Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution: Part V, Male Call, 1940--1949

Greetings: Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have now been selected for training and service therein..."

Funny how your whole life can change with one letter. In September 1940 Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act and instituted a national draft. More than 16 million men received registration cards. Almost one million men between the ages of 20 and 36 opened their mail to learn that Uncle Sam wanted them to report for a year of service--with a provision that the term be extended to 18 months in a national emergency.

Americans watched the fall of France and listened to Edward R. Murrow describe the Battle of Britain from the rooftops of London.

In 1941 Congress extended the hitch to 30 months. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the fine print read simply "for the duration." Within a year, Congress had lowered the draft age to 18. Most of us had never heard of Pearl Harbor, but as of December 7, 1941 we were a nation at war. Our goal was victory, our theme song God Bless America. Mobilization was a blur; a constant leave-taking performed again and again in bus stations, on train platforms, at airports and ports of embarkation. The U.S. armed forces grew from eight divisions to 90 in the space of four years, from fewer than half a million men to almost 4 million by 1942, 9 million by 1943, 11 million by 1944, 12 million by 1945. Men simply vanished from the streets of towns and cities across America, replaced by blue stars displayed proudly in the windows of families with boys in the military. When those boys died, the blue stars were replaced with stars of gold.

One letter changed your life, and you live in a world where the most important time of day is mail call. You hear a name called and recognize it as your own. News from home. Slowly men settle onto overturned boxes, huddle on bunks. Letters, they say, are like five-minute furloughs.

You tear (continued on page 124) Male Call (continued from page 90) open the letter and read for the first of many times the heartfelt words of the girl you left behind. Her letters are an open journal, describing in detail life at home, revisiting that last good kiss, conveying the yearning. All you have of her are these letters and a photo of the two of you taken on top of the Empire State Building, a souvenir of the long weekend, a three-day pass spent together.

You haven't seen her for almost two years. She had accepted a ring and promised to wait. Back home girls are encouraged to write. She tells you about the posters: "V-Mail is speed mail: You write. He'll fight." "Be with him at every mail call." "Can you pass a mailbox with a clear conscience?"

The river of words flows both ways. You begin to write, more words than you've ever written in your life. You describe your plans for the future, your dreams. You know the letter will be read by an officer who will black out words that could prove useful to the enemy. You cannot tell her where you are, or where you are going, or what exactly has happened to your unit as she tries to keep track of you with pins pushed into a map of the world. She follows the drive across North Africa, the battles in the Pacific, the news from Europe. You ask her to read between and around the lines, to press the letter to her heart as she would your lips.

Words can convey only so much. One officer will tell you that he is surprised by how often the terms helpmate and soul mate appear in the letters he has to censor. Love deprived of touch can survive through imagination and hope. Perhaps, without realizing it, you have put women on a pedestal the size of a piece of stationery.

Conducting a relationship long distance brings sex to the surface in charming and awkward ways. An article in Yank describes the Service Men's Service in New York. Men in the military can write to ask volunteer shoppers to buy gifts for wives and sweethearts back home. The most requested items are black lace underwear and black negligees. One guy wrote about his girlfriend: "I suspect she's always had a suppressed desire to be slinky and sophisticated like Marlene Dietrich, so I'd like very much to get her one of them there negligees or whatever they are. You know, all glamorous and frothy and sultry looking. The sort that will shock her mother and convince her that her future son-in-law has a lewd and depraved mind."

The article tells about a GI whose wife wrote back: "When you come back I'm going to go out and buy some black paint and paint the windows so I can wear this black negligee for you all day long."

The article assures the reader that all requests are held in strictest confidence. "One man overseas forwarded the Service $50 to buy six presents--one for his wife and five others for five other girls. He was a sailor, and the shoppers could tell right off the places where his ship had docked while he was in the States because each of the girls lived in a different port. The Service was pleased to note that he'd ordered a $25 present for his wife but specified that the presents for the other girls were not to cost more than $5 apiece."

If they only knew.

You remember the writer on assignment for Ladies' Home Journal who wanted to interview you for "What Is Your Dream Girl Like?"

Is Dream Girl a phrase that existed before this nightmare began?

The article reported that "Uncle Sam's boys do a lot of thinking about girls. They have definite ideas about the sweetheart whose love and loyalty will keep their hearts warm and their spirits high while they are doing their jobs."

Most servicemen knew what they wanted: a domestic type, fond of cooking and children (28 percent), an outdoor girl, good at sports (20 percent), a good conversationalist and social mixer (19 percent) or shy and sweet (19 percent). They all sound good to you.

The survey included the question: What do you notice first about a girl? One out of four servicemen admitted: her figure.

The letters are windows on the world back home. The news is not always good. For every woman willing to wait, there are those who won't. The rush to war had produced a passion, an impulsiveness that defied precedent. Some men in the U.S. believed they could avoid military service if they were married. As Congress debated the draft, the marriage rate increased by 50 percent, and nine months later the birth rate rose, too.

After Pearl Harbor, the same thing happened, only the motive was different. You knew you were going and you wanted someone waiting for you when you came back--if you came back. Americans got hitched at the rate of 1000 a day, a 20 percent jump in the first month of 1942. Time for one good weekend and another jump in the birth rate, the so-called goodbye babies.

The guy on the bunk next to you shows you a picture of his kid. He is a paper father to a paper son. His family lives on $50 a month--the $22 allotment and $28 allowance from Uncle Sam. The government has taken your place at the family table, sending out 5.2 million checks each month to the families of servicemen.

What kind of family is it with an empty chair at the head of the table? What kind of marriage with an empty space in the bed? Reader's Digest writes about problem wives: "A girl has married 13 soldiers and divorced none of them. Need any of them support her? Yes--the first."

You read about the so-called Allotment Annies, women who marry as many servicemen as possible, hoping to collect the Uncle Sam paychecks and maybe the $10,000 insurance payout if one takes a bullet.

More often it is the mail that contains a bullet to the heart. Called Dear John letters after a popular radio show that featured letters written to absent males, they open like graves. The girl you left behind has found someone else. Perhaps more than any other single piece of evidence, the Dear John letter destroys the double standard, proving that women are sexual creatures with appetites and yearnings of their own. Desire cannot be put on a shelf, nor kept in a drawer, secured by a ribbon.

Both Yank and The Stars and Stripes publish letters from servicemen in columns titled "Mail Call." Soldiers grouse about a California law that lets married women put up for adoption children born out of extramarital affairs without notifying their husbands who are overseas.

After the war, film director Billy Wilder will capture the moment in a scene in Stalag 17. An American POW in a German prison camp is reading a letter from home. "I believe it. I believe it," he says.

"You believe what?" asks his buddy.

"My wife. She says, 'Darling, you won't believe it, but I found the most adorable baby on our doorstep. And I've decided to keep it for our very own. Now, you won't believe it, but it's got exactly my eyes and nose.'

"Why does she keep saying that I (continued on page 144) Male Call (continued from page 124) won't believe it?

"I believe it ... I believe it.... [With less certainty] I believe it."

You take another sheet of paper and begin to write. You dream of windows painted black. A woman who has waited.

You believe.

The Home Front

The soldier had his dream girl, a blend of memory and imagination. Nothing he carne up with kept pace with the real thing. The war provided women with unprecedented opportunity. When women change, sex changes. The war promoted a heady blend of patriotism and promiscuity. Some women waited, others would not. Some women kept to traditional roles. They dressed in powder blue outfits based on uniforms, wrapped bandages, grew vegetables in Victory gardens and wrote letters.

Others played a more active part: The nation got to know Rosie the Riveter, Wanda the Welder, WAACs, WAVES and the Petticoat Army--as well as legions of passionate patriots known as V-girls, young women who would give their all. Even the comics had a new heroine. Wonder Woman joined Superman and Batman in the fight against evil.

America went back to work, effectively ending the economic hardships of the Depression. The unemployed, still 15 percent of the workforce (some 8 million people) in 1940, dropped to one percent by 1944.

Women who had marched shoulder to shoulder for the right to work (26 states had passed laws prohibiting married women to work during the Depression) now labored shoulder to shoulder with men on the job. Women would help build the arsenal of democracy called for by FDR. But not without controversy.

Women in the workplace posed a threat to those who stayed at home. Magazines ran articles about seduction in the office and sex on the assembly line, about the danger posed by "office pals" and "man stealers."

John Costello, author of Virtue Under Fire, reports that there was an attempt to blame the bosom: "The management of some war plants banned women from wearing makeup, in an attempt to contain the temptation. When the Boeing Aircraft Corp. sent home 53 women for wearing tight sweaters, it became a cause célèbre. Their union objected that what was considered perfectly moral attire in the office should not be considered immoral on the shop floor. Management brought the National Safety Council into the dispute by claiming that sweaters caught fire, attracted static electricity and were a dangerous hazard because they might snag in rapidly turning machinery."

Ann Sheridan, a Hollywood star whose way with a sweater had earned her the title of the Oomph Girl, came to the aid of the factory women. Costello describes her retort: "While a small figure in a large sweater might be a threat to safety, a big girl in a tight sweater is only a moral hazard to men."

Prosperity reminded women of the power of sex appeal. Skirts revealed knees for the first time in a decade. When Du Pont introduced nylon stockings nationwide in 1940, almost 4 million pairs walked out the door in a matter of days. When nylon was needed for the war effort, women painted their legs and drew lines down the backs of their calves with eyeliner.

Women, who had learned to ration sugar, butter, cheese, meat, canned foods, shoes, gasoline and alcohol, also had to face the man shortage. A hit song of the day captured the woman's view of a nation stripped bare of its most eligible bachelors: They're Either Too Young or Too Old.

Scarcity had as much of an impact on sexual behavior as did the more frequently cited "war aphrodisia"--the live-for-the-moment mentality that swept over men and women alike.

Beth Bailey, in her history of dating, From Front Porch to Back Seat, recalls that the male call directly affected young single women and shattered the social expectations of the Twenties and Thirties. One casualty was the dating system that had evolved since the turn of the century, in which a woman's popularity was measured by the number of men who asked her out, by the number of men lined up to cut in on the dance floor and by the sum of money a man was willing to spend on an evening of entertainment. Imagine the envy, the sense of lost opportunity or outrage, of a girl who had read this bit of advice from a 1940 Woman's Home Companion: "If you have dates aplenty, you are asked everywhere. Dates are the hallmark of personality and popularity. No matter how pretty you may be, how smart your clothes--or your tongue--if you have no dates, your rating is low. The modern girl cultivates not one single suitor but dates lots of them. Her aim is not a too obvious romance but general popularity."

"This generation of women," Bailey says, "had expected to have their years of popularity, of commanding the attention of men." The ratio of men to women on one campus was suddenly one to eight, where it had previously been five to one in women's favor. Colleges opened dating bureaus to help coeds find escorts, either civilian or in service. Men in uniform were preferred--especially officers. At some colleges, 75 per-cent to 90 percent of the students were female. The war was a disaster for those who had gone to college to improve their social lives or to find husbands.

Without irony, Bailey comments: "To complain about lacking dancing partners seemed selfish and unpatriotic when former dancing partners were fighting and dying in foreign lands." But complain they did. They stooped to advertising for dates to the prom, offering to supply the car and pay for the date as well.

