The Porn is Green

Everybody, but everybody, is watching and waiting. Two cameras are zooming in on his naked butt and bare phallus, and a flawless brunette--Debbie, all flaring hips and coal-black hair--is lying there cooing before him. Alex de Renzy, a gifted, no-nonsense director, is peering like a gynecologist from somewhere behind. The setting is a ledge in Nevada at twilight, and not too many minutes of sunlight are left. If the male star fails, the whole scene is wasted--production costs, people's time, the works.

He tries. God, how he tries. With the whole crew silently, breathlessly cheering him on. He tries, as they say in the trade, to get into her (they mean it figuratively even more than literally), to become triggered by any one of the multiple feminine sparks she sends up. It doesn't work, nothing arises, and the huge glob of Nevada sun is now three quarters down. Ironically, he made love to her faultlessly a few nights before, in the motel, on his own time, just after they had been driven to this location; sitting next to each other in the car, rubbing against each other on the long drive, both had become excited and flew into each other's arms as soon as the motel door closed.

A drop of sweat falls from his eyebrow. Only a tip of the sun is showing. Frantically, he tries thinking of other girls, panty ads, fantasies he hasn't tried out in years. He has been in over 40 pornies, always coming through like yeast rising in bread, and this is a desperate situation. He flunked the same scene the day before at dusk, and this is his second and final chance. He is sick from what turns out to be a bleeding ulcer and had upchucked only a minute before the cameras started rolling. He feels the ground turning but somehow gets his mind into the edge of a fantasy. He senses himself getting bigger, gets giddy and then feels it drop. Nothing works.

"I can't," he says. "I can't help it, I just can't."

"I've paid you to do it," De Renzy, the compleat professional, says, disgusted. "Performers are paid to perform."

"I ... I can't...." He is moving down from the ledge, tucking in his shirt, zipping up his fly.

"Was it me, was it me?" Debbie says, clutching at him.

"No," he says. "It was me."

His real name is one the old Scottish religious reformer John Knox would have been proud of: George S. McDonald. He is 21. In Merced, California, where he grew up, he was on the football, wrestling and track teams in high school. He was president of the senior class and voted boy of the year. A month after the Nevada fiasco, his health restored somewhat, he sits in Enrico's, the hip, open-air bistro in San Francisco's North Beach, and raps about everything from New Left politics to his own sex life. He has all of the general good looks, and then some, that one comes to expect from his generation in California: tall, loose-limbed, a frame easily attached to surfboard or cycle. But his eyes go beyond the stereotype, tell more. They are hazel, most often open and searching, but sometimes brooding and lonely. He has thick dark hair and still sports the beard he grew for the Nevada cowboy film. It makes him vaguely resemble the young Abe Lincoln.

"I can talk freely about my sex life," he says, protesting perhaps a little too much. "I don't give a damn, I could even talk to my mother about it. I really think that I have a healthier sex life than all those middle-aged people who sneak in to see my films. It's surely a lot healthier than the sex lives of those obsessively against them."

George got into pornies by answering an ad in the Berkeley Barb. It was at Cinema Seven--a pioneer in the field--and on his first appearance he was turned down: He looked too much the hippie, and pornie films were glutted at the time with that image. Enterprisingly, he went back with short hair, coat and tie, and was hired on the spot. Then he became terrified. What if he couldn't perform? The shooting was at 11 o'clock in the morning, in a sound stage above the company's theater. George paraded around with coffee in a cardboard container, his hand shaking. What would she look like? How would they start? The director--Jon Fontana, gregarious, an ex-athlete--at last came up with a very pretty girl, not much older than George, a Berkeley-coed type, and said this was his partner for the film. He was going to leave them alone for a while. Why didn't they get acquainted?

They sat on the edge of a bed in a klieg-lit set. She said her name was Lolania. When she found out it was his first time, she said, "Maybe I can help you get ready." She did things to him, asked him what he liked and began undressing. He followed suit and before long it began to happen. It threw George off only a little to feel a lot of strange hot breath hit him, see a light meter poke up near his scrotum and hear, "F three point five, boys. OK, roll 'em." He didn't slow nor falter but pressed into the breach for 400 feet of torrid film. Dressed, paid, proud, he was swinging out the door when he met Lolania with a man. "Oh, George, come here. I'd like you to meet my husband...." He admits it made him feel a little odd.

