Thy Neighbor's Wife (22 page)

After the war, following the publication of magazine articles that acerbically reported his claim to have discovered “orgone energy”—a primal force found in the living organism and in the atmosphere that could be absorbed by a patient sitting in one of Reich’s “orgone boxes,” which resembled telephone booths—he came under investigation by the Food and Drug Administration. Ignoring the fact that his patients, before using the boxes, had signed affidavits stating that they knew the treatments were experimental and guaranteed no cures—although there was often hope on their part that the energy might cure everything from impotence to cancer—the FDA proceeded to prohibit the orgone box as a fraud, and it also banned all of Reich’s books containing his sociopolitical theories on health and sex.

In the McCarthy atmosphere of the early 1950s, few people were eager to defend Reich’s civil liberties, and he did not help his own cause by ignoring a court date and writing instead to the
judge saying that the courtroom was an inappropriate place for adjudicating questions of science. Sentenced in 1956 to a two-year term for contempt of court as well as for violation of the Food and Drug Act, Reich was sent to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (where the prison population would soon include Samuel Roth, following his 1956 obscenity conviction); but after Reich had served eight months, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The death of Wilhelm Reich in November 1957 was not considered major news by the media—his brief obituary appeared near the bottom in the New York
Times
of November 5—and, except for dissenting academics and Reichian therapists and young Americans who identified with the “beat” movement (Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg were adherents of Reich), relatively few people were interested in the underground copies of his work that the FDA had banned and, in many instances, had burned.

But all this was changed by the mid-1960s, as biographies and articles about Reich by former colleagues and friends, as well as the legal reissue of his books—including
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Character Analysis
, and
The Sexual Revolution
—found a receptive audience among college students and activists who, through him, understood more clearly the connection between sex and politics.

Had Reich lived long enough to witness the radical sixties, he undoubtedly would have seen much that would have confirmed for him his predictions made long ago that society was “awakening from a sleep of thousands of years” and was about to celebrate an epochal event “without parades, uniforms, drums or cannon salutes” that was no less than a revolution of the senses. The churches and governments were gradually losing control over people’s bodies and minds, and while Reich conceded that the shifting process, would initially produce confrontations,
clashes, and grotesque behavior, the final result, he believed, would be a healthier, more sex-affirmative and open society.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1965, which forged its slogan with the initials of a four-letter word (“Freedom Under Clark Kerr”), as well as the civil rights protests in the South and the subsequent antiwar demonstrations and marches on Washington—the sit-ins, teach-ins, love-ins—all were manifestations of a new generation that was less sexually repressed than its ancestors and also less willing to respect political authority and social tradition, color barriers and draft boards, deans and priests. It possessed more of what Reich called “genital character” and less of what another Freudian radical, Géza Róheim, called “sphincter morality.”

But while the blasphemous, braless, peace-beaded young counterculturalists received most of the attention in the media during the sixties, multitudes of quiet middle-class married people were also involved in this quest for free expression and more control over their own bodies. Like the draft-age demonstrators who defied the law in refusing to risk their bodies in Vietnam, church-going women disobeyed their religion in preventing the birth of unwanted children through abortion or various forms of birth control. A reported 6 million women, many of them practicing Catholics, were using the Pill in 1967; and in this time of topless bars, miniskirts, and long-haired lawyers and businessmen it seemed clear that the governing forces of society had limited influence over what clothes should be worn or how the hair should be shorn. Pubic hair made its film debut in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Blow-Up
, and penis-shaped plastic body vibrators for women were displayed for sale in drugstore windows in many cities, although the New York
Times
censored them from its advertising columns.

The sexual satisfaction of the body—pleasure, not procreation-was generally accepted now in the middle class as the primary purpose of coitus, and in an attempt to more fully comprehend and rectify unresponsiveness among pleasure-seeking patients, the Masters and Johnson researchers in St. Louis pioneered in the
use of an eight-inch plastic phallic “coition machine,” employed a number of former prostitutes among its co-experimenters, and later also provided “surrogate wives” as sex partners for dysfunctional men.

A lawsuit against the Masters and Johnson center by a husband of one of the surrogates, as well as snide speculation in public print about the performance of the machine, contributed to the researchers’ decision to eliminate these features from their laboratory work, although female surrogates would continue to find employment at several other sex-therapy clinics that would be established around the nation as a result of Masters and Johnson’s fame and success. At some of these clinics, couples would be tutored in the art of giving erotic massages and would also be shown instructional films on fellatio, cunnilingus, and the joys of mutual masturbation that were more sexually explicit than what was passing for pornography in theaters on Forty-second Street.

The number of mate-swappers in America, most of them middle-class married people with children, were now estimated by some swing-trade periodicals to exceed 1 million couples; and in a speech to the American Psychological Association, Dr. Albert Ellis, a psychologist and author, said that marriages can sometimes be helped by “healthy adultery.” Group nudity could also be personally beneficial, according to psychologist Abraham M. Maslow, who believed that nudist camps or parks might be places where people can emerge from hiding behind their clothes and armor, and become more self-accepting, revealing, and honest.

Mixed nude bathing and massage became popular during the sixties at such “growth centers” as the Esalen Institute in Northern California, a lush retreat nestled in rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific where the spirit of Reich seemed alive in the faculty that supervised dozens of sensuous seminars attended by thousands of predominantly middle-class couples that made Esalen a million-dollar-a-year enterprise. Most of the new forms of therapy that had been at least partly inspired by Reich’s work—bioenergetics, encounter, sensitivity training, primal therapy,
rolfing, massage—were available at Esalen, where the most prominent therapist was Dr. Frederick S. Perls, a German refugee who had been one of Reich’s patients in Europe before the war.

