Stages

By Donald Bowie

IN THE GLAMOROUS WORLD OF THE THEATER, THEY WERE GIFTED, HOPEFUL, AND HUNGRY FOR FAME

KATHY, whose brilliant performances rose like fire from her soul; LAUREN, regal, golden-voiced, fleeing a desperate past; MELANIE, sophisticated and sexy, prey to every temptation; DAVID, driven by pride and passion; PAULA, searching for love, afraid of success, hoarding her talent like a hidden treasure; MIKE, slipping from mask to mask, the stage his only home

Together they shared the magic of rehearsals and opening nights, of love and heartache and grand ambition bursting from the safe cocoon of the college drama club to struggle, suddenly alone, for the spotlight. For two decades, from New York to London to L.A., they held on to their dreams, playing the starving actor or flying high on movie deals and cocaine, marrying rich or making fortunes, far from the bright lights. But only one would soar to the heights, swept away by the thunderous applause, the magical glow, the love of millions of fans at last a STAR.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611877311

Book preview

79

Stages

By Donald Bowie

Copyright 2015 by Donald Bowie

Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

Cover Design by Ginny Glass

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 1987.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the Publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Also by Donald Bowie and Untreed Reads Publishing

Cable Harbor

Station Identification: Confessions of a Video Kid

www.untreedreads.com

The Cast of Stages

Melanie… She survived by making commercials, until love lured her into the dissolute world of a rock and roll band. But when the party was brutally over, a sudden inheritance gave her a new shot at fame….

Lauren… A tall, unapproachable beauty, awakened by an older man’s lust. Her husband’s wealth was staggering, but she really needed his love—and her undying dreams of Broadway….

Paula… Despite her classic looks and singular talent, auditions left her dry-mouthed and shaking, staring in terror at the stage door….

Mike… From sizzling Greenwich Village nights to the hushed, expectant silence of Off-Broadway theaters, he was a lover, a warrior, a prince, a fool—anything but himself….

David… As a high-powered movie producer, he was the first to taste L.A.’s success. But a rival’s revenge sent him spinning out of control….

Kathy… Once she shared David’s bed and his ambitions. How she poured her passion into a dangerous new cause—and only a heartbreaking betrayal would set her free….

Stages

Donald Bowie

Prologue

To All Members of the Footlights Society:

As you surely know by now, the highlight of this year’s graduation week will be the dedication of the new, ten-million-dollar Wilson Center for the Performing Arts. We Footlighters who are still undergraduates are especially grateful to those Society alumni whose generous contributions helped to make the Center possible, and we hope to see as many of them as can make it here during the week of June tenth, which will be an occasion to celebrate for us all.

We’re thrilled to be able to announce that Veronica Simmons will be postponing work on her new film for a few days in order to accept the honorary degree that the college is awarding her. We have asked her to talk to us informally at the Center the day before graduation, which she has very kindly agreed to do.

We know that it will be especially enjoyable for those of you who worked with Miss Simmons as undergraduates to see her again now that she’s one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, an Academy Award winner, and, needless to say, the Footlights Society’s most famous member.

Please make your reservations early for the banquet following the dedication.

And please make a special note of this: due to Miss Simmons’ enormous popularity, admission to her talk at the Center must be by ticket only.

We are allowing two tickets for each member of the Society who will be attending the graduation week ceremonies. Sorry, but we can’t make any exceptions. So get all your reservations in soon!

Yours in the Business,

Julie Axelrode,

Secretary

Copies of this letter were sent to the four hundred and thirty-one members of the Footlights Society for whom the college had current addresses.

One of those addresses was a loft building in lower Manhattan; an actor’s workshop had recently opened on the fifth floor of this building. The managing director was a woman of forty who could have passed for thirty. From the look of her clothes, you might imagine that gypsies had stolen her and kept her in a painted wagon for a few years, hidden from the aging process. She wore bandannas and Indian shawls embroidered with tiny mirrors and a large round earring in one ear.

The morning the invitation from the Footlights Society arrived, the workshop’s mail had not been picked up. Its managing director had spent five exhausting hours getting a twenty-two-year-old, apple-cheeked lacrosse player just out of college to be believable, to himself and a dozen other young actors, as the consumptive Edmund in Long Day’s Journey.

