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American Swing

It sounds like the beginning of a joke. A fundamentalist minister, his wife, my friend and his significant other, and I go to one of the hottest nightclubs in the city, which means it is supposed to be one of the hottest night spots in the world. It was decorated by what looked like left over props from the movie Caligula and by a decorator who believed you can never have enough marble and black leather. The music was too loud for my taste, and had the soul and feel of a Howard Johnson's motel room. It was hip and cool and as long as you did not have an original thought, a person could enjoy themselves. After awhile I noticed the minister was getting agitated and finally he whispered to me, "I'm uncomfortable here. Aren't you?" I looked up to see what he was getting worked up about. The young women dressed in bikinis and various other rags hired by the establishment to garnish the walls, dance, and engage in pseudo-lesbian activity, a last days of the Roman Empire feel. He saw the grinding. I just saw the dead eyes and expressionless faces. Any bystander could tell these ladies were not into what they were doing. It might have been the most unerotic thing I have every seen. I could just imagine the following conversation taking place, Lady #1: "How is your day going?" Lady #2: "Was late dropping my daughter off at day care. It is so hard to find good day care in this city. "Lady #1: I spilled a piece of cherry pie on my favorite white pants this morning. Don't know how I am going to get that stain out. Lady #2: "That is an easy one. You... just a second, grind a little faster on me, some fat guy is leering at us."

In 1973, baseball's American League introduced the designated hitter, something that still fries purists like myself to this day, but most of the media coverage and mail commissioner Bowie Kuhn received was about two mediocre New York Yankees pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, who swapped wives, kids, and even their dogs. (The Petersons had a poodle and the Kekichs had a terrier if you are interested.) The political/financial scandals that have nearly crippled this nation are not nearly as interesting to the American people as what some self-hating Idaho Senator is doing in a Minneapolis men's room, or who some hypocritical South Carolina tomcat governor is hiking down to Argentina to see. (Ever notice that being hotter and younger than one's wife always seems to make a woman more understanding and interesting?) When one pulls back the veil of titillation, what remains is usually sad and pathetic involving middle-aged men desperate to prove they are masculine and virile.

The same can be said about swing clubs. It sounds like an fascinating and exciting subject with an estimated four million Americans engaged in it according to the Kinsey Institute and 3,000 major clubs and countless thousands of minor ones across the world. While most keep a low profile, almost every major city in this country has one, even Des Moines! The most famous of these is New York's Plato's Retreat, often called the Studio 54 of sex clubs, which opened in 1977 and lasted only eight years. A documentary on the club, I thought, would have naked bodies doing all sorts of things, hot chicks, and big stars from the 1970s, like the cast of Saturday Night Live, Sammy Davis Jr., director Melvin Van Peebles, movie star Richard Dryfuss, wrestler Jesse Ventura, writer Buck Henry, and Houston Oiler's quarterback Dan Pastorini and they are there, but the dominant story is something less glamorous, less hygienic, and more ordinary. Plato's Retreat was a member's only swinger's club founded in the basement of Manhattan's Ansonia Hotel (the former location of the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler and Barry Manilow began their musical careers). Founded by Larry Levinson, a thick accented Brooklyn ice cream and soft drink salesman, who discovered marital life stifling, after years of organizing swingers parties named his new club after Plato because it sounded classy and gave the establishment a Greco-Roman ethos not realizing the ancient philosopher's same-sex relationships with adolescent boys. The club had it all - a huge pool with waterfalls, a disco dance floor complete with DJ, a jacuzzi, sauna rooms, private rooms, a huge room lined wall-to-wall with mattresses, and even a food buffet, a spread that former patrons remarked they lacked the courage to sample, for obvious reasons. Within weeks of its opening, it was a phenomenon, with crowds lined up around the block. As Buck Henry remarked a large portion of those that went to the club were there more out of curiosity than wanting to participate in public.

The problem with a documentary of this kind is the interviews are with the actual patrons. Some of them look like your grandparents. Most less than attractive and some just plain strange. Ma and Pa Kettle were alive and well in the 1970s and swinging at Plato's. If the partiers are not enough to make your stomach turn, many of their stories and observations will. The smells and sights were a bit over powering even for the hardy at times. There were major crab lice infestations in the mattress room. Prostitutes plied their trade through out the place. While Levinson claimed the club was drug free, people naturally brought their own and used them liberally. As the novelty wore off, Levinson had to recruit through his public access show and magazines, a more hardcore clientele and even had to hire professionals to give the public what they wanted to see. The unhygienic, carnival-like atmosphere, one women remarks, "It completely killed your idea of romance." As I think about some of this I want to bathe in a vat of bleach and rinse off with a gallon of hand sanitizer.

Plato's fall came in wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Mayor Ed Koch and the New York City Health Department, in order to combat the virus moved quickly to close down the city's gay bathhouses. One little problem with doing such, if they focused on only the city's homosexual establishments they would be violating the city's newly passed anti-discrimination laws. Plato's had to go and on New Year's Eve 1985 officials made their move, closing the place for violating public health standards. The site the club once occupied is now a parking garage. While the documentary is supposed to be about the rise and fall of the club, the more interesting story is really the rise and fall of its owner, Levinson. He was the good natured, loud-mouthed greeter and face for the establishment, often wearing a velour robe and crown. He kind of lost his bearings, and his primary relationship, somewhere along the way. Not only did he come to think that many of the young women there were interested in him and not just his cash (which he did not have) and even gotten beaten half to death in a lover's triangle, leaving him in a wheelchair for awhile. If this was not enough, he failed to pay his taxes and possibly embezzled funds, taking from the till in front of employees (and then firing these people). Whether it was a failure to understand tax laws, plain ignorance, or theft, Levinson did nearly three years of jail time after the Internal Revenue Service nailed him for skimming $2.3 million. The party was almost done when he got out. In the new climate, people stopped coming to the club. When the club closed, the "King of Swing" was penniless and most of his friends abandoned him. Living out of a studio basement apartment, Levinson was forced to drive a cab to support his newly formed drug habit. In 1999, he died after quadruple bypass heart surgery. For a man who was the toast of New York, on "The Phil Donahue Show," and claimed to have turned the swingers club from "a grocery store" to a "supermarket" it was an ignominious way to go.

We are a nation hung up on sex. It dominates our religious life, our politics, and can be found in most of our advertising. For some it is power. Some, vitality. Some, it just feels good. Some, a duty. Some, a way of getting back at their parents. Some, it is dirty, a way of punishing themselves. Others, almost a religion. For most, it is a way of meeting unspoken wants and needs. Sex is a lot of things but hardly ever what we think. Several months ago, I found myself in a Las Vegas coffee house, unknowingly during the AVN awards that were in town, and found myself listening to a conversation between two eastern European women and their euro-trash "manager." They were going over the shoot they were going to do that evening as matter of factly as if they were making a list of what to get at the supermarket. Where was the romance? The passion? The raw sexuality? It wasn't there. One of my favorite cartoons comes from an Australian cartoonist named Leunig and it shows a man, on his knees, worshipping an empty cardboard box. The next panels show a couple of his friends with clubs that decide to beat the box to a pulp to show him that he is worshipping nothing, that the box is empty. The final panel shows the man kneeling in front of the same box, beaten, ragged, and Scotch-taped together, leaning a bit to one side, but still the object of the man's worship. It is never the box. It is always the man. The same is true of sex.

Verdict: Pretty Good