George--dependable, conscientious--worked his way up to become a superstar in pornies. Although his name never appears on the marquee, he can stand in the lobby of the O'Farrell or Sutter Cinema for only a short while before fans come up to him. "Weren't you the Window Washer? Boy, you were sure great in that flick. Keep it up!" Now he no longer appears in quickie, 400-foot films. He works in those that take a day, sometimes two, to film and that, usually require "location." However, these longer, more prestigious films are not so plentiful as the shorter ones. For a day's work now he gets $150; the 400-footers paid from $35 to $50. He lives with nine other people, male and female, in a communal house in Berkeley. He is not getting rich.

"You can't bargain with these producers," he says. "Once you start holding out, they'll go get somebody else. There are simply too many of us. And if your rent is due, you just accept what they offer. It's hungry people who keep the business going...."

• • •

Films today are perhaps the focal point for the revolution in erotica--for, in case you've been away, there has been a revolution in erotica. In 1946, The Outlaw was banned in San Francisco because too much cleavage was shown by Miss Jane Russell. Today, over 25 moviehouses in that city regularly show everything and anything a mind can fantasize sexually: lollipop-licking Lolitas strapped to chairs for chastisement, blonde Valkyries making love to pigs--the works. In house after house, there are those plum-ripe, Techni-colored images of sexually connected couples flashing on the screen before patrons with chins in their hands--and fear in their bones that someone may touch them. (How different from the old stag-film days, when catcalls sounded and rough fellowship abounded.) Nothing now is held back--nothing except, perhaps, taste: the zoom lens of an Arriflex probing past spread labia into the very recesses of the vagina, evoking memories of nothing so much as oysters on the half shell, then back off to catch the pucker of an anus, around to catch those dreamily closed eyes above lips that are diving wetly over a stiff, purple-veined phallus. You end up seeing more than you want to. For after a while, after so much pink-and-white tissue is so unabashedly revealed, it all becomes reminiscent of--and about as exciting as--open-heart surgery. The tease, such an important ingredient of the old pornography, has all but vanished.

The patrons must have waited some time for the chance to glimpse such wonders, for the age level is a good 40-going-on-60. (The irony is that the very young make the movies and their parents' generation sees them.) Most fly past the mini-skirted cashiers in a whirlwind of guilt, men in narrow ties and narrow-brimmed hats, solid citizens, a few toting the attaché case of the executive. Some enter, sniff the air and pretend confusion. "You show movies in here? Yeah? Well, I, hum, yes, er, hum, one please." There have been cases where men have walked in backward. But there are also now the couples who go in defiantly, people with the stamp of the newly liberated, a folksy greeting to the cashier, an ear-to-ear grin to the girl at the popcorn machine, then a leisurely stroll to beyond the dark curtain. OK, folks, just off to see a little fucking! Nothing wrong there!

When actual copulation was first shown on a commercial screen in San Francisco, in 1969, the theaters that took the chance were soon packed. Today, most of these are less than half filled, and occasionally snores resound from a senior citizen whose head has lolled back. Even the cop on the beat, at first enraged by pornies, has become more or less bored with the whole thing. As I sat nursing a drink in a North Beach minitheater with bar, a large gray-haired man in a blue uniform with a silver badge eased up. The bartender, not at all uncomfortable, made small talk with him, and then we all watched the silent film for a moment on the tiny screen down front. It showed a rosy-cheeked blonde being administered cunnilingus by a man with Afro hair. "What shit!" the policeman said, departing. "How can anybody watch it?"

The police still make arrests once in a while, but their hearts do not seem to be in it. Too often they have tried to use their knuckles on a theater owner or "live show" producer--seizing film, overturning equipment, throwing people in the tank--only to be met with a swift Federal court order restraining them until a hearing could be held. And in the calm atmosphere of a courtroom no one seems able to determine what is really obscene and what is not. Supreme Court decisions have established that material cannot be considered obscene unless: one, its dominant theme appeals to prurient interests; two, it is patently offensive to contemporary community standards; and, three, it is utterly without redeeming social value. The key decision (Fanny Hill, 1966) established that before a work could be considered obscene, it had to meet all these criteria. But what does--or doesn't--have social value? What are the community's standards? As case after case was won by the defendants in the lower courts, it became increasingly difficult to establish just what is beyond the protection of the Constitution. Trials became expensive and time consuming--and in the end indecisive--and after a policeman has had a few stints on the witness stand on his own free time, the thought hits him that busting the pornies can be bad news. Watch and Ward Societies fare even worse than the police in slowing the porn traffic. Most often, their fellow taxpaying citizens seem bored by the subject, see no threat in it or, in many cases, simply are in favor of having a little squint at the hot stuff themselves.

