Bedsprings Eternal

an open-eyed chronicle of shut-eye sites built for morpheus and other nocturnal visitors--plus a pictorial survey of contemporary sleeperies

Considering that one third of a man's life is spent enjoying the horizontal pleasures of the sack, the importance of beds can hardly be overestimated. One school of scientific thought has even gone so far as to contend that the idea of using fire as a tool dawned on early man not by observing volcanoes or spontaneous brush fires or lightning, as has been assumed, but in bed. Known as the hot-bed theory, this intriguing notion was first put forth in 1961 by the British anthropologist A. C. Arnold and holds that "the first really congenial fires probably resulted from the heat created by bacterial decomposition of man's first bedding, which was just matted vegetation."

Support for this theory may be found in the myth that Prometheus filched man's first fire from the gods and concealed it in a stalk of fennel, and in the historical fact that man's oldest surviving beds--those of the ancient Egyptians--are constructed of palm fibers, sticks and wickerwork, so dried and woven as to prevent spontaneous combustion.

Like most ancient beds, those of the Egyptians were about as roomy as a modern camp cot but extremely light and portable. More portable yet were the simple bedrolls of the common folk of the Middle East. Unencumbered by bedsteads, the shepherds, slaves and artisans could curl up under the stars, and a man miraculously cured of palsy could--without too much effort--obey the Biblical command to take up his bed and walk.

But it is mainly in reference to the erotic that the Bible waxes most lyrical on the use of beds. Equally numerous, though less descriptive, are the many allusions to beds involving homicide, incest and sinful slothfulness. But, judging from the sort of togetherness described in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, the big problem for many householders was more likely to be finding enough room in the family bed to catch 40 winks. In reply to a plea for bread, the man of the house is quoted as calling out, "Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee."

The Greeks favored beds that were as light and portable as those of the Egyptians--so light and portable, in fact, that Aristophanes has one of his women characters carry a bed on stage. The play is the anti-war satire Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens swear to withhold all amorous favors from their militant menfolk until the long war with Sparta is ended. To preserve their chastity during those religious festivals when they were required to live apart from male companionship, the women of Greece and Rome (text continued on page 154) "laid a certain herb, named hanea, in their beds," which assuaged "the ardent flames of love." From Juvenal's satire on Roman women, however, one gathers that no mere herb could have done much to cool their passions. "Chastity lingered on earth, I believe, in the reign of King Saturn," he wryly observed.

Roman fondness for beds was, indeed, universal. With the advent of Christianity, however, the Roman bed, the lectus, came to be identified solely with lechery. The early church fathers impartially considered all beds to be breeding places of unholy lust. In their anxiety to avoid sexual pleasure, devout married couples resorted to the chemise cagoule, a sort of heavy nightshirt with a suitably placed hole through which a husband could impregnate his wife while avoiding any other contact. Aspiring ascetics, on the other hand, would take attractive young female consorts into their beds, the better to mortify their flesh through the nightly agony of temptation and denial.

Among both lords and commoners in northern Europe, the concept of privacy had yet to dawn. Intimacy prevailed over modesty. The bulky and often crude garments of day were shed before the blazing fire, and sleepers huddled together for warmth. Nightshirts were virtually unknown, and the oldest pictorial records show kings and queens lying in bed wearing nought but their crowns. Looking beyond the efforts of Victorian writers to re-create the earthy age of chivalry in terms of unrequited love between chaste ladies and virginal knights, we find that beds of adultery and fornication were as much a part of ye olde romantic past as were tilting grounds and squeaky drawbridges. Brave Sir Launcelot privily secured a ladder, climbed up to Queen Guinevere's bedroom window and "wished that he might come in to her. Wit ye well, said the queen, I would as fain as ye, that ye might come in to me.... So, to pass upon this tale, Sir Launcelot went to bed with the queen" and "took his pleasaunce and his liking until it was the dawning of the day."

On those occasions when a liaison between knight and lady led to marriage, both bride and groom were undressed by their friends and clad in new dressing gowns for the bedtime ritual of "throwing the stocking." According to one description, "Two of the groom's friends sit on one edge of the bed, two of the bride's maids on the other; each man then throws one of the groom's stockings over his shoulder, hoping to hit the bride; then each girl throws one of the bride's stockings in an attempt to hit the bridegroom. If the stocking hits, the thrower is likely to marry before the year is out." When all stockings had been thrown, the priest appeared with a posset of wedding ale. "When this had been drunk by the amorous couple, the priest blessed the bed, sprinkled holy water on bride and bridegroom, then censed the room to drive off the wicked demons who would be attracted by the performance of the sexual act."

Considerably less ceremony surrounded the nightly bedgoing of men, maids and monarchs at the time of the Norman invasion--a circumstance that inspired E. C. Bentley to allege:

Edward the Confessor.

