Full Service (23 page)

I
was working at a party in the Hollywood Hills in the early fifties when I first met him; few people knew who he was. Yet he was to make an indelible impression on the science of human sexual research and become a household name. He was biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey, then in his late fifties. He had shaken the very foundations of science, sociology, and medicine in 1948 with the publication of his first book,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
At the time we met he was writing his second ground-breaking tome,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
He was discussing it with a group of friends and medical associates at a party and was complaining about how difficult it was to gain access to young women who were prepared to freely share stories of their sexual experiences with him.

Toward the end of the evening when the conversation around the table had grown louder, and as groups of diners broke off into different discussions, I leaned over his shoulder to remove his dessert plate and whispered into his ear, “I think I might be able to help you in your research, sir.”

Later in the evening he took me aside and told me all about the Institute for Sex Research, known as the ISR, which he had established as a nonprofit organization on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research associates were Clyde Martin, Wardwell Pomeroy, and Paul Gebhard. Nothing like the ISR had ever existed before. However, Kinsey said he was getting frustrated over the difficulties he was having gaining access to young women to interview because there was a longstanding social stigma against open discussion of female sexual behavior. He wanted to investigate the subject as deeply as possible, just as he had done a few years earlier with his report on males. He wanted to know what I meant when I said I might be able to help him. I told him that I thought I might be able to introduce him to some of my female friends who may want to share their stories with him. To discuss it further we arranged to meet a couple of days later. That was when my close and utterly fascinating relationship with Alfred Kinsey began.

At our next meeting I told Kinsey all about what I had been doing ever since I got out of the Marines. He was intrigued. No, he was more than that. He was utterly fascinated. Because of the new book he was working on he was particularly interested in what I knew about the female of the species, most specifically with regard to lesbianism. His aim was to focus on numerous aspects of female sexuality: marital sex, extramarital sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, oral sex, masturbation, and prostitution. He was fascinated but not surprised when I told him how prevalent I had found lesbianism to be in society. Up until then researchers were much more aware of gay sexual activities among men but not much was known about lesbian behavior. Kinsey wanted to break through those barriers. He wanted to prove that there was just as much homosexual activity going on among women as there was among men and that it ought to be classified as a normal part of human sexual behavior. He explained to me what he was looking for and I expressed an interest in showing him not only how much lesbianism there was but also the degree of variation there was in the many forms of lesbian sexual activities. After our meeting he made enquiries around town about my credentials and within a week he enthusiastically embraced me as a member of his team. But everything would take place in confidence. I would never be credited for any assistance I might bring to the project and all the young ladies I recruited to help his institute in its research would remain nameless. Their identities would not be revealed.

And so began a number of trips to Bloomington, Indiana. Over a period of about two months Kinsey flew me and a group of young women whom I had handpicked, from Los Angeles on United Airlines to Chicago and then from there on Lake Central Airlines to Bloomington. To remain within the boundaries of the law the girls I had chosen were always eighteen or older, but we were especially keen to recruit those who looked about seventeen, simply because that is the average age at which females became sexually active, especially those commencing college. To accurately reflect that group we wanted them to look like typical bobby-soxers of the time, replete with pom-poms, ribbons, saddle shoes, white socks, and short skirts.

We shot hours of 16mm and 8mm film of them on the Indiana University campus, portraying them as typical college students. We followed them around in groups of two or three, observing them in class, coming out of class, chewing gum, giggling, and wiggling as boys made passes at them, and then eavesdropping over their shoulders as they retired to their rooms and dormitories. There, behind locked doors, prevailing myths were shattered as the girls undressed, made out with one another, and engaged in various forms of sex. They practiced cunnilingus, played with dildos, masturbated, and did everything that college-aged kids did in real life in the big wide world. There was nothing abnormal in any of this. That’s what young ladies did, even back in the fifties. The people we had chosen for these scenes were not necessarily lesbian but they were more than happy to experiment, discover, and explore their sexuality for the cameras. And that was the point of it all. We wanted to show the sexual variety expressed among young females. At that time most doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, educationists, academics, and certainly religious leaders and parents refused to accept the idea that young college girls engaged in sexual experimentation of any kind, let alone—heaven forbid!—lesbian activities. Kinsey wanted to pull off people’s blindfolds, provide them with the truth, and open their minds to reality.

Because of strict antipornography laws in Indiana we had to take extra precautions when processing the film that we had shot. Kinsey and I made contact with a guy who I will simply refer to as Bob because he asked me never to reveal his name to anyone. Of course, it would be safe to do so now, but a promise is a promise. Bob worked as an industrial chemist for the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. Once filming was completed Kinsey used to fly Bob to Bloomington, together with big metal cases full of processing and laboratory equipment, and Bob set it all up in a darkened warehouse beside a local film processing laboratory where we had established discreet local contacts. There the motion picture film was processed and printed and then brought over in unmarked cans to the institute.

Behind the bolted doors of meeting rooms and lecture halls we showed the material to groups of researchers and counselors. Middle-aged women were always the most resistant. They were especially doubtful about our work or simply wanted to deny that lesbianism existed on American college campuses. But Kinsey quickly managed to dispel their myopic thinking. When
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
came out in book form in 1953 it caused an outcry. However, people gradually simmered down and began to grasp the validity and extensive range of Kinsey and his team’s research. Women’s clubs and other organizations were the last barriers to fall as they reluctantly came to accept the fact that lesbianism indeed existed and was practiced in American society, from college age upward. Prior to that, as I said earlier, the thinking was that only men engaged in homosexuality. Some hard-liners still clung to the belief that lesbianism was only to be found in prisons, where women were alone, or in places where they were deprived of heterosexual relationships. Kinsey and his team overturned all that thinking. Lesbianism was as prevalent as gay sex. It was part of human life. Amazingly, once the book came out the sluice gates opened. Counselors at colleges and universities all over the country began to be inundated by questions from female students who admitted that they were confused about their sexual orientation or who came out of the closet and openly stated that they were lesbian.