The Supreme Court, our final arbiter, until recently appeared to be stretching the limits in each case it heard. But the Burger Court has shown indications that it would like to reverse the trend. What has consistently bothered the Justices, though, is how material is advertised and presented. Anyone who pays five dollars and walks into a darkened theater probably knows what to expect; surely no pistol has been put at his head. If what he finds is distasteful, then the simplest solution is to walk out and not come back. But how about someone strolling down the thoroughfare on a fine clear day? Even staunch libertarians wonder if anyone has the right to assault the passer-by's sensibilities with (continued on page 182)Green Porn(continued from page 82) wild, blatant come-ons. And among the valleys and hills of the seedier parts of San Francisco, the come-ons are blatant: visions of amazons with twinkling nipples and pudenda pouched out as big as doors above signs filled with phrases like 16 MM Femmes!, I am a Redhead! and Tijuana stags. In Los Angeles, the theaters have names like Sho-Mor and Tom & Cat and are along Santa Monica Boulevard, in the heart of old Hollywood--indeed around any chance corner. New York's porn theaters have spread from Times Square across to parts of the East Side and can be missed only by blind men who have lost the sense of smell: The theaters--which are almost invariably cramped and dirty--usually stink of vintage Lysol.

Ironically, the best and really hottest porn appears in the few theaters that have discreet advertisements and comfortable, relaxed surroundings. In fact, you would never know pornography was the staple unless you could read between the lines. Alex de Renzy's Screening Room Theater in San Francisco could be a small place in Dubuque showing a rerun of Snow White--until that first frame clicks on. His advertisements in newspapers are direct, sensible and nontitillating. The O'Farrell--run by hard-core film makers Art and Jim Mitchell--is spotless. The Sutter Cinema, in a well-heeled part of town, operates like an art theater. There are free coffee and sweets in the pleasantly humming lobby, an air of good humor and intelligence.

Arlene Elster runs the Sutter. She is a big-eyed, taffy-haired girl in her late 20s who went to high school with Janis Joplin in Port Arthur, Texas, and has a bachelor of science degree from the University of Texas. She freely admits being turned on by good porno and appears to have few hang-ups about sex, discussing how she has strolled nude on beaches and appeared in early "beavers." Only her past throws a shadow across her face, as when she mentions a six-month disaster of a marriage to--in her words--a super-straight guy.

The Sutter is the showcase for Leo Productions, the porno-film company run by Arlene and her unlikely partner, Lowell Pickett. Pickett is in his mid-30s, has a comfortable paunch, glasses and a constant, charming air of befuddlement. His appearance and mannerisms could have been plucked from a Dickens novel--even his name has a Dickensian ring--but his opinions and thrust are far from Victorian. He was the guiding hand, with Arlene, of San Francisco's First International Erotic Film Festival last December. He and Arlene have never hidden their identities in connection with Leo Productions, but the stars of their films have always gone by such names as Randy Dazzle and Rock Deepton when credits were flashed on-screen. Recently, though, they released a film called Intersection, in which the female star's real, honest-to-God name was credited. (She was Mary Rexroth, the lovely young brunette daughter of poet Kenneth Rexroth.) Perhaps when porno movies feature real people who receive real rewards for their work, it will be a sign that the audience is starting to accept its own sexuality, to quit all the slinking in and out.

• • •

San Francisco is without question where the most lively porn emanates from today. There are many theories why this should be so. Maurice Girodias, the owner of Olympia Press, thinks it's because of the warm, Mediterranean climate, that certain sensuous waft to the air. (He also echoes the McLuhanesque belief that the very young are into films because that generation has been conditioned by the visual rather than the printed media.) Others think San Francisco is the place because it has a long history of civilized tolerance of new points of view and different life styles. In any case, any number of San Francisco State and UCLA graduates, mostly majors in film making, are turning out pornies in the Bay Area by the carload.