Slept under the dresser.

When that began to pall

He slept in the hall.

The rhyme contains more truth than poetry, for 11th Century sleeping arrangements were still both casual and simple, and even a royal bedchamber was seldom more than a whitewashed room furnished with a roughhewn bedstead, a clothes sperche," a chair, a chamber pot and a chest.

But a new degree of elegance and luxury was attained in France, where Philip the Tall succeeded Louis the Headstrong in 1316. The queen slept and received visitors on a bed of scarlet silk, while the king slept in and ruled his realm from a handsome bed of blue silk bedizened with fleurs-de-lis and other heraldic symbols. This was the royal lit de parade, the bed of state upon which French kings from time immemorial had reclined while receiving ambassadors and dispensing justice.

Because of the inordinate amount of fluffing and smoothing required to keep a lit de parade looking fresh and regal, the bed of state was in time reserved for ceremonial use, while kings and queens slept in less ornamental beds in rooms off the main chamber. Since attendant lords and ladies maintained an all-night vigil over the sleeping monarchs, the desire for occasional privacy was answered by a tester, or canopy, with curtains that could be drawn to create a kind of room within a room. In imitation of the royal style, the bedchambers of all important persons were used as reception rooms, and the area between the wall and one side of the bed was often furnished with chairs for guests. Known as the ruelle ("little street" or "alleyway"), this intimate cul-de-sack soon earned the reputation of being a crossroad to romance, where the traffic to and from a popular beauty's bed would lead betimes to awkward queues and murderous confrontations between husband and lovers.

In merry England, where a bed's lack of elegance had never been known to hinder either sleep or sex, the 16th Century brought new comforts and refinements with the vast Tudor beds of Henry VIII. Approximately 11 feet square, Tudor bedsteads were distinguished by their carved ornamentation and four tall bedposts supporting a wooden ceiling, from which the bed curtains were hung. These were the original four-posters, the best-known surviving example of which is the Great Bed of Ware, now on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Great Bed first came to public attention at the Crown Inn at Ware, where it once accommodated a party of six couples who had come up from London for a "frolick." When it was later enshrined at the Saracen's Head in Ware, an aura of king-size cuckoldry seems to have surrounded its use, for guests were required to be "sworn in" on a large pair of horns. How suitable the Great Bed was for purposes of grand passion must remain a matter of doubt, however, since the story persists that occupants frequently complained of being pinched, beaten and scratched by reason of its being haunted by the spirit of its maker, Jonas Fosbrooke.

Throughout the Tudor period, beds were designed as much for sociability as they were for sleeping. Bed sharing with friends was common among all classes, and Reginald Reynolds tellingly cites Buckle's Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works concerning the social bedsmanship of Henry VIII's widow, Catherine Parr, and her seagoing hubby, Admiral Seymour: "When my Lord Admiral was roving the seas or otherwise engaged, Catherine tucked up with a lady called Odell. The admiral himself, with less discretion, would visit the Princess Elizabeth--another bed sharer--and assist her sleeping companion, Mrs. Katherine Ashley, in tickling the future queen." Speculations as to whether Elizabeth's queenly fancy had ever been tickled to the point of sharing her bed with a man rest purely on circumstantial evidence, but eyebrows were raised when the Virgin Queen chose to retain gentlemen rather than lady attendants for the royal bedchamber.

Such descriptions of Elizabeth's "night-gownes" as have come down to us are in reality descriptions of dressing gowns--though it is more than likely that the queen slept in some sort of nightdress or smock. According to biographer John Aubrey, bed smocks were worn even by the daughters of Henry VIII's erstwhile favorite Sir Thomas More, whose plan for Utopia included a law that young persons should be required to see each other nude before marriage. Sir Thomas. Aubrey tells us, was visited one morning by Sir William Roper "with a proposall to marry one of his daughters," who "were then both together abed in a truckle bed in their father's chamber asleep." True to his avowed beliefs, More led Roper to his daughters' bedside and whipped off the sheet in order that the marriage-minded knight might take his pick of girls. "They lay on their Backs, and their smocks up as high as their arme-pitts. This awakened them, and immediately they turned on their bellies. Quoth Roper, I have seen both sides, and so gave a patt on the buttock, he made choice of, sayeing, Thou art mine. Here was all the trouble of the wooeing."

Even less trouble was taken in Scotland, where couples bedded as man and wife according to the ancient custom of handfasting--a kind of trial marriage that the Presbyterians of Aberdeen condemned as "fornicatioun and huirdom." To the Puritans of England, even Anglican church weddings were contrary to "The Christian State of Matrimonye" because of the merrymaking that followed. Worse yet, when the bride and groom were finally bedded, "unmanerly and restlesse people" would "go to theyr chambre dore, and there syng vycious and naughtie balates that the Devell may have his tryumphe."

