Plumbing the Shallows

By Paul Gray

THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE by Gay Talese; Doubleday; 568pages; $14.95

With bestsellers on the New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power) and the Mafia (Honor Thy Father) to his credit, Author Gay Talese felt ready to tackle a really big subject for his next book. In 1971 he noticed a massage parlor near one of his favorite bars on Manhattan's East Side. Instead of saying "There goes the neighborhood," he decided that something was up, perhaps nothing less than "the redefinition of morality in America." An indefatigable reporter, Talese plunged into the world of commercial sex, not just patronizing massage parlors but also managing two of them. He saw "numerous" X-rated films, did research at topless bars, crisscrossed the country in search of nude encounter groups. His work attracted snickering publicity, strained his marriage and caused him to miss his deadline by five years.

At long last Talese has got his story into print, and it certainly answers thousands of questions. How, for instance, did Nude Model Diane Webber's great-great-grandmother die? (An Indian shot her in the back.) Did General Custer carry life insurance into the battle of Little Big Horn? (Yes, a $5,000 policy with New York Life.) What covered the circular bed in Hugh Hefner's private DC-9? (A coverlet made of Tasmanian opossum fur.)

No book that somberly enshrines such trivia can be all bad; fun is fun, whether intended or not. But well over 500 pages of details should probably, finally, add up to something more than polymorphism, and Thy Neighbor's Wife does not. Talese's subject is not "sex in America," as he claims, but rather a narrow band of U.S. citizens: married middle-class males now in middle age who want more sex with more women than society and, usually, their wives condone. Talese identifies with all the neatly dressed clients of massage parlors; "He was them," the author writes of himself, "in many ways." Fair enough. Men afflicted to the point of distraction with adolescent fantasies have their rights as well as their problems, along with everyone else. But Talese does not let it go at that. He paints his male characters as victims, healthy ids thwarted by church, state, censors and, most devastatingly, uncooperative women.

This largely buried argument is all that connects the book's welter of anecdotes. A Chicago teen-ager named Harold Rubin is limned practicing self-abuse over photographs of nude women. He is joined in the narrative by the newly married Hugh Hefner, who wanders the streets and gazes at apartment windows where women might appear. Hefner makes room later for John Bullaro, a married Los Angeles insurance executive who bicycles to Venice Beach on Sundays to ogle sunbathers.

About all these men have in common is the fact that they talked, at enormous length, to Gay Talese. He responds by decreeing them typical and elevating their itches into a national problem. What must be done to provide sauce for these ganders? Hefner has built a sybaritic, self-enclosed world, described by Talese with popeyed wonder. The author found another answer in the "permissive paradise" of Sandstone, a 15-acre retreat near Los Angeles that flourished in the '70s on a diet of communal nudity and sex. The Sandstone philosophy was not, Talese insists, a clever license for men but a liberation for both sexes: "A sexually adventurous woman could experience, if her mind were willing, her body's capacity to exhaust in a single evening the best efforts of a succession of lusty Lotharios."

Do women want this? Talese spoke to several who think so, but he spends little time on the question. He is more interested, throughout the book, in how women look: "Voluptuous . . . curvesome . . . shapely . . . buxom . . . comely . . . pretty . . . piquant . . . zaftig . . ." Thy Neighbor's Wife is an orgy of adjectives, and both sexes get their share. A peak of sorts is reached when Talese describes the members of the Supreme Court: "Broad-chested, sixty-six-year-old mustachioed Thurgood Marshall . . . tidy, hornrimmed, thin-lipped Harry Blackmun." Much of the book reads as if it has been badly translated: "Some inventive interpretation of the malleable wording of the flexible definition of the crime of obscenity."

Finally, Talese fails to draw the conclusions his evidence provides. He shows how Hefner's freedom to disport has pained his partners. He admits that Sandstone was hard on some who went there. What he does not say is the obvious: given power over others, hedonists can be as tyrannical as censors. The injunction to perform can be as chafing as the commandment to abstain. Talese thinks that the war between men and women could be called off if women would learn to like "recreational sex." He does not add that this fantasy of surrender is a boring substitute for the complex, painful and joyous reality.

--Paul Gray

Excerpt

"A lean, dark-eyed man of forty-three whose brown hair was beginriing to turn gray, Talese was not entirely a stranger to the people in the room. He had visited Sandstone often in the past ... and his book-in-progress had already received inordinate amounts of publicity ... Most of what had been written about Talese in the press, however, had been jocularly presented, strongly suggesting that his reportorial technique as a 'participating observer' in the world of erotica--his patronage of massage parlors, his dark afternoons in X-rated cinemas, his intimate familiarity with swing clubs and orgiasts across the land--was an ingenious ploy on his part to indulge his carnality and to be unfaithful ... While Talese had never openly refuted this notion, assuming that any attempt to deny it might mark him as a man on the defensive ... he was nonetheless keenly aware that his allegedly ideal assignment was frequently less pleasurable than other people generally believed."

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