The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

Let’s not go there yet. Let’s jump back to 1972, to the happy times. In those first golden years in California, Alex and Jane fucked and recited limericks and threw dinner parties. They had set up house outside Santa Barbara, in Montecito, and seemed destined to slither into old age bathed in massage oil. They padded around naked and floated in swimming pools as blue as Viagra—though, of course, Viagra hadn’t been invented yet. The sex pill of choice was still 3-blindmycin, Alex’s imaginary aphrodisiac.
    At first, Jane “was willing, maybe even eager, to participate in the sexual play,” according to Marilyn Yalom. Alex boasted about her prowess in bed, and even created a stage on which both of them
could perform; in the back of their house, he installed an “Indian room” filled with batiks and pillows where he could throw orgies. “He assumed that the two of them would be the sexual gurus of Montecito,” according to Yalom. “But Jane balked.”
    Stranded in an alien country, Jane began to regret indulging Alex’s every sexual whim. In the late 1970s, she told her husband she wanted a conventional marriage—no group scenes, no experiments, no second or third wives. “I can still see the look of disappointment on [Alex’s] face,” Yalom remembers. “He had more or less contracted for a sexual playmate where the doors would be open. She changed her mind.”
    Alex had believed that open marriage and group sex would become the model around which most people organized their lives—and he’d been wrong, on both a personal and a cultural level. According to Yalom, “He didn’t realize the strength of monogamy.”
    In 1985, he and Jane decided to move back to Britain. Jane would feel at home there, and Alex might be able to resume serious academic work. Besides, they were now well into their 60s. “[My father] came back to the UK to enjoy his old age,” according to Nick. “But that didn’t happen.”
    AGE-ISM
    In the late 1970s, around the time that Jane demanded his fidelity, Alex’s magpie mind led him to return to a question that had fascinated him as a young man: how and why do people grow old?
    Since the 1940s, he’d been reading and publishing papers on gerontology; now he hoped to do for the aged what he had once done for the sexually innocent. In 1976, he published a manifesto against the warehousing and dehumanizing of old people, titled A Good Age. He intended his new book to be as groundbreaking as Joy, a bestseller that would radicalize the wrinkled. However, as it turned out, readers were not as eager to join this revolution. The book sold respectably, but couldn’t begin to match the influence of Comfort’s big hit. Still, Alex kept on with his crusade. He flew to conferences on gerontology, trying to wrangle his way to the top of the field. When the proceedings bored him, he jumped up on stage and summarized the disagreements with a limerick, written on the spot. He couldn’t resist proving how much smarter he was than any of them. The scientists and doctors out there in the audience, those men with their sober expressions and sharp name tags, thought of him as a pop-culture idiot. Joy had ruined his reputation among serious people. He wanted it back.

    He shed his jumpsuits for tweed blazers; he anticipated the breakthroughs he’d make in the field. He published a shower of books and articles. But wherever he turned, he was dismissed as the guy who had written that sex book.
    â€œThere was the publicity roller-coaster which he quite enjoyed,” according to Nick Comfort. “But he wanted to be treated seriously. He was an academic of considerable gravity.” Still, it wasn’t just his pop-culture past that tainted his reputation as a biologist. Alex had little interest in making a scientific argument; instead, he published polemics. His crusade had