In the Puritan view, the sluggardly habit of oversleeping was a vice that ranked close to sex and mirth. The thrifty man and devout woman went to bed with the birds and were up and about by two A.M. Idlers and sots might lie abed till five, when "the alehouse door is unlocked for good fellows." But courtiers, rakes, bawds and vain ladies were so far under the spell of Satan as to "lye in bed till nine or tenne of the clocke."

"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed," Shakespeare declared in one of his sonnets. But in his plays, the allusions to bed are less frequently connected with sleep "that knits up the ravel'd sleave of care" than with murder, incest, adultery and the joys of Hymen. One of the most memorable lines the Bard ever wrote, however, was not contained in a play or poem but in his will: "I give unto my wife my second-best bed, with the furniture." At a time when beds were handmade and costly, such bequests were not uncommon. The best bed, which was reserved for guests, was usually passed on to a younger heir who would be most (continued on page 239)Bedsprings Eternal(continued from page 156) likely to keep such a treasure in the family, and Shakespeare's bequest is remarkable only because the second-best bed appears to have been his wife's sole inheritance.

With the accession of James I, the actors of Shakespeare's company were assured royal protection by virtue of their being appointed grooms of the king's bedchamber. The more intimate roles of gentlemen of the bedchamber were filled by a succession of male favorites of such dubious sexual character that the king was secretly known as Queen James. Though he constantly referred to the queen as his "dearest Bedfellow," it was evident that James's greatest affections were reserved for his gentlemen friends, and the king's "kissing of them after so lascivious a mode in public" led many to speculate upon the sort of "things done in the tyring house."

No speculations were necessary concerning a queen's lying-in prior to the birth of a child, however. In England, as in France, 20 lying-in balls might be held in the bedchamber of a pregnant queen or duchess, and the delivery itself would be attended by a glittering throng that might number as many as 200. For the entertainment of guests at the accouchement of his "dearest Bedfellow," James was required to spend £52,000. Like sums were lavished on royal weddings, which still included a formal "bedding" of the newlyweds. Though James reportedly "loved the crude horseplay that accompanied the bedding of brides and grooms," his son Charles I made bedroom history by refusing to admit anyone to his nuptial chamber. But when Charles's ten-year-old daughter, Mary, was married to the 14-year-old Prince of Orange, he personally escorted the young groom to the marriage bed.

An eyewitness account has it that the young prince entered the bed, "kissed the princess three times, and lay beside her about three quarters of an hour in the presence of all the great lords and ladies.... When the king intimated it was time to retire to another chamber which had been prepared for his use, the prince bade adieu to his little bride, kissing her thrice." The contrasts of the 17th Century come vividly alive when one compares this with an on-the-scene account of another royal bedding that took place toward the end of the century. The groom was again a Prince of Orange, and his bride another Princess Mary, niece of the rowdy Restoration monarch, Charles II. The wedding took place at nine P.M. "At eleven o'clock they went to bed, and his Majesty came and drew the curtains and said to the prince, 'Now, nephew, to your worke!'"

Much of Charles II's unbuttoned bedroom behavior had been learned during his exile in France at the court of the bed-happy monarch, Louis XIV. Louis, it seems, sent beds to his friends as lesser mortals now send greeting cards and accumulated a stockpile that numbered more than 400 of 25 types and styles. As an additional distinction, beds were often named according to the pictorial subject matter of their tapestry hangings--usually an artfully woven combination of mythology and erotica designed to encourage the occupants of the bed to emulate the sexual abandon of the depicted nymphs and satyrs.

Louis, always the Grand Monarque, went a step further and ordered a wildly indecent Triumph of Venus painted on the underside of the canopy that covered the bed he shared with Mme. de Maintenon. The madam, with a rare show of piety, took exception to the overhead art that she had to face so often in the course of an average day and night and finally persuaded Louis to have it painted over with a scene depicting The Sacrifice of Abraham. The effect on Louis' libido is unknown, but the fad for naughty canopies spread among the French aristocracy and led to a vogue for overhead mirrors that enabled couples with a voyeuristic bent to enjoy their various bedtime bits as both spectators and performers. This narcissistic novelty was known as the miroir indiscret and--according to one account--literally "fell out of favor when the well-known voyeur, M. de Calonne, narrowly escaped vivisection as his mirror, too rudely shaken, dropped and shattered on the bed." But M. de Calonne's mishap merely sharpened the inventiveness of other upper-class visionaries, who had their mirrors securely fastened to the walls and ceilings of specially built alcôves impures, where the multiple reflections made it possible for a cavorting couple to appear as an erotic crowd scene and for a single act of intercourse to resemble an orgiastic precision drill by a team of sexual gymnasts.

