The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (3 page)

One day in 1958, Alex received a letter from his son's boarding school: parents should give their sons a talk about “personal hygiene”—that is, the facts of life—as the school would not provide such delicate information. Soon afterwards, Alex called his son in for a talk, fidgeting as he explained the business between man and woman. He exuded so much embarrassment that 12-year-old Nick did not dare ask questions. “He did very little to fill in the gaps,” Nick remembered later. “I probably heard less talk about sex than the average child.” Nick ended up turning to his father's medical books for information, poring over cut-away diagrams of the male and female reproductive organs.

Because he boarded at school, Nick didn't see much of his father during his teenaged years. He had no idea when his father began an affair with Jane Henderson, whom the boy regarded as an
honorary aunt. But clearly, something strange had happened. His father seemed to be on TV and the radio all the time now.

In 1962, Alex Comfort participated in an antinuclear protest in Trafalgar Square; the police threw him in jail, along with a cabal of distinguished cellmates like Bertrand Russell. In the morning, most of the other professors sprung themselves by paying a nominal fee. Alex refused to bail himself out and stayed in prison for a month, where he had a lovely time discussing roses with his guards, who were enthusiastic gardeners.

News of Alex Comfort's arrest spread through Nick's boarding school. The other boys taunted the 16-year-old. “Jailbird, jailbird,” they called after him. For his part, Nick fumed that his father had chosen to go to prison when he didn't have to—just to get attention. Raised by his mother to value moderation, Nick abhorred his father's outrageous style.

In 1963, his father published a book that advocated for free love,
Sex in Society,
and went on the radio to push its radical agenda. He called chastity a health problem. He argued for legal prostitution. He celebrated cultures in which children had sex with one another. He lobbed his ideas like bombs, and the British public, duly scandalized, responded with scathing attacks on him.
“Being at boarding school when that book came out wasn't the best place to be,” according to Nick. Back then, as a teenaged boy, he endured taunts for the actions of his faraway father. Seventeen-year-old Nick seethed over one particular remark his father had made in the book—that 15-year-old boys should be given condoms. Trapped at a blazers-and-neckties school, Nick hardly ever saw girls; he blushed and grew sweaty when he tried to talk to females at a school mixer. The last thing he needed was a condom. His father was busy running around decreeing what was best for theoretical teenagers, but he didn't even know his own son.

The truth was, Alex didn't have much left over for Nick. When you reconstruct his schedule in the mid-1960s, he appears to be comically super-human, like one of those lechers in the old Benny Hill TV show who scooted around in fast-forward, their legs flailing as they chased after naked women. Alex would dash home for dinner with Ruth and sleep there; then in the wee hours of the morning, he'd hurry to Jane's flat, nuzzle with her for a while, drive her to her job at the library, then head off to his own duties at University College London. “For quite a large part of my time, I was with two different women,” Alex would comment later. “It is not an arrangement I recommend.”

Nick tolerated the situation, too, because for the first time ever, his father seemed happy. “There were sparks of levity starting to come through. [My father] felt he'd been too serious when he was young.” Now, at last, Alex had discovered his own impishness. His joy.

Being married to two women could be exhausting—the driving alone wore him out. By the late 1960s, he had divvied up his week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays belonged to Jane; the rest of the week he spent with Ruth. Neither of the women had other lovers, so he had to keep both of them satisfied. His wife would tolerate anything, so long as he played the part of her devoted husband. Nick believes that his mother agreed to the arrangement because “it gave her more time. My father could be such a handful.” But one senses that Ruth had simply learned to make the best of a bad situation. If her husband decided to be a free lover, well, she would just bear up and smile. Jane, meanwhile, wanted more of him. He commuted between them in a tricked-out van with a condom taped on the dashboard.

Even many of Alex's friends knew nothing about the Monday-Wednesday-Friday side of his life. Marilyn Yalom—a feminist scholar who had befriended both Alex and Jane—was one of the
friends who did know. “He was proud of the fact that he had two women and that he'd arranged his life this way,” according to Yalom. “There was something ineffably childish about Alex.”

In the late 1960s, Yalom was passing through London and fell sick with a high fever. While she recovered, she stayed in an extra room in the flat that Jane and Alex shared. She found the bond between Alex and his “second wife” rather touching. But Yalom had no desire to join in. “When I got better, they proposed a threesome to me. They were like two little children saying, ‘This would be fun.' I brushed it off without taking them too seriously,” Yalom recounted later. “When I left, packing my things, Jane brought me a pair of her underpants. It was for her some kind of symbol of what I'd missed, or of some kind of intimacy between them.”

