Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution, Part VI: Something Cool, 1950--1959

These were the good old days, the happy days, what would become for many of us the source of our earliest, fondest memories. They still define the American character--on television reruns. At every hour of the day someone somewhere is reliving the golden age of the American family.

For two decades Americans had lived in the grip of poverty and war. Now we were ready for some giddy, goofy fun. The country was swept by frivolous fads--baton twirling, Hula Hoops, paint-by-number art kits, Davy Crockett hats, 3-D movies. But who needed 3-D? The whole world seemed like a wide-screen, stereophonic special effect.

The pop culture of the Fifties became a parody of the American dream. We lived on Madison Avenue, in an unlikely world of perfect appliances and perfect families, of highballs and hifis, of Bermuda shorts and backyard barbecues.

Teenagers went to sock hops and drive-in movies, where they practiced unhooking bras. College boys staged panty raids, marching across campuses chanting, "We want girls! We want sex!" But they settled for cotton underwear as a sorry substitute for the real thing.

When motivational researchers claimed that advertising contained subliminal sexual messages, no one was surprised. Automobiles were obvious sex symbols. Cars looked like phallic rocket ships and everyone knew the grill of the Edsel was a Ford engineer's hymn to female genitalia. It didn't sell.

Conformity became a national passion--part of a return to sexual and political conservatism. Male executives wore the same gray flannel suits and drank the same cocktails at mandatory two-martini lunches. Women wore Dior dresses that hid their legs and lived in tract houses that hid their very existence.

Television moved in, a new and welcome member of the nuclear family. We liked Ike and loved Lucy. Fred and For many people, the stroll down memory lane starts here. The Fifties offered something cool as an antidote for Cold War conformity. We had Marilyn Monroe as well as McCarthyism. Centerfolds and censorship. Drive-in theaters and TV Togetherness. Mickey Spillane and The Mickey Mouse Club. Elvis and Alfred E. Neuman. Ann Landers and Lenny Bruce. Edsels and Ed Sullivan. Hi-fi and highballs. Gray flannel suits and Bermuda shorts. Bullet bras and Brigitte Bardot. Brando and Barbie. Howdy Doody and Hula Hoops. Frank Sinatra and Father Knows Best. Christian Dior and James Dean. Confidential and Tales From the Crypt. Cool jazz and hot rods. Drag strips and strippers. Vespas and Volkswagens. Spike heels and blue suede shoes. Coonskin caps and black berets. Spy planes and Sputniks. Golden Arches and Golden Dreams. Pogo and Playboy. Flying saucers and The Twilight Zone. The Beat Generation and rock 'n' roll. It was cool, man! Real cool.

Ethel became everyone's next-door neighbors. In 1950 only 3.1 million American homes had television sets. By 1955 the number would be 32 million. Television relocated the family table. Henceforth, food would be served on trays.

Television offered a portrait of the American family as viewed in a fun-house mirror. We watched other families on Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Leave It to Beaver and Life With Father and identified with them, not even noticing that the one thing TV families never did was watch television.

Critics called it the boob tube, but they weren't referring to female anatomy. Television, from the very start, reflected mainstream middle-class morality, and the Federal Communications Commission made sure that TV was as sanitized as radio had been before it. No one had sex on TV; parents slept in separate beds in offscreen bedrooms. Still, there was Dagmar on Broadway Open House. And a whole generation of youngsters grew up watching Annette Funicello blossom on The Mickey Mouse Club.

When Senator Estes Kefauver grilled reputed members of organized crime on television, the primary attraction was Virginia Hill. As one writer observed, even the Senator had trouble keeping his eyes off the "extraordinarily long, silk-clad legs" of Bugsy Siegel's mistress.

Lucille Ball's pregnancy was played for laughs on I Love Lucy (they called it her "expectancy"). Millions of women followed her to term, spawning families of their own. In 1950 birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger had organized funding for research into an oral contraceptive that would make family planning as easy as taking aspirin. She was now the head of International Planned Parenthood, but no one on the home front seemed interested. We were in the midst of a baby boom, with women turning out children as though on assembly lines. The Depression had forced the birthrate to a low of 18.4 per 1000 women; now it rose to 25.3 per 1000. The birthrate for third children would double; for fourth children triple.

We were living in a Norman Rockwell world, but some fault lines were visible. Two of the best-selling books of the time were Dr. Benjamin Spock's on how to raise children and Mickey Spillane's on how to deal with them when they grew up and became Commie, pinko, pansy punks.

We had vanquished enemies abroad, only to have new ones surface. When Russia exploded its first nuclear device, we entered a world of deadly threat. Kids practiced duck-and-cover drills under school desks. Newspapers ran maps showing circles of destruction around major cities. They called it the Cold War, but it didn't stay cold.

We sent our boys to Korea to be slaughtered in a police action--whatever that was.

We were no longer the world's only superpower--and confidence gave way to suspicion. We began a demonic quest for the enemy within. We became a surveillance society, with citizen spying on citizen. Self-proclaimed protectors of the American way destroyed careers and ruined lives--all in the name of security.

For every frivolous fad there was a dark tic in the American psyche. There was an epidemic of UFO sightings. The government insisted that flying saucers did not exist, but it said that about U-2 spy planes as well. The nation, feeling that it was being watched, sought divine surveillance. Reconfirming that we were one nation "under God," we inserted that phrase into the pledge of allegiance. We had more money than our parents dreamed of, but added the comfort of "In God We Trust" to our country's paper currency.

Wilhelm Reich, a former disciple of Sigmund Freud, had concocted a theory of sex that suggested orgasm released a kind of energy into the air. The energy could be collected by orgone boxes, he said--six-sided, zinc-lined, coffin-sized containers--and used to restore orgiastic potency. Reich worried that atomic tests were poisoning this free-ranging sexual energy, that repression was crippling mankind's genital character. Instead of laughing off these pseudoscientific rantings, the Food and Drug Administration sent agents with axes to destroy all the orgone boxes, and to burn every published work by Reich that mentioned the dreaded orgone. Reich was charged with contempt of court, for which he was undeniably guilty. The doctor, diagnosed as a paranoid, died in prison in 1957.

America had saved the world and become the first superpower--and yet, instead of pride came paranoia. Wilhelm Reich may have been right. Something was contaminating the air we breathed. Suspicion and fear spread across the land--from small towns to the very seat of government.

The Poison Pen

The letters began to arrive in the spring. A family with two teenage daughters received mail that accused one daughter of sordid sexual behavior. A businessman read detailed accounts of his wife servicing other men. Those who read the letters believed the charges. Husbands and wives quarreled. The quarrels led to divorce and to abandonment.

And still the letters came. The poison pen touched the lives of families in College Park and East Point, Georgia. According to John Makris, author of The Silent Investigators, the rumormonger "alleged perverse sexual activities" and "disgusting and filthy sexual misconduct." Many parents refused to discuss the letters with authorities.

Makris tried to explain the bizarre impulse that caused such scandal: "This type of poison-pen letter is the outgrowth of sexual frustration. Beauty- and popularity-contest winners, pretty models, movie and television actresses and girls whose pictures--along with their addresses--appear under engagement or wedding notices in the newspapers are among those who most frequently receive these letters. Nor are these letters confined only to the opposite sex. A high school football star, for instance, who gets his name and his picture in the newspapers, becomes the target of homosexuals."

A newlywed received a letter accusing her husband of bigamy. She committed suicide. Investigation revealed that the charge was unfounded.

Sexual frustration? That might explain the perverts who wrote such letters, but not why so many people believed what was written. In the Fifties we lived in a world of lies, of deception and deceit--and the lies wrecked human lives. America was a schizophrenic nation, trying to hold to a pretense of virtue while never acknowledging the other America, the one of human lust and frailty.

Scandal was infectious. It became the lens through which we viewed life. An article in the March 1952 Coronet described one apocalypse: "Mark and Eva were discreet. They never risked idle gossip. They always met by a prearranged plan in a neighborhood where neither one was known. Sometimes they would park Eva's car and take Mark's for their few hours together. Sometimes it would be Eva's car. Their absence from their respective homes was always well covered. Not a soul who knew either even speculated about clandestine meetings.

"This very fact is why the sudden knowledge of their double living came as such a shock to all who knew them. 'It just pulls the props right out from under you. If a guy like Mark can be that two-faced, who on earth can be trusted?' gasped Mark's closest friends when they read the lurid headline Gas Truck Crashes Love-Tryst Car!

"'It's unbelievable,' said Eva's friends. 'It makes you feel there isn't anything decent or fine that you can have faith in anymore.'" The lovers were dead. Instead of grief, the only emotion their friends could summon was stunned indignation.

Cold War Confidential

The scandal magazine Confidential appeared on newsstands in 1952, promising that it "Tells the Facts and Names the Names." It was simply a commercial version of the poison-pen letter, one with a mass audience. Robert Harrison, publisher of such titles as Beauty Parade and Eyeful, got the idea for the bimonthly after watching the widely televised Kefauver hearings on organized crime, prostitution and vice. Harrison's insight was simple: "Americans like to read about things that they are afraid to do themselves."

Harrison exploited human weakness. He sent spies into the house of love. Would-be models and aspiring actresses, eager to earn a $1000 fee, would haunt the bars along Sunset Strip, making themselves available to the rich and famous. And like government agents, they kept miniature tape recorders in their purses, the better to catch the boasts and bedroom confidences of their victims. In the Fifties informing on your neighbor was a national pastime. While Herbert Philbrick might write the best-seller I Led Three Lives or another recruit might confess "I Was a Communist for the FBI," anonymous agents penned articles that could have been titled "I Was a Slut for Confidential."

We learned that Frank Sinatra consumed a bowl of Wheaties between sexual encounters, Errol Flynn had a two-way mirror installed in his bedroom, Dan Dailey liked to dress in drag, Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. were an item, Lana Turner shared a lover with Ava Gardner and Liberace liked boys.

Infrared film. Telephoto lenses. There were photos of alleged love nests, if not the offending parties in action. Harrison used the technology of the time to invade the privacy of America's aristocracy. Kenneth Anger, author of Hollywood Babylon, claims that Confidential was not above blackmail. Harrison allegedly opened an agency called Hollywood Research Inc. Investigators would take copies of "compromising materials" to the victims and suggest that their stories would be quashed in exchange for certain fees.

The rag reached a circulation of four million before it began to self-destruct. A story on Robert Mitchum said the star had stripped naked at a party thrown by Charles Laughton, covered himself with ketchup and bellowed, "I'm a hamburger." Mitchum filed suit.

Maureen O'Hara took issue with a published story that had her grappling with a Latin lover in the balcony of (continued on page 104) Something cool (continued from page 78) Grauman's Chinese Theatre. She sued for $5 million (and collected $5000).

One of the witnesses in O'Hara's trial, Polly Gould, killed herself the night before she was to testify. A member of Confidential's editorial staff, she had been selling secrets to the prosecutor. Soon after the trial, Howard Rush-more, the magazine's editor, shot his wife in the backseat of a cab, then turned the gun on himself.

Harrison's reign of terror ended when the State of California charged Confidential with conspiracy to commit criminal libel and distribute obscenity. He sold the magazine in 1958 and disappeared from view.

Harrison had kept sex mired in the tawdry for decades. He was a product of the tabloid journalism of the first half of the century. As a teenager he had worked for a national rag, The Daily Graphic--a kaleidoscope of scandal, confession and doctored photographs that earned the title The Daily Pornographic. He had moved from that job to working for Martin Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Daily and the Motion Picture Herald. Quigley was also one of the straitlaced Catholics who had bullied Hollywood into adopting the Production Code. In the shadow of propriety and repression, Harrison had put together a girlie magazine called Beauty Parade. When Quigley discovered the project, Harrison was out of a job. He took the basic formula--shots of models in sexy costumes, bikinis, loincloths and lingerie--and arranged it in short storyboards titled "What the French Maid Saw" or "Confessions of a Nudist" or "If Girls Did As Men Do." Harrison's empire of girlie magazines grew through the Forties to include Titter, Wink and Flirt--simple fare that combined baggy-pants humor and pin-ups.

A female editor who had read Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis contributed a little kink. As Tom Wolfe noted, this unsung heroine of the revolution brought us "the six-inch spike-heel shoes and the eroticism of backsides, or of girls all chained up and helpless, or of girls whipping the hides off men and all the rest of the esoterica of the Viennese psychologists."