During the period of the Puritan Commonwealth, English bedrooms tended to become as austere as those of the French were naughty. But with the restoration of Charles II, "mortifying" religious wall mottoes gave way to frisky mistresses and the most shameless bedside manners. Diarist John Evelyn visited Charles at court and observed that Charles delighted in using his own bedchamber as a kennel where his numerous spaniels slept, mated and whelped--"which rendered it very offensive and, indeed, made the whole court nasty and stinking." According to all accounts, however, Charles spent less time in his own doggy digs than he did in the scented chambers of his several mistresses--one favorite refuge being the mirror-lined bedroom of Nell Gwyn, whose solid-silver bed was ornamented with figures of cupids, crowns, eagles, the king's head and the likeness of a ropedancer.

Madcap mistresses notwithstanding, the liveliest bedmates of the Restoration were the bedbugs, lice and fleas that infested the mattresses of rich and poor alike. Nor were conditions any better on the Continent, where sleeping quarters were commonly shared with strangers, as in the Middle Ages. In one part of Switzerland, John Evelyn contracted smallpox while sleeping in a bed still warm from the body of his hostess' daughter. In another district, he speaks of going to bed "in cupboards so high from the floor that we climbed them by a ladder; we were covered by feathers; that is, we lay between two ticks stuffed with them, and all little enough to keep one warm."

It was just such cupboard beds that the Dutch colonists built into their homes in New Amsterdam. Known as a betste, the cupboard bed is to be distinguished from the Murphy type of folding bed that could be pushed up flat against the wall and concealed behind cupboard doors. This old Colonial favorite was known among the Dutch as a sloep-banck--a name that was later Americanized as slaw-bunk and, finally, as just plain bunk.

Used in the slang sense, the same name might apply to many of the Colonial four-posters that old New England families and antique dealers claim were brought over on the Mayflower. So numerous are these heirlooms that it has been estimated the little Pilgrim ship must have been loaded to the yardarms with bedframes and headboards. The ones that arrived intact were usually reserved for the head of the house, while other members of the family made do on trundle beds, straw pallets and hideaway types, which the New Englanders called turnups. Another popular space saver was the settle, or bench bed--a pull-out convenience that operated in a manner similar to our modern sofa-bed convertibles.

Regardless of type, Pilgrim beds were usually set up in the kitchen for purposes of warmth. But no combination of kitchen hearth, quilts and coverlets was quite so effective as the body heat of one or more bed companions. The sharing of beds by family members was naturally extended to include overnight visitors--and, thus, by frigid degrees, the Puritan mind was gradually conditioned to accept that typically New England form of courtship that Americans call bundling.

It is a matter of anthropological fact that many such forms of bed courtship have been practiced by peoples in widely scattered parts of the world--in the Middle East, in the far Pacific and in the New World with the boy-girl blanket parties of American Indians. Some have credited--or blamed--the Dutch settlers for its importation from Holland, where the cozy custom was known as queesten, or questing. Others have attributed such horizontal hugging and cooing to immigrant Welshmen, who had been dating in bed for centuries, calling it caru yn y gwely.

Scandalized reports of American bundling, written by visiting Englishmen, made the New England colonists sensitive to its numerous failures and defensive of its many virtues. In the decades preceding the Revolution, Yankee bed courtship increased to a degree that suggests a patriotic desire to bundle in defiance of Britain. Weighing the results almost a century later, Washington Irving credited bundling with the "amazing increase" in the population of Colonial New England: "For it is a certain fact, well authenticated by court records and parish registers, that whenever the practice of bundling prevailed there was an amazing number of sturdy brats annually born into the state without the license of law or the benefit of clergy."

These hardy offspring tended marvelously toward peopling the American frontier and proved remarkably good fighters in the War of Independence. But most early Americans were a sturdy breed, if only because their mattresses were often stuffed with cornhusks, wood shavings, seaweed, straw and dried pea pods. At War's end, most citizens of the new republic were as poorly and diversely bedded as before, and the old bundling controversy was revived by the Reverend Samuel Peters in his General History of Connecticut. "The women of Connecticut are strictly virtuous and to be compared with the prude rather than the polite European lady," he argued. And, indeed, in that same year, 1781, the polite ladies of London were animatedly discussing the aphrodisiac potential of Dr. Graham's celebrated Celestial Bed.

