That’s when I knew New York was really changing and becoming more open, and I wanted to write about it.Īnd was it mostly the Roger Sterlings of the world who frequented these places? So I said, go ahead! That was my first local, and I thought, Wow, this is crazy, I hear the buses of Lexington Avenue, not far from Bloomingdale’s where I bought a sofa a week before, and there I was, getting a hand job from this lovely young woman. She told me it was a hand job, and I asked if it was extra, and she said no. She said, “Look, are you here for a massage, or do you want to have a conversation?” She said, “All I do is locals,” and of course I had no idea what that was. I picked this blonde woman with a deep southern accent, and I tried to talk to her about attending the University of Alabama. The next morning I went back, and they gave me a choice of four beautiful women and told me it would be $30 for a massage. This was around the time of Hair and Oh Calcutta, which was a nude revue, but there was never such a thing as a public massage parlor before. A man told me that it was a massage parlor that had been open four months, and told me that I could also have a nude woman to pose for me if I wanted to take photographs. She told me to go on my own, and so I went, three stories up in this apartment building. It was 1971, and my wife and I were walking home and we saw a sign that said “Live Nude Models,” and I said to her, “that can’t be!” and suggested that we go up and have a look. When I saw the first sign of sex in neon lights, and I mean actual neon lights, it was on Lexington Avenue, not too far from where we are speaking now. We are talking about mercenary sexuality, the commercialization of sex - a very Mad Men concept, by the way. What prompted it was how blatantly obvious sex had become. Was there an instigating event that made you realize there was a book to be written about that time? Let’s talk about Thy Neighbor’s Wife, which deals with the sexual experimentation of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Men like him were most of the men I knew. These straitlaced law-and-order types would,, be swapping mates.ĭid you know people like Roger, who went from more of a buttoned-up businessman existence into experimentation with drugs and group sex? That was a time of great hypocrisy, great dichotomies. And yet there was so much repressed, too. The Sexual Freedom League and the sexual revolution of the later 1960s and ‘70s was known by title as being historically pertinent, but in private, the dolce vita life was happening well before that in almost every major operation in journalism, advertising, finance, hell, even in the clergy. So Roger Sterling’s swinging sexual awakening had its roots in the decade before? It was lust everywhere! They used to say, drink is the bane of the Tribune, but sex is the curse of the Times. Especially the sexual scenes: At the Times, we had a managing editor having an affair with one of the junior reporters no executive had a record of monogamy for any length of time. When I see Mad Men, the martinis and all that hedonism it’s something I recognize completely. The drinking during the day was the same, and so was the cavorting, this rampant sexual life of the great paper of record.
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I came in 1956 and worked at the New York Times, and the period when I was on staff, that paper - except for the product itself - could’ve been an advertising agency. Mad Men is straight out of the period when I first came to New York. It comes out of the world I knew very well.
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He spoke about Mad Men, the rise of sex in neon lights, and the reason that blow jobs will never be as exciting now as they were in 1969.
#ININTERVIEW WITH GAY MASSAGE PARLOR FULL#
I met Talese at the Upper East Side townhouse he has lived in for decades - his writing “bunker” is below the house, full of boxes and boxes of notes on human sexuality - and he answered the door wearing his trademark three-piece tweed suit with a crisp pocket square. It was also scandalous - Talese, a married man (who is still with his wife Nan after over 50 years of marriage), put himself and his own sexual experimentation in the book.
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When reporter Gay Talese published Thy Neighbor’s Wife, a chronicle of the ‘60s free-love culture that swept America in 1981, it was an immediate best-seller. In order to make sense of Roger Sterling’s crowded bedroom, we spoke to the man who literally wrote the book on the subject of the swinging ‘60s and the sexual awakening. Judging from Sunday’s Mad Men season premiere, we are now solidly in the middle of the sexual revolution - Megan and Joan are in miniskirts, Pete is cavorting around Los Angeles, and Roger Sterling appears to be living in a no-rules communal apartment as the daddy-benefactor to a young hippie couple. Photo: Alex Gotfryd/Corbis Harper Perennial