Others saw the girlie magazines as pure Americana. These women, said Gay Talese in Thy Neighbor's Wife, portrayed sex as bizarre behavior. "His high-heeled heroines with whips and frowning faces were, in the best Puritan tradition, offering punishment for pleasure."

From Fashion To Fetish

This was supposedly a time of innocence. But there was something unhealthy loose in the world, a repressive tide that became increasingly visible in the postwar years. In fashion, Christian Dior sheathed women in the New Look--chastity garments that hid and hobbled the female form. Dior moved from the hourglass to the H shape, a look that inspired the sack dress, trapeze and balloon--fashions that made the female figure disappear. Panty girdles and brassieres bound the woman and dehumanized her. "Without foundations," declared Dior, "there can be no fashion." But foundations were unnatural molds that forced women into ideal static shapes. They seemed to take us back to the turn of the century, when a woman's place was in her corset--controlled and inaccessible. It seemed that we had crossed a line from fashion to fetish. John Willie, the pseudonym of an enthusiastically perverse mind, recorded this sense in the pages of Bizarre. Willie, whose real name was John Alexander Scott Coutts, was the "Leonardo da Vinci of fetish." In the introduction to his first issue, Coutts wrote, "Bizarre is, as its name implies, bizarre! It has no particular sense, rhyme nor reason, but typifies that freedom for which we fought... the freedom to say what we like, wear what we like and to amuse ourselves as we like in our own sweet way."

Bizarre was a bondage magazine, a postwar phenomenon that achieved considerable underground cult status. Covers showed women blindfolded, gagged, manacled. One of the earliest copies showed a devil holding a fashion pattern while looking at a chained model. Another depicted a woman riding an exercise bike. As she pedaled, revolving switches lashed her buttocks. There were articles on punishment techniques of the Puritans, with pictures of women held captive in pillories, of women bound and lowered into cold ponds. Americans amusing themselves in their own sweet way.

The Mccarthy Era

Puritans had their witch trials, but Americans of the Fifties had a witchhunt of their own. The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings launched in 1947 had run amok. Responding to Republican charges that he was soft on Communism, President Truman established loyalty oaths for government employees. Soon loyalty boards sprang up all across the country, but they were star chambers playing havoc with people's lives on the basis of rumors and innuendo.

Truman tried to rein in the anti-Communist hysteria by pointing out that after periods of great upheaval such as the Civil War and World War One there had been similar panic, with the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of vigilantism. At a press conference in June 1949, Truman ridiculed a HUAC proposal to screen the books in America's schools and colleges for subversion.

On February 9, 1950 an obscure U.S. Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy gave a speech to a Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he said, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 names known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working in and shaping the policy of the State Department."

The charge electrified America. Over the next few weeks, McCarthy changed the accusation--the 205 Communists became 205 "security risks." When the accusation became "57 card-carrying Communists," the FBI urged the Senator to be less specific. The fewer the details, the better.

The McCarthy Era had begun. America was trampled by what Senator Margaret Chase Smith called "the four horsemen of calumny--fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear."

An unsubstantiated charge by the Senator, or a snickering remark by one of his aides, could end a career. McCarthy's investigation of the State Department and the U.S. Army never produced a Communist nor exposed any wrongdoing. But Tailgunner Joe held the country hostage for four years, finally self-destructing during a televised Army-McCarthy hearing in 1954. Censured by his fellow senators, McCarthy died in disgrace, an alcoholic, at the age of 48 in 1957. But the damage lasted more than a decade, spread by others practiced in the art of what came to be known as McCarthyism. For some, the damage lasted a lifetime.

The Great Homosexual Panic Of 1950

Many historians say the witch-hunt was inspired by the power of television. While McCarthy was pursuing subversives, Senator Estes Kefauver was (continued on page 136) someting cool (continued from pge 104) holding televised hearings on organized crime. The spotlight took this unknown Tennessean and made him a national figure, as it would Richard Nixon two years later.

The box brought sensation and scandal into the home: Within the space of a few years there were probes of vice and prostitution, organized crime, comic books, pornography, obscenity, the Post Office, the State Department, the U.S. Army and Congress itself. Athan Theoharis, author of J. Edgar Hoover, Sex and Crime, describes how America's top cop exploited the new technology. Hoover had steadfastly denied the existence of organized crime. His reputation was built on a few well-publicized shoot-outs with Depression Era desperadoes, a kidnapping here or there and catching spies during the war. He picked on prostitutes and radicals, but he knew the value of a good conspiracy theory from his crusade against the Red Menace.

Kefauver paraded crime kingpins such as Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello before the camera and entertained America with tales of the Mafia, codes of silence, gunsels and bag ladies. The Kefauver Committee was more than an embarrassment to Hoover--it was a direct threat to his political turf. On the eve of the hearings on organized crime the FBI, through the Attorney General, was still denying the Mob's very existence.

When McCarthy came to Hoover and said he had gotten an enthusiastic response to his speech on subversives in the State Department, Hoover saw a way to regain the limelight. The new inquisition--the world of unsubstantiated charges and televised confrontation, the pressure to name names and betray fellow travelers--was custom-made for Hoover's favorite form of blackmail.

"The same month as McCarthy's charges," writes Theoharis, "the head of the Washington, D.C. police vice squad publicly asserted that at a 'quick guess' 3500 'sex perverts' were employed in the federal bureaucracy, of whom 300 to 400 were State Department employees. In response to this publicity, State Department security officers admitted that the department had fired 91 'sex perverts' since the establishment of the Federal Employee Loyalty Program."

"Communists, deviants--they're one and the same," said one senator, thus wedding the Red Scare with homophobia. Senator Clyde Hoey, described by Time magazine as a "frock-coated" North Carolinian, had been "quietly looking into a sordid matter: the problem of homosexuals in the government."

Senator Hoey found a record of "sexual perversion" among workers in 36 sectors of the government and a host more in the armed forces. He targeted 4954 deviants, most in the military. There were 574 suspect civilian government employees--some 143 in the State Department--who had quit, were fired or were cleared. The Veterans Administration housed 101 perverts, the Atomic Energy Commission 8, the ECA 27, the Library of Congress and other agencies 19, the White House none.

"It follows," Hoey warned, "that if blackmailers can extort money from a homosexual under threat of disclosure, espionage agents can use the same type of pressure to extort confidential information."

J. Edgar Hoover told Congress that FBI investigators possessed derogatory information on 14,414 federal employees and applicants and had identified 406 "sex deviates in government service." He asked for and received greater appropriations to launch a special Sex Deviates program. FBI agents began to hang out at leather bars and other gay haunts, collecting names. Theoharis writes that in 1977, when the FBI received permission to destroy the files in the Sex Deviates program, more than 300,000 pages had been accumulated.

Each file contained the name of a suspected pervert, his occupation and the charges that had brought him to the attention of the Deviates division. Theoharis reports that little is known of the use of these cards, but evidence exists that Hoover approved letters to those outside of government, warning college heads and law-enforcement agencies of the "security risks" within their own organizations.

Homosexuality, wrote Ralph Major in the September 1950 issue of Coronet magazine, was the "New Moral Menace to Our Youth."

This panic may be traced to the Kinsey Report on American males that had appeared in 1948. Kinsey had reported that "37 percent of the total male population has had at least some overt homosexual experience between adolescence and old age." If our men weren't growing up to be men, there was something hideously wrong with America.

Science was one source of the panic, literature another. James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity hinted at a hidden homosexual network within the Army. The story begins when a gay officer in the Bugle Corps promotes one of his "angels" over the more deserving Prewitt. Most Americans remember the movie version with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling about in the surf as a hymn to heterosexual passion and the danger of getting sand in the wrong places. The novel discussed queer baiting and FBI fairy hunts.

Ironically, the same panic that McCarthy unleashed came back to topple him. The Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 came about because of charges that McCarthy had pulled strings to try to get the Army to promote David Schine--a protégé of McCarthy staffer Roy Cohn. These three, devoted to driving out the "lavender lads" and "cookie pushers" from the State Department, were widely rumored to be gay and using favoritism to advance their own angels. Roy Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, still an outspoken gay basher.

The Brick Foxhole, a novel by future film director Richard Brooks, concerned a gay murder in the military in wartime Washington. In the movie version, called Crossfire, the bigotry became anti-Semitism. In postwar America, some prejudice was more acceptable than others. We were prepared to question intolerance related to race and religion, but not sex. The film was a hit for RKO, but both the director and the producer of the film were called to testify about their leftist leanings by HUAC.

During the war, the Pentagon tried to weed out gays--using profiles based on Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman's Male-Female Quotient to identify and turn away those of questionable sexual orientation. There are some who argue that the screening process actually alerted homosexuals to the presence of others of similar persuasion.

In 1951 Henry Hays founded the Mattachine Society, devoted to "the protection and improvement of Society's Androgynous Minority." (Lesbians, in 1955, would organize the Daughters of Bilitis.) Of course, Hays was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Confidential warned America that the Mattachine Society had a war chest of $600,000. The idea of secret cells of perverts fascinated America. That so many were willing to believe that sexual preference could be betrayed or subverted by homosexuals indicates the state of innocence (or ignorance) of the country on the subject of sex at the time. Did we believe that our own sexual identity was in danger? It appeared that the American male was not even loyal to his own gender. In 1952 ex-GI George Jorgensen underwent the first public sexchange operation, going to Denmark a man and returning as Christine Jorgensen, a woman.

The sexual undercurrent in national politics surfaced in the 1956 presidential election when Hoover crony Walter Winchell would declare that "a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen."

The homosexual panic was fueled by the press of the day. We had no clear picture of this sexual minority, and the uninformed mind created monsters.

"All too often," warned Eugene Williams, a Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of California, "we lose sight of the fact that the homosexual is an inveterate seducer of the young of both sexes and that he presents a social problem because he is not content with being degenerate himself: He must have degenerate companions and is ever seeking younger victims."

In 1949 the nation had been stunned by brutal sex crimes on the West Coast and in Idaho. The local incidents had turned into a national obsession. News week ran an article on "Queer People." Time on "The Abnormal." Collier's ran a 13-part series on "Terror in Our Cities."

J. Edgar Hoover wrote a widely reprinted article asking "How Safe Is Your Daughter?" and distributed coloring books that taught children to distrust strangers. The government produced statistics that claimed sex crimes other than prostitution were escalating-- from 46 per 100.000 in 1953 to 51 per 100,000 in 1954, and 54 per 100,000 in 1955.

Historian George Chauncey, author of The Postwar Sex Crime Panic; shows how expansive the propaganda campaign became: "The press reports that shaped public perceptions of the problem usually blurred the lines between different forms of sexual nonconformity. They did this in part simply by using a single term (sex deviate) to refer to anyone whose sexual behavior was different from the norm. Like the term abnormal, the term deviate made any variation from the supposed norm sound ominous and threatening, and it served to conflate the most benign and the most dangerous forms of sexual nonconformity. People who had sex outside of marriage, murdered little boys and girls, had sex with persons of the same sex, raped women, looked in other people's windows, masturbated in public or cast lewd glances' were all called sex deviates by the press."

Once you strayed from the norm, you were a monster.

Seduction Of The Innocent

Once again, America began to fear for its children. And there arose new crusaders with new concerns. Anthony Comstock, the prototype for all Puritan champions, once railed against "traps for the young," warning about the dangers of penny dreadfuls, dime novels and police gazettes. In the late Forties a new and most unlikely menace appeared--comic books.

With Hollywood chafing under a Production Code that sanitized all forms of sin, comic books filled a growing appetite for more-lurid fare. The old standards--Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Sheena--still entertained devoted fans, but they were joined by Gangbusters, True Crime Comics and Crime Does Not Pay. Americans may have left the city for the suburbs, but crime had followed--at least as far as the local news-stand. And a wave of more-frightening titles appeared, including Crypt of Terror, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear. Critics claimed that comic books were "sex horror serials" and "pulp paper nightmares" that created "ethical confusion" and moral decline. E.C. Comics even gave its most subversive title the warning label Tales calculated to drive you Mad.

Fearing that a diet of pulp would lead to juvenile delinquency, city fathers across the country cracked down. In 1947 the Indianapolis police department labeled comic books "vicious, salacious, immoral and detrimental to the youth of the nation."

In Rumson, New Jersey; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Binghamton, New York and Chicago, Cub Scouts and other schoolchildren collected comic books and tossed them on bonfires. Boston and Cincinnati appointed special comic book censors. The National Office for Decent Literature, long the watchdog of magazines and books, took to rating pulp panels.