Installed in the quackish doctor's Temple of Health and of Hymen, the bed's "Genial and Prolific Influences" might be enjoyed by all who could pay the hefty £100 fee. "It is placed on the second floor, in a large and elegant hall," Graham wrote in his prospectus. "In a neighboring closet is placed a cylinder by which I communicate the celestial fire to the bedchamber ... and those cherishing vapours and Oriental perfumes, which I convey thither by means of tubes of glass." The bed's invigorating effects, he declared, were chiefly due to the powerful "effluvium" produced by 1500 pounds of magnets. "These magnets ... being pressed, give that charming springyness--that sweet undulating, tittulating, vibratory, soul-dissolving, marrow-melting motion; which, on certain critical and important occasions, is at once so necessary and so pleasing."

The complete treatment--which included mood music by an offstage orchestra--was ostensibly designed to promote fecundity in childless couples. But Graham hinted, "Neither I nor any of my people are entitled to ask who are the persons who rest in this chamber, which I have denominated the Holy of Holies." As a result, the Celestial Bed enjoyed a brief but profitable vogue among wealthy male cognoscenti and female "adepts," eager to experience new "refinements." But when the bed repeatedly failed to deliver the promised erotic charge, the Holy of Holies was soon exposed as London's fraud of frauds.

In the America of the early 1800s, both slugabeds and early risers still favored the genial and prolific influences of the old four-poster. Frontiersmen slept on pine boughs. Springy saplings were laid on a plain wooden frame to support the plump straw ticking of a farm bed. As late as 1827, the lively old custom of bundling still survived on Cape Cod; and 20 years later, English moralists were horrified when the Reverend William Jones belatedly discovered that caru yn y gwely was being practiced in Queen Victoria's own back yard--among the young people of Wales.

During Victoria's lengthy reign, it often seemed that bundling in bed was not to be considered decent, even after marriage. But the big brass or wooden bedstead was central to the Victorian home, and the queen's numerous brood of children was evidence that Victoria herself had repeatedly engaged in physical "conversation" with her beloved Prince Albert.

In America, as in Britain, the appeal of the Victorian brass bed lay partly in the fact that it offered a less kindly refuge for vermin. But buggy or vermin-free, the most talked-about beds in mid-19th Century America were those of Brigham Young's polygamous Mormons. To escape persecution in the monogamous East, Brother Brigham led his followers into Utah and founded Salt Lake City, where the Latter-day Saints were free to enjoy the rejuvenating benefits of religious bed rotation. "I would not be afraid to promise a man who is 60 years of age, if he will take counsel of Brother Brigham and his brethren, he will renew his age," Heber C. Kimball testified in 1857. "I have noticed that a man who has but one wife ... soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality looks fresh and young and sprightly."

Monogamists who survived the discomforts of the Civil War's collapsible camp cots were given a chance to avoid the withering effects of one wife by availing themselves of the plurality of choices offered by the newly patented Piano Bed--a versatile parlor upright with a pull-out bed, bureau, washbowl, pitcher, towels, flip-top desk and 88 keys. But the ingenuity of this do-it-yourself entertainment center had already been surpassed by a patented Alarum Bedstead displayed at the Leipzig fair. This ring-a-ding rig had a two-tone bell, a device that would snatch off a reluctant riser's nightcap and another that shot out a warning sign reading, Time To Get Up! If these were ignored, the bedspring rose up to a sharp tilt and dumped Mr. Lazybones out onto the floor, whence he could reach up to a handy spigot and draw off a, restorative cup of hot coffee from an urn built into the bed.

Almost as novel and twice as absurd, to the Victorian mind, was the idea of married couples sleeping in twin beds--a comparatively recent concept that most furniture historians date to the year 1743. Controversy between pro- and anti-twin bedders began almost immediately, with the pro-twin faction drawing most of its support from health faddists. Arguments were hurled back and forth for more than a century, with most Americans favoring the traditional double bed until well into the 1900s.

No nation was more passionately anti-twin than France, where liberty, fraternity and proximity were the watchwords of l'amour. Defenders of the double bed included statesmen, artists, writers and bourgeois businessmen, together with their wives, mothers and mistresses. It could be argued, indeed, that the double bed had been the cradle of the modern French novel. From its tousled depths had sprung the real-life prototypes of such literary heroines as Camille, Sapho and Zola's Nana. At the peak of her amorous career, Nana had commissioned a Parisian designer to build her "a bed such as never before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity. It was to be all in gold and silverwork.... On the headboard a band of Loves should peep forth laughing from amid the flowers, as though they were watching the voluptuous dalliance within the shadow of the bed curtains."

In New York and other major cities around the turn of the century, touring actors and traveling salesmen noted an increasing number of patented turnup beds in hotels. Made by several manufacturers, the efficient hideaway beds were soon to be known by the name of only one--Murphy--and vaudeville teams made comic capital of the unlikely possibility that an occupant could be folded up into the wall while sleeping "in the arms of Murphy," a hazard that may or may not have influenced Sarah Bernhardt's decision to sleep in a coffin during her professional engagements in America.