It was six-thirty that evening before she’d thought of the mail.

As she rode up alone in the wooden freight elevator sorting her letters, she saw one from the school. The college she’d graduated from nearly twenty years before. Assuming they were looking for money again, she opened that envelope last.

Yours in the business, she thought. Oh, come on. Give me a break.

She laughed out loud. Veronica Simmons! And that line, due to Miss Simmons’ enormous popularity…

Oh, brother.

She had known Veronica Simmons by another name. She, and the rest of them.

She wondered if any of them would bother to show up.

Suddenly, she realized that she would.

Why the hell not?

Standing by one of her loft’s big windows, she watched the sun setting over the Hudson River. A tugboat plowed stolidly along, its bow parting the gray waters. Only a little while ago the river had been mottled with floating ice.

And only a little while ago they had all been college seniors, acting in that final production. King Lear.

Then they’d started that long migration upstream that was being in the business, as Julie Axelrode would say. Little did she know.

How deep and cold the water is, how you have to push and shove and wiggle your little tail just to stay afloat.

How you have to learn to live for those few moments when everything is right with you and the world—and the waters part for you. As the curtain rises.

1

March 1967

Where they were not covered with theatrical posters, the cinder block walls of Melanie’s room looked like gallon slabs of coffee ice cream. And the single window in those walls admitted little drafts like the ones you feel when opening and closing a refrigerator.

So Melanie was doing something to warm herself up.

It was one o’clock on a Saturday morning. Sitting in her folding director’s chair, Melanie was playing strip poker with her date. And he had lost every hand but one. On her bed Melanie had stacked her winnings: a green crewneck sweater, an oxford shirt, a pair of basketball sneakers, a pair of sweat-socks, and a belt with a nautical-looking brass buckle.

A half hour ago Melanie had lost one of her black Capezios, but then she’d won it back in the next hand.

Curt, her date, who was now gambling the pockets on his ass, was the captain of the college’s swimming team. He’d met Melanie in an American literature course, while they were reading Tender Is the Night. The professor, whose ties and jackets were always twisted, as if he’d just emerged from a spin cycle, made Nicole Diver come alive in a way that drew Curt’s attention to Melanie: there, he thought, was a girl with the same restless sexiness, and (with luck) a capacity for booze to go with it.

He hadn’t figured her for a card sharp, though. Nor had he ever dreamed that she would be able to hold her liquor better than he.

Barefoot and bare-chested, he looked at the hand he’d drawn this time and felt chilly, embarrassed, and horny all at the same time.

He hesitated as long as he could.

He had two pairs.

Melanie had four kings.

She’d won his jeans.

Curt felt his cheeks prickling. From looking at her half-unbuttoned blue workshirt and her tongue that played around her lips as she arranged her cards, he had given himself an erection. Trying to conceal it, he stood up crookedly.

Hey, isn’t this game about over? he asked as he unzipped his fly.

I dunno, Melanie replied. We’ll see.

He took off his Levi’s and tossed them on the bed. There was no hiding it now. His shorts were being run up the flagpole.

Oh, Melanie said in obvious disappointment.

In a moment of terror for his ego, Curt thought that she meant his erection.

But then she said, "I don’t think I want to bother playing for those boxer shorts. The stakes aren’t high enough."

What are you sayin’? Curt asked in a voice that was as shrill as a boy soprano’s.

Oh, it’s just that I think boxer shorts are so dull, Melanie said. I like briefs better.

What’s my underwear got to do with anything? Curt squealed.

It’s all in the way things are served to you, Melanie replied. A hot dog should come in a nice pair of bun huggers—not in a bed of…cotton lettuce.

Why, you little…

Uh-uh, said Melanie, halting his advance with a waving finger. There’s something I want to discuss here, first. Tell me. Those Speedos you wear when you’re swimming in a meet. Do you ever wear them on the beach?

No, I don’t. They’re too…

Too revealing?

Yeah, as a matter of fact. It’s gross for guys to wear bikini bathing suits.

But not girls?

Impatient and emboldened, Curt replied, Girls don’t have nuts and a dick to stick out.