Into this maelstrom walked Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who had worked with troubled youths in New York City. He began crusading against the comics in 1948.

According to Wertham, 90 percent of the nation's children read an average of 18 comic books a week. The average 16-year-old reader had "absorbed a minimum of 18,000 pictorial beatings, shootings, stranglings, blood puddles and torturings to death from comic books alone."

He would recount horror stories of innocent children led astray. Kids in the Fifties threw rocks at trains and automobiles, beat candy store owners with hammers, trampled siblings to death, poured kerosene over classmates and set them afire, led safecracking expeditions and committed "lust murders."

"There is nothing in these juvenile delinquencies," Wertham would write, "that is not described or told about in comic books. These are comic book plots."

Some of his stories reveal parental overreaction. Telling about a group of kids who, acting out things they read in comic books, tormented one girl, he noted: "They handcuffed her with handcuffs bought with coupons from comic books. Once, surrounding her, they pulled off her panties. . . . Now her mother has fastened the child's panties with a string around her neck, so the boys can't pull them down."

Wertham's crusade was a failure at first. When the New York Legislature passed an anticomics bill in 1952, Governor Tom Dewey vetoed it. Kefauver's Senate Committee investigation initially scoffed at the role of comics in creating juvenile delinquents. In 1950 the headlines announced its conclusion: Comics Dont Foster Crime.

Wertham continued his crusade in one magazine article after another. Comic books were "pollution," the source of "unhealthy sexual attitudes." Wertham warned that children copied crimes from crime comics, and that they developed a taste for rape, torture, mutilation, cannibalism and worse. Plus, the comics would create a nation of breast fetishists, he said.

"Comic books stimulate children sexually," he warned. "Attention is drawn to sexual characteristics and to sexual actions."

He warned about headlight (a slang term for breast) books. "One of the stock mental aphrodisiacs in comic books is to draw girls' breasts in such a way that they are sexually exciting. Wherever possible, they protrude and obtrude. Or girls are shown in slacks or negligees with their pubic regions indicated with special care and suggestiveness. Many children miss that, but very many do not."

Some books emphasized girls' buttocks. "Such preoccupations, as we know from psychoanalytic and Rorschach studies, may have a relationship to early homosexual attitudes." Wertham's grasp of the psychodynamics of homosexuality left a little to be desired.

Wertham held the nation's attention because he drew a target around innocent youth. "The difference between the surreptitious pornographic literature for adults and children's comic books is this: In one it is a question of attracting perverts, in the other of making them."

In his Book-of-the-Month-Club selection Seduction of the Innocent he pinpointed the villains. To the well-trained eye the supermasculine heroes Batman and Robin were gay. "They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together."

Listen to his description of Robin, as a "handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident."

The stories were devoid of "decent, attractive, successful women." Instead, there was Catwoman, "who is vicious and uses a whip."

Lesbians were the by-products of Wonder Woman, Wertham said. "For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls, she is a morbid ideal. Her followers are the gay girls."

Comic books glorified "assertiveness, defiance, hostility, desire to destroy or hurt, search for risk and excitement, aggressiveness, destructiveness, sadism, suspiciousness, adventurousness, nonsubmission to authority"--the very qualities that research had shown were the building blocks of juvenile delinquency.

Some 90 million comic books were consumed each month by American innocents.

Wertham's book caused a sensation. In 1954 Senator Kefauver--who had taken to wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin cap during political campaigns--reopened the comic book question. Not surprisingly, he discovered a plot against America: "Almost without exception the comic books were displayed indiscriminately in the midst of magazines notorious for their emphasis on sex, nude torsos and exaggerated accentuation of some physical characteristics of male and female alike. We have a strong feeling that this step-by-step development of adolescent curiosity is more design than coincidence."

The comic industry responded, not with laughter, but by creating the Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America. Modeled on the Hollywood Production Code and prepared with the spiritual guidance of Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders, the comic book guidelines prohibited nudity, profanity, obscenity, smut and vulgarity, as well as any salacious illustration or suggestive posture. "Females shall be drawn realistically," wrote the censors, "without exaggeration of any physical qualities."

So much for the headlights. "Respect for parents, the moral code and for honorable behavior shall be fostered," noted the code. "The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage. Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions."

Hell, you might as well watch TV.

The code was created by the industry in order to survive, for without the government's seal of approval titles were essentially banished from newsstands. Companies went out of business and artists were driven underground. William Gaines, publisher of such E.C. Comics classics as Tales From the Crypt, was particularly hard hit. He had tried to defend one cover--a severed head dripping blood --as tasteful. He discontinued most of his titles and focused on an upstart magazine created by Harvey Kurtzman called Mad.

"It was as if comic books were castrated," said John Tebbel in an article on the code. "People couldn't keep their children from growing up, but they could keep the comic books from growing up."

Paperback Sex

Adults had their own source of sex and violence. Since the mid-Forties, the paperback rack at the corner store had become a fixture. It was one of the great things to come out of the war, when servicemen relied on pocket-size books for entertainment overseas.

The paperbacks played with provocative covers--one showing The Private life of Helen of Troy was known to an entire generation as simply "the nipple cover." A painter grappled with models on a book titled Art Colony. The covers of Mickey Spillane novels showed women in tight dresses clutching handguns, not handbags. A rash of novels exploited the juvenile-delinquent motif--from The Amboy Dukes and jailbait to The Blackboard Jungle.

Of course, Congress could not miss the opportunity for a another full-scale investigation, creating a Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials (not to be confused with older pornographic materials).

Chaired by E.C. Gathings (D-Kans.), the investigation would go after "the kind of filthy sex books sold at the corner store which are affecting the youth of our country." The publishers of paperbacks were spreading "artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and degeneracy. The exaltation of passion above principle and the identification of lust with love are so prevalent that the casual reader of such literature might easily conclude that all married persons are adulterous and all teenagers are completely devoid of any sex inhibitions." The committee members were particularly upset by "lurid and daring illustrations of voluptuous young women on the covers of the books" and by books that extolled "homosexuality, lesbianism and other sexual aberrations."

The Reverend Thomas Fitzgerald, a director of the National Organization for Decent Literature, presented a list of 274 objectionable books, but Gathings had his own list. Women's Barracks, a sexy story of French army women, drew particular heat.

The hearings did not result in new laws, but they ignited a series of vigilante-style crusades. Church groups and local police chiefs intimidated store owners who stocked books considered objectionable. In Two Bit Culture, a history of the paperback phenomenon, Kenneth Davis notes, "There were police actions in Detroit and vigilante-type actions in Minneapolis; Augusta, Maine; Chattanooga; Scranton; Akron; and Manchester, New Hampshire." Youngstown Police Chief Edward Allen personally banned more than 400 paperback books on the logic that "all such books are obscene." In August 1953 a Federal judge reminded Chief Allen that "freedom of the press is not limited to freedom to publish, but includes the liberty to circulate publications."

The paperback of J.D. Salinger's contemporary classic The Catcher in the Rye appeared in 1951. It would, notes Davis, become "number one on the hit list." Not a day passes, or so it seems, without some parents, somewhere, believing that Holden Caulfield's musings on alienation and sex will be the ruin of their own children.

Government already controlled radio and television, and had previously put the fear of censorship into Hollywood. The point was clear: If kids didn't read about it, and if parents didn't read about it, the world would be safe from sex.

The Second Kinsey Report

August 20, 1953 would be known as K-day, the moment that sex became front-page news in almost every newspaper in the country. The long-awaited second volume of the Kinsey Report-- this one on sexual behavior in the human female--was the most important story of the year. It distracted us from the Cold War, at the same time that the existence of a Russian H-bomb was confirmed. The stolid, red-bound book, almost the twin of the male report, sold nearly 200,000 copies within a matter of weeks. A paperback special explaining the report would top the charts in 1954.

In the volume on males, Alfred Kinsey and his associates at Indiana University set out to describe sex not as it should be but as it was. The reaction had been swift and mostly negative. Everyone from college presidents to J. Edgar Hoover had condemned the depiction of American morality.

Kinsey noted that one woman wrote to say she could not fathom the controversy over the first book. The report had shown only that "the male population is a herd of prancing, leering goats."

Women had known that forever and, indeed, the whole of Puritan morality was predicated on constraining the goat. But what of women?

Americans were not so tolerant of the truth about women. Without bothering to read the study, Congressman Louis Heller from Brooklyn demanded that the Post Office block all shipments. Heller condemned Kinsey for "hurling the insult of the century against our mothers, wives, daughters and sisters." He threatened an investigation of the Institute for Sex Research, saying Kinsey was "contributing to the depravity of a whole generation, to the loss of faith in human dignity and human decency, to the spread of juvenile delinquency and to the misunderstanding and the confusion about sex."

Hoover opened a file on Kinsey, but nothing came of it.

Ernest Havemann, a prominent journalist asked to interpret the study for Life, warned that the interviews of 5940 women "constitute a sort of mass confession that American women have not been behaving at all in the manner in which their parents, husbands and pastors would like to think, and doubtless a great many people will even be loath to believe that Dr. Kinsey has got his facts straight."

In a world swirling with rumor, scandal and gossip about sex, Kinsey offered facts. He had talked to women of all ages and had discovered that your date of birth was the single most important indicator of sexual behavior. Women born before 1900 were morally circumspect; those born after--who came of age in the Roaring Twenties--were a different breed. The flaming youth of the Jazz Age had set sex afire. The petting parties described by F. Scott Fitzgerald had become a rite of passage: Nearly 99 out of 100 women born between 1910 and 1929 had petted by the age of 35.

We tended to think of Victorian women as corseted, or dressed neck to ankles, too ashamed to make love with the lights on. And Kinsey did find that a full third of the women born before 1900 made love with their clothes on, but only 8 percent of the younger women he studied kept their nightgowns on during sex. Women born in this century were riding a wave of experimentation that would have shocked their elders. They were doing more of everything--from petting to French kissing to oral sex.

While women born before the turn of the century had held on to their virginity (86 percent of unmarried women were still virgins at the age of 25), the modern woman was more inclined to go all the way--a third of unmarried women were no longer virgins by the age of 25.

Kinsey discovered a great continent of premarital sex: Of the women who were married, half had lost their virginity before the wedding bells rang. Almost half of those had limited their lovemaking to their fiancés--making the sex truly premarital. But some had not: A third had had coitus with two to five partners, and 13 percent had had coitus with six or more. (In contrast, some 85 percent of married men, those leering, prancing goats, had had premarital sex--about a third with two to five partners, almost half with more than six.)

The Kinsey Report reflected the guiltfree attitude of the modern girl: Almost 69 percent of the unmarried women who had had premarital sex expressed no regret. Of those married women who had been sexually active before their wedding night, more than 77 percent saw no reason to regret their earlier sexual experiences. The more partners they had had, the less likely they were to feel regret. Initial regrets disappeared with experience.

Kinsey listed 20 classic arguments against premarital sex, then demolished them with 12 modern arguments in favor of fooling around. Fear of reputation? Fear of disease? Fear of pregnancy? Forget the sex panic of the past. Kinsey had numbers, the force of empirical science. In a sample of 2094 single white females, who among them had had coitus approximately 460,000 times, there were only 476 pregnancies (one pregnancy for each 1000 acts of copulation). Only 29 women out of 2020 had been caught in the act. In a sample of 1753 women who had had premarital intercourse, only 44 had ever had a venereal infection. Science put fear into perspective, into odds you could live with.

Even more startling than the figures on premarital sex were those for adultery. One out of five married women had been unfaithful by the time they were 35. Among younger married women the figure was two out of five. Again, the figure for men was approximately 50 percent.

Ernest Havemann, writing for Life, tried to emphasize the differences between men and women: "Nearly half the unfaithful wives (41 percent) had only one partner. For nearly a third the act of unfaithfulness had occurred only a few times, often just once. The whole pattern of infidelity, except in rare cases, was unpremeditated and often accidental. The husband went out of town on a business trip, a friend happened to drop over to return his golf clubs, wife and friend had a few drinks, and Kinsey's adding machine rang again."

Can you believe it? In the Fifties guys loaned one another their golf clubs. Kinsey explained that sometimes infidelity was "accepted as an accommodation to a respected friend, even though the female herself was not particularly interested in the relationship." Havemann was not buying this. All in all, he wrote, "It appears the figures on woman's promiscuity are mostly a reflection of the fact that the male wolf is always with us, providing as much temptation as he can to as many women as he can."