In her Paris home, the divine Sarah's couch was "heaped with a mountain of cushions." The pelts of "polar bears, beaver, tiger and jaguar overflowed onto the floor, and up the walls among the mooseheads," the English bed historian Lawrence Wright reports, the total effect being that of "a bomb incident in the zoo." By confining herself to tigerskins, the heroine of Elinor Glyn's 1907 best seller, Three Weeks, succeeded in supplanting the zoo atmosphere with that of the jungle. A tigerskin became the heroine's bed, upon which she greeted her lover at full length, a rose clutched in her teeth. "My beautiful tiger!" she purred. As a final variation, Miss Glyn's fervent little fur fancier embraced her lover on a couch of rose petals, but it was the tigerskin episode that earned the author world-wide fame and inspired jokesters to inquire:

Would you rather sin

With Elinor Glyn

s On a tigerskin,

Or would you prefer

To err with her

On some other kind of fur?

The choice of amorous millions was more mundane, however, as indicated by James Joyce's earthy Dublin siren, Molly Bloom, in her reveries concerning her double brass-bedding with Blazes Boylan on the afternoon of June 16, 1904: that "damned old bed too jingling like the dickens I suppose they could hear us away over the other side of the park till I suggested to put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom."

In spite of its embarrassing tendency to jingle and rattle under stress, the durable old brass bed was a familiar sight in American bedrooms until the late Twenties. On the eve of America's entrance into World War One, taste maker Elsie de Wolfe was pleased to announce that the "dreadful epidemic" of brass beds was all but over, and warned American women to confine the increasingly popular chaise longue to the bedroom and boudoir, "because the suggestion of intimacy" was inappropriate to other rooms of the house. When American doughboys arrived in France the following year, they found that a similar suggestion of intimacy surrounded all sorts of French beds--of which the chaise longue was perhaps the least suitable for amorous maneuvers. Indeed, the shortcomings of the long chair bed were such that England's Mrs. Pat Campbell had reportedly welcomed marriage by exclaiming, "Oh, for the deep, deep peace of the double bed, after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue!"

The chaise's association with intimacy was to continue on into the Thirties, when "modernistic" versions became the horizontal confessionals upon which an ever-increasing number of Americans bared their psyches to a growing population of Freudian analysts. Also increasing in numbers were the mass-produced innerspring mattresses, which began to win popular favor in the mid-Twenties. The box-shaped innerspring was ideally suited to the "futuristic" bed designs of the late Jazz Age, when America's first gropings toward functionalism often resulted in a geometric hodgepodge of forbidding angles and chrome-plated pipe.

In the 20-odd years between World Wars One and Two, the bed became the no man's land of the Hollywood film industry. Love scenes, which in the early days of moviemaking might have been played on or in the immediate vicinity of a bed, were now played standing up in the living room or sitting on a porch glider. Official censors and self-appointed vigilantes saw to it that the bedroom was a place where character actors went to drag out a death scene and leading ladies to pack suitcases--preferably in a hurry and usually in a huff.

As if to compensate for the minor role that beds were playing on the screen, Hollywood press agents prodded the public's imagination with publicity releases describing the magnificence of the "real-life" beds of glamorous stars. Custom-built in a variety of shapes and roomy sizes, the Hollywood beds of the Thirties and Forties prepared the way for consumer acceptance of the king- and queen-size beds that would be mass-produced in round, oval, heart and U shapes in the Fifties and Sixties. Groucho Marx, whose cinematic bedroom antics were on such a high level of hilarity that no censor could snip at his flying coattails, made a witty 1930 plea for doughnut-shape beds for people who slept curled up in the fetal position, and Z-shape beds for "zigzag bedsmen."

"It isn't politics that makes strange bedfellows. It's matrimony," Groucho declared in his book on Beds. But even stranger bedfellows were made by the Depression, when families crammed into smaller quarters and jobless men overflowed municipal flophouses. World War Two reduced unemployment to a fraction, but American GIs found the average Army barracks to be a living museum of strange sleepers who mumbled, tossed, ground their teeth and snored in every imaginable key. Strange, too, were the bedding habits of most of the world's peoples--many of whom, the GI discovered, still slept on the bare ground. Overseas, the American soldier saw communal beds in which whole families huddled and beds of nails on which Indian fakirs lay begging for rupees. But most pleasing to the GI eye was the simplicity of the Japanese bedroom, with its sleeping pad placed directly on floor mats--a mode later adapted to the Stateside digs of early Beats who had seen service in Japan.