But they do have their boobies, don’t they? said Melanie, sticking out her chest. "Honest to God. You guys. You want to see everything we’ve got, but everything you’ve got is strictly privatesville. What do we ever get to see? Two hairy legs stuck in the curtains of the Metropolitan Opera."

Narrowing his eyes, Curt said, Okay, you wanna see somethin’, I’ll show ya somethin’.

He yanked off his shorts and stood before Melanie naked, his erection batting the air like a feline paw.

Melanie said, Now I think the poker playing is over.

Sticking a long red fingernail inside her workshirt, she tugged, releasing her breasts, which turned outward like a show of empty hands.

Curt made his move. As he pressed his body against hers, he felt her stroking him.

Oh. Oh God, he moaned. "You don’t…you don’t…go down, do you?"

He sounded as if on every date he’d been praying for this miracle.

"You mean will I French you? Melanie said. Of course. But only if…tomorrow you go out and buy some French bikini briefs. I’m not giving head to any…Joe Palooka."

Oh, my God, he murmured. My God. Okay…okay, it’s a deal.

*

Across the campus was a room nearly as theatrical as Melanie’s, but the posters on the walls were of campus productions in which the room’s resident had acted—except for one large poster of the Marx Brothers. That had been altered by pasting a likeness of Karl Marx over Zeppo’s face.

In the darkness the voice of a young woman was sighing, "Oh, I love your beard. It’s so rough."

The young woman’s name was Amanda. She was a freshman. The senior making love to her—so passionately, as she would write in her diary the next day—was David Whitman.

She had loved his room almost as much as she was now loving his beard. Seeing it, she had said to him rapturously, Are you as enchanted with the theater as I am?

She was rubbing her cheeks against the hair on his face in as giddy a frenzy as that of a parakeet with a cuttlebone.

David kissed her, letting his tongue loll around in her mouth.

Oh, I love your tongue, she breathed. Oh, it’s so rough.

And his dick was so slick.

While he was humping her, Amanda let out little groans—with a rhythm that threw his own rhythm off.

His erection flagged a little, and fucking her became almost work. He started wondering if she sandpapered her legs instead of shaving them—for the added roughness.

After he came, after she had fallen asleep and David had gently lifted her arm off his chest, he lay there in the dark thinking.

In a few months he’d be out of school. Then what? Would he go to New York? Was he going to be able to get out of the draft? Was he going to make it as an actor? In the hallway, a door opened and closed. Then, from what seemed a great distance, came the wail of a toilet.

David was filled with a nervous energy that even when he was in bed threatened to run away with him. He had not yet learned that this restlessness, this constant anxiety, was not a product of his ambition. He hadn’t made the connection between the reasons why people go to bed together with the reasons why they go on stage—the attention, and the love.

2

David had a small but distinctly Semitic nose, a carefully trimmed black beard, and brown eyes as attentive as a cat’s. Stroking his beard, as was his habit, he inevitably created an impression of slyness, just as some people will appear contemplative when they put on eyeglasses. David was twenty-one years old, but he looked closer to thirty, and crossing the campus that burly March afternoon, his long scarf stuffed inside his Harris tweed jacket, he also looked like what he was: an actor.

A serious actor. Earlier in the day, while David was standing at a urinal, an idiot student politician who couldn’t relieve himself without trying to be ingratiating had said to him, Hiya, Dave, don’t see you around much lately. You in another show?

We’re having tryouts for one this week, David replied. "Riddiford has decided to do King Lear."

Shakespeare, huh? was the response. I suppose you’ll disappear for another couple of months. Christ, that theater’s almost a frat house for you guys. It’s a whole way of life, isn’t it?

That observation struck David as a triumph of the obvious. And not simply because the theater was his life, which indeed it was, but because in light of the theater, everything else about college was tedious, trivial, and irrelevant.

It was ten past three now, and David was late, delayed for fifteen minutes by a boring lecture that had run overtime.

Adding to David’s outrage over the delay was the fact that he was late for a workshop at the theater, which was being conducted by a Method actor from New York. And Broadway waited for no one.

The Hubbard Theater Arts building was located at the bottom of the hill that most of the campus clung to. It was a converted gym, and it seemed like an outhouse beside the rest of the school’s architecture, which had been constructed in the typical Georgian style of academia, with ivy aspiring up the brick walls.