But Kinsey demolished the stereotype of the frigid woman. In the first year of marriage, one wife out of four could not reach orgasm during sex, but by the tenth year of marriage that figure was only one in seven. About half the wives reached climax every time they made love.

One statistic jumped from the page: Women who had had premarital sex were more responsive in marriage and were more likely to be among the earliest orgasmic wives. Kinsey wrote that there was a marked positive correlation between experience in orgasm obtained from premarital coitus and the capacity to reach orgasm after marriage. And with subtle wit he destroyed another stereotype. A nymphomaniac, he said, is simply a woman "who has more sex than you do."

Dr. Iago Galdston, a New York public health official, found the study corrupt: "What magic is there in premarital coitus that is missing in the legitimized act? Why can't the female learn as well by one as the other?"

Kinsey's answer: "The girl who has spent her premarital years withdrawing from physical contacts has acquired a set of nervous and muscular coordinations that she does not unlearn easily after marriage."

At the core of the second report is a comparison between male and female sexual sensitivity.

Kinsey put the sexes side by side: In a comparison of 33 psychological factors related to sex, he found that men scored higher on all but three. Women, it seemed, were more excited by reading romantic literature, by love scenes in movies and by being bitten during sex. Go figure.

On the other hand, men were more likely to have an erotic response to observing the opposite sex; looking at photographs, drawings or paintings of nudes; observing their own genitals or those of the opposite sex; watching burlesque; watching other people having sex; watching films of other people having sex; watching animals mate or turning on a light to watch themselves having sex. Men fantasized about the opposite sex during masturbation, during nocturnal dreams, while reading pornography, while writing pornography. Men were less likely to be distracted during intercourse, and were more likely to be turned on by erotic material, stories, writing and drawing. Men were more likely to talk about sex--as revealed by the odd statistic that most women learned about masturbation by "self-discovery," men from printed or verbal sources. Men were more likely to be aroused by sadomasochistic stories (which probably explained the success of Mickey Spillane). And sure, we wanted a home and family, but if marriage meant no sex, forget it.

This, in itself, was not news. For centuries observant guys had noticed a difference between the way men and women approached sex. The Victorian double standard was based on the perception that men were predatory animals and women were merely the objects of men's beastly desires. For the first half of the century, Puritans and reformers had argued that a female standard should apply to all of society. Men should dance to a woman's tune. Kinsey, though, said there was no physiological reason for the gap between the sexes. Women were not sexless; their natural responses had simply been repressed.

In a best-selling book, Ashley Montagu argued that such differences amounted to proof that women were superior. He regarded a lack of responsiveness as a virtue. After all, the devil was in the flesh. But Kinsey concluded that women had been crippled by culture, by religion and by silence. Repression turned most people into "conforming machines."

The antisexual prejudice of our essentially Puritan society demanded conformity. Benjamin Gruenberg, a biology teacher and sex educator called on to critique Kinsey, defended repression.

"Conformity in sex behavior," he wrote, "is as necessary for the stability of any society as conformity in relation to property or in the daily intercourse of individuals or groups. In any given society there is rarely any doubt as to what is considered right and what is considered wrong. And for all practical purposes, the 'right' is absolute, as it has been in our traditions."

And in an oddly prescient moment, he warned against the possible rebellion against such unthinking conformity: "The polarity of good and evil, when both are absolutes, will make the individual who rejects the code, or its sanctions, seek good at the opposite pole. Sex becomes a major good for its own sake, so that, for example, the typical playboy will make his chief game a career of sex."

Anthropologist Margaret Mead also saw the Kinsey Report as an unfortunate, ill-timed attack on conformity. Young people, she said, had a need to conform. It was their only defense. To confront sexual diversity--the idea that humans could be sexual creatures--would be a major threat to the "previously guaranteed reticence" of young people.

The Reverend Billy Graham read the news of the report and concluded, "It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America." Another religious leader called the report "statistical filth."

According to Henry Pitney Van Dusen, head of the Union Theological Seminary and one of Kinsey's most relentless critics, the studies depicted "a prevailing degradation in American morality approximating the worst decadence of the Roman Empire." Kinsey, said Van Dusen, viewed sex as being "strictly animalistic."

Not unexpectedly, Congress convened a special committee to investigate the funders of the Kinsey Institute. Was the entomologist from Indiana part of a Communist plot? Not likely. A fruit of capitalism, the Rockefeller Foundation, had underwritten Kinsey's research for years. Under pressure (and a new leader, Dean Rusk) the Foundation terminated Kinsey's funding, opting instead to give more than half a million dollars to Van Dusen's Union Theological Seminary.

The local U.S. Customs agent at Indianapolis took to opening packages addressed to the Institute and decided that the erotica being collected from around the world was "damned dirty stuff." Washington, D.C. Customs officials agreed; in their opinion, Kinsey's status as a scientist did not redeem the material. At issue was not just sexual freedom, but scientific freedom as well. Eventually judge Edmund Palmieri would rule that Customs officials did not have the right to dictate to scientists what they should or should not study.

It was too late. Kinsey died an exhausted and broken man on August 25, 1956. His dream of a sexual revolution remained unfulfilled. That task would fall to someone else.

The Male Rebellion

In 1953 a young Hugh Hefner sat at the kitchen table of his Chicago apartment making plans for the launch of a new magazine for the indoor male.

"We like our apartment," he wrote. "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex."

He would create a romantic men's magazine, the first of its kind. One had only to look at what passed for men's magazines in 1950 to realize the boldness of the idea.

Macho men's magazines such as True, Argosy and Stag dominated the market after the war. They reflected the male camaraderie and bonding of the war years, with an emphasis on outdoor adventure and derring-do. A whole generation of men had returned from the war restless and discontent. These magazines perpetuated the segregation of the sexes--a woman's place was in the home; a man's place was at the poker table, in the barroom or camping in the wilderness with the guys. Hefner wanted something more sophisticated. "I wanted a romantic men's magazine," he would write, "one based on a real appreciation of the opposite sex. It would act as a handbook for the young urban male."

Esquire had suffered a lengthy battle with the Post Office over second-class mailing privileges. Chastened by the skirmish, the postwar Esky had lost its way. Gone were the sexy cartoons and pin-up pictures by Petty and Vargas. By the end of the decade the editor of Esquire would actually be calling for a New Puritanism.

Esquire may have been afraid of the Post Office, but Hefner wasn't. "I had less to lose," he said, "but I was also convinced that sex and nudity were not obscene per se. The Post Office was acting as if it had won the Esquire case back in 1945--but I knew better.

"I planned on publishing a sophisticated men's magazine and I didn't think the Post Office had the right to stop me. This was the revolutionary thought on which Playboy was based, because no other magazine containing nudity was being sent through the mail at the time.

"I didn't have any money, but I had taken a loan on my apartment furniture, and a printer had promised me credit." And Hefner had something special for that first issue--a full-color nude of Marilyn Monroe. She was the most promising star on the horizon. She had posed for photographer Tom Kelley with "nothing on but the radio" when she was still a starlet. The calendar picture had caused some controversy, but few had seen it--the calendar company was afraid to send it through the mail. Like everyone else, it was afraid of the Post Office.

Hefner wrote a letter touting the new magazine--and the nude photo of Marilyn--to wholesalers across the country. With orders for 70,000 copies, all that was left was to create the magazine. He spent the summer and fall of 1953 working on the first issue. It went on sale in November with no date on the cover, "because I wasn't sure there would be a second." But it was a sellout. And so were the second and third issues as well.

Hefner's editorial mix of fiction, satire, sexy cartoons, lifestyle features and a centerfold was an unbeatable combination in a decade that was as conservative as this one.

Years later, social critic Max Lerner would explain that in the sexual revolution Kinsey was the researcher and Hef its pamphleteer. "What Kinsey did was give the American male permission to change his basic life way, his basic lifestyle. And what Hefner did was show the American male how to do it."

Comedian Dick Shawn would say that Hefner "introduced clean, wholesome sex at a time when a male and a female were not allowed to be shown in the same bed. I remember Doris Day and Rock Hudson. In two different beds. Two different rooms. Two different movies."

Hefner celebrated sex as a part of the total man. He loved women, but he also cared about jazz, sports cars, art, literature, gear, gadgetry, grooming, good food and drink. He reinvented masculinity. In the pages of Playboy, men cooked for women, appreciated art and refused to surrender to anyone else's definition of what it meant to be male. They would not, to use Kinsey's phrase, become "conforming machines."

The magazine created and described a new male authority. Articles by Philip Wylie attacked The Abdicating Male and The Womanization of America. Mourning the day that the women's movement broached the saloon and invaded the men's club, Wylie gave a glimpse at the heart of the magazine of a place where "he and his fellow men could mutually revive that integrity which Victorian prissiness, superimposed on Puritanism, elsewhere sabotaged. He could talk and think of himself as a sportsman, a lover, an adventurer, a being of intellect, passion, erudition, philosophical wisdom, valor and sensitivity. In sanctuary he could openly acknowledge that his true male feelings did not in his opinion make of him the beast that 19th century Western Society claimed he was. He could furthermore discuss females as other than the virginal, virtuous, timid, pure, passionless images that constituted the going female ideal."

Wylie attacked the nightmare of togetherness: "The American home, in short, is becoming a boudoir-kitchen-nursery, dreamed up by women, for women, as if males did not exist as males."

•

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment, gave us this feminist assessment of the magazine: In Hef's world, "Women would be welcome after men had reconquered the indoors, but only as guests--maybe overnight guests--not as wives. In 1953 the notion that the good life consisted of an apartment with mood music rather than a ranch house with a barbecue pit was almost subversive....A man could display his status or simply flaunt his earnings without possessing either a house or a wife--and this was, in its own small way, a revolutionary possibility."

She continues, "Playboy's visionary contribution--visionary because it would still be years before a significant mass of men availed themselves of it--was to give the means of status to the single man; not the power lawnmower, but the hi-fi set in a mahogany console; not the sedate, four-door Buick but the racy little Triumph; not the well-groomed wife, but the classy companion who could be rented (for the price of drinks and dinner) one night at a time. So through its articles, its graphics and its advertisements, Playboy presented something approaching a coherent program for the male rebellion: a critique of marriage, a strategy for liberation (reclaiming the indoors as a realm for masculine pleasure) and a utopian vision (defined by its unique commodity ensemble)."

"Critics," she writes, "misunderstood Playboy's historical role, Playboy was not the voice of the sexual revolution, which began, at least overtly, in the Sixties, but of the male rebellion, which had begun in the Fifties. The real message was not eroticism, but escape--literal escape, from the bondage of breadwinning. For that, the breasts and bottoms were necessary not just to sell the magazine, but to protect it. When, in the first issue, Hefner talked about staying in his apartment, listening to music and discussing Picasso, there was the Marilyn Monroe centerfold to let you know there was nothing queer about these urbane and indoor pleasures. And when the articles railed against the responsibilities of marriage, there were the nude torsos to reassure you that the alternative was still within the bounds of heterosexuality. Sex--or Hefner's Pepsi-clean version of it--was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn't have to be a husband to be a man."

Her tone is oddly sexist: Hefner wanted to liberate males. When feminists borrowed the same blueprint a decade later (in finding their identity outside the home), it was hailed as heroic. When a man dreamed of the same sort of freedom, women saw it as a flight from commitment.

Not all feminists would express the same prejudice. Camille Paglia, defining today's man, remarked, "Hugh Hefner has never received the credit he deserves for creating a sophisticated model of the suave American gentleman in the Marlboro Man years following shoot-'em-up World War Two. Contemporary feminism has tried to ditch male gallantry and chivalry as reactionary and sexist. Eroticism has suffered as a result. Perhaps it's time to bring the gentleman back. He may be the only hero who can slay that mythical beast, the date-rape octopus, currently strangling American culture."

By the end of the decade, Playboy was selling a million copies a month. The Rabbit Head logo was recognized around the world. Men were cutting out the logo and taping it to car windows. Colleges were holding Playboy theme parties. And the centerfold--the idealized image of the girl next door--had become an American icon. Magazines tried to duplicate Hefner's formula of "torso, only more so," making Playboy the most imitated magazine in America. Mort Sahl would quip that an entire generation of men was growing up convinced that women folded in three places and had staples in their navels.