If any one generalization may be made regarding American beds of the Fifties and Sixties, it would be that the preference had been for wider and longer beds. As befitted a nation committed to freedom of choice, no one style of bed design was promoted to the exclusion of others. Canopied four-posters, Louis XVI lits de repos, frontier-style double-decker bunks and convertible sofa beds in contemporary "no style" were as available as the most chastely modern platform beds and push-button jobs with motorized head and foot elevators. And no matter what design or period one selected, the number of sleep aids and comfort-inducing gadgets available to Americans would have elicited the envy of the ancient Sybarites, who used to slumber on beds of rose petals.

When sag-resistant, long-wearing mattresses of foam rubber began to invade the market in the late Forties, inner-spring manufacturers stepped up efforts to meet individual preferences of firmness and softness. Mattresses of the Fifties were advertised largely in terms of their orthopedic virtues--the theory being that the old Puritan-pioneer antipathy to comfort was still strong enough to prevent Americans from indulging in the luxury of a new mattress. In recent years, however, bed manufacturers have been angling their sales pitches at newlyweds and young marrieds, who are most desirous of obtaining a bed that will best serve their sexual needs. It was with such couples in mind, perhaps, that one New York company began promoting a custom-made Workbench Bed ("You can have it as you like it, in any length or width you desire").

Sex-angled advertising copy was also the specialty of the Norman Dine Sleep Center in New York, a shop devoted exclusively to the sale of "Dream gifts to tranquilize, to rejuvenate and to delight. Each one has been selected by noted sleep authority Norman Dine, who, in 30 years as America's Public Sandman, has solved a million sleep problems," the Sleep Center's catalog assured wide-awake readers. "He is the sleep wizard who created our famous king-size beds with their inspirational guarantee: 'No Wife Has Ever Left Our Tranquillzing Big Bed, Disquieted!'" Bedtime wizardry was also suggested in the Sleep Center's ad for an automatic multiposition bedspring: "Your Wife's Secret Desire. Now You Can Grunt Your Wife Her Fondest Wish! Our Push-Button Heaven ... 100 Blissful Positions!"

Along with such gadgets as sleep masks, earplugs and electrically heated bedsocks, the Sleep Center stocked a number of more sportive items, such as "Romantic Award" pillowcases with citations for "Distinguished Service" and a "Call of the Wild" bedside horn with which word-shy lovers could sound a variety of mood-charged mating calls. A similar concern for the legerdemain of love was evidenced by the buttock-comfy contours of the center's Angulation Pillow, designed to "provide comfortable angulation or elevation for any portion of the female body," while more than a pinch of pixy dust was scattered through its descriptions of Acrilan fur bed sheets ("Sinfully soft and luxurious, should be slept on without pajamas") and a pink "Swedish Massager" ("Slip the contoured Veltron Massager over your hand, flip the switch and feel those tensions ooze away. Your fingers now pulsate magically on your mate or yourself.").

While any bed of the Fifties could be equipped with vibrators, back, rests, glare-free reading lamps, TV tuners, bedside stereo, lighting controls and satin sheets, none managed to surpass the sumptuously appointed Playboy Bed that burst upon the bedroom scene in late 1959. "Especially designed by Playboy for the man who prizes luxurious lounging and sleeping," the custom-styled superposh lit de Playboy came equipped with everything except a push-button blonde. With its mattress area scaled to maximum dimensions, Playboy's opulent land of Nod is bounded on the north by a low and handsome eight-foot-long headboard housing bookshelf, stereo speakers, adjustable brushed-brass lamps, a no-hands conference-type telephone and an automatic clock-timer "that gently awakens you in the morning and starts your coffee perking." In place of an automatic nightcap snatcher, the Playboy Bed provided a built-in bar, a compact refrigerator for drinks and food and a roomy pull-out armrest with wells for drinking glasses and a Formica snack surface. Two backrest units could be pulled out from the headboard and angled for drinking, thinking or watching TV on a foot-of-the-bed set suspended from the ceiling. In the unlikely event that these and all other bedtime activities failed to beguile, occupants could dictate their memoirs or sing duets to a voice-activated recording unit, or noodle around with a "touch-type electronic switch panel" offering "from-the-bed control of the entire apartment, opening or closing of windows and drapes, on-off controls for temperature and lighting, etc."

With the 1962 appearance of plans for a Playboy Town House, the Playboy Bed was presented in a new round version that could be electronically rotated on its 360-degree base, so that occupants could swivel around to face the bedroom fireplace or the ceiling-suspended TV or avail themselves of a skylight view of the starry heavens above. Combining the best of the celestial and the scientific, the rotating Playboy Bed achieved a kind of 20th Century ultimate in comfort and convenience, and left the historian to wonder, "Whither beds?" Since earth-bound designs have attained a hitherto undreamed-of perfection, there appears to be little further opportunity for man to express his age-old urge for comfort, other than in the weightless bedchambers of outer space.