The school’s priorities being what they were, the Hubbard Theater had floors that creaked so badly that, during a performance, when members of the cast were backstage, they had to tiptoe about in their stocking feet.

During David’s freshman year he had heard a lot of enthusiastic talk about the new theater that was in the works, but he soon learned that this project had been rumored for the past five years. Now he was a senior, and the ground had been broken only by the frost of four winters. The same frayed green sofa was in the lounge off the lobby, as was the coffee table, a sort of wooden doormat embellished with ballpoint ink. The same battered upright piano, perpetually out of tune, stood opposite the box office.

Only the sets had changed. The theater itself was a constant, a jury-rigged hulk of beams and boards painted black in order to present, when the lights came up, the illusion of a smooth surface.

Opening the stage door, David felt, even in his haste, the familiar tingle that he’d first experienced as a freshman coming to the tryouts for Death of a Salesman. The theater always created in him an excitement that was almost sexual, but without sexual insecurities—something like the arousal of old sensations of warmth that he felt when he was going home for vacation.

The workshop was already in progress onstage. Quietly David took a seat. The teacher running things, whose name was Samuels, was working with Kathy Lowenthal. Kathy was short and plain, with a round chin from which, on occasion, a single coarse hair would protrude. But she had large, very expressive eyes, and full lips. In the right role she could radiate a kind of womanly beauty that came more from the heart than the appearance.

I want you to think of the funniest thing you ever saw, Samuels was saying, and then I want you to laugh at it, just as if you were seeing it all over again.

To David this Samuels character looked a little seedy and down on his luck; he appeared to be straining to get his point across, like an unconvincing salesman. Which teachers often are, David reminded himself, let alone this guy, who was pushing his limited contact with Broadway from door to door. As Samuels walked around Kathy, adjusting her gestures, David noticed that he had a limp, which was so pronounced that it had to mean a wooden leg or at the very least a brace. That explained why he was running acting workshops on the college circuit. There weren’t many roles for cripples.

In order to concentrate on the comic moment, Kathy had shut her eyes. Her face seemed to fizz like seltzer, and then her head rolled back and her mouth fell open and a great guffaw came out of her. David smiled. Titters broke out in the seats around him. He recognized Mike Lange’s laugh, which was always nervous, and Melanie Chisolm’s laugh, which always sounded like a snide remark, and Paula Rubin’s laugh, which was abraded by cigarettes, and Lauren Holland’s laugh—which went up and down David’s spine like a padded hammer on a xylophone.

During their sophomore year, David had been with Kathy for six months. He had slept with Melanie three times, and with Paula once. But he had never taken Lauren to bed, and he knew he never would. She was taller than he by three inches. Her eyes were more watchful than his, and they were intensely blue. Her thick brown hair fell almost to her waist. On her pale face there was always a thin smile. The most striking and unsettling thing about her was her voice: Lauren had a voice with grains of gold in it that sparkled against a texture as hard and gray and cold as that of slate. It was the voice of a soul deep in a crystal cave, and onstage, it carried, to say the least.

Lauren’s only physical flaw was a separation between two of her front teeth. She needed braces, David had thought. But wearing braces wouldn’t hold her back. Lauren could pull off playing Amanda Wingfield with a retainer. It would just seem part of the play, like Laura’s clubfoot.

Switching off the hilarity with a wave of his hand, Samuels said to Kathy, Okay, now I want you to remember one of the unhappiest moments of your life. I want you to show us pain as openly as you just did with pleasure.

As if to forestall a hiccup, Kathy gulped and collected herself. Then she looked to her left, giving her audience the impression that her unhappy memories were all grouped together over there in the corner.

A cold mist seemed to drift over her. Suddenly she choked. And then she burst into tears.

As Kathy stood there sobbing and trembling, the student actors nearly froze in their seats.

Behind his eyes, David felt a damp heat that he was afraid might embarrass him.

Realizing that he was losing control of the situation, Samuels, his hands raised, fluttered awkwardly around Kathy in an attempt to calm her down.

O-okay, okay, he stammered. You started it. You can turn it off.

Kathy’s shoulders heaved. She clenched her fists. Her sobbing subsided.

"Now that’s how you convince your audience," Samuels said by way of apology.