For the first time in the century, men were valued for being young, virile and available--and women competed for them. Colleges held seminars on how to make oneself attractive to the few good men to be had. Ladies' Home Journal reported that women spent $800 million in 1942 on "keeping beautiful."

Sex was out in the open. Men developed lines, and to their surprise, found they worked. "I'm shipping out tomorrow" doesn't rank with Shakespeare, but it had a surefire effect on the opposite sex. The war gave rise to a new phenomenon known as the wolf.

Take a young man, surround him with other young men, deprive him of female companionship except in a concentrated burst of hormonal energy known as the weekend pass, and you have a wolf. Not the type to go from camp to church social, he had time only for sexual shorthand, best communicated by a wolf whistle. Anyone who knew his way around the ladies was considered a wolf, and he became a part of the pop culture of World War Two. To build up a buddy to his shipmates in the 1942 film The Fleet's In, Eddie Bracken refers to retiring William Holden as the biggest wolf in the Navy. Tex Avery turned the big bad wolf of fairy tale into a sexual predator in popular animated cartoons such as Red Hot Riding Hood and Swing Shift Cinderella. When cartoonist Leonard San-sone was drafted he created a wolf in GI's clothing for the Camp Newspaper Service that also distributed Milton Caniff's classic Male Call. (After the war San-sone's Wolf made an uneasy and ultimately unsuccessful transition to civilian life. A postwar America was not so accepting of unbridled lust.)

In horror films, male sexuality was often identified with the beast. The Wolf Man, a sexual monster in 1941, returned in a postwar send-up of monster movies titled Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Lon Chancy Jr. confesses to the two comics, "In a half hour the moon will rise, and I'll turn into a wolf." Costello replies, "You and 20 million other guys."

The wolf had a sexual counterpart in the V-girl. As one female commentator, a hopelessly outnumbered advocate for chastity, described the situation: "Patriotism, vast admiration, fervor and precocious sex urge get all tangled up in adolescent bodies that are not yet equipped with the necessary adult intellectual processes with which to make decisions. Juvenile girls are avid to show soldiers a good time: In one meeting they become the girlfriend, the pickup, with no inherent adult standard of sex conduct to offset emotionalism."

She called these girls bobby-socks amateurs, but they were simply doing what their big sisters were doing.

Thousands of girls flocked to the ports and bases, greeting servicemen on furlough and proving they too were doing their part. Eliot Ness, the former Untouchable, took on a new task as director of the Federal Social Protection Program. He found his new foe to be "a casual fun-seeking girl, wanting male companionship, a young experimenter, somewhat lonely, easing her conscience by quixotic references to patriotism."

In many cities the V-girls were organized and supervised. The Red Cross held "practice parties" for hostesses. There were camp dances, YMCA socials and USO clubs. The stars came out at the Hollywood and the Stage Door canteens, where men in uniform could dance with the likes of Hedy Lamarr, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland to the big band music of Benny Goodman and Count Basic. I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen became a popular song of the day. The scene was repeated across America. In Seattle 12,000 young women, volunteers 18 to 20, spent more than nine million hours dancing with servicemen during the war. It is interesting to note that dancing--considered the devil's handiwork at the turn of the century--was now a patriotic duty.

It was against the rules, but the hostesses were very touchable.

In the 1944 Preston Sturges classic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Betty Hutton portrays a small-town girl named Trudy Kockenlocker who, after a wild "kiss the boys goodbye" dance, wakes the next morning with the vague memory that she may have married one of the soldiers. Was it "Private Ratziwatski, or was it Zitzikiwitzky?" The troops are long gone, but the cock in the locker becomes a bun in the oven. Finding herself pregnant, Trudy marries Norval Jones, a 4-F friend played by Eddie Bracken. She becomes a celebrity when she delivers sex-tuplets, and Norval is made an honorary colonel in the state militia.

An affectionate and often hilarious look at patriotism and promiscuity, the film sailed right past the censors. Far from being branded a fallen woman or a bigamist, Trudy is applauded for her part in the war effort.

The prudes at the Production Code Administration wanted the studio to cut a line delivered by Trudy's sister: "She's not the first dumb cluck who got herself in a snarl. What with the war and all, there'll probably be millions of them. They say they make the cutest babies."

The sister wasn't far off: Some 650,000 wartime babies were born out of wedlock in the U.S.

Betty Grable played a canteen hostess in Pin Up Girl who boosted the boys' morale by never saying no to a marriage proposal. In one musical number she sings "Battles are won in the daytime, but history is made at night." And she asserts the new standard of discretion: "Don't carry tales out of school. If you're a blabbermouth, you're off my list."

James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, gave an eyewitness account of life near military bases in his history of World War Two. Having been wounded at Guadalcanal, he returned to Memphis to find: "At just about any time of day or night there were always between half a dozen and a dozen wide-open drinking parties going in the rooms and suites, where it was easy to get invited simply by walking down the corridors on the various floors until you heard the noise. Money was not much of a problem. Nor were women. There was always plenty of booze from somebody, and there were also unattached women at the hotel floor parties. You could always go up to the Starlight Roof and find yourself a nice girl and dance with her awhile and bring her down. Everybody screwed. Sometimes it did not even matter if there were other people in the room or not at the swirling, kaleidoscopic parties. Couples would ensconce themselves in the bathrooms of the suites and lock the door."

It is clear that servicemen were aware of the advantage those at home enjoyed. When a skinny 4-F crooner named Frank Sinatra opened at the Paramount Theater in December 1942, thousands of screaming bobby-soxers jammed the streets, reportedly swept away in near sexual hysteria. The men overseas resented Sinatra and booed him when he appeared on a USO tour.

Despite the controversy, Sinatra would become the most important singer of the decade, acclaimed as the Voice, as influential to a new generation as Bing Crosby had been the decade before.

Music and movies were major morale boosters for the home front and for those away from home. Glenn Miller's Chattanooga Choo Choo earned a gold record and Juke Box Saturday Night celebrated an industry that took in $80 million, an incredible 5 billion nickels a year. Each nickel evoked a few moments of pure emotion---from the heartbreaking I'll Be Seeing You to the heartsick Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me). During the musicians' strike in 1943 the big bands still recorded V discs of the latest hits for the boys in service.

Hollywood made movies as escapist fare and as propaganda. We saw John Wayne and Errol Flynn, neither of whom saw service, win the war on the silver screen. Mindless musicals such as Star-Spangled Rhythm, Two Girls and a Sailor, Seven Days' Leave, Something for the Boys, Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Anchors Aweigh were about as complicated as Fourth of July parades and just as popular.

Hollywood's commitment to the war was total. Directors Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler turned out documentaries for the government. When Carole Lombard died in a plane crash returning from a bond rally, husband Clark Gable enlisted and flew bombing missions over Germany. Other stars signed on, including James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Robert Montgomery and Mickey Rooney, the Andy Hardy of our youth. The film palaces sold war bonds and acted as collection points for strategic materials and blood donations.

In the movies war was a grand adventure. We knew that Pearl Harbor had been a day of infamy and that real lives had been lost, but we would not know how many until after the war. The government controlled all wartime information, as it did almost every other aspect of our lives. John Jeffries, author of Wartim America, says that grisly photos of combat were the first to be censored: "Not until 1943 were photos of dead Americans released for publication," he writes. "Not until 1945 did Life show American blood being shed."

The phrase "Don't you know there's a war going on?" was often heard on the home front. Overseas, men needed no reminder. The prospect of death rewrote the rules on sex.

Overthere

"Over there" was not a single sexual state. The sex life of a bomber pilot stationed in England differed vastly from that of a Marine on an island in the Pacific or an Infantryman marching through the mud in Italy.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, sailors sing a ribald tribute to the members of the opposite sex: "We get packages from home, we get movies, we get shows. We get speeches from our skipper and advice from Tokyo Rose. We get letters doused in perfume, we get dizzy from the smell. What don't we get? You know damn well."

Soldiers stationed in the Pacific tried to remember what it felt like. "It" was pussy, and men talked about it. dreamed about it and died thinking about it. In a bull session recorded by novelist Norman Mailer, one character recalled a woman with a pussy so sweet "it was like dipping it in a barrel of honey."

James Jones provided another account from the Pacific. The men who spent the first six months of the war pulling anti-invasion duty on the beaches of Hawaii knew there was nothing like a dame. "A half-Hawaiian gentleman with a good eye for business drove up in a pickup truck with four wahines in the back. While our lieutenant and his staff sergeant looked the other way, the four girls, utilizing one of our five pillboxes and a sheltered ledge open to the wind directly behind it, managed to take care of the whole 37 of us on the position in just over 45 minutes. The lieutenant timed it, while ordering five men who had already been to go and relieve the five men on post in the pillboxes so they could go. The fee was ten bucks a man and everybody was happy with the price."

Pussy, no matter how quick and tawdry, no matter if it was timed by a lieutenant, was still a moment of atfirmation, a moment that was entirely your own. Your heartbeat, your erection.

One of the earliest war films, A Yank in the RAF, followed Tyrone Power as he joined the Battle of Britain. He fell for Betty Grable playing an American show-girl. By June 1944, a million and a half Americans had relocated to British soil. They flew bombing raids in broad day-light and partied the night away at the Rainbow Club, the Hammersmith Palais and the Paramount. Almost everyone, from Ike on down, was taken by the charm of British women. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist most often associated with islands of the Pacific, visited Britain and wrote home about American men, with their "exuberant informality," having "morning tea given to them in bed by a titled hostess, without any servants, who has nevertheless opened her house to them. 'And wouldn't that make Sioux City open its eye?"'

She painted a picture of a soldier forming permanent ties with a family, "packing up his weekend ration allowance so that at the British dinner table he will have his little jars of butter and sugar, too, and a bit of something special for his harried hostess."

Hers was not the first bit of disinformation given the American public. British soldiers-who had already been at war for years in the deserts of North Africa and on the beaches of Dunkirk-complained about the presence of the Yanks, who were, they said, "Overpaid, oversexed and over here."

American soldiers found comrades in arms. The women they met had lost loved ones, seen neighborhoods disappear under the air raids. Women overseas did not share the same prejudice as Americans-in both Italy and Britain Negro soldiers were often treated as equals. Interracial sex sparked riots between white and Negro troops in Launceston, Manchester and Newbury. American bigotry begat bloodshed.

English women knew there was a war going on. Civilian casualties were a brutal, inescapable fact. Some 92,700 were killed in Britain. Fear was an aphrodisiac. They were willing to steal moments of comfort, to build a picnic or dinner around a gift of ham, bread, real butter and beer. Companionship, an evening in each other's arms, gave a moment of normalcy. And, sorry, the morning tea in bed came after a night of less printable activity.

There were a third of a million illegitimate babies born in Britain during the war. The experience was repeated in Australia. After the war, American servicemen would take 50,000 British war brides. About 10,000 Aussie girls came back to the U.S. (giving up the outback for a world of refrigerators and electric stoves).

American magazines ran articles asking, "Are the British Stealing Our Men?" When American women learned that our soldiers were sleeping with German women, they protested loudly. The War Department responded by levying a $65 fine for fraternizing with Fräuleins.