Like Reich, Perls had become dissatisfied with Freud’s “talking cure” as well as with many of Freud’s rigid practitioners who, in Perls’s view, were “beset with taboos”—it was as if “Viennese hypocritical Catholics had invaded the Jewish science”—and Perls’s therapy emphasized instead new methods for achieving freer body movement, more awareness, fuller expressiveness, and “life feeling.” Too many people were obsessed with their heads and were alienated from their bodies, Perls believed, adding: “We have to lose our minds and come to our senses.”

Much of what was being advocated at Esalen and elsewhere was in harmony with John Williamson’s own attitude, although he wanted to go further than Reich’s followers in altering the sociopolitical system through sexual experimentation—he hoped to soon establish his idealized community for couples wishing to demolish the double standard, to liberate women from their submissive roles, and to create a sexually free and trusting atmosphere in which there would be no need for possessiveness, jealousy, guilt, or lying. Now was the perfect time for such a venture, Williamson felt; society was in turmoil, and people were responsive to new ideas, particularly in California, where so many national trends and styles had started.

If successful, his project could be financially profitable—like Esalen, or the Synanon drug program founded by a onetime alcoholic; or at least heavily funded and solvent, like the Kinsey Institute and the Masters and Johnson clinic—as well as becoming a contributing force toward a healthier, more egalitarian society. But first he had to organize his core group, those intimates who would help him initiate the process and ultimately serve as the “instruments for change” in other people’s lives. He already had several candidates in mind, people he had befriended since moving to California three years ago. Most of them were in their late twenties or early thirties, were employed in large corporations, were divorced or unhappily married, were restless and searching.
Several of the men were engineers, conservative individuals whose livelihood was linked to the fortunes of the defense industry in California but who admitted to extreme boredom with their work and home lives and seemed ready for radical alternatives.

Among the women Williamson had in mind were Arlene Gough, with whom he had enjoyed a brief affair after meeting her at Hughes Aircraft, and with whom he was still friendly. He was also close to two other women who worked at his electronics firm, one of them an extremely attractive individual who had been an airlines stewardess. But the woman he considered most essential to his program—which he would call Project Synergy-was Barbara Cramer.

In the months he had spent with her since their trip to San Francisco, he gradually realized that she already possessed many of the qualities that undoubtedly would be the goals of women in Project Synergy: She was professionally successful, independent, and self-assured, was sexually liberated and aggressive when it suited her, and was not intimidated by the possibility of rejection. In some ways she reminded him of Dagny Taggart, the heroine in
At las Shrugged
, although Barbara Cramer was thankfully not a female elitist and would therefore serve as a more representative role model to the young middle-class women that Williamson hoped would be drawn into Project Synergy. He saw Barbara as the prototype of the new woman of the changing middle class; and, in a synergistic sense, she ideally suited him—her assets complemented his deficiencies, and vice versa. She was verbal and active while he was theoretical and introspective; she was more direct and efficient if less calculating and visionary. She did not procrastinate, she knew what she wanted. She had already decided, at twenty-seven, that she would never have children, being aggrieved by recollections of her hapless mother and other child-rearing women she had known since leaving rural Missouri. But Barbara nonetheless wanted to become more feminine than she was, more gentle and sensitive, and she also admitted to Williamson that she sometimes felt sexually attracted to certain women. Williamson urged her not to repress this, but to
explore it in the interest of greater self-awareness; and shortly after their marriage in the summer of 1966—a conventional act that they both agreed would create a socially acceptable facade for their unconventional life-style—John Williamson decided to fully test Barbara’s tolerance of sexual variety within their marriage.

Hours before they were to leave Los Angeles for a restful weekend at Lake Arrowhead, he informed her that they would be accompanied in the car by a young woman from his office named Carol, the former airline stewardess that he had dated prior to his meeting Barbara. When Barbara seemed unenthusiastic, he assured her that Carol was very feminine and charming, adding that it would be both beneficial and enjoyable for Barbara to have her as a friend.

Barbara had heard him discuss Carol before, always fondly but never hinting that he was still seriously involved with her, if he ever was; and Barbara imagined Carol to be, like the receptionist she was, a lovely frontispiece for a faceless corporation, a naive young individual who had found a father figure in John and had, like so many other women, been drawn to him because, unlike so many men, he would
listen
to a woman, would really listen to what she was trying to say.

Late that afternoon after she had met Carol, Barbara amended some of her assumptions about her. A tall, angular blonde with dark eyes and a graceful body, Carol seemed hardly naive and quite composed, although there was nothing haughty or affected in her manner. She appeared to be genuinely happy to meet Barbara, and remarked on how impressed she had been by John’s description of Barbara’s career; as they rode in the car toward Lake Arrowhead, Carol was careful to include Barbara in all the conversations with John about their office and their mutual friends.

Still, despite these efforts, Barbara felt uneasy with Carol, and she recognized this as characteristic of the way she had nearly always felt toward women in social situations; though she privately
was attracted to them, she could not easily relate to them, having had limited experience with her own sex during her tomboy adolescence and the years that followed. The one time that she had cultivated a female friendship with her schoolmate Frances, it had ended sadly and bitterly, and Barbara still could not explain her own strange, hostile reaction to Frances after Frances had announced that she was getting married and moved out of their apartment.

Barbara also felt somewhat disconcerted in the car because she sensed that she was the odd woman in this threesome with Carol and John, and that they had arranged this weekend behind her back. Barbara had pondered her husband’s intentions as soon as he had mentioned that Carol would be joining them, and she now anticipated being put in the position of possibly having to accept or reject Carol as a bed partner with John at Lake Arrowhead, or perhaps being left with the choice of remaining on the sidelines while her husband embraced Carol as a way of proving, as he often said he could, that wholesome, open sex with friends need not disturb the deeper meaning of marriage.