The remaining hour of the workshop was uninspiring and tepid, though. Like the others, David kept thinking about Kathy.

Once she had said to him, We’re very informal in my family. When I was home for spring break, my father and I were in the bathroom at the same time, and we were both naked. When he bent over to pick up the bath mat I gave him this big wet kiss, right in the middle of his back.

David and Kathy were both from Jewish families, but David came from a family buttoned up to the chin in guilt and shame, and capable of expressing affection only in portions of food. Had he tried to act out the bathroom scenario with his mother, she would, he imagined, have made a parachute of bed sheets and garter belts and leaped from the window of their seventeenth-story apartment to the safety of Sixth Avenue below.

Yet it was Kathy’s unselfconscious openness that had damaged her as an undergraduate actress. Lacking David’s vanity and ambition, she gave too generously of herself in thankless roles. In December she had played to nearly empty houses as the lead in a turkey by the obscure European playwright Michel de Ghelderode. And the year before she had struggled through a nearly identical ordeal in a vehicle by the Italian poulterer Ugo Betti. Both of these disasters had been Mr. Cherry’s shows. He was the technical director, and he chose plays suitable for the murky lighting effects he liked to create, and to which he would sacrifice anyone’s talent.

David’s memory of Kathy’s recent run in another of Mr. Cherry’s endless twilights, together with the exhibition of sheer misery that she’d put on today, so distracted him from the rest of the workshop that it all might as well have been television—and he liked to describe TV watching as the mind picking its teeth.

Kathy had started him thinking about the odds again. Of making it as an actor once you left school. They would be graduating—he, Kathy, Melanie, Paula, Mike—in less than four months.

What would happen to them if they didn’t make it? And the chances were maybe one in a hundred thousand that any of them would make it.

What then? Vietnam? Law school? Running some little theater in Wisconsin, or selling tickets in New York, and living in a room with a bed and a toaster, like the women with dirty hair and seams in their stockings who showed you with their flashlights to your seats?

Often David had to will himself not to think about the alternatives to success, about compromising. Up until now, he’d always been able to turn his thoughts to the role he’d be playing in the next major production. But at this point, there was just one major production left, Riddiford’s Lear.

While the pathetic Samuels slogged along, David told himself that he’d be best off playing Kent. Like Kent, he was dedicated and determined. And a survivor.

Riddiford himself was going to play Lear.

It was an event for someone on the faculty to act in a show, let alone play the lead in it.

David couldn’t help but wonder what Riddiford’s motivation was. This was partly out of a habit of thinking about motivations for the characters he played himself—and partly because he could see himself in Riddiford’s place: as the director, the one with the power. Power had always fascinated David.

3

When Melanie Chisolm’s father showed up for a parents’ weekend, Paula Rubin took one look at him and said, When you see some people’s parents, you understand why they’re the way they are. With his shock of white hair, Melanie’s father looked to be about eighty, but he was not bent, nor was he shrunken. He stood an imperious six feet tall, and he wore a black homburg hat that heightened him even more. His overcoat, which was also black, had a velvet collar. To complete his darkling tintype he carried a gold-headed ebony walking stick. Everything about the man was formal and reserved. He was, in his manner and appearance, a model of an eminent Victorian.

To Paula, he explained a lot about Melanie. Why she dressed and made herself up and talked like a divorced woman of forty, for instance.

An only child, Melanie had arrived late in her parents’ lives. Three years after she was born, her mother had died of pernicious anemia.

Melanie had grown up as her father’s dinner companion. She’d sat at one end of the table, and he’d sat at the other. The table was twelve feet long, and it was surrounded by tall chairs with backs the same shape as windows in a cathedral. Sitting as a child at that table, while the maid came and went in a hush, Melanie would cast her eyes upward at the gessoed ceiling. The ceiling was painted with garlands and cherubs. Melanie would dream of cavorting naked with these happy creatures, all ringlets and big toes, in some giddy, cloud-upholstered place where there were no chairs that kneed you in the spine.

As a high school girl Melanie found a substitute for that place in the dramatic club. She played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wrapped in gossamer, she bounded across the stage night after night. She had emerged from the hard, dry cocoon of her childhood with wings on, but those wings were not just for flight. Melanie quickly learned to wrap them around her body so she could resist the adolescent cold and damp that all her friends felt.