The Pin-Up

She was everywhere. Soldiers put pinups on the walls of their barracks, on the insides of tanks and bombers, inside their helmets, on palm trees next to their shaving mirrors, in footlockers. An officer in the Pacific sent out pin-ups with intelligence reports to make sure they were read. The code breakers kept a huge collection of photos under glass on their desks, a calm center amid the chaos of enemy ciphers. GIs clipped magazine ads and sent away to Hollywood studios for glamour shots of the stars.

During the war, cheesecake was as American as apple pie. After Pearl Harbor, the Army decided that the enlisted man needed his own magazine. Hartzell Spence told the newly recruited staff of Yank: "We've got to have a pin-up." Ralph Stein recalled: "None of the rest of us had ever heard the term. I think Hartzell might have invented it." Each issue of the Army weekly would contain a full-page black-and-white photograph of a pretty girl wearing relatively few clothes.

The Yank "Pin-up Girl" almost never got off the ground. An early layout went all the way to General Henry Stimson, who sent it to his superior officer--Mrs. Henry Stimson. She saw the pencildrawn dummy and ordered it quashed. Hornier heads prevailed.

An estimated two million servicemen ended up with the still shot of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, looking over her shoulder. She was the girl with the million dollar legs, whose musicals made her the highest paid woman in America. She married bandleader Harry James but was still "the enlisted man's girl." Her title as the ultimate Pin-Up Girl was celebrated in her 1944 film of the same name.

Rita Hayworth posed in lingerie for Life and became another favorite. Almost all the distaff stars and starlets posed for pin-up photographers, doing their part to boost the boys' morale, many with their own trademark looks: Veronica Lake had her peekaboo hairstyle, Lana Turner her sweater and Dorothy Lamour her sarong. Carole Landis was the Ping Girl, and Marie McDonald was The Body.

The most sexual pin-ups were the work of Alberto Vargas, an artist who had spent his early years glorifying the girls of the then graduated to Hollywood Ziegfeld Follies. In 1940 the first Varga Girl appeared in Esquire, eventually replacing the streamlined creations of George Petty. When the editors released a calendar of 12 Varga Girls, The New Yorker declared Vargas as "an artist who could make a girl look nude if she were rolled up in a rug."

The first calendar sold 325,000 copies, the 1944 version 2.5 million. Despite the rationing of paper (which meant magazines that went overseas were printed in miniature versions), the military insisted on receiving Esquire full size.

John Costello, in Virtue Under Fire, notes that the pin-up had a special status for many: "The extensive personal testimony to the emotional impact of World War Two suggests that what men and women were fighting for had less to do with abstract notions of freedom or patriotism than with the need to protect the personal values represented by sweethearts, wives and families. Sex, therefore, played an extensive role in the war experience. Whether with its pin-ups of Hollywood stars, well-thumbed pictures of the girl back home, Rosie the Riveter, the archetypal female factory worker, or women pilots, World War Two acquired an undeniable feminine aspect."

The pin-up was reassuring to women worried about women over there. The Saturday Evening Post ran an article about a wife who wondered, "Are there any blondes at the front?" She had been married for only four months before he left for war. She had not seen him for nearly two years. The author of the piece answered, "Yes. There were lots of beautiful blondes, but I wouldn't be alarmed about them. They were all pin-ups."

As more than one soldier commented, the pictures "give us guys a good idea of what we're fighting for."

James Jones, in a discussion on Hollywood pin-ups in World War Two, recalls a sergeant who heard a famous story that swept the Pacific. It seems that Paulette Goddard and director Anatole Litvak were having dinner at Giro's in Hollywood. As the evening progressed, the couple became amorous. An obliging waiter put up a screen to shield them from view. Accounts vary, but apparently one of the celebrities disappeared under the table to pleasure the other.

The sergeant, grinning, said: "Now, man, that's what I'm fighting this war for. That kind of freedom. Where could that happen but in the good old U.S. of A.?"

Most soldiers were not fighting for Roosevelt's four freedoms. Indeed, most could not count off the list of noble values they were defending. But the fine art of fellatio (or whatever happened under that table) was something else again.

Bomber Art

Gary Valant, an art historian fascinated by a particular kind of pin-up--the one painted on bombers--writes this chilling rationale for the practice: "It's midwinter 1943, you're 20 years old, it's 4:30 in the morning, it's raining, it's cold. You've got a slight hangover, and you're walking in mud (there's always mud). You're wearing a fur-lined flying suit because where you're going it's 30 degrees below zero. You've got an oxygen mask because where you're going it's hard to breathe. You're carrying a map because at 25,000 feet there are no signs. Prior to December 7, 1941 your main goal in life was to get a car and marry Ginger Rogers, but now it's just to stay alive another day because you're a crewman on a B-17, and where you're going people are going to die. But not you, not your plane, not your crew because you're special, and the special people always come back. They don't blow up in the sky or go in at 400 miles per hour, one wing gone, no chutes, on fire--not the special ones. They always come back. So we need a special name for our plane--and a special picture on it. Maybe a picture of Betty Grable, or one of those Varga Girls from Esquire."

Valant collected images in a book called Vintage Aircraft Nose Art. He explains the impulse that caused men to paint women on the sides of bombers: "The origin of nose art goes back to some ancient time when the first proud charioteer decorated his vehicle so that it would be distinguishable from others. The desire to personalize an object, a machine, to make it unique among the multitude, is basic to man's nature. Place man under great stresses, give him a very uncertain future, and this desire can become an obsession. So it is in war, and with the machines of war. A thousand B-l7s identical in every way roll off the assembly line and fly to an uncertain fate, but each one can be different. The difference is not in the tail number. Those are for record keepers and ribbon clerks. The difference is in the imagination and talent of the crew. Few crew members would talk about 247613 or 34356, but many tales would be told about Sack Time or the Dragon Lady."

A GI artist would copy a Varga Girl or Milt Caniff's sumptuously reclining Miss Lace from Male Call and maybe come up with a sexual name: Target for Tonight, Night Mission or Lucky Strike. And next to her he might paint a bomb for each successful mission, each dawn ascent into flak-infested skies. More than 100,000 crewmen flew to their deaths. The military set the number of missions men had to fly at a level that would give them a 50 percent chance of survival. One artist, trying to paint the signs of the zodiac on 12 bombers flying out of England, had to start Taurus three times. The first two planes had taken off and never come back. After the war, a man given the job of converting bombers to aluminum scrap found himself moved by the art: He had a workman remove the panels with a fire ax. On a whim, they were kept from becoming toasters, frying pans and washing machines.

The Chaplain's War

Most Americans focused on morale, not on morals. But the forces that for 200 years had controlled sex in America did not go AWOL. The roar of the war machine tended to drown out prudes and puritans, but these people still walked the perimeter.

Throughout the war Monsignor William Arnold sat at a desk in Washington, B.C. cataloging the sins of mankind. As Chief of Chaplains, with the rank of Brigadier General, he oversaw 8000 or so military chaplains serving around the world. His legions filed monthly reports and letters of complaint about profanity, pin-ups, camp newspapers, ads for offerings from the Charm Photo Co. (shots of girls disrobing), risqué and irreverent magazines, indecent literature, VD campaigns, pro kits and rubbers, houses of prostitution, bomber art and USO tours.

Arnold moved these letters through the bureaucracy the way commanders moved models of ships around the war room. He kept meticulous files that would become the only surviving record of the war between morale and morals. Let other historians chart the battles and bloodshed; Arnold charted the corruption of souls. He was the puritan conscience in a world gone mad.

He kept the letter from a chaplain at Camp Sutton who had run amok in the officer's club and torn down pin-ups from the wall. When the camp commandant ordered the pictures replaced, the field chaplain fired off an angry reply: "As I am the depot chaplain, I feel that it is my duty to have removed all such literature and posters that are destructive to the morals of this command. This property was two pictures of nude women. I have been taught for the past 17 years that such pictures lead men to immoralities and destroy all the good that is in them. As one looks upon such scenes, his passions become stirred and then he seems to satisfy them in any manner possible. It was my desire in removing these pictures to keep the thoughts and acts of these men pure and clean. I thought sure that to remove such poison to the mind and soul of mankind from the sight of your officers would be pleasing to you."

A chaplain in charge of moral counsel in China, Burma and India sent a letter to all chaplains serving in the area reminding them that "no chaplain wants to pose as a prude, nor does one desire to be a thorn in the flesh of anybody," but that a chaplain's duty was "to propose suitable means to promote 'right thinking and right acting,' and to 'promote character building and contentment.'"

The chaplain enclosed a careful study of the number of pin-ups in a headquarters company. He found 15 Varga Girls, 20 flesh-colored nudes and seminudes, 15 collections of various types. Some 51 men out of 723 enlisted men kept photos on the wall; the rest, noted the chaplain, kept ordinary photos of home folks in their footlockers. He blamed the incidence of girlie photos on the makeup of the unit, "some of whom evidently were reared in gutters rather than homes."

He recorded and categorized the types of applause at USO shows, noting the hearty, normal initial response to a "radiant American girl as she makes her appearance" and bemoaning the "vociferous . . . response to daring or coarse humor, loud features of dress or lack of it"--as though applause were the sound of the devil's artillery.

He found little support from the brass, whose philosophy, as expressed to the chaplain, was "what the soldiers want is, first, more beer, then a woman." The chaplain confessed that "the actual number who perhaps do merit such an estimate is regrettably large."

A chaplain at Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi complained, "Does the morale of the American soldier depend upon pinup girl pictures and lewd cartoons? I cannot believe this; for if it be true, our soldiers are on the same low level as the Nazis and the Japs."

The chaplain was wrong. The Nazis worshiped the Führer and had a drive toward purity that seized degenerate art and consigned books to bonfires. The Japanese worshiped the emperor and did not tolerate distraction. The Japanese actually used pin-ups against Americans, dropping pictures of a naked woman beckoning seductively on troops in Guadalcanal. On the back of the photo were instructions on how to surrender to Japanese troops.

A copy of Male Call, the cartoon strip drawn for men in service by Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, prompted the Chaplain General to act. Caniff had drawn a strip showing the arrival of a new lieutenant. Walking into the barracks, the fresh-faced officer lectures the men about the pin-ups on the wall. "Do you mean that combat troops go in for such childish displays? Take those things down!" When the unit commander invites the replacement into his office, the walls are covered with nudes. "Now, Lieutenant," he says, "what was it you wanted to speak to me about?"

Arnold wrote the commanding general, saying, "Many camp papers would be sent home to parents and families if soldiers did not fear that these cartoons, pin-up pictures, etc. might cause apprehension in the minds of home folks and a false impression be given that these things are normal and encouraged." Arnold also complained about the implication that "the questioner of suggestive art is a 'pantywaist' and that experienced officers of higher echelons definitely approve."

Perhaps stinging under the label of pantywaist, Monsignor Arnold tried another tack on bomber art, forwarding a letter from a woman who described herself as a "person of no importance whatsoever" but who as a "citizen and a Catholic" wanted to protest a certain practice she had seen in a newsreel. "The film featured pictures of unclothed women, which some of the pilots had placed on their planes. I cannot believe that such pagan, barbarous pictures represent the choice of a majority of the pilots. A few of the women were lightly draped, but the majority had no garments. The film spoke of the representatives as being morale builders. We all have reason to be proud of the courage and heroic self-sacrifice of our splendid aviators. Large numbers of the young men have left wives and little babies at home. It can be very little comfort to their suffering wives to see their husbands represented as wild pagans with no thought of decency. America is fighting for freedom, not for license, and I am certain that a majority of her aviators are upholding her standards and are not dragging them in the mire."

