath an outsized Charlie Brown poster emblazoned with the legend: Happiness is peace and love throughout the world.

Whether attending get-acquainted night on Wednesdays or the hard-nosed bartering on Fridays and Saturdays, it's important to know how to maneuver at The Swing. Experienced swingers usually sip their first drink at the bar, scanning the well-filled turtlenecks, miniskirts and vinyl boots parading by, like hunters staking out and sizing up their prey.

From this vantage point, they can observe the interplay between couples seated in semicircular booths, their faces bathed by candlelight, some talking and drinking, others voraciously kissing and fondling their companions. Such overt stimuli customarily serve as an invitation to join the smitten strangers and engage them in conversation. Certain key questions inevitably reveal the interlopers' intentions and proclivities.

"Do you come here often?" the knowledgeable team might ask, idly twirling their swizzle sticks.

"Oh, yes, we come here every Saturday night."

"Have you been to any of the parties?"

A gauche response--such as "What parties?"--usually halts the conversation abruptly. Hard-core swingers have little patience with tourists.

Lately, a good opening gambit begins with the female admiring a likely stranger's love beads and inquiring seductively as she strokes them: "Are you a swinger?" Bluntness is de rigueur. The anticipated affirmation will prompt more penetrating questions like: "Do you dig everybody in one room or do you like the private scene, where everybody splits and goes into separate rooms?"

Even the McClures, who patrol the room like chaperones at a college mixer, faintly smiling as they introduce prospective partners, are occasionally amazed by some of the candor audible from the booths and tables. "The openness of the conversation is remarkable, Greg admits. "They talk about balling and screwing in such a casual manner."

But their own expertise in the field enables both McClures to appreciate their clientele's frank pursuit of pleasure. Though they're privy to the times and locations of various swinging parties, the McClures make a practice of keeping such information to themselves. "We are completely legal in everything we do," Greg declares. "We don't even have a picture of a nude woman in the club. We think we have something that some people might take exception to, so we'd better run it real straight, even though I feel that what people do after they leave here is fine. If it's not hurting anybody, why not do it?"

The substantial proportion of swingers from high-income brackets--at keast in Los Angeles--inspires Leo Gordon's even-people-who-have-everything-use-Listerine theory. "Like Onassis, we gradually aquire every goddamn thing that money can buy," he explains. "The color-television set might have three months of payments outstanding, but we've still go it. Same way with the car. How many material things can one person collect? How many meals can he eat? The only thing left is other people. So we start looking for things we can't get by saying 'Here's ten dollars. I want it.' Swinging is especially attractive because you can't buy it."

Like art collectors, swingers also tend to become almost dilettantish in their selectivity. They have no interest in balky newcomers; and those with long hair or granny glasses or Russian peasant blouses are usually repudiated, along with those crass outsiders who pay money to savor the pleasures that swappers believe are beyond bidding.

This is not to say that swingers are unwilling to invest a few dollars in the pursuance of their pastime. In the Los Angeles area alone, quite apart from The Swing, more than a dozen lonely-loins clubs charge male applicants up to $25 initiation fee, plus $5 monthly dues (girls are admitted free), for leads to like-minded members of the opposite--and sometimes the same--gender. Among the sex societies in and around L. A.: The Local Swinger, The In-Crowd, The Compatibles, The Exchange, The Group, Dial-A-Date Tonight and the best-organized of the lot, The Utopians, which boasts a membership of some 1200 swapping couples and 1800 swinging singles, male and female, who preach as well as practice the club's winking motto: "Let's keep in touch." In addition to a telephone introduction service, each member is furnished with the ultimate in sign language--triangluar-shaped bumper stickers whose arrangement of yellow borders designates a particular category.

"Thank you for calling The Utopians," says John Adams, the bearded entrepreneur whose voice purrs gently into the receiver. "May I help you?" His two-telephone command post is the back room of a storefront office in West Hollywood decorated with a nude canvas painted by one of the organization's members. The Rubenseque figure is a composite--the face of the artist's wife and the body of his mistress. Behind a makeshift plywood desk hang studio greeting cards from several of Adams' eminently satisfied female customers. One of them reads: "I don't always think about sex. Once I thought about overthrowing the Government." An adjacent reproduction of an Early American sampler, fashioned out of cardboard, pleads: Help me meet my seduction quota.