But to understand the appeal of Playboy, one had only to look at the alternative.

Togetherness

The Fifties saw the start of a great exodus that changed sex as significantly as the Depression or war had in previous decades. The American dream of a city on the hill gave way to a nation of Cape Cods grouped across the land. These enclaves were called bedroom communities, in an ironic twist on their actual effect on the libido. Every morning throngs of commuters in Burberry raincoats would board a train, or drive off in the family Buick. Every night, at exactly the same hour, they would return. The American family had become as regimented as the military.

The Fifties sugar-coated repression and called it conformity. The spread of cookie-cutter houses and mass-produced dreams was as relentless as Chinese water torture.

John Keats, one of the first journalists to investigate suburbia, described this new vision of America: "For literally nothing down ... you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we're building around the edges of American cities ... inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours.... [They are] developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them."

In 1954 the editors of McCall's tried to put a positive name on the phenomenon. They called the new lifestyle togetherness. The magazine noted that "men and women in ever increasing numbers are marrying at an earlier age, having children at an earlier age, rearing larger families. For the first time in our history the majority of men and women own their own homes, and millions of these people gain their deepest satisfaction from making them their very own."

Suburbia represented a wider range of living that was "an expression of the private conscience and the common hopes of the greatest number of people in this land of ours."

There was a new social organism, the American family, in which "men, women and children are achieving it together... not as women alone, or men alone, isolated from one another, but as a family, sharing a common experience.

According to one profile of the American male printed in McCall's, husband. Ed likes to "putter around the house; make things; paint; select furniture, rugs and draperies; dry dishes; read to the children and put them to bed; work in the garden; feed and dress the children and bathe them; pick up the babysitter; attend PTA meetings; cook; buy clothes for his wife; buy groceries." What Ed doesn't like, we were told, was to "dust or vacuum, or to finish jobs he's started, repair furniture, fix electrical connections and plumbing, hang draperies, wash pots and pans and dishes, pick up after the children, shovel snow or mow the lawn, change diapers, take the babysitter home, visit school, do the laundry, iron, buy clothes for the children, go back for the groceries Carol forgot to list."

Ed, it seems, must have lost an essential part of his anatomy in the war. Doesn't Ed like to fuck? McCall's wasn't saying.

Bob Hope saw the humor of "togetherness" almost immediately, joking that there was so much togetherness "now the old folks have to go out to have sex."

Betty Friedan, a writer turned housewife turned writer, began to research a book on the togetherness phenomenon. She found that a whole generation of women had turned their backs on dreams of emancipation, settling instead for the security of being housewives. She claimed that togetherness was concocted by male editors at women's magazines, a revisionist scheme foisted on receptive women. It had begun as early as 1949, when the Ladies' Home Journal ran the feature "Poet's Kitchen," showing Edna St. Vincent Millay cooking. "Now I expect to hear no more about housework's being beneath anyone," said the magazine. "For if one of the greatest poets of our day, and any day, can find beauty in simple household tasks, this is the end of the old controversy."

Edna St. Vincent Millay, the goddess of Greenwich Village in the Teens and Twenties, love object of the Lost Generation, reduced to a housewife? Anthony Comstock must have rejoiced in the grave.

Whether it was a conspiracy of magazine editors, the seductive vision of Madison Avenue or the plot of prime-time television, we had returned America to the Victorian era, with a perverse twist. The world of work was man's domain; the home was woman's. The sex of the guys wearing the aprons was unclear.

Togetherness drove women crazy. Friedan would find that housewives survived by wolfing down tranquilizers "like cough drops." Consumption of tranquilizers in 1958 was 462,000 pounds per year. By 1959 it reached 1.1 million pounds. Doctors told of women who had snapped, who ran naked through the streets of suburbia screaming.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers captured the horror of suburbia, with its image of pod people taking over individual humans. The cover of the paperback asked the question: "Was this his woman, or an alien life-form?"

Americans turned their backs on the sensual city, the city electric, to sit huddled around the cold fire of television. We watched fictitious families live perfect lives. The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Life With Father, Father Knows Best--these were the pod people. No one on those shows ever dragged a spouse into the master bedroom or copped a feel from the next-door neighbor under the bridge table.

This was an America dreamed of by the Puritans.

Some called this progress. The automotive industry acquired trolleys and train lines--those avenues of escape which had made the city possible--and put them out of business. Eisenhower ordered interstate highways, which Detroit filled with gas-guzzling cars, cars big enough to hold the new family. What had once been a vehicle for escape and escapades became another room of the house. In the space of a decade about 4500 drive-in movies sprang up, catering to the family trade (and subsequently to teenage lust). It was possible to do almost everything as a family--except to get away.

Oddly enough, this congested landscape contained the seeds of the sexual revolution. Friedan found women who said the only time during the day that they felt alive was during sex. And when left alone for hours at a time, sex filled their time--in fantasy at least.

David Riesman, a sociologist whose book The Lonely Crowd became a surprise best-seller in 1950, charted the shift in the American personality from rugged individualist to tradition-worshiping conformist. "The other-directed person," wrote Riesman, looks to sex "for reassurance that he is alive." Sex became part of keeping up with the Joneses. Riesman noted that while any person could assess a Cadillac parked in a driveway, knowing the horsepower, the accessories and how much it cost, sex remained "hidden from public view."

"Sex," he said, is "the last frontier."

There was pressure to find paradise in the bedroom. According to Riesman, "Though there is tremendous insecurity about how the game of sex should be played, there is little doubt as to whether it should be played." And new to the game was the specter of the "Kinsey athletes" with their "experience" and "freedom." The Fifties guy, according to Riesman, was "not ambitious to break the quantitative records of the acquisitive consumers of sex like Don Juan, but he does not want to miss, day in, day out, the qualities of experience he tells himself the others are having."

Sex had been drawn into the postwar phenomenon of rising expectations. The problem for women who lost themselves in sexual fantasy every day was the husbands who couldn't keep up, who came home tired. Magazine ads promoted stimulants such as No-Doz: "Too Pooped to Play, Boy?" An ad for Rybutol showed a distraught, sexually frustrated woman next to a sleeping husband. (Lenny Bruce would lampoon this ad, saying the woman discovered the real reason for her husband's listless libido when she found the wig, dress and makeup in his closet.)

Friedan's women wrapped their fantasy lives in torrid novels and magazines that offered articles asking, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" By 1958 some six million of them had bought Peyton Place, a salacious novel by Grace Metalious that "lifts the lid off a small New England town." Rape, incest, illegitimate children, spectacular affairs, teenage lust-- bring it on.

But by most accounts, suburbia was a goldfish bowl that made fooling around almost impossible. Herbert Gans, in his sociological study The Levittowners, found that "a woman neighbor did not visit another when her husband was home, partly because of the belief that a husband has first call on his wife's companionship, partly to prevent suspicion that her visit might be interpreted as a sexual interest in the husband."

Friedan also noted extramarital sex was frustrated by the "problems posed by children coming home from school, cars parked overtime in driveways and gossiping servants." Women, she said, were turned into sex seekers, but not sex finders. If sex was the last frontier, it would remain unexplored--and unsettled--for at least another decade.

Gans found a disturbing side effect of life on the suburban frontier: "Some adults seem to project their own desires for excitement and adventures onto the youngsters. For them, teenagers function locally as movie stars and beatniks do on the national scene--as exotic creatures reputed to live for sex and adventure. Manifestly, teenagers act as more prosaic entertainers: in varsity athletics, high school drama societies and bands, but the girls are also expected to provide glamour. One of the first activities of the Junior Chamber of Commerce was a Miss Levittown contest in which teenage girls competed for honors in evening-gown, bathing-suit and talent contests-- the talent contest usually involving love songs or covertly erotic dances. At such contests unattainable maidens showed off their sexuality--often unconsciously--in order to win the nomination. Men in the audience commented sotto voce about the girls' attractiveness, wishing to sleep with them and speculating whether that privilege is available to the contest judges and boyfriends. From here it was only a short step to the conviction that girls were promiscuous with their teenage friends, which heightens adult envy, fear and the justification for restrictive measures."

The paranoia exploded in a whispering campaign that swept the town with "rumors of teenage orgies in Levittown's school playgrounds, in shopping center parking lots and on the remaining rural roads of the township. The most fantastic rumor had 44 girls in the senior class pregnant, with one boy single-handedly responsible for six of them. Some inquiry on my part turned up the facts: Two senior girls were pregnant and one of them was about to be married."

The sexual paranoia of parents became one of Hollywood's favorite themes in the Fifties. A Summer Place-- the make-out movie of 1959--depicted mother as monster. After Sandra Dee is shipwrecked with Troy Donahue for an unchaperoned evening, the first thing her mother does is have her virginity inspected by the local doctor.

The 1955 film classic Rebel Without a Cause offered the definitive portrait of the breakdown in family communications. The only point of contact between teens and parents seemed to be the booking room at the local police station. Getting in trouble was a way of life for juveniles. Faced with an ineffective father and a manipulative mother who bombarded him with conflicting messages, James Dean would scream in anguish: "You're tearing me apart!"

So much for togetherness.

Rebels Without A Cause

Parents and schools attempted to regulate teenagers in ways both ludicrous and ineffective. The enforcement of dress codes (shirts and ties for boys at school dances, skirts for girls) led to truly aberrant forms of social control. Principals would force a golf ball down a boy's trouser leg to make sure his pants weren't too tight.

The house in Levittown might represent the American dream for a returning veteran, but it was a prison cell for a teenager. The Depression may have created a separate substratum for teens--with high schools as holding pens--but the adolescent of the Fifties had more autonomy and ready cash than Andy Hardy ever did. Teenagers became a true subculture in this decade.

Previously, teenagers had shared their parents' world--watching the same movies, listening to the same songs on the radio. Now they had their own teenage idols, their own films, music, fads and fashions. They borrowed the family car, bought their own or stole one for joyrides. Any kid with a convertible was guaranteed a sex life.

Wheels allowed one to cruise, to hang out at the drive-in, to explore sex while parked for a little submarine-race watching, listening to songs coming in over new stations devoted to a new teenage music called rock 'n' roll. Teens staked out the balcony of the local theater, or their own row of cars at the drive-in, and feasted on movies made just for them--low-budget science fiction thrillers such as The Blob, I Was a Teen-age Werewolf and Teenagers From Outer Space, or sexy exploitation flicks such as High School Confidential!, The Cool and the Crazy, Teen-age Rebel, Hot Rod Girl, Joy Ride, High School Hellcats and Eighteen and Anxious.

Some schools instituted "health," or "life science," lectures--sermons delivered separately to male and female students by members of the athletic department. The sight of a coach with a whistle around his neck giving a chalk talk about sperm may have temporarily reduced lust to the level of calisthenics, but we doubt it. The alternative experts--the biology teachers--still had the scent of formaldehyde and dissected frogs about them.

Teenagers traditionally learned about sex from their peers. Patricia Campbell, author of Sex Education Books for Young Adults, reports that in 1938 only four percent of young people learned the facts of life from the printed page. But by the end of the Fifties, that figure had increased to 33 percent for girls and 25 percent for boys.

The available books had more to do with etiquette than with sex. Consider this detailed advice about the proper way to end a date from Evelyn Duvall's long-selling Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers: "Mary gets out her key, unlocks the door and then turns to John with a smile. She says, 'It's been a lovely evening. Thank you, John.' Or something similar that lets John know she has enjoyed the date. John replies, 'I have enjoyed it too. I'll be seeing you.' Then she opens the door and goes in without further hesitation. Since this is the first date, neither John nor Mary expect a goodnight kiss. So Mary is careful not to linger at the door, which might make John wonder what she expects him to do."

Duvall warned against petting ("the caressing of other, more sensitive parts of the body in a crescendo of sexual stimulation"), stating, "These forces are often very strong and insistent. Once released, they tend to press for completion."

Girls were given the job of controlling male arousal. "Changes in his sex organs are obvious," warned Duvall. Oh, yes. Especially if you were slow-dancing to Earth Angel.

This was the decade that labeled the stations of lust in terms such as "first base," "second base" and "all the way." The focus on female anatomy turned the body into an erotically charged battleground. (No girl in her right mind would respond by, say, touching the male genitals. Unless you begged.)