Arnold drafted an order reminding the Air Corps of standards of decency: "The expression of a normal interest in the opposite sex has occasionally, through exercise of bad judgment under the stimulation of unfamiliar wartime circumstances, resulted in pictorial, textual and spoken representations that exceed the bounds of normal good taste and decency. It is desired that every effort be exerted to correct these untypical occurrences."

The men who flew the bombers were nearer to God, every day, than was the Chaplain General. The first American bomber to complete 25 missions was brought home a hero. On her side was painted the Memphis Belle.

The pictures stayed or were blown out of the sky.

The Battle of the Varga Girl

The Chief of Chaplains kept track of a campaign waged by the National Organization for Decent Literature, a movement started by the Most Reverend John Noll, bishop of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The NODL had concocted a Code for Clean Reading, banning all magazines that "(1) glorify or condone reprehensible characters or reprehensible acts; (2) contain material offensively sexy; (3) feature illicit love; (4) carry illustrations indecent or suggestive or (5) advertise wares for the prurient minded."

The NODL, like the Legion of Decency before it, was perfectly willing to pass judgment on reading material for the rest of America. Its list of banned magazines encompassed almost 200 titles, targeting among others College Life, Cowboy Romance, Film Fun, Modern Romance, Police Gazette, True Love, Uncanny Tales and Zest and more racy titles such as Breezy Stories, Spicy Adventure, Garter Girls, Keyhole Detective Cases, Scarlet Confessions and The Ideal Woman.

The NODL recruited chaplains, who wrote, "If you understand the life of a soldier you will realize the damage bad literature will do to his moral life. Is it any wonder that every girl becomes an object of lust? Is it any wonder that every girl feels that she is being X-rayed by the soldiers as they pass? The literature on our canteen stands is predominately sexy."

Catholic chaplains would peruse the base newsstand and report any magazines that showed up on the NODL's list. Most base commanders shrugged off these complaints.

Unfortunately, the NODL had an ally in one of the richest and most powerful Catholics in Washington. Frank Walker became Postmaster General in 1940. This reincarnation of Anthony Corn-stock went after magazines with a vengeance, stripping them of their second-class mailing privileges. In two years he declared 23 magazines obscene and revoked or denied the second-class mailing privileges of another 62.

Chaplains would take the list of unmailable magazines (ranging from Real Screen Fun to College Humor) to a base commander and argue that if Uncle Sam deemed them unmailable, they should not be sold on PX newsstands.

Such was the power of the Postmaster General that chastened editors soon took layouts of their magazines for approval to the solicitor of the Post Office Department in Washington. They should have learned from Neville Chamberlain's lesson at Munich: Appeasement sucks.

Walker went after Esquire in January 1941. Founding editor Arnold Gingrich was forced to make monthly trips to Washington to meet with the solicitor. The solicitor would go over the dummy of the next issue page by page, cartoon by cartoon, making changes on the spot. In his memoir Gingrich recalled, "Some of the things I had to tone down seemed to me to be a case of bending over backward to avoid offending even the most sensitive of sensibilities to a degree that was nearly ludicrous." In a vain attempt to satisfy the Post Office, Gingrich went so far as to clothe the nude gatefolds of Petty in transparent chemises in subscription copies. It wasn't enough.

On Labor Day weekend in 1943 Walker challenged Esquire to show cause why it should not lose its second-class mailing permit. (He presented it as a privilege--one that if revoked would cost Esquire $400,000 a year in postage, effectively putting the magazine out of business.)

The Post Office cited as obscene 90 items that had appeared in Esquire. The list included 22 Varga Girls, short stories, various photographs, a parody of The Night Before Christmas and cartoons reprinted from military base newspapers. In one a woman asks, "Would you like to see where I was operated on?" A man replies, "No, I hate hospitals."

Hugh Merrill, in Esky: The Early Years at Esquire, reports that Walker objected to specific language: "The words considered obscene by the Post Office included bottom, juke, diddle, bawdy house, prostitute, streetwalker, syphilis, sunny south (referring to a woman's posterior), fanny and son of a bitch."

H.L. Mencken, who was for decades the avowed enemy of bluenoses and puritan twits, took the stand in Esquire's defense. "Sunny south," he explained, "is obviously an attempt at humor. I myself in such a situation use the word caboose, but then everybody has his favorites.

"The idea that it was [considered] obscene shocks me. It seems to be a term of limited situation. What he would call it if she were facing south, I don't know."

The Postal Board found in Esquire's favor, but Walker overruled his own panel. The case worked its way to the circuit court of appeals in Washington, D.C. On June 4, 1945 Judge Thurman Arnold thanked the Post Office for its valiant effort to set a new national standard for readers. But, he observed: "We believe that the Post Office officials should experience a feeling of relief if they are limited to the more prosaic function of seeing to it that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

The Post Office persevered, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Justice William O. Douglas upheld the appeals court ruling with the stern rebuke: "The provisions [of the second-class mailing act] would have to be far more explicit for us to assume that Congress made such a radical departure from our traditions to clothe the Postmaster General with the power to supervise the tastes of the reading public of this country."

"On the surface," according to Merrill, "the Esquire trial was about censorship and the Varga Girl. But there is a deeper meaning to those years in court. The trial was also about rural versus urban sensibilities, about the dominance of old-time Christianity and about changing sexual mores in America. The magazine stood alone among mainstream periodicals as an advocate of the new sexuality. The Court's decision gave the final push into reality to a country whose popular culture still tucked its sexuality into twin beds with the lights out."

The Chaplain vs. the USO

The Chief of Chaplains let others try to control the reading tastes of America. Arnold reserved the full weight of his office for a campaign against Hollywood and USO shows.

The United Service Organizations sprang forth in 1941 to send 3500 performers on the Victory Circuit, the Blue Circuit, the Hospital Circuit and the Fox Hole Circuit. Performers racked up more than 35,000 personal appearances in three years.

Bob Hope described the role of touring shows in Don't Shoot, It's Only Me: "It took me a long time to realize that all the rules of comedy were going to be changed. We represented everything those new recruits didn't have: home cooking, mother and soft roommates. Their real enemies, even after war broke out, were never just the Germans or the Japanese. The enemies were boredom, mud, officers and abstinence. Any joke that touched those nerves was a sure thing."

Hope was the star of the number one show on radio. Shortly before the war broke out, his sponsor, Pepsodent, suggested he broadcast a show from an air base. On May 6, 1941 he took Frances Langford, Jerry Colonna and Bill Goodwin over to March Field near Riverside, California. His reception was nerve-tingling. One of the soldiers told Hope the revue was the best thing that happened to the U.S. military since Gettysburg--Hope had gotten live girls past the sentries at the gate.

Hope performed before an audience whose laughter was unlike anything he had ever encountered. On a normal show, the director figured on 23 minutes of jokes and music, three minutes of commercials, and a little over three minutes for laughter. "Once we started playing Army camps, we had to allow six minutes for the laughs."

At the show's first broadcast at a base for WAACs the laughs increased to more than 12 minutes and Hope had to cut the show while he was on the air. The WAACs even drowned out jokes with wolf whistles (proving that sexually appreciative predators were not strictly male). Hope realized that the troops used the radio broadcast to let their voices be heard across America. They were alive, and the wolf whistle and a roar of laughter was the best way to send that message.

Hope took his troupe to London and North Africa. John Steinbeck recorded the other emotions these USO entertainers encountered. After touring a hospital, he wrote: "There is a job. It hurts many of the men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisions, and yet the laughter is a great medicine. . . .

"Finally it came time for Frances Langford to sing. The men asked for As Time Goes By. She stood up beside the little GI piano and started to sing. She got through eight bars when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped and then went on, but her voice wouldn't work anymore, and she finished the song whispering and then she walked out so no one could see her and broke down. The ward was quiet and no one applauded."

Perhaps it was a legacy of the Hays Office, the success of the Legion of Decency in pressuring Hollywood, but Monsignor Arnold took it upon himself to lecture the special branch. The file contains letters between Arnold and Lawrence Phillips, the executive vice president of the USO Camp Shows.

Chaplains at camps were the first to complain. "A stage show was presented by members of the armed forces to the armed forces with dialogues and jokes that were unwarranted for a mixed audience, including Army nurses. Two of the gags given in this show were:

(1) First man: 'What is the difference between the Hudson River and a woman's leg?'

Second man, after hesitation: 'I don't know, I have never been up the Hudson River.'

(2) Jack and Jill went up the hill, Each had a dollar and a quarter.

When they came down the hill, Jill had two dollars and a half.

Now I ask you, did they go up for water?"

Chaplains even complained about Hope, saying he laced his routines with inappropriate jokes. Perhaps they referred to his classic response to the fashions of the day on his radio show: "If skirts get any shorter, women will have two more cheeks to powder."

Someone in the 60th Troop Carrier Group complained about comedian Otis Manning telling the Jack and Jill joke, then quoted an exchange between the short comedian and performer Barbara Long:

"What would you do if you met a beautiful girl?" Long asked.

"I'd kiss her."

"What would you do if she were a tall girl?"

A ventriloquist on the same show had this exchange with his dummy:

"Do you know who Charlie McCarthy was?"

"He was the son of a birch."

"Do you know who his mother was?"

"She was the best piece of ash in the party."

Long, it seems, wore a split dress and danced seductively, pulling her dress aside to say, "That's all right, fellows, there's enough here for all of you." At the other end of the stage, she said: "That's all for you. That's your ration for today." Going through suggestive motions, she remarked: "How does it look from down there, honey?"

The Chief of Chaplains forwarded the complaint to USO exec Phillips, who asked that the performers be given a second chance. The USO finally gave in to the pressure and offered a human sacrifice. Arnold's file contains copies of Phillips' letter asking that Long, the ventriloquist and Manning be recalled and not be allowed to tour again. The blacklist had been born.

Arnold invoked the image of an army of 8000 chaplains who would return to civilian life with a negative opinion about the entertainment industry. The threat of a boycott by the Legion of Decency was still fresh in the minds of Hollywood executives. But one reads the files and realizes how few of the 8000 chaplains were concerned about such matters. They went about the daily business of comforting the wounded, writing letters for those unable to hold a pen, performing last rites for the dying. And some were pushed over the edge.

"I am writing you with regard to a problem as to which I am peculiarly helpless. A very dear friend of mine, a man of high ideals and moral convictions, is a captain in the Medical Corps. Displaced persons constitute the bulk of the patients he must care for, and he is disturbed beyond words that the discipline of his unit with regard to these unfortunate victims of Nazi brutality is deplorable. His letter to me constitutes an indictment of his superiors and, alas, even of the chaplain of the unit. Several other medical officers feel as he does but cannot do much about it. A few quotations from his letter will illustrate what I mean:

"'Our chaplain--not drunk--went through the hospital raising sheets from the female patients to see what they're made of. On another occasion, while drunk, he proceeded to the DP Camp and attempted to enter the rooms of several girls.