"Yes, this is C-44," replies the caller on the other end, identifying himself with the coded number assigned when he joined the club. "I just saw one of our emblems on a car--number B-6. A goodlooking chick was driving. What can you tell me about her?"

"Hold on," says Adams, flipping through a commodious card file.

"Her first name is Colleen. She's twenty-foru," Adams begins, dispassionately reciting the vital statistics belonging to the girl in the car. "Five feet, four inches. A hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Black hair. Brown eyes. She will go with a Negro man if necessary. Will not trio. Will not go with a gay girl. She lives out by the beach."

"Sounds great," exclaims C-44.

"Fine, I'll have her call you if she's interested," Adams replies, observing his policy of withholding female telephone numbers to accomodate local statutes. "It will probably be around seven o'clock. She gets home from work at six and I'll get in touch with her then."

"I'm also looking for Scandinavian girls," C-44 persists. "Do you have any on file?"

"Yes, I have Bridget," Adams replies. "But she won't be back until next month. She's gone to Norway on vacation. In the meantime, Colleen should do fine. My other phone is ringing. Talk to you later."

Since launching operations as a sex organier a year ago (his club was originally known as average of 1400 membership inquiries each mouth, in addition to the uncounted phone conversations in which he parallels the matchmaking propensities of Dolly Levi or Polly Adler in their prime. And business is expanding. Once an unheralded baritone in road-company productions of shows such as The King and I, Adams has already sold Utopian franchises at $1000 apiece to operatives in the Los Angeles suburbs of Long Beach, Orange County and Van Nuys, as well as in San Diego, the San Gabriel Valley and Austin, Texas.

A large-hipped, button-nosed insurance-claims investigator who dabbles in abstract painting and charcoal cookery, Colleen clearly illustrates the opportunities offered by Registry membership. She had attended swinging parties nearly every weekend since joining The Registry four months before. Among her earliest contacts was Fred, a land developer who had since become her steady swinging partner.

"One Saturday, he called and asked me to a party," Colleen recalls, re-creating their first joint appearance. "It was my first real big party, about 20 couples in a home in Inglewood. I told Fred I wasn't going to swing that night. Guys kept coming over to me and asking whether I'd like to go into the other room. I kept saying no. It was the wrong time of the month. Finally, I noticed my date go into one of the bedrooms. Watching other people enjoy themselves seemed like a very exciting idea. All of a sudden, I decided to participate. Fred was nowhere around, so I went into another bedroom with a guy I had been talking to. There was already another couple busy on the bed. We joined them. Afterward, we said 'Hi.' The guy I was with wanted to swing with the other girl, so they did--and I swung with the other guy. The exchange worked out fine.

"When it was all over, I told them that I still hadn't swung with my date and that I thought I should. They all laughed. My date finally took me into another room. When we started making love together, he turned me on to a point where I'd never been turned on before. I can't quite describe the sensation. Later on, Fred told me there had been another couple waiting next to us for their turn ou the bed and that they'd finally just given up and left. For us, it lasted a good hour or so, at least. I didn't bother to count the number of orgasms. Most women dont' like to admit it, but actually they're more sensitive when they're menstruating."

After Adams called to give Colleen the phone number of C-44, she phoned him up and asked a series of questions she'd devised for every Utopian referral, whatever his race, creed or code number. "I usually can tell a lot from the way a guy talks on the telephone," she told C-44. "I want to know how old you are, how tall you are and your occupation." He told her. She also found out where he lived, the nature of his job and whether he was "happy," before getting to the most salient question.

"I'm looking for a husband," she admitted. "I have no qualms about advertising that. I tell some uys my intentions when I first talk to them. That eliminates most of my callers. They don't call me back anymore. I do that purposely. If the guy is insecure, he's going to run from reality."

Nonplused, C-44 agreed to meet her the following day. But the chemistry Colleen had anticipated failed to matrialize during a rather perfunctory luncheon, and C-44 went back to his pursuit of Scandinavian swingers. "I enjoy sex," Colleen later confided. "But if a man doesn't have anything to say or if he's not interesting, I'm not going to swing with him. So many guys join The Registry with stars in their eyes. Like, they're going to meet Brigitte Bardot; they're going to meet Brigitte Bardot; they're going to a sex orgy and they're going to get so much sex they won't know what to do with it. I expect to be treated like a lady and I demanded it, so I get it. Most guys tell me they were thinking of dropping out until they talked to me and I gave them new hope. Sometimes I feel like Billy Graham."