Roughly 70 percent of the porno films come from California, about half of these from San Francisco, half from Los Angeles (20 percent are made in New York, ten percent in Miami). If you see enough of these films, you can soon spot which city any of them comes from, often within the first minute: A stiletto-heeled girl struts onto a set that drips with the colors of a banana split. Her outfit includes split-crotch panties, cantilevered brassiere with holes for her nipples and, on her head--for someone's deviation somewhere--a tasseled flamenco hat with drawstring tight. With hardly a hello, she begins fellatio on a glassy-eyed partner. "Oh, Lord, an L. A. film," a connoisseur snorts. An L. A. film is what's known in the trade as raunch. Of course, there are excellent underground film makers in L. A.--such as Carl Linder, whose Vampira is a classic study of a sensuous woman enjoying her body--but these film makers just happen to be hanging their hats there for the moment and are not indigenous to the city.

"Los Angeles is where the old-guard smut peddler is," says Lowell Pickett. "These are the fellows in Perry Como sweaters and suede shoes whose wives have lacquered hair and seldom leave the house. These men look down on their work; they think it's dirty. They hold their customers in contempt, and they have their neighbors thinking they're in 'publishing' or 'public relations.' Naturally, their products lack imagination."

A hard-core film maker in L. A. is hard to find, let alone interview. ("Listen," in a strangled voice over the phone, "how'd you hear about me? ... Yeah? Well, we don't want any publicity. We gotta be careful about the cops, they're cracking down on us....") The San Francisco film makers and actors (and live-show operators and performers) are available nearly everywhere--in theater lobbies, in their homes, even on sets where couples are grinding away under your eyeballs. I talked to Art Mitchell in a courtroom where he was on trial. He looks like Wally Cox's Mr. Peepers, with receding blond hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. His gentle manner, though, is deceptive.

"I don't mind being thrown in the tank anymore," he says, bouncing his diapered baby on a corduroyed knee. "It scared me at first, but now I have a ball. It's taught me that everyone should stand up more for his individual rights. At first, the cops grabbed my film and harassed me in any number of ways, thinking that would stop us. But we fought back and will keep fighting. I don't care if I go to jail for ten years. When I get out, I'm going to start showing these films again, because I know I'm right. People want to see them and they hurt no one."

In his summation to the jury, the prosecuting attorney, a 33-year-old Mormon bachelor, ran a few excerpts from Mitchell Brothers' films on the courtroom wall in an attempt to prove his charge of obscenity. Lights dimmed, images jumping for a moment in the great stag-film tradition, fellatio could soon be discerned, now a moon-shaped butt, changing positions to dog fashion or nebulous buggering, and then a merry wave and wink from the doe-eyed model to the audience. "Strictly Tijuana," someone in the Mitchell Brothers section said, getting a laugh. The jurors--as arseholes bloomed and the gizzum flew--sat rigid as cartoon characters frozen into blocks of ice; in fact, as patrons sit in hard-core moviehouses. Predominantly middle-aged and conservatively dressed, they returned hopelessly deadlocked. Case dismissed. San Francisco is open and free to fantasy.

And wouldn't you know that those engaged in the highest flights of fantasy, those acting out the impossible dreams, would come from the most inhibited backgrounds in America? For example:

Gregg and Bobbi are a married couple, not swingers, with a two-year-old child, who have starred in over 30 blue movies. Gregg, 22, with blue eyes and corn-silk hair trimmed just shy of hippie length, grew up in a Catholic family of 12 children. He studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin and met Bobbi at a dance in Milwaukee. Bobbi, 23, leggy, raven-haired, also was brought up a Catholic--and more strictly, she says, than her husband. "I went to an all-girls' school, and was taught--by the nuns, family, everybody--that men were to be feared, that sex was dirty and shameful, except maybe in some never-never land of marriage. I lost my cherry at nineteen in the back seat of a car and it changed my life." She has come a long way since.

Like millions before them, she and Gregg went to California for the weather, the sea and what they believed would be a freer way of life. They say they got into dirty movies because they needed the money (they average $100 between them a shooting). They also claim that they are monogamous, that they love each other very much and are little concerned that their parents or friends back in the Midwest will ever be exposed to their filmwork. They try to appear more than a little liberated, making love at the drop of a hat before a whirring Arriflex.

("Now move over him, please, Bobbi," says Bruce Bellingame, 19 years of age but looking younger, the director as well as cameraman on the "set"--which is the bedroom of his own home on the outskirts of Berkeley. "Now if you would, please, Bobbi, suck his dick." "Hunh?" "I say, suck his dick." "Oh, sure, I just didn't hear you.") Liberated! A free life style! Yet one thing keeps puzzling them. Why do so many people pay to watch them do it?