"'Our MAC officer on two occasions has got drunk and attempted to rape DP nurses working in the hospital. On a third occasion he did have intercourse with a German girl.

"'The major has got drunk on several occasions and has made a practice of running into the street firing a pistol into the air.

"'Certainly if the chaplain requires disciplining, it must be done. But apparently, he is a symptom of all that is transpiring and is not resisting the current--as he should.'" Even the keeper of souls wanted to lift the sheet to see what women were made of.

She may look clean

Call her the unknown pin-up. On a wall of every barracks in the Army an attractive brunette gazed into the distance, the kind of shot you see in yearbooks, the kind of heartthrob you carried in your wallet. The poster carried the warning She May Look Clean--But.

The VD poster girl had legions of accomplices. Hollywood churned out dozens of VD training films that followed a simple plot. A soldier follows a girl to her room for a few minutes of fun. (One film showed a guy leaving his burning cigarette on the staircase railing outside the love nest. He entered, did the dirty deed and came back to finish the same cigarette.) The film would cut to the consequences. Needles. Lesions.

Uncle Sam wanted to put men wise: "Prostitutes and pickups are not safe. And cannot be made safe." Any girl willing to have sex with a soldier was dangerous. Commander (and former boxing champ) Gene Tunney encouraged soldiers to wear "the Bright Shield of Continence." Writing in Reader's Digest, Tunney warned that out of every 1000 prostitutes, 500 had gonorrhea and 360 had syphilis. Surely the champions of democracy knew enough to avoid "the cheapest and most diseased harlots."

Every six months soldiers sat through the medical films that showed the horrific images--sores the size of bomb craters, eyes eaten away by the late stages of syphilis.

Sergeant George Baker, an artist who had worked for Walt Disney before the war, created a classic cartoon character known as Sad Sack. The penultimate potato peeler, the ultimate goldbrick, the lowest of the enlisted men, Sad Sack appeared in Yank every week. A comic strip called Sex Hygiene shows the excruciating reactions of the dismayed dogface as he watches a VD film. When introduced to a buddy's girlfriend, faced with the need to shake her hand, the terrified Sad Sack first puts on a rubber glove.

The war marked a turning point in the nation's approach to VD. Although some experts said fear was the best weapon, others were not sure. Allan Brandt, in No Magic Bullet, quotes a medical officer who said, "The sex act cannot be made unpopular."

Another official concluded, "We cannot stifle the instincts of man, we cannot legislate his appetite. We can only educate him to caution, watchfulness and the perpetual hazards of promiscuous intercourse and furnish him with adequate preventive measures."

Incredibly, prior to 1940 the American Social Hygiene Association never mentioned condoms as a means of preventing disease. Thomas Parran, the Surgeon General who had fought for a National Venereal Disease Control Act and who had pioneered elaborate screening and treatment programs, avoided any reference to condoms as too controversial.

The military studied the problem. During World War One, venereal disease took a toll, costing the armed forces 7 million days in manpower--soldiers taken from active duty by the need for long, arduous treatment.

At the outset of World War Two, 60,000 men out of the first million drafted had VD: 6 out of 100, 1 in every 16.

Manpower was everything. You owed it to your buddies to stay healthy. Measles cost 5000 days a year, mumps 10,000, venereal disease 35,500. Public health officials viewed soldiers as "human machinery." These accountants took pride that a VD campaign in Britain preserved the health of an estimated 15,000 men, freeing in effect a frontline infantry division of men to die on the beaches of Normandy.

The VD posters subtly suggested that women were sexual creatures with appetites similar to those of men. Military historian John Costello reports that at a secret 1942 conference, top brass considered the problem of venereal-disease prevention among enlisted women. A scholar from Johns Hopkins University presented the results of a startling survey. "While only a quarter of unmarried men were continent, 25 percent regularly engaged in sexual intercourse and the other 50 percent did so sporadically. The equivalent proportions for unmarried women were 40 percent continent, 5 percent promiscuous, and 55 percent having sexual experience from time to time."

The decision to issue prophylaxes to WAACs was leaked to the press in 1943 and promptly withdrawn. When it came to sex, women were on their own.

During the war, some 50 million condoms a month were being distributed to servicemen overseas, eight per man per month. In a classic snafu, after V-E Day, when the bullets stopped in Europe and lust blossomed, the ration dropped to four a month.

In World War One, the War Department closed every brothel within five miles of a military base. At the onset of World War Two, epidemiologists warned America about "well-dressed women in smart automobiles patrolling the roads around Army camps giving soldiers a lift--to houses of ill fame, to brothels on wheels, to a deadly trailer camp near Fort Knox populated by elderly parents, each with a surprisingly large family of dubious and dangerous daughters, to one powerful syndicate organizing a great band of Panzer prostitutes operating in mechanized units among the roadhouses and juke joints from Chicago to the Dakotas."

Although Congressman Andrew May launched an antiprostitution drive early in the war, the Pentagon had a more realistic approach. It created pro stations--pit stops where servicemen could line up for chemical disinfectant treatments. Oahu, where brothels were tolerated, averaged some 50,000 pro treatments a month in 1942. (After the war, comedian Mort Sahl would joke that GIs would find the pro station and work backward "to where the action was.")

Overseas, the VD records provided a map of license. A survey revealed that eight out of ten men stationed overseas for longer than two years had sex. Half of married men had liaisons. In one of the great public-relations moves of the war, the military kept this report classified for nearly 40 years.

According to Costello, Naples had some 50,000 women working as prostitutes; they infected one out of every ten soldiers. The conquering hero had a target painted on his private parts. In France, two thirds of the troops who contracted a sexual infection attributed it to their stays in Paris.

In Italy, an infected soldier was hauled off to the stockade, a treatment facility known as Casanova Camp. The letters VD were painted in red on his uniform and he was fined $65 if the infection came from a German. In 1944 Congress repealed a law that docked pay for soldiers with VD, but many men simply didn't report infections in the waning years of the war.

But even more interesting was the campaign against VD on the home front. The blend of patriotism and promiscuity created a new problem--the girl next door. Albert Deutsch alerted readers of The Nation to the failure of the campaign (according to figures, infection rates of U.S. troops had increased from 26 per 1000 in 1943 to 43 per 1000 by 1945; for overseas troops, the figure was 150 per 1000). But the real news was that among some American teenagers the infection rate had risen by 200 percent. Prostitutes were no longer the major threat.

"Fully 90 percent of the Army's cases in this country are traceable to amateur girls," wrote Deutsch, "teenagers and older women--popularly known as khaki wackies, victory girls and good-time Charlottes." She may look clean, but. . . .

Kiss Anyone, Anywhere, any Time

As the war escalated, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, researchers at Oxford University, foresaw the need for new agents to treat battlefield infections. The researchers recalled a 1929 paper by Alexander Fleming on his discovery of penicillin--a mold that seemed to kill bacteria. They contacted Fleming and started working with a descendant of the original spore. Florey and Chain found a more efficient way to grow and store penicillin. Biochemist Norman Heatley found a way to freeze-dry and concentrate the substance. They confirmed that the concentrate wasn't toxic to rabbits and humans. On February 12, 1941 they began injecting penicillin into an Oxford policeman who had suffered a massive infection following a scratch from a rosebush.

Penicillin was so rare that they had to recover the substance from the policeman's urine. His condition improved until the penicillin ran out. Without the drug, he died.

Florey tried penicillin on five more patients, with miraculous results. Supplies went to doctors in Africa, where patients were exposed to every bacteria the tropics could throw at them. Florey brought samples to the U.S. Doctors treated survivors of a fire at Coconut Grove in Boston in late 1942 and five patients who had been wounded on Guadalcanal. In America, a research team found that penicillin grew well in vats of corn steep liquor; a young assistant found a sample of penicillin mold on a cantaloupe she bought in Peoria, Illinois. Without hesitation, the U.S. Surgeon General ordered 150 million units a week for clinical investigations in Army hospitals.

Between July 1943 and July 1944, penicillin production rose from fewer than a billion units a month to nearly 1.3 trillion units. The government tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps; above all, this was a weapon of war. Triage dictated that penicillin go to soldiers overseas. The amount left over for civilian use was to be strictly rationed. A penicillin "czar" would handle citizen requests case by case. Newsweek wailed: "Public Vies With Army for Penicillin, Miracle Drug That Comes From Mold." America faced a moral choice: "When there is only enough of the newest miracle drug to save either a child or wounded soldier, which one would you save?"

In October 1943 Dr. John Mahoney told the American Public Health Association that he had injected four patients suffering from syphilis with 25,000 units of penicillin every four hours for eight days. After 16 hours the dreaded spirochetes could not be found.

Subsequently, Captain Monroe Romansky and T/4 George Rittman, two researchers at Walter Reed General Hospital, announced that penicillin had cured 64 out of 65 gonorrhea patients with a single injection. The magic bullet, the cure for diseases that had haunted mankind for centuries, had been found.

Former Congressman William Fitzgerald was outraged at the use of a miracle drug on an immoral disease. Citing the loss of an upstanding constituent, who had not had access to the drug, he noted: "I think it is a crime that the Health Department in Washington refused to release any of this drug for his benefit, and then I read in the paper that men who have been careless in their lives and have contracted a dreadful disease can obtain this medicine."

Publications in the U.S. concocted articles on how to grow your own miracle cure at home. Fleming was alarmed at the proliferation of quack products such as penicillin ointments, penicillin lotions for the eyes and penicillin beauty preparations. "I wonder what they're going to invent next?" he told a friend. "I shouldn't wonder if somebody produces a penicillin lipstick."

"That's more than possible," answered the friend. "Kiss whom you like, where you like, how you like. You need fear no tiresome consequences (except marriage) if you use our Penicillin Rouge."

Not everyone celebrated the discovery of penicillin. Indeed, the moralists who had dealt with the VD question came face-to-face with a new moral dilemma. If we are to teach sexual abstinence, argued William Snow, head of the American Social Hygiene Association, it can no longer be simply as the best method for avoiding venereal disease.

"Won't penicillin open up the floodgates of vice?" asked a physician in William Styron's play In the Clap Shack. "For if a libertine knows he can indulge himself with impunity, he will throw all caution to the wind. What universal debauchery this might portend for our nation."

The news that there was a cure for the clap reached the front in a small single-paragraph item in the November 10, 1944 issue of Yank. Soldiers reacted pretty much the way you would expect. The VD rate skyrocketed--and soldiers complained about disciplinary actions taken for health problems contracted "not in the line of duty." Live for the moment and let the cure catch up with us was the new motto.

Specially equipped armored trucks--with medics and hypos--followed troops from Italy and France into Germany, administering little golden ampules of penicillin to the bared arms and buttocks of soldiers, keeping men fit to fight in the final hours of the war. In the decade after the war VD rates would plummet, almost to the point of extinction.

One disturbing footnote suggests the government had different standards over who should or should not receive penicillin. A U.S. Health Department study in Macon County, Alabama tracked 600 black patients for more than a decade. Doctors wanted to determine the path of untreated syphilis to see, among other things, if the consequences were worth treatment with the sometimes deadly combination of arsenical and heavy metals then in use. Two thirds of the patients had syphilis. If they were told anything, it was simply that they had "bad blood." Penicillin rendered the experiment meaningless, but doctors did not inform the patients that a cure existed.