On especially active nights, when she's in the mood and her four-year-old daughter has gone to sleep, she impulsively invites callers to her second-story apartment, scheduling them at 45-minute intravals. "Sex is just like cooking," she tells them. "Each thing you prepare and serve should have a different taste. It can get pretty bland if it all tastes the same."

Colleen's social contacts--unlike those of most unattached girls her age--aren't limited to the group she meets at work. "Being a woman and swinging, you can write your own ticket," she continues. "You can have everything you want. It was different when I was younger. I was already pregnant when I got married. Now I have my choice of a fantastic range of men. I'm curious about a lot of the men I meet. I like to find out what they're like in bed."

At another time in history, Colleen might have been stoned to death for advocating such irreverent views. And even today, only a minority of citizens would condone her prodigious appetite. But she doesn't care. "When a woman swings," Colleen maintains, "she blossoms. Inhabitions suddenly all disappear. You're more aggtressive and more responsive in sex, You feel things differently. It's actually doing away with the double standard, which I away with the double standard, which I am absolutely oposed to. When you're able to enjoy these sexual experiences without love and without marriage, you actually find out the true basis for love."

Surprisingly, two marriages have already resulted from contacts made through The Utopians. Not surpirisingly, the newlyweds now swing as couples. A recent holiday season inspired another pair of newlyweds to send a membership to their neighbors as a Christmas gift.

Included in the membership package, besides an identification card and a bumper sticker, is free advertising Swing Modern, a monthly magazine self-proclaimed the "Swingers Official Publication." Eight pages of want ads and nude photographs detailing the qualifications and desires of swinging couples and singles highlighted the first issue of its carlier incarnation, National Registry. Some typical copy read:

Beautiful A. C./D. C. girl wants to hear from couples and single girls who are young and very attractive.

Burbank couple want to learn to swing...early 20s and happy...all singles...bi-girls or couples. Photo appreciated.

For added enjoyment, Adams' readers were encouraged to purchase nude photographs of groups and singles in action, color motion-picture films, Lesbianadorned playing cards, 'sex body lotion" and laminated-plastic cards establishing membership in the fictious Swap-A-Wife Club, Inc. The Utopians also sponsors gatheringd at two swingers-only night clubs in the L. A.area--theCougar Room and The Cstacombs.

Adams' partner in this burgeoning enterprise--and among the most opulent nudes on view in his swinger's guide--is none other than Mrs. Adams, an attractive blonde in her mid-20s.

"I'm very much in love with him," she confesses, "so much so that when I'm swinging, I want someone who has a similar technique to his, because I enjoy him so much. We've been married eight years and have two children of our own sho seem very h appy. They'll probably be swingers when they grow up. All our six-year-old and our three-year-old know now is that swingers are people who love children."

Clubs like The Utopians, Adams feels, are of inestimable value as a medium of sex education. "Society has told a woman from the time she was a little child not to go to bed with a man unless she's married to him or deeply in love with him," he asserts. "Most women, therefore, have been repressing natural urges and desires since they have physically matured. Then all of a sudden, the woman is married. The first thing society says is, 'It's OK now. Hop into bed and screw your head off.' But she often can't. She's up tight and therefore frigid.

"It's the same way for a lot of young men. Despite his sexual inexperience, a boy gets married and goes to bed with his wife--and it's over with just like that because of premature ejaculation or impotence induced by fear. We throw married people into bed together with absolutely no experience whatsoever, if we follow society's rules. If couples had a variety and a frequency of experience with intercourse beforehand, many of the basic probelms that afflict most new marriages could be avoided."

