Pleasure is good, Mr Talese believes, and guilt is bad; the idea is to have a lot of pleasure without feeling any guilt. It is indeed a noble dream. Mr Talese’s hero in this department is Hugh Hefner, who claims a sizeable chunk of his book. Talese really has to hand it to Hef, and writes of him throughout with envious admiration. Here, after all, is a man who spends the leisure of his mature years being massaged by ‘four or five’ robotic Playmates of the Month on his circular $15,000 bed, constantly monitored by an Ampex television camera designed to produce ‘instantaneous and delayed transmissions’ on the wall screen above. Meanwhile, outside the Jacuzzi-infested mansion the ‘sprawling green lawns’ recede over ‘gently rolling hills’.
Mr Talese raptly follows Hefner’s seduction of a Texan beauty called Karen Christy, who was lured up to Chicago by one of Playboy’s roving talent scouts. Hef, with his infectious enthusiasm and love of ‘variety and spice’, successfully chats Karen up on their first night and installs her as court favourite. Hefner goes on to give Karen a diamond watch, a white mink coat, a silver fox jacket, a diamond cocktail ring, a Matisse painting, a Persian cat, a white Mark IV Lfncoln, ‘a beautiful metallic reproduction of the Playboy cover on which she was featured’, and a nightly Mazola party on his circular bed. Mr Talese has this to say about the effect on Karen’s personality: ‘she remained essentially the same country girl she had been on the day of her arrival from Texas.’ How extraordinary, if true. But the thought leads nowhere. Karen is a cliche, after all, for Hefner and for Talese.
In his final chapters Mr Talese records that at one point during his decade of energetic fieldwork, his wife suffered a ‘negative reaction’ to all the publicity he was getting: she left him. At this juncture (page 543) you might expect a suspicion of doubt, or of judgment, to intrude. Perhaps ‘body pleasure’ can’t be sanitised; perhaps sex is as contingent as most aspects of life are. But Mr Talese went out to dinner and an interview with New York magazine. Two days later Mrs Talese came home. Lucky man. Thy Neighbour’s Wife might have had some edge to it if she had stayed away.
Observer 1980
Double Jeopardy: Making Sense or aids
Witness this banal and quotidian incident. And then consider the ways in which it might affect all our lives.
A young man is walking home to his flat in Camden Town. In appearance he is, as they say, a ‘Castro clone’, modelled on the all-gay Castro Street area of San Francisco (where they have gay groceries, gay policemen, gay banks): short hair, regulation moustache, denim shirt and jeans, running shoes. In his path are two young women. They have their standard equipment too: lit cigarettes, tabloids under the arm, a push-chair apiece. As the young man passes the girls (and these are tough girls), they decide to say something. A year ago they might have contented themselves with ‘Fucking queen!’ or ‘Fucking queer!’ or ‘Fucking poof!’ But this year they have something new to say (remember those tabloids). It is: ‘Fucking AiDS-carrierP The young man walks on. End of incident. Now, let us imagine that the accusation is unfounded. The young man gets back to his flat. He feels shaken-up, he feels hurt, in every sense. He wonders if he is an AIDS-carrier: conceivably (and he has done his reading too), he might be asymptomatic HTLV3-infected! He is At Risk, after all, and the symptoms are so damnably vague: fevers, chills, swollen glands, diarrhoea, dry cough, breathlessness. That bad night last week — was it a tummy upset, or was it Death? The young man has been considering whether to go down to Hammersmith and take the antibody test. He now decides against it. How can he safeguard his job, his flat? He feels no consensus of decency out there. Meanwhile the stress of the incident and the anxieties it has awakened are, infinitesimally, running him down, making inroads on his defences, weakening him for another kind of attack.
The two young mothers have also done themselves a bit of no good. By the time those babies are as old as their parents, aids will probably have shrugged off its homosexual associations (its origins may well be heterosexual anyway, but let that pass for now) and will be established in all areas of society. By then, aids could be the most common cause of disease-related death in young people, not just in young men — a status it already enjoys in New York and San Francisco. The young mothers have also done their bit to impede any early control of the epidemic, because such an effort will depend on an atmosphere of unwonted candour and trust. Incidentally, since the cost of caring for aids patients may reach £200 million annually by 1989, they have also helped deplete the health services on which their children will rely.