In every sense, the government response to the disease and its cure was baffling. After the war, public health money would be turned over to others to fight more lethal (or socially acceptable) diseases. It has been argued that an opportunity was lost to eradicate a sexual plague. Funds for clinics and contact tracing would decline. Sexual infection (and education) would return to the private sphere.

But still, a fear that had shaped sexuality for centuries had been defeated. We could kiss anyone, anywhere, even in Times Square on V-J Day, without fear.

The Bomb

William Laurence, a journalist for The New York Times, watched the end of the war through arc-welder's glasses: "A giant ball of fire rose as though from the bowels of the earth. Then a pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shooting skyward. At one stage it assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white. Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, sizzling upward, a thousand Old Faithful geysers rolled into one."

Nagasaki ceased to exist.

The world had entered the Atomic Age. Even after peace came, the military continued to test the new weapon of destruction. Scientists taped a pin-up of Rita Hayworth to Gilda, a bomb named after her 1946 movie, and dropped it at Bikini Atoll.

When Hayworth heard the news, she expressed outrage. "My two brothers fought in the war," she said. "They were never the same when they came home." The French had a different reaction. They named a skimpy bathing suit after the famous site.

Homecoming

Bill Mauldin, an 18-year-old cartoonist who served mostly in Italy, created two world-weary dogfaces named Willie and Joe. Mauldin, better than most historians, captured the foot soldier's view of World War Two. His cartoon ran in Stars and Stripes and in local newspapers around the world. He would describe two guys sitting in a foxhole, feeling homesick.

"You wanna go home?" asks one. "Hell, you found a home in the Army. You got your first pair of shoes and your first square meal in the Army. You're living a clean, healthy, outdoor life, and you want to go back and get henpecked?"

Almost eight million men and women were overseas. The prospect of their return--these heroic warriors who had made the world safe for democracy--was much discussed. Magazines ran articles on "What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran." Good Housekeeping offered this advice: "After two or three weeks he should be finished with talking, with oppressive remembering. If he still goes over the same stories, reveals the same emotions, you had best consult a psychiatrist. This condition is neurotic."

Emily Post told how to treat the seriously wounded: "We will do well to follow the first rules of good manners, which are: Don't stare, don't point, don't make personal remarks."

The country did not know what to expect. One psychiatrist, offered an opportunity to interview the crew of the Memphis Belle on the crew's return tour, wrote of her great relief when she could not find "any signs of ruthlessness."

In 1946 there were 35,000 discharges a day. The men returned and tried to revive marriages scarred by years of separation. A soldier who had carried a condom in his wallet--unused for the entire war, a shield of continence that left a familiar ring embossed in leather--came home to find that his fiancée had not waited. Soldiers who had been spared Dear John letters walked into situations that could not remain hidden. Even Mauldin, whose reunion with his wife and child was the subject of an article in Life, saw his marriage fall apart after his return.

Marriages consisting of a weekend pass and a thousand letters could not hold. The divorce rate in America doubled between 1940 and 1946. By the end of the decade one million veterans had added divorce to their battle ribbons.

William Wyler, a daring filmmaker who had flown with the Memphis Belle for one of the war's best documentaries, captured the difficulties of returning servicemen in the Academy Award-winning The Best Years of Our Lives. One bombardier returns to a faithless wife and a meaningless job. A sergeant who discovers his family grown up and independent finds his old job at the bank stifling and takes to drink. A sailor who suffered the loss of both hands cannot begin the touch that will heal his relationship with his childhood sweetheart.

In Hollywood, as in real life, the war was, for the most part, segregated. These returning servicemen were all members of the white middle class.

For the duration, America had believed in the propaganda. "Throughout the war," writes John Jeffries in Wartime America, "advertisers painted reassuring and sentimental pictures of home-front America as a place of sacrifice, hard work and common cause, where traditional values and patterns of life would sustain the fighting men, themselves products and protectors of a timeless Norman Rockwell America." What the American soldiers carried around in their minds was the image "of smalltown America, of the corner drugstore, of old-fashioned virtues and folkways--and of Mom's pies." White houses, white fences, white steeples.

What they found was an America that was repressed and bigoted and bordering on the totalitarian. There were battles still to be fought--for racial equality, for sexual liberation and for freedom.

Readjustment Blues

The GI Bill sent a million veterans to college, reversing the ratio of males to females on campus. But Beth Bailey points out that the returning veteran was different from Joe College of the Thirties. "Angry exchanges in student newspapers often boiled down to one issue. Veterans claimed they simply wanted women, not girls. Coeds angrily insisted that they knew what that meant--and publicly said no. But the misunderstandings went deeper than standards of sexual behavior. College men were saying that the American college girl was spoiled, self-centered, that she knew nothing of the realities of life."

Bailey notes that one war correspondent said "he'd heard more complaints from American women over the lack of nylons than he had heard from European women over the destruction of their homes and the deaths of their men." The men were serious. They wanted to return home, buy a piece of land, build a house and put a woman in that house. They had dreamed of a future, fought for that future and wanted to get on with that future.

Fortune declared that the average GI didn't "want a new America. He wants the old one--only more of it."

"Those boys have been through a hell of a lot," an Air Force officer told Mademoiselle. "And they're going to want to come back to somebody more like the old style. I don't care about the bright lights now. I want a pretty, solid, all-round girl . . . and a sincere one. A boy wants to know where he stands . . . not all this beating around the bush. I'm not looking for the most popular girl on the dance floor now."

In 1946 the marriage rate hit 16.4 per 1000, 25 percent higher than in 1942. No long courtships or competitive dating. No gradual getting to know each other. It was a matter of taking the final hill.

Women who entered the workplace were expected to return to the private sphere of the family, into a world of supermarkets and tract houses. The GI Bill, with its low-interest mortgages, sparked a building boom, and a new American dream. Betty Friedan described the transition in It Changed My Life: "During the war, we'd had jobs like researcher or editorial assistant and met GIs at the Newspaper Guild Canteen, and written V-Mail letters to lonesome boys we'd known at home, and had affairs with married men--hiding our diaphragms under the girdles in the dresser. And then the boys our age had come back from the war. I was bumped from my job on a small labor news service by a returning veteran."

Women turned to Freud and psychoanalysis. Moss Hart created a lonely woman editor in the Broadway hit Lady in the Dark, which interpreted women's dissatisfaction as simply the need for a man. Two Freudians authored a bestselling book, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which counseled females to seek fulfillment as housewives, mothers and lovers: "Where the woman is unable to admit and accept dependence upon her husband as the source of gratification and must carry her rivalry even into the act of love, she will seriously damage his sexual capacity. To be unable to gratify in the sexual act is for a man an intensely humiliating experience; here it is that mastery and domination, the central capacity of the man's sexual nature, must meet acceptance or fail."

Scholars would ponder the paradox of derailed feminism in the postwar years: Women who had held jobs and wielded power in the public sphere retreated to old roles. They gave up hard-earned freedom, for what? "It was fun at first, shopping in those new supermarkets," wrote Friedan. "And we bought barbecue grills and made dips out of sour cream and dried onion soup to serve with potato chips, while our husbands made the martinis as dry as in the city and cooked hamburgers on the charcoal, and we sat in canvas chairs on our terrace and thought how beautiful our children looked, playing in the twilight, and how lucky we all were, and that it would last forever."

The martinis helped.

From Casablanca to Film Noir

The war changed the battle between the sexes. During the Depression we saw gold diggers and ditsy socialites careen across the screen in musicals and screwball comedies. The most memorable film of the war years, Casablanca, touched a different emotional chord. The film offered romantic obsession, male camaraderie and an appropriately patriotic ending. Rick, abandoned by lisa in Paris, overcomes his bitterness, saying the "problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans." Rick accepts lisa's infidelity as something wrought by the havoc of war. What would have happened if Rick and lisa had met again, after the war was won?

Humphrey Bogart's cynical tough guy became the new male role model, one to match the new female who appeared in the Forties. Hollywood had discovered the works of Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Raymond Chandler--brooding mystery writers whose women were frequently femmes fatales, seductive beauties who used sex as a tool, who turned desire into betrayal.

The directors of the Forties created a genre that became known as film noir. The trend started in 1941 with Bogie in The Maltese Falcon, followed by Laura, Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window and Murder, My Sweet. In 1946 and 1947 Hollywood released a series of increasingly darker films: Gilda, The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Blue Dahlia, Dead Reckoning and Out of the Past. The films fed off the suspicion and sexual paranoia of the war. Marriage no longer controlled female sexuality. Sam Spade was having an affair with his partner's wife, and she not only thought he had killed her husband, she found the thought romantic.

Wives were uncontrollable: In Gilda, Rita Hayworth would declare, "If I'd been a ranch, they would have named me the Bar Nothing."

In these films, the husband was often a cuckold or worse. One of Gilda's lovers dismisses the threat of an irate spouse: "For a long, long time I've taken husbands little by little, in small doses, so that now I've developed a complete immunity to them."

Frank Krutnik, author of In a Lonely Street, traces the new treatment of women back to the pin-ups of the war. We had put women on a pedestal and surrounded that pedestal with barbed wire---juggling our fantasies with stories of infidelity, confusing longing with the threat of infection in VD films. The dream girl had become a nightmare.

The women in film noir had killer looks. They knew the effect of a low-cut dress, a veiled glance from behind a shower of hair. The moviemakers couldn't show sex--the Production Code wouldn't allow that--but they filled the screen with sexual tension and innuendo. Lauren Bacall was "sizzling, slinky, husky, sultry," and could bring Bogart down with the challenge, "I'm hard to get--all you have to do is ask me." The perfect match for Bogie--she could even instruct him in sexual matters, saying after one kiss: "It's even better when you help."

Krutnik points out the dilemma posed by the femme fatale: "The noir hero frequently agonizes about whether or not the woman can be trusted, whether she means it when she professes love for him, or whether she is seeking to dupe him in order to achieve her own ends."

In The Blue Dahlia, Alan Ladd returns from the war to find that his wife has been unfaithful. She tells him, "I go where I want to with anybody I want. I just happen to be that kind of a girl."

He walks away--right into the arms of Veronica Lake. She is as familiar as the pin-up he'd worshiped in the war: "Every guy's seen you before, somewhere. The trick is to find you."

The Outlaw

Film noir pushed the boundaries of Production Code propriety. Howard Hughes ignored them completely. The maverick millionaire playboy made his own rules, whether constructing The Spruce Goose, a 200-ton airplane made of plywood, or working on a more interesting fuselage. Beginning in 1941, he fought a one-man, two-weapon war against the man known as the Hollywood Hider.

Joe Breen had been the chief enforcer 162 of the Code since the early Thirties. In March 1941 Breen sat through a screening of Hughes' newest film, The Outlaw. He then fired off this letter:

"In my more than ten years of critical examination of motion pictures, I have never seen anything quite so unacceptable as the shots of the breasts of the character of Rio. This is the young girl whom Mr. Hughes recently picked up and who has never before, according to my information, appeared on the motion picture screen. Throughout almost half the picture the girl's breasts, which are quite large and prominent, are shockingly emphasized and in almost every instance, are very substantially uncovered."