A series of swinging weekend boat excursions, culminating next October with an 11-day sailing trip to the Leeward Island in the West Indies. will presumably provide limitless oppurtinities to indoctrinate new converts with the Adams philosophy. He hopes to crry 70 swinging couples on board a 192-foot schooner at a $700-per-person tariff that will include round-trip air fare from Los Angeles, ample amounts of duty-free Scotch and all the sex they can handle. But the Adamses normally prefer a more intimate swinging scene to such massive gatherings. "A lot of people like to have a big orgy on the living-room-floor,"says Mrs. Adams. "It stimulates them, I guess. But it makes me feel self-consious."

Escalating numbers of uninhibited young men and women across the country feel differently about it. "Until a year ago, I didn't even know what an orgy was, really," admits Jane, a 20-year-old brunette who works as a part-time bank teller."I'd always heard about them, but I'd never seen one. I wondered whether attending an orgy meant being involved simultaneously with two or three other people or whether it meant taking on a number of people one at time. I was totally unprepared for my first one. I went to this party solely to meet and talk with a friend. So i had no anticipation, no expectations. Then I founf myself in the middle of it all.

"My sexual relationship with my husband was not what it should have been. I hadn't slept with him for about a month. I was very horny, which made it a lot easier to participate. That we was a catalyst once I got there, once people started coming on with me physically and verbally. Then I had a few puffs from a joint that had been cured with Kahlua, and later a little liquor. A drink will kill anybody's inhibitions. They weren't a bunch of pretty people, which surprised me; it was a motley assortment, But they all seemed to be so open and healthy about everything. They had their hang-ups-like some of them wanted only oral sex--but they didn't want to participate, fine. Two or three women wanted to make it with me. I reacted by expecting my friend to protect me but he didn't. And then it dawned on me: 'If I'm old enough to be here by myself, that certanily means I should be able to take care of myself.'

"There was no motivation needed to become involved in the orgy. It just sort of happened. It was like, all of a sudden,I'm dancing with some guy and we're more or less undressing each other. It was totally spontaneous. I don't even remember the music. The next thing I knew, I was walking into the bedroom. There were like, ten people on the bed and the floor, each one involved with the two people next to him. They would all trade off when they were finished, like a round robin.

"It was so completely new to me. I'd never been a part of anything like that before. I could never have imagined myself doing anything like that. Previously, all my relatioships were with one man at a time. I slept with three men that night. There was no embarrassment. When you're balling somebody and half a dozen people are balling simultaneously, you sort of lose your qualms. When I was concerned about getting home and my husband wondering where I was. When I told him about it, he was really interested."

For orgy people like Jane, there are no membership fees or dues nor any need to run provocative classifieds. The cardboard identification tags used on getacquainted nights at swinging night clubsare also absent. Brief first-name introductions are more than sufficient. Furthermore, there are none of the sticky preliminaries observed by other groups, no game playing, no shallow romancing. According to insiders, tuned-in individuals can choose from upwards of 200 orgies each night in Los Angles alone, whether it be Saint Swithin's Day or New Year's Eve. A loose-knit telephone network relays the news of times and places for these word-of-mouth affairs.

Women like jane dress for the occasion as simply as possible, usually in little more than shoes and a dress, eachewing encumbering undergarments. They frequently arrive alone and, when they feel surfeited, leave by themselves.

"That's a lot better than sitting home watching Johnny Carson," comments Jack Margolis, a Hollywood comedy writer who knows the scene. "many of these people's lives are barren and uncreative. They have nothing happening and they like to ball, so they go to the orgies. Everybody likes to fuck. Today, it's increasingly acceptable."

With the list of orgygoers he has accumulated through the years, a local telephone-advertising salesman named Mel Chesner could easily cast an epic bedroom sequencein the best De Millean tradition. As the city's king of swing in the orgy department. he is respected for his uncanny ability ti find sumptuous homes for his bacchanals and the right kind of extroverts to populate them.

One of his recent affairs was held at a three-bedroom Tudor home in benedict Canyon, just a couple of winding driveways above the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was called for the customary hour of all 11P.M., after guests had dined or attended straight parties of their own. New arrivals were almost immediately assimilated into the languid ambiance--low livingroom lighting, soft music, perfunctory conversation and the euphoric aroma of pot. Chesner had specified in advance that this would be a "head" party, a good omen for those who believe that marijuana intensifies the sexual experience.