But even as space scientists work and plan to put a mattress on the moon, news bulletins attest to the fact that many of man's old attitudes and customs survive. In Yorkshire, England, where the necessity for communal beds could scarcely be said to exist, 50 students "proved they could all get in one bed," and the man on the bottom "was almost pressed to death." Earlier, in the Sixties, the ancient take-up-thy-bed-and-walk theme was revived in the form of a collegiate bed-pushing craze.

Other modern throwbacks may be found in the field of ladies' nighties, which have run the gamut of brevity and transparency through waltz-length gowns, baby-dolls and sleep bikinis to the most ancient of all fashions--that of going to bed (as the late Marilyn Monroe described it) with nothing on but Chanel No. 5. The colorful patterns of sheets and pillowcases are now blessed with descriptive titles--one stirring example being Three Cheers, a red, white and blue treatment of stars and stripes, upon which patriotic bedgoers can snooze and snuggle for Old Glory.

"New Versions Of Wall Bed Introduced--Three Companies Show Varieties Of 'Murphy,'" a home-furnishings headline declared, in announcing a revival of interest in the old Colonial turn-up, while trundle-type "rise-up" beds that pull out to "sleep two in the space of one" are now available everywhere in the nation. One model is currently being produced by the makers of the Workbench Bed. Presumably intended for precocious tots with extremely permissive parents, it is called--so help us--Lolita, the Children's Workbench! And a modern rival of the Piano Bed has been developed in the form of an office desk that converts into a roomy couch, so that the executive who finds himself overwhelmed by a 16th Century urge "to sleep after his meat" need no longer "stand and lean and sleep against a cupboard."

Footsore and eye-weary visitors to the 1964-'65 World's Fair in New York were offered the opportunity to enjoy a half-hour siesta in the Simmons Company's three-story hostel at the intersection of the Avenues of Enterprise and Invention. Plunking down a dollar admission fee to this Land of Enchantment, the fatigued fairgoer entered a "magic elevator" and was whisked upstairs, where he was greeted by a smiling young lady in blue, who murmured a dulcet, "Hello ... I'm the Beautyrest lady. I'll show you to your alcove." At the mention of the word alcove, the historically informed bedsman would shed all drowsiness and snap awake in the expectation that the Beautyrest lady might, just possibly, usher him into an intimate little recess d'amour with scented silk hangings and a four-wall miroir indiscret. But the alcoves of this 20th Century Land of Enchantment proved to be nothing more than functional little cubicles boasting a push-button bed with paper sheets, a box of cleansing tissues, an air blower, two coat hangers and a one-way window offering an insomnia-conducive view of the fair.

With his allotted half hour relentlessly ticking away, the recumbent visitor experienced such wakefulness as is the nightly lot of more than 90,000,000 American--and this at a time when American beds are undoubtedly the most comfortable, commodious and bug-free in the world. To a somewhat lesser degree, perhaps, sleeplessness plagues untold millions in all the other nations and tribes of man, and had already reached epidemic proportions in 1621, when Robert Burton addressed himself to the problem. "Many cannot sleep for witches and fascinations, which are too familiar in some places," he wrote in his Anatomy of Melancholy. "But the ordinary causes are heat and dryness, which must first be removed: a hot and dry brain never sleeps well; grief, fears, cares, expectations, anxieties, great business and all violent perturbations of the mind, must in some sort be qualified, before we can hope for any good repose."

In the absence of modern tranquilizers and sleeping pills, Burton recommended the soporific effects of pleasant reading, music and lying "near some floodgates, arches, falls of water ... or some continuate noise which may benumb the senses." Having thus anticipated present-day "sound conditioners" that lull the senses with simulated sea sounds and other somniferous noises, he then put in a good word for a liquid nightcap of "nutmeg and ale, or a good draught of muscadine."

In so doing, Burton seconded Dr. Andrew Boorde's 400-year-old prescription for "a good draught of strong drink before one goes to bed." More important, and still as valid as the day the doctor wrote it in 1542, is that sagacious bit of advice with which this brief history of beds must draw to a wee-hour conclusion: "To bedward be you merry, or have merry company about you, so that to bedward no anger nor heaviness, sorrow nor pensiveness, do trouble or disquiet you."

"For doe but consider what an excellent thing sleepe is," Thomas Dekker added, some 65 years later. "It is so inestimable a Jewel, that, if a Tyrant would give his crowne for an houres slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautifull a shape is it, that though a man lye with an Empresse, his heart cannot be at quiet, till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other.... Who complains of want? of woundes? of cares? of great men's oppressions, of captivity whitest he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as Kings."