By now, even though Jane and Alex had both grown wrinkled and so podgy they wore stretch pants, “they were like a couple of teenaged kids,” she said. All the while, they had kept on writing their book together, adding exotic positions that they learned about on their travels (sometimes with Ruth in tow) to India and across Europe. They also began to write longingly about group sex:
“Subject of a whole cult today, of which we aren't members, so we speak from hearsay. It's becoming socially more easy to arrange, and personal taste apart we see no earthly reason why pairs of friends shouldn't make love together.”

By the late 1960s, Alex realized that his hobby with Jane might turn into an important book indeed; he believed they had compiled and documented more sexual practices than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of the Fourth Century scholar who edited the
Kama Sutra.
So one day, Alex scheduled a meeting at Mitchell Beazley, the UK's top publisher of illustrated encyclopedias, to show off the manuscript. The editors recognized the book as a masterpiece, the most comprehensive book on sex ever written, and every position in it “kitchen tested.” They'd take it.

“It is an iron rule in our trade that no one gets anywhere until they give up snails,” biologist Steve Jones has observed, pointing out that Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll and Alex Comfort all achieved greatness only after they lost interest in mollusks.

By 1969, Comfort had spent two decades pottering around in labs, surrounded by piles of snail shells and plastic jugs full of
guppies; he'd been searching for the mechanism that causes mollusks and fish to grow old. He'd first become interested in the tick-tock of death back when he was a young man. In his 20s, as a poet-scientist sickened by the needless destruction of Hiroshima and Dresden, he'd belonged to a literary movement called the New Apocalyptics. In his poetry and in his lab, too, he'd explored the clockwork of decay. But now, he'd become a different sort of person entirely. A swinger. A sex expert. A happy man. Death no longer interested him.

Picture him in his office in London, packing shells in cotton and labeling boxes. He takes apart his chromoscope and drops the pieces into a box. Soon he and Jane will fly to Los Angeles, to the blinding sun and the dry canyons where few snails crawl. There, he will study another kind of specimen. He has heard about a utopian community out in those hills, where couples are experimenting with orgies. He will finally get a chance to participate in a laboratory of free love. Alex Comfort is about to drop snails forever and go on to bigger things.

Meanwhile, he finished up work on his sex manual. As he did so, he began to worry about the risks of publishing what was, in
effect, a diary of his sex life with Jane, written in the voice of a couple: “we” prefer playing in the bedroom, “she” likes her nipples licked, and so on. Had Alex owned up to being the male half of the couple, most readers might assume his wife Ruth to be his toe-riding, rope-loving, corset-wearing partner. Or the audience would suspect the truth: that his coauthor was his mistress. Either way, the book would destroy his marriage. It might also lead to the suspension of his license to practice as a doctor; the British medical board had been known to punish MDs who wrote scandalous tracts.

In the end, he tried to get around such problems by listing himself as the editor of the book, rather than its author. He lied in his introduction, saying that he had gathered his material from other people rather than from first-hand experience. “The book is based originally on the work of one couple. One of them is a practicing physician; their anonymity is accordingly professional,” he explained. He also pretended not to have written the text, saying he had “left alone” the “authors'…light-hearted style.” Later on, he told journalists that he'd resorted to this subterfuge in order to protect his reputation as a doctor. No doubt Alex also hoped to spare Ruth the cruelty of going public with his sex life. After all, his
marriage to Ruth had endured through the wild 1960s, and though he saw less of her in 1970, he still loved her.

He had dedicated almost every one of his previous books to his wife. This time, he included no dedication page at all.

The original title for the book,
Doing Sex Properly,
sounded too stern, so an editor suggested a better one:
The Joy of Sex
would capitalize on the popularity of Erma Rombauer's bestselling cookbook

The idea of treating sexual play as if it were French cooking delighted Alex. His mother had been the first woman ever to win a scholarship to Oxford University in French studies; when Alex was born, she dropped out of school and concentrated on sculpting him to be a perfect little wunderkind. By the age of seven, Alex could speak French fluently. The language still came easily to him, and he scattered it all through
The Joy of Sex,
like so much gold dust. Foreign phrases worked magic. Ass licking became
feuille de rose.
Sniffing the partner's armpit became
cassolette;
a finger up the anus,
postillionage.
He made acts that were illegal in many countries sound like rare, sought-after perfumes. Without quite realizing what he was up to, Alex had found a way to re-brand sex. He'd taken stunts
seen nowhere outside of triple-X porn and turned them into entertainments suitable for a suburban couple to try after a few glasses of merlot. Looking back, his greatest stroke of genius was to abandon the one-size-fits-all model used in nearly all the previous sex manuals. Alex—himself a bondage and group-sex fan—championed the idea of different tastes for different tongues. Today, with the Internet at our fingertips, we're used to people dividing themselves up into erotic tribes: costume wearers, horse-play enthusiasts, and dungeon mistresses have found each other and formed communities. But in 1970, few people had heard of such variations. Alex treated it all as just part of the
pot-au-feu
of human desire, and his tone suggested that the reader would too. He imagined that
Joy
would become a “coffee table” book; on display in the living room, it would make an excellent ice breaker, and might even encourage the Joneses to invite their neighbors the Smiths for a foursome.