I got to know Kinsey and his partners Martin, Pomeroy, and Gebhard really well. But the better I knew them the more I realized that they were actually surprisingly square and out of touch with things. They didn’t really have the full picture of what was going on in the alternative and counterculture tiers of society. Despite all of Kinsey’s work he was still rather naive in some ways. I wanted to help him. I wanted to expose him to what he was trying to find out. I wanted to contribute to the database of knowledge of what really went on in the big wide world.

I brought the subject up with Willie Somerset Maugham one day and was thrilled when Willie said, “Well, dear boy, arrange a little soirée of a mixed bag of, say, half a dozen at my bungalow on Saturday night and bring this Kinsey fellow along with you. I’d love to meet him.”

So I did. I arranged for a straight couple, plus two gays and two lesbians to give us a little performance at Willie’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I dragged Kinsey along with me. Actually, dragged is the wrong term. He was only too happy to be there. He was also thrilled to meet Willie and Alan. As Kinsey stared at the young people getting up to their antics I watched him. He was mesmerized. I don’t think he expected anything like what he saw that night. It was raw, open, unfettered, uninhibited, totally indulgent sex. At times I wanted to laugh out loud as I watched the expressions on his face, but I managed to stifle the urge by convincing myself that this little spectacle wasn’t meant for fun but, for want of a better term, “wholesome scientific research.”

Over the years, Kinsey continued to conduct extensive interviews for the ISR. He often told me that some of the most revealing information came from prisoners. Inmates at state and local penitentiaries were only too happy to spend a day in the prison library talking to him about their sex lives. Prisoners would delve into the minutest detail about their personal histories and sexual experiences, often spending hours at a time with him. Kinsey found their help invaluable. They provided a captivating window into the sexual mores of society.

Kinsey also wanted to research pornography. But that was a totally taboo topic in those days. Unlike current times, pornography was extremely hard to come by during the fifties. It was illegal in every single state of the union. Certainly it existed, but it was always underground, always behind locked doors, always in back alleys, always in hushed and whispered tones in secret places. God help you if you were caught with explicitly sexual pictures. People used to come back from Europe with dirty postcards sewn into the linings of their suitcases or hidden in their unwashed laundry. Pornography was a passport to trouble. Over the years I was at a number of parties where pornographic photographs were being passed around among the guests and suddenly the vice squad appeared at the front door. They would interrogate everyone present and search the place. It didn’t matter if you were rich or famous, a pauper or a movie star. No one was above the law. If you were discovered to be in possession of pornographic material you were in deep trouble. Some people had clandestine screenings of 16mm or 8mm porno films at home. If the vice squad was tipped off they would raid the house and immediately seize the projector and films and any other equipment. Those present would be arrested without question and would have to explain themselves to the judge the next morning. Oddly enough, if you were found with photographs of a male and female engaging in normal heterosexual sex—usually a guy having intercourse with a girl in the missionary position—you might be able to get away with just a stern warning. The cops would most likely hand images like that back to their owners.

However, if the photos depicted a woman performing fellatio on a man or a guy going down on a woman or, heaven forbid, two members of the same sex together, that would count as flagrant pornography.

I have no idea how he came to the information but Kinsey always maintained that the biggest collection of pornography in the world was in the possession of the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican. I found that hard to believe but he was convinced of it. According to him, the second largest selection was owned by ex-King Farouk of Egypt. When he told me that my interest was immediately piqued. The reason was because I had a direct connection to the Egyptian royal family.

“Is that true, Alfred?” I asked him. “Because if it is I might be able to find out more for you.”

“How?” he queried.

“Well,” I said, “I know Farouk’s sister. She lives right here in Los Angeles and I occasionally work at parties and dinners for her.”

Kinsey could hardly believe it and I said I would see what I could do.

Princess Faiza Fouad Rauf was a sultry looking Beverly Hills socialite in her thirties who threw extravagant parties and lived the luxurious life of an Egyptian princess. Which is exactly what she was. She was one of the three sisters of King Farouk, monarch of Egypt. His full title was the very fancy sounding His Majesty Farouk I, by the grace of God, King of Egypt and of Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, of Kordofan, and of Darfur. It doesn’t get more grand than that. The problem was that King Farouk was forced to abdicate in 1952 following allegations of corruption, an overly excessive lifestyle, pilfering valuable objects and artifacts from his hosts while on state visits abroad, a lack of empathy for his people, and, worst of all, the ramifications resulting from Egypt’s defeat during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He was deposed in a military coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and forced into exile. After he left Egypt he settled in Italy and Monaco but much of his wealth and treasures went with him. Twice divorced and now single, Farouk fancied himself a playboy, womanized wherever he went, continued to live the high life, spent a fortune on himself, and indulged in his passion for fine cuisine. The result was that he became chronically obese, weighing in at around three hundred pounds. He traveled extensively and occasionally visited his sister Princess Faiza in Beverly Hills. The story of how she came to settle on the west coast of America was fascinating and, I might add, not without tragedy.