Mary is a very pretty, boyish-looking girl of 19, with short trimmed hair and a fetching bridge of freckles across her nose. A native Californian, she was brought up in a strict Protestant home and taught not only that sex was dirty but also that if a girl didn't remain a virgin she would never land a husband. Mary talks in a quick, offhand way, punctuating the flow with a sudden flashing grin. "Well, I was going great until a neighbor boy ... uh, did it to me when I was twelve and I was in the eighth grade"--a white-toothed chuckle--"and I dug it. Weird, you know." Her only complaint was that the neighbor boy didn't come back often enough--he was more shamed and hung up about it than she was. Though they were using multiple birth-control methods at the same time, both were terrified that a baby might pop up. At 15 Mary was introduced to marijuana, and she points to that as her major personality "breakthrough." When she appeared in her first pornographic film, she was not concerned with the morality of it. "What was worrying me," she says, "was that I might be rejected." She certainly wasn't, and has since appeared in around 100 of them. Onscreen she is energetic, cheerful--and much in demand. (She starred in De Renzy's Sexual Encounter, the girl being balled in center stage by the group leader, none other than George S. McDonald.) Mary's younger sister has followed her in the trade, and both sometimes appear in the same film, once in a while making love to each other.

Now one might think that a girl into such things would be living in extremis, an outcast. In fact, Mary is married and has a young son. Her home, not far from Daly City, is spotless (a vestige, perhaps, of her Calvinistic past), though the artwork and artifacts--an American flag used as a drape--proclaim her identification with the drug/peacenik culture. She hugs and disciplines her young son, cooks good meals on time and is attentive to her husband, a young, dark-browed man with hair cut the same length as hers. He does not object to her "modeling," as it's delicately put, with other men--just as long as it's before cameras and nothing heavy gets going in private. But why does Mary model? "It beats typing in an office," she says. "And if I don't do it too often, then ... uh, it's fun ... dig?"

One problem. That phone keeps ringing, the maniacs somehow getting through all types of security, and Mary has to keep changing her unlisted number. ("Hello there, baby, I saw you in your last flick and I want you to know I got the biggest one in San Mateo--Slam!) And yet is it so unusual to fantasize about a girl whose image is flashed around in all those startling, convoluted positions for the whole world to see? Just before I caught a plane from the International Airport, I bought a copy of the San Francisco Ball ("To Ball is to live ... everything else is just waiting"), and there on the cover--nude as the day she was born, labia parted, inviting us all--was a picture of my Mary. Who would think that her greater reality was as a housewife in suede shoes, Levis and peasant blouse, dangling a baby on her hip as she moved through her neatly tended rooms?

• • •

So much is coming into the open these days, so many twists and kinks and reactions to bygone realities. For instance, the Cockettes. How to describe them? You really can't call them homosexuals, transvestites nor any of the other quick tags we use in choosing up teams sexually. Their act is perhaps best described as a parody of our past consciousness of sex. On weekends at sometime after midnight, at the Palace Theater in North Beach, the Cockettes do their turn. The horde of regular Chinese patrons has long since left, leaving behind in memory on the floor a layer, like sawdust, of pistachio-nut shells; and now the baroque Thirties theater is jammed with the hip of San Francisco. Onstage comes a fat boy in nothing but a feathered boa, who sings Ol' Man River in falsetto. Then the show jumps into a cross between Show Boat and Gone with the Wind. A chorus line of Southern belles shoots out--rather big feet for such ladies kicking up--and one of them, stoned, perhaps, falls backward and disappears through the cardboard showboat. Now here comes a swishing apparition who wails, "Atlanta is burning! Our fair Atlanta is in flames!"

One sees an extremely pretty face--an Ali MacGraw face enclosed in a bevy of ringlets--and then glances down to witness a flapping penis. And yet there are real women among the Cockettes, and males who pair up with females and make love. And Hibiscus, who is sometimes called the leader, wears a beard along with eye shadow and a loose covering of feathers and wax fruit. (The Organ of San Francisco describes him as a blend of Captain Kidd and the United Fruit Company.) The Cockettes all live together in a vast Charles Addams house in Haight-Ashbury, eating meals together, mingling loosely. Their rooms are distinct, some looking straight out of the set for Casablanca, others with enclosed psychedelically lit sleeping lofts, all charged with their enigmatic mystique. And they move as a group not only onstage at the Palace but through the byways of the city. At the Erotic Film Festival, as bearded critics and longhaired film makers were gravely taking their seats, there suddenly came music. Strutting down the aisle in ostrich plumes, spangles and the make-up of aborigines came the Cockettes, singing, "When you walk through a storm, Keep your chin up high...." It got a louder cheer than any film that night. They're telling us something--though it's not easy to say what.