At the same time, he recognized that many of his readers would be sexual imbeciles. The book included a sewing pattern for a g-string, so that readers could make their own stripper clothing and wear it around the bedroom. What's mind-boggling now, decades on, is that g-strings were not available in any store back then. Imagine the housewife who cut out the pattern, shopped for
black silk, and painstakingly hand-sewed the adornment, all so she could surprise her husband. In 1970, when Alex prepared his sex tips, most adults were married. The birth control pill had been available for less than ten years. Many of Alex's readers had wed at 20 or 21, and had slept with only one partner. They were poignantly aware that they could be better lovers.

The book reflects these aspirations. Follow instructions, its tone implied, and you could develop the kind of exceptional love-making skills previously available only to the rich. Here were the tricks you might learn if you spent a few years bumming around Europe, jetsetting to nude beaches, dabbling with lovers who spoke French. World-class sex required more than just practice—you had to learn from the experts. “Chef-grade cooking doesn't happen naturally,” Alex exhorted his readers. “It starts at the point where people know how to prepare and enjoy food, are curious about it and willing to take trouble preparing it, read recipe hints, and find they are helped by one or two detailed techniques. It's hard to make mayonnaise by trial and error, for instance. Cordon Bleu sex, as we define it, is exactly the same situation.”

It was a message that would resonate with millions of people—their sex could be thrilling and also classy.

But what about the illustrations?
The Joy of Sex
would describe positions that few of Comfort's readers had ever encountered before—Chinese style, Indian style, croupade, cuissade. Obviously, it would be necessary to include pictures that showed how to insert part A into slot B. Alex handed over the Polaroid photos that he and Jane had snapped years ago to document their adventures. Couldn't artists turn these photos into sexy drawings? The smudgy, dark Polaroids of two middle-aged intellectuals smashed together in various tableaus were far from appetizing. Both Charles Raymond and Chris Foss, the men assigned to illustrate the book, decided they must go looking for inspiration elsewhere. They leafed through porn magazines and hired models, but they couldn't seem to get the right look. Furthermore, the editors at Mitchell Beazley nixed the idea of photographs, which would be likely to get the book banned.

In the end, everyone agreed
The Joy of Sex
should be filled with line drawings; the softness of the pencil would add a homespun intimacy and let the book slip past the censors. The drawings would be inspired by photographs of a real-looking couple—though the models would not be as real and saggy as Alex and Jane.

One of the illustrators, Charles Raymond, volunteered himself and his wife Edeltraud. Charlie had a hippie beard and the long, tangled hair of a wino, but he turned out to be well-suited for his new role as sex model. Chris Foss, who snapped the photos, could only marvel at the ease with which Charlie and his wife bent themselves into the 200 positions they documented for the book. “Edeltraud was very Germanic and so she would say ‘Right, Charles, we start now. Position number one!'” remembers Foss. “She'd tap her leg and say ‘Come on, Charles!' and off they would go and do that and she would tick it off and say ‘Right Charles, now we do this one!' Poor old Charlie was only human, so every now and then he—how do I say it—blew it a bit. I'd say ‘Charlie, you can't do it now. We've got 15 more positions and just an hour left. Charlie, can you get back into business as quick as you can?'”

Afterwards, Foss produced minimalist line drawings based on the photos, gorgeous in their simplicity. His illustrations capture the many moods of two people who adore each other. In some, the lovers droop across one another, satisfied; in others, they rear back, trying to find just the right spot. But, lovely and erotic as the illustrations are, the first thing you notice about them is Charles Raymond's hair, that wild mop on his head and the obscene beard.
When the book came out, much of the buzz would center around the “bearded man,” who seems to be the narrator and hero of the story. His caveman coif and perpetually hard penis would do as much to sell the book as Alex's elegant prose.

Of course, as Alex worked on his manuscript in 1970, he had no idea just how popular the book would become two years later. The publisher planned an initial print run of only 10,000 copies. For Alex,
Joy
was a manifesto, a byproduct of his own revolutionary sexual life. He had begun commuting back and forth to the United States to spend weeks at a time living in a community called Sandstone. He had just discovered an erotic playground that could only have existed in his wildest fantasies—or in California.