In Heavy Petting, a documentary devoted to the state of sex in the Fifties, David Byrne recounts the stages of making out: "There was kissing with your mouth closed. Arm around. Kissing with your mouth open and French kissing. Feeling a girl's breast with her bra on. Then with her bra off. Then beyond that, all hell kind of broke loose. If you want to feel somebody's genitals--if the girl felt yours, or you felt hers--you were getting beyond the bases. The steps didn't go in order anymore."

In the same film Spalding Gray remembers learning about masturbation from a friend, who told him that if he stroked his penis with a piece of animal fur, something nice would happen. "I didn't have any animal fur around the house. But I remember a lot of Davy Crockett hats. They were really popular then."

Holden Caulfield, the antihero of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, captured the confusion: "Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it--the same night, as a matter of fact. I spent the whole night necking with a terrible phony named Anne Louise Sherman. Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God I don't."

Grace Palladino, author of Teenagers: An American History, says that "the real difference between good teenagers and bad was a matter of appearance. Good teenagers kept their private lives private, which meant, in effect, they remained 'technical virgins.'"

The ethic, if that's what it could be called, was simply: Don't get in trouble. The sexually active lived in fear of pregnancy. The Kinsey Report had revealed that a large number of women were having premarital sex. A third Kinsey Institute report on Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion, which was published in 1958, would reveal that one out of every five women who had premarital sex became pregnant. Of those, one in five would be forced into marriage. The other four women had their pregnancies terminated by abortion.

Scandal wagged its finger from the daily headlines: In 1956 girls read about a young fashion designer whose "body was cut into 50 pieces, placed in Christmas wrapping paper and dumped into various trash cans." She was the victim of an illegal abortion. On the East Coast, girls read this story in the Daily Mirror: Dig Up Body Of Girl., 17, On Long Island. "The body of a pretty, blonde, 17-year-old bank clerk, missing ten days from her home, was dug out of a rubbish heap yesterday near the Jamaica Racetrack. Police said she had died after an abortion." Marvin Olasky, author of The Press and Abortion, tells how "the girl had put together $300 to pay an abortionist her boyfriend had found for her. He went with her and she died. When the boyfriend demanded a refund he was given back $160 to give the kid a decent burial, but he dumped her body in the rubbish near the racetrack."

There was teenage rebellion bubbling right below the surface, rooted in the cruel hypocrisy of their parents' world, but it would take another decade for the rebels to find a cause worth fighting for. For now, they identified with the inarticulate confusion of James Dean and Marlon Brando. When a town girl asked a biker in The Wild One, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" Brando replied, "Whaddya got?"

In 1955 we got a look at the future: Richard Brooks' Blackboard Jungle was an exposé of juvenile delinquency in innercity high schools. The film had everything--sex, unruly students, the attempted rape of a teacher and a great soundtrack featuring Bill Haley and the Comets playing Rock Around the Clock.

The music went right into the veins of teenage America. No more togetherness, singing along with Mitch Miller or slowly going crazy to your parents' mood music. Jazz, the music that had inspired the sexual dreams of earlier generations, had become so cerebral you could only sit and nod in cool appreciation. But rock was hot. It was physical. It had a beat and you could dance to it.

When a young truck driver named Elvis Presley stood in Sam Phillips' Memphis studio and told a crew of backup musicians, "Let's get real, real gone," the nation followed. Heartbreak Hotel. Don't Be Cruel. Love Me Tender. Each single sold more than a million copies.

But the voice was only part of the show. Elvis sang with his whole body. He was sex personified, straddling the microphone, then breaking into wild gyrations. His band said Elvis was "wearing out britches from the inside." A critic for The New York Times noted that Elvis was a "virtuoso of the hootchy-kootchy. His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway. The gyration never had anything to do with the world of popular music."

But it had everything to do with sex.

Elvis had what one critic would call his "I'm-gonna-get-your-daughters zeitgeist." Elvis, one review noted, was "a terrible popular twist on darkest Africa's fertility tom-tom displays," and his performance was "far too indecent to mention in any detail."

Girls attacked Elvis, tore off his clothes, wrote their names and numbers in lipstick on his limousines. A judge in Jacksonville threatened to arrest Elvis' body for obscenity. When Elvis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, the camera was allowed to show him only from the waist up--but it didn't matter.

Years later, the lead singer for the rock group U2 would say that Presley did what years of the civil rights movement had failed to do: "He jammed together two cultures, and in that spastic dance of his you could actually see that fusion and that energy. It has the rhythm and the hips of African music and the melody of European music."

Blood Sacrifice

Elvis and other rock musicians may have jammed together two cultures to create a sexual frenzy, but it opened a Pandora's box of racial fears and animosity.

Protecting white girls from black sexuality had been the excuse for demonic behavior on the part of white Americans for centuries. As Americans struggled with integration in the mid-Fifties, sex was never far from the conversation. At a White House dinner in the spring of 1954, Dwight Eisenhower told Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren that the lawyers arguing in favor of segregated schools weren't all bad. They just didn't want their young daughters sitting next to "big, overgrown Negroes."

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in favor of school integration had dramatic consequences. On August 24, 1955 Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, walked into Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. Depending on which account you believe, Till was told there was a white woman in the store. He entered the store, bought some bubble gum and, as he left, either whistled at Carolyn Bryant, or said, "Bye, baby," or grabbed her wrist and made a lewd suggestion, adding, "Don't be afraid of me, baby. I been with white girls before."

Three days later Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, went hunting for the Chicagoan. They dragged the 14-year-old from his bed and drove to the banks of the Tallahatchie. They stripped him naked, and when he refused to show fear (they said), they fired a .45 bullet into his head. They wired a propeller from a cotton gin to the body and dumped it into the river.

Till's family called the police. A few days later the mangled, waterlogged body was found. Pictures appeared in Jet, Life, Look--and in the nightmares of black families all across the country. You could die for being black, and for being fresh with the wrong people.

Police arrested Bryant and Milam. The trial took five days. After an hour, the jury acquitted both men.

Milam bragged, "As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired of living."

Milam wanted to make an example of the Chicago boy, "just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand."

The Search For Sophistication

Not all Americans stood for ignorance or prejudice. World War Two had taken millions of Americans overseas--and some of those who returned did not care to continue the repressive patterns of the past. They rejected conformity and its illusion of security. They wanted new scripts in every area of life--from personal and political freedom to the pursuit of pleasure.

While middle America was buying chrome-plated bulgemobiles, there were some who preferred the Thunderbird, Corvette, Jaguar or Mercedes 300SL. While mainstream America was watching television, others preferred FM radio and foreign films. They ignored rock 'n' roll and dug the new post-Oscar Frank Sinatra, Ella, Chet Baker and Bird. Mainstream America had Martin and Lewis, but the more discerning college crowd was listening to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.

These young moderns were the Lost Generation reincarnate--people who came home from the war hoping to recreate the energy of the Roaring Twenties--and were appalled at the Cold War repression of what Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer called "The Ike Age."

Leisure time, discretionary income and the American desire for upward mobility merged into a quest for sophisticated entertainment--in film, literature and other art forms. What had been isolated voices reached out to a growing audience, and, in doing so, expanded the boundaries of expression.

In retrospect, the events that broke the stranglehold on the arts and entertainment in America seem inconsistent with the conservative climate of the decade. In 1950 the New York screening of Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle, about a simpleminded peasant girl (Anna Magnani) seduced by a stranger she believed to be Saint Joseph, encountered fierce Catholic opposition, headed by Francis Cardinal Spellman and the Legion of Decency. Theaters that attempted to show the film were picketed, and there were bomb threats. The state censor board revoked the license for the film, calling The Miracle "sacrilegious," an action that was upheld by the New York courts.

In 1952 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the film. For the first time in history, the High Court held that motion pictures were protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Cardinal and the Legion of Decency might try to tell Catholics what films they could see, but local governments could not.

Foreign films offered earthy tales of sex and passion, but Hollywood still had to contend with the Production Code. Howard Hughes had challenged the code with Jane Russell in The Outlaw, but a far more chaste film changed history. In 1952 Otto Preminger submitted the screenplay for The Moon Is Blue, based on a play he had produced on Broadway without causing any undue concern to the citizenry. It was a lighthearted tale of seduction, but the PCA rejected the script, saying the story made sex between consenting adults "a matter of moral indifference."

Preminger went ahead anyway. The PCA refused to grant the film a seal in 1953, saying it had an "unacceptably light attitude toward seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity."

As the success of Playboy would prove later that same year, the country was ready for just that attitude. The film was a major hit, grossing nearly $6 million. Preminger had proved that Hollywood could make a successful film without Production Code approval. He did it again with The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak, in 1955.

Nudity was still taboo in Hollywood movies, but it could be found in foreign films and in the low-budget fare of the grind houses. As American audiences became more sophisticated, the grind houses became art houses. In Grindhouse, Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris note, "Some theaters catered to a sophisticated crowd: fresh-brewed coffee in the lobby, imported chocolates, the latest Dave Brubeck recording blowing cool."

Theater owners redefined the way we viewed sex. The former grind houses showed the same old imported films such as Devil in the Flesh and One Summer of Happiness, and homegrown hymns to nudism such as the 1954 classic Garden of Eden. That film prompted a New York judge to declare that nudity was not indecent, and that Garden was neither sexy nor obscene. "Nudists are shown as wholesome, happy people in family groups, practicing their sincere but misguided theory that clothing, when climate does not require it, is deleterious to mental health by promoting an attitude of shame with regard to natural attributes and functions of the body."

Misguided theory? Nudity was arthouse fare. We discussed the French New Wave, Italian neorealism and auteur filmmaking, while watching Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida fill peasant blouses, or Anita Ekberg take a spontaneous dip in the Trevi Fountain of Rome. European films did not condemn the erotic--they simply presented its many complications.

Foreign films showed us sin and sex the way continentals did it, after centuries of practice. Indeed, Fellini's La Dolce Vita was a blueprint for "hedonism and debauchery," sybaritic living or decadence, depending on your viewpoint.

American film directors struggled with sexuality. Film versions of Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll with Carroll Baker, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Montgomery Clift were dark testaments to the power of repression. Tea and Sympathy portrayed Deborah Kerr's seduction of a young student as an act of kindness because he thought he might be gay, although by the time the PCA finished with the script he was merely "sensitive."

The major sex star of the decade--and the century--was Marilyn Monroe, though she never appeared nude on the screen. In contrast, her continental counterpart, Brigitte Bardot, could be counted on for some nudity in almost every one of her films. And God Created Woman, Roger Vadim's 1956 hit, opened with a wide-screen caress of Bardot's bare buttocks. BB stood for far more than the actress' name.

The Lovers, Louis Malle's classic tale of a repressed wife finding salvation through adultery, gave us the details of a sophisticated affair. Jeanne Moreau and her lover made love in a rowboat and in a tub, traced the letters of each other's names on bare skin, performed fingercurling oral sex. The usual stuff, if you lived in France, maybe.

The Lovers would play at more than 100 theaters in the U.S., eventually resulting in the arrest of a theater manager in Ohio. The theater's owner launched a challenge that worked its way to the Supreme Court.

The test case resulted in one of the most famous lines in judicial lore. When asked to define obscenity, Justice Potter Stewart remarked, "I know it when I see it." The Lovers was judged to be not obscene.

Foreign films educated the Supreme Court. When New York tried to ban a film version of Lady Chatterley's Lover because it advocated immoral ideas, Justice Stewart said in 1959 that the First Amendment protected ideas, including the idea that "adultery may sometimes be proper."

Love American Style

American studios responded to the European invasion by churning out a series of movies about seduction that the entire family could see. In Pillow Talk, Doris Day played a professional virgin who steadfastly resists the advances of Rock Hudson. His apartment is the classic playboy pad--one switch turned out the lights, turned on the stereo and locked the front door. A critic for Time said of Doris and Rock: "When these two magnificent objects go into a clinch, aglow from the sunlamp, agleam with hair lacquer, they look less like creatures of flesh than a couple of Cadillacs parked in a suggestive position."

Doris Day played the chaste career girl in so many movies that Oscar Levant was prompted to observe, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."

But the increasing sophistication of American audiences started to have an effect on Hollywood: By the end of the decade Billy Wilder would film Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis escaping gangsters by going drag. When Lemmon's cross-dressing prompts a proposal from Joe E. Brown, Lemmon is forced to confess the deception. To which Brown simply replies, "Well, nobody's perfect." The genderbending signaled that perhaps the great homosexual panic of the Fifties was abating.