Along San Francisco's Broadway--rather too straight a neighborhood for the far-out Cockettes--are the nudic shows, the "love-dance" emporiums, which is where tourists are usually introduced to the San Francisco voyeur scene. Neon dances and bold messages--and live barkers--beckon. At Lloyd's, the outsize lettering proclaims, Pussy Galore and Alotta Box. And at the Condor there is a bronze plaque, like those placed on landmark houses where historical figures have lived:

Topless June 19, 1964Bottomless September 3, 1969

No more need be said. This is where Carol Doda first revealed her breasts to the public, became convinced that a size-34B was not big enough and began silicone injections. There are men today who can recall avidly watching her bosoms grow, from week to week, like watermelons on a sun-warmed vine. Everybody loved big tits back then. But those days are gone, and only a plaque remains.

I am sitting in the communal dressing room--a space of about 4' x 6'--of a place called the Garden of Eden. As Black Magic Woman blares for the act going on out front, four girls are getting ready for their turns. I must move my elbows and knees, as best I can, to make room for a swinging bare buttock or a set of breasts being pushed into a bra. No one--except for myself--seems remotely self-conscious. Sasha, a beautiful olive-skinned girl, is admiringly brushing her black pubic hair before a mirror, her right knee up and out like a ballet dancer's.

"Don't you girls have any hang-ups about being nude before strange men?"

"Not any longer," says Gail (B. A., University of Georgia, education major), a redhead in a blonde wig. "This place has done wonders for me. I got the job right after I broke up with my boyfriend and ... you know ... at the time, I felt sort of unwanted, like I wasn't desirable or something. He left me alone a lot. Now it's restored my confidence to have men really want to look at me. I can't get enough of it, it seems. I love it here."

"The fuzz!" a girl in a purple, postage-stamp G string says, bursting in and slamming the door. "The fuzz is out front."

"Oh, Kee-rist!" cries Irish (B. A., Webster College, psychology major), taking a final puff on her joint, ducking the minuscule coal and then swallowing the remains. "There's nothing else in here, is there? Is there? I was like busted only last week and I can't go through that hassle again."

"Calm down, girls," says Bob Savage, strolling in. The owner and father figure, he is young, broad-shouldered and tall, with a Mod trim, tinted Alpine goggles and a black fur coat. In the parlance of the street, a heavy dude. No one hearing his calm even voice and finding his ice-blue eyes leveling in would cross him lightly. "The fuzz is only here on a fun trip. They're catching the show. No hassle."

He suddenly reaches into the shopping bag he is carrying and removes some white, fluttering Sally Rand feathers. "Look at what pretties I got you lovely babies. You can try these out onstage. They'll go crazy." He takes a seat, a girl on one knee, his arm around another, the business end of a feather tickling a third. "Irish, you were a knockout tonight, babe. Turning 'em on like crazy. Listen, I'm going to promote you to the Love Dance. Yes, I am. You can do it. I'm dying to see it myself, you beautiful hunk...."

"Bobby, I don't know if I can ... if I'm able ... if...."

"You can, darling. You can. I guarantee."

Later, over drinks in private, he says, "They're all, all, mind you, terribly insecure. They're total exhibitionists, too. So the simple secret is to give them individual attention and love, and then teach them the best way to exhibit their bodies so they cater to fantasies. Perhaps why I'm more successful than others on the street is because I do love them and I have a rich fantasy life myself."

The girls at the Garden of Eden take off their costumes on a raised platform, then go through sensuous, lip-puckering motions, as if making love to themselves or an imaginary person. In the Love Dance, a male partner, often the barker, enters and the two go through simulated lovemaking, complete with a St.-Vitus'-dance "orgasm." (In this they usually sport something of a G string--but at the evening's last show there is often no clothing and, if the coast is clear, well, what the hell, it might be a little more than simulated.) The Garden of Eden is generally packed, while other clubs down the street are half filled. "I don't know how Savage does it," another club owner says, a man with a potbelly and a diamond ring. "He can take the biggest dog I ever seen, a girl who can't draw a sailor off the street, and turn her into the hottest number in town. I can't even hardly believe my own eyes."