A couple on the couch was busily engaged in preliminary manipulations. A mini-skirted blonde named Candy, known for her hearty homosexual appetite, weaved back and forth near the fireplace, dancing in tandem with her elongated shadow projected on the wall. Arms held aloft Zorba style, she was soon joined fom behind by another blonde, who clasped her hands around Candy's waist.

It gradually became apparent that few newcomers would be in attendence, a fact that dismayed several of the regulars eager for variety. Clearly, however, nobody would be hesistant about retiring to the bedrooms. In the past, Chesner had occasionally been obliged to circulate among a relucant gathering, wearing nothing more than a red terrycloth shaving towel around his waist, merely to get things going. A self-consious group of neophytes at another recent party decided to change into bed sheets before proceeding. Then they nervously assembled in the living room, waiting for somebody to break the ice.

"Well, what's everyone waiting for?" a woman finally exclaimed, unraveling herself from a sheet. "Let's go!" In moments, the piles of sheets on the carpet resembled Monday morning at a Chinese laundry.

"Have you seen the rest of the house?" a bearded enthusiast was now asking one of the girls at the Benedict Canyon orgy. She responded to this roundabout invitation by taking his hand and learning the way. Already, half a dozen couples were thrashing away on three king-sized mattresses arranged side by side on the floor of a bedroom. Various angles of a lengthening daisy chain could be seen in the flickering candlelight reflected by the plate-glass mirrors covering the four walls and ceiling. Participants walked in and out of the room in various stages of undress. One gentleman had just finished with a slender girl. He was immediately replaced by another fellow lying next to them.

Sorroundings this mound of writhing bodies was a circle of fully dressed observers, some of them hunkering, some prone, with hands supporting their heads, eyes transfixed, as they casually passed around joints of grass. Like bleacherites at Yankee Stadium, they often whispered appoval of the participants' technique or speculated on the next development. One of them murmured that he was experiencing a strange sensation of omniscience, a godlike quality, a sense of power.

"How about a little audience participation, you Peeping Toms," suggested a man on one of the mattresses, as he climbed off his female companion, "before you have an optical climax." His raillery, as well a his performance, inspired numerous clucks of appreciation--and a couple of takers. They were soon joined by drifters from the living room and several late arrivals. The final vision of two dozen people heaving on the mattresses--beheld by a few fascinated holdouts--resembled a cross between a purple passage from an Olympia Press reader and a goal-line stand between the Colts and the Jets.

"It's perfectly natural to want to watch other humans screwing," says Dr. Tom Grubbs of this unbashed voyeurism. "It's a throwback to our childhood, when we wished to join Mother and Father when they were doing this very intimate thing. We were loved by then and we wanted to be a part of all of their life. When they went into the bedroom, closed the door and got into bed, we were excluded, even though we wanted to view Mother and Father copulating and be a part of it. Men who are chronic voyeurs want to be accepted, in a similar manner, into the orgy scene. There's also an element of exhibitionism here, too, in this group sexual activity, of being seen, of being accepted by those viewing, and thereby having one's sexuality accepted."

Experienced male swingers like Margolis have long since learned to pace themselves in such a situation. Presumably, their only limitations are those of durability. "The most important thing is to have a good partner who'll let you relax and enjoy yourself," says one of the orgy girls. "This is more difficult for a man. He has to take the initiative and is expected to perform well with several women. A man cannot fake something like that, whereas a woman can."

This constant pressure to perform prodigiously both in the orgy and in the swapping environment can create psychosexual probelms for some male participants. "For many men," Dr. Simon explains, "swinging tends not to produce joyous free sexuality but very compulsive, very constrained sexuality in which the ability to stay hard becomes almost an end in itself. They get so hot that in the process of vascularization, it comes to such a point they can't have an orgasm even if they want to, and therefore they feel inadequate. They're so concerened with displaying ego-gratifying competence that they've forgotten how to enjoy it. There is something very frightening about that."

Some of those frequently exposed to orgies also become disillusioned by the impersonal nature of what takes place. Jane, the bank teller, resisted attending the New Year's Eve orgy to which she was invited, preferring to spend a quiet evening at home.

"The last couple of times, I went only because I got a free dinner," she admits. "It's not as stimulating now as it was at first. Many of the same people present at my first orgy recently reappeared a year later at another one. After talking to them for a while, I realized they were, without doubt, intellectually the dumbest human beings I've ever encountered. Now I'm only sort of haphazardly involved in the scene."