Oberon, who was sixteen and lanky, asked Melanie out. In the back of his car, he went fishing in her clothes with his hands.

After five minutes of his explorations, Melanie, raising her head, said, "God, do you ever sweat."

The summer she graduated from high school Melanie’s father sent her on a trip to Europe. In Zurich she met a French ski instructor. He was twenty-six, and had a smile that breathed on Melanie’s heart.

But of course he was French, and his recipe for involvement was high heat followed by a whisk.

By mid-August Melanie knew she would be returning to the States, and to American men, with their bathing suits as bulky as her father’s Brooks Brothers boxer shorts. She thanked God that she’d been accepted by a college with a theater program.

In her three and a half years at Blake University, Melanie had—as a sideline to her involvement with the theater—slept with six more men, two of them graduate students and one a professor of English. The professor was of course the sweatiest. He was married.

Sleeping with David Whitman had been a big mistake, though. He seemed to want to sleep with women in order to prove something, which was a common enough urge among men, Melanie knew. But then he would lapse into this terrible postcoital depression, as if all the banging had worn away the crust of the earth, to reveal a vast, empty cavern beneath the bed. Acting wasn’t enough for David, and sex wasn’t enough, either. Melanie didn’t care to think about what it was that he wanted and needed, and couldn’t seem to get, because when she turned her mind in that direction she would feel a vague sense of vacuum from a place in her chest close to her heart.

It was better for her head to ignore such sensations and just go on with the show.

Melanie was happy that she and Paula would very likely be playing Goneril and Regan in this, the last show of their undergraduate careers. They might have been rivals, for they were the same height, about five-six, and they had essentially the same hair, a changeable auburn, and of course they were the same age. But something about Melanie always landed her the older parts, while Paula was given the younger roles.

This would be the first time they’d be playing sisters instead of women a generation apart. They’d finally be recognizing onstage a comfortable kinship that had been there all along.

Supposedly Riddiford was pressuring Morris from the English department to try out for the role of Gloucester.

Morris was the professor Melanie had slept with.

If she was to play Regan, she would be gouging out his eyes, every night for a week and a half.

That, Melanie thought, was truly show biz.

Eventually she and Paula and Kathy organized themselves unofficially into a League of Women Actors. The league’s mission was to promote a sense of civic responsibility—to making life as theatrical as possible.

To this end, the members of the league carried on most of their conversations in stage whispers and scrambled their clothes closets until every outfit came out as a costume. Instead of idling away hours in the student union or the library, the three young women entertained themselves by creating dramatic moments, as they did the time Melanie insisted that they spy on one of the practices of the men’s swim team.

That command performance took place on a Wednesday evening in the winter of their junior year.

When the league entered the gym, most of the college’s students were still at dinner or already studying. But Melanie, her sharp eyes brimming with slyness, was leading her two friends along the darkened corridors with a penlight.

What if a janitor or somebody comes and sees us? Paula said.

They all quit work at four-thirty, Melanie replied. Ahead was a trophy case and a pair of doors with a light shining in the crack between them.

They crept stealthily toward their goal.

Melanie looked through the crack first,

Ah, she said.

Lemme look, said Paula.

She took a peek. Her eyes widened and she covered her month.

Wanna see, Kath? Melanie offered.

Kathy poked her head under Paula’s shoulder.

Then she said, Oh, aren’t they cute?

I told you, Melanie said. They always practice in the nude.

What incredible bodies they have, Paula said. Look at the one with the curly blond hair.

I am, said Melanie. Isn’t this too delicious? If they only knew. We’re committing sacrilege, you know. They’re so-o-o sensitive about their privates. They think their pubies are sacred.

Looking through the crack again, Paula said, Ooh, that blond one, I just can’t imagine a guy being self-conscious about having one as big as—

All American men are self-conscious about their bodies, Melanie replied. Just try to imagine an American man on a nude beach, like St. Tropez.

God forbid, Paula said. I’m sure if some of the men I see at Jones Beach ever started walking around in the nude, I’d lose my appetite for Chilly-Willies.

Nobody’s body is anything to be ashamed of, whether it’s good or bad, Kathy insisted.

"You