"I teach the girls," Bob says, "the little things, the important touches. How to blow a kiss, the way to look at a man as if he's the only one in the world, the way to tease and the way to finally come across. But it's all illusion, of course. Listen, all this concern over censorship doesn't bother me at all. Let the courts put us back in the Victorian age and it won't make one bit of difference to me. I'd still be able to sell illusion. Because, finally, that's what it's all about. Illusion."

• • •

San Francisco is a dream--and other places, try as they may, cannot match its élan or inventiveness in most fantasy fields. Along gritty, gray 42nd Street in New York, dignified middle-aged men pore guiltily over graphic shots of girls with legs raised in V-for-Victory signs--until the man behind the counter blasts, "OK, there ain't been no purchase in the last half hour! I'm giving youse guys five minutes to buy somep'n' or else it's outside for youse." But New York, the first and foremost in so many things, tries. It has the Gallery of Erotic Art, shown by appointment only, its main claim to fame having been a collection of homosexual work in which a sculpture by Carlin Jeffrey featured the artist himself chained nude to a large silver crucifix. (The work was intended as a memorial to homosexuals who had died in Vietnam.) There are shadowy bars in Greenwich Village where nude males do go-go routines on small raised platforms. And there is Club Orgy.

Club Orgy will not be tamed or stopped. It was at 110 West 24th Street, a few doors down from the shuttered and barred rectory of St. Vincent de Paul Church, until April 13, when a fire of mysterious origin (some say from God) gutted it. New quarters will undoubtedly be had by the time you read this, and once more Victor and Rita, a New York couple who learned their trade in California, will be performing a zany, existential playlet that begins with the two of them balling. The act gains ground when Diane--a transsexual with siliconed breasts, genitals strapped down and out of sight, and looking more feminine than Rita--makes it a weird threesome, and winds up with the wiry, balloon-haired Victor holding his dark-tressed Rita up by her heels before the audience and making a bleating musical sound from a part of her anatomy he terms the "skin flute," while Rita sings, upside down from between his legs, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." Well. New York keeps trying, but it never can lead you into that willing suspension of disbelief that California so effortlessly induces.

In San Francisco, the entrepreneur who has been most successful in giving the public what it always has wanted to see (but never dared expect) is--Alex de Renzy. His Pornography in Denmark cost $15,000 to produce and has grossed over $2,000,000 to date. And what De Renzy has done with his money seems as much a fulfillment of fantasy as any of his movies. He lives in San Rafael, in a 15-room hilltop mansion complete with his own editing and screening rooms, a glistening 6' x 12' English snooker table and a heated outdoor swimming pool. He runs two silver Targa Porsches, one of which he's had up to 150 mph on a Nevada straightaway, a fox-gray Mark IV Jaguar and a custom-made equipment truck that he lives in on film locations. He has always liked the outdoors, having grown up in New England, where he trapped game as a boy. His early life, in fact, sounds as wholesome as a Booth Tarkington hero's. He comes from a fairly well-to-do family (father an engineer, mother the head dietitian for a hospital) and went through Tilton, a prep school in New Hampshire. He cared little about pornography back then, the hottest things he can remember reading being the early gang novel The Amboy Dukes and God's Little Acre. And he got married shortly after prep school--"Had to, the pregnancy thing." he says, in his clipped accent. "I was tied up in the usual guilt pattern of my generation." (He is now 35.) He became the father of a daughter, went to Reno in 1954 as an instructor in the Air Force's Survival School, and watched his marriage slowly disintegrate. It wasn't an easy life for him in Nevada. After discharge from the Air Force, he earned his living as a gambling dealer at Harrah's and studied zoology at the University of Nevada in his free time.

But his life seemed to be going nowhere, and--like so many others--he finally made it to San Francisco, for a second start, in 1964. He became a cameraman at Gordon News Films simply because the job turned up. And then it happened. Moonlighting, he made a 600-foot film of a girl stripping; it cost him $75 and sold for $250. He had found his field. Because he was willing to go one step further than the others and because he didn't mind working while they slept, his free-lance films caught on and his ambitions rose. He opened his own theater in San Francisco, the Screening Room, stocking it with his own productions, and soon quit his job as a news photographer. "My hardest decision was giving up that steady job." he says. "I was brought up to believe everyone had to hold a regular job, it was very important. You could starve otherwise."