Dr. Simon suggets a likely reason for this kind of reaction. "As you move into the orgy scene, it becomes increasingly imperative to talk," he says. "You have to explain yourself and what you want to happen or else you wind up being a dumb actor in a charade that one is running, which leaves most people feeling terribly frustrated. Because of that feeling, large numbers of people are walking away from the swinging scene."

His observations after taking to orgiasts on Fir Island last summer crystalized Dr. Simon's thinking. "How banal and immensely dull the conversations were." he racalls. "and how typical all the parties. It's an amazingly limited exchange of cards of identity--'I like this, you like that, you like that, let's screw.' Either these people are very simple-minded or the aspects of themselves that they are prepared to reveal are extremely limited."

Many of those who've tried it, however, don't knock it. The hoary Hollywood cliché that held that one sould attend a different orgy each night for a month and never see the same people can now be authenticated--at least in Los Angles.

Many well-known celebrities devote as much time to orgies as they do to moviemaking, political campaigining and raising funds for various causes. Among the more prominent asherents are a popular Negro singer, a millionaire businessman and his wife, a couple that headlines in Las Vegas Café and the star of a current television series and his actress wife.

While still in her teens, actress Mia Farrow already had become interested in the scene. "For my education, Salvador Dali took me to a number of orgies," She reports. "He presided over them. These strange, erotic people like someone presiding, kind of watching. He had this cane and conducted a symphony of these people sort of all over the place. I would wear my long white dress, like something that just arrived from heaven. This added an ingredient that was even more erotic, and everybody sensed it. I would just stand there and watch these sex orgies, people making love. All kinds of people. All kinds of sexes. They were all deeply absorbed in themselves. I has a strange feeling they were performing, like a ballet."

"If you know your way around today," Margolis ecstatically enthuses, "you can get laid every single night. It's the new morality. Girls take pills. It's OK to make love. If you don't, there's something wrong with you. Who knows, before long, swinging might be as popular as pistachio nuts."

A cross section of more objective thought produces a less emotional evaluation of how long the swinging pendulum may stay in motion. "Societies tend to generate all kind of innovative behaviour," notes Dr. Simon. "The social scientist's probelm is to distinguish which of these forms is prototypal of the future and which is a symptom of the crisis that society is undergoing at a given moment. In its present form, swinging tends to by symptomatic of our current overloading of the sexual, making it stand for more than it can really be. There is no emotional or intellectual commitment involved in it. And I'm not sure that it's the route to greater sexual freedom."

Dr. Ellis doesn't take such a dim view.'May be hundred years from now it will be generally accepted," he says. "But even then, what will be practised is what I call civilized adultery, rather than wife swapping--meaning the allowing of leeway in a marriage for couples to find extramarital mates." A possible increase in socially sanctioned swinging is also anticipated by Dr. Bartell. "For the next four years, I think we'll see a regression to a more staid, Eisenhowerlike period, which will trend to diminute this," he predicts. "But then, if society continues evolving toward an increasingly permissive attitude about the sexual activities in which people choose to engage--then mate swapping could develop a beneficial rapport for those who practise it, as it does for the Eskimo society. If it doesn't, eventually it will fall apart and the population will go on to something else."

Ragardless of the casualties suffered along the way, the swinging phenomenon shows no sign of disintegrating; it gives every indication, in fact, of becoming a viable life style for increasing numbers of Americans. In the final analysis, however, only time--and the experiences of the participants themselves--will tell whether swinging makes a positive, negative or any kind of imprint at all on exixting cultural patterns. According to Dr. Eleanor Hamilton, a New York marriage counselor and author of a new book called Sex Before Marriage, it may be a deep and lasting one. "I suspect that there are going to be plenty of polyandrous or polygamous relationships in the future, especially if we continue to have wars and emerge from them with more women than men in the population," she hypothesizes. "It's possible that the loneliness of the modern couple--and they are lonely--has already produced the current searching ofr deeper relationships. These people are looking for a really intimate fellowship beyond the traditional twosome--beyond even the threesome or the foursome. I'm pretty sure there will be more and more divergence--along with a willingness to experiment and to see what works best for any individual couple."