Thy Neighbor's Wife (29 page)

The description roused Goldstein from his lethargy, and as soon as he returned to his apartment on West Twentieth Street he dialed her number. There was no answer, but he tried it again one hour later, then again within the next hour, and then with almost desperate persistence he continued to dial through the night into the next day and finally through the week.

Frustrated, and finding it sadly reminiscent of the time when his ads in the lonely hearts press went unanswered, he telephoned his friend at the insurance company, who commiserated but encouraged Goldstein to keep dialing—Mary Phillips was probably on an overseas flight or short vacation, the friend said, adding that after she had returned to New York and Goldstein had finally managed to meet her, he would not be disappointed.

Goldstein thanked him, and during the next two weeks he called her number several times each day, while her continued unavailability allowed full play to his fantasies; he was becoming obsessed with her, was convinced that she would ultimately fulfill his romantic need, was jealous of the pilots who traveled with her and the corporate businessmen who propositioned her at 35,000 feet, from one time zone to another—and then one afternoon, after he had dialed and the telephone began to ring, the receiver was picked up at the other end, and Goldstein was suddenly tempted to hang up, but he heard a woman’s voice say hello, and when he asked for Mary Phillips, the voice said, “This is she.”

With a slight stutter, Goldstein introduced himself; he men
tioned the name of their mutual acquaintance from the insurance company, and asked if during the coming week she was free for lunch or dinner. She thanked him but said that her travel schedule and other obligations would make lunch or dinner impossible for most of the next month, but after that she would be happy to see him, and she suggested that he call her again. She seemed sincere, and he liked the sound of her voice, which was warm and vivacious, although he quickly reminded himself that she was an airline stewardess and that he might be naively responding to what was merely a professionally polite manner.

Nevertheless, he continued to dial her number regularly, but each time he reached her she declined to go out with him—and yet her charm and gentility kept him from becoming irritated or discouraged; her elusiveness seemed to intensify his desires, to heighten his anticipation.

Finally, after five months of trying, Al Goldstein made a date with Mary Phillips. They had brunch at a restaurant off Lexington Avenue near her apartment. As he sat across from her he was so awed by her beauty that he could barely speak or eat. Her blue eyes were exquisite. Her blond hair, her creamy complexion, her sunny disposition suggested to him that she had never known an unhappy day in her life. Her lean figure was exactly to his liking, and, as he sat listening to her and also watching as other people entered the restaurant, he could not help but think that they were wondering what she was doing with him—this golden belle having brunch with a fat Jewish cabdriver.

But she appeared to be unembarrassed, replying easily and at length to the questions he asked about her job and her girlhood in the South, her ancestors who were country doctors and lawyers, her mother who was a musician and her father who taught history at The Citadel military college in Charleston. She seemed to be fond of her parents and comfortable with her past, and as Goldstein listened he realized how little the two of them had in common. And he also knew, though he had no insight into her at all, that she was not the sort of person that he could ever make a pass at. She seemed too ethereal for his rampant coarseness. And
then she told him that she had been expelled from college in her junior year for keeping her lover in her dormitory room.

The ease with which she revealed this astonished him as much as the fact itself. There was no remorse in her voice, no change in her angelic presence, as she recalled being summoned before the disciplinary committee of Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, just before the spring holiday, and charged with harboring a male in her room for several nights. Actually, she admitted to Goldstein, the young man had been living with her for nearly a month, and although she knew that this was against the campus rules she also believed that she had a right to privacy in her dormitory. When Mary and her friend left the school and went to Charleston to tell her parents that she had been expelled, her parents reacted with anger. Her father banished Mary’s lover from the house, and her mother urged her never to tell anyone in the town why she had left college.

After sitting mournfully at home for several days, Mary read an announcement in the Charleston newspaper that a representative of Pan American had just arrived in the city to interview prospective stewardesses, and Mary saw this as a grand opportunity to escape the continuing disapproval of her parents; so she applied to the Pan Am representative, passed the examination, and was accepted. Weeks later she was attending a training school in Miami, and five weeks after that she graduated and was transferred to New York. During her first year with Pan Am, she flew to the Caribbean, then shifted to the European division. And while she told Goldstein that she did not intend to make a career of flying—her ambition was to become an editor or freelance writer—she liked her work and enjoyed living in New York.

After they had finished brunch, she invited Goldstein back to her apartment. She was very open and friendly, and they spent the rest of the afternoon talking; and later she made it clear, in ways that women can, that she was ready to go to bed with him. He hesitated, unable to fully believe what was happening, but by early evening they were making love.

He saw her often after that, and while he remained somewhat
skeptical of her affection, assuming that much of it was inspired by her rebellion against her parents, he did not care to question too closely the source of his pleasure. She moved into his apartment during the spring of 1968, and they were married that summer in Mexico, though he had yet to get a divorce from his first wife. Such technicalities did not greatly concern him during this chaotic year when the government seemed unworthy of consultation, and civil disobedience and dissent was being adhered to across the country; and while Goldstein had never thought of himself as a political activist, he now felt the urge to take an antiestablishment position, and he decided to begin by exposing in the underground press his espionage mission for the Bendix Corporation.

He saw this as a way of assuaging some of his lingering guilt as well as embarrassing a large corporation that fulfilled major defense contracts with the government, and when he proposed his idea in person to the editors of a radical tabloid, the New York
Free Press
, he was pleased to hear that they were eager to print his story. They could only afford one hundred dollars for it, but they promised to begin it on page one and to allow him adequate space in which to describe all the sordid schemes used by white-collar executives against the unsuspecting workers.