For years, European directors had made two versions of many films--one for continental tastes and another more subdued take for America. In 1959 Hollywood reversed the trend. The American director of Cry Tough, Paul Stanley, shot two versions of a love scene between Linda Cristal and John Saxon. In the U.S. release, Cristal wore a slip; in the export version, she did not.

When Playboy published stills from the two scenes, the police chief in San Mateo, California pulled the magazine from the stands. Hefner responded, "If the reading matter of the citizens of any community is to be preselected--a pretty abhorrent thought in itself--I can't think of anyone less qualified to do it than a local police chief."

Congresswoman Kathryn Granahan, one of Washington's several sex-obsessed crusaders, flew to California to express her views on the subject. The newspaper headlines declared: smut prober here--hints red plot.

In the Fifties anything controversial-- from sex to fluoridation--was considered to be Communist inspired.

Hip Subversives

Mort Sahl stood on the stage in a red sweater, a folded newspaper clutched in his hand. America's only working philosopher launched into a free-form rap, touching on hi-fi, sports cars, McCarthy and Sahl's reaction to a sexy, oversize billboard.

"Outside the theater there's this picture of a girl about 25 feet high and she has a towel around her from the Hilton Hotel chain. It's kind of like, you know, like good taste in panic. And she's got this kind of terror in her face, she looks real bugged and her face is a social indictment of the entire insensitivity of society, you know, and there's a synthesis within her expression of a rejection of old-world thinking and yet a kind of dominance of this phony puritanical strain, which makes our mores, you know. In other words, she's operating under the ostensible advantages of suffrage and, on the other hand, this phony standard of morality. So, anyway, over her head there's an indictment of all of us and it says, You did it to her. Wonderful. I was standing there on the street digging this sign and I noticed a lot of young men walking by had looks of communal guilt across their faces."

He shifts to a memory of World War Two sex-hygiene units that would direct soldiers to VD centers via little green arrows. "The men reacted in three different ways to the Army's protection. First of all, there were the conformists. No imagination. I hate those guys. The worst, you know. The Good Soldier. The Organization Man. They simply did as they were told--got sick, followed the arrows in. First aid. Thanks. And that was that. The second group was a little sharper. They weren't actually sick, but they reported in anyway, you know, in an attempt to build reputation. The last were the real sophisticates. They were the perceptive people. What they did was to follow the arrows in reverse direction and find the action."

Sahl had landed his first job at the Hungry i in San Francisco with a joke about a McCarthy jacket. Like the famous Eisenhower, this one would have lots of flaps and zippers--plus one that could be closed over the mouth. "Tell your children about McCarthy and Roy Cohn," he would say, "before they find out about it on the streets."

The hipster rebellion had begun. Defiance through humor. If we could laugh at repression, perhaps it would slink off into the night.

In another part of town, Lenny Bruce waxed profane. Having started out as an emcee at strip clubs, Bruce developed irreverent and, some thought, obscene humor. Like Sahl he was an archetype of the hipster. Having grown up around jazz musicians, Bruce used routines that were closer to improvisation than to punch line-pratfall shtick. Above all, he was a social critic: "The truth is what is, not what should be. What should be is a dirty lie."

And he had an eye for the underdog. Referring to a newspaper with the headline Floodwaters Rise. Dykes Threatened, he would deadpan, "It's always the same. In times of emergency, they pick on minorities."

Bruce attacked that which he considered to be truly obscene. "I would rather my child see a stag film than The Ten Commandments or King of Kings--because I don't want my kid to kill Christ when he comes back. I never did see one stag film where anybody got killed in the end. Or even slapped in the mouth."

He articulated our fantasies: "Sometimes when I'm on the road in a huge hotel, I wish there was a closed-circuit television camera in each room and at two o'clock in the morning the announcer would come on: 'In room 24B there is a ripe, blue-eyed, pink-nippled French and Irish court stenographer lying in bed tossing and turning, fighting the bonds of her nightgown. All the ashtrays in her room are clean, her stockings and panty girdle have just been washed and are hanging on the shower curtain bar. This is a late model, absolutely clean, used only a few times by a sailor on leave.'"

On sex: "If you put a guy on a desert island, he'll do it to mud. A girl doesn't understand this: 'You'd do it to mud--you don't love me!' Sex is a different emotion for women."

The hip subversives went from playing in basement clubs to national exposure in Playboy, on television and on best-selling comedy albums. A Harvard student named Tom Lehrer built a campus following all across the country with an LP of his songs spoofing sex, drugs and atomic annihilation:

We will all go together when we go,

Every Hottentot and every Eskimo;

When the air becomes uranious,

We will all go simultaneous.

Yes, we will all go together when we go.

He could take the Boy Scout motto and turn it into a public information campaign for condoms:

If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind

And you come across a Girl Scout

who is similarly inclined.

Don't be nervous, don't be flustered,

Don't be scared: Be Prepared!

At the University of Chicago an off-campus group of performers called the Compass Players, which included Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Shelley Berman, was doing similar offbeat extemporaneous comedy routines to increasingly appreciative audiences. After Mike, Elaine and Shelley departed for the Big Apple, the performers who stayed in Chicago evolved into Second City.

Improv comedy was not limited to the stage. Jules Feiffer did his sketches on paper. He tried to explain the rebellion of the hip humorists in Tony Hendra's Going Too Far: "I think everything's political. I think that in those years, certainly whoever you hit was an appropriate target. You know, there could hardly be a wrong target. They all represented authority with very repressive social and political structures. So whether it was your mom or your boss or your teacher or your president, there was no confusion in targets. They were all the enemy. Because--and this is about language--they were all lying to us. They were all saying things they didn't mean. They were all using language as code. Certainly what my work was about in the beginning was people saying one thing and meaning something different. It was a direct reflection of the society we lived in where on every level, from one's parents to one's teachers to one's leaders, one learned automatically to decode what was being told you. And so automatic had it become that it took years to find anything wrong with this. You know, to feel outraged. Hypocrisy is too mild a word. The blatant, mischievous disinformation practiced on us from birth seemed like such a norm that you didn't know you had a right to expect anything different. And so, often when you did complain, it was turned around on you as if there were something abnormal in expecting something other than that, just as Huck Finn felt foolish and selfconscious for feeling loyal to Jim when he should have turned him in. The rules of society were so corrupt and so cynical that anybody pointing out the obvious was considered the cynic instead."

The establishment called the new art form Sick Humor, but it was the culture that was sick. The hip subversives were members of some kind of underground, a privileged social movement, said Feiffer. "You did get a sense that something was happening. That the laughter was a laughter of real humor, but also of defiance, that there was anger here. That these perceptions were necessary in order to breathe. It wasn't just about being funny. It was about being true."

Tony Hendra, who was one of the founding editors of The National Lampoon, noted the same thing: "People began to draw strength from the simple awareness that they were not alone. The subversives were exchanging handshakes all over the place, as nightclubs proliferated, comedy album sales soared, banned books were passed from hand to hand. Old Uncle Joe's worst fears were being realized. The things were coming out from under the bed, but instead of slipping six frames of Lenin into the latest Doris Day movie, they were doing something much worse--they were laughing. And what's more, they were laughing at him and his cherished vision of a rigid-with-fear, screwed-shut, dumbly obedient, boot-in-the-mouth America."

Kefauver And Klaw

Joe McCarthy may have been laughed off the scene by 1955, but Senator Estes Kefauver still roamed the country, stomping out the forces of sin and nonconformity. With aspirations for higher office, he posed as a homespun hero.

He needed a new target, but most of the obvious ones--from Communists to comic books--were taken. He picked pornography and its supposed connection to juvenile delinquency. He compared porn to narcotics--calling it addictive. The only problem Kefauver faced in this investigation was that there wasn't a lot of real pornography around in the Fifties, so he settled for the next best thing--Irving Klaw, "the Pin-up King," and Klaw's favorite model, Bettie Page.

In the hinterlands, Kefauver's investigators had collected circulars advertising "real nudes unretouched in any way" and "snappy photographs, the kind men like." He expressed shock and outrage at a "deck of 52 playing cards with different scenes of perverted acts shown on each card" and the eight-page comic books that showed "some popular comic strip character or prominent person performing perverted sex acts." And he sent his political posse after the itinerant stag film projectionist who showed lusty loops at smokers.

But Kefauver defined a pornographer as loosely as McCarthy defined a Communist. When he came to New York, he focused on Klaw, calling him "one of the largest distributors of obscene, lewd and fetish photographs throughout the country by mail."

Irving Klaw and his sister, Paula, ran Movie Star News. They sold publicity photos of movie stars and pin-up pictures of burlesque queens and camera club models--the kinds of shots that servicemen carried through World War Two and Korea.

When Klaw's customers wanted something more provocative, he provided playful photos of girls wrestling, spanking one another or practicing the kind of knot tying one didn't learn in Girl Scouts. These were the same burlesque and bondage sensibilities found in Robert Harrison's Beauty Parade, Wink and Titter. But if Kefauver was in need of a damsel in distress, he had a beauty in Bettie Page.

Bettie had come to New York in 1950 with acting aspirations--a 27-year-old with a trim, athletic body and a winning, fresh-faced, wholesome personality and appearance. By 1952 she was the most popular model on the camera club circuit and a favorite in Harrison's girlie magazines.

Irving and Paula Klaw had become her close friends. "We had a big sister-little sister relationship," Paula said. Bettie appeared in a feature-length burlesque film tided Striporama, starring Lili St. Cyr, in 1953. Its success prompted Irving Klaw to produce two similar films titled Varietease and Teaserama, starring St. Cyr, Tempest Storm and Bettie.

Hef purchased a picture taken by Bunny Yeager, in which Bettie is trimming a Christmas tree and wearing naught but a Santa Claus cap and a smile, and made her Miss January 1955. By then she had become the most popular pin-up model of the decade, appearing on the covers of everything from Jest and Breezy to John Willie's Bizarre.

She was the living embodiment of the "naughty but nice" calendar art of the Thirties and Forties, but it was the bondage and fetish photos for Klaw that earned Bettie the title the Dark Angel. She brought the same playful innocence to her spanking and bondage photos as she did to her other pin-up poses, turning perversion into parody.

Senator Kefauver's investigators tried to get Bettie to testify against Klaw, but she defended her friend. "I told them very frankly that Irving Klaw never did any pornography at all, not even nudes, and that I would say that if they put me on the stand," she said.

The committee blamed the strange death (possibly from autoerotic asphyxiation) of a 17-year-old Eagle Scout in Florida on a bondage photo of Bettie Page. His father had found the boy's body tied up in a manner similar to a photo in Klaw's catalog. There was no actual connection between the youth's death and the photo, but no matter.

Kefauver called Dr. Benjamin Karpman, a Washington-based psychotherapist, who claimed, "A normal 12- or 13-year-old boy or girl exposed to pornographic literature could develop into a homosexual. You can take healthy boys or girls, and by exposing them to abnormalities, virtually crystallize and settle their habits for the rest of their lives."

Klaw pleaded the Fifth and Bettie never testified, but the harassment continued. In 1957, weary of the conflict and in ill health, Irving called Bettie and told her that he was getting out of the business. She left Manhattan and simply disappeared.

Four decades later, Bettie Page had become a cult icon. Rock stars wrote songs about her, artists captured her on canvas, books and magazines were devoted to her legend, she became the heroine of the comic book The Rocketeer and fashion models and superstars such as Madonna paid tribute to her Dark Angel persona.

Whatever it was that Kefauver feared was now being celebrated.

Last Of The Old Time Pornographers

The government also targeted Samuel Roth, an anarchist and sexual radical who had a long string of run-ins with censors and with other members of the literary community. When he reprinted excerpts of James Joyce's Ulysses without the author's permission, even some supporters turned against him. He went to jail for selling unexpurgated copies of Ulysses in 1930, and again for selling copies of The Perfumed Garden to agents of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. A book that described 237 sexual positions no doubt offended those who were comfortable with only one--the missionary.

For decades, Roth was the sexual underground. He published unauthorized editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the Kama Sutra and a book on masturbation called Self-Amusement. He smuggled in works by Henry Miller and Frank Harris. In 1936 the Postmaster General charged him with sending obscenity through the mail. Roth served three years in prison.

He learned to survive the harassment of raids and federal indictments. He sent his advertising circulars first class--mail that could not be opened legally by inspectors. If a citizen complained about a solicitation from one company, he would switch to a different letterhead for the next mailing. Roth was American Aphrodite, Seven Sirens Press, Gargantuan Books, Falstaff Press, Paragon Press, Candide Press, Golden Hind Press, Hogarth House or Book Gems--as the need arose.