Breen, shell-shocked after years of defending the country's virtue, was losing his grip. He had issued injunctions against sweater shots "in which the breasts are clearly outlined," against strapless evening gowns and flimsy negligees. Now, overwhelmed by Jane Russell's cleavage in the movie, he ordered the filmmaker to cut "37 breast shots."

Hughes refused. He was well aware of his star's attributes. He had designed a device that would add a certain upthrust to Russell's anatomy, though it really wasn't necessary.

He initiated his own campaign against the censors. PR agents released still photos of Russell from a film that no one had even seen. She became one of the most popular pin-ups of the war.

Without a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration, Hughes booked the film into a San Francisco theater in 1943. "How would you like to tussle with Russell?" asked a billboard that showed the star reclining in a haystack. Another ad proclaimed, "The Outlaw conclusively proves that sex has not yet been rationed."

The booking was a sellout, but the mysterious millionaire decided to table the film for another three years. Was he waiting for a changing of the guard? Perhaps. In the interim, Will Hays--the general who orchestrated the Production Code--retired.

In 1946 Hughes released the film nationally without a seal, with a publicity campaign that emphasized the attempted censorship and Jane Russell's monumental endowment. A skywriter filled the sky with smoketrails giving the film's name followed by two circles topped by two dots. Everyone knew what the circles represented.

A Baltimore judge, upholding a ban on the film, declared that Russell's breasts "hung over the picture like a thunderstorm spread over a landscape."

Hughes showed that a film could ignore the Code and make a profit.

Following the war the country was flooded with foreign films--ungoverned by Hollywood morality--promising a new realism.

"When these people talk about realism," Joe Breen said, "they usually talk about filth."

Hollywood Scandals

Throughout the Thirties, the industry had protected its own. Fearing a repeat of scandals similar to the Fatty Arbuckle trials, gossip columnists painted rosy pictures of stars and starlets. But the gentleman's agreement that had protected Hollywood for a decade began to unravel, replaced by a tragic hunt for scapegoats. Those who refused to conform to sexual and political norms became targets.

In 1942 Los Angeles police picked up a young vagrant named Betty Hansen. Among her possessions was a slip of paper with Errol Flynn's telephone number. The swashbuckling star of Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, Flynn was also famous as a master swordsman in the bedroom. Hansen, who happened to be under 18, said she had met Flynn at a pool party and that the evening had ended with sex. The star, she said, kept his socks on.

Perhaps sensing a weak case, the D.A. rummaged around Hollywood for another "victim." They brought in Peggy Satterlee, a well-endowed young woman making her living as a dancer. She was supposedly 16.

Flynn admitted entertaining Satterlee on his yacht. "Who asks for a birth certificate at a time like that?" he wondered. "Especially when she is built like Venus?"

The headlines announced Robin Hood Charged With Rape. Flynn hired Jerry Giesler, the Hollywood lawyer who specialized in celebrity cases that smacked of scandal. Under cross-examination, the girls seemed confused. The jury acquitted Flynn on all counts. A newsboy hawking his paper said simply, "Wolf freed!"

The phrase "In like Flynn" became a popular euphemism for sexual conquest.

Everyone loved Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, but the actor's offscreen life generated considerable controversy. In the Twenties, his predilection for young women had filled the tabloids. Now his political views made him a target. An early antifascist, he had parodied Hitler in the 1940 film The Great Dictator.

In 1943 Hedda Hopper announced to the world that aspiring actress Joan Barry was bearing the illegitimate child of Charlie Chaplin and denounced him in her column.

Chaplin didn't deny knowing Barry. He had met her in 1941 and--perhaps under the sway of the breastmania that blossomed with the war--he would describe her as a "big, handsome woman of 22, well built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive." On June 3, 1943 Joan Barry filed a paternity suit. That this was more than a sexual scandal was soon apparent. Barry was aided in her pursuit of justice by no less than J. Edgar Hoover and William Randolph Hearst.

Chaplin denied paternity but offered to support Barry until the child was born and a blood test could be performed. Eventually, three doctors would testify that the test proved conclusively that Chaplin was not the father of the child.

The first trial ended in a hung jury. A second jury would eventually decide, despite the evidence, that Chaplin would have to pay child support.

When Barry first surfaced, the case came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Barry was telling investigators that she had joined Chaplin in New York when he traveled there to make a speech urging that America enter the war in Europe to help Russia fight the Nazis.

The FBI arrested Chaplin for a violation of the Mann Act, a federal law prohibiting interstate travel for immoral purposes. In Hoover's mind, support for a second front was the immoral act.

Hoover knew the use of sexual blackmail. During the war, he had bugged brothels and hotel rooms in Washington, D.C., trying to get incriminating evidence on foreign diplomats. He put Chaplin, newly married to Oona O'Neill, under surveillance and allegedly bugged his hotel rooms. Agents quizzed servants, asking about "wild parties and naked women."

On the witness stand, Chaplin admitted that he had paid Barry's train fare but said he did not travel with her. He did not pay her hotel bills; indeed, he had seen her only once in his 23-day stay. He said the visit lasted 30 minutes; under coaching from the FBI she said it lasted three hours--in bed.

The government's agenda was evident in the questioning. The prosecutor asked: "Are you sure you didn't go into the bedroom with her and undress?"

"I did not," Chaplin replied.

"Didn't you have a bedroom conversation regarding the second front?"

"No, I did not."

After acquitting Chaplin on the criminal charges, one of the jurors told him, "It's all right, Charlie. It's still a free country."

The juror was mistaken. Chaplin was forced to pay child support even though blood tests had proved he was not the father, and when he produced the pacifist film Monsieur Verdoux in 1947, Hedda Hopper launched a vicious smear campaign. With Hoover's blessing, the American Legion staged a boycott of all Chaplin's films. Accused of being a Communist sympathizer, Chaplin declared: "I am what you call a peacemonger."

When Chaplin and Oona traveled to London for the premiere of Limelight in 1952, he learned that the U.S. Attorney General had instructed immigration authorities to deny the English-born Chaplin a reentry visa unless he submitted to an inquiry on his politics and moral worth. Thenceforth, Charlie Chaplin would be a citizen of the world.

A similar fate befell Ingrid Bergman. Her public persona was beyond reproach. On the screen the beloved actress had played a nun in 1945's The Bells of St. Mary's and Saint Joan in 1948's Joan of Arc. But postwar America was turning ugly. A witch-hunt had begun and it was only a matter of time before someone was burned at the stake.

In 1949 Bergman left a husband and daughter to move in with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. He was the innovative creator of such films as Open City, Paisan and Ways of Love--the very type of neorealism that Joe Breen had dismissed as filth. America felt betrayed. Saint Ingrid would conform to her public image, and our expectations, or pay the price.

Breen actually wrote her a letter begging her to reconsider her relationship with Rossellini, warning of the possible impact on her career. She thanked him for his concern, but chose to remain with the Italian, bearing him a son and twin daughters. America turned its back on the actress. Hollywood blacklisted her--she would not make another Hollywood film until 1956. Time announced that she was "Off the Pedestal": "They saw me in Joan of Arc and thought I was a saint," Bergman would say. "I'm not. I'm just a human being."

The Bergman scandal became a political cause célèbre. Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado vowed to confront "the mad dogs of the industry." He proposed legislation that would require entertainers to be licensed. If an actor, director or producer violated the law or moral standards of the country, he or she would not be allowed to work. The government could bar any film that encouraged "contempt for public or private morality" or starred "persons of ill repute." Raving on, he called Rossellini a "narcotics addict, Nazi collaborator and black-market operator," a love thief who had turned Bergman into "a powerful force for evil," one of the current "apostles of degradation."

Bergman was ostracized because she broke with convention. But she also symbolized the war between Washington and Hollywood. In the aftermath of World War Two, Hollywood directors had begun to make films about social issues. Gentleman's Agreement looked at anti-Semitism; Home of the Brave addressed racial bigotry.

But the House Un-American Activities Committee had a different view of what it took to be a true American. In 1947 HUAC began questioning the patriotism of its fellow Americans, including those from Hollywood. A number of stars testified and were encouraged to name names--identifying those in the industry they considered subversive. Several highly regarded artists (known as the Hollywood Ten) refused to cooperate and were cited for contempt of Congress. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and others flew to Washington, D.C. to protest the hearings. But intimidation took its toll. The Hollywood Ten--along with 300 other writers, directors and actors--were blacklisted by the industry that should have supported them.

HUAC turned its attention to radio and television, to advertising agencies, to college campuses and even to members of the clergy. Neighbors informed on neighbors. Reputations were ruined, lives destroyed. America, infected by paranoia, became what it had just fought a war to defeat.

Big Brother

During the war J. Edgar Hoover had recruited an estimated 60,000 volunteers, mostly from the American Legion. These self-appointed patriots were to glean information about subversive activities. Not surprisingly, sex that did not fit Hoover's idea of morality was one such activity. Into the files went information that so-and-so liked to walk around his house in the nude, that Senator X liked boys, that W.C. Fields had paintings of Eleanor Roosevelt that, when viewed upside down, revealed her sexual organs.

Sexual intelligence was a weapon of war: The FBI had bugged brothels in the capital, trying to gain leverage on foreign diplomats. Washington also sought information on American citizens, including Eleanor Roosevelt. When Army Counter-intelligence tried to monitor the activities of Joseph Lash--a friend of the First Lady's--it bugged hotel rooms where the entourage was staying. Microphones captured the sound of Lash and Trude Pratt (a leader in the American Student Union) making love. The surveillance report announced: "Subject and Mrs. Pratt appeared to be greatly endeared to each other and engaged in sexual intercourse a number of times." By the time the information got to Hoover, it was Mrs. Roosevelt, not Mrs. Pratt, who was reported to have been the lady in Lash's arms.

More than anyone else in Washington, Hoover knew the power of sexual blackmail, and he used his network of informants in self-defense. In the Thirties he had dealt with journalists who derided his "mincing step." Attacks on Hoover's sexuality were attacks on the Bureau. In The Boss, Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox recount how a woman attending a bridge party held by the aunt of an FBI agent had confided that "the director was a homosexual and kept a large group of boys around him." Almost before the dishes had dried a local FBI agent had called her into his office and "severely chastised her."

When a beauty parlor operator gossiping with one of her beauticians breezily stated that "the Director was a sissy, liked men and was a queer," she found herself facing two agents who told her she would "be given the opportunity to testify as to exactly what she did or did not say."

In England, novelist George Orwell wrote a book about an authoritarian society in which sex was a subversive activity. Citizens in 1984 lived with the warning: Big Brother Is Watching You. Members of the Ministry of Love turned in those suspected of engaging in sexual activity. Orwell was writing about postwar England, but America already had its own version of Big Brother.

Banning Books

Edmund Wilson, the eminent critic, had for years kept a private journal in which he observed and recorded impressions of sex. Even as D.H. Lawrence rocked the world with the explicit language in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Wilson was creating his own palette to describe passion. In 1946 Wilson thought he could make these topics public. He turned the material from the journals into a series of interlocking stories called Memoirs of Hecate County.

The book sold 50,000 copies within five months. It was too much for the Old Guard, who, having established repressive victories over movies, magazines and radio, still had to pursue books on a case-by-case basis. John Sumner, who had taken over the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice from Anthony Comstock in 1915, had for 30 years been the voice of American censorship. Near the end of his career, he launched one more attack. He raided four bookstores in Manhattan, confiscating 130 copies of Wilson's book.