Now he sits on a comfortable red-velvet couch in his living room, the view through his picture window of acre after acre of virgin-green foliage. As music from Santana filters through the cavernous room from multiple speakers, an attractive dark-haired girl enters with a boy and girl. She is introduced as Katheryn, his wife. She was once a topless dancer in North Beach and knew Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. A very pleasant, large-eyed brunette--somewhat resembling the Italian actress Giulietta Masina--she was known in the old North Beach days as Little People and now is in her late 20s. Fine. Then a second girl enters with a little girl. This is Christine 19 years old and a blonde. With no embarrassment whatsoever, she is introduced as the second wife. De Renzy tells me later that he has no major problems in the ménage à trois. Both girls get along fine with each other, and all three sleep in a mammoth bed. Ironically enough, Christine's mother and De Renzy's first wife, who are the same age, are good friends in Reno.

So now De Renzy is living many men's wildest fantasies; not only is he making fantastic sums but his The History of the Blue Movie was the object of a long, laudatory article in The New York Times. Yet even De Renzy must face his reality. After going on all cylinders for a stretch, he awoke one dawn unable to keep it up, his psyche splitting from all that had been poured there. He had to give up drinking and pot and tobacco; now coffee is his only stimulant. And on May 2, 1969, the law of velocity caught up with him. As he was barreling down a sun-drenched street in San Francisco on his motorcycle, a car coming the other way turned abruptly, and he crashed through the window. He broke his leg in 30 places and spent 83 days in the hospital--meanwhile contracting hepatitis through a tainted blood transfusion. Today his face is crisscrossed with scars, and one of his fine eyes seems to have been sewn back lower than the other....

• • •

And back at Enrico's, George S. McDonald, the superstar of blue films, has all of $4.93 to his name. "You make four or five of these kinds of films in a row and it can be a real bummer," he confesses. "You know, you have all the hang-ups that ordinary people have--like getting a hard-on and worrying about satisfying your partner--plus you have to act like Superman in doing things others can't do. It can bring you down. And I've had to do things in films I've never done in private. Like, in De Renzy's Sexual Encounter, I'm screwing in the midst of twenty other people, all of us down on the floor. Who ever does that in real life? I tell you, it can fuck up your mind...."

• • •

Like a Somerset Maugham character who becomes a little punchy after venturing too far into the tropics, George may always have a slight hum in the head from his revolutionary work. But, thanks to him and others, no audience will ever again have to wish for just a little more. It's all there in the open now--graphic, complete, in toto. The ultimate.

At any rate, now that audiences have seen the real and utter McCoy, they are becoming bored. For hard-core pornies are living proof of the law of diminishing returns--you've seen one, as Spiro Agnew would say, you've seen them all. And when enough people have passed through the turnstiles, when profits cease being made, pornies may simply go the way of the hula hoop.

To survive, to keep drawing an audience, the hard-corers will have to come up with something they haven't yet shown--something I, for one, cannot imagine. Hollywood could incorporate the literal sex act in a film or two, now that someone has broken the ground, with a name actor and actress; that might stir up a flicker of interest for a while. In the end, though, films will have to be good on many counts, sex or no sex, in order to draw viewers. It's not too much to hope that this wave of ultimate porn will be followed by films that combine genuine erotic content with all the other elements that have always made good movies. All of the younger film makers say they want to make more imaginative porno films and look down on what they actually have to turn out for the market. That shit, they call it.

• • •

After the San Francisco Erotic Film Festival, there was a party in a loft with a high ceiling, crammed with the liberated of that great city. As the gray smoke rose and the champagne went down, a few here and there began shedding clothing. No one paid much attention. The waiters, in dinner jackets and bow ties, wore nothing below the waist. A melon-breasted waitress, bless her, circulated with only a wispy apron around her middle. And to think that the first time I saw a pussy--paid 50 cents to see it, in a darkened carnival tent in Tennessee--I fainted from the excitement. Now, in 1971, I stood talking to a woman who looked a bit like a librarian with her hair back in a bun, and as she recounted something in a normal voice about the Sexual Freedom League of San Francisco, I looked down to see that she was holding someone's penis in her hand. The owner, however, was talking to a third party over his shoulder. And from somewhere else a large hand was cupping the woman's rather generous ass.

It was not sexy, nor even startling. And the fact that it was neither was rather sad.

in san francisco and los angeles, the erotic entertainments range from beaver shows to live sex ...

... while moviemakers vie to produce the ultimate stag film, cabaret performers let it all hang out onstage