It took Goldstein ten days to write his story, and when he delivered it the editors were impressed with its condemning evidence and predicted that its publication would set off traumatic repercussions within the corporate hierarchy of Bendix. But a week after the 10,000 copies of the New York
Free Press
were delivered to the newsstands with Goldstein’s story on page one, under the headline “I Was an Industrial Spy for the Bendix Corporation,” it was obvious that the editors had overestimated the public’s interest in this story, or perhaps the people who read it simply did not believe it.

For whatever reason, the
Free Press
did not receive a single letter or phone call in response to the story, and Al Goldstein, who had been sitting around the newspaper office each day in a state of vaulted anticipation, was visibly deflated by the result.
But the assignment with the
Free Press
would prove in time to be beneficial to Goldstein, for it provided him with an introduction to a young staff member who would befriend him and later help him launch his own newspaper.

Jim Buckley was a typesetter and subordinate editor on the
Free Press
, a diminutive, dark-haired twenty-four-year-old New Englander who, despite four years in the Navy and a lifetime of misadventure, exuded the starched innocence of an ageless choirboy. He had large doeful brown eyes, and well-scrubbed pale complexion, and a timorous disposition that concealed a restless spirit that drove him from job to job and place to place as a temporary companion of anyone who seemed to have a sense of direction.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and reared in several orphanages while his quarreling and separated parents took turns reclaiming him and abandoning him, Buckley attended schools in New England and Florida, and California and Hawaii, before dropping out to become a full-time hitchhiker, a delicate and meek roadside figure that motorists invariably stopped for. Following his release from the Navy in 1965 after a tour of the Orient, Buckley worked variously as a teletype operator with a San Francisco securities firm, a sidewalk vendor of the Los Angeles
Free Press
, a cook in a Greenwich Village restaurant, a typist with the United Nations, a fudge maker at the New York World’s Fair (standing in a glass booth not far from where Goldstein managed the dime-pitching concession), and a porter in a cheap London hotel that catered to $5-a-day tourists.

After living in France with dope-dealing American college boys, and in North Africa with Arab sheepherders, and returning home to have a wayward cross-country romance with James Agee’s niece, Buckley felt he was ready to settle down in New York and pursue a career in journalism. But after a few months with the New York
Free Press
he was again ready to quit, planning to invest his limited savings in a newspaper of his own, one
that would hopefully be less polemical and more profitable than the
Free Press
, whose forlorn owner discouraged requests for salary raises by walking around the office in bare feet.

This was when Jim Buckley met Al Goldstein, whose spy piece he helped to edit, and whose expressed frustrations he not only identified with but saw as the compatible essence of a viable partnership—or at least some hedge against the probability that neither of them could ever make it alone. While Goldstein’s idea of starting a sex tabloid did not immediately appeal to Buckley, who was not yet completely liberated from the years of strict upbringing in Catholic orphanages, Buckley did agree with Goldstein that there was undoubtedly a ready market for the sort of weekly periodical that Goldstein envisioned—a kind of
Consumer Reports
on bodily pleasure and prurience, a newspaper that would unabashedly portray the erotic world that was rising all around them but was being ignored by the squeamish proprietors of the establishment press. Sex was the biggest story of mid-twentieth-century America, Goldstein told Buckley in a burst of pitchman’s pride, and their libidinous and frolicsome journal would be a welcome contrast to the dreary palaver of the New Left that dominated the underground press in America.

And so in the late summer of 1968, with each man investing $175, a corporation was formed to publish a newspaper that Goldstein entitled
Screw
, being somewhat inspired by a defunct poetry periodical of the recent past that had called itself
Fuck you—a Magazine of the Arts
. Fearing that his first wife might one day legally claim part of his stock in
Screw
, Goldstein registered his half of the partnership in the name of his second wife, Mary Phillips, who was listed on the masthead as a copublisher with Buckley, though she continued to fly as a Pan Am stewardess. Goldstein identified himself as the executive editor, and placed his name at the top of a long list of staff members, most of which were imaginary.

In producing the twelve-page first edition of
Screw
in November 1968, and introducing it in an editorial as “the most exciting new publication in the history of the West,” Goldstein and Buck
ley did almost everything themselves: Goldstein wrote most of the articles, Buckley did the typesetting, and they both personally delivered the initial printing of 7,000 copies to the few newsstands in New York that would accept a tabloid whose front page was dominated by a photograph of a bikini-clad brunet stroking a large kosher salami.

The first issue sold more than 4,000 copies, the second issue did better, and after ten issues
Screw
became a twenty-four-page paper selling nearly 100,000 copies. Now
Screw
had the money to advertise for more editors and reporters, and many that it hired had the professional skill and educational background to work on almost any publication in New York.
Screw
’s book critic, Michael Perkins, a graduate of Ohio University with postgraduate work at CCNY, had previously reviewed books for
The Village Voice
. The new managing editor of
Screw
, Ken Gaul, a graduate of Seton Hall with a degree in English literature, had worked for Prentice-Hall and other publishers; and
Screw
’s contributing editor, Dean Latimer, had won a creative writing fellowship to Stanford. The art director of
Screw
, Steven Heller, who had worked with Buckley on the New York
Free Press
, would years later become an art director on the New York
Times
. A young photojournalist on
Screw
named Peter Brennan had graduated with honors from Fordham and earned a graduate degree in literature from Harvard.

When Brennan joined
Screw
in January 1971, the paper had recently shifted its operation from overcrowded quarters on Union Square into a more spacious office in a tall loft building less than two blocks away. While the loft building at 11 West Seventeenth Street was dark and grimy, and was located on a shadowed side street west of Fifth Avenue, Goldstein and Buckley considered it an ideal place in which to inconspicuously produce their controversial tabloid, never realizing that this new location was already under the surveillance of the police and the FBI.