William Randolph Hearst ordered his newspapers to crusade against indecent literature. Punish Writers Of Filth urged the headlines. Prurient Fiction Linked To Crime.

Sumner found a willing champion in New York District Attorney Frank Hogan. Hogan, too, seems to have been sensitive to wartime adultery. He charged that the book celebrated "the immense delight of sexual intercourse with the wife of another man."

Hogan filed a brief that underlined every sexual scene in the book, itemizing 20 separate acts of sexual intercourse, four unsuccessful attempts at sexual intercourse, various daytime reveries about sexual intercourse, and ten or more filthy conversations about sex. "Finally," he harrumphed, "the story is not without its disgusting embellishments." Gee, we must have missed those.

A three-judge panel declared the book obscene. The Supreme Court upheld the decision.

Book censorship proceeded along several fronts. At the beginning of the decade, Postmaster Walker had declared as unmailable both Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra. Bluenoses in Detroit, Newark and Milwaukee banned Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes, while the Boston contingent went after Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, charging that it promoted "lascivious thoughts" and might "arouse lustful desire." The Massachusetts Attorney General sought an injunction against Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber, citing some 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies and assorted descriptions of women undressing in the presence of men. The judge said the book put him to sleep; the controversy put Forever Amber on the top of the best-seller lists for two years.

The prosecutions intimidated both publishers and writers. In 1948, when Norman Mailer tried to describe the reality of World War Two, including the language, in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he had to resort to using a three-letter euphemism: fug.

When Mailer was introduced to Broadway actress Tallulah Bankhead, she reportedly said: "Oh yes, you're the dear boy who doesn't know how to spell fuck."

The Kinsey Report

In 1948 a book would appear that would change the way Americans viewed sex. At the very least, we would learn a new sexual lexicon that would replace euphemisms such as Norman Mailer's fug. The proper word was coitus. And should we have occasion to refer, in polite conversation, to fellatio and cunnilingus, we could use the term oral-genital contact. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male--most often referred to simply as the Kinsey Report--was an objective look at sex. The book caused a sensation.

In the late Thirties Indiana University instituted a course in marriage. Looking for someone to coordinate it, school officials picked an unlikely candidate. Alfred Charles Kinsey was an entomologist with a passion for gall wasps. He had spent the past 17 years collecting some four million of the little creatures--he believed in the empirical method, that before you commented on a certain structure in a wasp wing, you would have to look at many wasp wings.

Kinsey recognized his own lack of knowledge regarding the new subject. There was no suitable text for a course in marriage (at the time the college dealt with sex in a single lecture in a required course on hygiene). Putting together a list of questions, he began to interview students. He asked about everything--from the frequency of orgasm to when and how it was achieved.

Kinsey encountered controversy from the outset. Thurman Rice, the same professor who gave the annual sex-hygiene lecture, attacked him for interviewing coeds behind closed doors, for showing slides considered too stimulating and for not declaring that premarital sex was wrong. Besides, he said, the subject did not warrant a whole course--it would put sex out of proportion to its importance. Local church leaders joined the protest.

In 1940 Kinsey gave up the course, but the university president suggested he continue his research. Over the next 15 years, Kinsey and his team of researchers interviewed more than 17,000 males and females.

His network of informants matched that of Mr. Hoover's. Kinsey contacted clergymen, psychiatrists, social workers, persons in the social register, prison inmates and women's club leaders.

He went out of his way to explore the world of homosexuals, traveling to Times Square and the gay underworld of Chicago. He conducted interviews in hotels, prompting one manager to throw him out with the comment that he did not intend that anyone should have his mind undressed in his hotel.

Some of Kinsey's conclusions:

• 85 percent of the white male population had premarital coitus and 50 percent had extramarital coitus.

• By the age of 15, 95 percent of males had experienced some form of sexual release. (Kinsey used the term sexual outlet and noted six kinds: masturbation, nocturnal emissions, petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual contact and intercourse with animals.)

• 92 percent of men masturbated.

• 37 percent of men had reached orgasm at least once through homosexual contact.

• 69 percent of the white male population had some experience with prostitutes.

Kinsey was a scientist, not a preacher. He collected facts without judging behavior. "This is first of all a report on what people do," he wrote, "which raises no question of what they should do." To give you a sense of how dramatic and liberating this view was, consider the best-selling sex manual of the day.

Theodoor Van de Velde published Ideal Marriage in 1926. The book had sold millions of copies by the time Kinsey published his report. Van de Velde had his own sense of what was normal: "But let us first of all make unmistakably clear that by sexual intercourse, we refer exclusively to normal intercourse between opposite sexes. If we cannot avoid occasional reference to certain abnormal sexual practices, we shall emphatically state that they are abnormal. Ideal marriage permits normal, physiological activities the fullest scope, in all desirable and delectable ways; these we shall envisage without any prudery, but with deepest reverence for true chastity. All that is morbid, all that is perverse, we banish: For this is holy ground."

What was perverse? Van de Velde taught the world that it was perfectly appropriate to perform the genital kiss as a means of precoital arousal, but that one must stop short of orgasm or, oh God, "the hell gate of the realm of sexual perversion" would open and devour the souls of all involved. Honest. We're not making this up.

Kinsey simply noted that: "Mouth-genital contacts of some sort, with the subject as either the active or the passive member in the relationship, occur at some time in the histories of nearly 60 percent of all males."

Furthermore, there were no distinctions between erogenous zones--there were no erroneous zones: "While the genitalia include the areas that are most often involved in sexual stimulation and response, it is a mistake to think of the genitalia as the only sex organs, and a considerable error to consider a stimulation or response that involves any other area as biologically abnormal, unnatural, contrary to nature and perverse. Mouth, breast, anal or other stimulations involve the same nervous system (namely the whole nervous system)."

Kinsey's report on sexual behavior in the male prompted considerable controversy. A professor at one scientific institute told Reader's Digest that after "publication of one recent survey on sex, the number of illegitimate pregnancies among our girl students has been multiplied four times over."

The head of the Salvation Army said such reports become "weapons for temptation" and warned that "the effect of unchastity on the nervous system is severe. You may start out rebelling against 'stuffy old moral and religious systems' and wind up in a psychiatric hospital."

Even J. Edgar Hoover commented: "It is important to the very future of our national life that we hold fast to our faith. Man's sense of decency declares what is normal and what is not. Whenever the American people, young or old, come to believe there is no such thing as right or wrong, normal or abnormal, those who would destroy our civilization will applaud a major victory over our way of life."

Kinsey's book--an 804-page compilation of charts, statistics and interpretation intended for the scientific community--sold more than 200,000 copies in two months. Associate Wardell Pomeroy's biography Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research cataloged the public reaction. Time reported that a grain merchant gave his mistress a copy with the inscription: "I hope this will help you to understand me better." In a greater bit of hyperbole, Time described a Miami Beach playboy who sent a copy each to 50 women he knew. Comedians worked Kinsey into gags. "Hotter than the Kinsey Report" became a national figure of speech. Kinsey was asked to endorse everything from religious works to bras to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Mae West asked to meet him.

With a perverse appetite for records, America focused on extremes. Everyone, it seems, knew about the guy who averaged more than 30 ejaculations a week for more than 30 years, and the poor guy who had ejaculated only once in the same period of time. Americans stopped thinking in terms of normal or abnormal and began comparing themselves to averages on number of orgasms per week (around five for married males) and to minutiae such as the angle achieved by an erection (slightly above the horizontal for most, but 45 degrees above in 15 percent to 20 percent of cases). Three quarters of all white males reach orgasm after two minutes of sexual intercourse? Pull out the stopwatch, Betty.

Edward Brecher, in The Sex Researchers, notes that Kinsey had run into a prototype of Big Brother. While conducting research for the marriage course in 1938, Kinsey had interviewed a campus policeman, a man with an eighth-grade education, who thought Indiana students were perverts. "They would lie under trees in pairs and just pet and pet," writes Brecher. "Sexual intercourse the policeman could understand, but this interminable petting must be some form of perversion."

His research turned Kinsey into a sexual radical: In a culture where class and education dictated sexual attitudes and mores, who had the right to impose their standards on the rest of America? Who policed the sex police?

Kinsey approved of laws that protected person and property--such laws could be defended rationally. Injury was easy to define. But a wealth of other laws policed the most personal of behavior: "If society's only interest in controlling sex behavior were to protect persons, then the criminal codes concerned with assault and battery should provide adequate protection. The fact that there is a body of sex laws which are apart from the laws protecting persons is evidence of their distinct function, namely that of protecting custom. Just because they have this function, sex customs and the sex laws seem more significant and are defended with more emotion than the laws that concern property or person."

Kinsey ended the era of "hush and pretend." Surely, laws should reflect the desires of the people and be based on real facts. Throughout the book, Kinsey challenged ridiculous laws such as the U.S. Naval Academy's practice of rejecting "any candidate who showed signs of masturbation."

Morris Ernst, the lawyer who had successfully defended Ulysses against a U.S. Customs ban, who had fought to make the dissemination of birth control information legal, saw the meaning immediately. In 1949 he addressed a gathering of scientists:

"Our laws have attempted to abolish all sexual outlets except marital intercourse, nocturnal emissions and to some extent solitary masturbation. The first Kinsey Report says that 85 percent of all younger males are criminals, since they make use of other sexual outlets.

"Forty-four states have laws against adultery. There have been only a handful of prosecutions. Yet the Kinsey Report may well, in its final national overall figures, show that one third of all husbands should be in jail if fact and law were the same."

Ernst saw the injustice of capricious and spiteful sex laws. "For example, is there more fornication in Louisiana, where it is not a crime, than in Arkansas, where a first offense is appraised as worth $20? What about the amount of sodomy in Georgia, where the punishment is life, compared with New Hampshire, where it is not covered by a special statute? And if you have seduction in your heart, or wherever it resides, I suggest you pick Vermont or Utah rather than Georgia. It may spell a difference of 20 years of freedom to you."

At the University of Illinois, a former GI turned psychology student, deeply impressed by the Kinsey Report, wrote an editorial on the subject. Upon graduation, he continued his studies at Northwestern University. In a term paper titled "Sex Behavior and the U.S. Law," he wrote: "Somewhere along the line, sex became separated from the rest of the moral freedoms.

"Why does tolerance turn to intolerance, rationality to irrationality, when man contemplates the problem of sex?" he asked. "Why does Webster's Collegiate Dictionary define masturbation as 'self-pollution,' why do the lawmakers become so emotional in their legislation against sodomy, why are excellent literary works sometimes banned as obscene, why is it still against the law in some states to circulate information regarding birth control and venereal disease?

"It is impossible to undo the mistakes of centuries in a few years, but Krafft-Ebing and Freud have started the work, and Kinsey's statistics will undoubtedly help too. Let us see if we cannot begin to find our way out of this dark, emotional, taboo-ridden labyrinth, and into the fresh air and light of reason."

The student would have more to say on the subject in the decade ahead. His name was Hugh Hefner.

The Dear John letter destroys the double standard, proving that women are sexual creatures.

The war promoted a heady blend of patriotism and promiscuity. Some women waited, others would not.