He had 400,000 customers and he claimed to have sent out 10 million fliers. John Makris, in The Silent Investigators, leveled the charge that "Roth used no discretion in compiling his lists and indiscriminately sent his circulars to many small children--even to orphanages."

From 1928 through 1956, no fewer than ten postal inspectors maintained open files on Roth, placing orders to a degree that Roth joked he was being supported by the Post Office. In the December 1953 issue of Roth's American Aphrodite, he wrote an open letter to Postmaster General Arthur Summer-field: "While I have no wish to offend persons who seem to me both prudish and unrealistic, neither have I any wish to trim my sails to their faint breezes. I want freedom of speech as a publisher. I know that people are interested in sex, as they are interested in all other aspects of living, and I believe that this is healthy, normal interest--vigorous and creative. Those people who think that sexual love is dirty may leave my books alone. I do not publish for such as those."

On July 30, 1955 the Feds indicted Roth on 26 separate violations of the Comstock Act--the federal statute that forbids sending obscenity, or advertisements for obscenity, through the mails. At Roth's trial the government paraded a prude's gallery of mothers, ministers, lawyers, plumbers and housewives willing to testify they had been shocked by the circulars, ads for an issue of American Aphrodite that contained a story and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.

The jury found Roth guilty on four counts. The judge sentenced him to five years and a $5000 fine. At the age of 62, Roth went to jail. His lawyers appealed.

A new Definition of Obscenity

In April 1957 the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case. At issue was the Comstock Act, a law that had been on the books for more than three quarters of a century. Did the federal government have the constitutional right to keep the mails free of "obscene materials"?

The Solicitor General brought in a crate of hard-core porn. Edward De Grazia, in Girls Lean Back Everywhere, suggests that the idea probably came from Arthur Summerfield, who kept an exhibit of provocative photos, films, books and drawings at the Post Office building. Visitors could get a crash course in kink.

The photos, booklets and comics were not connected to Roth, but they served to shock the Justices. De Grazia reports that Justice William Brennan sent the box back to the Solicitor's office after the hearing, only to get an irate call that half the stuff was missing.

The Court voted six to three to uphold the conviction, concluding that obscenity was not protected. The Comstock Act was, it seems, constitutional. But here Brennan, speaking for the majority, tried to define his terms: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous," he wrote. "Obscene material is material that deals with sex in a manner appealing to the prurient interest. The portrayal of sex in art, literature and scientific works is not itself sufficient reason to deny material the constitutional protection of freedom of speech and press. Sex, a great and mysterious motivating force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest and public concern."

Prior to this decision, if a work depicted sex--no matter how briefly--it could be considered obscene. For decades jurists had worried about the effect of isolated passages on "the most susceptible" persons. Brennan had greater faith in the citizenry and proposed a new test.

"The test is not whether it would arouse sexual desires or sexually impure thoughts in those comprising a particular segment of the community, the young, the immature or the highly prudish, or would leave another segment, the scientific or highly educated or the so-called worldly-wise and sophisticated indifferent and unmoved.... The test in each case is the effect of the book, picture or publication considered as a whole, not upon any particular class, but upon all those whom it is likely to reach. In other words, you determine its impact upon the average person in the community."

Obscenity was "utterly without redeeming social importance" in the Court's view and, in the future, the test would become "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest."

The Supreme Court integrated sex into the context of the whole work. A book couldn't be banned just because it had what some considered to be "good parts." They took sex out of the ghetto. In a way, the decision confirmed Hef's view that sex was part of the complete man, of interest to all--and that any work that hoped to capture the human experience would have to deal with sex.

But the decision sent Roth to prison. One writer noted with irony that Roth was put behind bars for mailing material far more innocent than the magazines and books that appeared in the wake of the Court's decision.

Postal Repression

The Post Office celebrated the decision and used it to tighten the screws on sexual expression. It hadn't read the small print.

In 1958 it conducted 4000 separate investigations relating to the mailing of obscene and pornographic matter and caused the arrest of 293 persons.

The media reprinted the government claim that mail-order porn was a $500 million-a-year business. Postal inspectors estimated that 200,000 circulars went out every day, "decorated with teasing pictures and spiced with provocative erotica."

According to an article in the April 27, 1959 Newsweek, the Post Office received an average of 700 letters of complaint each day "from parents protesting the corrupting of their children." (One assumes the other 199,300 recipients of the circulars were not bothered.)

J. Edgar Hoover, always vigilant and ready to confront a paper villain, warned the nation that "millions of innocent children are exposed in their formative years to reading matter and art depicting shocking sexual travesties" and that such material was "creating criminals faster than jails can be built."

The panicmongers moved for greater control of the mails, including the suspension of all mailing privileges to anyone suspected of producing obscenity. But Brennan had opened a door that invited change. In the next few years the courts used the Roth decision to encourage increasing communication on sex. In a case involving One--an overtly gay magazine--the Supreme Court ruled that discussions of homosexuality were not obscene. In a case involving Sunshine & Health--a case involving those misguided sunbathers--it declared that nudity was also not obscene.

And a jury of average persons had a better sense of justice than the crusaders. Gay Talese, in Thy Neighbor's Wife, reported that in 1959, "after a Chicago vice squad had arrested 55 independent news vendors for selling girlie magazines, a jury of five women and seven men--uninfluenced by a church group that sat in the courtroom holding rosary beads and silently praying--voted to acquit the defendants. After the verdict had been announced, the judge seemed stunned, then slumped forward from the bench and had to be rushed to a hospital. He had had a heart attack."

Lady Chatterley And Beyond

In the wake of the Roth decision, Americans discovered long-suppressed classics. During the war soldiers had filled duffel bags with the works of Frank Harris, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. Throughout the Fifties it had been a mark of sophistication to come back from Paris with the green bound volumes published by the Olympia Press. One of Shel Silverstein's first travel satires in Playboy showed the bearded artist at a book stall ordering "10 copies of Tropic of Cancer, 12 copies of...."

You went to Paris to acquire Vladimir Nabokov's dark comedy about an obsessive love for an underage girl. (Lolita had been published in France in 1955, but then was declared obscene. It was finally published in America in 1958--after being turned down repeatedly by major houses.) Or you could visit Paris to devour Terry Southern's delightful Candy.

In 1959 Barney Roset published an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Post Office inspectors promptly confiscated 24 cartons of the books. The legal defense was inspired: Yes, Lawrence's work--the whole living, breathing masterpiece--was concerned with sex, and might actually arouse, but arousal, in the hands of an artist, might not be obscene. And certainly not offensive to the average person with an appetite for sophistication.

The Court agreed.

In an article celebrating the decision, critic Alfred Kazin tried to put the novel into perspective: "Lawrence's exultant, almost unbearably sensitive descriptions of the countryside can mean little to Americans, for whom the neighborhood of love must be the bathroom and the bedroom, both the last word in sophisticated privacy. Lawrence's descriptions of the naked lovers gamboling in the rain, his ability to describe a woman's sensations and a man's body with feminine sureness--all this belongs to another world. Lady Chatterley's Lover brings back memories of a time when men still believed in establishing freedom as their destiny on earth, when sex was the major symbol of the imprisoned energies of man, for when that castle was razed, life would break open and flow free."

Contrary to what Kazin assumed, at least one American couple knew exactly what Lady Chatterley represented.

In Princeton, New Jersey a family of five went into an 8' x 9' fallout shelter as part of an experiment. They would spend two weeks in isolation, trying to duplicate the response to an atomic catastrophe. There was a panic button in case the isolation proved too great. (Unbeknownst to the couple, the scientists performing the experiment taped every sound through hidden microphones.)

This was the ultimate test of togetherness. The New York Times reported that the couple had "tranquilizer pills for the children, a bottle of whiskey for themselves and a library that included a copy of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover."

The Beat Generation

By the end of the Fifties, new role models were capturing America's attention. The hip humorists celebrated Bohemia (defined by Mort Sahl as one of those neighborhoods where Jews tried to act like Italians). A significant number of Americans were turning their backs on conformity, conservatism and the notion that money assured happiness. They gathered in coffeehouses, digging the cool sounds of Bach, Bartók and Bird. They smoked dope, listened to beat poetry and folk music and spoke in a hipster's language derived directly from black musicians. Organization Men they were not.

Detachment, not rebellion, marked the Beats. In Howl, poet Allen Ginsberg spoke of seeing "the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." The poem, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights, was seized in San Francisco in 1957 by Customs officials and declared obscene. A judge ruled the work had redeeming social importance. A journalist from Time described Ginsberg as "leader of the pack of oddballs who celebrate booze, dope, sex and despair."

To the new bohemians, mainstream America was Squaresville. The Beats offered a crack in the conformity and an alternative lifestyle that simply ignored the rat race.

The movement went mainstream with Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. More than half a million people read the picaresque account of hitchhiking, wild parties and casual sex. Suddenly there were beatniks in Venice Beach, beatniks in Greenwich Village and beatniks on Long Island, at least on weekends--all looking for satori, or at least the chance to get laid.

In the pages of Playboy, Kerouac explained the origins of Beat in a long, rambling, mystic invocation of Americana--everything from King Kong, Clark Gable, Krazy Kat and Buddhism to private eyes and great baseball players. The Beats, he said, were not against anything. "Why should I attack what I love out of life? This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out. When they come and stone you at least you won't have a glass house, just your glassy flesh."

They were outsiders by choice, who rejected traditional values and relationships, who could find love over a bottle of wine. They believed in the great goof and offered an escape route from the conformity and conservatism of the Fifties. Who could say where they were heading? Life was trajectory.

The hero of Jack Kerouac's On the Road sounded a new call--to move, to flee, to escape. "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."

Anyone want to hitch a ride to the Sixties?

He took the basic formula: shots of models in sexy costumes, bikinis, loincloths and lingerie.

J. Edgar Hoover picked on prostitutes and radicals, but he knew the value of a good conspiracy theory.

Rock around the clock

tunes from the fifties

Mona Lisa • Good Night Irene • A Bushel and a Peck • C'est Si Bon • From This Moment On • If I Knew You Were Comin', I'd've Baked a Cake • It's So Nice to Have a Man Around the House • Luck Be a Lady • I Wanna Be Loved • Autumn Leaves • Tennessee Waltz • How High the Moon • Too Young • Hello, Young Lovers • Come On-a My House • In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening • I Get Ideas • If

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Cry • Blue Tango • The Wheel of Fortune • Wish You Were Here • You Belong to Me • Takes Two to Tango • I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

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Secret Love • Your Cheatin' Heart • No Other Love • I Love Paris • I Believe • Pretend • Stranger in Paradise • That's Amoré • How Much Is That Doggie in the Window • No Other Love • Sh-Boom • The Man That Got Away • Arrivederci Roma • Three Coins in the Fountain • Young at Heart • Hey There • Misty • Little Things Mean a Lot • Fly Me to the Moon

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Rock Around the Clock • Ballad of Davy Crockett • Ain't That a Shame? • Teach Me Tonight • Love Is a Many Splendored Thing • Let Me Go, Lover! • Whatever Lola Wants • Unchained Melody • Something's Gotta Give • Mr. Sandman

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Don't Be Cruel • Hound Dog • Singing the Blues • Heartbreak Hotel • Blue Suede Shoes • True Love • Love Me Tender • Que Será, Será • I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face • My Prayer • Tonight You Belong to Me • Love and Marriage • The Great Pretender • Tutti Frutti • See You Later, Alligator • Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

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All Shook Up! • Young Love • Love Letters in the Sand • April Love • Party Doll • Tammy • That'll Be the Day • Bye Bye Love • Jailhouse Rock • Teddy Bear • Chances Are • Little Darlin' • Blueberry Hill • Wake Up Little Susie • Diana • It's Not for Me to Say • You Send Me • All the Way • At the Hop • Witchcraft • Thank Heaven for Little Girls • Volare • Lollipop • It's All in the Game • All I Have to Do Is Dream • Twilight Time • Fever • Great Balls of Fire • Splish Splash • La Bamba • Sixteen Candles • Donna • Venus • Dream Lover • Mack the Knife • Come Softly to Me • Mr. Blue • Put Your Head on My Shoulder • The Hawaiian Wedding Song • A Teenager in Love • Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Com